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The sparrow darted to the Chablis to refresh the lovely milk-white throat. A tiny droplet spilled away from a corner of her glass. Blinking, she touched it with a fingertip and, flushing with embarrassment, said quite shyly, ‘Excuse me.'

For just an instant their eyes met and, Chief Inspector of the Sûreté that he was, he looked deeply into hers until the sparrow ducked away again. Ah yes.

‘Wait for us. We won't be long.'

The anguished look the girl threw from the back seat troubled Hermann.

‘Hey, it's okay,
chérie.
Come on, Giselle. Everything is all right. It's just a bit of business. There's nothing for you to worry about. Louis and I just have to stop in to say hello.'

To the Butcher of Poland, the Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Polizei, the Höherer SS und Polizeiführer of France!

Hermann touched the pale cheek and then the white, white crowns of her front teeth through the slightly parted lips that were so red.

She knew he was thinking she had lovely lips.

‘She's really something, eh, Louis?
Gott im Himmel
, am I glad to see her again.'

They left her then, and though she could not force herself to watch, in her mind's eye she saw them hurrying between the jackbooted sentries who stood under the swastika flags that hung above the entrance.

Merde!
what was she to do? Press her knees together to stop from shaking? Grip her thighs and seek the other side of the avenue? Wait as Hermann had said and as she knew she must? Ah yes.

Even the traffic avoided this place. The rush of bicycles pushed a little harder as the stream of them approached the dreaded Number 72. Those who were on the far side of the avenue Foch looked the other way when passing; those less fortunate came towards her with downcast eyes. Where once there had been so many cars, there were now only those of the Germans and their friends. And she did not know which were the worst, the Nazis or their friends …

Occasionally the sound of a bicycle bell interrupted the agony of her thoughts, once the shout of, ‘Hey, there, look where you're going!' as if she were the one in the road, she the one with the shaky handlebars.

Karl Albrecht Oberg was forty-five years of age and married, with a wife and two children in the Reich. A man from the north of that country. Tall, but not so tall as Hermann Kohler – really just a little over medium height.

A man who had worn thick spectacles with wire rims and who had leaned well back in his chair when he had examined her.

Had she been so offensive to him? Had he been near-sighted, had that been it?

A man with a small paunch. A man who had looked as if the corset he had worn had been a little too tight.

The Butcher of Poland … The Höherer SS.

The pale blue-grey eyes behind those glasses had been round and bulging but not with hatred for her or anything like that, though they had frightened her at first. Terribly, ah yes. Not even with interest in her body, which had been fully clothed, she left to stand as if naked in front of that desk of his, that magnificent desk!

Just the look of a middle-aged businessman wearing the field-grey of the German Army but with the flashes of the SS, a general. A man who had been impatient to get on with his work.

The policing of France and the hunting-down of traitors and terrorists.

The one who had been at his side, the one who had had her brought to this place from deep in her sleep this morning, had spoken French but with a German scholar's accent. It had been he who had translated what he had judged fit for her ears.

‘Okay. It's agreed. You can go now. Please do not forget our little arrangement.'

Our little arrangement.
The brothel on the rue Chabannais should she fail. The largest of the forty or so that were reserved specifically for the common soldiers of the German Army who came to Paris for a few days' leave and wanted to get it all out of their systems in a hurry. Bang, bang!

Right from the Russian Front. Ah yes, that's what he had said to her, knowing quite well she would have understood. Everyone knew those girls never lasted. They retired sore and broken unless they were big where it counted and crazy.

He had had a perpetually mocking twist to his lips, the left side. Tall and thin – a little taller than his chief, so as tall, perhaps, as Hermann. A man with spectacles, too, and very good manners.

A little arrangement … Oh Mon Dieu, they had her just where they wanted! She could not confess a thing to Hermann even though the Bavarian did, perhaps, care a little for her. Even though he was, ah yes, a detective from the Gestapo.

This Obersturmbannführer, the Herr Doktor Knochen was a much younger man than his chief – a man of perhaps thirty-two or so, one who had stripped her body naked with his grey-blue eyes and had laughed at her nakedness, at what she would do to her Gestapo detective, had laughed with that mocking smile of his. Sardonic, knowing, all-perceiving. A man after power, a man who knew his place in the hierarchy of the Nazis at this and other addresses.

