1

THE STENCH WAS TERRIBLE, OF PISS-SOAKED wool, wet ashes and death, that sweet, foul, clinging odour of burnt flesh, excrement and human hair.

Jean-Louis St-Cyr let his gaze drift over the corpses that lay in two great mounds at what had once been the curtained doorways to the foyer. Some, too, were scattered about the charred, soaked seats that now lay in ruins under ice.

Some had tried repeatedly to force the exit doors—there were corpses there, too, lots of them—trampled again and one could see how that seething mass of terrified humanity had run to those doors and then had tried to escape through the foyer.

‘Louis, how the hell are we supposed to go about sorting this thing out?’ demanded Kohler angrily. Hermann was looking desperate and ill behind a blue polka-dot bandanna that had been soaked in cheap toilet water and disinfectant. Contrary to popular belief, many Bavarians were known to have weak stomachs, this one especially.

Concerned about him, St-Cyr nudged his partner’s arm. ‘Try not to think too much about the loss of so many, mon vieux. Try to go carefully, eh? Remember, we don’t have to pull them apart. Not us. Others.’

Louis was always saying things like that! A chief inspector of the Sûreté Nationale and a detective of long standing, he was the other half of their flying squad, such as it was and always seeming to be on the run. ‘Verdammt! It’s nearly Christmas, Louis! Giselle and Oona … they were expecting me to be at home in Paris for the holiday.’

Ah merde, no concern for his partner, and how, really, were they to begin? wondered St-Cyr, wishing he was elsewhere and looking desperately around at the carnage, telling himself that Hermann was better off if a little angry. It helped the stomach.

One couple clung in a last, desperate act of love. Ice encased everything, and the fire that had come before had removed all but scraps of clothing. Even the woman’s garter belt was gone, the elastic adding its tiny contribution to the conflagration, the wires now embedded in her thighs.

Others had cringed under the seats, covering their heads and trying to protect their faces. Still others had been trampled by their fellow human beings. Now those who had done the trampling lay atop the piles of tangled bodies, their stark, empty-eyed expressions caught and kept by death and the encasing ice.

A cinema … The Palace of Pleasure of the Beautiful Celluloid. Whoever had set the fire—and it had been set—had made certain of the carnage. Both fire doors had been padlocked, though not, he thought, by the arsonist. The cinema had been packed—two days before Christmas 1942, a Wednesday evening performance, the fire set at about 9.15 Berlin time. The City of Lyon, the German Occupation of France but not a cinema reserved for the Wehrmacht, not one of the soldatenkinos. Railway workers and their families. Humble people, little people. Loyal fans, the film a favourite of all railway workers, La Bête humaine, The Human Beast.

In the scramble to escape, 183 patrons had died, an unofficial estimate. ‘Ah, mon Dieu, Hermann, to come straight from the railway station to a thing like this!’

Icicles were everywhere—hanging from the balcony and a brass railing that had come loose under the crush. Even from the cornice of the projectionist’s booth, even from the backs and bottoms of the seats. Charred timbers showed where portions of the roof had gone. The sky above was empty and grey. Icicles hung up there—great long things that, with the fifteen degrees of frost, appeared dirty grey and savage.

There was glass underfoot from the skylights above, and plaster in chunks with laddered bits of once-painted wood whose charred alligator pattern might have been used to trace the progress of the fire had one not been told exactly where it had started.

‘Right at the head of each aisle, Louis. Simultaneously or very close to it. Gasoline, though God knows where they got it.’

‘Molotov cocktails?’ asked the Frenchman.

Kohler shook his head and nudged the bandanna farther up on a nose that had been broken several times in the course of duty and elsewhere. ‘More subtle than that. Two women were seen entering together. One carried a woven rush bag large enough for the shopping.’

‘And those two women?’

The Bavarian’s gaze didn’t waver. ‘Seen leaving in a hurry, Louis, just as the fire struck. They were the first to get out.’

‘Two women.’

‘Yes. They came in late, and the usherette found them seats at the very back, the right aisle, left side, nearest the aisle.’

‘It’s not possible. No woman would do this, Hermann, and certainly not two of them.’

‘Then talk to the usherette. See if you can get any sense out of her. The poor kid’s still so deep in shock, she couldn’t even tell me her name. I told her to go home and think about it. All the others had buggered off. She alone had stayed.’

Hermann was really upset. The faded blue eyes that could so often hold nothing but saw everything, were moist and wary. Frost tinged the strongly boned brow round the edges of its bandage—a bullet graze there from a last investigation and blood … blood everywhere, some still seeping through. Too worried to even change the dressing. Yes, yes, that last case and what it had revealed to him about the growing resistance to the Occupation. Provence and a hill village. Murder then and murder now, and no time to even take a piss. Just blitzkrieg, blitzkrieg, because that was the way the Germans wanted everything solved. No time even for Christmas and a little holiday.

‘We’ll leave the usherette for now, Hermann. The relatives will want the dead released for burial. It’s the least we can do.’

Then you take this aisle, I’ll take the right one. Meet me in front of what’s left of the stage.’

‘Look for little things. House keys, cigarette lighters, bits of jewellery, brass buttons, anything that might let us get a feel for what really happened here. Then we will know better how to proceed.’

‘Guns?’

‘Yes, guns. They were railway workers. Communists. Resistants. Perhaps the fire was an act of vengeance after all.’

‘Gestapo Lyon wanting to get even, eh?’

‘Perhaps, but then …’

Kohler snorted sarcastically. Always Louis couched things by saying Perhaps but then … mais alorsalors … And of course Gestapo Lyon could well have lit the bloody thing just for spite to nail a couple of Resistants yet would try their damnedest to blame it all on someone else!

