Clandestine (40 page)

Having lit the pipe and appreciatively paused, felt St-Cyr, he would tell her exactly how it had been. ‘Because those scraps speak volumes, mademoiselle. My partner and I, having discovered where you were living and under what name, have been desperately trying to keep that information from the special commando that are looking for you.'

‘They having deliberately left me free to leave Amsterdam because they had an informant both Arie and Étienne, and myself at first, didn't know of. The “black” diamonds don't exist, in so far as I know. What I have belongs only to the daughter of Mijnheer Josef Meyerhof. Enough, he hoped, for her to get Diamant Meyerhof restarted when this war is over. Until he had told me of her, however, I would never have thought it of him, for he was, I'm sure, very much in love with Mevrouw Meyerhof and they did have a son. Unfortunately, Michèle is not in Paris with her mother and stepfather, but is in Barbizon at the home of Monsieur Laurence Rousel, Josef's former notary. The house is right across the street from the small museum that celebrates the painters of the Barbizon School, but … but I don't know how I can possibly get to her.'

‘We'll help if we can, but I should tell you that Barbizon has its nest of collaborators and is a much-favoured spot of the Occupier especially because of those painters.'

‘And is that partner of yours not of the Occupier?'

‘Hermann is simply Hermann and unique, but they've made things exceedingly difficult. They're holding his Oona and Giselle hostage and threatening Drancy, and it has to be weighing heavily on him, but we've been up against such people before and he has always pulled through.'

Yet now, what now—was
that what was worrying the chief inspector? ‘Where is he—watching your back as Emmi is watching mine?'

‘Would that that were true, but he's near the Santé. Another house-to-house, not because he wants to be any part of it—please don't misunderstand—but because, like myself, he has continually to walk a knife edge.'

The 14th and far too close to the Gobelins and the tannery.

^*
An adjacent suburb just to the east of Paris.

^*
Head of the Abwehr, also arrested for the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. Unlike Boineburg-Lengsfeld, Canaris was executed 9 April 1945.

^*
9–10 November 1938.

11

Louis would understand. He would have to, felt Kohler. Miserable as always, Heinrich Ludin was still behind the wheel but had been far too silent, and the rue de la Santé ahead could not have been bleaker. Devoid of foot traffic and bicycles, there was, but far along from them near the intersection with the boulevard Arago, nothing but two horse-drawn delivery wagons half-loaded with firewood no one should have left untended and one lonely
gazogène
truck that looked as if its little fire had suddenly been extinguished.

‘He isn't learning, is he, that colonel of yours, Kriminalrat?
Ach
, this is Paris, not the Warsaw Ghetto on a second visit to its sewers.'

‘And you have yet to learn that I've had enough of the shit you and that partner of yours have been trying to feed me. That girl was stopped last night and we now know where those
Banditen
must have met before and
after
they killed Frans Oenen.'

Cigarettes lay in full view between them—Camels this time, but there was no point in even asking. ‘Maybe that girl will try to make contact. Have you even thought of that?'

‘Contact, after what they did last night? Those two women of yours will be in Drancy tonight, and in a railway cattle truck tomorrow at 0500 hours. I've already given the order to send them to Mauthausen, and it's been ratified by Reichssicherheitschef Kaltenbrunner.'

‘And here I am, trying to tell you something but neither you nor the colonel will listen.'

‘Two of the Paris police stopped that slut near here at 2337 hours last night, just after she must have left their hideout.'

Ludin had finally turned onto the boulevard Arago and they were now slightly to the east of the Santé. Salad shakers were being loaded. Half-naked and totally, the models and other arrested females were, of course, verbally sounding off, the kids too, their fathers having been hammered.

‘Artists, Kohler!' shrilled Kleiber, pistol in hand. ‘Communists!'

Even reason wasn't going to help, but he'd have to try. ‘The Cité Fleurie is but one of several such colonies, Colonel. There's another nearer the Gobelins and on the rue Broca,
*
at Number 147. There the Cité Verte is even more dilapidated than this, since artists never waste anything and scrounge what they can. Everything needed to build these shacks and glaze them came from the Universal Exposition of 1867. Picasso once had a studio here, Modigliani, too, and Rodin. Others as well, lots of them and still maybe thirty or forty. That's why the big, north-facing windows and the makeshift skylights that always seem to leak. The porches are so that they could haul their paintings outside to have another look.'

Louis, being Louis, had brought him here in the autumn of 1940. Vegetables had been harvested again this year from every scrap of the now retilled soil, refurbished constantly of course with outhouse waste to await spring planting. Rabbits were caged indoors in whatever had been to hand, chickens, too, and gerbils, which were really very tasty when fried, or so Louis had claimed necessity was causing some to eat. One lonely goat looked bone dry, though there were no cats and dogs, since every scrap of food was needed.

