‘The boy had disobeyed me. An example had to be set.’
‘And the mistake in the passage de l’Hirondelle? Hobnailed boots again, Colonel? Ach, don’t you French ever throw anything out, especially after all the wars you’ve been in? I couldn’t get rid of mine fast enough. Rage, Colonel, that’s what it suggests to me. Uncontrollable rage, just as with Max and Elene. A very troubled mind that was, and still is, very afraid of what Oberg really will do when he hears about everything you’ve been up to behind his back. The Cercle de l’Union Interaliee and an inner circle who advise you on which targets to use as examples, Hercule the Smasher being one of those advisors? Men who gladly fed you far more names than Denise Rouget or Germaine de Brisac could ever have provided. POW wives and fiancees who needed lessons those bastards then financed.’
It would do no good to even say it, but … ‘Please try to understand that we’re fighting a war on the home front. Prefet Talbotte is one of that inner circle.’
‘Heroes are you, to veterans and others who believe it’s right to punish such women? Then listen hard. You’re a fence sitter and we can prove it. You work for the SS nailing resistants and others they and Von Behr and the ERR want, but at the same time you’ve been covering your ass for later, when the Occupier has to go home. Garnering support from as many as you can while filling vacated residences with the objets d’art and other things of the deported? Cash from double and triple billing the clients, from the sale of wanted names and from contract killings-that’s what Elene was, Bob. Cash you then hide in real estate and probably gold and diamonds, even though it’s illegal for you or anyone else to buy and hold these last. Already you must have built yourself quite a bankroll.’
There would be no sense in trying to bribe Kohler. ‘Tell St-Cyr to join us.’
‘Not until you tell me what makes a man like that one tick.’
‘Jeannot? He discovered that the woman he adored and would have done anything for had betrayed him not once but several times.’
‘And you, Colonel? Did you discover what he’d done and then get him to work for you?’
‘Jeannot and myself are equal partners, fellow members, yes, of the Interaliee, which is where I first met him. This Occupation affords so many opportunities and now, of course, the Argentina he came to love and want to help to build is on the best of terms with the Reich******** and has agreed that, again, he can be accepted as a citizen, especially as he has sufficient capital to buy back and enlarge his ranches.’
‘Travel by submarine?’
‘Perhaps. Now tell St-Cyr to stop whatever he thinks he’s doing and join us.’
‘Me? You still haven’t got it, have you? Louis is the one who usually does all this wrap-up stuff and has a mind of his own.’
Would the cartridges be damp and useless? wondered St-Cyr. Would Jeannot Raymond’s reactions be too swift even then? Would the colonel shoot Hermann?
There was only one way of finding out. He looked at the Lebel in his hand, but to say to it, Don’t fail me again, seemed senseless. Hermann would still have wanted him to try. If not successful, at least he’d know that this partner and friend of his had made the attempt.
All the matches in the packet he’d brought from the car would be needed-merde, they were so hard to get. The black powder from two of the cartridges Hermann had okayed, but should have bitten first and wiggled, was added, as were paper token offerings whose loss the dead would not object to and joss sticks, the shoes and socks left to one side. Bare feet would be best. The rosewood planks in the floor had been lovingly honed and polished so that they glistened.
The four-legged turtle urn he had chosen was large enough to contain the fire and not burn the temple down. The matches flared, the powder took, the paper strips igniting as the joss began at once to burn.
Incense billowed up to be caught by the latest gust and carried to them, but would they be distracted by it, Hermann intuitively realizing what his partner was up to and becoming a part of it?
‘Bob, there’s my soldier,’ sang out Kohler. ‘He’s really missing Elene, Colonel. These what you’re after in my jacket pocket, Bob? The white, lace-trimmed pongee step-ins I used when I found her wedding ring?’
Eagerly Bob tugged at the briefs, pulling Delaroche off-balance. Joss smoke was everywhere …
Smashed in the forehead, the shot reverberating, Jeannot Raymond released his grip on the knife as he fell. ‘COLONEL, DON’T!’ yelled Louis.
Hermann leaped. The pistol was grabbed, wrenched away, Delaroche hit and hit hard with it until he, too, dropped, Bob looking puzzled now, the briefs dangling from his mouth, Suzette Dunand trying to steady herself.
‘Ah, bon,’ said Louis with a sigh. ‘It’s over, Hermann.’
‘Delaroche won’t sing and you know it.’
‘But will be asked to.’
‘Though not by us.’
* * *
Up through the woods, the sounds from the industrial suburb of Suresnes came to mark an end to the day. Wet through and cold, pneumonia was bound to set in. Louis handed him the cognac bottle. ‘It’s safe,’ he said, having downed a goodly measure and found no nicotine. How could he have been so sure?
‘I wasn’t,’ he confessed. ‘I just assumed it since the cork had been bunged home and leaded sixty-seven years ago.’
Below them, prudence had demanded that they leave the Citroen tucked in against the base of an oak that, for some reason shy;, hadn’t been logged, burned or sawn up for lumber in 1871. ‘The Prussians must have felt they needed its shade,’ Louis had mused. Those people had found the fort up there on Mont-Valerien shy; empty shy;. In that distant war, they hadn’t even had to shell that dismal pentagon of buttressed grey stonework at the end of this rutted, boulder- shy;strewn lane. On 29 January of that year they had marched in without a shot having been fired, the strongest of the seventeen such forts in the defence of Paris.
And now? Kohler had to ask and answer, Why now they’re back in it again.
‘Sixty-nine-and-a-half years later,’ said Louis drolly, having calculated it to the Defeat of June 1940. ‘He won’t wait for us, Hermann.’
It was still Sunday 14 February 1943 and they’d been run off their feet. Giselle had remembered Louis’s singing the praises of his friends on place Vendome and their shop, Enchantment, and had managed to reach it. Taken in by Muriel Barteaux, of Mirage perfume fame, and Chantal Grenier, her partner, both well into their seventies and lifelong companions, she’d been ‘assessed. Completement nue, my Hermann,’ and now was one of their lingerie mannequins. Good goods, very high class. ‘Another profession,’ she had said and given him a peck on the cheek. ‘Safer, too, I think, than keeping house for one who doesn’t need a housekeeper.’
As if she had ever done that. And Oona? he asked. Oona had found Adrienne Guillaumet, who had been moved to another floor in the Hotel-Dieu. She’d gone to tell Henri and Louisette that their dear maman would soon be rejoining them and that, for a little, she would need some help.
Oona would stay with her in the flat on the rue Saint-Dominique. A shy and hesitant touch on the arm, that’s all he’d been able to give her, she the same with him. A lingering last look? he wondered.
The boys had got safely away and would work on their respective farms until after the autumn harvest at least. The street would be lonely for Louis but then, he was hardly ever home and not likely to be in the near future.
They continued on up the hill. At least the rain had quit.
‘You forgot something, Hermann. The Ritz.’
And right next door to the shop Enchantment. Adrienne Guillaumet hadn’t been about to sell the use of her self but rather the Biedermeier furniture her husband treasured. They had negotiated the sale to the General Schiller from Baden-Baden. At least it wouldn’t be stolen, and she’d got a fair price, Reichskassenscheine, too, all of fifty thousand of them, a million francs. She would divorce the husband if the courts would let her, would leave him in any case and never wanted to see him again, was thinking of Spain and the Costa del Sol, of a seaside lodging house perhaps, but only because Oona had suggested it. Deauville had been an alternate, though for later, when this Occupation was over.