7
Long shadows fingered the carnival where a coal-black Renault, the two-door Primastella-the 1934, St-Cyr thought-sat at the end of the snow-covered lane on a gentle rise up near the Noah’s Ark and the dangling, shattered biplanes of the Pilot in the Sky. Two men in grey fedoras and broad-shouldered overcoats, their cigarettes alight, stood waiting all but in darkness with hands in their pockets, one on either side of that car.
‘The colonel’s detectives,’ sighed Hermann.
Perhaps one hundred metres lay between the two vehicles. From the Textilfabrikschrijen it hadn’t taken twenty minutes with Hermann at the wheel. There had been no time, really, to talk things over, and yet word had gone ahead and these two had come out here.
‘Lowe Schrijen must have called them, Louis, as soon as we left the gates.’
‘The trigger element, Hermann.’
‘Guncotton wrapped in papier-mache. I’m certain of it. If we didn’t have company, I’d touch a match to it.’
‘Burns with a very hot flame; explodes if a detonator is used. Is made from pure cellulose, of which Eugene Thomas had plenty. Cold nitric acid too, and sulphuric acid.’
‘But they wouldn’t have needed a detonator, not with the trinitrophenol.’
‘The flame of the one would have been perfectly adequate for the other, but why had he been sentenced in absentia? Surely he would have wanted to escape as much as the rest of that combine?’
‘But they’d asked him to do something and he had refused. He must have, Louis. One for all and all for one because that’s the way it has to be.’
‘That cutthroat you found in their office wagon … Had they been planning to use it on someone?’
‘They must have. They’ve been gathering solder and making uniform buttons, badges and collar pips which Dorsche doesn’t yet know of.’
‘And that tourer of Sophie Schrijen’s brother enters and leaves the Works without challenge.’
The two up ahead were still patiently watching them. ‘Lowe Schrijen says his son was at Natzweiler-Struthof the weekend Renee was hanged,’ said Kohler.
‘Yet the boy couldn’t have been. Weber, the garage mechanic, has stated that Alain unexpectedly arrived at the railway station on that Saturday afternoon and that Sophie had to drive the car there for him to use. That’s why the Mademoiselle Ekkehard went out to the carnival alone instead of her.’
‘But if we are to believe Schrijen, the girl then left a note in lipstick that said, “I can’t go on. Please forgive me,” and what do I find in Alain Schrijen’s desk, in the corner that sister of his reserves for herself, but a lipstick and a little piece of granite from the quarry camp.’
This hole they were digging for themselves seemed bottomless. ‘Did the son kill that girl, Hermann? Did he discover what that Winterhilfswerk Committee was really up to and attempt to put an end to it?’
‘She skis and or walks all night, and could well have caught one of the local trains or thumbed a ride. Neuf-Brisach and Alt-Breisach aren’t that far. Maybe seven and a dozen kilometres from here.’
‘And, if she could get across the Rhine between them, where to, then? A girl who wears a beret that is forbidden.’
‘She wasn’t,’ said Kohler. ‘She was wearing a woollen toque, according to Henri Savard, the carpenter who made that coffin. Rasche must have removed the one and replaced it with the other, but why would he do a thing like that if they were up to something and where did he get it? From her rucksack?’
‘Or a room at the Lutze residence.’
Still the colonel’s two detectives hadn’t moved. ‘This isn’t looking good for us, Hermann. Schrijen sends van-loads of his wine to the Gauleiter Wagner.’
‘At no charge and guess who has been invited to the wedding now a funeral and also to the fundraiser a certain combine must still want to know is continuing, especially in view of what’s happened to another of their members and with a visit to Natzweiler-Struthof a distinct probability.’
Merde but they needed a cigarette to share.
‘Saturday, 6 March, is the target date,’ said Kohler. ‘Nearly everything is ready, including buckets of papier-mache balls that just need a bit of paint and a match. What the hell were those boys really up to, eh? Guncotton flaming to trinitrophenol?’
‘And three young women, each of whom was a rebel in her own right. A bookshop that reminds its customers of book burnings, its proprietor a fired teacher who admits to being bitter about a mother who is being held in the internment camp at Vittel which she visits on the last Friday of every month, and if that isn’t opportunity enough to make contact with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, what is?’
‘A chairman’s daughter who, beside what they are actually receiving, impulsively jots down the calorie intakes necessary for men at hard labour, and a secretary who steals police snapshots of those two so that her friend-’
‘Her lover, Hermann. I’m almost certain of it.’
‘And yet another reason for her to insist that death was murder. Snapshots so that she can see who’s been following her and not following that same secretary.’
‘Whom Frau Lutze tells us brought to the house or bookshop the travel papers Victoria Bodicker needed for Vittel, rather than have the bookseller visit the Polizeikommandantur too often. Good of the colonel, wasn’t it? No wonder he’s worried.’
‘Frau Lutze, Louis, formerly Fraulein Yvonne Eva Ellmann. Schrijen made a point of telling me “she was one of those on her father’s side.”’
Which discretely meant half-Jewish. ‘A woman who has a daughter, Hermann, at the University of Strasbourg in Clermont-Ferrand.’
‘That marriage is a puzzle, isn’t it, since Rasche was once hot and heavy with Yvonne and Lowe Schrijen knows all about it even to asking me what the colonel hoped to gain by claiming murder instead of suicide?’
‘Which we now know it definitely was, at least in the case of his secretary.’
‘An ampoule and a droplet earring that girl was searching for …’
‘A girl, Hermann, who didn’t even like the taste of schnapps or an eau-de-vie and who could make a glass of wine last all evening. Drugged was what Sophie Schrijen asked the bookseller, that one in turn demanding to know why she hadn’t accused her brother of raping the Fraulein Ekkehard at that skiing party. An event which causes the sister to wonder if the girl hadn’t cried out the truth about her feelings for men and for herself.’
‘And all the rest of it, like moving deserters through to the Vosges.’
‘Talk to those two. Use your charm. See if they’ll tell you why they were following Sophie Schrijen. That Primastella is no match for a Citroen traction-avant. I’ll go round them and leave the car up by the Devil’s Saucer. I’ll get to that office wagon before the three of you.’
‘You’d best have these, then.’
Her keys. ‘I knew I could count on you. Now reach under the seat and hand me my Lebel.’
‘It’s back at the house. I didn’t think we’d need the firepower.’
‘Then think again!’
‘Have you any more matches?’
The last of the light was fast fading. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘I gave them all to the Russians.’
‘Merde, what is it with you? Now I’ll have to head over to the farmhouse for lanterns and matches!’
‘Ask for bread, marg’ and a bucket of their potato soup. It’s the least the Army can do, seeing as we’re working for one of them.’
Alone, St-Cyr stood where the Primastella had been. ‘Hermann,’ he heard himself saying. They’d taken him. ‘To Lowe Schrijen?’ he demanded and knew it must be so.
‘They can pick me up at any time,’ he rebelled, for here in Elsass he was an alien on a temporary pass.
Hermann’s footprints were next to where the taller one had stood-the other one hadn’t come round his side of the car. He would have held a gun on Hermann, forcing him to get into the car.