Mannequin

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Wants to curry favour with the big cheese so gets himself and his girlfriend invited to an art auction and supper,’ snorted Kohler.

  ‘Have they paintings to sell that are not theirs?’ mused St-Cyr, still looking off towards the escarpment. ‘He has been with the girlfriend since arrival. That’s a long time for him to be with one woman, is it not?’

  It was! ‘She’s a distant cousin and a girl who likes her fun. Did they meet in Berlin before the war?’

  There was as yet no light among the distant trees. Again Hermann asked about Berlin—impatient, must he always be so impatient? wondered St-Cyr. A shrug would be best and then … ‘Perhaps, but if so, is the love affair as strong as it once was, and how is it, please, that Denise, who has lost a brother to your soldiers and has another in a POW camp, can take up with such a one as Kempf?’

  Ignoring the need to save it, and wishing Louis would quit watching the fucking escarpment, Kohler tossed his cigarette butt away. ‘That affair’s as strong as ever. Success demands it, and success is sweet. She’s a realist, dummkopf. A realist!’

  Mornings were never Hermann’s best of times. If only he would open his eyes to the beauties around him. If only …

  ‘Louis, for Christ’s sake …’

  ‘Ah yes, then, Hermann, a realist but would that woman do the unmentionable to keep her lover?—that is the question. Has she taken steps to protect herself and the Sonderführer?’

  The first light was now at last among the most distant trees and for a moment the Sûreté’s little Frog insisted on remaining silent.

  Then the hand that had gripped his partner’s arm fell. ‘Did the banker become aware of his daughter’s plans to leave, Hermann, and is this not why the engravers had to die?’

  ‘Or be arrested.’

  ‘Or did Kempf call the anti-Jewish squads but do so in French?’

  ‘Okay, so let’s not avoid it any longer. What about Marie-Claire de Brisson and Dijon?’

  ‘That is what concerns me most, Hermann. Is it that she plans to kill herself so that no one, not even Mademoiselle St. Onge, can stop her?’

  ‘Maybe Angèlique Desthieux can tell us.’

  ‘That is my earnest hope but we will, of course, not ask her directly but feel our way so as to decide later.’

  And Joanne? wondered Kohler. What of Joanne?

  The street was narrow and crooked and right in the heart of old Dijon. Uniformly shuttered town houses presented nothing but massive, arched wooden doors that led to each courtyard, while smaller doors in these saved the muscles and the back when no carriages needed to enter. Number 22 was no different from all the others.

  ‘Though a city of nearly 90,000, Hermann, Dijon is stricdy provincial. Dank, cold, grey and eminendy respectable. If you thought Lyon was close, my friend, here you have things to learn.’

  It was all so typically Burgundian, thought St-Cyr. Rich in its own right—the food and the wealth of humour had been superb—but confined and scornful of others. ‘To return here from a life in Paris, would be as it was for Napoleon at Elba. Stables downstairs all along one side of the courtyard, with an enclosed staircase zigzagging upwards to connect each part of the house. Living quarters at the front and back. Two storeys here, three at the back with garrets there as bad as any in Paris. No flowers, for it’s not a city of them. Shards of bottle glass sticking out of the top of every free-standing wall as if, down through the centuries there has been a legacy of acute distrust of one’s neighbours.’

  Footprints in the snow revealed the single crosses that had been cut into the soles of the clergy. Wherever a foot was placed, a cross. It said something about the Dijonnais, thought Kohler uncomfortably.

  ‘This house is next to the Bishop’s, Hermann, but still the two courtyards abut along a wall whose crest of broken glass defies all but the foolish and is far too high for most to climb in any case. Our Mademoiselle Desthieux came back from the joys of Paris to gaze out on what could just as easily have been the prison yard of the Santé!’

  End of lecture. ‘The street’s perfect for a rafle.’

  A round-up and house-to-house search. Trust Hermann to think of it when they had so much else to concern them! But Hermann was really just mocking the Gestapo.

  ‘Bung the barrel at both ends, Louis, then stave it in with an axe and let the pickles pour out on to the paving stones.’

  The stones, ah yes. They were treacherous beneath three centimetres of newly fallen snow.

