Carnival Read Free Page B

if the girl he’d known as a teenager was still vital, the girl he had married and had two sons with.
    â€˜ Ach , how times have changed, eh? Now I live with Oona and Giselle on those rare moments when we’re in Paris, while my Gerda … ’
    Had begged an uncle with connections in the Nazi Party to help her get a divorce so that she could marry an indentured farm labourer from France who was helping out on her father’s farm near Wasserburg, just to the east of Munich. And yes, both Giselle and Oona had come to love him and it wasn’t difficult to see that each understood and respected the other’s feelings and willingly—yes, willingly!—shared what little they saw of him and had become fast friends themselves.
    â€˜War does things like that,’ muttered Kohler, having read his partner’s thoughts. ‘It also brings enemies like us together, so please don’t forget it.’
    Enemies. He hadn’t said that in a long, long time, had always been planning to get Giselle and Oona out of France and into Spain.
    â€˜Bartholdi may have sculpted New York’s Statue of Liberty with freedom in mind, Hermann, but that isn’t why I brought you here. One hundred and three days up there in that citadel? They held fast to what they had come to believe in, themselves. That hot box was a warning to us of the Francs-Tireurs, as was the plethora of Felgendarmen and Gestapo looking for deserters in the railway station. Since this Kommandant Rasche was one of your former commanding officers at Vieil-Armand, and no doubt has remembered your usefulness, perhaps you had best tell me about it.’
    Ah, damn! ‘That left ball of mine … ’
    â€˜ Sacré nom de nom , have I not been subjected to that little legend enough? Swelled to the size of a ripe lemon? As hard as a dried one. A grapefruit perhaps?’
    â€˜You’ve no sympathy. I’m not at all surprised your first wife left you for a railway man from Orléans!’
    â€˜She was lonely.’
    â€˜You told me your practising the euphonium for the police band drove her away!’
    â€˜That too.’
    â€˜Then she didn’t take off with a door-to-door salesman or a lorry driver? You actually lied to me?’
    Hermann had caught a ‘cold’ in that most tender of places while in the trenches and snows of that Alsatian battlefield.
    â€˜You know what those field hospitals were like, Louis. I couldn’t have some verdammt Wehrmacht medic amputating the necessary.’
    Ah, merde!
    â€˜I went AWOL and found myself an Alsatian pharmacist’s daughter who was training to fill her father’s shoes even though it was heresy of her to have thought of such a thing.’
    â€˜She was pretty.’
    â€˜Sweet heaven but I couldn’t have done it with her and she knew it.’
    And so much for his subsequent tour of duty in a Himmelfahrtskommando , a suicide commando, as one of its trip-to-heaven boys.
    â€˜I could have been shot. Instead, Rasche, who headed up the court of inquiry, thought I might be useful and gave me a choice, and when I took it, six months of never knowing when the next second would be my last.’
    Hence his uncanny ability to find tripwires and smell out explosives. ‘Carnival, Hermann. It’s from the medieval Latin for Flesh Farewell, the celebration that precedes the forty meatless days of Lent.’
    â€˜Masked girls and boys who simply want to get into mischief, eh? Costumes? Music and dancing and torch-lit parades and feasts in an Arbeitslager , a work camp, mein Lieber ?’
    It was a good question. ‘A travelling fair too, I think. Sideshows, booths with games of skill or chance, others exhibiting the wonders of the world.’
    â€˜ Ja, ja , the palace of mirrors, eh? Well please don’t forget that this Colonel Rasche of mine could break every one of them with a simple look.’
    â€˜But does he know of the