The fist that clasped the broom handle was beet-red, the fingers painfully chapped and thick, but on the third, fourth, and fifth digits there were rings, the look of which no soap or margarine would ever free. Bolt cutters would possibly be needed, thought St-Cyr. It was that or determination.
The little finger wore a ring whose faceted rectangles were of clear-white diamond and dark-green emerald, the design from the early ’20s and Art Deco: Van Cleef & Arpels, no doubt. Then came a canary-yellow diamond of at least sixteen carats, the faceted navette surrounded by brilliants in the style of Boucheron and probably dating from 1915.
The last was a sapphire cabochon of thirty carats and exquisite colour, with brilliants all around—Cartier, he was certain—the three rings a tidy fortune for such a one as this, to say nothing of the fact that she was in an internment camp where such items were invariably taken from one and an oft-worthless receipt given.
‘FERME-LA, MES AMIES!’ the woman shouted to shut up the racket. ‘GIVE US ROOM WHILE I DEAL WITH THIS TURD AND PULL HIS LITTLE CHAIN!’
The laughter and other disturbances died off as if struck. Shabby, thin, tall, gaunt, dumpy, or not, to a woman they wore hats. Some of these were tiny, like this one’s, which was perched atop hennaed hair whose roots were fiercely black. Uncompromising, the hair was thick, long, and wiry and pulled back into a bush that was tied with a Union Jack. Others, though, wore hats that were large and floppy; others still, tiny pillboxes with bits of forgotten veil, but all used hatpins that were obviously daggers in their own right.
Surrounded, collectively the looks were contained but in ribald expectation of the fistfight to come.
Ah, merde, thought St-Cyr, chancing a glance back and upward to Hermann who had remained standing at the third-storey’s railing with Nora Arnarson. Perhaps the girl had gripped the railing out of fear of heights, Hermann having laid a hand firmly on hers.
‘Madame. . . ’
‘IT’S SIMPLE THEFT, COUILLON! A PHOTO, A POSTCARD, A LITTLE BIT OF GLASS, A PEBBLE, A ROCK CRYSTAL!’
Must she call him an asshole and let her voice fill the hotel? ‘Madame, un moment, s’il vous plaît. Simple theft?’
‘IT IS THEN THAT EVERYTHING BEGAN, FIVE MONTHS SINCE THOSE CHATTES ARRIVED HERE!’
Those cunts? ‘Ah, bon, je comprends. When the Americans arrived, the thefts began, and from petty theft things developed into an accident, and from there to murder—is that how it was?’
‘Oui.’
The once navy-blue overcoat, still with all of its buttons after the years of internment, had a sable collar that would be pleasantly warm but definitely didn’t belong with the original coat, and though the eyes were small and of a dark grey-blue, they were swift and hard behind octagonal gold-rimmed specs that must have belonged to someone else. ‘Your name, madame? The face, the figure, the stature. . . Was it in Honfleur that we encountered each other? La rue du Dauphine, perhaps, or was it Le Havre and along le quai Videcoq?’
The docks, in any case.
The grin was huge, the teeth tobacco- and tea-stained, and broken or absent; the woman as tall and big across the shoulders as Hermann, who was probably congratulating himself on the little problem he had managed to dump on his partner.
‘This Occupation, madame,’ said St-Cyr. ‘This war. People come into contact in the strangest places only to lose contact while others come back unexpectedly.’
I had better drop the voice, she thought. ‘Listen my cow that moos, I’ve never seen you before.’
And gangster slang for police, but one must be cheerful and sing out, ‘Ah, the dialect, that’s it. One hears so many in my line of work, one automatically tries to place them. Les Halles, madame? The rue des Lombardes? The house at number twenty-seven. I’ll have the date in a moment.’
The belly of Paris, the central market, and an unlicenced house. ‘Couillon, ferme-la!’
‘Of course, but one good turn deserves another.’
And wouldn’t you know it! ‘Qu’ est-ce vous désirez, Monsieur l’inspecteur? The love of the chase, the hunt, the young and beautiful or the more mature?’
‘Our overboots and my partner’s gun, and not without every last one of its cartridges, which I will have already counted.’
He was definitely a shitty bastard. ‘Marguerite, hand over the gun, Hortense, give back the overboots. There’ll be another time.’
Was Hermann pleased? wondered St-Cyr. He didn’t smile, still stood with that hand of his clamped over that of Nora Arnarson of Room 3–38. They were talking. The girl looked as though trapped. . .
‘You’re afraid of them,’ confided Kohler to the girl.
Nora winced. ‘Please let me go, Inspector.’
‘Not until you tell me. That woman down there mentioned stealing little things of no earthly value and you immediately began to tremble. I’d like to know why.’
‘You don’t understand, do you? You can’t. But you’re letting them all see me with you. They’ll think I’ve told you things and ratted on them. They’ll wait. They’ll find a moment when I’m not watching out for just such a thing.’
‘And then?’
‘They’ll shove me.’
Louis had the gun and the boots and was quietly asking the woman down there something. . .
‘Your name, madame,’ said St-Cyr, ‘so as to clear up that little problem and remove the necessity of my asking one of the others.’
The shit! ‘Léa Monnier.’
‘I knew it! Your husband was at Verdun, a corporal and terribly wounded, but one of the lucky.’
Ah, mon Dieu, what was this, sympathy from a sûreté? ‘He never came back. I had to leave his medals at home when the cows rounded me up and gave me a lift in the salad shaker.’
The Black Maria, but one had best shrug and gesture at the helplessness of turning fate aside. ‘So many didn’t survive, did they, but I seem to recall that neither shell nor bullet, bayonet, poisoned gas, or illness got him, yet he left you with a bronze.’
The medal for five children that was pinned high on the left breast of her coat! ‘The youngest turned seventeen in November, so the green beans, having decided that they’d better, had to let her go home, since she wasn’t eighteen.’
The Wehrmacht wore grey-green, thus earning that epithet, but concern had best be shown. ‘Home, and without the benefit of a mother’s guidance? The salauds! It makes no sense, does it, when you could have made a fortune with all those boys on leave and wanting company?’
‘Don’t try to pound the bread dough too much, Inspector. Tell me what else you want and I’ll see to it.’
She would never back off, not this one. ‘Peace for now and the right to talk to those among you who might be able, if you were to persuade them, of course, to shed a little light on the investigation. A couple of cigarettes, too, if you can spare them so that all present will see that we have parted on the best of terms.’
The Lucky Strikes were not from a British Red Cross parcel, and were taken not from a packet, but from the silver, diamond-and-emerald-encrusted case Van Cleef & Arpels had crafted in the ’20s to go along with the diamond-and-emerald bracelet that went with the first of those rings.
‘Ah, bon, merci. My partner will be certain to return the favour with interest as soon as possible.’
