Flykiller

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘And that one’s response?’

  How cautious of the Sûreté. ‘She laughed at Sandrine and then cheered the crowd who’d gathered to watch, and turning back to my wife, shrilled, “Why not strip and we’ll see which one of us causes his cock to lift?”’

  Ah merde! ‘Had you told the nurse you’d get a divorce and marry her?’

  ‘Inspector, surely you are aware that family is everything to a man in my position and that what I say to such women is of little consequence? She knew it was impossible but couldn’t resist making the taunt.’

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘Spat in her face, slapped her hard, and left.’

  ‘Then I’m going to have to interview her.’

  ‘That’s impossible. I can’t allow it.’

  ‘You will whether you like it or not, and that is final.’

  Six of those little grey pills of Benzedrine the Luftwaffe’s night-fighter pilots took to stay awake were shaken from Hermann’s inexhaustible supply, to lie like gravel on the linoleum-topped table.

  ‘Down those, Louis. You’re going to need them.’

  ‘Six! We’ve been up for nearly forty-eight hours! You know those won’t sit well on a stomach that has had only beer or pastis to wet it!’

  Unsteadily Herr Kohler got up and, a head and shoulders above nearly everyone else, picked up his two empties and began to make his way back to the bar.

  ‘He’ll be awake all night now and asleep tomorrow when I need him,’ grumbled St-Cyr.

  ‘Don’t you two ever stop?’ demanded Richard caustically.

  ‘Never. Now where were we? Oh yes, the older scratches and bruises the coroner noted on Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux and this supposed threat to assassinate les gars.’

  *

  Caught unexpectedly, their voices low and urgent only to be suddenly silenced, the cabaret troupe remained motionless in their dressing room. ‘Oh, sorry,’ quipped Kohler. ‘I was looking for the toilets.’

  Still the three of them didn’t move, nor did they grin or laugh at such an obvious lie. They’d left the stage, he the bar and right after them. Now they knew he’d deliberately invaded their privacy and they didn’t like it one bit.

  Their gazes taking him in, their black velvet chokers setting off the kind of women men imagined them to be, their expressions were, as one, cold, and silently demanded, why is it that you want us to be the way you do? But then … each, in her own way, realized why he must have come.

  ‘Kohler,’ he heard himself saying, his throat still dry at the accusation but also at having interrupted something he should have quietly listened to from the corridor. ‘Kripo, Paris-Central.’ The dressing room was crowded. Underthings, skirts, blouses and winter coats hung on wooden pegs even around the much-stained mirror. Stage make-up, grey rolls of unbleached toilet paper, lipsticks, et cetera, cluttered the shared dressing table. In a far corner, a rusty iron hole in the floor with stirrups, a pull-chain and one hell of a rush of icy water – a Turkish – was not only wet and slimy but reeked.

  ‘A detective,’ croaked the one with the clarinet, moisture rapidly filling wounded dark brown eyes that only moments ago had wantonly gazed down the length of that instrument she had blown into and fingered on stage. Her thick chestnut hair was long and still shaken out but now it fell forward, for she was lying, tummy down, on a lumpy, moth-eaten day bed and had had to turn her head his way. Ass up a little, legs slightly parted, knees dug in and waist bare, the off-white satin bra no doubt binding her so tightly it pinched and chafed her nipples.

  Unbidden, Herr Kohler’s faded blue eyes fled emptily over her body, Aurélienne told herself – Madame Tavernier to you, Inspector. He didn’t pause at her frill-clad bottom and black-meshed legs, but noted the holes in her stockings and, realizing that they couldn’t be mended because they helped to create that seedy, sluttish, twenties look of Berlin that was so in demand, especially now, paused only at her black high-heels and cleats. Was he thinking of footprints in the snow? Was he? she wondered desperately.

  He blinked as if a little drunk and tore his gaze from her to look suddenly at Carole – that’s Madame Navaud to you, Inspector – who stood with lighted cigarette poised. The flowered grey silk kimono was thrown well off that bare left shoulder, that hand placed firmly above a provocative hip, while the barbed tattoo of a wild rose climbed from her belly button and the equator of pink peekaboos to just below her satin bra. Black garters and black net stockings too, and her long, light brown hair all over the place and all but hiding the hard hazel eyes that looked sideways at him.

