Tapestry (5 page)

Louis’s mother had passed away fifteen years ago yet the house was still considered hers.

‘She didn’t think you and Herr Kohler would
ever
come back from inside the Reich.’

‘Nor did the other two who came to stand with her,’ said Guy, watching them closely.

‘Giselle and Oona?’ asked Hermann of his two ladyloves and saw the boys nod.

‘The blackout rapes, Inspectors. Are you working on them?’ asked Antoine.

‘The handbag snatching, too?’ hazarded another.

‘
Oui,
especially those if done in daylight,’ said yet another.

‘All last night and now here just for dry clothing,’ lamented Louis. ‘Antoine, be so good as to ask your mother to do what she can with what I’m still wearing, but please tell her not to alleviate the dampness by burning any more of my books. Give her the message after school, eh? Now get going. If there’s trouble, tell your teacher that you were delayed because we had to question you about the safety of the streets at night.’

‘But … but you haven’t done that?’ blurted Dédé. ‘
Grand-mère
, she is saying things can only get worse and that you both should be worrying about your girlfriends.’

‘They’ll be found bound, violated, murdered and robbed, she says!’ swore Hervé, ignoring his runny nose. ‘Their handbags snatched!’

‘We’ve already found one corpse,’ muttered Kohler, not liking what the boys had just said but wishing he had ersatz chewing gum to hand out. ‘You haven’t any cigarettes to sell, have you?’

In unison heads were swiftly shaken and, without another word, the army turned away and headed up the street.

‘Has the lawlessness of the black market reached such depths of innocence?’ bleated Louis.

‘Don’t be so naive. I should have asked for underwear and silk stockings.’

* * *

Long after the detectives had left the house at number 3, Jeanne Courbet continued to stare across the street at it through the lace of the bedroom’s curtain. She knew she didn’t have the time to loiter, that one had to be out and about very early if one was to get anything from the shops. Yet I can’t move, she silently said. Is it that I’ve offended God with my gossip about that house and the troubles the chief inspector has had with the first wife who left him and the dead one, too, the one who made the grand cuckold of him, even though he forgave her?

Word was that they had all laughed at him behind his back at the rue des Saussaies. Word was that he and his partner were hated so much for pointing the finger of truth, they would never leave the city alive this time.

Word was … But would either of them help her now? Antoine hadn’t just been up to mischief but to a crime so serious it jeopardized the whole family. A dirty stub of blackboard chalk had been in one of his pockets—was that not
évidence
enough of scribbled slogans on the walls:
Laval aux poteau
—Premier Laval up against the post;
La guillotine pour Pétain
—the
Maréchal
and Head of State; the V for Victory of Monsieur Winston Churchill; the cross of Lorraine, that symbol of the Résistance and Jeanne d’Arc?
Victoire,
eh?
Liberté
! Antoine knew nothing of such things. He was only ten years old, but that chalk had started her doing something she had vowed never to do in this room of his older brothers. The neighbours wouldn’t laugh if the family was arrested. They would sadly shake their heads and later whisper, ‘That mouth of hers. That gossip, she got what she deserved,’ but one arrest would lead to another and the families of all four would be taken. Didn’t that knave Desrochers operate his
vélo-taxi
out of
place
de l’Opéra? Wasn’t the stand directly across from the Kommandantur and wouldn’t Hervé’s
papa
be known to several of those Germans?

A woman’s compact had lain under the loosened floorboards beneath the straw mattress Antoine used, a file for the fingernails, too, and a lipstick. A
Kleiderkarte
also, a clothing card and a half-empty packet of cigarettes—Kamels from Berlin, stale but kept as a treasured memento. A matchbox from the Kakadu, on the Kurfürtsendamm, a club or bar. A room key,
ah, oui, oui
, from the Hotel-Pension am Steinplatz and a
liaison sexuelle
, the torn half of a ticket to the UFA Palast, a cinema and hands up this girl’s skirt, eh? The silver cigarette case of a virtue lost had been inscribed with the words of all such men. Though she could neither speak nor read the language, she knew they would say,
To Sonja with undying love, Erich, 3 March 1940
, and just before the invasion of Norway.