Hermann’s Walther P38 had all eight Parabellum cartridges in its box magazine and one up the spout.
‘We don’t steal things, Inspector.’
How watchful she was. ‘Only the Americans do that?’
‘They’ve plenty now, yet they still torment us.’
‘And you’ve ways and means of finding out who the thief is?’
‘A magpie, that’s all we know for sure. Things are stolen for their colour or the temptation of it, the thrill, n’est-ce pas, le grand frisson.’
L’orgasme, the great shudder. ‘And not for their use or need? A kleptomaniac?’
‘Call the slut what you will, but it’s still stealing. If you find her, remind her that Madame Chevreul keeps asking, and that soon Cérès will give us the answer even if you don’t.’
Hermann was still standing up there with Nora Arnarson, who was confiding something to him. Just what that was, one couldn’t tell, but it must have been given with a certain desperation, for they faced each other and the girl had at last managed to free her hand.
‘Léa Monnier isn’t the ringleader of the British, Herr Kohler. She’s just head flunky.’
As he came down the stairs and into the foyer, the others having left, Hermann was in high spirits. ‘Limehouse, Louis. The docks along the Thames in London couldn’t hold our Léa, and she came over here in 1914 as a truck driver in that other war but found love drove her. Married a Claude Monnier in the autumn of 1917 while he was on extended leave. Learned the language, had five kids, collected his medals and his pension—Verdun as usual.’
Such naiveté always needed clarification. ‘While working her way up to becoming madame of the clandestin at 27 rue des Lombardes, mon vieux, to support Monnier in the style to which he had become accustomed. Sénégalais porters, coal sellers from the Auvergne, farmers from the Vendée, Orléans, Nantes, and other places. All as customers bearing ducklings, fresh-picked asparagus, young spring leeks, Charolais beef, sausage from Lyon and oysters from Concarneau. Good country people with a little time on their hands after the onion soup.’
Les Halles after that war to end all wars, and with overblown memories of what it must have been like before this Occupation!
There was a sigh.
‘But she had kept her passport,’ said Kohler. ‘How many of those British women did you know?’
‘None, but working with you has been good for me. Ah, your Walther P38, Inspector. Please see that better care is taken of it.’
‘Still got that Lebel six-shooter I made sure the Geheime Staatspolizei were good enough to let you carry?’
‘The Modèle d’ordonnance 1873?’
‘The one with the eleven-millimitre low-pressure, black-powder cartridges no one wants when things get tight because they’ve been stored for such a long time and might be damp.’
‘It’s where it ought to be. Silent until needed.’
‘Maybe you’d better let me have it and I’ll get the Kommandant to lock up the firepower.’
‘Don’t be crazy, not with Madame Monnier and her hatpins. Now, please be so good as to carry your own overboots. You might need them.’
The first victim wasn’t easy to get at, for the elevator, in the farthest wing from the entrance of the Vittel-Palace, had been decommissioned like all the others in September of 1939, its cage left in the cellars at the bottom of the shaft.
‘Someone opened the gate on the third floor, Louis. The corridor lights were blinking on and off—another electrical problem for which the electrician from town was later brought in. Caroline Lacy had had a rough night and was out along the corridor trying to get her breath and light one of her cigarettes. Mary-Lynn Allan, from Sweet Briar, Virginia, was coming toward her and Caroline thought the girl might need a little help, but then there was a scream.’
‘Why help? I thought Caroline Lacy was the one who needed it?’
‘Mary-Lynn was unsteady on her feet. Drunk perhaps, on home brew.’
‘And Nora Arnarson, who divulged this information, where was she?’
‘On the stairs. She swears it.’
‘And also drunk?’
‘A little.’
‘Date?’
‘Saturday to Sunday, the thirteenth and fourteenth.’
‘Time?’
‘About 0100 hours on the Sunday and the reason for that urgent call to summon us.’
‘And why was Nora on the stairs, Hermann, since she obviously hadn’t gone to help Caroline Lacy?’
‘She and Mary-Lynn had been to a séance in the Hôtel Grand.’
‘Madame Chevreul?’
‘How the hell did you know that?’
‘The Ouija board I found under Nora’s bed and the words of Madame Monnier, but for now it would take too long to discuss it. Find us a flashlight. This candle stub of mine won’t last.’
‘Ach, I’ll have to go out to the gate. No one here is allowed one.’
‘And when the lights go out, it’s pitch-dark. Ah, merde, Hermann, what have we got ourselves into?’
‘A problem, especially since the Kommandant who asked for us but has now been replaced must have given the two permission to be out late that night, as well as letting them keep such personal items as watches, rings, and bracelets.’
With the cellars at close to freezing, only now were there touches of yellowish-green to copper-red discolouration, but the veins in the neck and on the backs of the hands, where marbling was present, were a dark purplish blue.
St-Cyr looked up the shaft of the elevator’s well. Mary-Lynn Allan had fallen the four floors from that third storey, had instinctively grabbed at cables that were shamefully frayed, considering it had been a deluxe hotel when built in 1899 and partially renovated in 1931. The palms of both hands had been badly torn, the left cheek as well.
She had then turned over and had plunged to land facedown with arms flung out atop the elevator between its two cables, the rest of her bent over the iron bars to which those same cables were bolted.
Blood had drained. Within about twelve hours, postmortem hypostases had coalesced and made the face, ears, and neck livid in their lowermost parts. The eyes bulged, the mouth, teeth, forehead, and nose were broken, as were the arms, legs, ribs, and shoulders. Having emptied herself instantly, the rats had got at her.
‘Ah, mon Dieu, Mademoiselle Allan, Hermann had best not see you. Death has haunted him since his days in the Great War from which a prisoner-of-war camp saved him but allowed time to dwell on the matter. Outwardly he puts on a veritable show, but inwardly. . . It’s not just that the big shots of the Gestapo and SS will use this against him, a detective of theirs who no longer has the stomach for it, but though he would never admit it, he’s far too old for the Russian Front and has already lost his two young sons to that. Boys. . . They were only boys. Yet, still, it’s really just Hermann himself. We’ve been through so much, have constantly been in each other’s company and yet have survived while displeasing virtually everyone else. Those who stood to gain and those who hoped to, even those remotely connected who simply wished the status quo to continue.’
The thighs were bare, the foetus absent, the placenta wrapped around the remains of the umbilical cord.
As gently as he could, he covered her. ‘Two months, three, mademoiselle? Had you told anyone, the father perhaps? Was he a guard, one of the doctors. . . the electrician who comes from town? The dentist, or one of the camp’s officers?
‘And why, please, was that gate deliberately opened when it should have remained closed and locked?’
The candle stub flickered in a down-draught that drew the little flame to one side, threatening darkness. Several photos lay about—snapshots from home she’d been carrying, and also a beautifully carved cavalier, a knight from a chess set, the wood light-red to reddish-brown.
