Carnival by J. Robert Janes

just keep it to ourselves.’
    â€˜Since Rasche must have known about it?’
    â€˜ Ah, mais alors, alors , Hermann, for now the benefit of doubt, especially as these two buttons I found in Thomas’s pockets are totally unlike those he left out for us to find and are from a girl’s summer dress.’
    â€˜Then you’d best read this, seeing as the salaud failed to mention it as well.’
    â€œTo whom it may concern,
    Messieurs, I feel it is my duty to report that the wife of Eugène Thomas, prisoner 220371, Stalag XIV J, Arbeitslager 13, Colmar, Alsace, has been unfaithful to him. On occasions too numerous, his little son, a boy of five, has been left with a neighbour while Mme. Paulette Thomas goes to Pigalle, les Halles and other such well-known rendezvous and does not return until the following morning. Sometimes it is noon before she gets home, sometimes later or not at all.
    â€˜Hermann, is this really necessary?’
    â€˜Read on.’
    â€œAt other times the victorious soldiers of our German friends are seen entering her flat, the child then being shoved out the door in the cruelest of weather. An hour goes by, two hours. Sometimes she is with two men, sometimes with three.”
    â€˜How can anyone give credence to such rubbish?’
    â€˜Anonymous and uncensored, Louis, but as to his having killed himself because of it … ’
    â€˜There was also rust from iron filings.’
    â€˜ Ach , any Kriegie worth his salt finds himself a carpenter’s nail and a little stone. He grinds off a bit every day. You put the filings on your tongue and wash them down with water. Stomach acid then changes the filings to iron chloride which is absorbed by the blood, but I have to tell you, Rasche’s second-in-command here is positive it’s a suicide.’
    â€˜Then why, please, does a man who watches his health as closely as he can under such circumstances, kill himself even if he had only just read that letter, which he couldn’t have, since it wasn’t found with him?’
    â€˜The Oberstleutnant Rudel would have shown it to him earlier.’
    â€˜And yet our victim still takes his iron?’
    â€˜There was this, too, and this.’
    One of the ‘nature’ magazines and a cutout from another.
    â€˜Left in the toilet for him to find, Louis. Maybe by one of the Postzensuren , since they were both gun-shy of me and the firm has lost several of its former staff members to the meat grinder of the present conflict.’
    â€˜A grudge, a wanting to get back at the enemy?’
    â€˜Perhaps, but for now that driver of ours is insisting that he show us a little something else.’
    To the flat farmlands some seven kilometres to the east of Kolmar, the long and ever-deepening shadows of the late afternoon brought a bleakness that couldn’t help but be felt. Snow drifted. The wind, down from the Vosges to the west, found each obstruction: a lonely, shaggy-maned russet mare, an orchard, a haystack, cows being driven to a barn. Two boys pulling a toboggan heaped with firewood stopped to stare at the car, while beyond them, across the barren, windswept fields where cabbages would flourish in season, the carnival lay in ruins partly enclosed by the Kastenwald, a woods whose bare branches and darkened trunks had helped to shelter what remained.
    Caught, trapped, overrun, its operators and owners chased out by the Blitzkrieg of 1940, everything had been left in place, but the sight of it made one ask, is it the end of the world?
    Multicoloured, much faded bunting flew in tatters. Once-gilded charioteers rode into battle. Marquee roofs of canvas, board and painted panel had collapsed, yet still there were the ruined stalls, booths, sideshows and rides. A carousel, the stark pipes of whose band organ were caked with ice and webbed with snow, awaited its riders, a zeppelin pointed skyward and dangled drunkenly by one cable, a swan chair had lost its