When the boys heard the sound of the Citroën at 8.42 a.m., they knew absolutely who it was. That big, black, beautiful traction avant slid to a stop down there at number 3 rue Laurence Savart in Belleville. Antoine Courbet’s mother did the cleaning but never the washing-up. Hadn’t Monsieur Jean-Louis once said that such a humble activity was the best way of relieving tension and that he’d better keep doing it so long as the pots hadn’t burned the dinner. What dinner?
‘He’s home at last,’ said Guy Vachon with a sigh. They’d be late for school.
‘It’s been ages since we’ve seen him,’ said Dédé Labelle. ‘At least a week.’
Together they stood in the rain those two detectives. ‘They look exhausted,’ whispered Guy. ‘Has there been trouble?’
‘There’s always trouble for them,’ whispered Antoine. ‘Maybe your papa can find them another set of side mirrors.’
They all knew that Monsieur Jean-Louis didn’t like using the black market or imposing on the neighbours. Hadn’t Antoine been the one to suggest his mother look after the house in the chief inspector’s absence and that of the second wife and little son?
‘That wife and son having been killed when the Gestapo left a bomb the Résistance had hidden on the doorstep for him,’ said Hervé Desrochers, shaking his head just like everyone else did at the thought. ‘A collabo, that’s what those people in the Résistance think he is because he has to work with a German. The wife hadn’t helped either by coming home from the flames of a love affair with one of the enemy simply because the thrusting, it was over, and that one had been sent to the Russian front.’
‘It was the long absences,’ muttered Dédé sadly. ‘She never knew if Monsieur Jean-Louis would come home.’
‘He only has a Lebel Modèle d’ordonnance 1892 six-shot, swing-out, double-action revolver. The eight millimetre,’ said Hervé with a sigh.
‘It’s not the 1892, idiot!’ said Antoine. ‘I don’t think he’s ever been allowed one of those. It’s another 1873. Don’t you remember that he was first issued an 1873 by Gestapo stores but that he then lost it in the Rhône at Lyon?’
A case of arson. A packed cinema …
‘The 1873 uses black powder, low-pressure, eleven-millimetre cartridges,’ admitted Hervé reluctantly.
‘They’re almost as big as those for the British Webley Mark VI, the .455 inch.’ said Dédé with a sigh.
‘The 11.6 millimetre. He looks as exhausted as his geraniums,’ said Antoine. ‘Maman says he needed that second wife and is going completely to seed in her absence.’
‘He needs another gun,’ said Hervé tartly. ‘That old Lebel is no match for the Walther P38, nine-millimetre Parabellum automatic Herr Kohler packs. Eight in the clip, mes vieux. Another up the spout and a little pin that sticks out to tell him all is safe but ready. Three hundred and fifty metres a second muzzle velocity and almost double that of the Mark VI.’
‘It’s a semiautomatic,’ said Guy. ‘Bien sûr, you don’t have to pull the slide back when there’s one in the chamber, but Monsieur Jean-Louis, he can hit a swallow at forty paces.’
Everyone knew swallows were among the fastest of birds but … ‘Imbécile,’ hissed Hervé, ‘a slug like that would blast the bird to pieces. He’s a nature lover and would never shoot such a thing!’
‘But those old cartridges,’ muttered Dédé, ‘they’re so tired sometimes they don’t even bother to wake up when struck by the firing pin.’
It was a worry. Ex-champion boxer of the police academy and soccer forward, ex-sergeant in a signal corps in that other war, Monsieur Jean-Louis had been wounded twice, the left side as usual. No medals, no citations—he wasn’t a man for those but had never complained of it. ‘I always tried to duck,’ he had once said, ‘but honourably’.
‘BOYS, WHY ARE YOU NOT IN SCHOOL?’ came the yell.
‘THE STREETS, THEY ARE NO LONGER SAFE AT NIGHT FOR OUR SISTERS AND MOTHERS, MONSIEUR L’INSPECTEUR PRINCIPAL. WE ARE PROTESTING AND HAVE GONE ON STRIKE!’
Good for Hervé.
‘IT’S TOO WET AND SLIPPERY FOR SOCCER,’ added Guy. ‘WE CAN’T KICK THE BALL TO YOU.’
‘Louis …’
In hooded rain capes, the boys waited to see what their response would bring. Hollow-eyed and gaunt, each of the little buggers gazed guiltily up from under shelter.
‘Now what’s this about a strike?’ asked Louis.
‘We’re late,’ confessed Dédé. ‘We only wanted to see if you had arrived home safely so that the pretty lady would no longer be distressed.’
‘What pretty lady?’
‘Your chanteuse.’
‘She’s not mine or anyone’s but her own.’
Natal’ya Kulakov-Myshkin, alias Gabrielle Arcuri of the Club Mirage on the rue Delambre over on the Left Bank, in Montparnasse. ‘The one who sings to eight hundred of the Green Beans and over the wireless to all the others at the front?’ asked Kohler blithely.
