J. Janes - Tapestry

There was no answer. Was there more than one of them? Denise … Denise, my love … ‘Please,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I have two children.’

She waited.

‘Listen, you, I’m one of Abelard’s people. You can have my jewellery and handbag, just don’t hurt me or cut off my hair. I won’t resist.’

Again he said nothing. Again she wasn’t even sure he was there.

Retracing her steps, Germaine at last found the car still parked beside the fountain. Forced by nature to urinate, she did so in the gutter like a common prostitute, had never had to do such a thing before, was both ashamed and embarrassed.

The smoke from a Gauloise bleue filled the car. Herr Kohler was sitting behind the wheel.

‘Get in and behave yourself.’

‘Please, I … I didn’t think. I should have. It’s … it’s horrible out there on those streets.’

‘Just tell me everything you can about Jeannot Raymond and the others. Leave anything out and you really will be finding your own way back.’

He’d do it too. She knew this.

‘They came and they took Oona, mademoiselle. Maybe it’s that they couldn’t find Giselle le Roy and needed Oona as bait, maybe it’s that they’ve the two of them, but they took the woman those kids of Madame Guillaumet’s had come to depend on as I knew Henri and Louisette would because they needed her desperately.’

They didn’t use the lift in this house on the rue La Boetie where Denise’s father kept a flat, had been told by the maitre d’ at the Tour d’Argent that this is where they had best go. Germaine winced when she saw the broken seals around the door. She knew it was a reaction she couldn’t have avoided. Herr Kohler noticed it, as he did everything. He didn’t remove the handcuff that bound her to him as a common criminal.

‘You’re hurting my wrist, damn you.’

‘Be quiet. Speak only when spoken to.’

He checked his gun, said, ‘Don’t make me use it.’ Was very upset and worried about this Oona Van der Lynn but wouldn’t let such concerns interfere in the slightest with what he had to do.

He opened the door and made her walk in front of him, nudging her when she paused to pry off her shoes. ‘My coat,’ she said. It now dangled from that wrist. Her dress was ruined, her hair, her everything. How could he do this to her? Did he not know who she was?

Abruptly he stopped her in the entrance to the salle de sejour and she knew he would not let her go any further until he wanted her to. He must be looking around the room at everyone, must be taking it all in.

Broken glass littered the carpet at Louis’s feet amid the shattered wreckage of the mantel’s theatre poster. Denise Rouget had looked up suddenly, the daughter sitting tensely on the edge of a distant settee with that mother of hers whose hands were bandaged but who showed every sign of being about to leap up and smash something else-the vitrine? wondered Kohler.

Judge Rouget couldn’t find the will to even notice green eyes or this Kripo or that wife of his, nor was he enjoying the cigar whose smoke must cloud the thoughts when clear thinking was demanded. He’d been told exactly where things stood and hadn’t liked what he’d heard. Undying loyalty to the Fuhrer and the Reich even if things were beginning to look doubtful and the Allies might just possibly invade en masse as so many were now hoping.

The Standartenfuhrer Langbehn simply remained supremely confident with knees crossed and cigarette in hand. Sonja Remer, having gone into the kitchen to get herself one of those chairs, sat by that exit with handbag in lap, intently watching the proceedings without expression beyond a blankness that unsettled because one had still to ask, as always, was there nothing that could be done to change her mind?

‘Hermann …’

‘Louis, this one told me Madame Rouget arranged and paid for the killing of Elene Artur.’

‘I did no such thing,’ spat Vivienne, sucking in a breath and darting a look at everyone but her daughter.

‘Kohler …’

‘Standartenfuhrer, don’t get in the way of a police officer exercising his duties.’

‘A moment, mon vieux …’

‘Not now, Louis. Just let me handle this.’

‘There is no body, Hermann.’

‘Cleaned it up, did they?’

‘Kohler …’

‘Be quiet, you. An SS-Gestapo Mausefalle , eh, and two honest detectives dead because of the marksmanship of this one? Try it and see what happens, Standartenfuhrer. Madame Rouget? Madame Vivienne Rouget of the rue Henri Rochefort?’

Hermann gave the house number and said that his partner would take down her proces-verbal, her statement.

‘I arranged nothing. You have no proof, not now.’

‘ Ach, but I have.’

‘Let’s see it, then,’ she said in French.

‘ Aber naturlich. Bitte, though … Merci, un moment .’

Hermann was flying on Benzedrine-taunting her with that mix of languages. Nudging Germaine de Brisac ahead of him, he went over to the Blitz and took the handbag from her at gunpoint, tossing it on to the carpet some distance from her. ‘That’s to even things up,’ he said and nudged her with the Walther P38. ‘Just try to get it, mein Schatz , and you’ll never try another thing.’

Tucking his pistol away, he dug deeply into a pocket, had to finally release the Mademoiselle de Brisac but told her, as only he could, not to sit down. Fist clenched and then opened, he let Vivienne Roget look at what had, no doubt, been promised her by the killers but hadn’t been found until later.

‘Have you a collection of them?’ he asked. She didn’t answer but only glared. ‘I’ll give it to you later, then. For now it’s all the evidence we need since my report is on the Kommandant von Gross-Paris’s desk, awaiting his perusal at an hour you wouldn’t understand.’

Grace a Dieu , Hermann had realized that his partner would have used just such a lie, but had they grown so close, their lives, their very beings were now welded into one?

Squeezed, Louis, Hermann would have said. Like canards a la presse.

‘Mademoiselle Germaine de Brisac?’ he said, using his Gestapo voice.

Terrified, she looked at Hermann, who continued. ‘Tell them what you told me of Jeannot Raymond.’

Her overcoat fell to the carpet, her wrist was favoured. Alone before them, she knew her dress clung to her, that she mustn’t pluck at it, mustn’t even try to tidy the hair that was plastered to her brow, that to do such would only be considered unseemly of her, betraying a cowardice she didn’t wish to expose.

‘Abelard knew him from before the Defeat, from that other war, I think. The victory then. The Cercle de l’Union Interaliee, too, in the early thirties when he … he was living there and Monsieur Raymond had come home from Argentina to stay.’

‘But always the cool one, that right?’ prompted Herr Kohler, nudging her, she drawing away from him sharply. ‘Never anything else,’ he continued. ‘Dangerous-wasn’t that what you said when I asked it of you? Damned dangerous?’

Again he touched her. Again she pulled away. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘Dangerous and brave. When flying over the Andes Mountains, he and … and the other pilots of that airmail service he worked for had to draw their own charts and make their own repairs if forced down by bad weather or engine failure.’

‘Or walk out, Louis.’

‘He … he had two ranches. The one much nearer to Buenos Aires was for cattle and horses, while the one far to the southwest in Patagonia was for sheep. He …’

‘Had a wife and two children,’ said Madame Rouget, sucking in a breath and waiting to see their reactions. ‘A wife who betrayed him.’