Read Online Clandestine by J. Robert Janes - Free Book Online Page B

every entrance to the city?’
    The Höherer SS und Polizeiführer of France, Karl Oberg and his deputy, Helmut Knochen, had warned them of Kohler’s penchant for honesty bordering on intransigence, but an answer would have to be given with the curtest of nods.
    It was, felt Kohler, hard to believe that Berlin’s SD knew so little of how things worked in Paris they would unwittingly broadcast their interest in such a way. ‘And who was this still unnamed Schmuggler trafficking?’
    Had Kohler and St-Cyr found evidence of that girl? ‘That I can’t reveal, but was there any evidence of someone other than the killer?’
    Finally the chips were down, and with Oona waiting in the Citroën. ‘None. Far too much rain. No tracks, not even a whisper of that gazo truck you’ve been chasing.’
    â€˜Did I not say, “looking for?” Ach, mein Strudel at last. Are you sure you wouldn’t like half of this? Illegal for most others in France, of course, but my Hilda was a remarkable cook. Every morning, six days a week, and even seven far too many times, there would be a little extra in the briefcase for lunch. A slice of her marvellous strudel, Kohler—I’m partial to the apple-and-raisin. Though the latter are so difficult to find these days, she still managed somehow. A few of her Lebkuchen …’
    The cakes of life. ‘ Meine Oma used to make them.’
    His grandmother! ‘Spicy, Kohler, as life should be now and then, yet sweet as it always was before I was forced to identify the Bombenbrandschrumpfleischen .’
    The heat-shrunken corpses the firestorm had left, but must that God of Louis’s keep smiling at the partnership?
    â€˜The wife, Kohler, our eighteen-year-old house-daughter, Inge, too, and my Hilda’s parents and their four dogs, the ones I always hated because they’d piss on my shoes and trousers if they could. Now I will have answers from you, mein lieber Kamerad , or that Netherlander out there in my car will end up exactly like them.’
    And to think that 40,000 of these in the Reich could control a nation of 80 million at home largely through voluntary denunciations. ‘Let me talk to my partner. Let us take that van to the bank and settle a few things. We can’t interrupt a murder inquiry just to fuck about with something Berlin’s SD might or might not even know, and if you question it, mein Freund , think of all the shouting that must be going on about the Résistance getting the better of us. Von Rundstedt, eh, and the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, to say nothing of the avenue Foch and Oberg and his deputy.’
    â€˜Then take the woman with you. Maybe she’ll be reminder enough.’
    Oona was silent. She didn’t even respond when held in the partnership’s Citroën. Instead, she pulled away from him, felt Kohler, and through the darkness between and around them said, ‘First he told me that should I ever find my children, I must remember that they were half-and-halves, Mischlinge , crossbreeds, and that their fate would soon be decided, that Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian SS who runs my country, is determined to include them, as is Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs, but that Herr Kaltenbrunner and others in Berlin are still mulling the question over. But with myself, because of whom I had married, there would be no such problem. All of my hair would be shaved off and I would be deloused, and if fit for work, would be made to, if not, the furnace. Is that what those people would have done to my Martin, Hermann, and my Johan and Anna?’
    The truth about the Konzentrationslager was never mentioned openly by any of the Occupier but had become very clear to Louis and himself at Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace last February, but for Ludin to have said anything like that could only mean he and that colonel were desperate. And that could only mean that