‘It’s not my fault.’
‘No it isn’t but if you expect me to eat in a place like this, try to understand that it is difficult for me.’
Kohler grabbed four thick slices of bread. Butter, honey and plum jam were added, some cheese also, he piling the slices up on a napkin and calling out to the kitchen, ‘Rudi, I’ve got to do this!’
The kids took the bread and ran, and he stood in the grey light with the snow swirling around him as he watched in despair, his feelings hurt because they hadn’t even thanked him.
‘They called me a dirty Kraut, Louis. They spat at me and said spring would come but that it was taking a long time.’
Parisians the city over were saying this, spring being the end of the Occupation and of the Occupier.
‘I was thinking of my boys,’ he said, looking at the jam on his fingers.
‘And I wasn’t thinking. Forgive me.’
A shadow fell over them. ‘It’s such a small world, isn’t it?’ fluted Rudi Sturmbacher, noting the file card beside St-Cyr and then comparing the scars with the largest of those on the cheek of the Kripo’s most errant Detektiv. ‘They say hers glisten when oiled and that, by the time the Spade was done with her, the dress and blouse were in shreds yet she remained defiant.’
The Spade …
At 166 kilos, Rudi was the centre of all gossip, Chez Rudi’s a minefield of it. The flaxen hair was so fine it blew about every time he moved and was therefore closely trimmed. The florid cheeks were smooth and round and netted with the blue-black veins of too much good living, the pale blue eyes wary, sharp and swift to greed, sex or larceny.
‘Who’s oiling her?’ asked Kohler blithely.
The puffy eyelids widened beneath their thick thatches of ripened flax. ‘No one at the moment but there are those who are so fascinated by her scars, they want her back.’
‘Sit down,’ said Kohler. ‘Hey, rest a while and tell us what the airwaves are saying about the Ritz, Cartier’s and the Gare Saint-Lazare.’
The big lips were compressed. A floury hand was wiped on an apron that had seen use since well before dawn, though Rudi often changed them and it must be due to the shortages that he hadn’t.
‘Well?’ asked Kohler.
‘The airwaves …’ A steaming bowl of sauerkraut and sausage was brought, a little mid-morning sustenance.
Rudi cut off a slice of sausage and examined it. These two could be useful. ‘Information for information, are we agreed?’
‘Of course,’ said Louis.
They were desperate, then, and still very much on the run, and that could be good or bad depending on the whereabouts and accessibility of the loot, all 50-70,000,000 of it and taken in one night. The talk of the town.
St-Cyr would never agree to anything in spite of his having said, ‘Of course.’ Rudi fed the slice of sausage to Hermann. ‘That sous-directeur of Cartier’s overlooked a sapphire-bead-and-cabo-chon necklace with oriental pearls and South African diamonds to the value of 250,000 Reichskassenscheine.’
5,000,000 francs. ‘Anything else?’ managed the sausage-eater.
‘A sapphire and diamond bracelet with five rows of square-cut, deep blue sapphires, then a row of clear white diamonds on either side. Three hundred and seventy-five blue ones, each exactly the same; one hundred and fifty of the white. One of a kind.’
They waited. Hermann was fed another bit of sausage and then a forkful of sauerkraut, the juice running down his chin and Rudi dabbing at it with a napkin so as not to mess the tablecloth.
‘100,000 Reichskassenscheine,’ said the mountain. ‘Ear-rings to match – that was another 50,000. And a ring, the stone set in platinum. Another 30,000.’
‘That sous-directeur is just inflating the loss for insurance purposes,’ grumbled St-Cyr.
No sausage was offered, not even the sauerkraut.
‘He wishes he was,’ said Rudi, watching them both as one would two frogs before spearing them for their legs. ‘But apparently a woman had been in on several occasions to try on the sapphires. Tall, blonde, statuesque and with eyes not unlike your little Giselle’s, my Hermann. That perfect shade of violet. A chanteuse who couldn’t quite make up her mind.’
‘Ah no, not Gabrielle …?’ blurted St-Cyr, aghast at the implications.
A bit of sausage was cut off and savoured, Rudi judging the smoke-curing to have been as perfect as the times and the constant demand for sausage had allowed. ‘The same,’ he said. ‘Maybe she has some explaining to do, maybe she hasn’t. Like I said, it’s a small world.’
Louis leapt from his chair to grab his coat and hat and then to head for the street and the car. Rudi nailed Kohler’s wrist to the table with a grip of iron. ‘The fence or fences, Hermann. The loot, mein lieber Detektiv. I want a part of it.’
‘For the future?’
‘Who knows what might happen but it’s wisest, I think, to be prepared for all eventualities, is it not?’
‘Leningrad is only a city. It means nothing.’
‘Nor, then, does Stalingrad or the machine-gun nests the Wehrmacht are installing around town.’
‘Still no snipers on the roof?’
‘Not yet.’
Rudi had wanted the snipers up there in case the citizens of Paris should take a notion to revolt.
‘Information, my Hermann.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Gut. Oh, I almost forgot. A cigar, ja? for the proud papa to be. Take care of your little Liebling. I hope it’s a son to replace one of those you lost. Twin boys, perhaps, who knows? But watch over her. Don’t let them pick her up just because you weren’t cooperating. Your visitor is straight from Berlin and doesn’t trust either of you. He smells a rat. Don’t disappoint him. Give him one.’
‘Louis …? Do you mean Louis?’
Kohler threw a tortured look towards the street. The cigar was crumbled in a fist and fell to the floor, a waste.
Rudi patted him on the shoulder. ‘But first the Gypsy, mein Schatz,* and his woman, his Tshaya.’
* the Black Maria
* my treasure.
3
The rue de la Paix was an unexpected sea of traffic. The snow came steadily. A misery for the drivers, the weather was a joy to the passengers who laughed, stood up precariously in their hacked-off bathtub seats, settees, and ancient fauteuils to throw snowballs at one another. The girls wore thin overcoats, wavy hair and pillbox hats with nets of veiling or snap-brim fedoras and upturned collars, the boys were in grey-green, blue or black uniforms. There was no language barrier, not today.
A circus. Cartier’s wore a banner: Ferme pour les alterations.
Every newspaper had seized on the robberies and had raised the hue and cry with: HEISTS IN THE MILLIONS, WHAT WILL BE NEXT?
First one enterprising velo-taxi driver and then another had conceived the brilliant idea of a Robbery Tour. And since no two of those crazy rickshawlike contraptions were the same, colours, shapes and sizes clashed as the din rose to attic garrets five and six storeys above the fashionable shops.
Angered, dismayed – terrified, yes, damn it! by what Rudi Sturmbacher had just said, Kohler threw up his big hands in despair and said, ‘Merde! Let’s leave this bucket of bolts in the middle of the street.’
This beautiful Citroen … ‘They’ll only scratch the paint. They’re already doing so.’
Kohler got out to hold up his badge and part the waves. An onslaught of snowballs drove him back behind the wheel.
‘I could have told you so,’ grumbled the Surete and, looking well along the street, nodded towards place Vendome. ‘They pulled it down. The city’s like that, Hermann. Once the people get the fever of an idea nothing can stop them. That’s Paris.’
‘Pulled what down?’ They’d work to do and Louis was in a huff and sensing trouble. ‘Make it short, mein Kamerad. Don’t give me any of your fucking Quatsch.* Not today.’