Had Hermann and he happened upon an execution? wondered St-Cyr. Though they’d been seen, and their approach closely followed, no challenge had been given. ‘The administrative block is uphill, Hermann, and just outside the gate.’ They had parked some distance down from it.
‘Be quiet. Mein Gott, can’t you listen? What’s that sound?’
Hermann was really edgy. ‘Skiers.’
‘Not those. That other sound.’
Now it came and now it didn’t, for the wind from the west was intermittent. Again and again they heard it, both looking uphill questioningly. From the camp to the nearby bald crown of the hill it couldn’t be any more than two hundred metres. Tangled, windswept brush was up there. Stunted beeches, bilberry and gentian, the snow cover thin and trailing to leave uncovered a litter of round boulders.
‘A dinging,’ swore Hermann, not liking it.
‘Iron on iron.’
‘Countless blows.’
A steep, wide path, its snow beaten down by many, disappeared over the crest of the hill. Slippery, the path was a son of a bitch to climb, but looking back over a shoulder and beyond the wire enclosure of the camp, the view was straight out of a storybook.
‘Louis, maybe we’d best leave this. Let’s just go down to the Kommandant’s office, that one right down there, the one with the window and the binoculars that are staring at us.’
Hermann was afraid and with good reason. ‘We’ll go through the motions, mon vieux. We’ll do exactly as they want, and then, suitably chastised and conditioned, we’ll confront them.’
There were two quarries beyond the crest of the hill, sharply stepped, amphitheatre openings in the rock, other, lesser ones distant among the beech and fir. Against the green and grey of the trees, the snow and the blue of the sky, the pink of the granite was startlingly bright, the sound of the hammering constant. ‘When cold, there is no other sound quite like that of iron on iron,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘It’s distinctly resonant and acutely so.’
Perhaps four thousand men in mud-brown tattered coats, trousers and the oddest assortment of footgear were at work. No one took any apparent notice of two detectives standing out against the skyline on the crest of this hill. To have looked up would have been suicidal. Each man either knelt on the broad ledges among innumerable rectangular, snow-covered blocks yet to be removed, or swung a ten-kilo sledge to hit a drill rod that was being held, and certainly one waited apprehensively for the scream as a hand or wrist was smashed or an eye blinded by a splinter of iron or rock. Hoists and pulleys, logs, skids, ramps and finally wagons, on to which blocks of stone were being loaded for transport downhill to the railway siding at Shirmeck, also offered places where a man could easily be crushed.
Iron, two-wheeled barrows held the waste rubble and were being pushed, pulled, heaved at and dragged to a tip where they were dumped on to a roadway that was being built. Beyond these were lorries that could just as well have been used. Three of them were parked with two grey tourers next to the neat row of SS barracks from whose parade ground flew a large swastika.
Guards were nearly everywhere and warmly clothed, their steel helmets, rifles and Schmeissers sharply outlined against the frost, the sky, and a sun whose glare was blinding.
When a drill rod accidentally fell, it added its more rapid dinging until hastily stilled. On one ledge, the rock suddenly cracked and the long, long splitting of it was clearly heard above the undertone.
‘Their hands, Louis. They don’t have gloves, only rags.’
‘Their faces, Hermann. Many of them are sunburnt.’
The coffee was real, but she must not in any way indicate that this was anything but normal, felt Victoria; the schnapps, an eau-de-vie de framboise, a raspberry liqueur for which Alsace was justly famous; the cigarette a Juno.
Skiers came and went, paying no attention to them and yet … and yet, she wanted to cry out that things were far from normal, that at the camp, men were being systematically worked to death.
Instead, she must smile softly at this Obersturmfuhrer, this gaunt, rake-jawed SS with the jutting chin and intense grey eyes whose rank was equivalent to that of a Kriminalinspektor in the German Police. She must make idle conversation, must lie if necessary and consistently, must then remember every little thing she had said because he would remember it.
‘A bookseller!’ marvelled Bruno Meyer. ‘But that is extraordinary, Fraulein. Really, you must meet our Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer Kramer. He collects books for the Standartenfuhrer Sievers shy;, the Executive Secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, and Director of the Institute of Military Scientific Research. Standartenfuhrer Sievers was a bookseller before the war and here, at the camp, Schutzshaftlagerfuhrer Kramer has been patiently gathering quite a collection for him. Velum-bound manuscripts written entirely by hand and in Latin or in Old German. Examples of the earliest of printings too, and of the French. I’m certain you would find much in common.’
Again the Fraulein Bodicker found herself saying, ‘That would be lovely. If there is time, I would like that very much.’
‘Time … Why should there not?’
‘The two who brought me here. I … I simply don’t know how long they’ll be.’ His eyes darkened.
‘It’s about the suicide of Untersturmfuhrer Schrijen’s fiancee, isn’t it?’
Cher Jesus, save her now. ‘Alain’s fiancee, yes. Renee … Renee Ekkehard.’
‘You knew her well?’
He must know all about it. ‘A little. We worked together on the Winterhilfswerk Committee of Alain’s sister.’
‘A fete … I seem to remember seeing something about one your committee was to hold in mid-March.’
It was impossible to read his thoughts. ‘The sixth, yes. That’s when it’s to open.’
‘Ach, now I have it. Gauleiter Wagner is to officiate. Did you know he was a former primary schoolteacher, as was yourself?’
‘Did I say I’d been a teacher?’
‘A difficult one, if I understand the reports of your directors and visiting school inspectors. Not a strict disciplinarian, as was Herr Wagner. Little got past him, let me tell you. Minor offences must always be severely punished if discipline and absolute obedience are to be firmly instilled.’
Just what was he after? ‘I … I felt it best to overlook certain misdemeanours. If a child is placed in a position of trust and responsibility, he or she invariably feels useful and there is both a learning process of immense value and a sense of self-worth that engenders harmony.’
‘Then you don’t agree with the Gauleiter Wagner’s methods?’
Ah, merde, she had fallen right into it. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Then what did you imply?’ Her cheeks were colouring.
‘Breaking a child’s spirit isn’t necessarily the best form of discipline, Herr Obersturmfuhrer. Humiliating them in front of their peers by using a birch rod or leather strap simply reinforces the underlying problem which may have nothing whatsoever to do with the school and everything to do with what’s been happening at home. Children love to be busy learning new things and to feel useful. Always if there is that sense of their making progress, even if only at their own speed, you will seldom have discipline problems.’
‘Then it is that you really do disagree with the Gauleiter?’
‘I didn’t say that, Herr Obersturmfuhrer. I merely said that I …’
‘You disagreed.’ Her eyes had moistened.
‘Is Herr Wagner some sort of expert in the education of children?’
‘Would it interest you to know that we have a copy of your school notebook?’
On microfilm? ‘I … I assumed my mother’s house and bookshop had been searched while I was in Munich for retraining with other teachers in the late autumn of 1940. I … I didn’t know anything had been photographed.’