Worried about him, St-Cyr watched his partner and friend pick his way between the seats. No row gave easy access to the far aisle, but once committed, Hermann moved deliberately, stepping over a corpse, pausing to examine something. A big man with tired, frizzy hair that was not black or brown but something in between and greying fast. A man with the heart and mind of a small-time hustler. A petty thief when need be. These days, food and everything else was in very short supply and ration tickets often unavailable to one who was not a ‘good’ Gestapo but a damned good detective. Hermann lived with two women in Paris, so was always on the look-out for things. Unfortunately there was a third back home on her father’s farm near Wasserburg, the wife. But ‘his’ Gerda was suing him for divorce, having taken up with a conscripted French labourer, and the Gestapo’s Bavarian detective was feeling betrayed by his own kind. Ah yes. Gerda’s uncle was a big shot in Munich. Gerda’s uncle had pull enough to see that the divorce went through in spite of all the laws against such a thing. Problems … there were always problems and they had only just got word of the divorce.

When a bit of roof came away, Hermann jerked his head up and froze in panic with a hand inside his overcoat, clutching the pistol in its shoulder holster.

Yes, Hermann was just not himself. The German Sixth Army was surrounded at Stalingrad. In North Africa, the Americans had landed. It was only a matter of time until the Germans packed up and left, and they both knew it.

Uneasy at the thought of their parting and what it might entail—a shoot-out perhaps, though they had become more than friends—St-Cyr went back to work. A child, a girl of six he thought, had tried to escape by worming her way under the seats. Her hair had caught fire, she had tried to get to her knees but one of the seats had held her down.

The mother’s hand was still firmly about the child’s slender wrist. She’d been racing to reach the daughter, had gone down on all fours and had scrambled between the next two rows of seats only to flatten herself as the fire had swept over them, and to reach out to the child.

The ice that encased her body had cracked. A gossamer of dirty, whitish-grey lines now made an angular web over the charred back and blackened head.

The child had been trying to reach the stage but had only got about one-quarter of the way. Had the mother seen her dive beneath the seats? Had she simply been searching madly for her daughter by the light of the flames and suddenly come upon her at the last moment?

And why, please, had the child been here at all? La Bête humaine, madame? Marital infidelity and murder? Was there no one to look after your daughter, or did you think it necessary for her to see that railwaymen were really human? That among them there could be both good and evil, just as there is in any other class or occupation? That they, too, could lust and hate with passion?

There was little left of the woman’s purse, no chance of readily determining her identity, though he knew her flesh and skin would be better preserved next to the floor and that if he turned her over, parts of her clothing might still remain.

From across the bodies and the ice-encased wreckage, Kohler secretly watched as Louis tried to rationalize the child being with the mother. He’d be ‘talking’ to them, he’d be asking questions of the mother. Louis was stocky and tough, rarely belligerent and normally the diplomat even in very tight situations. Plump and chubby in the face, with the brown ox-eyes of the French and a broad, bland brow that brooked no nonsense. The hair was thick and brown and needing a trim, the scruffy moustache wide and thick. A fisherman, a gardener, a reader of books in winter when he could get the time, but now year round since fishing was no longer allowed under the decree of June 1940. Verboten to drop a line in the Seine of a Sunday. Verboten! Gott im Himmel, what had they been thinking of in Berlin when they’d written that decree? It had baffled the Bavarian half of their partnership as much as the French, and they both had had the idea then that this lousy war could not possibly last for ever. Take away the potatoes and you create, hunger; take away a man’s right to fish and eventually he’ll begin to question why.

Against all odds, Louis and he had got on—common crime: murder, arson—oh yes, arson!—rape, extortion, kidnapping, et cetera, et cetera. None of the rough stuff—not that kind anyway. Not Gestapo brutality. Ah no. Only its witness in passing.

Decidedly uncomfortable and uneasy at the memory of a naked seventeen-year-old girl horribly tortured by the Gestapo but a few days ago in Cannes, Kohler tried to put all thought of the French Resistance out of his mind. But as he searched among the wreckage, he had the thought his two sons would die at Stalingrad and he’d never see them again. Gerda would leave him, she’d get her divorce, and there’d be no one at home to run to when this whole sad business was over. He’d be tarred Gestapo along with all the rest. God forbid that Louis should still think, as he had at first, that their partnership would have to end in one of them killing the other.

Ironically, there was a revolver lying under the ice, an old Lebel, Model 1873, a swing-out six-shooter exactly like the gun Louis still carried.

‘Ah, shit!’ swore Kohler, exhaling the words exasperatedly. ‘I forgot about his shooter and Louis didn’t remind me of it!’

As the Gestapo member of the flying squad, Kohler was to keep their weapons under German control at all times. Well, at least until the shooting started and the time for questions was over.

Swiftly Kohler sought him out again. Louis had gone back through one of the gaps in the rear wall and was now standing in what had once been the foyer. The grey light of day was louvered with shadow. Just his head and shoulders were visible beyond that tangled, horrible pile of humanity he was calmly studying. The brown felt trilby was yanked down over the brow for warmth and as a warning of determination. He’d get whoever had done this. One could read it in him in spite of his calmness.

The head and shoulders vanished and Kohler realized that Louis hadn’t wanted to be seen just then.

Merde again! ‘If we can’t trust each other, we’re done for,’ he said, muttering it to himself. With difficulty he freed the revolver and, looking about to see that he was unobserved, quickly pocketed the thing, determined to drop it in the nearest sewer.

‘There’s no sense our getting Gestapo Lyon all worked up. Hell, they’d only rip the town apart and shoot thirty or forty hostages we might need to question.’

Kohler knew that if Louis had found the revolver he, too, would have hidden it away and said nothing of it, but Louis was French and had every reason to do so, whereas his partner was …

When the revolver had disappeared, and Hermann had busied himself elsewhere, St-Cyr heaved a contented sigh. For a moment, he’d thought Hermann undecided. He was glad that they were beginning to think alike on this issue, but of course, Hermann might yet weaken and quite obviously there had been Resistants in the cinema. Railway workers were notoriously Communist, pro-Russian and therefore anti-German.

