‘A little,’ he said and wrote, Did you meet Nana Theleme in Tours?
‘A rattle …? Is it that you wish to give the baby a rattle?’ she asked aloud and, saddened by his insistence on pursuing the matter, answered, Yes! in writing, but quite by accident. We had a cup of coffee in a small cafe.
And did she ask you to drive her to Senlis on the folloiuing day?
Gabrielle flinched in despair.
The dynamite, he wrote. Someone is supplying the Gypsy with it.
From Senlis? she asked, writing it out for him and listening for the Gestapo – waiting tensely for them to barge in and shriek, ‘Hande hoch!’
She lighted a candle and burned all the scraps of paper.
‘Giselle must want this baby very badly, Jean-Louis, but will your partner make an honest woman of her now that his wife has gained her divorce and has found another?’
Back home in Wasserburg, ex-wife Gerda had married an indentured French farm labourer, a humiliation Hermann had yet to complain about and probably never would.
St-Cyr waited for Giselle’s answer about the dynamite but she refused. Tears began to mist her lovely eyes. The stone quarries, he harshly wrote. The prospector Nana went to Tours to meet. Monsieur jacqmain asked her to go to Senlis.
To see his dying mother! That was all. I swear it. I could not refuse, she wrote and burst into tears.
In dismay, he saw before him what he’d seen when they’d first met: a determined evasiveness, lies and half-lies and every possible female ruse.
There had been some rough but beautifully coloured diamonds then; there were diamonds now.
Do you still belong to the Society of Those Who Have Been Left Behind?
The war widows. ‘Why should I not?’ she demanded aloud. His nod was curt, his whole being the detective she had first encountered. ‘My friends are clamouring for me. Will you come and listen?’
Neither of them had touched the vodka or the caviar. ‘Of course. But first …’
There was silence as he took from a pocket the crystal of clear quartz they both had been given last Saturday – his last investigation; a child of eleven, an heiress. Had she been a clairvoyant, that child? ‘It is magic,’ she had said so seriously. ‘You will need it, I’m afraid, for the cards are not good. A visitor is to come into your lives who will pit you against each other with terrible consequences. Please do not forget this. Remember to be true to each other.’
The crystal was one of those ‘diamonds’ of the curious stone and mineral trade, a dipyramid perhaps two centimetres by one and a half, six-sided and pointed at both ends but grown lopsidedly and full of internal fractures. They had gone to meet the child at a villa in Neuilly on the far side of the Bois de Boulogne. On the way, Jean-Louis had received a telex that had been meant for Hermann, since all such messages were directed to his partner. MOST URGENT. REPEAT URGENT. IKPK HQ BERLIN REPORTS INTERNATIONAL SAFE-CRACKER GYPSY REPEAT GYPSY HAS REPORTEDLY SURFACED. LAST SEEN TOURS 1030 HOURS 14 JANUARY HEADING FOR PARIS. APPREHEND AT ONCE. HEIL HITLER.
Jean-Louis did not know the reseau to which she belonged had received a wireless message tacked on to what the British had sent regarding the child’s parents.
GYPSY … REPEAT GYPSY DROPPED TOURS NIGHT OF 13 JANUARY. PROVIDE EVERY ASSISTANCE. MOST URGENT. REPEAT URGENT. WILL HAVE EXPLOSIVES. GIVE FULL PRIORITY. CODE NAME ZEBRA.
The Gypsy hadn’t had any explosives even though London had said he would have them. He had denied it to their faces, but of course they had already taken care of the matter on the thirteenth, during the trip to Senlis.
Three women. Nana, Suzanne-Cecilia and herself. Dynamite. Code name Disaster.
Nitroglycerine also, and plenty of blasting caps and fuse. Ah Jesus, jesus, what were they to do?
The Gare Saint-Lazare was the world’s third largest railway station. Gargantuan, it was divided into two long arrival-and-departure sections by an immense hall, every one of whose panes of glass, high up there above, had been crisscrossed by strips of brown sticking paper and given a thick and repulsive wash of laundry bluing.
The resulting gloom was only increased by the paucity of blue-washed lamps, the whole having a distinctly other-world feeling. Breath steamed. People spoke quietly. Though they hurried to and fro, the cumulative hush was broken only by stifled coughs, sneezes and the clack-clacking of wooden-soled high-heels. ‘Giselle …’
The girl kicked off her shoes and Oona gathered them in. Kohler knew he was in trouble. The two of them had given him the silent treatment all the way across town. ‘Look, I’m sorry, eh? Hey, I’ll take you both to the pictures tomorrow night. I swear it. The same ones if you want.’
‘It’s not what I want!’ hissed Giselle, meaning an abortion. ‘I’ll kill myself first!’
‘Oona, talk some sense into her.’
‘Me? Haven’t I done enough? Didn’t I find her sitting in front of that window debating arrest? Didn’t I convince her to see that film? Pah! why should I say anything? It’s your job. You’re the father!’
‘Verdammt! I want her to have the kid.’
There, he had got that out at last. ‘And what about me?’ she demanded.
Ah merde, where the hell was he to find the chef de gare or the sous-chef? he wondered. Pedestrians became travellers of the deep under clocks whose Roman numerals registered an alien time. 10.57 p.m. Tattered, picked-at posters advertised excursions to Deauville. Sun, sea and sand, and wouldn’t that be lovely except for it being the fiercest winter on record?
Condensation had frozen on the inside of walls and windows. Furtive sparrows sought warmth up there, pigeons too. The floor was spattered with their droppings.
Achtung! Achtung! Avertissement: Peine de mort contre les saboteurs. Warning: Death to saboteurs.
Beneath the notice someone had scratched: Les des sont jetes en Russe. The dice have been cast in Russia.
For a moment time was transfixed and one saw clearly the shabby suitcases and the clothing people wore, the made-overs, cast-offs and hand-me-downs, the things rescued from the thirties and from the trunks of long-dead relatives.
A girl tried to straighten her grandmother’s black lisle stockings, another was checking the seams of the paint job she had given her bare legs.
Soldier boys came and went. Les filles de la nuit plied their trade but could only wait to be asked, since here the law prevailed and the place was thick with cops of all kinds.
Kohler knew only too well that if one wanted to hide, as the Gypsy must, the city was by far the best of places.
There was a Wehrmacht soup kitchen for the boys that had come from the bunkers of the north. Soup with potatoes in it and maybe a bit of meat. Black bread and margarine.
He managed two servings and led Giselle and Oona to a bench. ‘Now wait here, please,’ he begged. ‘I’ve got a little job to do.’
‘And me … what about me, Hermann?’ demanded Oona. ‘You have not answered my question.’
‘Later, eh? I’m busy.’
Croissants, baguettes, brioches and patisseries were all banned and had been for nearly two years now. The daily bread ration, if one could get it, had been reduced to two 25 gram slices. A notice advertised that a reward of 100,000 francs would be paid for information leading to the arrest of terrorists or those assisting them. There were soldier-warnings about syphilis, tuberculosis and cancer – Berlin believed the French were rife with these diseases. Others warned the citizenry of the dangers of eating cats – the rat population would explode and bring on the bubonic plague.