Carnival (33 page)

‘So he cries murder, not suicide, Hermann, and asks himself where he can find two honest, hardworking, dumb
Schweinebullen­
who will look for the truth he'll present to them.'

‘And sends us to Natzweiler-Struthof. We can't take her into that camp.'

‘Schrijen and Rasche both know this but have given us no other choice.'

‘Yet Renée Ekkehard was forced to watch an execution. Only Kramer could have given that boy the permission to bring her into the camp.'

‘Which can only mean he knew all about what that girl had cried out.'

‘Or had been told enough by Alain Schrijen to sanction it. We've no authority there, Louis. Even I haven't. Camps like those have laws of their own.'

‘We'll leave her at the ski lodge. If we can, we'll bring Alain Schrijen to her. Maybe that will force the truth from him.'

‘He'll never tell us, and you know it.'

‘Of course he won't. They'll all lie, but between the lies will be the mustard and the Munster.'

9

The modest guesthouse, the Gasthaus Struthof, a ski lodge, was much as Victoria remembered from the winter of 1936: grey, weather-beaten boards and timbers whose carvings were beautiful and in the traditional style, with a long, railed, first-storey porch that overlooked the slopes. Racks of staghorn were on either side of the entrance. There had been lots of skiers back then, were quite a few still, though apparently oblivious to, or welcoming the swastika that hung from the crown of the roof high above her. Snow-deep, the single roadway out in front was no more than ten metres wide. Beyond its ends, downhill pistes cut through the fir trees to the west and east, clouds of powder snow trailing each skier. There were uniforms but not that many: the black of the Schutzstaffel, its newer grey-green, and that of the Wehrmacht, and here a Mauser rifle over a shoulder, there a Bergmann submachine gun or an officer with a holstered pistol.

‘Go in and have a cup of coffee,' said Herr Kohler. ‘Try to just relax. Don't do anything stupid.'

‘I have no reason to.'

Across from them, across the road, was the building that had been used for overflow guests, kitchen storage, extra showers and a washroom.
******
It all seemed so innocent: at least twenty degrees of frost, with drifting smoke from isolated farm chimneys being caught by the gusting wind, and in the distance, the sight of snow-covered hills and forest that she had always found so exhilarating.

Dismayed, she watched St-Cyr and Kohler drive away. Two decent men. Patriots? she asked. The Frenchman certainly; the Bavarian … Where, please, did he really sit in this tragedy?

The road to the
Konzentrationslager
was only three kilometres long. All of it was steeply uphill, and there were several tight bends the prisoners had cut and built with their bare hands. Laughing, two skiers pushed past her to stand their skis and poles in the nearby snowbank, both already pulling off their caps and unbuttoning their jackets to hang them up with all the others. No one seemed to pay the slightest attention to a woman with an overcoat, scarf and hat she quickly removed but took with her. The patterned pullover would blend in as would the slacks, but could she find the strength to behave exactly as if on holiday?

‘
Einen Kaffee mit Milch, bitte
. A table by the window, if possible.'

The lace-trimmed blouse the waitress wore was white, the straps of the dress, the deepest of reds, the braided hair under the primly tied kerchief, flaxen and long, but not perfect, for in the haste to wait on so many, several strands had come loose.

The girl had rosy cheeks, an enviable complexion, exquisite brows and beautifully formed lips, the eyes of the darkest blue. ‘Are you from Schirmeck?' asked Victoria.

Flicking her gaze hesitantly to a table far to the left of them, the girl said, ‘Now that I am needed here, Fräulein, I live in and share a room with two others. It … it is best that way.'

‘Have you been here long?'

Again there was that apprehensive glance toward the table where a lone man sat smoking a cigarette. ‘Not long. Since late last autumn when the skiing began.'

The dining room was large; there was a dance floor and a stage, everything that a party would need and, from the window, the view across the Bruche Valley stretched to the hazy outline of the Donon at 1,009 metres. Seemingly endless fir forest covered this part of the Vosges, with beech trees in the lower reaches, the snow deepest among them and thinnest over the crests of the hills, some of which had been cleared for pasture well before the Middle Ages. There would be utter silence out there, utter peace, the frost so hard, the branches would creak. The ski runs were perfect here, and wasn't it this that made it so hard? Renée had loved to ski; Sophie had too, and herself, and it hadn't been wrong of her to have brought those two together. They had been happier than ever before, content in themselves, so many things.

