Paris Requiem, page 22
‘Hervé,’ she called. ‘I’m home. I have a visitor.’
Increasingly mystified, I allowed her to usher me into what would have been a comfortably furnished apartment in old business premises had there been any walls. Instead, the one large room was divided by the furniture into the different areas of a home – a kitchen, a living room and a bedroom, all open to each other. The only internal wall was at the far end, probably the bathroom. Still taking in my surroundings, I heard the sound of something scraping on the tiled floor and a man around my age in a wheelchair came into view. Capeluche went over to him and kissed him.
‘This is Eddie,’ she told him. ‘I wanted him to meet you.’
Her voice was different again, softer than the killer but more confident than the caretaker. She turned his chair around and pushed him into the living-room area, with two mismatched armchairs opposite each other and a space in between where I imagined his wheelchair normally sat. She parked him where I thought she would and gestured me to sit down on one of the armchairs. We were in a horseshoe around a low table.
Hervé had no legs. But that wasn’t what I saw. It was his face, his expression. I stared into his eyes. He gazed back at me. He turned once to Capeluche for reassurance and then back to me.
‘You understand,’ she told me.
‘Shell shock,’ I replied, my voice low.
‘Hello, Eddie,’ he said to me, a small smile on his face.
‘Hello, Hervé.’
I looked from one to the other, unsure of what I was supposed to do. My eyes kept returning to the man. Shell shock. I knew what that was. That was what had first brought me to Paris in 1915, to an institute in the Fifth Arrondissement. Where I’d met a nurse called Sylvie, Jean-Luc’s mother, and fallen in love with her before they’d sent me back to the front, deemed fit to face more shells.
Capeluche kissed him again and sat down on the other armchair. She looked at him for a few moments in silence. Her expression was gentle, her spiked hair somehow softer, her hands no longer a killer’s.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ I asked her.
Seeming to tear her gaze away from Hervé, she turned to face me. ‘I lent my handsome, funny husband to the government so he could play in the war they wanted. And they sent him back to me like this. With no money, no compensation and a pension a mouse couldn’t live on.’
‘I’m sorry. But I don’t see what that justifies.’
She looked frankly at me. ‘Do you know what they told me to do? To make ends meet? Take in sewing. That’s what they said. Take in sewing. “You’re a woman, you can take in sewing.”’
She turned back to Hervé, her face filled with a latent fury that was almost as shocking as the coldness I’d seen in her eyes before. Watching the husband and wife stare without comprehension at each other, I saw again Julot’s mouth and understood where it came from. I closed my eyes and sighed. What do I say to an uncontained anger and grief like that? Especially when I’d felt it too.
‘Why throw your lot in with criminals?’
‘You need to ask? They’re all criminals. The government that did this to Hervé were all criminals.’ She paused. ‘Every single one of them.’
‘So why join them?’
‘Because there are times when to survive, all that’s left to you is to join them. You just have to choose the gang of criminals you think is going to win.’
‘You have a choice.’
‘Do you? You might have. I didn’t. But you have a choice now.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Join me. Your police aren’t going to go anywhere, not with the Nazis in power.’
‘They won’t be in power forever.’
‘How do you know that? And then what are you going to do? I know you, Eddie. I know what you’re capable of. I see it in you.’
‘What am I capable of?’
‘The same as I am.’
‘I’m not.’
She gestured to Hervé and put her head to one side and asked, ‘Are you sure of that? Just how well are you doing these days? With your cop’s salary? At the beck and call of the Boches? Join me and you won’t ever have to do that again. Join me and you won’t go hungry again.’
‘I’m a cop.’
‘And? Where’s it getting you? You have a choice which way you go in this war. The choice is yours to make.’
‘Is it?’
We sat in silence for a moment, all the words said. The still was broken by the sound of Hervé humming gently, a tune we used to sing in the trenches.
‘What’s your real name?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. ‘The only name you need to know is Capeluche.’
‘An executioner.’
‘Well done, Eddie, you’ve done your homework. I thought a bookish man like you would get to the bottom of it.’
‘What happened to him? The real one?’
‘He led a revolt.’ She laughed, the first time I’d heard a bitter note under the rage in her voice. ‘It failed.’
‘You don’t think that’s an omen?’
She shook her head. ‘He was a revolutionary. They always end badly. I’m a pragmatist. I recommend you be the same.’
‘Believe me, I am.’
‘I’ll remember that. I have another name for you. Henri Lafont.’
I was puzzled. It wasn’t a name I knew. ‘Who’s that?’
‘That’s for you to find out.’
Hervé ceased humming for a moment and made a small noise at the back of his throat. She reached across to stroke his head with an affection that was painful to watch. He began to hum again. She smiled at him and I had to look away.
‘I need to go now.’
She gestured to the door. ‘You’re free to go any time you want, Eddie.’
‘One thing I don’t understand. You’re killing anyone who threatens to say anything about who’s behind this, but here you are, telling me this.’
‘Nearly everything,’ she corrected me. She soothed Hervé as his humming became more agitated. ‘That’s where you just lost the choice, Eddie. Now you know, you either join me or I kill you.’