‘And hard, and moderately heavy, and very straight grained.’ It had fortunately tumbled to the far left front corner of the elevator’s roof, where it had remained clear of everything else.
‘Mary-Lynn Allan was twenty-seven years old, Louis. Two brothers in the service, the girl the youngest. Father Ed. . . ’
‘Killed during that other war?’
‘Ah, mon Dieu, how the hell did you. . . ’
‘The snapshots. An officer.’
‘Killed during the Meuse-Argonne advance of. . . ’
‘Hermann, I’m aware of the date. Twenty-six September, 1918. Fog got them. Buried tank tracks and other shot-up armour threw their compass bearings off, they failing to realize this until it was too late.’
The poor bastards had been green and almost straight off the boat from home, but Louis, like most of the French, would still be thinking les Américains sont toujours merveilleux. ‘They’d not had any food for at least four days and little if any sleep, mon vieux. You know how it was. End of story. First Army, Thirty-Fifth Division under Major-General Traub.’
‘The east bank of the Aire River well to the northwest of here and of Verdun, Hermann.’
‘She couldn’t have known him, would only have been about two years old but wondering all her life.’
The photos had been of the deceased father, the cavalier having belonged to him. ‘That why the séance with Madame Chevreul?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘For which she handed over a cheque for the princely sum of fifty dollars American.’
This investigation was getting deeper and deeper. ‘Which bank?’
‘The Morgan.’
‘With headquarters in New York but a branch office in Paris, Hermann, the cheque negotiable after this war since Madame Chevreul could not possibly get there to cash it even though that bank is still open. Ah, merde. . . ’
The candle had snuffed itself. ‘Two of the guards are bringing an extension cord,’ said Kohler. ‘They’ll lower a light to you.’
‘Why don’t they open the ground-floor gates?’
‘Ach, I didn’t think to tell them. The crowd, I guess.’
‘Then be so good as to clear all corridors and find our trapper. Pick up where I left off by asking if any of that datura has gone missing before.’
‘Missing. . . ?’ Did Louis want to warn everyone of it? ‘Was she drugged?’
Good for Hermann. ‘At this point, it’s simply an alternative to the effects of alcohol. She’d have lost focus, been very unsteady on her feet. . . ’
‘Hallucinogenic?’
They’d all be listening now, felt St-Cyr. ‘It’s just a thought.’
‘But don’t jump to conclusions, eh? And Madame Chevreul of the Hôtel Grand?’
‘Leave her for now. Let others tell her of our interest. Chevreul was the nineteenth-century Frenchman who popularized the use of a pendulum to induce hypnosis. She may have borrowed the name, which would imply study of the process, or simply have married someone related or totally unrelated.’
The listeners would think about that too. ‘In addition to getting in touch with her father, Louis, Mary-Lynn Allan wanted to know where he was buried since he was one of the hundreds of thousands who were never found. Blown to bits probably, or simply left in the cesspool of a shell crater to eventually be covered.’
A sigh would do no good. ‘Hermann, please do as I’ve asked. Since you’ve already been talking to Nora Arnarson, continue your conversation with her, then find out whatever else you can here.’
‘But leave the Hôtel Grand for later. A pendulum and two bodies.’
‘The theft of little things of no consequence.’
They’d all know of that anyways. ‘A trapper, Louis, a bell ringer, and a flunky.’
‘And a chess piece, Hermann.’
‘Oh, that. The wood’s from a Kentucky Coffeetree. The father carved it when he was a teenager. The mother sent it over with the snapshots in a Red Cross parcel. That’s why the ex-Kommandant who asked for us but left without leaving any information readily agreed to the late-night visitation and attended it himself as a firm believer.’
Ah, sacré nom de nom!
Room 3–38 was far from happy, thought Kohler. The blue-eyed blonde whose cot was under the St. Olaf College pennant tried to light a cigarette but was so nervous, match and fag fell to her lap, scorching the grey tweed of a slender skirt.
‘Shit!’ she cried in English. ‘Don’t, Marni. I’m warning you.’
That one, whose cot was next to the innermost wall and under the Marquette U. pennant, and who had helped herself without the chef’s permission to a cup of the rabbit broth, had been about to quench the fire.
‘Should I have let you torch your beaver?’ she yelled. ‘The préfet de police’s goatee, eh?’
The police chief’s beard and prostitute talk, the insult not really meant but. . .
‘That’s it!’ cried the blonde. ‘I’m not living here a moment longer. I can’t stand the stench of that!’
The rabbits, to which the trapper, Nora Arnarson, having flung a desperate look of censure at the green-eyed redhead with the mass of curls who’d helped herself to the broth, was now slicing peeled sow-thistle roots to be added to the pot.
She dumped the lot in and began to slice the hell out of an onion, though how she had come by such a rarity was anyone’s guess unless on the black market.
‘I don’t know how you can kill things like that, Nora,’ started up the blonde again. ‘I really don’t. They’re God’s creatures.’
‘As was the pig from which the SPAM you eat must have come,’ came the retort from Nora.
‘At least I was spared the agony of having to watch the poor thing being skinned and butchered!’
Shrill. . . ‘Jésus, merde alors, ladies. . . mesdames et mesdemoiselles, a moment. My English, it’s not enough. I’m not here to accuse any of you, why would I? My partner and I just need a little help.’
‘If you’re to stop another of us from being murdered—is that it, eh? Why don’t you just say it?’
That had been Jill Faber, who slept end-to-end next to Becky Torrence, the blonde, and was sitting under the U. of Wisconsin pennant.
‘Are we all to be poisoned?’ wept Becky. ‘Those damned seeds, Inspector. If Nora’s right, each one contains at least a tenth of a milligram of the datura poison atropine. Ten to thirty seeds will make you very sick and hallucinating in hell; a hundred can kill you.’
‘And for all I know, they could already have been added to our supper,’ said the chef, to which the redhead with the broth added, ‘Nora, darling, you don’t really mean that.’
‘We all knew both of them, Inspector,’ countered Nora, dribbling diced onion into the pot. ‘I wasn’t the only one who was near Mary-Lynn the night she died.’
Swiftly they made eye contact, but with it had they instantly come to a consensus on how best to deal with him? wondered Kohler.
‘Darling, you weren’t as drunk as she was,’ said Jill, who was in her late thirties and maybe ten years older than Becky, the youngest of them. Jill had dark grey eyes that could set off the whole of her if she would but let them and if things had been better.
‘I was drunker,’ said Nora. ‘Mon Dieu, I could hardly get up those stairs and kept telling her to wait for me.’
‘She was in a hurry, was she?’ asked Kohler.
The others were now intently watching the trapper-cum-chef.
