No lights shone in the Jardin des Plantes. Only by feeling its way, did the little Peugeot two-door sedan finally manage the gates, which were locked, of course.
Leaving the engine running – cursing herself again and all that had gone wrong – she struggled out. Snow rose to her ankles. Her silk stockings would be ruined. The engine didn’t sound too good either. Was there water in the gasoline again?
She rang the bell. Old Letouche, the concierge, was almost stone deaf. He’d be asleep. Had he died in his sleep?
Shivering, railing at herself, she blew on gloved fingers and stamped her high-heels to pack the snow down a little. ‘Monsieur,’ she called out. ‘It’s me, Gabrielle. Is Suzanne-Cecilia here?’
‘Not here,’ came the frayed, wind-tattered voice.
‘But she had nowhere else to go? I was worried about her?’
‘Not here. Gone to the detective’s house.’
‘The detective’s …?’
‘He offered, she accepted. I gave her my share of the dung to help her along. It’s freezing in here without a fire.’
‘Which detective?’
‘The one with the house, of course. “The difficult one”, she said.’
Dismayed, she looked away in the direction of Belleville. She couldn’t go to the house, not until the curfew was over. ‘And by then,’ she asked herself, retreating to the car, ‘will it be too late?’
What had begun with so much promise had fast become a nightmare. The Gypsy had proved himself far too difficult to handle. They had lined up the robberies for him but he had gone his own way and had done nearly all of them in one night! They didn’t even know where he was hiding.
‘And as for this Tshaya of his, if the Gestapo get their hands on her, she’ll be only too willing to betray us and already must know far too much.’
It was a mess – it was worse than that. It was a catastrophe! ‘Zebre,’ she said from behind the wheel now. Why but for the intrusion of fate – ‘Yes, fate!’ – had the British chosen to use such a code name?
They couldn’t have known the wireless set was hidden in the zebra house. Direction-finding at such long distances was simply too inaccurate. Even the German direction-finding vans had to get in really close.
The Wehrmacht’s Funkabwehr unit and now, also, the Gestapo’s Listeners constantly monitored the airwaves for clandestine transmissions. They used three widely spaced listening sets and, drawing lines from each of these to the source, triangulated the approximate location. Then, by repeatedly smaller triangulations as they moved in with their listening vans, they narrowed things down until, at the last, a house or flat could be singled out.
But so far the reseau had seen no sign of any such activity. Suzanne-Cecilia had been very, very careful. Transmissions were kept to a bare minimum and were always given at the same time and on the same frequency. Now only once a week and on Fridays at 0150 hours Berlin time.
It had to have been coincidence, the British using Zebra as the code name. It had to have been!
‘I must do something,’ she said. ‘I can’t just sit idly by and let De Vries destroy everything we’ve worked so hard for!’
Single-handedly, and over nearly eighteen months, Suzanne-Cecilia had painstakingly assembled the wireless transceiver from parts she had gathered. Oh for sure they had talked of doing something – anything – but the times had not been right, the Occupation so very difficult.
But then on a cold, clear night in October of last year, and well before she had met Jean-Louis and Hermann, Ceci’s faint tappings into the ether had finally brought a response, NOUS VOUS LISONS. We read you.
Cecilia had used, and still did, her modification of the French Army code of her husband’s unit – one of many, and yes, the Germans would be aware of it, but what else could she have done? By some quirk of – yes, fate again – the code book had been sandwiched among the bloodstained letters that had been returned to her along with her dead husband’s boots.
Lieutenant Honore Lemaire had been in the same unit as her own dead husband, and it wouldn’t take Jean-Louis long to discover this. ‘The Society of Those Who Have Been Left Behind, eh?’ she said bitterly. ‘Of course we are working together!’
Tasks had been assigned by London. The constant comings and goings of generals and other high-ranking officers – the troops too. Ah! she herself did this. It was easy for her. The audience at the Club Mirage changed constantly. The boys all loved her, trusted her. She was their loyal friend.
The sales of major international works of art at the Jeu de Paume – stolen, many of them. Could a list be provided? Of course! She was known to frequent the sales, often on the arm of a German general or other high-ranking official.
The sales of priceless antiques too, in the rooms of the Hotel Drouot, the Paris auction house.
So many things and all of it had been working so well but then Jean-Louis and Hermann had solved the Sandman murders. The child, the heiress, had lost her only friends and her parents too, and had been left all alone in the world.
Would London help? The child’s father had been a noted designer of weapons. The couple had gone to England just before the blitzkrieg and had not been able to return, had supposedly died in the bombing of Coventry.
On 15 January at 0150 hours London had sent its answer. It hadn’t helped. They couldn’t have sent over things like that.
Right after the message there had been a distinct break of several seconds – end of transmission – but then, suddenly, the green light had come on again and another message had come in. A message she could not have revealed to Jean-Louis and still could not do so.
The Gypsy had been dropped near Tours on the night of the thirteenth. Code name Zebra, but by then, of course, Nana and Suzanne-Cecilia and herself had known he was in Paris because he had arrived on the fourteenth.
Puzzled as to why there should have been that break in the transmission, Gabrielle took out the quartz crystal the child had given them. She looked away into the darkness and the falling snow to where she knew the zebra paddock and house must lie. Ceci’s surgery and laboratory of physiology were very convenient to the zebra house, and it had been perfect. It really had. As veterinary surgeon, she could legitimately spend nights here tending sick animals. No one would have thought to question this.
‘But now?’ she asked herself. ‘What now?’
The dust had settled in the Gare Saint-Lazare but the ringing in the ears would probably never go away.
Kohler tried to get his bearings. The ticket office was a shambles. The massive door to the old iron safe was off its hinges, bent, ripped apart and still disgorging sand and bricks, and half embedded in the floor.
‘I told you not to tamper with that dial, Inspector. I warned you the safe had a booby trap built into its locking mechanism!’
The sous-chef de gare was livid. ‘Then why didn’t it blow off the Gypsy’s hands?’
‘The portrait, yes? The Marechal, you idiot! Have you forgotten this?’
Tattered, dust-covered and furious, the little twerp blinked and apprehensively licked the dust from his lips when he saw the Kripo take a step towards him.
On the wall above the safe, Petain, and before him legions of former presidents, had looked sternly out at ticket agent and buyer. Nearly one hundred years of thumbprints had greased the lower left corner of that picture frame and wall. The damned thing had been slid aside enough times for the world to have seen the marks from any three of the wickets.
The combination had been written in pencil on the wall but the Gypsy had changed the settings. He’d written the new combination above the old one, the numerals so perfect one had to wonder about the severity of his schooling as a boy, but no one had wanted to try the numbers.