Tapestry (43 page)

‘But does Oberg now know what they’ve been up to?’

‘Has he offered them absolution if they get rid of us?’

‘The Fräulein Remer now being nothing but insurance, Louis, Standartenführer Langbehn having been told only so much?’

‘And the agency absolutely confident nothing will be pinned on them, they having the protection of the SS, as does the judge.’

Suzette Dunand heard them leave. Clutching Teddy, she had run to the door, had stood before the two detectives in her nightdress, ashamed, terrified and embarrassed until Herr Kohler had said, ‘Please don’t cry. We’re here to help.’

They hadn’t stayed more than a few minutes. She had told them everything she could about Jeannot Raymond, most especially that he was the one who always handled the recovery of stolen property and was often away from the office for days on end.

‘The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, Hermann,’ the Sûreté had said. ‘Jeannot Raymond is the one who hunts down the owners of that property and then the
agence
help themselves.’

‘Flats are kept for clients who need a place to stay,’ she had said.

‘Four, five—how many?’ the one called St-Cyr had asked, they both dismayed to find she didn’t even know where any of them were other than this one and the one downstairs.

Admit it
, said Teddy.
You couldn’t stop thinking about your date with this Jeannot Raymond. Nine o’clock this morning, Suzette? Isn’t that a little early if you are then to be taken to lunch?

‘The Chinese gate. I … I had thought perhaps a walk afterwards through the Institut National d’Agronomie Coloniale.’

And now?
he demanded.

‘I was wrong. He … he was going to kill me.’

Hiking the hem of her nightdress, she blew her nose and wiped her eyes, must be brave, must do exactly as the detectives had told her.

Fortunately her tears hadn’t splashed the
laissez-passer
and
sauf-conduit
Herr Kohler had given her, he glancing at the one from the Sûreté for further agreement before filling in her name and the town of Dreux, the chief inspector saying, ‘Hurry, Hermann,’ but had a part of them been lost? Had the passes been for someone else?

‘Pack a few things, mademoiselle,’ he had said. ‘A small suitcase. Carry a shopping bag with whatever food you can gather for the journey and a little extra to help out at home—not too much, though. Bringing food into Paris is illegal and contrary to the rationing, so taking it out with all the shortages will only raise eyebrows.’

‘Remember that you haven’t been home since the Defeat,’ Herr Kohler had said, ‘and that you’re very worried about your mother and how she’s managing without your dear
papa
.’

‘Make sure you emphasize he’s a prisoner of war and an excellent garage mechanic and that he has found lots of work in the camp and is pleased. Tell them how many brothers and sisters you have. Has your mother a medal?’

‘The silver,’ she had said, their advice coming so fast it had been as if spoken by one.

‘
Ah, bon
, there are eight of them, Hermann. Be brave, mademoiselle. Open your suitcase only when asked by the control. Try to remember to say,
“Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann
,
”
especially if he’s a private. They like it when a little
Deutsch
is used and they’ve been flattered.’

‘Put in some extra underwear,’ Herr Kohler had said. ‘If he fingers it, don’t worry.’

‘Just look away, as if embarrassed.’

‘If he steals it, let him. Underwear is in short supply at home and is valued most.’

And then?
asked Teddy as the bottle of cognac Herr Kohler had brought from the flat downstairs and reluctantly parted with went into the shopping bag.

‘You and the cognac will be seen, Teddy. If they take the one, I’m to say nothing.’

And if they should also take me?
he asked.

‘I will kiss you good-bye, as the friend you’ve been, and will walk on through the control to the train. I won’t be able to look back. I mustn’t. I’m not to hurry, am to walk steadily away and then step up into the carriage.’

She was to leave the flat well before nine and to take the earliest possible train, was to give herself time but not too much. ‘You don’t want to be noticed hanging around the station,’ the one from the Sûreté had said. ‘Act naturally. You’ve the necessary papers. Be positive about them. They’re good and have come from the very best of sources.’

‘Don’t even think of them as being false,’ Herr Kohler had said and given her five hundred francs in small bills. ‘I’d give you more but we don’t want it attracting attention. Split it up. Keep only two hundred in your handbag, the rest in pockets but not those of your overcoat.’