‘She said she was going to be sick, Inspector, and needed the vase de nuit.’
The night vase, the chamber pot. ‘The one in Room 3–54?’
He’d think the worst of her if he ever found out the truth, thought Nora, but something had best be said. ‘And the room right next to that elevator shaft we both had to pass.’
‘People come and go at all times of the night, Inspector,’ quickly offered Jill, who flicked a glance past him to the redhead called Marni.
‘It’s the shit you Germans give us to eat,’ said Marni. ‘It gives us the trots.’
‘Black bread that’s more sour than green apples; sour cabbage, too, and potato soup that always seems to have lost its potatoes,’ said Jill.
‘But with the chance of a knuckle from a long-dead horse,’ offered Marni.
‘Stop it! Stop it! Please!’ cried Becky.
The cigarette had fallen to the floor this time to roll under her cot.
‘Stay where you are. I’ll get it,’ said Nora.
She brushed it off and held it out, fondly touched the blonde’s cheek and said, ‘Why not let me rub your back? You know it’ll help because it always does, then I’ll make you some chamomile. I’m sorry about the rabbits. I should have realized and waited until you’d gone out.’
They weren’t just nervous, felt Kohler. They were worried about where each of them fitted into these killings, were tense as hell, and desperately tired of one another’s company and of the room.
‘It’s the winter, Inspector. It’s been getting to us,’ offered Jill with an apologetic shrug. She had straight black hair, a nice wide grin, certainly dimpled cheeks, and did look like she could be a lot of fun, but they’d had one death a week ago just along the corridor and yesterday another, taken from this very room.
‘First,’ he said, pointing at Nora, ‘tell me if any datura has gone missing before?’
She had better not look at the others, thought Nora, had better just gaze levelly at him and shake her head.
‘OK, now you,’ he said to Jill. ‘Tell me about the girl who fell.’
Herr Kohler was a little frightening after the celibacy of the past five months, thought Jill. She knew her nervousness stemmed from that as well as from everything else, but had he noticed it already? Was that why the others could see what she was thinking? If so, he would be bound to exploit it and then where would she be? ‘Sweet Briar’s essentially a girl’s college. You could say, I suppose, that Mary-Lynn had led a sheltered life, but then came Paris. Before it was closed and taken over when you people declared war on us in December of ’41, she worked as an interpreter and sales clerk at Brentano’s on the avenue de l’Opéra.’
The American bookstore.
‘Her German was almost as good as her French and because of it, she thought she was safe,’ said Marni, the redhead from Marquette U.
‘She hoped to attend the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, in Paris,’ wept Becky, ‘but. . . but you people came to put a stop to everything. Just everything!’
‘Jill, for God’s sake, tell him,’ said Marni. ‘If you don’t, I will.’
‘Perhaps you’d best then, darling, since you knew far more than any of us, even Nora.’
‘Jill, how could you do that to me?’
‘I just did. Now, tell him.’
The redhead lowered her gaze and fingered her cup. ‘Six months before our boys landed in North Africa in November last and you people rushed to take over the zone non occupée, the zone libre, for God’s sake, Mary-Lynn fought off all her prejudices and fell for a German, a Sturmbannführer, a Major Karl Something-or-Other.’
‘She liked older men, Inspector. She felt more at ease with them,’ said one of the others—which one, Kohler wasn’t sure.
‘Oh for God’s sake, Nora, she wanted a father figure,’ said Marni.
Springtime in Paris, thought Kohler, but one of the SS, which meant, of course, the avenue Foch and Karl Albrecht Oberg, the Höherer-SS und Polizeiführer of France, an acquaintance Louis and he wished they’d never had to meet. ‘Couldn’t the Sturmbannführer have lifted a finger to stop her from being sent here?’
‘He refused,’ said Jill flatly. ‘There were plenty of très chic Parisiennes to take her place.’
‘Begged him to do something, did she?’ asked Herr Kohler.
Again that rush of warmth came and though she wanted it to continue, Jill fought it down, yet he had the nicest of smiles. Soft and warm, kind and considerate—boyish, too.
‘Well?’ she heard him ask, and had to smile softly in return and say, ‘That and other things like offering to marry him.’
A sigh would be best and then another smile, thought Kohler. ‘But he was already married and had kept that little secret from her?’
Ah mon Dieu, that look of his! ‘And now you know why she despised herself.’
The timing had been perfect, but had Jill caught him off guard? wondered Marni.
‘That why the séance attempts to contact her father?’ he asked.
Even with that terrible scar from the left eye to the chin, he was adorable, thought Marni. Shrapnel? she asked herself. A fencing sword? but that couldn’t be possible with one such as this. He was far too down-to-earth and would be accustomed to bullets. ‘The attempts, Inspector. There were more than one of them. Five actually.’
The others hadn’t moved. ‘At fifty American dollars a crack?’
He was making her flash a grin, thought Marni, knowing the others would be thinking the very same thing, especially Jill—that to be alone with Herr Kohler, to feel those hands of his, would be to live that dream. ‘At two hundred and fifty, one-fifty, one hundred, and then fifty. Madame Chevreul offered to continue on an installment plan. Mary-Lynn blamed herself for the séance failures and had become convinced her dad must have known all about her affair with the Sturmbannführer.’
‘Even the most intimate of details,’ interjected Jill, watching for the effect of her words.
‘And definitely not approved of,’ said Marni, tensely watching him now, the tip of her tongue touching the crowns of her teeth.
‘The dead looking down on the living—that it?’ asked Herr Kohler.
‘Love, yes, as I used to know it,’ said Jill.
Louis should have heard her! ‘And she was feeling sick the night she died?’
It couldn’t be avoided, thought Jill, and certainly Herr Kohler would know all about such things anyway. ‘I had found her being sick one morning about a month ago.’
‘OK, so every young lady needs a bit of company now and then and the Sturmbannführer couldn’t have done it by mail. Did he pay her an extended visit?’
It would be best to be harsh. ‘We don’t know who the father was,’ said Jill, ‘only that it definitely couldn’t have been him. She wouldn’t tell us.’
‘She was afraid to,’ said Nora. ‘You knew she was, Jill, and so did I. Sure, she was looking for a father figure. That’s why she was friendly with Colonel Kessler, the former Kommandant. She had never known her own dad, Inspector, and had always regretted this.’
‘Brother Étienne said he would find something for her,’ added Jill quickly.
‘And did he?’
‘We were never told,’ said Jill.
‘Holy bitter, Indian brandy, juniper or yew leaves. . . ’
And Marni again, thought Kohler.
‘But also aloes and canella bark,’ she went on. ‘Rhubarb and nitrous ether; an emmenagogue in the hope the uterus will contract and get rid of the problem.’
Becky was looking positively ill, but what the hell had they agreed to hide? wondered Kohler.
