Alsace, Eastern France, 1903

 

The triple crash that echoed through the timber-framed house killed one man and damned another.   The first blow was metal against skull, followed by the crack of the victim’s head against the corner of an iron stove.  The weapon was a piece of cast iron, swung in a wide arc that intensified the impact. 

Afterwards all was still but for whirling motes of dust and the sputtering of an exhausted oil lamp.  The attic was a studio, bare and uncarpeted as if the man sprawled on the floor had created a neutral backdrop for his art.  The blood pooling from his head glowed like molten rubies - his last expression of pure colour.   

The killer shuddered, horror convulsing muscle and fibre as he contemplated the irreversible deed.   Then years of training jumped in.   Snapping the invisible visor down, he put his hands behind his back and observed the scene like a military general.  He might have been looking at a map upon which slaughter was recorded as pencil marks.

In a corner, someone moaned.  An unfinished portrait on an easel regarded them all with grey, inquisitive eyes.

 

Snow had collected in the corners of the skylight panes.  A blizzard would come later but even in this sub-dusk, the portrait’s skin glowed with a texture that was almost human.   The subject was fair haired with strongly moulded cheeks, a resolute jaw.  It was a face of Alsace, the border country of forests and mountains where Germany claws at France.   Strange ...  when you looked closely at the picture, you saw daubs of green and cobalt blue in the hair.  Nor was the skin pink, but a mosaic of blue and cream and tiny dots of crimson.  Alchemy, wild colours creating reality.  How was it done?  One certainty;  its creator would never tell.  The artist’s fingers were lifeless hooks.  Alfred Lutzman’s eyes were glazed in their final emotion.

The young man placed the painting against the wall next to others and inhaled.  Fresh paint.  Gluey, sulphurous smells redolent of abattoir and factory.   He realised that half the pictures in this studio were unfinished.  A vigorous rub would destroy them,  his own portrait with them.    He looked around for a rag, found one draped over the easel, then asked himself, did he want to sink as low as the vandals who had sacked Rome, or the thugs in Nazi Germany who burned work they couldn’t understand?  He was an art-lover.  On his way over here, he’d fancied himself a patron.  Could he destroy genius, even to save his own skin?

‘What shall we tell?’  The desperate question came from the corner, and blundered into his thoughts.  He turned and met eyes peeled raw by shock.  There was blood on one of her cheeks, a busy trickle that dripped onto her apron front.  ‘What shall we tell?’  

Suddenly, self-preservation was everything.   ‘Nothing.  We tell nothing.’  Using the rag, he rubbed away his footprints, smearing them into patches of unrecognisable shape and size.  He snatched the fur-felt Homburg he’d removed on entering and crammed it onto his head.  ‘Go down to your kitchen, do whatever you do at this hour.  Cooking  ...whatever.  You’ll say you heard nothing.  Understand?’  he spoke harshly because she was staring at him as if he was the only thing in this room that made sense.  ‘There now, do as I say and we’ll be all right.  Talk, and it’s over.  For both of us.’   His mind raced, churning out scenarios, trying to fix on a story this woman could be trusted with.   ‘I’ll leave the front door open, maybe I’ll say I forgot to close it.  Yes?  Then you’ll say somebody slipped in while you were in the kitchen.  You ... er ... you’d shut the kitchen door, you were clattering pans, the range was roaring.  A thief ... a vagrant ... slipped in.  Yes?’

A flicker of understanding, a tiny nod.  ‘Yes.’

‘Say nothing.  Whatever they ask, say nothing.’  At the door, he momentarily lost courage.    Should he not just go to the police station?   No, he decided.  Only three people would ever understand what took place here, and one was dead.   What about his portrait, take it, leave it?  Take it, he decided, because they’d ask him about it at home.  Wrapping it in a square of drugget cloth he found folded on a chest, he ducked under the doorframe and hurried down the narrow stairs , ignoring the pitiful cry that followed him;

‘What shall I tell my daughter?’

 

If anybody saw him stepping out into the gloomy impasse, they thought little of it.  This was Kirchwiller, a town whose spires poked out of a dark forest on a high plateau.  Frozen winds barrelled in from the east, piling snow in drifts from November to March.   In winter, everybody wore a heavy coat, collar pulled high.   Everybody walked fast, staring down at their feet.   Besides, this was the Jewish quarter and nobody lingered once dusk fell.

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

Paris, 1937

 

Jean-Yves, Comte de Charembourg, gazed at the telephone receiver on his desk.  The caller had spoken a single name:  Lutzman.   He’d then hung up.   Jean-Yves hadn’t recognised the voice, but he knew what it threatened to unleash.

      Putting the receiver back on its cradle, he went to his window, the quick movement making his heart falter.  He ignored it, telling himself that the pain was incurable and should remind him he was lucky.  He’d survived the carnage of 1914 to 18 when millions hadn’t.  He took in deep, calming breaths, focussing on the scene of charming normality that was Boulevard Racan.   Lacework railings gleaming black.  Pumice-grey villas fresh from recent rain.  The horse chestnuts were days from bursting into bud.  Soon, he would walk down Racan and smell lilacs and magnolia all the way to the river.    The glossy air pulled at him but he returned to his desk, scowling at the telephone.  The caller had been male with a deep, gravelly voice.  Middle aged, younger?  Impossible to say.  In his youth, Jean-Yves reflected, if somebody wanted to threaten you, they had to come and see you.   Telephones were – his mother had always said this – vulgar.  

He returned to his task, drafting an article for Le Figaro.  He’d promised them a thousand words denouncing the presence of the German Air Force in Spain.   He doubted it would take a thousand.

Since the summer of ’36, Nazi Germany had been waging covert war on France’s western border, yet those in power had their heads deep in the sand.   Jean-Yves tapped his pen to get the ink flowing and unwittingly recreated the picture in the magazine that lay open beside him.  It was a photograph of himself with ‘L’homme poétique, l’homme politique’ as the caption.  ‘Man of poetry and politics.’   He’d shrugged off the flattery but secretly it pleased him, as did the picture.  L’Illustration was a well-regarded publication and its photographer had captured him in profile in front of his bookshelves.  A firm jaw and aquiline features could be attributed to kindly lighting.   He was, after all, fifty-six, not thirty-six.   But his hair was still thick even if grey had advanced upon the fair, and several female friends had telephoned to compliment him.  He wondered, suddenly, if the publicity had incited that grit-voiced call. 

‘Germany is meddling with the peace of nations while we doze,’ he wrote, then crossed it out.  Be subtle.   He must stir his fellow Frenchmen to outrage, without provoking panic or apathy.    He began again.   “Why does Free Europe allow Germany to arm and support Nationalist insurgents in Spain when –” 

The shriek of the telephone shocked the pen from his fingers.  He snatched up the receiver and barked, ‘This is the Comte de Charembourg.  Answer, please.’

‘Lutzman.’  It was spoken in a rough guttural that originated here in Paris, he was sure of it.  But no more clues, just the buzz of a cut connection.