Mannequin

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘The money … the eighteen million? Is it hidden here? It can’t be. Those girls … Ah, you can’t possibly link their disappearances to that robbery.’

  Nursing his hand, St-Cyr took it away from his lips long enough to hiss, ‘I think I can!’

  ‘Then the money’s here?’ demanded Talbotte, wiping blood and rainwater from his lips.

  ‘No. No, it never left Paris.’

  ‘Louis, how can you be so …?’

  ‘So sure, Hermann? Ah, nothing is certain until all the information is in.’

  Talbotte told himself he had had enough of this shit! ‘Those two men abandoned the car and made a run for it, idiot! The Gare de l’Est, the Gare de Lyon … who’s to say once they’re gone?’

  Louis sat up and leaned forward quickly. ‘Yes, yes, préfet, but has there been any word of their having been seen taking the train? Any train?’

  ‘Louis, what about the …’

  ‘The lorries full of furniture? They’re certainly a possibility.’

  ‘Yet the money isn’t here?’ said Talbotte, wondering what Kohler had been about to ask Louis.

  ‘No. No, I do not think the money is here,’ said St-Cyr, grateful at having stopped Hermann.

  Kohler told himself to let Louis handle things now that the two of them had calmed down. Quite obviously the préfet knew nothing of the forged papers Marie-Claire de Brisson had had made.

  ‘The girl in that tower?’ demanded Talbotte darkly. ‘What has she to do with the robbery?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Louis.

  ‘Then there is no connection!’ snorted Talbotte, only to regret having used his nose so thoughtlessly.

  ‘A connection … ah yes, préfet, that is a quite different matter and for this we need to know more about the woman in the street’

  ‘The one who stood look-out for the robbers?’

  ‘Yes, that one.’

  Talbotte saw Kohler fiddling with the stick grenade. The Bavarian was only bluffing but … ah merde, he had a reputation for doing just such things! ‘She was not so young as thought at first. She was well dressed—that is to say, the overcoat, scarf and hat were of good quality. Not overly expensive, but good. Prewar. Leather gloves also. Dark blue.’

  ‘Eyeglasses?’ asked St-Cyr.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Perhaps fifty, perhaps a little more.’

  ‘Try sixty?’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘Now tell us about the hat?’

  ‘Felt, grey-blue with a feather. The brim not so wide as the hat you have left out in the rain.’

  ‘My hat? Ah maudit!’

  St-Cyr looked out at the rain, then ignored the loss. He’d find the hat later. ‘Before the robbery she was seen watching the one who is now in the tower, préfet. Was she seen following her after the getaway?’

  ‘Yes, but before this she approached the girl two or three times, always from behind. The woman was very nervous and seemed to have recognized the girl but they didn’t speak. It’s felt she was about to warn the girl of something but … but then couldn’t bring herself to do so.’

  ‘Good!’ breathed St-Cyr. ‘Then what?’

  ‘The girl hurried east along the rue Quatre Septembre. The woman hesitated and then followed. They turned south on the rue de Richelieu and went into the Bibliothèque Nationale. Only the woman came out and was seen trying to find where the other one had gone. The woman then went south and entered the garden of the Palais Royal and walked along the west arcade.’

  Past the shop of the engravers …‘And her name, préfet? Come, come, let us in on it’

  The moment must be savoured. ‘That we do not know. My informants …’

  ‘Are excellent, préfet. Péguy was most certainly not the only one, nor the best of them.’

  ‘Péguy … Ah yes, Jean-Louis, that is a little matter you and I will have to settle another time.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Louis, I’m going to arm this toy for him. Why not get out and ask him again. Hey, I’ll meet you after the bang.’

  St-Cyr got stiffly out of the car to stand in the rain and wait for the préfet to roll down his side window. ‘The name?’ he asked. He would not beg, though everything in him said to.

  Talbotte shrugged. ‘Find out and then we will deal with it, eh? Us, Jean-Louis, not you.’

  ‘Don’t be so miserable. It’s just possible the credit will come to you, so why worry?’

  ‘Why? Because, mon fin from the Sûreté, that particular mouchard was not nearly as good as Péguy.’

