Clandestine (35 page)

One of the photos had been placed between the two from Hague Central.

‘The reading room of the Bibliothéque Nationale, messieurs,' said St-Cyr. ‘A student diligently at her studies, the manuscript centuries old. That alone should have caused you to pause.'

‘Why?' demanded Bolduc, tossing off the last of his cognac and wiping his lips with the back of a hand. ‘So what if she's good at languages? French, Dutch, German, even English. The little
chatte
has a gift for them.'

‘And the English, monsieur, where, please, did you overhear her speaking it?'

‘Must you try to suck up evidence like a carp?'

‘A noble fish upon which the Cistercians who did not eat meat depended.'

‘Give him the answer,' said Kohler, helping himself to the rest of the chairman's cigarettes and lighter.

‘I heard her speaking it to Florence Gould at one of Nicole Bordeaux's cultural gatherings.'

‘And this photo, monsieur, when would it have been taken in this girl's room?' asked St-Cyr.

Sacré nom de nom!
‘I have absolutely no idea. Why should I have?'

‘Hauptmann Reinecke, I gather Jacqueline Lemaire informed you, or the lieutenant, of when it would be appropriate to illegally enter that room.'

St-Cyr would never back off and neither would Kohler. ‘That is correct, but as to when that photo was taken, perhaps the lieutenant might know.'

‘I'm sure he does, especially as Abwehr-West are known for thoroughness and have fortunately left nothing to question.'

Methodically, as if laying out the tarot cards of their fortunes, Louis began to place photo after photo in front of himself.

‘Early this year,' said Leutnant Heiss.

‘You're not quite correct.' Turning it over, he let them see the date and stamp. ‘The fifth of December last, messieurs, but by then, according to her concierge, she would have been visiting her mother who was extremely ill with pneumonia and in Rethel. When she returned on 10 December, Monsieur Bolduc, either yourself or Deniard or Paquette very generously gave her the half of a bottle of the Château Latour, whose vineyards you could well have an interest in. But surely knowing what you must of Rethel, Hauptmann Reinecke and Leutnant Heiss, either one or the other of you would have looked a little deeper?'

‘We now know she must have gone on to Amsterdam.'

‘Having gained exit past the Paris controls in one of Monsieur Bolduc's vans,
n'est-ce pas
?'

‘But not with this latest trip when she went to find out why her fiancé hadn't come to Paris to join her as agreed,' said Leutnant Heiss.

Everything in her room had been recorded—that cot, the all-too-evident student poverty, even that champagne cork, but Hermann and himself would still have to go carefully, felt St-Cyr. They couldn't reveal anything more than what had been gleaned from Mademoiselle Lemaire's file and Concierge Figeard or the murder site. They mustn't betray what they really knew.

There was even a shot of a pair of laundered and carefully mended step-ins and a brassiere, both laid out on that cot.

‘Jacqueline likes to tease,' said Bolduc, giving them a slum-landlord's grin.

‘And René Deniard and Raymond Paquette, monsieur, did they, too, like to tease?'

‘Look …' began Bolduc.

‘Just answer,' said Hermann.

‘Even I can see the date.'

‘Precisely,' said Louis. ‘The first of October and
after
the robbery and murders, not before them. A diagram of none other than the ruins of l'Abbaye de Vauclair, Hermann, the photo taken of a sketch map in her dissertation, I gather. There's even a notation—
l'eau potable
.'

‘And yet … and yet, Louis, he didn't even think to question why that van of his hadn't returned on schedule? Instead, he simply told Yvonne Rouget that they'd better give Deniard and Paquette a few more days.'

‘You
knew
, monsieur, that we would discover they'd been illegally hauling things for the
marché noir
.'

‘Precisely 65.25 million francs due in, Louis, and yet he didn't have a care.'

‘From which only 4,780,500 were taken,' said Bolduc. ‘Why so little?'

‘Because they, too, were hauling goods for that same market,' said St-Cyr, ‘and like yourself, didn't want it known that they had had any connection whatsoever to the murders.'

‘But they had a
mouchard
that they didn't know of,' said Kohler.

‘
Ein Spitzel
,' said St-Cyr. ‘One who knew of this Annette-Mélanie­ Veroche and was to follow and report on her whereabouts to that
Diamantensonderkommando
because they had let her go with a little something they should never have let go.'

