‘Be sure to look for cartridge casings, Chief. Footprints will be out of the question. We’ll let that ex-corporal stew in his own juice and then we’ll pickle him for good measure.’
Adding a few twigs to the fire that siphoned gasoline from the van had started, Rocheleau heaved a grateful sigh. The ‘steaks’ had done their work. Those two from Paris had noticed nothing. They’d find the bodies and would have a look at the van and then they’d come back with their questions to receive the answers already given.
Taking another piece of sausage from his coat pocket, he skewered it onto the stick he would burn once the repast had been consumed. Un saucisson fumé de Champagne and with the fully ripened Brie de Meaux, a little taste from heaven and who would have thought such would be possible in a bank van? Even Father Adrien had been surprised. He had seen the bottles and had immediately shoved two into the deep pockets of that cassock of his and had clutched a third and given him the gospel. ‘For the Mass, Eugène. Say nothing, my son. What has happened here is not for us. Let the police from Paris deal with it.’
Fritz-haired when he had pulled off the Gestapo’s storm hat, Herr Kohler was taller by far than that Sûreté turtle of his. And yes, a glistening scar caressed the left cheek from eye to chin, giving reminders of something Herr Kohler would definitely remember for the rest of his life should the end of this Occupation require a certain garde champêtre to point the finger of truth before the post was used, the one at least for that collabo partner of his.
Shrapnel scars from that other war had graced the storm-trooper countenance, the age, that of about fifty-five or fifty-six and maybe three years older than his little follower. Bulldog jowls had given the sad, rheumy faded-blue eyes a little more intensity, but they had held interest only in the rifle and its bayonet, and memories perhaps of that other war. The hands had been big, the touch of the fingers as he had held that cigarette, light.
The tortoise was, of course, still with that bland, broad and defiant holier-than-thou brow, the moustache much more than that of the German Führer he served, the thick and bushy eyebrows the same as before, the hair a dark brown but without the grey that had immediately overtaken his own after that battle. Medium in height, blocky across the shoulders, that one had changed so little he still terrified. But the bullet scars across the brow had been more recent, though it was a great pity some criminal had missed him. Here, as the battle had raged, the limestone had caused an infinity of rounds to ricochet until one from a sniper had slipped through to knock that salaud off his feet, causing St-Cyr to drop the rifle he had only just picked up, intending to thrust it back at himself and prevent such an act of cowardice.
Crossing himself, he said to no one but himself, Me, I thought he really was dead and that all my worries were over, but when I found that he wasn’t, I thought to take up his Lebel Modèle 1873 and let him have one of those old eleven millimetres even if that revolver should misfire due to the years of the government’s having stored them in dampness. Black powder too. But he opened his eyes and said, ‘Ah bon, mon brave, you’ve got your rifle again. Push on. Keep them from me.’
When everyone else was shitting themselves and wanting to run.
Those two from Paris would find the victims for certain and food enough for the Action Courts, but could they be accused of stealing any of it for themselves?
Having crossed what little remained of the cloister and its courtyard, and now adjacent to the eastern end of the church itself, St-Cyr entered what had been the chapter house. This small, square room, with its arched and gaping doorway to what was left of the sanctuary and altar, had two openings that faced onto the eastern walk of the cloister. Light would have entered from the remains of the three windows in its outer wall, and it was here that the abbot and his monks would have met each morning after the first hour to go over any problems and the business of the day. A lectern would have stood facing the cloister openings, the abbot sitting behind it, the monks on two rows of benches before him.
But all of that was gone except for the broken-off stems of a couple of the columns that would have supported the vault above which now gaped at the sky.
‘From just such a past do we poor mortals pass into the present,’ he said to the victim as if by way of greeting, for no matter how hard one tried, the reverence of these ruins still intruded on the thoughts.