  ‘Kohler,’ Carole said in that way she always did when forced to caress some bastard’s quiverins cheek. ‘Here to find a killer or killers.’

  ‘Not us,’ whispered Nathalie, her expression unchanged, and still sitting facing the back of that Thonet chair of hers. Its bentwood waist was slender and curved beautifully upwards just like her own, her thighs tightly gripping it, her chin on the hand that was folded delicately over the top rail as if she was caressing the back of a lover’s neck. A chair that she often used as a stage prop and had insisted she must have when she’d arrived in Vichy in the late autumn of 1940. Madame Nathalie Bénoist, Inspector. Nathalie who holds us all together and writes our songs and routines and makes us work. She has such lovely shoulders hasn’t she? And yet … and yet her expression can be so hard and uncompromising.

  Nathalie’s black teddy gave Herr Kohler’s swift scrutiny a glimpse of lace, flesh and garters, of smooth white thighs and black lisle stockings that had no holes above the tops of her jackboots.

  ‘What’s to happen to us?’ she asked at last, but with that same penetratingly cold voice she used on insufferable men. ‘Are we to be next?’

  ‘Just who the hell is doing this?’ demanded Carole, abruptly taking a quick drag, then curling back her upper lip to spit, ‘Detectives! Merde, haven’t you salauds from Paris thought it could well be the wives?’

  ‘A knife?’ Nathalie said softly from her chair. ‘Noëlle Olivier’s, is that so, Inspector? Well? Damn it, tell us.’

  ‘Yes! Louis … Look, my partner has it.’

  Had Herr Kohler been startled by Nathalie’s vehemence? wondered Carole. Did he, too, think there could well be a connection to that little legend? Edith Pascal, eh, Inspector? La Mégère as we call her – the shrew – when she hounds Albert for newspapers and about other things.

  ‘And is it true that Albert Grenier found it?’ bleated Aurélienne from where she lay, her back still to him.

  ‘Yes, again.’

  ‘Ah Sainte Mère!’ she cried, and, shutting her eyes, bowed her head to press it against her own stage prop which Albert had seen her lewdly sucking and fondling often enough. Albert …

  ‘Chérie, it can’t have been him!’ insisted Nathalie.

  ‘Ma foi, quelle stupidité, idiote!’ scathed Carole. ‘Albert loves us all. You know he’d never touch a hair on your head. He’d die for us just as he would for the Maréchal. He couldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘Just the rats, eh?’ blurted Aurélienne, defiantly swinging her legs off the bed to sit on its edge. ‘He presses a thumb under the chins of those that haven’t quite been done in and watches as they struggle for breath or all but cuts off their heads by tightening that wire of his!’

  ‘Or uses the chair leg, so why make such a thing of it?’ shot back Carole.

  ‘Because I’ve seen him watching me! Oh bien sûr we used to say he should at least have a little fun in his life and why not let him watch us, but now I’m afraid of him. I am, Nathalie. I am!’

  Hurriedly Herr Kohler pushed things aside on the dressing table to set his drinks down but knocked over the bottle of cologne that was always left open as an air-sweetener. Futilely he made a grab for it only to realize he was too late as it shattered on the concrete floor. ‘Verdammt!’ he swore and desperately searched his pockets for a cigarette until Carole gave him hers.

  ‘Merci,’ he said. ‘Christ, I needed this! F
our girls and Albert knew them all. Did he watch them too?’

  ‘Getting undressed?’ asked Nathalie.

  ‘Fucking their lovers?’ went on Carole. ‘Céline was one of us, Inspector. The others were friends.’

  ‘And she was killed with that knife!’ wept Aurélienne. ‘I knew she was going to be next. I begged her not to go to the Hôtel du Parc when Honoré de Fleury came in here to give her that nightgown and told her to put it on. Albert knew what she was up to with Pétain. I’m certain of it. Certain, do you understand?’

  Svelte and looking taller than she was, the one called Nathalie lifted herself from that chair of hers, its back slipping between and behind her legs in one gracefully fluid motion. Putting a bare arm about the clarinet player’s shoulders, she kissed that tear-streaked cheek and, pressing her forehead against it, rocked her head from side to side, saying soothingly, ‘Petite, don’t worry so. Albert couldn’t possibly have killed Céline or any of the others. Mon Dieu, didn’t he leave flowers for you in your room last summer, in mine also, and now sometimes a gingerbread his mother has baked especially for him?’

