Deported or shot, it’s the same thing.
‘We’re looking for a mouton,’ said St-Cyr, hauling him out of harm’s way. ‘A female. Last seen in Tours, Thursday the fourteenth, but also a regular of the Sante or the Petite Roquette or the cells here and over on the ave’ Foch if her conductor feels she needs a change of air.’
The SS or the Gestapo … The lark-eyed gaze flew evasively over the warren. ‘I know nothing of this.’
‘We didn’t think you would,’ came the soft response, ‘but of course when one has been seen buying sugar and white flour from the green beans to flog it to the butter-eggs-and-cheese boys, one must be careful, isn’t that so?’
The German soldiers in their grey-green uniforms, the black marketeers …
St-Cyr the cuckold. St-Cyr the friend of the Resistance who had mistakenly put him on their hit lists but had blown up his wife and son instead.
‘Start talking, Emile, or what I have to tell those same people you are thinking of will include the denunciations of old enemies.’
‘You bastard …’
‘Just give us what we want. It will save us all time.’
The drum was spun, the card turned up and accidentally ripped from its wheel of fortune to be then spat upon in fury and thrust at them.
‘Une roulure rumaine. Une fille de la duperie, la supercherie et escroquerie!’
A Rumanian slut. A daughter of deception, trickery and swindling.
‘Now leave us,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Go back to your weeping.’
‘The end’s coming, Emile,’ breathed Kohler, giving him a parting shot. ‘You had better prepare yourself for the worst by sealing your lips. Hey, maybe if you behave, Louis could fix it so that you’ll get the Medaille Militaire and Croix de Guerre with palms.’
‘Up against the post,’ muttered St-Cyr under his breath.
‘Not until we’ve had breakfast.’
The file card Turcotte had torn from the drum was replete with entries which went right back to when the Gestapo’s mouton had been ten years old. A charge of stealing two chickens and a round of goat’s cheese had been compounded by the laying on of curses. Sentenced to six months in Bucharest, she had escaped in less than two weeks. A guard was found to have been fooling around with her. Even then she had known how to convince men she was ripe for plucking only to deceive them.
The name on the card, which had been updated in August 1941, was Lucie-Marie Doucette but St-Cyr knew that such a name could well have meant nothing to the gypsies. A mere formality the Gaje authorities insisted on to control border crossings, entry visas and issue identity papers and passports.
She was, as Turcotte had so viciously stated, of Rumanian descent – at least, it would have been thought by those in authority that she had been born there. She’d have let them think what they wanted, knowing only that she had again fooled them.
Her real name was Tshaya. She was dark-haired, strongly featured and quite striking, but in the expression she had last given the police camera, there was deceitfulness, wilfulness, hatred … ah! so many things, and a depth of sadness which went well beyond her years.
The hair was parted in the middle, blue-black, long and glossy. Loosened strands trailed provocatively across the forehead, enhancing allure and all but hiding the ears which would have held gold rings or coins, though these must have been taken from her.
The eyes were large and dark beneath strong brows. The nose was full and prominent, the lips not parted. The face was what one would call a medium oval, the chin not pointed but determined, the throat full.
They had put her age at twenty-eight in August 1941. She would not have argued. Again such Gaje things meant little. For the gypsies, life was of the present, not of the past or of the future, alas.
Someone – her conductor perhaps – had tersely written in: Of the Lowara tribe. Daughter of the horse trader, Tshurkina la Marako, deported to Buchenwald 14 September 1941.
She had stayed behind and they had had their reasons for keeping her. Perhaps she had escaped for a time – there was no record of it. But they had used her.
Colour of skin: dark brown. Height: 1 metre, 68 centimetres. Weight: 62 kilos. Length of arms, length of legs, bust measurement, waist, that of the hips, the wrists and ankles – all such things were given in the tiniest of handwriting, especially the shape and size of the ears, for like fingerprints, the ears remained the same throughout life.
Signes particuliers: whipmarks on rear of thighs, buttocks, back, shoulders and upper arms, all dating from the summer of 1928 when she’d have been fifteen years old, if the age of twenty-eight was correct, which it probably wasn’t.
Her father? he wondered but thought it highly unlikely. Banishment for a time, perhaps, if the offence, such as stealing the gold of another, warranted it, not a savage beating.
But someone had tied her wrists to a post or tree and had let the whip do the rest.
Hermann was no stranger to this sort of thing and his mood darkened when told of it. Instinctively he gingerly felt his left cheek. That scar was the measure of truth over loyalty to one’s peers, and it ran from just below the eye to his lower jaw.
The SS had done that to him. What had begun as a ‘nothing’ murder in Fontainebleau Forest, a commonplace murder, had ended at a chateau near Vouvray as a far different matter not two months ago. The scar was more than matched by the one that ran beneath his shirt from the right shoulder to the left hip. They were still being held accountable for pointing the finger, still reviled, distrusted and held suspect by both the SS of the avenue Foch and the Gestapo of the rue des Saussaies.
‘She’s e gajo rom, Hermann – married to a non-gypsy, Henri Doucette. There’s a notation at the bottom of the card.’
‘Not the Spade?’
‘The same. Once touted as our answer to the Americans’ Gene Tunney. A major contender for the heavyweight championship in 1928 though no fight was held that year, and still, I think, the work-out man at the Avia Club Gym over behind the Porte Saint-Martin unless he’s found more lucrative things to do.’
The rue Lauriston perhaps? The notorious French Gestapo that was made up of gangsters the SS had let out of jail immediately after the Defeat to make ‘collections’ among other things.
‘Let’s go and have a word with him. Let’s stuff a rawhide whip down his throat before we cut off his balls.’
‘There’s no mention of his being responsible for this.’
‘Then he’ll tell us, right? and he’ll have nothing to worry about.’
Chez Rudi’s was just across the Champs-Elysees from the Lido. Everyone knew of it, and those who could not eat here or anywhere else would linger beyond the front windows watching those inside.
It being mid-morning, no meals were being served because lunch was being prepared, but all around them the Occupier came and went, many in uniform, most with their newspapers. Pariser Zeitung, the Volkischer Beobachter – Hitler’s own paper, or Signal, his picture magazine. Le Matin, too, and others. All controlled because that was the way things were.
The cafe filtre was black and strong and excellent when taken with two lumps of sugar. Real sugar and twice in the same day!
‘I saw that, Louis. You slid four of those sugars into your pocket. You know Rudi doesn’t like the customers when they take things. Put them back.’
A nod would suffice. Hermann turned to look over a shoulder, as indicated. There were four of them with their faces pressed to the glass. ‘Why aren’t they in school?’ he blurted.
‘Perhaps the schools are closed due to the lack of coal.’