Fuses that would have been a stiff hand span in length, with thumb-sized copper contact bars protruding at each end and umpteen volts, were not easily pulled, especially if in darkness and haste.
‘And yet they have been,’ breathed Helmut Meyer.
‘Lagerfeldwebel,’ came the oft-excitable voice of Grenadier Willi Keppler. ‘There are no spares. They were always kept on top of the box but are no longer here.’
Keppler was the youngest of the men—barely nineteen—and eager, yet requiring almost constant attention. Meyer looked back along the corridor past the boy and then at the prisoners who were waiting. Schmeissers were being trained on them by Bochmann and Ullrich, so that was good, since those two, in their late forties but still looking like grandfathers, were the most able and could, one hoped, be entrusted with such reissued weapons.
Krass, having found his Mauser rifle, had fixed its bayonet in place and was standing at the ready next to the cell’s gate. That, too, was as it should be, though Krass was still far from being 100 percent. Russia had done things to each of them.
Steam billowed from the canteen trolley whose cook had carefully set his ladle aside to take up one of the long-bladed knives. Flavien Garnier and Hubert Quevillon were standing very still, the latter no longer amused but afraid he was about to be taken to task for what he’d done to the Dutch woman the two of them had brought in earlier.
‘Put the people back in the lock-up,’ Meyer heard himself calling out.
‘It’s the one we had you put in that cage,’ said Garnier, his voice carrying on the damp, cold air. ‘Kohler and St-Cyr have come for her.’
Had Garnier not liked his use of ‘people’ for the Juden? wondered Meyer. ‘Then take her out and give her to them.’
‘Ach, Lagerfeldwebel, we can’t do that,’ objected Garnier. ‘The Höherer SS …’
‘Orders are orders, my friend. Yours, mine, those of others. Sometimes they conflict and this is one of those times, since I have received none and merely agreed to your hasty and unusual request, coming as it did in the earliest of hours.’
‘We’ll take her with us. Just escort us to our car.’
‘Ach, there could be trouble. Aren’t these detectives you are concerned about armed?’
‘They won’t shoot at …’
‘Won’t return fire should we start it—not myself, you understand, but these men of mine? Certainly these boys haven’t seen the front in nearly a year but must I remind you that we are here in Paris to recover from battle fatigue? Can you not also understand that a posting such as this is highly valued and that they wouldn’t wish to lose such a cushy job even though one or more of them might be convinced to shoot, out of nervousness only, of course.’
Meyer was just pushing things, felt Garnier. ‘Let us take her, then, and leave.’
‘That would, under ordinary circumstances, be appropriate, but once locked up, always locked up until I have the order to release her.’
Ah, merde, the salaud! ‘Fifty thousand.’
‘Reichskassenscheine?’
‘If you wish them,’ said the Frenchman gruffly.
‘One hundred thousand of those to be split among my men, and a further one hundred thou’ for myself, for the expenses and unnecessary delays of production, which you will understand have to be reported in my log and perhaps even verbally explained.’
‘Two hundred thousand it is, then.’
‘And no trouble but if there should be …’
‘There won’t be.’
‘That woman, Herr Garnier. Was she raped by the one that is with you?’
‘Not raped. I stopped him.’
‘Caught him in the act, did you?’
‘But in time. Now listen, there won’t be any trouble.’
‘Because, my friend, these men of mine will not fire on those two detectives. The General von Schaumburg and others of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, who are our commanding officers, don’t exactly like what has been going on here at the Lévitan and elsewhere in the country they occupy and for whose order, and plundering, I must emphasize, they are ultimately responsible. Hence, it is best that myself and those under my command proceed with caution.’
‘Three hundred thousand.’
‘That is a little better but still I have ordered—Men, did you all hear this?’ he called out.
Like parrots, their replies came in rank by rank.
‘I have ordered them to withhold all fire once the prisoners are again locked up and the one you wish has been released into your custody.’
‘The Baron von …’
‘Behr? He will not want any of these beautiful things of his to be damaged by the thoughtlessness of an exchange of fire that need not have happened, especially as such a disturbance would most certainly bring further attention down on what he and the ERR have been up to, yourselves and others as well, I understand.’