St-Cyr had said to make sure she bought a return ticket; Herr Kohler, that she was to use her looks if necessary but wasn’t to go so far as to hesitantly touch her throat or plead with her eyes. ‘Those people on the wickets can be bastards,’ he had said. ‘Some of them are in the pay of
les Allemands
and can, by pushing a little button under the counter or giving some other signal, summon help.’

‘For cash,’ St-Cyr had said. ‘Yours especially.’

At 5.00 a.m., 4.00 the old, the rue Laurence Savart began to stir but they had no time to watch it come alive even though parked and sharing a cigarette outside the house at Number 3. ‘We had to do it, Louis. We had no other choice.’

Oona and Giselle, if the latter was alive and if the two could be rescued, wouldn’t get their
laissez-passers
and
sauf-conduits
, nor would Gabrielle and her son or even Hermann. Antoine Courbet and Dédé Labelle would leave the city via the Gare Saint-Lazare to begin what would be the longest journey of their lives, to the farm of Madame Courbet’s sister.
Bien sûr
, their destination was near Rouen, which was being bombed repeatedly by the RAF. There’d be incendiaries and high explosives. Certainly the boys would be fascinated but …

A drag was taken, the cigarette returned. ‘Admit it, Louis. They couldn’t have stayed here.’

The boys were to ‘help with the spring planting’ and had been ‘excused from school.’

Hervé Desrochers and Guy Vachon would travel south to a farm near Dijon, they leaving the city via the Gare de Lyon and bearing a similar, officially handwritten letter that had been signed by the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and forged by Hermann. And didn’t the Occupier love to have his pieces of paper, and didn’t one hope that Von Schaumburg wouldn’t discover the forgery and that no one would question its not having been written on official letterhead?

That the boys might never come back was one thing, that they were only ten years old, another, and that they had had to grow up overnight, yet another.

‘Suzette Dunand, Hermann. That girl still worries me because she knows far too much.’

Though she hadn’t been able to tell them much about Jeannot Raymond, what she had said had confirmed their worst fears. In October 1940 there had been at least 150,000 Jewish people living and working in Paris, nearly half of all those in the country. Only a quarter had been of French descent and citizens, but with the continued arrests and deportations, that total had since plummeted to around seventy thousand.

Elsewhere in the country, it was approximately the same. The pecking order that had been initiated at Vichy’s request had focused first on the immigrants, especially those who had been refugees from the Reich, but now it was directed at those who were left, the French citizens, many of whom had been veterans of that other war, as had many of the immigrants.

Citizen or not, Jewish or not, for there were also many other unfortunates,
résistants
among them, it hadn’t and wouldn’t matter to the ERR’s Aktion-M squads, and yes, Jeannot Raymond and the Agence Vidocq were not the only ones helping themselves. ‘But as flats and houses here in the city are emptied, Hermann, Delaroche must be having his pick of them.’

‘Which he then furnishes to his taste and at absolutely no cost or very little.’

‘Thereby setting aside an ever-growing store of wealth few if any will know about.’

‘And when the Occupier has to leave?’ asked Hermann.

The cigarette was taken, ash flicked to one side. ‘The
agence
’s targeting of delinquent POW wives will put them in favour with the sympathies of many.’

‘Admit it, Delaroche will claim they’ve been secretly working for the Résistance.’

‘Having just as secretly betrayed many of them.’

Hermann took a deep drag. ‘And enough, probably, to have silenced all disclaimers.’

‘But Walter can’t know of their having targeted those wives and fiancées.’

‘And Oona could be in any of those flats or houses, Louis.’

‘
Ah, oui, oui,
but isn’t it more likely that she has to be held somewhere that is absolutely secure and where no one, no concierge no matter how much in the pay or how loyal to the cause, will question her having been brought there or say anything of it later?’

‘The Lévitan furniture store in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin is huge. There’ll be guards and not just a few of them, dogs, too.’

And 0900 hours at the Chinese gate would come soon enough and couldn’t be missed.

Birdcages, dishes, pots, pans, sheets, beds, blankets, furniture of all kinds … ‘Clocks, Louis.
Jésus, merde alors,
look at them!’

They went
tick-tock, tick-tock,
rang if off the hour or were silent, but didn’t just line the many aisles in regiments. Categorized, sorted as to species, they were stacked on shelves to the once white-painted, embossed tin-plate sheathing of a ceiling that fell to pseudo–Louis XIV plaster cornices before descending to a floor whose stained tongue-and-groove was store-worn.

