Tapestry (46 page)

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 of 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.

‘Gently,’ breathed Kohler, taking the Schmeisser from him. ‘We wouldn’t want to ruin anything else, now would we?’

In the cold, grey light of dawn they shared a cigarette but would it be their last? wondered Kohler. What they had uncovered wasn’t good. Too many in high places were being threatened; all would flock together, none would let two dumb
Schweinebullen
continue to interfere as they had most definitely. Jeannot Raymond might well arrive thinking to find Suzette Dunand waiting for him, but what of Delaroche, or of Sonja Remer and the Standartenführer Langbehn?

What of Oberg and even of von Behr, who wasn’t going to like the problem they had left on that Lévitan doorstep?

What of Judge Rouget and Vivienne, of the others too, that still shadowy and probably never-to-be-named group of men of influence who met at the Cercle de l’Union Interaliée to finance and advise Delaroche’s campaign of teaching POW wives and fiancées not to misbehave?

‘Too much is at stake, Hermann, too many are threatened.’

The cigarette was returned, the time, the moment, one of silence.

Caught between the Marne and the Seine, the Bois de Vincennes stretched bare branches up into the fog. Immediately beyond the Lac des Minimes, the keep, the donjon of the Château de Vincennes, all 52 metres (about 170 feet) of it could barely be seen, rising as it did higher and higher to a turret at each of the four corners, one of which carried a swastika every bit as huge as that atop the Eiffel Tower and not a breath of wind.

‘Six hundred, a thousand, Hermann. Two thousand? How many men garrison that stronghold?’

‘I’d worry about what the Wehrmacht have got stored under that keep.’

High explosives, artillery shells and ammunition.
********
They had left Oona at the
Hôtel-Dieu
, had asked for Matron Aurore Aumont if possible and had said they’d be back soon, a lie of course but … ‘Oona’s the one for you, Hermann. Stop all this talk of a little place on the Costa del Sol with Giselle tending the bar and having babies Oona will take care of. You need her desperately and she needs you now more than ever.’

Hermann had held her all the way there. ‘And Giselle?’ he asked.

‘We’ll find her. I promise.’

‘I just wish I had your confidence.’

A Peugeot four-door sedan, dark green under the fog’s sweat, was parked outside 45 bis avenue de la Belle-Gabrielle not far from the Château’s keep but looking damned lonely as such would these days. Kohler used a fist to clear side windscreen. ‘Ah, Christ, Louis,’ he said, that sinking feeling in him all too evident. They should have had plenty of time to get in place but now had none.

A teddy bear, torn from Suzette Dunand’s grasp, lay on the backseat. On the floor there was a small suitcase, beside this, a shopping bag that had toppled over as its cognac bottle had been grabbed and taken away.

‘I should have seen it, Hermann. I knew we should have been more careful with that girl. This place … It’s freely open to the public only on Thursday afternoons from 1400 to 1600 hours. At all other times permission must be obtained.’

No casual visitors. ‘And now you tell me.’

Gilded fleurs-de-lis surmounted the tall, wrought-iron gates which, partly open, looked as if having been unlocked by an attendant who had had no wish to hang around and yet had had to do as bidden. Louis wasn’t happy about it. ‘Adrienne Guillaumet’s husband spent an extended tour of duty in Indochina. He and that father of his would be known to several other officers and men, one or more of whom could be involved.’

‘And there are veterans and veterans from that other war.’

‘I was here in 1920 when the memorial to the Annamite dead was consecrated. Brave men, good men. That temple, pagoda,
dinh
or communal house whose red tiled roofs so beautifully point towards heaven at their corners, is magnificent. There are rooms you wouldn’t expect, ironwood pillars—I counted at least sixty. Carvings that are exquisite, individual memorials to many of the fallen, altars to the gods of this and that, as well as to the Buddha.’

‘Let’s just hope we’re not too late.’

‘They can’t have let that girl live.’

There was no one waiting under the Chinese gate. How could there have been? One could wish for another time to cross this courtyard or walk through a garden which, in summer, would be tropical, not under blankets of last autumn’s leaves or wrapped in layers of burlap sacking, its monuments and statues to the fallen looking not just damned lonely but eerie in a silence that was broken only by the sound of gravel underfoot.

‘Hermann, there’s a
passage
that runs beside the temple. Two-metre-high sandstone bas-reliefs, copied from those in the avenue at Angkor Wat, line this. You’ll find them strange and frightening if coming upon them suddenly. Battle scenes from the holy books and epics of the Hindu. Remember, please, that not only will you be driven to feel as one with those men, you’ll be distracted. It can’t be helped, not after Verdun and all the rest we had to face in that other war.’

