The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  ‘Thank you,’ she managed to say and produced her own handkerchief, wiping her face. ‘I think I’m all right now.’ If this had happened near any of her haunts in Paris, she who retained much of her American fastidiousness would have died of shame and had herself sent back to Providence in a box. The man looked at her; he understood. ‘On vit mal, eh?’ he said. Life’s hard.

  She wobbled a few steps, but free of the noxious ragoût, she felt much better. Her body suddenly filled with energy and she arrived at the rendezvous spot across the Place Royale. Five minutes to spare. The Nazi flags, limp on their staffs above the Hôtel de France, filled her with even more determination.

  She’d expected the town to swarm with police by now, to see cars rush past her like they did in the movies. Thus far, the place was Sunday-morning quiet, apart from the church bells. She’d been too self-absorbed to notice if the day was favourable for their escape. Now she saw the mountains snow-capped and registered the clear blue sky and, fleetingly, how beautiful the world was. But she was not someone given to omens.

  Where was he?

  She waited until nearly ten past ten, the longest minutes of her life. Had he been taken? She blew that terrible thought away. She couldn’t countenance losing him, not now.

  Then she saw two cars drive right past her, at speed, two of those cars whose profile and shape ever after would chill her to the marrow. They wouldn’t have far to go if they were the police or the Gestapo, just down the hill. Where the hell was he? She was furious as well as worried sick. Five minutes to the rendezvous at the bookshop. She wasn’t ready for despair, on the contrary. Her old irritations and resentments rumbled to the surface like a volcano erupting and propelled her along the street. She was fearful of one of those cars pulling up sharply at the kerb, doors bursting open and those men in coats and hats racing out to grab her.

  She took off.

  By the post office, the parfumerie on the corner over the road, then down the next corner a matter of metres, the bookshop.

  Five minutes late.

  She entered, breathless. He wasn’t there. She went to retrace her steps. The bookseller immediately beckoned Eleanor to follow her through a door into a storeroom at the back of the shop, where two young men waited. That’s all Eleanor needed, more young men with their sullen silence.

  ‘Where is he?’ the bookseller asked the obvious.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eleanor confessed. She’d told him about the bookshop, given directions, but really, that was a waste of time.

  ‘We cannot wait,’ said the bookseller. ‘Something’s happened this morning. The police and the gendarmes are out. Are you coming or not?’

  Eleanor dithered.

  ‘Make up your mind,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Eleanor. Greater love hath no man, yes, but what could she do? She had given him francs and some dollars. She had no idea why he wasn’t at the rendezvous. She didn’t believe he’d been picked up; he was just too clever to be caught, and the police would be too busy attending to her recent handiwork. She was angry with him about everything and at herself for her infatuation. Her mood was so mercurial, her darling was again that little shit who had been nothing but trouble. What happened between them was just ships in the night, a look, a voice, then darkness and silence.

  So she told herself, but she knew she was lying.

  The bookseller pushed Eleanor out. Behind her, the door shut. The two young men were boarding a delivery van through the doors at the rear. The motor was already running; a driver sat at the wheel. Eleanor was the last to board. The bookseller herself went to shut the door.

  ‘No!’ Eleanor cried out. ‘Please, can we drive along the boulevard, just in case?’ she begged.

  The woman gave Eleanor a hard, cold look and said, ‘What we women do for love, eh?’

  Eleanor heard her get into the front seat; the van moved along a laneway and onto the street. Inside was airless, though light came in through tiny round windows in the rear doors. She pressed herself to the glass but could not tell where the van was going until, yes, it turned and she saw the snowy peaks of the Pyrénées to the south. They were trawling slowly along the boulevard. If will had anything to do with it, she would have conjured him up out of that crack in the footpath he always seemed to hide in, but even her will wasn’t strong enough.

  ‘You must forget him, madame,’ the bookseller said through the curtain separating the cabin from the rear of the van. It was sound advice, woman to woman, kind and practical. The bookseller understood, but really, Eleanor thought, she didn’t understand at all.