  There were sparrows in the courtyard, feeding in a circle that had been swept clear and sprinkled with millet. Far down the courtyard, the house rose to tall french windows whose shutters were open.

  A well, a pump, was here even in the centre of the city, the house perhaps 300 years old …

  ‘She’s seen us, Louis. She was watching the sparrows. Our mannequin.’

  A housekeeper soon appeared, a no-nonsense type, short, rotund, all red bluster, blue darting eyes and a tangled mop of grey and unruly hair. ‘Messieurs, out. Out! Hurry! Hurry! You cannot come in here.’

  The richness of the accent was sauce to the air. Her breath billowed. An iron soup ladle was fiercely gripped in the left hand. Three leeks had been thrust into the generous waistband of her apron.

  Kohler grinned—the French never ceased to delight and take his mind off other things. ‘Let me, Louis.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot! When presented with such a firm resolve, go easy, eh? Madame, I am Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté Nationale and this,’ he indicated Hermann, ‘is my partner from the Gestapo.’

  She drew in her shrouded bosom. ‘I don’t care if you are two of the Bishop’s disciples from Galilee, monsieur. No visitors are allowed. All appointments are by letter and all are refused.’

  Stubborn to the very bone. ‘Oh bien sûr, we are aware of this, madame, but the préfet of Dijon, he has …’

  ‘That one should know better.’

  Better of too many things was implied. Ah merde, must she be difficult? ‘It’s a matter of great urgency, madame. A young girl has been kidnapped. Your mistress may be able to help once she learns that the girl resembles herself at the same age and that she is the latest of fourteen such girls, all others of whom have been savagely violated and murdered.’

  Her bosom was swifdy crossed. Dark droplets of soup or sauce stained the snow beneath the ladle. The sparrows had fled.

  ‘Murdered …?’

  ‘Yes,’ grunted Kohler. ‘Inform Mademoiselle Desthieux that it’s an order from Sturmbannführer Boemelburg, Head of the Gestapo in France.’

  The blue eyes beneath their shaggy mop gave Hermann a look of utter coldness, then turned to St-Cyr. ‘If it is as this one says, monsieur, I will advise Mademoiselle Desthieux. The father has been dead for some years. The mother wanders in the mind so much, Mademoiselle Desthieux must be careful she is not disturbed.’

  ‘And herself?’ asked the Sûreté.

  The look was one of scorn but with interest in visitors from afar, especially detectives. ‘She alone will decide. Excuse me a moment. Please stay exactly where you are. The front half of the house is occupied by les Allemands, a captain and his orderly. Two corporals are in the rooms between. Had the snow not fallen last night, you would, I am sure, have seen the tyre marks of their motor cycles or those of the captain’s car.’

  Meaning, if Hermann and he had been observant, as detectives should have been, they would have noticed them anyway.

  A nod would suffice and was given. After the woman had left them, Kohler hissed, ‘Why didn’t the resident préfet warn us, Louis?’

  St-Cyr surveyed the occupied parts of the house and shrugged. ‘To understand is to comprehend the Burgundian, mon vieux. Their character is not defined simply by their food or even by the manner of its eating. The préfet was certain the captain would stop us. Mademoiselle Desthieux is special and her privacy to be guarded not just by her housekeeper. No doubt the father was once mayor or one of Dijon’s other leading figures. That i
s why the daughter is sheltered, not only for her past and fame or infamy, but out of deference to the memory of her father.’

  ‘And that of her “guests”, her lodgers, eh?’ snorted Kohler. ‘Don’t try to fool yourself too much.’

  The woman received them in the attic at the back of the house. The narrow staircase seemed never to end. A candle warmed the glazes she used to decorate the porcelain plates before her with a design of fillet lace. ‘It’s a living, Inspectors. A local works keeps me busy.’

  The left eye was without lashes or eyebrow and permanently closed over its empty socket. From there down across the lips and chin, the scars were deep, red and glazed. There were others on her neck and no doubt her chest.

  But the other eye and the hair … ah mon Dieu, thought St-Cyr, it was as if all those missing girls pleaded with him to confide their stories to her.

  ‘How can I help?’ she asked. There were so many things crowding them. The scars, the ruin of her face, the stacks of unpainted plates, the simple work table with its candle and tiny pots of colour, her chair, the windows and the confines of an empty courtyard below.

