For just an instant their eyes met and, Chief Inspector of the Surete that he was, he looked deeply into hers until the sparrow ducked away again. Ah yes.
‘Wait for us. We won’t be long.’
The anguished look the girl threw from the back seat troubled Hermann.
‘Hey, it’s okay, cherie. Come on, Giselle. Everything is all right. It’s just a bit of business. There’s nothing for you to worry about. Louis and I just have to stop in to say hello.’
To the Butcher of Poland, the Brigadefuhrer und Generalmajor der Polizei, the Hoherer SS und Polizeifuhrer of France!
Hermann touched the pale cheek and then the white, white crowns of her front teeth through the slightly parted lips that were so red.
She knew he was thinking she had lovely lips.
‘She’s really something, eh, Louis? Gott im Himmel, am I glad to see her again.’
They left her then, and though she could not force herself to watch, in her mind’s eye she saw them hurrying between the jackbooted sentries who stood under the swastika flags that hung above the entrance.
Merde! what was she to do? Press her knees together to stop from shaking? Grip her thighs and seek the other side of the avenue? Wait as Hermann had said and as she knew she must? Ah yes.
Even the traffic avoided this place. The rush of bicycles pushed a little harder as the stream of them approached the dreaded Number 72. Those who were on the far side of the avenue Foch looked the other way when passing; those less fortunate came towards her with downcast eyes. Where once there had been so many cars, there were now only those of the Germans and their friends. And she did not know which were the worst, the Nazis or their friends …
Occasionally the sound of a bicycle bell interrupted the agony of her thoughts, once the shout of, ‘Hey, there, look where you’re going!’ as if she were the one in the road, she the one with the shaky handlebars.
Karl Albrecht Oberg was forty-five years of age and married, with a wife and two children in the Reich. A man from the north of that country. Tall, but not so tall as Hermann Kohler – really just a little over medium height.
A man who had worn thick spectacles with wire rims and who had leaned well back in his chair when he had examined her.
Had she been so offensive to him? Had he been near-sighted, had that been it?
A man with a small paunch. A man who had looked as if the corset he had worn had been a little too tight.
The Butcher of Poland … The Hoherer SS.
The pale blue-grey eyes behind those glasses had been round and bulging but not with hatred for her or anything like that, though they had frightened her at first. Terribly, ah yes. Not even with interest in her body, which had been fully clothed, she left to stand as if naked in front of that desk of his, that magnificent desk!
Just the look of a middle-aged businessman wearing the field-grey of the German Army but with the flashes of the SS, a general. A man who had been impatient to get on with his work.
The policing of France and the hunting-down of traitors and terrorists.
The one who had been at his side, the one who had had her brought to this place from deep in her sleep this morning, had spoken French but with a German scholar’s accent. It had been he who had translated what he had judged fit for her ears.
‘Okay. It’s agreed. You can go now. Please do not forget our little arrangement.’
Our little arrangement. The brothel on the rue Chabannais should she fail. The largest of the forty or so that were reserved specifically for the common soldiers of the German Army who came to Paris for a few days’ leave and wanted to get it all out of their systems in a hurry. Bang, bang!
Right from the Russian Front. Ah yes, that’s what he had said to her, knowing quite well she would have understood. Everyone knew those girls never lasted. They retired sore and broken unless they were big where it counted and crazy.
He had had a perpetually mocking twist to his lips, the left side. Tall and thin – a little taller than his chief, so as tall, perhaps, as Hermann. A man with spectacles, too, and very good manners.
A little arrangement … Oh Mon Dieu, they had her just where they wanted! She could not confess a thing to Hermann even though the Bavarian did, perhaps, care a little for her. Even though he was, ah yes, a detective from the Gestapo.
This Obersturmbannfuhrer, the Herr Doktor Knochen was a much younger man than his chief – a man of perhaps thirty-two or so, one who had stripped her body naked with his grey-blue eyes and had laughed at her nakedness, at what she would do to her Gestapo detective, had laughed with that mocking smile of his. Sardonic, knowing, all-perceiving. A man after power, a man who knew his place in the hierarchy of the Nazis at this and other addresses.
A man who had enjoyed her little predicament. Their little arrangement …
They’d kill her if she didn’t do what they wanted! Never mind the threat of the rue Chabannais, the ruin of her tender life and the end of her days in the profession. Never mind the ravaging thrusts of sixty front-line soldiers a night!
Never mind any of that. ‘Me, I must be the realist. I must steel myself. Hermann must never learn of this. Never!’
Unfortunately her horoscope for the day had told her to stay indoors and keep out of trouble. A tall, thin man would come into her life if she didn’t heed the warning, a man who would ask certain things of her.
There’d been no mention of his coming to get her. None, either, of Hermann’s friend. Just keep an eye on Hermann Kohler and report everything he says. Ah yes. Everything.
Three hundred metres of Aubusson carpet smothered the inlaid parquet and kept it warm. Gilded eighteenth-century mirrors – tall, richly carved, ornate things – hung on the wall to the right; plush Prussian-blue drapes to the left on either side of each of the many tall windows. Number 72, the avenue Foch. Head office.
‘Nice, Louis. Really nice. Not bad for a banana merchant.’
Lalique chandeliers, great ice-cakes of crystal, gave light on dreary days. A sumptuously gorgeous nude, a life-size painting of a coy and raven-haired innocent from biblical times, hung next to a marble statue of Hercules loitering naked as the hanging fruit of his loins betrayed.
Hermann couldn’t resist making light of things. The effect of the painting and the statue was electric. Hercules bearded, all frightening, with flat, hard muscles, had an arm draped over something, a shrouded little friend. Death perhaps.
The girl ducked her head away from the loins and appeared as if afraid and uncertain of what that uncircumsized thing of his might mean for her.
Again St-Cyr heard Hermann saying, ‘Nice, Louis. Really nice.’
The girl in the painting sat on the edge of something concrete with the toes of her left foot planted on the step below and those of the right foot peeking demurely from behind the tender calf of that supporting leg. The folds of her dressing-robe were sumptuously gold and equally crushed beneath her seat and flaring hips.
‘A little Jewish princess, Louis. Gott im Himmel, do you suppose they hadn’t noticed?’
‘I’d no idea you were such a connoisseur, Hermann.’
‘They liked their women ample in those days, Louis. The waist not too slim, the tummy pouting a little, the breasts perfect toys for some biblical scholar to play with.’
‘He’s not a biblical scholar. He has a Doctorate of Philosophy in English literature, I believe.’
‘What’s it matter? Doctor this, or doctor that? It’s this that I’m interested in. Knochen must have taken it upon himself to be art director of this little palace of theirs, Louis. A Jewess set to be ravaged by Hercules! It’s his little joke on all the others. It fits his sense of humour, if he has one. If.’ A warning …