Carnival

By J. Robert Janes

Amid the ruins of an abandoned Alsatian carnival, St-Cyr and Kohler investigate a pair of suspicious suicides
During the Great War, Hermann Kohler and Jean-Louis St-Cyr fought in Alsace on opposite sides of the barbed wire. Two decades later, they return as partners: a Gestapo officer and a French cop investigating everyday crimes in a world gone mad with war. In February 1943, Alsace is unrecognizable—an occupied country where speaking French is all it takes to lose one’s freedom. St-Cyr and Kohler have been summoned to a POW camp where soldiers and résistants manufacture textiles on the grounds of a deserted carnival. Where industry and warfare overlap, they will find a conspiracy worthy of the most twisted house of mirrors.
Two prisoners of this garish, decrepit circus have killed themselves, and the jailers must at least make a show of finding out why. Although the trenches of the Great War are long gone, St-Cyr and Kohler find that in Alsace, the fires of battle smolder still.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: May 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480468139

J. Robert Janes

J. Robert Janes was born in Toronto. He holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author before he began writing fiction. He began his career as a novelist by writing young adult books. In 1985 he began writing for adults, starting with the four-novel Richard Hagen series. He is best known for his St-Cyr and Kohler series, police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France.

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Carnival

A St-Cyr and Kohler Mystery

J. Robert Janes

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Historical Note

This is for Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté Nationale

and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo,

creatures of the imagination, lives of their own.

Acknowledgments

Each of the novels in the St-Cyr & Kohler series incorporates a few words and brief passages of French or German. Dr. Dennis Essar of Brock University very kindly assisted with the French, as did the artist Pierrette Laroche, while Professor Schutz, of Germanic and Slavic Studies at Brock, helped with the German, and in this novel, the Alsatian. Should there be any errors­, however, they are my own and for these I apologize.

Author’s Note

Carnival is a work of fiction in which actual places and times are used but altered as appropriate. As with the other St-Cyr & Kohler novels, the names of real persons may occasionally appear for historical authenticity, though all are deceased and the story makes of them what it demands. I do not condone what happened during these times, I abhor it. But during the Occupation of France the everyday crimes of murder, arson and the like continued to be committed, and I merely ask by whom and how were they solved?

Carnival: illusion masks reality, forgetfulness is engendered, truth hidden.

1

For some time now the train had been stopped in a cutting to the west of Belfort, in the Vosges Mountains and still in France. Crammed in on the hard wooden bench of wartime, Kohler ached for a cigarette. Mein Gott, had it been an hour of silence already? All lights, no matter how tiny and scarce tobacco was, had been forbidden. Louis, he knew, longed to sigh and drolly say, C’est une attaque aérienne, mesdames et messieurs, but soon they’d cross the frontier into Alsace, now the Greater Third Reich, soon Louis would have to be constantly reminded that speaking French in public was verboten.

It didn’t bear thinking about, their being sent on this investigation, this ‘Karneval.’ With the heat, the overcoats and the crowding, misery was compounded but ach, no one complained in a coach full of Waffen-SS—a Sonderkommando, a ‘special’ commando. One simply did as ordered.

‘Raus, Alles.’ Get out, all of you, croaked the sergeant-conductor. The snow, a metre or more deep in places, was pristine under a full moon and not a cloud up there, just stars like you’d never seen, except for the low and throaty drone of aircraft. The RAF at 9.05 p.m. Berlin Time, 7 February 1943, one hour of daylight saving time in winter, two in summer!

In single file everyone headed up into the adjacent woods to the smell of spruce trees and their enclosing darkness. ‘Merde, this is idiocy,’ swore Louis. ‘We’re not the target. We’re in just as much, if not far more danger out here than in that damned train. Thirty degrees of frost and my shoes … I’ve no overboots!’

There had been no time to beg stores for replacements and receive the uncaring shrug of the scarcities. From Vichy to Paris, the train had taken over nine hours, instead of four. From Paris, they had had to take the southernmost route, changing to a secondary line at Dijon, due exactly to the threat of what was steadily drawing close.

Clear under the moon, the train huddled between shoulders of bare rock and walls of freshly ploughed drift. Two locomotives, one of them a booster for the grades the Vosges offered, had coal tenders and good stuff too. Little of it seen in Paris and other cities and towns in France since the late autumn of 1940, except for the chosen, the collabos and BOFs, the butter, eggs and cheese racketeers, the big shots too, the Bonzen and Oberbonzen, the ‘Gold Pheasants’ back home in the Reich because of all the medals and braid they wore.

