Carnival (24 page)

Honour to whom honour is due, but was Hermann all right? Had he thrown up? Did he have the shakes that damned Benzedrine sometimes caused? They'd not eaten. His blood sugar would be low. It was nearly 3.30 in the afternoon.

‘The Fräulein Schrijen will be terribly upset, Inspector. Sophie had her heart set on those men bringing some of the
Karneval
things to life for the
Winterhilfswerk
fundraiser. Three deaths. First Renée Ekkehard … Such a lovely girl and her dearest friend. Those two … To see them together was wonderful. But then Herr Thomas on whom Sophie depended for virtually everything she had to do here. No task was too difficult, no schedule too complicated. He would work it all out with her and was extremely patient, a real teacher.

‘Inspector, you must know she is convinced Renée's death was not a suicide. Now she'll be worrying all the more that it could well have been herself had her brother, Alain, not come home unexpectedly. The car is his. Sophie never forgets.'

‘And on Saturday, 30 January?'

Not two weeks ago. Eleven days to be precise. ‘She went to the train station that afternoon to give him the car as she always does. Alain then drove here without her, spoke briefly with his father and then went on to the house at Kaysersberg. It's always been his first love, that house and its vineyards.'

‘Could he have gone out to the
Karneval
?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Didn't he want to see his fiancée?'

This one was going to press for answers that had best not be given. ‘He told me he was going to the house in the country.'

‘And his sister?'

Must the Inspector make things difficult? ‘Sophie would have stayed in town and taken the bus home, to the house Chairman Schrijen has in Kolmar.'

‘It's a beautiful car, isn't it? A dark forest green, with a bonnet that seems to go on forever, and two spare tyres up front under white duck covers.' Unheard of these days.

‘The 540K of 1938, Inspector. A birthday gift from the chairman. The four-speed, supercharged
Überwagen
whose overdrive is so smooth one hardly notices its kicking in. A hundred and seventy kilometres an hour, from zero to one hundred in 15.6 seconds. I've clocked it many times for Herr Schrijen and his son.'

And that with a weight of nearly two and a half tons, to say nothing of the five passengers, should each seat be occupied. ‘The Fräulein Schrijen must really enjoy having the use of it.'

‘She worries all the time and lives in fear of getting even the slightest scratch or dent, though there are so few cars on the roads, who hears of an accident? We take good care of it too, so she really has no need to concern herself.'

‘And when with the Fräulein Ekkehard?'

‘Only then would we see her get behind that wheel and smile.'

‘Yet still she must have fretted?'

‘Certainly.'

‘And on Sunday, 31 January? Come, come, Herr Weber?'

The day of Renée's suicide. ‘Alain took the late afternoon train back to Strassburg. I believe he was to stay over with the Fräulein Ekkehard's parents to discuss the wedding. Renée didn't want her parents spending much; Alain and Chairman Schrijen wished a somewhat larger celebration since the Gauleiter Wagner was to be among the guests of honour.'

‘I'll just sit in the car for a moment.'

This one was trouble. Anxiously Weber looked across the garage to see if the others were busy and finally taking no notice of them. ‘Inspector, there's no need. Sophie has the Mauser pistol my captain once carried in the Great War. She asked me to quietly find something for her and I …
Ach
, I gave it to her. It's fully loaded and in the glove compartment. It's crazy of her to think she's in any danger but what could I have done except to have humoured her? Please don't inform Chairman Schrijen of this. I … I would not just lose his trust and respect.'

The Wehrmacht's version of that pistol would most probably be the 7.63mm, with a ten- or twenty-round box magazine. The overall length was nearly thirty centimetres; the barrel a good fourteen, the weight almost one and a half kilograms, the muzzle velocity 480 metres per second. Somewhat clumsy and not as well balanced as the Luger, it was still every bit as effective. Indeed it had a third more muzzle velocity and was simply not a lady's gun.

Concrete laundry tubs, each with a lone and dribbling tap, flanked the washhouse walls on three sides, while at the far end, four goose-necked shower heads serviced nearly six hundred men.

