J. Janes - Tapestry

‘Louis, leave her. She’s okay.’

‘Mademoiselle, what exactly did Jeannot Raymond say to you?’

‘Only that I wasn’t to worry about losing my job because of what you did. That … that Monsieur Quevillon would apologize for hitting me and that … that the colonel would be asked to dismiss him.’

‘You lied to me, mademoiselle. You deliberately caused me to believe your flat was on the Champs-Elysees.’

‘And for that, I’m sorry. It … it was only because I didn’t know what had happened in this building, that there … there had been some trouble.’

‘Louis, she was afraid of you. How many times must I tell you to …’

‘Hermann, those salauds have out-Vidocq’d Vidocq! And tomorrow, mademoiselle?’ he asked.

‘I’m not even going to leave the building to go to Mass. I’m going to stay right here.’

‘As she should,’ muttered Kohler softly. ‘There, didn’t I just tell you she was okay?’

On the staircase down, Louveau ingratiatingly confided, ‘She usually does her laundry on Sundays afterwards unless …’

‘Out with it,’ said Louis.

‘Unless she goes to visit her relatives in Charenton but that’s only on the last Sunday of the month.’

The night was like ink. Ignition switched off, the Citroen coasted up the last of the rue de Birague and into the place des Vosges where it could just as easily, if not better, be stolen or robbed of its tyres.

Kohler rolled down his side windscreen. Through the freezing, damp, dark, quiet of the night came the incessant cooling of the engine and the silence.

‘This is crazy, Louis. You can’t be serious.’

‘Wood shavings, Hermann, and sawdust.’

Merde, what was he on about now?

‘Sometime today, probably early in the afternoon and while sitting briefly at that desk of his, Hubert Quevillon emptied the turn-ups of his trousers. Mahogany shavings, cedar of Lebanon, French oak and walnut, also teakwood from the Far East. Certainly not the plain spruce of the no-name coffins the Hotel-Dieu use for its unfortunates.’

‘A carpenter’s shop. A furniture repair place …’

‘Noelle Jourdan likes to give the gerbils she keeps something to burrow into. Matron Aurore Aumont thought the shavings must have come from the coffin shop but obviously they can’t have.’

It had to be said. ‘Noelle and her father could never have owned the items she pawned.’

‘Nor had a right to the stamp collection of Bernard Isaac Friedman of 14 rue des Rosiers.’

‘And Delaroche must have easy access to beautiful things.’

‘Some of which even that agency of his could never have afforded.’

‘Judge Rouget, too, Louis? The things I saw in that vitrine of his.’

Sickened by the thought of their being led ever deeper into the morass Paris and the country had become, Kohler wiped fog from the windscreen. ‘Just what did you find in that bastard’s desk and please don’t tell me that before this Defeat of yours he worked in La Villette.’

The largest of the city’s two abattoirs and where all but 20 percent of the sheep and cattle consumed each year in the city used to be slaughtered, as well as nearly eighty thousand horses. Now, of course, little of this work was required since most of the stock was simply loaded on to railway trucks and sent to the Reich.

‘Handcuffs, lipsticks, compacts, earrings and other jewellery, handbags too, some of which can no doubt be linked to victims. A spool of piano wire and clippers, a length of bloodstained sash cord and two bottles of chloroform, one of which was half-empty.’

Giselle … ‘What else?’

‘The usual photos.’

‘And?’

‘A jumble of negligees, brassieres, underpants and garter belts. The ticket stubs of the Cinema Imperial-no doubt the colonel charged the expense to Madame Morel’s account for the Barrault subject’s investigation. Blouses that had been ripped off. Keys-lots of them. Jetons , too, for the telephones they might need to force some girl to use. I couldn’t have let you know any of this when we were in that office. I tried to give you a hint but even that failed.’

More … there must be more.

‘A note from Delaroche reminding Quevillon not to forget to pay his PPF dues.’

The Parti Populaire Francais of Jacques Doriot whose militants, along with others, formed the backbone of the Intervention-Referat and who had eagerly assisted the nine thousand Paris police, and student police, during last year’s grande rafle .

‘Quevillon may well be the Agence Vidocq’s only member, Hermann. Otherwise the colonel would, perhaps, have paid the dues himself.’

‘Delaroche simply wants to give himself and the others a bit of distance yet show support. Funds will have been passed under the table. The PPF have friends in the Propaganda-Abteilung and can call on the press any time they want.’

‘Especially if there’s a student nurse who had best do as she’s told.’

‘You first, or me?’

‘Me, I think, but let’s hope the agence hasn’t yet anticipated a second visit.’

‘Since they’ll probably have been told of the first?’

‘Among other things, Flavien Garnier had a tube of Veronal in his desk and nearly fifty tobacco cards. The girl’s father needs the one for the constant pain he suffers, and writes appeals to former comrades-in-arms for help; the daughter found eggs, shoes, a chocolate bar and other items for Matron Aumont’s grandchildren, purchases and appeals that could perhaps only have been facilitated by the current and most popular medium of exchange.’

‘You’re full of surprises. I hadn’t realized you could be so light-fingered.’

‘Then realize that under Garnier’s blotting pad there was a list of resistants , some of whom had ticks beside them and lines through them, and that under Quevillon’s photo of the boys, was one of Giselle as she left Oona yesterday.’

Ach, where was it all to end? wondered Kohler. The PPF had been funded by the Abwehr, the counterintelligence service of the Wehrmacht, and had supplied them with the names and locations of resistants and other ‘troublemakers’ the Occupier had wanted but with the defeat at Stalingrad, everyone had started having second thoughts and, as if that weren’t enough, that fanatic ex-chicken farmer and Head of the SS, the Reichsfuhrer Himmler, had all along been jealous of the Abwehr and had sought to undermine it, and submerge it entirely within the Sicherheitsdienst.

One happy family. And guess what? he silently asked as he found the main staircase of the house at Number 25 and followed Louis up it. Given the ever-shifting sands of Paris and the Occupation, the PPF had seen the light and gone over to the SS. The Agence Vidocq must now be supplying them with those names and locations, Judge Rouget sentencing those taken, Oberg seeing that they were either shot as hostages for some act of ‘terrorism’ or shipped east to one of the camps no one wanted to mention, though everyone knew of them, especially Hercule the Smasher.

Having anticipated his thoughts, Louis was waiting for him on the second storey’s landing to softly confide, ‘That’s not what worries me at the moment, mon vieux . If Oberg ordered the agence to take Giselle as bait for his Mausfalle and they failed to do so, is that not, perhaps, reason enough for rage in the killing of the passage de l’Hirondelle victim? To fail when working for such a one can’t sit easily.’

‘Giselle and two honest cops who’ve been getting in the way far too many times.’

‘And are to be made martyrs of, in the line of duty, Hermann.’