Carnival (18 page)

In the carnival's field office but what else had he found? ‘I'm good at mending things. Those were for the shooting gallery. We've also made a bottle-fish for the ladies. At least, we will have if they are allowed to continue with their plans. Are they to be allowed, Inspector?'

And anxious, was he? ‘It's too early to say. A bottle-fish?'

‘Wine,
eau-de-vie
, cognac and champagne, if your comrades haven't drunk everything. It's easy. You tie slipknots that won't slip when the line is pulled after the little noose has dropped over the neck of a bottle. It's an old carnival trick I learned as a boy earning money for
maman's
apron pocket.'

This one would digress for as long as possible if allowed. ‘Now tell me about the night he killed himself.'

Were knots no longer of interest, the suicide definite? ‘Dorsche and his
Griefer
woke us up.'

His ‘catchers', the ‘grabbers', the plant's
Werkschutz
, its work police.

‘They searched that hotel of ours from top to bottom for Eugène.'

‘But he was found at just after midnight when the alarm first went out?'

Was Herr Kohler so green or had he forgotten that
Kriegsgefangenen
past of his? ‘Dorsche had a good look anyway. After all, life is not exactly stimulating here, even for a Lagerfeldwebel who enjoys his job. We sleep like stones, Inspector. I was tumbled out of my bunk as were the others.'

Dorsche had wanted to see if they'd known of the suicide but they had obviously managed not to give him anything. ‘Okay, okay, now tell me what Thomas was like?'

‘Quiet. Studious. Very professional. He didn't cause trouble, if that's what you're after. He was one of us, a friend to all. He had no enemies, Inspector. This I must state emphatically.'

Just like the onions and the shallots, was that it? ‘And with the members of the
Winterhilfswerk
Committee?'

‘
Bien sûr
, they were skirts and they smelled like heaven, but Eugène knew his place.'

‘Didn't the others? Yourself, for instance?'

‘Inspector, we're not that stupid. Eugène always kept himself as clean as possible. That's what made the Fräulein Schrijen first notice him, and when she decided to fix up some of the carnival booths early last September, she went straight to him. Eugène then brought the rest of us in on it.'

Which was to say nothing about Thomas's having worked in the lab right next to her office, thought Kohler, but he'd leave it for now. ‘Continue, I'm listening.'

‘There are twelve of us in that cage we call home and our combine, Inspector—well, eleven now, until a replacement is found—but all of us had a hand in deciding …'

‘Who best to help those naive young ladies, eh?' interjected Herr Kohler with all that this could imply about escape committees and other mischief for which a spell of
Straf
or a Natzweiler-Struthof hanging would be the reward. He had definitely found the cutthroat.

‘There is no escape from this place, Inspector. We simply took a vote on who was to work with them.'

‘No abstentions, no hard feelings?'

Like why should Eugène have been included when he already had such a cosy place in which to work and two—yes, two girls to talk to every day as well as the Fräulein Schrijen?

‘None. We're one happy family because we have to be.'

And wasn't that twice at least that the assistant machinist had emphasized how well they'd got on? Best, then, not to mention the carpenters' nails and all the other things that had been accumulated to smuggle in here, best to say nothing yet of that cutthroat and the trinitrophenol, or of the colonel's also having been evasive. ‘Enjoy the last of the cigar, then drop it in the soup. I'll be in touch.'

‘You do that, Inspector. We wouldn't want to upset the Lagerfeldwebel any more than is necessary, but please remind him that I was ordered to come in here by a member of his Führer's Gestapo and dared not refuse.'

Were all Bretons so gabby? Louis's second wife had been a Breton, but Louis wasn't here to be reminded and definitely wasn't going to like what was bothering his partner. Löwe Schrijen had been right. Caroff and the others must have all agreed on what to say and that could only mean they really had been up to something more than handfuls of carpenter's nails and a few buttons but why, then, was Rasche being so evasive?

