Flykiller

by J. Robert Janes

  Freeing the tall iron-and-glass doors brought only grunts and curses and then, at a sudden yank, the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphide and that of warm, wet mould.

  Water dripped. Effervescing carbon dioxide hissed as it escaped, but from where? wondered Kohler. Pipes banged in protest as if throttled.

  Through the pitch darkness of the hall, the beams of their torches began to pick things out. Pollarded lime trees that were dead – those palms Louis had mentioned were coated with so much ice their blade-like foliage had collapsed about the glazed jardinières of another time.

  The hall must be huge and would have held five hundred or a thousand at a time. Breath billowed, and as they looked at each other and then shone their torches around and upwards, they found that the beams of light would penetrate only so far. The air was filled with vapour, grey and layered, especially when not stirred by footsteps.

  ‘Four sources have their buvettes here, Hermann. Their pump kiosks. La Grande Grille, which issues at a temperature of 42.4 degrees Celsius (108.3 degrees Fahrenheit); Chomel, at 43 degrees Celsius; Lucas, at 28.1 degrees Celsius; and Parc, at 22.5 degrees Celsius (72.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Although Grand-mere should have warned me, she said, “Why not try them all, mon petit?” I foolishly did and spent the next twenty-four hours locating the toilets, something she probably had had in mind for me to do in any case.’

  By just such little exchanges do we keep ourselves sane, thought Kohler, dreading what they’d find. The throat probably hacked open but not before the breasts had been slashed, the womb repeatedly stabbed, the buttocks and … Jésus, Jésus, how much more of this could he stand? ‘Chomel, Louis. There it is. Bousquet said we’d find her behind that counter.’

  Though seen under the scanning beams of their torches, the Buvette du Chomel was much as St-Cyr first remembered it. A marvellously curved and ample art nouveau, glass-topped table, perhaps five metres by three, whose ringed ridges, atop the glass, had given the image of water flowing outwards from its source in a curved, eight-sided, glass-and-gilded, beehived dome with interlaced crown. Both the table and its source had been suffused with the soft glow of electric lights, as if shining upwards from deep underground.

  Wicker-clad bottles, vacuum flasks, jugs and measured glass cups with handles were still much in evidence. Had those in their hundreds who had come to take the waters, and those who had served them from behind the enclosing counter, simply departed in haste?

  ‘Take a little stroll, Hermann. Look for things Bousquet and whoever first found her will not have seen.’

  ‘I’m okay. Really I am.’

  ‘You’re not and you know it!’ Hermann had seen too much of death – at Verdun on 21 February 1916 when 850 German artillery pieces had suddenly opened up at dawn in a sheet of flame, his battery among them, and the flash of thunder had been heard 150 kilometres away. Death then, and later. Death, too, as a detective in the back alleys and streets of Munich, then Berlin, then Paris. Ah yes, Paris.

  Céline Dupuis was but a short distance from one of the gaps in the counter. She was lying on her back, but the hips and legs were turned towards her left and that arm was stretched well above her head, as though, in her final spasm, she had sought to pull herself away from her assailant.

  The coat of the nightgown was unfastened, the bloodstained décolletage of antique lace clasped instinctively by a right hand that had then flattened itself and now hid the wound.

  The blue eyes, their lashes long and false, were wide open and she was staring up into the light of the lantern Hermann now stubbornly held over her.

  A black velvet choker encircled the slender neck; the face was not the classic oval but long and thin, the cheeks pinched even in repose, the painted lips parted, the blonde hair askew and of more than shoulder length.

  ‘Caught between the dispensing bar and the table, Louis, but did someone pin her arms from behind as the bastard knifed her? That is a knifing. I’m certain of it.’

  ‘But why, then, does she reach that way?’

  Louis saw so much more than he did. Always he was better at it. Well, nearly so. And always one had to tone oneself up when working with him. He demanded that, but silently.

  Beneath the nightgown she wore a teddy of black lace, black garters too, and black lisle stockings that reached to mid-thigh from the tops of tightly fitting, well-polished black riding boots.

  ‘Greasepaint, heavy lipstick, mascara and the eyelashes,’ grunted Kohler. ‘Did she come straight from the club or theatre? If so, that “lover” of hers forgot to tell us.’