A flatbed with mounted 20mm Oerliken anti-aircraft gun and MG42 machine guns, courtesy of the Luftwaffe, was operated by them, but they, too, had been ordered to vacate their posts. Treasonable behaviour to the diehards, but best not to attract unnecessary attention by raising up a stream of flak. Valuable cargo on board. Artwork, oil paintings, Old Masters, coins, antique furniture, carpets and porcelains. Liebe Zeit, the stuff that had been pouring out of France.

Behind the guns were the first-class coaches, behind these, two seconds, one third-, and a fourth-, all vacated, all with their passengers fighting their way up into the forest. Crazy, really. Louis was absolutely right.

A baggage truck and then two goods trucks followed, and lastly a closed, sealed truck bearing the large, crudely painted white letters N und N, and the chalked words: KEIN ESSEN, KEIN AUSGANG. No food, no exit. No going out.

Kohler knew Louis would be watching that final railway truck. As the sound of the aircraft grew, the bombers began­ to pass before the moon. First came the pathfinders, then the others. Closing the gap between himself and his partner, he tugged at a sleeve. The aircraft, having begun their descent for the run-in, were probably at an altitude of 4,000 metres. There’d be a 1,000- or 2,000-kilogram bomb in each, and at least 5,000 kilograms of incendiaries, since it was a night raid and a little light would be appreciated just as it had been and still was over London and other British cities­ and towns, and that, too, was really crazy. Elsewhere, too, especially in Russia, Poland having been flattened in September­ of ’39.

No clamouring for escape came from inside the N-und-N truck. Not a sound, but how could anyone treat another human being like that? ‘Where the hell are they taking them, Louis, since we’re going in the same direction?’

The Nacht-und-Nebel Erlass people, those taken by the Night and Fog Decree. ‘Are they all dead, Hermann? Have they frozen?’ came the whisper.

‘Ach, they’re listening, just as we are.’

Hermann didn’t like it any more than he did, thought St-Cyr. They had both been in the Great War, on opposite sides, had had enough of the insanity and had intuitively understood this when they’d first met in September 1940 and had begun to work together. Two detectives, one from each side and fighting common crime, but known, too, for their steadfast honesty in an age of officially sanctioned crime on a horrendous scale.

‘Stuttgart,’ called out someone. ‘Lancasters.’

Louis nodded toward the truck and softly confided, ‘There’s a loose board up near the roof. One of them is pushing it while peering skyward. He’s letting them know what’s up.’

‘Us too,’ breathed Kohler sadly, but the N und N unfortunate­—mostly these were résistants, suspected or otherwise, and their clandestine wireless operators and female couriers—didn’t add, as many now dared to hope, that someday Herr Hitler was going to get his.

After another twenty minutes, in which the frost made the needles of the spruce as stiff as barbed wire, they filed slowly back into the train, each alone with their thoughts, Louis and himself with the telex they had received from Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris: Karneval. Kolmar. Contact Kommandant Rasche. Hangings. Apparent suicides. Stalag XIV J Arbeitslager 13 Elsass.

Suicides, muttered St-Cyr to himself, turning to stare bleakly at the blue-washed window as the coach began to move. Hermann had been a prisoner of war in France from 17 July 1916 until well after the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and had fought in Alsace in the winter of ’14–’15 under brutal conditions. He’d been transferred to a bomb disposal unit—some impulsive act of insubordination yet to be confided—and had, after his little sojourn with the trip-to-heaven boys, commanded a battery of field guns at Verdun, early in 1916. ‘Big stuff,’ he would always apologetically say, for this partner of his had been repeatedly subjected to it and, yes, God did do things like that. He’d been taken prisoner during one of the battles for the Somme and had learned to speak and write French while a POW but couldn’t have known that in twenty-­two years he’d have a partner to watch over and that his facility­ with the language had been what had brought them together. ‘Destiny. Pure chance too,’ he’d say with a snort, but chance so often meant everything these days and the irony­ was that they really did get on. Small arguments—mere differences of opinion. Bien sûr, the Bavarians were a stubborn lot and God must have dug deeply into the top hat to produce one of its stubbornest, but nothing serious even though Hermann­ was a Gestapo and had been tarred with that brush. ‘Assimilated,’ he’d say. ‘Conscripted without a chance to refuse,’ but could Boemelburg, his boss, have assigned­ them to this Karneval simply because Hermann would not only know the terrain, but that of a POW camp, or had there been that other reason?

