Beyond Revanche, page 40
If it did, no one said. “We are currently accommodating about ten thousand diplomats, arms salesmen, and spies, but the bankers are American. They want their money back. Not just from Germany. From us. Believe me. And the most untrustworthy of them all is…” He paused for effect, and a reinforcement of nicotine, so Mathieu finished the sentence.
“Herbert Hoover, the untouchable, the racketeer…the United States Secretary for Food?”
“Precisely.”
40
1919 – The Cover-Up
Mathieu returned to no. 36 with Americans on his mind. Toussaint saluted as he walked through the door and handed him three crumpled notes.
“They’re from your man on the other side.” Nothing got past Toussaint, and, truth told, his nosiness was sometimes helpful. Mathieu could smell the alcohol on his breath and was on the point of mentioning it when he glanced at the scrawl in his hand.
The first said, Left Auxerre on Paris train. Expect.
The second was equally as cryptic. No. 7, Rue Jean-Lantier…calls himself Rene Alba.
Moutie’s final scrawl read, Missing Window. He was clearly taking cryptic messages to heart.
It was, to date, the clearest note which Moutie had ever scrawled. He was certainly trying, in more ways than one. Moutie was a natural. Not a natural thief. At that he was opportunistic at best, but in another life, he would have made a good assistant. Mathieu was far too busy with protection and surveillance of diplomatic visitors to involve himself with Villain directly, but Moutie was adept in keeping tabs on the wretched murderer. Little in the city’s shadow world passed his notice. Mathieu picked up the envelope on which the note had been written and turned it in his hand. Rene Alba. Alba. That was Raoul Villain’s mother’s maiden name. Wow! The name had not been plucked from someone’s gravestone or borrowed from the front door of an apartment. Rene Alba was a statement, a gesture of defiance. It said, I am my mother’s son, my grandmother was a visionary, so let the world know me as such. There was something to be admired in that.
Before he had climbed to the first floor, a receptionist called after him. “There was a phone call for you, Captain, about half an hour ago. Would you please contact the Mairie at Toul?”
Mathieu took two slow strides forward and stopped. Toul? “Toul?” he shouted with a sense of alarm. “Was there a name?”
“No, Sir, but the superintendent of police sounded harassed.”
“Right, will you call them back and transfer it to my office, please?” The telephone was ringing before Mathieu reached his desk. “Captain Bertrand speaking.”
“Sorry to interrupt you day, Sir.” Polite but not subservient. Mathieu remembered the superintendent’s voice. “The bargeman who took you north…”
“Bistrot.”
“Yes, that’s him. He’s been waiting for an hour or so to speak with you. Very agitated, I would say.”
“Thanks. Put him on, please.”
He could feel the telephone being dragged from the policeman’s hand.
“Mathieu? Is that you?”
“Bistrot, what’s wrong?”
“Mathieu, you have to come here today. You asked me to watch for activity in a certain area of the basin? Something’s wrong. Very wrong. Can you come here. Now?” His alarm was obvious.
“Stay at the Town Hall and I will be with you as soon as I can. Are you or Margarite in danger?”
“Don’t know.”
“Ok. Stay where you are. Let me speak to the superintendent.”
Bistrot did as was ordered and Mathieu issued clear instructions. “Don’t let him out of your sight. Or his woman either, if she’s with him.”
He caught Dubois on the point of leaving no. 36 and rearranged his plans for the day
“Tell the chief there’s an emergency in Toul. Ask Jacques to cover my shift with the prime minister, and if I need help, I’ll call personally.”
The Gare de l’Est always appeared neat and unruffled, like a small, groomed show dog who knows what elegance means. Its fifteen arched entrance was perfectly symmetrical with an ornate clock precisely placed at the center above the main portico. There was a train scheduled to leave for Toul at 10:03 A.M. so Mathieu took the metro from St. Michel directly to the station. Outside, buses waited patiently in the square, parked neatly in front of the tramlines. Inside the basilica-like chamber, platforms and railway lines were dwarfed by the spacious glass-bound dome which served as a roof. Pigeons loved that space.