Distracting himself from such an uncomfortable thought, for things would be far from easy if the presence of the Resistance was as obvious to others, St-Cyr went back to searching the ruins. There were rings of gold and those of silver. If anything, the fire had deepened the colour of the gold wedding bands, while that of the silver had either been dulled by oxidation or swept clean by the flames. One gold wedding band had fallen and rolled ahead of its owner and he wondered about a last act of contrition. An illicit love affair? The wedding ring removed and then … then the fire and the realization that the ring would have to be put back on the finger or else …

He thought of Marianne, of how she must have removed the ring he’d given her on their wedding day. How she must have slipped it into a pocket only to guiltily put it back on when coming home late, satiated from the arms of her German lover. Yes, lover!

But Marianne was dead and so was their little son Philippe, killed by mistake! A Resistance bomb that had been meant for him. Ah yes, they had had his number—still did for that matter. They thought him a collaborator because he worked under a German, a Bavarian, and for the enemy. What else was he to have done, eh? God had frowned, and God had not thought to tell the Resistance otherwise.

With difficulty, he freed the ring and managed to force it back on the proper finger. He said to himself, Hermann was watching me just then. He has realized I’ve kept my gun and said nothing of it.

There was one corpse whose hand still clutched the clasp knife the man had used to kill those around him in his struggle to get out. The blade was a good fifteen centimetres long and not exactly what he should have been carrying around. Ah no, most certainly not.

Railwaymen! he said to himself. Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, how on earth were they to settle this business? How could they possibly hope to catch this … this maniac, this Salamander who had supposedly set the fire? Salamander, the telex from Mueller, Head of the Gestapo in Berlin, had read with all the brevity of a command from on high and all the warning too. ‘Find him before he kills too many more,’ Boemelburg had said in Paris. The Sturmbannführer Walter Boemelburg, Head of Section IV, the Gestapo in France. Hermann’s boss.

Two women, not one man, a Salamander, had been seen. It made no sense to tell them so little yet expect them not only to find out everything in the space of one or two days—would they have that much time?—but also to put a stop to the arsonist or arsonists immediately.

And how, please, had Berlin found out about it in the first place?

Back inside the cinema, Kohler came upon what must have been a priest. Only the top of a richly jewelled cross protruded from tightly clasped hands that had been roasted. The corpse was jammed between two rows of seats and on its knees facing the foyer. A chain, of many links and stones, was wrapped around the right hand, and why must that God of Louis’s make him do things like this? Gingerly he broke the encasing ice away and teased the cross free. It came quite easily, the flesh clinging a little, but unravelling the chain was more sickening. His fingers trembled. His breath was held. He knew he was on to something.

Rubies and sky-blue sapphires and diamonds … tiny fleurs-de-lis in gold … 150,000 marks? 175,000? Renaissance? Was it that old?

No ordinary priest. The Bishop of Lyon’s secretary? he wondered. A cardinal perhaps or some ambassador from the Vatican? But why wear a thing like this to a film? Surely he must have known robbery was a distinct possibility?

Had he come fearing the worst, the fire, and then knelt to pray it would not happen even as it did?

All around him were the remains of dinner pails, boots, goggles and heavy leather-and-asbestos gauntlets, indicating that some of the men had only just come off shift from the marshalling yards in Perrache, right in the centre of the city not far from here and on the end of the tongue of land that lay between the Saône and the Rhône.

Gestapo HQ Lyon was in the Hotel Terminus facing the Gare de Perrache, an uncomfortable thought. Questions … there were bound to be questions. The Resistance thing if nothing else. Verdammt!

Two women and a priest, but no ordinary cleric. A large handbag woven out of rushes. A bag for the market, though nowadays market pickings were slim unless one dealt on the black market and had things to sell or trade.

A telex from Mueller, an order from Boemelburg. Shit!

Kohler sought the seats where the two women must have sat but, of course, they were now under a pile of humanity. Surely the priest could not have been looking their way. Not at the last. But had he known of them? Could it be possible?

Pocketing the cross, he moved away, found a broken wine bottle and another dinner pail, wondered again at the avidness of the railwaymen. Clearly they’d all agreed to gather to see a favourite film, but since the film had first come out in 1938, presumably most had seen it already.

Then why the gathering? he asked himself. Such meetings could only mean trouble.

He began to search further. Nearly everywhere there was the rubbish of railwaymen or members of their families. The gun he had found weighed on his conscience and he experienced a spasm of cold panic. He saw again that girl in the cellars of the Hotel Montfleury in Cannes, saw the blood trickling from her battered lips and nose to join the swill of vomit and excrement on the floor. Dead … dead at such a tender age. She’d known nothing, hadn’t even been involved. Well, not really.

‘Hermann …’

He leapt. ‘Louis, good Gott im Himmel, what the hell do you mean by startling me like that?’

Ah mon Dieu, Hermann was really not himself! ‘Nothing, mon vieux. Nothing, eh? Forgive me. The fire marshal wants a word.’

‘Then talk to him. I’m busy.’

‘Don’t be so gruff. His German counterpart is present and speaks no French. Kommandeur Weidling requests your presence as interpreter.’

Kohler pulled down a lower eyelid and made a face behind the bandanna. ‘Doesn’t he trust you to do it accurately?’

‘Please don’t give me horseshit, Hermann. Both men are nervous and not without good reason. They are afraid this will happen again and soon.’

‘Then there really is a pattern and there have been other fires?’

‘Ah yes, a pattern.’

‘The Salamander?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Did you find anything?’

A shrug would be best. ‘Just little things. Nothing much. We’ll look again, eh? After the conference.’

‘Piss off! The Feuerschutzpolizei back home can’t know anything about this, Louis. What the hell’s he doing here?’

Again there was that massive shrug. ‘Ask Gestapo Mueller; ask Herr Weidling but proceed gently. We can use all the help we can get.’

‘A visitor from home who just happens to be a fire chief and on the scene of a major fire? The son of a bitch shouldn’t even be here, Louis, not with all those incendiaries the fucking RAF are dropping at home!’

Hermann always had to have the last word. It was best to let him so as to avoid argument, but … Ah, what the hell. ‘Then let us have a look at our surroundings first, so as to have everything in perspective. Please, I think it is important.’

