Carnival (8 page)

There were three chemical equations on the scrap of notepaper, each precisely and neatly written. The first involved a compound of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen with caustic soda. The second equation took the product of the first and combined it with carbon disulphide, the source of the stench of rotten eggs—the product of that reaction then being treated with sulphuric acid.

These equations were nothing more than the process, much simplified, of taking wood pulp, which was cellulose, and converting it to the artificial silk, the rayon the Works produced, but why write them on the corner of a notebook from which they were then torn? Why hastily scribble another formula below them, that of trinitrophenol—picric acid—used as a yellow dye, oh for sure, and as an antiseptic, but also as an extremely unstable and highly dangerous explosive? Why stuff that scrap of paper into a pocket the colonel must surely have gone through and found?

The handwriting of the trinitrophenol was decidedly different from the rest.

‘Louis, he lived in despair,' said Kohler, having at last arrived.

One had best run a finger over the contents of the note, ending at the trinitrophenol, something they both knew only too well. ‘For now,
mon vieux
, let's just keep it to ourselves.'

‘Since Rasche must have known about it?'

‘
Ah,
mais alors, alors
, Hermann, for now the benefit of doubt, especially as these two buttons I found in Thomas's pockets are totally unlike those he left out for us to find and are from a girl's summer dress.'

‘Then you'd best read this, seeing as the
salaud
failed to mention it as well.'

“To whom it may concern,

Messieurs, I feel it is my duty to report that the wife of Eugène Thomas, prisoner 220371, Stalag XIV J, Arbeitslager 13, Colmar, Alsace, has been unfaithful to him. On occasions too numerous, his little son, a boy of five, has been left with a neighbour while Mme. Paulette Thomas goes to Pigalle, les Halles and other such well-known rendezvous and does not return until the following morning. Sometimes it is noon before she gets home, sometimes later or not at all.

‘Hermann, is this really necessary?'

‘Read on.'

“At other times the victorious soldiers of our German friends are seen entering her flat, the child then being shoved out the door in the cruelest of weather. An hour goes by, two hours. Sometimes she is with two men, sometimes with three.”

‘How can anyone give credence to such rubbish?'

‘Anonymous and uncensored, Louis, but as to his having killed himself because of it … '

‘There was also rust from iron filings.'

‘
Ach
, any Kriegie worth his salt finds himself a carpenter's nail and a little stone. He grinds off a bit every day. You put the filings on your tongue and wash them down with water. Stomach acid then changes the filings to iron chloride which is absorbed by the blood, but I have to tell you, Rasche's second-in-command here is positive it's a suicide.'

‘Then why, please, does a man who watches his health as closely as he can under such circumstances, kill himself even if he had only just read that letter, which he couldn't have, since it wasn't found with him?'

‘The Oberstleutnant Rudel would have shown it to him earlier.'

‘And yet our victim
still
takes his iron?'

‘There was this, too, and this.'

One of the ‘nature' magazines and a cutout from another.

‘Left in the toilet for him to find, Louis. Maybe by one of the
Postzensuren
, since they were both gun-shy of me and the firm has lost several of its former staff members to the meat grinder of the present conflict.'

‘A grudge, a wanting to get back at the enemy?'

‘Perhaps, but for now that driver of ours is insisting that he show us a little something else.'

To the flat farmlands some seven kilometres to the east of Kolmar, the long and ever-deepening shadows of the late afternoon brought a bleakness that couldn't help but be felt. Snow drifted. The wind, down from the Vosges to the west, found each obstruction: a lonely, shaggy-maned russet mare, an orchard, a haystack, cows being driven to a barn. Two boys pulling a toboggan heaped with firewood stopped to stare at the car, while beyond them, across the barren, windswept fields where cabbages would flourish in season, the carnival lay in ruins partly enclosed by the Kastenwald, a woods whose bare branches and darkened trunks had helped to shelter what remained.

Caught, trapped, overrun, its operators and owners chased out by the Blitzkrieg of 1940, everything had been left in place, but the sight of it made one ask, is it the end of the world?

