Biting hard, he sucked at the wound, found irony in the thought that after all he’d been through with Louis, and before that too, something so small could well kill him.
Spreading a piece of new canvas on the floor, he upended the tin and quickly sorted through the contents. There wasn’t a match for the earring Louis had found, but the fragment of glass that had knifed him had blood on its spine and had gone in at least three millimetres. It was cylindrical and nothing like any of the shards from the mirrors. Perhaps two millimetres in diameter and maybe three-quarters of a centimetre in length, including the spine, it was of clear, medical glass.
Looking up to the shelves above, to that little row of Baccarat and the empty marc bottle, he said, ‘Danke, you son of a bitch. We’re going to get you.’
On cold, clear nights Yvonne Lutze knew sounds travelled, but now with so little traffic, they came from even farther. Just when Otto turned off the main road, she wasn’t sure, though soon he accelerated a little. Listening, freezing, she tried not to remember how it used to be, how as a girl she had often stood outdoors like this even in winter but upstairs, on her very own balcony, listening for her father who would be returning from the railway station, having been to Berlin, Munchen, Hamburg or Brussels, Paris too. Vati who sold the wine of others not because he had to, he had claimed, but because it was among the finest, though unrecognized as such until introduced properly.
Vati who had loved her dearly and would not have approved of her marrying Werner. Otto would have been much better, mein kleiner Liebling, he’d have said, but Colonel Hans Otto Rasche had already been married, that lie and fact still staying with her for he’d not just been handsome and gracious but all those other things she had admired and wanted then as a girl of nineteen when young men of her own age had been dying like flies and soon none would be left. Vati too.
And the child Otto had left her with? she asked and answered as always, was God’s gift as her half of the bargain. Genevieve who had been a student at the university in September 1939, Genevieve who had been so serious about her studies: ‘A biologiste, maman. I want to study biology and chemistry. Women do study such things. There are two of us girls in my class. Two, maman! I’m French, not Alsatian, not German.’ She would never really appreciate how generations of her mother’s family had come to live in this house. Werner had seen to that. Werner.
Whatever else might be said of him, Werner really did take care of things.
Otto knew where Genevieve was and fortunately perhaps the child had gone with the other students when the university had moved to Clermont-Ferrand, the letters frequent until the capitulation of June 1940, the postcards since never many and always heavily censored, and now far fewer of them.
‘She’s fine. She’s still at her studies,’ Otto had said, having made discreet enquiries, ‘Don’t worry.’ But mothers always do.
When the little car rolled to a silent stop, Otto cleared his throat and even though his voice was hushed, she heard him gruffly say, ‘Kohler, don’t forget the house will be fast asleep.’
Two suicides, two murders? she silently asked. Have they seen enough, those two detectives you asked for? The soup, the sausage, cheese and bread that girl took with her-they can’t help but realize you must have known where she got them and that I had said nothing of it, not even to yourself, though you never once thought to ask me.
Renee Ekkehard, Otto. Something happened between the two of you last August. A brief moment, a mistake on your part perhaps, but whatever it was, and I’m certain of this, it left you vulnerable to that ‘secretary’ of yours. She never once had to force the issue, did she? She simply asked for your help with the Karneval and knew you would agree. A pretty girl whose shy and self-effacing modesty gave you a memory of myself perhaps, though I was nearly ten years younger than her. And now what are we to do? Wait for the inevitable? Tough it out, as Werner would? Use caution always?
Why didn’t Sophie Schrijen go in her stead as she was supposed to? Lowe Schrijen and that son of his are bound to ask questions of their own privately and you know it too. They’ve people who do this for them. That’s why you had to call Paris. I know it was!
And Victoria Bodicker, Otto? Why did she look at me the way she did when I asked her where Renee might have gone, asked at your insistence?
She was afraid. That business of her having to go into the bookshop to take care of a customer was simply a means of her getting away from me for a moment to give herself time. There was no one in the shop. No bell had sounded above that door, though when she came back, she did say that it worked sometimes and not at others, and that a replacement would be impossible to find.
She had realized I had taken that school notebook of hers, one you desperately needed and had asked me to get. It hadn’t quite been hidden by my overcoat which was lying on a chair, but she said nothing of this. Nothing! Otto. And when I got ready to leave, she turned away to gather up the cat, making it easy for me to steal from her. Me, Otto. Me! who had never stolen a thing in her life.
Those three girls were up to something that has jeopardized us all. Why can’t you admit this? Why can’t you talk to me about it? I know you will want me to look through the detectives’ things. I know they will ask me how Renee got to the carnival and that I will have to tell them you-yes, you-arranged for a lorry to take her. A lorry, Otto. You knew where she had gone.
In single file they crossed the catwalk, the river ice pale under moonlight, she looking down at them. Softly letting herself back into the house, she stood a moment between the heavy blackout drapes and the closed door, listening still until Werner turned over in his sleep.
Out of long habit and no matter what, he could drop off so easily when needed and sleep as soundly as a babe.
Mein Mann, Otto. Your Oberfeldwebel.
In the quiet of a house where sounds would echo, Louis laid out on one of the beds the collected bits and pieces from his pockets, and as a conjurer in a Karneval, passed the wave of a silent hand over them.
The two rose-coloured buttons taken from Eugene Thomas’s pockets were nothing like those that had been carved by one of the POWs and left on Rasche’s desk for them to find.
Carefully Kohler set the spine of medical glass next to the former.
The earring’s amethystine brilliant caught the lamplight, the papier-mache ball looking out of place and seeming to mock them, as did the tightly rolled wad of 471 Lagermark, the bobbins with thread still wound, the swatch of blue cloth, and the poor bastard’s tin wedding ring, the original no doubt having been taken from him on capture.
‘This investigation, Hermann,’ came the whisper. ‘First there is Frau Oberkircher talking her head off to you on the train, only now we find she is known to the Fraulein Bodicker and sometimes is called in to take care of that one’s bookshop.’
‘Frau Bodicker having been locked up in the camp for British and American women at Vittel.’
‘Victoria being a decidedly British name.’
A hot box tells us there are partisans.’
‘Feldgendarmen and plain-clothes Gestapo make a hunting ground of Belfort’s railway station.’
‘Looking for deserters.’
‘N und Ns are heading for Natzweiler-Struthof.’
‘A quarry, Louis, but also with well-known ski slopes nearby.’
‘And a girl, a secretary and committee member, who is invited to a party there.’
‘Only to witness something that could well have driven her to kill herself if we were to have believed it.’