Carnival by J. Robert Janes Page B

knew all about it and would always look the other way, another chose to let the dogs come after me.’
    â€˜You had only paid the one off!’ snorted Rasche. ‘ Mein Gott , Kohler, you continue to surprise me. Now come along. The snow’s a little deeper here. We must find you some overboots, Chief Inspector. Those shoes of yours don’t look good.’
    â€˜It’s the glue,’ muttered Kohler. ‘I bought it and used it and got taken.’
    â€˜The swarzer Markt in France, Colonel. Hermann is an expert but an easy touch for the pretty ones.’
    And hasn’t changed one iota, thought Rasche. ‘The Volksopfer might have something.’
    The people’s offering of winter clothes for the boys in Russia.
    Quickly Louis stuffed the notebook and other things into his pockets to join the torn photographs he’d taken from the second victim, the identity papers and passes, the magazine with its pseudoerotic exposures of female anatomy, et cetera, and the anonymous letter.
    The chemical formulae also, thought Kohler, not liking it one bit. Trinitro-bloody-phenol this colonel of theirs wasn’t saying a damned thing about but should!
    As the night came down, the sky grew clearer, its stars sharper, brighter than any he had seen in a long, long time. Was it simply Alsace and the Vosges, or was it something subconsciously within him, he wondered, this need to look up even when no enemy aircraft were there, this need to look beyond the earthly? Rasche was keeping far too much to himself. Oh for sure, he had always had a mind of his own, but why ask for two detectives if you don’t want to confide everything they might need about two suicides that could just as easily have been left at that?
    Torn flags were irritated by the wind. Halyards constantly struck metal and wooden standards, canvas flapped, boards creaked, swung aimlessly on chains, or banged and rubbed together. Here and there—everywhere—were sounds, especially the hollow moaning of air as it rushed through a tube or tunnel, but then, too, there was the taint of mildewed canvas and of rotting boards even in the depths of winter. Eerie … strange, a deserted city whose life had suddenly been snuffed out, a wilderness of silhouettes where shattered biplanes dangled, turned and swayed.
    A Noah’s Ark had no roof but the shadows of its animals two by two. Twin giraffes flanked the entrance. A tattered gorilla raised a fist.
    In single file, the colonel leading, they threaded their way through the twenty centimetres or so of snow. ‘She’s not in the House of Mirrors,’ said Rasche. ‘I had her put in one of the wagons. Each of these’—he indicated the rides and sideshow booths—‘came in one or more wagons, which invariably formed part of the structure and were lived in and then used for transporting everything while en route.’
    â€˜A community. A little village of its own,’ said St-Cyr, realizing as Hermann would, that the colonel must have tramped about here a good deal.
    Toga-draped plaster maidens raised torches to the heavens, huge peacocks fanned their tails under starlight, an Ideal Caterpillar ride waited, its linked little train of cup-canopied carriages caught on the uphill in the broken darkness of a fallen marquee.
    Wagons did form the walls of the House of Mirrors. Iron cross-poles had once supported its canvas roof, and from these had hung the stand-up crazy mirrors whose walkways, stairs, false turns and landings were still in place. Glass probably everywhere, thought Kohler. Those two boys they had seen wouldn’t have left it for long and must have, like all the other children in the district, had free rein and a fantastic time of it.
    Rasche shone his blue-blinkered torch on the shattered entrance. ‘A chair was used,’ he said, ‘the rope thrown over one of the cross-poles.’
    â€˜Colonel, since she didn’t return after