Multicoloured, much faded bunting flew in tatters. Once-gilded charioteers rode into battle. Marquee roofs of canvas, board and painted panel had collapsed, yet still there were the ruined stalls, booths, sideshows and rides. A carousel, the stark pipes of whose band organ were caked with ice and webbed with snow, awaited its riders, a zeppelin pointed skyward and dangled drunkenly by one cable, a swan chair had lost its wings and been turned upside down. There was a cater­pillar … The Super Car Monte Carlo was still recognizable, biplanes, too, as were the Ferris wheel, the shooting galleries and the shies where one would throw a ball or coconut as hard and accurately as one could.

‘The
Sitzkrieg
,' muttered Rasche. The sit-down war.

‘The
drôle de guerre
,' said Louis. The phoney war.

Kohler knew both were stating the reason for the carnival's having been within less than ten kilometres of the Maginot Line and the front. From September '39, after the fall of Poland, until 9 April 1940 and the invasion of Denmark and Norway, men had languished on both sides. Then suddenly all such travel had been banned and the carnival had had to stay.

‘Colonel, please go over for us exactly how and where your secretary was found and by whom,' said St-Cyr.

‘Then tell us why you chose to show us the second victim first,' said Kohler.

These two, must they always suspect the worst? wondered Rasche. It was getting late. They would need the lanterns. ‘I found her, and I cut her down.'

The truth at last. ‘Where, Colonel?' asked St-Cyr.

‘The House of Mirrors.'

Which must surely all have been broken but such evasiveness had best be stopped. ‘That school notebook of Victoria Bödicker's, Colonel. At lunch you wouldn't let me take it from beneath your hand. Frau Lutze noticed this as she did everything else.'

‘All right, all right. Yvonne really did feel I ought to see it, that I might well need further background on the girl. Victoria, as you know, was one of the Fräulein Schrijen's
Winterhilfswerk
Committee. Renée and I … '

‘Your secretary, Colonel?'

‘Yes! We would stop by here of a late afternoon in summer. She was fascinated by the place and loved to wander about in there. I … Why, I was indulgent. Staff relations, call it what you will.
Mein Gott
, the girl was like a daughter to me. A few minutes, an hour at most. When one is constantly in demand, one seeks relaxation as best one can.'

‘That notebook, Colonel. It's evidence.'

‘The buttons too, are they?' asked Rasche.

But not those two that were found in the victim's pockets, was that it, eh? wondered St-Cyr. ‘Colonel, you deliberately left those items on your desk so that we would find them. Why did you do so, if you did not intend to let us examine them further?'

‘I had merely been getting a few things together to remind me of each of the men I'd allowed to help the committee. One was the firm's fabric designer and test weaver, another a machinist and carver. Both are very capable. The carved buttons are for a waistcoat I'm having made.'

‘Then please hand those items over, the papier-mâché ball also.'

Reluctantly Rasche opened his briefcase and handed them over. ‘Now if you two don't mind, we had best have a look at her. Kohler, there's a screwdriver in that side pocket. Be so good as to bring it and fetch the lanterns from the boot.'

Smoke rose from the chimneys of the farmhouse where the guard was billeted. Of buff-coloured stucco and weathered half-timbering, the house had been built in the late 1880s, the lichen-encrusted, reddish-brown and spatulate tiles of its mansard roof catching the last of the sunlight. Dogs barked and Hermann, who had always loved and been at ease with such, no matter how difficult, hesitated. ‘Behind the Ferris wheel,' said St-Cyr. ‘Two guards, two Alsatians, each of them looking our way.'

‘
Danke
. They're on the lead,' he sighed.

‘Why the fright?' asked St-Cyr.

‘
Ach
, after the 1918 Armistice had been signed and everyone was just waiting to be released, I used to go under the wire and would be back well before dawn
Appell
. Though one of the guards knew all about it and would always look the other way, another chose to let the dogs come after me.'

‘You had only paid the one off!' snorted Rasche. ‘
Mein Gott
, Kohler, you continue to surprise me. Now come along. The snow's a little deeper here. We must find you some overboots, Chief Inspector. Those shoes of yours don't look good.'