‘Ignis sancti Antonii perhaps,’ offered Jill, again intently gazing at him.
St. Anthony’s Fire and an ecbolic if ever there was one. The deadly ergot fungus from rye flour or bread made from the same.
‘Apiol, Inspector,’ said Nora. ‘Petrosilium crispum or common parsley. Large doses of the leaves and stems, or the oil if distilled out, the apiol stimulating blood flow to the uterus, but apiol and the rest of the oil can cause polyneuritis and gastrointestinal haemorrhages if one’s luck has run out. Brother Étienne told her not to worry, that “The Grace of God invariably was on the side of the grazer,” and that if it didn’t work, he’d increase the dose.’
They had put the run on him to see if they could take the heat off themselves, thought Kohler. It was either that or to cover up for one of them. ‘Parsley?’ he asked.
‘Oui.’
Just what the hell was this trapper of theirs hiding? ‘And did he bring her enough last Saturday?’
Uh-oh, Herr Kohler did have a way about him, and the others would already have noticed it, thought Nora, especially Jill who, like everyone else in the room, had known of the parsley.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Late in the afternoon. He’d been delayed. A flat tire.’
‘His petrolette, Inspector,’ said Jill. ‘Our former Kommandant allowed him a small weekly ration of gasoline.’
‘So that he could make it from where to here and back?’
‘Domjulien. It’s about eight or ten kilometres if the road is OK.’ said Jill. ‘If not, he uses the cutter, a small, one-horse sleigh.’
‘The former Kommandant OK’d that too,’ offered Becky, having at last found her voice again. ‘The one who had to leave right after Mary-Lynn fell.’
‘The one who left us with that little Hitler who now runs the camp,’ said Nora.
The blonde had dried her eyes, the cigarette and the back rub having helped to steady her nerves.
‘And now another murder,’ she managed under his scrutiny. ‘What’s happening to us, Inspector? We’re the forgotten of this war, but has God also deserted us?’
‘Becky, you were out in the corridor,’ said Marni. ‘You had gone after Caroline.’
‘Me? Not likely. I’d have let her wheeze.’
‘But you didn’t let her,’ said Nora gently. ‘The corridor light was blinking on and off. She couldn’t see a blessed thing at first because it was pitch-dark. You know that as well as the rest of us. She was trying to get at one of her cigarettes when that damned light came back on. You had grabbed her by the wrist to steady her hand.’
‘Darkness. . . ’ began Herr Kohler.
‘Night blindness,’ said Jill. ‘Caroline had been having a terrible attack of asthma.’
‘She was in tears, Jill,’ said Becky, ‘was very upset and madly searching for those damned cigarettes Madame had hidden on her and you then found. You did, Jill. Please don’t deny it. I got out of bed and turned the room light on and tried to calm her.’
‘Of course I found them, but then you went out into the corridor after her.’
‘Jill, you don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Becky with a wince. ‘We were nowhere near Mary-Lynn and Nora. Sure, we heard the scream and then. . . ’
‘Then what?’ asked Herr Kohler, reaching for her cigarette to take a few drags himself.
He was looking at her now, but what did he really see? wondered Becky. The weakest link? ‘I. . . I grabbed Caroline. She had started to run toward the elevator shaft when we. . . we heard Mary-Lynn hit the bottom. The bottom!’
She went all to pieces. Nora moved; Jill did too. Both sat at her side and tried to comfort her. The cot sagged.
‘You held her, Becky,’ said Nora gently. ‘When I managed to get up the stairs, I saw the two of you. You saved Caroline. She would have died as well. I’m certain of it. She’d have chanced a look and, in her state and still trying to get her sight back, would have tried to get a breath and fallen.’
Yet hadn’t.
‘I lit one of her cigarettes,’ managed Becky. ‘I did get her to take a couple of drags. That’s all she really needed. Right away there was a change for the better. She even gave me a weak smile, only to again burst into tears.’
‘By then the rest of the floor were out in the corridor, Inspector,’ said Jill, ‘and others, too. Mrs. Parker soon came up and somehow got everyone calmed down, then closed the gate but couldn’t put the lock back on where it should have been.’
‘Caroline was upset, that it?’ he asked Becky.
‘We all were.’
‘But before that, before Mary-Lynn Allan fell?’
‘Yes. Then too.’
‘And was anyone else on the staircase when you went up it at 0100 hours or thereabouts?’ he asked Nora.
Herr Kohler wasn’t one to fool with. ‘Inspector, I was so dizzy, I really wouldn’t have known. I was drunk and seeing things. Worms crawling all over me, bats tearing at my hair. I. . . I can’t remember a thing.’
Yet had remembered enough. ‘And during all of this, where was Madame de Vernon, your other roommate?’
Thank God, he had finally asked, thought Marni, but one ought to be careful, otherwise he would think she’d been pleased with the question. ‘In bed, where else?’
‘Yet Mademoiselle Caroline was having a severe attack?’
The poor man now looked so helpless, it would be best to tell him, but first her hands would be placed on her thighs and moved to her knees as if wanting him. ‘Madame de Vernon claimed it was all in the girl’s mind and that Caroline need never have the attacks if she would stop being so emotional and just stay calm and tell herself not to gasp for air.’
The redhead named Marni had lovely green eyes but the offer of the rest, though enjoyable no doubt, had best be ignored for now. ‘Well-liked, was she, this Madame de Vernon?’
Had he seen right through her? wondered Marni, disappointed by the thought but glad he had finally asked. ‘Hated, more likely. Nothing was ever right. The food, the lack of it, the room, the heat, the cold, the smell, the constant comings and goings in the corridor.’
‘Yes, but was the curtain drawn in front of those two beds?’
‘Every night.’
‘Then she might or might not have been in bed—that it, eh?’
The others were all holding their breath and intently watching him. ‘Yes. I. . . I guess so.’
There was even a collective sigh. ‘OK, for now, enjoy your supper. I’d better find my partner.’
‘Is he un lèche-cul?’ asked Jill.
An arse-licker, a toady. ‘Hardly, but I’ll be sure to tell him to interview each of you, then you’ll know for sure.’
As with the Chalet des Ânes, the padlock was distinctive and similar: a Harvard long-shackled six-lever, with a twenty-three-centimetre nickel-plated chain that had somehow absented itself by having fallen to the bottom of the elevator shaft.
‘Nervous was she, our lock opener?’ asked Kohler. No third-storey eyes were watching, but nearby ears behind closed doors would be straining.
‘And opened with its key, Hermann?’ whispered Louis. ‘We would have had no problem picking this, but others might, given the closeness of the nearby rooms and the threat of traffic.’
‘We’ll have to ask them but is it yet another example of French frugality? Luxury hotels. . . ’
‘Ah, mon Dieu, why must I continually have to defend the Troisième République? This lock and the other one are American.’
