St-Cyr would never back off and neither would Kohler. ‘That is correct, but as to when that photo was taken, perhaps the lieutenant might know.’
‘I’m sure he does, especially as Abwehr-West are known for thoroughness and have fortunately left nothing to question.’
Methodically, as if laying out the tarot cards of their fortunes, Louis began to place photo after photo in front of himself.
‘Early this year,’ said Leutnant Heiss.
‘You’re not quite correct.’ Turning it over, he let them see the date and stamp. ‘The fifth of December last, messieurs, but by then, according to her concierge, she would have been visiting her mother who was extremely ill with pneumonia and in Rethel. When she returned on 10 December, Monsieur Bolduc, either yourself or Deniard or Paquette very generously gave her the half of a bottle of the Chateau Latour, whose vineyards you could well have an interest in. But surely knowing what you must of Rethel, Hauptmann Reinecke and Leutnant Heiss, either one or the other of you would have looked a little deeper?’
‘We now know she must have gone on to Amsterdam.’
‘Having gained exit past the Paris controls in one of Monsieur Bolduc’s vans, n’est-ce pas?’
‘But not with this latest trip when she went to find out why her fiance hadn’t come to Paris to join her as agreed,’ said Leutnant Heiss.
Everything in her room had been recorded-that cot, the all-too-evident student poverty, even that champagne cork, but Hermann and himself would still have to go carefully, felt St-Cyr. They couldn’t reveal anything more than what had been gleaned from Mademoiselle Lemaire’s file and Concierge Figeard or the murder site. They mustn’t betray what they really knew.
There was even a shot of a pair of laundered and carefully mended step-ins and a brassiere, both laid out on that cot.
‘Jacqueline likes to tease,’ said Bolduc, giving them a slum-landlord’s grin.
‘And Rene Deniard and Raymond Paquette, monsieur, did they, too, like to tease?’
‘Look …’ began Bolduc.
‘Just answer,’ said Hermann.
‘Even I can see the date.’
‘Precisely,’ said Louis. ‘The first of October and after the robbery and murders, not before them. A diagram of none other than the ruins of l’Abbaye de Vauclair, Hermann, the photo taken of a sketch map in her dissertation, I gather. There’s even a notation-l’eau potable.’
‘And yet … and yet, Louis, he didn’t even think to question why that van of his hadn’t returned on schedule? Instead, he simply told Yvonne Rouget that they’d better give Deniard and Paquette a few more days.’
‘You knew, monsieur, that we would discover they’d been illegally hauling things for the marche noir.’
‘Precisely 65.25 million francs due in, Louis, and yet he didn’t have a care.’
‘From which only 4,780,500 were taken,’ said Bolduc. ‘Why so little?’
‘Because they, too, were hauling goods for that same market,’ said St-Cyr, ‘and like yourself, didn’t want it known that they had had any connection whatsoever to the murders.’
‘But they had a mouchard that they didn’t know of,’ said Kohler.
‘Ein Spitzel,’ said St-Cyr. ‘One who knew of this Annette-Melanie shy; Veroche and was to follow and report on her whereabouts to that Diamantensonderkommando because they had let her go with a little something they should never have let go.’
The stairs were many and of the rue des Gobelins, and they spiralled upward in that ancient tower, felt Anna-Marie, until at last they came to Frans. Forgotten hides, long-mildewed, hung from wooden rods, crowding in on either side of him. Bound hand and foot, gagged and blindfolded, he sensed her presence.
Kupka, the thirty-year-old Czech Communist from the Sudetenland, handed the knife to her. ‘Not the gag, mademoiselle, not the wrists either, and not the blindfold. He’s to face us only when all are gathered.’
The butt of a Webley Mark IV, .455 calibre revolver, a Resistance standby and leftover from the beaches at Dunkirk in 1940, protruded from Kupka’s belt, but to say Frans’s name was still too much. ‘You’ll have to let me take you by the arm. The stairs are steep and you’ll not be able to hold on to the railing.’
Violently shaking his head, struggling to speak and yanking himself away, he indicated a need to pee, Kupka tapping him on the shoulder and saying, ‘All right, I’ll unbutton you and hold it. Mademoiselle …’
Turning from them, she couldn’t help but hear the flood and wonder at what was to become of her, but it was as if Frans was grinning at her discomfort, for he wouldn’t have to face them with wet trousers.
Down and down they went, the air increasingly rank not with urine but the eye-stinging stench of this place until, in the cellars, they came to stand before the others amongst the silent wooden shy; hoists and beams the tannery would have used, the heaps of scrapings from the hides as well. A lonely chair had been placed apart, and on either side of it was one of the emptied rectangular shy; concrete vats that had been sunk into the floor to hold the sodium shy; sulphide and hydrated lime that had been used. Repeatedly steeped in a solution of those for days on end so that the hair could be easily scraped away, the hides would then have been de-limed by washing and soaking in a solution of brine and concentrated sulphuric acid.
Forgotten, perhaps deliberately so, were rows and rows of ten-litre glass jugs of that acid. Aram, she knew, had on two occasions given them a curious look as if to wonder what they could be used for.
Emmi, from Neukolln, a working-class and formerly Communist suburb of Berlin, always wore her thick blonde hair braided into the Knoten much-favoured by the Nazis. Tall, big across the bust and shoulders, big, too, in the heart, she could quote Schiller, Goethe, Heine and others, notably too, the Fuhrer, but if ever there was one the Occupier should be concerned about, it was her. Eine Brunnhilde with thighs, knees, heavy grey woollen stockings, black jackboots and tight grey skirt, she invariably wore the uniform and side cap of a Blitzmadchen, one of the Helferinnen, the helpers. Secretaries, wireless and telephone operators and such, she looked as if of the ‘grey mice,’ even to switching rank, topcoat, cap and all the rest when necessary, but preferring the boots since they were more comfortable at times than the regulation black leather shoes. Black or grey gloves too, and no others.
Andre Beauchamp, dark-haired, dark-eyed and always looking hungry and younger than his twenty, had been on the run since mid-1941 and not just as now for so many others, from the Service du Travail Obligatoire.
Felix Verando took his place among them, as did Aram. Light was offered from a can of motor oil with a wick.
Seated before them, Frans waited, Aram indicating that she should cut the gag and remove the blindfold. But again there was the thought that she had never done anything like this before and that from now on things would be very different for her.
Unaccustomed to even such a light, Frans blinked. Swallowing tightly, he asked for water, but was it to be but a ploy for time?
Aram indicated that she should comply but when the mug was held, Frans pulled away to look up at her not as the condemned-never that with him-but as one who laughingly mocked.
Unsettled, she very quickly accused him, but of course there was no coin.
There was only one way to escape this, felt Frans, but first they would have to be told how things had really been. ‘Bien sur, I’m a resistant and I helped Etienne Labrie, the alias of Stephane Lacroix, and Arie Beekhuis, that of Hans van Loos, to move hunted individuals such as yourselves through from Amsterdam, the Hague and elsewhere in the Netherlands to France and on to Spain and Portugal or North Africa. Whatever destination suited, since cost was seldom a factor. Our motive was to deny the enemy those they most wanted.’