Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  The nose was pugnacious, the age perhaps fifty-five years, so a good three years older than the blocky, shorter, somewhat portly Frenchman, and perhaps the same amount younger than the grizzled one who was fresh in from the Reich and smelling of old cabbage.

  Wehrle tried not to avoid their gazes. ‘There were some napoleons in my money belt. Fifteen, I think, but I can’t be precise. I buy when I can, you understand.’

  Kohler pulled down a lower left eyelid in mock surprise. ‘And?’ he asked.

  Must they all be at him? ‘Some sovereigns in a cloth bag, some American gold eagles and … and my stamps. These last are a hobby, at least they … they were unless I can get them back.’

  It was time for a little sweetness. ‘Can you supply us with a list?’ asked Engelmann, using a pocket-knife to ream a thumbnail.

  ‘Of course. It’s in my desk. There was also the office postage and petty cash. Would you like a record of those as well?’

  ‘Where is the office?’ asked St-Cyr swiftly.

  ‘The Hotel Majestic, naturally.’

  St-Cyr tossed his head in acknowledgement. When the Germans had marched into Paris on 14 June 1940, the Wehrmacht had taken over the Majestic and other such places. Lots of them, with sentries at the entrances and ausweise needed to come and go, but why had the safe not been housed there?

  Again the sound of the lift interrupted things but now it seemed to hesitate, putting them all on edge. But then it went away and for a moment there was silence. ‘She’s not coming,’ grunted Engelmann. ‘Perhaps after all, you had best tell us about her.’

  ‘Look, we know how it is,’ said Kohler companionably. ‘Paris is a long way from home. Leave is something your superiors, if they’re anything like mine, feel irrelevant. A man does need a little female company now and then.’

  How utterly pious! snorted St-Cyr inwardly. Just recently divorced but long married, Hermann lived with two women he had rescued. Giselle was a former prostitute, a very intelligent, purposeful and beautiful girl with jet black hair and violet eyes; Oona, a Dutch alien without proper papers, was beautiful also – blonde, blue-eyed, about forty years of age and nearly twice the age of the first. God’s little dilemma.

  Nervously Wehrle got up and went over to the bar then thought better of it and sought out the champagne only to hold the bottle up to them as evidence. ‘He opened it. Neither of us were in the room. He filled the two glasses – even I can see that – but he couldn’t have had more than a sip.’

  As the Sûreté watched, Herr Max’s dispassionate gaze lifted to settle on the victim. ‘And what, please, makes you so certain your mistress did not let the thief into these rooms?’

  ‘Nana’s not my mistress, damn you! She works for me and I pay her well. She has an ear for things and is often in the right place at the right time. As a diamond buyer I can’t be too obvious, can I? Discretion allows the timid to come forward without fear of arrest. No names are necessary or recorded. I pay in cash and there are no questions asked.’

  Perfect, then, if one had robbery in mind.

  It was Louis who said, ‘But … but if in cash, were there not also bundles of banknotes in your safe? And why, please, was the safe not housed in your office at the Majestic?’

  Again there was that nervous, self-conscious little smile as if still clawing at thoughts of his Nana’s having betrayed him.

  ‘We had just closed a deal and were to celebrate. That’s why there wasn’t much cash in the safe. That’s why the champagne.’

  ‘And the caviar.’ He was just too wary, too full of doubts about her, felt Kohler. Louis sensed it too, and so did Herr Max.

  ‘The caviar, yes. It was a promise, a little treat. Nana loves it. And as for the safe being here, I travel a lot. Mostly I work away from the office. I always have.’

  Again they heard the lift, again they waited, breaths held, hearts pounding now perhaps.

  The damned thing stopped. The gate came open. Every step the woman took was muffled by the carpet but they each knew when she would appear in the open doorway and then, there she was.

  Kohler swallowed hard. Louis, he knew would be intrigued. Herr Max apparently took but a moment to imagine flinging her into a chair before switching on the spotlight to shine it into her eyes. Slap, slap! and blood on her beautiful lips …

  ‘Nana …’

  ‘Hans, what has happened? Who are these men?’

  ‘Ihere Papiere. Bitte, Fräulein. Bitte.’

  ‘Hans …?’

  ‘Fräulein, he can do nothing for you now. Just give me your papers,’ grunted Engelmann impatiently snapping his fingers.