Studio after studio held the usual, and often degenerate art just to inflame Nazis like these two further. Jackboots smashed the hours of patient labour. One weeping woman had given birth and was in urgent need of help. ‘Get her an ambulance. They're not here, Standartenführer. Artists are only interested in their own art and that of their friends and competitors, and would have told you everything by now if anyone else had been here.'

Even the trees had been stripped of all but their highest branches, the stoves in such need. Near the shaded cast-iron water trough and pump, someone had lost a tooth. ‘Louis will have answers, Kriminalrat. Back off and rescind that order.'

Still cloistered in this pseudo jungle with the enemy constantly near and himself smoking his pipe at last, St-Cyr listened intently as Anna-Marie spoke softly but with an earnestness that was humbling.

‘All of the diamonds would be weighed and entered into the firm's ledger, but the day before the Blitzkrieg struck we had a shipment of industrials that came in from the Congo and South Africa. I was going over the lesser ones and when Papa came to see me, he turned his back on the others in the room and shoved that kilo bag of boart and the other of borderlines at me. I was simply a trainee and normally everyone when leaving for home would have to go through security but not that day for myself, and he must have known this. As soon as he got home, he put them into a fruit jar and after dark we buried it in the garden.'

‘And with his pocket watch?'

‘When he knew he and my mother were to leave, he left it there both to tell anyone else that they were Meyerhof diamonds and also in the hope that I would find it.'

‘Were other diamonds taken?'

‘If so, he never told me. Fortunately those who then ransacked our house failed to find them, even though they dug up the garden, too, but I felt I could no longer leave them there, so brought them to Paris last December.'

‘Only to then find that you had to make a second visit.'

It was now time to tell him, felt Anna-Marie, and taking a small twist of cloth from her pocket, handed it to him, he feeling its contents and immediately knowing what it contained. ‘Chief Inspector, the
équipe
are asking that you and Herr Kohler arrange for the sale of that kilo of boart to Munimin-Pimetex. Its lead purchasing agents, Rheal Lachance and Émile Girandoux, have both met me at Chez Kornilov on two occasions. You're to tell them full price on the
marché noir
: 45 million francs but not in 5,000-franc notes or 1,000-franc notes. In these.'

Having dug it out of another pocket, she let him unfold it. Distinctively big—eight inches by five—and white, but with flowing dark black script, the banknote was well worn and bore the usual cashiers' stamps, this one of Lloyds and Barclays, and the hastily scribbled notations of bookmakers, shopkeepers and others through whose hands it had already passed, they having jotted down who had passed it to them in case of forgery. ‘Fivers,' he said. ‘That's what the British call these, their most beloved of banknotes. Hermann and myself have encountered them before, but still …'

‘ Monsieur Lachance had a wad of them from which he paid their bill at the restaurant, and ours too, to impress Monsieur Lebeznikov and his son and myself. He then gave me one and wished us well.'

‘You then handing it over to the leader of your
équipe
.'

‘Who told me they must have come from the bank vaults of the occupied territories, that Reichsmarschall Göring would have made certain of getting his hands on plenty. The Belgians alone had apparently hoarded stacks and stacks of them.'

As foreign currency reserves but still forgery, too, was possible, and certainly both he and Hermann knew well enough that the SD and Abwehr used them to pay off informants and others. ‘Your choice of purchasing agency is appropriate, but if so, how many of these would be needed?'

Was he going to agree? ‘Forty-five thousand, tied in bundles of one hundred and packed in three medium-size suitcases, the drop-off and exchange to be made tomorrow, but arranged by yourselves.'

How businesslike of her. ‘And I'm to relay the time and place when and where?'

‘Tomorrow at 1000 hours. There's a
Lokal
on the boulevard Saint-Michel and just around the corner from a
Soldatenheim
on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Go into the
Lokal
on the pretext of looking for Herr Kohler. Take out your pipe and tobacco pouch, and wait. You'll be contacted, if not by myself, then told where to meet me.'

A district she would know well as a student, a hostel for visiting soldiers on leave and the canteen they would go to, but still a terrible risk for her, even though
Blitzmädchen
also used them. ‘And if we refuse? Things are difficult enough as I've already told you, and I don't honestly know how my partner will react. Before I came here to meet you, we had just seen the suitcases of his Oona Van der Lynn and Giselle Le Roy packed and ready waiting for the truck to take them to Drancy, this evening probably.'

Aram hadn't told her what to say to such a thing, but was an offer being demanded? ‘And where, please, might those have been seen?'

