by Simon Toyne
‘We don’t know, but we do have a suspect in custody. Let’s see what he has to say.’
‘Do you think it’s him? Do you think he … killed …?’
‘No. Not really. But he might help us find the killer.’ She opened the front door to let him out. ‘Let Pierre know when you’re ready, OK?’
She nodded and thought about telling him about the suit-carrier hanging on the back of her office door.
Remember this conversation when I’m dead, her grandfather had said, like he’d known he was going to die.
‘What is it?’
She could feel a pressure building inside her – anger, sorrow, and shame. ‘Nothing,’ she said. Amand had more important things to do than waste time looking into things that were probably more to do with her sense of guilt than anything else. She would mention it in her statement later and they could decide if it was important or not. She smiled. ‘I was remembering the last time I spoke to him.’
Amand nodded and kissed her on her cheek. ‘Take as long as you like with Léo,’ he said, then he turned and walked away.
She closed the door and leaned back against it, staring down the hallway at the kitchen door and thinking about the conversation she was about to have with her son.
How do you tell a seven-year-old boy his Grampy is dead?
How do you begin to find the right words to explain that he was murdered?
14
The man looked up from the red, pain-filled wetness of the video clip on his phone and watched Commandant Amand walk away from the house. He paused briefly to speak to the gendarme in the parked car before heading off in the direction of the Commissariat. The woman watched him leave then shut the door behind him. Amand had not been in the house long enough to have taken a statement, which meant she would most likely follow him soon. The gendarme remained behind in the car, sucking on an e-cigarette and blowing white vapour out of the open window.
Further up the street a woman in a cream linen jacket stepped out of her house and tucked her grey hair under a white sun hat while looking across at the officer in the parked car. Maybe the jungle drums of the town were already beating, carrying the news of the tailor’s death to the wider community. Nothing stayed secret for long in a place like this. She finished fixing her hat and glanced up the street in his direction. He was at least thirty feet away and facing in the opposite direction and from her age he imagined she probably needed glasses but was too proud to wear them in public. He doubted she would be able to identify him if it came to it, though her casual scrutiny was a reminder that the longer he stuck around, the more visible he was becoming. He couldn’t afford to stay here, but he couldn’t leave either, not without the list.
The old woman locked her front door, dropped the key into her shopping basket and walked away down the hill towards Maison Moulin where the morning bread was stacked in warm, crusty piles behind the counter. The gendarme watched her leave, slumped low in his seat, clouds of white vapour rising out of his open window and up into the morning sunlight. He didn’t look like he was going anywhere.
He watched him, the wet sound of the tailor’s last words playing in his earphones, reminding him what all of this was for as his mind ran through options of how he might get things moving. He reached into his jacket and pulled out two sheets of folded paper containing street maps, local market days, useful phone numbers. He checked the map against a list of houses, the germ of an idea starting to take hold, and copied one of the local telephone numbers into a cheap, pre-paid mobile phone he’d bought at the big E.Leclerc in Gaillac the previous day.
‘Police!’ a voice answered.
‘Yes, hello,’ he cleared his throat, over-emphasizing his words to make him sound foreign. ‘My dog found something in my garden. A man’s shirt covered in blood. I grabbed his collar and locked him in the kitchen before he could start chewing it. Thought I should call you in case it’s important.’
‘You did the right thing. Could I have your address please.’
‘Hang on. I’m here on holiday, let me find it for you.’ He looked back at the map and a list of addresses he’d downloaded from an online holiday lettings agency. He picked one close to his current position. ‘It’s number 28, Rue de la Chevalier Noir. When do you think someone will be over? Only my dog is locked up in the kitchen and this is a rented gîte, so if no one’s going to be here for a while I might have to take him for a walk before he makes a mess.’
‘Someone will be with you directly, monsieur.’
‘All right. I’ll stay put.’
He hung up and looked back at the gendarme in the parked car. The local police would be stretched thin right now because of the murder investigation and would logically send the closest officer to investigate. Or maybe they’d already drafted in extra men from other districts and the gendarme in the car would simply stay where he was and he would be forced to …
‘Vingt-sept, come in.’ The scanner crackled.
The gendarme leaned forward, picked up his radio and spoke, his voice sounding scratchy in the scanner’s tiny speaker.
‘This is vingt-sept.’
‘Tourist just called in saying he found a bloody shirt in his garden. I need you to go check it out.’
‘Amand told me to stay put until further notice.’
‘It’ll take you two minutes.’
The gendarme glanced back at the house then shook his head and turned on the engine. ‘OK, give me the address.’
The man in the parked car watched the vehicle move away and disappear from sight. He listened to the silence settle on the street then got out of his car and moved towards the boot, stretching the stiffness out of his back as he went. Inside was an old wooden crate containing the relics sacred to his task. He lifted the lid, took out a black scarf and wrapped it round his face, leaving only his eyes visible. It was a ritual with him, this covering up of his real self in order to become something else. The man he was could not do the things that needed to be done, but his other self could.