  And gazing up with superb china-blue eyes under bobbed and parted jet-black hair à la Madame Noëlle Olivier—yes, damn it! thought Kohler – said, ‘It was nothing, Inspector. Albert overheard Lucie telling Aurélienne and Céline that she was going to have to go to Paris. Gaëtan-Baptiste, her banker, was insisting on it and had …’

  ‘Had what?’

  Ah merde! ‘Arranged everything.’

  ‘An abortion?’

  ‘She wasn’t going to refuse, Inspector,’ said Nathalie. ‘She couldn’t, she said. But for me, I think she wanted very much to keep the child.’

  ‘And Albert? How did he react?’

  She shrugged. ‘He got angry. He thinks girls lead men astray – at least that’s what his mother has told him often enough. She’s very religious and had wanted a child so badly but had had to wait nearly for ever, so Albert, he doesn’t feel abortion is right either.’

  And neither does the Maréchal he worships, thought Kohler. ‘Where is this peephole of his?’

  ‘Actually there are two of them,’ said Carole. Picking her way round the day bed and past the doorless armoire, she found the crack high up in the wall and ran a finger along and right into it. ‘He stands on the wooden crate he uses as a footstool when reaching difficult places to set his snares.’

  ‘The other one is in the ceiling above Aurélienne, Inspector,’ said Nathalie dryly. ‘There’s a storeroom in which Albert must also set snares. Chez Crusoe would rather their kitchens and our dressing room were inundated every spring during the annual floods, than have all that stuff up there get wet.’

  ‘Cigarettes and pipe tobacco?’

  ‘Sugar, flour, chocolate, wine and champagne,’ said Carole, giving him the blankest of looks.

  ‘Orders are placed here, then, and the vans come and go?’ he asked, not missing a trick.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but please don’t tell anyone we let you in on it.’

  ‘And you all have rooms at the Hôtel d’Allier?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nathalie. ‘Inspector, forget about Albert. Think about the wives, as Carole has said. You see, they came here to Chez Crusoe. Not Bousquet’s – she’s in Paris – but Richard’s, de Fleury’s and Deschambeault’s. What they saw they did not like and were only too vocal about it. Everyone in the audience laughed, of course, ourselves especially. Mon Dieu, to be presented with such an opportunity for humour was too much to resist, but … but their husbands had left the club by then.’

  ‘Marie-Jacqueline, Camille, Lucie and Céline had gone with them to the Chateau aux Oiseaux Splendides,’ said Carole, lighting a cigarette for herself. ‘We joined the party later.’

  Louis had shown him his notebook: ‘“Party, 24 October”,’ he muttered, ‘and just before the Allied landings in North Africa and total Occupation …’

  ‘But there have been other parties since,’ confessed Aurélienne, taking Nathalie’s hand in hers to kiss and grip it tightly. ‘Like Camille, Inspector, each of us has a husband who is a prisoner of war in your country, but unlike Céline’s, ours are still alive. Alive!’

  ‘Those bitches had the nerve to accuse us in public of being unfaithful,’ snorted Carole. ‘Oh for sure, they despise us for letting a little fun come into our lives now and then, but to threaten to tell our husbands we’ve been unfaithful? To write letters to the Maréchal demanding that he get les Allemands to send us to the Reich and into forced labour in a munitions factory? Merde, how could anyone think of doing such a thing to another?’

  ‘We’re not saints, but we didn’t deserve what they said of us,’ said Nathalie. ‘I’ve two sons I board at a farm on the other side of Charmeil where I know they will get enough to eat. Carole has a daughter she left with her husband’s parents.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand to live with them any more. It drove me crazy, their constant carping. Now I work and save and hope we’ll have a future when my husband is released.’

  ‘Aurélienne comes with me, Inspector,’ said Nathalie. ‘Every second Sunday we visit the farm and take the boys to Mass at the same little church Pétain sometimes attends. They call her auntie, and as for me, I know she loves them as much as I do, if not more.’