Both to the Krauts and to the Allies, since those boys would also listen in and she had such a fabulous voice. ‘Oui, that one,’ said Dédé. ‘After your train came back from Vichy and you had to leave for Colmar, she came from the station to stand outside the house of your mother, Monsieur l’inspecteur principal. She didn’t cry, though I thought she was going to.’
Louis’s mother had passed away fifteen years ago yet the house was still considered hers.
‘She didn’t think you and Herr Kohler would ever come back from inside the Reich.’
‘Nor did the other two who came to stand with her,’ said Guy, watching them closely.
‘Giselle and Oona?’ asked Hermann of his two ladyloves and saw the boys nod.
‘The blackout rapes, Inspectors. Are you working on them?’ asked Antoine.
‘The handbag snatching, too?’ hazarded another.
‘Oui, especially those if done in daylight,’ said yet another.
‘All last night and now here just for dry clothing,’ lamented Louis. ‘Antoine, be so good as to ask your mother to do what she can with what I’m still wearing, but please tell her not to alleviate the dampness by burning any more of my books. Give her the message after school, eh? Now get going. If there’s trouble, tell your teacher that you were delayed because we had to question you about the safety of the streets at night.’
‘But … but you haven’t done that?’ blurted Dédé. ‘Grand-mère, she is saying things can only get worse and that you both should be worrying about your girlfriends.’
‘They’ll be found bound, violated, murdered and robbed, she says!’ swore Hervé, ignoring his runny nose. ‘Their handbags snatched!’
‘We’ve already found one corpse,’ muttered Kohler, not liking what the boys had just said but wishing he had ersatz chewing gum to hand out. ‘You haven’t any cigarettes to sell, have you?’
In unison heads were swiftly shaken and, without another word, the army turned away and headed up the street.
‘Has the lawlessness of the black market reached such depths of innocence?’ bleated Louis.
‘Don’t be so naive. I should have asked for underwear and silk stockings.’
* * *
Long after the detectives had left the house at number 3, Jeanne Courbet continued to stare across the street at it through the lace of the bedroom’s curtain. She knew she didn’t have the time to loiter, that one had to be out and about very early if one was to get anything from the shops. Yet I can’t move, she silently said. Is it that I’ve offended God with my gossip about that house and the troubles the chief inspector has had with the first wife who left him and the dead one, too, the one who made the grand cuckold of him, even though he forgave her?
Word was that they had all laughed at him behind his back at the rue des Saussaies. Word was that he and his partner were hated so much for pointing the finger of truth, they would never leave the city alive this time.
Word was … But would either of them help her now? Antoine hadn’t just been up to mischief but to a crime so serious it jeopardized the whole family. A dirty stub of blackboard chalk had been in one of his pockets—was that not évidence enough of scribbled slogans on the walls: Laval aux poteau—Premier Laval up against the post; La guillotine pour Pétain—the Maréchal and Head of State; the V for Victory of Monsieur Winston Churchill; the cross of Lorraine, that symbol of the Résistance and Jeanne d’Arc? Victoire, eh? Liberté! Antoine knew nothing of such things. He was only ten years old, but that chalk had started her doing something she had vowed never to do in this room of his older brothers. The neighbours wouldn’t laugh if the family was arrested. They would sadly shake their heads and later whisper, ‘That mouth of hers. That gossip, she got what she deserved,’ but one arrest would lead to another and the families of all four would be taken. Didn’t that knave Desrochers operate his vélo-taxi out of place de l’Opéra? Wasn’t the stand directly across from the Kommandantur and wouldn’t Hervé’s papa be known to several of those Germans?
A woman’s compact had lain under the loosened floorboards beneath the straw mattress Antoine used, a file for the fingernails, too, and a lipstick. A Kleiderkarte also, a clothing card and a half-empty packet of cigarettes—Kamels from Berlin, stale but kept as a treasured memento. A matchbox from the Kakadu, on the Kurfürtsendamm, a club or bar. A room key, ah, oui, oui, from the Hotel-Pension am Steinplatz and a liaison sexuelle, the torn half of a ticket to the UFA Palast, a cinema and hands up this girl’s skirt, eh? The silver cigarette case of a virtue lost had been inscribed with the words of all such men. Though she could neither speak nor read the language, she knew they would say, To Sonja with undying love, Erich, 3 March 1940, and just before the invasion of Norway.
Four hundred of the Occupation marks had lain beneath that cigarette case, a further two hundred of the Reichsmark. ‘And seven hundred new francs, all in one-hundreds.’
If taken and spent, the money would only draw attention to the family. Some would think it pay for watching that house for a repeat of the bomb laying. Oh for sure, stealing from the Boche was not the same as stealing from one’s own people and Antoine could, perhaps, be forgiven were the penalties not so severe. His two brothers and his father would be sent into forced labour, herself and Antoine and her girls, his two sisters into … But how had her little Antoine come by these things? His share of the loot—was that it? One quarter!
Grey and glued, a crumpled condom had lain alongside the death notice of this Erich Straub, this young man from Berlin who had used it with his Sonja.
‘And then,’ she said with finality, ‘there was this.’
