‘Mon Dieu, Hermann,’ said Louis, reverently ignoring the weather, his breath fogging an already iced-up windscreen, ‘it’s exactement as Caesar would have seen it in 52 BC. He’d been defeated by Vercingetorix and his Arverni at Gergovia, their hill fort, and had had to cross the ford down there to lick his wounds in the hot springs.’
Christ, were they to have another tiresome lecture at a time like this? They’d just driven through the little village of Charmeil, some seven kilometres north-west of Vichy, had first crossed the Boutiron Bridge without a murmur from the boys on the control, a bad sign. ‘That little aerodrome with the swastika wasn’t there, mon enfant, nor were the two Storchs or that Dornier that are warming up!’
Grumpy still and no imagination! ‘Nor was the railway spur that’s at the foot of this hill from which Herr Abetz’s chateau commands such an imposing view.’
After leaving Chez Crusoe, they’d spent the rest of the night in yet another of the lousy flea-bitten hotels honest detectives had had to become accustomed to. Searing pain in that left knee and no time to boil chestnuts and mash a poultice as promised. ‘Caesar wouldn’t have campaigned in the dead of winter!’
A sigh had best be given. Hermann had tossed and turned all night. Sleep had been impossible! ‘You’re missing the point. Every schoolchild in this country your Führer thinks is his has to memorize the heroics of that twenty-year-old warrior, less now, of course, due to the Maréchal’s policy of collaboration. But still, when he or she hears that Vercingetorix was defeated later that same year at Alesia, they learn that, like all noble Celts, he praised his vanquisher and led the Arverni in the victory parade, only to be courted by the Romans and then put to death. I tell you this simply to emphasize first that treachery is common to the Auvergne, though not limited to its natives.’
‘And the château?’
Hermann found a cigarette and, breaking it in half, lit both halves to pass one over.
‘Merci. Is like Vipiacus, the former estate of the Roman, Vipius, now corrupted into Vichy and owned by one of your countrymen.’
‘When in Rome, do as the Romans, eh; when in Occupied France, as the Occupier?’
‘Buy up everything you can.’
‘Then let those who once owned it, look after it.’
‘You’re learning. I’m certain of it.’
‘And second?’
Ah bon, Hermann had risen to the bait. ‘That those same natives, having kept their beloved Auvergne independent of Paris for over a thousand years until Louis XIV made the mistake of finally taking it, are still tough but toughest on themselves. Just look at this chateau of your ambassador. Its towers and square keep, which have been often repaired, are all that remain of the lava-stone feudal fortress. The villagers have repeatedly raided its ruins for building materials, not only out of necessity but because of a deep-seated hatred of its owners and former owners, all of whom had not only robbed but brutalized them. Of course the Revolution also took its toll, although even then it was the peasants who suffered. But then … then along came new money and a gentler time to give us the gracefully sloping roofs that are covered with lauzes, the walled gardens, fishponds and statuary of a maison de maître, the baronial mansion of a grand seigneur.’
‘Who, like as not, is still from outside and still keeping the peasants in thrall. Mein Gott, haven’t you heard that “effort brings its own reward”?’ snorted Hermann, quoting the Maréchal.
‘“Salvation is above all in our hands,” mon vieux. “The first duty of all Frenchmen,” and I count you one of us, “is to have confidence”.’
‘You sort out the former owner and bird lover. Leave the staff to me.’
‘Les bonnes à tout faire?’
The maids of all work. ‘Only those who have eyes and ears and are pretty enough to have been chased at parties! Coffee and cakes in the kitchen when you’re ready, Chief?’
Hermann had been lifted out of his slump and was now looking forward to opening this little can of worms, so it would be best to let him have the last word since he always liked to have it, except … except that, having now passed through the last set of gates, they had a visitor.
A black, four-door Citroën traction avant, just like their own in Paris, was drawn up in front of the main entrance, empty.
‘The bonnet is still warm,’ said Louis, noting its melting snow.
‘Hot, if you ask me. There are even skid marks.’
Sandrine Richard was waiting for them. Not in the grand salon with its Régence furniture and floor-to-ceiling murals of the hunt. Eighteenth-century, those, thought Kohler. Flemish by. the look. Gorgeous paintings of long-necked swans and geese hanging upside down to mature, pheasants too. Stags, boars and lunging hounds, the wounded at bay under crystal chandeliers whose light would be reflected from the gilded frames and bevelled mirrors.
