Clandestine (18 page)

‘Gentlemen, as a young student, I studied ornithology in my spare time and came to love and admire the eagle. But I was always torn when prey was being carried back to the nest. You see, eagles will attack one another and I would never know until the very last moment if the meal would be dropped or stolen and the young go hungry.'

Fortunately there was still no one else in the room, felt St-Cyr, and the general had even had the maître d's bell placed on the table in front of himself and had had the doors closed, but that eagle on his tunic was clutching a swastika and the analogy plainly evident.

‘Yesterday at dawn, gentlemen, British commandos landed at Termoli and are presently hastening to link up with the American Eighth Army. On the twenty-eighth of last month, the Italians signed their final surrender effectively denying the Führer his staunchest ally. “Traitors,” he's now calling them, and of course the Allies are not going to go away. The port of Naples is already in British hands, and they are rapidly repairing it so as to bring in the much needed materiel yet the Führer, for all his apparent wisdom, remains confident of a final victory, as do, indeed, the Japanese, another of his allies.'

There was likely more to come, and it would be wisest for them to stay out of it. ‘Hermann, give him the list.'

‘General, these are the names of the ten who forced their way into that shop to terrify those dear ladies.'

‘And take your two as hostage, Kohler. I'm not without my sources but had no idea of the utter gravity of the matter when I spoke so harshly to you.'

Liebe Zeit!
‘They were a hit squad of PPF.'

‘Ordered at the request of Kriminalrat Ludin,' interjected Louis­. ‘Apparently he felt a little squeeze necessary, General. You see Hermann­ and I, we were called in to investigate the murder of …'

‘Yes, yes, Untersturmführer Mohnke and Oberführer Thomsen reported the killings to myself. Some ruins, I gather. The Chemin des Dames, Kohler, and Falkenhyan's line. The Drachenhöhle. Reims, of course, and the shelling we gave it from those hills seven or so kilometres to the east, eh?'

‘The fortress of Witry-lès-Reims, Hermann, and the one at Nogent-l'Abbesse, and the forest lookout and battery that is just beyond Cerney-lès-Reims.'

‘Yes, yes. The 10.5 centimetre FH16 Leichte Feldhaubitze, Kohler, and the 7.5 FK16 Feldkanone. Our light howitzer was called the whizz-bangs by the British, the tempest of fire, by the French, eh, and by our boys, the drumfire. How it all comes back. Immediately.'

Even including, as Louis well knew, those thirteen-centimetre high-velocity guns whose key feature was that no one would even hear the shot until the bloody-damn shell had arrived. ‘Kriminalrat Ludin and the Standartenführer who is with him have been following the truck, General, in which was the murderer. This we have established.'

‘But they weren't after him,' said St-Cyr. ‘They were chasing a Dutch girl that
Spitzel
of theirs was watching and leaving coins as reminders, but Herr Ludin refuses to tell us who she is and why their
Sonderkommando
want her, nor will he even give us the name of the killer, though they obviously must know it.'

Thwarting the course of justice. ‘
Ein Spitzel
, you say?'

‘Their
Sonderkommando
is from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, General, and under a security so tight no one is even to know why Herr Ludin and his colonel are in Paris.'

Kaltenbrunner again, was it? said Boineburg-Lengsfeld to himself. He'd show that sadistic, chain-smoking incompetent alcoholic Himmler had put in charge of the SD a thing or two. ‘A mere girl requires such an effort, does she? What would you like me to do with those PPF, Kohler?'

‘General, here are their identity papers. The Organisation Todt is always needing labour, especially with the Atlantic Wall still not finished. Have them assigned to breaking rock and shovelling gravel and cement on the Channel Islands. Get them to do a little honest work for a change.'

‘And this Ludin, how can I help?'

They'd better keep it simple. ‘Louis and I need to take another­ look at those ruins where the killings happened. You see, en route, that girl switched horses because she must have realized they had a
Spitzel
among the group she was with.'

‘Leaving it, she went ahead, we believe, to ask for a lift in the bank van, General.'

‘And they saw that she was pretty,' said Kohler, ‘but that plain around Reims is so flat, we have to take a look at those 1914–1918 gun emplacements to see how those in that truck with its
gazo
could not only have seen the van but followed and finally caught up with it.'

