J. Janes - Gypsy

Swiftly he asked which of them had given Wehrle the cyanide. ‘Answer me, damn you. Men like Wehrle wouldn’t have been issued such a thing.’

They said no more, these two resistants . Taking each other by the hand, they walked on ahead of him until coming to a gap in the wall. Then they were lost to view and he was left to face the forest and his doubts, to search, to try to find the rifle that had marked him down.

When no shot was fired, he made his way along to the gap and stepped through it to find them waiting for him. Both were desperately afraid of what must lie ahead. Both anxiously swept their eyes over the trees and brush that lay before them until the ruins were reached.

‘Wehrle had ordered caviar and champagne again,’ he said, ‘but Nana couldn’t understand his having done so since it automatically implicated her in his death and in everything else. Perhaps he blamed her for betraying him and helping the Gypsy, perhaps he merely wished to atone for the mistake he had made and was thinking of the well-being of loved ones in the Reich, but someone had to have given him the cyanide.’

‘And?’ asked Gabrielle sharply.

He shrugged. He said, ‘That leaves only the two of you.’

‘Which implies we robbed Nana’s former villa in Saint-Cloud – is this what you are thinking, Jean-Louis? A stronghold of the SS. The headquarters of their Sonderkommando ?’

‘Didn’t Janwillem and Tshaya rob it?’ demanded Suzanne-Cecilia.

‘They wouldn’t have given Wehrle the cyanide. They had no reason to do so. Having robbed him, what more need of him had they?’

It was Gabrielle who said, ‘The SS could have taken him aside and given it to him with an ultimatum.’

‘But … but they showed no signs of having done so?’ he said, looking earnestly from one to the other of them.

‘He doesn’t realize we’re in a war,’ blurted Suzanne-Cecilia. ‘He has failed entirely to understand us!’

‘Then perhaps he had best talk to Nana. Perhaps Nana can tell him the things he so desperately wants to know.’

Two shots rang out. Two more soon followed but by then they were running towards the sounds only to now hear the fierce barking of dogs. ‘Hermann …’ began St-Cyr. ‘ H … e … r … mann !’

Widely spaced from one another across the open expanse of fields, three of the dogs lay dead in the snow.

Kohler waited for the others to be released. Lying flat on his stomach, his legs spread, he held the rifle ready. ‘Let the lieutenant go,’ he said, not looking back to where Nana kept the Beretta on the man. ‘Take his ammunition pouch. Hey, mein Kamerad , we want no trouble with any of you. This is between Herr Engelmann, myself and the SS-Untersturmfuhrer Schacht. Tell your men to hold the rest of the dogs and to send those two up to us.’

‘You are to be allowed to enter the ruins alone. No one else is to go with you. I have my orders.’

‘Fuck your orders. We’ve now warned the sons of bitches we’re here and they’re surrounded, eh? The Gypsy will have wired those ruins so well we can’t have the dogs setting them off. I’ll need the extra hands and eyes.’

‘The dogs were let go because you took me hostage. They were not to have been released unless all else had failed and you hadn’t been able to bring the Gypsy and his woman out.’

‘And if we had?’ asked Kohler, taking aim again. ‘You’d have dropped each of us, eh? and would have left De Vries to the last.’

‘And then released the dogs to stop him from running,’ said Nana in deutsch. ‘Bitte , Herr Leutnant, I do not want to kill you or anyone. This whole thing is a tragic mistake. Herr Engelmann and the Untersturmfuhrer are very wrong about us and are the ones to blame for what the Gypsy has done.’

The pistol was too tightly gripped. Kohler was pinned down …

‘I will shoot you if I have to,’ she said. ‘You see, they have left us no choice. Now go, please, before I do.’

Engelmann had come to the edge of the willows. One of the dogs strained at the leash he held.

With a single shot, Kohler hit the animal in the chest, causing it to rear up suddenly on its hind legs and to fall back. Herr Max scrambled for cover.

‘Tell Gestapo Boemelburg I could have dropped that man had I wanted to. The rifle’s good but it pulls a little towards the top left quadrant. Hey, tell the boys I like dogs and hated to shoot them. They were beautiful animals.’

‘I’ll tell him and I’ll try to keep the other two back.’

‘Good.’

They watched as he walked down towards the brook. He held up his arms and spread them widely to signal that no one should do anything until he got there. Without a word, Kohler got up and together with Nana ran for cover behind the wall.

‘Now start filling me in on De Vries,’ he said, not letting her get free of him. ‘And don’t stop until I know how the son of a bitch will think and what he’ll do and have done.’

‘And Tshaya?’ she asked, her dark eyes registering dismay as he took the pistol from her. ‘She hates me. She’ll try to kill me. She can use explosives just as well as Janwillem but is of the Rom and knows their ways and these ruins, so will have the others at her beck and call.’

‘Look, just fill me in on the two of them and on this place.’

‘But … but I haven’t been here in years. I wouldn’t know where to begin. He’s crazy . There are so many places … He’s not the same as the man I once knew. He’s …’

She felt Kohler’s fingers gently touch her lips; his thumb, her tears. ‘ Listen ,’ he whispered.

It was Louis. Louis was calling to him. Louis sounded trapped and in despair but was a long way off.

‘He’s inside the ruins, in the great hall,’ said Nana sadly. ‘That is where the gypsies gathered to hold their feasts and the Kris Romani , the trials at which all serious offences and conflicts within the kumpania were settled by the elders. He’s found something and is trying to warn you of it.’

A trial … Ah, Christ!

The hall, where the monks had once dined, was long and huge, its ceiling high. And from where there had been leaded glass in more recent years, the grey light of day entered under the arcade outside to throw pale shafts across the littered floor.

Snow had been swept in by the wind. Rags, cushions, blankets, bits of tattered, faded carpet lay among scattered eiderdowns whose feathers were teased by the wind and whose carmine, beige or white silk coverlets, with a black embroidery of flowered designs, had been torn.

Overturned cooking cauldrons were beside the fourteenth-century fireplace. An iron tripod still stood over long-dead ashes. There was broken furniture, some of it still bearing ancient fabrics and leaking horsehair. There were carved oak chairs with no legs, chairs with two or three … Benches, a narrow wooden bed, a wicker chaise-longue , a broken card table … Scatterings of dresses, the skirts wine purple, deep red and brown, all voluminous, the blouses once white and loose and low-cut.

A faded yellow kerchief that would have been tied around a boy’s neck lay next to the diklo , the headscarf in magenta which had once covered the long and braided, glossy, blue-black hair of his mother.

There were broken wine bottles, kicked-over wooden water buckets, battered fedoras, old suit jackets, horseshoes, horse harness, tarpaulins, anvils, the leather bellows of a simple but effective forge …

Jars of pickled cucumbers, those of hot red peppers in vinegar.

‘August 1941 …’ St-Cyr heard himself sadly exhaling the words. ‘Tshaya, daughter of the horse trader Tshurkina la Marako who was deported to Buchenwald 14 September of that year with all members of his kumpania except herself.’