Even the parquet underfoot would gleam, their quickening steps echoing as they passed a seventeenth-century harpsichord and followed the maid with the short blonde pigtails and blue, blue eyes. One of the Blitzmädchen. Eighteen, if that, and with an urgent, self-deprecating walk, her arms kept stiffly to the sides of the prim black uniform with its dentelle of white Auvergne lace. Black lisle stockings, too, and glossy black leather shoes with low and slightly worn heels.
Madame Richard, wife of the Minister of Supplies and Rationing, wasn’t in the billiards room either, its life-sized Hellenic nudes of Carrara marble gracing the decor of dripping, tassled green and maroon velvet, lozenges of crystal dangling from the low-slung lights above the table, the smell of cigars lingering in the musty air. Nor was she on the staircase that rose beneath baronial shields and crossed pikes to landing after landing, opening on to a long corridor that led to an even older part of the château.
She was in a high-ceilinged bedroom whose canopied bed was of dark rosewood and whose walls were covered with faded, patchy Renaissance frescoes but had the remarkable added touch of perched, exquisitely mounted birds. Hawks in full flight or having just come in to roost; eagles too, an owl … Another and another, one so small it was no bigger than a fist. All looking at the intruders, all caught as if alive. A snipe, a rail, a cock pheasant, a partridge. Eighty … a hundred … two hundred of these birds, the chicken-coop smell of their feathers mingling with that of cold wood-ashes.
‘Messieurs …’
‘Hermann, interview our guide and what staff remain. Leave this one and Monsieur Hébert to me!’
Turn-of-the-century, long-necked glass lamps with rose-coloured globes and wells of kerosene would shed the softest of lights on the assembled aviary, thought St-Cyr. An ormolu clock, its Olympian gracefully raising her garland from above the blackened fireplace, gave the exact time, even to its minute hand moving one step further into the current hour beneath a sumptuously reclining, all but life-sized nude whose back was slightly arched, throwing her pubes into full view.
Leaded windows let in the cold, grey light of day.
Madame Richard wore no hat or scarf – even the charcoal-grey woollen overcoat hadn’t been buttoned, so eager had she been to jump into that Citroën of her husband’s.
No gloves either, and watchfully tense, he noted. A woman in her late forties with straight jet-black hair that had been pulled to the right and back but had remained unpinned in haste, her eyes the hard and unyielding chestnut brown of the betrayed wife, socialite and mother, one of the Parisian beau monde, no doubt, with money, lots of money. Hers and his, ah yes. No wrinkles furrowed that most diligently tended of brows. Only at the base of the neck, above the everyday woollen dress, were there the cruel signs of ageing. A woman of more than medium height but not tall, the figure trim not because of the rationing, but because she ate only enough and never too much.
‘Inspector,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘We have to talk.’
‘A few small quest—’
‘Don’t you dare patronize me! That …’ She pointed accusingly to an oaken door, centuries old, which had seen the hammeri
ng blows of countless invaders. ‘Is where I found them and.’
She waited, still watching him as the hawks and eagles did.
‘Is where I had them photographed not once but several times!’
A dark Renaissance table was swept bare of its lamp and sundry other items. ‘Here, damn you!’ she shrilled as the sound of the breakage died and, sucking in a breath, snapped down print after twenty-by-twenty-five-centimetre print. ‘See for yourself what we were expected to put up with week after week, month after month. Élisabeth’s Honoré de Fleury and that … that dancer of his; Madame Bousquet’s husband, our Secrétaire Général and his school teacher; Julienne Deschambeault and her Gaëtan-Baptiste and his secretary. You should see what he’s done to that wife of his. Ruined her life. Made a decent, healthy woman into a nervous wreck who is constantly ill!’
She stamped a foot. ‘Of course I swore I’d kill Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux. That slut was always in heat.’
‘And those photographs, madame?’ asked St-Cyr, his voice somehow remaining calm while hers had climbed.
‘Were taken by the photographer I hired to accompany us.’
Trust the husbands not to have mentioned it! ‘And the negatives?’ he asked.
How good of him to worry about Alain André being blackmailed by the photographer! ‘For now I will keep them.’
‘No, madame. For now you will allow me that privilege.’
‘They’re not with me.’
‘Then when we leave here, you will take me to them.’