  ‘I haven’t had any of my own yet,’ confessed Aurélienne, shyly blinking away her tears. ‘There … there wasn’t time. One day we were married and the next my Yvon was sent to the front. Now a heavily censored letter still comes every once in a while but what’s a girl to do, eh? Pine away the whole of her life?’

  ‘Starve?’ said Carole.

  ‘Wear black?’ said Nathalie.

  ‘Wait when one never knows if her husband will ever come home and if he does, will he still feel the same way about her; will she still love him? Me, I can’t even remember his face!’ swore Carole.

  ‘We’re not here to judge.’

  ‘Don’t men always judge?’ she snapped. ‘And their wives too? Especially those who have everything and consequently think they’re better than those of us who have nothing?’

  ‘And at this chateau party, did any of the other wives join in the fight between Marie-Jacqueline and Sandrine Richard?’

  ‘Madame de Fleury found Honoré with Céline and wept but couldn’t seem to move or say a thing. She just stood in the centre of that room with her head bowed and fists clenched,’ said Nathalie. ‘Never have I seen a woman more devastated.’

  ‘And Madame Deschambeault?’ he asked.

  ‘Her?’ snorted Carole. ‘For that one, Inspector, you have to understand that her mind isn’t at all well. She remained in the car with Madame Pétain.’

  ‘Ah Christ!’

  They were subdued, these men of influence, said St-Cyr to himself and, for just this once in their corrupted lives, reduced to silently watching two overworked detectives enjoy a much-needed meal. Bousquet, again absenting himself had gathered the unfaithful around their table at Chez Crusoe, but Laval had made certain of the meal. From one of the restaurants he frequented along the Allier, the Premier had sent a splendid sampling of the rustic fare for which the Auvergne was justly famous.

  Pounti could be no more than a hash of bacon with onions, Swiss chard and eggs, but here it was golden brown, piping hot, cut into wedges, containing chopped ham, pork, raisins, cream and herbs – tarragon and chervil especially – and was accompanied by the dark green lentils that were grown only in the Puy de Dôme and had such a remarkably distinctive flavour.

  Two bottles of the Chanturgue red – ah, not a Beaujolais of course – were totally acceptable. Truffades were waiting. A kind of potato cake, but shredded coarsely, fried in lard with Cantal cheese cut in strips over them and left until melted only to be then turned over, the fire now low, the aroma superbe.

  A salade de lentilles aux saucisses also waited – dried country sausage cut in rounds, the lentils, which had been soaked overnight with onions and carrots, simmered and drained,
the carrots, et cetera, saved for the never-ending pots of soupe aux choux, the lentils cooled, mashed with a fork and given a drizzle of whisked egg yolks, vinegar, olive oil and Dijon mustard.

  The bread? he asked himself, refilling Hermann’s glass and then tearing off a fistful from the round and golden cross-hatched loaf, was a meal in itself.

  But, to business, he said, looking silently round the table and asking himself, Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux and this acid little Minister of Supplies and Rationing, this Alain Andre Richard? A patently indiscreet nurse with a private practice who was on call at the girls’ school where Camille Lefebvre was a teacher, and who had also worked part-time at the clinic of Dr Raoul Normand where Julienne Deschambeault sought constant help? Marie-Jacqueline, monsieur, age thirty-seven, not thirty-two or -three, and born in Tours. A divorcee at the age of nineteen who had just given birth to twin girls she had given up to the Carmelites. A woman with jet-black hair, dark blue eyes, an angular face, sharp nose and chin and dimpled apple cheeks. What, please, had Julienne’s reaction been when attended to by such a creature? Intense hatred, a traumatic fit perhaps, or did Madame Deschambeault simply swear to drown her?

  Gaëtan-Baptiste Deschambeault, the husband and Sous-directeur of the Bank of France, was tall and not unhandsome, broad-shouldered under an open black overcoat, the black hair thinning, the aristocratic blue eyes swift to every nuance. Was he thinking of his little Lucie who’d been smothered at the age of twenty-three? His very personal shorthand typist, the one he’d got pregnant? Was he remembering the foetus between her blotched and putrid thighs, the effluent and bloodstained oedematous fluid that had still oozed from her, or was he thinking instead of her chestnut curls and dark brown, mischievous eyes, the riding crop clutched licentiously – was that not so, monsieur? – and leather thongs waiting, but to tie up which of you?