He didn’t stop to buy a ticket, but flashed his identity card at an officious guard and mounted the last wagon on the train as it pulled away in an impressive flurry of steam and grinding wheels. Mathieu settled at a window seat hoping that Bistrot’s emergency would be quickly solved. Time and steam sped him through a countryside in recovery, but as the train approached Toul, the landscape changed. Greenery appeared faded, but discernible. The temporary road surfaces had not been removed and in the marshaling yard, dozens of goods wagons lay empty and unused, the detritus of a more prosperous time. No troop transporters were in sight; no hospital trains either. Was this how it would be in Toul?
The peace dividend meant boarded up shops and an increase in poverty. Perhaps trade along the canal had improved? The Town Hall stood as it had, but now the square was all but empty as if lingering in a world of half-day openings. War, death, misery, and profit had given way to more peaceful, placid, safer poverty. Did the gods always punish humans this way?
He had hardly crossed the threshold before Bistrot was upon him. “You asked me to look out for them…just before you left, Mathieu.”
“Captain Bertrand to you, bonehead,” the superintendent snarled and made to smack the bargeman’s head.
“No, no, Bistrot is a friend of some years’ standing. He and Margarite, both. Where is she?”
Bistrot looked at the policeman behind the fading front desk before giving a cryptic reply.
“Safe and well. But they are back.”
“They? Bistrot, the man who tried to kill us was dispatched to a watery grave. He cannot come back. And, unless you’ve told anyone, I assure you, no one knows or has reported the matter officially.”
“No…of course not…it’s the Americans. They’re back.”
“Americans? On the canal? Where they berthed their barges?”
“Yes. They’ve emptied the place. Stripped everything bare and disappeared.”
“Show me.”
Bistrot broke into a run towards the canal basin and the prim brick two-storied Custom House which had served as the American base at the canal junction three years before. Quite noticeably, the Stars and Stripes no longer fluttered from the flaking flagpole. Ownership had been severed. The arched entrance was boarded up in some haste and Mathieu pried open the wood covering on the east side. Breaking in was not difficult. It was illegal, but there was no time for niceties. He climbed through the broken window with a struggle, picking up a splinter from the cheap wooden frame for his troubles. Bistrot followed with an ease which suggested that he knew how to climb through windows. Inside, the cold darkness was accentuated by its utter emptiness. The bargeman’s anger boiled over.
“They’ve stripped it bare.” He kicked the bare wall and swore like the would-be mariner he thought he was. Had there been anything to rip from the walls, the room would have been further destroyed.
“Hold on, Bistrot, this has to be done properly. Good detective work might uncover something we can’t see yet. We need help and a search warrant. Back to the Town Hall”
It took an hour to obtain a warrant. The local magistrate from whom they expected permission claimed that it was outside his jurisdiction and would have none of it. Mathieu phoned the chief.
“You know the power that the Americans have in Paris. If I ask, the American Embassy will be alerted. Go back to the magistrate and inform him that the Deuxième Bureau will be investigating him tomorrow if he fails to oblige. Turn the screw. Get that warrant locally.”
Roux’s advice encouraged the magistrate to have second thoughts. Mathieu made a mental note to open inquiries when time permitted. Detectives were short on the ground but the local superintendent grudgingly allowed three gendarmes to help in the search. By that time, Bistrot had described his confrontation with the Americans. They had simply driven up to the basin, gutted the Custom House in its entirety, and sped off in two army trucks without answering a question. The barges, too, floated high on the canal, empty.
“They were going to sink them as they stood, but we emptied the Bar du Port and faced them down. Can you imagine the arrogance? They thought nothing of blocking the canal because they had no need for the barges. Who are these people?”
Indeed.