‘They’re at the clinic. I … I couldn’t keep them at home. Alain André would … would only have found and destroyed them.’
Had she threatened to blackmail her husband into behaving? ‘Did Monsieur le Ministre tell you to come here?’
His use of the word Ministre had been deliberate! ‘What do you think? That to save his career and reputation he begged me not to and I compromised by saying I wouldn’t give them to Herr Gessler who knows all about what went on here in any case?’
‘Madame, please just answer.’
‘Ménétrel, you imbécile! That bastard telephoned to say that it would be wisest of me to destroy them.’
Then she had threatened Richard and he had then asked Ménétrel to intervene.
‘If I could have tarred and feathered that slut I would have, Inspector. Instead, when I realized fully what was happening to my marriage, I was fool enough to take my troubles to Ménétrel who suggested I masturbate to relieve the tension! Mon Dieu I hate it here. I always have and always will. The hypocrisy of the Maréchal’s return to family values. All women are chaste, all girls virgins, is that it, eh? Pah, what idiocy! And what about the husbands? The fornicateurs? And Pétain himself? A dancer? Well, he got what he deserved and so did she!’
Ah merde, her voice was echoing and she shouldn’t have said that. ‘I … Forgive me. This room. The memory of it. You can see the state I’m in. Well, can’t you?’ she shrilled.
‘Certainly.’
‘Then look at the photos. See for yourself!’
‘I will, but first, madame, who informed you of the party on 24 October last, and gave you not only the appropriate time to strike but also the precise locations of the four pairs of lovers that you would confront and have your man photograph?’
‘My husband was the last we surprised. As to who helped us, I can’t say.’
‘You’d best.’
‘Or you will arrest me?’
‘Just answer!’ At last the inspector had been moved to raise his voice.
‘Mademoiselle Blanche Varollier.’
‘Hired to inform on her employers?’
‘It was she who first came to me, but yes, I agreed to pay her ten thousand francs.’
‘One hundred thousand?’ It was a shot in the dark.
‘Two hundred and fifty.’
‘Then where were you, please, during the cinq à sept of Wednesday, 9 December last when Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux was drowned?’
The briefest smile of triumph was not reflected in the hardness of her eyes.
‘A dance recital at Thérèse Deschambeault’s ballet school. Élisabeth de Fleury’s daughter is very good and presently needs all the support we can give her.’
Merde, this town, this investigation! ‘And was Céline Dupuis there?’
No hint of triumph passed her lips.
‘Monique de Fleury was her best student. A dance from the Ballet Russe. It was marvellous. Madame Dupuis played the piano.’
Sacré nom de nom, the acid of that put-down! But did everyone know everyone in this town? ‘And were Madame de Fleury’s daughter and Céline Dupuis close, as a teacher and her prized pupil would have to have been?’
‘Very. So you see, Inspector, Céline did not just betray Élisabeth, but her daughter as well!’
The kid with the pigtails was uneasy and with good reason, felt Kohler. In November, when the Wehrmacht had suddenly taken over the zone libre, her boss had been recalled to Berlin. Urgent consultations, questions about his loyalties and loving the French and all things French too much. Abetz’s wife, Suzanne, came from France’s de Bruyker family and was a sensation when the couple had taken up residence in Paris in July 1940, never here. Mein Gott, who’d want to live near Vichy in a draughty old chateau in a winter like this when the City of Light beckoned? France and Germany together in happy alliance and marital bliss in the showcase of showcases. Reception after reception, designer dresses, jewels, champagne and all the rest, the races too. Abetz and Fernand de Brinon, that pedlar of laissez-passers and Vichy’s ambassador to the Occupied Territories, had been old friends from the mid-thirties when Abetz had got de Brinon and other like-minded collabos to join his Comité France-Allemagne. A hotbed of sympathizers, some of whom had willingly spied on their own country and helped to place Sicherheitsdienst agents in France.
But now, as could happen with the most loyal of former drawing instructors – and Abetz had been one of those – there were doubts.
And this little Mädchen für alles, this bonne à tout faire, had been up to more than mischief and had realized he knew it.
‘Look, relax,’ said Kohler and grinned. ‘All I want is a little information.’
‘Sicherlich!’ – I’ll bet! she swore and pulled away to stop in the corridor with her back to him. ‘I only did what I was told.’