Kohler’s grunt was answer enough. Picking their way past the ticket booth, they stood a moment at the entrance, gazing out across place Terreaux. Bartholdi’s four magnificent horses were caught frozen in their imaginary flight to the sea. Shrouded in ice, the Goddess of Springs and Rivers looked unfeelingly down from her chariot at the corpse of a man who had run to her in flames for help.

French police and German soldiers kept the crowd at bay behind a rope barrier. The debris of firefighting was everywhere. Pumper trucks, whose snaking hoses were now collapsed and clinging to the icy pavement, were being attended to by exhausted firemen whose disillusionment at having failed to save so many was all too evident.

The square, one of the finest in Lyon and right in the centre of the city, would normally be busy in the afternoon, even under the Occupation. Now the curious and the grieving huddled around its periphery and, in places, beneath shop awnings that had been folded out of the way.

Collectively the mood of the crowd was one of outrage and fear. They’d be blaming the authorities. They’d be whispering How could you let a thing like this happen? Why were the fire doors padlocked? It was that bastard who owned the place. He did it for the insurance. No, no, it was a sadist, a maniac. It’s going to happen again. Oh yes it is!

A murmur intruded, a disturbing puzzle for it was not coming from the crowd. Now and then the sporadic chipping of firemen’s axes broke through the hush and the murmur as the hoses were freed for coiling.

Unsettled that he could not readily find the source of the murmur, St-Cyr scanned the length of the square. The Hôtel de Ville, the city’s seventeenth-century town hall, faced on to it at the far end, with a domed clocktower rising above and behind the entrance. The Palais des Arts—the Palais Saint-Pierre—took up the whole of the opposite side of the square. Eighteenth century. All solid, well-built buildings. Staid but baroque too, and emitting that singularity of purpose so evident in the Lyonnais character. Good business and sound banking: silk and explosives, leather tanning and many other industries. A city of about 700,000, with blocks and blocks of nearly identical, shoulder-to-shoulder buildings from three to five windows wide and from four to six storeys high, as were some of these. The stone grey or buff-grey, the stucco buff-grey to pale pink. The roofs of dark grey slate or weathered orange tile, the chimneys far more solid than those of Paris and of brownish-yellow brick with chimneypots that were rarely if ever canted because the people here would have seen to them.

Mansard roofs with small attic windows and tiny one-or two-room garrets for servants, shopgirls, clerks and students were to the left and right. Below them were ornamental iron railings before tall french windows behind which most of the lace or damask curtains were now parted. Drop-shutters were pulled up and out of the way or, in a few places, lowered to half-mast like weary eyelids, and in one case, closed completely as if to shut out what had happened.

‘The location is perfect, Hermann. Maximum exposure if fear of repeat fires is what was wanted.’

‘Publicity. Someone who knows the city well,’ grunted Kohler. ‘A pattern, Louis.’

‘An uncomfortable thought and an arsonist totally without conscience. But for every fire there is a reason, no matter how warped.’

‘Or sick.’

Again the murmuring intruded but now there was that unmistakable feeling of never knowing if they were being watched by the arsonist.

‘Louis, our visitor is feeding the pigeons. There, over there. Behind the fountain.’

The stiff woollen greatcoat was Prussian blue, the rubber boots, whose tops were folded down, were well used and black, of pre-war vintage. Little more could be seen of him beyond the stallions with their flailing hooves and wild-eyed muzzles, but the murmur increased and became more excited. The black leather gloves had been removed and stuffed into a pocket. The left hand held a torn loaf of white bread—white, no less and seldom seen on the streets these days!—while the fingers of the right hand ripped off bits and tossed them to the pigeons, his little friends.

‘Does he keep doves at home?’ hazarded Kohler, baffled that, in the face of such a catastrophe and hunger among the civilian population, anyone could be crass enough to unthinkingly undertake such a sentimental task.

‘Maybe he’s homesick,’ offered the Sûreté.

‘Maybe he wants to show you French exactly how unimportant you are!’

Such inflammatory statements from Hermann were best ignored but why should they be? ‘Is it that he has seen it all so many times before, Inspector, or is it that he needs to find release from the horror in such a simple task?’

Kohler grinned at Louis’s use of ‘Inspector’. The Frog was one up on him in rank and always pulling it. ‘Hey, Chief, cut the crap. He’s budgeting the crumbs. He’s making sure that the weak and not-so-weak get their fair share but like all good Nazis he admires the brave and the strong. See how he flicks the extra bits down at his boots as a reward.’

It was St-Cyr’s turn to grin. ‘You’re learning, mon ami. Being stuck with me is good for you. Let’s hear what he has to say.’

‘Let’s ask him exactly why the fuck he’s here and what he intends to do about it!’

The grunt of acknowledgement from the fire chief was terse, the bread summarily ripped into four large chunks and thrown among the pigeons so as to equalize the fight. ‘Leiter Weidling at your service, Herr Kohler. Lübeck, Heidelberg and Köln. This one’s done it all before. Same technique, same pattern. Gasoline poured on the floor to run under the seats and around the shoes and boots of the unsuspecting. Then across the entrances to the foyer or across the staircase. Then the match or cigarette lighter.’

‘But … but the usherette has said there were two women …?’ began St-Cyr in German that was far from rusty.

Unimpressed that a Frenchman could speak his native tongue, Weidling fastidiously brushed crumbs from thick, strong fingers before pulling on his gloves. Again he spoke only to Hermann. ‘Lübeck first, in late May of 1938. A cinema in the student quarter near the university.’

The blue eyes were lifeless in that rosy, apple-cheeked countenance. A man of sixty or sixty-five, a father probably and a grandfather. The lips were thin.

‘Heidelberg in early July of the same year, a crowded lecture hall, a Party meeting. The first fire killed sixty-seven, the second only twenty-eight. Then Köln and a night-club in mid-August—again the same technique, again a good number—sixteen to be precise—but most escaped through the stage doors and I count the thing a failure.’

Was he really telling them everything? ‘Two women?’ asked Kohler, watching him intently.

Weidling returned the look. ‘Perhaps, but I happen to think not.’

‘And since those fires?’ hazarded the Sûreté.