Unfolding a torn page from last Friday’s Paris-Soir, she read again yet another of the advertisements Herr Kohler placed each week, as did countless others still, and even though he had not been in Paris to receive an answer.
Reward of 200,000 francs will be paid for information leading to the safe return of Johan Van der Lynn, now age eight-and-a-half, and his sister Anna, now age six-and-a-half, son and daughter of Martin and Oona from Rotterdam. Lost to the east of Doullens on the road from Arras, 16 May 1940. Apply Box 1374.
Lost during the Exodus when ten million from the Lowlands and northern France had fled the blitzkrieg to clog the roads until machine-gunned to clear them for the panzers, but why had this Sonja had it in her handbag, or had she? Had Antoine hidden it here earlier, and for what reason, please?
Fool that he was, Herr Kohler wouldn’t let this Madame Oona Van der Lynn lose hope, nor would he get rid of her. She was forty years of age, couldn’t have good papers and had lost her husband in December to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. A Jew, people whispered, her children only the halves, though such things really shouldn’t matter and certainly wouldn’t to a Stuka or Messerschmitt.
Herr Kohler had taken the woman in during another investigation, that of a carousel in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, and wasn’t this why the boys loved to go to that park? And yes, yes, he had a younger one and lived with both when in Paris, sleeping with each but in turns as everyone said, herself most especially. ‘May God forgive me.’
Giselle le Roy was twenty-two years old and very attractive, though beauty like that would quickly fade and men ought to know this. Half-Greek, half-French and from the Midi, the girl was also from the House of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton, though she didn’t work in that business anymore. ‘The Lupanar des Oiseaux Blancs!’ she said aloud, was filled with hateful thoughts of such ‘submissive girls,’ as the flics were fond of calling them. The brothel of the white birds. ‘Fornicatrices!’ she said. ‘Leeches who take money that is desperately needed by the families of the men they service!
‘Men!’ she spat. ‘They give you the clap and the chancres because they’ve been careless and horny. “Seized by the moment,” eh? “Unable to control themselves?” ’
For the married ones, the occasional lapse was considered both natural and at times necessary and healthful; for the married woman, the gravest of sins and punishable by prison and a fine of from five to twenty thousand francs. Adultery was, it had to be said, a two-faced affair when viewed by the State whose laws were, of course, entirely set by men. Women could, and occasionally did, have husbands arrested but far from being severe, the courts were always lenient. Boys will be boys.
But would these sadists everyone worried about find interest in the advertisement and answer it? If so, those two women of Herr Kohler’s would come no more to stand in the street and stare at that house of his partner and friend.
As that one’s new girlfriend had done, the wife and little son not dead even three months—Marianne and Philippe St-Cyr—and oh for sure war and this Occupation speeded up such things, ‘But honour to a dead wife is honour to one’s life, chastity the bankroll of memory and Heaven’s cash on deposit.’
Kohler winced when he saw the Trinité victim in the Hôtel-Dieu. It wasn’t that her nose had been broken, or that the once smooth brow had been repeatedly slammed against the back of the vélo-taxi’s seat. It wasn’t even that her throat had been clenched so tightly there were plum-purple bruises or that, early on in the attack, she had been struck repeatedly.
It was the look in her bruised and deep brown eyes. He’d seen it before—Louis had, too, though he was busy elsewhere.
She was going to kill herself. The disgrace, the neighbourhood gossip, the threat of venereal disease or worse, that of an unwanted child. The shame. The husband a POW in the Reich.
Out of the fug of all such hospital rooms, the hesitant voice of the interne who’d been delegated to deal with him started up only to hesitate. Though absolutely nothing would be made of it, he had to wonder if the boy was but one among the many from all walks of life with false papers, a false military discharge circa 1939 or early 1940, or simply suspected of having these?
Such was the undercurrent of bitterness that even battle-hardened veterans from the 1914–1918 war had banded together to demand that only those who had actually fought in this one should be considered as veterans. Not the million or half-million or whatever who, through no fault of their own, had seen no fighting at all but had simply been overrun and rounded up along with those who had actually fought during the blitzkrieg.
‘The left shoulder and wrist, Inspector …’ began Dr. Paul-Émile Mailloux. ‘They are badly sprained but fortunately not broken. He must have wrenched the arm behind her back as he … Well, you know.’
If the Trinité victim thought anything of this, she gave no indication.
‘Scratches?’ asked Kohler.
‘Of course, but mainly between the shoulders and on the buttocks and hips. The assailant tore a fingernail. We found it lodged in …’
‘We?’
It would have to be said. ‘Dr. Rheal Lachance is the senior physician who oversees such cases. This woman isn’t the only one we’ve had to admit. She’s number thirty.’
Lachance, but ach mein Gott, so many? ‘In how long?’
Had the detective been away from the city or had the matter simply been hushed up even within police circles, the authorities too afraid to admit that such things were happening? ‘In the past four months, Inspector. Three so far this week, two last weekend.’
And there were twenty-four hospitals in Paris.
‘She’s one of the worst,’ said Mailloux, ‘though we only get the serious cases, of course.’
‘Have the attacks been escalating?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Verdammt, either you think it or you don’t!’