  * * *

  Daylight had come, and with it, solid curtains of rain which screened the open ends of the barn, filling the place with their unnerving sound. Louis was grim. Hands jammed into the pockets of an overcoat that was drenched and cold, he watched impatiendy as the flics from Provins emptied the contents of the lorries and stacked the furniture. A harpsichord, a gorgeous but fragile piece, had inadvertently lost a leg and every time the instrument was banged against something, the poor Frog would leap.

  One by one the paintings and bits of sculpture were carried out and held before him but he would only nod gruffly, after which they were taken away and stacked.

  Kohler went through every drawer and chest but couldn’t find the negatives and prints of the photos that had been taken in the Paris house. Worried that they had been destroyed, he searched all the harder but to no avail, then stood beside Louis sharing a last cigarette.

  ‘All of the paintings and sculptures Mademoiselle Desthieux told us of are missing, Hermann, the tapestries and carpets also. Either Monsieur Vergès senior sold them some time ago to pay for die care of his son, or they were stolen and we will now find them offered for sale at the Jeu de Paume.’

  ‘Why would he have kept the house in Paris during the twenties and thirties?’

  ‘To escape the farm and the responsibility. To conduct business, to remember, perhaps, the good times they had once had there. Ah, who knows the reasons behind such things? That house, Hermann, has been in the family for generations.’

  ‘Angèlique Desthieux and Luc Tonnerre must have had the use of it prior to 3 July 1916.’

  ‘Those photos of her in the buff … yes. Tonnerre must have had a key of his own, and our mannequin was not so saindy as either she or some of her other photographs would suggest.’

  ‘That key was then used after the Defeat of 1940.’

  ‘Unoccupied, the house was perfect,’ said St-Cyr sadly.

  ‘We’ll have to find Tonnerre and quickly.’

  ‘Those two droolers couldn’t have come and gone between here and Paris without laissez-passers, Hermann.’

  ‘They couldn’t have robbed that bank.’

  ‘No, of course not, since their faces would have been seen, but is it possible, perhaps, that Madame Lemaire’s maid saw Luc Tonnerre in the attic of that house?’

  ‘Waiting for the photos to be taken downstairs,’ said Kohler. ‘Did Tonnerre and Vergès hire the photographer and that woman to help them?’

  ‘Perhaps, but …’

  At a shout, they were forced to run through the rain to the kitchen of the main house where the former help had been brought from their homes and assembled. A cook, a housekeeper, a gardener and caretaker, all were greatly distressed and very afraid.

  St-Cyr took off his soaking hat and let it drain over the cluttered sink. Kohler emptied his shoes and squeezed the turn-ups of his trousers, then dragged off his overcoat and draped it over the back of a chair. He, too, drained his hat.

  The préfet of Provins had been instructed to report to Talbotte on the interviews, but was now told to leave. ‘We will call you when we need you,’ said Louis. ‘Let these good people speak freely, préfet. None of them were responsible.’

  It was only in bits and pieces that the truth came out. Monsieur Vergès senior had died in the fall of 1939 and from then on things had deteriorated rapidly. ‘Occasionally, at first, Monsieur Gaetan�
�s friend would come by car from Paris,’ said the caretaker, ducking his ancient head and clutching his black beret in deference. ‘They would “talk”, Inspector, in the only way such as they can talk. Very serious, always close. The walks, the fishing, the ether at night—yes, both took it, and the friend brought it in two-litre bottles—three or four of them, sometimes more. The cognac aussi, of course. Five or six bottles at a time.’

  ‘Then the withdrawal,’ hissed the cook, a wasp of a woman, thin and tall and nearly seventy. ‘That one,’ she spat. ‘He would drive away and leave Monsieur Gaetan without another drop to tide him over. We could not buy ether—how could such as we have done such a thing? The brandy of course. Oh bien sûr a little cognac, no matter how rough. But the ether, ah no. Doctor Audet was against it. The liver, the kidneys …’ Her hard, little eyes said, You can see how it was. Do you need us to say it?

  ‘Without it, Monsieur Gaetan, he … he would slip into despair,’ said the housekeeper, who had obviously known the son since his birth. Her tears were constant and silent, and she had remained a little detached from the others as had been her station in life.