Again he was ignored. ‘Nothing of a similar nature, Herr Kohler. Other arsonists, of course, but now this, yes? A student perhaps who visited the Reich in 1938 and then went home to Lyon. My people are checking into things and will send me the case files. You can read them yourself.’

A student, a citizen of Lyon …

‘Leiter Weidling is to become a professor at the Fire Protection Officers’ School in Eberswald. We are fortunate to have him with us. He’s the only fire marshal in the Reich to have been decorated three times for bravery beyond the call of duty.’

This had come in French from Lyon’s fire marshal, Julien Robichaud.

‘On holiday, is he?’ snapped Kohler in French, for that was the way one got things done quickly.

Weidling grinned, for though he hadn’t understood a word, he had understood only too well the drift of Herr Kohler’s thoughts. Hero firemen sometimes lit their own fires. ‘Here for the International Fire Marshals’ Convention and staying on a few days.’

It was Kohler’s turn to be unimpressed, but he tried hard to hide his feelings by offering precious cigarettes all round and insisting Louis take one. ‘A coffee, I think, and a glass of marc?’

Robichaud strode over to the nearest pumper truck and returned with a thermos jug, four tin cups and a bottle. ‘Emergency rations, messieurs,’ he said, gritting his teeth self-consciously. ‘It’s not a day for alcohol but …’ He gave the shrug of a man uncertain of his position and definitely worried about it. ‘But one has to have a little something, eh? to settle the stomach.’

Kohler took the bottle from him and uptilted it into his mouth, shutting his eyes in blessed relief. ‘Merci,’ he said, wiping his lips. ‘Louis?’

St-Cyr shook his head. ‘In the coffee, I think. Yes, yes, that will be sufficient.’

They were a pair, these two detectives, thought Weidling. Gestapo Leader Mueller’s telex from Berlin had said to watch them closely. Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris had been emphatic: St-Cyr was a patriot and therefore untrustworthy; Kohler a doubter of Germanic invincibility. They’d been in trouble with the SS far too many times. They had made disparaging remarks about some of its members and had held them up to ridicule.

Weidling helped himself to the bottle. The coffee was good—the real stuff—the brandy barely passable, the French fire chief nothing but a nuisance to be got rid of quickly. ‘You will need a list of all those who were in the cinema, Herr Kohler, both the victims and those who escaped.’

‘It’ll be impossible to get a complete list.’

‘Nothing is impossible. Get one. Also the employees, the night-watchman and the cleaners, the concierge if that’s what they call him, the manager and the owner and their closest relatives. Also all previous employees over the past four years. Grudge fires are not uncommon.’

Kohler grinned. ‘I thought you said it might be a student? Lübeck, wasn’t it?’

‘Or Heidelberg or Köln. Ja, ja, you will still require the lists. It’s best that way. Find out if the staff have been turning anyone away. Sex in the back rows. Some filthy Frenchman or Algerian exposing himself to women and little girls or boys. Some black or brown bastard making suggestive remarks. A woman betrayed by a husband with a lover. A Jewess. Those are always possibilities but you are correct, Herr Kohler, hero firemen could very well become ‘hero’ arsonists to advance themselves, but not this one. You will find me at the Bristol. Inquire at the desk. Get a list of the tenants too. There were apartments above the foyer and behind the balcony and projectionist’s booth.’

Brusquely he shook hands with Robichaud and made excuses about having to tidy up for dinner. ‘The wife,’ he grunted. ‘She’ll have purchased the last of her silks by now and I must examine them. Have the lists compiled, Herr Kohler. You can bring them over at dawn. Gestapo Mueller wants this solved before it happens again and wishes me to give the matter my fullest attention. Even here in France people have a right to know they are safe under our administration. Heil Hitler.’

Shit!

They watched as he strode the short distance to his car. Robichaud sucked grimly on his cheeks and held his breath in exasperation.

It was Hermann who said, ‘You have our sympathies.’

Lyon’s fire chief nodded. ‘But you have not had to introduce him at far too many banquets, monsieur, and you do not have to answer for your sins or blame yourself for letting this one happen. You see, messieurs, I was in the cinema. It was myself who turned in the alarm and unfortunately he knows of this.’

There was dead silence but only for a moment. St-Cyr took the bottle from him and cautiously filled the fire chief’s cup. ‘Two women?’ he asked, pleasantly enough.

There was a hiss. ‘Of this I am certain! I saw them vanish into a tram-car right over there.’

Right across the square beyond the fountain and obscured by it at the moment of escape, right in front of the Palais des Arts.

It was on the tip of St-Cyr’s tongue to ask, Why did you not blow your whistle and summon a gendarme to chase after them? but he let the matter rest. Obviously Robichaud had had his hands full.

Finishing his cigarette, he carefully put it out, then handed the butt to Hermann for his little tin. These days tobacco was in such short supply it was the least he could do. The crowd seemed intent on their every move. Again he cautiously looked around the square—always there was the possibility that the arsonist would hang about to watch the fun and come back again and again. Sometimes they would offer help or pitch right in unasked. Sometimes they would even turn in the alarm and make suggestions as to how the fire might have started. But not Robichaud, never him. Other things perhaps but not arson.

No one seemed out of the ordinary until St-Cyr spotted a lone girl with a bicycle. She had only just arrived and now stood uncertainly where Herr Weidling’s car had been. She had come up the rue Paul Chenavard. Her carrier basket held a cloth bag that was square and no doubt full of books. About twenty-five or-six but looking a little younger. Still a student? he wondered apprehensively, but thought not. Of medium height, with short, light brown hair and a fringe. The deep, wide-set eyes earnestly searched. The pale oval of her face was not wide or narrow but something in between. There was no lipstick or rouge that he could discern from this distance. A bookseller? he asked. A librarian? A girl in a cocoa-brown beret and long white scarf that was tied under her chin and thrown over the shoulders of a fawn-coloured double-breasted overcoat. A grey plaid skirt and dark grey woollen argyle socks that would come to her knees. Flat-heeled, brown leather walking shoes, not winter boots. Knitted beige gloves gripped the handlebars. Gloves were not so easy to knit, and he wondered if she had made them and thought that perhaps she had. Trained in those arts, then, he said. Yes, she has that capable look about her. Not beautiful, not plain. Does she keep house for someone in addition to her job? Two women …

‘Hermann, wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.’

‘She’s already turning to leave, Louis. She’s seen you looking her way, dummkopf.’

‘Damn!’

Lyon’s fire marshal said nothing but he, too, had noticed the girl. Robichaud seemed a decent enough fellow. Tough and experienced and carrying a cross no fire chief would wish to bear. A man of middle age and grey, a veteran with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour to prove it. A father? wondered St-Cyr. A man who, like most these days, worried about his pension and had gone to work under the Nazis grudgingly, no doubt, but out of necessity and to ensure that pension. We French are realists, he said sadly to himself, especially the Lyonnais.

It was Kohler who, having gathered up the cups and the thermos, returned them to the pumper truck, then led the way back into the ruins. Only the neck of the cognac bottle protruded from his already bulging overcoat pocket.

The girl with the bicycle might have a relative among the victims. Perhaps a husband she didn’t want or a former lover? he asked himself.

Crime … it brought out the worst in one. It made one see motive behind everything, even the most insignificant of things.

Yet the girl continued to haunt him as her presence would Louis. Why had she come for such a brief look? Why had she fled before their eyes?

No shred of film had escaped the fire. Funnelling flames through to its skylight, the projectionist’s booth, never roomy at the best of times, had been turned into an inferno. Bent and twisted film canisters and other rubbish were now heaped in the far corners and against that wall by the pressure from the last hoses. Only the twin projectors, once magnificent pieces of complex engineering, stood sentinel but in ruins on their jackleg pedestals whose tripod feet were securely bolted to the floor.

A lover of the cinema and a cinematographer at heart, St-Cyr ran his eyes ruefully over the control panel. Eighteen Bakelite-handled switches had operated the lights, the screen, the curtains and the sound system. Subdued lighting at the sides, please, behind torch-bearing Venuses that were no more. Spotlights on the manager if some sort of an announcement were to be made—an air-raid warning perhaps. Starlight on the ceiling. Now the full or half-moon and the shooting star. The magic of the cinema.

At once, the whole thing was there before him, that sense of power and control the projectionist must feel, that sense of boredom too, for how many films—even a masterpiece like La Bête humaine—can be seen thirty or forty times?

Picking through the canisters, he uncovered the charred remains of the projectionist’s stool and beneath it, a woman’s shoe that had survived only in its spiked heel and shank. Had someone been in the booth alleviating the boredom? There were no bodies. Presumably the projectionist and his visitor had survived. Perhaps the shoe was from an earlier time and had no bearing on the case.

Searching, he found a warped cigarette case, not expensive. With difficulty, he pried it open but there was no name. A woman’s, he said, pocketing it and the remains of the shoe.

A fountain pen was next. Had the woman come for payment? Had the projectionist been writing her a cheque? Had she forced him to do so?

All manner of possibilities came to mind, the cinematographer discarding most of them as soon as they flashed on the screen of his mind. Once the feature film had started, the projectionist would have rewound the newsreel on the other projector before placing it back in its canister. Since all newsreels these days were German and from the Propaganda Staffel, this had to be done carefully, but had the woman arrived by then? Was she sitting on the stool? No cigarette smoking would have been allowed up here but plenty broke the rule and some had suffered as a consequence. Photographic and motion picture film had a nitrate base that made it highly inflammable. Perhaps she had taken out her cigarettes and he had told her to put them away?

Those two women had come in late. The feature film had already been in progress … Had this woman been one of them? Was it too much to hope for?

A lipstick was uncovered, the thin tube still bearing traces of its fake gold plating. A cheap compact followed, its mirror gone, the thing open—dropped—had it been dropped in panic at the cry of Fire?

He thought it had, and saw her sitting on the stool, bundled in her overcoat, hat and scarf. No heat in this place—no heat anywhere these days but in the rooms of the Nazis and their collaborators. She was touching up her face, turning a cheek sideways. She was doing her lips, a corner … yes, yes. The projectionist had paused in coiling the newsreel’s leader on to the spool. He was looking at her, grinning. He knew all about her little hopes and desires. He had seen her naked many times, had heard her saying … saying …

Only the sound-track of the film came to St-Cyr along with the whirring of the fans that sucked air past the lamp to cool it. But that could not be, not now.

The door would have been closed. Yes, it had a simple hook and eye. Would Lantier and his partner have discovered the hotbox that was to keep their beloved locomotive from returning to Le Havre, thus triggering the story? Had the film progressed much further? Had Séverine kissed the husband she would later beg Lantier to kill, having first had sex with the engineer in a railway shed among the boxes of bolts and piles of oily rags?

Had the engineer betrayed his true love, La Lison, the locomotive, for that of the innocent though shrewd and calculating Séverine?

In Zola’s novel, Lantier had been born with an obsession to kill women—his cousin first. In the film, a passing train had stopped Lantier then, and later, when Séverine had asked him to kill for her to cover up the murder she and her husband had committed, the engineer had found he couldn’t. She had told him their affair was over—fini—and he had snatched up a knife and had plunged it into her throat.

La Bête humaine … the Human Beast. An obsession … three fires in 1938 in Germany, two women and now this. A Salamander … The cry of Fire.

The film had been set totally in the world of railwaymen, its scenes so vivid one could still thrill to the power of the locomotive beneath one’s feet and lean out to see the track ahead racing inevitably towards the story’s horrible conclusion.

Even the smell of hot engine oil was still with him, even that of coal dust and the stench of sulphur dioxide.

One hundred and eighty-three deaths—450 in the audience, all with separate stories of hope and desire, deceit and avarice or pain and struggle. Always there were these stories, only the more so in cases like this because the victims’ last moments had to have meaning, the substance of individual lives. That woman and her daughter; the one who sat up here but could well have escaped unscathed; the one who had frantically remembered to replace her wedding ring only to lose it as she fell under the feet of others.