Hated and reviled by many in the Paris SS and Gestapo, and those elsewhere in France, for always pointing the finger of truth where it belonged, were they now to be ‘taught’ a final lesson?

These days the blackout’s constant exposure to that wash of laundry blueing over the glass made one despair of its presence ever ending. Hermann’s reflection was, of course, too blurred for detail. In spite of the scar the SS had given the left side of his face from eye to chin with a rawhide whip—the matter of a small murder that had turned sour because of this partnership’s penchant for pointing that finger—he still attracted the ladies as an orchard does bees, and rogue that he was, Hermann usually encouraged them. ‘Ach, how else are we to find out what’s up?’ he’d say. ‘You should take better notice of how your partner works.’

‘A carnival,’ St-Cyr softly breathed and, finding a thumbprint-sized hole where some delinquent had scraped away the blueing, let the heat of a thumb melt its covering of frost and fog.

‘Louis, Frau Oberkircher was just telling me about a textile factory in Colmar. Poles, Russians, and a handful of French. Lazy, all of them, and worthless. It seems our Arbeitslager 13 manufactures rayon and Kommandant Rasche was one of my old bosses.’

Ah, mon Dieu, mon Dieu. ‘In the Great War?’

‘Where else?’

A ‘hot box’, an overheated axle bearing, emptied the train at Belfort. Having flipped up the box’s lid that had been hurriedly closed by a railwayman, Kohler gingerly plucked at the packing of chopped rag waste, and using the man’s glove, let some of it fall to the sooty snow. ‘A two-hour delay?’ he asked the cheminot.

The lantern was lifted. The jacket of the bleu-de-travail, the ubiquitous blue coveralls, was open, the gut, once that of a barrel. ‘Four,’ came the Occupation’s vegetable-rooted grunt.

Merde alors, panicked Henri-Claude Ouelette, this ‘Kripo from Paris-Central,’ this Kriminalpolizei, had shaken off the glove and was now rubbing some of the packing slowly between a thumb and middle finger, the perfume of burnt engine oil all too evident.

Sweating, was he? thought Kohler. Ah, bon, mon ami, now get ready for the surprise of surprises. ‘Then see what you can do, eh, but first empty that box and drop everything into the station’s stove.’

‘But … but the shortages, monsieur …’

‘Idiot, don’t argue. Just do it.’

So much of France’s rolling stock had been requisitioned by the Reich, scrapyard relics like this coach and the trucks and engines had been pressed back into service and were always causing trouble. Maybe, just maybe the Bahnschutzpolizei stationmaster, the SS Obersturmführer or anyone else in authority wouldn’t think beyond that to take a closer look.

Silicon carbide had been added to the oil-soaked rag waste. It hadn’t taken him a split second to feel the sharpness. Probably done in Besançon or in L’Isle. Fortunately the bearing hadn’t melted and the train been derailed or set alight. Someone had wanted to stop them and free the N und Ns but hadn’t counted on its stopping where it had last night, thus cooling the bearing and giving it a lease on life. Of course they hadn’t considered that the prisoners might well have been killed. Miraculously, too, Louis and himself had avoided being caught up in the derailment or shoot-out, but had been awarded yet another delay.

The restaurant de la gare and its buffet were closed until 7.00 a.m., 5.00 the old time, the station overcrowded. Coughs here, sneezes there. Kids, old people, mothers without their husbands, babes greedily at the breast or wailing their little hearts out, Wehrmacht boys, too, returning to the front from the eager­ arms of les filles de joie de Paris and dog-tired, naturally. Military police, the Felgendarmen, were on the lookout for deserters­ coming through from the Reich. Gestapo plainclothes were vigilant too, and God help those unfortunate enough to be caught.

‘The Army’s mobile soup kitchen is serving hot coffee,’ hazarded Claudette Oberkircher.

‘Coffee … ?’ blurted Hermann, his mind still elsewhere.

‘It’s not for everyone,’ she said. ‘Only for our dear boys in uniform, but perhaps if … ’ She left the thought hanging like laundry in winter.

