it?â
Pinching out the flame, St-Cyr heard her suck in a wounded breath and stammer, âI ⦠I never do that. Not ⦠not until the candleâs burned out.â
âThen let us hope your prayers will be answered.â
Wax and candles and a sister in the Salpêtrière. Acarine mites from Russia ⦠Old Shatter Hand hadnât given them a hell of a lot to go on, thought Kohler, finishing a cigarette while standing next to a newspaper kiosk inside the Gare de lâEst.
People were everywhere; uniforms, too, the smell of boot grease, sweat and urine mingling with those of cheap cologne, unwashed bodies, stale tobacco smoke, farts and all the rest. Jesus , merde alors , why did the French have to make their railway stations so huge?
High above him, the glass-and-iron dome of the roof was lathered with regulation laundry blueing, each pane criss-crossed with brown sticking-paper, but now daylight fought to get in to discolour everything in this perpetual gloom. More than thirty platforms fed lines to and from Eastern France, the Reich and Switzerland. It was from here that trainload upon trainload of goods left the country. Fully 80 per cent of the countryâs wheat, nearly all of its potatoes, eggs, cheese, wine, copper, lead, zinc and steel. There were goods-sheds upon sheds in the yards to the north of the station, warehouses upon warehouses. So how the hell did honeycomb from Russia bypass the Reich to find its way into this, and where was it being kept?
Tucking the cigarette butt away in his mégot tin for another day â a real butt collector like everyone else â Kohler took a moment longer to look around.
People came and went or milled about in their thousands, or joined seemingly endless queues at the controls which solidly blocked the traffic up. Some had burlap sacks of onions â firewood even â on tired, worried shoulders. Others lugged suitcases â the better dressed, their briefcases. A crate of carrots, one of cabbages â artichokes in a hamper that was stuffed to the limit. Sacks empty, on occasion, and oh, bien sûr , it was a city and a nation on the scrounge and most here had been out foraging the countryside or were on their way to it. And those returning with the spoils had to face the lottery of the controls.
Paris had become a city of police and nowhere did one see this better than in places like this. The flics in their dark blue capes and képis patrolled endlessly looking for trouble or just being damned officious to show that they still had some power. The Feldgendarmen, the military police, in field-grey greatcoats and with badges of office that looked like miniature breastplates dangling from the neck, were here in force. The Kettenhunde , they were called behind their backs: the chained dogs. They, too, carried black leatherclad, lead-weighted truncheons.
Gestapo ⦠there were lots of those and invariably they carried thin briefcases and looked like down-at-the-heel undertakers whoâd had a bad year. But the Wehrmacht had its plain-clothed secret police, too: the GFPs, the Geheime Feldpolizei, on the hunt primarily for deserters.
And wasnât this matter of the mites a question for the railway police? he asked himself and said, Go carefully. Remember that these days there has to be a system for every commodity.
The Reichsbahn supervised the railways, so heâd have to go to them. But in France they didnât wear the becoming light blue-grey they did at home. Here they wore coal black with silver piping on their tunics. Swastikas and eagles also, of course.
Where ⦠where the hell to start? Soldier-boys were everywhere, arriving and departing, laughing, shouting, crying, too, as they kissed their girls goodbye. There were boys from the Kreigsmarine and also from the Luftwaffe, for Paris was Mecca to all and probably the closest one could get to how things had been before the war â no bombing; well,
Pinching out the flame, St-Cyr heard her suck in a wounded breath and stammer, âI ⦠I never do that. Not ⦠not until the candleâs burned out.â
âThen let us hope your prayers will be answered.â
Wax and candles and a sister in the Salpêtrière. Acarine mites from Russia ⦠Old Shatter Hand hadnât given them a hell of a lot to go on, thought Kohler, finishing a cigarette while standing next to a newspaper kiosk inside the Gare de lâEst.
People were everywhere; uniforms, too, the smell of boot grease, sweat and urine mingling with those of cheap cologne, unwashed bodies, stale tobacco smoke, farts and all the rest. Jesus , merde alors , why did the French have to make their railway stations so huge?
High above him, the glass-and-iron dome of the roof was lathered with regulation laundry blueing, each pane criss-crossed with brown sticking-paper, but now daylight fought to get in to discolour everything in this perpetual gloom. More than thirty platforms fed lines to and from Eastern France, the Reich and Switzerland. It was from here that trainload upon trainload of goods left the country. Fully 80 per cent of the countryâs wheat, nearly all of its potatoes, eggs, cheese, wine, copper, lead, zinc and steel. There were goods-sheds upon sheds in the yards to the north of the station, warehouses upon warehouses. So how the hell did honeycomb from Russia bypass the Reich to find its way into this, and where was it being kept?
Tucking the cigarette butt away in his mégot tin for another day â a real butt collector like everyone else â Kohler took a moment longer to look around.
People came and went or milled about in their thousands, or joined seemingly endless queues at the controls which solidly blocked the traffic up. Some had burlap sacks of onions â firewood even â on tired, worried shoulders. Others lugged suitcases â the better dressed, their briefcases. A crate of carrots, one of cabbages â artichokes in a hamper that was stuffed to the limit. Sacks empty, on occasion, and oh, bien sûr , it was a city and a nation on the scrounge and most here had been out foraging the countryside or were on their way to it. And those returning with the spoils had to face the lottery of the controls.
Paris had become a city of police and nowhere did one see this better than in places like this. The flics in their dark blue capes and képis patrolled endlessly looking for trouble or just being damned officious to show that they still had some power. The Feldgendarmen, the military police, in field-grey greatcoats and with badges of office that looked like miniature breastplates dangling from the neck, were here in force. The Kettenhunde , they were called behind their backs: the chained dogs. They, too, carried black leatherclad, lead-weighted truncheons.
Gestapo ⦠there were lots of those and invariably they carried thin briefcases and looked like down-at-the-heel undertakers whoâd had a bad year. But the Wehrmacht had its plain-clothed secret police, too: the GFPs, the Geheime Feldpolizei, on the hunt primarily for deserters.
And wasnât this matter of the mites a question for the railway police? he asked himself and said, Go carefully. Remember that these days there has to be a system for every commodity.
The Reichsbahn supervised the railways, so heâd have to go to them. But in France they didnât wear the becoming light blue-grey they did at home. Here they wore coal black with silver piping on their tunics. Swastikas and eagles also, of course.
Where ⦠where the hell to start? Soldier-boys were everywhere, arriving and departing, laughing, shouting, crying, too, as they kissed their girls goodbye. There were boys from the Kreigsmarine and also from the Luftwaffe, for Paris was Mecca to all and probably the closest one could get to how things had been before the war â no bombing; well,
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