Free Carousel by J. Robert Janes Page B

be art director of this little palace of theirs, Louis. A Jewess set to be ravaged by Hercules! It’s his little joke on all the others. It fits his sense of humour, if he has one. If .’ A warning …
    Marble busts of Greeks and Romans stood solemnly sentinel, facing the windows from across the carpet. There were other paintings between the mirrors. A Correggio, a Dürer, a Frans Hals … gorgeous things. ‘Does he change them periodically?’ asked the Frog, their steps hastening now towards the far end of the room and trouble … trouble …
    â€˜Perhaps, but then …’ offered the Gestapo’s Bavarian explorer.
    A life-sized bronze of Julius Caesar – a truly remarkable thing – stood in the far left corner nearest the hammering, intruding and incongruous telex. Berlin on the line at all times.
    The desk was Russian – Napoleonic in anticipation of conquest. The top was of polished malachite holding scattered files and papers – huge mounds of them. Papers, papers, always it was papers with the Germans.
    The malachite was superb and the Gobelin tapestry that hung huge and richly on the wall behind the man with the grey-blue pop-eyes was fantastic. Ruby reds and golds et cetera, et cetera. The Finding of the Baby Moses among the Reeds. Interesting … very interesting. Jews again.
    St-Cyr clutched his hat and heart. The pop-eyes didn’t even bother to look up.
    â€˜Sit down. The two of you. I won’t detain you a moment.’
    Hermann hesitated. St-Cyr knew he must wait for his partner’s lead.
    The glasses winked with their thickness, the orbs were bulging, and the bent, domed, diligent head showed pinkly from beneath its close-cut cropping of fair hair.
    Oberg scribbled a signature as he might have authorized a bill of lading in the Hamburg warehouse of the West India Bananen-vertriebsgesellschaft where he’d been a purchasing agent from 1926 until 1929.
    â€˜And this one, too, Herr Generalmajor.’
    Knochen, the Doctor of Philosophy, had not yet deigned to notice them. All business that one. Somewhat emaciated and with that sick little smile. The wounded academic? wondered St-Cyr, or the one who has perpetually the tongue in cheek for his superiors and everyone else?
    Ah yes, the latter. Most definitely. St-Cyr took in the hastily brushed auburn hair that was thick and badly in need of cutting. Was Knochen the Bohemian in the Nazi flock? The blue-grey eyes behind their glasses seemed to say he couldn’t have cared less what anyone thought. The pinched face said it too.
    A strange combination these two who held the threat of life or death over not just Paris’s millions, but every living soul in France.
    Power, this was power. Fate at its cruellest.
    Kohler saw Louis glance up at the ceiling and knew the Frog was asking his God why He’d had to smile down upon the Earth in this particular fashion.
    Another and then another of the papers were signed. Were they witnessing the signing of the hostages’ death notices? Had it been deliberate on Knochen’s part? That skinny aesthete who had missed out on being a professor of literature?
    Of course it had been deliberate. Gott im Himmel , why hadn’t that God of Louis’ granted the bastard a tenured position in some university?
    For the same reasons, perhaps, that He’d decreed young Adolf should not have been admitted into the Academy of Art!
    Knochen had been Reinhard Heydrich’s man in France; Oberg, Himmler’s. And just as that God of Louis’ had shut the doors of academia to the assistant, so, too, He’d opened those of mass unemployment and dissatisfaction to the banana merchant.
    Oberg had drifted into tobacco and cigars as a small shopkeeper, only to find that the Great Depression had stopped the ships from bringing in the supplies and the coins from flowing out of sailors’ pockets. In June 1931 he’d joined the Party. Card Number