A man who had enjoyed her little predicament. Their little arrangement …

They'd kill her if she didn't do what they wanted! Never mind the threat of the rue Chabannais, the ruin of her tender life and the end of her days in the profession. Never mind the ravaging thrusts of sixty front-line soldiers a night!

Never mind any of that. ‘Me, I must be the realist. I must steel myself. Hermann must never learn of this. Never!'

Unfortunately her horoscope for the day had told her to stay indoors and keep out of trouble. A tall, thin man would come into her life if she didn't heed the warning, a man who would ask certain things of her.

There'd been no mention of his coming to get her. None, either, of Hermann's friend. Just keep an eye on Hermann Kohler and report everything he says. Ah yes. Everything.

Three hundred metres of Aubusson carpet smothered the inlaid parquet and kept it warm. Gilded eighteenth-century mirrors – tall, richly carved, ornate things – hung on the wall to the right; plush Prussian-blue drapes to the left on either side of each of the many tall windows. Number 72, the avenue Foch. Head office.

‘Nice, Louis. Really nice. Not bad for a banana merchant.'

Lalique chandeliers, great ice-cakes of crystal, gave light on dreary days. A sumptuously gorgeous nude, a life-size painting of a coy and raven-haired innocent from biblical times, hung next to a marble statue of Hercules loitering naked as the hanging fruit of his loins betrayed.

Hermann couldn't resist making light of things. The effect of the painting and the statue was electric. Hercules bearded, all frightening, with flat, hard muscles, had an arm draped over something, a shrouded little friend. Death perhaps.

The girl ducked her head away from the loins and appeared as if afraid and uncertain of what that uncircumsized thing of his might mean for her.

Again St-Cyr heard Hermann saying, ‘Nice, Louis. Really nice.'

The girl in the painting sat on the edge of something concrete with the toes of her left foot planted on the step below and those of the right foot peeking demurely from behind the tender calf of that supporting leg. The folds of her dressing-robe were sumptuously gold and equally crushed beneath her seat and flaring hips.

‘A little Jewish princess, Louis.
Gott im Himmel
, do you suppose they hadn't noticed?'

‘I'd no idea you were such a connoisseur, Hermann.'

‘They liked their women ample in those days, Louis. The waist not too slim, the tummy pouting a little, the breasts perfect toys for some biblical scholar to play with.'

‘He's not a biblical scholar. He has a Doctorate of Philosophy in English literature, I believe.'

‘What's it matter? Doctor this, or doctor that? It's this that I'm interested in. Knochen must have taken it upon himself to be art director of this little palace of theirs, Louis. A Jewess set to be ravaged by Hercules! It's his little joke on all the others. It fits his sense of humour, if he has one.
If
.' A warning …

Marble busts of Greeks and Romans stood solemnly sentinel, facing the windows from across the carpet. There were other paintings between the mirrors. A Correggio, a Dürer, a Frans Hals … gorgeous things. ‘Does he change them periodically?' asked the Frog, their steps hastening now towards the far end of the room and trouble … trouble …

‘Perhaps, but then …' offered the Gestapo's Bavarian explorer.

A life-sized bronze of Julius Caesar – a truly remarkable thing – stood in the far left corner nearest the hammering, intruding and incongruous telex. Berlin on the line at all times.

The desk was Russian – Napoleonic in anticipation of conquest. The top was of polished malachite holding scattered files and papers – huge mounds of them. Papers, papers, always it was papers with the Germans.

The malachite was superb and the Gobelin tapestry that hung huge and richly on the wall behind the man with the grey-blue pop-eyes was fantastic. Ruby reds and golds et cetera, et cetera.
The Finding of the Baby Moses among the Reeds.
Interesting … very interesting. Jews again.

St-Cyr clutched his hat and heart. The pop-eyes didn't even bother to look up.

‘Sit down. The two of you. I won't detain you a moment.'

Hermann hesitated. St-Cyr knew he must wait for his partner's lead.

