A woman’s compact had lain under the loosened floorboards beneath the straw mattress Antoine used, a file for the fingernails, too, and a lipstick. A Kleiderkarte also, a clothing card and a half-empty packet of cigarettes-Kamels from Berlin, stale but kept as a treasured memento. A matchbox from the Kakadu, on the Kurfurtsendamm, a club or bar. A room key, ah, oui, oui, from the Hotel-Pension am Steinplatz and a liaison sexuelle, the torn half of a ticket to the UFA Palast, a cinema and hands up this girl’s skirt, eh? The silver cigarette case of a virtue lost had been inscribed with the words of all such men. Though she could neither speak nor read the language, she knew they would say, To Sonja with undying love, Erich, 3 March 1940, and just before the invasion of Norway.
Four hundred of the Occupation marks had lain beneath that cigarette case, a further two hundred of the Reichsmark. ‘And seven hundred new francs, all in one-hundreds.’
If taken and spent, the money would only draw attention to the family. Some would think it pay for watching that house for a repeat of the bomb laying. Oh for sure, stealing from the Boche was not the same as stealing from one’s own people and Antoine could, perhaps, be forgiven were the penalties not so severe. His two brothers and his father would be sent into forced labour, herself and Antoine and her girls, his two sisters into … But how had her little Antoine come by these things? His share of the loot-was that it? One quarter!
Grey and glued, a crumpled condom had lain alongside the death notice of this Erich Straub, this young man from Berlin who had used it with his Sonja.
‘And then,’ she said with finality, ‘there was this.’
Unfolding a torn page from last Friday’s Paris-Soir, she read again yet another of the advertisements Herr Kohler placed each week, as did countless others still, and even though he had not been in Paris to receive an answer.
Reward of 200,000 francs will be paid for information leading to the safe return of Johan Van der Lynn, now age eight-and-a-half, and his sister Anna, now age six-and-a-half, son and daughter of Martin and Oona from Rotterdam. Lost to the east of Doullens on the road from Arras, 16 May 1940. Apply Box 1374.
Lost during the Exodus when ten million from the Lowlands and northern France had fled the blitzkrieg to clog the roads until machine-gunned to clear them for the panzers, but why had this Sonja had it in her handbag, or had she? Had Antoine hidden it here earlier, and for what reason, please?
Fool that he was, Herr Kohler wouldn’t let this Madame Oona Van der Lynn lose hope, nor would he get rid of her. She was forty years of age, couldn’t have good papers and had lost her husband in December to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. A Jew, people whispered, her children only the halves, though such things really shouldn’t matter and certainly wouldn’t to a Stuka or Messerschmitt.
Herr Kohler had taken the woman in during another investigation, that of a carousel in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, and wasn’t this why the boys loved to go to that park? And yes, yes, he had a younger one and lived with both when in Paris, sleeping with each but in turns as everyone said, herself most especially. ‘May God forgive me.’
Giselle le Roy was twenty-two years old and very attractive, though beauty like that would quickly fade and men ought to know this. Half-Greek, half-French and from the Midi, the girl was also from the House of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton, though she didn’t work in that business anymore. ‘The Lupanar des Oiseaux Blancs!’ she said aloud, was filled with hateful thoughts of such ‘submissive girls,’ as the flics were fond of calling them. The brothel of the white birds. ‘Fornicatrices!’ she said. ‘Leeches who take money that is desperately needed by the families of the men they service!
‘Men!’ she spat. ‘They give you the clap and the chancres because they’ve been careless and horny. “Seized by the moment,” eh? “Unable to control themselves?” ’
For the married ones, the occasional lapse was considered both natural and at times necessary and healthful; for the married woman, the gravest of sins and punishable by prison and a fine of from five to twenty thousand francs. Adultery was, it had to be said, a two-faced affair when viewed by the State whose laws were, of course, entirely set by men. Women could, and occasionally did, have husbands arrested but far from being severe, the courts were always lenient. Boys will be boys.
But would these sadists everyone worried about find interest in the advertisement and answer it? If so, those two women of Herr Kohler’s would come no more to stand in the street and stare at that house of his partner and friend.
As that one’s new girlfriend had done, the wife and little son not dead even three months-Marianne and Philippe St-Cyr-and oh for sure war and this Occupation speeded up such things, ‘But honour to a dead wife is honour to one’s life, chastity the bankroll of memory and Heaven’s cash on deposit.’
Kohler winced when he saw the Trinite victim in the Hotel-Dieu. It wasn’t that her nose had been broken, or that the once smooth brow had been repeatedly slammed against the back of the velo-taxi’s seat. It wasn’t even that her throat had been clenched so tightly there were plum-purple bruises or that, early on in the attack, she had been struck repeatedly.
It was the look in her bruised and deep brown eyes. He’d seen it before-Louis had, too, though he was busy elsewhere.
She was going to kill herself. The disgrace, the neighbourhood gossip, the threat of venereal disease or worse, that of an unwanted child. The shame. The husband a POW in the Reich.
Out of the fug of all such hospital rooms, the hesitant voice of the interne who’d been delegated to deal with him started up only to hesitate. Though absolutely nothing would be made of it, he had to wonder if the boy was but one among the many from all walks of life with false papers, a false military discharge circa 1939 or early 1940, or simply suspected of having these?
Such was the undercurrent of bitterness that even battle-hardened veterans from the 1914-1918 war had banded together to demand that only those who had actually fought in this one should be considered as veterans. Not the million or half- shy;million or whatever who, through no fault of their own, had seen no fighting at all but had simply been overrun and rounded up along with those who had actually fought during the blitzkrieg.
‘The left shoulder and wrist, Inspector …’ began Dr. Paul-Emile Mailloux. ‘They are badly sprained but fortunately not broken. He must have wrenched the arm behind her back as he … Well, you know.’
If the Trinite victim thought anything of this, she gave no indication.
‘Scratches?’ asked Kohler.
‘Of course, but mainly between the shoulders and on the buttocks and hips. The assailant tore a fingernail. We found it lodged in …’