From time to time the squeaking wheels of a frost-pinched vélo-taxi would struggle by, but for the most part the night left him alone. His right arm was stiff—nothing more than a flesh wound, but close. They had patched him up at the Hôpital Laennec and had asked why he hadn’t gone to one of his own clinics.
He had simply said the hospital was nearer and had warned them to say nothing. But the confrontation in the Bar of the Broken Cat was troubling him and not just because one of his confrères had given him a bad tip and some in Gestapo Paris would like to be rid of him, but because this war had to end and when it did, those who were left behind were going to have to pay for it, rightly or wrongly.
Only too well he knew the French passion for ‘justice’. ‘Giselle,’ he said, searching the dark outline of the cinema’s billboards where once, in good times, the lights would have been lit up until three or four in the morning. ‘I’m going to have to do something. Oona’s in it too.’
Sentiment rushed in on him. He liked and admired them both, often for quite different reasons. They made him feel at ease with himself when all around him he could see so clearly what was going on. They never once openly questioned their relationship though deep within themselves they must be asking what was going to happen to them when the Germans went home.
Sure as hell life would be made damned miserable for all who had fraternized with the enemy. And Louis? he asked.
The Resistance would go for Louis, disregarding entirely that he had had to work for the Occupier or else. False papers, new IDs … travel permits? wondered Kohler. Spain, maybe Portugal? Somewhere warm and near the sea. Then maybe after the rubble and the hatred had cleared, a small bar, a quiet little shop, nothing fancy, only peace.
A farm for Louis, since even a recent case in Provence had failed to make him shut up about going back to work a land he had never farmed like some, his partner namely, except as a boy on holiday.
Flinging his cigarette down in disgust at himself, Kohler said, ‘Use your brains, idiot, not your balls! Let them go while they still have a chance. Set it up for them and say goodbye.’
Giselle was sitting in the middle of the cinema, about three-quarters of the way towards the back because her eyes couldn’t take anything closer. Shoulders that were so lovely when naked were hunched. No heat in the damned place, of course. Half-hidden by the cheap fur collar of a thin overcoat, she stared raptly at the screen, was completely oblivious to all the others around her who smoked, necked, fucked, slept or did other things. Ah yes.
She was totally lost to a film she must have seen twenty times since its release in 1937. Another ancient rerun the war and the censors had allowed, the latter because, asses that they were, they had thought it reflected unfavourably on the French!
Pépé le Moko. The story of a little thief who was wanted by the flics and had taken refuge in an Algerian kasbah. Christ! the wonder of celluloid. A kasbah no less, and no knife in the guts from another thief!
Apart from this, it was a good film, but he hadn’t the time for it and when he ousted the man next to her, Giselle didn’t even look up or pay attention to the disturbance but only stared at the screen.
A tear trickled down a soft cheek, another followed it. ‘Giselle …’
‘They … they have arrested him. He … he is now going to kill himself rather than face prison.’
Quickly she crossed herself and kissed her mittened fingertips, was all broken up about the ending just because the fantasy of hope had turned out to be the harsh reality of life.
Handcuffed, the thief cut his own throat with a penknife. End of Pépé. Would that all such thieves and punks would do the same.
‘There … there will be no escape when this war is over,’ she said, a torn whisper as she dried her eyes.
The film was late due to a ‘power failure’. It was nearly 11.00 p.m. when the Métro would close. Everyone else didn’t bother to stand for the anthem of the Occupier but beat it. They were soon left alone in the dark. ‘Look, I’ll do what I can, chérie. You know I will. Hey, I was only just thinking about it.’
She had short, straight, jet-black hair with a fringe, strong, decisive brows, good hips, lips, legs and all the rest. Magnificent violet eyes, a lovely milk-white throat.
She was only twenty-two years of age, half Greek, half Midi French, could pass for someone else. Was not stupid and would use her brains.
‘The résistants, the ‘patriots,’ will kill me,’ she said. ‘They will strip me naked, Herr Kohler, then they’ll beat me as those from the rue Lauriston did not so long ago, isn’t that correct? And then they will stone me to death.’
