Only then had she let him become aware of her. The Odeon had been running newsreels. Tanks, tanks, and more of them but not in the snow and hard-frozen mud of a Russian winter. In high summer. Stukas plummeting through naked skies to bomb the Jesus out of baffled peasants and scatter Cossack cavalry.
She had slipped from row to row and had sat right down beside him. Half-way through the destruction of some miserable Ukrainian village, he had felt her knee against his own.
She had asked for a light, the accent of Normandy, had said softly, ‘It’s a bunch of shit. Let’s go to my place.’
Then had got up but had hesitated in front of him, her backside firmly blocking his view and those knees of hers between his own. He’d got up. He’d had to! Some fanatic four rows behind had shouted at them to sit down and somehow she had turned around. Had stood there frozen in the fringes of the projector beam. Nice eyes, nice lips, a generous smile. Nose to nose and body to body. ‘I meant it,’ she had said. ‘I think I could show you a few things, monsieur, and perhaps you could teach me something.’
Ah Nom de Dieu, what was he to have done, eh? He had buttoned up that coat of hers and had said, ‘Beat it. I haven’t got the time.’
Admonishingly a forefinger had been pressed against his lips, the catcalls coming. The crowd jeering at some victory Goebbels was trying to put over on the French, that bastard behind yelling his head off, too, and threatening violence. Flames on the screen, a fuel dump that time. Nomadic Arab goats scattering like hell across Saharan sands and then …‘The male orgasm it takes only seventeen seconds. We could do it right here and no one would be the wiser than yourself. But,’ she had tossed those lovely eyes of hers, had shrugged and touched his cheek ‘at my place it could be prolonged.’
She’d had a car all ready and waiting. The flat was on the fashionable rue Pergolese not far from the Arc de Triomphe. A piano took up one corner with a tall crystal vase of roses and litter of sheet music. Handel, Bach, Schubert and Brahms …
On the corner walls behind the piano were two gorgeous murals, done perhaps in the mid- to late 1700s. Eve caught in the clutches of a giant oak around whose twisted trunk coiled a boa constrictor after the juicy apple in her frightened hand. Succulent breasts uplifted, the torso thrown back and cringing, one arm clutching a branch for dear life as those same branches formed the crude fingers of a brutal and lustful curiosity that had Eve firmly within its grasp. Oh to be a boa.
The other mural was of a sleeping Psyche lifted on a robe of gold among pitch-dark thunderclouds by cupids with smiles and grins and teenaged boys in the buff and up to mischief.
Both paintings drew the eye and he could not decide which he liked better.
‘Perhaps this is what you want?’ she said, startling him. ‘But, alas, my poor detective from the Gestapo, I am already spoken for.’
Kohler grinned. The tight-fitting woollen dress was the colour of Moroccan lemons. The stupendous eyes were of a soft amber that matched the hair and the single topaz that hung from fine gold links in the centre of her cleavage.
He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Mademoiselle Suzanne Labrie,’ he said. ‘Former proprietress of the Pelican Bar in Caen and now …’
Swiftly she pressed that finger against his lips then kissed him, withdrew a touch. ‘Now the lover of Hugo Ernst Bleicher, better known as the Abwehr’s Colonel Henri.’
The hero of German Military Intelligence in France. ‘The man who nailed Brutus and put that one and a hundred of his Interallie escape network behind barbed wire.’
Ever so slightly she nodded that pretty head of hers, still held his hand, did not indicate her part in that affair. ‘Henri, he wishes to talk to you – yes? – but finds the Abwehr’s Hotel Lutetia on the boul’ Raspail somewhat conspicuous. If you get my meaning.’
Kohler laid a hand on her shoulder. It was a nice shoulder and she did not seem to mind. ‘Henri will be here soon,’ she whispered. ‘In the meantime …’ She gave that little shrug.
‘Seventeen seconds?’ grinned Kohler, nibbling a topaz-studded ear lobe.
‘Coffee, I think, and a glass of marc or would you prefer, perhaps, the pastis of your friend?’
‘I hate the stuff.’
‘Then I can assure you of a very fine cognac but first …’ She touched his lips again and listened for the lift. ‘First, I would like another sample for the record book of my memory.’
Kohler slid the Gestapo’s dossier on Anne-Marie Buemondi across the antique desk as though through a minefield.
At forty-three years of age, Hugo Bleicher was a specialist in counterintelligence attached to the Abwehr’s Group III F. Fluent in French, he was equally and far more notably proficient in Spanish, ah yes. He had the freedom to travel where and when he liked and to employ whomever he wanted in his never-ending search for enemies of the State and for his own advancement. Bayonne? wondered Kohler apprehensively. Had Bleicher been there too?
‘So, Kohler, why show me this?’
The backs of the hands were hairy, the thin brown locks were rapidly receding. The heavy brown hornrimmed glasses did nothing to hide the bleak emptiness of dark brown eyes.
Kohler knew he’d best say something. ‘By rights, Colonel, as a member of the Deuxieme Bureau, Jean-Paul Delphane ought to be working for the Abwehr, but we find him under the Gestapo Munk. Maybe you’d like to tell me why that horse has changed its rider?’
‘Then why not ask your superior officer, the Sturmbann-fuhrer Walter Boemelburg?’ Bleicher indicated the telephone and took the trouble to move it cautiously through the minefield towards his opponent.
‘Walter’s getting forgetful, Colonel. Rumour has it that he’s soon to be replaced.’
An accomplished pianist, Bleicher had been the former chief clerk in the Jewish export firm of Bodenheimer, Schuster and Company where he’d dipped the whole lot of them, friends and all, into the net without batting an eye. He had a wife and son in Poppenbuttel, near Hamburg.
‘What can you do for us?’ asked the Abwehr’s man. ‘Come, come, Kohler, when my little Suzanne found you, you were in Montparnasse on your way to see me so let us not beat about the bush.’
The crunch had come. ‘Give you a link in a possible escape network.’
The thin and shadowed cheeks and chin were favoured in thought. ‘A certain telephone list?’ asked Bleicher, deciding to quietly reveal a little of what the local gossip had yielded.
Louis wasn’t going to like it but … ah, Gott im Hitnmel, something had had to be done. If Suzanne hadn’t intervened, Kohler would have gone to Bleicher anyway. Besides, the bastard had known it and had prepared himself in advance. He’d seen the airman’s body, then. He had known all about it. Shit!
‘All right, I’ll give you the list once my partner and I are satisfied about Delphane and his part in the murder of that one.’
‘This partner of yours, could he be used to our purposes?’
Ah damn! Bleicher must be only too well aware of the maquis link. He was smelling blood so hard, had he been a dog after a bitch in heat, his nose would have been running. ‘Louis and I are buddies, Colonel. You know what it’s like. You work so closely with a guy, you step right into his shoes. If you don’t, then the bullet or the knife that’s coming could well be your last.’
When Bleicher didn’t respond, Kohler said lamely, ‘The Frog trusts me, Colonel, but yeah, we can use him, only he mustn’t know I’m feeding you things.’
Kohler was known to be untrustworthy and defiant of authority. He had disgraced the SS in front of his superiors, defying all of them in his search for the truth.
‘What’s in it for yourself?’ hazarded Bleicher, closing the dossier and noting the stamp of the Gestapo Cannes.