Taking out the letter from Kaltenbrunner, St-Cyr knew he had to do what he had to, she seeing the signature and the stamps and knowing immediately how valuable they would be to those who forged papers. ‘They're in Neuilly, on the corner of the boulevard Victor Hugo and rue de Rouvray. The villa Gestapo Boemelburg keeps for special prisoners.'

‘When?

‘The sooner the better.'

Drawing the Citroën to the side of the road, St-Cyr fingered the rijksdaaler that had tipped her off, but could she and Emmi do the impossible, and could Hermann and he really make such a deal and then see that all that cash was handed over to an FTP
équipe
?

Along the street, all was in chaos. Harried and dismayed, Hermann was trying his best to reason with Ludin and Kleiber, but they simply weren't listening.

Ancient like its former
maisons de maître
, the rue Broca was much nearer to the Gobelins. Blocked off with trucks, salad shakers,
flics
and Wehrmacht just like the Cité Fleury apparently had been, the Cité Verte, at number 147, was another artists' colony. Here, though, the studios were in the centre of the garden that those early artists had taken over as squatters back in the latter half of the last century. Even more dilapidated, fire must have seemed the only solution to former city fathers, the present ones too, and certainly the Standartenführer gave every indication of helping things along.

Lined up on the clods of overturned earth, resident males faced resident females, both in all states of dress and undress, teenagers too, and young children, as well as grandparents and others, and shouldn't those kids have been in school?

Kleiber and a Parisian interpreter were progressing between the two rows. Held back by the rifles and Schmeissers of the helmetted and the batons of the
flics
, the forty or so adults were far from happy, but obviously had been beaten into submission.

Flames leaped from the still growing mountain of canvases, easels, paints, brushes and such, the troops rejoicing in their task by first smashing things.

‘Louis, these people will only hate the Occupier far more than they already do, and when I have to pack up and leave, it's not going to be pleasant. Oona and Giselle …'

It was, of course, heresy for him to have said any such thing in such company. ‘
Doucement, mon vieux
, let me roll you a cigarette from that
mégot
tin of Arie Beekhuis. You've not taken more of those pills, have you?'

‘Beekhuis? She didn't make contact. She couldn't have.'

What a slender thread that was and Hermann had felt it snap, but there was no time to tell him what had happened. Struck hard across the face by Kleiber, a woman in the line-up shrieked,
‘BOCHE POLTRON, SOYEZ MAUDIT!'
*
There was silence at that greatest of insults, and through it came the crackling of the flames as Ludin settled on her ten-year-old daughter. Holding the child by the left hand, he drew on his cigarette.

‘Don't, Kriminalrat,' pleaded Hermann. ‘Leave her. She won't know anything.'

Gut
, a little panic could but help, thought Ludin, giving pause to things.

‘Kohler, the Vermeulen girl must have come from somewhere in this district last night,' said Kleiber. ‘It's only a matter of time until one of this scum coughs up the answer.'

‘They were hiding here last night, weren't they?' Ludin asked the child in Deutsch, the interpreter translating.

Soulful, deep brown eyes lifted to him from under dark brown bangs, and a seriousness came to those tender years, the freckles and the thinness.
‘Ah non, monsieur,'
she said gravely. ‘Those people, they don't hide in places like ours where there are far too many coming and going all the time except for after the curfew when it's illegal to do such a thing. They hide in the Bièvre.'

‘What's that?' demanded Ludin.

‘Tell him in French, Louis.'

Had she been reading
Les Misérables
?
*
wondered St-Cyr. ‘A stream whose banks were lined with tanneries, dye works and factories, all of which dumped their effluent into it until the stench became so rank it was covered over in 1910 and made into part of the sewer system in the 1930s.'

All this was duly repeated in Deutsch until a sigh was heard. ‘There,' she said, ‘Now you know. Tanneries stink and so does that sewer system into which that hidden river pours especially when it rains a lot, and when those people you want have to come up to walk along the boulevard Arago you can
smell
them especially when they're not
even
wearing their big rubber boots.'

‘Les égoutiers?'
asked the startled interpreter.

‘Ah oui,'
she answered, scrunching up her nose to indicate the stench, ‘but me, I think there are others too.'

‘All hiding in the sewers?' asked the interpreter.

‘Oh for sure they're down there, monsieur. Lots and lots of them, and they come out at night because they
like
the darkness.'

‘
Ach
, she's making it all up, Kriminalrat,' said Hermann. ‘
Mein Gott
, what else would you expect her to do?'

‘The Bièvre, as a sewer, does flow into the one that runs under the boulevard Arago to join others, Kriminalrat,' said the interpreter­, ‘and from there you can get to virtually any place in the city.'