A victim. A target.
Dawn had broken, and from the flat Hermann had rented on the rue Suger there was a splendid view across place Saint-André-des-Arts towards the river and the Notre-Dame. Sunlight touched the belfries, warming both pigeon and gargoyle. Shadows gave a bluish cast to copper-green roofs whose faded orange chimney pots were so much a part of the Paris St-Cyr loved. But what had that child found up there? he asked himself. The fob of a gold ear-ring, was that it?
Liline Chambert had been with her, the older girl distracted, afraid of the abortion to come, the sin of it, the danger … ah, so many things would have been going through her mind. Perhaps she had snapped at Nénette and had told her such searchings were crazy, perhaps she had simply waited and had looked out across the river as he did himself. But had that child really discovered who the Sandman was?
Both of them had known things were not right at the Villa Vernet. Both had seen that things could not go on as they had been.
Everything in the child’s coat pockets had had meaning for her, but what, really, had she been up to? Tracking the Sandman or trying to trap that aunt of hers or both?
‘Jean-Louis, come and eat while it’s hot.’
‘Ah! Oona. Forgive me. The flat is pleasant and tastefully furnished. My compliments. I should have paid you a visit long ago but …’ He shrugged. There’d been no time.
‘The flea markets are helpful,’ she said, knowing full well that things were not cheap there now and that Jean-Louis thought her the anchor that would keep Hermann from the storm when Giselle pulled out.
She was tall and blonde and blue-eyed, a pleasant-yes, pleasant-looking forty-year-old, she thought. Well, almost forty-one-but with a welcome bank account of common sense the Sûreté admired. And, yes, she could have had the pick of the Occupier-he knew this, too-but knew also she would settle for a ménage à trois that was not always easy. A patriot, an alien without proper papers. A woman who had fallen in love with his partner but was still too afraid to openly tell Hermann of it or give too many outward signs for fear of upsetting Giselle.
‘Tarot cards,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a reading.’
On the kitchen table she had placed the miserable loaf of grey bread that was their daily ration if they could get it. The bowl of muddied ersatz coffee had no sugar or milk. The flat was freezing, but it was home, and he saw her smile softly before raising her eyebrows in question and saying, ‘Tarot cards?’
‘Ah yes.’ He fanned out the six of them and passed his fingers over them as a clairvoyant would. ‘The Star can mean abandonment,’ he said. ‘We’ll let it.’
‘And the Lover?’ she asked. ‘It can mean just that if you wish.
‘I do. The Nine of Swords implies deception and despair, among other things.’
‘Shame, in the reverse, and imprisonment-Giselle has been teaching me.’
‘The Devil,’ he said of yet another card. ‘It can mean violence-blindness if reversed. Those and other things.’
She set her coffee down and urged him to drink his. ‘And the Eight of Swords?’ she said. ‘It shows a young woman bound and blindfolded under swords that are ready to plunge into her. Is she the girl who …’
‘That card is bad news, also sickness and other things, but in the reverse it can mean treachery, and that is what Nénette Vernet must have felt it meant for Liline Chambert and for herself.’
Treachery … They ate in silence, trying to savour each morsel while picking out the unmentionable and questionable sweepings that had found their way into the flour. ‘And this one?’ asked Oona of another card.
‘The Ace of Swords. What would Madame Rébé have said of it?’
‘That it is a very powerful card both in love and in hatred and that it can mean, among other things, triumph or triumph by force.’
‘And in the reverse?’ he asked.
Again he would seek only to have the card read as the child must have done. ‘Conception, Jean-Louis Childbirth and disaster.’
Swiftly he reached across the table to grip her by the hand. She had lost her children on the trek from Holland during the Blitzkrieg of 1940 and knew only too well the pain of their loss. They and her husband had gone to beg water at a farmer’s well. The price had been far beyond their meager resources but they had been so thirsty they had hung around, begging. Then the Stukas had come, and then the Messerschmitts, and everyone had run for cover.
In the terror that had followed, she and her husband had been unable to find their children and now he, too, was dead-a month ago. Was it as long as that? The French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston, a carousel and yet another murder. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘One is constantly reminding oneself to be careful what one says and does, but even so … Oona, your children may still be alive. You must always hope that someday they will be returned to you.’
‘They’re gone. I know they are. A mother feels such things. They’re buried by the roadside in unmarked graves, and it’s an emptiness within me that will never go away.’
With his usual boisterousness, Hermann returned from using the telephone in the café down the street and said, ‘I held back on an all-points for Rébé simply because the SS-Attack Leader and artist Gerhardt Hasse is at home and expecting us, Louis, thanks to von Schaumburg. His friends over on the avenue Foch will try to shield him. They’re worried about his interest in young girls. Apparently he can’t get enough of them.’
Oh-oh.
Giselle wandered into the kitchen bundled in two overcoats, trousers, three pairs of Hermann’s woollen socks, scarves, a toque and mittens. ‘It’s freezing in here,’ she said and pouted, having just got out of bed. ‘God is punishing me for cohabiting with the Occupier, especially one who is so patriotic towards the Conquered he will not ask for even a simple ration of coal!’
‘Giselle …’
‘Hermann, a moment,’ cautioned Oona, and, taking the girl by the shoulders, sat her down at the table and began to warm coffee for her on the tiny hotplate that served for all cooking.
‘What do those tell you?’ asked the girl suspiciously of the Tarot cards.
‘Trouble,’ said the Sûreté, quickly gathering them up. ‘Much trouble.’
7
The Impasse Maubert was one of those narrow, dead-end streets that so delight the eye yet terrify the timid. Not far to the east of place Saint-André-des-Arts, and right near the quai de Montebello, it was not clean but was a half-hidden slot overtowered by ramshackle houses, some of which dated from the twelfth century. Walls were bowed out or in and all but naked of their covering plaster. Iron grilles defied entry, though not a shutter was in place. A street, then, of Balzac or Dumas, thought St-Cyr, with embrasures at eye level for the discharge of muskets.
But what struck the heart as they walked up the alley was the sight of a Daimler sedan facing them. Big, black, powerful and so obviously SS that Hermann hesitated.
A motorcycle courier had parked his bike just in front of the car and to the left. Narrow pavements on either side allowed only one person at a time to pass, and the house beyond that thing at the very end of the impasse rose up four storeys, windows two by two like an ancient god of warning.
‘Vouvray …’ said Hermann and, pulling off a glove, gingerly felt the scar on his left cheek. What had begun as a nothing murder in the Forest of Fontainebleau had ended with their being hated by the SS.
And now here, again, they were coming face to face with the bastards. Berlin wouldn’t like it, the avenue Foch would be in a rage-’Hey, that’s why the courier’s here,’ he said. ‘Oberg’s sent a love note to our friend ordering him to say nothing.’
Oberg was head of the SS in France, a former banana merchant, now with the power of life and death over everyone, themselves included.