‘ “The sacrifices of the army, Louis? Bulwark of a historical European mission and not in vain,” or so that bastard of a propaganda minister claims, but if not in vain, then what?’
‘Easy, mon vieux. Easy. You’re in the Reich.’ Hermann had lost his two teenaged sons, Jurgen and Hans, at Stalingrad, this partner of his having had to convey the terrible news to him early in January. He’d be wanting to see his Gerda, if only to tell her he was sorry for their loss. Granted, it wasn’t that far and perhaps the trip could be arranged, though the delay in getting back across the frontier would be something else again.
Two direction-finding vans, with diamond-shaped wire aerials, were parked in front of the Polizeikommandantur which overlooked the Cathedral square. Gestapo plainclothes were earnestly talking about the sweep, just as they would have done in Paris and elsewhere in France. ‘Piano study, Hermann.’
Clandestine wireless transmitters and London … calling London, just as in France when possible.
A dark blue Renault Juraquatre, the two-door, four-seat economy of 1937 to 39 was parked ten metres ahead and had just been washed and polished-washed in this weather!
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ said Kohler. ‘I warned you.’
Half-timbering gave great age, the flanking double wings of what was now an expanded cop shop rising through three and four storeys to lofty garrets, steeply pitched roofs, and paddle-shaped brown beaver’s-tail tiles, the Biberschwanzen. No patterns were up there on the roofs to brighten the place. Just broken, crooked shutters or none at all. In the years since 1575 much had happened, but more recently the stucco had sloughed and become stained, had been shot up too, a little.
‘Colmar’s Hotel de Ville had a fire, Hermann.’
Its town hall and a reminder that during the Blitzkrieg all the records had been conveniently destroyed. As a result, the town had become the home address favoured by many using false papers in France. ‘Relative upon relative the remaining citizens haven’t even heard of!’ said Kohler with a snort.
Above them, above the swastika, a columned, railed gallery, looking like something straight out of the Renaissance, was open to all elements. Above this, there were two garret dormers, one on either side, their solid wooden shutters permanently closed and bolted.
‘Hermann, before we go in there I have to tell you something. If we should run into any of my second cousins, I really don’t know what I’ll do.’
‘Hug or hate them?’
‘Or both.’
‘And they?’
‘Will remember the boy they teased until he fought back so hard he learned to use his fists.’
Louis had spent three summers on the farm of distant relatives near Saarbrucken.
‘Grand-maman kept saying I would have to return until she was satisfied.’
She had lived through the siege of 1870-71 to bankroll vivid memories of the Prussians.
‘Their father, my uncle Ernst, had the biggest manure pile in the village and was a real Gauleiter of the shit, Hermann. Looked up to by everyone because of it and other things. Feared, too, let me tell you.’
‘Calm down. Don’t be so nervous.’
‘I even saw my cousin Hedda undress completely so as to give the local boys their money’s worth. My look was free since I took in the cash for her. Six pfennigs, one from each of them.’
At times, even such as this, it was best to wait and say nothing.
‘Oncle Ernst was a big man, Hermann. Not quite as tall as yourself but as strong as an ox. Gentle, though, but thorough. Rigorously so.’
‘I’m waiting, aren’t I?’
‘Ah, bon. Guess who was forced to strip off for free and stand in front of all the girls and women of the village yet … yet afterward, no one said a thing of it. There was not one whisper shy; or giggle. Hedda and I lived in mortal fear and remorse for days-it was as if we had been banished, but ever since then, except for that last war and this one, she and I have corresponded.’
The truth at last, but a bond, if not of distant kinship and forbidden commerce, of shared guilt, shame and trial.
‘Grand-maman said that they had won me over and that I was a terrible disappointment to her. She had hoped I would come back hating them, and didn’t even acknowledge that I had finally learned the language.’
Louis was always answering for the sins of his boyhood.
‘Just remember Sainte Odilia, Hermann, then you’ll realize how long such things can linger. In 700 A.D. she prophesied that evil would come via the Antichrist from the Danube.’
A tale worthy of the troubadours. Born blind, rejected by her father, Alsace’s patron saint had been hidden away until baptized when a beautiful maid. Miraculously she had gained her sight and her vocation, had kept her virginity, and become a nun and then abbess of the convent she had founded. One day, in her old age when a passerby, and not a blind one, had said he was thirsty, she had touched the stone at her feet with her cane and produced a spring to which, yearly since, the blind had flocked to bathe in hope of gaining their sight!
‘You shouldn’t pay that legend much credence, Louis.’
‘I don’t. I just see the evidence of it all around me.’
The stove was cylindrical and of fluted white ceramic tile bound by gleaming straps of brass. Hands held to it, they waited in the colonel’s office. Finally Hermann could no longer stand their being left alone. ‘He likes to make his fish sweat before frying! He’s pissed off because we’re late and will never believe it wasn’t my fault!’
They had been ushered past the duty desk, had been quickly led through the warren of narrow corridors, up sets of creaking staircases, down others and up again at turns, all eyes taking time out in the various offices to not only watch their progress but see what Paris had sent.
Diamond-leaded casement windows filled much of the oriel behind the Empire desk that looked oddly out of place. Frantically Hermann tried to roll a cigarette. Megot-scavenged tobacco showered, messing the Aubusson under foot and littering the black sheet-iron beneath the stove.
‘Let me.’
‘Verdammt! Can’t you just be patient?’
Was it all coming back to him? wondered St-Cyr. The agony of never knowing what verdict the court of inquiry would render? The distinct possibility of the firing squad-he’d never given a hint of being so troubled!
The chair behind the desk was not Empire or anything so fine. It was simply a plain, bare, mismatched wooden thing, high- and straight-backed, a railed affair without armrests. A man, then, this colonel of Hermann’s, who favoured his back, but did he, in his contemplative moments, gaze off to the northwest beyond the Cathedral to the Eglise des Dominicains whose exquisite stained glass would have been taken down in 1939 and crated to rest in security, as had the rose window of the Notre-Dame and others? Did he know that the building of that church had begun in the thirteenth century and had continued through the fourteenth, fifteenth and well into the eighteenth? Master builders, those artisans, but did the colonel not also, as he absolutely must since it was right in the middle of the square, notice the Collegiale Saint-Martin with its glazed tiles in diamond patterns, the Cathedral’s buttresses and walls inset with blocks of red sandstone among the grey so that a pattern emerged which complimented that of the roofs?
Or did he notice on the rue des Clefs, that of the keys and now the Schusselstrasse, the formerly named Hotel de Ville which was unique in itself and for more reasons than the false identities it had provided.
Everything on the desk had its place. Herr Rasche liked order. Pipe and tobacco pouch were to the left and as if just taken out, the bowl but half-filled. An interruption.
‘Louis … ’