‘Then, yes, especially since the … the defeat of your Sixth Army at Stalingrad on the third of this month. Not all were raped, you understand.’
‘Robbed of their handbags and papers?’
‘Yes. Some were completely or only partly stripped before …’
‘The hair?’
This one would know all about such things from that other war. ‘It was first hacked off some of them before the beating. With others, they were beaten and then it was cut off, and since there is a market for it, the hair was probably stolen and sold.’
‘But not all lost their hair?’
‘Not all. With this one, perhaps there wasn’t time. Punishment, yes, but not continued to that point.’
Though they were all too aware of blackout crime, Louis and he hadn’t fully realized the severity of what was now going on, but with so many victims, how could they possibly interview enough to get a clear picture of things? ‘Their wedding rings?’ he asked.
Had the detective been defeated by the thought of so many? ‘The rings, ah oui, from those who were wearing them.’
‘Meaning that some had deliberately removed them before the evening out, eh? Were all of them married to absent POWs?’
‘Not all. Those whose fiancés are prisoners of war did not have such rings to wear, unless the engagement one.’
Which few couples could afford or even give a thought to. ‘But fiancées of POWs have also been targeted?’
‘That is correct, at least in so far as we here at the Hôtel-Dieu are aware.’
‘And not others? Single girls, unhappily married nonmilitary wives, those of veterans from that other war or those that simply need the money to feed the kids?’
‘Occasionally but perhaps as mistakes. Most of the victims we get are wives of prisoners of war or fiancées of them.’
And targeted, but everyone would be saying the streets were unsafe at night and would be avoiding them if possible. ‘Okay. Now tell me about that fingernail.’
‘Lodged in the upper right hip. The nail must have been torn or cracked beforehand. Tweezers were used to remove it. There’s her blood, of course, and skin, but also some kind of grease.’
A torn, folded corner of newsprint yielded its little treasure. The nail was a good centimetre-and-a-half along the curve, and from two to three millimetres at its widest. The middle right finger, and dirty. Big hands too—a big gut, eh? wondered Kohler but said, ‘Bon. Now tell me why that door was locked and you had to ask the matron for the key?’
Would this one miss nothing? ‘The press.’
‘What do you mean “The press”?’
‘Inspector, let’s go into the corridor. They came. Two of them, you understand.’
‘I’m trying to.’
Was there nothing for it but to reveal what had happened? ‘They photographed her late last night.’
‘They couldn’t have, not without help.’
Lachance would just have to admit to having failed to foresee such a possibility. ‘One of the nursing assistants was bribed, Inspector. Two thousand francs. The girl tried to deny it, of course, and has been dismissed. She’ll never get another job in this or any hospital.’
But others would have been bribed and Mailloux set up to take the fall. ‘Okay. Now tell me what photos were taken.’
‘The back and the front.’
‘Then watch her closely. If she kills herself, I’ll have you up for murder.’
‘I wasn’t even on duty when the press got here at three fifteen last night. I wasn’t even getting out of bed so that I could catch the métro to work at five a.m. I live in Montrouge.’
And not far from the Porte d’Orléans, but one never offered such information these days. At the very least, one waited to be asked. Mailloux damned well knew he had been set up but it would be best to go easy. ‘Which paper?’
‘Le Matin.’
And but one of the dailies, all of which were collaborationist and, with varying degrees, loved to ridicule segments of the populace and to show the citizenry what animals they harboured and that their police needed not only to be strengthened yet again but placed entirely under the competent control of the Occupier.
The headline said it all: RAPE-BEATING NARROWLY MISSES CONJUGAL MORTUARY SLAB OF ÉCOLE DES OFFICIERS DE LA GENDARMERIE NATIONALE’S MAQUEREAU.
Berlin would be in an uproar, the Führer demanding reprisals and deportations, his shining example of an open city badly tarnished. Boemelburg would be beside himself and expecting the early retirement everyone whispered about, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, Old Shatter Hand himself, utterly unapproachable, Préfet Talbotte bent on revenge and covering his own miserable ass, Louis and this Kripo accused of thoughtlessly letting it all happen or better still, of having taken money from that same press who would be only too willing to admit that they had. And as if that were not enough, Pharand, that arch little Fascist, head of the Sûreté and Louis’s boss, would see to it and urge Talbotte on while scheming all the time.
‘Get her dressed. Whether you agree or not, that woman has to be with her children.’
The bastards hadn’t just taken a simple head-and-shoulders shot. They’d had her stand, had had the smock removed so that full frontal and back views, with the regulation little black triangle in place of course, would hit the page.
And next to them, as if she were in some way connected to him, was the police academy’s victim, identified as her pimp and with his bare ass up and all the rest, if not blacked out.
‘Moving her today is just not possible, Inspector. Whoever did that to her also used an object.’
The academy’s victim had been struck hard on the back of the head, not once but twice, thought St-Cyr. A smooth, blunt instrument, a truncheon perhaps, but a period of time had elapsed between the blows, he was certain.
