Flykiller

Rene Bousquet would also be on Hermann’s mind, for here, beside his partner, was the man who had met with Reinhard Heydrich and others of the SS at the Ritz in Paris, on 5 May of last year. Here was the one who had convinced Karl Albrecht Oberg, the ‘Butcher of Poland’ and Hoherer SS und Polizeifuhrer of France, not to take over the French police but to let him handle things.

‘The Marseillais has a reputation as a practical joker, Secretaire. He calls a tender shower of rain a tempest, a lost shirt from the laundry line an armed robbery in which the wife and daughters were strip-searched and their virtue plundered. But he has an even more significant reputation, one for vengeance. Has your suggestion of an attempted assassination been prompted at all by fear of repercussions over what the first arrondissement suffered? I ask simply because I must.’

The Vieux Port de Marseille had been a rat’s nest of steep and narrow streets, the home of prostitutes, pimps and gangsters! ‘We did what we had to do.’

A month ago, on 3 January, German security forces had raided a maison de passe, one of those seedy, walk-in hotels where prostitutes took their clients for a little moment or an hour or two and then left. Suspecting to find resistants and Wehrmacht deserters hiding out and fast asleep, there had been an exchange of fire in which several on both sides had been killed or wounded. Hitler, in a rage on hearing of it, and having at that time all but suffered the final loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, had demanded the levelling of the whole of the first arrondissement and deportation of 50,000 of its citizens to camps in the east. Bousquet and Lemoine, the regional prefet, had managed to convince Oberg that French police should do the job, and at 3 a.m. on the night of the 13th-14th, 30,000 residents, having been told they had but a few hours to vacate their homes, had moved out. Their papers were all checked, but far fewer resistants and deserters than anticipated had been arrested and the homeless citizens, for want of anything better, had been shunted off to camps at Frejus and Compiegne, where they still resided and would for as long as it took to free the country. Then on 15 January, Wehrmacht engineers had begun to dynamite every building – tenement houses, warehouses, churches, loading docks and port machinery – and had, by the 24th, even sent 173 vessels to the bottom thus unintentionally blocking the harbour for months.

‘The Fuhrer was appeased,’ exhaled Bousquet exasperatedly. ‘Twenty thousand were saved and the other thirty thousand kept in France and not deported.’

‘But has this event anything to do with the suspected attempt on the Marechal’s life?’

‘Has the Grande Rafle also anything to do with it, eh? Come, come, Jean-Louis, let us get things out in the open.’

‘That, too, then.’

‘I had no choice. Too much would have been lost. We gained. In all such things there are the pluses and minuses. Be glad you don’t have to make such decisions.’

‘I am.’

Doucement, Louis, go easy, thought Kohler, alarmed at the exchange. On 16-17 July of last year Bousquet and the prefet of Paris had convinced Oberg and Heydrich that French police, under French direction, could handle things. Nine thousand Paris police had surrounded five arrondissements in the dead of night during what had since come to be known as the Great Roundup. They had then arrested 12,000 terrified men, women and children and had locked them up in the Velodrome d’Hiver, the cycling arena, for eight days without sufficient water, food or toilet facilities – Jews that had then been deported by rail in cattle trucks; the children kept in France for a little longer and then sent on as well, but not knowing where to or why they had been taken from their parents or whether they would ever see them again.

Louis and he had been away from the city at the time, thank God, but since then Louis had pieced together a record of the tragedy that he intended to pass on to the Resistance for the day of reckoning that would surely come.

‘Just do as you’ve been told, Jean-Louis,’ grunted Bousquet. ‘Don’t let your brand of patriotism interfere.’

Only one of those Paris flics had resigned and refused to take part. Only one, Kohler told himself, but, to be fair, a good many of them would have been too afraid to object. And orders were orders especially in a police force of 15,000, for that’s what Paris had. But if the Resistance had wanted a target, then why not Bousquet himself?

On the outskirts of Vichy the car was stopped at a control by armed Wehrmacht sentries, no longer by members of the Garde Mobile de Reserve, Vichy’s small paramilitary force. The latest password was demanded, as one had been since 1 July 1940 at all entrances to the town, and never mind that it was still the curfew, thought Kohler wryly. Assassination had been on the Government’s mind right from the beginning!