Caught, trapped, overrun, its operators and owners chased out by the Blitzkrieg of 1940, everything had been left in place, but the sight of it made one ask, is it the end of the world?
Multicoloured, much faded bunting flew in tatters. Once-gilded charioteers rode into battle. Marquee roofs of canvas, board and painted panel had collapsed, yet still there were the ruined stalls, booths, sideshows and rides. A carousel, the stark pipes of whose band organ were caked with ice and webbed with snow, awaited its riders, a zeppelin pointed skyward and dangled drunkenly by one cable, a swan chair had lost its wings and been turned upside down. There was a cater shy;pillar … The Super Car Monte Carlo was still recognizable, biplanes, too, as were the Ferris wheel, the shooting galleries and the shies where one would throw a ball or coconut as hard and accurately as one could.
‘The Sitzkrieg,’ muttered Rasche. The sit-down war.
‘The drole de guerre,’ said Louis. The phoney war.
Kohler knew both were stating the reason for the carnival’s having been within less than ten kilometres of the Maginot Line and the front. From September ’39, after the fall of Poland, until 9 April 1940 and the invasion of Denmark and Norway, men had languished on both sides. Then suddenly all such travel had been banned and the carnival had had to stay.
‘Colonel, please go over for us exactly how and where your secretary was found and by whom,’ said St-Cyr.
‘Then tell us why you chose to show us the second victim first,’ said Kohler.
These two, must they always suspect the worst? wondered Rasche. It was getting late. They would need the lanterns. ‘I found her, and I cut her down.’
The truth at last. ‘Where, Colonel?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘The House of Mirrors.’
Which must surely all have been broken but such evasiveness had best be stopped. ‘That school notebook of Victoria Bodicker’s, Colonel. At lunch you wouldn’t let me take it from beneath your hand. Frau Lutze noticed this as she did everything else.’
‘All right, all right. Yvonne really did feel I ought to see it, that I might well need further background on the girl. Victoria, as you know, was one of the Fraulein Schrijen’s Winterhilfswerk Committee. Renee and I … ’
‘Your secretary, Colonel?’
‘Yes! We would stop by here of a late afternoon in summer. She was fascinated by the place and loved to wander about in there. I … Why, I was indulgent. Staff relations, call it what you will. Mein Gott, the girl was like a daughter to me. A few minutes, an hour at most. When one is constantly in demand, one seeks relaxation as best one can.’
‘That notebook, Colonel. It’s evidence.’
‘The buttons too, are they?’ asked Rasche.
But not those two that were found in the victim’s pockets, was that it, eh? wondered St-Cyr. ‘Colonel, you deliberately left those items on your desk so that we would find them. Why did you do so, if you did not intend to let us examine them further?’
‘I had merely been getting a few things together to remind me of each of the men I’d allowed to help the committee. One was the firm’s fabric designer and test weaver, another a machinist and carver. Both are very capable. The carved buttons are for a waistcoat I’m having made.’
‘Then please hand those items over, the papier-mache ball also.’
Reluctantly Rasche opened his briefcase and handed them over. ‘Now if you two don’t mind, we had best have a look at her. Kohler, there’s a screwdriver in that side pocket. Be so good as to bring it and fetch the lanterns from the boot.’
Smoke rose from the chimneys of the farmhouse where the guard was billeted. Of buff-coloured stucco and weathered half-timbering, the house had been built in the late 1880s, the lichen-encrusted, reddish-brown and spatulate tiles of its mansard roof catching the last of the sunlight. Dogs barked and Hermann, who had always loved and been at ease with such, no matter how difficult, hesitated. ‘Behind the Ferris wheel,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Two guards, two Alsatians, each of them looking our way.’
‘Danke. They’re on the lead,’ he sighed.
‘Why the fright?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘Ach, after the 1918 Armistice had been signed and everyone was just waiting to be released, I used to go under the wire and would be back well before dawn Appell. Though one of the guards knew all about it and would always look the other way, another chose to let the dogs come after me.’
‘You had only paid the one off!’ snorted Rasche. ‘Mein Gott, Kohler, you continue to surprise me. Now come along. The snow’s a little deeper here. We must find you some overboots, Chief Inspector. Those shoes of yours don’t look good.’
‘It’s the glue,’ muttered Kohler. ‘I bought it and used it and got taken.’
‘The swarzer Markt in France, Colonel. Hermann is an expert but an easy touch for the pretty ones.’
And hasn’t changed one iota, thought Rasche. ‘The Volksopfer might have something.’
The people’s offering of winter clothes for the boys in Russia.
Quickly Louis stuffed the notebook and other things into his pockets to join the torn photographs he’d taken from the second victim, the identity papers and passes, the magazine with its pseudoerotic exposures of female anatomy, et cetera, and the anonymous letter.
The chemical formulae also, thought Kohler, not liking it one bit. Trinitro-bloody-phenol this colonel of theirs wasn’t saying a damned thing about but should!
As the night came down, the sky grew clearer, its stars sharper, brighter than any he had seen in a long, long time. Was it simply Alsace and the Vosges, or was it something subconsciously within him, he wondered, this need to look up even when no enemy aircraft were there, this need to look beyond the earthly? Rasche was keeping far too much to himself. Oh for sure, he had always had a mind of his own, but why ask for two detectives if you don’t want to confide everything they might need about two suicides that could just as easily have been left at that?
Torn flags were irritated by the wind. Halyards constantly struck metal and wooden standards, canvas flapped, boards creaked, swung aimlessly on chains, or banged and rubbed together. Here and there-everywhere-were sounds, especially the hollow moaning of air as it rushed through a tube or tunnel, but then, too, there was the taint of mildewed canvas and of rotting boards even in the depths of winter. Eerie … strange, a deserted city whose life had suddenly been snuffed out, a wilderness of silhouettes where shattered biplanes dangled, turned and swayed.
A Noah’s Ark had no roof but the shadows of its animals two by two. Twin giraffes flanked the entrance. A tattered gorilla raised a fist.
In single file, the colonel leading, they threaded their way through the twenty centimetres or so of snow. ‘She’s not in the House of Mirrors,’ said Rasche. ‘I had her put in one of the wagons. Each of these’-he indicated the rides and sideshow booths-‘came in one or more wagons, which invariably formed part of the structure and were lived in and then used for transporting everything while en route.’
‘A community. A little village of its own,’ said St-Cyr, realizing as Hermann would, that the colonel must have tramped about here a good deal.
Toga-draped plaster maidens raised torches to the heavens, huge peacocks fanned their tails under starlight, an Ideal Caterpillar ride waited, its linked little train of cup-canopied carriages caught on the uphill in the broken darkness of a fallen marquee.
Wagons did form the walls of the House of Mirrors. Iron cross-poles had once supported its canvas roof, and from these had hung the stand-up crazy mirrors whose walkways, stairs, false turns and landings were still in place. Glass probably everywhere, thought Kohler. Those two boys they had seen wouldn’t have left it for long and must have, like all the other children in the district, had free rein and a fantastic time of it.