* Head of the Abwehr, also arrested for the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. Unlike Boineburg-Lengsfeld, Canaris was executed 9 April 1945.
* 9-10 November 1938.
11
Louis would understand. He would have to, felt Kohler. Miserable as always, Heinrich Ludin was still behind the wheel but had been far too silent, and the rue de la Sante ahead could not have been bleaker. Devoid of foot traffic and bicycles, there was, but far along from them near the intersection with the boulevard Arago, nothing but two horse-drawn delivery wagons half-loaded with firewood no one should have left untended and one lonely gazogene truck that looked as if its little fire had suddenly been extinguished.
‘He isn’t learning, is he, that colonel of yours, Kriminalrat? Ach, this is Paris, not the Warsaw Ghetto on a second visit to its sewers.’
‘And you have yet to learn that I’ve had enough of the shit you and that partner of yours have been trying to feed me. That girl was stopped last night and we now know where those Banditen must have met before and after they killed Frans Oenen.’
Cigarettes lay in full view between them-Camels this time, but there was no point in even asking. ‘Maybe that girl will try to make contact. Have you even thought of that?’
‘Contact, after what they did last night? Those two women of yours will be in Drancy tonight, and in a railway cattle truck tomorrow at 0500 hours. I’ve already given the order to send them to Mauthausen, and it’s been ratified by Reichssicherheitschef Kaltenbrunner.’
‘And here I am, trying to tell you something but neither you nor the colonel will listen.’
‘Two of the Paris police stopped that slut near here at 2337 hours last night, just after she must have left their hideout.’
Ludin had finally turned onto the boulevard Arago and they were now slightly to the east of the Sante. Salad shakers were being loaded. Half-naked and totally, the models and other arrested females were, of course, verbally sounding off, the kids too, their fathers having been hammered.
‘Artists, Kohler!’ shrilled Kleiber, pistol in hand. ‘Communists!’
Even reason wasn’t going to help, but he’d have to try. ‘The Cite Fleurie is but one of several such colonies, Colonel. There’s another nearer the Gobelins and on the rue Broca,* at Number 147. There the Cite Verte is even more dilapidated than this, since artists never waste anything and scrounge what they can. Everything needed to build these shacks and glaze them came from the Universal Exposition of 1867. Picasso once had a studio here, Modigliani, too, and Rodin. Others as well, lots of them and still maybe thirty or forty. That’s why the big, north-facing windows and the makeshift skylights that always seem to leak. The porches are so that they could haul their paintings outside to have another look.’
Louis, being Louis, had brought him here in the autumn of 1940. Vegetables had been harvested again this year from every scrap of the now retilled soil, refurbished constantly of course with outhouse waste to await spring planting. Rabbits were caged indoors in whatever had been to hand, chickens, too, and gerbils, which were really very tasty when fried, or so Louis had claimed necessity was causing some to eat. One lonely goat looked bone dry, though there were no cats and dogs, since every scrap of food was needed.
Studio after studio held the usual, and often degenerate art just to inflame Nazis like these two further. Jackboots smashed the hours of patient labour. One weeping woman had given birth and was in urgent need of help. ‘Get her an ambulance. They’re not here, Standartenfuhrer. Artists are only interested in their own art and that of their friends and competitors, and would have told you everything by now if anyone else had been here.’
Even the trees had been stripped of all but their highest branches, the stoves in such need. Near the shaded cast-iron water trough and pump, someone had lost a tooth. ‘Louis will have answers, Kriminalrat. Back off and rescind that order.’
Still cloistered in this pseudo jungle with the enemy constantly near and himself smoking his pipe at last, St-Cyr listened intently as Anna-Marie spoke softly but with an earnestness that was humbling.
‘All of the diamonds would be weighed and entered into the firm’s ledger, but the day before the Blitzkrieg struck we had a shipment of industrials that came in from the Congo and South Africa. I was going over the lesser ones and when Papa came to see me, he turned his back on the others in the room and shoved that kilo bag of boart and the other of borderlines at me. I was simply a trainee and normally everyone when leaving for home would have to go through security but not that day for myself, and he must have known this. As soon as he got home, he put them into a fruit jar and after dark we buried it in the garden.’
‘And with his pocket watch?’
‘When he knew he and my mother were to leave, he left it there both to tell anyone else that they were Meyerhof diamonds and also in the hope that I would find it.’
‘Were other diamonds taken?’
‘If so, he never told me. Fortunately those who then ransacked our house failed to find them, even though they dug up the garden, too, but I felt I could no longer leave them there, so brought them to Paris last December.’
‘Only to then find that you had to make a second visit.’
It was now time to tell him, felt Anna-Marie, and taking a small twist of cloth from her pocket, handed it to him, he feeling its contents and immediately knowing what it contained. ‘Chief Inspector, the equipe are asking that you and Herr Kohler arrange for the sale of that kilo of boart to Munimin-Pimetex. Its lead purchasing agents, Rheal Lachance and Emile Girandoux, have both met me at Chez Kornilov on two occasions. You’re to tell them full price on the marche noir: 45 million francs but not in 5,000-franc notes or 1,000-franc notes. In these.’
Having dug it out of another pocket, she let him unfold it. Distinctively big-eight inches by five-and white, but with flowing dark black script, the banknote was well worn and bore the usual cashiers’ stamps, this one of Lloyds and Barclays, and the hastily scribbled notations of bookmakers, shopkeepers and others through whose hands it had already passed, they having jotted down who had passed it to them in case of forgery. ‘Fivers,’ he said. ‘That’s what the British call these, their most beloved of banknotes. Hermann and myself have encountered them before, but still …’
‘ Monsieur Lachance had a wad of them from which he paid their bill at the restaurant, and ours too, to impress Monsieur Lebeznikov and his son and myself. He then gave me one and wished us well.’
‘You then handing it over to the leader of your equipe.’
‘Who told me they must have come from the bank vaults of the occupied territories, that Reichsmarschall Goring would have made certain of getting his hands on plenty. The Belgians alone had apparently hoarded stacks and stacks of them.’
As foreign currency reserves but still forgery, too, was possible, and certainly both he and Hermann knew well enough that the SD and Abwehr used them to pay off informants and others. ‘Your choice of purchasing agency is appropriate, but if so, how many of these would be needed?’
Was he going to agree? ‘Forty-five thousand, tied in bundles of one hundred and packed in three medium-size suitcases, the drop-off and exchange to be made tomorrow, but arranged by yourselves.’
How businesslike of her. ‘And I’m to relay the time and place when and where?’
‘Tomorrow at 1000 hours. There’s a Lokal on the boulevard Saint-Michel and just around the corner from a Soldatenheim on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Go into the Lokal on the pretext of looking for Herr Kohler. Take out your pipe and tobacco pouch, and wait. You’ll be contacted, if not by myself, then told where to meet me.’