‘I didn’t betray any of them. I simply followed her to the Gare de l’Est to tell her she wasn’t to worry, that I would never have told them anything. That’s why they still can’t know of the safe house she and the others are now using and where she must have left those diamonds.’
A nice try, but it was Aram who said, ‘Anna-Marie, please take this and tuck it under his shirt.’
It was, she knew, a stick of Nobel 808 and it stank of bitter almonds so badly, she automatically flung back her head but could no longer bring herself to say Frans’s name, had had to become another person. ‘It’ll give you a blistering headache. The skin absorbs it just as fast as the lungs.’
She couldn’t, felt Bedikian, allow herself to refuse, and had quickly come to realize it. ‘And now this, Anna-Marie. Stab it into the end of that 808 and crush the necessary.’
‘Red gives a delay of one-half hour, depending on the temperature,’ said Felix. ‘The colder it is, the slower the chemical reaction.’
Of about fifteen centimetres in length, the ‘pencil’ was about six millimetres in diameter.
‘It has a thin glass vial of acid,’ said Andre Beachamp. ‘When crushed, that dissolves a wire that holds back a spring that then fires the detonator.’
‘Protecting the vial, there’s a ridge that has to be pressed hard,’ said Emmi.
Feeling as though she could hear it break, Anna-Marie knew she had to do this, for they’d never forgive her if she didn’t. Quickly inserting it into the end of the doughy brown 808, she emptily said, ‘You may have about thirty-five minutes, since it’s colder here than outside.’
‘Surely you’re not going to leave me like this?’
Gagged, he was taken to the car, but were there now even twenty shy; minutes left? she wondered. Time pencils were known to mal shy;function, some either detonating far too soon, others far too late.
Floored, the car shot out of the courtyard and up the rue des Gobelins through the blackout, the tires squealing horribly as they reached the boulevard Arago and then the boulevard Saint-Marcel, Aram heading for the pont d’Austerlitz.
Running its control, crossing in a matter of seconds as the Wehrmacht detail tried to use their rifles, he turned onto the quai Henry IV to follow the river, but within two or three minutes the tires were again squealing, they having turned to the right, Aram saying, ‘The avenue de l’Opera, I think. Yes, that should do nicely.’
Andre sat up front with a Schmeisser, Frans in the back between herself, with Fran’s pistol, and Emmi who had a Luger. Reaching place de l’Opera, doing a loop, they barely missed the low, white-painted traffic barricade in front of the darkened Kommandantur. Skidding to a stop, now facing the equally darkened Cafe de la Paix, where late-nighters in uniform with their petites amies and others would still be hanging on in that favourite haunt of the Occupier, the engine idled, Emmi getting out as Frans valiantly tried to resist. ‘Shove him,’ said Aram.
Totally in darkness, the nearby steps down into the metro would be closed off, for those last trains would have departed at 2200 hours, but now there were lights from the cafe and yells, too, in Deutsch to halt, get out of the car and put their hands up.
Slamming the door behind herself, Emmi breathlessly said, ‘Neun Sekunden,’ as shots were fired, and they hurtled west along the boulevard des Capucines.
Nine seconds. Not content to trust the time pencil, Emmi had stuffed a pattern-24 stick grenade behind Frans’s belt. Ashen, Anna-Marie knew she mustn’t cry, but when held and kissed on the forehead, cheeks and eyelids, broke down. They couldn’t have detonated any of that near the tannery, but could have shot Frans and left him anywhere else. Instead, Aram had chosen the very place to most enrage the Occupier. ‘They’ll kill us all,’ she wept. ‘They won’t stop, Aram. Not now.’
‘But it will bring the worms out,’ said Bedikian as they raced back across the river. ‘You’re truly one of us at last, and the lesson learned is that savagery will be met with savagery.’
Floodlights lit up place de l’Opera at 2315 hours. Truncheon-wielding shy; flics and helmeted, rifle-bearing Wehrmacht held back the curious shy; which included Rudy de Merode, Sergei Lebeznikov and other gestapistes shy; francais, namely the towering, white-fedora and white silk shy;- shy;suited shy; Henri Lafont of the rue Lauriston, an old acquaintance shy;, felt Kohler. And among them, of course, were the pompiers, the ambulances shy; and even three salad shakers. Louis and himself had finally shy; been about to get something to eat when a harried shy; Rudi Sturmbacher, having just heard the news, had rushed to tell them.
To the right were the collective brass in their greatcoats and military caps; to the left, waiters from the Cafe de la Paix urging patrons to return to their tables since the imminent threat of another bomb had passed.
Picking their way through the entrails, their high heels and silk stockings clear enough since the hems of their evening dresses had been hiked, les horizontales ou petites amies paused to have a closer look. After all, it wasn’t every day such a thing happened. And of course, someone had notified the press who were having a field day.
‘Kohler …’
It was the Kommandant von Gross-Paris.
‘Get rid of those parasites, then come to see me alone and with St-Cyr.’
‘Immediately, General.’
All wore name tags either on the chest or tucked into their fedoras, and among them were Paris Soir, the most widely read daily, Le Matin, too, a close competitor as was Le Petit Parisien, and all were fierce rivals even if tightly controlled, but there was only one way to shake them off.
Je Suis Partout, that insidious weekly that sought out and published the hiding places of wanted Jews and others and clamoured for their arrest, loved nothing better, like the others, than to reveal hidden caches for the marche noir: sixty kilos of sugar in a baby carriage; one hundred fifty-kilo sacks of potatoes in a convent, eighty of butter in a stove for which fuel could seldom be found. But news like that seldom, if ever, targeted the BOFs who could buy their way out, only the lampistes.
‘Hermann, at least let’s consider the ramifications.’
‘We’ve no choice. We need Boineburg-Lengsfeld now more than ever. Hey, you two from Je Suis, and you from Pariser Zeitung, do you see that bank over there on the boulevard des Capucines? Yes, that’s the very one beyond that gleaming white Bentley of Lafont’s. Well, my partner and me have just come from the mother lode of marche noir caches, and guess where we found it?’
There were even offers of money, which only showed how shallow the press were, felt St-Cyr, but Hermann told them anyway, and out it all came in a rush. ‘Take a few flics with you and be sure to tell them to bring an army from the food control. Eyes are going to be opened and not just your own.’
General Karl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel, the military governor, was with Brigadefuhrer und Generalmajor Karl-Albrecht Oberg, the Hoherer SS und Polizeifuhrer of France whose bottle-thick glasses were catching the light. Boemelburg, head of the Gestapo, was beside them, and beside that one, Osias Pharand of the Surete and Talbotte of the Paris Police. All were far from happy, as was Heinrich Ludin. Only Standartenfuhrer Kleiber looked as if in his element.