‘War does things like that,’ muttered Kohler, having read his partner’s thoughts. ‘It also brings enemies like us together, so please don’t forget it.’
Enemies. He hadn’t said that in a long, long time, had always been planning to get Giselle and Oona out of France and into Spain.
‘Bartholdi may have sculpted New York’s Statue of Liberty with freedom in mind, Hermann, but that isn’t why I brought you here. One hundred and three days up there in that citadel? They held fast to what they had come to believe in, themselves. That hot box was a warning to us of the Francs-Tireurs, as was the plethora of Felgendarmen and Gestapo looking for deserters in the railway station. Since this Kommandant Rasche was one of your former commanding officers at Vieil-Armand, and no doubt has remembered your usefulness, perhaps you had best tell me about it.’
Ah, damn! ‘That left ball of mine … ’
‘Sacre nom de nom, have I not been subjected to that little legend enough? Swelled to the size of a ripe lemon? As hard as a dried one. A grapefruit perhaps?’
‘You’ve no sympathy. I’m not at all surprised your first wife left you for a railway man from Orleans!’
‘She was lonely.’
‘You told me your practising the euphonium for the police band drove her away!’
‘That too.’
‘Then she didn’t take off with a door-to-door salesman or a lorry driver? You actually lied to me?’
Hermann had caught a ‘cold’ in that most tender of places while in the trenches and snows of that Alsatian battlefield.
‘You know what those field hospitals were like, Louis. I couldn’t have some verdammt Wehrmacht medic amputating the necessary.’
Ah, merde!
‘I went AWOL and found myself an Alsatian pharmacist’s daughter who was training to fill her father’s shoes even though it was heresy of her to have thought of such a thing.’
‘She was pretty.’
‘Sweet heaven but I couldn’t have done it with her and she knew it.’
And so much for his subsequent tour of duty in a Himmelfahrtskommando, a suicide commando, as one of its trip-to-heaven boys.
‘I could have been shot. Instead, Rasche, who headed up the court of inquiry, thought I might be useful and gave me a choice, and when I took it, six months of never knowing when the next second would be my last.’
Hence his uncanny ability to find tripwires and smell out explosives. ‘Carnival, Hermann. It’s from the medieval Latin for Flesh Farewell, the celebration that precedes the forty meatless days of Lent.’
‘Masked girls and boys who simply want to get into mischief, eh? Costumes? Music and dancing and torch-lit parades and feasts in an Arbeitslager, a work camp, mein Lieber?’
It was a good question. ‘A travelling fair too, I think. Sideshows, booths with games of skill or chance, others exhibiting the wonders of the world.’
‘Ja, ja, the palace of mirrors, eh? Well please don’t forget that this Colonel Rasche of mine could break every one of them with a simple look.’
‘But does he know of the Francs-Tireurs who tried to stop our train, or simply think, as others must, that they might be out there in those hills?’
‘Helping deserters to cross over?’
That, too, was a good question.
Karneval, thought Kohler. A travelling fair with games, sideshows, rides and other forms of amusement. Normally run as a commercial enterprise, occasionally held by charitable groups as a way of raising funds.
Rasche would give them no peace. Relegated to looking after Arbeitslagern, long past retirement and still a colonel? It didn’t bear thinking about.
One hundred and twenty thousand had been expelled from Alsace in 1940; 500,000 from Lorraine-all those who had wanted to keep their French citizenship and lose their property. Only those whose families had been there before 1918 were to be considered citizens of the Greater Reich. A matter of efficiency to Berlin, one of easing assimilation and purifying the remaining stock, and then, in August of last year, introducing conscription.
Frau Oberkircher, who had grown silent at thoughts of the frontier, had probably just been caught up in things like so many others, but had bought herself a copy of today’s Volki shy;scher Beobachter, the Fuhrer’s paper, thinking its presence, along with that of two detectives, might just help.
Excusing himself, Louis reached across the woman and opened a fist, revealing some chestnuts. ‘There are only a few left, Hermann. Don’t forget to use your pocketknife. We don’t want to have to visit a dentist.’
‘Ach, we’re almost in the Reich. Things will be different. There’ll be anaesthetic. Cold, boiled, dried chestnuts,’ he said in Deutsch to the woman. ‘A little something for the road his girlfriend pressed upon him in Paris as we caught the train out.’
His girlfriend, Gabrielle Arcuri, a chanteuse.
‘There’s been no heavy breathing yet, from that love affair,’ confided Kohler, widening the woman’s eyes.
‘Shave it, Hermann,’ said St-Cyr in French, indicating the chestnut. ‘Don’t cut yourself.’
‘We’re floaters,’said Kohler to their travelling companion. ‘We drift from murder to arson to missing persons, fraud and bank robberies and live in the never-never land of shadows.’
Chestnut shavings were eaten. ‘I gather beechnuts in the autumn and press a lovely oil from them which I heat with onions and salt for the potatoes,’ said Claudette. ‘It’s every bit as good as butter-better, I think.’
Certainly there were so few potatoes available in France, she shouldn’t have said it, but Louis let it pass. Louis knew the woman was bringing memories back to this partner of his. At the frontier, he took the heaviest of the woman’s suitcases which was opened and thoroughly searched, as he’d known it would be. At Kolmar, now spelled with a K, they saw her into a horse-drawn sleigh, a taxi whose mare was far beyond the needs of the Russian Front and just as aged as the few the Occupier shy; had left in France.
Giving them a wave, her heart filled with relief and gratitude, Claudette looked back to see them standing in the Bahnhofstrasse, formerly the rue de la Gare, two very different men wondering what the future might bring.
‘Amis,’ she said, as if it were a miracle, ‘but even les tres amis must doubt one another now.’
It was curious that they each remembered where the police station was but that neither spoke of it, thought St-Cyr. Two charcoal-gas-powered lorries reminded one of Occupied Paris, their fire-boxes up front or behind and gas tanks on the roof. Long queues stood outside the shops, just as at home. There were bicycles, bicycle taxis and few, if any, privately operated cars. Here, too, people simply went on foot, but also there were fewer of them. Perhaps a third less than usual, so a population now in Kolmar of about 23,000.
Swastikas flew from many of the three- and four-storey buildings that, cheek by jowl, overlooked the former Champ de Mars, the Military Esplanade, now the Militarpromenade. Black wreaths trailed bunting, a noon bell sounded, but no longer was the moment of silence being observed. The workmen who had been clearing away the wreaths continued to do so as the last bell shimmered.
On 3 February, and but five days ago, Radio-Berlin had announced the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the first such public admission. Three days of official mourning had begun on the fourth but were now over.