‘Use your charm, Hermann,’ quipped St-Cyr. Guiding her through to a far corner, he set her two suitcases and their small grip down. Evasively this infernal chatterbox Hermann had instantly struck up a conversation with, this Hausfrau ‘from home’ who had squeezed the French half of the partnership against the ice-cold side of the carriage as if getting back at the enemy, emptily returned his gaze, her dark brown eyes misting as she said to herself, Sûreté—he knew it, always did, but would she now confess to knowing how to speak French, thinking as she must, since she had been deliberately led to believe it, that he knew no Deutsch? Or would she use Alsatian whose dialect was neither totally of the one or the other but that ardent distillation of the centuries of changing hands while demanding independence?

She would choose silence, Claudette told herself. These days people didn’t do what she had done in that coach—talked incessantly to a perfect stranger, a Gestapo detective at that. Even those who knew each other seldom spoke, and then only in whispers.

He took out his pipe and tobacco pouch, this Oberdetektiv from the Sûreté Nationale with the terrible bruise and stitches above the left eye. He looked ruefully at the contents of the pouch, found his Kippe tin, his mégot tin with its collection of cigarette butts picked up here and there like everyone else and, opening it, explored the contents with a doubtful finger.

‘Your … ’ he began, struggling to find the word for suitcases, ‘are … ’ He couldn’t even find the words for ‘not heavy.’

But one must be careful these days. ‘I carry little,’ she said in Deutsch. ‘The one suitcase is all but empty; the other has but a few clothes and two newspapers bearing the notices of my brother-in-law’s death.’

Not understanding a word she had said, this Frenchman shrugged. Their coffee came, and for a time these two companions of hers were silent. ‘The Army should use parsnips,’ she said after taking a few exploratory sips. ‘This is good, ja, but it could be much better.’

‘Parsnips,’ echoed Hermann who had an encyclopedic interest in all such things of the Occupation. ‘Not roasted acorns and barley, and maybe with a touch of chicory if one is lucky?’

The Frenchman rolled his eyes in despair but had best be ignored. ‘You do not peel them, you understand, Herr Hauptmann Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter. Just wash in cold water and shred, then roast until black before grinding. Eighty turns of the mill, I give it until it is as fine as the flour we used to be able to buy. Then brew as you would that other stuff you mentioned. Ach, my little sister swore she couldn’t tell the difference and said it’s real!’

‘Louis, what have I always been telling you, eh? Right from the start of this war you people started, you French should have listened to your friends. Mein Gott, Frau Oberkircher, the answers to so many of the problems they’ve caused themselves and us, too, are often so simple and right to hand!’

Like the lack of real coffee.

‘Now don’t argue,’ quipped Kohler in French. ‘Let’s take a little walk. Bitte, meine gute Frau, you’ll hold our seats? A breath of fresh air will do this one good.’

The Bavarian was fifty-five years old, Claudette felt, the Frenchman perhaps three years his junior. Much taller and stronger looking, a giant of a man, Herr Kohler’s eyes were pale blue, the lids bagging and drooping from exhaustion, no doubt. And sometimes those eyes had been so empty when he had looked at one of the SS, his gaze had frightened her, but always when he had turned to her there had been that little rush of excitement in herself. Though those years had slipped away some time ago, Herr Kohler hadn’t let their absence deter him. He was not at all like a gestapiste, though he did have the chin and cheekbones of a storm trooper, the scar of a terrible wound and far more recent than those that other war had left, the shrapnel. A criminal with a knife? she wondered of that scar. A dueling sword? A bullet graze had recently brushed his brow. Occasionally the thick fingers would favour it as if he was counting his blessings. No ring of course, but probably married, the hair cut close and neither brown nor black but a shade in between, like his marital status, and flecked with grey.

The Frenchman was altogether something else, even if he did wear a wedding ring he’d best change to his other hand unless he wanted to be stopped by the police and hauled in for questioning. Of a little more than medium height and blocky, he had the deep brown ox-eyes common to those people, the fists of a pugiliste—had he lost the fight that had given him the stitches? she wondered. The hair was dark brown and needing a trim, the moustache wide and bushy, and as for the eyebrows, must they give him a look that was so fierce?

Outside in the darkness, Louis couldn’t wait. ‘She’s carrying cigarettes in that lighter suitcase, Hermann. How could you do this to us? She’s let herself cosy up to you, knowing she’s with two Schweinebullen and still has hopes you’ll unwittingly waltz her through customs!’

