Ruefully the line, which stretched alongside the waiting train, advanced one footstep: bundled-up, grey travellers in all but complete darkness, colds, coughs – sneezes – and, under a dim blue wash of light, two railed walkways below a distant signboard that read in heavy black letters on white: HALT! DEMARKATIONS-LINIE, and in very polite but much smaller French, Êtes-vous en règie? Are your papers in order?
Hermann, as usual, thought it a great joke. His partner would be scrutinized, accosted, searched, perhaps even roughed up, simply because he was French and the boys on duty hated Schweinebullen more than anything else but dared not touch their own cops!
‘Relax. It’ll go easy this time. I can tell,’ confided Kohler. ‘Just act normal and don’t get hot under the collar.’
‘It’s too cold for that. It’s snowing heavily, or hadn’t you noticed?’
Emptied out of the train from Paris, Louis wasn’t happy. It was Thursday, 4 February 1943 – 2.47 a.m. Berlin Time, 1.47 the old time. Ever since 11 November last, when the Wehrmacht had moved into the South in response to massive Allied landings in North Africa, the whole of France had been occupied, yet still there was this wait, this frontier between what had since June 1940 been the zone occupée and the zone libre. Here, too, at Moulins, some fifty-five kilometres by road to the north of Vichy, the international spa that had become the capital.
‘Did you bring your vaccination certificates?’
‘And my Great War military demobilization, my ration card and tickets, residence card, carte d’identité, Sûreté ID, the letter from Gestapo Boemelburg – from your chief, not mine – authorizing the visit. My Ausweis – my laissez-passer – my last tax declaration, and yes a thousand times, my letter exempting me from three years of forced labour in your glorious Third Reich because I work in a reserved job and am considered necessary, though I cannot for the life of me understand this since no one among the higher-ups cares a fig about common crime or that hardened criminals freely walk the streets because the SS and Gestapo employ them and have given them guns!’
‘Gut. I’m glad you’ve finally got that off your chest. Now be quiet. Leave it all to me. This one won’t understand a word of French, so don’t even try it.’
‘Name?’ demanded the portly Feldwebel, a grey blob with sickly blue-washed bristles under a pulled-down cap, the greatcoat collar up and a scarf knotted tightly around the throat. Leather gloves – real leather! – thumbed the crushed fistful of carefully cared-for papers.
‘St-Cyr. Sûreté.’
‘Mein Herr, that is not complete,’ grunted the staff sergeant, his eyes straying from the torchlit identity card.
Nom de Jésus-Christ, must God prolong the torture? ‘Jean-Louis St-Cyr, Oberdetektiv der Sûreté Nationale.’
‘Age?’
‘We’ve a murder investigation in Vichy. It’s urgent we get there.’
‘It can wait.’
‘Murder never does!’
‘Easy, Louis. Just go easy.’
‘Hermann, the humiliation I am suffering after two and a half years of this sort of thing has at last frayed my nerves!’
‘Dummkopf, just give him your age.’
‘Fifty-two.’
‘Hair?’ asked the Feldwebel, still studying the card.
‘Brown.’
‘Eyes?’
‘Brown. Nose normal. Look, mein lieber General, would I attempt to legally cross the Demarcation Line between two now fully occupied zones if my nose were that of a communist, a Gypsy, a résistant – a terrorist – or even some other Rassenverfolgte, some racially undesirable person, and I knew exactly what would happen to me if caught?’
‘Nose?’
‘Normal, but broken twice – no, three times, though years ago.’
‘He was a boxer at the police academy.’
‘Hermann, who the hell asked you to interfere?’
‘Bitte, Herr Oberdetektiv St-Cyr. Diese Papiere sind nicht gültig.’
Not good … ‘Ach! was sagen sie?’ What are you saying? ‘They’re perfectly in order,’ shrilled St-Cyr.
‘Argue if you wish.’
Two corporals with unslung Schmeissers leaped to assist.
‘Hermann …’
Kohler was let through with a crash of heels, a curt salute and a, ‘Pass, Herr Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter. This one must, unfortunately, be detained.’
‘Louis, I’ll wait in the barracks.’
‘You do that. Enjoy the stove, the coffee and outlawed croissants but ask for real jam not that crap we French have had to become accustomed to!’
Oh-oh. ‘Louis, I’ll go with you. I think that’s what he wants.’
‘Gut! Mein Partner finally realizes what is required of him!’
‘I knew it all the time.’
‘You didn’t. You were simply enjoying my predicament!’
‘Then you tell me who those three are who’ve been waiting all this time for a quiet word?’
They were standing outside the barracks, standing side by side like a little row of increasingly broad-shouldered, overcoated and fedora-ed set of steps. ‘Bousquet is the middle one. The others I don’t recognize.’
‘The shorter, thinner one will reluctantly tell us who he is; the taller, bigger one will wish to remain nameless.’
French, then, and Gestapo. Occupied and Occupier, with the Préfet of France as the cement between them.
‘Things must be serious,’ confided Kohler.
‘Aren’t they always?’
Hermann had never met René Bousquet, but then the partnership didn’t move in exactly the same circles. ‘Monsieur le Secrétaire Général,’ said St-Cyr, convivially swallowing pride and extending a hand, but with a crushing lump in the throat, for this one had already become a legend.
‘Chief Inspector, and Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter Kohler, it’s good of you to have come on such short notice.’
‘And of you to have waited out here half the night,’ countered Kohler in French.
These two had a reputation. ‘We’ve been warm and you haven’t,’ chuckled Bousquet. ‘But, please, we must still stamp the feet until your suitcases have been cleared through customs. No currency you’ve agreed to pass on for friends in the north, eh?’ he quipped. ‘No letters to post?’
The pre-printed postcards, with their word gaps to fill in and words to cross out or use, were still mandatory.
‘Not even a train novel,’ snorted Kohler. ‘No British detective novels or spy thrillers. Not even any chicory. No time to get them, eh, Louis?’
A huge, illicit trade in Belgian chicory existed on the marché noir, the black market. The number one coffee substitute and better than cash! ‘Just a kilo of dried horse chestnuts,’ offered St-Cyr drolly. ‘For personal use – it’s an old Russian remedy for aching joints, Secrétaire. You boil them until soft, then mash them up before spreading the poultice on a towel and wrapping the inflicted joint. My left knee. An old wound from the Great War.’
Horse chestnuts! St-Cyr was known to have a White Russian girlfriend in Paris, a very popular chanteuse, Gabrielle Arcuri, hence the remedy! ‘Then perhaps you’ll have time for the thermal baths.’
‘Are they still open?’
‘A select few.’
Cigarettes were offered and accepted and why not, wondered Kohler, with tobacco in such short supply, and certainly Bousquet didn’t know it wasn’t Louis’s left knee but that of his partner! Only when the flame of a decently fuelled lighter was extended did the Secrétaire confide, ‘Monsieur de Fleury, Inspecteur des Finances, felt it might be useful for him to join us, since the latest victim was his mistress.’
The gloved hand was cold and stiffly formal. ‘Inspectors,’ muttered de Fleury uncomfortably, ‘whatever you wish to know from me I will gladly confide but please, you must be discreet. My wife and family … My mother …’
‘Of course,’ said St-Cyr with a dismissive wave of his cigarette. ‘Please don’t give it another thought.’
The third man, the taller one, had still not said a thing or come forward, in any way. Darkness clung to him like a second overcoat. Beneath the pulled-down snap-brim, a watchful gaze took in everything from behind rimless glasses.
Kohler shuddered inwardly. He knew that look only too well, as would Louis. It was one of ruthless assessment chilled by a total lack of conscience, and it said, Don’t even wonder who I am. Just understand that I am here.
‘Ah!’ exclaimed Bousquet. ‘Your bags have been cleared. Gentlemen, the car. We can talk en route and I will fill you in as best I can.’
