Flushed with success, Goering ate, drank, drew on his cigar and let his eyes dance over the crowd. Beautiful young women and girls in beautiful dresses and jewels, handsome young men in uniform—Luftwaffe blue, Kriegsmarine blue, Wehrmacht and SS grey and SS black, ah yes. Suits too: art dealers, buyers and sellers. Men on the make, girls on the make. Food in a powder-blue silk lap, wine down a generous bosom as a joke to exclamations of despair that fought to rise above the din but failed.
A broken glass, a shattered plate—the wealthy, the nouveaux riches, the demi-mondes of Paris toasted the Reichsmarschall’s phenomenal luck and drank deeply.
Isolated, cut off, alone and subdued, Denise St. Onge sat six places from the Reichsmarschall across the table, and every time his gaze fell on her and he drank her health, she shuddered.
She looked so tiny in her black silk dress with its spaghetti straps. She hardly touched the breast of chicken that was in front of her and when the fillet of beef Dukes of Bourbon came, she shook her head.
St-Cyr watched her closely from one of the private balcony dining-rooms, letting the cameras of his mind record her every anxiety, for she must by now have realized that the Sonderführer and Michel le Blanc wouldn’t return.
And Goering knew it too, which could only mean Boemelburg really had been contacted and had sent someone to the shop to uncover the truth.
Ah merde, what were Hermann and he to do?
When the wild dove in red-wine sauce arrived, she picked at it and tried to eat, for Goering, dribbling dark sauce down the front of his nice white uniform, was devouring her.
At last she couldn’t stand him looking at her any more and, colouring rapidly, leapt to her feet, knocking two of her wine glasses over.
Chablis stained the white table-cloth to mingle with a red flood of burgundy. The laughter and talk fled down the table to silence even the island tables around them.
‘Eat,’ said Goering. ‘No one is to leave.’
‘I … I can’t.’
‘Eat!’ he shrieked.
She put both her hands down hard on the table to brace herself. As everyone watched, she picked up a dove, letting the sauce splatter where it would, never once taking her eyes from the Reichsführer.
Sauce clung to her lips and cheeks, a tiny bone caught in her throat. Choking, she clutched her throat, winced, coughed, reached for bread … for anything and finally took a proffered glass of the red.
Then she stood there in defeat staring down at her greasy hands, wondering what was happening to her.
St-Cyr drew in a breath. His eyes glazing over as he fought the effects of alcohol and drugs, Goering roughly shoved plates and cutlery aside, wine glasses, too, and those of his neighbours which smashed on the floor until …
In bundle after bundle, the 18,000,000 francs were brought in and placed before him and she knew exactly what he was going to do to her.
The robbery passed before her eyes, the good times and the fun, the orgies with naked girls who couldn’t count for anything and kept Franz amused while she … she knelt beneath them or …
‘Eat,’ said Goering. ‘Let everyone see you eat’
* * *
What had made her do it? wondered St-Cyr. Spoiled as a child, greedy, ambitious, arrogant—ah so many things came to mind but still, could there ever be an adequate answer?
Handcuffed to the arms of a chair and still in her party dress, Denise St. Onge sat with head bowed before Walter Boemelburg. Dragged out of bed at 3:00 a.m., the Sturmbannführer scowled. Her voice was too faint. He had to ask her to speak up but still it remained faint. ‘At … at first I … I didn’t stay in the house after the girls had … had removed their clothes. Franz would tell me to leave; Michel would … would give him the revolver and then … then come downstairs with me to make certain the door was locked. They … then they …’
‘A moment,’ interjected St-Cyr with a lift of his pipe. ‘Where was the Sonderführer while the photographs were being taken by le Blanc?’
‘Franz..?’ she asked, remembering so clearly the look in his eyes as they had searched each girl’s nakedness.
Kohler gently reminded her that she had best answer. The corporal, here, has to take it all down so that you can sign it. Make things easy for him, eh? We’re all tired.’
‘Franz … Franz usually waited upstairs in the attic rooms. He would hear us as I told each girl what to do. Which dress to wear, which blouse or slip. The make-up … It … it excited him to listen to us. I would then leave and …’
‘Go on,’ said St-Cyr quiedy.
