St-Cyr pitied the poor girl. Such defiance could only have brought a painful retribution.
He turned the page – was surprised to find a dose-up of the girl’s body. She’d been garrotted with wire but not before she’d been tortured. Her plump, bare peasant arms were a mass of bruises and cigarette burns. The homespun sweater and shirt had been torn from her, to hang about her trouser waist revealing the plain cotton halter shift and sagging breasts. A long welt marred the left underside of her jaw. There was nothing in her eyes but hatred and this had remained even after death.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Kohler.
‘Our friend makes interesting reading, Hermann. Perhaps I ought to help you.’
‘Get a proper fix on him first. Here, let me find you these …’ The Bavarian lifted his shoe to retrieve the five or six issues he’d salvaged so far. ‘Begin with the bottom one. It’s nice, Louis. Really nice. One of Himmler’s boys and we’d better not forget it.’
The photograph showed two smartly dressed, black-uniformed SS subalterns, complete with ceremonial swords. Both men were slim-waisted, tall, young, handsome, virile … black gloves, black ties, white shirts and death’s-head insignia on their caps. The busy street behind them was probably Berlin’s Kurfurstendamm. Girls shopping, a little stroll in the sun.
Ackermann was the one on the right. The peak of his cap shaded the eyes. The mouth was grim-set for such a lovely day. The ears stuck out a little. The face was a smooth, wide oval, the chin wide, clean-shaven and round, not belligerent in the slightest. The nose … Teutonic perhaps. He looked into the camera as if only slightly tolerant of the attention. His companion was openly smirking.
‘Pretty,’ mused St-Cyr. ‘Handsome, yes. A lady’s man.’
Kohler snapped the latest issue at him. ‘Streets of Kiev. Interrogating prisoners again.’
The woman was on her knees. Her wrists had been tightly bound with wire behind her back. The long, blonde braids fell over pendulous breasts. The shoulders were rounded.
‘Turn the page.’
She lay on her side gaping at the paving stones. ‘Still no tank trouble,’ said the Bavarian blithely.
They found the desired issue on the bottom of the left-hand stack. By then St-Cyr had been through half the right-hand stack in spite of Kohler’s pleas to go slowly.
‘“Hero’s return”,’ mouthed the Bavarian, reading the headline and holding the issue from him while puffing on the cigar. ‘General Hans Ackermann of the Waffen-SS.’
The cover showed the general on a stretcher, his face and hands swathed in bandages. An insert photograph showed the young subaltern from the Kurfurstendamm. Just a head and shoulders.
‘Apparently someone with a Molotov cocktail chose to teach him the lesson the Finns first taught the Russians. Don’t smoke in your sardine can,’ roared Kohler. ‘“The sheet of flame erupted, turning the tank into a blazing inferno.” Well, I’ll be. Is that what it does? Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Laurels, Louis. Holder of a half-tonne of zinc. He’s not likely to forget us, not this boy.’
‘Nor we, him.’ The eyes hadn’t just been blue but of its hardest shade, the scar tissue on the left, puckered about the eye and glazed beneath it to the chin.
Even the nose hadn’t been spared. St-Cyr recalled how the general had looked at them outside Gabrielle Arcuri’s flat.
The nose had been half eaten away and the lips … twisted and thin on the left, merging into those of the subaltern on the right.
A man of two faces, depending on which he chose to let you see.
Kohler found the photo of the last partisan. She hadn’t been garrotted. She’d simply been shot.
He found the first partisan, held her photo from him as a man would while mentally undressing a woman, even to pulling down a lower eyelid. ‘A lot like a Resistance killing, eh, Louis?’ he said. ‘Yes, my friend, there’s not a hell of a lot of difference.’
St-Cyr got to his feet. ‘I think we’ve seen enough history, Hermann. Let’s be on our way.’
‘You want any of these?’ asked the Bavarian with a grin.
The two men flung all of the remaining magazines into the river.
‘We wouldn’t want the Gestapo to find us with them,’ whispered Kohler.
‘No doubt the General Ackermann will have his own scrapbook, should we need to refer to them again.’
The beauty of the Loire was momentarily lost, but then, as the last of the magazines drifted downstream, the sun came out.
‘Do you know,’ said the Bavarian, ‘I think God just smiled. Your God, Louis. The one you always keep referring to.’
They started back to the car.
‘What would Ackermann be doing in Paris, Hermann?’
‘On rest and recoup probably, or attached to the Sonderkommando-SS under the General Oberg, the Butcher of Poland, and the Sturmbannfuhrer Helmut Knochen, his deputy.’
‘Number 72, the avenue Foch, and the Secret Service of the SS. The Sicherheitsdienst.’
‘Perhaps that’s why the Resistance has taken such an interest in Gabrielle Arcuri and her maid.’
‘Perhaps,’ said St-Cyr, but didn’t elaborate.
At noon they were no closer to finding the chateau but the day … ah, what could one say? Of course, the late spring, early summer and fall were always best. But the Loire … its many chateaux …
St-Cyr sighed contentedly. With the fire going well in the bowl of a favourite pipe and a good lunch beneath the belt, what more could one ask? Hermann had even mellowed and drove more as a tourist should.
Still, it would not hurt to go over things. Sometimes the German mind needed that. ‘Five towers surround a courtyard,’ he insisted, again consulting the child’s sketch. ‘There are two gates, as in a medieval stronghold. Outside the chateau are grounds, and a road, a grand entrance, runs through these, in part along a tunnel under the lime trees.’
They’d been asking along the way without success. Kohler had heard it all before.
Undaunted, St-Cyr continued with a toss of his hand and half an eye to the unfolding scenery. ‘There is a wood, Hermann – me, I’m certain of this – and between it and the chateau, gardens of which the crowning glory is a maze, perhaps quite tall and of box or yew, well trimmed and quite complicated.’
Louis could still go on at length about it. The bugger was really enoying himself.
‘In the centre of this maze stands a small, round tower of stone with embrasures. The boy is positive, so it has been a favourite of his tender years.’
Thinking again of his son, no doubt. ‘Mere scribblings,’ snorted Kohler. ‘You should have been a schoolteacher, Louis. That paper’s so well thumbed it has the look of a mother’s love.’
‘Fields lie below the woods, Hermann, and one can, I think, see the chateau’s towers from the far bank of the river.’
The sketch could well have been done years ago and the kid now grown up.
They came to a bridge near St-Dye, and crossed over to the left bank, pausing on a hilltop to scan the horizon and warm themselves in the welcome sun. The German presence, so apparent as one moved nearer to Paris, was almost totally absent in the countryside.
‘Osier beds, Hermann. These lie on the flatlands by the river which suggests Touraine to me, as does the boy’s mushroom logo with feet, hands and eyes but no ears.’
‘You talk as if the kid were right between us.’
‘It’s surprising what the mind of a child can reveal.’
No hint of warning of Marianne’s abdication? wondered Kohler but said only, ‘You’re the expert, my friend. I’m merely the chauffeur.’
‘Osier beds for the baskets, Hermann. So, a working chateau, I think. Vines, yes. Caves for raising mushrooms and racking wine. Fishing on a Sunday afternoon if one is lucky – there are some punts drawn up among the reeds near the osier beds. No doubt there are ospreys on the river, and the boy is very fond of spying on them.’
He’d built such a mental picture of the place, Kohler hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed.