Carnival (3 page)

One hundred and twenty thousand had been expelled from Alsace in 1940; 500,000 from Lorraine—all those who had wanted to keep their French citizenship and lose their property. Only those whose families had been there before 1918 were to be considered citizens of the Greater Reich. A matter of efficiency to Berlin, one of easing assimilation and purifying the remaining stock, and then, in August of last year, introducing conscription.

Frau Oberkircher, who had grown silent at thoughts of the frontier, had probably just been caught up in things like so many others, but had bought herself a copy of today's
Völki­scher Beobachter
, the Führer's paper, thinking its presence, along with that of two detectives, might just help.

Excusing himself, Louis reached across the woman and opened a fist, revealing some chestnuts. ‘There are only a few left, Hermann. Don't forget to use your pocketknife. We don't want to have to visit a dentist.'

‘
Ach
, we're almost in the Reich. Things will be different. There'll be anaesthetic. Cold, boiled, dried chestnuts,' he said in
Deutsch
to the woman. ‘A little something for the road his girlfriend pressed upon him in Paris as we caught the train out.'

His girlfriend, Gabrielle Arcuri, a chanteuse.

‘There's been no heavy breathing yet, from that love affair,' confided Kohler, widening the woman's eyes.

‘Shave it, Hermann,' said St-Cyr in French, indicating the chestnut. ‘Don't cut yourself.'

‘We're floaters,'said Kohler to their travelling companion. ‘We drift from murder to arson to missing persons, fraud and bank robberies and live in the never-never land of shadows.'

Chestnut shavings were eaten. ‘I gather beechnuts in the autumn and press a lovely oil from them which I heat with onions and salt for the potatoes,' said Claudette. ‘It's every bit as good as butter—better, I think.'

Certainly there were so few potatoes available in France, she shouldn't have said it, but Louis let it pass. Louis knew the woman was bringing memories back to this partner of his. At the frontier, he took the heaviest of the woman's suitcases which was opened and thoroughly searched, as he'd known it would be. At Kolmar, now spelled with a
K
, they saw her into a horse-drawn sleigh, a taxi whose mare was far beyond the needs of the Russian Front and just as aged as the few the Occupier­ had left in France.

Giving them a wave, her heart filled with relief and gratitude, Claudette looked back to see them standing in the Bahnhofstrasse, formerly the rue de la Gare, two very different men wondering what the future might bring.

‘
Amis
,' she said, as if it were a miracle, ‘but even
les très amis
must doubt one another now.'

It was curious that they each remembered where the police station was but that neither spoke of it, thought St-Cyr. Two charcoal-gas-powered lorries reminded one of Occupied Paris, their fire-boxes up front or behind and gas tanks on the roof. Long queues stood outside the shops, just as at home. There were bicycles, bicycle taxis and few, if any, privately operated cars. Here, too, people simply went on foot, but also there were fewer of them. Perhaps a third less than usual, so a population now in Kolmar of about 23,000.

Swastikas flew from many of the three- and four-storey buildings that, cheek by jowl, overlooked the former Champ de Mars, the Military Esplanade, now the
Militärpromenade
. Black wreaths trailed bunting, a noon bell sounded, but no longer was the moment of silence being observed. The workmen who had been clearing away the wreaths continued to do so as the last bell shimmered.

On 3 February, and but five days ago, Radio-Berlin had announced the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the first such public admission. Three days of official mourning had begun on the fourth but were now over.

‘ “The sacrifices of the army, Louis?
Bulwark
of a historical European mission and not in vain,” or so that bastard of a propaganda minister claims, but if not in vain, then what?'

‘Easy,
mon vieux
. Easy. You're in the Reich.' Hermann had lost his two teenaged sons, Jurgen and Hans, at Stalingrad, this partner of his having had to convey the terrible news to him early in January. He'd be wanting to see his Gerda, if only to tell her he was sorry for their loss. Granted, it wasn't that far and perhaps the trip could be arranged, though the delay in getting back across the frontier would be something else again.