Caught among the squared-off blocks of medium-grey limestone with their encroaching dark-green moss, ivy and wild grape, the man lay under canvas as if in the Great War. Hermann would immediately have turned away and probably thrown up. Having lost his two sons at Stalingrad before the defeat of von Paulus and the Sixth Army there early last February, this impulse of his had become more intense with every new murder. The younger, the harder; the more innocent, the more terrible. ‘My partner’s really a very good detective and I’ve come to absolutely depend on him, while he himself has increasingly become the citizen of the world I’ve been encouraging.’
Pausing to let that sink in and the cameras of the mind to do their work, he gave the room the once over, noted the sodden grass and wildflowers that had gone to seed, lush as they both were, and the encroaching saplings of the forest. And finding one of the latter broken off some distance from the corpse, fingered it in doubt and said, ‘Ah bon, mon ami, what has gone on here?’
The grass could, or could not have been trampled more than necessary. It was simply impossible to tell, but the room was small and all but a cul-de-sac. Had the victim been trying to hide? Had he heard the other one being shot, or had he been the first?
Gently pulling back the canvas, he had to pause, for before being killed, the victim had been holding a bloodied handkerchief to his forehead. ‘Had you been hit by a stone, or did you fall and hit yourself? Is that why there was that broken sapling? Dazed, you would have stood, the killer then jamming that weapon of his tight against your chest.’
Surprise … Had that been it, that left hand up and near the head as if, in having been startled, he had just removed the handkerchief?
The bank’s uniform jacket, vest, shirt and undershirt had all been torn by the bullet’s entry, the muzzle having left its circle around the bullet hole. There would be powder burns. Joliot would also find the tiny tattoos the grains of that gunpowder would have left as they’d been driven into the skin.
‘Had your clothing not been torn, I’d have thought the bullet had been fired from at least a metre away.’
Rigor had passed, but with the cold and dampness, decay would have been retarded. Hypostasis, the lividity due to the gravitational settling of the blood into its lowest parts, would have begun after about two hours, giving the slatey blue to reddish patches that were evident. The lips were that same blue, the eyes somewhat clouded, though of a deep brown, the face broad, strongly-boned and quite pale.
‘Since on average rigor lasts for sixteen to twenty-four hours, mon ami, and begins from two to four after death, the time this could most recently have happened is yesterday and probably in the morning since it is now 1320 hours, but it could also have happened on the preceding day, perhaps in the afternoon. Joliot will be able to give a far more definite estimate since I’ve broken my thermometer, but when were you first found and who was it that reported the killings? Certainly not Rocheleau, and why, of course, did whoever it was happen to come upon you and that van in a place like this? It’s not usual to walk here, nor to visit the ruins in weather like this.’
The victim had been unarmed, the Germans increasingly hesitant to even allow such a thing as pistols for bank guards. In age he was in his mid-thirties, but nowadays especially with Gauleiter Sauckel’s demands for forced labour and the Vichy government’s compulsory labour draft, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, papers would be needed detailing the absolute necessity of the Banque Nationale de Crédit et Commercial’s having him. Such a necessity would also have meant that the third bank employee, the one who would no
rmally have ridden in the back and assisted the second with the pickups and deliveries, had no longer been possible and they were having to deal with only two victims.
‘Also, mon ami, and one has to ask this, why were you not a prisoner of war in the Reich, along with all the others? Had you been rejected by the military for health reasons, tuberculosis perhaps? Bien sûr, there could be any number of reasons, the eyesight among them, but still there has to be a reason, n’est-ce pas?’
The pockets had been turned out and emptied, the papers and everything else simply taken, even the small change that was so necessary now if one was to ride the métro, whose riders had gone from 2 million a day in the autumn of 1940 to nearly 4 million. And since German soldiers on leave were fond of being forgetful and continued to take their change home, the correct amount was now being demanded by the ticket collectors, causing utter chaos at times.
Unlike so many these days, however, this one had obviously been eating well enough. ‘And married too. Have you children?’ he asked.