The pomade was not so much ‘greasy,’ as Hermann had thought, but oily, sweet-smelling and of sandalwood, giving a reminder of Indochina, a significant source, and the final moments of Président Paul Doumer in this very building.
But had the victim been brought here simply to draw attention to the ineptitude of a police force that now had fifteen thousand flics in Paris alone and should have done something to prevent such crimes?
‘Hit first an hour or so before he was brought here, Armand?’ he asked of the coroner. ‘Perhaps thrown into the back of a gazogène* lorry to lie there unconscious.’
Jean-Louis loved nothing better than a ‘good’ murder, thought Armand Tremblay, but had best be cautioned. ‘You know it’s too early to say. Once he’s on the table …’
‘Yes, yes, but that back of the head was hit again and later?’
Must he always push for answers? ‘Oui, oui, it’s possible the second blow followed the first by an hour at least.’
‘With death at between eight thirty and nine thirty p.m.?’
‘Did I not say that was close enough for now?’
‘Of course, but if at that time, then he was perhaps abducted as early as seven thirty.’
And near or at the Lido from which the telephone caller had later rung the commissariat? ‘Jean-Louis, you mustn’t worry so much. Of course we’d both like to save that girl, but by now with so many hours having passed …’
The shrug was not one of uncaring but simply of logic. At fifty-six years of age, dark-shadowed and ruddy, corpulent too, though not nearly so much as before the Defeat, Armand had had to deal with successions of préfets and knew how best to preserve integrity through hard reason and fact. The dark brown eyes behind spectacles whose surgically taped repairs had yet to be properly mended, were intent. From time to time he tossed his head, gestured or shrugged the rounded shoulders as if in communication with himself.
Again he muttered, ‘It’s not the usual but all the evidence points to it.’ Long ago the cigarette that had fastened itself to his lower lip had gone out. ‘It’s curious, Jean-Louis,’ he said, not looking up. ‘The position of the body isn’t right, is it? Partly up on the knees, the arms and back stiffly bent—why, please, hasn’t he completely collapsed? The muscles should have been flaccid, yet here we have a victim who—oh for sure, rigor is now well advanced—but he’s too tense even for that. Was he rigid before being dragged down several of those steps?’
Not thrown from the top of them as first thought. ‘Violent exertion?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘Any such struggle would speed the onset of rigor, making the body almost immediately rigid.’
But this was more. ‘The hands,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Were they so tightly clenched, the only way the fingers could be loosened was to stamp on the fists?’
‘Precisely!’
‘As a result of instantaneous cadaveric spasm?’
One didn’t see this often, but … ‘He was strong and in good shape,’ acknowledged Tremblay. ‘He resisted his attackers. At one point he got away from them but …’
‘Was brought down and hit again, that second time.’
‘The bruising of the buttocks and thighs bear this out, also that of the left shoulder. The scrotum was then grabbed and torn, not crushed. He may well have passed out, though; would have been brought round, dragged up, steadied …’
‘Held by two men, while a third smashed him across the face with the flat of a long-handled shovel, the neck instantly breaking.’
‘A sudden, violent disruption of the nervous system, Jean-Louis, but unlike rigor, the fingers stiffen so much they are far more difficult to open even when compared to the tightly clenched fists of a living person who resists with all their might.’
Had the victim grasped something during the struggle? Had this been why it had been necessary to open the hands, the fingers then removed not so much to hide the victim’s identity as to hide the reason for their opening? ‘Strands of hair?’ St-Cyr heard himself ask. ‘A wristwatch perhaps? Some item that could lead to the identity of his killers?’
It wasn’t a happy thought, they both looking down at the grille of the sewer. ‘There might be a catchment at the bottom of the shaft or a weir to hold back the solids,’ mused Jean-Louis who had, it must be admitted, far more experience with such things. ‘We could,’ he added, ‘order up the sewer workers and wait for them to arrive, or go fishing ourselves to save time and further possible loss.’
‘Idiot, it’ll be freezing. Is it that you would have us toss a coin to see who strips off to take the first plunge? In any case, he must be turned over and moved, and that will help to verify the spasm.’
* * *
Kohler longed for a cigarette. More than ever he felt Louis and he were on quicksand. Too much bad feeling towards them, the two of them being put on the run like that last night.
Austere in the old Cité barracks, the Préfecture de Police was to his right, overlooking place du Parvis Notre-Dame. To the south and directly ahead of him beyond the quai, the Seine was mud-grey in the rain, to the east, the main portal of the Notre-Dame accepted a hurrying, umbrella-bearing flock of sisters. Wounded, the eye of the rose window had been plucked to safety in the autumn of 1939. Now its canvas and timber-framed bandage bagged and sagged with accumulated moisture, causing the gargoyles to cringe.
The Trinité victim, Madame Adrienne Guillaumet, age thirty-two, had been a part-time teacher of German for the Deutsche Institut, and hadn’t the French, its Parisians especially, flocked to learn the language, and wasn’t everything being done to encourage them? But here, too, things were never simple. The Institut had taken over the Hôtel Sagan, the former Polish Chancellory on the rue de Talleyrand and not far from her flat at 131 rue Saint-Dominique, which was in the quartier du Gros-Caillou and just to the west of the Invalides, in a very up-market Left Bank neighbourhood.
