In either case, things were not good – bien sûr this Sûreté was a supporter of the Résistance – but must one submit to such blackmail?
Sandrine Richard took a last drag at her cigarette and, with sharp jabs, stubbed it out in the overflowing saucer she’d used as an ashtray. ‘Perhaps, Inspector, you should ask him how well he and Edith Pascal got on at that bank when Monsieur Olivier was defending his country at Verdun and other places. Edith noticed irregularities in the transfer of funds and took him to task.’
‘Small transfers! It was nothing, I assure you, Inspector. That virginal puritan mistakenly thought she’d caught me out only to find everything had been returned with interest!’
‘He’s lying. Ask him what she did.’
‘All right, all right, I’ll tell him, shall I?’ shouted Hébert. ‘She notified Auguste-Alphonse – yes, yes, Madame Richard. That woman went right through the chain of command to Pétain himself! Pétain, madame!’
‘Olivier returned, Inspector, ostensibly on leave, and for the last year of war, Edith, a mere secretary from the wrong side of the tracks, had the right to challenge every transfer this one made and to sanction it only if correct and honest.’
‘Jésus, merde alors, you bitches certainly talk!’ snorted Hébert, tossing his smock and fedora into a chair. ‘Did that lantern-jawed witch, Madame la Maréchale, tell you all of this?’
‘And more, monsieur. Much more. How you, yourself, during his absence had seduced Noëlle Olivier, your friend and business partner’s wife. How you had wanted her to leave him for yourself. Many times you had had her out to this place, to parties just as wild and licentious as the ones you now hold for your friends and business partners. How, when she refused to leave her husband for you, you then continually introduced her to other men who made their attempts and sometimes succeeded!’
‘Trou de cul, the dried-up wife has really been stung, hasn’t she?’
‘Asshole, am I? Then what about this, Inspector? His first wife left him in despair; the second … ah! should I tell you of her? All but a virgin and only twenty-one, she fell down the cellar stairs here and bled to death behind … yes, yes, Inspector, behind a door that should not have been found closed and locked after her fall but was, it is whispered, slammed on her!’
‘Imbécile, she was drunk and had pulled the door closed behind her!’
‘But she couldn’t have locked it, could she?’ shouted Sandrine, getting up from the table to face him with clenched fists. ‘Not when naked, terrified and running away from two of your friends who’d been at her in that bird-room of yours because she’d sworn she was going to leave you! A girl whose wealth was more than your own and went straight into your pockets!’
‘Espèce de salope! Putain!’
‘Fucking bitch, am I? A whore, eh?’
‘Talk is cheap, madame, and that is all you women ever do!’
‘Ah oui, mon fin, but surely we do it not for entertainment? Surely it is to get at the truth of vermin like yourself!’
The warehouse, the barn, was chock-full of dehydrated food. ‘Enough for an army,’ breathed Kohler, in awe of what lay before them.
For as far as they could see, sealed crates were stacked to the roof timbers. Narrow aisles threaded their way through this maze. There was no sign of Albert beyond the last of his footprints in the snow and now … now, thought Inès, only the droplets of blood that, on either side of him, had shadowed those footprints.
‘He’ll have built himself a little nest in here,’ said Blanche. ‘He’ll have gone to ground and will wait until you and the Chief Inspector leave.’
‘Then he’s got a long wait,’ grunted Kohler.
‘Must we find him?’ bleated Inès, sickened by the thought. ‘He … he might do something.’
‘Just why are you so afraid of him if you’ve nothing to hide?’ he asked.
‘Because these days even when one has done nothing, one can still be blamed.’ And why, oh why did Albert suspect her? She’d given him no sign she’d cause trouble, had done nothing but try to befriend him. Had even shown him the wax portrait of Pétain in her valise and had watched as his eyes had searched it for each detail, in wonder, yes, but had that been when he’d first decided to take exception to her, or had it been later at the Jockey Club?
They came to cases and cases of pipe tobacco, then to those of cigarettes, one of which had been opened at a corner to reveal tins of Wills Gold Flake. ‘Fifty to a tin,’ quipped Kohler, ‘and wouldn’t you know it, these never saw the underside of a parachute.’
There was tea and there was coffee, cognac too – case after case of it and no concern about its freezing; the champagne and wine were kept in the cellars, no doubt. And cigars? wondered Inès.
‘They’d have picked up the aromas of too many other things,’ said Herr Kohler. Had he read her mind?
Blanche had said nothing further but had stayed close, too close. Sunlight, pouring through the cracks between the boards, filtered in. At a turning, the translator’s hands touched her shoulders, lightly, so lightly …
At another turning, the corridor ran straight to the very centre of the barn and to a ladder up into the loft.
There was blood on the first of the rungs, then only on every third and fourth one and its side rails. The rats … had there been dead rats? wondered Inès, Had they banged against the ladder as Albert had climbed it?
He was right under the cupola, had made himself a little shelter and was sitting, legs sprawled on the floor, with the beige dust of dehydrated beef-and-noodle soup showered all over his tricolour scarf, knitted cap and bleus de travail, along with the diced, rock-hard carrots and peas, the tomato, too, of a minestrone and the pale white of a leek-and-potato. Several packets had been torn open, sampled, consumed or discarded. Two silver foils of Swiss, dehydrated bar chocolate were half gone. The soup and the chocolate were smeared all over his face, guilt in his eyes, and four dead rats hanging by their tails from wires that were hooked to his belt.
