‘Thieves in this weather?’ came the startled retort but by then the two were negotiating the gates, and soon, even the light of their torches had been swallowed up.
Isolated the quarry was, and huge. Though they would see little, would they not perhaps feel the size of it? he wondered. The utter emptiness? Versailles was a palace but there had been other and more recent demands. As a result, a lot of stone had been removed, the face of the escarpment having been eaten away until it was now indented nearly one kilometre.
Far from flat, the floor was often stepped. There were ledges. There were still places where, in summer one could see the lines of holes, each hole two metres from all others in the line and perhaps thirty centimetres deep. These holes had been drilled by hand using hardened iron chisels and wooden mallets. The lines followed the grain of the rock so that it could be ‘feathered’ out by pounding hardwood pegs into the holes. The rock was then split along the lines of pegs and along the bedding surface below, a time-honoured method but one which had left the debris of some carelessness for those who would venture in at night, and in winter, to stumble over.
When the beams of their torches found the powder magazine, it stared out of the blizzard at them from under a sloping roof whose tar paper was buffeted by the wind.
The door was solid, the padlock big and tight. And the bare, unpainted boards were weathered beneath the alarmingly bullet-riddled signboard of Explosifs. Danger, Defense d’entrer.
‘That sand in the walls must be full of lead, Louis.’
‘Gabrielle and Nana came here, Hermann. How could they have done such a thing?’
They had come on the thirteenth, in preparation for the Gypsy’s arrival. ‘They even thought to oil the lock. Look, it’s still sticky.’
The powerful stench of bitter almonds came to them. Hermann gagged and tossed his head. Hesitating, he stared at the lock in alarm, then at the key in his hand. He tried to cram his torch under an arm and get it to shine fully on the damned thing. ‘Here, Louis. You hold it.’
The key went in. He bit his lower lip. He said, ‘Is it really oil, or has that son of a bitch beaten us here and left us another surprise?’
Leaving the key in the lock, Hermann began to search for footprints other than their own, but it was no use. ‘They couldn’t have had an oil can with them, could they?’ he bleated in despair, only to add, ‘Beat it, eh? Go on. Take cover.’
St-Cyr reached out and, saying, ‘We’re in this together,’ turned the key and removed the lock.
The door opened easily enough but not before Hermann had gone over and around it carefully. Light shone feebly in on wooden cases, each of which carried embossed words of Dynamite, 25 kilos. Fifty per cent, 110 sticks.
Each stick would be twenty centimetres in length by two and a half in diameter, and there were plenty enough of them lying in recently opened cases for one to see that the years and the heat and the humidity had been most unkind.
There were slats of wood under the tiers of cases, and straw beneath these and around them, and this straw had received the seepage.
‘Louis …’
‘Hermann …’
Both were speechless. It was eerie, it was terrible. Gabrielle and Nana Theleme and perhaps the Gypsy too, but later … later, had used a screwdriver to open the cases. They had actually taken handfuls of sticks, had braved the fumes, the dizziness and had been oblivious to the danger.
‘Hermann …’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘Flasks of nitroglycerine, but the case is empty.’
Oh-oh. ‘How many?’
‘A dozen. Each of one hundred cubic centimetres.’
They stared at the flat case whose square compartments were cushioned with rubber and had each held its little wooden box. They tried to comprehend how those two women could possibly have transported such things to Paris without accident. They worried about Janwillem De Vries.
‘The house on the rue Poliveau,’ blurted Hermann. ‘He needed nitro then.’
‘But is it that he now has more than enough or is it that they held back on him and gave him only the first flask and not the others?’
Had he been here since, or had only Gabrielle and Nana paid a visit?
Braving the fumes, weeping, gagging constantly, they searched as best they could. Perhaps the freezing temperatures helped to hold off an explosion, perhaps God simply looked down on them and took pity.
The magazine was not large by such standards, and when he found a woman’s handkerchief, St-Cyr knew that one of them must have dropped it by accident.
Coughing, choking, they went outside for air. Both were bent double. The fumes burned.
Weeping, they huddled over the handkerchief. ‘How many cases are gone in addition to the nitroglycerine?’ managed St-Cyr.
‘Two, I think, and … and some coils of safety fuse.’
The magazine for the detonators was much smaller and was free of fumes. Here there was shelving but broken-open cardboard packets revealed blasting caps so corroded, their copper tubes, each of pencil-size in diameter and no more than three and a half centimetres in length, were encrusted with verdigris. The ones that were used with safety fuse were often stuck together. The ones that were used for electrical blasting had two thin wires protruding from the base of each cap, and often these wires were corroded at their ends.
It was clear that Gabrielle and Nana Theleme had searched for the best of them, clear also that they had taken sufficient.
But had the Gypsy been here since to help himself?
At 5 a.m. those who started for work in Paris did not lift their heads. The iron-hard frost of the Occupation’s most hungry winter was crushing. They coughed, they wheezed painfully. Steps squeaked. The smoke from the firefly glows of occasional cigarettes did not rise, and everyone, it seemed, had the flu.
Remi Rivard let the last of the Wehrmacht’s soldier boys out of the Club Mirage and began to bolt the doors.
‘A moment, Remi,’ hazarded a frozen voice in pitch darkness. ‘Are things clear?’
Of the Gestapo? ‘Perhaps.’
The Corsicans, the club’s owners, were ever-wary. ‘Where is Gabrielle? Her car …’
‘It was stolen. She has had to file a proces-verbal and is not here. Some idiots in the Resistance took it.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You don’t listen, do you? The Gypsy, you idiot. The Resistance! Now ask that frozen gumshoe brain of yours what was in her car.’
‘Explosives.’
‘You said it. I didn’t.’
7
From the quai de Tournelle, at first light, the spires of the Church of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais were hardly visible, and the jumble of rooftops St-Cyr loved so much was a leaden, bluish-grey through which the faded green of copper sheathing made a tracery among the slate and tile.
Hermann and he had been through a lot since September 1940, but this … this was not even a nothing murder in which they had had to cross the SS. It was a catastrophe and no amount of fitting the pieces together could solve the thing because they had been pitted against friend and loved one and she had not confided in them.
Gabrielle had driven the Gypsy to the quarry on the very morning of the day they had gone there but had had no need of the keys. They had not even noticed the tyre marks of her car!
He thought back to that nothing murder in the first week of December last. He recalled how, at its conclusion, she had sought him out and had found him staring at the Loire as he was now staring at the Seine. He had just learned of the deaths of Marianne and Philippe. She had offered solicitude and comfort, a room in her flat, since the front of his house had been destroyed. She had wanted to get to know him better and had taken that supreme step of putting her life in his hands by confiding she would join the Resistance, but must already have been in the reseau and even then had hidden it from him. Ah nom de Dieu, what were they to do?