Carnival (9 page)

‘A good lunch, that's all.
Ach
, did you think I would try to hide the distance those skis of hers might have helped? Look, you two, I know exactly how difficult it will be for me if this should ever get out. Why else would I have called Paris, Kohler, had I not needed someone I could depend on? Renée came back here to warm up and rest and had, I am certain, every intention of returning to Kolmar. None of us would have known where she had been, not really. She could have told us anything and we would have accepted it. She was that kind of person. Totally reliable and above suspicion.'

Yet she had been out all night, thought Kohler, and wasn't this carnival a place where one might be watched by another without knowing it? ‘Colonel, when I dropped in on the Oberst­leutnant Rudel, he stated flatly that both deaths were suicides. This one due to despair over something the girl had seen at Natzweiler-Struthof.'

Would a sigh be best? ‘Karl's forte is expedience. Three weeks before Christmas, Renée went up to Natzweiler-Struthof to ski. The
Konzentrationslager
is nearby. Skiers have gone there for years. When she came back, she was subdued and not her usually outgoing self. I thought to cheer her up, and on our return from a meeting in Neu-Breisach, we stopped in here, but she said she wasn't feeling well and would rather go home. I insisted, and it did help. She was always intrigued by the things she constantly found here.'

‘And did the Fräulein Ekkehard mention what had troubled her?' asked Louis.

‘
Ach
, we never spoke of it. There are some things one simply doesn't discuss. Now, please, it is this way.'

‘The lanterns, Colonel,' said Hermann. ‘Hadn't I best light them? One for you and Louis, and the other for myself.'

A harlequin, a hangman, a frantic young girl trapped at the end of a seedy
passage
, a lewd and laughing butcher advancing upon her, blood dripping from his hands and upraised cleaver; in the background, a high-court judge, jailer and ax-wielding executioner whose crowd of onlookers shrilled their venom.

Children also, terrified children.

Masks grinned, frowned, grimaced or were wide-eyed in horror above the wagon's mural panels but all were seen in the surrealistic blue wash of the lantern and in the full-length, distorting mirrors that stood round, their carved frames carefully repaired, the decorations lovingly restored: some with vines and succulent bunches of grapes, others with spiderwebs whose decidedly humanoid insects were not only trapped but fought back fiercely.

Palms, snakes, jungles with strange birds and bats completed the panorama, along with glasses of wine and links of sausage.

‘From one house of mirrors to another,' breathed St-Cyr, the colonel having placed the lantern atop a trestle-held coffin that, in itself, hadn't been made of plain pine boards but of carnival panelboard whose ruined cartouches with their hieroglyphics in gold, silver and ruby, had faded and peeled.

Rasche, his image warped by the mirrors behind and on either side, faced him, a black-gloved hand still on the lantern. ‘Though you've yet to meet him, Chief Inspector, never underestimate Löwe Schrijen. Curved inwardly, bowed outwardly—even prismatic probably—whatever glass was needed, he had it found. Frankly, I think he went too far, but you'd never convince him of that. What his daughter Sophie required for this little effort of hers she got. They simply dismantled a house of mirrors in Berlin, no doubt saving it from the bombing.'

‘And then used the old frames from here.' For now one had best say nothing of the months of internment work this alone must have required, but one had to wonder at such evasiveness.

‘You or me?' asked Rasche, indicating the screwdriver he had taken from Hermann.

‘Myself, I think.'

‘To make certain no one has tampered with her?'

‘Colonel, if what my partner and I are coming to realize was at all the case, then you had best cooperate fully.'

‘Renée wasn't my lover.'

‘Had she one?'

‘A boy she met from time to time.'

‘At official functions?'

‘And others.'

Sacré nom de nom
, must this evasiveness continue and things go deeper still? ‘His name, Colonel?'

Perhaps now St-Cyr and Kohler would begin to understand. ‘Alain Fernand Schrijen.'

‘The chairman's son and brother of Sophie?'

‘Who else?'

