Scheisse! ‘Having travelled all over the Netherlands, Belgium, France and beyond, Louis, learning everything those good folk could teach him.’
‘Good, Kohler?’
‘Ach, I meant figuratively, Kriminalrat. How to shuffle cards or coins and play that guessing game where you gamble and lose. How to mimic others and even appear as if one of them, how to act but not just on stage, and how to do all the rest, including very accurately being able to instantly and correctly size people up. He’ll also know how to hide things, how to deceive, how to find angles and get himself out of difficulties, since he’ll have anticipated them before they even happen. Why such a one, Kriminalrat? Why when you must have known what he’d be like?’
‘Because we didn’t choose him; he chose the Reich. Back in October 1941, arrested and held with 483 others in the Joodsche Schouwburg awaiting transit to Westerbork, he offered his services to the SD and was so convincing, he was given a chance to prove himself. It was only after having successfully targeted several “divers” in Amsterdam and the Hague, that he was then infiltrated into Labrie and Beekhuis’s service, and that is why, later still, Standartenfuhrer Kleiber, chose to use him for our purposes. His choice, I must add, not my own.’
‘Ach, Heinrich … Heinrich, mein Lieber,’ interjected Kleiber, hurrying to rejoin them. ‘It was yourself who did that and more recently told me that everything was in place for this Diamantensonderkommando-isn’t that korrekt? Meyerhof was desperate you said, and when he saw that girl, a former employee he knew well, since she was the daughter of his lead cutter and much respected employee, you chose to let him speak to her through the wire that shut off that ghetto, and then … ach then, deliberately let him use a non-Jew who was free and whom he trusted, to contact not only her, but Labrie and Beekhuis.’
The bastard! ‘Standartenfuhrer, that non-Jew has since been arrested, interrogated and shot, as you well know since you yourself ordered it.’
The usual in such situations, felt Kohler, but animosities should be encouraged, for one never knew when they might be useful. ‘Which of you gave Oenen that pistol he then used to kill those two?’
‘Which of us is an accessory to murder-is this what you’re wondering?’ asked Kleiber. ‘Ach, I did. Don’t you remember, Heinrich? Oenen specified what he felt would suit, and after you had agreed, I reluctantly allowed such a weapon to be released, but only on the condition that there be one full magazine and no extra rounds.’
How comforting. ‘And the coins?’ asked Louis.
Taking a deep drag and then another before dropping the butt to the paving stones and crushing it underfoot, Ludin looked defiantly at his superior officer and said, ‘Oenen felt they would be a means of letting the Standartenfuhrer know they had successfully gone through certain places along the route, places he knew of since Etienne Labrie had told him of the route that would be used. Oenen chose the places-prominent and easily found-and the coin recovered, but also secure. It seemed quite harmless.’
‘Harmless or not, Heinrich,’ said Kleiber, ‘it was yourself who agreed.’
‘As did yourself, Standartenfuhrer, since the coins were, if I remember it correctly, on your desk when he told us of the route that would be used.’
The two of them must hate each other, felt St-Cyr. ‘Could that girl have scratched her initials on that coin, Kriminalrat?’
Good for Louis. So often it was the little things that counted. ‘As a means of identifying him to others, Standartenfuhrer, assuming of course, that it would have had to have been returned to his pocket after she had scratched her initials on it.’
‘But identifying him to whom?’ asked Kleiber.
‘Having lived with the Gypsies, Standartenfuhrer, he would have learned how to follow someone as if glued to them even though at a distance,’ said Hermann.
‘In other words,’ said Louis, ‘did that girl have help here on first arriving in Paris and does she still have that help?’
‘Banditen?’
‘FTP?’ said Hermann. ‘It’s just a thought, given the recent assassination of Dr. Julius Ritter, but if Louis and myself are to find her for you both and recover all the black and life diamonds those two from Berlin say are hidden, then it’s a question that needs to be answered.’
Flipping the coin and catching it heads up, Louis climbed into the backseat of the tourer to let this ‘Rommel’ drive while they inhaled the secondhand cigarette smoke rather than beg.
FTP, thought Ludin. Was it time to release those photos of her to others who would be more likely to find her?
To the courtyard at 3 rue Vercingetorix there was nothing, felt Anna-Marie, but the stark reality of the ordinary for a Monday morning. Everyone-the carpenter, the tinsmith, the picture-framer, the mason-watched her as she walked the bike up to the very far end, the children, too, and one old woman at the communal pump.
Lines of washing were being strung from upstairs windows, the houses of one and two stories and occasionally a ramshackle third. Pigeons’ nests, years old, still clung to narrow windowsills behind whose Second Empire railings a caged rabbit or chicken waited in hopes of nearby lettuces and herbs. Makeshift crepe paper blackout curtains still hung in some of those upper windows, and overlooking the courtyard from the rue de l’Ouest or the avenue du Maine was one of those wretched many-storeyed tenements from the 1920s and ’30s.
A lone, mange-plagued cat paused. Staircase after staircase led into the adjoining labyrinths. Even the curtain of the concierge’s loge looked as if permanently closed, the cloth having all but lost its original pink.
Plastered inside the glass were not only a pencilled, hand-drawn map of the courtyard, but a plan detailing the exact location and profession or other status of every tenant. All fifty-six of them. Etienne and Arie had been listed as ‘furniture movers.’
Watched, she was certain, she went on. It was crazy of her to have come back. Frans must have told the Occupier where this safe house was. He’d not answered when asked, had simply smiled that smile of his and had made her cry out, ‘Why? Why are you doing this?’
To which he had answered, ‘That’s for you to guess.’
Garages-old stables-and now often ateliers, were ranked side by side with their rusty, galvanized stove pipes clinging to the outer walls, cast-iron drainpipes too, and that inevitable clutter of things half-made and left, things still being made, and the desperately needed house repairs all too evident.
Ivy clung precariously to the flaking stucco above the door to the house at the far end, the curtains not moving.
‘So you came back,’ said Etienne, having stepped out of the adjacent stable, giving but a glimpse of Arie unloading things from that truck.
‘I did, yes. I had to warn you.’
Right down the length of the courtyard, from the open windows with wet laundry in fists to the ateliers, everyone watched them.
‘Warn us of what, then?’
Lame, a collie came straight to him and he paused to greet it warmly, revealing a side to him she would never have expected shy;. ‘Frans was going to betray you and Arie, not just myself. For all I know, he still might have, since I can’t show you the coin. It wasn’t in his pockets. He must have passed it on to someone when we went through the Porte de Versailles, but I really don’t know. How could I, having been hidden like that, in the back of yours and Arie’s truck?’