‘Céline Dupuis née Armand,’ mused Louis, pausing as he always did over the victim’s name. Kohler knew his partner would be thinking of the girl’s family and of her past – he’d be letting his imagination run free, the cinematographer within him probing that name for everything he could dredge, savouring it, too, as a connoisseur would.
‘Married, but a widow as of June 1940 and three days before the Maréchal’s radio broadcast to the nation on the 17th,’ said Bousquet, who was sitting in the back of the car next to Louis, with the nameless one on his left.
‘“It is with a heavy heart, I tell you today that it is necessary to stop the fighting,”’ said St-Cyr, quoting the Maréchal and remembering the tears he, himself, had shed at the news. ‘And then on the 20th, “We shall learn our lesson from the lost battles.” What lesson, I wonder? Any children?’ he demanded harshly.
‘A daughter, age four and a half, domiciled with the victim’s parents,’ answered Bousquet – this one had had it all memorized, thought Kohler. Préfets weren’t normally good at such things. They were friends of friends in high places and had been chosen so as to keep the existing hierarchy in power, and were either reasonable or abysmal at police work and the same at what they were supposed to do.
But not Rene Bousquet, age thirty-three and the youngest secrétaire général, probably, in the past two hundred years. ‘Brilliant,’ some said; ‘Exceptional,’ others. ‘A man we can trust,’ Himmler, head of the SS and Gestapo, had enthused. ‘Our precious collaborator.’
‘Age: twenty-eight, therefore pregnant at twenty-three,’ Louis went on, knowing exactly what his partner had been thinking. ‘Was it love? I ask simply so as to know the victim better.’
‘Love,’ grunted Bousquet. ‘When word came through that her husband had been killed, she tried to join him and very nearly succeeded. Aspirins, I believe, but now they are in such short supply one never hears of similar attempts.’
‘And since then?’ asked Louis, using his sternest Sûreté voice.
‘Back to dancing. A contract to work in Vichy at the Théâtre du Casino and other places and to teach part-time at the ballet school.’
Teaching the offspring of the elite? wondered Kohler, mentally making a note of it. Everyone was smoking Gitanes, the tobacco black and strong. De Fleury was squeezed between himself and the driver, chain-smoking and nervous as hell. The road ahead wasn’t good. Visibility was down to thirty metres, if that. Snow everywhere and Ach! a Schmeisser on the floor at his feet. Had they been expecting trouble? The son of a bitch behind the wheel had half his gaze on the road and the other half on the woods and fields. ‘Want me to drive?’ he asked, implying, Would it help?
‘Georges is good at his job, Inspector,’ chuckled Bousquet knowingly. ‘When a man is so skilled, we like to leave him there but increase his wages.’
Thermoses of coffee, laced with marc, had been provided, sandwiches too, but the Delahaye was so crowded it was hard to manoeuvre.
‘Nationality: French,’ went on Louis, scanning the carte d’identité under blue-blinkered torchlight, having lowered it to his knees to help hide the light. ‘Born: 10 April 1915, Paris, Hermann. Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Finances, how old are you, please?’
The cigarette de Fleury had been smoking fell to his overcoat lap and was hastily brushed to the floor with a muted ‘Merde! Fifty-six.’
‘And twice her age, Louis,’ snorted Kohler. ‘Do all of Pétain’s top-ranking civil servants go for girls half their ages?’
Hermann, who was the same age as de Fleury, lived with two women, one of whom was twenty-two, but no matter. The Maréchal Pétain had a lifelong history of just such affairs, having married one of the women in 1920 when she was forty-three and divorced, and he had reached the less-than-tender age of sixty-four, but having also bounced her on his knee in 1881 when she’d been four years old. Un homme, then, with a long memory and utter patience. Thirty-nine years of it!
‘Inspector, could we not stick to the matter at hand?’ muttered Bousquet testily.
It’s coming now, thought Kohler, and smiled inwardly as Louis said the inevitable: ‘All things are of interest in murder, Secrétaire. The victim’s family and little daughter live at 60 rue Lhomond. That is almost halfway between the Jardin du Luxembourg and Jardin des Plantes. The house will overlook place Lucien-Herr which divides the upmarket neighbourhood of the Panthéon from that of the little shopkeepers and working-class people to the east along the rue Mouffetard and other such streets, and it implies our Madame Dupuis was well educated. Was she a good conversationalist, Monsieur de Fleury?’
‘Jésus, merde alors, Jean-Louis, can you not let me fill you in? Me, mon ami! Your secrétaire general.’
‘Please, first his answer. We need everything. It’s best my partner and I get it clear right away. The coffee is excellent, by the way, and most appreciated. Merci.’
Ah damn, thought Honoré de Fleury. ‘Céline was a very quick-witted girl – marvellously so, at times, and knowledgeable about many things. Birds – pheasants, guinea … Ah! I go on. Music …’
‘Operettas?’
‘Jean-Louis …’
‘Please, another moment.’ Birds … why had de Fleury cut himself off like that? ‘Monsieur …?’
‘Musicals, Inspector,’ snapped de Fleury. ‘Cabaret things and yes, operettas, but much, much more. Chopin, Debussy – she played the piano beautifully.’
‘At private dinner parties?’
‘Yes,’ came the defeated reply as Hermann found the Inspector of Finances another cigarette and lit it for him at a bend in the road, a tunnel through tall plane trees whose mottled bark caught the blue, slit-eyed light from the headlamps, momentarily distracting their driver.
‘Place of residence: Hâtel d’Allier, on the rue des Primevères in Vichy,’ went on Louis. ‘That’s just upstream of the Boutiron Bridge, is it not, Secrétaire?’
‘If you know, why ask?’
‘Was the ID found on her person, or was she so well known no one had to ask who she was and it was only later taken from her room or handbag, or both?’
‘In short, tell us who found her, where she was found, how she was killed, and particularly,’ demanded Kohler, ‘why the hell her body was where it was.’
‘The Hall des Sources,’ grated Bousquet with an exasperated sigh. ‘Early yesterday morning.’
‘Naked?’ demanded Hermann, not waiting for the other answers.
‘Clothed in a nightgown I had bought her, Inspector,’ confessed de Fleury. ‘White silk with a delicate décolletage of Auvergne lace.’
‘It’s winter,’ grumbled Louis. ‘You’ve not mentioned an overcoat, a. warm dress, boots, or a scarf and gloves. Therefore she was either taken to this place as found, or went there freely and then put the nightgown on, after first undressing.’
‘Inspectors … Inspectors, mon Dieu, that is why we wished to speak to you in private,’ sighed Bousquet. ‘The Hall des Sources is all but adjacent to the Hôtel du Parc. Footprints in the snow – a set clearly from her boots – suggest that Céline Dupuis was taken from the Hâtel du Parc by at least one other person. Jean-Louis, you’ve had experience at this sort of thing. In 1938, as an associate of the IKPK, you worked closely with Gestapo Boemelburg on the visit to France of King George VI and his Queen.’
‘The Blum Government were worried about an assassination, yes,’ conceded St-Cyr. ‘The Internationalen Kriminalpolizeilichen Kommission’s* Vienna office were all aflutter and no doubt the Gestapo used the visit to gain further insight into the workings of our Sûreté. But … but, Secrétaire, are you suggesting there is a plot to assassinate the Maréchal?’
Who has a bedroom and adjoining office in the Hôtel du Parc and loves the ladies! snorted Kohler inwardly. ‘And if so, please tell us why the mistress of this one was in her nightgown and knocking on that one’s door?’
‘And, please, where were the guards that normally patrol those corridors?’
These two … Why the hell had the Premier had to ask for them, why not others who would be tractable? demanded Bousquet silently. He would ignore St-Cyr’s question and tell them as little as possible. Yes, that would be best! ‘We French are no innocents when it comes to assassinations, are we? Admiral Darlan, only last Christmas Eve in Algiers. Marx Dormoy, the Popular Front’s ex-minister, on 26 July 1941, and exactly one month later, an attempt was made on Monsieur Laval himself.’