  ‘Was she told by de Fleury to throw the nightgown on over her costume because they were late, or is this what was wanted?’

  Two costumes. The first revealing the bad girl, the second for bed. ‘Did he have the nightgown with him, or did she have it in her dressing room, wherever that is?’

  Questions … there were always those. ‘Leave me with her now, Hermann. Please. I’ll be sure to tell you what you need to know.’

  ‘Okay, Chief, she’s all yours.’

  Hermann could be heard vomiting. He’d be thinking of the victim’s daughter, an orphan now. He’d be wondering if he’d have to be the one to tell her what had happened.

  He’d be thinking of the grandparents, too. Would they put the child into a convent school as a boarder or do the proper thing and watch over her day and night?

  He’d be wondering if Giselle and Oona could help out. He was like that.

  ‘Dead certainly for more than twenty-four hours,’ sang out St-Cyr. ‘Probably at about 10 p.m. Tuesday evening but the coroner can, perhaps, elaborate. A knife, I think, but must …’

  ‘That goddamned tap above her feet is dripping, idiot! It’s the only one in this buvette that is, so her killer must have cracked it open to wash off his hands and the knife.’

  Looking like death itself in a greatcoat, Hermann held up the spluttering lantern. A Fritz-haired* giant under a battered grey fedora, with sagging pouches beneath pale blue eyes that seldom revealed emotion but were now filled with tears – those of rage at what he had to face; those, too, of loss. ‘Easy, mon vieux,’ breathed St-Cyr, deeply concerned about him. Too much Benzedrine to keep him going, too little sleep, alcohol whenever he could get it and tobacco!

  The stormtrooper-like lower jaw and cheeks that needed a shave carried shrapnel scars from that other war, the brow the fresh scar of a recent bullet graze, and, from the left eye to the chin, the duelling scar of a rawhide whip the SS had used on him early last December for his insisting on the truth. Another case.

  ‘Here, have one of these,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Our Secrétaire was so worried he forgot to take the packet back.’

  The big, raw-boned hands that had defused booby-traps and 500-kilo bombs shook as the lighter was lit. Disloyal, a lousy Gestapo to his confrères and a lampooner of the Führer and of Nazi doctrines, Hermann had become a citizen of the world long before Paris had polished him.

  ‘A cabaret dancer, Louis. Painted fingernails, good, nice legs – was she playing at being in the seedy nightclubs of Berlin in the twenties and about to do a striptease for the Maréchal?’

  ‘Or was she first to have sung for him, since he’s known to love operettas and other such simple pleasures?’

  ‘“Patrie. Suivez-moi! Gardez votre confiance en la France éternelle,”’ quoted Kohler, imitating the high, reedy voice of Pétain. Follow me. Keep your confidence in eternal France.

  ‘“Think upon these maxims: Pleasure lowers, joy elevates; pleasure weakens, joy gives strength.” But was she to have given him pleasure, Hermann, or joy?’

  ‘We’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘Or Dr Ménétrel who, unless I’m mistaken, initiated the little visit and put our Inspecteur des Finances in such a spot that his pension was threatened and he found he couldn’t refuse.’

  Ménétrel vetted nearly everything the Maréchal did or said, and thus wielded enormous power. ‘Or once did,’ snorted Kohler, ‘seeing as Vichy no longe
r has the zone libre to govern, no longer a navy, an Army of the Armistice, her African colonies or anything else but this town and the day-to-day civil service stuff.’

  ‘And France is now united, those in the zone occupée no longer envying those in the zone libre.’

  The north and the south. ‘And no longer believing in the Maréchal. Her fingers really are those of a piano player, Louis. She even wears her wedding ring like a good girl should, even though a widow.’

  ‘I’m going to have to move her hand, Hermann.’

  ‘The lace of the nightgown will only hide the wound, that of the teddy too.’

  ‘Bear with me. Turn away if need be.’

  Overly loud in the imagination, the breaking of rigor’s stiffness at the wrist and elbow would sicken Hermann. ‘There,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Forgive me, madame, but it was necessary. Hermann, have a look at these.’

  Two parallel scars marred the right wrist. ‘Not aspirins, then,’ grunted Kohler, ‘and Bousquet must have known it. There are ashes, too, Louis, from a cigar, I think, though can’t be sure. Spilled down her front either before she was stabbed or during the killing. Either at the theatre or club, then, or here.’