It took less than five minutes to break open all the doors and windows of the old Custom House. The interior revealed a featureless shell of damp, blackened brick stripped back to maximize space. It was a shell that offered no comfort. A space to leave as quickly as possible.
“Have you used standard procedures in carrying out a formal criminal search before?” Mathieu asked the three gendarmes. The question was his error of judgment. No one appreciates being patronized as a country hick and the look he received was deserved.
“Sorry, of course you have. Just take great care and check with me before touching anything that might be evidence.”
Though the building and its contents had been evacuated at high speed, little of consequence appeared to have been left behind. There was an odd iron or steel molding on the upper floor which had been broken into four unequal parts, no longer useable, but strangely out of place in its dank surroundings. Beside it, a small furnace, perhaps for making bread, was crammed with ashes. A gendarme called to Mathieu who was downstairs examining deep scratches on the floor.
“Captain, you should see this.”
The ashes still retained some heat which suggested that whatever had been inside was the last to be destroyed. His instruction was to put the remains in a box and try to keep them in order, leaving the policeman to wonder how that could be done, given that there were no boxes. More importantly, perhaps, was that keeping ashes in order required more of a magician’s sleight of hand than a policeman’s balance. A crate was requisitioned from the bar and the gendarme painstakingly carted it downstairs like a precious prize-winning dish carried by a proud chef.
The barges offered some evidence of the trafficking in black market foods which had brought Mathieu to Toul. A row of canned peaches from Florida sat at the back of a broken cupboard, hidden by an upper shelf which had collapsed on top of them.
“Could you lift that cupboard, please?”
Instinct argued that if they had missed the peaches above, the Americans may have missed something below. And there it lay, blackened by dirt and dust, a ledger detailing border crossings on the Toul to Strasbourg section of the Canal de la Marne au Rhine. All in all, there were eleven pages of dates, arrows, and coded notes, border crossing permits, stamped and dated, French, German, and Dutch numbers and letters, so precisely annotated that it screamed Prussian.
“Perfect. I’ll take this back to Paris in the morning.”
Such was his excitement at the find that Mathieu almost called it a day.
“Excuse me, Captain, but we may have overlooked something back in the Customs House.”
“What?” Mathieu Bertrand was tired. The day had been long but profitable. He had the evidence he came to find.
“It’s those iron pieces on the first floor. Somebody went to a great deal of trouble to break them carefully.”
Carefully? They seemed like four randomly smashed bits of metal but he let the gendarme lead him back inside. The metal still looked like four pieces of a larger machine which had served its purpose years ago and broken up so that no one else could use it.
“What do you think that was, then?” He turned to the youngest gendarme, hoping for an answer which wouldn’t waste his time.
“Can I lift it, Captain? Feel its weight?”
Mathieu’s grunt was such an exact imitation of Roux’s usual means of approval, that he corrected himself and said, “Yes, certainly.”
“It’s heavy, maybe steel, or perhaps…” He lifted it to eye level and felt the weight once more. “Graphite?” The lad, for he had barely entered his twenties, reordered the broken pieces so that a hollowed brick-like shape took form.
“And what do you think it’s for…eh, your name?”
“Barthel, Henri Barthel, Captain. I’d say it was a mold of some sort.”
“What? A bread mold?”
“No.” He looked closer. Everyone in the building gravitated towards the conversation, hoping to add a perceptive comment. But Henri held the floor.
“Can I take these outside? I need to see the central indent.”
“Of course, Barthel, lead on.” Mathieu had not the slightest idea what the boy meant, of course he should examine the central indent in a better light. The gendarmes carried the broken mold outside to the welcome daylight. The cool air smelled fresh and sharpened their spirits.
Henri was enjoying his moment. “Ah, it’s an inverted stamp of some kind. Probably a hallmark, but I’d need a magnifying glass to identify it.”
“A hallmark…isn’t that used on…” Mathieu paused to make sure he was hearing properly.
“Silver or gold,” said Henri Barthel in a very matter-of-fact voice.
