And was gone. No sound. No scream.
Louis cautioned his partner. ‘Stay away, idiot! You’ve Giselle and Oona to look after. Me, I am alone but for Gabrielle. Say goodbye for me. My shoes, they aren’t up to this. My hands, they are freezing.’
He had pulled off his gloves and had thrown them away.
Madly the torch beam danced over him as he clawed his way back up to the crown of the roof. Then, balancing again, he stubbornly went on.
‘She’s gone across the next roof,’ he shouted, having climbed the wall. ‘She’s left a skylight open in her haste and is safe.’
Back in the house on the rue Chabanais the lights had come on, and they knew the SS major had been the one to switch them off.
He was standing on the ground floor next the body. He was grinning up at them.
‘Hasse, Louis. The escort service,’ cursed Kohler. ‘Debauve must have found things out about him the SS now know. They must believe the Attack Leader is the Sandman.’
‘Perhaps but then … ah mais alors, alors …’
‘Save it. We haven’t time.’
There were no lights at all in the impasse Maubert where the SS-Attack Leader had his atelier. Come to think of it, there hadn’t been any at all on the Left Bank. The houses on either side of that narrow slot crowded closely. The one at the far end showed only the dark silhouette of its roof-top against the night sky of stars.
They paused. They did not like the situation at all. They had to find Nénette Vernet but feared they were too late.
The Daimler wasn’t there, the entrance to the house was locked. All window grilles were bolted solidly.
When they rang the bell, they had to wait, and the sound of it, escaping into the impasse, was overly loud. ‘Ah merde, Louis, why does that God of yours have to do this to us?’
God had nothing to do with it, and Hermann knew as much. ‘Maybe He’s trying to tell us something about the SS.’
‘As if we didn’t already know enough! Verdammt, where the hell is the piss-assed concierge?’
He rang the bell again, yanking so fiercely on its chain the damned thing snapped, and for some reason the bell-stop jammed and the bell rang and rang until its ancient spring finally tired itself out.
At last the thing shut up. Sometime later a bolt was slid back, another and another.
From the darkness, a voice said, ‘He’s not here. He has gone to his lesson.’
They moved aside. They shone their torches into the concierge’s face, causing him to blink and yelp and duck away in fear. Kohler towered over him. St-Cyr simply said, ‘Take us up to his rooms. Open the flat and wait in the corridor. We haven’t time for magistrate’s orders. Not now, so do not bother to ask.’
‘The … the electricity in this quartier has been off for some time, messieurs. There … there are no lights.’
The SS again.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ breathed Kohler. ‘We’re getting used to the dark. Now move.’
‘A child of eleven,’ hazarded St-Cyr as they went up the stairs. ‘Has he been keeping her here?’
‘How should I know? I don’t live in the front of the house but in the cellars. I can’t watch everyone.’
‘Yet you knew he had gone to his lesson.’
‘Because I had heard the car start up and every Tuesday night he takes the life-drawing class at the Grande-Chaumière.’
‘And afterwards,’ asked Kohler, ‘where does he go?’
‘To be with the older ones, les filles de joie perhaps. One does not ask of such as him. One only tries not to notice.’
‘How many schoolgirls has he had visit him up there?’
‘Lots. This I do know. He pays them. He tempts them. Most are from the streets and so poor he can do what he wants with them.’
‘Merci, that is just what we needed to hear,’ said the Sûreté grimly. ‘Please wait for us. We will close the door but will not be long.’
‘You won’t touch a thing, will you?’
‘Ah, don’t be silly. We will only touch what is necessary.’
As before, the place was pungent with turpentine and oil paints and cluttered with canvases, but it was to the storeroom they went, not to the studio.
On canvas after canvas there were schoolgirls, most with their hair in braids but few with smiles, for here most had been captured, here most had been terrified.
‘Louis, take a look at this.’
By the tone of voice, Hermann had betrayed his sorrow. The beam of his torch faltered. He shook the thing and it came on a little stronger.
In the paintings, in corpse after corpse, schoolgirls of perhaps eleven to fifteen or sixteen years of age lay about the floor of a gymnasium. All naked, all lying there, just lying there.
Trapped … they’d been herded in and forced to strip and their screams, their cries rose up from the paintings as one.
They shut their eyes. They switched off their torches. It was Hermann who, breathing in deeply, said, ‘Ah, Gott im Himmel, Louis, it has to be him.’
How many had been violated only then to be shot down and silenced forever except for this? In painting after painting Hasse had recorded their demise, the triumph of war unleashed on children. All girls.
‘Let’s go and pick him up.’
‘Oberg isn’t going to like it,’ said the Sûreté.
‘That can’t be helped.’
The cat was at its saucer of milk. A tin of sardines had been emptied for it into another saucer, enough to feed a child and keep it alive for a week at least.
When the creature left its supper to find a radiator near the front windows, they saw it licking something and then playfully pawing at it and licking its claws.
A black cat with mucus-clotted sea-green eyes. A mangy, torn-eared thing.
‘Chewing gum,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Louis, it hasn’t been here long.’
There was a packet of the stuff on the cluttered coffee table among the jars of paintbrushes soaking in turpentine or standing upright and ready. ‘Banana,’ he said, reading the ersatz flavour, one of so many that had been concocted and mixed with saccharin to tempt the taste buds of a defeated nation and keep the memory or the hope of better times alive.
In a land of approximate jam, mystery meat and non-alcoholic near-wine, port or Pernod, flavour was seldom totally captured, only reinvented, but kids would chew on this stuff anyway, especially if offered it and they wanted to calm their nerves. Ah yes.
‘She sat in this chair, Louis. There are dried oak leaves on the cushions.’
So there were, and some had all but been crumbled to dust while others still held their shape. Had they worked their way out of the coat lining they had stuffed? Had they come from a bouquet Hasse had set near his easel, upon which sat the unfinished sketch of Andrée Noireau and Nénette?
‘Hasse has used the leaves as models for those the girls are kicking in their three-legged race,’ said Louis. ‘They may not be from the child’s coat, Hermann. Indeed, I don’t think they are, but perhaps he has held a few as he thought about those girls before crumbling them to dust’
‘Then how about this, eh?’ demanded Kohler harshly. He held out a child’s tooth-brush, its bristles well-worn and all but flattened. The torchlight shone on it.
Louis took the thing from him and read the name the manufacturer had given it.’ “The Little Princess, fabricated in Lodz.” The Blitzkrieg in the East, September of thirty-nine. Ah merde …’
Nénette could have bought it on the black market, but that didn’t seem likely even though the whole of Occupied Europe was awash with the debris of war. More likely Hasse had found it for her and she had forgotten to take it with her, or he had simply had it out to remind himself of what had happened in the gymnasium.