3

In a cul-de-sac of shattered mirrors and lantern light at the end of a corridor, Kohler felt just as alone as Renée Ekkehard must have. Worried too—terrified perhaps, poor thing—certainly far from happy and with the sounds of flapping canvas and the like coming at her, or had there been nothing at all but an ice-cold silence on that early Sunday morning? Had it been then that she hanged herself, or had it been later on in the day, the girl waiting it out, arguing with herself until no arguments remained­?

Trinitrophenol …
Lieber Christus im Himmel
, what had Louis and himself landed in? Rasche had, apparently, touched as little as possible here. He had even carried in a box to stand on as he'd cut her down, rather than use the chair that had been kicked away and was on its side, facing a corner.

A career soldier, nerves of steel too. Odd, though, that he should have been so calm, given that he must have been in shock and thinking only of his secretary, that ‘daughter to him.'

Louis didn't know the half about the colonel; Louis couldn't. That cosy little nest with Oberfeldwebel Lutze and Yvonne and Rasche's leavings from that other war? Trust the
salaud
to think nothing of it and come back to use her again, if only as his housekeeper!

Lutze, like others at Vieil-Armand and elsewhere during the 1914–15 campaign, had known about the affair. Maybe­ he had simply had his colonel's best interests at heart, maybe­ there had been a payoff, even love, for he'd married her. Certainly now Yvonne Lutze would have watched Renée Ekkehard and her former lover at their meals and listened in the night as well.

Yes, Louis didn't know the half of it.

Finding an empty hook on one of the corridor walls, Kohler hung the lantern up and to hell with the blackout, to hell with laundry blueing. No one was going to notice one star down here when there were so many up there.

The rope was of dark brown hemp and had all the protruding hairs of such, but it wasn't weathered, had been stored, probably in a tin trunk in one of the wagons. About sixty centimetres of it dangled from where it was doubly lapped over the cross-pole to form a loop through which the ends had been passed by a girl who had been determined not to fail, but had that really been the way it had happened?

The rope was of Manila hemp and common enough. Weatherproofed, it was flexible though still rough, and since when did a girl who wanted to hang herself not care about torn skin and rope burns too? Didn't females who did this sort of thing invariably choose a silk stocking, though these days those were often too scarce. A lisle stocking, then, or slip, scarf or chemise—hadn't he seen them all, especially the neckties of absent lovers. Whatever was at hand, but please make it soft.

The mirrors on either side of her must have showered their remaining glass as she had kicked out violently, and she must have done, for there was little of it left, but had her wrists been tied behind her back, or had she been able to grab the rope instinctively as she would have done?

Just why would a twenty-eight-year-old who had been out all night skiing hang herself?

‘There can only be one reason,' he said, and felt it deeply, everything within him suddenly collapsing. Giselle and Oona … Gerda too, would be taken. Gabrielle and Louis as well. All would be rounded up if this thing was what he thought it might be and wasn't handled properly.

‘She was afraid she'd be arrested,' he managed. ‘She knew she would talk and didn't want to.'

Or had her reasons been otherwise? Had she even killed herself?

Taking up the lantern, he stood on the box, was head and shoulders above the cross-pole and the walls, could now see over the rest of the House of Mirrors and the dark, if shattered maze of it. She hadn't just stepped into any corridor, this secretary of the colonel's. She had chosen one of the farthest from the entrance, had come in here as far as she could to hide her corpse for as long as possible, and that … why that could only mean she had wanted to give others in her Résistance group time to escape—was that how it had been?

Of medium height—she must have been—she had stood on that chair, but would still have had to stretch a little to flip the bend in the doubled rope over the pole. ‘She was left-handed,' he said as if Louis was with him. ‘The bend is to the right of the pole. Instinctively the left hand tossed it up and over, then the right grabbed it while the left fed the two ends through and yanked down hard.'

The colonel's knife had been razor sharp. Both ends of the rope had been cleanly cut as one, but was there anything else? he wondered. ‘Something,' he muttered. ‘Some little thing to tell us it couldn't have been a suicide, that Renée Ekkard hadn't feared arrest, torture and decapitation.'