‘On 27 August,’ muttered Louis. ‘If I understand the matter correctly, Secrétaire, though out of office but still fulfilling some state functions, Monsieur Laval had felt there might be trouble and hadn’t really wanted to present the flag to the first contingent of the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme.’
French volunteers who willingly joined the Wehrmacht on the Russian Front! ‘Both he and Marcel Déat were wounded,’ said Kohler, picking up the thread. ‘Laval so seriously that a weaker man would have died.’
‘The bullet in the shoulder was removed without complications,’ confided Bousquet, ‘but the other one had lodged so closely to the heart that the chief surgeon felt it necessary to leave it and only repair what damage he could.’ This information was not well known.
‘A 6.35 millimetre and lodged an equal distance,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Pneumonia set in, and for days Monsieur Laval’s temperature hovered at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).’
These two had done their homework, so good, yes, good! thought Bousquet. ‘Our Premier and Marcel Déat revealed considerable understanding of the nation’s psyche when they begged the Maréchal to show clemency and keep the boy’s head from the breadbasket.’
The guillotine … ‘Paul Collette, age twenty-one and a former seaman from Caen who would otherwise have made a beautiful martyr,’ said Kohler flatly. ‘And now you’re telling us there’s a plot to assassinate the Maréchal Pétain.’
Out of the darkness of his little corner, the nameless one tonelessly said, ‘Our Government does not want this to happen, Kohler, and you are to see that it doesn’t.’
Scheisse! ‘Or else?’
‘Just make certain you understand that we are all treading on broken glass these days,’ grunted Bousquet. ‘The hills of the Auvergne may well be a haven to terrorists.’
‘But … but if what little you’ve told us so far is true, Secrétaire, these terrorists, on being interrupted during an attempt on the Maréchal’s life, took the girl from outside his door to silence her for fear of their being identified.’
‘That is correct – at least, it is what I suspect must have happened, and that is why Monsieur Laval has asked for you both.’
‘“Flykiller slays mistress of high-ranking Government employee,”’ quoted Kohler, remembering the telex Laval had sent to Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris. ‘Why “flies”?’
‘An assassin!’ swore Bousquet angrily. ‘Can you not listen?’
‘But … but a conclusion, Secrétaire, for which you have as yet offered no proof,’ countered Louis, deliberately baiting him.
‘Only three corpses, idiot! The first two are being kept at the morgue in spite of the pleas of relatives for their release; the latest one is just as she was found and nothing – I repeat, nothing – has been touched. Not in her room at the Hôtel d’Allier, except for her carte d’identité which I myself removed, and not at the crime scene.’
‘Good, that’s as it should be,’ said Louis. ‘But, then, perhaps before we view the victim, Monsieur de Fleury would enlighten us as to why, since she was his mistress, Madame Dupuis was knocking at the great one’s door? And on what day and at what time, please?’
‘Céline didn’t want to do it but … but I begged her to, Inspector. The Maréchal, he has a passion for beautiful young women. He’s old – oh bien sûr – but age does not necessarily make a glacier of the urges.’
‘And you were pimping for him?’ blurted Kohler, startled by the admission.
‘A small favour,’ muttered Bousquet acidly.
‘One I felt I could no longer refuse,’ de Fleury added.
‘And at what time, then, Monsieur de Fleury, was he to have had his little moment?’ asked Louis.
‘Tuesday night, at … at 9.40. I … I dropped her off outside the hotel. She … she was wearing her overcoat, scarf and beret, her gloves too. These things, they … they have not as yet been found.’
Not found. ‘Height: 170 centimetres, Hermann (five feet seven inches); hair: blonde; eyes: blue; particular signs: none; nose: straight and average – normal, if you wish. Face: oval but the side profile doesn’t really do her justice. A very handsome young woman, Monsieur de Fleury. Stunning, I should think – you do like the pretty ones, don’t you? Complexion: pale.’
St-Cyr tapped his partner on the shoulder and passed both torch and identity card to him. ‘A young widow, mon vieux. A working girl with a child to support who is no older than the one the Maréchal once bounced on his knee. Madame Pétain is known to be a very jealous and spiteful woman.’
‘Idiot, Madame Pétain is well aware of the Maréchal’s infidelités!’ spat Bousquet.
‘And you are angry with me, Secrétaire, when calmness is called for.’
‘Truncheon! Just stick to what you’ve been told to do and leave Madame Pétain out of things. The fewer who know of this the better!’
Just before St-Germain-des-Fossés they stopped at the side of the road for a piss. Kohler stood upwind of de Fleury. ‘Was she good in bed?’ he asked companionably.
‘Inspector, you’re splashing my trousers.’
‘Oh, sorry. Did she enjoy sex, seeing as she’d tried to kill herself at the loss of her husband?’
‘Salaud! How dare you?’
‘Calm down and tell me exactly how faithful a mistress was she?’
‘We were going to get married. I was going to divorce my wife when … when it became possible.’
Divorce had all but been outlawed by Vichy. ‘Yet you asked her to service another?’
‘I had to! I didn’t know she’d be killed! How could I have?’
‘Just who else knew what you were up to?’
‘Merde alors, do you not take the hint Monsieur le Secrétaire has given? Dr Ménétrel, the Maréchal’s personal physician and confidant. His personal secretary.’
‘And Ménétrel okayed the session?’
‘Céline was not some cheap putain, damn you!’ Tears fell and were agitatedly wiped away with the fingers. ‘He gave his blessing. He said it was exactly what the Maréchal needed to restore faith in himself during such a difficult time and that … that Céline would be handsomely rewarded as would … as would I myself.’
‘Then you were pimping and that’s an indictable offence, unless you followed Vichy’s latest ordinance on it to the letter. Oh don’t worry, mon fin, we’ll be discreet but if you’ve lied to me and not told us everything, you’d better watch out.’
‘She was a dancer. You must know what such women are like!’
‘And that bit about your marrying her?’
Would this Gestapo find out everything? ‘It … it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t have done so and she must have been well aware of this yet we spoke of it as if there was no impediment. A little game we played.’
How nice of him, but one must hold the door open so as to grab a breath of air. It took all types, thought Kohler, and the arrogance of top civil servants, though well known the world over, was legendary in France.
Had all of what had been felt necessary been said? wondered St-Cyr. The engine throbbed, the road climbed. Frost clung closely, snow was everywhere and darkness lay deep among the trunks and bracken.
For some time now each of them had withdrawn into private thoughts. Hermann, never one to keep still or silent unless necessary, had taken to staring out his side window but hadn’t bothered to clear the frost from it. Was he thinking of his little Giselle and his Oona, was he worrying, as he often did these days, that when the Allies invaded, as they surely must, his lady-loves would be caught up in things and blamed for sleeping with the enemy, with himself? Was he still trying to figure out a way to get them false papers and to safety in Spain or Portugal?
René Bousquet would also be on Hermann’s mind, for here, beside his partner, was the man who had met with Reinhard Heydrich and others of the SS at the Ritz in Paris, on 5 May of last year. Here was the one who had convinced Karl Albrecht Oberg, the ‘Butcher of Poland’ and Höherer SS und Polizeiführer of France, not to take over the French police but to let him handle things.
‘The Marseillais has a reputation as a practical joker, Secrétaire. He calls a tender shower of rain a tempest, a lost shirt from the laundry line an armed robbery in which the wife and daughters were strip-searched and their virtue plundered. But he has an even more significant reputation, one for vengeance. Has your suggestion of an attempted assassination been prompted at all by fear of repercussions over what the first arrondissement suffered? I ask simply because I must.’
The Vieux Port de Marseille had been a rat’s nest of steep and narrow streets, the home of prostitutes, pimps and gangsters! ‘We did what we had to do.’