The rue Lauriston … She was refering to a previous case. ‘Hey, what’s with the Herr Kohler bit? It’s Hermann you’re talking to.’
Entirely not her fault, she had been badly roughed up in that other episode by gangsters of the French Gestapo and still bore the bruises and the memories of it.
‘Come on, let’s pick up Oona. I have to see Louis. It’s urgent.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s finished, Hermann. Your little ménage is over. Me, I am going back to work so as to be fucked by Frenchmen!’
‘Oh no you’re not’
‘Am I too good for my fellow countrymen, Herr Haupsturmführer?’
‘Of course not. You’re too good to be a whore.’
‘And you—you are saving me from that? You with your great big Bavarian cock?’
‘Come on. A girl is missing, Giselle. We have to find her before they kill her.’
* * *
The Club Mirage was on the rue Delambre in Montparnasse. Squeezed among the thirsty tunics of Fritz-haired men in grey-green and navy or air-force blue, St-Cyr tossed back the pastis with a gulp and fiercely thrust the glass across the bar. ‘Another,’ he said. Eight hundred Wehrmacht troops on leave hooted, cheered and ogled the chorus line of naked girls and grandmothers who should have known better, while the band, preferring noise above all else, blew their guts out.
It was pandemonium—Kultur with a capital K! Under chartreuse floodlights, emerald ostrich plumes and brilliant red pasties moved in a layered haze of tobacco smoke, farts and sweat that had a life of its own.
Leon Rivard, the one with the face like ground meat, tossed him a quizzical eye but knew enough not to ask what the trouble was. ‘This one is on the house,’ he shouted. ‘The last one also.’
‘Merci.’
Downed again. A fire in the belly and the brain. A real tough guy who was pissed off at something. Ah yes. ‘Hey, Gabrielle isn’t mad at you, Inspector. She just cut her holiday short to come back to work. Okay?’
‘It’s Chief Inspector St-Cyr to you, and she’s far too good a singer for a dump like this.’
Rivard grinned. One of two brothers who owned and ran the place, the Corsican fluted, ‘Just as you please, monsieur,’ before fist-wiping the zinc and refilling the glass a fourth time.
The girls up on stage were thrusting their bottoms at the troops. The roar grew deafening. St-Cyr added a drop of water for propriety’s sake and gloomily watched as the pale yellowish-green of the pastis became milky. ‘Hermann,’ he grunted disconsolately, as he fingered his glass in thought. Everything with his partner would have to be out in the open this time. There must be no secrets if they were to find Joanne. He would have to tell him the engraver’s son had been forging papers for the Resistance. He would have to trust Hermann not to turn the boy in. There might be a connection to something the Bavarian had uncovered.
The pastis, pre-war and 90 proof, was kept under the bar not only because of its rarity but because most Germans found its strong taste of liquorice revolting. The girls were gone, the stage empty, the hush expectant. Perhaps a minute passed but not an eye was diverted. Even the thirsty who thronged the bar had put down their glasses or rapidly shaken their heads when more was offered.
In the shimmering, sky-blue, sleeveless sheath that was her trademark, with diamonds at her wrists and neck, Gabrielle Arcuri wa
lked on stage. Thousands of tiny seed pearls, in vertical rows on the fabric, rippled, electrifying the place with her gracefulness and fluidity. Tall and willowy, she had an absolutely gorgeous figure. The hair was not blonde but the soft, soft shade of a very fine brandy, the eyes not just blue but an exquisite shade of violet.
She clasped her long, slender hands before her as a schoolgirl might and shyly smiled, then broadly grinned and shrugged as if, having suddenly made up her mind about them, she could now accept them into her heart. ‘Mes cher amis, I have a song for you of love. Of lovers who have been separated by trouble and now do not know if each still has in them the love for the other that was once there. They meet in a cinema under the cone of light from the projector. Cigarette smoke filters up into this light but the film, it means nothing to them. Nothing, you understand. They are sitting side by side, not even daring to hold hands, not knowing what the other is thinking.’
