Why had he to ask? ‘Me, I knew it was a mistake to agree to let him and his father take me there. Oh for sure, the food it was magnificent and extremely expensive. Once perhaps, but twice … What am I to do?’
‘Tell him he’s crazy.’
‘Of course. You’re absolutely right.’
It would have to be said, felt Figeard. It simply couldn’t be avoided. ‘There was another visitor.’
Another.
Sickened, alarmed—ready to run if necessary—this girl he had trusted like a daughter, this Annette-Mélanie Veroche, waited for him to continue. ‘A Sûreté. Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr.’
Ah merde, merde, it had finally happened! ‘Why?’
She had even darted a look behind and along the corridor. ‘Please, mademoiselle, there is no reason for you to worry. Apparently they think you must have witnessed the murder of two bank employees and the partial robbery of their van. They will only want to hear what you have to say about it.’
‘They?’
It would be best to just say, ‘The Sûreté.’
Side by side, and looking as if Frans had put them there to mock her, the shoes were in the armoire beneath that incredibly soft and beautiful dress, but the one would lead to the other and that Sûreté would soon find that she had had a part-time job every second Sunday at the cultural-exchange gatherings of Madame Nicole Bordeaux.
Those would then lead him to Jacqueline Lemaire, mistress of Hector Bolduc whose bank van it had been.
Up on the roof, alone if ever she could be alone now, the nougat tin was still where she had hidden it. Surely if he had come up here and found it, that Sûreté would have taken it, but he hadn’t.
Opening it, she heard herself gasp.
Black and of wrinkled leather, its braided thongs pulled tightly by those two wooden pegs, the pouch lay atop everything, and beneath it as if to emphasize what had happened, was the still wet, white paper packet of twelve flawless brilliants she had been given for herself. He hadn’t taken anything. He had done the only thing he could to make her agree and not go to ground so hard all contact with her would instantly have been severed. He had also left the Opinel with which she had tried to defend herself at l’Abbaye de Vauclair, so must know everything.
Mademoiselle, we need to talk. Please agree to meet at the Jardin d’Hiver of the Jardin des Plantes between 2.30 and 3.30 Tuesday or Wednesday the fifth and sixth. You will know me by a brown suede tobacco pouch, which sadly remains empty but bears the scorched hole of carelessness and the letters AMPHORA. It was a gift of Agnès, my first wife, who had aspirations of my emigrating to America with her and becoming a detective there.
He had even known and trusted that great care would be taken with the note, since it could definitely identify him.
A Sûreté, a chief inspector, divorced once and married twice.
Funerals were usually in the morning but burials could be in the afternoon depending, of course, on the scheduling, this one being at 1400 hours, Monday’s lunch having been postponed.
‘The quartier de Bercy’s burials are most often here, Hermann, where the departed can listen to the music of the arrivals. Be patient. It’s necessary. God has granted us a reprieve and given us an opportunity.’
‘We won’t get a damned thing out of this bunch and you know it. Bolduc will have seen to that.’
Since losing his sons at Stalingrad, funerals had been difficult for Hermann, the lack of cigarettes simply adding an edge. ‘Well, at least I won’t have to break the news to the families.’
‘You should have let me tear the heart out of Werner Dillmann!’
‘Later. Even a Detektiv Inspektor from the Kripo should know that compromises are often necessary. Quite obviously I needed you here.’
‘Rocheleau is now your sworn enemy.’
‘But where he belongs.’
In a cell at the rue des Saussaies. ‘I did ask Boemelburg to consider him a hostage but he said he’d have to ask Oberg who will, of course, simply tell him to release the salaud. Somehow I’m going to have to get Évangéline out of Rudy de Mérode’s clutches before she and that husband of hers sink the two of us for good.’
‘Perhaps she’d be suitable for that one’s escort service?’
Arm in arm, Mademoiselle Jacqueline Lemaire—it couldn’t be Madame Bolduc—was with the owner and president of the Banque Nationale de Crédit et Commercial. ‘Who provided the gasoline, Louis. Otherwise the Occupation would have made certain those hearses were drawn by horses or a gazo.’