  Reluctantly Louis translated, and as he watched her, Kohler thought he detected an all but imperceptible wince. A handsome woman. Tall, proud – haughty even. Andalusian? he wondered. Spanish certainly. Part Moor? She was making him think of hot sun, lolling cattle nearby and midday silence. An abandoned hacienda among ancient olive groves. Two horses, no blanket on the ground. Just the sun high above and seen through the dusty grey of the leaves.

  Her hair was jet black and thick, worn loose and long beneath the stylish hat of Arctic fox. Her eyebrows were dark and wide and served only to enhance eyes that did not flash in anger but could, though now they remained as if looking well into the distance to something other than themselves. They were large, dark olive eyes with deep touches of the Moor, the Carthaginian perhaps, or Phoenician – Louis would have run back through the gamut of her ancestry and perhaps this was what she was seeing in the distance.

  The chin was proud, the lips not compressed, just wide and very firm in resolve. A touch of lipstick. No wrinkles yet at the age of what? he asked and told himself, thirty-eight. No powder, no rouge, her skin not white, not coffee brown but of the softest shade of hazel. Perfume … Was she wearing any?

  She didn’t flinch under his scrutiny nor that of his partner but remained immobile as Herr Max thumbed her papers, grunting from time to time as a pig would at its swill.

  At last Kohler thought he detected a quivering nostril as she waited, not looking to either side but straight at her Generalmajor with … Was it hatred, he wondered; was it, I will kill you for this if you do not defend me?

  The white cashmere gloves would be soft. The off-white overcoat was of alpaca, a fabulous thing cut so that it brought out the tallness of her, the shoulders.

  ‘Herr Kohler, don’t take too great an interest in our guest. Fetch some coffee. While you’re at it, call your superior officer. As Sturmbannführer Boemelburg is Head of the Gestapo in France, and has taken a definite interest in our Gypsy, he will be waiting in his office for just such a call. Inform him of the details. An all-points alert for our friend. Every rail station and road. A sweep of what remains of the gypsy haunts – please include the … Ah, what was it?’ he asked himself and peered again at her papers, even to lifting his specs out of the way and squinting myopically.

  She got the hint. ‘The Club Monseigneur,’ she said and swallowed tightly. ‘The Schéhérazade also, but only sometimes.’

  He tossed his head in acknowledgement but let her say, ‘They’re in Montmartre, on the rue d’Amsterdam and the rue de Liège, but tonight is my night off.’

  ‘Everyone needs a break,’ he said, scratching a scruffy cheek and nodding sagely.

  Again Louis, his brown ox-eyes still intrigued, was forced into the reluctant role of translator.

  ‘A sweep of what’s left of the gypsy warrens, as I was saying,’ went on Engelmann. ‘Montmartre, near the railway yards and the Gare Saint-Lazare. Belleville, too, eh, Herr St-Cyr – that is where you live, isn’t it? Those little streets where the tenements are so close, the rats can get across the gaps without hitting the paving stones below or getting tangled in the laundry lines after fucking someone else’s wife, with her consent, of course.’

  My wife, monsieur? Is that it, eh? raged St-Cyr inwardly. How could the bastard say such a thing? ‘The Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est – the Canal Saint-Martin and
Bassin de la Villette,’ came the cold retort, ‘but if I were you, I would look further afield. Saint-Ouen perhaps, and Saint-Gervais.’

  The whole of Paris perhaps, and St-Cyr still touchy about a pretty wife – his second and much younger than himself – who had made love repeatedly to the Hauptmann Steiner, the couple’s naked antics secretly recorded by Gestapo Paris’s Watchers and kept on file for posterity. Steiner’s uncle, the General von Schaumburg, was still Kommandant von Gross Paris – that was why they’d been watching the nephew – and everyone knew the Gestapo didn’t exactly hit it off with the Wehrmacht. ‘The industrial suburbs, I think, and the flea markets,’ grunted Engelmann. ‘Bagneux as well. There are Russian exiles in those high-rise pigsties the thirties brought.’