‘Did they take her back?'

‘We think they must have,' said Hermann.

‘And if I were to keep all of this in confidence yet call Höherer SS und Polizeiführer Karl Oberg, to tell him of the necessity of your request to delay this meeting with the Kriminalrat, where would you like it to be held and when?'

Good generals were rare but often thorough, thought Kohler, and of course among them, those who were dyed-in-the-wool Prussians most often had utterly no use for the SD and SS. ‘The Boeuf sur le Toit and this evening at around 2100 hours.'

‘An excellent choice since it will, of necessity, have to go in my duty report, but I'll also forward a copy to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, another to the Führer and a third to the OKW.'

The High Command, but of course the Boeuf sur le Toit
,
being a favourite of the SD, SS and Gestapo, had been shut down and forbidden by the Führer last March to rid Paris of its slackers, felt Kohler, only to reopen illegally in a wing of the Hôtel George V and be but a nice stroll from its former location on the rue du Colisée, which had been much closer to Gestapo and Sûreté headquarters.

But there was still more to come, and Louis looked as if he knew it too.

Unpinning his Iron Cross First Class from the Great War, Boineburg-Lengsfeld ran the thumb of memory over it. ‘This, as I'm sure you must know, Kohler, dates back to the Napoleonic Wars when on 10 March 1813, Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia inaugurated it. Like mine still does, they originally had the imperial crown at the centre. Now, of course, it's the swastika, but that hasn't been enough, has it? Nothing ever is with those people in Berlin. Were it the Abwehr you were dealing with, you would immediately have been told everything needed, but with Kalten­brunner and the SD things are, unfortunately, insidiously different. Today I received final word from those who respect and revere it, that our world-renowned counterintelligence service, founded on 25 March 1866 by Count von Moltke, chief of the general staff, will cease to exist by the end of the year. Instead, it will be taken over and “absorbed” completely by the Sicherheitsdienst. For men such as myself, and I've been a soldier all my life, it's incomprehensible. According to Reichsführer Himmler's latest directive, all mention of the Abwehr is to be expunged from the history textbooks by next June at the latest.'

Taking not a second longer, he brought the palm of his right hand down firmly on the bell.

‘Now, please, here are our breakfasts. Enjoy and I will see that a full lunch hamper is made up for you both.'

‘Gasoline, General.'

‘Of course. Two jerry cans and a full tank. You've only to call round to the Abwehr's garage since it still exists. I'll give you an order for them and a blanket
ausweise
for the journey.'
*

Two smoked herring, sausages, eggs and ham were set before Louis who had, Kohler knew, been looking forward to more illegal croissants, butter and jam but would now have to eat the lot as if enjoying it all.

Having come out here to the east of Reims about eight kilometres in an attempt to pick up the trail of that van and
gazogène
, they had taken a short detour to the north of the RD 380 to the base of what had to be one of the most massively ugly, pentagonal fortresses, felt Kohler. Smashed grey-stone walls rose to gun emplacements in tiers, reminding them both of the stupidity of all such wars, but here the maximum elevation was only 175 metres. Farms crowded the lowermost slopes and were spread out over the plain of Champagne. Sugar beets, rutabagas, cabbages, turnips, onions and potatoes, hay, wheat, barley and corn all seemed to flourish in that chalky soil in spite of the shortages of manure. Kids, mothers, grandmothers, wagons, handcarts, plow horses, bullocks, old men, too, and the disabled from that other war were at the harvest. And to the south of Reims, on the slopes of the Montagne de Reims, which wasn't a mountain at all but an escarpment and plateau of about 275 metres at its highest, the leaves would be turning and the
vendage
in progress: champagne and those roads toward Reims busy as hell, so you don't stop traffic, otherwise folks get very angry and shout their heads off.

Built between 1875 and 1878, the fortress of Witry-lès-Reims, named Loewendal by the Wehrmacht in 1914, had been but a part of the defensive chain of fortresses and batteries the Third Republic had thrown up after the Franco-Prussian War. Universal conscription had been introduced. Never again would
la patrie
suffer such a humiliating defeat, yet they had prepared for a style of warfare that would no longer be in vogue, and had done the same damned thing in this one with the Maginot Line.