34
‘New one on me.’
I turned to Boniface and asked him if he’d heard of a villain called Henri Lafont, but he denied any knowledge either, only he took longer to say it than Dax had.
‘What’s it to do with?’ Dax wanted to know.
‘The Boulevard Voltaire robbery.’ Well, it was in a very circuitous away, I argued to myself.
‘Good to see you making some progress on this,’ Dax grumbled.
‘Isn’t it?’
I also tried asking Barthe and Tavernier as they were the old-timers and Mayer as he knew what he was talking about. I even tried the rest of the detectives and put a phone call through to Judge Clément. Not one of them had heard of the name that Capeluche had given me the previous day. I checked such records as we had since the turmoil of the Nazis hitting town and our bosses floating all the papers down the Seine in a barge. We’d got them back, more or less, but they were all over the place. I drew a blank everywhere.
I waited until Boniface left the detectives’ room before going to tell Dax that I’d be out all day working on the Boulevard Voltaire robbery.
‘Take Boniface with you,’ he told me.
‘Will do.’ Won’t do.
My first job was to pay another visit to the library at the Sorbonne. I reckoned that if Capeluche was a reference to the city’s history, Henri Lafont might be too. He wasn’t. The same librarian as the other day brought me the big old history of Paris where I’d found Capeluche. Not a Henri Lafont in sight. I asked the librarian if the name rang a bell, but she was as mystified as everyone else I’d asked. Closing the large tome gently, I cursed Capeluche and her cryptic ‘help’.
I’d been followed by Hochstetter’s men on the way from Thirty-Six to the Sorbonne, which hadn’t worried me, but I had no intention of having their company for the second part of the day. Outside the library, I picked up my car and finally lost the Peugeot 202 tailing me with the old drive-out-in-front-of-a-German-lorry-at-a-junction ruse. It was only going to be a matter of time before a German lorry stopped me or crushed me under its wheels, but it worked again now. Checking behind me, I took a roundabout route to the road north out of the city and opened up.
* * *
Hauptmann Prochnow checked my ID again and compared it with the record he’d kept in the big old cabinet in the corner of the room.
‘No change since the last time you looked at it,’ I told him.
He thanked me. The day the Germans get my sarcasm, I’m really in the scheisse. I’d got past the same checkpoint at Senlis and parked as near the Wehrmacht garrison in Compiègne as they’d allowed me to. A clerk in a uniform had made me wait in the same corridor where I’d waited last time, before Prochnow had invited me into his office. I’d decided to do things officially this time. Provided your definition of official meant not telling Dax where I was and lying to the German army.
‘What is your purpose for coming here?’ he asked me after handing me back my ID. ‘Is this related to the prisoner you were looking for the other day?’
I kicked myself again for having used that as a reason. ‘Yes, we have further information. The miscreant we’re looking for has a brother who was in the French army. We believe that the brother was taken prisoner in the fighting in May and is in a prison camp somewhere near here. We think our missing prisoner will be trying to make contact with his brother, or even attempt to free him from prison. We want to apprehend him before he can do that.’
It had taken me from Paris to Compiègne to come up with that story. I maybe should have taken the scenic route.
Prochnow just looked puzzled. ‘There are no French prisoners here. All captives taken were sent to camps in Germany.’
‘That is strange. We’d been informed that the brother was in prison here.’ We hadn’t, but it was worth a shot. ‘He served with the 24th regiment of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.’
Prochnow looked like he’d been stung. ‘A colonial regiment?’
‘In the French army.’
Prochnow didn’t do the uncomfortable look that Hauptmann Schnabel in Paris had. ‘That is a different proposition.’
‘Why?’
Not even that one word discomfited him. ‘You are certain that this man’s brother was taken prisoner?’
‘Definitely. The brother’s name is Fabrice Mendy.’
‘And you were told that he was being kept prisoner here in Compiègne?’
‘I might have misinterpreted that information, but that is what I understood. Do you know where he would be?’
‘So you can apprehend the criminal from Paris?’
‘Exactly.’ I’d almost forgotten that part of the lie.
‘I’m afraid you are only partially well-informed. The treatment afforded to colonial soldiers was different from their white counterparts. They were separated from the other soldiers.’
‘In what way?’
‘African and Arab captives have not been sent to prison camps in Germany like the other French prisoners.’
‘Where have they been sent?’
‘They are here in France. The order was taken to keep them in France.’
‘So you should be able to find this prisoner?’
He shook his head. ‘That is not to say that these soldiers are here in Compiègne.’
‘So where are they?’
‘They are in Frontstalags throughout the Occupied Zone. But I’m afraid I wouldn’t have access to precise information about individuals. The administration is different from prisoners sent to Germany. Had your Fabrice Mendy been sent to Germany, I would have been able to verify his whereabouts and tell you where he was.’
I shook my head and wondered where to go next with my questions. ‘Why have they been kept in France?’
He looked at me challengingly. ‘To stop the spread of tropical diseases to Germany.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Although the most important reason for keeping these people here is to prevent the racial defilement of women in Germany.’
* * *
They kept me in a cell.