Two direction-finding vans, with diamond-shaped wire aerials, were parked in front of the
Polizeikommandantur
which overlooked the Cathedral square. Gestapo plainclothes were earnestly talking about the sweep, just as they would have done in Paris and elsewhere in France. ‘Piano study, Hermann.'

Clandestine wireless transmitters and London … calling London, just as in France when possible.

A dark blue Renault Juraquatre, the two-door, four-seat economy of 1937 to 39 was parked ten metres ahead and had just been washed and polished—
washed
in this weather!

‘I told you, didn't I?' said Kohler. ‘I warned you.'

Half-timbering gave great age, the flanking double wings of what was now an expanded cop shop rising through three and four storeys to lofty garrets, steeply pitched roofs, and paddle-shaped brown beaver's-tail tiles, the
Biberschwanzen
. No patterns were up there on the roofs to brighten the place. Just broken, crooked shutters or none at all. In the years since 1575 much had happened, but more recently the stucco had sloughed and become stained, had been shot up too, a little.

‘Colmar's Hôtel de Ville had a fire, Hermann.'

Its town hall and a reminder that during the Blitzkrieg all the records had been conveniently destroyed. As a result, the town had become the home address favoured by many using false papers in France. ‘Relative upon relative the remaining citizens haven't even heard of!' said Kohler with a snort.

Above them, above the swastika, a columned, railed gallery, looking like something straight out of the Renaissance, was open to all elements. Above this, there were two garret dormers, one on either side, their solid wooden shutters permanently closed and bolted.

‘Hermann, before we go in there I have to tell you something. If we should run into any of my second cousins, I really don't know what I'll do.'

‘Hug or hate them?'

‘Or both.'

‘And they?'

‘Will remember the boy they teased until he fought back so hard he learned to use his fists.'

Louis had spent three summers on the farm of distant relatives near Saarbrücken.

‘
Grand-maman
kept saying I would have to return until she was satisfied.'

She had lived through the siege of 1870–71 to bankroll vivid memories of the Prussians.

‘Their father, my uncle Ernst, had the biggest manure pile in the village and was a real Gauleiter of the shit, Hermann. Looked up to by everyone because of it and other things. Feared, too, let me tell you.'

‘Calm down. Don't be so nervous.'

‘I even saw my cousin Hedda undress completely so as to give the local boys their money's worth. My look was free since I took in the cash for her. Six pfennigs, one from each of them.'

At times, even such as this, it was best to wait and say nothing.

‘
Oncle
Ernst was a big man, Hermann. Not quite as tall as yourself but as strong as an ox. Gentle, though, but thorough. Rigorously so.'

‘I'm waiting, aren't I?'

‘
Ah,
bon
. Guess who was forced to strip off for free and stand in front of all the girls and women of the village yet … yet afterward, no one said a thing of it. There was not one whisper­ or giggle. Hedda and I lived in mortal fear and remorse for days—it was as if we had been banished, but ever since then, except for that last war and this one, she and I have corresponded.'

The truth at last, but a bond, if not of distant kinship and forbidden commerce, of shared guilt, shame and trial.

‘
Grand-maman
said that they had won me over and that I was a terrible disappointment to her. She had hoped I would come back hating them, and didn't even acknowledge that I had finally learned the language.'

Louis was always answering for the sins of his boyhood.

‘Just remember Sainte Odilia, Hermann, then you'll realize how long such things can linger. In 700
A.D.
she prophesied that evil would come via the Antichrist from the Danube.'

A tale worthy of the troubadours. Born blind, rejected by her father, Alsace's patron saint had been hidden away until baptized when a beautiful maid. Miraculously she had gained her sight and her vocation, had kept her virginity, and become a nun and then abbess of the convent she had founded. One day, in her old age when a passerby, and not a blind one, had said he was thirsty, she had touched the stone at her feet with her cane and produced a spring to which, yearly since, the blind had flocked to bathe in hope of gaining their sight!

‘You shouldn't pay that legend much credence, Louis.'

‘I don't. I just see the evidence of it all around me.'

