Hermann still hadn’t turned from the stove.
‘Louis, it’s my fault you’re here. I … I just wanted you to know that.’
‘Your former commanding officer is a connoisseur, Hermann.’
‘Get the hell away from that desk of his before he finds you there!’
Mon Dieu, he was edgy. ‘A half-bent Billiard, the brier straight-grained and waxed as it should be, the stem of ebonite just like my own, the mixture … ’
‘Don’t touch it!’
‘A medium-dark cavendish, Hermann. Swiss perhaps, or Dutch or Danish. Matured Virginia Old Belt with perique and a pinch of latakia to slow the little fire and add its plummy taste to the spiciness of the perique and the sugars of the Virginia. Had I the opportunity and the cash for such a treat, I’d have chosen no other.’
‘Jesus, merde alors, just because you treasure that straight Billiard in your own pocket is no reason to think you’re blood brothers with that salaud! Is the pouch of faded Prussian-blue pigskin?’
‘It is, and unless I’m mistaken, your Kommandant is greatly concerned with these suicides. That little car of his absented itself while we were on our way up the stairs.’
Dead centre of the green, baize-coloured blotter, and to the right of the pipe, pouch and matchbox, there were two dossiers, one above the other and with the lowermost name showing in heavy black Gothic type with eagle and swastika stamp. Hermann Andreas Kohler and, yes, Jean-Louis St-Cyr, and so much for their trying to discover if the colonel knew this Surete understood both languages. Gestapo Paris had had the dossiers flown in.
A plain, dog-eared brown notebook-one of those a schoolchild would have used before the Defeat-lay atop the dossiers, a clutch, too, of beautifully carved staghorn buttons, the set for a waistcoat perhaps. Three beechwood bobbins, still wound with thread, were there too, as was a swatch of wood-fibre cloth, the shade that of the medium blue so common among the business suits of the Occupier.
The temptation to ask, ‘Does your former commanding officer enjoy hunting?’ was there simply because each of the buttons depicted a different type of game.
‘Louis, this map on the wall … There are forty-seven green flags scattered throughout Baden, Wurttemburg, Alsace and Lorraine.’
‘The potash mines and factories near Mulhaussen, Hermann. The textile mills, and not just the one in question. Metal- shy;working plants too, as well as coal, lumber, sauerkraut, sausage, pate and wine. Alsace has many things the Reich needs.’
And does he like trout fishing and to tie his own flies in winter, there being three superb flies embedded in a wine cork as a little reminder of retirement perhaps?
Gently brushing the buttons, bobbins and cloth aside, Louis teased the school notebook open and looked up. Does the name Victoria Bodicker mean anything to you? He silently asked.
Finding pen and paper, Hermann quickly wrote, Frau Oberkircher did mention her. The daughter of a dearest friend, and something about a bookshop she often helped at when this Victoria had to be elsewhere.
Alsatian schoolteachers had been sent to the Reich in 1940-41 for indoctrination. This one had taken the personal progress record every French schoolteacher had to carry when going from school to schooclass="underline" the grading and comments of inspectors, no matter how damning, classes taught, days absent or late, even love affairs that should not have been allowed to interfere with one’s career.
The thing had been stamped, too, by the Munich office, noted Kohler, but the girl had been chequered out of the profession, judged not indoctrinated enough.
Victoria’s not French but British, he knew Louis was thinking as a faded, once brightly coloured papier-mache ball was gently rolled across the blotter, a finger to the lips.
A carnival, Hermann. A booth, a game of Jeu de massacre where one tries to hit the bane of one’s existence: priest, schoolteacher, butcher, bully, wife or sweetheart who has chosen another.
A Game of Massacre. ‘Natzweiler-Struthof, Louis. That’s what it says beneath the red flag on that map. It’s about forty kilometres to the southwest of Strassburg and up in the hills.’
Not just a prisoner-of-war camp, not just a stalag, but a Konzentrationslager under which were all forty-seven of those Arbeitslagern.
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, you must excuse my absence, but I’ve been to see if everything is as I requested. You’ve had a long journey and must be exhausted, poor fellows. Mein Gott, is it really shy; you, Kohler? How have you been faring? Not badly, I trust? Busy, of course, as we all are, but ach, I do go on. Come … come this way, please. Inspector St-Cyr, would you be so kind as to bring my pipe, pouch and matches? A bit of lunch is in order even if we have to make do with the shortages like everyone else, but it’ll give us a chance to get to know one another and in the course of it, why I can fill you in, as is my duty.’
Rasche had known the office was bugged and hadn’t wanted Gestapo-Kolmar ears to hear what he had to say, thought St-Cyr, but had left the dossiers and the rest out for them to find and bring along, had known, too, that they would realize others were not to be allowed to listen in. A Karneval …
The house wasn’t far from the Polizeikommandantur. Built in the late eighteenth century, it was on the left bank of the River Lauch and shoulder to shoulder with others of its kind. A railed porch, extending shy; but five metres from one side to the other, was off the first storey, its plate timbers sagging. Another was off the second, yet another off the third. From there, the half-timbering ended in a steeply pitched, stepped and sway-backed roof from which a lonely dormer protruded.
‘Once the house of a tanner, Hermann,’ said Louis as they got out of the colonel’s car. ‘Look how beautifully carved the timbers and shutters are, the entrance also. Before the turn of the century, the tanners still washed hides in this river and hung them to dry in those attics up there.’
Narrow, railed walkways, placed to access each pair of houses, spanned the four-metre width of the river. Everywhere the snow had been cleared. The river ice looked thick enough for skating, and why not? wondered Kohler. Wehrmacht boys during their off-hours, probably. ‘Soldatenheime?’ he asked of the nearby houses. Hostels for the troops.
‘I would have thought it obvious,’ grunted Rasche as the perfume of wood smoke came to them.
‘Requisitioned?’ persisted Hermann.
‘Kohler, you ask too many questions.’
‘Aren’t detectives supposed to, Herr Oberst?’
‘Ach, try to realize you’re back in the Reich. Some were vacant, others donated, this one the rightful property of the family that built it.’
‘And the SS, Herr Oberst?’
‘Those people live elsewhere and have their offices in the former Prefecture.’
Complaining under their collective weight, the walkway’s planks signalled approach, a parted curtain falling back into place while just downstream of them, a one-armed veteran of that other war looked their way from under a forage cap that telegraphed its memories, Rasche tossing the man a wave and a, ‘Good of you, Werner. Any visitors?’
‘Nein, Kommandant.’
‘Danke. That’s my former sergeant-major, Kohler. Perhaps you remember Oberfeldwebel Lutze? Always loyal, always with his colonel’s best interests at heart and his own, of course. Gentlemen, it pays to be careful these days. One never knows who is listening or watching.’
‘Lutze led the search party that arrested me, Louis. A rank little-’
‘Kohler, Kohler, why will you never learn? Werner was on your side and still is because I want him there.’
The Stube, the combination living and dining room, was warm, its aroma heady, the ample peaches-and-cream woman at the tiled Kachelofen about forty-five years of age: blonde and blue-eyed, the apron white, the long, layered bright red skirt colourful, it and the subdued waistcoat and pure white blouse with its lace-trimmed sleeves and bodice straight out of a storybook. Braids too!