A month ago, on 3 January, German security forces had raided a maison de passe, one of those seedy, walk-in hotels where prostitutes took their clients for a little moment or an hour or two and then left. Suspecting to find résistants and Wehrmacht deserters hiding out and fast asleep, there had been an exchange of fire in which several on both sides had been killed or wounded. Hitler, in a rage on hearing of it, and having at that time all but suffered the final loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, had demanded the levelling of the whole of the first arrondissement and deportation of 50,000 of its citizens to camps in the east. Bousquet and Lemoine, the regional préfet, had managed to convince Oberg that French police should do the job, and at 3 a.m. on the night of the 13th-14th, 30,000 residents, having been told they had but a few hours to vacate their homes, had moved out. Their papers were all checked, but far fewer résistants and deserters than anticipated had been arrested and the homeless citizens, for want of anything better, had been shunted off to camps at Fréjus and Compiègne, where they still resided and would for as long as it took to free the country. Then on 15 January, Wehrmacht engineers had begun to dynamite every building – tenement houses, warehouses, churches, loading docks and port machinery – and had, by the 24th, even sent 173 vessels to the bottom thus unintentionally blocking the harbour for months.
‘The Führer was appeased,’ exhaled Bousquet exasperatedly. ‘Twenty thousand were saved and the other thirty thousand kept in France and not deported.’
‘But has this event anything to do with the suspected attempt on the Maréchal’s life?’
‘Has the Grande Rafle also anything to do with it, eh? Come, come, Jean-Louis, let us get things out in the open.’
‘That, too, then.’
‘I had no choice. Too much would have been lost. We gained. In all such things there are the pluses and minuses. Be glad you don’t have to make such decisions.’
‘I am.’
Doucement, Louis, go easy, thought Kohler, alarmed at the exchange. On 16-17 July of last year Bousquet and the préfet of Paris had convinced Oberg and Heydrich that French police, under French direction, could handle things. Nine thousand Paris police had surrounded five arrondissements in the dead of night during what had since come to be known as the Great Roundup. They had then arrested 12,000 terrified men, women and children and had locked them up in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the cycling arena, for eight days without sufficient water, food or toilet facilities – Jews that had then been deported by rail in cattle trucks; the children kept in France for a little longer and then sent on as well, but not knowing where to or why they had been taken from their parents or whether they would ever see them again.
Louis and he had been away from the city at the time, thank God, but since then Louis had pieced together a record of the tragedy that he intended to pass on to the Résistance for the day of reckoning that would surely come.
‘Just do as you’ve been told, Jean-Louis,’ grunted Bousquet. ‘Don’t let your brand of patriotism interfere.’
Only one of those Paris flics had resigned and refused to take part. Only one, Kohler told himself, but, to be fair, a good many of them would have been too afraid to object. And orders were orders especially in a police force of 15,000, for that’s what Paris had. But if the Resistance had wanted a target, then why not Bousquet himself?
On the outskirts of Vichy the car was stopped at a control by armed Wehrmacht sentries, no longer by members of the Garde Mobile de Resérve, Vichy’s small paramilitary force. The latest password was demanded, as one had been since 1 July 1940 at all entrances to the town, and never mind that it was still the curfew, thought Kohler wryly. Assassination had been on the Government’s mind right from the beginning!
‘Spring brings the new growth; autumn the harvest,’ said their driver – the only words he had spoken on the whole damned trip. Had Pétain written the thing?
With a wave, they were released, and drove into the heart of the town.
Out of the cold, the damp, the blackout and the silence, and from the deeper darkness of the covered promenade that ringed the Parc des Sources, Hermann’s voice came gruffly. ‘Louis, was it right of you to have told them to leave us?’
‘Merde, Hermann. We are greeted in the small hours by a Secrétaire who doesn’t appreciate our little visit, but brings along the victim’s supposed lover, yet fails to brief us completely and tucks in a Gestapo for good measure. Does this not make you concerned?’
They had been dropped off about mid-park and on the rue Président Wilson, some distance from the Hall des Sources and the Hotel du Parc, and not at all the route the victim would have had to take. Acetylene lanterns had been provided but were, as yet, unlit.
‘All right, it smells.’
No collabo and no Pétainiste either, Louis had once been a poilu, a soldier in the Great War at Verdun and other such places, and had, like ninety-eight per cent of his fellows and most of the nation, thought fondly of the Victor of Verdun, hailing Pétain’s offer of leadership in June 1940 as a godsend to a nation in despair.
Some leader. Very quickly Louis had lost whatever respect he’d had for the Maréchal.
‘Come on,’ breathed Kohler. ‘I guess it’s this way.’
‘It is, and we walk as the curistes – those seeking the cure – walked beneath Émile Robert’s marvellous thistledown of wrought iron, which graced the Great Universal Exposition of 1890 in Paris and was moved here in 1900.’
‘I can’t see a hell of a lot of it. Too dark, I guess.’
‘Yes! But I’m trying to remember it as I first saw it when a boy of eleven going on twelve, Hermann. In the summer of 1902 Grand-mère thought she had a load of gravel in her guts and made me accompany her. My father urged me to do it, and I could not bear having him suffer her tongue any more. Of just such things are heroes made, but look at me now. Sacré! My left shoe has come apart again.’
‘I’ll reglue it for you later.’
‘That glue you bought on the marché noir won’t be worth the lies that budding horizontale told you. Just because she was young and pretty and headed for a life on the streets was no reason for you to have trusted her!’
And still bitchy about Bousquet! Glue was all but impossible to find these days; shoes only more so, unless one bought the hinged, wooden-soled ones with their cloth or ersatz leather uppers. Twenty-four million pairs of the things had been sold to date in a nation of forty million, which only showed how lousy they were!
‘Think of La Belle Époque,’ muttered Louis, mollified somewhat by his own outbursts and wanting to be calm. ‘Think of high society from 1880 until we all bid adieu to such splendour in 1914. Think of the grand hotels that were built here with their covered terraces and art nouveau ironwork and interiors, their verandas, dining rooms and atriums delicately graced by Kentia palms and other exotics. Of silk or satin gowns, jewels and sensuous perfumes, of princes, duchesses, lords and ladies – marquises, courtesans and counts.
‘Then think of the hordes who followed them, especially in the twenties and thirties, Hermann. Old maids and war widows, shopkeepers, postal clerks and accountants, lawyers too, and judges and young girls of easy virtue. Gamblers also.’
‘Think of a swollen liver, an attack of gout, an enlarged prostate or constant dose of the clap. And then think of guzzling or gargling that Quatsch, that crap! An international spa, eh?’
‘But, Inspector, opera singers did it, actors and actresses too, and artists. All such believers came here for the cocktail thérapeutique and the baths.’
‘And other things, so don’t get pious. Nom de Dieu, Louis, will you look at that!’
They had finally reached the Hall des Sources. Under torchlight, great daggers of discoloured ice hung from the rusting, green-painted frieze. Sheets of that same ice coated the tall, arched windows as a frozen signboard above the entrance spelled it out for them: FERMÉ POUR LA SAISON.
It had been left here in July 1940, and no one in the Government had seen fit to have the sign removed!
‘None of our politicals have a sense of humour, Hermann. This, too, we’d best remember.’
In addition to the Government of France, thirty-two embassies and legations had moved to Vichy in those first few months of the Occupation. Now, of course, there would be far fewer of them – cold and empty villas as of last November, but still there would be the Italians and Japanese, the Hungarians and Rumanians, the Finns too, and neutrals like the Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, thought Kohler. Could Ausweise for Giselle and Oona be prised out of the Swiss?
‘Don’t even consider it,’ mused St-Cyr, having easily read his partner’s mind after the two and a half years they’d spent constantly in each other’s company. ‘It’s far too expensive a country for you. Concentrate on the murder. All things in their proper place and time. Besides, the Swiss are turning them back.’