Must everything have its price? swore Garnier silently. ‘Four hundred thousand.’
Eight million francs. ‘It’s a lot, Louis,’ whispered Kohler. ‘I’d no idea our boys were so corrupt.’
‘Of course you did, but can they be corrupted further?’
‘If offered the fuses they need?’
Like most big stores, the Lévitan had a pneumatic system for the cash, cheques and paperwork each floor had to send to the head office which was here at the back of the ground floor. Hermann had been going to feed the fuses into it for safekeeping when voices had been heard, thanks, no doubt, to one of the prisoners holding a portal open, or had it been the Lagerfeldwebel himself?
‘Garnier and Quevillon can’t be armed, Louis.’
Inevitably the Occupier was reluctant to arm even its most fanatically loyal supporters. The Agence Vidocq might work for Boemelburg and Oberg but that didn’t mean they had powers of arrest, even if hunting down résistants, and in any case, they could be armed on the spot, if felt necessary.
‘I’ll try to negotiate,’ said Hermann.
This wouldn’t go well, St-Cyr was certain, but the tube was blown into. ‘Achtung, achtung, Lagerfeldwebel. Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central. Release Madame Van der Lynn and tell her we’re here. Garnier and Quevillon, and those three behind the trolley, are all under arrest. Lock them up and we’ll let the Kommandant von Gross-Paris know that good German boys have helped with their capture. He wants them, meine lieben Herren. Our orders come straight from him.’
‘And not from Gestapo Boemelburg?’ shouted Garnier, his voice muffled by distance.
‘From the chief also.’
‘But not from the Höherer SS Oberg who wants to be rid of the two of you.’
‘Eine kleine Mausefalle, eh?’
‘What does it matter, then, how that happens?’
Garnier had a point, but why would he waste time talking about it … ‘WATCH HIM, LAGERFELDWEBEL!’
The warning was too late. A burst from a Schmeisser raked the air, screams, shouts and commands pouring from the tube. ‘YOU, YOU AND YOU, INTO THE LOCKUP NOW. YOUR PISTOL, LAGERFELDWEBEL. VITE! VITE!’
‘AND IF I REFUSE.’
‘YOU WON’T!’
‘I might just as well.’
‘Idiot, no one need know. Just leave us to deal with those two and we’ll give you back your weapons.’
‘Bochmann, since you were foolish enough to have lost yours to this one, please go and release the prisoner into their custody.’
‘He snatched it away from me, Lagerfeldwebel. I wasn’t expecting …’
‘Yes, yes. It’s all right, Bochmann. We’ll do as we have to and deal with it later.’
‘Russia … They’ll send me back, Lagerfeldwebel.’
‘I know, but it can’t be helped. Kohler, the fuses, where are they?’
A sensible man. ‘Lying here on the former director’s desk. Let the prisoners go to their work stations and ask among them for someone to show you the way, if needed.’
Angry shouting followed, then silence, then a whispered, ‘Kohl
er, the woman has managed to run from them. Garnier and the others have taken our torches but have not, I think, yet found her.’
‘Louis, did you hear that?’
There was no answer. He had already left.
Crouched, half-hidden, St-Cyr eased the Lebel’s hammer fully back. Garnier and the others—the cook, his two helpers and Quevillon—weren’t just shining their torches into and along each aisle. They had spread out in a line, aisle by aisle, room display by display, and were crossing the ground floor in unison, moving inevitably towards the director’s office and Hermann, who might not yet know this but might anticipate it.
Garnier had dropped right back into being the sergeant he’d been in that other war. The cook and sous-chefs were also veterans—one had but to glance at them to see this. The former now carried a Schmeisser, the latter two had the Lagerfeldwebel’s Luger and the rifle.
Alone of them, Hubert Quevillon had been allocated the cook’s knife and relegated to the farthest aisle and immediately to Garnier’s right, that one still wanting to keep an eye on his subordinate or better still, to use that weakest link to advantage.
Looking down from the first floor at the head of the escalator he had somehow found in the dark, St-Cyr knew Garnier was being thorough. That one would use everything he could including, especially, that Oona had gone to ground.
