Read Tapestry for Free Online Page A

Kommandantur and wouldn’t Hervé’s papa be known to several of those Germans?
    A woman’s compact had lain under the loosened floorboards beneath the straw mattress Antoine used, a file for the fingernails, too, and a lipstick. A Kleiderkarte also, a clothing card and a half-empty packet of cigarettes—Kamels from Berlin, stale but kept as a treasured memento. A matchbox from the Kakadu, on the Kurfürtsendamm, a club or bar. A room key, ah, oui, oui , from the Hotel-Pension am Steinplatz and a liaison sexuelle , the torn half of a ticket to the UFA Palast, a cinema and hands up this girl’s skirt, eh? The silver cigarette case of a virtue lost had been inscribed with the words of all such men. Though she could neither speak nor read the language, she knew they would say, To Sonja with undying love, Erich, 3 March 1940 , and just before the invasion of Norway.
    Four hundred of the Occupation marks had lain beneath that cigarette case, a further two hundred of the Reichsmark. ‘And seven hundred new francs, all in one-hundreds.’
    If taken and spent, the money would only draw attention to the family. Some would think it pay for watching that house for a repeat of the bomb laying. Oh for sure, stealing from the Boche was not the same as stealing from one’s own people and Antoine could, perhaps, be forgiven were the penalties not so severe. His two brothers and his father would be sent into forced labour, herself and Antoine and her girls, his two sisters into … But how had her little Antoine come by these things? His share of the loot—was that it? One quarter!
    Grey and glued, a crumpled condom had lain alongside the death notice of this Erich Straub, this young man from Berlin who had used it with his Sonja.
    ‘And then,’ she said with finality, ‘there was this.’
    Unfolding a torn page from last Friday’s Paris-Soir , she read again yet another of the advertisements Herr Kohler placed each week, as did countless others still, and even though he had not been in Paris to receive an answer.
    Reward of 200,000 francs will be paid for information leading to the safe return of Johan Van der Lynn, now age eight-and-a-half, and his sister Anna, now age six-and-a-half, son and daughter of Martin and Oona from Rotterdam. Lost to the east of Doullens on the road from Arras, 16 May 1940. Apply Box 1374 .
    Lost during the Exodus when ten million from the Lowlands and northern France had fled the blitzkrieg to clog the roads until machine-gunned to clear them for the panzers, but why had this Sonja had it in her handbag, or had she? Had Antoine hidden it here earlier, and for what reason, please?
    Fool that he was, Herr Kohler wouldn’t let this Madame Oona Van der Lynn lose hope, nor would he get rid of her. She was forty years of age, couldn’t have good papers and had lost her husband in December to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. A Jew, people whispered, her children only the halves, though such things really shouldn’t matter and certainly wouldn’t to a Stuka or Messerschmitt.
    Herr Kohler had taken the woman in during another investigation, that of a carousel in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, and wasn’t this why the boys loved to go to that park? And yes, yes, he had a younger one and lived with both when in Paris, sleeping with each but in turns as everyone said, herself most especially. ‘May God forgive me.’
    Giselle le Roy was twenty-two years old and very attractive, though beauty like that would quickly fade and men ought to know this. Half-Greek, half-French and from the Midi, the girl was also from the House of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton, though she didn’t work in that business anymore. ‘The Lupanar des Oiseaux Blancs!’ she said aloud, was filled with hateful thoughts of such ‘submissive girls,’ as the flics were fond of calling them. The brothel of the white birds. ‘Fornicatrices!’ she said. ‘Leeches who take money that is desperately needed by the families of the