‘Renee Ekkehard and Victoria Bodicker were members of the committee that was having some of the Karneval things painted and refurbished,’ interjected Yvonne. ‘Otto had agreed to lend his support and the use of five of the prisoners. A carpenter, a glazier and three others to clean and paint, or restitch canvas that had been … Ah, forgive me, please, Otto, I … I only wanted to help.’
‘I didn’t formally request the loan of those men,’ grumbled Rasche. ‘Kramer, like so many of his compatriots, is a fanatic when it comes to paperwork, but none of those five were anywhere near that Karneval on that weekend. They were at the mill and at their jobs. This I know for certain.’
‘And the other suicide?’ asked Louis.
‘Was one of them.’
* A wine bar offering traditional fare
2
Trees, their bare branches overhanging, lined the freshly ploughed road onto which the colonel now turned. Ahead of them, the road dipped gently into a hollow where a small bridge gave easy access to a snow-covered stream. Rasche slowed the car, but did he need to shut out the ever-increasing, sooty-grey drabness of the obvious? wondered St-Cyr.
To their left, to the west in the Vosges and perhaps no more than five kilometres, the absolute beauty of snow-covered, spruce- and pine-clad hills drew one’s gaze. Below these and nearer were fields where flax would once have been grown for the textile mill, but also there were orchards, among them a cluster of houses and the white stucco and gilded spire of a church whose headstones reached well above the snow. Chapel and columbarium were there to make this Surete think of that last Alsatian investigation. Under French law, and they had observed it here between the two most recent wars, the scattering of the ashes was forbidden, since this constituted a violation of the burial place. Usually there was a stiff fine; occasionally the three years and the 5,000 francs it had cost an undertaker in Strasbourg who had claimed, in the autumn of 1937, that all such niches had been filled and that the bishop had turned a deaf ear to cries for more. Certainly M. Edouard Klausener had been lying to bereaved widows and eager heirs too distant to have checked up on him, but to have slept with the widow of the wealthy banker whose ashes he had just scattered, to have promised marriage when he had already tied the knot? The imbecile. Ashes were nothing to fool with.
‘There are still trout here,’ said Rasche longingly, having stopped the car on the bridge. ‘The bed of this little tributary of the Fecht is surprisingly clean and of well-rounded gravel. Granite from those hills, and its sand.’
To the east, across another field, the road they should have taken ran straight alongside the compound. Behind the wire, in its southwestern corner and nearest to them, was a large, five-storey rectangular building of faded red brick with tall chimneys on either end, but no smoke coming from them. Beyond this original mill, and running in a north to south direction side by side, one after another, were the low, ground-storey factories of modern industry whose tall chimneys pillared sooty black smoke from the steam plants, but Hermann … Hermann wouldn’t be thinking of scattered crematoria ashes or of a springtime’s stolen moment. He would be ever-mindful of that double-stranded, horizontally run barbed wire at fifteen centimetre intervals which was three metres high, the top canted inwardly a half-metre so that no one in their right mind would ever attempt to climb it.
Without a word, a match was struck by St-Cyr, and when the cigarette was passed forward over the back of the front seat, Rasche noticed that Kohler instinctively reached for it. These two, he wondered. Had they grown so close? Kohler had always been trouble, but had been different than most, yes, different, but had it been wise to have asked for them? Two ‘honest’ detectives, ‘hated’ by some, the SS in particular?
Without even turning, the Bavarian handed the cigarette to the Frenchman who took but a brief drag before passing it back and gently patting his partner on the shoulder.
‘Gentlemen, a quiet word before we go in there. Under the rules of the Geneva Convention governing prisoners of war, those above the rank of private are not obliged to work but can, if they wish, volunteer. From the autumn of 1940 well into ’41, the men held here were French POWs-among them several textile workers from Lille and other places in the north. In ’41 the camp at Natzweiler-Struthof came into being. Most of the French were moved out to other stalags and oflags well inside the Reich, but some were absolutely essential.’
‘Meaning that they had no other choice but to stay, Louis, and now find themselves under Kommandant Zill and Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer Kramer.’
‘Ach, Kohler, please! Zill and Kramer are not above me-it’s a grey area, since they are SS and I’m the Wehrmacht’s representative. Among my duties as Kommandant of the Ober-Rhein,** I liaise with each of the Arbeitslager Kommandants and their staffs but can, since handling the discipline problems of each of those forty-seven camps is the prerogative of the Konzentrationslager, go only so far.’
And if that wasn’t warning enough, what was? wondered Kohler.
‘Yet you were able to obtain help for the ladies of the Winterhilfswerk Committee,’ said Louis.
Irritably rubbing away the fog on his side windscreen, Rasche again gazed up the little valley toward the hills. ‘The second of these so-called suicides ran the testing lab and was responsible for the chemical work-the dye batches, the digesters, that sort of thing. There’s a staff of two that he had trained quite well for subordinate duties, but someone will definitely have to be found to replace him.’
‘The date, the exact location and time, Colonel?’ asked Louis.
Rasche didn’t turn from looking toward the hills. ‘Last Friday shy; evening, 5 February. The men work a twelve-hour shift, but he had stayed late-the matter of a new dye batch that was coming up. When he didn’t return to the barracks by lights-out-that is 2200 hours-it was felt he must have been detained shy;. It had happened frequently. Some prisoners do enjoy losing themselves in their work. It was thought that one of the factory guards would surely fetch him. At midnight the alarm went out and they found him soon afterward. There’s a toilet near the lab. He had-’
‘Yes, yes, Colonel. The body?’ asked St-Cyr, a hand firmly gripping Hermann by the left shoulder.
A glance at this Surete who asked the questions and felt so deeply for his partner would be sufficient, felt Rasche, and then the gate closing behind them as further warning.
‘The dogs, where are they?’ asked Hermann.
‘Ach, they’ll be in their kennels.’
‘And that second victim, Colonel?’
‘I had him put in the root cellar with the potatoes. It was, at that moment, the best I could do.’
‘The potatoes, Louis.’
Hermann was really feeling it. ‘Transport, Colonel. A busy man such as yourself can’t constantly be with us.’
‘It’s being arranged, but for today you’ll just have to be content with me as your guide.’
Constant on the air now was the muted, agitating sound of thousands and thousands of mechanical shuttles, and the rank, chemical smell of rotten eggs.
The steps were wide and of concrete, the root cellar deep and seemingly endless under the arctic light of two widely spaced fifteen-watt bulbs. Up from the earthen floor a dampness seeped, fog hanging in the fetid air. The potatoes, too many of them rotten, lay on racks of lath in tiers, the double-wrapped cord around the victim’s neck, stark white, stiff, and brand-new.