Gypsy (35 page)

‘For what purpose?' he asked.

She let him have it. ‘Sabotage, since the times are no longer ordinary and there are so few of their people left. He has everything he needs, hasn't he?'

‘
Think
, Nana,' urged Gabrielle quickly interceding. ‘A conservatory – didn't he once tell you of one?'

‘A house that had been fashionable in its day,' added Suzanne-Cécilia, ‘but one which, on the death of its owner, had been left to a religious order.'

‘An arcade,' said Nana. ‘An inner courtyard. Janwillem … I once overheard him saying to someone on the telephone that they should meet in the conservatory where … where the Prussian general had established his personal latrine during the war of 1870-71. The house is a former villa, Sturmbannführer, within whose stairwells the ceilings are still decorated with the same paintings of swallows that were there in the fourteenth century. There is a chapel. A maze of corridors connect innumerable bedchambers, since cut up into the more recent cells of the monks who have now long departed. Above the rooms and corridors there are gaping holes in the roof.'

‘Would it be in or near the Forêt de Marly-le-Roi, Nana?' asked Gabrielle.

She didn't look at any of them but said faintly, ‘Yes, that is where it is.
L'Abbaye des frères bienveillants
.'

The Abbey of the Benevolent Friars. ‘Were you ever there?' asked Boemelburg.

Her gaze met his fully and she had to ask herself, Does he know of it after all? Has he suddenly remembered it?

‘Once and now … now I have given him to you and may my son and God Himself forgive me.'

In the pitch darkness before dawn, Hermann was silent. The rue Laurence-Savart had barely awakened. The Citroën was freezing. ‘Didn't you sleep at all?' asked St-Cyr.

‘A couple of hours.'

‘And Giselle, is she still determined to throw herself from the belfries of the Notre-Dame?'

‘
What
…? Oh, Giselle. A false alarm. Cramps, all that sort of thing. Her cycle's way out of tune, but she's still determined to kill herself, though she says she'll wait to see if we return.'

‘And Oona?' asked St-Cyr sadly.

‘Still thinks she'll drown herself but admits it will be difficult cutting a hole through the ice without an axe.'

‘
Bon
! That should slow her up. Now why don't you tell me what's really bothering you? No baby on the way? I would have thought you'd be …'

‘
Celebrating
? Then read this. I got it from a friend of a friend at Gestapo Central but had to pay the lousy son of a bitch 10,000 for it.'

‘Francs?'

‘
Idiot! Reichskassenscheine
. Suddenly nobody wants francs any more, not since von Paulus stopped being supplied. There's a rumour he told the Führer he was going to have to throw in the towel.'

Stalingrad … The Sixth Army … A hundred thousand men at least and had the pendulum finally begun to swing the other way? Berlin would be enraged.

The flimsy slip of paper was a copy of a telex from Himmler to Boemelburg and it had come in at 0530 hours, not ten minutes ago.
SETTLE IT
– that was all there was to the message, but the intended inference was
Befehl ist Befehl
, an order is an order.

‘Jacqmain blows his head off. The Spade is torched. Wehrle takes cyanide. Death follows on death but all Gestapo Paris-Central and the SS over in Saint-Cloud have to show for it is a shortage of at least 100,000,000 francs, an obvious absence of cyanide and explosives, and three women in their nightgowns, each of whom steadfastly claims her innocence! The Chief hasn't any other choice. I'm telling you, Louis, it's us or them. They're terrorists.'

‘
We can't turn them in!' It was a cry
.

‘Look, I know that. I just had to get it clear with you because now it'll have to be the five of us against all of them.'

‘Snipers?'

‘Or grenades but, yes, it's the thought of snipers that worries me the most.
Killed while attempting to apprehend the Gypsy
! You, me, the three of them and it's … why then it's all settled and no one has to fuss about us any more. Hell, we only look after common crime. No one cares about that, not with all the really big crime that's going on!'

‘And we've crossed the SS once too often.'

St-Cyr wet his lips in uncertainty as he searched the darkness ahead. ‘What did Boemelburg send the Reichsminister to engender such a response?'

‘That he wasn't sure of our loyalties, nor those of the three suspects.'