The stairs were many and of the rue des Gobelins, and they spiralled upward in that ancient tower, felt Anna-Marie, until at last they came to Frans. Forgotten hides, long-mildewed, hung from wooden rods, crowding in on either side of him. Bound hand and foot, gagged and blindfolded, he sensed her presence.

Kupka, the thirty-year-old Czech Communist from the Sudetenland, handed the knife to her. ‘Not the gag, mademoiselle, not the wrists either, and not the blindfold. He's to face us only when all are gathered.'

The butt of a Webley Mark IV, .455 calibre revolver, a Résistance standby and leftover from the beaches at Dunkirk in 1940, protruded from Kupka's belt, but to say Frans's name was still too much. ‘You'll have to let me take you by the arm. The stairs are steep and you'll not be able to hold on to the railing.'

Violently shaking his head, struggling to speak and yanking himself away, he indicated a need to pee, Kupka tapping him on the shoulder and saying, ‘All right, I'll unbutton you and hold it. Mademoiselle …'

Turning from them, she couldn't help but hear the flood and wonder at what was to become of her, but it was as if Frans was grinning at her discomfort, for he wouldn't have to face them with wet trousers.

Down and down they went, the air increasingly rank not with urine but the eye-stinging stench of this place until, in the cellars, they came to stand before the others amongst the silent wooden­ hoists and beams the tannery would have used, the heaps of scrapings from the hides as well. A lonely chair had been placed apart, and on either side of it was one of the emptied rectangular­ concrete vats that had been sunk into the floor to hold the sodium­ sulphide and hydrated lime that had been used. Repeatedly steeped in a solution of those for days on end so that the hair could be easily scraped away, the hides would then have been de-limed by washing and soaking in a solution of brine and concentrated sulphuric acid.

Forgotten, perhaps deliberately so, were rows and rows of ten-litre glass jugs of that acid. Aram, she knew, had on two occasions given them a curious look as if to wonder what they could be used for.

Emmi, from Neukölln, a working-class and formerly Communist suburb of Berlin, always wore her thick blonde hair braided into the
Knoten
much-favoured by the Nazis. Tall, big across the bust and shoulders, big, too, in the heart, she could quote Schiller, Goethe, Heine and others, notably too, the Führer, but if ever there was one the Occupier should be concerned about, it was her.
Eine Brünnhilde
with thighs, knees, heavy grey woollen stockings, black jackboots and tight grey skirt, she invariably wore the uniform and side cap of a
Blitzm
ä
dchen
, one of the
Helferinnen
, the helpers. Secretaries, wireless and telephone operators and such, she looked as if of the ‘grey mice,' even to switching rank, topcoat, cap and all the rest when necessary, but preferring the boots since they were more comfortable at times than the regulation black leather shoes. Black or grey gloves too, and no others.

André Beauchamp, dark-haired, dark-eyed and always looking hungry and younger than his twenty, had been on the run since mid-1941 and not just as now for so many others, from the Service du Travail Obligatoire.

Félix Vérando took his place among them, as did Aram. Light was offered from a can of motor oil with a wick.

Seated before them, Frans waited, Aram indicating that she should cut the gag and remove the blindfold. But again there was the thought that she had never done anything like this before and that from now on things would be very different for her.

Unaccustomed to even such a light, Frans blinked. Swallowing tightly, he asked for water, but was it to be but a ploy for time?

Aram indicated that she should comply but when the mug was held, Frans pulled away to look up at her not as the condemned—never that with him—but as one who laughingly mocked.

Unsettled, she very quickly accused him, but of course there was no coin.

There was only one way to escape this, felt Frans, but first they would have to be told how things had really been. ‘
Bien sûr
, I'm a
résistant
and I helped Étienne Labrie, the alias of Stéphane Lacroix, and Arie Beekhuis, that of Hans van Loos, to move hunted individuals such as yourselves through from Amsterdam, the Hague and elsewhere in the Netherlands to France and on to Spain and Portugal or North Africa. Whatever destination suited, since cost was seldom a factor. Our motive was to deny the enemy those they most wanted.'

This one was clever, felt Bedikian, for he hadn't denied the accusation as most would. ‘And were you yourself ever held in the Hollandsche Schouwburg as she has claimed?'

