J. Janes - Tapestry

Trapped again? he had to ask. In Paris alone there were more than thirty thousand POW wives whose incomes were below ten thousand francs a year and who were in desperate circumstances.

‘Her desk is in the bedroom, Jean-Louis,’ said Oona, knowing she should tell the children to tuck themselves in but that she couldn’t bring herself to do this without joining them.

Reassuringly Jean-Louis reached out to her. His, ‘Please don’t worry. Hermann and I will see to things,’ was meant to be comforting. The desk was nothing but a plain table. To Jean-Louis’s right, there was the lamp she had switched on after the children and Giselle had finally fallen asleep. There were only sixteen postcards in that little pile, there having been a good four months at the first when no mail at all had come through to anyone. Eight of them had also gone to the grandparents.

To his left was February’s five-kilogram parcel the woman and the children had been making up to send to the camp. No extra ration tickets were ever provided by Vichy for this purpose even though there were so many men locked up. Everything that went into that box, and everyone else’s, had to come from the family’s own supplies.

There were some cubes of Viandox, once the nation’s most popular brand of beef tea, prewar of course and obtained on the black market. Some packets of camomile and of mint tea followed-not much yet, she knew Jean-Louis would be thinking. A pair of heavy woollen socks that had been knitted from the leavings of an unravelled sweater, two drawings …

‘Cartoons,’ Henri said. ‘My latest.’

‘And one of mine,’ his sister added. ‘It has been marked with my kisses.’

Though her words would sound hollow, Oona knew she had best say, ‘The package won’t be sent until the end of the month, so there’s lots of time yet.’

‘Time for Maman to come home to us,’ said Louisette.

‘We add a bit each day, Inspector. Sometimes once every two days. It depends,’ said her brother.

Though heavily censored-blacked out first by the German censors at the camp and then by Vichy’s at the frontier-each postcard held only seven lines, often reduced to four-and-a-half or less; each letter, written on the regulation return that would fold itself yet again into an envelope, held only twenty-seven lines, reduced usually by the censors to twenty or less.

‘One can’t say much, can one?’ said Oona. ‘Repeatedly he writes as though she will do everything he says and expects; she, in turn, as though she has.’

But had she? Hadn’t she arranged to be taken to the Hotel Ritz where at least two hundred francs would have been received for a simple pass, four hundred for the half-hour, six for the hour? A steady income? She was handsome-a framed photo taken before the Defeat revealed her to have been a little on the comfortable side but she would have lost all that, would have had the figure trimmed down hard by all that walking if nothing else. The hair was of shoulder length and parted in the middle, swept back to expose droplet earrings of great delicacy that framed a look that was steadfast, serious, and wanting what? he had to ask. To be understood, to be treated as an individual of some worth? Had she been trapped even then?

All over the city and the country it was happening. ‘She’s lucky her assailant didn’t kill her,’ he said. ‘ Mon Dieu, forgive me, children. I only meant …’

They looked at him with moistening eyes, rightly feeling betrayed by the harshness of his judgement but had the life of a detective not forced him into a prison of his own?

‘Come on, you two, let’s go into our room,’ said Oona. “Let’s snuggle up and leave the chief inspector to think a little more about what he says.’

‘Oona, I’m not like Hermann. Certainly he constantly reminds me to mend my ways. It’s only that the policeman in me sometimes forgets. Once a cop, always a cop.’

‘And the gun in that handbag?’

‘Is another matter but not entirely.’

* * *

The Ford’s heater was throaty, Didier Valois, owner-operator of the marechal ’s Baton, less than cooperative. Kohler sighed as he hauled out the bankroll and, in the feeble light from the judge’s cigar, counted them off. ‘Five hundred … No, let’s make it a thousand.’

‘Two. Things are expensive these days and Monsieur le Juge will have my balls put on display before the blade falls if he ever finds out that I’ve spoken to you.’

An interesting comment Louis would have appreciated. ‘Two thousand it is, but with the offer of a bonus.’

And didn’t the Boche have all the money and think they could buy everything? ‘Sometimes the judge has me pick him up just to make sure he gets home.’

It was a start but one had best go carefully. ‘Under the empire of alcohol is he at such times?’

‘He’s not an alcoholic, only sometimes takes a little too much. It … it depends.’

On whom he’d been with, but that had best not be asked just yet. ‘The Folies-Bergere?’

‘Inspector, I’m not the only one he hires. There are others,’

‘Of course there are.’

Pressure was needed, otherwise this Kripo was going to dig a grave that would hold them both. ‘The Cercle de l’Union Interalliee shy;.’

That private club of clubs and better even than the Cercle Europeen since everyone who was anyone had to be a member of both but only some of the latter were allowed into the former. Men like Gaston Morel, no matter how useful they might be or how hard they tried, would never be welcomed into the Interalliee. It was just that simple. Located on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore at number 33, opened in 1917 and counting that arch supplier of cannon fodder, the Marechal Foch, as a member, now deceased, the hotel particulier was sumptuous in all regards and had a history that went back a further two hundred years to Louis Chevalier, president of the Parliament of Paris, and his sister, Madame le Vieux, but Louis would have said, Go easy, Hermann. Don’t be rash.

The Interalliee, the union of the Inter-Allied, had been started as a place for, amongst others, American aviators to stay when in Paris on leave, and when that other war had ended, this use had continued but been expanded to include others, especially now with the club’s military reputation and the Defeat.

Herr Kohler was thinking the matter over and that was good, thought Valois. The judge had stated most clearly on a number of occasions the names not only of the club’s most illustrious members-pillars of society-but more especially those of the new ones, among them the generals Karl Albrecht Oberg and Ernst von Schaumburg.

‘The Casino de Paris?’ hazarded Herr Kohler, but had he asked it so as to distract from the other?

‘The Apollo,’ said Valois levelly. ‘Sometimes the judge likes a little change.’

I’ll bet he does, snorted Kohler silently. Both were on the rue de Clichy in Pigalle where lots of those delinquent prisoner-of-war wives trolled the music halls, bars and pavements before lining up outside the nearest maison de passe with their clients. ‘The Naturiste, the Chez Eve and the Romance?’ he asked.

Sister clubs on place Pigalle. ‘The Bal Tabarin also.’

Number 36 rue Victor Masse and in the area, an old style cancan that always showed lots of leg and frilly-clad crotches. A man of many tastes. ‘And after a good feed at the Lapin Agile or some other such trough, the Boeuf sur le Toit, eh, at its new home in a wing of the Hotel Georges?’

An SS and Gestapo trough! ‘Inspector, Monsieur le Juge has many contacts he must consult on the business of the courts. Who am I to …’

‘Entertains them, does he?’