There was a sigh. ‘Then they really do intend to kill us. It's to be a classic Gestapo-SS ploy.'

Kohler tossed his hands in despair. ‘
And we're going to have to go in there after the Gypsy knowing there's a gun at our backs and that the trigger will be pulled
!'

Or the grenade thrown …

It wasn't fair. It was criminal! but there was nothing they could do. ‘We're already as good as dead. There will be mountains of white silk lilies and carnations for Gabrielle and her friends. Their coffins will be draped with swastikas. Tears will be shed wherever soldiers wait, and Goebbels will have a field day with it. Loyal French women
killed
in the act of
assisting
the Reich!'

Snow-covered, the lane passed through magnificent stands of oak and beech whose trunks stood tall and sentinel in the hushed and frozen air. The ruins were not within the Forêt de Marly-le-Roi, but were just on its outskirts and well to the north-west of the Joyenval crossroads.

From where he stood beside Boemelburg's car, St-Cyr could not yet see them. Silently, as before an assault, heavily armed troops in their white, padded parkas, hoods and overtrousers fanned out to take up positions. Perhaps a platoon in number, perhaps two squads and some.

Uncertain of what lay ahead, Gabrielle looked steadily at him from the other side of the car; Suzanne-Cécilia also. From the north, another approach was being made. But there, the troops would have to pass through several hectares where willow shoots had been harvested down through the centuries for basket-making and other wickerwork. There, with backs to the thickets, Nana Thélème and Hermann would have to cross a frozen brook and fields and then make their way uphill through the abbey's former gardens to the ruins.

The Forêt occupied a low and hilly plateau which had once bordered the ancestral Seine; the ruins were downhill of it on a lesser rise. Beyond them, in the lowlands, there was a brook and, beyond this, the willow shoots. It was, for De Vries and Tshaya and, in the past, the gypsy caravans, a perfect location. Isolated yet within twenty-five kilometres of Paris and all but surrounded by forest, copse or low-lying field and farm.

Boemelburg didn't even bother to get out of the car. ‘Louis, we'll give you two hours before we move in. Warn us if he's wired it. Enough good men have already been lost. Berlin are adamant. We can't spare any more.'

‘But there are at least three others with them, Walter?'

‘Talk to them. Convince them to come out. If they throw down their arms, they'll be deported. That's the best I can do.'

‘And if they refuse?'

‘We'll come in and get you.'

‘
Am I not even to be allowed my gun
?'

‘We want to talk to them, Louis. I'm sorry.'

‘And Hermann?' The bags below Walter's eyes seemed bigger, sadder, more jaundiced in the grey light.

‘No weapon either. Signal twice with the white flag when you've contacted De Vries, and three times when you're ready to bring him and the others out. If they try to make a break for it, we'll get them.'

‘There's no need for Gabrielle and Madame Lemaire to come with me. Why not keep them here?'

Must Louis make things difficult? ‘They'll soften them. Their presence will make De Vries less cautious and more open to talking.' Twice now Louis had noticed the rifles the snipers would use and had frantically torn his gaze from them. Had he realized what was to happen?

‘And if he's not there? If there's no one?' leapt St-Cyr.

‘We'll deal with that when we come to it.'

‘Then it's
au revoir
' he said, dismayed.

‘
Bonne chance
.'

Sickened by what was to happen – betrayed, angry – he took Gabrielle and Suzanne-Cécilia by an arm. As they picked their way among the trees and underbrush, his spine was tense. If he could he would shove each of them aside and try to cover for them as they scrambled away.

But it would do no good. They'd all be taken. ‘Did you kill the Spade?' he asked. There was a shallow ravine they had to cross and he was helping them into this. Gabrielle met his gaze.

‘Why do you ask? Why do you doubt me so?'

Suzanne-Cécilia said, ‘There is no way we could have, Inspector.'

‘It's Chief Inspector,' he replied impatiently. ‘Gestapo surveillance on you both was not in any way complete until after you had turned yourself in, Gabrielle. Not until Thursday afternoon. Did you pierce his eyes?'

‘Is this what you believe of me, Jean-Louis?'

They would tell him nothing. They would each be shot – would he hear the sniper's gun? he wondered. Would he see them throw up their arms and open their mouths to cry out silently in shocked surprise even as they crumpled to the ground, or would they die from a grenade?

