‘So he cries murder, not suicide, Hermann, and asks himself where he can find two honest, hardworking, dumb Schweinebullen shy; who will look for the truth he’ll present to them.’
‘And sends us to Natzweiler-Struthof. We can’t take her into that camp.’
‘Schrijen and Rasche both know this but have given us no other choice.’
‘Yet Renee Ekkehard was forced to watch an execution. Only Kramer could have given that boy the permission to bring her into the camp.’
‘Which can only mean he knew all about what that girl had cried out.’
‘Or had been told enough by Alain Schrijen to sanction it. We’ve no authority there, Louis. Even I haven’t. Camps like those have laws of their own.’
‘We’ll leave her at the ski lodge. If we can, we’ll bring Alain Schrijen to her. Maybe that will force the truth from him.’
‘He’ll never tell us, and you know it.’
‘Of course he won’t. They’ll all lie, but between the lies will be the mustard and the Munster.’
9
The modest guesthouse, the Gasthaus Struthof, a ski lodge, was much as Victoria remembered from the winter of 1936: grey, weather-beaten boards and timbers whose carvings were beautiful and in the traditional style, with a long, railed, first-storey porch that overlooked the slopes. Racks of staghorn were on either side of the entrance. There had been lots of skiers back then, were quite a few still, though apparently oblivious to, or welcoming the swastika that hung from the crown of the roof high above her. Snow-deep, the single roadway out in front was no more than ten metres wide. Beyond its ends, downhill pistes cut through the fir trees to the west and east, clouds of powder snow trailing each skier. There were uniforms but not that many: the black of the Schutzstaffel, its newer grey-green, and that of the Wehrmacht, and here a Mauser rifle over a shoulder, there a Bergmann submachine gun or an officer with a holstered pistol.
‘Go in and have a cup of coffee,’ said Herr Kohler. ‘Try to just relax. Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘I have no reason to.’
Across from them, across the road, was the building that had been used for overflow guests, kitchen storage, extra showers and a washroom.****** It all seemed so innocent: at least twenty degrees of frost, with drifting smoke from isolated farm chimneys being caught by the gusting wind, and in the distance, the sight of snow-covered hills and forest that she had always found so exhilarating.
Dismayed, she watched St-Cyr and Kohler drive away. Two decent men. Patriots? she asked. The Frenchman certainly; the Bavarian … Where, please, did he really sit in this tragedy?
The road to the Konzentrationslager was only three kilometres long. All of it was steeply uphill, and there were several tight bends the prisoners had cut and built with their bare hands. Laughing, two skiers pushed past her to stand their skis and poles in the nearby snowbank, both already pulling off their caps and unbuttoning their jackets to hang them up with all the others. No one seemed to pay the slightest attention to a woman with an overcoat, scarf and hat she quickly removed but took with her. The patterned pullover would blend in as would the slacks, but could she find the strength to behave exactly as if on holiday?
‘Einen Kaffee mit Milch, bitte. A table by the window, if possible.’
The lace-trimmed blouse the waitress wore was white, the straps of the dress, the deepest of reds, the braided hair under the primly tied kerchief, flaxen and long, but not perfect, for in the haste to wait on so many, several strands had come loose.
The girl had rosy cheeks, an enviable complexion, exquisite brows and beautifully formed lips, the eyes of the darkest blue. ‘Are you from Schirmeck?’ asked Victoria.
Flicking her gaze hesitantly to a table far to the left of them, the girl said, ‘Now that I am needed here, Fraulein, I live in and share a room with two others. It … it is best that way.’
‘Have you been here long?’
Again there was that apprehensive glance toward the table where a lone man sat smoking a cigarette. ‘Not long. Since late last autumn when the skiing began.’
The dining room was large; there was a dance floor and a stage, everything that a party would need and, from the window, the view across the Bruche Valley stretched to the hazy outline of the Donon at 1,009 metres. Seemingly endless fir forest covered this part of the Vosges, with beech trees in the lower reaches, the snow deepest among them and thinnest over the crests of the hills, some of which had been cleared for pasture well before the Middle Ages. There would be utter silence out there, utter peace, the frost so hard, the branches would creak. The ski runs were perfect here, and wasn’t it this that made it so hard? Renee had loved to ski; Sophie had too, and herself, and it hadn’t been wrong of her to have brought those two together. They had been happier than ever before, content in themselves, so many things.
Of course it had been wrong, she said silently, for look where things are now, look at what has happened to Renee.
Her coffee came, and with it, a glass of schnapps. ‘Who …’ she blurted as the girl tossed her head in the direction of the Kachelofen and that other table. ‘I can’t accept it. I’m sorry.’
‘Bitte, Fraulein, if I were you, I would thank Herr Meyer and call out Ein Prosit. It costs nothing and will keep him happy. It’s always best with those people.’
‘Who is he?’
‘The Obersturmfuhrer? He is Head of the Political Department at the Natzweiler Lager.’
Somehow she did as advised, even to smiling at this Nazi in mufti. She would concentrate on the ski slopes, would let the good-natured camaraderie of this place wrap itself around her. St-Cyr and Kohler would want to sit Alain down in front of her at this table and confront him with what they knew must have happened, but did they now suspect that Renee, on seeing that car of his arriving at the carnival, had thought Sophie must have come out after all, only to then realize that it was Alain and to scramble to put on her skis and head into the Kastenwald to avoid him?
Did they now know that the Polizeikommandantur’s Grune Minna had then arrived and that Renee, on looking back, had seen it and had immediately thought all had been lost? They could only assume that she had been out all night. They could not possibly know that she had forced herself to do the impossible and had gone east to the Totenkopf, to the hut to find out what had gone wrong and to warn the others along the line, only to then find that none of them were there either.
Two boys, two deserters and their courier were supposed to have been coming through from Munich. Instead, she had found cold ashes in the firebox of the hut’s little stove and an emptiness that would not go away.
Exhausted, Renee had had no other choice but to return to the carnival. Despondent, yes, poor thing, and terrified of arrest.
‘Might I join you, Fraulein?’
‘Ach! Why, yes, of course.’
‘A cigarette?’
‘That would be lovely. The two who dropped me off used up all I had.’
‘Then we had best see that you keep better company.’
The camp was quiet, the wire fences barbed and electrified, the ground-storey, barrack blocks low-roofed in tiers, paired two by two and stepped up the hillside, perhaps thirty of them in all and without a whisper of wood smoke or sign of a chimney except from the kitchen hut. Guard towers were at each corner of the wire and midway between, but even here, little sign of life was evident beyond that of the wood smoke from their portable stoves. Even the dogs, in the fenced runs, had sought the shelter of the kennels, these being well insulated with straw.