The Cimètiere de Charenton was just beyond the Gare de Nicolaï* and its marshalling yards that fed directly into those of the far larger Gare de Lyon.
‘Since we’re adjacent to the western edge of the Bois de Vincennes, mon vieux, there is at least the joy of its autumn leaves. Bien sûr, there are a few maples from Canada, other exotics from elsewhere, but by and large and most welcome are the steadfast oaks and beeches that the Prussians didn’t cut down in 1871 as they did every last tree in the Bois de Boulogne. Perhaps they had it in mind to leave generations of the wealthy and upper middle-class Parisians thinking they were at a loss and envious, while the rest of us had this park.’
Louis always had to have reasons. ‘The driver of that van did have a large family, just as Yvonne Rouget said. That has to be Madame Deniard.’
Seven children were ranked by age and height, and all looked under the age of twelve. ‘Raymond Paquette, the assistant, had six, two sets of twin girls, and two boys, and all under eight.’
‘The first victim and driver of that van bashed on the forehead with a jagged rock and shot in the chest at zero range.’
‘The second, and assistant, in the back of the neck. Would the coffins have been open, do you think?’
Louis would ask. ‘It’s amazing what undertakers can do but you can be sure everyone, including that priest, will have had a damned good look.’
‘Grégoire, the operations manager, but not residing in the bank’s building, as does Mademoiselle Rouget, still takes her arm.’
‘Steadfast like those trees, eh?’
‘And no sign of Madame Bolduc, Hermann, or her daughters, Didi and Yvonne.’
‘Kids don’t like funerals any more than I do, but bankers love to show off their mistresses.’
The clay was gaping. ‘And just like Rocheleau told us of his village priest, this one is adding a final deluge. Let’s not hang around for the sprinklings of soil. Bolduc has arranged for a reception to take your mind off things and get it onto what’s important.’
‘Like the murder of those two and a whole lot else including why our Anna-Marie didn’t want to step into that bank van or any other probably.’
Good for Hermann, Corporal Horace Rivet, custodian of the Berru lookout’s ruins having said, ‘I think her heart fell when she saw it and them.’
LES AMIES FRANÇAISES
BUREAU D’HOSTESSES … MLLE JACQUELINE LEMAIRE
DEUTSCHFREUNDLICH, DEUTSCH SPRECHEN
Alone in the corridor—taking a terrible chance to simply stand in front of the frosted glass of that door—Anna-Marie knew all was lost. Everything. The Sorbonne, the job here, the one at the Frontbuchhandlung and at Madame Nicole Bordeaux’s.
She had to run, had to go to ground but couldn’t, mustn’t, would somehow have to work it through and try not to think of the loss of Henk Vandenberg and her parents, but of the promise she had made to Mijnheer Myerhof.
Mademoiselle Lemaire had tried and tried to get her to agree to becoming a ‘hostess’ but had led to Madame Bordeaux and Hector Bolduc whose vans had offered routes into and out of Paris without the need for laissez-passers and sauf-conduits.
Miliciens, PPF and others—those vans had been freighting them all so why not herself, Aram Bedikian had asked and said, ‘You have to.’
And she ha
d on that first trip to visit her ‘mother’ in Rethel last December though never again, but on the return with Étienne, Arie and Frans, something that no one could have foreseen had happened. Bien sûr, a roadblock control, but not a spotter plane and then, there in defiance of her ever having to use one of those again, had been that van at the ruins of the Berru lookout.
Étienne hadn’t known, and she hadn’t been able to tell him. She had simply said, ‘L’Abbaye de Vauclair,’ because she had known of it and a tiny village like Corbeny would have offered dangers of its own, and to do what they’d had in mind, those two would have stopped somewhere before it anyway.
Somehow she had to move her things—she couldn’t just leave everything and take only the diamonds and the scraps from home. Yet if she were to take even a suitcase, Monsieur Figeard would know at once that she was not coming back, no matter what she said.
She must ‘return the bike,’ as she had told him, must then ‘take the métro back but later.’
And that Sûreté? she asked herself.
That decision would have to be up to Félix and Aram and the others—FTP, all of them, and submarines as well.
