Blowing on his hands, he waved and waited. Rudi Sturmbacher’s youngest sister, Helga, was on duty but had just finished making a heavy night of it and took her time. One blonde braid refused to be tied. There was gravel under her puffy eyelids. The pale blue workdress was so incompletely buttoned large glimpses of her ample bosom, unhindered by any Bavarian or French soutien-gorge of starched cotton and elastic or otherwise, were offered as she ground herself into an upper corner of Hermann’s chair. Ah merde, thought St-Cyr. Like so many of the Occupier who dreamed of living like God in France, she had also come to Paris to find a man, but at the age of twenty-eight had discovered that sex was one thing, love quite another, and that war gave traffic only to such affairs.
‘Well, mein Schatz [my treasure],’ she croaked sharply at Hermann, ‘what can we do for you at this hour?’
Kohler wrapped a giant’s arm about her chunky hips and grinned up at her. ‘It’s a little too early for that, eh, Helga? But … two boiled eggs, a pail of black coffee, three fried slices of that ham of Rudi’s to remind me of home, melted cheese on top, brown bread, butter and none of that lousy approximate jam our French friends are so fond of but Rudi would never let within a kilometre of his establishment.’
She squirmed a little under his arm. She wished Hermann would really notice her. Approximate jam … the fake stuff the French had to eat if they could get it. ‘And for him?’ she asked, testily motioning with her pad and pencil.
‘He’ll have the usual. Two hot croissants, café au lait with real milk, and the plum jam with real sugar just to tell him we still make it the same old way back home and that all this talk of shortages in the Reich is merely lies, right?’
There was no thought of ration tickets here, an embarrassment that always caused Louis to edgily watch the street lest others be looking in. Others of the Resistance, ah yes.
‘Fräulein Sturmbacher, I will have the same as Hermann, please,’ he said in German that was really very good. ‘The gooseberry conserve if possible, as it is even more Bavarian to me and more piquant than the plum. We may not eat again for twenty-four hours, and here the food, it is always cooked to perfection and superb.’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere, pig!’ she hissed, tearing herself away from Hermann’s arm. ‘I really wish you two would agree before you dare to come in here. Now look what you’ve made me do!’
She tore off the page and, crumpling it, threw it at Louis. ‘French bastards!’ she shrilled. ‘You ought to shoot him, Hermann. How-how can you dare to work with the likes of him?’
Ah merde, what was this? wondered Kohler. Certainly more than a broken love affair, more than a last night before the latest boyfriend was shipped back to the front, leaving only promises.
In tears, she blurted, ‘If we have to feed him, let him eat in the courtyard.’
Kohler caught her by the arm. A button burst and then another. ‘Helga … Helga, Liebchen, what is it? The defeat at Stalingrad?’
She nodded, and when he pulled her on to his lap, she buried her face against his neck and wept uncontrollably. ‘The … the Wehrmacht are turning the air-raid shelters into machine-gun posts, my Hermann. The ones on the avenue Kléber, the esplanade des Invalides, here, too, along the Champs-Élysées. They … they are even going to cancel the horse-races at Longchamp this year and move them outside the city to Le Tremblay. Rudi … Rudi is asking them to put snipers on the roof in … in case of …’
She couldn’t say it, and when Hermann did manage, ‘A French revolt,’ she straightened up to fondly touch the slash down his left cheek and let a shudder pass through her.
‘General von Schaumburg and the others fear an uprising. They are preparing for … for the worst.’
Verdammt!
Even when their breakfasts came, there was still no sign of Rudi Sturmbacher, the Nazi Brown Shirt from Munich and great lover of gossip who, at 166 kilos, smouldered in his kitchens. Rudi had carved swastikas into the melted Gruyère that lay atop Louis’s Black Forest ham.
An uprising … a citizens’ revolt … Poor Louis stared at that hated symbol as Helga expectantly waited and watched.
Reaching across the table, Kohler took the plate and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got mine, Chief. I said I wanted the gooseberry, right, Helga? He wants the plum.’
They ate in silence as the SS regulars and others of the Occupier filtered in with their copies of Pariser Zeitung or the previous Saturday evening’s Der Angriff straight from Berlin and hot off the first Ju 52 of the day. They watched as workmen unloaded a Telefunken wireless set, lifted from a Rothschild villa perhaps, and set it up against the wall.
It was not yet 0800 hours Berlin Time and the city was still gripped in darkness, frost and, yes, distrust and fear.
‘Come on, Louis, we’ve got work to do.’
‘Don’t they care that we have murders to solve and that the Sandman is out there somewhere? Don’t they give a damn that a child and a girl of eighteen need desperately to be found before it’s too late?’
‘Of course they care. It’s only a matter of priorities.’
‘Then put on these gloves before that SS major notices I have relieved him of them. I hope they fit!’
They did. ‘Hey, you’re learning.’ Kohler grinned. ‘Das ist gut, mein Herr. Stick with me, and your fortune will be made.’
‘Sicherlich! Dummkopf. Sicherlich!’ (I’ll bet!)
Soot, garbage and clanking donkey engines gave to the port alongside the quai du Président Paul-Doumer the air of a busy place, but in truth, most of the river barges had been taken in the fall of 1940 for an invasion of England that had never happened and few had returned. Life on the river had gone on, ah yes, of course, but would it ever be the same? Impossible.
A mattress floated by, grey and ugly in the midst of the ice floes and rafting its crew of three terrified rats. A wooden crate was next, then a jersey, a man’s perhaps, but one so encumbered by encircling sewage it remained afloat only because of the gas bubbles and the condoms.
The house at Number 47 rose five storeys to shroud its broken-shuttered attic dormers and hide unfriendly slates and moth-eaten copper sheathing. Liline Chambert had had an assignation here at 2.00 p.m. yesterday. It was hardly the place for an innocent girl of eighteen from the provinces to venture alone. She must have been desperate.
‘Hermann, talk to the concierge. Leave the room to me.’
Though officially illegal and subjecting those involved not just to prison but to the threat of the guillotine, abortions could be obtained if one had the right connections and knew of a doctor and his clinic or hospital, but this …
‘The place bears every attribute of housing a clandestine abortionist, said St-Cyr bluntly.’
‘Then I’ll kick the door in and scare the hell out of the concierge.’
It would do no good to argue. ‘Please announce our presence.’
The glass shattered, the wood splintered. The door banged back and forth to screams and cries from within and then silence as they took the stairs.
‘Kohler, Gestapo Paris-Central, to see the occupants of Room thirteen.’
Death would have a better voice, thought the woman. A giant …
Kohler swept his eyes about the cage. Her teeth were still in their foggy glass beside the armchair, leaking stuffing. Her cheeks were sucked in, the faded blue eyes watered instantly. ‘Messieurs …?’ she began, still concentrating on him as he reached over her head to pluck the ring of keys from their hook and hand it to his friend.