  The van turned down a street away from the boulevard. Eleanor sat back on the wooden bench. One of the men was sitting there now. Opposite her sat the other, and he grinned at her.

  ‘What’s so funny, fella?’ she snapped. They looked away, leaving her to her unhappy thoughts.

  HÔTEL COSMOPOLITAN, PAU

  Towards 10am, Sunday, 14th December 1941

  Bauer had been up early, going through reports in the communications room for possible news, but had found nothing detailed about the British attacks in North Africa or the troubles outside Moscow, no cable to him about his missing son. Since then he had been on the telephone, making sure the border around the Col de Somport was secure. The snow report was heavy on the peaks but only light on the passes. Still walkable for the sturdy if they had local guides. French Customs had the photograph of Pohl; the commandant of the German troops at Orthez had his men on patrols along the walking tracks and passes. The railway station in Pau was under close watch; the Spanish were watching at Canfranc.

  He remembered Lieutenant Wolf, whose case he’d had to put to one side. The fellow was asleep in one of the hotel rooms.

  Except he wasn’t, as Kopitcke now informed him. He had left sometime in the early hours, telling the night watch he was returning to his own hotel.

  ‘What the hell’s the fellow thinking?’ Bauer exclaimed in frustration. ‘The Gestapo probably have him again.’ He was about to call the hotel when came the thunderclap, in a call from Inspector St Jean.

  The concierge at the hotel they’d visited the night before had been stabbed to death. St Jean ordered him to drop whatever he was doing and appear as soon as possible.

  The time was ten to ten.

  Bauer had a different driver, as Mascaro had more important duties to fulfil. His car stopped near the laneway that ran down to the hotel, where other police cars were parked outside. It was odd, Bauer remarked to Kopitcke, no crowd. A murder always attracted a crowd, but not here, not today.

  St Jean was inside Eleanor’s attic room. The body of the concierge lay on its back where Eleanor had dragged it, a knife thrust deep into her upper abdomen. Photographs had been taken, samples collected. He was highly exercised; his fury about a murder on his turf was narrowly focused.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ he said to Bauer. ‘French, a good Catholic and a knife in her belly.’

  ‘How long’s she been dead?’ Bauer asked as he bent closer to the corpse. ‘This looks freshly done.’

  ‘An hour or so,’ St Jean confirmed.

  ‘It’s a Wehrmacht field knife,’ Bauer said immediately, ‘the same sort that killed our two soldiers.’ He looked up at St Jean with a smile. ‘Our murderer has left bloody fingerprints all over the hilt.’

  He stood. ‘Ah, look,’ he said, pointing to the bloodied water in the basin. ‘Pontius Pilate washes his hands.’

  ‘Remove the knife,’ St Jean ordered. ‘Carefully now. I need those fingerprints as quickly as possible.’

  Which was when Kopitcke’s sudden sneezing and streaming nose uncovered the presence of a cat.

  ‘Ach,’ Bauer said. ‘It is him. Pohl.’ He’d expected it, given the knife. Now he had proof.

  He said this with immense satisfaction, because now he would have the entire resources of the local police and gendarmerie to help him.

  ‘The dogs are on their way,’ St Jean said. ‘He won’t get fa
r. I have ordered patrols out.’

  The knife now safely removed and taken for examination, the ambulance porters were able to take the body. Bauer took one last look. Classic knife play, he could see, getting the victim to walk onto your knife.

  Bauer looked around the room. He reported his and Mascaro’s encounter with the woman the night before; how, when pressed, she’d started to abuse Marshal Pétain and the German occupation. Now, only now, he understood the canny old dame had been sending up smoke. Why exactly? he wondered.

  St Jean told him the Spanish houseboy had turned up for work at around nine-thirty. His boss wasn’t in her room. He went looking for her, eventually finding the fresh blood on the landing outside the attic room. He raised the alarm. Within fifteen to twenty minutes, the hotel was empty, every guest fled. Heavy belongings were left, doors remained open, soap on the table.

  ‘The Mary Celeste again,’ said Bauer, peering at the two beds. ‘Only one slept in last night,’ he noted.