  Ah damn, thought Kohler. The two of them were really at each other’s throats and some son of a bitch down at Gestapo Paris-Central had let Herr Max know all about Louis’s wife. Had the visitor from the IKPK viewed the films? He must have. Then he would also know that the Hauptmann had been sent to Russia by his uncle, and that he had later died there. Marianne St-Cyr had been coming home with Louis’s little son when she had tripped over a wire, a Resistance bomb that had been meant for Louis. Not two months ago and a mistake if ever there was one – he was no collabo but like many, had been forced to work for the Occupier. One would never know how she had felt, repentant or otherwise, least of all poor Louis who had forgiven her and the Resistance, and had been trying ever since to get back the films he had never seen, thank God.

  Herr Max tossed the woman’s papers on to the coffee table, glanced at his wrist-watch and said, ‘The métro and the buses. Have them shut down.’

  ‘They’ve already stopped. It’s 2333. They grind to a halt at 2300. No diamond bearings, I guess,’ quipped Kohler to lighten things and get her back her papers.

  ‘VERDAMMT! Don’t you ever do that again. You and this Teichfroch of yours are under my orders. Mine, Kohler. Orders, do you understand?’

  This pond-frog … ‘Okay, I’ll call the Chief.’

  ‘And you will ask him, ja? to define for you just what I have said.’

  Though the woman, like each of them, had been startled and had leapt at the shrillness of Herr Max, she had somehow calmed herself only to be unsettled again by the whispered exchange that had followed.

  Without waiting for her to recover, Engelmann grabbed her by the wrist, hustled her to a chair, and told her to take off her coat, hat and gloves. ‘You won’t be needing them. It’s warm enough.’

  ‘Und in den Zellen, mein Herr?’ she asked defiantly.

  Startled, poor Louis took a step forward only to think better of it. Herr Max was only too aware of him and now grinning, since she had betrayed a knowledge of the language she would rather have kept to herself.

  ‘In the prison cells, Fräulein?’ breathed Engelmann softly. ‘But … but what is this you are saying? Have you been in prison before?’

  She took a little breath. Her deutsch, when it came, was cold and fluent. ‘Never. Now am I to be placed under arrest for assisting the Third Reich? Hans, do something.’

  That icy contempt would have to be shattered. ‘He can’t, Fräulein,’ said Engelmann. ‘He mustn’t. You see, your diamond buyer has just realized it would be imprudent. He has, meine gute Dame, cast you to the wolves, to me.’

  To the Gestapo …

  ‘That’s not true! Nana, these people … One has to be patient. Things take a little time. Questions are only natural. You’ve nothing to hide.’

  Or have you? wondered St-Cyr with a sinking feeling that would not go away.

  ‘Und now we begin it, Fräulein,’ sighed Engelmann. ‘You let the Gypsy into these quarters. You either left the lock off or gave him a key. You told him where your lover had written down the combination, and then you went to have your … Was it washed and dried? Please, I must touch it.’

  ‘Don’t! I know nothing. I’ve done nothing.’

  Her hair was soft. He let it fall. ‘Then you have nothing to fear.’

  ‘Herr Max …’ began Louis only to see the visitor glowering at him and hear him saying, ‘Please, she is all yours. You first with the questions as agreed, and then myself.’

  Once away from them, Kohler took a moment to steady himself. Verdammtl Max Engelmann reeked of trouble. The IKPK? and now here it was resurrected and squatting on their doorstep, especially on Louis. Poor Louis.

  The Gypsy, ah merde. A plague in the late twenties and the thirties but then someone had given him away – betrayal and jail in Oslo, 17 May 1938. Seven years of hard labour on a diet of cold hardfiskur,* no mayonnaise, and torn chunks of ruqbraud,* only to turn up as free as a bird in Occupied Paris.

  The cable from Heinrich Himmler via Gestapo Mueller in Berlin via Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris had been terse, MOST URGENT. REPEAT URGENT. IKPK HQ BERLIN REPORTS INTERNATIONAL SAFE-CRACKER GYPSY REPEAT GYPSY HAS REPORTEDLY SURFACED. LAST SEEN TOURS 1030 HOURS 14 JANUARY HEADING FOR PARIS. APPREHEND AT ONCE. HEIL HITLER.

  Like most of the Sûreté, Louis had heard of the Gypsy, but why bring in Engelmann, why put them under that bastard’s orders when he couldn’t even speak French and couldn’t know the city or the country for that matter, or did he? And why, please, had he deliberately insulted Louis with that crap about unfaithful wives?