‘It's the glue,' muttered Kohler. ‘I bought it and used it and got taken.'

‘The
swarzer Markt
in France, Colonel. Hermann is an expert but an easy touch for the pretty ones.'

And hasn't changed one iota, thought Rasche. ‘The
Volksopfer
might have something.'

The people's offering of winter clothes for the boys in Russia.

Quickly Louis stuffed the notebook and other things into his pockets to join the torn photographs he'd taken from the second victim, the identity papers and passes, the magazine with its pseudoerotic exposures of female anatomy, et cetera, and the anonymous letter.

The chemical formulae also, thought Kohler, not liking it one bit. Trinitro-bloody-phenol this colonel of theirs wasn't saying a damned thing about but should!

As the night came down, the sky grew clearer, its stars sharper, brighter than any he had seen in a long, long time. Was it simply Alsace and the Vosges, or was it something subconsciously within him, he wondered, this need to look up even when no enemy aircraft were there, this need to look beyond the earthly? Rasche was keeping far too much to himself. Oh for sure, he had always had a mind of his own, but why ask for two detectives if you don't want to confide everything they might need about two suicides that could just as easily have been left at that?

Torn flags were irritated by the wind. Halyards constantly struck metal and wooden standards, canvas flapped, boards creaked, swung aimlessly on chains, or banged and rubbed together. Here and there—everywhere—were sounds, especially the hollow moaning of air as it rushed through a tube or tunnel, but then, too, there was the taint of mildewed canvas and of rotting boards even in the depths of winter. Eerie … strange, a deserted city whose life had suddenly been snuffed out, a wilderness of silhouettes where shattered biplanes dangled, turned and swayed.

A Noah's Ark had no roof but the shadows of its animals two by two. Twin giraffes flanked the entrance. A tattered gorilla raised a fist.

In single file, the colonel leading, they threaded their way through the twenty centimetres or so of snow. ‘She's not in the House of Mirrors,' said Rasche. ‘I had her put in one of the wagons. Each of these'—he indicated the rides and sideshow booths—‘came in one or more wagons, which invariably formed part of the structure and were lived in and then used for transporting everything while en route.'

‘A community. A little village of its own,' said St-Cyr, realizing as Hermann would, that the colonel must have tramped about here a good deal.

Toga-draped plaster maidens raised torches to the heavens, huge peacocks fanned their tails under starlight, an Ideal Caterpillar ride waited, its linked little train of cup-canopied carriages caught on the uphill in the broken darkness of a fallen marquee.

Wagons
did
form the walls of the House of Mirrors. Iron cross-poles had once supported its canvas roof, and from these had hung the stand-up crazy mirrors whose walkways, stairs, false turns and landings were still in place. Glass probably everywhere, thought Kohler. Those two boys they had seen wouldn't have left it for long and must have, like all the other children in the district, had free rein and a fantastic time of it.

Rasche shone his blue-blinkered torch on the shattered entrance. ‘A chair was used,' he said, ‘the rope thrown over one of the cross-poles.'

‘Colonel, since she didn't return after lunch on Saturday, the thirtieth,' asked Louis, ‘how is it that you are certain she died on the following day?'

‘The girl was seen by a farm family on their way to the early Mass. They waved to her, but she appeared too cold and tired to respond. She'd been cross-country skiing.'

‘All night?' asked Louis.

‘Apparently.'

Hence the need for secrecy, said Kohler silently. ‘Who questioned them?'

‘I did. Renée was an accomplished skier. The woods, the flat-lands, the hills and mountains, each offered challenges she loved.'

It was Louis who patently ignored what was due east of them and not that far, the old frontier, the Rhine and the Black Forest, and simply asked, ‘At what time, then, was she last seen?'

These two would think the worst. ‘At just after dawn on Sunday. The church isn't far.'

‘Had she a rucksack?' asked Kohler.

‘It's still with her as is the empty vacuum flask she had filled with soup and the newspaper she had wrapped some sandwiches in.'

‘Only
some
, Colonel?' asked St-Cyr.