The École Militaire was immediately to the south of the Gros-Caillou, the Champ de Mars and Tour Eiffel to the southwest. Money there, too, bien sûr, but the quartier École Militaire was home to retired career officers from that other war and this one too, some of them, and most were nothing more than pompous pains in the ass who would be all too ready to damn an absent fellow officer’s wife if she strayed.
She had taught her evening class at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, over on the rue Vaucanson in the Third. At just after 9.30 p.m., or close to it, she must have stood in the rain on the rue Conté to hail a vélo-taxi’s little blue light. The college of engineering and manufacturing was popular. Some of those taxis would have been waiting until evening classes were out, but why hadn’t she just run the short distance south to the métro entrance on place Général-Morin? That would have got her home safely.
Though he didn’t want to think it, not with her, not with those kids of hers and a husband locked up in the Reich, it would have to be asked: Had she been on her way to meet someone? She had left the children at home, hadn’t had the cash perhaps to have hired anyone to come in or hadn’t wanted the neighbours to know, yet had had the cash for a taxi.
The passage de la Trinité hadn’t been far, the time perhaps 9.45 or 9.50 p.m. He shuddered at what she had had to go through, couldn’t help but recall other such cases.
When Matron Aurore Aumont of the Hôtel-Dieu found the detective, he was staring bleakly down at the square as many must have done in the old days when dragged there to be anointed with oil before being set afire in the face of God. He looked, she was certain, like a gentilhomme de fortune who had just seen the ashes of his life.
She had been going to tell this gestapiste that there was no soap and little disinfectant, that there had been a 50 percent increase in tuberculosis, wards full of those who had foolishly smoked uncured tobacco, obtained illegally of course, and that appendicitis, ulcers of the stomach and ruptures of the bowel were due entirely to the eating of rutabagas—cattle food! the potatoes having all gone to the Reich. But she couldn’t bring herself to say any of it to this fritz-haired giant with the terrible scar and others far smaller but still far too many to count.
‘Monsieur, you wished to see me?’
‘Has Madame Guillaumet said anything?’
‘Not to us. There may be memory loss simply from hunger, you understand. Like so many these days, it’s the little things first that one forgets, and not just with the rape cases, which are never easy, as I can see you are only too aware.’
As if it mattered deeply to him, he said that he and his French partner handled only common crime. ‘We’re floaters,’ he said, and that they had been brought in especially to deal with this tidal wave of blackout crime and could use all the help she could give. ‘The girl who let the press in?’
‘Noëlle Jourdan.’
‘How could they have gotten to her?’
‘The press, they have their ways. I wouldn’t know, of course.’
‘But might have an idea?’
Was this one on an amphetamine—Benzedrine perhaps? she wondered. He had a nice grin, not unkind and though the accent, it was harsh to sensitive ears, he did speak French and was not like so many others of the Occupier who didn’t even bother to learn a few words. ‘Inspector, is it that you would shut us down at such a time? Those who must have helped them get to Mademoiselle Jourdan have been set the example of her dismissal in disgrace. Now, of course, they tremble that they’ll be next. Is that not enough?’
A wise woman. ‘Tell me about the girl. Her age, address, training—give me as much as possible in the limited time you have to spare.’
‘Nineteen. The mother’s dead. The girl lives alone with her father at 25 place des Vosges. Noëlle was very competent. It struck me hard to have to dismiss such a promising candidate. One invests the time, n’est-ce pas? One cares deeply, rejoices at each step of progress and then …’ She shrugged. ‘The young, they abandon you.’
‘Two thousand francs wasn’t much.’
Enough to buy perhaps three days of food, but he’d seen that too, this one. ‘Inspector, I simply don’t know who paid her, only that when confronted, the girl cried out that she had done her duty. To whom, I ask?’
Her duty … ‘Was she forced into agreeing, do you think?’
‘Did they get to her because they knew they could, is this what you are saying? If it is, the answer must be that I couldn’t possibly know.’
There was absolutely nothing else he could do. To offer money to make sure the woman didn’t kill herself would only insult the matron who, by one of the pins she wore, had been made a widow by the 1914–1918 hostilities as so many had been: 1,390,000 Frenchmen, with another 740,000 left permanently disabled. ‘Take care of her then, madame.’
* * *
The police academy victim’s fingers were stumps. Shreds of skin and splintered bone suggested that in places at least two or even three jabs with the shovel had been necessary; in others, the severing had been immediate.
Anger? wondered St-Cyr. Hatred? Haste? Unfamiliarity with such an action? A new shovel, an old one? These days, obtaining a new one would have been all but impossible. Had the shovel, then, not been used much and therefore not blunt along its cutting edge?
‘As sharp as shovels go,’ conceded Armand Tremblay. ‘There is rust, Jean-Louis. Oxidized flakes of the metal are embedded in the face and will have to be retrieved later, but for now, an old shovel, long-handled, though one not used much and therefore sharp.’