Freeing the tall iron-and-glass doors brought only grunts and curses and then, at a sudden yank, the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphide and that of warm, wet mould.
Water dripped. Effervescing carbon dioxide hissed as it escaped, but from where? wondered Kohler. Pipes banged in protest as if throttled.
Through the pitch darkness of the hall, the beams of their torches began to pick things out. Pollarded lime trees that were dead – those palms Louis had mentioned were coated with so much ice their blade-like foliage had collapsed about the glazed jardinières of another time.
The hall must be huge and would have held five hundred or a thousand at a time. Breath billowed, and as they looked at each other and then shone their torches around and upwards, they found that the beams of light would penetrate only so far. The air was filled with vapour, grey and layered, especially when not stirred by footsteps.
‘Four sources have their buvettes here, Hermann. Their pump kiosks. La Grande Grille, which issues at a temperature of 42.4 degrees Celsius (108.3 degrees Fahrenheit); Chomel, at 43 degrees Celsius; Lucas, at 28.1 degrees Celsius; and Parc, at 22.5 degrees Celsius (72.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Although Grand-mere should have warned me, she said, “Why not try them all, mon petit?” I foolishly did and spent the next twenty-four hours locating the toilets, something she probably had had in mind for me to do in any case.’
By just such little exchanges do we keep ourselves sane, thought Kohler, dreading what they’d find. The throat probably hacked open but not before the breasts had been slashed, the womb repeatedly stabbed, the buttocks and … Jésus, Jésus, how much more of this could he stand? ‘Chomel, Louis. There it is. Bousquet said we’d find her behind that counter.’
Though seen under the scanning beams of their torches, the Buvette du Chomel was much as St-Cyr first remembered it. A marvellously curved and ample art nouveau, glass-topped table, perhaps five metres by three, whose ringed ridges, atop the glass, had given the image of water flowing outwards from its source in a curved, eight-sided, glass-and-gilded, beehived dome with interlaced crown. Both the table and its source had been suffused with the soft glow of electric lights, as if shining upwards from deep underground.
Wicker-clad bottles, vacuum flasks, jugs and measured glass cups with handles were still much in evidence. Had those in their hundreds who had come to take the waters, and those who had served them from behind the enclosing counter, simply departed in haste?
‘Take a little stroll, Hermann. Look for things Bousquet and whoever first found her will not have seen.’
‘I’m okay. Really I am.’
‘You’re not and you know it!’ Hermann had seen too much of death – at Verdun on 21 February 1916 when 850 German artillery pieces had suddenly opened up at dawn in a sheet of flame, his battery among them, and the flash of thunder had been heard 150 kilometres away. Death then, and later. Death, too, as a detective in the back alleys and streets of Munich, then Berlin, then Paris. Ah yes, Paris.
Céline Dupuis was but a short distance from one of the gaps in the counter. She was lying on her back, but the hips and legs were turned towards her left and that arm was stretched well above her head, as though, in her final spasm, she had sought to pull herself away from her assailant.
The coat of the nightgown was unfastened, the bloodstained décolletage of antique lace clasped instinctively by a right hand that had then flattened itself and now hid the wound.
The blue eyes, their lashes long and false, were wide open and she was staring up into the light of the lantern Hermann now stubbornly held over her.
A black velvet choker encircled the slender neck; the face was not the classic oval but long and thin, the cheeks pinched even in repose, the painted lips parted, the blonde hair askew and of more than shoulder length.
‘Caught between the dispensing bar and the table, Louis, but did someone pin her arms from behind as the bastard knifed her? That is a knifing. I’m certain of it.’
‘But why, then, does she reach that way?’
Louis saw so much more than he did. Always he was better at it. Well, nearly so. And always one had to tone oneself up when working with him. He demanded that, but silently.
Beneath the nightgown she wore a teddy of black lace, black garters too, and black lisle stockings that reached to mid-thigh from the tops of tightly fitting, well-polished black riding boots.
‘Greasepaint, heavy lipstick, mascara and the eyelashes,’ grunted Kohler. ‘Did she come straight from the club or theatre? If so, that “lover” of hers forgot to tell us.’
‘Was she told by de Fleury to throw the nightgown on over her costume because they were late, or is this what was wanted?’
Two costumes. The first revealing the bad girl, the second for bed. ‘Did he have the nightgown with him, or did she have it in her dressing room, wherever that is?’
Questions … there were always those. ‘Leave me with her now, Hermann. Please. I’ll be sure to tell you what you need to know.’
‘Okay, Chief, she’s all yours.’
Hermann could be heard vomiting. He’d be thinking of the victim’s daughter, an orphan now. He’d be wondering if he’d have to be the one to tell her what had happened.
He’d be thinking of the grandparents, too. Would they put the child into a convent school as a boarder or do the proper thing and watch over her day and night?
He’d be wondering if Giselle and Oona could help out. He was like that.
‘Dead certainly for more than twenty-four hours,’ sang out St-Cyr. ‘Probably at about 10 p.m. Tuesday evening but the coroner can, perhaps, elaborate. A knife, I think, but must …’
‘That goddamned tap above her feet is dripping, idiot! It’s the only one in this buvette that is, so her killer must have cracked it open to wash off his hands and the knife.’
Looking like death itself in a greatcoat, Hermann held up the spluttering lantern. A Fritz-haired* giant under a battered grey fedora, with sagging pouches beneath pale blue eyes that seldom revealed emotion but were now filled with tears – those of rage at what he had to face; those, too, of loss. ‘Easy, mon vieux,’ breathed St-Cyr, deeply concerned about him. Too much Benzedrine to keep him going, too little sleep, alcohol whenever he could get it and tobacco!
The stormtrooper-like lower jaw and cheeks that needed a shave carried shrapnel scars from that other war, the brow the fresh scar of a recent bullet graze, and, from the left eye to the chin, the duelling scar of a rawhide whip the SS had used on him early last December for his insisting on the truth. Another case.
‘Here, have one of these,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Our Secrétaire was so worried he forgot to take the packet back.’
The big, raw-boned hands that had defused booby-traps and 500-kilo bombs shook as the lighter was lit. Disloyal, a lousy Gestapo to his confrères and a lampooner of the Führer and of Nazi doctrines, Hermann had become a citizen of the world long before Paris had polished him.
‘A cabaret dancer, Louis. Painted fingernails, good, nice legs – was she playing at being in the seedy nightclubs of Berlin in the twenties and about to do a striptease for the Maréchal?’
‘Or was she first to have sung for him, since he’s known to love operettas and other such simple pleasures?’
‘“Patrie. Suivez-moi! Gardez votre confiance en la France éternelle,”’ quoted Kohler, imitating the high, reedy voice of Pétain. Follow me. Keep your confidence in eternal France.
‘“Think upon these maxims: Pleasure lowers, joy elevates; pleasure weakens, joy gives strength.” But was she to have given him pleasure, Hermann, or joy?’
‘We’ll have to ask him.’
‘Or Dr Ménétrel who, unless I’m mistaken, initiated the little visit and put our Inspecteur des Finances in such a spot that his pension was threatened and he found he couldn’t refuse.’
Ménétrel vetted nearly everything the Maréchal did or said, and thus wielded enormous power. ‘Or once did,’ snorted Kohler, ‘seeing as Vichy no longer has the zone libre to govern, no longer a navy, an Army of the Armistice, her African colonies or anything else but this town and the day-to-day civil service stuff.’
‘And France is now united, those in the zone occupée no longer envying those in the zone libre.’
The north and the south. ‘And no longer believing in the Maréchal. Her fingers really are those of a piano player, Louis. She even wears her wedding ring like a good girl should, even though a widow.’
‘I’m going to have to move her hand, Hermann.’
‘The lace of the nightgown will only hide the wound, that of the teddy too.’
‘Bear with me. Turn away if need be.’