Everyone listened but no sound was heard, Suzette was certain. Dragons in dark, highly polished wood, their bulging eyes glistening as they watched her and waited, were coiled about the pillars or lying stretched along the rafters as if but awakened to what was happening and going to happen to her. Brightly painted terra-cotta unicorns tensely waited with phoenixes and turtles and they, too, seemed to listen and to watch. A polychrome Buddha waited, sitting on a lotus blossom. Spiralled incense coils—tall, open, white-ribbed cones—waited as they hung above the altar of this crowded shrine whose joss sticks the colonel had lit to smoulder constantly before the ash urns of the dead behind which were the framed photographs in glass of their owners, all of whom were in uniform.

Though there had been no sound that could have been heard, Bob had given warning and rigidly watched the block-printed red silk hangings that formed a screen over the doorway to this shrine. Colonel Delaroche had carefully redoubled his hold on the leash, Jeannot Raymond stood behind her, waiting too, as did the dead of that other war to whom relatives had burned further joss sticks before each photograph and had left offerings of money. Banknotes that had been printed in France in 1939 and never sent out, the colonel had said to Jeannot Raymond, who had caught her as she had hurried down the steps of the Concorde station and had forced her to come with him after first telephoning the colonel.

Bob didn’t move. Bob was very still, the two of them watching him and not herself, but would it matter, could it? Her hands were tied tightly behind her back. They had stuffed a kerchief into her mouth. The knife that would be used was still lying on the table before her and, among the reflections from its black lacquer, she could clearly see those of the incense coils and the dragons. ‘An old friend,’ Jeannot Raymond had said of that knife he had brought from Argentina. A gaucho’s knife with a long and shallow groove on either side and almost the whole length of the blade to hold and drain away the blood—her blood—once the throat had been slashed. He would simply pick it up, grab her by the hair, yank her head back and cut her throat as he’d done to others, she was certain of this. A knife whose blade was twenty centimetres long at least, two in width at the top and razor sharp, with a flattened, S-shaped guard, the handle beautifully embossed with what looked to be hammered, coppery-silver designs of crisscrossed triangles, curves, ridges and countless patterns.

‘One kills to feel it,’ Colonel Delaroche had said to her before Bob had stiffened. ‘Though the time of the gauchos was long ago, Jeannot employed only those who could prove they were descendants.’

‘The only honest human beings,’ that one had said. ‘Whenever possible they would use no other weapon than the
facón
each carried at the waist in its sheath, behind the back.’

Perhaps that knife weighed two hundred grams. Certainly it must be light for such a length. ‘The
gavilán,
’ he had said of it in Argentinian Spanish. ‘The balance has to be absolutely perfect. This one’s short by a good ten centimetres because I wanted it that way.’

Wanted it
…

Bob fidgeted. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the smell of the burning joss, it was, Suzette was certain, that their scent reminded him of someone and that this then made him uneasy.

Again and again it came to them: the softest rustling—rats? wondered Kohler. Was it backup Delaroche had called in? Curtained doorways to niche memorials had been deliberately drawn, others left open. Bongs, gongs, drums, funeral biers, flags, bowls and urns—
lieber Christus im Himmel,
the bloody crap was bound to get in the way. A life-sized bronze Buddha sat behind the main altar, glowing softly in the ever-subdued light, waiting, it seemed, for something to happen. Others of wood were seated about in shades of dark varying to a light rose-amber, one with a hand raised in caution—was it caution—all eyes closed, the expressions beatific?

Merde,
the rustling was stronger now. Louis hadn’t moved from where he was standing just inside the main entrance. Backlit by the growing light of day, he was a perfect target.

Now louder, the rustling put one on edge. Louis jabbed with the Lebel to indicate something off to the side in front of him. An altar. Joss sticks, bowls, urns, rows and rows of short strips of thin, reddish-purple paper with vertical lines of writing on them—hundreds and hundreds of these hung directly above one another from horizontally mounted bamboo rods, forming a panel maybe a metre-and-a-half wide by two in height. ‘Token offerings,’ he whispered, all but mouthing the words. Promises to the dead, for when times get better, wondered Kohler; items given, even with the shortages; good deeds done in the eternal quest to influence one’s karma?

The fog must be clearing. Air was moving through the
dinh
and, as each gust passed by, it lifted the loose ends of the paper offerings, one after another, row with row, and carried joss smoke up from behind a curtained door halfway along that side.

‘Don’t kill her, Colonel. Let’s talk.’

There was no answer.

Curtains of block-printed red silk were parted. ‘Colonel …’

‘Put that gun down, Kohler. Don’t and she dies,’ said Delaroche.

Jeannot Raymond had a knife like no other at her throat, the kid in tears.

The Walther P38 made its sound as it struck the glossy-black lacquer of the table. ‘Louis,’ he called, throwing the name over a shoulder, ‘the bastards have got me.’ There’d been nothing else he could have done. Nothing.

‘Join us, St-Cyr,’ called out Delaroche.