‘And, please, where were the guards that normally patrol those corridors?’
These two … Why the hell had the Premier had to ask for them, why not others who would be tractable? demanded Bousquet silently. He would ignore St-Cyr’s question and tell them as little as possible. Yes, that would be best! ‘We French are no innocents when it comes to assassinations, are we? Admiral Darlan, only last Christmas Eve in Algiers. Marx Dormoy, the Popular Front’s ex-minister, on 26 July 1941, and exactly one month later, an attempt was made on Monsieur Laval himself.’
‘On 27 August,’ muttered Louis. ‘If I understand the matter correctly, Secrétaire, though out of office but still fulfilling some state functions, Monsieur Laval had felt there might be trouble and hadn’t really wanted to present the flag to the first contingent of the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme.’
French volunteers who willingly joined the Wehrmacht on the Russian Front! ‘Both he and Marcel Déat were wounded,’ said Kohler, picking up the thread. ‘Laval so seriously that a weaker man would have died.’
‘The bullet in the shoulder was removed without complications,’ confided Bousquet, ‘but the other one had lodged so closely to the heart that the chief surgeon felt it necessary to leave it and only repair what damage he could.’ This information was not well known.
‘A 6.35 millimetre and lodged an equal distance,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Pneumonia set in, and for days Monsieur Laval’s temperature hovered at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).’
These two had done their homework, so good, yes, good! thought Bousquet. ‘Our Premier and Marcel Déat revealed considerable understanding of the nation’s psyche when they begged the Maréchal to show clemency and keep the boy’s head from the breadbasket.’
The guillotine … ‘Paul Collette, age twenty-one and a former seaman from Caen who would otherwise have made a beautiful martyr,’ said Kohler flatly. ‘And now you’re telling us there’s a plot to assassinate the Maréchal Pétain.’
Out of the darkness of his little corner, the nameless one tonelessly said, ‘Our Government does not want this to happen, Kohler, and you are to see that it doesn’t.’
Scheisse! ‘Or else?’
‘Just make certain you understand that we are all treading on broken glass these days,’ grunted Bousquet. ‘The hills of the Auvergne may well be a haven to terrorists.’
‘But … but if what little you’ve told us so far is true, Secrétaire, these terrorists, on being interrupted during an attempt on the Maréchal’s life, took the girl from outside his door to silence her for fear of their being identified.’
‘That is correct – at least, it is what I suspect must have happened, and that is why Monsieur Laval has asked for you both.’
‘“Flykiller slays mistress of high-ranking Government employee,”’ quoted Kohler, remembering the telex Laval had sent to Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris. ‘Why “flies”?’
‘An assassin!’ swore Bousquet angrily. ‘Can you not listen?’
‘But … but a conclusion, Secrétaire, for which you have as yet offered no proof,’ countered Louis, deliberately baiting him.
‘Only three corpses, idiot! The first two are being kept at the morgue in spite of the pleas of relatives for their release; the latest one is just as she was found and nothing – I repeat, nothing – has been touched. Not in her room at the Hôtel d’Allier, except for her carte d’identité which I myself removed, and not at the crime scene.’
‘Good, that’s as it should be,’ said Louis. ‘But, then, perhaps before we view the victim, Monsieur de Fleury would enlighten us as to why, since she was his mistress, Madame Dupuis was knocking at the great one’s door? And on what day and at what time, please?’
‘Céline didn’t want to do it but … but I begged her to, Inspector. The Maréchal, he has a passion for beautiful young women. He’s old – oh bien sûr – but age does not necessarily make a glacier of the urges.’
‘And you were pimping for him?’ blurted Kohler, startled by the admission.
‘A small favour,’ muttered Bousquet acidly.
‘One I felt I could no longer refuse,’ de Fleury added.
‘And at what time, then, Monsieur de Fleury, was he to have had his little moment?’ asked Louis.
‘Tuesday night, at … at 9.40. I … I dropped her off outside the hotel. She … she was wearing her overcoat, scarf and beret, her gloves too. These things, they … they have not as yet been found.’
