Nearby and just around the corner from the rue des Saussaies, home of this one’s fellows and the Gestapo. ‘Certainly, but she didn’t wish them to be sent there, Chief Inspector. The shoes they were to match a dress she had chosen for someone she was helping.’
This whole thing was only getting deeper and deeper. ‘So you delivered them where?’
And now for the delicious part. ‘An escort service, Les Amies francaises. Salle Pleyel, Studio 51, but please don’t ask me why Madame Bordeaux would have given some young girl an expensive dress and all the underthings to go with it plus a pair of our finest shoes since those obviously did not fit her precisely.’
Nicole Bordeaux was of les hautes and held parties and gatherings at that house of hers that were the talk of Paris: splendid gatherings to promote artistic and cultural exchanges between Occupier and Occupied. Alice, the Swiss wife of Dr. Karl Epting, head of the Deutsches Institut, was a bosom friend, as was Suzanne Abetz, the French wife of the German ambassador. Anna-Marie Vermeulen could simply not have been that girl. ‘Say nothing of this to anyone, Monsieur Chartrand. Get contrary and you will not only have to deal with me but with my partner, the Detektiv Inspektor Kohler of the Kriminalpolizei, the Kripo for short.’
The Tabac National was to the south of Paris and in the suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux just on the other side of the ‘wall,’ the enceintre shy; that encircled the city if one could find it. Drawing to the side of the road nearest that hive of industry, Kohler longed for a cigarette, for it was here that each of those Gauloises bleues began their little lives. At twenty to the soft packet and a ration of two of those per month plus one of the loose, it was no wonder shy; there was a healthy trade in forged and stolen tobacco cards. Men only, too. Women simply hadn’t been factored into Vichy’s tobacco shy; thoughts even though hundreds among the staff of 3,000 would be working here, especially when so many of their boys were locked up in POW camps in the Reich and not likely to ever get out as far as the Fuhrer was concerned.
Coal smoke did issue from the chimneys but the parking lot of prewar days held only bicycles and a few of the delivery trucks. But when two of those last started out for the Porte de Versailles entrance, he followed. Turning to the right, onto the avenue Ernest Renan,* they drove past the factory and the Parc des Expositions where from 1925 until the defeat there had been trade fairs showcasing industry and technology. Directly to the west, and taken over by the Luftwaffe of course, was the Champ des Manoeuvres,* where the very first French aviator had learned to take off and land in 1905 and the Paris-Madrid air race of 21 May 1911 had been won by the only pilot to finish it, another Frenchman. Huge swastikas announced everything, the gates of the exposition dominating the eastern side of the entrance. Rent-controlled brick tenements, drab in their essence and built in the 1920s and ’30s, clustered closely, for the 15th arrondissement, the Vaugirard, was industrial to its core. Long lines of traffic were impatiently waiting to enter the city for here, too, Ludin and that no-name colonel had still not lifted their high-priority. But tobacco trucks, like vans from the Banque de France of all things, could draw over to the western side and have it a lot easier. Well, some of them.
‘Ach, meine Herren,’ shouted the sergeant-major of this little detail, ‘no one breaks the gottverdammten rules while I’m in charge. Corporals Mannstein, Weiss and Rath, do your duty!’
Flung open, the back door to that Bank of France’s van let a third employee tumble out to face the trouble. ‘Ducklings* among the banknotes and ready for the squeeze at the Tour d’Argent?’ yelled Oberfeldwebel Dillmann. ‘Sugar? Wine you’ve bought at 50 francs to sell at 800 the bottle? Butter … Ach, mein Gott, the charges. Ihre Papiere. Papiere, damn it. Schnell!’
Terrified, the three from the Bank of France collided while trying to find the necessary. Waving the papers, Dillmann who couldn’t understand much more than oui ou non, and less of the latter, took time out. Meanwhile his boys carried the offending loot to a nearby Wehrmacht truck whose tailgate was down and canvas tarp pulled slightly aside.
‘Now, meine Freunden,’ he yelled. ‘Take yourselves over to that batch of Vichy food controllers and those flics with their salad shaker* and wait for me there.
‘Liebe Zeit, Corporal Weiss, that can’t be milk, can it?’
Two of the grey metal containers were lifted out by Dillmann as if but featherweights. Deftly opened, indicating a former proficiency, they were tipped over, letting a flood of what most Parisians hadn’t seen in years pour across the paving stones toward those very food controllers. But as for the two tobacco trucks ahead of himself, felt Kohler, there was merely a glance at each set of papers and a nod that could only mean, ‘Do as agreed and I’ll see you later. Don’t, and you’ll be in hell the next time.’
Big in the chest and lips, which Dillmann constantly seemed to be wetting, the left hand had somehow lost all but its forefinger and thumb, while that ample greenish-grey girth and chest, with its Gott mitt Uns belt buckle, sported the ribbon of the commemorative of the Spanish Revolution. A Wehrmacht volunteer against the Bolsheviks, few would know that Werner had had his reasons for leaving the Reich in a hurry in April 1937 to join the fight in Spain: namely one altercation in a Nazi Bierkeller that had gone terribly wrong. Having been dragooned into making an arrest, this Detektiv Inspektor had figured it at fifty-fifty and given much-needed advice: join up and bugger off or else.
Apart from the neck and facial scars shrapnel had left, there was other evidence of Dillmann’s having been through things, for the right hand had lost its little and fourth fingers. But to the left and higher up on that bulwark chest was the Assault Badge, the Infanterie Sturmabzeichen, and beside it, the Polish medal and the one he had earned in that first winter in Russia, along with the frozen and now missing toes.
‘Werner, mein Lieber …’
‘Liebe Zeit, Hermann, is it really you and not a ghost those bastards in the SS, SD and Gestapo have sent me?’
‘I need a fag and a word.’
Ice-blue and wary above a full and beautifully tapered moustache shy; the Wehrmacht had somehow let him keep, that gaze instantly narrowed. ‘Ach, the first is easy, the second … Well you can see that the place is crawling with blowflies, yourself excluded shy;, of course.’
The cigarette was lit, a welcome drag taken. ‘They’re the very reason I need a word.’
Lying on the seat beside Hermann was a bundle of 5,000-franc notes-a good one hundred of them-two rounds of Brie, some tins of sardines and two bottles of champagne, the Moet et Chandon.
Favouring his moustache, Dillmann wet his lips again and finally said, ‘The horse abattoir. Follow those tobacco trucks. Tell them you’re not about to make an arrest. Just let them leave what they have for me, then tuck the car out of sight, leaving room for my truck and others, and while you’re at it, ask Hartmann, my latest recruit, to close the big doors and give you two packs, no more. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Are you still working with that Frenchman?’
‘Louis? We’re still divvying up the work. I give him the harder tasks.’
‘But he knows you’ve come here? Our little secret has been shared?’
‘He’ll be expecting you not to forget it.’
The Salle Pleyel wasn’t far. Satisfied that he hadn’t been followed, St-Cyr hurried, for that edifice of culture was simply far too visible, an escort service? At 252 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore and art deco in design, the concert hall had been built in 1927 by the Pleyel piano firm. Fire had consumed it but a few months later. Unable to rebuild, it had fallen into the hands of its major creditor, the Banque de Credit Lyonnaise, a link perhaps. Bank to bank, Hermann would have said, but still …