The man who had murdered in his fury to escape; the one who had climbed a dry fountain, hoping its stone goddess would offer succour.

One thing was certain. The cinema was not the usual for railwaymen, its location too expensive, its seats too posh, yet they had come en masse.

Clearing away the ice from one of the portals, St-Cyr peered down into the cinema. There was no sign of Hermann, no sign of anyone but the dead, yet as sure as he was standing here, he felt there had been Resistance people in the audience. A meeting. Ah merde, was it a complication or in itself reason enough for the fire so as to kill the lot of them?

And if so, how did this business of the Salamander fit in? Mere coincidence, or was it that the arsonist or arsonists had known someone in the audience and had wanted to get rid of them no matter the cost?

A Salamander. A person or persons so elusive only a codename could be attached to them.

A directive from Berlin, and now a visiting fire chief who claimed to know all about it. merde!

Kohler nudged the door to the toilets open and shone the light over the ice-covered walls. Four men and two women had been trapped in here—locked in. Yes, verdammt! The key was still in the lock, the bolt sticking out. Out! The firemen had had to use an axe to get in.

The bodies were fully clothed. Overcoats, heavy sweaters, corduroy and twill trousers, beige paint on bare female legs instead of silk stockings, a wrist-watch that had stopped.

Two of the men had their faces crammed over the squat-holes in the floor, hoping against all odds that the sewer gas would contain enough oxygen to sustain life.

One of the women was bent double over the deep wash-basin at the far end, her head still under the faucet she clutched. Purse spilled open on the floor, pillbox hat and veil in ruins.

Another of the men had tried to cling to the tiny air vent high on the far wall but had finally had to let go and was now slumped against the corner.

The last woman and man had lain directly behind the door, trying to cover their faces with handkerchiefs.

Not liking what he’d found, Kohler fingered the lock and key in doubt. One toilet for both sexes, that was the norm, so nothing out of the ordinary there. A three-holer Turkish with trough urinal for the boys and a cracked mirror so they could comb their hair and try to watch the ladies at their peeing. But why lock the door on them? Why? Was the arsonist or arsonists so sick in the head, he or she or they could think to do a thing like that in addition to everything else?

The bodies had been untouched by the flames and lay exactly as they’d been found, except for the two behind the door. He stepped over them and nudged the door closed. He set the torch down on the floor and turned the man over, sucking in a breath as he did so.

There was a rolled-up sheaf of paper in the right hand, the grip so tight it was only with difficulty—a foot pressed down hard on the knuckles—that it was released.

Railway schedules, ah merde. Lyon to the internment camp at Besançon and on to the German border near Mulhouse. Lyon to Paris. Lyon to Tours, to Bordeaux, to Marseille and Toulon …

The locations of bridges, viaducts, tunnels and switching yards … the lines black and clear under the torch beam. A siding at Dijon had been circled with red ink; another at Mâcon. A water tower at Moulins, a coal depot at Nevers …

Switches … and more of them. The locations of flatbed cranes to lift track or wrecked locomotives and railway trucks out of the way. Verdammt! What had the bastards been planning? To blow up everything?

Were the papers to have been sent over to England?

Dragging the woman back against the door to hold it closed, he went to work. First the identity papers of every one of them, then the contents of the men’s pockets and the women’s purses.

None of the men were over the age of forty-five. The women were in their late thirties. Not young, not old, not beautiful but ordinary … Why did he have to look at them that way?

Madame Madeleine Roget of the passage Mermet in Croix Rousse, the hill between the rivers and home of the silkweavers …

Kohler yanked her head up from under the tap. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, madame? Plotting terrorism? You were a courier. Come on, answer me! You were going to take those plans to someone else. Two women would split the risk, the one going north, the other south.’

He let her head fall. He tried to get a grip on himself. Louis …? he asked. Louis, what am I supposed to do? Tell Gestapo Lyon or keep silent about it?

Behind the projectionist’s booth, and facing on to the place Terreaux, there were three flats. A corridor led across the width of the building to the now-open doorways and the narrow staircase to the street. St-Cyr hesitated. Ah nom de Dieu, there was no sense in risking life and limb, yet he had the feeling there was something he should see and asked angrily, ‘God, why must you do this to me, eh? A simple detective? Roasted children on the Eve of Christmas! Mothers straining to reach their daughters! How much more do You think a man can take?’

As was His custom, God did not answer. One of the occupants had leapt to his death. The others had either made it down the stairs or had been taken down the ladders.

Gingerly stepping on to a joist, St-Cyr began to pick his way along the corridor, turning first to the right and then to the left when things got shaky.

The middle flat had not been occupied by the man who had jumped. There was nothing, no furniture, a puzzle until he noticed the charred buckets that had once held paint or glue for wallpaper, the remains of the ladders and bags of patching plaster. Redecoration in these times of shortages? The black market for materials. He heaved an immense sigh of relief at the prospect of finding no more bodies.

When he came to the doorway on the other side of the building, he hesitated, then ran his eyes swiftly over everything, for here the fire had left a few things: toppled, high-backed armchairs that would have had lace antimacassars, the jade-green fabric scorched and then drenched by the hoses; a marble-topped table, now cracked in half, an alabaster vase and bust, both broken and on the floor. In spite of the stench, he imagined he could smell the place as it must once have been, the dust of ages, the closeness of faded linen mother or grandmother had left to an only daughter, the sharpness of camphor, wine, cheese in days past, and once-forbidden cigarette smoke. Dust filtering slowly through the sunlight that would, on those rare days, have streamed in through the windows.

Ornate, three-globed lamps on tall, thick standards of Napoleonic brass had been toppled over and smashed. Family portraits had been flung onto the floor and were now jammed into the corners behind all the rest of the debris.

The brass of a ruby-coloured chandelier had been blown right off its moorings by the pressure of the hoses.

Again that feeling of dread came to him, tightening the stomach muscles and telling him his instinct had been right. Smoke damage was everywhere. Hot … it must have been so hot.