She sang. She gave herself to it totally and the song brought tears to every last man in the place. She held them in the palms of her outstretched hands which implored them to understand the tragedy of life, of war, of hardship and separation.
A breath was caught, a note was kept until her lungs threatened to burst and all at once there was a collective sigh and then a single shout, the voices of men who knew of the battlefields and wept for home. She brought the house down.
‘Louis … Hey, Louis, sorry I’m late.’
It was Hermann. ‘Your arm? What’s happened, please?’
‘It’s nothing. A punk called Péguy.’
‘Fortune? Ah merde, did you …?’
St-Cyr saw that Oona and Giselle were with him. He touched his lips with the tip of a troubled tongue and plucked nervously at his moustache. ‘Fortune isn’t to be trusted, Hermann. Exactly how well did you destroy him in the eyes of his friends?’
‘Completely.’
St-Cyr turned swiftly to the barman and hissed, ‘A table. Quickly!’
There were objections from the troops. Even the chanteuse had to wait while they were seated but laid the soft down of a pacifying voice over the ruckus by asking the displaced to join her on stage.
She put her arms around them. They grinned shyly and stood with her like great dumb drunken blockheads not knowing what to do.
With her fingers trailing in their departing hands, she smiled at each of them, then sang as they left the stage, mollified and coddled in the cocoon of her generous nature.
Giselle le Roy could only remember standing naked before men such as these, hearing their hoots and thrusting catcalls, their hush as her bruised and battered body had been exposed to them by the gangsters of the rue Lauriston.
Hermann had covered her. He and Jean-Louis had come to the rescue, but now it was as if those two didn’t even remember what had happened here not long ago and were oblivious to her feelings.
I am a whore—putain, fille de joie, cunt—she said to herself. It is expected of such women that they should have no feelings. It is part of the profession.
Yet they had just spoken of an engraver’s son. Hermann had leaned closely to Jean-Louis and had asked, ‘Could the boy do some work for me?’ He had given a nod towards herself and Oona, so they were not unaware of her after all.
In return, Jean-Louis had grimly understood and said, ‘Let’s see about it. A good thought.’
False papers. Laissez-passers, the ausweises of the Nazis. A little trip somewhere. Escape from Paris and the only place she had ever known.
Two tears fell, blurring her vision so that the lights became as the last of a sunset and she saw herself on a tropical island walking alone along a beach beneath tall palms, waiting for the night to come and trying to believe she was safe from the coming storm.
Unlike Giselle, Oona van der Lynn watched her ‘protector’— what else could she, an illegal Dutch immigrant from Rotterdam, call Hermann Kohler? Having lost her two children during the blitzkrieg and had her husband murdered while under interrogation by the French Gestapo, she had had no other choice. But war makes instant friends and lovers just as quickly as it separates them. Hermann was a good man, and perhaps he did love her a little, if one could call it love, for he was home so seldom and Giselle … why Giselle did require attention.
The girl was amazingly beautiful but sat woodenly staring up at the stage, unconscious of the looks she was getting from the crowd, remembering how it had been and wondering what the future held. Ah yes.
To be blonde, blue-eyed, tall, slender and forty years of age was not to covet Hermann Kohler or get jealous of Giselle le Roy, though sometimes those sorts of feelings intruded. One was only human and yes, of course one worried for that same future. At any moment the rifle butts could come even at Hermann’s door. Giselle and herself could well be dragged away and ‘deported’.
One must live for the present and accept the situation as it was.
The two detectives had drawn a sketch of the quadrangle of the Palais Royal and its environs and were deep in conversation over it. Hermann was in his element, smoking, tossing glances up at the stage, grinning, drinking beer, thinking that he would like to get a hand between a pair of legs up there, yet all the time his mind was flitting back and forth, recalling little things, projecting on into the future.
Jean-Louis always questioned everything. A thinker, he was not at all interested in the naked girls who kicked their legs above his head. She knew he longed to be alone with his pipe and tobacco, his little furnace, so as to examine the disappearances and murders from as many angles as possible. One so committed, he lived only for each case, especially this one. A cuddly man, Giselle had once said and laughed delightedly at the thought of seducing him, for men over fifty made good lovers sometimes, and the girl had thought it might be ‘very interesting’ to compare the two detectives in such a way.