Still she couldn’t bring herself to face them. ‘Then he and Michel would … would play with the girl.’
‘They raped them,’ said Louis levelly.
‘Yes, several times. This and … and other things. I … I don’t know how many times that first day. Maybe twice, maybe three times—enough to teach submissiveness. When …’
“When what?’ demanded Boemelburg furiously.
Startled, she leapt and for a second, looked up but away and then down …
Again Kohler reminded her to answer and she did so. ‘When they tired of them, after a month, two months—what did it matter?—they killed them. I didn’t ask if they’d done so. I … I assumed the girls would be let go. Honestly I did. You must believe me. You must!’
‘We don’t,’ breathed Kohler.
‘You knew they’d be killed,’ said the one called St-Cyr.
‘All right, I knew!’ she said bitterly. ‘Does that make you feel better?’
The bitch! fumed Boemelburg. He’d had enough of her! ‘They couldn’t have been allowed to live, not after what the three of you had done to them!’
Through her tears she looked at him and then at each of the detectives. They would never understand how it had all started or why she had become involved in such a thing. Never!
When she was asked how it had begun, anger came to her and she shouted at them, ‘How does anything like that start? The war was lost. My brother Julien was dead. Dead, do you understand? My brother Martin was in a prisoner-of-war camp and I wanted him freed—yes, freed! Franz could do that for me. Franz …’
‘How patriotic of you,’ snorted Boemelburg. ‘Louis, haven’t we heard enough?’
‘Walter, please. She has to tell us everything.’
‘Franz … Franz came to see me when he arrived in Paris in the summer of 1940 and I …’ She shrugged. ‘I saw my chance. We began to go out again. It was exciting. He was always lots of fun. He had a job, he had influence. I had none, but I knew him from before, from Berlin. He was a cousin. He was very handsome. We had …’
‘Slept together,’ said Louis, ‘and did so again.’
‘But it wasn’t enough,’ breathed Kohler.
Ashen and trembling, she again lowered her eyes. She knew that no matter how long it took, they wouldn’t stop until she had told them everything. ‘No. No, it wasn’t enough. Not for him. He wanted to do something “different”, something “really exciting”. One night soon after the Defeat we were in Marie-Claire’s flat when Marie asked him about houses whose owners hadn’t come back. I think maybe she wanted a place for herself. I really don’t know what made her ask such a question. Franz went to have a look. I stayed with her. It … it was then that she told me of the jewellery she had found for the shop and of the man who was her real father.’
Kohler filled the Chief in, offering a cigarette. ‘Tonnerre had been taking money from Madame de Brisson for years, threatening to tell her daughter he was the girl’s father. Tonnerre had a key to the house. They …’
‘He never missed it,’ she said bleakly, not looking up. ‘It was nothing to him. Not any more. Only memories of a mannequin he hated, the mother of the daughter he had never spoken to until the day Marie went to ask him about the jewellery. Even then they didn’t speak of who her real parents were. Later, Franz and I gave him ether. We got him very drunk on it, very quickly—like lightning, isn’t that so? We went through his pl
ace, finding first the key and then the negatives of his mannequin naked on a chaise-longue, naked and bent over a chair, a table … everything … everything done in that very house!’
‘Those negatives then gave you the idea for the advertisements and you worked out the schedule of photographs and put together the clothes each girl would be asked to wear,’ said Louis, lost to the thing. ‘Always the same clothes, always the same poses because Tonnerre and Gaetan Vergès were the ones who were to be blamed for the crimes if discovered.’ He drew on his pipe, had a sudden thought, asked, ‘When did Mademoiselle de Brisson tell you about her own abuse, mademoiselle? Monsieur de Brisson was …’
‘Fucking her? Is this what you think?’ It was. ‘Oh mon Dieu, you are so wrong! Marie-Claire hadn’t been touched by him since the age of fifteen!’
‘Yet she wrote of it every day,’ sighed Louis, his pipe forgotten. ‘And you, mademoiselle? You let her feed on this fear. She was afraid you would tell others, so much so that she would never leave your employ no matter how good the offer.’