Not found. ‘Height: 170 centimetres, Hermann (five feet seven inches); hair: blonde; eyes: blue; particular signs: none; nose: straight and average – normal, if you wish. Face: oval but the side profile doesn’t really do her justice. A very handsome young woman, Monsieur de Fleury. Stunning, I should think – you do like the pretty ones, don’t you? Complexion: pale.’
St-Cyr tapped his partner on the shoulder and passed both torch and identity card to him. ‘A young widow, mon vieux. A working girl with a child to support who is no older than the one the Maréchal once bounced on his knee. Madame Pétain is known to be a very jealous and spiteful woman.’
‘Idiot, Madame Pétain is well aware of the Maréchal’s infidelités!’ spat Bousquet.
‘And you are angry with me, Secrétaire, when calmness is called for.’
‘Truncheon! Just stick to what you’ve been told to do and leave Madame Pétain out of things. The fewer who know of this the better!’
Just before St-Germain-des-Fossés they stopped at the side of the road for a piss. Kohler stood upwind of de Fleury. ‘Was she good in bed?’ he asked companionably.
‘Inspector, you’re splashing my trousers.’
‘Oh, sorry. Did she enjoy sex, seeing as she’d tried to kill herself at the loss of her husband?’
‘Salaud! How dare you?’
‘Calm down and tell me exactly how faithful a mistress was she?’
‘We were going to get married. I was going to divorce my wife when … when it became possible.’
Divorce had all but been outlawed by Vichy. ‘Yet you asked her to service another?’
‘I had to! I didn’t know she’d be killed! How could I have?’
‘Just who else knew what you were up to?’
‘Merde alors, do you not take the hint Monsieur le Secrétaire has given? Dr Ménétrel, the Maréchal’s personal physician and confidant. His personal secretary.’
‘And Ménétrel okayed the session?’
‘Céline was not some cheap putain, damn you!’ Tears fell and were agitatedly wiped away with the fingers. ‘He gave his blessing. He said it was exactly what the Maréchal needed to restore faith in himself during such a difficult time and that … that Céline would be handsomely rewarded as would … as would I myself.’
‘Then you were pimping and that’s an indictable offence, unless you followed Vichy’s latest ordinance on it to the letter. Oh don’t worry, mon fin, we’ll be discreet but if you’ve lied to me and not told us everything, you’d better watch out.’
‘She was a dancer. You must know what such women are like!’
‘And that bit about your marrying her?’
Would this Gestapo find out everything? ‘It … it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t have done so and she must have been well aware of this yet we spoke of it as if there was no impediment. A little game we played.’
How nice of him, but one must hold the door open so as to grab a breath of air. It took all types, thought Kohler, and the arrogance of top civil servants, though well known the world over, was legendary in France.
Had all of what had been felt necessary been said? wondered St-Cyr. The engine throbbed, the road climbed. Frost clung closely, snow was everywhere and darkness lay deep among the trunks and bracken.
For some time now each of them had withdrawn into private thoughts. Hermann, never one to keep still or silent unless necessary, had taken to staring out his side window but hadn’t bothered to clear the frost from it. Was he thinking
of his little Giselle and his Oona, was he worrying, as he often did these days, that when the Allies invaded, as they surely must, his lady-loves would be caught up in things and blamed for sleeping with the enemy, with himself? Was he still trying to figure out a way to get them false papers and to safety in Spain or Portugal?
René Bousquet would also be on Hermann’s mind, for here, beside his partner, was the man who had met with Reinhard Heydrich and others of the SS at the Ritz in Paris, on 5 May of last year. Here was the one who had convinced Karl Albrecht Oberg, the ‘Butcher of Poland’ and Höherer SS und Polizeiführer of France, not to take over the French police but to let him handle things.
‘The Marseillais has a reputation as a practical joker, Secrétaire. He calls a tender shower of rain a tempest, a lost shirt from the laundry line an armed robbery in which the wife and daughters were strip-searched and their virtue plundered. But he has an even more significant reputation, one for vengeance. Has your suggestion of an attempted assassination been prompted at all by fear of repercussions over what the first arrondissement suffered? I ask simply because I must.’