The bed frame was of iron, the coverlet and blankets soaked through and yellowed. Only a sodden curl of dark brown hair showed. Cursing his luck, he eased the covers back and saw at once that the woman was naked. Flat on her stomach, with her arms stretched out above her head and all but hidden beneath the pillows, ah merde.

Her wrists were tied to the ironwork, her ankles too. Her hips, thighs and seat were chunky. A woman of forty-five or fifty, he thought and when he found her purse, found her name and asked, Why did he not free you?

There was a rag in her mouth, the jaws clamped so tightly they would have to be broken to free it. Breath held in outrage, St-Cyr began slowly to examine her back and buttocks for signs of a whipping.

Finding none, he asked, Did the fire interrupt things? And then, gently and aloud, ‘Who was he, Mademoiselle Aurelle? The one who jumped, or someone else? You were lonely, isn’t that right—please, I’m only guessing, of course. But … but you invited him in for a yuletide glass of marc perhaps, and a cup of that lousy acorn water everyone hates but is forced to call coffee. You were thinking of a little romance, even sex perhaps, but had planned to tell him you would have to go to the late-evening Mass.’

Terrified, she would have lain there stiff with fear, begging him not to hurt her until, having heard enough, he had stuffed the rag into her mouth to shut her up. Then had come the cry of Fire, and he had left her.

Ah nom de Dieu, such were the ways of some, but was the murder—he would have to call it that—more directly related to the fire?

There was nothing of importance in the other flat. Downstairs, there were only two flats, one much larger than the other and therefore better furnished. The owner’s? he asked himself, flicking a doubtful glance at the ceiling, still thinking of that woman. Asking again, Who was he, madame? Someone you had only just met by chance or someone you met on the stairs nearly every day?

A copper bathtub rested on a black-and-white tiled floor, the bidet and toilet in another room as usual. A Meissen clock, Louis XV armchairs with tapestry coverings … A settee in plush maroon velvet, a large canvas of a street scene now in shreds. Smoke and water damage everywhere. It was as if the pompiers had taken out their anger on the place, hammering everything in sight with the force of their hoses.

Again he thought of the woman upstairs, of how she must have tried to scream for help and strained at the ropes. She would have been only too aware of what was happening to the building.

The place Terreaux was now deep in darkness, with only the blue-washed glass of occasional streetlamps and pinpoint torches to guide the way. The black-out, of course. On November eleventh, the Wehrmacht had crossed the Demarcation Line thus ending the existence of the Unoccupied Zone and bringing with them the SS, the Gestapo and all the rest of it.

He wondered if the girl with the bicycle had come back. Suddenly the need to find her was overwhelming and he went down the stairs to the street, and quickly out across the square. Stood where she must have stood, asked, Why did you run away?

Though the crowd had thinned, there were still onlookers, their silhouettes dark and muffled in the darkness. He shone his light around. He gasped, ‘Mademoiselle …?’ She threw up a forearm to shield her eyes. For perhaps two seconds panic gripped her, then she ran with the bicycle, hopped on, even as he yelled for her to stop and ran after her.

It was no use. The ice … the ice. Ah merde! He slipped and fell heavily. Even so, the memory of her face lingered, the fear in her eyes, the tightness of her lips, the dismay at being discovered.

She had dropped something and when he saw it clearly, he said, ‘Not you, mademoiselle. Ah no, not you.’

It was the yellow work card all prostitutes must carry.

They shared a cigarette, just the two of them, in the darkness of the square beyond the fountain. ‘Louis, this student of Weidling’s, this Salamander of Gestapo Mueller—hey, where did Berlin get a code-name like that?’

It was a problem, Berlin’s knowing things they ought rightly to have shared. ‘Salamanders are slippery, Hermann. Some can change the colour of their skins so as to blend in with their surroundings.’

Kohler handed him the cigarette. ‘Stop being so evasive. You found something.’

And so did you, said St-Cyr to himself. ‘A visitor, yes. I am almost certain a woman went up to the projectionist’s booth.’

‘One of our two women?’

The cigarette was returned. ‘Perhaps, but then … Ah,’ he shrugged, ‘nothing is definite, my old one. Nothing. There was another woman, but that is a separate matter and I think the two are unrelated.’

‘What about the girl with the bicycle? Did you find anything?’

‘Me? Ah no, nothing. A student perhaps, but a teacher, I think.’ He would keep the yellow work card private for the moment. ‘And you, my friend? What did you find?’

Kohler knew he would have to say something but he need not reveal everything. ‘A Lebel. The old Model 1873. I dropped it into a sewer over there.’

Merci. I am most grateful, Hermann. The less fuss the better.’

‘Leiter Weidling wasn’t telling us everything, Louis, and neither was Robichaud.’

The cigarette had now burned down to the fingernails and could be passed only with great difficulty. ‘Lübeck, Heidelberg and Köln,’ said St-Cyr as if lost in thought and asking questions of himself. ‘The same technique, Hermann, yet I must ask why gasoline was not splashed so thoroughly on the staircases to the balcony? Was it that the arsonist, this Salamander perhaps, or one of those two women who came in late, wanted to save the other?’

‘Who was upstairs visiting the projectionist?’

‘Yes.’

‘A prostitute, Louis?’

‘Perhaps, but then perhaps not. At the moment nothing is clear except that the Resistance were here in force, Hermann. Me, I am certain of it, and that revolver you found says so.’

merde! The bastard had the nose of a ferret. ‘There was a priest, Louis, and a cross.’

‘Yes, yes, a priest,’ said the Sûreté, impatient with him for not revealing all. ‘And a girl on a bicycle, eh, Hermann?’ he taunted.

‘What about the fire doors that were locked? What about the owner?’

‘What about him indeed? Let’s find the owner and ask him.’

‘No sleep?’

‘Not tonight. Not yet anyway. Not while the Salamander, if he or she even exists, is out there, Hermann, waiting to see what we will do.’

Louis seldom had the last word but the prospect of being watched was uncomfortable and Kohler let him have it. There was also Gestapo Mueller’s interest to consider. Shit!

In silence they returned to the cinema to find Robichaud and ask him where the owner might be found. It was not far.