Because
that
was exactly what would have happened to her if she was mixed up in anything.

As the lid of the ‘coffin' came away, the colonel gasped and quickly turned aside, the mirrors throwing the grimace he gave out of all proportion.

‘Forgive me,' he said. ‘It's just that, having not seen her in some time, I'd grown accustomed to remembering her as she'd been.'

Less than a week ago, said St-Cyr silently to the victim. The colonel won't understand my talking to you, Fräulein, but you do see that he must have been with you at least twice on that Tuesday? Once to cut the rope which is still tightly around your neck, and once to lay you out like this. ‘Colonel, the coffin. Its carpenter … '

‘
Ach
, I had to go to the Textile Works to get him.'

‘Was she left alone in your absence?'

‘I stopped in at the
Polizeikommandantur
and sent two of the special constables with orders not to disturb a thing. My detectives followed, but those idiots claimed it was a suicide, and don't be thinking you and Kohler are going to question those two. Just leave them out of it. The Wehrmacht guard was arranged later.'

Ah,
bon
, Fräulein, the colonel knows I've realized that by not accepting the conclusions of his own men, he has not only shut his mind to what they might have had to tell him, he has pissed off the whole station. Whispers … were there those about the two of you? Lovers … is this what the staff at the
Polizeikommandantur
had all been saying? That Sophie Schrijen's brother, Alain, didn't know what he was getting into by showing even the slightest interest in you?

She had lain here since, hadn't even been taken to the morgue, as she should have been. ‘The knot is to the left, Colonel, and has slipped from below to above the larynx, as is consistent with her having stepped off the chair.'

Her face, once sharply featured, was livid and swollen. Sprays of dark blood spots were just beneath the slate-grey skin of her forehead. There would be more of them under the beret, over the scalp and beneath the soft brown hair that had been bobbed, and would curl outward at its ends, giving bounce to every step.

Blood spots lay under the skin beneath her eyes. They were showered over the freckled bridge of her nose and cheeks. Those once lovely lips were a dark, plum purple in the flickering light, her tongue all but bitten through. Snot, blood, saliva and fluid from the lungs had erupted to drain from the nostrils and right corner of her mouth, spattering that shoulder and the front of her ski jacket.

‘Rigor has left her, Colonel,' said St-Cyr, watching him too closely. ‘She wasn't tall, but a little taller than most. How far were the toes of her boots from the floor?'

St-Cyr had moved swiftly away from head to foot to look along the length of her at him. ‘Thirty centimetres at least. She dropped, didn't she?'

‘Yes, yes, of course, but her neck wasn't broken. Instead, the ligature slipped upward as it tightened, causing asphyxia. It took time, Colonel. Oh for sure, not much more than five or six seconds, but enough for her to have realized what was happening.'

‘She kicked out. Broken glass is caught in her socks and among the bootlaces. The chair … '

‘Was in a corner, but could it have been deliberately placed there?'

‘I touched as little as possible.'

‘But your detectives must have and you are upset with me for mentioning it. Why, please, were you so certain her death could not have been a suicide?'

There must be no hesitation. ‘She had everything ahead of her, was happy and outgoing, believed firmly as many still do that the Reich would eventually win the war.'

‘But wears a beret which is very French and now illegal? The penalty, please, for doing such a thing?'

‘Look, I don't know why the little fool should have—'

‘Colonel, this is a murder inquiry. Please simply answer.'

‘Six months of forced labour, or in the cells if too weak to work, and a fine of 150 marks.'

‘And within the former confines of the Reich?'

‘Its wearing is allowed, as it always has been.'

Only in Alsace, then, and Lorraine, had it been banned. ‘What was she really up to, Colonel, in spite of claiming faith in the Reich's winning this war? Was she smuggling Wehrmacht deserters through to the Vosges so that they could be hidden in France with false papers or join the partisans? We both know the Russian front is no picnic and that desertion has become an ever-increasing problem. Ask Hermann. He'll tell you the same thing.'