The Vieux Port de Marseille had been a rat’s nest of steep and narrow streets, the home of prostitutes, pimps and gangsters! ‘We did what we had to do.’
A month ago, on 3 January, German security forces had raided a maison de passe, one of those seedy, walk-in hotels where prostitutes took their clients for a little moment or an hour or two and then left. Suspecting to find résistants and Wehrmacht deserters hiding out and fast asleep, there had been an exchange of fire in which several on both sides had been killed or wounded. Hitler, in a rage on hearing of it, and having at that time all but suffered the final loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, had demanded the levelling of the whole of the first arrondissement and deportation of 50,000 of its citizens to camps in the east. Bousquet and Lemoine, the regional préfet, had managed to convince Oberg that French police should do the job, and at 3 a.m. on the night of the 13th-14th, 30,000 residents, having been told they had but a few hours to vacate their homes, had moved out. Their papers were all checked, but far fewer résistants and deserters than anticipated had been arrested and the homeless citizens, for want of anything better, had been shunted off to camps at Fréjus and Compiègne, where they still resided and would for as long as it took to free the country. Then on 15 January, Wehrmacht engineers had begun to dynamite every building – tenement houses, warehouses, churches, loading docks and port machinery – and had, by the 24th, even sent 173 vessels to the bottom thus unintentionally blocking the harbour for months.
‘The Führer was appeased,’ exhaled Bousquet exasperatedly. ‘Twenty thousand were saved and the other thirty thousand kept in France and not deported.’
‘But has this event anything to do with the suspected attempt on the Maréchal’s life?’
‘Has the Grande Rafle also anything to do with it, eh? Come, come, Jean-Louis, let us get things out in the open.’
‘That, too, then.’
‘I had no choice. Too much would have been lost. We gained. In all such things there are the pluses and minuses. Be glad you don’t have to make such decisions.’
‘I am.’
Doucement, Louis, go easy, thought Kohler, alarmed at the exchange. On 16-17 July of last year Bousquet and the préfet of Paris had convinced Oberg and Heydrich that French police, under French direction, could handle things. Nine thousand Paris police had surrounded five arrondissements in the dead of night during what had since come to be known as the Great Roundup. They had then arrested 12,000 terrified men, women and children and had locked them up in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the cycling arena, for eight days without sufficient water, food or toilet facilities – Jews that had then been deported by rail in cattle trucks; the children kept in France for a little longer and then sent on as well, but not knowing where to or why they had been taken from their parents or whether they would ever see them again.
Louis and he had been away from the city at the time, thank God, but since then Louis had pieced together a record of the tragedy that he intended to pass on to the Résistance for the day of reckoning that would surely come.
‘Just do as you’ve been told, Jean-Louis,’ grunted Bousquet. ‘Don’t let your brand of patriotism interfere.’
Only one of those Paris flics had resigned and refused to take part. Only one, Kohler told himself, but, to be fair, a good many of them would have been too afraid to object. And orders were orders especially in a police force of 15,000, for that’s what Paris had. But if the Resistance had wanted a target, then why not Bousquet himself?
On the outskirts of Vichy the car was stopped at a control by armed Wehrmacht sentries, no longer by members of the Garde Mobile de Resérve, Vichy’s small paramilitary force. The latest password was demanded, as one had been since 1 July 1940 at all entrances to the town, and never mind that it was still the curfew, thought Kohler wryly. Assassination had been on the Government’s mind right from the beginning!
‘Spring brings the new growth; autumn the harvest,’ said their driver – the only words he had spoken on the whole damned trip. Had Pétain written the thing?
With a wave, they were released, and drove into the heart of the town.
Out of the cold, the damp, the blackout and the silence, and from the deeper darkness of the covered promenade that ringed the Parc des Sources, Hermann’s voice came gruffly. ‘Louis, was it right of you to have told them to leave us?’
‘Merde, Hermann. We are greeted in the small hours by a Secrétaire who doesn’t appreciate our little visit, but brings along the victim’s supposed lover, yet fails to brief us completely and tucks in a Gestapo for good measure. Does this not make you concerned?’