Standartenführer Kleiber and Kriminalrat Ludin would appreciate getting their hands on this bunch. ‘What the
Moffen
—the Boche—in October 1941 forced the Dutch to rename the Joodsche Schouwburg? Yes, I was, and yes they knew me as Paul Klemper, an actor, and yes I was first taken to Gestapo HQ-Amsterdam in that requisitioned public school on the Euterpestraat, and yes, I did manage to escape from that theater as she's claimed. Though the date is a little hazy, I think it would have been around the 17 October 1941. A Friday, and yes, a good forty or so of us, not just myself, simply buggered off as soon as the guards got distracted by searching for valuables and forgot that some of us—myself in particular—would have known that theater well and would lead the others out.'

A hero, felt Emmi. If given the opportunity, he'd take all night to slow them down and make leaving this place more difficult than that theater had soon become. ‘And when recaptured, what, please, did you do, monsieur?'

He mustn't smile, felt Frans, though dressed like that she only needed a beer stein. Instead, he must look steadily at her and say, ‘I was never “caught,” Fräulein. I remained on the lam until, having kept the
Moffen
from Étienne and Arie not once but twice, Étienne then asked me to join them last February.'

A year and four months of betraying others before that, no doubt, but she'd have to tell them what had happened to him, decided Anna-Marie. ‘This one was, apparently, grazed by a bullet.'

‘The scar of which, if the sight of me is not too traumatic for her, I will willingly reveal, if you'll but let her cut my wrists free. It's high up and near the shoulder and I was, I admit, rather lucky, since they had dogs as well.'

‘Yet when we grabbed you at the Gare de l'Est, you tried to get at this pistol of yours, and when you couldn't, cried out for help,' said Félix.

‘Wouldn't you have done?
Merde alors
, monsieur, how was I to know who you were?
Gestapistes français, peut-être
, and not just an end to myself and Étienne and Arie, but this one, too, especially since she has been hiding so much from you all.'

‘A trainee borderline sorter, Diamant Meyerhof, Amsterdam,' said Kupka.

‘But has she told you what she's been carrying? Lots and lots of those, otherwise why would the enemy want her so badly Kaltenbrunner in Berlin would clamp such a lid of secrecy over it all?'

If he could, this Frans would turn them against Annette-Mélanie­, even to using her real name, but still he would have to be heard, thought Bedikian. ‘Did you and Labrie or Beekhuis know anything of what she was carrying?'

They could use the diamonds and this one was now thinking about that, so good. ‘Not until we got to Paris. We only knew that she was desperately wanted and that we had to get her out.'

By her expression alone, felt Emmi, Annette-Mélanie couldn't hide the dislike of what she was being forced to do, accuse another­ whose life was in the balance. ‘Out and away as fast as possible, monsieur, and how, please, did the three of you manage that? I'm not a Fräulein, by the way. I'm a widow but no longer wear the ring because those who shot my husband, who was a Communist like myself, stole it from me. Now answer, please. We haven't got all night and you know it.'

The slut. ‘At my suggestion we played dress-up as NSBers, the Dutch fascists, the Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, and we—that is myself who was playing the captain—told the Wehrmacht at the Amsterdam depot that we were to deliver one of their trucks to the internment camp at Vught. We had forged papers for it, certainly. Good ones too.'

But had those on guard at that depot been told to let them have it? wondered Kupka. ‘And where, then, if I may ask, did you finally leave that vehicle?'

So that others could then be held responsible and shot, eh? ‘We had parked our own, a
gazogène
, with a reliable farmer well inside the Belgian border, but of course we didn't leave the Wehrmacht's truck anywhere near him, but next to the farm of a well-known
collabo
.'

This one would have answers for everything, decided Bedikian­. ‘So you made the crossing just to the south of Reusel, was it?'

Again he had better not smile. ‘And that is where she claims to have cut herself as she retrieved that coin I was supposed to have left for the enemy to find. A rijksdaaler,
mes amis
? A silver­ coin any would gladly pick up, and with no guarantee it would ever be found by those she claims were intended. Now is there anything­ else, Anna-Marie Vermeulen, or would you prefer­ Annette-­Mélanie Veroche, and I do hope and trust you'll tell them all about the diamonds.'