Four hundred of the Occupation marks had lain beneath that cigarette case, a further two hundred of the Reichsmark. ‘And seven hundred new francs, all in one-hundreds.’

If taken and spent, the money would only draw attention to the family. Some would think it pay for watching that house for a repeat of the bomb laying. Oh for sure, stealing from the Boche was not the same as stealing from one’s own people and Antoine could, perhaps, be forgiven were the penalties not so severe. His two brothers and his father would be sent into forced labour, herself and Antoine and her girls, his two sisters into … But how had her little Antoine come by these things? His share of the loot—was that it? One quarter!

Grey and glued, a crumpled condom had lain alongside the death notice of this Erich Straub, this young man from Berlin who had used it with his Sonja.

‘And then,’ she said with finality, ‘there was this.’

Unfolding a torn page from last Friday’s
Paris-Soir
, she read again yet another of the advertisements Herr Kohler placed each week, as did countless others still, and even though he had not been in Paris to receive an answer.

Reward of 200,000 francs will be paid for information leading to the safe return of Johan Van der Lynn, now age eight-and-a-half, and his sister Anna, now age six-and-a-half, son and daughter of Martin and Oona from Rotterdam. Lost to the east of Doullens on the road from Arras, 16 May 1940. Apply Box 1374
.

Lost during the Exodus when ten million from the Lowlands and northern France had fled the blitzkrieg to clog the roads until machine-gunned to clear them for the panzers, but why had this Sonja had it in her handbag, or had she? Had Antoine hidden it here earlier, and for what reason, please?

Fool that he was, Herr Kohler wouldn’t let this Madame Oona Van der Lynn lose hope, nor would he get rid of her. She was forty years of age, couldn’t have good papers and had lost her husband in December to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. A Jew, people whispered, her children only the halves, though such things really shouldn’t matter and certainly wouldn’t to a Stuka or Messerschmitt.

Herr Kohler had taken the woman in during another investigation, that of a carousel in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, and wasn’t this why the boys loved to go to that park? And yes, yes, he had a younger one and lived with both when in Paris, sleeping with each but in turns as everyone said, herself most especially. ‘May God forgive me.’

Giselle le Roy was twenty-two years old and very attractive, though beauty like that would quickly fade and men ought to know this. Half-Greek, half-French and from the Midi, the girl was also from the House of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton, though she didn’t work in that business anymore. ‘The Lupanar des Oiseaux Blancs!’ she said aloud, was filled with hateful thoughts of such ‘submissive girls,’ as the
flics
were fond of calling them. The brothel of the white birds.
‘Fornicatrices!’
she said. ‘Leeches who take money that is desperately needed by the families of the men they service!

‘Men!’ she spat. ‘They give you the clap and the chancres because they’ve been careless and horny. “Seized by the moment,” eh? “Unable to control themselves?” ’

For the married ones, the occasional lapse was considered both natural and at times necessary and healthful; for the married woman, the gravest of sins and punishable by prison and a fine of from five to twenty thousand francs. Adultery was, it had to be said, a two-faced affair when viewed by the State whose laws were, of course, entirely set by men. Women could, and occasionally did, have husbands arrested but far from being severe, the courts were always lenient. Boys will be boys.

But would these sadists everyone worried about find interest in the advertisement and answer it? If so, those two women of Herr Kohler’s would come no more to stand in the street and stare at that house of his partner and friend.

As that one’s new girlfriend had done, the wife and little son not dead even three months—Marianne and Philippe St-Cyr—and oh for sure war and this Occupation speeded up such things, ‘But honour to a dead wife is honour to one’s life, chastity the bankroll of memory and Heaven’s cash on deposit.’

Kohler winced when he saw the Trinité victim in the
Hôtel-Dieu
. It wasn’t that her nose had been broken, or that the once smooth brow had been repeatedly slammed against the back of the
vélo-taxi
’s seat. It wasn’t even that her throat had been clenched so tightly there were plum-purple bruises or that, early on in the attack, she had been struck repeatedly.

It was the look in her bruised and deep brown eyes. He’d seen it before—Louis had, too, though he was busy elsewhere.