Kohler hesitated; those who were doing their laundry paused. For perhaps thirty seconds, the two long lines of waiting, naked men, each with a bundle of clothes and a postage stamp of grey face cloth for drying off, waited.

They were all staring at him, even the guards who hustled the men into and out of the shower bath at intervals so short no one could possibly clean oneself properly.

Without a word, one of the Russians stepped away from a laundry tub, indicating that he should use it.

‘
Danke
,' he managed, but the shakes came so suddenly it was all he could do to get his left fist under the tap. Ice-cold water helped but again and again the shakes came, again and again he kept seeing the dead in the trenches of that other war, the heaps of rotting corpses, those of this one too, Louis among them. Louis. Gabrielle and Oona and Giselle—
Gerda?
he demanded. Their boys, Jurgen and Hans—how had they died at Stalingrad?

Searching for answers to it all did no good. Throwing up didn't either. The mush of papier-mâché in his hand held a tight wad of off-white threads.
Rayon?
he demanded. Like an eggshell, the papier-mâché covering had been.

‘None of you saw this,' he heard himself saying first in French and then in
Deutsch
, for he knew no Russian or Polish.

The phosphorescent button with its enamelled red swastika stared up at him from amongst those threads and why the hell would Maillotte have tried to swallow a ball they had made for the
Jeu de massacre
?

There could be only one reason. The dry heaves hit and he shook so hard, he almost wet himself.

‘Your tears, tovarisch. It's not good that you should be seen with them.'

Washed without hot water when the steam plants could have supplied endless streams of it at no cost, the rag, a woollen sock, was far from clean but he used it anyway.

‘Is it true what we hear of Stalingrad?' asked the prisoner.

A nod would suffice. Suddenly he was too exhausted to do otherwise.

‘Are your people building an Atlantic Wall in France?'

A continuous line of fortifications. True again.

The Russian considered this gravely. Frowning, he deferentially hazarded, ‘It's impossible your Führer could have made the same mistake as the Maréchal Pétain and Monsieur Maginot when they helped to convince the French Government to build a similar line from Southern Alsace to the Belgian border but still, isn't wisdom as foreign to great leaders as poverty is to wealthy men?'

During the Blitzkrieg of 1940, the Maginot Line had been gone round and taken within the blink of an eye but there were more important things to discuss. ‘Did any of you do laundry for Eugène Thomas?'

Had this detective once been a POW? ‘We do it for the French when they feel it necessary.'

‘Cigarettes?'

‘One for the socks, the underwear and undershirt; two for the trousers, shirt and pullover. Though we would like to haggle, the price is nonnegotiable and has been set firmly by the French. Without Lagergeld, Red Cross parcels or those from home, it is the—'

‘The only way you can get a smoke, but did the others of his combine make certain his clothes were always the cleanest you boys could get them?'

This one was thinking clearly. ‘That is as it was, Inspector.'

‘Good. Here, take these. Share them up for me.'

Fumbling, the Gestapo's detective pressed cigarettes and small cigars into waiting hands, matches too. ‘I'm not one of them,' he said of the enemy. ‘If Dorsche or any of his
Greifer
ask, forget I was here.'

Four dried, boiled sweet chestnuts mysteriously appeared from the depths of a pocket. ‘Shave them,' said Herr Kohler. ‘Don't break a tooth.'

‘We will soak them in water for as long as it takes and make a paste. Perhaps a little of the boiled potato or black bread could be added if it is first soaked. Salt is out of the question, of course, but …'

‘Enjoy. I only wish there was more. Maybe someday there will be.'

‘Then let us look forward to it, Inspector. Now go, please. It's not good for me to be seen talking to you.'

Again the men were staring at him, again he had to pause just inside the door. Standing out in the wind and the snow, a handkerchief tied round his hand, Kohler knew they would have endless days and nights in which to think over and discuss what had happened in those few moments. Something strange, something decidedly different. A miracle.

When Louis, hurrying between the nearest of the steam plants and the kitchen, caught up with him, Kohler quietly confided, ‘Ask that God of yours to be with us,
mon vieux
. I think I've found the trigger element.'