  ‘But he didn’t go on periodic rampages through the house until when?’ asked St-Cyr gently.

  ‘Until just after the Defeat, monsieur,’ grumbled the gardener. ‘Until after he had dismissed us in July of 1940. We who have always been so kind to him and have never avoided his gaze or turned away from that face of his!’

  Florid, pug-nosed and pockmarked, the man was quivering with indignation.

  ‘Was the dismissal after a visit from his friend?’ asked Louis.

  They glanced at each other. The cook said, ‘Yes!’

  ‘Bon, that, fits,’ said St-Cyr, wishing he had tobacco with which to stoke the empty furnace he had taken from a pocket. ‘But there is a small problem. Since the Defeat, cars are no longer common. Did Luc Tonnerre still drive his?’

  Again they glanced at each other as only country people can, swift with alarm and hidden meaning. Each shrugged in his or her own way.

  ‘Come, come,’ urged St-Cyr. ‘We haven’t all day and must return to Paris.’

  ‘Always since the Defeat, he … he has walked in from the main road, Inspector,’ confessed the gardener. ‘He has come alone but without the ether or cognac’

  The detectives waited for more. At last the cook could stand their silence no longer and said, ‘But I have heard a car passing my house, Inspectors.’

  They were both startied, and that was good, she said to herself.

  ‘When exactly did you hear this car?’ asked St-Cyr cautiously.

  Was it too much to hope for a little break, a smile from God perhaps?

  Shrewdly the woman tasted the triumph of her little success. ‘Late at night—1.30 or 2.00 the old time. In the beginning, early in October 1940, within the first week.’

  ‘It has come and gone every once in a while for these past two years, Inspector,’ acknowledged the caretaker. ‘Always late at night, always leaving well before dawn. A big car with a powerful engine and the lights blinkered for the black-out.’

  Had the caretaker been out illegally trapping rabbits? wondered Kohler, and thought he had. ‘How many in the car?’ he asked. ‘Come on, don’t clam up now. I’ll only have to run you in …’

  ‘Hermann, please! A simple walk in the night doesn’t mean hunting with a ferret and the pâté or stew at morning! How many in the car, monsieur?’

  Both detectives were looking intently at him. Would they understand how difficult it had been to even see the car? ‘I … I can’t say for certain, Inspectors, but think there must have been more than one person.’

  It was the gardener who said there had been smoke coming from the house at dawn. ‘At first I thought Monsieur Gaetan was burning old tyres but as this is now forbidden because of the shortages, I … I found the smoke did not smell of burning rubber.’

  ‘Thick and black and full of soot?’ bleated the Sûreté! ‘When …? What day, what month?’

  Again they looked at each other swiftly. There was hesitation, a curt nod from the cook to the gardener, a ‘Tell them, Monsieur Romand. You must.’

  ‘Always at dawn the last of a fire that must have begun some time before. First seen in the fall of 1940, in late November, Inspectors, then … then in mid-March of this year and … and again in September, on … on the morning of the 12th.’

  ‘Three times, Hermann.’

  Boemelburg had given them photos of eight of the victims’ bodies. Joanne made nine and now … another three?

  Next to the stove there were brick ovens with sheet-iron tops that, in the earliest years, had been used to do the cooking. Louis opened the nearest firebox door to a spill of wood ashes and fragments of bone.

  ‘Part of a femur, Hermann. Part of a tibia …’ He crouched and peered into the firebox and lifted the lantern close. ‘Also a piece of a pelvis … some ribs—these have been sawn. A jaw, fragments of a skull, some teeth.’

  They were enough. ‘We only need two more, Louis, and we’ll have accounted for all fourteen of them.’

  8

  PARIS IN THE RAIN AND SLUSH WAS MISERABLE, thought St-Cyr, the rue des Saussaies silent and unfriendly. Boemelburg was not pleased to see them. Rain poured down the windows that overlooked the courtyard where their car was parked. The Chief studied the gobs of slush that accompanied the rush of water while Hermann and he, like two errant schoolboys in steaming overcoats and shoes, sat uncomfortably in front of the antique limewood desk to which the bare planks of expediency and enlargement had been thoroughly nailed the day Boemelburg had taken over the office.