  ‘Why is it you choose to work up here, mademoiselle?’ asked the Sûrté when, of course, he already knew the answer.

  ‘So as to watch the comings and goings of my father’s house. One has to these days, is that not so?’

  She looked with apology at Hermann and saw him nod. Nervousness made her hesitate, but then she leaned down to blow out the candle and took up a rag to wipe her hands.

  A new design, or one remembered, covered the back of her left hand with a delicate tracery of dark green and gold, but all too soon this vanished.

  ‘Well?’ she asked, removing her apron. They were making her nervous and she didn’t like this because … ah, how could she put it? They were themselves nervous and trying to feel their way. Then she had been correct to meet them here and not in the salon.

  Kohler noted that from the right, apart from a few scars, she was still a very handsome woman. Tall for a Burgundian. Even in a heavy beige sweater, white blouse and dark brown skirt, she had that certain quality, that tremendous sense of presence only a top mannequin possessed.

  ‘Can we begin at the beginning?’ asked Louis with apology in his voice, so much so she couldn’t help but note its sincerity.

  Fingers touched her lips to feel their scars. ‘The beginning …?’ she blurted. ‘Which beginning?’

  St-Cyr handed her the engagement announcement. It took but a moment for it to register. Angèlique Desthieux turned suddenly away to face the stacks of plates in their straw-filled racks. ‘What has Gaetan to do with this?’ she gasped.

  ‘We don’t know, mademoiselle,’ confessed Louis.

  ‘I was only twenty and did not understand what the war could do to a man.’

  ‘Of course. We were both caught up in it, mademoiselle. We both know how you must have felt.’

  ‘Do you? I screamed when I saw what the Boches had done to him! I shrieked my silly head off and had to be taken from the ward. I cried out, Inspectors, and yelled at God, I hate You for what You’ve done to me. To me! Not to them.’

  It was all coming back, Ward 5 at the Val de Grâce in Paris, and les baveux. ‘They … they had no lips, no jaws, no noses or even eyes, some of them. There were towels around their throats to keep their constant droolings from soiling their pyjamas. Vacant, horribly twisted faces—faces that stared hatefully at me from among the bandages. The … the doctors showed me Gaetan’s face and … and I shamed myself and my father and mother in front of all of them, messieurs. Me, who was so beautiful. Even in my nightmare, I could feel the hunger in them for a woman and felt violated as I screamed.’

  After the Great War, veterans’ groups had proliferated out of a desperate need. The droolers had taken the motto, Keep smiling. Don’t become a victim. The aveugles de la guerre were those who had been blinded; the ailes brisées were the broken wings, the disabled aviators with their terrible burns.

  The gueules cassées, the broken mugs.

  ‘Did Gaetan Vergès hate you for refusing to marry him?’ asked Louis.

  ‘Is that why the acid in the face? No! No, a thousand times, Inspector! Gaetan understood.’

  Her back was to them. The eye was hurriedly wiped, the nose touched with a handkerchief. Her shoulders quivered.

  ‘Then who threw the acid?’ asked Hermann.

  ‘Why must you ask? I have said all there is to say, messieurs! That business, it is closed!’

  ‘But must be reopened,’ said Louis. Clearing a space on the table, he laid out single photos of each of the missing girls then quietly told her why they had come.

  ‘So many?’ she asked, trembling at the sight of them and what their hair, their eyes and ages must imply.

  ‘If Gaetan Vergés didn’t throw acid into your face, Mademoiselle Desthieux, who could it have been?’

  ‘Luc’

  Ah merde. ‘Albert Luc Tonnerre?’ he asked, tossing Hermann a look of alarm.

  They must know something of her past, but who had told them? she wondered. ‘My former business agent was among les baveux, Inspector. It’s God’s irony that the two men in my life should have been disfigured by the same cloud of shrapnel. I didn’t know this at the time of my visit to the ward of that hospital. I discovered it only later when the letters began to come.’

  ‘The letters …?’ asked Kohler uneasily.

  ‘Letters of such hatred, I destroyed them and told no one.’

  ‘Not even when the acid …’ began Kohler.

  ‘It was thrown a year later. By then the letters had stopped. I had my life in Paris. I didn’t even think I was in danger.’