Of course it had been wrong, she said silently, for look where things are now, look at what has happened to Renée.

Her coffee came, and with it, a glass of schnapps. ‘Who …' she blurted as the girl tossed her head in the direction of the
Kachelofen
and that other table. ‘I can't accept it. I'm sorry.'

‘
Bitte
, Fräulein, if I were you, I would thank Herr Meyer and call out
Ein Prosit
. It costs nothing and will keep him happy. It's always best with those people.'

‘Who is he?'

‘The Obersturmführer? He is Head of the Political Department at the Natzweiler Lager.'

Somehow she did as advised, even to smiling at this Nazi in mufti. She would concentrate on the ski slopes, would let the good-natured camaraderie of this place wrap itself around her. St-Cyr and Kohler would want to sit Alain down in front of her at this table and confront him with what they knew must have happened, but did they now suspect that Renée, on seeing that car of his arriving at the carnival, had thought Sophie must have come out after all, only to then realize that it was Alain and to scramble to put on her skis and head into the Kastenwald to avoid him?

Did they now know that the
Polizeikommandantur
's
Grüne Minna
had then arrived and that Renée, on looking back, had seen it and had immediately thought all had been lost? They could only assume that she had been out all night. They could not possibly know that she had forced herself to do the impossible and had gone east to the Totenkopf, to the hut to find out what had gone wrong and to warn the others along the line, only to then find that none of them were there either.

Two boys, two deserters and their courier were supposed to have been coming through from Munich. Instead, she had found cold ashes in the firebox of the hut's little stove and an emptiness that would not go away.

Exhausted, Renée had had no other choice but to return to the carnival. Despondent, yes, poor thing, and terrified of arrest.

‘Might I join you, Fräulein?'

‘
Ach!
Why, yes, of course.'

‘A cigarette?'

‘That would be lovely. The two who dropped me off used up all I had.'

‘Then we had best see that you keep better company.'

The camp was quiet, the wire fences barbed and electrified, the ground-storey, barrack blocks low-roofed in tiers, paired two by two and stepped up the hillside, perhaps thirty of them in all and without a whisper of wood smoke or sign of a chimney except from the kitchen hut. Guard towers were at each corner of the wire and midway between, but even here, little sign of life was evident beyond that of the wood smoke from their portable stoves. Even the dogs, in the fenced runs, had sought the shelter of the kennels, these being well insulated with straw.

Had Hermann and he happened upon an execution? wondered St-Cyr. Though they'd been seen, and their approach closely followed, no challenge had been given. ‘The administrative block is uphill, Hermann, and just outside the gate.' They had parked some distance down from it.

‘Be quiet.
Mein Gott
, can't you listen? What's that sound?'

Hermann was really edgy. ‘Skiers.'

‘Not those. That other sound.'

Now it came and now it didn't, for the wind from the west was intermittent. Again and again they heard it, both looking uphill questioningly. From the camp to the nearby bald crown of the hill it couldn't be any more than two hundred metres. Tangled, windswept brush was up there. Stunted beeches, bilberry and gentian, the snow cover thin and trailing to leave uncovered a litter of round boulders.

‘A dinging,' swore Hermann, not liking it.

‘Iron on iron.'

‘Countless blows.'

A steep, wide path, its snow beaten down by many, disappeared over the crest of the hill. Slippery, the path was a son of a bitch to climb, but looking back over a shoulder and beyond the wire enclosure of the camp, the view was straight out of a storybook.

‘Louis, maybe we'd best leave this. Let's just go down to the Kommandant's office, that one right down there, the one with the window and the binoculars that are staring at us.'

Hermann was afraid and with good reason. ‘We'll go through the motions,
mon vieux
. We'll do exactly as they want, and then, suitably chastised and conditioned, we'll confront them.'

There were two quarries beyond the crest of the hill, sharply stepped, amphitheatre openings in the rock, other, lesser ones distant among the beech and fir. Against the green and grey of the trees, the snow and the blue of the sky, the pink of the granite was startlingly bright, the sound of the hammering constant. ‘When cold, there is no other sound quite like that of iron on iron,' muttered St-Cyr. ‘It's distinctly resonant and acutely so.'