7

Long shadows fingered the carnival where a coal-black Renault, the two-door Primastella—the 1934, St-Cyr thought—sat at the end of the snow-covered lane on a gentle rise up near the Noah's Ark and the dangling, shattered biplanes of the Pilot in the Sky. Two men in grey fedoras and broad-shouldered overcoats, their cigarettes alight, stood waiting all but in darkness with hands in their pockets, one on either side of that car.

‘The colonel's detectives,' sighed Hermann.

Perhaps one hundred metres lay between the two vehicles. From the Textilfabrikschrijen it hadn't taken twenty minutes with Hermann at the wheel. There had been no time, really, to talk things over, and yet word had gone ahead and these two had come out here.

‘Löwe Schrijen must have called them, Louis, as soon as we left the gates.'

‘The trigger element, Hermann.'

‘Guncotton wrapped in papier-mâché. I'm certain of it. If we didn't have company, I'd touch a match to it.'

‘Burns with a very hot flame; explodes if a detonator is used. Is made from pure cellulose, of which Eugène Thomas had plenty. Cold nitric acid too, and sulphuric acid.'

‘But they wouldn't have needed a detonator, not with the trinitrophenol.'

‘The flame of the one would have been perfectly adequate for the other, but why had he been sentenced in absentia? Surely he would have wanted to escape as much as the rest of that combine?'

‘But they'd asked him to do something and he had refused. He must have, Louis. One for all and all for one because that's the way it has to be.'

‘That cutthroat you found in their office wagon … Had they been planning to use it on someone?'

‘They must have. They've been gathering solder and making uniform buttons, badges and collar pips which Dorsche doesn't yet know of.'

‘And that tourer of Sophie Schrijen's brother enters and leaves the Works without challenge.'

The two up ahead were still patiently watching them. ‘Löwe Schrijen says his son was at Natzweiler-Struthof the weekend Renée was hanged,' said Kohler.

‘Yet the boy couldn't have been. Weber, the garage mechanic, has stated that Alain unexpectedly arrived at the railway station on that Saturday afternoon and that Sophie had to drive the car there for him to use. That's why the Mademoiselle Ekkehard went out to the carnival alone instead of her.'

‘But if we are to believe Schrijen, the girl then left a note in lipstick that said, “I can't go on. Please forgive me,” and what do I find in Alain Schrijen's desk, in the corner that sister of his reserves for herself, but a lipstick and a little piece of granite from the quarry camp.'

This hole they were digging for themselves seemed bottomless. ‘Did the son kill that girl, Hermann? Did he discover what that
Winterhilfswerk
Committee was really up to and attempt to put an end to it?'

‘She skis and or walks all night, and could well have caught one of the local trains or thumbed a ride. Neuf-Brisach and Alt-Breisach aren't that far. Maybe seven and a dozen kilometres from here.'

‘And, if she could get across the Rhine between them, where to, then? A girl who wears a beret that is forbidden.'

‘She wasn't,' said Kohler. ‘She was wearing a woollen toque, according to Henri Savard, the carpenter who made that coffin. Rasche must have removed the one and replaced it with the other, but why would he do a thing like that if they were up to something and where did he get it? From her rucksack?'

‘Or a room at the Lutze residence.'

Still the colonel's two detectives hadn't moved. ‘This isn't looking good for us, Hermann. Schrijen sends van-loads of his wine to the Gauleiter Wagner.'

‘At no charge and guess who has been invited to the wedding now a funeral and also to the fundraiser a certain combine must still want to know is continuing, especially in view of what's happened to another of their members and with a visit to Natzweiler-Struthof a distinct probability.'

Merde
but they needed a cigarette to share.

‘Saturday, 6 March, is the target date,' said Kohler. ‘Nearly everything is ready, including buckets of papier-mâché balls that just need a bit of paint and a match. What the hell were those boys really up to, eh? Guncotton flaming to trinitrophenol?'

‘And three young women, each of whom was a rebel in her own right. A bookshop that reminds its customers of book burnings, its proprietor a fired teacher who admits to being bitter about a mother who is being held in the internment camp at Vittel which she visits on the last Friday of every month, and if that isn't opportunity enough to make contact with the Francs-Tireurs
et Partisans
, what is?'