Her smile was twisted. ‘Monsieur de Brisson came to secretly watch us. He was so hungry, that one. He had such lust in his eyes. Franz caught him on the balcony looking through the gap we had deliberately left in the curtains for him. It was perfect. Perfect! Monsieur de Brisson the banker joined the party!’
‘Louis, I’ve heard enough,’ grunted Boemelburg.
‘Walter, a moment, please.’ St-Cyr turned to the prisoner who looked up beseechingly at him through her tears. ‘Were photographs taken of the banker with any of those girls?’
Again there was that smile. ‘What do you think, Inspector? How else could we have found out about the money from Lyon? How else could we have got him to convince Madame de Brisson to help us so that we had them both? He enjoyed it! What man would not enjoy a naked girl who has a bag over her head and cannot identify her assailant?’
Merde alors! what had happened to give her such ideas? wondered St-Cyr, greatly troubled by her. Had she been so possessive of Kempf, she had willingly gone along with things?
Sadly he knew this was how it must have been, otherwise Kempf would soon have gotten rid of her and found another.
Again Kohler filled the Chief in. ‘Eventually Marie-Claire de Brisson discovered what they were up to. She warned the neighbour’s maid to stay away from the balcony for fear the girl would be killed. She made copies of some of the photographs without their knowledge and, after the house was emptied, scattered them for us to find.’
‘She had forged papers made for Kempf and le Blanc,’ said Louis, picking up the thread of it. ‘She hid the money where they wouldn’t find it, then wrote everything down so that when she killed herself in Dijon, we would find it on her body. She took a terrible chance they would discover what she was up to, SturmbannFührer, but they failed to do so until the end.’
‘Why wouldn’t they have scattered the photos themselves, since their wish was to pin it all on the two droolers?’ asked Boemelburg.
St-Cyr shook his head. ‘Everything was to point to the Château des belles fleurs bleues so as to gain distance from themselves. No doubt the photos were to have been left with Gaetan Vergès’s body but …’ he paused to look steadily at the prisoner, ‘but were destroyed at the country house, were they not, mademoiselle?’
Must he act like God? ‘Yes, I burned them in the kitchen. Franz was very angry when he found out but …’ She shrugged. Those photographs, they were always such a worry to me. Something … ah, I don’t know what, told me they would cause us trouble in the end and …’ Her smile was again twisted. ‘I was correct.’
Boemelburg still couldn’t leave things. ‘Why did Marie-Claire de Brisson wait so long, Louis? Why didn’t she speak up?’
There was a sad shrug. The hand, with its forgotten pipe, lifted. ‘She didn’t know of it until early last May, Walter, when she heard or saw her father returning from that house and then discovered the horror of what they’d been up to.’
‘The acid,’ breathed Kohler. They had gagged that one and …’
She would force herself to face them through her tears.‘We … we had spread the girl out in the cellars and … and had tied her down. De Brisson … de Brisson left us in a hurry and … and then Franz said that it had to be done so as to make the motive clear. He … he took the acid bottles and … and he made Michel and me watch.’
‘The daughter then tried to kill herself, Walter,’ said the one from the Sûreté gruffly.
She would try to smile at him again so as to tell him he had been right about her in this too. ‘But I saved her, Inspector, and I told her she could say nothing because if she did, I would swear that she, too, had been involved.’
‘You must have been very careful when going to and from that house,’ he said, never leaving her eyes for a moment.
‘Careful? We had to be, but these days, Inspector, isn’t it always best for others to simply turn away and say nothing?’
She had tried her best to condemn him as being a party to the Occupation but he would ignore it. ‘And Joanne?’ he asked, lifting his eyebrows in question.
‘Joanne Labelle … Oh for sure, Inspector, that last one, she told us many times that you were a neighbour and that you and your partner would find and bring us to justice.’
‘Kempf or le Blanc took her upstairs to the tower room,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Which of them killed her?’
‘Franz … after we … we had had one last quick session with her. She … she kept on telling us you would … Franz hit her several times. He … he hated her for saying this. When … when it was done, he signalled to me from the window. I was in the kitchen garden waiting for him to do so.’
‘You then went to find Gaetan Vergès whom Ie Blanc was holding in the cottage.’
