‘And Oona could be in any of those flats or houses, Louis.’
‘Ah, oui, oui, but isn’t it more likely that she has to be held somewhere that is absolutely secure and where no one, no concierge no matter how much in the pay or how loyal to the cause, will question her having been brought there or say anything of it later?’
‘The Levitan furniture store in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin is huge. There’ll be guards and not just a few of them, dogs, too.’
And 0900 hours at the Chinese gate would come soon enough and couldn’t be missed.
Birdcages, dishes, pots, pans, sheets, beds, blankets, furniture of all kinds … ‘Clocks, Louis. Jesus, merde alors, look at them!’
They went tick-tock, tick-tock, rang if off the hour or were silent, but didn’t just line the many aisles in regiments. Categorized, sorted as to species, they were stacked on shelves to the once white-painted, embossed tin-plate sheathing of a ceiling that fell to pseudo-Louis XIV plaster cornices before descending to a floor whose stained tongue-and-groove was store-worn.
‘Philippe had needed a crib,’ Louis had said as they’d sat a moment in the car-it had just been one of those dumb things a partner would say before taking the plunge, any plunge into the unknown. ‘Marianne wanted me to make the choice for her, but I had to work, so I made her take care of it.’
Had Louis the sudden need to get it all off his chest? That boy, that little son of his, had grown and had then to have a bed, a chest of drawers and, perhaps, if the money could be found, a little table and chair of his own. Always there had been money problems, the wages for defying death next to nothing, just like in the army. ‘But again she wouldn’t choose them herself, Hermann. That wouldn’t have been right of her, she had felt, like so many of our women, and had insisted that, as “head of the household” I must make that decision for her.’
This war, this Occupation, had made a lot of them change their minds about that and change them quickly. Louis had ordered the stuff from the Levitan, spring of 1940, but would the memories and the loss of that second wife and their little boy haunt him to his dying day?
They had entered the Levitan through a door next to the loading docks, had smelled the rank soot from the Gare de l’Est and heard its locomotives beyond the usual high wire fence all such places were supposed to have. There’d not been a light anywhere out there in the darkness of that railway yard and but a stone’s throw away, nor had there been anyone on that door, the place apparently wide open yet that couldn’t be, but they’d gone up the stairs anyway so as to keep out of sight.
Kitchen stoves were also on this third floor and Kohler had to wonder at the logic of this since most were of cast iron and heavy. Sinks, washbasins, bathtubs, bidets, mirrored medicine cabinets and toilets were here, too, as were iceboxes and tennis rackets, ironing boards, steamer trunks and suitcases still with their travel stickers, ladies’ hats, fur coats, dresses, suits, corsets …
‘Candlesticks,’ breathed Louis. ‘God has deserted us, Hermann. There are thousands of them.’
The escalators, installed in the thirties but now frozen in time to save power, were to be used simply as staircases of another kind. ‘Oona, if she’s here, must be in the cellars.’
Lamps were on the fourth floor and seen to the horizon’s walls, wireless set, too, and gramophones with heaps of black Bakelite recordings.
‘Mendelssohn,’ breathed Louis. ‘The Violin Concerto-it’s magnificent. A Deutsche Grammophon. Nothing but the finest.’
Though Mendelssohn was a definite no-no at home and even here in France.
Sheet music, tied in half-metre-thick bundles, made its ramparts but there were no pianos. Those had been taken by the Sonderstab Musik and were stored elsewhere in three large warehouses just to the north of the city. Numbered, certainly-how the hell else were they to have kept track of them, seeing as their legs, bearing those same numbers, had been removed to make the carcasses easier to ship?
But there were piano benches, delivered here by mistake. A teenager’s note, when found, said only, and in her native Deutsch:
Herr Kaufmann, if we are to meet in secret even for coffee and the cakes you love so much, my father would never forgive me. You would then be out of a necessary employment and would, in addition to your extremely modest fee, no longer receive the generous tips that are his great pleasure to present to you when such progress has been deemed entirely evident, even to ears that cannot, and never could, to my knowledge, hold a tune or keep the voice on key, due entirely, it must be admitted, to the noises of the foundry he owns and tirelessly manages so that my younger sister and myself may experience the finer things of life from such a talented instructor as your kind and diligent self.
A mouthful.
‘Let’s go downstairs, Hermann. Maybe they’re waiting for us there.’
Clothing racks held men’s suits. Shoes, sorted from their mountains, were piled on shelves. Some had even been polished.
Lists of the contents of each house or flat would have been made, sometimes by the owners if time allowed, most often by the ERR with Germanic thoroughness though done most likely by a French employee and overseer, since virtually all of the Aktion-M boys were locals, and sure, they had needed the jobs just like Max Auger.
Jewellery, china, books-whole libraries of them-desks, family photos by the spill and heap, were accompanied by military decorations, and why hadn’t Colonel Delaroche simply taken a Legion d’honneur ribbon from here? Too Jewish, too tainted, or simply, unlike Max, goods that had best not be taken unless paid for, even if only a little and especially as one had a hold on a fellow veteran who would have had to agree to letting him have the use of his own?
Personal things even letters and tax records, the lot had been gathered. First the fist or truncheons at the door, then the arrest and the stick-on seals to tidy things unless the neighbours were able to dash in and grab whatever they could, but this would have happened anywhere, Kohler knew. The Netherlands was still seeing it, Poland too, even the Channel Islands. Wherever people were arrested and deported.
‘Legalized, officially sanctioned robbery, Hermann.’
‘And then murder, Louis. We both know those “work camps” they’re being sent to aren’t just for work.’
Once sorted, catalogued, cleaned and repaired if necessary, the loot would be packed up and either sent to the Reich and the Eastern Territories, or to another depot for later transhipment.
Deliberately they had avoided the ground floor, had chosen instead to make the briefest of reconnaissances up here first. Seen from the head of one of the escalators, though, the ground floor had its riches-billions of francs worth of loot. Aghast at the display, Kohler hesitated. Savonnerie and Aubusson carpets were spread out, Turkish ones, too, and Persian. Tapestries-Flemish, Beauvais and Aubusson-were there, paintings … family portraits by the look, hundreds and hundreds of them on the floor, piled and leaning against each other while above them hung the richly carved, water-gilded empty frames of still others whose subjects had been cut away and trashed-they must have been-even those dating back a century or two or three.
‘Louis …’ he managed.
‘Hermann,’ came the reply.
Descending a few more steps, he again paused. There were aisles and aisles, a maze in which the contents of the grandes salles and salons of chateaux, maisons de maitre, hotels particuliers and appartements had been emptied and some of them hastily reassembled, though totally depopulated. Among the contents there were gorgeous bouquets and splashes of flowers that, even when seen from such a distance, still took the breath away. ‘Henri Fantin-Latour, Hermann. Pierre-Joseph Redoute …’