Perhaps four thousand men in mud-brown tattered coats, trousers and the oddest assortment of footgear were at work. No one took any apparent notice of two detectives standing out against the skyline on the crest of this hill. To have looked up would have been suicidal. Each man either knelt on the broad ledges among innumerable rectangular, snow-covered blocks yet to be removed, or swung a ten-kilo sledge to hit a drill rod that was being held, and certainly one waited apprehensively for the scream as a hand or wrist was smashed or an eye blinded by a splinter of iron or rock. Hoists and pulleys, logs, skids, ramps and finally wagons, on to which blocks of stone were being loaded for transport downhill to the railway siding at Shirmeck, also offered places where a man could easily be crushed.

Iron, two-wheeled barrows held the waste rubble and were being pushed, pulled, heaved at and dragged to a tip where they were dumped on to a roadway that was being built. Beyond these were lorries that could just as well have been used. Three of them were parked with two grey tourers next to the neat row of SS barracks from whose parade ground flew a large swastika.

Guards were nearly everywhere and warmly clothed, their steel helmets, rifles and Schmeissers sharply outlined against the frost, the sky, and a sun whose glare was blinding.

When a drill rod accidentally fell, it added its more rapid dinging until hastily stilled. On one ledge, the rock suddenly cracked and the long, long splitting of it was clearly heard above the undertone.

‘Their hands, Louis. They don't have gloves, only rags.'

‘Their faces, Hermann. Many of them are sunburnt.'

The coffee was real, but she must not in any way indicate that this was anything but normal, felt Victoria; the schnapps, an
eau-de-vie de framboise
, a raspberry liqueur for which Alsace was justly famous; the cigarette a Juno.

Skiers came and went, paying no attention to them and yet … and yet, she wanted to cry out that things were far from normal, that at the camp, men were being systematically worked to death.

Instead, she must smile softly at this Obersturmführer, this gaunt, rake-jawed SS with the jutting chin and intense grey eyes whose rank was equivalent to that of a Kriminalinspektor in the German Police. She must make idle conversation, must lie if necessary and consistently, must then remember every little thing she had said because he would remember it.

‘A bookseller!' marvelled Bruno Meyer. ‘But that is extraordinary, Fräulein. Really, you must meet our Schutzhaftlagerführer Kramer. He collects books for the Standartenführer Sievers­, the Executive Secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, and Director of the Institute of Military Scientific Research. Standartenführer Sievers was a bookseller before the war and here, at the camp, Schutzshaftlagerführer Kramer has been patiently gathering quite a collection for him. Velum-bound manuscripts written entirely by hand and in Latin or in Old German. Examples of the earliest of printings too, and of the French. I'm certain you would find much in common.'

Again the Fräulein Bödicker found herself saying, ‘That would be lovely. If there is time, I would like that very much.'

‘Time … Why should there not?'

‘The two who brought me here. I … I simply don't know how long they'll be.' His eyes darkened.

‘It's about the suicide of Untersturmführer Schrijen's fiancée, isn't it?'

Cher Jésus
, save her now. ‘Alain's fiancée, yes. Renée … Renée Ekkehard.'

‘You knew her well?'

He must know all about it. ‘A little. We worked together on the
Winterhilfswerk
Committee of Alain's sister.'

‘A fête … I seem to remember seeing something about one your committee was to hold in mid-March.'

It was impossible to read his thoughts. ‘The sixth, yes. That's when it's to open.'

‘
Ach
, now I have it. Gauleiter Wagner is to officiate. Did you know he was a former primary schoolteacher, as was yourself?'

‘Did I say I'd been a teacher?'

‘A difficult one, if I understand the reports of your directors and visiting school inspectors. Not a strict disciplinarian, as was Herr Wagner. Little got past him, let me tell you. Minor offences must always be severely punished if discipline and absolute obedience are to be firmly instilled.'

Just what was he after? ‘I … I felt it best to overlook certain misdemeanours. If a child is placed in a position of trust and responsibility, he or she invariably feels useful and there is both a learning process of immense value and a sense of self-worth that engenders harmony.'

‘Then you don't agree with the Gauleiter Wagner's methods?'

Ah,
merde
, she had fallen right into it. ‘I didn't say that.'

‘Then what
did
you imply?' Her cheeks were colouring.

‘Breaking a child's spirit isn't necessarily the best form of discipline, Herr Obersturmführer. Humiliating them in front of their peers by using a birch rod or leather strap simply reinforces the underlying problem which may have nothing whatsoever to do with the school and everything to do with what's been happening at home. Children love to be busy learning new things and to feel useful. Always if there is that sense of their making progress, even if only at their own speed, you will seldom have discipline problems.'