‘Befehl ist Befehl, eh?’ An order is an order.
‘All of us used to report to Herr Schleier who came from Paris once every so often, but now … now we have yet to be informed of who our new contact will be.’
Schleier – who was Abetz’s assistant and, at forty-one, the embassy’s oldest member and most senior Nazi of the 568 Paris staff, of whom 367 were from home – was now temporarily in charge.
‘Ach! don’t worry so much,’ he said, chucking her under a chin that could, no doubt, be soft and tender when necessary. ‘Gemütlichkeit prise useful information. Rudolph won’t forget that such cosy friendship with the Occupied is useful and that your loyalty is beyond reproach. He’s just busy. Mein Gott, doesn’t he like uniforms, medals and official receptions even more than Herr Abetz? He’ll delegate someone. Just give him a chance to put his glass down.’
‘They’ll close this place and send us home. I know they will!’
To live like God in France had been everyone’s dream, except that this kid was Alsatian and her bilingualism had been deemed useful.
‘Show me your room and tell me what went on.’
‘My room …?’
‘We’ve lots of time. That partner of mine’s a bird-lover.’
As she stabbed at the photos, Sandrine Richard sucked in a breath and said, ‘A bordel, Inspector? A maison de tolérance? Oh for sure in such places these things go on, but here? Here in an official residence of the German Ambassador?’
‘Calm down, please.’
‘Why should I? Look, damn you! See for yourself what those bitches were up to with our husbands. Feathers … torn pill
ows? Does she have to pee? Is that why she holds a fistful of feathers against herself and also blows them from her lips?’
Jésus, merde alors, Bousquet and Camille Lefebvre had been caught in a state of total undress and more than a little drunk, their laughter frozen by the camera’s intrusion!
Deschambeault and Lucie Trudel were tout nus also, the shorthand typist stretched up on tiptoe, her wrists bound tightly together to an iron ring in the wall of a tower room or dungeon, the sous-directeur with the riding crop raised to fiercely strike her shapely but already welted buttocks. Fear, tension, excitement and apprehension – lust, that pent-up urgency for the grand frisson, the great shudder – were only too evident in her expression as, puzzled that her lover had paused, she had looked over a shoulder past him and into the camera.
Honoré de Fleury and Céline Dupuis had been caught on their hands and knees on a leopardskin throw before a roaring fire, the Inspector of Finance having taken the dancer and instructress from behind while tightly gripping her breasts, her hair in his teeth and her head thrown back as if in ecstasy.
‘Can you imagine how Elisabeth must have felt?’ shrilled Madame Richard.
Céline’s eyes were closed and there were tears, but it would be best to say nothing of them.
‘Monique de Fleury is fifteen years old, Inspector,’ seethed Sandrine, ‘but now no longer wants to dance or strive for excellence in anything, her schoolwork especially. Endless tears for the mother who was betrayed; floods of them for herself because, like girls of that age, she adored her father and idolized him. Must Vichy corrupt everything? That child worshipped Céline Dupuis only to discover her father was fucking the woman!’
‘But surely she needn’t have been told?’
‘Then you don’t know Vichy and how crowded are the rooms in which we live! Madame Pétain, who is présidente of the Committee on which Elisabeth and I serve, has tried repeatedly to get better housing for us, but all our complaints only fall on deaf ears. “It’s the Occupation and we must set an example.” Some example!’
Caught among the onlookers at the fight between this one and Marie-Jacqueline were several whom St-Cyr recognized from their photos in the Paris press and other sources. Léon Aubriet of Aluminium Français, the giant cartel that had been set up to guarantee the country’s former position in producing the metal business and to supply the rapacious appetite of the German aircraft industry, was with the Blitzmädel who had guided Hermann and himself to this very room. That one had a pleasing figure and a lingering hand on Aubriet’s bare shoulder. His arm was still around her naked waist. Antoine Chaudet, of La Samaritaine – the Paris department store which, with Le Printemps, Les Nouvelles Galeries and others, had entered into agreements with Karstadt, Erwege and Hertie, their German counterparts – was with a girl far less than half his age. Charles Lenoir of Matériel Électrique and Pierre-Denis Martin of the Compagnie Générale du Téléphone were there with older girls that had, no doubt, been brought in especially for them. So many prominent men were in states of undress and drunkenness, the girls with their garlands of ivy having slipped.
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