He took out a black hat next with a short brim and pulled it low over his eyes, feeling his other self beginning to emerge. He looked back down and ran his hand over the different shapes contained in the crate, each wrapped in the grey fabric known as ‘death cloth’. He found the long shape of his sword and removed it from the folds. It was a Nazi police dress bayonet with a silver-tipped scabbard and a pommel shaped like an eagle’s head. He withdrew the long blade and turned it over in the sunlight, feeling the weight of it in his hand, and his own transformation was complete. He was no longer the man, now he was Wotan and the bayonet was Gram, his sacred sword.
He locked the car and started walking towards the house, the bayonet hidden in the folds of his long, black coat. He was invisible now, featureless and unrecognizable.
Wotan, the avenger.
Wotan, the immortal.
Wotan, the shadow that fell over the hunted as he walked through the sunlight on the Wild Hunt for the souls of the damned.
III
‘Some of you say “It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.”
And I say, “Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.”’
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran
Extract from
DARK MATERIAL – THE DEVIL’S TAILOR: DEATH AND LIFE IN DIE SCHNEIDER LAGER
By Herman Lansky
By the summer of 1939 war felt imminent. It hung heavy in the air like a coming storm and wherever I travelled on business I saw troops at every station: moving west; moving east.
The Germans were mobilizing along our western border and the Russians were doing the same in the east: ready to come to our aid if the Germans invaded, the politicians assured us, which gave us some comfort. We knew the Red Army would rather fight the Nazis on Polish soil than their own and though none of us liked the idea of our homeland becoming a battlefield we liked the idea of standing alone against the Germans
even less.
The storm finally broke on the morning of 1 September 1939. A million and a half German troops poured across the border while the Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields. I awoke to the distant sound of explosions as the retreating Polish army blew up bridges to slow the German advance.
The first bombs fell on Łódź on 4 September. They hit the stations first, cutting a main route of escape. It was shocking. Unbelievable. Some started fleeing to the east, away from the invasion. Most stayed. The Polish army was garrisoned in Park Julianów, so we were not entirely defenceless – and there were always the Russians. Only after the war did we discover that Stalin had struck a secret deal with Hitler to carve Poland up, the Germans taking the west and the Russians the east, and that when the Russians headed west across our border it was not to rescue but to invade.
The Germans arrived in Łódź on the eighth, their well-drilled armoured divisions and motorized infantry quickly overwhelming the disorganized Polish army. I was walking down Piotrkowska Street when the first troops arrived, neatly ordered lines of grey uniforms sweeping down the straight boulevard like a river, ethnic Germans lining the way shouting ‘Heil Hitler’, giving Nazi salutes and throwing flowers like the Germans were conquering heroes. I remember studying their shining faces, shocked by how many there were, and wondering which one was the coward who’d written ‘Jew pigs’ on the Synagogue wall less than a year earlier. It could have been any of them. Only now they were out in the open and it was us who were about to be driven into the dark.
To truly understand how devastating it was watching the Nazis march down Piotrkowska Street you must realize that Łódź was my city: it belonged to me as much as I belonged to it. My family had helped build it. To give an example, my very first memory of the Great Synagogue was of being introduced to the Rabbi and him shaking my hand and thanking me for the building we were standing in. After he left to lead the tefilah, my father explained that Grandpa Lansky had provided a large portion of the funds for the construction of the temple and that it had been built to accommodate the huge influx of displaced Russian Jews who flooded into the city at the end of the nineteenth century, exactly as my great-great grandfather had done in the early eighteen hundreds.
‘We have made this town what it is,’ my father whispered as we sat on the Lansky family bench at the front of the congregation, closest to the Torah Ark, the holiest place in the Temple. ‘A haven for our kind. A sanctuary that no one will ever drive us from.’
But he was wrong. Within a few short months of the Nazis’ arrival, nothing would belong to us at all. In four generations my family had built the largest chain of clothing stores in the country and the biggest textile factory in a city known as ‘the Manchester of Poland’. Four generations to build an empire and the Nazis took it all away in just a few weeks. They were incredibly well organized and efficient, like they had been planning it all for years, meeting in secret behind locked doors, drawing up lists of what to take and who to take it from, all that hate so well hidden that all we saw of it beforehand were a few bits of graffiti on the Synagogue wall.
And when their time came they emerged fully formed, a monster made of many faces, some of them people we had considered friends. They blamed us for everything, took everything we had and forced us to live twenty to a room in an overcrowded ghetto in the worst part of a city we had helped build. But after a time even that was too much. They wanted us gone, no trace remaining. That was when the transportations started to the camps, those factories of unfathomable horror where we were to be robbed of the only things we had left – our lives, our souls.
Hell has many names in the Hebrew Bible – She’ol, Abaddon, Gehenna – but to me it will always carry the name of the camp the Nazis took me to, where I existed for four long years. I call it existing because I cannot call it living and in truth it was closer to death.
Hell for me is The Tailors’ Camp.
Hell for me is Die Schneider Lager.
15
Café Belloq had emptied out a little by the time the first of the group walked in. Jean-Luc Belloq nodded a silent greeting and watched the man move across the black-and-white chequered tile floor towards the stairs leading to the private room above the bar. A minute later a second person arrived and followed the same path.