“What makes you think that, Barthel?”
“Started a course on metallurgy before the war, Sir. It’s definitely a crucible of some sort. Not French.”
Yet another layer of mystery hovered over the canal basin like a swirling summer mist. Silver or gold? Atlantic salmon or peaches from Florida? What would be next?
“Ah,” the elongated sing-song timbre of an educated American broke the moment. “Captain Bertrand of the Deuxième Bureau? You’ve got our property there, I see.” Mathieu recognized the drawl before he spun round. Bistrot was wrong. The Americans were still in Toul in the person of Bryson Hamilton and at least six associates in US army uniforms. He had walked down the tow path and positioned himself squarely at the head of his posse like the sheriff of the county.
“Why, it’s Mister Bryson Hamilton, as I recall, from the Paris embassy.” You could see surprise register in his body language as Hamilton realized that Mathieu knew who he was. For a moment they stood facing each other like cowboys in a standoff. Who would blink first?
“Your property?” Forced politeness bordered on sarcasm. “I think that this ledger is German in origin, not American, and I have to ask why you would want some useless ashes and pieces of scrap metal?”
“They are American property, owned by the American Relief Agency, and we are here to reclaim them.”
“Why? Are they valuable in some way? Clearly your people disposed of all the paperwork and broke the metal because it was useless…or perhaps you had another motive?” The conversation was in English which meant that Bistrot and the gendarmes did not understand the detail of the argument, but the grim faces required no translation.
“None of your damned business, Captain, but you have two options. Either hand over our property immediately or we will escort you to the Town Hall where our embassy and the president’s office will instruct you in your obligation to France’s most important ally.” Bryson Hamilton was the embodiment of smug, the playground bully whose muscle was provided by the Headmaster himself. Mathieu turned away from him and spoke rapidly in the local patois, hoping to unsettle his American foe.
“Men, the loudmouth here has the backing of the American government and our president so defiance will be short lived. However, when we get back to the Mairie I want you to write detailed notes on what we found. And you, Henri, I need you to do drawings of the metal…and do your best to identify that hallmark. Put the evidence we have on the ground and go immediately. Bistrot, stay with me.”
That said, he turned to Bryson Hamilton and conceded ownership to the American. “I would like to understand what has been going on here.”
Hamilton beckoned his troopers to pick up the ledger, box, and scrap iron and brushed Mathieu’s inquiry aside.
“As I’ve already said, it’s none of your business, let me assure you. And don’t imagine that you have greater influence here than I do. Without the food and aid which we provided during the war, you would have starved, Belgians would have perished by the hundreds of thousands, and Germany would have won the war.”
With impulsive anger Mathieu retorted, “Because you also provided them with food and finance? Or was it gold and silver? Tell me.”
Hamilton’s demeanor changed instantly. His face sharpened in surprise before he rasped back, “You should be very careful of wild allegations, Vincent.” A twisted smile crooked round Hamilton’s lips. Mathieu stepped back inadvertently. That name. His name. The American knew who he was. How? Hamilton registered Mathieu’s shock and smiled with victorious conceit, as if having the last word was the end of the matter.
“We still have a peace treaty to sign at Versailles. And you have a career to safeguard in the years ahead.” He turned and strode off, hands swinging, fingers twitching. But Hamilton had made a mistake. He had played a card too early, out of sequence. Mathieu had never considered the likelihood that the Americans were watching him…and presumably the chief. Now he knew.
“Bistrot, I have to speak with the gendarmes and contact my department in Paris. I’d appreciate it if I can stay on your barge this evening. Please jot down all that you know about the Americans and the way they have behaved over the last four years. I’ll read it before I leave. Is that all right?”
“Yes, if you want, but I’m not much of a writer.” Then his face lit up. “And if you’re not too late, we can empty a bottle of wine…or two.”
“And tell Margarite I want to see her. She is in no danger…absolutely none at all. Make her understand?”
