He slid the matchbox across the table. She winced. She knew her fingers were trembling and that he could feel this as she took the box from him.
Trapped, her answer was perfect. HE WAS THE WIRELESS OPERATOR FOR HIS UNIT. HE DIED AT SEDAN DURING THE INVASION AS I HAVE ALREADY TOLD YOU.
St-Cyr took the matchbox from her. I TOO WAS A SIGNALS OPERATOR BUT IN THE WAR BEFORE THIS ONE.
Ah! she silently said and tossed that pretty head of hers.
SO MADAME LET US NOW GET DOWN TO BUSINESS BEFORE. IT IS TOO LATE FOR ALL OF US.
*
At 2.47 a.m. tobacco smoke filled the air, the lights were low on hanging carpets, cushions, brasses, samovars and plush red-velvet drapes. Kohler let his gaze sift over the Club Monseigneur’s tables, Giselle and Oona did too, looking always for the Gypsy.
Gestapo, SS and Wehrmacht officers, teary-eyed and homesick, most of them – Mein Gott what sentimentalists! – sat with their women or unaccompanied except for black-market big shots and gangsters, all lost, it seemed, to the haunting melancholy of a clear and soft serenity that carried yet a sense of restlessness all found slightly disturbing. It was as if unsatisfied, the chanteuse – the gypsy woman in the red dress and through her, her audience – sought constantly for the unattainable. Long pauses accompanied repeated phrases. Rhythm drove her more and more to seek the release she wanted. Tune after tune followed but now a vigorousness crept in, the orchestra in their black corduroy trousers, white blouses, tasselled felt caps, sashes at the waist and high, brown leather boots, straining with her, racing … racing until … until, with a whirlwind of violins, cimbaloms and tambourines, that voice of hers lifted the audience out of their melancholy. It raced away with them in rushes. Its volume swelled. She shouted. They stood. They clapped. They cheered. And as she continued to throw her hair, to sing, to clash those heels of hers on the stage and bash her tambourine, the violinists dispersed among the tables, playing here, there, their cap-tassels jerking, the music electric, fierce, fast, the piece exploding again and again as individual violinists competed against each other until … until the woman in red with the earrings of gold coins, her linked belt of them and bracelets too, had raised her long, lithe arms.
With a crash! the song came to an end. Exhausted, she bowed her head and for an instant her eyes were closed, each feature fixed in memory: the long, jet black hair that was parted in the middle but allowed tonight to fall loosely to her shoulders, the sharpness of dark black eyebrows against the soft hazel of her skin, the cheekbones high, the nose and chin proud and undefeated. The rising and falling of her chest was half hidden by the neckline of her dress whose shade had faded with the lights and now was matt red, warm, deep and like the embers of a fire just waiting to be fanned into flame.
This was Nana Theleme. Kohler shook his head in admiration – he’d hate to have to arrest her for anything, would hate to let the Gestapo or Herr Max get their hands on her. ‘Formidable!’ he croaked. ‘Louis should have heard her.’
He marvelled that she could sing at all. The split in her lower lip had been well disguised, the swollen cheek hidden under rouge. But to sing as well as that, knowing what she must, and to such company had required an immense strength of will.
When she found them, and the introductions had been made, she said softly and regretfully, ‘Tshaya would have sung it far better than myself. Whereas I can only dream of living it, she has done so.’
It was a confession of sorts, a reason perhaps why Janwillem De Vries had gone back to the boyhood love of his gypsy days.
They sipped Tokay. The orchestra played more quietly – little tunes she called birdsongs, with improvised trills and flourishes the audience half listened to. Kohler confided what had happened. Oona and Giselle both said earnestly, ‘We saw him, mademoiselle.’ ‘He spoke to me,’ added Giselle. ‘He saved my baby from the force of the blast, my face, my eyes … By doing so, Oona saw him and understood enough to hit the floor before she was killed.’
Everything was going wrong. Janwillem had changed so much.
‘Three women,’ said Kohler. ‘Yourself, Gabrielle Arcuri and Suzanne-Cecilia Lemaire. Are there others?’
Was it to be a time of reckoning?
‘Tell me which of you lined up again and again until you knew exactly what the banking schedule of that ticket office was and where the combination to that safe had been written down.’
‘Which of us …? Please, Inspector, I don’t understand. It’s all a mistake.’
Verdammt! why must she be so difficult when surely she must know the end was near? ‘Look, which of you is hiding him, where’s he being hidden, and what’s his next target?’
It would do no good to lie and hadn’t Gabrielle said Herr Kohler could be trusted if necessary? ‘We … we don’t know where he is. None of us. He’s … he’s simply not co-operating.’
‘Gone off on his own, has he?’
‘Yes, and obviously with Tshaya, though this we did not anticipate and … and had had no inclination of. How could we have?’
He’d best get it clear. ‘But you met with him on the fourteenth when he arrived in Paris. How the hell did you even know he’d be on that train?’
‘We didn’t know anything, Inspector! Jani … The first I knew of his arrival was his knock at my door. He said … All right, he said he’d escaped to England in 1940 and that … that the British had parachuted him into France. Could I keep him for a day or two? That was all he’d ask. He was desperate. I couldn’t refuse. The whole thing was crazy. I’d our son to think of but … but Janwillem was already in the flat. I did not know who, if anyone, might have noticed him or if, by sending him away, his presence would not be fixed in memory. The concierge … Mon Dieu, that one’s a collaborator if ever there was one.’ She shrugged. ‘You see the dilemma I was in.’
She was all innocence. None of it was her fault. ‘So you kept him until …?’ asked Kohler, pleasantly enough for Giselle to be startled by his manner.
‘Until the late afternoon of the seventeenth.’ This wasn’t true, of course, thought Nana, but somehow she had to protect the others.
‘Then he must have seen your son.’
She would have to smile. ‘Yes … Yes, for the first time. He was very pleased. Our Jani was beside himself with delight. The father he had always heard about had at last come to see him. They played for hours. They …’
‘Forget it,’ snorted Kohler impatiently. ‘When we took you home from the Avia Club Gym you told my partner to ask De Vries, when we caught him, why he had tried to kill the son he had never seen.’
She touched her chest. ‘Did I?’
Kohler nodded curtly towards a far table she could see well enough. ‘Were those two couples at the dinner party the SS and their friends threw in your former villa on the night of the eleventh?’
He would only ask it of them if she didn’t tell him. ‘Yes.’
‘And you still don’t know who they are?’
‘Should I?’
Oona was staring at her wine and keeping very still; Giselle had swallowed tightly.
‘Then listen,’ said Kohler sadly. ‘The one with the cigarette in its ivory holder, the polished jackboots and the blue-eyed blonde with the overhang is Oberstleutnant Willi Lowenstein, head of Funkabwehr Paris and France; that’s radio counter-espionage in case you’re interested.’
‘And the one with the brunette?’ she managed, her voice faint.
‘Horst Uhrig, his Gestapo counterpart. They’re sizing you up, Mademoiselle Theleme, and that can only mean one thing. They’ve buried their petty jealousies and have agreed to work together. Now you tell me why?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘I think you do.’
The fire had long since gone to dust. At 4.40 a.m. and out of tobacco, St-Cyr quietly pulled on his overcoat and found his scarf and gloves.