Overly loud in the imagination, the breaking of rigor’s stiffness at the wrist and elbow would sicken Hermann. ‘There,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Forgive me, madame, but it was necessary. Hermann, have a look at these.’
Two parallel scars marred the right wrist. ‘Not aspirins, then,’ grunted Kohler, ‘and Bousquet must have known it. There are ashes, too, Louis, from a cigar, I think, though can’t be sure. Spilled down her front either before she was stabbed or during the killing. Either at the theatre or club, then, or here.’
Good for Hermann. As they fell, cigar ashes tended to smear more than cigarette ashes. There was usually more of them, too, and they were softer, sootier and greyer, especially so these days when cigarettes could be made of almost anything and cigars were all but unheard of.
Taking tweezers from a jacket pocket, Louis teased away the bloodstained severed threads. Patiently the battered brown fedora was removed to let the light shine more fully on her, then he rocked back on his heels.
‘A knife, of course,’ he said. ‘Straight in and upwards with maximum force, the haft then lifted hard to make certain of it.’
Skin was elastic; the wound must be wider at the top than a simple entry and retrieval would leave. But merde, how could he remain so calm? wondered Kohler. No feelings of revulsion and loss – that horrible gut-sick emptiness – only a totally absorbed curiosity. A need to know.
‘The blade was probably no more than one and a half centimetres at its widest, Hermann. A single cutting edge. She can’t have moved afterwards, must have been stopped by the shock of it. Our killer knew exactly what to do. Madame Dupuis could well have lived for hours had the haft not been lifted while the blade was still deeply in her.’
‘There’s not a lot of blood.’
‘Precisely!’
‘Therefore the sac that encloses the heart …’
‘The pericardium has been flooded.’
‘Putting her into shock and stopping the heart.’
‘We’ll want Laloux, Hermann. As an ardent socialist with an unbridled tongue, he’ll have been dismissed, but you will tell Bousquet our Félix is the only one who can be trusted to be discreet.’
The coroner. She’d voided herself, poor thing, and would probably have been ashamed of it.
‘Leave me with her now, Hermann. I can’t be in two places at once and need your eyes elsewhere.’
Louis would ‘talk’ to her. That Sûreté with the pugilist’s nose, bushy brown moustache, brown ox-eyes and broad brow, that somewhat portly partner of his in the open, shabby brown overcoat would be gentle, so gentle.
‘One earring is missing,’ he muttered, not looking up but arching the thatch of his eyebrows.
Hermann had already gone in search of it.
Beyond the circular stand-up bar of white marble, with its geometric lines and patterns in black, the stonework of the Buvette de la Grande Grille climbed into the fog.
Kohler shone the torch upwards. Four cherubs, two facing outwards, two inwards, held a flowering platform on which stood and stretched the statue of a naked girl of eighteen or so. Beautiful, graceful – athletic – the absolute picture of health, the left arm crooked above her head, the right arm bent at the waist, the thighs slender, the buttocks perfect.
Stone faces – two male, two female and mature – gazed benevolently out from around the base of this heap of pulchritude.
He shone the torch behind the bar and over the floor. Had Céline Dupuis been able to break free? he wondered. Had she tried to hide where he was now standing? Was that when she had removed the earring or simply lost it? Her left lobe hadn’t been torn, so robbery couldn’t have been the motive, could it? Her killer would have taken the remaining one unless interrupted.
Again he looked towards the Buvette de Chomel. Louis had put the lantern on the bar and had taken off his overcoat and scarf, but was nowhere in sight, was distant across a floor whose bluntly triangular pieces of dark grey stone, each of about five centimetres in length by half that in width, provided thousands of shallow hollows. Enough and more to hide an earring if thrown.
But why thrown? Fear of being discovered wearing them? Then why have them on if visiting the Maréchal?
Round brilliants – Jagers, or had they been Top Cape or Cape? – but worth plenty in any case.
Two stones each, the one of about two and a half carats, the other much smaller – and linked to the larger diamond by a tiny loop of gold.
But why remove it? And where, exactly, had the Maréchal’s bodyguards been when all of this was happening?
Finding each tap, he felt the subterranean warmth, saw one dripping here, too, and heard the escape of effervescing bicarbonate of soda and hydrogen sulphide: 42.4 degrees Celsius, Louis had said.
In a nation where warm water was rarely if ever seen, used or felt, Kohler longed for a good soak. It would ease that right shoulder he had failed to tell Louis about, it would ease the knee those ‘horse chestnuts’ had really been for.
‘I should have told him about the shoulder. He depends on me. He says I’m his “alter ego”, whatever that is.’
Ashes had fallen on the counter, grey and soft against the polished stone. When he touched them, they smeared and he knew the girl had hidden here and then had run.
To where? he asked. Her boots would have sounded harshly on a floor that was warm in places, due to the pipes that passed beneath it.
‘Louis, she got away from him,’ he called out, his voice muffled by the fog and the distance.
‘Track her, Hermann. The other earring has been loosened. Its disc has almost been unscrewed.’
The right earlobe was cold, the skin soft. Having gone behind her, and now kneeling near her head, St-Cyr gingerly turned the disc through the last of the threads.
Gently pulling on the larger diamond, he felt the post slip free of her ear. ‘There,’ he said and sighed, asking, as he held the earring to the light, ‘Were you greatly troubled by having worn them, madame?’
Cartier’s were at 23 place Vendôme in Paris, Van Cleef and Arpels at number 22, Chaumet at number 12. ‘But Boucheron has been at number 20 since 1893 and is the favourite of the beau monde, and these, I am all but certain, came from their house. They would easily fetch 350,000 francs, or about £1,750 at the official rate, or 7,000 American dollars, but at least twice those amounts on the Black Bourse. Were you wearing someone’s freedom? I ask simply because I must. Several do try to buy their way to Switzerland and other such places.’
If she thought anything of it, she didn’t let on and this made him sigh more heavily and chide, ‘You must trust me, madame. My partner and I will see that your daughter receives them, have no fear.
‘A young man?’ he suddenly asked, gazing down at her, she staring up at him. ‘Not Honoré de Fleury, madame, but someone in the Resistance. Were you thinking of making the Maréchal a present of them in return for allowing that young man to escape and is this why you felt it best to remove them when threatened?’
Moisture seemed to well up in her eyes, brightening their blue under the lantern light. Her lips seemed to draw in a breath, her wounded chest to rise.
He would have to tell her what he knew of the diamonds. ‘Blancs exceptionnels, madame. Dancers don’t wear such things when on stage – they would only be lost, n’est-ce pas? – so you must have put them on before you left your dressing room and Monsieur de Fleury must have seen them.
‘Unless, of course, you put them on after he had let you out of his car.
‘After, I think, because that one, if he’d given them to you, would not have wanted us to find them on you. They’re from the Belle Époque, aren’t they, and were doubtless someone’s mother’s or grandmother’s.’
She couldn’t smile but would have wanted to softly, he felt, and when he took her by the left wrist, he knew she wouldn’t have minded his running a thumb over its scars. So many young women had lost their men during the Defeat, either to the grave or to POW camps in the Reich where one and a half million of them still languished in spite of all promises to repatriate them.
The scars indicated the wounds had been deep and decisive. As with the other wrist, they’d been carefully stitched so as to lessen their visibility but still she’d camouflaged them with a thin smear of greasepaint and a dusting of powder. ‘You wanted to die in 1940, but now wanted very much to live. Had you found another lover, and I don’t mean de Fleury?’
Her hair had been deliberately stiffened so as to accentuate the scraggly look of a loose woman. Bending closely, St-Cyr smelled it. ‘Inconclusive,’ he said, leaning back but still fingering it. ‘Was it Dr Ménétrel who set this whole thing up and excused the guards from their duty? Come, come, madame, Monsieur de Fleury was only the go-between, the procurer, the standby, the pimp.’