‘A chairman's daughter who, beside what they are actually receiving, impulsively jots down the calorie intakes necessary for men at hard labour, and a secretary who steals police snapshots of those two so that her friend—'

‘Her lover, Hermann. I'm almost certain of it.'

‘And yet another reason for her to insist that death was murder. Snapshots so that she can see who's been following her and not following that same secretary.'

‘Whom Frau Lutze tells us brought to the house or bookshop the travel papers Victoria Bödicker needed for Vittel, rather than have the bookseller visit the
Polizeikommandantur
too often. Good of the colonel, wasn't it? No wonder he's worried.'

‘Frau Lutze, Louis, formerly Fräulein Yvonne Eva Ellmann. Schrijen made a point of telling me “she was one of those on her father's side.”'

Which discretely meant half-Jewish. ‘A woman who has a daughter, Hermann, at the University of Strasbourg in Clermont-Ferrand.'

‘That marriage is a puzzle, isn't it, since Rasche was once hot and heavy with Yvonne and Löwe Schrijen knows all about it even to asking me what the colonel hoped to gain by claiming murder instead of suicide?'

‘Which we now know it definitely was, at least in the case of his secretary.'

‘An ampoule and a droplet earring that girl was searching for …'

‘A girl, Hermann, who didn't even like the taste of schnapps or an
eau-de-vie
and who could make a glass of wine last all evening. Drugged was what Sophie Schrijen asked the bookseller, that one in turn demanding to know why she hadn't accused her brother of raping the Fräulein Ekkehard at that skiing party. An event which causes the sister to wonder if the girl hadn't cried out the truth about her feelings for men and for herself.'

‘And all the rest of it, like moving deserters through to the Vosges.'

‘Talk to those two. Use your charm. See if they'll tell you why they were following Sophie Schrijen. That Primastella is no match for a Citroën
traction-avant
. I'll go round them and leave the car up by the Devil's Saucer. I'll get to that office wagon before the three of you.'

‘You'd best have these, then.'

Her keys. ‘I knew I could count on you. Now reach under the seat and hand me my Lebel.'

‘It's back at the house. I didn't think we'd need the firepower.'

‘Then think again!'

‘Have you any more matches?'

The last of the light was fast fading. ‘Haven't you?'

‘I gave them all to the Russians.'

‘
Merde
, what is it with you? Now I'll have to head over to the farmhouse for lanterns
and
matches!'

‘Ask for bread, marg' and a bucket of their potato soup. It's the least the Army can do, seeing as we're working for one of them.'

Alone, St-Cyr stood where the Primastella had been. ‘Hermann,' he heard himself saying. They'd taken him. ‘To Löwe Schrijen?' he demanded and knew it must be so.

‘They can pick me up at any time,' he rebelled, for here in Elsass he was an alien on a temporary pass.

Hermann's footprints were next to where the taller one had stood—the other one hadn't come round his side of the car. He would have held a gun on Hermann, forcing him to get into the car.

Turning toward where the Citroën idled, its headlamps blinkered­, he said, ‘Things have finally caught up with us, haven't they? The honesty, the dogged pursuit of common crime no one seems to want to bother about but ourselves.'

The snow in the Primastella's ruts was packed down hard. He'd walk along one of them even though the new overboots were perfect, would turn to look back at where those footprints had met.

‘A pillowcase,' he muttered. While squeezing himself into the backseat of that little car, Hermann had managed to drag it from a pocket and flick it behind himself. Unseen by either of those two, it lay forlornly between the ruts, caught in the light of a borrowed Wehrmacht torch.

‘Newspapers,' he hazarded, much puzzled, ‘and a little carving, though not a child's toy. Boudicca, Hermann. Queen of the Iceni in what is now Norfolk.'

And freedom.

To the west, the iron and slatted skeleton of the Ferris wheel raised dark and silent circles to the night sky. Closer in and even darker, were the remains of the
Salon Carousel
and Ideal Caterpillar, and when he brought the Citroën to a halt deep in this lost city of theirs, the House of Mirrors waited.