And left over from the Great War. ‘But if opened with its key, who the hell is supposed to be keeping an eye on those, and where are they being kept?’
‘Perhaps the new Kommandant will be good enough to tell us.’
‘Jundt won’t want to ask, since the answer might reflect on Wehrmacht Command stupidity.’
That, too, was a problem, but Louis wasn’t yet prepared to leave, even though suppertime had run out. Pacing off the distance to Room 3–38, he turned and followed Caroline Lacy’s and Becky Torrence’s steps, pausing as if for the one to catch up with the other, the forty-watt overhead blinking on and off, the hotel’s wiring still heavily overloaded. ‘Is it that Room 3–54’s door was left open for Mary-Lynn Allan’s return?’ he asked.
Kohler shrugged. Louis tossed a disparaging hand at a question that should have been asked of the inmates had opportunity allowed, which it hadn’t.
‘Ach, you don’t yet know what they’re like,’ confided Kohler. ‘Just wait until they get you between them!’
From the top of the far stairs to the elevator’s gate and shaft was but a step or two, but where had her killer been waiting?
The staircase to the attic? indicated Louis. It was just along the corridor and right at the far end of the wing. Step by step they went up it, silently cursing the single overhead light yet searching, too, for some sign. Anything.
‘Ah, bon,’ sighed the sûreté, having run a hand under the railing.
Chewing gum. ‘Dried?’ whispered Kohler. ‘Don’t forget the cold and the dampness.’
Which would have slowed the drying. ‘Spearmint, and fresh enough, though a week old if left by the killer.’
With his pocketknife Hermann gently pried it off. ‘Our killer was nervous,’ he said. ‘The gum was to calm herself. Becky Torrence was the most nervous. Really keyed up. Terrified I’d find out something.’
‘Even though she stated she was out in the corridor with Caroline Lacy?’
‘At first she denied it but then Nora said she’d seen the two of them together.’
‘But only after that one had reached their floor.’
Time. . . Had there been time for Becky to have done something else? ‘Becky did say she and Caroline heard the scream and then the bump.’
‘But Caroline Lacy, our second victim, can’t confirm this, can she?’
‘And Madame de Vernon, her guardian, could well have left her bed earlier and none of them in that room would have known.’
They went on up the stairs to the attic only to find its door solidly locked and its rooms closed off for the duration. ‘But here we would have had a problem, Hermann, for it’s a pin tumbler that would, in a hurry, definitely need a key.’
‘But did our murderess have one?’
‘For the moment we’ll disregard your concluding the sex, but was the killer waiting on this attic staircase for Nora Arnarson and Mary-Lynn Allan to return from that séance in the Hôtel Grand?’
And after the killing had the killer then departed in the confusion? Kohler knew this was what Louis was asking.
‘And was Mary-Lynn really the intended victim, Hermann? That, too, must be asked.’
‘Or Nora?’
‘Or Caroline Lacy, who claimed she was and has since been taken care of?’
They went down the staircase to the ground floor and the cellars. Step-by-step, they patiently searched, but even the leavings of spent chewing gum were absent.
‘Everyone must need it, Louis, to seal up holes in their shoes and boots. It works, but only for so long.’
And said like a former prisoner of war.
The barracks, the luxury thirty-suite Hôtel Continental that had been built in 1899, was just to the other side of the casino, with an entrance on the avenue Bouloumié and not hard to find, given the gates to the camp and the barbed wire.
Irritably having an after-dinner cigarette and fussing by the moment, Jundt sat stiffly alone at the head of an otherwise abandoned dining room. Towering pseudo–Gallo Roman columns, after the Emperor Caracalla, were behind him. The modernized update of Art Deco urns was incongruous, their two-metre Kentias looking downright thirsty.
‘Kohler, did I not tell you eighteen thirty hours?’
Must everything be auf nazitisch with this one? ‘Colonel, investigating murder doesn’t run on meal times.’
‘Cooks do, and from now on you will damn well obey me.’
Had he dreams of becoming another Caracalla? The roast pork was cold, the sauerkraut, too, and the boiled potatoes. The soup, though tepid, was thin until the rest of the meal had been hastily added to that sûreté bowl by Louis, along with the one allowed slice of bread.
‘There is no wine?’ he asked facetiously.
‘Kohler, who the hell is that?’
It would be best not to say, The one who caused the delay. . . ‘My partner. He’s senior to me.’
‘A Frenchman? Get him out of here. He can eat in the cellars with the blacks.’
‘Colonel. . . ’
‘Hermann, einen Moment, bitte? It’s a good idea, isn’t it?’ said St-Cyr.
‘Two of them may still be in the kitchens, Kohler, where they’re supposed to be doing up the pots and pans and cleaning the ovens. Those verdammten layabouts are probably smoking tobacco they’ve stolen. They’ll be using that gibberish of theirs no one can understand.’
Discreetly gathering up his soup plate and spoon, Louis tucked the half-round remains of the bread under an arm and departed.
‘Ach,’ continued Jundt, flattening his big hands on the table, ‘I can’t stand the French. Little better than the eastern labourers, Kohler. The horsewhip and a damned good thrashing are what they need. Ten of the best and the boot! Now, what have you for me?’
Thank God, Louis hadn’t heard him. ‘Two possible murders, a terminated pregnancy, a kleptomaniac, a medium who overcharges, and one datura capsule that contains from two to four hundred seeds and has gone missing.’
‘Datura. . . ?’
Instant suspicion had registered, but perhaps it would be wise not to tell him the whole truth. ‘Some kind of herb, Colonel.’
‘You’d better ask the monk. A kleptomaniac?’
Berlin was going to hear of this last—Jundt had that look about him. ‘A compulsive thief, Colonel. Little things of no use or consequence.’
‘Or reason for murder? Das Motiv, Kohler? Isn’t that one of the first things an experienced detective looks for? You are experienced, aren’t you?’
‘We’re working on it.’
‘Are you indeed? I give you two days. If you don’t come up with something solid, Untersturmführer Weber will be given the order he wants: others, Kohler; others from Berlin who will soon sort this matter out. Colonel Kessler was wrong to have asked the Kommandant von Gross-Paris for help. Paris-Central should have known better than to have sent you and that other one.’
‘Afraid of what Weber and the boys from Berlin might do, was he, this Colonel Kessler?’
Kohler had earned that gash down his face from the SS during a murder investigation near Vouvray in December, and understood the whip better than most yet had still chosen to remain defiant of authority. ‘The Untersturmführer is in charge of security. Colonel Kessler should by rights have left the entire matter in his capable hands.’
A second lieutenant in the SS and wouldn’t you know it! ‘Your predecessor, Colonel. . . We understand that he availed himself of Madame Chevreul’s séances.’
‘You want them stopped?’