Bolduc was far from happy to see them at the reception.
‘Inspectors, I trust you are not going to be asking questions on such a sad and very private occasion. Please allow the families, their friends and associates, the decency of honouring their dead.’
‘Ach, we wouldn’t think of asking anything,’ said Kohler, ‘but perhaps you’d be good enough to tell us how much cash was lifted from that van of yours?’
‘And why, if I might be permitted, did you, beyond the flimsy excuse given, show no interest in the absence of that van until we happened to tell you of it? Three days later, wasn’t it, Hermann?’
‘The porch. Come, come. Not here. Let them have their grief and a little sustenance. Yvonne, make excuses for me to Mesdames Deniard and Paquette. The latter is, of course, pregnant, the former no doubt as well, so the brutal killing of two of my most valued employees is very much on my mind.’
It must be. ‘Go with him, Hermann. Let me find that priest.’
And circulate.
The salaud! thought Bolduc. ‘Father Richaux no more needs to talk to you than yourself to him. He didn’t know either of the victims nor even the families. He’s a priest on call for such occasions. Jacqueline found him for me.’
‘Jacqueline … Ah, Mademoiselle … ?’ asked Louis.
‘Lemaire, and yourself, Inspector?’
Hair: light auburn; forehead: average; eyes: brown, space: medium; age: 32, height: 1.7 metres; weight: 50 kilos; clothing, apart from diamonds: designer mourning suit from none other than Paul Poiret, cost on the marché noir, a minimum of 12,000 francs. ‘It’s Chief Inspector, and this is Detektiv Inspektor Kohler of the Kripo.’
‘The one with the slash …’
She would impulsively yank off a glove, thought Jacqueline, to let a forefinger trace what the SS had given this one early last December, leaving everyone else who was anyone, to speak of it ever since, and he with his two women being held hostage at Gestapo Boemelburg’s villa by none other than Kriminalrat Heinrich Ludin. ‘The truth and nothing but it, eh? Hector, we shall have to be careful.’
Bolduc could sure pick them, felt Kohler. Clothed, as in the belle epoque of this place’s decor, she’d be like that reproduction on the wall of Tissot’s gorgeously seductive painting, L’Ambitieuse. Heady, just like that one, her fine hair swept up and back in defiance of the usual styles of the present day to reveal two of Cartier’s blanc exceptionel drops to match the much larger brilliant at her throat even when in mourning, and what a throat it was.
‘Hector, darling, let me leave you with the chief inspector for a little while I show this other one around.’
An open-air café or dance hall, in the old style of a guinguette, there were two parts to the restaurant on the Île de Reuilly in the Bois de Vincennes’s Lac Daumesnil, felt Kohler. An inner room, still with the gaslights, was surrounded with end-to-end tables, place settings and Thonet bentwood chairs for eighty at least.
But beyond that room, equally spacious and with perfect views of the lake, the forest and a glimpse of the zoological garden with its six hundred animals and seven hundred birds, native and otherwise, was a latticed porch with climbing grapevines offering shade and temptation, and thoughts of the jungle.
One table had been set out here.
‘Hector would have had us sit with the others, himself right in the centre, for he can be of them when he feels it necessary, but Yvonne, not appreciating my presence, felt this more appropriate.’
‘Mademoiselle,’ asked the waiter, ‘the Moët et Chandon, the Taittinger or the Mumm?’
All three had been laid out on the tray, the glasses already filled and grouped accordingly, the hospice for the blind having been short-changed. ‘The first, I think,’ said Kohler.
‘And an excellent choice,’ said Jacqueline, he having chosen the very same as had been found broken open when Grégoire had gone to check the contents of that van. ‘Now, please, while we have this moment of privacy, tell me everything you can about these terrible murders. Otherwise I will have nothing to say to others, and you know what that must mean to a girl like me.’
She was even wearing Guerlain’s Eau de Cologne Impérial just like Yvonne Rouget would and had when Louis and he had broken into Bolduc’s office to find out all they could. ‘First tell me what you do?’