  Good for Hermann. As they fell, cigar ashes tended to smear more than cigarette ashes. There was usually more of them, too, and they were softer, sootier and greyer, especially so these days when cigarettes could be made of almost anything and cigars were all but unheard of.

  Taking tweezers from a jacket pocket, Louis teased away the bloodstained severed threads. Patiently the battered brown fedora was removed to let the light shine more fully on her, then he rocked back on his heels.

  ‘A knife, of course,’ he said. ‘Straight in and upwards with maximum force, the haft then lifted hard to make certain of it.’

  Skin was elastic; the wound must be wider at the top than a simple entry and retrieval would leave. But merde, how could he remain so calm? wondered Kohler. No feelings of revulsion and loss – that horrible gut-sick emptiness – only a totally absorbed curiosity. A need to know.

  ‘The blade was probably no more than one and a half centimetres at its widest, Hermann. A single cutting edge. She can’t have moved afterwards, must have been stopped by the shock of it. Our killer knew exactly what to do. Madame Dupuis could well have lived for hours had the haft not been lifted while the blade was still deeply in her.’

  ‘There’s not a lot of blood.’

  ‘Precisely!’

  ‘Therefore the sac that encloses the heart …’

  ‘The pericardium has been flooded.’

  ‘Putting her into shock and stopping the heart.’

  ‘We’ll want Laloux, Hermann. As an ardent socialist with an unbridled tongue, he’ll have been dismissed, but you will tell Bousquet our Félix is the only one who can be trusted to be discreet.’

  The coroner. She’d voided herself, poor thing, and would probably have been ashamed of it.

  ‘Leave me with her now, Hermann. I can’t be in two places at once and need your eyes elsewhere.’

  Louis would ‘talk’ to her. That Sûreté with the pugilist’s nose, bushy brown moustache, brown ox-eyes and broad brow, that somewhat portly partner of his in the open, shabby brown overcoat would be gentle, so gentle.

  ‘One earring is missing,’ he muttered, not looking up but arching the thatch of his eyebrows.

  Hermann had already gone in search of it.

  Beyond the circular stand-up bar of white marble, with its geometric lines and patterns in black, the stonework of the Buvette de la Grande Grille climbed into the fog.

  Kohler shone the torch upwards. Four cherubs, two facing outwards, two inwards, held a flowering platform on which stood and stretched the statue of a naked girl of eighteen or so. Beautiful, graceful – athletic – the absolute picture of health, the left arm crooked above her head, the right arm bent at the waist, the thighs slender, the buttocks perfect.

  Stone faces – two male, two female and mature – gazed benevolently out from around the base of this heap of pulchritude.

  He shone the torch behind the bar and over the floor. Had Céline Dupuis been able to break free? he wondered. Had she tried to hide where he was now standing? Was that when she had removed the earring or simply lost it? Her left lobe hadn’t been torn, so robbery couldn’t have been the motive, could it? Her killer would have taken the remaining one unless interrupted.

  Again he looked towards the Buvette de Chomel. Louis had put the lantern on the bar and had taken off his overcoat and scarf, but was nowhere in sight, was distant across a floor whose bluntly triangular pieces of dark grey stone, each of about five centimetres in length by half that in width, provided thousands of shallow hollows. Enough and more to hide an earring if thrown.

  But why thrown? Fear of being discovered wearing them? Then why have them on if visiting the Maréchal?

  Round brilliants – Jagers, or had they been Top Cape or Cape? – but worth plenty in any case.

  Two stones each, the one of about two and a half carats, the other much smaller – and linked to the larger diamond by a tiny loop of gold.

  But why remove it? And where, exactly, had the Maréchal’s bodyguards been when all of this was happening?

  Finding each tap, he felt the subterranean warmth, saw one dripping here, too, and heard the escape of effervescing bicarbonate of soda and hydrogen sulphide: 42.4 degrees Celsius, Louis had said.

  In a nation where warm water was rarely if ever seen, used or felt, Kohler longed for a good soak. It would ease that right shoulder he had failed to tell Louis about, it would ease the knee those ‘horse chestnuts’ had really been for.

