A district she would know well as a student, a hostel for visiting soldiers on leave and the canteen they would go to, but still a terrible risk for her, even though Blitzmadchen also used them. ‘And if we refuse? Things are difficult enough as I’ve already told you, and I don’t honestly know how my partner will react. Before I came here to meet you, we had just seen the suitcases of his Oona Van der Lynn and Giselle Le Roy packed and ready waiting for the truck to take them to Drancy, this evening probably.’
Aram hadn’t told her what to say to such a thing, but was an offer being demanded? ‘And where, please, might those have been seen?’
Taking out the letter from Kaltenbrunner, St-Cyr knew he had to do what he had to, she seeing the signature and the stamps and knowing immediately how valuable they would be to those who forged papers. ‘They’re in Neuilly, on the corner of the boulevard Victor Hugo and rue de Rouvray. The villa Gestapo Boemelburg keeps for special prisoners.’
‘When?
‘The sooner the better.’
Drawing the Citroen to the side of the road, St-Cyr fingered the rijksdaaler that had tipped her off, but could she and Emmi do the impossible, and could Hermann and he really make such a deal and then see that all that cash was handed over to an FTP equipe?
Along the street, all was in chaos. Harried and dismayed, Hermann was trying his best to reason with Ludin and Kleiber, but they simply weren’t listening.
Ancient like its former maisons de maitre, the rue Broca was much nearer to the Gobelins. Blocked off with trucks, salad shakers, flics and Wehrmacht just like the Cite Fleury apparently had been, the Cite Verte, at number 147, was another artists’ colony. Here, though, the studios were in the centre of the garden that those early artists had taken over as squatters back in the latter half of the last century. Even more dilapidated, fire must have seemed the only solution to former city fathers, the present ones too, and certainly the Standartenfuhrer gave every indication of helping things along.
Lined up on the clods of overturned earth, resident males faced resident females, both in all states of dress and undress, teenagers too, and young children, as well as grandparents and others, and shouldn’t those kids have been in school?
Kleiber and a Parisian interpreter were progressing between the two rows. Held back by the rifles and Schmeissers of the helmetted and the batons of the flics, the forty or so adults were far from happy, but obviously had been beaten into submission.
Flames leaped from the still growing mountain of canvases, easels, paints, brushes and such, the troops rejoicing in their task by first smashing things.
‘Louis, these people will only hate the Occupier far more than they already do, and when I have to pack up and leave, it’s not going to be pleasant. Oona and Giselle …’
It was, of course, heresy for him to have said any such thing in such company. ‘Doucement, mon vieux, let me roll you a cigarette from that megot tin of Arie Beekhuis. You’ve not taken more of those pills, have you?’
‘Beekhuis? She didn’t make contact. She couldn’t have.’
What a slender thread that was and Hermann had felt it snap, but there was no time to tell him what had happened. Struck hard across the face by Kleiber, a woman in the line-up shrieked, ‘BOCHE POLTRON, SOYEZ MAUDIT!’* There was silence at that greatest of insults, and through it came the crackling of the flames as Ludin settled on her ten-year-old daughter. Holding the child by the left hand, he drew on his cigarette.
‘Don’t, Kriminalrat,’ pleaded Hermann. ‘Leave her. She won’t know anything.’
Gut, a little panic could but help, thought Ludin, giving pause to things.
‘Kohler, the Vermeulen girl must have come from somewhere in this district last night,’ said Kleiber. ‘It’s only a matter of time until one of this scum coughs up the answer.’
‘They were hiding here last night, weren’t they?’ Ludin asked the child in Deutsch, the interpreter translating.
Soulful, deep brown eyes lifted to him from under dark brown bangs, and a seriousness came to those tender years, the freckles and the thinness. ‘Ah non, monsieur,’ she said gravely. ‘Those people, they don’t hide in places like ours where there are far too many coming and going all the time except for after the curfew when it’s illegal to do such a thing. They hide in the Bievre.’
‘What’s that?’ demanded Ludin.
‘Tell him in French, Louis.’
Had she been reading Les Miserables?* wondered St-Cyr. ‘A stream whose banks were lined with tanneries, dye works and factories, all of which dumped their effluent into it until the stench became so rank it was covered over in 1910 and made into part of the sewer system in the 1930s.’
All this was duly repeated in Deutsch until a sigh was heard. ‘There,’ she said, ‘Now you know. Tanneries stink and so does that sewer system into which that hidden river pours especially when it rains a lot, and when those people you want have to come up to walk along the boulevard Arago you can smell them especially when they’re not even wearing their big rubber boots.’
‘Les egoutiers?’ asked the startled interpreter.
‘Ah oui,’ she answered, scrunching up her nose to indicate the stench, ‘but me, I think there are others too.’
‘All hiding in the sewers?’ asked the interpreter.
‘Oh for sure they’re down there, monsieur. Lots and lots of them, and they come out at night because they like the darkness.’
‘Ach, she’s making it all up, Kriminalrat,’ said Hermann. ‘Mein Gott, what else would you expect her to do?’
‘The Bievre, as a sewer, does flow into the one that runs under the boulevard Arago to join others, Kriminalrat,’ said the interpreter shy;, ‘and from there you can get to virtually any place in the city.’
Dropping the butt, Ludin lit another. ‘A buried river.’
‘The sewers and a tannery,’ said Kleiber, having made the mother kneel, the muzzle of his pistol now pressed to the back of her neck.
‘To the east of us a little,’ said the interpreter. ‘There are several just off the rue des Gobelins. Ask the flics to show you.’
The tannery was in the Parisian usual, how could it have been otherwise? felt Kohler, uneasy at the thought of this warren of butt-to-butt, corner-to-corner, courtyard-to-courtyard buildings, some ancient, others not quite but all pinch-penny and needing repairs. Towering over it all was a nearby tenement from whose upper-storey shy; windows possible accomplices could look down on everything, while against the sky the oft-struggling forest of rusty metal chimney pipes from the ateliers and small-scale factories below sought relief.
Otherwise, the whole damned area had fallen silent, Kleiber having readied the troops.
Number 17’s courtyard ran straight in and south from its iron-barred, padlocked gate. A hexagonal, grey-stone tower was at the nearest corner of what had once been la maison de la reine blanche, but it didn’t look inviting.
‘Ah mon Dieu, mon vieux,’ said Louis, ‘that tower simply holds the staircase to the first and second storeys and those attic dormers. That’s why there aren’t any windows. The courtyard does, however, if I remember it correctly, take an abrupt turn to the right.’
Trust Louis to have said it but not, ‘And out of sight.’
‘Ah oui, it ends in a cul-de-sac where there is, indeed, a manhole cover, but also iron-barred windows and locked doors. That’s where, on 13 June 1935, I was …’