He gave a nod and wrote: We’ve a suspect in another killing and must keep him some place safe for a little.
‘A little? Here? Are you crazy?’ she whispered urgently.
A bargain, he wrote. I bring information.
‘That’s not fair.’
He shrugged. He wrote: The SS over on the avenue Foch may want him. We have no other choice
No choice …
As chanteuse, Gabrielle Arcuri received 10 per cent of the take of this place, a fortune that would be of no use in her defence. None at all. Nor would her ‘friends’.
Tall and willowy, she was a good head taller than himself. A White Russian who had, as a girl named Natalya Kulakov-Myshkin, fled the Revolution in 1917, and arrived in Paris at the age of fourteen, having lost her family on the way. But she hadn’t done what most girls in such circumstances would have had to do. She had been a singer right from the start. A widow now, whose husband, a captain, had been badly wounded at Sedan during the invasion of 1940 and had died in the late summer of that year. She had a son, Rene Yvon-Paul, ten years of age. How was he? he wondered, and saw her in the stunning sky-blue sleeveless silk sheath that, with the scent, was her trade-mark. Thousands of tiny seed pearls in vertical rows from hem to diamond choker made the thing opalescent, shimmering and electric every time she strode on stage under the spotlights or stood, as now, under his scrutiny. Very aristocratic, very finely moulded, the nose aquiline, the brow and cheeks so smooth, the lips magnificent, the hair, the soft, soft shade of a very fine brandy and piled up in waves and curls.
She had the voice of a nightingale, was astute, clever and courageous if a trifle bold-had got the drop on him completely with an ancient fowling piece. It had taken place in an abandoned gristmill on a small island in the Loire near Vouvray, not far from the chateau of her husband’s family. She’d been a suspect then, and they had shared the simple meal of a crottin de chèvre, a small round of goat’s cheese, very strong in flavour, very dry and dusted with chopped dill and chives. A real treasure perhaps four weeks in the aging That and crusty bread and real coffee. All from her rucksack.
The Resistance had sent her one of the little black coffins they present to collaborators who have been marked for death. He, too, had received one and she had been trying ever since to clear his name.
There were scattered Resistance cells, tiny groups-two or three persons each, perhaps five at the most-he really did not know. Others, too, outside and working in and through Paris, chains of them, he thought. But making all aware of the truth about an individual was far too difficult and dangerous. He was still on several lists, still marked for death by some.
Finding another scrap of paper, he sat down and quickly wrote: Antoine Vernet, industrialist, accidentally revealed this during questioning. The Relève is definitely to become the Service de Travail Obligatoire next month. Lists are being drawn up naming those in each factory who are expendable and those who must remain. The selection will perhaps begin with students or simply all remaining young men of the ages 18 to 22, but eventually they will take all able-bodied males up to the ages of 45 to 55.
‘Ah no,’ she said and covered her mouth. Tears filled her eyes, which were not blue, as he had first thought, but a lovely shade of violet. Hermann’s Giselle had eyes of that same shade. Was it merely coincidence, he wondered sadly, or was God trying to tell them something? A warning perhaps? A last look before the Gestapo descended and swept her away.
Hermann was on very, very dangerous ground with this one.
She tried to kiss Jean-Louis, but he was still far too timid, still feeling the loss of his wife and little son and blaming himself for what had happened to them, though worried also about her. Ah yes. ‘We should have spent Christmas and New Year’s at the chateau as you said you would,’ she whispered, damning the microphones. ‘We may never get another chance.’
You know I wanted to but couldn’t. Will you see that the Rivards take care of our suspect? he wrote.
‘The cellars,’ she whispered, wishing they could be together in peace, if only for a moment. He needed that and so did she.
It was Hermann who brought the prisoner in from the court-yard. She objected to the lion. She refused to sing any more. ‘I quit,’ she seethed at Rémi Rivard, the mountain. ‘That thing stinks too much!’
Rivard pointed to the hidden microphones and shrugged before drawing a forefinger across his swarthy throat.
God knows what Gestapo Paris’s Listeners made of the exchange or of the lion’s greedy licking of the salty ersatz things Hermann had sprinkled on the floor near one of the microphones.
Rébé kept silent and, once on stage, the chanteuse clasped her hands before her with childlike innocence and, giving the crowd the warmth of her smile, said, ‘Mes chers amis, I have a little song for you of love-the love one feels right from the soul, yes? It is such a terrible longing, isn’t that correct? So intense, one wishes only to lie down in the soft, sweet clover of home and kiss the earth.’
She sang for them J’ai deux amours, ‘Two Loves Have I’, France and Paris, and followed it with Paris sera toujours Paris, ‘Paris Will Always Be Paris’.
A foolish, foolish gesture of defiance. Few seemed to notice anything out of place. Stolidly Germanic, they watched the stage, and when she sang Lili Marlene for them, there wasn’t a sound other than that of her voice. It filled the club and they were spellbound for the sound transcended all carnal thoughts. It took them right out of themselves and made them yearn desperately to pack up and go home.
‘Come on, Louis. We’ve got to find Hasse before he kills that child.’
‘Yes, yes, I understand.’
9
To drive through the city during the blackout was to have its map in mind at all times. One ticked off the major intersections, counted the streets, computed speed, distance and compass bearing, searching the memory always for landmarks, the darkness for their silhouettes. A blue-washed lamp whose bluing needed replenishment, another which had been done too much, the outline of a métro entrance, a roof, a sculpture, a mothballed fountain.
On the boulevard Raspail the vélo-taxis, those ridiculous bicycle contraptions, were like gulls migrating along a river of black ice and snow. In the faint pinpricks of the headlamps, and those of the autobus au gazogène and lorries, they showed up suddenly, their drivers frantically trying to get out of the way and not hit one another. Breath steamed in the fifteen degrees of frost. Their eyes were harried, desperate, their passengers laughing, making a great joke of it all or simply not caring as they kissed their girlfriends and tried to do other things beneath the heaps of throw rugs, old scraps of carpet, or blankets.
Hermann turned on to the boulevard Saint-Germain. They were making for the quais and the pont de l’Alma. Then it was straight north up the avenue George-V to the Lido, the Champs-Élysées and Number 78.
Hasse had been under psychiatric care for some time. There had been repeated visits to the escort service, weekends with a Mademoiselle Monique Reynard at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. A qualified psychotherapist, or so they had been told. Everything had been laid on by Oberg of the avenue Foch, the Butcher of Poland. ‘One has to learn to live again,’ Hasse had said, ‘that’s what they tell people like myself. Personally, I think it’s a waste of time.’ Of time …
No matter how hard St-Cyr tried not to think of it, the sketch of Nénette they had found in the Grande-Chaumière was seen in memory against those of Herr Hasse’s storeroom, sketches of naked schoolgirls whose screams the Attack Leader had once heard and still did.