  ‘I should have told him about the shoulder. He depends on me. He says I’m his “alter ego”, whatever that is.’

  Ashes had fallen on the counter, grey and soft against the polished stone. When he touched them, they smeared and he knew the girl had hidden here and then had run.

  To where? he asked. Her boots would have sounded harshly on a floor that was warm in places, due to the pipes that passed beneath it.

  ‘Louis, she got away from him,’ he called out, his voice muffled by the fog and the distance.

  ‘Track her, Hermann. The other earring has been loosened. Its disc has almost been unscrewed.’

  The right earlobe was cold, the skin soft. Having gone behind her, and now kneeling near her head, St-Cyr gingerly turned the disc through the last of the threads.

  Gently pulling on the larger diamond, he felt the post slip free of her ear. ‘There,’ he said and sighed, asking, as he held the earring to the light, ‘Were you greatly troubled by having worn them, madame?’

  Cartier’s were at 23 place Vendôme in Paris, Van Cleef and Arpels at number 22, Chaumet at number 12. ‘But Boucheron has been at number 20 since 1893 and is the favourite of the beau monde, and these, I am all but certain, came from their house. They would easily fetch 350,000 francs, or about £1,750 at the official rate, or 7,000 American dollars, but at least twice those amounts on the Black Bourse. Were you wearing someone’s freedom? I ask simply because I must. Several do try to buy their way to Switzerland and other such places.’

  If she thought anything of it, she didn’t let on and this made him sigh more heavily and chide, ‘You must trust me, madame. My partner and I will see that your daughter receives them, have no fear.

  ‘A young man?’ he suddenly asked, gazing down at her, she staring up at him. ‘Not Honoré de Fleury, madame, but someone in the Resistance. Were you thinking of making the Maréchal a present of them in return for allowing that young man to escape and is this why you felt it best to remove them when threatened?’

  Moisture seemed to well up in her eyes, brightening their blue under the lantern light. Her lips seemed to draw in a breath, her wounded chest to rise.

  He would have to tell her what he knew of the diamonds. ‘Blancs exceptionnels, madame. Dancers don’t wear such things when on stage – they would only be lost, n’est-ce pas? – so you
must have put them on before you left your dressing room and Monsieur de Fleury must have seen them.

  ‘Unless, of course, you put them on after he had let you out of his car.

  ‘After, I think, because that one, if he’d given them to you, would not have wanted us to find them on you. They’re from the Belle Époque, aren’t they, and were doubtless someone’s mother’s or grandmother’s.’

  She couldn’t smile but would have wanted to softly, he felt, and when he took her by the left wrist, he knew she wouldn’t have minded his running a thumb over its scars. So many young women had lost their men during the Defeat, either to the grave or to POW camps in the Reich where one and a half million of them still languished in spite of all promises to repatriate them.

  The scars indicated the wounds had been deep and decisive. As with the other wrist, they’d been carefully stitched so as to lessen their visibility but still she’d camouflaged them with a thin smear of greasepaint and a dusting of powder. ‘You wanted to die in 1940, but now wanted very much to live. Had you found another lover, and I don’t mean de Fleury?’

  Her hair had been deliberately stiffened so as to accentuate the scraggly look of a loose woman. Bending closely, St-Cyr smelled it. ‘Inconclusive,’ he said, leaning back but still fingering it. ‘Was it Dr Ménétrel who set this whole thing up and excused the guards from their duty? Come, come, madame, Monsieur de Fleury was only the go-between, the procurer, the standby, the pimp.’

  Would she really have gone to bed with the Maréchal? Pétain certainly did have a legendary reputation as a tombeur de femmes, a Casanova. While engaged to his present and only wife, that moralizing hypocrite had carried on a torrid affair with Germaine Lubin, aged twenty-nine and singer to the troops. Madame Lubin was to have been his ‘war godmother’ but, unlike so many of his lovers, had apparently been reluctant to leave her husband.

  ‘“What I love best is infantry and making love,”’ sighed St-Cyr, quoting him. ‘And you, I think, madame, went to him under duress but hoping perhaps to exact a promise. A little something over and above the “reward” Dr Ménétrel had so generously promised you and Monsieur de Fleury? Or were you even aware of that little arrangement?’