‘Ach, I wondered when you’d figure that out. She’s terrified of the company we’ve had to keep and feels like an utter fool for having chanced what she did and has stuck to us like glue. Go easy on her, eh? Just be your generous self and thankful that she’s let us know that Kolmar’s schwarzer Markt is flourishing. That Kolmar is with a K, by the way, not a C.’

And never mind the Deutsch. Its black market, its marché noir. Cigarettes must now be the preferred currency in the Reich, as they were in France. ‘That no-good, piano-teaching brother-in-law of hers, "that brute of a one-legged Frenchman and seducer of young girls," was into more than student skirts, Hermann. While helping that little sister of hers go through his things, your Frau Oberkircher, for all she wishes to disclaim and hide her French origins, came upon the mother lode of fags and felt it her duty as a citizen of the Greater Reich to confiscate the evidence before her sister found it!’

As was their custom when on short rations and in need of a quiet tête-à-tête, a cigarette was rescued from an inner pocket—Louis’s this time. Kohler found them a light, and after a few drags each, they began to walk toward the centre of the old town, gripped as it was in glacial darkness.

‘Silicon carbide?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘It was close, Louis. Just be thankful the RAF came along when they did.’

‘Ah, bon, then it’s as I’ve thought. During the war of 1870–71, the region’s Francs-Tireurs constantly harassed the Prussians. Now it’s the turn of their descendants.’

The region’s irregulars, its citizen soldiers. In Vichy, not a day—was it still only a day ago?—they’d had a final run-in with the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, a Résistance group started by Communist railway workers in Lyons. Tough—real sons of bitches who had put Louis at the top of their hit list simply because he had to work with one of the Occupier.

‘Even though Alsace was taken in less than five days by the Prussians in 1870, Hermann, and Paris placed under siege and France defeated within five months, not five weeks as in 1940, the people of the Vosges kept much to themselves. Let’s not forget it, because we mustn’t, and just to prove it to you, I’m going to take you to have a look at the Lion.’

They had had some soup and two of the regulation twenty-five gram slices of the grey National. They had each handed over a bread ticket and had left the customary two-franc donation for the Winter Relief that was run by the Secours National, the national help.

They had tried to doze off, saying little, each knowing the other’s thoughts could well be in a turmoil. The future, which people seldom if ever thought about these days, was far too cloudy and troubling.

Then they had come out here, the shadows deepening as they had approached the rock face, while etched in silhouette on high, the château, the citadel, defied assault as it had during the Franco-Prussian War.

Hermann, his fedora pulled down hard, the collar of his greatcoat up and close, couldn’t seem to lower his gaze. He would be thinking of the 103-day siege that had ended twenty-­one days after the Armistice of that war, would be telling himself­ that Colonel Denfert-Rochereau of place D-R in Paris­, its métro station, too, and countless streets in France, had defied­ the Prussians for so long, even Bismark and the Kaiser had been forced to acknowledge the bravery and agree to freeing Belfort and its immediately surrounding territory from the fate so much of Alsace-Lorraine was to suffer. Annexation.

He would also be seeing the dead of the Great War, the long, dark lines of the trenches in the snow, the gun emplacements, would be thinking of Vieil-Armand which was less than thirty-five kilometres to the northeast of them: Alsace’s Verdun where, for eight long, hard months over the winter of 1914–15 and into the summer, more than 30,000 men had died, but not himself, the French 75s answering his own 77s which had raced ahead to twenty-five rounds a minute. The drumfire, the Germans had come to call those French guns: Das Trommel­feuer; while the French poilus, the common soldiers, had spoken of the other side’s shelling as la tempête de feu, the tempest of fire. He would know, too, that his partner was all too aware of this and that its enduring memories were but one of the things that had welded the partnership, but still, reminders must always be given.

Some twenty-two metres long and eleven high, and caught against the sheer rock face below the citadel, resting on its hind quarters with right foreleg stiff and head turned a little from the rock out of which that head had been carved, the Lion, still in shadow cold, appeared as if about to roar.

‘I always wondered what it would look like, Louis, but could never bring myself to see it.’

Between 1875 and 1880, Colmar’s sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had fashioned it largely out of blocks of that same rock as the citadel and the old town.

‘The red sandstone of the Vosges,’ muttered Hermann sadly, ‘but there’s granite to the north and northeast,’ he said as if that were the answer to everything. ‘Granite’s far harder, Louis. It splinters when struck. Forms the busts, the heart, the guts of these rounded hills here in the south, is far worse than any shrapnel.’

