Not one for talking alone and aloud to himself, or to the victim and such like Louis, he said, ‘Oona will want us to find out everything we can and help that girl if at all possible.’
From Rotterdam, Oona was speciaclass="underline" gentle, beautiful, supremely intelligent and everything he would ever need in a life’s companion. Louis had been absolutely right, but having lost both her husband and children, she had, he knew, times that were very hard. A voice, a photo in a magazine or child near a school, and the tears would start and she’d have to be held. ‘And I’m not there enough. Giselle helps, that’s for sure, but Johan would be nine now, Anna seven. Would they even recognize their mother?’
Six to eight million, maybe even ten, had been on the roads during the Blitzkrieg. The Stukas had come, and then the Messerschmitts, and she and Martin had been unable to find the children and ever since then she had maintained that a mother shy; would know, that she felt they had been buried in unmarked graves beside that road. There had been those, he and Louis had discovered, but not their names. Constantly he placed advertisements in the newspapers, like lots of others still. ‘And she always wants to know what’s been going on at home.’
Back in February 1941, in Amsterdam, there had been an altercation at an ice-cream parlor and about four hundred young Jews had been arrested, some so badly beaten, fifty had soon died in the Konzentrationslager at Buchenwald, the rest being sent on to the KZ at Mauthausen. But being Dutch and not liking what had happened, the Netherlanders had gone on strike on the twenty-fifth of that month, circumstance putting a stop to it within about three days. Even so, by September 1941 every Jew in the country had been registered. All 140,000, of whom about 20,000 had been refugees, most of whom had fled the Reich before the war. And by April of this year, none had been allowed to live anywhere other than Amsterdam or in the internment camps of Vught and Westerbork, the latter being the main transit point.
‘And now?’ he asked himself, clenching a fist at the inhumanity, for it had been going on here too, and Louis and he had come up against it time and again. ‘Only about 2,000 are left in the Netherlands. That Le Matin of 20 August 1942 dates to just a month after that first major round-up in Paris. What was happening here would have driven her crazy with worry.’
Slamming on the brakes, he got out to impatiently wait for Louis.
One would have thought him a sudden control, felt St-Cyr, for Hermann was a big man and the breath was billowing from under that fedora and into the frosty darkness that was lit from behind by the faintness of the Citroen’s headlamps and then his own.
‘Louis, she went home to find out what had happened to her parents. Oona’s always wanting to for the same reason, and not just her own, but Martin’s too. That’s why that girl took such a chance with the embroidery. She brought it from home-it was all she could find. She couldn’t stand not knowing what could well have happened and had finally forced herself to leave Paris.’
‘Only to then find out and hitch a return with a passeur?’
‘Passeurs don’t drive trucks like that. They’re usually loaners. They sit a few seats behind in the bus or railway carriage, not in heavily loaded trucks that can’t even get up the speed of a gasoline engine.’
‘Unless …’
Ah merde! ‘Using the cover of hauling stuff to sell on the marche noir. I don’t think there’ve ever been any passeurs caught doing that, but …’
‘There’s always a first time, Hermann, though it still doesn’t explain Berlin’s sending those two.’
‘Then maybe there’s an FTP connection.’
As Hermann and he both knew, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans were the backbone of actively armed resistance and the cause, no doubt, of the recent death of Dr. Julius Ritter. ‘What a happy thought.’
‘It’s a night for them. Now roll us one from these. Two Wills Goldflake and two Chesterfields.’
Though but a rumour like everything else they usually heard, von Rundstedt, commander of the army in the West, had recently sent the Fuhrer a detailed report of the rapid increase in rail sabotage. In September alone there had been more than 500 serious actions, compared to a monthly average of 120 for the first half of the year. FTP reseaux were thought to be small, their security so tight none would even fart in public, but there would be Italians among them from the days of 1930s and Mussolini’s hatred of the Communists, Armenians, too, from the Turkish troubles, and Poles, especially from just before and after 1 September 1939.
‘And Austrians, Hermann, from before, during and right after the Anschluss. The Third Republic and Paris, in particular, offered home to many.’
‘And most would likely have taken day jobs that fitted them right in, some even having gotten married and had families.’
Name changes too, and false papers, but was that girl connected to any of them? If so, then they really did have a problem on their hands.
Near Le Bourget, the giant Paris aerodrome, the fog the rain had brought was so thick at 0347 Berlin Time, St-Cyr knew Lufthansa’s early-morning flight from Berlin through to Madrid and Lisbon would have been cancelled. That such could even exist in wartime was remarkable, but there were also once- or twice-weekly flights to Bristol by Pan-American Clipper and the Free Dutch KLM* from Sintra, which was about ninety kilometres to the west of Lisbon. ‘Not that they’re one hundred percent safe from being shot down, mademoiselle, but they do offer hope,’ he said as if again to her.
The Luftwaffe’s Luftflotte 3 squadron of bombers that had taken shy; over the airfield in June 1940 would also have been grounded shy;, and London and other cities and towns given a peaceful shy; night, this district too.
‘And to think that not so very long ago I stood waiting, along with 100,000 others, including my first wife, to cheer Lindbergh as he landed the Spirit of Saint Louis at twenty-two minutes past ten in the evening, 21 June 1927. It was memorable, mademoiselle. Agnes and myself wouldn’t have missed it for all the world, but who would have thought we’d be in another tragic war by 1 September 1939?’
At the turn-off to Drancy, that transit point for Jews and Gypsies, there was only one tiny blue-washed light over the black-lettered arrow that had originally been put up by the Prefecture du Departement de la Seine more than a year ago. An unfinished, U-shaped complex of low-income tenements, five of which were currently being lived in by legal citizens, the remaining unfinished four-storey had at first been run by French police but had been taken over by the SS in July of this year, though the perimeter was still guarded by Frenchmen-jobs, if nothing else. ‘Yet it’s only five kilometres (three miles) from Paris. Technically you’re an illegal, mademoiselle, and by the Vichy statute of 24 October 1940, subject to immediate arrest and internment regardless of whether you are Jewish or not. Even without the Occupier’s having requested such a thing, Vichy undertook to have everyone who had come here to evade the Nazis prior to 1 September 1939 and thereafter locked up.’
Aubervilliers was industrial, the stench of soot rank on the fog-ridden air. Ash heaps, incredibly poor housing, raw sewage and all such things marred la zone, the peripheral suburbs, and made them deplorable for far too many but … Hermann had stopped and had taken out his pistol.
‘When the end comes, Louis, it’ll start in places like this.* It’s now all but impossible for the Wehrmacht to even patrol the streets here at night. Stay close. It’s not often a bank van crawls through at 0420 hours.’