J. Janes - Tapestry

Each stood in a doorway, out of the rain, and when the slit-eyed, blue-blinkered light from Louis’s torch found the blocky faces, Kohler saw that impassive gazes were returned.

Each then evaporated into the blackout, the click-clack of the Occupation’s wooden-soled shoes earnestly retreating along the passage de la Trinite, a lane so narrow and old, water rushed down its centre finding the shoes first and sewers second. Rain, an icy, bone-numbing rain: Paris, Thursday 11 February 1943 at 11.47 p.m.

It gushed from downpipes to fountain across the passage , blocking all reasonable access to the velo-taxi that had been crammed into a doorway. A bicycle taxi across whose backside bold letters gave … Ach, mein Gott , could a better-chosen name have been found? PRENEZ-MOI. JE SUIS A VOUS . Take me. I’m yours. And stolen too!

‘HERMANN, LET ME!’

Jesus, merde alors, how many times had he heard Louis yell it like that? A rape, another grisly murder probably and they not home more than an hour. Dragged off the train from Colmar, Alsace shy; and now the Greater German Reich, ordered here or else. Two honest cops, one from each side, and fighting common crime when everybody else was in on it. ‘She’s all yours, mon vieux . I would never have found her without you.’

‘Grab the last of those departing filles de joie . Tell her that pneumonia is in the offing and that if she doesn’t answer truthfully, I will personally deny her the necessary medical treatment but not the VD checkups she has constantly been avoiding!’

Louis shouted things like that just to keep his partner sane. ‘She’s already agreed. Hey, her hand’s cold, wet and trembling, but I’m calming her.’

‘ Bon . Without a licence she’s going to need it. Is that still the quartier de Bonne-Nouvelle’s most notorious maison de passe, madame?’ Louis rammed a pointing hand towards a door of no edifying virtue.

‘Oui,’ she grunted dispassionately. Purposely he didn’t hear her, so she yelped it again and shrilled, ‘MESSIEURS, I KNOW NOTHING OF THIS MATTER. I AM SOAKED TO THE PREFET ’S GOATEE AND CANNOT SWIM!’

The walk-in hotel, one of Paris’s many to which the street girls took their clients, asked no questions, took no names and, like the passage , preferred anonymity.

‘Snow should soon begin,’ shouted Louis as he reached to open the closest of the taxi’s doors, ‘but first there will be the ice pellets.’

Half of him was soon squeezed inside the velo-taxi . From it Kohler could hear the muted, ‘ Ah, mon Dieu , mademoiselle, you’re safe now. My name is Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Surete, but I’m not like most of those. We’ll get the one who did this. We won’t stop until we do.’

He ducked out to earnestly confide, ‘Hermann, let that one go. This one’s not only been savagely raped but brutally beaten. We’ll have to take her to the Hotel-Dieu and quickly.’

More couldn’t be said, but through the celluloid of the side windscreen, a fever of blue-washed light passed quickly over the victim before being extinguished. ‘Easy, mademoiselle. Easy. Please don’t try to talk.’

‘My children …’

‘Madame, we’ll see to them.’

‘My papers. My keys. Our ration cards and tickets. My wedding ring.’

‘Please don’t concern yourself further. Rest… . Just try to rest.’

‘She’s passed out, Louis.’

‘Fish oil, Hermann. That taxi reeks of it. There’s grease on the seats and on her neck and shoulders.’

At 1.07 a.m. sleet pinged off the Citroen. They had put the woman, as yet unnamed, into the very best of hands, felt Kohler, had got his little Giselle and his Oona to watch over the children, and would get back to her as soon as possible, but liebe Zeit was there to be no rest? Bleakly he gripped the steering wheel and stared through the shrapnel at the silvery darkness the storm and the blackout gave to the boulevard Montmartre. Not another car was in sight, of course, for virtually all of them had disappeared from the city in June 1940, the crowds, too, at this hour, and didn’t the Fuhrer pride himself on having war-torn Europe’s only open city and the good example it set of all things Nazi?

The passage Jouffroy, at number 12, had been built in 1846, thought St-Cyr, but Hermann didn’t need a travelogue, not with Walter Boemelburg, his boss and Head of Section IV, the Gestapo in France, breathing down their necks and a telex that had summoned them on the run: return hq immediately / streets being terrorized by blackout crime, and so much for the Fuhrer’s shining example of an open city.

Pitch-dark, beyond the regulation dim pinpoint of blue that should mark its far end and exit, the glass-and-iron roofed Jouffroy was much wider than that of the open-slotted Trinite. Secondhand books specializing in photographic equipment most could only dream of in this third and most miserable winter of the Occupation were on offer; secondhand mechanical toys, too, and walking sticks and umbrellas …

‘Used postage stamps,’ grumbled St-Cyr. ‘That’s not you is it, Agent Belanger, not the officer I last worked with here on the thirteenth of October 1939, the one who had been wounded in the left shoulder at Verdun in the autumn of 1917?’

To flatter a Parisian flic was even more insane than trying to grease one of their waiters without offering cash, but this one, Kohler noted, was a hirondelle, one of the swallows with cape and bicycle, and God help him if he tried to ride that chariot he had chained to the light standard.

Briefly Belanger shone his torch over them. The Gestapo was a draining giant of fifty-five with pale-blue eyes and an expression shy; the torchlight did nothing to alleviate; the Frenchman, a former shy; boxeur of the Police Academy, was blocky, chunky, broad-shouldered shy;, of medium height and fifty-two years of age, the big brown eyes noticing everything, the full, dark brown soup-strainer shy; one that should definitely suffer decapitating scissors and a razor, lest the stomach get a hairball.

That terrible scar of the Bavarian’s was on the left and ran from eye to chin. Everyone had heard of it. The police, the Surete, the SS and Gestapo. Honest … these two were not only known for their absolute honesty, that scar was the reward an SS whip had given Kohler for their steadfastly having pointed the finger of truth, the idiots.

‘It is this way, Inspectors,’ grunted Belanger.

Besides the truncheon, he toted one of those torches in which there was a dynamo that was activated by repeatedly pressing the thumb down on a lever. No batteries though, thought Kohler, and they did say the things didn’t wear out as easily but were a bugger on the thumb.

Au Philateliste Savant was at the far end and not six steps from the old Hotel Ronceray. The little blue exit light, mounted high on the wall, was there in its wire cage, but flickered instant warnings of yet another power outage: punishment of the population for the ‘terrorist’ actions of a few or simply industrial demands elsewhere. Always the power could be cut off.

Now suddenly not even the exit on to the rue de la Grange-Bateliere could be seen but the door to this four-metre-wide shop had been jemmied. As Belanger’s torchlight passed over them, banks of envelopes stuffed with collector’s ‘bargains’ appeared. Nothing over five and ten francs and yet there must be thousands of the envelopes, felt Kohler, astounded by the dedicated patience of the years and the musty smell of old, worn-out glue.