Would she really have gone to bed with the Maréchal? Pétain certainly did have a legendary reputation as a tombeur de femmes, a Casanova. While engaged to his present and only wife, that moralizing hypocrite had carried on a torrid affair with Germaine Lubin, aged twenty-nine and singer to the troops. Madame Lubin was to have been his ‘war godmother’ but, unlike so many of his lovers, had apparently been reluctant to leave her husband.
‘“What I love best is infantry and making love,”’ sighed St-Cyr, quoting him. ‘And you, I think, madame, went to him under duress but hoping perhaps to exact a promise. A little something over and above the “reward” Dr Ménétrel had so generously promised you and Monsieur de Fleury? Or were you even aware of that little arrangement?’
Vichy was a nest of vipers – the whole nation knew of this, rumour building on rumour in an age rampant with them. Ménétrel, along with Premier Laval, was known as an éminence grise, a grey eminence who was responsible for many of the Maréchal’s mistakes and for a lot of other things.
‘But he would not have spoken to you directly about this liaison with Pétain. Everything would have been done through Monsieur de Fleury and if asked, I’m sure the doctor would disclaim all knowledge of you. After all, he’s a family man with a wife and three children.’
There was perfume but far too much time had elapsed since it had been applied. ‘Expensive, though,’ he sighed, leaning back again to gaze at her, the cameras of the mind searching out each detail. The way the killer must have yanked her nightgown open – a broken tie-string – the way the black lace showed through the white but also revealed her skin. The grey smear of the cigar ashes, the left arm stretched out above her head.
It had to be asked. ‘Why, really, did you have to die? Why here of all places? And please, madame, though my partner wants to be convinced that your killer was a man, I still require further information.
‘Hermann, have you found it yet?’ he called out from behind the bar.
‘NO!’
No … No … came the echoes.
‘He will, madame, if it’s here. He’s like that.’
Moving the right hand back to where it had covered the wound, St-Cyr again went over the corpse. She’d been trapped at the last but could have retreated, yet hadn’t taken more than a backward step or two. The killer had come in through the gap in the bar, had grabbed her by the nightgown’s coat and then an arm. There’d be bruises from the fingers, scratches perhaps. Something … They had to have something definite. The cigar ashes? he asked, but these could have been left on purpose to mislead them. Look, damn you, he said to himself. Do as Hermann would.
The floor was bare. Going down on his hands and knees again, he gently lifted the looseness of the nightgown away and ran a hand as far in under her as possible. ‘Nothing … There is nothing.’ He was certain of it.
Only when he got to her head did he find anything. It was buried well beneath her hair.
‘Ah grâce à Dieu, madame,’ he sighed but was surprised and disturbed to see it was the back of a small separable cufflink. Rather common. Not of silver or gold but of tin-plated steel. Punched, pressed, the diameter all but that of the larger diamond, the post shaped like an inverted eggcup so that the eyelet of the cuff would be kept easily open as the cufflink’s head was pressed into place. Mother-of-pearl, probably. Flat and cheap and like so many, many thousands.
It could simply have been lying on the floor and could well mean nothing. The girls and women who had once dispensed the waters here had all worn grey-blue maid’s uniforms whose cufflinks, if not buttons, could well have been the same.
But had Céline Dupuis caught at a woman’s arm and inadvertently freed the cufflink, and, if so, where was the other half?
And wouldn’t that woman have worn an overcoat, which would have got in the way, unless … unless, of course, this had also been left elsewhere as it would have been with … Ah merde, had there been blood on that blouse, had it been dumped with her …
‘The victim’s overcoat, Hermann. We have to find it. Please, there may not be time. It’s urgent.’
‘Then go!’ sang out Kohler. ‘I’ll join you when I’ve finished.’
‘I’ll leave you my lantern.’
‘You do that.’
‘The Hôtel du Parc, third floor. Perhaps a maid’s closet,’ said St-Cyr.
‘Don’t forget Ménétrel’s office is also on that floor.’
Floor … Floor … The echoes died and Louis was gone from him. Gone, thought Kohler. Merde, where would this affair lead them? Into the arms of the Gestapo, the Garde Mobile, the Milice or the Resistance?
Laval had wanted Louis and him to handle the investigation; Bousquet hadn’t and had been upset enough at their arrival to meet them well outside Vichy.
The Buvette Lucas was near a far corner of the Hall and when he held his lantern high, Kohler saw its light reflecting from the tall, arched windows. A simple railing of art nouveau wrought iron had separated the grilled floor and sources from the curistes, the long oval of the buvette being perhaps seven metres by four across. Again there were the hanging cups, jugs and vacuum flasks, but here two eight-sided, carved stone fountains would spill the elixir into shallow basins that encircled them and above each of these basins there were taps.
Square holes made a complete cross-hatching over the floor, a grillework that brought only dismay, for if she’d thrown the earring in there, he had little hope of finding it.
Hanging the lantern from the railing, Kohler set to work. Distances were so hard to gauge here, sounds were too flat and muted. Had she really come this way? Had she even hidden behind either of those fountains?
Ivy had at one time spilled from them to trail to the basins. The leaves were brown, the basins dry. No taps dripped. Whitish encrustations of bicarbonate of soda caught the torchlight. Again there were cigar ashes, again that sense of her having knelt or crouched and then slipped away.
Absolutely terrified and yet concerned enough about her earrings to have tried to remove them both.
Through long use and much rinsing some of the glass cups had become frosted. Sip thirty cubic centimetres twice daily, monsieur. Morning and evening before eating. Gargle if you wish, but please use the gargle-atorium or whatever they called it!
‘Come on,’ breathed Kohler impatiently. ‘Lead me to it, madame.’
The earring was in one of the hanging cups – not near any of the gaps in the railing but midway between two of them. She’d not quite had time to remove the other one but must have stood here in the pitch darkness feverishly trying to do so.
Outside the Hall, he found where Vichy’s flics had encircled sets of footprints with marking string. A little snow had blown over them, but one set had probably been made by her boots. And, yes, the others were not nearly so clear but held suggestions of that hinged gap, the curse of all wooden-soled shoes, since it often trapped clay and small stones and the wearer then had constantly to tap them or flex the hinge. The snow, too, would build up in the gap, forming ice.
Those shoes made sounds that weren’t at all like those of leather-soled ones. A harsh clack, clack, which she would have heard very clearly from that floor in there.
A dancer, a singer and piano player – a good conversationalist at private dinner parties. Quite knowledgeable about many things. Birds, de Fleury had said, and then had cut himself off before revealing too much.
A working mother, a young widow. At least two sets of footprints but was the second set that of a man?
Getting down on his hands and knees – gasping in pain as his left knee objected – Kohler blew the soft snow from the prints. Only the forward halves of the wooden soles were clear, but they were larger than the toes of the boots. ‘A man’s,’ he said and looked for the scratches and gouges all such soles would bear.
There was a ridge of snow that indicated a deep gouge in the right sole. The thing was about four centimetres in length and parallel with the long axis of the print, so at some time their owner must have struck that foot against something sharp and it had cut the gouge.
Sabots or leather boots would be worn on the farms and in the hills. These prints were from town shoes and, yes, they led from the Hôtel du Parc at a quick pace.
All the others that had been enclosed by the string were older, he felt – the day-to-day traffic probably and not involved. There’d been only the two of them, then, the killer and his victim.
Forcing himself to return to the body, Kohler shone the torch over the soles of her boots and then ran an explorative thumb over the scratches and cleats. At least the local gendarmes had got those prints right.
She hadn’t begun to stink as corpses soon do – the cold weather had retarded that – but when he looked along the length of her, he saw so many other corpses that he, too, asked, ‘Why you, why here, when the bloody place should have been locked?’
Louis wouldn’t have run off like that had he not realized something significant. ‘Urgent,’ he had said. ‘It’s urgent.’