‘Renée Ekkehard,' said Kohler with a sigh, his knees jammed uncomfortably against the back of the front seat. ‘She got away from the two of you on that Saturday, didn't she?'

There was no answer. There hadn't been a word from either of them. The taller one was behind the wheel and solidly filling that seat, the one with the bullfrog neck, the shoulders and the gun feeding lighted cigarettes to himself and his partner.

They weren't taking him back to the Textilfabrikschrijen. They were heading off into the hills to the northwest of town and with the headlamps unblinkered, were taking him to the vineyards near Kaysersberg, but first they'd ask him a few questions. ‘She knew that
Karneval
like the palm of her hand, didn't she?' he taunted. ‘
Ach
, just when you thought you had her cornered, the little
Schlampe
would slip away. The Devil's Saucer, Maze of Darkness, Super Car Monte Carlo … She wasn't about to let you kill her, was she, so she grabbed her skis and buggered off as soon as darkness fell but you knew she loved to find things and that she'd have to come back, and you knew that either of her friends on that committee could easily have sat down beside her, pretending to have found a little something she wanted, but that was on Sunday, wasn't it?'

Kohler was just pissing about, said Hervé Paulus to himself. He'd light another Gauloise bleu for Serge and see if this Kripo had figured out how they'd come upon such a supply. Burnt, ground parsnips for coffee? A lovely oil from beechnuts? ‘Floaters'—hadn't Kohler told the woman he and St-Cyr worked in the ‘never-never land of shadows'? ‘Missing persons,' Frau Oberkircher had blubbered. ‘Fraud and bank robberies,' she had coughed and crapped herself.

He and St-Cyr had even hired a horse-drawn sleigh to take the old bag home from the railway station. Home to fruit leathers and boiled sweets she could no longer make to sell to schoolchildren!

‘That girl fingered you, didn't she?' said Kohler. ‘She stole mug shots of you so that Schrijen's daughter could get a better bead on the two of you, but what I can't understand,
meine Schatzen
, is why he had you follow his daughter and not Renée Ekkehard. Chairperson of this and that, wasn't she, this Sophie of his? Paragon of Nazi virtue and favourite of Gauleiter Wagner?'

‘Silence!' shrilled Paulus. ‘You're some treasure yourself! Refusing to tell Herr Schrijen what he wishes to know? Looking for trouble when he told you there couldn't possibly be any? Are you too stupid to listen to someone like that?'

‘Hervé, leave it,' muttered the other one. ‘We'll find a place up ahead and soon.'

‘
Dummköpfe
,' swore Kohler. ‘Renée definitely wasn't what Schrijen wanted for that son of his, so he told you to make it look like a suicide, even to your scribbling a note in lipstick. Where'd you get the war paint, eh? From one of your
Huren
? Hey, you two left things lying around you shouldn't have and guess who found them?'

There wasn't a murmur from either of them, which wasn't good. At least now he knew Schrijen had been telling them what to do, but that could only mean there were others who would be after Louis. ‘She was up to mischief, wasn't she, that daughter of his? She didn't like what was going on at the Works. Starving the men while working them to death? Freezing the poor bastards? Unsafe working conditions and no doctor?
Lieber Christus im Himmel
, is it any wonder she rebelled?'

Still they didn't respond but now the car was climbing more steeply into the hills. The rear wheels skidded, clouds hid the moon, but with the snow cover there was still sufficient light. Vineyards were on either side. They couldn't be far from the house now, but they'd have to stop first, have to soften up this Kripo.

‘This will do, Hervé,' said the one behind the wheel. Banks of plowed-up snow lay on either side and, of course, there was no one else about.

‘I don't need to take a piss.'

‘When we're done with you,
mein Lieber
, you will,' said Serge Deiss. He would leave the engine running, would let Hervé get out first and then pull the back of the seat forward for this
Schweinebulle
from Paris.

One lead-weighted leather truncheon, taken from the floor, came softly to rest on top of the car and was slid over to the driver's side, the other kept to hand. ‘Look, I'll stay here. I've no need to get out.'

‘Don't be difficult,' said Deiss. ‘We have our orders.'

Both now had their guns out. ‘
Ach
, my shoelace has come undone. Hang on a minute.'