The aroma of the colonel's pipe tobacco seemed suddenly, thought Victoria, to fill the
Stube,
bringing warnings of its own the chief inspector could not realize. She had smelled it strongly on Renée many times. It had been soaked right through that lovely short-sleeved voile print Renée had worn out to the carnival on the twentieth of last August in the heat, the seams of its right sleeve and shoulder having been torn, the padding loose, and two of its rose-coloured buttons missing.

Dieu merci
, there had been no customers in the shop. Colonel Rasche had simply dropped Renée off and she had run in here, run fast, the smell of that tobacco in her hair, her lovely hair. Spicy, plummy, sickeningly sweet and even more disconcerting than now because she herself hadn't known if Renée had said things she shouldn't have to the colonel.

Doucement
, she said silently to herself. Go easy. Don't weaken. Sophie has left you to deal with this one.

Waving out the match he had used to light that pipe of his, the chief inspector studied her through the smoke. ‘The Fräulein Ekkehard,' he began, ‘I see that you've a telephone. Did she call to tell you she was on her way out to the carnival instead of your friend?'

‘She said that she didn't mind going instead of Sophie. For her it was an unexpected opportunity not only to get out of the office but to be by herself. She loved to explore the carnival, was always delighted when she found something. A playbill that hadn't been picked to pieces by the local children, a ticket to the Ferris wheel or …'

‘One of these?' he asked, dangling the droplet earring while watching her closely, too closely.

‘Where … where did you find that, Inspector? In our biscuit tin?'

‘A fake,' he said, capturing it in a pugilistic fist.

Some explanation had best be given. ‘Renée had been searching for its mate. She was like that. Everyone will tell you this. Once she had found one of a pair, she had to find the other. I tried to tell her that we would never find it.
Mein Gott
, the size of that place alone defied us, not just the children who foraged constantly. We'd enough pieces and weren't going to use such costumes anyway, but still she kept it and others in mind. “Where there's hope, there's always a chance,” she would say. If that is the mate, Renée would have cried for joy and clapped her hands like a ten-year-old then rushed to tell us all about it.'

He was not going to let her know where it had been found, nor was he going to ask how well or often she or Renée or Sophie had got on with the local children. Instead, he asked, ‘When and where did the two of you first meet?' as if it had far more bearing on what had happened than that earring or the children, or the grief one had to conquer, the fear.

‘On the ski slopes to the west of town in January of '41. I'd just come back from Munich and had gone there for a few days while the authorities searched through the deeds to this place, searched through everything, I guess, though the police don't tell people that, do they, and often it's done so well one doesn't even realize they've been in.'

If she had hoped to unsettled him, she had failed but had made certain he understood the shop and the house had been thoroughly searched more than once with nothing incriminating having been found.

‘Renée came out to ski, late on a Saturday afternoon with Colonel Rasche, though he didn't and one had to wonder, I must admit, why he had chosen to come along. The ride, I suppose, as a little treat. We fell on one of the slopes and had a good laugh, and that is how we met. Sunday, 5 January 1941, at about 4.00 p.m. the old time and just as the light was fading.'

The old time and Colonel Rasche having stayed the night and all that might or might not mean. ‘But you must have known who she was.'

‘Of course I knew. Kolmar is not so big now, especially not with a third of its citizens having left. Everyone knows what the Kommandant looks like because everyone has to. Renée often took my papers in to him to be signed and stamped, so of course it was only natural I knew who she was beforehand.'

The
Ausweise
and safe-conducts, the
Geleitbriefe
this one would have needed on the last Friday of every month.

‘
Ach
, I admit I was lonely, Inspector. Terribly worried and desperately in need of a friend. Mother was in Besançon then, in the internment camp—all those women, the old, the young, the middle-aged, their teenaged daughters also, and younger children. No heat in that bitter winter, no running water or toilet facilities other than a latrine trench?—a terrible, terrible time for them and one from which she suffered greatly and still does. In March of '41 they were moved to Vittel, those with little children being finally allowed to go home. For the life of me, though, I still cannot understand what threat a sixty-five-year-old widow poses to the Reich, a nurse who came here before the Great War, got caught up in it, was married to an Alsatian, had me, lost her husband to an artillery barrage, ran a bookshop only to foolishly include among her keepsakes her British passport, not out of loyalty but sentiment, for she had no family left in Britain, none at all.'