The glasses winked with their thickness, the orbs were bulging, and the bent, domed, diligent head showed pinkly from beneath its close-cut cropping of fair hair.

Oberg scribbled a signature as he might have authorized a bill of lading in the Hamburg warehouse of the West India Bananen-vertriebsgesellschaft where he'd been a purchasing agent from 1926 until 1929.

‘And this one, too, Herr Generalmajor.'

Knochen, the Doctor of Philosophy, had not yet deigned to notice them. All business that one. Somewhat emaciated and with that sick little smile. The wounded academic? wondered St-Cyr, or the one who has perpetually the tongue in cheek for his superiors and everyone else?

Ah yes, the latter. Most definitely. St-Cyr took in the hastily brushed auburn hair that was thick and badly in need of cutting. Was Knochen the Bohemian in the Nazi flock? The blue-grey eyes behind their glasses seemed to say he couldn't have cared less what anyone thought. The pinched face said it too.

A strange combination these two who held the threat of life or death over not just Paris's millions, but every living soul in France.

Power, this was power. Fate at its cruellest.

Kohler saw Louis glance up at the ceiling and knew the Frog was asking his God why He'd had to smile down upon the Earth in this particular fashion.

Another and then another of the papers were signed. Were they witnessing the signing of the hostages' death notices? Had it been deliberate on Knochen's part? That skinny aesthete who had missed out on being a professor of literature?

Of course it had been deliberate.
Gott im Himmel
, why hadn't that God of Louis' granted the bastard a tenured position in some university?

For the same reasons, perhaps, that He'd decreed young Adolf should not have been admitted into the Academy of Art!

Knochen had been Reinhard Heydrich's man in France; Oberg, Himmler's. And just as that God of Louis' had shut the doors of academia to the assistant, so, too, He'd opened those of mass unemployment and dissatisfaction to the banana merchant.

Oberg had drifted into tobacco and cigars as a small shopkeeper, only to find that the Great Depression had stopped the ships from bringing in the supplies and the coins from flowing out of sailors' pockets. In June 1931 he'd joined the Party. Card Number 575205. The money troubles had ceased and the wife could get pregnant.

Knochen's turn had come a little later. In 1933 he'd joined the SA and had been given the lowly rank of obertruppenführer, a company sergeant-major, just to show the world what you can get when you've got a Ph.D.

Since then that same fate or God had been merciful. Meteoric rises to power for both of them. Heady rises.

And now all this. The Palace of Wonders, of All Things Possible. The avenue Foch, Number 72.

Hermann finally sat down. St-Cyr watched the signing of the last of the death notices.

‘Sit down.'

It was Knochen who, gathering the notices, had said this. Unable to react, the Frog stood there feeling desperate. ‘How many are to die?' he croaked.

Oberg didn't glance questioningly up at his assistant. So this was the Frenchman who, together with Kohler, had been responsible for the Vouvray mess, the disgracing of the SS on another murder case.

‘Twenty-seven. The three others are to be spared.'

‘Transported,' said Knochen.

Louis sat down heavily. He tried to find a place to put his hands and hat, and the two behind the desk watched him in silence.

Twenty-seven were to die. Had Oberg got up on the wrong side of the bed or something? Why not all thirty, or why not only a few?

Oberg didn't like the look of either of them. The Frenchman was trouble and the Bavarian dishonest and disloyal! ‘Your futures are both in question. You are here, at my command, to be given a second chance.'

So much for Vouvray. The banana merchant was clearly not happy. The Führer and Himmler would both have heard of it.

‘This murder …' began Oberg. He'd make them sweat! Betray the SS, would they? Hold the Service up to ridicule?

‘There are two murders, Herr Generalmajor,' interjected Knochen.

‘Yes, yes, a young gangster and his filthy prostitute. Coins –' Oberg snapped his chubby fingers. ‘These coins. Gold, I understand.'

‘Forgeries, Herr Generalmajor.' Knochen indicated the coins should be produced.

Hermann got up to fumble in his pockets. The coins had that certain ring on the malachite. One of them spun dizzily. The telex hammered. Oberg thought to turn, then thought better of doing so.