How did he even know she did anything other than please Hector? ‘Me?’ She would toss her head and give him an impish smile. ‘An escort service. Jour ou soir, it’s all the same. An entertaining, fully satisfying and most memorable visit. La tour Eiffel, the galleries, the Louvre and Catacombs, museums too, then a dinner or luncheon in nothing but the finest of restaurants.’
‘The Folies-Bergère, Noctambule, Lido, Moulin Rouge or Shéhérazde?’
With bare breasts and bare bums. ‘Those, too, if requested.’
‘And breakfast?’
How mischievous of him. ‘If necessary, since clients are seldom here for more than a few days.’
‘Satisfaction guaranteed?’
‘It goes without saying.’
‘Any new ones of late?’
Zut, he would ask! ‘There are always new ones.’
‘Business good?’
Why had he to fire such questions at her? ‘Business is seldom what one desires, but has been immensely gratifying. If one works hard and is known for what one does, one is sought, isn’t that so? But me, I accept only clients of distinction. Bien sûr, my girls fulfil what the clients want. The experience, it is positive, you understand, or the fee, less expenses, is returned. I’ve two shifts of twenty at present and rotate them every two weeks.’
‘Ages?’
Was he zeroing in on someone? ‘Eighteen, twenty, twenty-four or -six, even thirty. It depends. Sophisticated, of course. Knowledgeable and not just of Paris. Fluent in Deutsch—that is essential.’
‘Fee?’
Why, again, must he ask such a thing and so quickly? ‘It varies: 4,000 to 6,000 for an afternoon or evening, and whatever is necessary is placed on top of that.’
With the bed, couch, chair or carpet underneath. ‘Students?’
Ah merde. ‘Sometimes but it depends more on their willingness to … shall we say, forget their studies and be accommodating. For instance, a student of the violin at the conservatory must set aside her love of the classical to genuinely appreciate and enjoy the latest jazz.’
‘And dancing in a place such as this?’
‘If necessary. Why not?’
His shrug could well have been that of the uncaring, but then he said, ‘Ach, you must know.’
Running a finger lightly down his sleeve, she would move in a little closer to gaze raptly up at him as if a girl w
anting nothing else. ‘Because it’s illegal? As are many things, yet still they happen and most people don’t even seem to mind. Now, please,’ she tapped his chest as one of his two women might, ‘a little refreshment and some sustenance. At least a croquette ou canapé. Surely those are not out of the question, or does duty prevent you from enjoying yourself?’
The hot, or the hot and the cold. ‘Not at all when there’s shaved ham from Reims and smoked sausage from Champagne or Brie de Meaux and lots else like sardines, but you still haven’t given me the names of your latest clients?’
Damn him for his persistence! ‘My secretary will have those. Perhaps you could drop by the office later? Here, let me give you my card. It has the address and telephone number. Call ahead, and I’ll be sure to be there to answer fully whatever it is that you need and we can offer. Now tell me, please, about these terrible murders.’
There was only one way to let her know he wasn’t yet done with her. ‘Let’s take a stroll and leave that partner of mine to sort things out here.’ And grabbing a bottle of the Moët in case refills were needed, he took her by the arm.
Oeufs durs mayonnaise were among the hors d’oeuvres. Tempting, oh for sure, felt St-Cyr, but because of the Occupation’s shortages some of the younger children had never seen an egg before. Terse explanations were being given. Bolduc had already said his piece to the assembled, as had Grégoire. Both were solicitously going from table to table offering condolences before rejoining Yvonne Rouget and himself.
‘While I have you at my elbow, mademoiselle, be so good as to tell me why, if the illegal contents of that van were to have been sent over to the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts, is there not only some of the champagne here, but the vin rouge, vin blanc de blanc, ham, cheese, eggs, flour for the canapés and croquettes, the smoked sausage, sardines, too, and even the truffles? And please don’t tell me René Deniard was doing such an illegal thing simply to please his mother. We’ve already had that from your boss, and even Deniard’s younger children knew what an egg was before they got here.’
Must this Sûreté be so impossible? ‘Since a reception was called for, where else was I to have found such things? There’s little enough as it is.’
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