She was going to kill herself. The disgrace, the neighbourhood gossip, the threat of venereal disease or worse, that of an unwanted child. The shame. The husband a POW in the Reich.

Out of the fug of all such hospital rooms, the hesitant voice of the
interne
who’d been delegated to deal with him started up only to hesitate. Though absolutely nothing would be made of it, he had to wonder if the boy was but one among the many from all walks of life with false papers, a false military discharge circa 1939 or early 1940, or simply suspected of having these?

Such was the undercurrent of bitterness that even battle-hardened veterans from the 1914–1918 war had banded together to demand that only those who had actually fought in this one should be considered as veterans. Not the million or half-­million or whatever who, through no fault of their own, had seen no fighting at all but had simply been overrun and rounded up along with those who had actually fought during the blitzkrieg.

‘The left shoulder and wrist, Inspector …’ began Dr. Paul-Émile Mailloux. ‘They are badly sprained but fortunately not broken. He must have wrenched the arm behind her back as he … Well, you know.’

If the Trinité victim thought anything of this, she gave no indication.

‘Scratches?’ asked Kohler.

‘Of course, but mainly between the shoulders and on the buttocks and hips. The assailant tore a fingernail. We found it lodged in …’

‘We?’

It would have to be said. ‘Dr. Rheal Lachance is the senior physician who oversees such cases. This woman isn’t the only one we’ve had to admit. She’s number thirty.’

Lachance, but
ach mein Gott
, so many? ‘In how long?’

Had the detective been away from the city or had the matter simply been hushed up even within police circles, the authorities too afraid to admit that such things were happening? ‘In the past four months, Inspector. Three so far this week, two last weekend.’

And there were twenty-four hospitals in Paris.

‘She’s one of the worst,’ said Mailloux, ‘though we only get the serious cases, of course.’

‘Have the attacks been escalating?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘
Verdammt,
either you think it or you don’t!’

‘Then, yes, especially since the … the defeat of your Sixth Army at Stalingrad on the third of this month. Not all were raped, you understand.’

‘Robbed of their handbags and papers?’

‘Yes. Some were completely or only partly stripped before …’

‘The hair?’

This one would know all about such things from that other war. ‘It was first hacked off some of them before the beating. With others, they were beaten and then it was cut off, and since there is a market for it, the hair was probably stolen and sold.’

‘But not all lost their hair?’

‘Not all. With this one, perhaps there wasn’t time. Punishment, yes, but not continued to that point.’

Though they were all too aware of blackout crime, Louis and he hadn’t fully realized the severity of what was now going on, but with so many victims, how could they possibly interview enough to get a clear picture of things? ‘Their wedding rings?’ he asked.

Had the detective been defeated by the thought of so many? ‘The rings,
ah oui
, from those who were wearing them.’

‘Meaning that some had deliberately removed them before the evening out, eh? Were all of them married to absent POWs?’

‘Not all. Those whose fiancés are prisoners of war did not have such rings to wear, unless the engagement one.’

Which few couples could afford or even give a thought to. ‘But fiancées of POWs have also been targeted?’

‘That is correct, at least in so far as we here at the
Hôtel-Dieu
are aware.’

‘And not others? Single girls, unhappily married nonmilitary wives, those of veterans from that other war or those that simply need the money to feed the kids?’

‘Occasionally but perhaps as mistakes. Most of the victims we get are wives of prisoners of war or fiancées of them.’

And targeted, but everyone would be saying the streets were unsafe at night and would be avoiding them if possible. ‘Okay. Now tell me about that fingernail.’

‘Lodged in the upper right hip. The nail must have been torn or cracked beforehand. Tweezers were used to remove it. There’s her blood, of course, and skin, but also some kind of grease.’

A torn, folded corner of newsprint yielded its little treasure. The nail was a good centimetre-and-a-half along the curve, and from two to three millimetres at its widest. The middle right finger, and dirty. Big hands too—a big gut, eh? wondered Kohler but said, ‘
Bon
. Now tell me why that door was locked and you had to ask the matron for the key?’

Would this one miss nothing? ‘The press.’

‘What do you mean “The press”?’