  ‘Let’s talk to the boy,’ said St Jean.

  They went down to the vestibule, where he was waiting.

  And so it came out. Dumas’s guests were all Jewish refugees, each of whom she was blackmailing with threats of being given over to the Gestapo.

  ‘How do you know this?’ St Jean demanded. The kid was Spanish, parents communists, how could he trust him?

  Unknown to the concierge, her Spanish boy, to whom she spoke in a childish creole as if he were a two-year-old and whom she paid meanly, spoke and understood French perfectly. He knew everything she did.

  ‘She was running a protection racket, the old goat,’ Bauer remarked, ‘but she tried it on someone who had a knife and who used it.’

  St Jean looked through the register. The boy showed him another register. She’d kept two.

  ‘One false, which she showed you last night,’ he explained to Bauer, ‘and one true, which she used to threaten them. Pay up or the Gestapo will see this.’

  Bauer looked closely at the real register. There was the name of the occupant of the attic room, arriving Friday evening, Madame Roget, Toulouse, and her identification card number. ‘That’ll be fake,’ he said, ‘but the other names all have the ring of truth, German and Austrian Jews, poor stupid mutts.’

  The boy, whose powers of observation were quite nuanced, gave them a good description of the woman. Her hair was auburn, not brown, nor were her eyes, which were green.

  ‘Like a cat’s.’

  Bauer looked at his watch. Ten-fifteen. The dogs had arrived and bounded excitedly up the stairs. Given the sheets on the rumpled bed for a scent, they went delirious with excitement. Bauer smiled.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said to Kopitcke’s embarrassment. ‘See, Kopitcke? Sex is indelible.’

  Once outside on the street, however, the dogs fell into confusion. Three dogs pulled their handlers up the laneway and two others, just as determined, along the path that led to the chateau. The culprits had split up.

  Bauer detailed Kopitcke to follow the chateau trail while he went up the laneway. St Jean was above such histrionics and returned to his office to direct his forces. He couldn’t ignore this. Crooked she might have been, but a French citizen had been murdered, it seemed, by a German deserter who, worse, was a Jew.

  BOULEVARD DES PYRÉNÉES TO RUE LAMOTHE, PAU

  10.45am, Sunday, 14th December 1941

  Bauer’s dog team and handlers took him along a direct course, first to the boulevard opposite the Hôtel de France, thence to a bookshop, which was closed.

  The police forced it open. The dogs burst in, then through the open door to the storeroom, then to the back lane, where the trail went cold.

  ‘They’ve driven from here,’ said Bauer. It was ten-fifty, no more than two hours after the woman had been stabbed. How far could you get in two hours driving south? he asked the French dog handlers.

  At best, they could be nearing the customs post at Col du Somport, he was told. ‘Close it,’ Bauer ordered only to be told that St Jean already had. The Aspe Valley was a funnel to the Somport pass; there wasn’t any other way through to Spain unless you went into the higher passes, which was hardly likely, especially in winter, and not possible by car.

  He needed to know how Kopitcke was faring. A radio call tracked him down to the boulevard, where the dogs had lost the trail, exhausted and confused.

  Bauer assumed, unless otherwise proven, that she, the one with money, had gone to the bookshop and then to the boulevard by car, where they’d picked up Pohl. What explanation could there be for the other trail running out?

  St Jean arrived at the bookshop within minutes.

  ‘Hah,’ he exclaimed to Bauer. What followed was a rant about the bookshop owner who was known to the police for selling a notorious board game that was won by the gangsters escaping the police. ‘We got her into court, she batted her eyelashes and was so contrite, the judge almost apologised for inconveniencing her.’ He wouldn’t be surprised if the duplicitous minx wasn’t selling depraved literature as well.

  Then, grist to his mill, in came information, radioed to his car. She had a permit for a delivery van.

  ‘In the name of the Father, how did she get the gasoline?’ St Jean raged. ‘She’s using it to ferry escapees.’ He sent out specific instructions to bring her in.