‘In 1914, at the start of it in August, Hermann, there was a garrison of three hundred and seventy-seven.
Bien sûr,
the magazine alone held 85,000 kilos of artillery shells for the thirty-one heavy guns above, a cavern so huge it defied reason. Tunnels and tunnels, and even a bread oven that could bake three hundred and fifty loaves a day. Czar Nicholas II was very impressed when he attended the
grandes manoeuvres de l'Est
on September 1901, same garrison size, same bread oven.'

Yet it, and other such forts, and there had been a lot of them taken, had only been turned against the French in the 1914–1918 war. ‘And assuming that my side would have rightly used those guns every day for 1,051 of them, we sent shell after French shell into Reims, a few of our own as well.'

‘Levelling more than 12,000 of its 14,000 houses, virtually all of the public buildings and enough of the cathedral, its repairs lasted all but to the start of the present hostilities.'

But entry here was absolutely forbidden, the road up and into it all having been closed off by a mountain of rubble.

‘Hidden in the back of that truck, Louis, our Anna-Marie wouldn't have seen a thing in any case and would have only wondered what the hell was going on.'

Knowing as she must have, that there was an informant amongst them. ‘But they would have sought the heights elsewhere, Hermann, since those leaving the city and travelling east on the RD 380 would have told them of why there was such a traffic hold-up going west.'

‘Every incoming vehicle being torn apart in a desperate attempt to find her by a Standartenfûhrer and a Kriminalrat who should have known better than to broadcast what they were after.'

‘Though it will now be overgrown by forest, the lookout at Berru might be better. It's about 7.5 kilometres from Reims and at an altitude of about 270 metres. Those comrades of yours also shelled the city from there.'

‘And with French guns, was it?'

‘There's a magazine that would have held 65,000 kilos of shells and a bread oven that would have produced three hundred loaves a day.'

Dented, speckled by bird shot and rusting, the sign wasn't any more than twenty-four years old, yet clear enough:

BERRU LOOKOUT AND BATTERY,

CONSTRUCTED BETWEEN 1876 AND 1881.

THIS WOODS AND ITS DEFENSIVE WORKS

ARE ALL PRIVATE PROPERTY

AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

HUNTING AND TRESPASSING ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

‘Messieurs … Messieurs, écoutez-moi, s'il vous plaît. Les bombardements de la Grande Guerre, n'est-ce pas? Les obus explosifs et des mortiers aux perforants.'

‘The armour-piercing ones, Louis, but he's forgotten to include the grenades and land mines.'

‘Leave him to me, Hermann. We don't have time to argue.'

Oaks, beeches, chestnut and pine, none probably more than twenty-five years old, grew in profusion, and through these and the underlying brush, a stone-laid trudge path brought instant memories of men slugging shells uphill and wounded down.

A stone lookout that no one had bothered to repair, and why should they have, nestled on high and might well have given a clear enough view and been used by that
passeur
, but Louis had gone back along the road a little.

The resident retainer's house was on a postage stamp of a clearing, with woodpile, drive-shed, chickens, cow, goat, and he with one arm, the left. But the frayed bit of ribbon with its red-lined green moiré and bronze palm on this bantam's chest indicated a Croix de Guerre. Less than the five mentions a silver would have brought, but no matter since one was quite enough.

Full and broad, and not unlike Werner Dillmann's, the grey and mercilessly tended moustache was given a decisive knuckle brush. ‘Me, Horace Rivet and former corporal in an army that was an army and didn't run like those in this war, cannot let you pass, Inspectors. The wife will insist. She's a Jouvand. Her father and mother are far worse.'

‘Are there others who would watch and report our trespassing if you did allow us to have a look?' asked Louis, pleasantly enough.

‘They are all too busy at the harvest but will have seen that car of yours taking to this hill.'

‘It's urgent. A murder inquiry. Your assistance is not only necessary, Corporal, it's demanded under the law.'

Ah bon
, firmness would be necessary. ‘Arrest me, then. If my boys were here, and not in the prisoner-of-war camps of that one, and let me tell you they and the others with them fought bravely, I would simply stand back and have them deal with you. It's far too dangerous as the sign plainly states, or is it that you can't or refuse to read?'