‘Yes. Yes, Inspector. You see Vergès knew all about what we had been doing to those girls. We took him ether, we got him so very drunk—and them too, us also. Why else would he have turned away the very people who had helped him through the years? We made him watch us. We often left him alone with one of the girls and he would, in his drunken state, try to release them, but of course they didn’t understand what he was doing and thought the worst. Later, he would realize what had happened and would rampage through the house, destroying everything in his desire for ether and his hatred of himself until, at last, he would fall into a stupor and live in filth.’
‘He cut the bullet that killed him, mademoiselle,’ said Louis. Why didn’t he shoot himself?’
‘Because he refused to let us get away with things that easily, and because Franz said we would have to make it look like a suicide anyway.’
‘And Tonnerre?’ asked Louis sharply, his patience all but gone.
‘We gave him ether and when he was out, Franz made me soak a pad and … and hold it over that horrible face. I wanted to, do you understand? I wanted it an to end!’
They were silent for several moments and she didn’t know if they were done with her. Then the Sûreté asked, ‘The bodies of the other two girls, Mademoiselle St. Onge? Please, we’ve been able to account for only twelve of them.’
‘Buried at the farm in … in the kitchen garden.’
Now it only remained for them to ask why the teller had had to be killed and this information she would give quite readily. ‘Franz said the teller had to be killed. We didn’t argue. I … I knew the teller would recognize Franz, since he had seen us on more than one occasion going upstairs to Monsieur de Brisson’s office.’ She shrugged. ‘It had to be done, that’s all there was to it. Now I would like a cigarette. May I have one, please?’
Ignoring her, the Sturmbannführer, signalled to the one called Kohler to read through her statement, while the one called St-Cyr fiddled uncomfortably with his pipe and finally put it away.
Troubled, he still had matters to settle.
‘On the day of the robbery, Mademoiselle St. Onge, what exactly did you do?’
‘I … I followed the girl as I us
ually did with the others until I was satisfied they were alone. I … I saw Madame de Brisson about to warn her. I panicked. I hurried to the house and … and waited but then … why, then the girl came. I couldn’t believe it, but there she was at the door.’
‘And then?’ he asked so quietly she knew he was following every step.
‘I … I calmed her fears. I gave her a little wine—she said she had only just had a cup of coffee, that a boy across the way had … Ah no, the forged papers …’
‘Paul Meunier,’ acknowledged St-Cyr curtly. Marie-Claire de Brisson couldn’t have caused the deaths of the engravers. The banker must have called in the alarm. Madame de Brisson must have become aware of her daughter’s visits to Paul Meunier and finally told her husband of them … ‘And then?’ he asked.
‘Michel came but he was very late and the girl wanted to leave. I …’
‘Please, the truth, Mademoiselle St. Onge. Joanne was uneasy. She knew she had been followed—isn’t that correct?’
‘Yes, but I … I was able to convince her that … that pretty girls often thought such things and that if she stayed, why she’d be sure to get the job.’
‘Had you not been there to answer the door and welcome her in—had it been le Blanc or Kempf, mademoiselle—what would she have done?’
Again there was that twisted smile. ‘They all needed the presence of a woman to reassure them—isn’t this what you wish me to say, Inspector? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Me, I welcomed them in.’
‘Le Blanc finally arrived and …?’ he asked, unruffled.
‘We began the session.’
‘The session … Is that what you called it?’
She didn’t answer. He asked her again.
‘Yes.’
Louis thought for a moment, then sadly asked, ‘And how did you feel as you greeted each of those girls?’
Was it so important to him? ‘Very excited but … but terrified also—afraid that it would all go wrong and the police would come. Fear and sex, Inspector? Is it not fear that sometimes heightens sexual arousal? The fear of discovery, the fear that others are watching as you gratify yourself with another, with a girl who can’t escape and must submit, sometimes with a man also and that girl, the three of us—oh I knew Franz and Michel and then de Brisson, too, watched me as I had sex with those girls and with one of them but this … this only seemed to make it all the more exquisite and it pleased Franz to watch me. Don’t you see, I couldn’t have kept him otherwise?’
Mannequin Page 27