‘I need to know. I cannot find it in me to believe any of you capable of such cruelty but the detective in me says I could be wrong.'

Silence followed the outburst. Gabrielle was a good head taller than either of them and easily pulled herself out of the ravine. Suzanne-Cécilia remained behind and when the two of them waited, looking down at her, Céci, disheartened and afraid, looked up to say, ‘They're going to kill us, aren't they, Jean-Louis?'

In despair he looked away to where the men could no longer be seen. ‘Yes.'

Hurriedly she crossed herself and kissed her fingertips, having pulled off Marianne's mitten to do so. ‘I've not killed anyone,' she said, ‘but since it seems a time for confessions, I would have slept with you willingly in that house of your mother's we shared so briefly.'

‘
I knew it
!' said Gabrielle. ‘You can't be trusted, can you, Céci?'

‘Then the sous-directeur of Cartier's was not your lover?'

‘
M. Laviolette
? Me? I simply rented the house from him to be closer to the wireless. He was tempted to believe an affair possible. He was always prepared and would try to press the issue but … Ah! what can a woman say?'

Kneeling, reaching out to her, he wrapped a hand about her arm and pulled her up, and for a moment the two of them knelt facing each other, Gabrielle looking uncertainly towards the troops, then to them and then towards the ruins which could not yet be seen. ‘Have I lost you, Jean-Louis?' she asked, but heard no answer, simply his, ‘Where, then, did you hide the wireless set?'

His eyes were so large and deeply brown, soft, warm, full of concern and compassion for them, and for herself, thought Suzanne-Cécilia. ‘In the holding tanks below the pens of the wild pigs. They are not to be emptied until spring but by then it won't matter will it?'

He pulled off a glove to gently touch her swollen cheek and to refix the sticking plaster which had come loose over the bridge of her nose. ‘I enjoyed our moment, even as I have enjoyed those I have shared with your
amie de guerre
. Now, please, let us go forward. To stay here is to invite the bullet or the grenade. Hermann and Nana may already have been killed.'

‘
But … but we have heard nothing? No shots
…?' blurted Suzanne-Cécilia.

‘She's right, Jean-Louis,' said Gabrielle more harshly than she wanted, for this was love she was seeing before her and she knew she could not fight it but must let it happen.

The willows had been a bugger to get through. Not copsed since before the Defeat, they offered superb cover. But now there was open space, now snow-covered fields of stubble sloped down to the brook in its swale before rising gently up to the ruins.

Perhaps eight hectares had been enclosed by the abbey's outer walls, perhaps a little more. It was hard to tell, for the walls had fallen in several places offering perfect defensive and sentry positions. Forest and brush had long ago encroached on an orchard that could now hold terrorists. Ah
Gott im Himmel
!

Desperately looking for a way out, Kohler stood beside Nana Thélème. The men, supremely confident and thoroughly experienced, had taken up their positions. The dogs they had brought with them were muzzled but intently searched the lie of the land as he did.

There wasn't a sound. Breath steamed in the air.

‘At least let us have a look, eh?' he said to the lieutenant in charge. Under the padded white parka, the bastard wore the ribbon of the
Winterschlacht im Osten
1941/42, the ‘Frozen Meat Medal'. He had lost his right leg to the Russians but had got through the willow shoots easily enough on that prosthesis of his.

The silver wound badge and both the EK2 and EK1 were pinned to that same tunic, the
Eiserne Kreuz
, the Iron Cross.

Max Engelmann and the SS-Untersturmführer Schacht had chosen to wait in the Citroën. Schacht had even asked for the keys ‘in case of problems'. Goodbye car, goodbye trouble.

Given the field glasses, Kohler searched the ruins for any sign of life.

‘Janwillem and Tshaya won't have built up the fire during the day,' confided Nana sadly.

The belfry of the chapel dominated everything. From there, the abbey's walls enclosed a substantial inner courtyard in which there were now large trees. He could make out nothing of the arcades at ground level, could get only glimpses of gaping windows and holes in the roof above them. Once stuccoed, the thick grey limestone of the walls was often exposed in ragged patches and where not, the yellowness of age and dampness remained.