When he found a wooden-handled Opinel, the peasant’s standby, behind a stone, he wondered if the knife had been held in defiance. ‘But not by yourself, mon ami. Not when found here. Was it torn from the hand that held it and thrown aside by yourself, eh? Is that why the rock that bashed your forehead left such a mark you had to pause to mop it?
‘Ah merde, monsieur, was it a third victim we are now going to have to concern ourselves with, and while we’re at it, why would your killer take the time to empty your pockets if your partner was still on the run, or was he the first?’
Deep in the grass and wildflowers to the right of where the killer would have stood, he found the cartridge casing and heaving a contented sigh, said, ‘Now the investigation really begins, doesn’t it? An altercation causes the forehead wound, that party then running from you, yourself to sit and mop the forehead only to then be confronted by the killer. Understandably I need more proof, of course, so for now we’ll just say it’s curious.’
The cartridge casing was from a nine-millimetre Parabellum round, common enough in a Luger or Walther P38, and certainly the Résistance, if the killer was of them, could have bought the weapon from among the Occupier.
‘Automatically this casing was ejected, but Hermann will remind me that the Browning FN, the first truly automatic pistol, the one that the Belgians gave to the world of killing and adopted for their own army prior to this war, was also adopted by the Dutch, who called it the Pistool M25, No. 2. The Browning Hi-Power has a thirteen-round magazine and it’s not a common Résistance gun, so it has to be telling us something else if that is what it really was. Merde, but the questions keep piling up, don’t they? The Parabellum is a high-powered round. There will be markings on this cartridge—scratches from the breech and its ejector, the imprint of the firing pin as well. All of these can be compared with the next one I had better find because then, if they’re the same, it will tell us that whoever killed you most probably went after your partner using the very same weapon.’
But clearly something else had happened here before that shot had been fired. ‘It really does get deeper and deeper, doesn’t it? Hermann would have said, “It’s like swimming in gravy, Louis. The bottom’s hard to find and the lumps just get in the way, but we always have the taste of it.”’
Turning the body over, he found the slug and pocketed it. Hermann would be pleased.
It was a Purdey smooth bore, side-by-side 12-gauge, an absolutely gorgeous upland gun. Still in the cradle that had been made for it between the two seats in the van’s cab, it certainly would have been a bit of a problem drawing it quickly, but there would have been no argument from anyone as the crew had collected deposits or made a delivery. Beautifully chased ducks on the wing in silver set off the gun-metal blue of the barrels and the straight-grained French walnut stock. Tightly incised, the crosshatching of the left hand’s grip sparkled even with this lousy daylight and fitted that fist perfectly. And were the day not so miserable, Kohler knew he would have stepped out to flow through the motions of shooting imaginary birds on the wing.
‘Louis, it’s a honey,’ he said, though Louis was elsewhere. ‘I’ll have to lock it up in the Citroën’s boot so that no one steals the evidence.’
As to why the killer or killers had left it, and why the driver or his assistant hadn’t at least tried to draw it, would have to remain questions for now, but back in the early autumn of 1940 guns like this had been confiscated unless smeared with cosmoline and buried, the penalty for doing such being far too onerous for most. There had been racks and racks of hunting rifles and shotguns, pistols and revolvers too. Those whose owners had held British passports, including, no doubt, the owner of this shotgun, had been arrested, the men sent to the internment camp in the former French Army barracks at Saint-Denis, just to the north of Paris. British women, and those with that passport who were French, had all been sent to the old military barracks atop the mesa overlooking Besançon, but so bad had the winter of 1940–1941 been, so appalling the conditions the French had imposed, that the Wehrmacht had insisted that those with children under the age of fifteen should be released and sent back to their homes in France, the rest to Vittel’s Parc Thermal, an internationally famous spa and one that Louis and he knew only too well from last February.