‘I'm sure he would.'

‘And the skis?'

‘She loved the forest, the quiet in winter, the sight of a fox, a hawk or even a few crows or ravens. “There are always three of those birds,” she used to say. It was something Celtic, she thought, something Gallic from a long time ago. They were always so silent. Suddenly they would be there watching her. Three goddesses of the supernatural who deliberately did terrible things to people, especially the innocent and the righteous. Silly of her to have believed in such rubbish. I told her some of the men used to shoot them for sport.'

‘And what was her response?'

‘That each facet of the Phantom Queen could and did take that form, and that to harm any was to harm all and bring down her wrath upon us.'

‘You're a patient listener. You must have been, to have remembered it.'

‘When Werner told me her cross-country skis were missing, I knew this was where she must have come but did nothing. I waited too long. I know it, and freely admit it.'

So now we learn a little more, Fräulein Ekkehard, and are to be reassured that your colonel really did think well of you and that, though you both may or may not have been lovers, he did consider you as a daughter. But is it the truth, that business of his having done nothing? If a lover, or father figure, surely he would have come after you, especially if there were other reasons like your helping deserters to escape?

‘Colonel, why not set the lantern over there? If Hermann has finished with the location of the crime, he'll be looking elsewhere. Leave him to it and go to the farmhouse where the guards are billeted. Warm yourself. We'll find you when we need you. It may be a long night.'

Was this sympathy from a Sûreté? ‘The location of the crime … You believe it really was murder.'

‘It's too early to say, but instinct tells me she wasn't alone. Was she left-handed?'

‘
Ach
, the knot. Yes, but it never affected her work and no one thought anything of it.'

But must have if murdered. ‘That papier-mâché ball, Colonel. Why was it among the items on your desk?'

‘We'd been practising, the two of us, the last time we were here.'

‘When, please?'

And again a stickler for detail. ‘The Wednesday before she died—27 January. Among the throw-booths the committee were having restored, there was one that Renée was particularly pleased with. The village bailiff, schoolteacher, old maid, that sort of thing. Though not quite completed, she insisted she take out some of the figures and we try our luck to much laughter and good fun, and in the course of this, I must have forgotten it was in my overcoat pocket.'

A game of
Jeu de massacre
. ‘And the booth?'

‘Is stored in one of the other wagons. Three of the men I'd assigned to help were here on the Thursday and Friday, with their guards.'

A carpenter, glazier, assistant machinist, fabric designer and the chemist, Eugène Thomas. ‘Which three?'

‘The firm's assistant machinist was finishing work on the chain-drive and other things, the carpenter and fabric designer busy with the booth and painting, I think. Their tasks varied so much, I … well, I saw no need to take note of them. It's all written down in the duty roster they kept.'

‘Then for now that's sufficient. A little of your splendid tobacco, though, if you can spare it.'

St-Cyr had already gone back to work, having moved the lantern to the other end of the coffin, but would he be asking himself why the knot had been tied that way?

Of course he would. He'd see that particles of sawdust and flecks of old paint and gilding from the lid had fallen and would wonder why her eyes hadn't been closed, but would he understand the strength of will it had taken not to do so, the need that had driven him to return after the second suicide and remove the lid so as to be alone with her? To think, to decide, and finally to telex Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris for detective help.

Closing the door on Louis and the body, Rasche stepped away from the wagon. ‘Renée,' he said, and finding his cigarette case, lit one and let the tobacco smoke and breath billow from him. So deep was he in thought, he didn't look up at the stars or moon, Kohler noted from the shadows. Instead, the colonel concentrated on a wagon some twenty metres from the edge of the Kastenwald. By eye alone Rasche followed a trail of footprints to that very wagon—mine, Colonel? Its door isn't closed, but what have I done with the lantern, eh? Doused it? Covered it with one of those mouldy costume dresses the
Winterhilfswerk
Committee must have gathered and rolled into bundles as if they hadn't quite known what to do with them? A wagon they had then cleaned and fixed up as a field office, but when?