Except it wasn’t a cell but a room with two soldiers outside with Mauser submachine guns, so these four walls definitely did a prison make.
They’d put me in here because I might just have made a lunge across Prochnow’s desk for his throat. On hearing his words, I’d had a vision of Dominique. I hadn’t attempted to go and see her after last night’s encounter with Capeluche. She hadn’t called me either and she didn’t have a telephone at home, so that looked like stalemate for the time being. I thought of her fears for her son, and I lost my usual good reason and common sense and decided I’d try to force Prochnow’s head into the old wooden filing cabinet.
My hearing now was like listening underwater. A couple of soldiers had come in at the commotion before I could reach Prochnow and one of them had fetched me a blow to the ear that was still ringing an hour later. Through the ocean mist, I heard the door open and turned to see Prochnow come in. He was flanked by the Mauser twins.
‘You are very lucky you didn’t manage to assault me,’ he told me. ‘Or you would be facing a German military court. But as you are a policeman, I will give you the benefit of the doubt. You will return to Paris now.’
He handed me my police ID and told the soldiers to accompany me to my car.
‘As I’m a policeman, I will continue with my investigation.’
He stood centimetres from my face. ‘You do not understand. You will return to Paris now.’
They followed me all the way to the checkpoint in Senlis. Muttering unseemly words under my breath, I drove on until I’d gone a good way past the control and stopped at a crossroads. I turned right. I was busy looking for the smallest possible roads I could find. And for a way back to the Bois d’Eraine that took me nowhere near Senlis or Compiègne.
‘I will return to Paris,’ I said out loud, looking for somewhere to hole up off the road and wait until dusk fell, ‘when I’m ready.’
35
Remembering my route from the other day, I drove through the dark to Bailleul-le-Soc and found the long road leading to young Fernand’s pig farm. The aroma would have guided my way even on the foggiest of nights, headlamps or no. The farmer didn’t look too pleased to see me.
‘I don’t want trouble with the Boches,’ he told me.
He’d loosened the braces over his shoulders until they were hanging down round his arse. His trousers were staying up by gravity alone.
‘There won’t be,’ I assured him.
He grunted and let me in. I followed him into the kitchen. A door from it was open, leading into a pantry. He shut it quickly, but not before I saw sides of pork and ham as rich as a villa on Avenue Foch hanging inside. My mouth salivated at the sight and smell of it as my mind tried to reconcile how a stench like the one outside could be part of the process to produce an aroma such as the one just snatched away from me.
Sitting down at the table, he picked up the last piece of ham from his plate and put it in his mouth. Looking at me, he chewed it noisily.
‘Got any of that to spare?’ I asked him.
‘Nope.’
I nodded at the pantry. ‘Looked like you did.’
‘You want it, you buy it.’
‘How much?’
He named a price.
‘I want some ham,’ I told him, ‘not your first-born.’
‘Take it or leave it.’
He belched. That would have to do for me.
‘We were interrupted last time,’ I told him. ‘You were about to tell me something.’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t help you.’
I leaned conspiratorially towards him on the table. ‘You were complaining about the Ministry. I’ve got a friend there, I can put in a good word for you.’
‘Have you?’
‘Of course I fucking haven’t. But if you don’t tell me what you know, I’ll make sure I do get a friend there and I’ll have them come after you with every fucking thing they’ve got. Taxes, black market, permits, swine fever, you name it.’
‘You couldn’t.’ His voice was unsure.
‘Try me.’
He got up and cut another slice from a ham on the sink and sat down with it. This is my sort of bribe, I thought, but young Fernand looked me in the eyes and slowly ate it.
‘The African soldiers were separated from the French ones.’
I stared at him. ‘I could have told you that.’ My frustration shone through. I listened to him chomp on his ham. ‘What else do you know?’
‘That’s it.’
Fighting down a desire to grab the ham off him and scoff the lot, I had to turn away. I looked outside, through a chink in the blackout and thought of the forest beyond the darkness of the farmhouse.
‘The forest. Do you see much in the way of comings and goings in there?’
‘Some. Germans mainly.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘Don’t know. Most of us locals won’t go in there now. Not with them here.’
Instinctively, I looked at the chink in the blackouts again and thought of Prochnow and his Frontstalags, the prison camps where the African soldiers were being kept. Would there be room for one in there? And if so, could they keep it secret? As to why, that was obvious. The Nazis obviously had no intention of extending the prisoner-of-war niceties to all of their captives.
‘You got a torch?’ I asked him.
* * *
The light from Fernand’s torch was weak, which was no surprise but probably a blessing. He’d only lent it to me because the glass was cracked. At least it wouldn’t be a beacon pointing the way to me as I set off for the woods. Young Fernand had told me that I’d be better entering the tree line a few kilometres further to the west, as that’s where he’d seen most activity. Taking his advice, I’d driven away from his farm and parked off the road. I’d left my Citroën protected as much as possible by a small clump of trees and set off on foot into the woods. With a temperamental torch and the sounds of animals and who knew what else scurrying among the undergrowth, the forest was scarier than a Pigalle backstreet on payday.