Must this one be suspicious of everything? ‘Not yet. Better to let them continue.’
Jundt tapped that Wehrmacht nose of his with a cautioning forefinger. ‘But you think they’re involved. I can tell.’
‘We just need a little time to sort things out, that’s all.’
Perhaps some reason for Kessler’s having attended the séances should be given. ‘Colonel Kessler’s wife of thirty-seven years was killed during the bombing of last September. The house was unfortunately flattened.’
And houses these days were important, considering what the RAF were doing at night and the USAF during the day, but best not to mention that, either. ‘Anything else?’
‘The Kesslers’ little maid, Kohler. A girl the couple had taken an interest in was also killed. I gather he was very close to both of them.’
And if that wasn’t a hint, what was? ‘Did the medium get through to them?’
Did they talk to each other from beyond the clouds? Such persistence could only mean Kohler thought he was on to something juicy. ‘Ach, I know nothing of such things. Colonel Kessler must have held this Chevreul woman of yours in high regard, for he specifically asked that if you thought it best, she be allowed to continue her valuable work. “It keeps them happy,” he said.’
And so much for who was going to be held responsible for letting the séances and all the rest of it continue but. . . ‘Untersturmführer Weber told you this, did he?’
‘That is correct, since the outgoing Kommandant was no longer present to do so himself.’
‘Séances night after night?’
‘Sometimes two sessions if the sign of the Zodiac is in conjunction with atmospheric conditions, but no more than ten to fifteen in attendance at any one time. Otherwise, the spirits might become distracted.’
‘And ten times fifty American dollars. . . ’
‘Profitable perhaps, but ach, there are others of them who do it. The circle, the holding of hands with the eyes closed and thoughts concentrated, the table that tilts when the fingertips are pressed to it as the questions are asked by the medium who strives to make contact with the deceased. The crystal ball, as well, and the Ouija board, the palm readings too, and tea leaves—they get tea in those parcels of theirs, Kohler. Tea when we have none!’
And so much for Jundt’s not knowing a damn thing about the spiritualistic goings-on around the camp. ‘But these other mediums aren’t as good as Madame Chevreul?’
‘I believe his very words were, “She is the only one who can do it.”’
According to Untersturmführer Weber. ‘Had the Colonel tried others?’
‘Several, I gather. Weber will know.’
‘And the name of the Colonel’s interpreter? Just for the record.’
Did Kohler already suspect there was a killer amongst those at that last Saturday evening’s séance? ‘Colonel Kessler spoke English, which he was perfecting, and perfect French. That was why he was chosen for this position.’
‘Then tell me, why was he recalled?’
Certainly Weber had let Berlin know how things were, Jundt felt, but the recall had come with such short notice that one had to wonder. Perhaps it would be best, though, to offer some other reason so as to distance oneself further. ‘The languages, mein Lieber. With so many Allied prisoners of war to be interrogated, the High Command have had to make choices. Now, is there anything else?’
The pork was even colder. ‘Just one thing, Colonel. Why on earth was that poor unfortunate girl’s body left at the bottom of that elevator shaft? Surely someone should have—’
‘Removed her? Is this what you mean?’
‘You know it is.’
‘Kohler, Kohler,’ he muttered, shaking his head in dismay at such insubordination. ‘Colonel Kessler had ordered that she not be touched until the two detectives from Paris had examined her. Need I remind you that you were to have been here late last Sunday or on Monday? An eight-hour trip becomes a delay of six days? The Untersturmführer had to have guards posted on every floor of that verdammt hotel to keep those bitches from trying to see her and destroying what might well have been valuable evidence. One can’t see her, by the way. Not from above. I made certain of that. The elevator shaft is far too dark.’
‘Did any of the doctors get to her?’
‘The Scotsman was awakened by one of those women who wore dark horn-rimmed glasses. A Sister Jane then asked that a priest be summoned and the last rites given.’
‘And were they?’
Another cigarette would be best, the offer of one expected but withheld. ‘The Untersturmführer, as was correct, told her that, like everyone else, God would have to wait for you. That third-storey gate should simply not have been open. When I first arrived here four days ago, the Untersturmführer and I made a thorough examination of every facet of the camp. I tell you Kohler, that padlock was on and secure last Saturday at seventeen hundred hours, as was its chain.’
Yet he’d not been here to see it himself. ‘And its key, Colonel, where might that have been kept?’
‘You think it was stolen, do you?’
‘I’m just asking.’
‘Then understand that it is and was exactly where it ought to have been—right with the others on the wall behind the Untersturmführer’s desk. As head of security, is that not where such keys should be kept?’
‘Only to then have another one borrowed, Colonel?’
‘Ach, what is this?’
‘The stable.’
‘You and Weber had best go over things in the morning. Breakfast is at 0600 hours.’
Berlin time, which, in winter, included an hour of daylight saving.
They were coal-black and there were at least twenty of them in the cellar under a distant forty-watt bulb. Some were still eating, others already in bed, the bunks in tiers against the far wall, but what one most noticed, thought Kohler, was how trapped they looked yet grins flashed big white teeth and whites of eyes that quickly darted away from him to politely seek something else.
Les vaches—‘the cops’—was written in every one of those grins, of course, but never mentioned. Instead, Louis sat as one in a circle of eight, and the feeling was that the centuries of colonial rule and two European wars these boys and their fathers had never wanted to join, had been set aside so as to return to their roots.
‘Ah, bon, Hermann. Salaam aleikum. That’s peace be with you.’
‘Aleikum asalaam,’ came the reply. And peace be with you, and then, wonder of wonders, Hermann shook hands with each of them, betraying a knowledge he’d not yet let his partner know of, and asked how things were with each, their answers being, Fine, and how are things with you?
A space was made on the carpeted floor of the circle. Rice, not seen anywhere in years, was in one tin bowl, nice and fluffy and piping hot; a paste in another, a sauce of what looked to be and smelled like mashed sardines, corned beef, potatoes, sow thistle, and kale with broken crackers, walnut pieces, chestnuts, and dried prunes they’d got from God knows where, the whole blended with the liquid remains of the Kommandant’s soup as a reminder.
‘And Libby’s beans, Hermann. Two tins. It’s curious, isn’t it, since these boys are no longer receiving their Red Cross parcels.’
The rice was taken with the right of hands that had first been washed. It was then rolled into a tight little ball and the fingers of the right hand then transferred to the sauce, which was scooped out as it was added.
Then one sat back and ate slowly, enjoying the meal and the company. Kohler couldn’t help but recall those early days of September and October 1940 with Louis guiding him along the muddy roads in the suburb of Saint-Denis to the north of Paris. A little field trip for this Kripo to get to know the city better. Filth, no sewers or running water, ramshackle huts, and kids—kids everywhere—smoke, too, from the ash and slag heaps as well as from the stovepipes.