Torchlight from the cook raced along the row of Boulle armoires but came back quickly to settle on one of them and then on another and another. One of the doors to this last hadn’t quite been closed. Had he found her?
Gingerly this cook teased it open. Caught in the mirror, the torchlight momentarily threw back its reflections. Blinking, he jabbed the muzzle of the Schmeisser deeply into the armoire. He didn’t call out, this man with the stomach of a barrel. Though one had at first felt he might have done, the soldier within him was too ingrained and brought only silence.
The line advanced. Its having all but reached the halfway point, Monsieur le Chef de Cuisine would have to hurry if he was to keep up. He showed no concern.
A torn piece of the lining from Oona’s woollen dress was fingered, the cook looking back along the aisle into darkness before teasing it out. He shone the light into the first of the vitrines whose curved glass doors and contents gave back their glints. He tried the next armoire but suddenly decided to retrace his steps.
He was counting off the armoires and when, at last, he came to the one next to where the torn fabric had been found, its doors were tightly shut. Perhaps it was a game to him, perhaps it had its sexual overtones. Harshly on the air came the pungency of the black bread he and the other two had toasted for the prisoners, burning, caramelizing what sugars there were in those round, hard loaves. The smell of too many Gauloises bleues was here, too, that of anise and sweat and garlic and pomade. A heavy man. A man of this Sûreté’s height and close now, very close. A little more … only a little and then the bracelets, that bit of cloth stuffed into the mouth to guarantee silence.
Oona’s right shoulder had been laid bare and had been badly bruised by Hubert Quevillon. There were bruises on the slender throat. Her lips had been split, her cheeks revealing where she’d been struck. She didn’t cry out but blinked at the light, dismay registering in those bluest of eyes, was all but bent double, would have difficulty getting out of the armoire.
‘Un moment,’ she softly said, the accent still there as it always would be, the memories of the Exodus from Rotterdam constantly with her, the loss, the endless days, weeks, months, years of never really knowing if her children would be found alive or in some hastily dug, unmarked grave a farmer might accidentally come upon years later.
She didn’t look past this cook who had found her. She stood before him, he shining the light over her. ‘My hair,’ she said. ‘It’s come loose. Please give me a moment, monsieur.’
The pudgy cheeks with their glazed-over nicks from a morning’s dull razor, their shadowed hairy moles and warts and aftershave, tightened. The Schmeisser lifted. Its muzzle was now pressed firmly against her stomach, Oona … Oona looking only at the cook, she watching that one’s eyes closely, too closely … Ah, merde, Hermann. HERMANN, ME, I DIDN’T REALIZE SHE WOULD WANT HIM TO KILL HER!
The silence hurt like hell, the sense of loss was total. Over and over again Kohler silently said, ‘Louis, why couldn’t you have waited?’ He knew Louis had gone to find Oona for him. Louis would do something like that. Louis.
The trickle of another rain of porcelain trailed itself away. Another large wedge of vitrine glass or mirror collapsed. The stench of cordite was all too evident, the ears still rang with the emptying of a Schmeisser’s box magazine, all thirty-two rounds at five hundred a minute.
There were no torchlights. These had instantly gone out with the firing. There’d been no shouts—nothing like that from Garnier or any of the others. Nor had there been a sound from below them, from the cellars.
Quevillon had pissed himself and was still quivering. The butcher knife and torch he’d held when found were lying on the floor at his feet, the urge to kill him all too …
‘Hubert?’ came a whisper at last from out of the surrounding darkness, calm, though Kohler nudged the back of Quevillon’s neck with the Walther P38’s muzzle.
‘FLAVIEN, WHAT HAS HAPPENED?’
Must Hubert be so shrill? thought Garnier with a snort. Blindly, gingerly he felt his way forward. He had to find a gap in all this rubbish, had to get through to Quevillon’s corridor before Kohler realized what was happening.
‘Flavien?’ hazarded one of the sous-chefs some distance from him.
Again there was no answer.
‘Eugène, are you okay?’ whispered that sous-chef. Kohler was certain of it. Had Louis found Oona? Had they both been killed?