‘A killer who doesn’t throw anything out or sell it?’
‘Or one who has access to such items. Didn’t you say one of your Drouant victims was involved with … ?’
‘Cement. That one couldn’t have done it. He’d have used his fists or a sledgehammer, but with this one a thumb and forefinger would be most useful. Was it the killer who stamped on the hands to open them, or one of his accomplices?’
‘Whoever it was, he didn’t wear rubber boots. Here and here again, there are what appear to be the marks of hobnails.’
Again they both looked questioningly at the sewer. ‘Jean-Louis, I really must insist. Who needs a drowned detective or one that’s on his deathbed from hypothermia?’
‘You sound like Hermann. You worry too much about the wrong things. Haussmann and Eugène Belgrand, his chief engineer, weren’t idiots when they put such things in place.’
A hundred years ago …
‘But is it a lateral for the runoff?’ went on Jean-Louis. ‘Sometimes Belgrand would have a weir installed to hold back the larger solids, which could then be periodically removed by lifting the grille and using a shovel, a long-handled one, too, at that, I must add. At other times a catchment was installed at the bottom of the shaft for exactly the same reason and also, again, to hold objects that might have accidentally been dropped.’
In an age of pocket watches, wrought-iron keys, flintlock pistols and little leather bags of coins. The end of one era, the beginnings of another.
A glance up the stairwell revealed unabated rain. Out on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré there would be nothing but the hush of hurrying bicycles and the click-clack of wooden-soled shoes, the eyes not purposely averted from this scene of horror if the press had indeed brought notice to it, simply gazes that were empty of all feeling.
‘Ours is a funereal city, Armand,’ he said of the Occupation. ‘The sound of laughter is often as rare as that of tears. Instead, there is usually nothing but a numb indifference.’
The area beneath the victim had yielded only the grey granite of the paving stones and iron of the grille. Jean-Louis peeled off coat, jacket, pullover, shirt and undershirt. The thick dark brown hair was pushed out of the way, the bushy moustache tweaked as if he was about to step into the boxing ring.
An iron bar had been obtained to prise the grille open. Lowering it into the sewer, he probed for the bottom and when, perhaps a metre or so below, it was touched, said, ‘Dieu merci, perhaps I’ve been spared the necessity of holding the breath.’
The force of the water was not great but because of the quantity, there was backup and the lateral full. Reaching down with both arms fully extended, the walls could be felt and gently probed, each brick’s outline followed.
‘Ah, mon Dieu, the things one has to do!’ he shouted. ‘If Hermann could see me now, I’d never hear the last of it!’
Up he came again, to catch a breath. ‘We’ll probably have to wait for help,’ he said, his teeth chattering.
There were no fingers, there was no weir, no catchment either, it seemed. Repeated attempts failed to yield anything, thought Tremblay, ready with a towel.
‘It’s not later than Haussmann,’ Jean-Louis was forced to admit after a last dip. ‘It’s definitely not recent. The weir is of cast iron and has rusted through but has held back a little something.’
Like a secretive schoolboy of ten, a frozen fist was opened. Hadn’t Napoléon been the one to say men were ruled best by baubles?
‘Vanity?’ managed Jean-Louis as he rushed to dry off and get dressed. ‘Pride? The joys of possession, eh?’
Not just any award, but the thin red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur.
‘Was it ripped from the lapel of his killer’s overcoat?’ he exhaled. ‘Caught on the barb of a decayed weir.’
The ribbon was more often worn on the lapel of the suit jacket.
‘There’s only one problem, Armand. Well, two, no three,’ he went on. ‘First, of course, it may not have been the killer’s, but if it is, he could have been awarded it for honest reasons, either civilian or military, and therefore his arrest might be difficult, especially these days if he’s a friend of the Occupier.’
‘Or?’
‘You know the answer as well as I do.’
‘It could have been awarded by a friend or associate for services rendered to that friend or an associate of said.’
‘Or associates of both.’
Scandal had also plagued the Légion d’honneur. Hadn’t Daniel Wilson, the playboy son-in-law of Président Jules Grevy caused that one’s downfall only hours after he had been returned to office for a second term in 1885?
Wilson had sold Légion d’honneur medals and ribbons to retire gambling debts and other loans. ‘Yet still we all aspire to it,’ said Jean-Louis with a sigh, ‘and nearly everywhere it’s worn it brings profound respect and a willingness by others to give assistance and even to obey.’
The boulevard du Palais separated the Préfecture from the Palais de Justice. Kohler stood in brief shelter by the main entrance of the latter and under a stone lintel that still carried the carved motto of the Third Republic: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, freedom, equality and brotherhood, but had been bolted over by a white wooden signboard with black Gothic letters that gave Vichy’s and the Maréchal Pétain’s Travail, Famille, Patrie, work, family and homeland.
