Unlike most, she hadn’t taken small valuables from the house but had built up a stock of necessities and simple luxuries. Toothbrushes were extremely rare and she had them, elastic bands, too. Hairbrushes, hair-combs, pencils, playing cards, dice, lipsticks, cigarette lighters, small tins of black-market lighter fuel but watch out, it’s gasoline!
Matches, too, but from the Reich, not French. Cigarettes — Russian, these. Pipe tobacco — Dutch. How had she come by it?
Chocolate — real chocolate!
Balls of wool — blue-grey, black and white — recovered from unravelled sweaters. Some reasonably good perfume, face powder and compacts. Tins of tuna fish. A christening dress for a baby, a bonnet, too. Three brassieres and several pairs of underwear, both male and female, not new, of course, but well laundered and with, yes, that same clean, white sand …
Jammed into the suitcase were the spoils of bartering: a small sack of chicken manure to be mixed with wood ash if possible, and used to fertilize the soil under the forty or so inverted glass bell jars, the cloches beneath which the girl would soon start growing Belgian endive, green onions, radishes, lettuces, et cetera, in the garden.
The smoked pork sausage with garlic, smelled also of savory and mushrooms. Six chicken eggs were cradled in a cigar box that was lined with straw and secured by elastic bands. The bacon, a slab of about two kilograms, was wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. There was a small crock of pate. Two jars of redcurrant jelly were nestled beside others of plum jam. Dried cherries and dried apples filled a small tin box. There was also a rope of garlic.
The sack held beets, but among them were potatoes, carrots and a stalk of Brussels sprouts.
Among the tins of face powder she had to offer was one whose shade would easily have matched the pallor he’d seen and he realized then that here was a very resourceful young woman. At each control she would have coughed, looked like death, and gasped, ‘A fever. The flu, I think, Herr Offizier. Forgive me.’
‘Pass. Let this one pass.’
Not only would it have discouraged a close inspection but also flirtation. And yes, the road controls were normally run by the Wehrmacht, not the Gestapo, not the flics, the Milice and other Vichy goons as at the railway stations. But how had she come by so many things to trade, and where the hell was Hermann? Surely he should have been here with the car by now?
There wasn’t just one man in the Bahnschutzpolizei office at the Gare de l’Est, a hole in the wall with stove, table and chairs. There were three of them, and the contents of the woman’s purse was still strewn across the table, so they weren’t yet finished with her, thought Kohler. Ah damn …
Putting his back to the door, he took in the competition. The Bzp Obergruppenfuhrer who had watched the other two at play, didn’t smile. A climber who would have liked to have worn a different uniform, the man was about forty years of age, clean-shaven and serious.
‘So, mein Herr, you have a problem?’ asked the Bzp in deutsch — in German. ‘The woman is suspected of being a courier for the terrorists.’
Black tunics and flies were undone on the other two, not on this one. He even wore his cap.
‘Several times we have noticed her,’ eagerly sang out an eighteen-year-old boy in French, the younger of the two miliciens. ‘When I was with the Service d’Ordre, she would come and go twice a week. I watched her.’
‘Always she has those kids with her as a distraction,’ grunted the older milicien, grim-faced and smug about doing his ‘duty’. Both wore the regulation-issue brown shirts, black ties and trousers. Her suitcases had been emptied into a corner, but they’d not had time yet to pick through the loot — winter beans, dried and still in their pods, potatoes …
‘You raped her,’ sighed Kohler in French. ‘Under OKW ordinance eighty-four, section thirty-six, article seven — that’s Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to you two — what you’ve just done is a criminal offence and subject to the death penalty. Look, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to report it.’
‘To whom?’ asked the Obergruppenführer softly.
‘To the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. How’s that for an answer?’
Herr Kohler’s German was still perfect, of course, but his French had really been very good and far better than most. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you.’
Deutsch again. ‘And why not?’
‘Word gets around. Besides …’ The Obergruppenführer thumbed her identity card. ‘This, I believe, is a forgery.’
What else was the bastard to have said? scoffed Kohler silently as the other two quickly buttoned themselves. The boy found his chasseur alpin beret and truncheon, the older one, his cigarettes and those of the woman, her lipstick, too.
Was there nothing for it, then? asked Kohler silently. Louis wasn’t here to back him up. Louis wasn’t anywhere near. Had she been arrested by the Gestapo or the SS, things would have been far harsher and still would be. Yet if a courier, then wasn’t the item these bastards wanted not on her person at all, but being passed from child to child out there on that bench!
‘Look, I can’t have trouble. Not at the moment. My partner and I are on to something really big and need a little help.’
‘So, are we to let the whore go in return? Is this what you’re saying?’ asked the sergeant, finding the thought mildly amusing.
Neither of the other two could comprehend a word, so gut, ja gut, thought Kohler. ‘That’s it. Old Shatter Hand wants me to have a look at …’ He found his little black notebook and flipped it open to any page. ‘Shed fourteen, line twenty. Help me out and I’ll put in a good word for you and forget all about what happened here.’
Kohler … Kripo, Paris-Central … where had he heard that name before? wondered Obergruppenführer Karl Otto Denke. The rue des Saussaises, he told himself, and something about the SS. A rawhide whip and their not liking this one. The scar on the left cheek — yes, yes that was it, so he could go to them if Kohler should reveal anything useful. ‘Okay, you’ve got a deal. Let her go, you two. Vite, vite. Orders from above. Orders, idiots!’ He swept an arm across the table and, dumping the contents of the purse back into it, handed the bag to the boy.
Kohler took it from him. ‘The cigarettes and the lipstick,’ he asked the older milicien in French and snapped his fingers. ‘Just to calm her nerves, eh? Then maybe if she really is working for the terrorists, those salauds won’t come looking for you.’
Unable to comprehend all that had been said, suspicion registered in the Bzp’s countenance; doubt and fear were in those of the other two.
‘So, okay, we’ve got ourselves a deal,’ quipped Kohler, ‘and the three of us will visit the shed.’
Out on the concourse, he told the corporal to make certain the suitcases were refilled. ‘We wouldn’t want her going home empty-handed, especially since her papers are in perfect order.’
She would change them within the hour. She had that look about her. One after another the storybooks were closed and the staircase of kids got to their feet to dutifully wait.
‘Take care of her,’ he said to the littlest one. Nothing else. Just that.
Madame de Bonnevies was in the kitchen, sipping the leftover of the daughter’s tisane of linden blossom, perhaps sweetened with honey. She didn’t look up when St-Cyr put the last of the things the girl had brought on the counter, but when he shook the matchbox the husband had used to hold its little corpses, the woman set the bowl down.