But had it really been an attempt to assassinate the Maréchal or had the killing been for some other and totally unrelated reason?
Crossing the rue du Parc at a run, St-Cyr made for the main entrance of the hotel, which faced on to that street. He was following in Céline Dupuis’s footsteps, he told himself, but at least up until 11 November of last year neither she nor he or anyone else could ever have gotten so close to the hotel without having first passed through the iron-fisted cordon of the Garde Mobile.
Now they were, apparently, no longer in evidence. Perhaps Pétain and the Germans were still discussing whose responsibility it was. Perhaps the fifteen degrees of frost at this hour had simply kept them indoors. ‘But had a window of opportunity been made available?’ he demanded, not liking the thought as he pushed through and into the lobby, was challenged, shrieked at – vos papiers! – and hit; struck hard across the brow with the flat of a revolver.
Slumped against the wall, he found himself sitting on a cold stone floor. Blood had welled up above his left eye and was trickling down to blind it. Blinking, he gingerly explored the parted skin and rapidly swelling goose egg, tried to clear his head. The victim’s overcoat … must find her coat, he warned himself. The killer may have left her blouse with it.
‘Henri-Claude Ferbrave,’ he said, tasting blood – his own blood! – and looking up at his assailant. ‘Age thirty-two. Former altar boy of the Saint-Sulpice, and between June 1936 and the call-up of ’39, a key member of the Parti Populaire Français’s “riot guard”. Accused of killing an obstreperous socialist with a wooden club during a noisy intercalation at the March 1937 gathering of the PPF when one hundred and thirty thousand of the faithful were crowded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver to hear your leader, but released for lack of reliable witnesses. Being one of Doriot’s former toughs won’t help you, mon fin, nor will being one of the Maréchal’s bodyguards. You are under arrest for assaulting a police officer. Please put that gun down before I take it from you.’
‘Why not relax, since we have to work together?’
‘Never! Ahh … my forehead, you salaud!’
‘Some ice and a few stitches will help.’
‘And there’s a doctor in the house, isn’t there?’
‘It’s only five-thirty. Ménétrel doesn’t usually show up for breakfast until after seven.’
‘And I’m to bleed to death for having reached only for those papers you demanded?’ Hermann … where the hell was Hermann? They had to find her overcoat, they had to …
‘Messieurs, I … I have some sticking plasters in my case. Perhaps …’
Again the detective blinked to clear his eye. She must try to smile softly and hope he wouldn’t notice she’d been crying, thought Inès. She must forget everything else and put him at ease. ‘My name is Mademoiselle Charpentier, Inspector. From Paris to … to see the Maréchal.’
‘She’s from the Musée Grévin,’ snorted Ferbrave, not bothering to look behind himself and across the lobby to where the girl sat in her overcoat, scarf and cloche on the edge of a chair. ‘A sculptress whose train arrived last night.’
‘I spent the intervening hours in the station,’ confessed Inés, ‘until … until the curfew had ended.’
At 5 a.m. ‘Your sticking plasters, please, Mademoiselle Charpentier. It’s most kind of you to have offered them.’
Had the Inspector deliberately repeated her name to let her know he wouldn’t forget it? she wondered. Four others of the Garde hung about, all with machine pistols – Bergmanns and Schmeissers. All in their disgusting black uniforms with brown shirts, black ties, black berets and black leather, three-quarter-length coats. Arrogant smart-asses all of them and cruel. Cruel!
The girl was gentle but unsettled, thought St-Cyr. Several tissues sopped up the excess blood. Some water was called for, a little brandy. More tissues were needed to quickly dry the cut, then there came the sting of the iodine she had taken from her case. ‘It’s necessary,’ she said, the accent clearly from the quartier Sorbonne and the Pantheon but with suppressed overtones of the rue Mouffetard also.
On her knees beside him, and still wearing the fawn-coloured, camel’s hair overcoat with the big lapels and deer-horn buttons of the thirties, she taped the parted skin as best she could, then lingered a moment to examine her workmanship. ‘It will do for now,’ she said with beautifully modulated tones, and gave a curt little nod more to herself than to anyone else. A girl with soft reddish hair and lovely but still smarting sea-green eyes under finely curving brows, the freckled nose turned up a little, the lips slightly parted, the chin and lower jaw delicately boned but determined.
‘Guerlain,’ he heard himself muttering. ‘Absolute rose, bergamot and jasmine, mademoiselle. Oil of cloves and cinnamon, but with sandalwood, of course, and ambergris. You or your lover have exquisite taste. Though the scent is not a recent one, the memory of it haunts.’
Ah Sainte Mère, her perfume! ‘Merci,’ she managed.
‘My case of tools, Inspector,’ he heard her quickly saying as she indicated a worn leather valise with a tray of many compartments. Spatulas, hooks, knives and other wooden-handled tools – the same essentially as a taxidermist would use – were there. Scissors, balls of knotted twine, rolls of surgical gauze … a small, tightly stoppered phial of some kind of oil, another of the perfume – could he manage to get a closer look at it? he wondered. Some drawing pins …
‘All the rubbish of my humble trade, Inspector.’
‘And the Maréchal is to sit for you?’ She was still close to him, still on her knees …
‘The Musée is always late when granting its commissions, but fortunately has decided Monsieur le Maréchal should have a head-and-shoulders done for posterity’s sake. I am nervous, of course, but understandably so, even though experienced. Ten years, and with the medals to prove it.’
Pétain, like Charlemagne, would take his place in the waxworks of history at 10 boulevard Montmartre. ‘The Musée already has a life-sized statue of him, mademoiselle.’
‘Yes. The Victor of Verdun and on the white horse he once rode in a parade, but that … that was done long ago.’
‘Not so long. Not even twenty-five years ago. I was among those who marched in that Bastille Day parade of 1919, the Treaty of Versailles having just been signed in June.’
A veteran, then, but one who was determined to let her know of it. The young these days … Did he think them cowards? wondered Inés. ‘You are correct, of course, Inspector. The bust is simply to show how the demands of state have superimposed themselves upon those left by that other terrible war. One in which the father I never knew was taken from me, and at Verdun as well.’
An ice pack arrived and she gently placed it against his forehead, guiding his hand to hold it. Closing the case, she retreated to her chair. A girl of twenty-eight or so, not too tall but above medium height and of good posture. Very correct. Calm, too, now that the introductions were over.
‘You must rest a little, Inspector. There may be concussion. Please don’t try to move. Just try to relax.’ And let your dark brown, wounded eyes, now cleared, take in the swift-eyed little gangster who hit you. Please note the scar beneath the thinness of that black goatee he thinks so handsome. It’s to the right of that chin which is so pronounced, and was caused, I assume, by the razor’s edge of a broken lump of sugar* and a fight over some pimp’s girl, but at the tender age of sixteen perhaps. Note, too, the insolent way he looks at you, the carefully trimmed moustache that extends to the turned-down corners of thin lips but is not so thick and bushy as your own. Note the forehead that is surprisingly free of wrinkles for one so bold. Note the nose, its sharpness, the clarity and paleness of the skin – he’s no outdoors man, this Henri-Claude Ferbrave of the Garde Mobile, otherwise those beautifully chiselled and shaven upper cheeks would be ruddy, n’est-ce pas? The jet-black, carefully combed and parted hair glistens with a pomade that holds the scent of ersatz spices – cinnamon, I think, but it’s doubtful. The deeply sunken dark brown eyes have late-night shadows that are caused, no doubt, by repeated visits to his favourite maison de tolérance. Note, too, the suspicion with which he now, under my scrutiny, gazes at me, Inspector. But please remember that I arrived late last night and can therefore have had absolutely nothing to do with this tragedy.
The forerunner of Interpol. |
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World War One slang for a German soldier. |
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Before the war, sugar was often obtained in blocks or cones, and when broken as in a bar or club, was very sharp and a favourite weapon. |