God often did things like that. He let chance play such a part these days, made surprises all too evident when least expected and only the more unsettling. Had she been questioned on her return? Had Hermann inadvertently let something slip while on that train?
Kohler waited behind the door to the laboratory and next to the foyer of the executive offices. He knew he hadn’t much time. Sophie Schrijen hadn’t hung around to be questioned while he had been closeted with her father. She hadn’t even bothered to lock up, had left in such a rush her office door was wide open, but would Frau Macher leave that front desk …
It was empty. Muffled, the sound of Schrijen dictating a letter came faintly into the foyer where oil portraits of himself and Gauleiter Wagner flanked that of the Fuhrer.
Closing the door a little, Kohler took in the office at a glance. Everything was in its place because she had so many things on the go. A table to the right held a beautifully made model of the Karneval as it had been. Brightly coloured, gay, exciting, tantalizing … the Ferris wheel, the Super Car Monte Carlo, Barrel of Love, House of Mirrors … were all to scale, but the time to have made it must have been considerable.
Behind it, on the wall, there was a diagram of the ruins with the locations and distances all keyed to the model and no problem at all in finding a potential victim, none either of fading away quickly or of watching someone put on her skis. Was that how it had been?
The left side of the desk was reserved for the volunteer work. Manila paper file folders overlapped in sequence: the Women’s Auxiliaries of the Nazi Party, among them the Frauenschaft, the mothers and housewives, the Arbeitsmaiden too, the Labour Service for girls from eighteen to twenty-one, also the BDMs-the League of German Girls-those from fifteen to twenty-one, and the Jungmadel from ten to fourteen, then, too, the Red Cross catering service at the hospital and the Winterhilfswerk. A busier lady by far than even that father of hers had claimed. Speeches to give, receptions at which to be the guest of honour, pins and other awards to hand out, the names of the recipients all underlined. The stress on her must be really something.
To the right was everything dealing with the Textifabrikschrijen. Orders, letters to be signed, requisitions for supplies, production figures, fabric specifications … the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine and SS. Uniforms too, for the BDMs, and cloth for civilian needs. Dress fabric, blouse, shirt and suit fabric … man-hours expected, Straflager penalties handed out to slackers and troublemakers-as good an indication as any of how contented a camp was. Wages … seventy pfennigs per day per man, per twelve-hour shift but paid only to the French POWs, the Russians and the Poles receiving zero, but even at the base level of the official exchange rate and in Reichskassenscheine, the Occupation marks in France and other countries, that seventy pfennigs equalled 14 francs, or 17 British pence, or 32 American cents.
Food was listed: potatoes, cabbage, sauerkraut, black bread in two-kilo loaves and lumpy, sour too, and soggy, horsemeat and bone, pork and bone, soup bones also, and calorie intakes required under the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht ordinance as per Karl Rudel.
Beside each of these intakes she had lightly pencilled in the normal minimum requirements for a healthy man at hard labour: 3,000 calouries per day instead of the 1,500 received; fats at least 100 grams instead of 30; protein the same; vitamin A 5,000 units, not the 2,000, et cetera.
Oh for sure, a voice should be raised, but from here and right next to the prime mover and shaker of the Works? It was suicidal.
Five hundred and ninety-three prisoners ate, slept, worked and did little else, and the quarry camp at Natzweiler-Struthof was always there if a vacation was needed.
She must have known Eugene Thomas quite well, must have had to consult with him often and but a step or two away, but had she known he had received that anonymous letter, had she known of the trinitrophenol and the cutthroat?
The bell above the bookshop’s door rang well enough, but things were never simple, irony often deep, thought St-Cyr. Two buckets of sand, painted red and clearly marked by Civil Defence for use in case of fire during an air raid, were tucked out of the way inside the door. As would be expected, the regulations were clearly posted and signed by the Luftschutzfeldwebel, but here the name of one Werner Lutze was found, a fact that neither Frau Lutze nor Colonel Rasche had bothered to mention.
Leaded, diamond-pane, seventeenth-century casements gave crisscrossing shadows to the books. On the far wall, a large, framed photo of a book burning brought its stark reminder: 10 May 1933. Thousands and thousands of students had plundered public and private libraries, marching into the Unter den Linden and then following it to the University of Berlin, to set the mountains alight while Zeig Heil-ing at the top of their lungs.
All such fires, and there had been many of them, had awakened within him an ominous sense of foreboding that had been realized on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but why had Victoria Bodicker chosen to hang that photo? As a protest or sign of loyalty, and if the latter, was that not wise, and if the former, not foolish?
Beneath the photo, three plump porcelain geese, like those found before the war in every second shop window in Strasbourg and Colmar to advertise pates de foie gras, were nestled in straw atop small stacks of newly received books, the geese sound asleep.
A protest, then, but hard for anyone in authority to prove.
‘Mein Herr, can I help you?’
The voice was carefully modulated, yet warm and soft. A brunette with page-boy styled hair, she was perhaps thirty-two years of age. High, strong, almost Slavic cheekbones framed deep brown, mildly interested eyes, no lipstick, rouge or powder being worn, the skin clear and with the burnish of wind and sun.
She was also of the same height as Sophie Schrijen who stepped timidly from one of the aisles to stand apprehensively behind and partly to one side of her. Two of the original three, the one here to get the story of the other straight and make sure they both said the same thing, or here in fear of her life?
‘Meine Damen, a few small questions, nothing difficult, but first, the automobile that is parked well down the street …’
And not outside the shop as a precaution-was this what he thought? wondered Sophie. ‘It’s my brother’s. I left it there because, since a child, I’ve loved walking along that street to this shop. The Schupos will find me if it needs to be moved.’
The urge to say, Ah, bon, pulled at him, but it would be best simply to nod.
There were aisles and aisles of books: 20,000 new ones were published in the Reich each year. Sentimental novels of Kameradschaft shy; in the front lines, dogma, too, and doctrine, the superiority of the Volk, the Germanic Nordic race and the unjust lack of living space. Stories of chivalry as well and of Kinder, Kuche und Kirche-kids, kitchen, and church-for those were what girls were supposed to aspire to, though the church was definitely not in favour with the Nazis and hadn’t been since 1933, especially the Protestants, and the slogan but one that had been borrowed from a deeper past and never quite expunged from the popular psyche and therefore used in various ways.
A sleeve of the closely fitted, trim brown velvet jacket of the Fraulein Bodicker’s suit brushed against his overcoat as she put the lock on and turned the signboard to read Closed, her perfume causing him to start and she to smile softly.
‘Mirage,’ he said, as if baffled as to how she could have come by it, thought Victoria, but did he not know that Renee had bought her watch near that shop before the war and that Colonel Rasche had since been back and had, on one occasion, bought more of the perfume?