Turning toward where the Citroen idled, its headlamps blinkered shy;, he said, ‘Things have finally caught up with us, haven’t they? The honesty, the dogged pursuit of common crime no one seems to want to bother about but ourselves.’
The snow in the Primastella’s ruts was packed down hard. He’d walk along one of them even though the new overboots were perfect, would turn to look back at where those footprints had met.
‘A pillowcase,’ he muttered. While squeezing himself into the backseat of that little car, Hermann had managed to drag it from a pocket and flick it behind himself. Unseen by either of those two, it lay forlornly between the ruts, caught in the light of a borrowed Wehrmacht torch.
‘Newspapers,’ he hazarded, much puzzled, ‘and a little carving, though not a child’s toy. Boudicca, Hermann. Queen of the Iceni in what is now Norfolk.’
And freedom.
To the west, the iron and slatted skeleton of the Ferris wheel raised dark and silent circles to the night sky. Closer in and even darker, were the remains of the Salon Carousel and Ideal Caterpillar, and when he brought the Citroen to a halt deep in this lost city of theirs, the House of Mirrors waited.
‘Renee Ekkehard,’ said Kohler with a sigh, his knees jammed uncomfortably against the back of the front seat. ‘She got away from the two of you on that Saturday, didn’t she?’
There was no answer. There hadn’t been a word from either of them. The taller one was behind the wheel and solidly filling that seat, the one with the bullfrog neck, the shoulders and the gun feeding lighted cigarettes to himself and his partner.
They weren’t taking him back to the Textilfabrikschrijen. They were heading off into the hills to the northwest of town and with the headlamps unblinkered, were taking him to the vineyards near Kaysersberg, but first they’d ask him a few questions. ‘She knew that Karneval like the palm of her hand, didn’t she?’ he taunted. ‘Ach, just when you thought you had her cornered, the little Schlampe would slip away. The Devil’s Saucer, Maze of Darkness, Super Car Monte Carlo … She wasn’t about to let you kill her, was she, so she grabbed her skis and buggered off as soon as darkness fell but you knew she loved to find things and that she’d have to come back, and you knew that either of her friends on that committee could easily have sat down beside her, pretending to have found a little something she wanted, but that was on Sunday, wasn’t it?’
Kohler was just pissing about, said Herve Paulus to himself. He’d light another Gauloise bleu for Serge and see if this Kripo had figured out how they’d come upon such a supply. Burnt, ground parsnips for coffee? A lovely oil from beechnuts? ‘Floaters’-hadn’t Kohler told the woman he and St-Cyr worked in the ‘never-never land of shadows’? ‘Missing persons,’ Frau Oberkircher had blubbered. ‘Fraud and bank robberies,’ she had coughed and crapped herself.
He and St-Cyr had even hired a horse-drawn sleigh to take the old bag home from the railway station. Home to fruit leathers and boiled sweets she could no longer make to sell to schoolchildren!
‘That girl fingered you, didn’t she?’ said Kohler. ‘She stole mug shots of you so that Schrijen’s daughter could get a better bead on the two of you, but what I can’t understand, meine Schatzen, is why he had you follow his daughter and not Renee Ekkehard. Chairperson of this and that, wasn’t she, this Sophie of his? Paragon of Nazi virtue and favourite of Gauleiter Wagner?’
‘Silence!’ shrilled Paulus. ‘You’re some treasure yourself! Refusing to tell Herr Schrijen what he wishes to know? Looking for trouble when he told you there couldn’t possibly be any? Are you too stupid to listen to someone like that?’
‘Herve, leave it,’ muttered the other one. ‘We’ll find a place up ahead and soon.’
‘Dummkopfe,’ swore Kohler. ‘Renee definitely wasn’t what Schrijen wanted for that son of his, so he told you to make it look like a suicide, even to your scribbling a note in lipstick. Where’d you get the war paint, eh? From one of your Huren? Hey, you two left things lying around you shouldn’t have and guess who found them?’
There wasn’t a murmur from either of them, which wasn’t good. At least now he knew Schrijen had been telling them what to do, but that could only mean there were others who would be after Louis. ‘She was up to mischief, wasn’t she, that daughter of his? She didn’t like what was going on at the Works. Starving the men while working them to death? Freezing the poor bastards? Unsafe working conditions and no doctor? Lieber Christus im Himmel, is it any wonder she rebelled?’
Still they didn’t respond but now the car was climbing more steeply into the hills. The rear wheels skidded, clouds hid the moon, but with the snow cover there was still sufficient light. Vineyards were on either side. They couldn’t be far from the house now, but they’d have to stop first, have to soften up this Kripo.
‘This will do, Herve,’ said the one behind the wheel. Banks of plowed-up snow lay on either side and, of course, there was no one else about.
‘I don’t need to take a piss.’
‘When we’re done with you, mein Lieber, you will,’ said Serge Deiss. He would leave the engine running, would let Herve get out first and then pull the back of the seat forward for this Schweinebulle from Paris.
One lead-weighted leather truncheon, taken from the floor, came softly to rest on top of the car and was slid over to the driver’s side, the other kept to hand. ‘Look, I’ll stay here. I’ve no need to get out.’
‘Don’t be difficult,’ said Deiss. ‘We have our orders.’
Both now had their guns out. ‘Ach, my shoelace has come undone. Hang on a minute.’
The wind was down, the silence of the carnival absolute. On the ring of keys Hermann had taken from Sophie Schrijen’s desk there were those to the executive offices and others in the administration block, but also those to various sheds and storerooms, even one to the garage, no doubt, and those to the houses in town and in the country. And if left once in haste on that desk of her brother’s, could they not have been left another time and copied by that combine’s assistant machinist so that doors that needed to be opened for trinitrophenol could be, or was her association with Eugene Thomas so trusting she simply let him borrow her keys when needed? Certainly she would miss them, but would she ask Frau Macher if they’d been seen, would she dare to ask that father of hers, since by now she must have realized who had taken them?
Six others, all nearly identical, were to the padlocks on the wagons here, only two of which they had yet been in and yes, Renee Ekkehard must have had a set of her own, though no mention had been made of them by Colonel Rasche. Had he taken them; had her killer?
The bread was hard, coarse, sour, and being dry, rather difficult to swallow. Gripping the chunk between his teeth, he found the appropriate key and, ignoring the Wehrmacht no-entry notice, removed the padlock only to pause, to listen again and to look over a shoulder. The bare branches of the Kastenwald being nearby, one could not help but think of that girl going in there on skis, but had she done so in the afternoon of that Saturday or only after dark, and why, please, had she been out all night, if not to escape her killer or killers?
With the wagon’s door tightly closed behind him and one of the full-length, heavily framed mirrors leaning against it for good measure, the coffin screws came undone and its lid was gently drawn halfway back.
‘So that I can use it as a table,’ he said. ‘We haven’t much time, mademoiselle. I greatly fear we are about to have company.’
Her face was now more livid and swollen, the lips of a darker plum-purple. Decay would be rapid if she was allowed to warm. The blotches would meld and take on iridescent hues, the sprays of petechiae also; the once sea-green eyes that must have been lovely and full of life would soon collapse and drain.