‘You should go home, madame,’ he said to Madame Segolin, taking her by the elbow and guiding her to the door. ‘You need rest after the shock you’ve had.’
She nodded and mumbled something about rats as he led her to the door. Belloq watched her weave away down the street, muttering to herself and steering well clear of the drains. He surveyed the patrons on the terrace, checking to see if anyone was taking any notice, then crooked a finger at Mariella to summon her.
‘Watch the bar,’ he said. ‘If anyone asks for me, tell them I’m out and you don’t know when I’ll be back.’ He passed through the door and went up the stairs to join the others.
The private room above the bar was oak-panelled and intimate with velvet curtains the colour of red wine draped across tall windows, making the room feel dusky. A chandelier dripped crystal over a large oval table, its dark surface burnished by the sleeves of countless diners, though no one had eaten in this room for several months now, not since Belloq had turned it into his command centre. Evidence of its new function lay everywhere, stacked in boxes and piled on the marble-topped bureau running the length of one wall: piles of leaflets and posters, most featuring the smiling face of Belloq himself amid slogans such as – ‘La France aux Français’ – France for the French – or – ‘LES IMMIGRÉS VONT VOTER … ET VOUS VOUS ABSTENEZ?!!’ – The immigrants are going to vote … and you’re staying at home?!!
A large poster was pinned above the small marble fireplace showing Belloq standing behind his bar, wearing shirt, tie and apron and smiling a welcome. An outline of a black boar surrounded him like a jagged halo with the slogan:
VOTER Belloq – Votez Parti National de la France Libre. Votez pour la France et l’avenir de vos enfants.
Vote for Belloq – Vote National Party of Free France. Vote for France and for your children’s future.
Belloq locked the heavy door behind him and turned to face the two men sitting at the table: Edmond Laurent, Michel LePoux. Between them they represented the oldest families in Cordes – their names carved on numerous gravestones as well as the marble war memorial outside the gates of the town cemetery. They were as much a part of Cordes as the stone that made up the walls. They were the town: its past, its present and also, they hoped, its future – and the future of France.
‘Josef Engel is dead,’ Belloq said. ‘Murdered.’
Silence followed and Belloq flicked his eyes from face to face, looking for a reaction.
‘Murdered?’ It was Laurent who broke the silence, his voice as well cut and smooth as his chestnut hair and dark blue suit. Laurent was in his mid-forties, the youngest of the group and also the richest, his family owning more than forty properties in and around Cordes as well as several restaurants and shops. Laurent ran his own successful law practice, continuing a long family tradition of practising law and telling other people what to do. ‘Are you sure he didn’t die of natural causes? He was quite old.’
‘I checked with the Commissariat: it’s a murder enquiry.’
Laurent frowned. ‘Have you informed the leadership?’
‘Not yet. I wanted to talk to you two first. See if either of you knew anything.’ He looked at LePoux, who scowled back.
‘Don’t look at me. Why do you always assume it’s me when something bad happens?’
‘Well, this is more your area of expertise,’ Laurent replied smoothly. ‘And you do have a reputation for being somewhat heavy-handed.’
LePoux’s face flushed crimson. ‘It’s not my fault if my workers are lazy and their bones are weak.’ He looked up at Belloq. ‘I had nothing to do with the Jew tailor’s death. Nothing at all. I swear it.’
Belloq nodded. ‘Of course. I never d
oubted it, but I had to ask.’ LePoux huffed and shot Laurent a filthy look. ‘Nevertheless, the tailor’s death poses problems. From what I hear, he was tortured before he died and his house was searched, we have to assume that the killer might have found the list.’
LePoux huffed again. ‘I still don’t understand why the leadership is so bothered by some old Jew tailor. We should be driving his sort out of the country, not watching over them. I’m glad he’s dead. One less dirty mouth to feed.’
‘We do not need to understand our orders,’ Belloq said. ‘All that matters is that we follow them. The tailor is clearly significant for some reason, as is this list. Our job now is to find it. The police already have a suspect in custody …’ He put on his reading glasses, pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and read the name he had written on it earlier: ‘A Monsieur Solomon Creed.’
‘I know that name!’ LePoux sat forward in his seat, his stomach spilling over the edge of the table. ‘He was at my vineyard this morning. He attacked me.’
Laurent turned to him. ‘He attacked you?’
‘Yes. I was talking to one of my workers and he appeared from nowhere, grabbed my cane, broke it in half and pushed me to the ground.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
Laurent shrugged. ‘Strangers do not usually go around attacking people for no reason, especially if they’re trying to keep a low profile because they’re here to commit murder.’
‘All I was doing was reprimanding an Arab.’
‘With a stick?’
‘What business is it of yours how I choose to run my vineyard?’
‘Gentlemen, please,’ Belloq said. ‘I did not call you here to argue.’
Laurent turned to him. ‘Do you know if they’ve formally charged this Monsieur Creed?’
‘Not yet. They’re currently holding him for questioning.’
‘And who’s leading the investigation?’