St-Cyr traced out Joanne’s route from the Bourse station of the Métro westward along the rue Quatre Septembre towards the bank which was on the other side of the street. Then back again and south down the rue de Richelieu past the Bibliothèque Nationale to the Théâtre du Palais Royal in the north-western corner of the quadrangle.
She had picked up the final letter and had, at 1.15 or 1.20 p.m., entered the garden and gone into the shop of Meunier the engraver.
Then finally she had walked out of the garden and around to the rue de Valois to knock at the door of that house.
‘For three days she’s kept a prisoner, Hermann. Three days of … ah, I can’t bring myself to think of it. Then suddenly they leave and the house is emptied.’
‘The photos are then scattered either by one of the kidnappers or by someone else,’ said Kohler grimly.
‘But the photos only tell us so much. The rapes aren’t shown, but were they photographed?’
‘For someone else to view?’ breathed Kohler, watching him closely. ‘Someone who wasn’t present?’
St-Cyr nodded curdy and passed a smoothing hand over the rough sketch map he had drawn. Oona van der Lynn was very still, and when he looked across the table at her, he saw her flinch, saw moisture rush into her lovely eyes.
Giselle le Roy was tense and pensive—ashen, so much so that the paleness of her fresh young cheeks contrasted sharply with her jet-black hair.
‘A sadist, Hermann? A psychopath—one with money enough to hire those who would do his every bidding?’
‘A man and a woman …’ said Kohler, lost in thought.
‘Madame Lemaire’s maid, Nanette, heard the crying not just of Joanne, but of others,’ said St-Cyr.
Kohler told him of Renée Marteau’s body and that the former mannequin had been kept for at least forty-three days. ‘Between 3 July 1941 and 15 August. The throat was slit, Louis, the hair hacked off, the breasts …’
‘Say it, please.’
Ah merde …‘Removed.’
‘Months—years, Hermann. How long has it been going on in that house? Fourteen girls all with the same colour of hair and eyes, the same height, weight, s
ize of bust …’
‘Louis, take it easy. Try not to get so close. A man probably took the photos but a woman may have greeted each girl at the door.’
‘One whose purpose was to lead them on,’ blurted Giselle le Roy, all broken up about it. ‘How could any woman do such a thing?’
‘She was essential,’ said Oona, instinctively reaching out to comfort Giselle. ‘If she hadn’t been at that door to welcome them in, some of those girls would have turned away and saved themselves.’
‘Joanne was very nervous. She knew she was being followed …’ muttered St-Cyr.
‘But did she see the robbery?’ asked Oona earnesdy. ‘Could she have identified one of the men or perhaps the woman who watched the street for them?’
‘Ah, I wish I knew,’ said Jean-Louis.
‘And was that not the woman who followed her?’ asked Giselle.
The girl shrugged when St-Cyr looked at her—she could appear so innocent at times, so fragile.
‘If so, then it couldn’t have been the one who answered the door,’ she said more decisively.
‘Then there were two entirely unconnected women,’ concluded Oona positively. ‘One who watched the street for the bank robbers, and one who opened the door when Joanne rang the bell or knocked.’
Two women It was a thought.
‘They couldn’t have been the same because Joanne would have recognized her, Louis,’ said Kohler. ‘The one she knew was following her must have been the one who watched the street.’
‘Did both women follow her, but only that one was seen by Joanne?’ asked St-Cyr grimly.
‘Verdammt, Louis. The one who opened the door would have made damned certain Joanne had come alone!’
‘And to do so, she would have had to follow Joanne right from the Bourse Métro to the Théâtre du Palais Royal,’ said St-Cyr, ‘then leave her so as to get to the house on time.’
‘But wouldn’t she have seen the other woman, then,’ asked Oona, ‘and thought the girl hadn’t come alone?’
‘Perhaps but … ah mais alors, alors …’ muttered St-Cyr. It was all speculation.
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