The wedding ring.
The chief inspector then touched the pocket watch Renee had had to borrow but said no more of it. Pages from Kolmar’s Morgenzeitung were fingered, a reminder of the lunch that girl had taken and something she, herself, would definitely have known of but had said nothing of. Did he think her guilty?
A bead of solder, a swatch of grey-green cloth the size of a tunic’s lapel were there, the dying of this last really quite good. ‘Boudicca,’ he said, fingering the small carving. ‘Unfortunately her javelin broke off when the cage those POWs call home was turned upside down.’
Other newspapers, scraps torn from the personals columns, were underneath a bloodied papier-mache ball that looked as if partly chewed.
The ampoules were not here, of course, nor was the lingerie.
‘Please sit across the table from me,’ he said. There were three pieces from broken gramophone recordings in front of her and she had to ask herself, Had he anticipated her coming downstairs?
‘Das Rheingold und Die Walkure, Frau Lutze. Was that girl to have found two deserters waiting for her at the Karneval on Saturday, 30 January, or was she to have gone farther east to collect and guide them back, and then hide them among those ruins?’
‘How could I possibly know?’
‘Please don’t lie to me, not when my partner and I must leave early to interview Alain Schrijen whose fiancee carried a man’s pocket watch while hers … Where did you tell me it was? At a repair shop, 3 Schongstrasse, wasn’t it? A Maurice Springer. Am I to assume that Victoria Bodicker and Sophie Schrijen also knew of him, or am I to ask Alain Schrijen? Repeated repairs to an expensive wristwatch that Colonel Rasche could easily have returned to Brequet’s on place Vendome when next in Paris? Has this Springer a relative living on the other side of the Rhine, especially if one goes through Neuf-Brisach and Alt-Breisach?’
‘Herr Springer’s brother lives in Vogtsburg and has a string of hides in the forest leading up to the Totenkopf. He’s the Kaiserstuhl’s Wildhuter.’
Its gamekeeper and probably at least twenty-five kilometres from the carnival.
‘Is he involved?’ demanded Yvonne, now desperate. ‘Is Maurice, whom I’ve known all my life, as has Victoria and Sophie? If so, I must blame myself. You see, Inspector, Maurice Springer would stop me in the street to tell me when Renee’s watch would be ready for pickup and to ask if I would please let her know. Three days, a week, sometimes ten days, seldom more. I didn’t ask why he would bother with such advance notices. I simply felt the girl was anxious to have her watch back and that he had understood this. After all, she was the Kommandant’s secretary and must have needed it.’
There were tears and that was understandable. ‘But those who should have been waiting at the Karneval weren’t there, so the girl went east to find out why and then came back exhausted.’
‘I didn’t kill her, nor would my husband.’
‘Yet he went out there in the Polizeikommandantur’s Grune Minna on that Saturday afternoon at about 4.00 p.m., your having told me that the two of you always did the shopping and afterward visited the Winstube of a friend, returning home at around 3.00.’
‘My husband and Otto tell me very little, often nothing.’
‘Of course, but you knew that girl was going out there instead of Sophie Schrijen, and you knew that upstairs in your daughter’s bedroom there were three ampoules of Evipan that girl must have brought back from Natzweiler-Struthof. Everything that is in that room is known to you.’
‘Genevieve is my daughter. It … it helps to keep me close to her.’
‘And to Renee Ekkehard?’
‘After she came back from that party, I …’
‘Frau Lutze, I haven’t time. You’ve been keeping an eye on that girl ever since she first arrived on your doorstep. You even went through that grip of my partner’s and mine and had a look at our guns.’
‘She was so pretty, I … I couldn’t help myself. Otto-’
‘Has let her and the other two drag us all down, hasn’t he?’
Through the gilded letters of an altered name, history fled in faded outlines: APOTHEKE FERBER … PHARMACIE FERBER … and there, again, APOTHEKE. Impatiently scraping at the frost on the inside of the Citroen’s windscreen, St-Cyr peered at the shop. This war, he lamented silently, the Occupation of France, the Annexation here, the interwar years and those from 1870 until 11 November 1918. Weren’t they all coming home to roost to make the statement that humanity would never learn because it couldn’t?
Hermann stood before the arched, dark-mullioned windows of the shop, framed by trusses too many and a reminder of the impediments guaranteed by war, but other items too: a pyramid of tooth powder to his right, but even there one had to ask, Chalk dust, soot and peppermint, as in Paris and the rest of France?
It was 9.57 a.m. Berlin time, Wednesday, 10 February and they had a long way to go and an interview neither of them looked forward to.
Pedestrians brushed past Hermann who seemed stuck in memory and still looking into the shop. Twin demijohns of pickled snakes, a favourite of all such shops during the fin de siecle, simply presented their owner-this girl who, at the age of nineteen, had rescued him in 1915 and had then spoken in his defence to Colonel Rasche-with a problem of disposal.
Posters flashed the benefits of Sirop Ferber, a spring tonic whose belle fille had once adorned a similar poster: Regenerez-vous par le Sirop Vincent. It had been in every pharmacy and she had simply cut the figure out and slapped it on to a poster of her own making: Deutsch as ordered.
A girl then, a middle-aged woman now, he reminded himself, one who must have little patience and absolutely no free time. As in France, and here still, unless one was on their very deathbed, one always consulted the pharmacist, never, God forbid, a doctor. The former had to undergo a rigorous training-three years or more-but acquired none of the arrogance and pathetic ignorance typical of the latter.
Harried, Hermann finally tore his gaze from the window to take in the crowded bus terminal which was diagonally across the Unterlindenstrasse and next to the ancien cloitre where Augustinian shy; nuns had established their convent in the thirteenth century. He gave the whole thing the quick once-over, realizing as did his partner, that there would be twice-daily autobus au gazogene runs to Neuf-Brisach that anyone could have taken if needed on that Sunday, a distance of probably not more than fifteen or so kilometres, the Karneval and the Kastenwald being about halfway between it and Kolmar.
Strains of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ came from the Platz where fresh-faced recruits in their early twenties and late teens stood rigidly to attention, their single suitcases behind them, each casting its shadow on the snow.
Hermann had ducked into the pharmacy.
The line-up was the length of the display cases whose glass tops were curved and still the same as they’d been in 1914 and ’15, thought Kohler. To one side, a woman in her sixties handled the nonprescriptive trade, giving him the look-see as he rushed past. Coughs echoed, for the ceiling was high and of embossed tin plate, just as he had remembered it. ‘My chest,’ he heard someone saying. ‘The usual,’ grunted another.
The dispensary was still at the very back of the shop and behind the lift-up of an oaken countertop that had been scored by the years of use. The register which contained the dates, names and prescriptions filled, still weighed probably thirty kilos and was bound by brass rods and to his left. Behind the counter, he setting it back in place, an open doorway led discreetly into that alchemy of alchemies where jars and glass-stoppered bottles filled narrow shelves and a roll-away ladder sometimes had to be used.