  ‘Kempf, Louis,’ breathed the Chief as he studied yet another gob of slush. ‘The Sonderführer comes from a very old and wealthy family—Prussian to the core, you idiots. He’s a cousin of the Reichsführer Goering or were you unaware of this?’

  Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, a cousin! ‘Walter, over the past two years …’

  Boemelburg didn’t turn from studying the weather. He would be very formal with these two. ‘Don’t interrupt me, Chief Inspector St-Cyr, and please don’t assume a familiarity you shouldn’t just because we once worked together in the old days.’

  ‘Sturmbannführer, there were …’

  ‘Louis, we were speaking French. Please let us continue. Your German may be excellent and admirable but my secretaries have ears, or hadn’t you noticed?’

  Irritably a hand was passed over the all-but-shaven grey and bristly dome. ‘Kohler, use your brains and close the door. This is serious.

  ‘Kempf …’ he went on without turning from the rain. ‘How could you have asked the Sonderführer and his friend, this … this French newspaperman, to file daily itineraries with my office each morning at 0700 hours?’

  Hermann made the mistake of grinning and said, ‘I thought it a good idea at the time, Sturmbann …’

  ‘You thought it a good idea but you didn’t consult me? Me who has the power to send you to join your sons? Ah Gott im Himmel, dummkopf, Kempf’s wife …’

  ‘She’s dead, Sturmbann …’

  A fist was clenched, the weather outside forgotten, the voice like steel. ‘Dead or alive it makes no difference. Kempfs wife was once a favourite of the Reichsführer.’

  Shit! ‘When the Sonderführer showed up at 0700 hours with his little bit of paper and his grin, Hermann, I called Gestapo Leader Mueller for some background. Since we’re old friends, Mueller very kindly filled me in and asked me to consider the Russian Front for you and Louis.’

  In these overcoats and shoes? wondered St-Cyr ruefully. Must God always frown on a poor but honest and hard-working detective?

  Kohler saw Louis idly fiddle with a button that had come loose. He heard Boemelburg quietly saying, ‘This had better be good. A bank was robbed. The Resistance may be involved. The murders of those girls, no matter how close any of them were to you, Louis, cannot intrude.’

  It was now or never thought St-Cyr, and always such things were
a gamble. ‘The two are connected, Sturmbannführer, if only through the woman who watched the street for the robbers.’

  ‘Droolers!’ stormed the Chief. ‘Did you not think Talbotte would come running to me? Did you have to assault—yes, assault—the préfet of Paris? Don’t hide your hand like that!’

  ‘Walter, may I remind you that over the past two years fourteen girls have been taken from their simple lives, brutally assaulted, mutilated and ruthlessly murdered!’

  Boemelburg placed both hands on his desk among the mounds of papers. ‘And what do you want me to do about it? Let the two of you make a fool out of me?’

  He sat down heavily. Everyone knew the word was out that he was to be retired soon, that he was becoming forgetful, and that in a policeman, a former detective and Head of the Gestapo in France, such a thing could not be tolerated.

  But Walter was far from forgetful. ‘Kempf and le Blanc exactly fit the descriptions of the robbers, Sturmbannführer,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Forged papers were made out using assumed names but bearing their photographs.’

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘No, not yet but …’

  ‘But, what, Louis?’

  ‘But the boy who made the papers gave Hermann their descriptions and we have no reason to doubt his word.’

  ‘Then bring the boy to this office and let me hear what he has to say before we put him up against a wall and shoot him.’

  ‘He’s already dead, Sturmbannführer,’ interjected Kohler. ‘Someone called the anti-Jewish squad and they nailed the son of a bitch and his lousy father.’

  ‘Good! No forged papers, no proof. Only the word of one who could well have been lying to put you off.’

  ‘And if we can produce the papers, Sturmbannführer?’ asked St-Cyr quiedy.

  ‘Then I’ll agree to study them but will reserve my decision on the matter until I’ve consulted Berlin.’

  Dédé was standing in the rain getting drenched. The peaked hat, with its big earlugs, let the water pour off into the upturned collar of the heavy, grey, herringbone overcoat that didn’t fit too well and had been handed down several times.