Tshaya … A fly in amber. Vadni ratsa. Why had Janwillem asked for such a thing as that cigarette case? Was it to have been her final insult?
No. No that was the bomb in the car below.
‘Louis, the Resistance have to be involved. They’re the only idiots desperate enough to fool around with stuff like that. We’ve got to find the quarry and quickly, and then trace the stuff to whoever took it.’
The Resistance and Gabrielle, and was this not the reason Herr Max wanted a certain Surete’s head? ‘Perhaps but … ah mais alors, mon vieux, is it that others wish simply to make it appear as if the terrorists are involved?’
The SS of the avenue Foch, the Gestapo of the rue des Saussaies, or the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. Louis couldn’t know he had talked to Boemelburg. Not yet. ‘I’ve thought of that too. Engineer a crisis, eh? so that you can then have all the authority you want to stamp it out.’
The relief of Leningrad, the defeat at Stalingrad were excuses enough but so, too, were increasing acts of ‘terrorism’ and related evasions of the forced labour draft, the hated Service de Travail Obligatoire which was sending so many workers to the Reich but also driving the young men to swell the ranks of the maquis.
‘Knock off a few places to make sure the loot taken more than compensates for the effort, eh? since if the plan works,’ said St-Cyr, ‘all those involved in it will be handsomely rewarded with a lot left over for the bosses.’
‘But it isn’t working, is it?’ said Kohler sadly. ‘He’s buggered off on them.’
‘And now they have to have him back.’
Louis dragged out his pipe, only to ruefully examine the meagre contents of his tobacco pouch and, momentarily furious with life, put both away. ‘There’s no denying his parking the car outside her flat can do nothing but cause her trouble.’
‘He can’t be happy with her but is he with anyone?’
‘Someone’s been helping him and not just with that uniform and ID he got in Tours,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘He knew Wehrle’s safe would be loaded. He knew all about Cartier’s, knew the Gare Saint-Lazare kept its receipts too long, and knew enough of the house on the rue Poliveau to take the keys to it.’
‘He had to have help getting from the Gare to that house. Two suitcases, a large rucksack … The patrols, the risk of being stopped … He was carting dynamite too, wasn’t he?’
‘A bicycle would have been sufficient, Hermann. He has all the recklessness and nerve needed to ride one when fully loaded and on ice. No problem.’
Louis was just evading things. ‘A car,’ breathed Kohler sadly. ‘Who do we know in the Resistance who has one?’
Hermann had finally got to it. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask, but even Gabrielle can’t drive about after the curfew without a laissez-passer.’
‘I’ll check it out. I’m going to have to, Louis. Someone had to haul that dynamite around. Someone had to find it first and then store it. Boemelburg and Herr Max will expect it of me. I’m sorry, but I have no other choice.’
‘Tshaya … we have to find her too.’
*
‘Lucie-Marie Doucette. I know nothing of her,’ said Nana Theleme. ‘The name, it is unfamiliar to me.’
The flat grew still.
Herr Max had arrived at the departure of the bomb squad. Furious with her, and with Kohler and St-Cyr, he said quietly, ‘Nothing, Fraulein?’
Louis started forward. Kohler grabbed him. Still she stood defiantly in those all-but-Ali-Baba trousers – that was the way Engelmann would see her – with arms tightly folded across her chest. And all around her, the Turkish and Afghani leavings of the Marche aux Puces, the flea-market stalls in Saint-Ouen, threw back their throw-rug colours and kilim-patterns. Dark reds, blues, greens and yellows, the geometry of their patterns and the pseudo-mid-Eastern attire so foreign and repulsive to him, they could only bring anger at her obstinacy.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
The hammered brasses glinted. Gilded, carved neo-Gothic chairs were caught in wall-mirrors that must have come from some circus, the beautifully sculpted head and shoulders of a gypsy patriarch too, a Rom Baro, a ‘big man’, a leader with a fiercely bushy moustache that drooped at its ends. The Rassenverfolgte, the racially undesirable and here she was keeping images of them.
Herr Max removed his bifocals, letting his gaze pass myopically down over her. Untidy wisps of hair fell across his brow. ‘Tshaya?’ he asked again.
All around the room, watercolours gave scenes of gypsy encampments and caravans. Portraits too. The smoke, the scent of camp fires, of women and young girls washing clothes in a stream, of an ancient matriarch pouring Turkish coffee from a superb brass jezbeh, of another wearing heavy necklaces and earrings of gold coins. Holland, Belgium, Normandy, the Auvergne … Provence, Spain and Andalusia, where hadn’t Janwillem De Vries travelled with them?
The paintings were exceptional and St-Cyr realized then that De Vries could so easily have become an artist of a far different sort but … she had got the message.
‘All right, I … I did know of her once,’ she said sharply.
Engelmann gripped her by the chin. She yanked her head away. ‘But … but your former lover slept with her, Fraulein, with this marhime lubnyi you hate so much? That unclean whore took him from you, yes you! She could have had any man she wanted, but chose instead that which was forbidden by gypsy law. A Gajo. Always it was your Gypsy she wanted right from when she was seven years old and he but a boy of eleven. When marriage to De Vries was refused absolutely by her father and all the others of the kumpania, she ran away to Paris to find him. Age fifteen then, in 1922.’
Her nostrils pinched. The smile she gave was swift and cruel. ‘She found she had a sudden likeness for muscles, for the smell of male sweat and the thrill of being splashed by blood during a fight!’
Oh-oh, thought Kohler.
‘Henri Doucette,’ sighed Herr Max, pleased that he had got her to respond with such acrimony. ‘The Spade, Fraulein, a guest at that party in your villa a week ago Monday. Her husband, her conductor. She was his mouton, his informer. Tell me, please, did he applaud your singing?’
Dear Blessed Jesus, help me, she said silently and then acidly, ‘He was too drunk and loud to have noticed.’
‘But had brought her along?’
‘Yes.’
‘And she knew who you were?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were forced to sing gypsy songs in front of her, knowing you were no gypsy yourself but that she had taken the father of your son from you?’
Her voice leapt. ‘What would you have had me do? Refuse those loudmouthed, arrogant pigs?’
His eyebrows arched. ‘The SS? The Gestapo and the French Gestapo who were their guests?’
‘It was my house! Doucette deliberately tried to humiliate me. They thought it a great joke. They were drunk. There was food everywhere. On the walls, the ceiling, the carpets – my carpets! They threw it. They encouraged their whores to do so and when one of them tried to dance naked on the table, they clapped and roared and slapped her behind.’
‘No. No that is not quite correct. Tshaya danced for them fully clothed as a gypsy. While you remained silent, your little orchestra played for her. She showed you how it was really done. If anyone humiliated you, it was her.’
‘He … he had sex with her on the table afterwards while they all shouted encouragement. He … he stripped her naked and she … she spat in my face when I tried to cover her.’
Ah Gott im Himmel, swore Kohler silently. Louis was thinking the same. Debauchery – her villa, everything she had once owned and had taken pride in but for these few things, the paintings …
‘I don’t know where either of them are, nor do I know if they are hiding together or who, if anyone, is helping them.’