They weren’t done with Kohler, swore Herve Paulus. Serge would get his breath back and come at him when he least expected it. And then Kohler would get a fistful of handcuffs in the mouth. They would both fall on him and beat him senseless.
Coughing, his chest heaving, Serge Deiss toppled over and lay there repeatedly flexing himself into the fetal position as he clawed at his throat. Blood from his right ear stained the snow and oh for sure, it wasn’t good, that ear, thought Kohler. They would really hate him now, these two, the Kolmar SS as well and even Kramer at Natzweiler-Struthof.
The flame of the lantern stirred but otherwise there wasn’t a sound. Though he listened hard, St-Cyr swore he could hear nothing. The wagon was indeed like an ancient, albeit garishly decorated and cluttered tomb-a long barrow of its own, he thought, remembering the Gallic and pre-Gallic tumuli and standing stones of the Quiberon Peninsula and the Morbihan in Brittany.
‘Ah, bon, mademoiselle, a crudely fashioned coat-hood with its insulation of daily newspapers. Inoffensive and logical enough under cursory examination, nor does it matter particularly if the hood was that of Eugene Thomas instead of one of the others, but did he often go into Sophie Schrijen’s office? Isn’t that where he first discovered these newspapers? “Karen is at the age where she desires children.” Loves Wagner, mademoiselle? “Beate is blonde.” Likes Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, from Wagner’s magnificent tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen? Wants a man, a lover who will appreciate the same? “Guidance” is needed. In each of these personal messages it’s more or less the same, yet they are separated by many others and by time and location from city to city forcing me to ask, Is this how you three were contacted?’
She gave no answer. Quickly he glanced over the lid of the coffin. The carving was to the left, then the personals columns and that partly masticated papier-mache ball. The phosphorescent swastika button was next, after it the desperate bead of solder Hermann had found and the weeks and months of secrecy and planning it must imply.
Spread open at its torn page, the school notebook of Victoria Bodicker made him murmur. ‘Bouda, Munich, the Munchner Neueste Nachrichten and freedom.’
Again St-Cyr read the chemical equations for viscose rayon and the single formula for picric acid. ‘It was Raymond Maillotte who wrote this last, wasn’t it? He came into the lab to lean over Eugene Thomas and remind him of it. Only he and Thomas had passes to be there.’
Again she offered nothing. ‘There are also these,’ he said. ‘The tip of the glass ampoule that cut my partner’s finger and the earring that was taken from that biscuit tin, most probably to distract you. And then, there are these.’
He held up the three delicately stemmed liqueur glasses, but did not ask who had sat down beside her in that other wagon. Instead he said, ‘Those men were planning a break-out, mademoiselle, but for some reason Eugene Thomas refused to do what they had asked of him which is unfortunate, for they could not have known of the pistol Sophie Schirijen keeps in the glove compartment of her brother’s car when that one is not around, and yes, she would not have told anyone of it, not when desperately afraid for her life. Which leaves us with the cutthroat, doesn’t it? And an explosion. A big one.’
Frau Oberkircher’s suitcase had never been much, yet as he took it from the Primastella, Kohler remembered he had gotten such a kick out of talking to her on the train. It had really felt like coming home, like it used to be.
And now? he wondered as he set the case on the bonnet. ‘Now what have you two done to her, a war widow well into her sixties?’
‘Contraband,’ spat Herve Paulus. ‘She was planning to sell them on the black market.’
The son of a bitch had tried to smash this Kripo with Polizeikommandantur bracelets and had found he couldn’t. Legs spread widely for balance, hands now cuffed behind them, the colonel’s two detectives sat in the faltering light from the headlamps. Fedoras were lying about, coat buttons were missing, blood was splashed everywhere, that ear of Serge Deiss’s now so cold the bleeding had all but stopped, though it still must hurt like hell.
He would open the suitcase and see what they’d done, would say, ‘If you’ve harmed her, I really will have to leave you to freeze to death. Then I’ll come back to remove the bracelets and let the car go off the road so as to make it look like an accident.’
They’d been helping themselves to her cigarettes. Sick with apprehension, he turned to look at them.
Alarmed, Deiss shouted, ‘Kohler, be reasonable.’
‘Why should I? What did you have her doing? Watching the street for you?’
‘And the comings and goings at that bookshop.’
He would pick up a truncheon with each hand, would simply ask, ‘For how long?’
‘Kohler, listen. Back off, will you?’ said Paulus shrilly and spitting blood.
‘Look, I want an answer. Don’t force me to use these.’
It was Deiss who yelled, ‘Only since you and St-Cyr got off the train with her but why did Rasche ask for the two of you? He had to have a reason, didn’t he?’
‘A man who walks over corpses,**** Kohler,’ said Paulus, his left eye now closed. ‘One who doesn’t want autopsies done?’
They’d get Kohler going now, thought Deiss. ‘He finds that secretary of his missing on a Saturday afternoon but doesn’t bother to look for her until the following Tuesday?’
‘Returns to the Karneval to open that box he had made for her and sits with her for hours, when another suicide turns up? Finally calls Paris?’ said Paulus.
‘Doesn’t want those French POWs to be taken to the quarry camp. Is afraid of what they’ll reveal under reinforced interrogation,’ shouted Deiss.
‘There has to be a reason,’ managed Paulus, having to spit out a tooth.
‘Ask yourself why that colonel of yours didn’t leave it at a suicide, Kohler?’ said Deiss. ‘Ask why he had to claim it was murder. What could he possibly have hoped to gain?’
‘Rasche has a daughter at the University of Strassburg in Clermont-Ferrand,’ said Paulus.
‘The daughter he had by Yvonne Eva Ellemann, now Lutze,’ said Deiss.
‘Maybe the Detektiv should ask himself what Frau Elleman-Lutze hopes most to hide, Serge?’ asked Paulus.
‘No request for the Sippenforscher at the Office of Racial Affairs? No check back through the ancestors as is required by law?’
‘Three generations at least, isn’t it, Serge, before the Sippenbuch can be given if clean?’
The record book laying out a family’s lineage to prove it Aryan. They had worked it all out.
‘That of the daughter too, Kohler,’ said Herve Paulus. ‘Those students and their professors at the University of Strassburg in Clermont-Ferrand are a hotbed of trouble the Gestapo there are most anxious to stamp out.’
This was true enough and they’d known it too.
‘Is Genevieve Rasche-Lutze one of the Mischlinge?’ taunted Deiss.
The mixed offspring of a Jew and a non-Jew.
‘Bad for the colonel if true, Serge,’ said Paulus. ‘Guilty of racial disgrace which can only lead to a court-martial.’
But that fire at Colmar’s town hall during the Blitzkrieg had put all of the records up in smoke. These two couldn’t prove a thing and neither could Lowe Schrijen, but these days did that really matter, and why should Schrijen feel he had to prove anything unless, of course, he had damned well found out what that daughter of his and her friends had really been up to?
‘Don’t leave us, Kohler. Bitte, there are wolves,’ managed Deiss, the one with the bullfrog neck.
‘Ach, don’t worry. The Generaldirektor will take care of you both, not only for failing to soften me up as ordered, but for drawing attention to him he can’t afford. Not with friends like the Gauleiter Wagner, and with a son in the SS at Natzweiler-Struthof and a daughter who is chairperson of this and that and one hell of a lot else. Just jump up and down. Then I can tell him you won’t freeze to death.’