J. Janes - Tapestry

‘ Ah, merde , I honestly didn’t connect the two. Now toss off the rest of this.’

‘Is it the Remy-Martin Louis XIII? Am I to enjoy an El Rey del Mundo Choix Supreme?’

Sacre nom de nom, what was this? ‘Not at all. Of course the bottle isn’t the Molotov cocktail these two felt before roughing me up. It simply contains the last of the marc we had in the Citroen’s boot.’

‘What the hell are we to do, Louis? Our telephone caller, Elene Artur, was nearly four months pregnant. You know what that belle-epoque plumbing’s like on the rue La Boetie. Her killers tried to flush the evidence but the cord got caught and I had to pull it out so gently. A boy, Louis. I know it’s hard to tell at that stage, but you can, can’t you? A son. She’d been beaten, raped …’

Out it came in a torrent of French the orderly, an Unterschar shy;fuhrer, and his Sturmmann couldn’t understand-even Oberg, head of all of this, couldn’t speak a word of the language. ‘Leave us,’ said St-Cyr in Deutsch .

Unterscharfuhrer Bruno Pruetzmann wasn’t happy. ‘You can’t stay here alone.’

‘Then back off to the other end of the room. This is private.’

They didn’t move, wouldn’t move.

‘We weren’t supposed to find her, Louis. The judge was, but Elene Artur’s killing may not have been done by whoever’s been terrorizing the streets.’

‘Chez Rudi’s, I think. We can’t talk here.’

‘I’VE GOT TO LET OBERG KNOW! If I don’t …’

‘Of course, but it can wait since he’s not likely to come in at this hour. Besides, I’ve got a few things to tell you and something in the car that Rudi wants.’

‘Sonja Remer, age twenty-four years, seven months and five days,’ breathed Rudi-had he felt they wouldn’t be able to retrieve the girl’s handbag? wondered St-Cyr.

‘Madelscharfuhrerin at the age of ten; leader of a Gruppe at eleven, a Ring at twelve. When a Bund Deutscher Madel such as this comes along, others take notice.’

He’d give these two a moment to digest the lump they’d been fed, but would the regurgitation of it sink into Hermann? The idiot looked like death in a greatcoat and should, for he hadn’t only stolen a car from two of the Propagandastaffel, he had had them consigned to scrubbing toilets! ‘Not for her the Glaube und Schonheit, Hermann.’

The Faith and Beauty brigade of the BDMs-girls selected not only for their physical attributes as examples of Aryan Nazism but to be trained further in the arts of homemaking or made to tease secrets from high-ranking civil servants and captains of industry.

‘Untergauleiterin at that same age,’ went on Rudi.

A leader of five or six Ringe.

‘Only when young Erich Straub was about to leave for his Heldentod did she break down and reveal what she’d been up to with that boy whose family her father couldn’t tolerate.’

‘The happy couple became engaged,’ said Louis with a sigh. ‘The third of March 1940, and on the twenty-ninth of April she and the boy’s family received notice of the hero’s death.’

‘ Kommen sie,’ urged Rudi. ‘Sit, ja. Helga , bitte , the soup first and then the Eintopf . Your Hermann needs nourishment. We’re offering the Reichsfuhrer SS und Reichskommissar Himmler’s one-pot meal at noon today and nothing else but the soup, the same as is on the menu at Horscher’s.’

On the Lutherstrasse and central Berlin’s famous restaurant, it having apparently escaped the RAF’s nightly bombing raids.

‘Red cabbage from home, meine Lieben . Pieces of roast meat-I’m using sausage with Charolais beef and New Zealand mutton that was taken off a freighter bound for England but captured by one of our raiders. Potatoes, of course, and onions and beef stock. The trick is to let the meat marinate in wine and not be impatient. A full day if possible. A decent Bordeaux, a Chateau Lafite perhaps, but I have used a Mouton Rothschild, the 1929. Baked in individual casseroles to preserve all the flavour and juices. Served with chunks of crusty bread-those French sticks I have to make for the curious from Berlin are suitable enough and will have to do since there are extra and they shouldn’t be wasted.’

To be forced to listen to this with Hermann so upset and needing answers was hard enough for a French patriot, and Rudi knew it too, which could only mean he had more in mind. ‘The soup is excellent, Herr Sturmbacher.’

‘Ich Linsensuppe mit Thuringer Rotwurst.’

Lentil soup with Thuringian sausages. Rudi was giving them time, but for what? Kohler had to wonder. ‘The Tokarev, Rudi.’ It lay all but hidden by the still opened handbag.

‘ Ach, einen Moment, bitte! First you must see with whom you’re dealing. Helga, bring your big brother what he has borrowed from the library of the Propaganda-Abteilung, which is so close its staff are among my most valued customers.’

And if that wasn’t warning enough, what was? wondered Kohler.

Photo magazines made life easy for readers in the Reich, seeing as they’d just been introduced to full mobilization. The cover of one of last autumn’s Die Woche , The Week, revealed a very determined blonde Madchen tying barley sheaves. The Nazi Party’s Illustrierter Beobachter gave an even more heroic stance, facing into the morning sun, standing with a sheaf under each arm and all of Russia before her, though she couldn’t possibly have seen it.

‘On the death of her Erich, Hermann, the girl needed time to gather herself and then, after the blitzkrieg’s dust had settled in the west, volunteered for duty with the Landvolk . She was sent to Vresse in the Semois Valley to supervise female Belgian farm labourers.’

‘An admirable ambition and location, Rudi, but shouldn’t she have been harvesting tobacco?’ asked Hermann.

A good sign felt St-Cyr, not because the area was famous for that crop, but because the comment had come from the old Hermann. ‘She looks healthy enough, Herr Sturmbacher, which would seem to indicate sufficient time for her to have come to peace with her loss, but did she learn French while among the Walloons?’

‘ Ach, mein lieber Oberdetektiv, how is it, please, that you even knew the girl could speak such an inferior language?’

One mustn’t react. ‘I didn’t. I just assumed.’

‘You did neither. The boys who stole that handbag and roughed her up told you.’

‘Rudi, listen,’ urged Hermann. ‘They were only boys. Mein Gott , my Jurgen and Hans might have done the same under similar circumstances.’

‘But would have been punished, isn’t that so?’

‘She wasn’t beaten up,’ muttered Louis.

‘NOT THREATENED WITH A KNIFE?’ demanded Rudi.

‘Is that what she claims?’

‘That and other things, Louis,’ said Kohler with a sigh. ‘Oberg had her into his office to tell Hercule the Smasher all about it, but I don’t think she was asked to bare the breasts she claimed had been badly bruised.’

Sickened, the Oberdetektiv St-Cyr was at a loss, Rudi knew, and couldn’t lift his gaze from the soup he had been trying to enjoy, but what was this about Hercule the Smasher? Was the judge in trouble?

One had best continue and not let on. ‘So, it’s serious, meine Lieben , and now you know a little of why.’ He would flick a glance at each of them, would check out the customers before taking Helga’s hand to fondly kiss it, since the girl still dreamed that Hermann would someday realize what he was missing and fall madly in love with her. ‘The Hoherer SS saw this photo spread in late October and, needing a listener to the Mundfunk , Hermann, asked for her to be reassigned to the Paris office.’