  ‘The Gare de Lyon?’ prompted St-Cyr.

  ‘How is it that you knew?’

  ‘I didn’t. I merely guessed. The platform would have been very crowded. Hundreds of soldiers heading for the Gare de l’Est and the war, or returning homeward on crutches and stretchers, the ambulances and nurses, a few civilians …

  ‘Believe me, I saw nothing. I was blinded. Burned! I screamed in agony just as they had done. I panicked and tore at my face, my beautiful face. My lips were on fire, my skin, my cheeks, my eyes … I rolled and thrashed about and finally someone pinned me down and I fainted. When I awoke, I was just like them.’

  ‘How close in friendship were Tonnerre and young Vergès?’ asked Louis.

  ‘Very. They were comrades in arms, Inspector, two of the droolers.’

  ‘Could your fiancé have …’

  ‘My ex-fiancé.’

  ‘Could they have decided it together?’ he asked.

  She had to sit down before them. She must try to compose herself and tell them how it really was. ‘It’s a question I’ve had the years to answer, Inspectors, and yet my answer has always been the same. Gaetan would never have harmed me. He was far too gentle and kind—not bitter, I think, as so many would have been, but philosophical. If he had even in the slightest suspected Luc of such a thing, he would have gone to the authorities.’

  Yet she had so readily given them Tonnerre’s name. ‘Then could it have been another of the patients on that ward?’

  This was a question that deeply troubled them for they had the life of this one girl to consider and the deaths and mutilations of the others. ‘Luc must have had an alibi Gaetan was positive he could accept,’ she said blankly.

  Ah nom de Dieu, it was evident she had counted on Vergès coming forward to accuse his friend! ‘Was it Tonnerre who threw the acid, mademoiselle?’ asked St-Cyr, determined to settle the matter.

  Her gaze was unrelenting. ‘That I will never say, Inspector. You see, I’m now one of them.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  How cruel of him! ‘No, not quite, but in spirit.’

  They prepared to leave. The Frenchman gathered the photos, the other one held the briefcase open. Both were disappointed in her responses. Both had a young girl to find before it was too late.

  ‘Inspecto
rs, I … I’ve not seen or written to Gaetan since the summer of 1917 when I saw his face so clearly I can still recall it.’

  ‘The letters, then, had begun to arrive in the fall?’ asked Louis and saw her nod.

  He wouldn’t leave it alone. She had best tell him. ‘But then they stopped on the day of their anniversary, the day the shrapnel hit them.’

  ‘Pardon?’ he asked.

  ‘Both were wounded on 2 October 1916, Inspector. I saw the damage the following summer, and in the fall of that year, the letters stopped on that very day, 2 October 1917.’

  ‘Then the acid the following summer, Louis. 1918 …’

  ‘Yes, yes, Hermann.’ Would it help to show her the photo of that one girl? wondered St-Cyr and took it out.

  ‘Oh!’ she gasped and turned away.

  Kohler took hold of her by the shoulders and said they were sorry. ‘Could Tonnerre have done it?’ he asked. ‘We need to know.’

  ‘Poured acid on her like that?’ she asked, distraught. ‘Luc … Luc liked the young ones, the younger the better. I once caught him in bed with … with two fifteen-year-olds. He had tied up one of them and had gagged her. He was going to …’ She swallowed hard and shook her head. ‘Paris—he will have found himself a place there and will be living on his pension, even though the memories of the good times will constantly remind him of what he once had and was … was able to do.’

  Two fifteen-year-old girls …

  St-Cyr put the photo away and closed the briefcase. For a moment he seemed undecided. Again he threw Kohler a troubled glance. ‘A daughter, Mademoiselle Desthieux,’ he said, and she dreaded what must come next. ‘Whose child was it that you gave to the Sisters?’

  The child … ‘Gaetan’s. She … she was such a tiny thing but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I had done. You see, by then I knew what I faced and that I couldn’t marry him and keep her.’

  ‘Did Tonnerre know of it?’

  ‘How could he have? No one knew except … except Aurora, whom you have met, and my parents.’

  ‘And the doctor or the midwife and the Sisters.’

  ‘Yes, but Luc could not have known!’

  ‘But could he have found out?’