Instinctively Garnier knew he had reached the far end of the aisle. There was that sense of openness, of being free of things. Stretching out his left arm, torch in that hand, Schmeisser in the other, he would take a silent, tentative step forward, would hurry yet chance nothing.
He had to make his way well around Hubert, couldn’t let Kohler realize this. Had it not been for that burst of firing, Kohler would have been taken, but now … now that Kripo must have Hubert. Eugène Roulleau would see that things weren’t good and would retrace his steps to find out what had happened to Claude Beaupré, the cook. Victor Denault would hold his position. Those three had often worked together but never at anything like this since Verdun.
The dressing table had its chair. Kohler nudged Quevillon into it. Louis wouldn’t have shot this agent privé or anyone else, not unless absolutely forced to in self-defence. Louis simply wasn’t like that.
A wrist was taken and pulled back behind the chair, the other one, too, Quevillon not objecting but waiting only for help—was that it, eh?
Metal clicked against metal and clicked again. Instantly Garnier knew the bracelets had been applied but Kohler wouldn’t hang around. And what of St-Cyr? he wondered.
Claude Beaupré must have found the woman, but had that Sûreté found the cook with her? It wasn’t like Claude to have emptied that gun. Had the finger of a dying man been jammed against its trigger? Had the woman been killed?
When he found Hubert, Garnier felt the silken nightdress that Kohler had crammed into that one’s mouth. He waited. Vehemently Hubert shook his head but had Kohler done the unexpected and hung around?
Only the soft fluttering of the silk as it moved in and out at its corners with each attempted whisper came to him. There was no other motion now, simply a stiffness in Hubert that gave warning enough.
Kohler … Where was he? Near, so near—watching through the darkness? Waiting for what—the torch to come on, the Schmeisser to be swung away from Hubert and what must be beyond him? Did Kohler actually believe he would spare that little shit?
A wash of perfume had been released on to the dressing table in front of Hubert, the flacon lying on its side but with the stopper deliberately set upright, the scent that o
f a woman of exceptional taste—was this what Kohler wanted to suggest? A Jewess? A wife, mother, daughter, mistress, the perfume still flooding from its little bottle?
The folding mirror under hand was in three panels. Hubert would see himself in it when the lights came on. Was this what Kohler had had in mind?
Blood, brains and bits of bone had been sprayed across the floor and over the nearby armoires and vitrines with their bullet-shattered doors and broken glass. It didn’t need a light for one to realize this, thought Eugène Roulleau. The cook had been hit in the back of the head at very close range, the slug racing around in there before tearing away much of the forehead and the eyes on exit.
One of the old Lebels, he silently swore. The fingers that had found the wound were wet and greasy. The Schmeisser Claude had held might have slid away but he doubted this and couldn’t recall having heard the clatter it should have made.
Merde, this wasn’t good. What the hell had the colonel got them into? Bien sûr, the odd job at night. It had been right of them to take care of those bitches, to teach them lessons their husbands couldn’t give. The schoolteacher, an officer’s wife, had been given hers hard, the stamps had then been recovered but …
There was no sign of St-Cyr, nor of the Dutch woman. With the Schmeisser’s burst there had been no sounds other than the terrified shriek she had given.
Wasn’t there an escalator nearby? Of course there was.
The muzzle of a Lebel has a signature all its own and much different from that of a Schmeisser or Luger. Sometimes warm, often cold, all are individuals when one has experienced such things, and all mean the same. Would a nod suffice?
The Luger was teased away. Roulleau waited. One didn’t think St-Cyr would shoot—Claude had been unavoidable and maybe the woman was dead and lying crumpled up in one of the armoires.
One would just have to try to duck aside or bend the knees on impact so as to soften the blow. Those old revolvers weighed a tonne. He’d have a king-sized lump.
Garnier heard the blow and the gasp it brought before the body collapsed. Stiffening, he looked away through the pitch-darkness towards where Claude Beaupré must have been, knew that Eugène Roulleau, the one who had raped the Guillaumet woman, had been taken, wanted to call out to Victor Denault of other such attacks and the robbery, with Roulleau, of Au Philatéliste Savant, but stopped himself, wanted to use the torch but found he couldn’t.
Tapestry Page 35