They had been dropped off about mid-park and on the rue Président Wilson, some distance from the Hall des Sources and the Hotel du Parc, and not at all the route the victim would have had to take. Acetylene lanterns had been provided but were, as yet, unlit.
‘All right, it smells.’
No collabo and no Pétainiste either, Louis had once been a poilu, a soldier in the Great War at Verdun and other such places, and had, like ninety-eight per cent of his fellows and most of the nation, thought fondly of the Victor of Verdun, hailing Pétain’s offer of leadership in June 1940 as a godsend to a nation in despair.
Some leader. Very quickly Louis had lost whatever respect he’d had for the Maréchal.
‘Come on,’ breathed Kohler. ‘I guess it’s this way.’
‘It is, and we walk as the curistes – those seeking the cure – walked beneath Émile Robert’s marvellous thistledown of wrought iron, which graced the Great Universal Exposition of 1890 in Paris and was moved here in 1900.’
‘I can’t see a hell of a lot of it. Too dark, I guess.’
‘Yes! But I’m trying to remember it as I first saw it when a boy of eleven going on twelve, Hermann. In the summer of 1902 Grand-mère thought she had a load of gravel in her guts and made me accompany her. My father urged me to do it, and I could not bear having him suffer her tongue any more. Of just such things are heroes made, but look at me now. Sacré! My left shoe has come apart again.’
‘I’ll reglue it for you later.’
‘That glue you bought on the marché noir won’t be worth the lies that budding horizontale told you. Just because she was young and pretty and headed for a life on the streets was no reason for you to have trusted her!’
And still bitchy about Bousquet! Glue was all but impossible to find these days; shoes only more so, unless one bought the hinged, wooden-soled ones with their cloth or ersatz leather uppers. Twenty-four million pairs of the things had been sold to date in a nation of forty million, which only showed how lousy they were!
‘Think of La Belle Époque,’ muttered Louis, mollified somewhat by his own outbursts and wanting to be calm. ‘Think of high society from 1880 until we all bid adieu to such splendour in 1914. Think of the grand hotels that were built here with their covered terraces a
nd art nouveau ironwork and interiors, their verandas, dining rooms and atriums delicately graced by Kentia palms and other exotics. Of silk or satin gowns, jewels and sensuous perfumes, of princes, duchesses, lords and ladies – marquises, courtesans and counts.
‘Then think of the hordes who followed them, especially in the twenties and thirties, Hermann. Old maids and war widows, shopkeepers, postal clerks and accountants, lawyers too, and judges and young girls of easy virtue. Gamblers also.’
‘Think of a swollen liver, an attack of gout, an enlarged prostate or constant dose of the clap. And then think of guzzling or gargling that Quatsch, that crap! An international spa, eh?’
‘But, Inspector, opera singers did it, actors and actresses too, and artists. All such believers came here for the cocktail thérapeutique and the baths.’
‘And other things, so don’t get pious. Nom de Dieu, Louis, will you look at that!’
They had finally reached the Hall des Sources. Under torchlight, great daggers of discoloured ice hung from the rusting, green-painted frieze. Sheets of that same ice coated the tall, arched windows as a frozen signboard above the entrance spelled it out for them: FERMÉ POUR LA SAISON.
It had been left here in July 1940, and no one in the Government had seen fit to have the sign removed!
‘None of our politicals have a sense of humour, Hermann. This, too, we’d best remember.’
In addition to the Government of France, thirty-two embassies and legations had moved to Vichy in those first few months of the Occupation. Now, of course, there would be far fewer of them – cold and empty villas as of last November, but still there would be the Italians and Japanese, the Hungarians and Rumanians, the Finns too, and neutrals like the Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, thought Kohler. Could Ausweise for Giselle and Oona be prised out of the Swiss?
‘Don’t even consider it,’ mused St-Cyr, having easily read his partner’s mind after the two and a half years they’d spent constantly in each other’s company. ‘It’s far too expensive a country for you. Concentrate on the murder. All things in their proper place and time. Besides, the Swiss are turning them back.’
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