And a very Germanic saying. ‘Herr Generaldirektor, a moment, please. Am I to understand that early last September your daughter first came to you with the request for help and that you then had to ask Colonel Rasche?’
‘Who is it who stamps the passes and then signs them? Everything has to be done through the Kommandant von Ober-Rhein and, in this case, our Reichsarbeitsdienst.’
The local labour recruiting office Rasche had made no mention of since it had probably not even been asked!
‘I pay the men, of course, and feed and house them as is my duty.’
Still looking puzzled, this Kripo found his little black notebook but had to borrow a pencil from the stein on the desk. ‘I’d best get it straight. Colonel Rasche didn’t come to you with the request, you went to him?’
‘He came to see me at my request, of course, but as to the order of things, is not the chain of command necessary at all times? Sophie and her committee had already settled on what they thought best to do, but a formal request could only have come from myself to Colonel Rasche.’
‘And what was his reaction?’
‘Since Gauleiter Wagner had judged their holding a Karneval an excellent fund-raising idea, your former commanding officer could but agree to give the necessary permission.’
Having first made damned certain Rasche would give his sanction, those ladies on that committee had then known exactly the right buttons to push. Schrijen first, then Wagner, since the former would have insisted on telephoning the Gauleiter, then Rasche, a mere formality even though he had been the start of it all!
‘The French POWs who work here are paid for their labour,’ said Rudel, ‘and are treated correctly as is laid out by the Wehrmacht’s ordinance that covers the use of prisoner-of-war labour, so you see, Kohler, ultimately it is Colonel Rasche to whom one must go if even incidental labour is to be freed up, no matter how just the cause.’
And no one else was to blame. ‘My partner and I will need to talk to those four men, Generaldirektor, and to the guards who accompanied them on each visit to the Karneval site. Your Werkschutz too.’
The work-police, and still no mention of the two laboratory assistants, thought Schrijen, or of the Postzensuren and other office staff Eugene Andre Thomas had most certainly come into contact with on a daily basis, but was Kohler keeping that to himself? ‘You and your partner could be here for a very long time, mein Lieber. Questioning this one, that one, getting so many conflicting stories, for they’ll all conflict, won’t they? Men behind barbed wire like to play games to alleviate their boredom, and that is one of them. An answer here, another there and great fun in the confusion created, the testimony of their guards contradicting every one of them because the POWs will have agreed on what to say beforehand. Two suicides, two murders, or one and one, which is it to be?’
Attract the least attention possible. Leave it at suicides and go home smiling. ‘We’ll need to interview your son and daughter, Generaldirektor, and to have nothing but your fullest cooperation.’
The Schweinebulle had spoken like a man on the way to his Heldentod-the hero’s death. Paris had said that St-Cyr and Kohler were sticklers for the truth but that if the right means could be found, the Bavarian, being close to home, might wish to pay his ex-wife a visit and be convinced to switch horses. Paris, of course, did not know everything about Herr Kohler, especially the pharmacist’s daughter who had nursed him back to health before his tour of duty in Elsass with a bomb-disposal squad. ‘Karl, why not leave us for a little? Come back in a half-hour. If Herr Bremer should cross your path, tell him he won’t be needing any of that Quatsch that lady pharmacist gives him for the stomach ulcers. She’s good, of course, and has her doctorate, having grown up in her father’s pharmacy.
‘Some coffee, Herr Kohler? Frau Macher … Frau Macher, refresh this, would you please?’ he called out to the secretary in the outer office, his first line of defence. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘A cigarette? How are you getting on at that boardinghouse of the colonel’s? Frau Lutze is, I gather, an excellent cook.’
‘An old friend,’ said the Chief Inspector of the tobacco pouch he had deliberately forgotten-Yvonne was certain of this. He stood before her in that rumpled brown fedora, threadbare overcoat, prewar trousers and shoes … the right one bearing a split seam and sole and leaking meltwater onto the terra-cotta tiles.
‘Two pairs of socks are also needed, I’m afraid,’ she heard him saying, the Deutsch without hardly a trace of a French accent. Removing his shoes, he went quickly past her and up the stairs but did he suspect she had just been through their things, had she put them back exactly as they’d been?
He made no sound in a house where sounds always carried: Genevieve running down those stairs to greet Otto during the interwar years when her ‘fabulous uncle’ would come from Magdeburg for a visit; Genevieve calling out, ‘Mutti, I can see him! He has turned onto the quay and is hurrying. He has two suitcases and a big bunch of flowers, has brought me a cockatoo, Mutti. A cockatoo!’
Otto, to give him what little due he deserved, had never forgotten the child. Money had come every now and then, money she had hated to receive though necessary.
‘Madame … Ach, I would forget French is forbidden. Frau Lutze …’
The Inspector was right behind her. He had come down those old stairs without a sound, had avoided the third step from the first landing, the seventh too, and the one before the last and final step, but as to his having forgotten the ban on French …
‘It’s all right. We can speak it behind closed doors if you wish. My daughter …’ Ah, Sainte Mere, had he tricked her into saying it?
He waited, the mildly puzzled frown neither demanding answer nor allowing one not to be given.
‘Is away. A student,’ she heard herself bleakly saying in Deutsch.
‘In Clermont-Ferrand?’ he asked pleasantly enough.
‘Her final year.’
He did not say that it was odd the child should have gone to the university from a home like this, he simply nodded as if the information was of polite interest but of no consequence and begged her to get him a little of the colonel’s tobacco, if possible.
Intuitively he had sensed that she would not want to do this, that Otto was bound to find out and discover that he had come back to question her in private unless she was very careful and did not spill any or take too much.
‘A moment, then,’ she managed.
He was now watching her go up the stairs. He had known Otto must have lied to her when she was nineteen and so very much in love with him-Herr Kohler would have told his partner of it. Genevieve had some of her looks at that age but was tall like Otto. ‘Tall girls always have a hard time of it, Mutti,’ the child had wept not once but often until she had realized that God must have wanted her to be the way she was. ‘It is because of this that I must study,’ she had concluded, as if consigning herself to scientific cloisters.
Otto had, however, taught Genevieve to love the outdoors, especially on those occasions when he had taken the child away for a day or a weekend’s fishing. She had then spoken of it for months and had longed to be with him just like her mother.
When she came downstairs, the Chief Inspector was sitting at the kitchen table. To not offer coffee and butter biscuits would be impolite and might help to distract him.