‘He wanted his sister to return and you couldn’t have that, could you?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘As I’ve already told you, Inspector, I didn’t poison him. Oh bien sûr, if I’d known how to, I most certainly would have tried to, but …’ Her slender shoulders lifted in a nonchalant shrug as she looked away.
‘But would Danielle?’ he asked.
‘Have told me how to — Is this what you’re after? Well, is it?’
‘No, madame. Would Danielle have told your son?’
‘Who despised his father for the way he treated me and would want to stop it?’
‘Before Angèle-Marie was allowed to compound your suffering.’
‘Étienne isn’t in France, Inspector. Oskar always promised to pay for his release. He’d always say, “Next week, or tomorrow, or in a few days,” and I’d let him do whatever he wanted to me. I’d even beg him to do it and willingly I’d allow others into the room to watch or participate, if that was what he wished. What did it matter, really, so long as Étienne came home?’
‘Then could anyone else have paid for that boy’s release?’
‘His real father — Is this what you’re wondering, because if it is, then I must tell you that he died in 1938.’
‘His name, Madame de Bonnevies? I’m sorry, but it’s necessary.’
‘But … but it has no bearing on my husband’s death. How could it have?’
‘All things have bearing, even the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl in the Père Lachaise on 20 August 1912.’
How cruel of him. ‘Henri-Christophe de Trouvelot. His widow has since remarried, and now the mother who refused her son the joy of his one true love, lives alone.’
‘Where?’
‘Forty-two boulevard Maillot.’
In Neuilly, overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, and money … lots of money. ‘Ah bon! that’s all I want from you at present. Next … who’s next?’ he called out and then, in deutsch to a guard, ‘You may release this one.’
But no one was to be released until the major had returned.
The conservatory was warm, huge and humid, and stepping into it like entering a verdant jungle where one expected monkeys to chatter and pythons to lurk.
Or scorpions, thought Kohler uncomfortably as he leaned on his crutches. The major and his adjutant had ushered him through the entrance of this dripping glass house and now stood guard outside it!
Merde, what the hell was up? This wasn’t the Luxembourg but the Jardin des Plantes where, not so long ago and in its zoo, a bomb had been left for him to defuse. Sweat and all the rest of it. Suspicions of Résistance people — Gabrielle no less — and a safe-cracker named the Gypsy.
Scheisse! Oberg couldn’t have liked the outcome of that affair, nor what had happened in Avignon, and had deliberately chosen to meet him here as a reminder. But that could only mean the meeting had been decided on well before he’d even asked for it. And why, please, the secrecy?
There were flowers — things called Flame of the Woods and Bleeding Glory Bower. Orchids, too, and hadn’t Oberg liked them? They grew on the ribbed trunks of the palms, and in among the creepers. One was high above him, another over there … Pretty things that seemed to wait in silent judgement.
Bananas, too. Their thick stalks and long, broad leaves all but hiding pale green bunches.
Spiders, most probably. Black widows maybe.
In 1926 Karl Albrecht Oberg had landed a job with a wholesale tropical fruit importer in his home town of Hamburg. Perhaps he had dreamt of jungles like this while tallying the books, perhaps of naked Polynesian maidens, but he’d have thought of them with disgust, no doubt, for he had been, and still was, contentedly married and was as strait-laced, severe and no-nonsense a son of a bitch as one could find. A plodder with women. A man of little joy. Within three years he’d left to join a competitor, only to have the Great Depression shove him out the door and into the tiny tobacco kiosk he’d managed to buy in the Schanenburgerstrasse, near the town hall.
In June of 1931, he had joined the Party — number 575205 — and months later the SS, where Reinhard Heydrich had put him in the Sicherheitsdienst and had shot him up the ranks.
September 1941 saw him as S.D. und Polizeiführer at Radom, where he earned the epithet ‘The Butcher of Poland’ for his ruthless suppression of resistance and passionate extermination of Jews and other so-called undesirables, most especially the Gypsies, ah yes.
At forty-five years of age, and with the power of life or death over every living soul in France, he had landed in Paris. Hardly a word of French to him — he’d leave all that to others.
One had to pause and gape, for there he was at last, coming out from the jungle. The field-grey greatcoat, with its wide parade lapels and shining cap, with its silver skull and crossbones, went with the highly polished jackboots and the black leather gloves which were impatiently being slapped into the left hand. Behind him, water from a tiered and sculpted fountain shot up into the air before showering into streams beneath the glass dome of the conservatory, and flanking Australian tree ferns towered above him.
A man of little more than medium height, round and fleshly of face, and with a slight paunch and double chin, and a small, closely clipped, Führer-style moustache, tight sardonic smile, and pale, blue-grey, bulging eyes behind thick and steel-rimmed spectacles.
When approached, the look he gave was simply one of mild impatience as if to say to himself, I can squash this bug any time I like.
It was impossible to clash the heels together, and one crutch would fall away to clatter on the floor as the salute was given!
‘Heil Hitler, Herr Höherer SS und Polizeiführer. Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central. You wanted to see me?’
‘Kohler … Ah yes. You’ve been wounded.’
The crutch was snatched up. ‘It’s nothing, mein Brigadeführer und Generalmajor von der Polizei. A small accident. I was careless.’
‘Then you mustn’t let it happen again. These days, good men are becoming harder and harder to find.’
Oberg let that sink in. ‘This entanglement with the Procurement Office, Kohler. Das Amt is a Wehrmacht organization but most useful to the SS.’
The office … the bureau … ‘That is understood, Herr Höherer.’
‘Gut. Then in your reports to the General von Schaumburg you should emphasize two things. First, that we have no interest whatsoever in it, and secondly, that this compound is really quite remarkable.’
The tin was about ten centimetres in diameter and the same in height, the label showing an industrious Panzergruppe polishing their boots in a Russian flax field while bees floated happily around them.
‘The Soldier’s little Friend?’ he bleated.
‘Beeswax and lanolin. Herr Schlacht manufactures the compound for the Wehrmacht, Kohler, and has just been awarded a two-year contract. I, myself, find it excellent, and have enthusiastically recommended it to the General von Stülpnagel.’
Oberg had been in the same regiment on the Western Front in 1916 and, as a lieutenant then, had been awarded both the Iron Cross First Class and Second. They were still on speaking terms, von Stülpnagel leaving all ‘political’ matters to Oberg.
‘One first warms the boots a little, with a candle flame perhaps, then works the compound well into the leather, Kohler. It has a pleasant smell and is also good for the skin, particularly if the hands are chapped. You’d best keep that tin, I think.’
‘Herr Generalmajor, are you sending me to Russia?’