‘Philippe had needed a crib,’ Louis had said as they’d sat a moment in the car—it had just been one of those dumb things a partner would say before taking the plunge, any plunge into the unknown. ‘Marianne wanted me to make the choice for her, but I had to work, so I made her take care of it.’

Had Louis the sudden need to get it all off his chest? That boy, that little son of his, had grown and had then to have a bed, a chest of drawers and, perhaps, if the money could be found, a little table and chair of his own. Always there had been money problems, the wages for defying death next to nothing, just like in the army. ‘But again she wouldn’t choose them herself, Hermann. That wouldn’t have been right of her, she had felt, like so many of our women, and had insisted that, as “head of the household” I must make that decision for her.’

This war, this Occupation, had made a lot of them change their minds about that and change them quickly. Louis had ordered the stuff from the Lévitan, spring of 1940, but would the memories and the loss of that second wife and their little boy haunt him to his dying day?

They had entered the Lévitan through a door next to the loading docks, had smelled the rank soot from the Gare de l’Est and heard its locomotives beyond the usual high wire fence all such places were supposed to have. There’d not been a light anywhere out there in the darkness of that railway yard and but a stone’s throw away, nor had there been anyone on that door, the place apparently wide open yet that couldn’t be, but they’d gone up the stairs anyway so as to keep out of sight.

Kitchen stoves were also on this third floor and Kohler had to wonder at the logic of this since most were of cast iron and heavy. Sinks, washbasins, bathtubs, bidets, mirrored medicine cabinets and toilets were here, too, as were iceboxes and tennis rackets, ironing boards, steamer trunks and suitcases still with their travel stickers, ladies’ hats, fur coats, dresses, suits, corsets …

‘Candlesticks,’ breathed Louis. ‘God has deserted us, Hermann. There are thousands of them.’

The escalators, installed in the thirties but now frozen in time to save power, were to be used simply as staircases of another kind. ‘Oona, if she’s here, must be in the cellars.’

Lamps were on the fourth floor and seen to the horizon’s walls, wireless set, too, and gramophones with heaps of black Bakelite recordings.

‘Mendelssohn,’ breathed Louis. ‘The Violin Concerto—it’s magnificent. A Deutsche Grammophon. Nothing but the finest.’

Though Mendelssohn was a definite no-no at home and even here in France.

Sheet music, tied in half-metre-thick bundles, made its ramparts but there were no pianos. Those had been taken by the Sonderstab Musik and were stored elsewhere in three large warehouses just to the north of the city. Numbered, certainly—how the hell else were they to have kept track of them, seeing as their legs, bearing those same numbers, had been removed to make the carcasses easier to ship?

But there were piano benches, delivered here by mistake. A teenager’s note, when found, said only, and in her native
Deutsch
:

Herr Kaufmann, if we are to meet in secret even for coffee and the cakes you love so much, my father would never forgive me. You would then be out of a necessary employment and would, in addition to your extremely modest fee, no longer receive the generous tips that are his great pleasure to present to you when such progress has been deemed entirely evident, even to ears that cannot, and never could, to my knowledge, hold a tune or keep the voice on key, due entirely, it must be admitted, to the noises of the foundry he owns and tirelessly manages so that my younger sister and myself may experience the finer things of life from such a talented instructor as your kind and diligent self
.

A mouthful.

‘Let’s go downstairs, Hermann. Maybe they’re waiting for us there.’

Clothing racks held men’s suits. Shoes, sorted from their mountains, were piled on shelves. Some had even been polished.

Lists of the contents of each house or flat would have been made, sometimes by the owners if time allowed, most often by the ERR with Germanic thoroughness though done most likely by a French employee and overseer, since virtually all of the Aktion-M boys were locals, and sure, they had needed the jobs just like Max Auger.

Jewellery, china, books—whole libraries of them—desks, family photos by the spill and heap, were accompanied by military decorations, and why hadn’t Colonel Delaroche simply taken a Légion d’honneur ribbon from here? Too Jewish, too tainted, or simply, unlike Max, goods that had best not be taken unless paid for, even if only a little and especially as one had a hold on a fellow veteran who would have had to agree to letting him have the use of his own?