Asnières had been no better, nor Villejuif and Vitry-sur-Seine to the south of the city. Fully sixty percent of all common crime in the Département de la Seine had been laid at the feet of men like these, Louis had said, and had gone on to add, “Yet in the last half of 1917 who was it who showed the rest of us they still had the stamina and will to fight?”
And having all but come through a winter like no other but this one.
‘Sergeant Senghor here holds the Croix de Guerre with two palms, Hermann, but doesn’t wear its rosette.’
Since the guards and their officers would get upset, and he was needed by the others.
‘He was just telling me how they came by the tinned beans and the rice.’
That one’s grin grew even bigger, yet his gaze passed momentarily over this Kripo to settle on the meal.
‘It’s a slinging match of the good God, Boss,’ said Senghor.
The patois was something else again, thought Kohler, but unlike the French of the middle and upper classes—somewhat easier for a foreigner like him to understand. ‘A little barter and on the quiet, eh?’
Had this one really been a prisoner of war as the sûreté had said? wondered Senghor. If so, it could only mean trouble, but had it been said as a warning and bargaining chip?
‘The guards do it,’ said one of the others. Bamba Duclos, thought Senghor.
‘Every man for himself, Boss,’ said another. Blaise Guéye for sure. ‘We defend our beefsteak.’
We’re only standing up for our rights. ‘And you have a system just like everyone else, eh?’ asked Kohler.
‘Are not all circumstances to be beaten, Boss, by those over which they form a lid?’ replied Senghor.
And no fool. ‘Did any of you agree to meet with Caroline Lacy at the Chalet des Ânes?’
‘Hermann, go easy. The negotiations are at a delicate stage.’
Still there was that grin, the teeth really very white and big.
‘No, Boss. None of us talked to that girl. Les Américaines . . . ’
‘They call us lazy niggers,’ said one of the others, also with a grin.
‘Even though you cut and haul the firewood and do all the other heavy chores?’ continued Hermann, bent on unwittingly laying to waste all that had been gained.
‘Ah, oui, oui, Boss,’ said Senghor, ‘but not all of those girls are like that. Only some. The mademoiselle Lacy was young and pretty, and for her sake as well as for our own, none of us would have spoken to her.’
‘When others were nearby, eh?’
‘Hermann. . . ’
‘Louis, leave it. Let him answer.’
And spoken like one of the Occupiers: ‘For fear of reprisals, Boss. Herr Weber is a tough, hard person.’
‘Who remembers well the occupation of the Rhineland, Hermann.’
In 1919, when the Allies moved into the area, France, thinking it best, had sent the Tirailleurs sénégalais and other coloureds as their contingent, thus spawning hatred from the occupied Rhinelanders then and retribution now.
‘The usual distressful stories of rape, Hermann. Herr Weber had a sister who was found amongst some ruins. Her clothes had been torn, her neck broken.’
‘Half our number are out in the forests, Boss, cutting and hauling firewood and logs for lumber,’ said Senghor. ‘Half are here, and every two weeks we change. Those that are left come home and those that sometimes don’t must wait for spring until the ground becomes unfrozen.’
‘Hermann, some of the Americans are fond of calling them “fresh.” Herr Weber knows this and waits for it.’
‘Even though some will wiggle their breasts and bottoms at us, Boss, and try to play us up in other ways, are we not men?’ asked Senghor, still with that grin of his.
‘And the British?’ asked Hermann, wanting to air all the linen.
‘What do you think, Boss?’
‘That they’re far more friendly.’
‘Since many of them come from slums like us?’
‘And like a bit of fun?’
This Gestapo wasn’t going to be easy, thought Senghor, his collaborator of a partner no pushover either. ‘They love to haggle, and always it is best that they think they’re getting the better of us, so we let them.’
A man of truth, was it? ‘And Madame Monnier?’
Hermann still wasn’t going to leave it.
‘The juju lady’s lead henchwoman. With her we must be very careful, Boss, so if we can, we do as asked and get her whatever she wants.’
‘Chocolate, Hermann. She has a sweet tooth.’
‘The juju lady or Madame Monnier?’
‘Both.’
‘Extra firewood,’ said someone, reaching for more sauce.
‘Wallpaper,’ offered another, thinking to help his sergeant.
‘Paper, Corporal Rivette, to light their stoves and cooking fires.’
‘Ah, oui, oui, mon sergent. For the fires.’
And for a little something else? wondered Kohler. And where, please, would they be getting it when the rest of the nation couldn’t? ‘Those golf balls,’ he said, pointing to a string bag that held a good hundred and far too many for one game unless an absolutely lousy golfer.
One had best heave a sigh. ‘The former Kommandant, Hermann. One or another would caddy for him.’
Was it safer ground, wondered Senghor, or was it more likely that one would never know with these two until it was too late? ‘As many days as possible in summer and autumn, Boss. In the spring, too, once the rains had stopped and the ground had dried a little, but he wasn’t like the new one. If he had a good day on the course, we were always given a little something.’
‘Colonel Kessler tended to spend a lot of time in the rough, Hermann, so they always kept themselves prepared.’
And don’t you dare ask where the golf balls came from!
Coffee, made from wild rose petals gathered in summer and dried before roasting, fortunately intervened and was passed round to be sweetened with Borden’s condensed milk courtesy of a Canadian Red Cross parcel.
‘The Americans distribute all parcels for the Western Allies, Hermann, except for those of the British.’
The things one had to learn. ‘Are there Canadians here?’
‘Australians, too, and others from the Dominions.’
‘But only a few of them, Boss,’ said Senghor. ‘Mostly the British internees are British but married to Frenchmen, the Frenchwomen in the Grand married to Britishers or widowed, but then there are also the British-British, like the English girls.’
As chorus girls were known in France, since they had invariably come from Britain.
‘There is also bishap, if you would prefer it, Inspector,’ said Louis. ‘A tisane of hibiscus leaves, a favourite from the homeland some of them left a good many years ago, but a local source.’
‘Brother Étienne again?’
‘But of course.’
Woodbines, Players, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, and Camels circulated. Having none to offer and having shared the meal, Hermann hauled out the partnership’s bankroll and, peeling off not one but two one-thousand-franc bills, added a further five hundred!
‘Louis would have left you a paltry fifty, if that,’ said the banker.
To all things from the Reich come all things good, was that it? ‘You’re very free with our money, Inspector.’
‘Consider it a down payment. The sergeant understands that we need their help but aren’t about to run to Weber or the Kommandant about anything incidental we might discover, since none of these boys would have killed either of those girls. You can see it as well as I can, so it’s best we ask for their help.’
‘And is that an order, Herr Hauptmann und Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter?’
‘Jawohl. Now, let’s pack up and get some sleep. We’ve an early morning ahead.’