Stamped and signed by the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and the Reich’s chief supervisor of French banks, since such travel permission was required, the van’s manifest on its clipboard was under a spill of shotgun shells he quickly pocketed. As he ran his gaze down the list, he muttered, ‘Cash … cash … and more of it. Eighteen branch pickups, for a total of 42 bags and 65,250,000 francs.’
Even at the official exchange rates of 20 francs to the Reichskassenscheine the troops were given to spend, it was 3,262,500 of those, or when at 200 francs to the British pound, or 45 to the U.S. dollar, not the black bourse’s 100 to 140, still 326,250 pounds or 1,450,000 dollars, a bigger than usual pickup.
All of the notes would have been sorted as to size and tied with that twisted paper string everyone had to use these days and hated, elastics being simply nonexistent. But once at the designated entrance to the city, the Porte d’Aubervilliers, no one would have bothered to take any more than a glance at this manifest, not unless some of the Führer’s finest had had a share in what else was in the back.
Squeezing round, he had a look through the armoured window. Cut open, the heavy grey bags had been scattered in haste, loose banknotes seemingly everywhere, the blue, green and white of the five-franc notes, brown of the tens and hundreds. But right on top of a wooden case whose straw packing had been scattered, was a round of what could only be Brie de Meaux. A bottle of Moët et Chandon had had its neck snapped off, the champagne downed in celebration probably, but why leave it standing upright near that cheese, why not throw it out the back since that door would have been open as it now was?
There was nothing for it but to have a closer look, and going round to the back, he climbed in and somehow found room enough to stand. ‘Louis, what the hell has really gone on here? They didn’t even go into lockdown.’*
Louis could take forever with a corpse and was still nowhere near. Two wedges of the Brie had been eaten and, since taking fingerprints was next to useless these days, as he cut into that velvety white surface, the aroma, when held closely, was magnificent, the taste like heaven. Yet case after case of the champagne had been left, six in all: two of the Moët et Chandon, two of the Taittinger and the same of the Mumm. And as if those were not enough, there were two open cases of a vin rouge and another two of a blanc de blanc, three bottles of the former having been taken.
Bought at 85 francs the litre, that wine would have sold in Paris for a good 500 francs, the champagne for 1,000, the bottle having been bought at 150 probably, and at 10 bottles to the case, a good 51,000 for the champagne, and 16,600 for the wine, for a total profit on these alone of 67,600 francs and not
bad at all.
Certainly the two with the van hadn’t just been augmenting their wages. If each trip had been like this, they must have been planning an early retirement. There were even bags of cooking onions, unheard of these days in Paris and most other large cities and towns. Smoked sausage was in coils atop hams from Reims, at least twenty of those, and beneath them all, as if they were not enough, several sides of bacon, a good ten rabbits and two dozen fully plucked chickens. Obviously these boys had had deliveries to make as soon as they arrived back in the city and before returning to the bank’s garage. That bacon would have brought at least 250 the kilo, the chickens from 150 to 200 each and the rabbits maybe 50 apiece since most who could raised their own in the cupboard or on the balcony or roof, the citizenry having turned Paris, with all its vegetable pots and plots, into the largest farming village in the world.
Garlic hung by the necklace and would bring at least 35 francs the bulb, whereas before this Occupation it would have cost 50 centimes at most, but when he uncovered black truffles, he really had to pause, for these were of the winter variety and would bring at least 5,000 a kilo, maybe even 7,500, the summer ones a hell of a lot less, but it all depended on who the customer was and how much was on offer; other things too, like friends and friends of friends.
Merde, but there were sardines in tins from as far away as Marseille. At eight-five to ninety the tin, they would originally have cost maybe three, if that, before the Occupation. Butter was now at 120 the kilo, and there were four crocks of it, another four of eggs submerged in water glass. The eggs, bought at sixty francs the ten, could bring twenty each if sold individually for something that would originally have cost from five to seven for the ten back in 1939, and with wages stagnant at generally 1,000 to 1,500 a month, or lots less, prices had simply climbed and climbed.*
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