  ‘Even if you have to drag her out of the confessional,’ he added, highly unlikely for someone who had to be an atheist, but it sounded good. ‘Your birds have gone to ground,’ he said to Bauer. ‘You should be after them.’

  ‘They’re your birds too, inspector,’ Bauer said slyly.

  ‘Indeed,’ said St Jean. ‘Let’s go and flush them out, eh?’

  A FARM, FIVE KILOMETRES SOUTH OF PAU

  Towards midday, Sunday, 14th December 1941

  Eleanor and her two companions sat sullen and silent. The van was going south as fast as it could safely go along these back roads. She and the young man at her side were constantly thrown together as they followed a road that soon was as winding as it was hilly. She didn’t look out through the portholes once. She had failed again, this second time much more painful than the first, and retreated into a passive indifference to her fate. If they were stopped and she was arrested, it would be a relief.

  They left the roadway and bumped up a track to a farmhouse on a rise, which looked south to the snowy peaks. Above, the sky was vast and infinite and icily blue. It was the sort of day and view that in normal times always caused Eleanor to feel her humility before the Almighty and called to her spirit, but that now, in her misery, she ignored. She stared listlessly down at her shabby boots.

  The bookseller emerged from the house with two young men. Eleanor imagined one to be Henk. Ridiculous, but she and logic were currently strangers. She ran across, only to see she’d deluded herself. They were as surprised to see her as she was disappointed that neither was Henk.

  ‘Who’s she?’ one demanded.

  ‘You know better than to ask questions,’ said the bookseller brusquely. Plans had changed, she explained. She ordered the two young men she had driven from Pau to go inside and shave, and be quick about it. She’d explain why when they were done. They could use the farmer’s shaving brush and blades.

  ‘Listen carefully,’ she said gravely on their return. The place was suddenly hot. She didn’t know why, but the French police were setting up roadblocks around towns south to the Col de Somport.

  ‘Looking for us?’ one of the young men asked, which elicited almost a smack in the mouth from his companion. ‘Can’t you keep your bloody mouth shut?’

  The bookseller said if he didn’t, he’d be dead, by the hand of either the gendarmes, the Germans or his companions. ‘Or mine,’ she added. Something in her eye caught the cocky miscreant and he shrank before her.

  They needed to detour. Their next stop would be on the Way of St James, the pilgrims’ trail to Santiago in Spain from Arles via the Somport Pass. They would join it where it ran towards Oloron from Lourdes. Today being
Gaudete Sunday, pilgrims were walking the Way, some having come from Lourdes the day before yesterday. There was to be a special Gaudete Mass in Oloron tonight.

  ‘You will join them. The less you look like who you are, the better. You walk with them, you eat with them, you go to Mass with them later, and you spend the night with them at Oloron. Tomorrow you return to Lourdes by train, except you don’t. Is that clear?’

  No one dissented. Eleanor had picked up the gist and left it at that.

  ‘You should know the “Lourdes Hymn” or at least the chorus. Pilgrims don’t gossip or talk along the Way.’

  ‘What happens after?’ one asked.

  ‘You’ll be contacted in Oloron by someone.’

  ‘What about her?’ one of the young men asked, pointing rudely at Eleanor.

  ‘She goes with you,’ said the bookseller. ‘Now get in. We’ll be late.’

  This produced an explosion of protest. She was a woman, how could she cross the passes, she’d endanger their whole escape, they’d tell de Gaulle about this if they ever reached London, and so it went, explaining to Eleanor exactly what was really going on. It dragged her out of her lethargy.

  ‘I’m an American, buster,’ she said defiantly. ‘You pansies wouldn’t know a real winter if it bit you. And just in case you don’t know, it’ll be America who’ll save your sorry souls from Hitler. Understand?’

  There was nothing like her dander to get Eleanor going. They’d no more get rid of her than they would their hands from their arms. She asked no favours of anyone, she told them. If she fell behind, which she wouldn’t, she’d die, her funeral, but she would follow them to hell if she had to, and there was nothing they could do about it.