He touched his face, and one knew at once where those nicks and scars had come from. Belfort the ‘Heroic’ lay in the Trouée de Belfort, the Gap through which the invading hordes had come. Celts, Goths, Romans and others, the Germans of course, and more than once.

‘We could see the Black Forest from the summit of Vieil-Armand,’ he went on. ‘We could see what we called home only to then have to give up the crest of that hill to your side. Time and again we took it; time and again it was lost.’

Another cigarette was found and, once lit, passed over.

‘Gerda was waiting for me,’ he said, as if the girl he’d known as a teenager was still vital, the girl he had married and had two sons with.

‘Ach, how times have changed, eh? Now I live with Oona and Giselle on those rare moments when we’re in Paris, while my Gerda … ’

Had begged an uncle with connections in the Nazi Party to help her get a divorce so that she could marry an indentured farm labourer from France who was helping out on her father’s farm near Wasserburg, just to the east of Munich. And yes, both Giselle and Oona had come to love him and it wasn’t difficult to see that each understood and respected the other’s feelings and willingly—yes, willingly!—shared what little they saw of him and had become fast friends themselves.

‘War does things like that,’ muttered Kohler, having read his partner’s thoughts. ‘It also brings enemies like us together, so please don’t forget it.’

Enemies. He hadn’t said that in a long, long time, had always been planning to get Giselle and Oona out of France and into Spain.

‘Bartholdi may have sculpted New York’s Statue of Liberty with freedom in mind, Hermann, but that isn’t why I brought you here. One hundred and three days up there in that citadel? They held fast to what they had come to believe in, themselves. That hot box was a warning to us of the Francs-Tireurs, as was the plethora of Felgendarmen and Gestapo looking for deserters in the railway station. Since this Kommandant Rasche was one of your former commanding officers at Vieil-Armand, and no doubt has remembered your usefulness, perhaps you had best tell me about it.’

Ah, damn! ‘That left ball of mine … ’

‘Sacré nom de nom, have I not been subjected to that little legend enough? Swelled to the size of a ripe lemon? As hard as a dried one. A grapefruit perhaps?’

‘You’ve no sympathy. I’m not at all surprised your first wife left you for a railway man from Orléans!’

‘She was lonely.’

‘You told me your practising the euphonium for the police band drove her away!’

‘That too.’

‘Then she didn’t take off with a door-to-door salesman or a lorry driver? You actually lied to me?’

Hermann had caught a ‘cold’ in that most tender of places while in the trenches and snows of that Alsatian battlefield.

‘You know what those field hospitals were like, Louis. I couldn’t have some verdammt Wehrmacht medic amputating the necessary.’

Ah, merde!

‘I went AWOL and found myself an Alsatian pharmacist’s daughter who was training to fill her father’s shoes even though it was heresy of her to have thought of such a thing.’

‘She was pretty.’

‘Sweet heaven but I couldn’t have done it with her and she knew it.’

And so much for his subsequent tour of duty in a Himmelfahrtskommando, a suicide commando, as one of its trip-to-heaven boys.

‘I could have been shot. Instead, Rasche, who headed up the court of inquiry, thought I might be useful and gave me a choice, and when I took it, six months of never knowing when the next second would be my last.’

Hence his uncanny ability to find tripwires and smell out explosives. ‘Carnival, Hermann. It’s from the medieval Latin for Flesh Farewell, the celebration that precedes the forty meatless days of Lent.’

‘Masked girls and boys who simply want to get into mischief, eh? Costumes? Music and dancing and torch-lit parades and feasts in an Arbeitslager, a work camp, mein Lieber?’

It was a good question. ‘A travelling fair too, I think. Sideshows, booths with games of skill or chance, others exhibiting the wonders of the world.’

‘Ja, ja, the palace of mirrors, eh? Well please don’t forget that this Colonel Rasche of mine could break every one of them with a simple look.’

‘But does he know of the Francs-Tireurs who tried to stop our train, or simply think, as others must, that they might be out there in those hills?’

‘Helping deserters to cross over?’

That, too, was a good question.

Karneval, thought Kohler. A travelling fair with games, sideshows, rides and other forms of amusement. Normally run as a commercial enterprise, occasionally held by charitable groups as a way of raising funds.

Rasche would give them no peace. Relegated to looking after Arbeitslagern, long past retirement and still a colonel? It didn’t bear thinking about.

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