Two paniers à salade—Black Marias, salad shakers with individual wire cages inside—had pulled in to the kerb. Emptied, girls of all ages tumbled out, raising voices to the rain. Unchained and then linked up again, these ‘submissive’ girls, who probably hadn’t had licences and certainly looked like repeat offenders, were lined up: no hats, all shades of hair now drenched, the dye, mascara, rouge and eye shadow streaming on some, while the open-toed high heels of several were disintegrating. One aged daughter of the night had been pinpricked by cobbler’s tacks that had held the red felt uppers to their white wooden soles. She cursed, gestured, shrilled at the flics, ‘LÉCHE-BOTTES! LÉCHEZ MON CUL, ESPÈCES DE PORCS À LA MANGUE!’ Boot-lickers. Kiss my ass, you worthless pigs. ‘Voilà, mon cul!’ she shrilled and flared her bare bottom at them only to be given a clout she’d remember. The stocking seams she had painted up the backs of her legs had smeared.
Herded by their guardians, they were marched along the rue de Lutèce towards him, convicts already, since under French law a suspect was considered guilty until proven innocent and that could take years. The Police Correctionnelle, the small crimes court, wouldn’t be in session until 2.00 p.m., a long wait. Afterwards they’d be taken to the Petite Roquette over in the Eleventh on the rue de la Roquette, and wasn’t that prison, like all the others, vastly overcrowded? Hadn’t one French citizen in every fifty been deprived of their liberty? In November of last year the courts here and all over France, for the whole country had been fully occupied then, had begun to submit copies of every verdict and sentence to the Gestapo. One never knew, as Louis had said at the Drouant, when something useful might turn up, and the Gestapo knew it as well and that even the most incidental thing might lead them to a résistant or network of them or to valuables that should have been declared.
The Police Judiciaire, known colloquially as the quai des Orfèvres—Préfet Talbotte’s criminal investigation department—was in this massive warren of buildings and courtyards. Detectives were on the third floor, those who kept tabs on visiting nationals on the fourth via Staircase D, if one had a mind to find it. The Bicycle Brigade was in an entirely different building, so if one had to track a stolen bike’s owner who had been murdered, one had not just to go from floor to floor, but from building to building. There were almost two million bicycles in the city, the cost of a new one impossible, if one could be found, and weren’t vélo-taxi licences on file over there, too?
Of course they were. And of course the racket in stolen bikes was huge, but first he had to find the owner of a certain dog.
Records was at the far end of one of the courtyards and in under a stone arch that must date from God alone knew when. The notice board at the head of the stone staircase, whose steps were worn, was cluttered. A reward of one hundred thousand francs was being offered for turning in the names and addresses of those engaged in criminal activities, i.e., the Résistance and those who were trying to avoid the forced labour call-up. Hadn’t Louis’s housekeeper two sons in that age bracket? Hadn’t Yvon Courbet, a veteran of that other war, made damned certain his boys would avoid this one and now that much-hated call-up by finding essential jobs for them in a munitions factory?
Posted dead centre of the notices was an open-fold from the IKPK’s** magazine, Internationale Kriminalpolizei. Even the Swiss were decrying the explosion of blackout crime:
The problem is, of course, not nearly so rampant as in Paris where Gestapo Boemelburg, head of Section IV, blames French decadence and immorality. When asked to comment, Herr Boemelburg has declined beyond saying emphatically that the problem has been blown out of all proportion and that the investigation, though under tight wraps, is rapidly drawing to a successful and gratifying conclusion.
Horseshit! But even back in September 1940, Boemelburg had known he’d have to have at least one flying squad he could count on to fight common crime and be honest about it. A shining example of law and order in an age of officially sanctioned crime on a horrendous scale.
The dog registry wasn’t even here. Uncovered as he removed the article so that Louis could have a read, a card stated that it was now to be found in another building.
Dry as a bone, Louis was waiting for him. Vacillating, shifty-eyed and dark-shadowed, the clerk behind him was as withered as the apple that one was saving for dessert, once the lunch of thin soup and a half-bulb of garlic had been consumed.
‘The préfet has been most kind, Hermann. Everyone wishes to assist us but,’ he confided softly, ‘the offer of ten francs for turning away while I had a look was most appreciated.’
Unknown to the clerk, Louis had pulled and palmed a file card from one of the rotary drums, but even so, had best be told. ‘Just you wait, then, until Talbotte sees the newspapers. We’re never going to hear the end of it!’
The card was for an Irish Terrier bitch named Lulu. The clerk, whose salary couldn’t be any more than his prewar twelve thousand francs a year in this age of rampant inflation and frozen salaries, could easily have taken this Kripo for a thousand, which just showed the difference between Louis and himself.
‘It’s what the card reveals that’s important, Hermann, but for now we’d best find a little peace and quiet.’
‘I know just the place.’
‘I’m not going there. I absolutely refuse.’
‘Don’t be an idiot. You’re as hungry as I am. Besides, it will give us a chance to tap the street if nothing else.’
He was right, of course. These days radio-trottoir was often the only source of information. Pavement radio, gossip but prolific, and what better place to go than the fount of it all? ‘Then I had best tell you that though the theft has yet to be set down in stone by Records, that vélo-taxi must have been stolen from place de l’Opéra. That’s where it was registered to work from.’
And with the Kommandantur itself in full view across the square.