She paused as if she had said too much, which she had, of course, had he not been a patriot himself, thought St-Cyr. She swallowed hard and then, still with an edge, said, ‘And myself, you're wondering? I'd just lost my teaching certificate. I was a very good teacher who had been judged no longer fit to teach.'

The copy of the
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
was dated Thursday, 19 December 1940. The photo showed a group of about fifty students, all of them Alsatian schoolteachers of varying ages from twenty to well past sixty.

‘I was the only one who failed simply because of mother's being in the internment camp. Herr Ludin, the principal of that so-called school in Munich they sent us to for indoctrination, wouldn't listen, though I pleaded with him to let me continue teaching. I'd students who loved me, who then came to despise me for no other reason. I'd neighbours with whom I had always shared things but who would share no more. Understandably I am still bitter.'

‘Yet you agreed to be a member of the
Winterhilfswerk
Committee.'

‘It was my duty, wasn't it?'

‘Good cover too, one might think.'

‘Cover? Didn't I have to show people that I was a loyal citizen?'

‘And your neighbour, Frau Oberkircher. Does she no longer—'

‘Claudette? Claudette and my mother shared their widowhood, and now, poor soul, she has just lost her primary source of income.'

Dieu merci
, that had made him pause. ‘Sophie likes to ski, and when the three of us got together, we found we shared that love.'

‘And the archery?' he asked, avoiding Claudette and whether she had been forced into watching the shop for the Gestapo.

‘Sophie introduced us to it out at her father's country house. Renée was always keen to compete. We enjoyed ourselves. We skated too—there's a beautiful little lake in the forested hills behind the house and when the wind clears the snow, the ice is perfect and one can skate for hours in absolute peace. But … but how did you know of the archery?'

‘Calluses on her fingers, feather cuts on the back of her right hand.'

Again he was watching her too closely but was he thinking of the knot that had been around Renée's throat, or that Renée hadn't committed suicide at all?

‘She didn't love Alain Schrijen, Inspector. He hadn't given her time, had rushed her off her feet, but she'd been afraid to say no to him. Unlike Sophie, Alain has … well, he's been given far too much.'

‘Why not say he's spoiled, Victoria? Why not say he's become a sadist who beats defenceless men who are already so broken, they can no longer work? That he enjoys what he does? That they're—'

‘Sophie … Sophie, please go back and rest. You don't know what you're—'

‘Saying? Don't you ever try to silence me, Victoria Bödicker. They even send young women to that place, Inspector. Experiments … they do experiments on them!'

The hush of the Steeping Shed had alarmed Herr Kohler, accustomed as he was to the noise of the Pulping Shed, felt Dorsche. Quickly this Kripo scanned the building, seeing the men in black rubberized boots, suits and long aprons, their gauntlets and goggles removed, their helmets those of a fire brigade. He would be wondering what was going on and where he was—in some sort of industrial spa perhaps, for long rectangular baths extended one after another and side-by-side from this end of the building to the other, the steeping tanks. He would see that rack upon rack of metre-square sheets of pure white cellulose from the Pulping Shed now waited to be bathed: two hundred of them to a rack, fifty racks side-by-side and to the far end of the building. He would note the fumes, the strongly alkaline odour of caustic soda, would know for certain that it was dangerously corrosive and that if splashed on bare skin or lips or in the eyes, one screamed in agony. He'd know that the concrete floor would most certainly become slippery once the roller presses, which were to the far side, began to squeeze the caustic from the sheets after their little bath of forty minutes.

‘The carpenter,' managed Kohler, not liking things. ‘You said he'd be here. Just why would a building like this need one?'