A wise one reeking of Surete and Paris and pissed off at having to wait his turn! The forlornly clutched pipe was empty, the tobacco pouch also, as further evidence. ‘A moment, m’sieur. I will see if there is anything beyond ashes. Sometimes the urn contains a few leaves.’
Verdammt, Louis, how many times have you told me never to try to joke with a waiter? Hermann would have gone on and on about the ‘lessons’ in French etiquette he constantly received from his partner, but Hermann wasn’t here as anticipated and perversity had won out!
Vichy’s railway station stank of cold, damp soot, unwashed bodies, disinfectant and urine. Dirt was everywhere: in the saucer that was used for powdered saccharin, on the floor that hadn’t been swept in months, in the shabbiness of the crowd that mingled or came and went but that held few happy faces. Papers being checked — plain-clothed Gestapo on the hunt; GFPs too, the Wehrmacht’s secret police, looking for deserters; its uniformed military police also, the Kettenhunde, the ‘chained dogs’ who wore their badge of office on a chain around their necks. Tough, brutal, no-nonsense men to whom even the Vichy goons and flics gave a wide berth.
The sculptress had taken the same train as Hermann and himself, but try as he now did, St-Cyr could find no memory of her having been in any of the waiting queues, either at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on Wednesday, the day after Celine Dupuis’s murder, or at the Demarcation Line.
‘Ines Charpentier,’ he said. Oh for sure, her name had been in the register. She’d taken a sleeper — normally one would think nothing of it except that, as an artist and poor, how could she have afforded such a luxury when even detectives didn’t dare to do such a thing?
Then, too, since the Defeat, the trains had been policed, not by the Surete, but by the German railway police. And everyone, including most especially the Resistance, was well aware of the respect and admiration given to wealth and position by the common and ordinary of the Occupier.
Even at the Demarcation Line they seldom bothered to disturb those in the wagons-lits, the Schlafwagens.
‘A man and a woman, but one of the latter,’ he said, ‘who knows well how to come and go and now has a reason for staying here.’ Had someone paid her fare, someone in the Resistance?
It was an uncomfortable thought and, as always these days, things could be so complicated. Many of the railway workers, especially in Lyons, had been communists until the party had been banned, and when the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941, the cheminots formed what was to become, in 1942, the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, but by then the assassinations they had initiated were being carried out in earnest. Prominent collaborators, Wehrmacht corporals and higher-ups. In December 1941, General Keitel signed the Nacht und Nebel Erlass, the Night and Fog decree. In retaliation for the killings, all those arrested whose innocence could not be quickly determined were to be deported to the Reich under cover of darkness.
Families could not even find out where their sons or daughters had been taken or if they had even been arrested. Brothers lost brothers; sisters the same. One simply vanished without a trace.
Hostages were also taken and shot. At first only a few, then ten for each German killed, then more, people being rounded up and held as Suhnepersone — as expiators — for those who’d been killed.
And yes, a civil war between Vichy’s newest police force, the Milice, and the Resistance was definitely possible. And yes, Hermann and he himself would be caught up in it, his Giselle and Oona too; Gabrielle also.
But these killings, he reminded himself, these failed assassination attempts, if indeed that is what they’d been, might not have been the work of the Resistance at all.
First there was the extreme right of Paris who hated Vichy and wanted power. The Intervention-Referat, at 48 rue de Villejust, recruited and trained teams of assassins from among members of the Parti Populaire Francais of Jacques Doriot whose newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, didn’t just shrill collaboration beyond that of Vichy, but total union with the Reich. True, these killers did the work of the Gestapo when they wished to appear dissociated from it and, true, they did the PPF’s work as well, even when it didn’t necessarily agree with the Gestapo’s position.
Then, too, there was the Bickler Unit of the Alsatian, Karl (Hermann) Bickler, who trained infiltrators and agents for the Gestapo — assassinations, kidnapping and extortion also — but primarily directed against the Resistance.
‘And otherwise?’ he asked himself, for there were still possibilities of a political nature. ‘A jealous wife or lover, but surely not with all three of the victims.’
There was still no sign of Hermann, nor the tisane he had ordered. When looking out of the restaurant at the crowd, he couldn’t help but notice their footwear. Shoes indicated the health of the nation: carpet slippers in winter, but stuffed with bits of newspaper or twists of straw and worn sometimes even in mismatched pairs; open-toed high heels with thin straps, but with woollen socks instead of the silk stockings for which they’d been fashioned, hence the tightness, the rubbing, the painful chilblains one often noticed on the female corpses one had to examine. Wooden-soled shoes with their cleverly articulated hinges and cloth or ersatz leather uppers were everywhere, sabots also, and then, too, shabby leather or rubber boots that were far too big for the wives of those who were locked up in POW camps in the Reich.
‘We’ve become a nation that will wear anything and that no longer cares about appearances,’ he said and then, getting back to the matter at hand, ‘Camille Lefebvre’s father will have to be interviewed. There is also Celine Dupuis’s love of birds and her use of their quills that will have to be looked into. Merde, where is that partner of mine?’
Hermann functioned best with a set of wheels under him. In September 1940, when they’d first met, he’d seen that big, black, beautiful Citroen traction avant, that front-wheel drive, and had said blithely, ‘You’d better give me the keys.’
‘My car! The years of diligent service, the rise to Chief Inspector, and then … then to have it all taken away!’
Hermann was a terrible driver. Heavy on the foot, careless on the straight and narrow, insane on the blind curves. ‘It’s a wonder I haven’t been killed or forgotten how to drive.’ But Hermann, for all his faults, was desperately needed.
‘Bousquet has not come completely clean,’ St-Cyr grumbled when, grinning and loudly exclaiming, ‘I knew I’d find you here!’ the Bavarian at last appeared in a rush. ‘He’s still trying to hide something, Hermann.’
‘Cheer up and shut your eyes — come on, do it — and hold out your hand.’
Louis sucked in a breath as he felt for the thumbnail groove and carefully opened the blade to cradle the pocket knife in his hand. ‘A Laguiole, Hermann. A woman’s knife — there is no awl or corkscrew as with those of the men. It’s an unwritten rule of etiquette that women flash only open blades. The bee under my thumb at the head of the haft supposedly symbolizes Napoleon’s warrant but I doubt it. The village is well to the south of Clermont-Ferrand and a good distance from here. Still, the knives travel, and in the Auvergne it is preferred over the simple Opinel most of our peasants favour. Beautifully made, not cheap now, but razor-sharp because the steel is similar to that of surgical instruments — one per cent carbon, seventeen per cent chrome and point eight per cent molybdenum — but always the love of one’s craft goes into them.’
Opening his eyes, Louis laid the knife on the table, the cinematographer within him taking in each detaiclass="underline" the length, in total, some twenty centimetres, the blade being a little less than half of that: silver-coloured, then brass and rosewood with brass rivets, then brass again in the softly curved end to fit the hand perfectly — any hand.