  Was someone playing with them? Were their loyalties being ‘investigated’ again? Louis was a patriot; himself a conscientious doubter and objector of Nazi infallibility, brutality and all else. Everyone knew both Louis and himself were kept on by Boemelburg simply because they produced results. One hundred percent.

  In an age of officially sanctioned crime, they were virtually the only honest cops left to fight common crime. But as sure as that God of Louis’s had made safes to crack, there was an IKPK card-index file with the Gypsy’s profile for the SS in Berlin to peruse at their leisure. Were they using the Gypsy? Was it all a sham?

  Deeply troubled by the thought, Kohler went along the corridor, round a corner and up a small flight of stairs until he had what he wanted.

  She was sitting in her little cupboard, waiting patiently to clean up the dust. She had her shoes and black stockings off, and was soaking her bunions and corns in a basin of salt water to which she had added a small handful of rose petals – red ones, ah yes.

  ‘God, they’re a bugger, aren’t they?’ he said of the shoes these days. ‘Mine are killing me.’ And from a tattered pocket, he rescued a forgotten cigarette and broke it in half.

  Lighting them, he handed her one and said congenially, ‘Hey, don’t worry, eh? No one will see us, and if I have to, I’ll tell them it’s business.’

  Business? She swallowed and began to do up the belt and buttons she had released to give a tired waist a little room.

  ‘The robbery,’ he said. She ducked her eyes away and cringed – knew he had seen the rose petals, knew he’d noticed the two tickets she had found for the Opéra, the magazines and the newspapers, all in German he would know only too well she could not understand.

  ‘The pictures,’ she managed. ‘I look at them.’

  ‘That’s what the Propaganda Staffel count on, but like I said, don’t worry. I simply want to ask you a few small questions. Nothing difficult.’

  Her bunions were swollen, the corns aflame. The toenails had been painted but some time ago. The uniform, a dress of thin black cotton with a starched white lace cap and an apron, needed attention. The shoes had been made of ersatz leather and cardboard, their soles of softwood.

  At the age of sixty-seven, life had been unkind. Bony in places, sagging in others, she had been a girl of the streets and brothels until married to the night shift at the Ritz and to cleaning up after others.

  ‘So, the robbery,’ he said again and she didn’t know whether to fear him or to be beguiled, for he was formidable with that slash down his face and the other one across his brow, but there was laughter in his faded blue eyes and it was not unkind, or was it?

  ‘I saw n
othing. I heard nothing. I was occupied in another part of the hotel.’

  ‘Don’t be stubborn. The rose petals came from room 13. It’s the Opéra tickets that worry me.’

  ‘They’re no good now. The performance will be …’

  ‘Your name? Papers … Papers, bitte, eh?’ He snapped his fingers just like Engelmann had done and hated himself for doing so but it was no time for her to be stubborn.

  ‘Mademoiselle Georgette Bernard,’ he breathed, scanning the ID photo and glancing at the guilt-ridden, swimming brown eyes.

  Self-consciously she touched a curl and then her cap. ‘Monsieur …’

  ‘It’s Inspector and hey, I really do want us to cooperate.’

  ‘I found the tickets on the carpet in the corridor outside room 13.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Sometime after … after the Generalmajor had left to play with the birds.’

  ‘And the rose petals?’

  ‘A rose with its stem had fallen and was lying between the tickets. I …’

  Had the Gypsy a sense of humour? Had the bastard left them in the hall as some sort of calling card or a reminder for Nana Thélème? ‘Now start by telling me if that’s your master key up there on the hook, then why is there another hanging from your belt?’

  Things would not go well. ‘That is Mariette’s key. She’s the day-girl. When she leaves at six, she changes out of her uniform and hangs it up, the key also.’

  ‘Good. And when you come on to change and get your key, do you leave the door to this cupboard locked?’

  She crossed herself and silently said a small prayer. ‘The door is never locked. I …. I am away from here for some time – the carpets, you understand. The mirrors, the endless dusting – I can see that you appreciate my absences and that, the back, it was often turned and I could not possibly have known always that … that Mariette’s key had remained constantly in its place.’

  ‘And would anyone else have known of this?’

  ‘The Mademoiselle Thélème? Ah no. No, Monsieur l’inspecteur. It’s impossible. That one comes only by the lift. Never the stairs and certainly not the ones you have climbed, since they are only for the staff and the notice forbids entry to all others.’