The stove was cylindrical and of fluted white ceramic tile bound by gleaming straps of brass. Hands held to it, they waited in the colonel's office. Finally Hermann could no longer stand their being left alone. ‘He likes to make his fish sweat before frying! He's pissed off because we're late and will never believe it wasn't my fault!'

They had been ushered past the duty desk, had been quickly led through the warren of narrow corridors, up sets of creaking staircases, down others and up again at turns, all eyes taking time out in the various offices to not only watch their progress but see what Paris had sent.

Diamond-leaded casement windows filled much of the oriel behind the Empire desk that looked oddly out of place. Frantically Hermann tried to roll a cigarette.
Mégot
-scavenged tobacco showered, messing the Aubusson under foot and littering the black sheet-iron beneath the stove.

‘Let me.'

‘
Verdammt!
Can't you just be patient?'

Was it all coming back to him? wondered St-Cyr. The agony of never knowing what verdict the court of inquiry would render? The distinct possibility of the firing squad—he'd never given a hint of being so troubled!

The chair behind the desk was not Empire or anything so fine. It was simply a plain, bare, mismatched wooden thing, high- and straight-backed, a railed affair without armrests. A man, then, this colonel of Hermann's, who favoured his back, but did he, in his contemplative moments, gaze off to the northwest beyond the Cathedral to the Église des Dominicains whose exquisite stained glass would have been taken down in 1939 and crated to rest in security, as had the rose window of the Notre-Dame and others? Did he know that the building of that church had begun in the thirteenth century and had continued through the fourteenth, fifteenth and well into the eighteenth? Master builders, those artisans, but did the colonel not also, as he absolutely must since it was right in the middle of the square, notice the Collégiale Saint-Martin with its glazed tiles in diamond patterns, the Cathedral's buttresses and walls inset with blocks of red sandstone among the grey so that a pattern emerged which complimented that of the roofs?

Or did he notice on the rue des Clefs, that of the keys and now the Schüsselstrasse, the formerly named Hôtel de Ville which was unique in itself and for more reasons than the false identities it had provided.

Everything on the desk had its place. Herr Rasche liked order. Pipe and tobacco pouch were to the left and as if just taken out, the bowl but half-filled. An interruption.

‘Louis … '

Hermann still hadn't turned from the stove.

‘Louis, it's my fault you're here. I … I just wanted you to know that.'

‘Your former commanding officer is a connoisseur, Hermann.'

‘Get the hell away from that desk of his before he finds you there!'

Mon Dieu
, he was edgy. ‘A half-bent Billiard, the brier straight-grained and waxed as it should be, the stem of ebonite just like my own, the mixture … '

‘Don't touch it!'

‘A medium-dark cavendish, Hermann. Swiss perhaps, or Dutch or Danish. Matured Virginia Old Belt with perique and a pinch of latakia to slow the little fire and add its plummy taste to the spiciness of the perique and the sugars of the Virginia. Had I the opportunity and the cash for such a treat, I'd have chosen no other.'

‘
Jésus, merde alors
, just because you treasure that straight Billiard in your own pocket is no reason to think you're blood brothers with that
salaud
! Is the pouch of faded Prussian-blue pigskin?'

‘It is, and unless I'm mistaken, your Kommandant is greatly concerned with these suicides. That little car of his absented itself while we were on our way up the stairs.'

Dead centre of the green, baize-coloured blotter, and to the right of the pipe, pouch and matchbox, there were two dossiers, one above the other and with the lowermost name showing in heavy black Gothic type with eagle and swastika stamp.
Hermann Andreas Kohler
and, yes,
Jean-Louis St-Cyr,
and so much for their trying to discover if the colonel knew this Sûreté understood both languages. Gestapo Paris had had the dossiers flown in.

A plain, dog-eared brown notebook—one of those a schoolchild would have used before the Defeat—lay atop the dossiers, a clutch, too, of beautifully carved staghorn buttons, the set for a waistcoat perhaps. Three beechwood bobbins, still wound with thread, were there too, as was a swatch of wood-fibre cloth, the shade that of the medium blue so common among the business suits of the Occupier.