Slim and sleek, Noëlle Olivier’s Laguiole lay open in his lap. The butcher’s knife was on the floor next to his left hand. The contents of her bag were strewn about, having been well thumbed. Her carte d’identité, sauf-conduit, lipstick and compact, some photos of Céline and herself as teenagers, the phial of perfume … Again Blanche touched her shoulders. Instinctively Inès ducked. Albert leapt! Herr Kohler hit him hard and he dropped like a stone.
‘Get him some snow to eat. Not too much or he’ll swell up like a balloon.’
‘He was hungry. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone,’ swore Blanche, frantic but not, perhaps, at the sight of Albert or of what he’d almost done. ‘Now he’s bleeding. He’s cut his head.’
‘Mother him. Pet him like you let him pet that rabbit of Céline’s.’
Kohler plucked the Laguiole from the floor where Albert had dropped it as he’d lunged at the sculptress. ‘Look after it,’ he said, pressing it into Inès’s unwilling hands. ‘I’ve got to find my partner.’
‘The butcher’s knife,’ she managed, pale and badly shaken.
‘Oh, sorry. Look after that one too.’
The noise was really something. It sounded like a cross between a PzKw IV tank and a leichter Schützenpanzerwagen, a ‘light’ half-track, and when it appeared on the road from Vichy, cresting the final approach to the château, snow swirled around its dark, heavily plated body, sunlight glinting from the blue-tinted bulletproof windscreens.
On and on it came, rocking gently from side to side, lumbering yet travelling at a good fifty kilometres an hour and capable of much more.
‘An armoured Renault …’ began Kohler, having come from the barn to find Louis waiting in the yard.
‘Built at great public expense for King George VI of England and Queen Elizabeth’s visit in July 1938,’ said St-Cyr drolly. ‘Typical of such visits, it was used only once for a little side trip the consort made to Versailles. Boemelburg and I were in the lead car and defenceless from ambush. Th
e tyres can’t be punctured. That’s why it sways. They’re far too thick. It’s Laval.’
‘Louis, we have to talk.’
‘Hermann, is there something going on that we’ve been missing? Those who knew that Madame Dupuis would wear the earrings and the perfume, didn’t know that the dress, et cetera, would be taken from Noëlle Olivier’s room and deliberately left for us to find. There was also, apparently, a hamper that was intercepted.’
‘A hamper with a knife that has a corkscrew just like this one, eh?’
More couldn’t be said.
The durs who got out of the front seat wore the grins of long, expenses-paid, pre-war holidays in the Santé, Fresnes and other such prisons. Tattoos were on the fingers that gripped the Schmeissers and barred polite progress. Three dots, two back and one forward, in the web of skin, the tobacco pouch between the thumb and forefinger. Mort aux vaches, death to cows – cops. The five dots too, for All alone between four walls and solitary.
‘Ignore them,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s always best.’
A rear door opened, a pinstriped trouser leg appeared, then another. Black kid boots negotiated a rut so as to avoid the deeper snow, their grey cloth uppers each closed with a neat little row of mother-of-pearl buttons from which the sunlight struck rainbow hues.
‘Ah Sainte Mére, Hermann!’ swore Louis, furiously fishing deeply into an overcoat pocket until, at last, he had what he wanted.
The plain, tin-plated stud, the post, the back of one of those goddamned buttons and memories of Céline Dupuis’s corpse lying in the Hall des Sources behind the counter of the Buvette du Chomel!
9
The wind swept the granules of snow past those carefully planted boots, bringing with it, St-Cyr noted, the tired pungency of stale cigarette smoke. Long-moist, a stained fag end clung to the Premier’s fleshy lower lip, the bushy black moustache half hiding it, the bull neck scarfless.
Dark eyes, swift to all meaning, detective or otherwise, took in Blanche Varollier and Inès Charpentier, for they’d come to watch from a distance, with Albert Grenier between them. Albert, who was terrified and in tears, of course, but for his own good necessarily out of commission, his wrists bound by the shame of Kripo bracelets he could not remove.
Sandrine Richard and Charles-Frédéric Hébert were also attentive, the two sworn enemies unaware they stood shoulder to shoulder in that side entrance to the kitchens. But one must say something.
‘Premier …’ began St-Cyr, the gangsters moving discreetly away to allow privacy as commanded.
‘Inspector, surely that …’ Laval indicated Albert. ‘That can’t be our killer?’
‘He’s a part of it,’ grunted Hermann. ‘He tried to kill the sculptress with this.’
‘Pah!’ snorted Laval, impatiently tossing his fedora-ed head in acknowledgement of the almost brand-new Laguiole of Noëlle Olivier. ‘The doctor vets every visitor his God on earth receives and is most fastidious about it. Surely Mademoiselle Charpentier poses no threat to the great one, or are we to hire Albert to head up security?’
‘Premier, the body of Céline Dupuis …’ hazarded Louis.
‘Inspectors, the boy loves the Maréchal as he would a grandfather who dotes on a little grandson. Certainly Pétain fails to acknowledge his existence, but Albert’s loyalty never wavers, not even when the great one’s autograph has to be purloined by other means, namely the Maréchal’s batman!’
‘Premier, you went to have a look at Madame Dupuis after the doctor had pronounced her dead.’
‘My button … You found its backing! Certainly I have a stock of them, a few extras, but they’re impossible to buy these days. I’m always misplacing them. Merci.’
Louis’s fist was tightly closed and snatched away, the words spoken, though Kohler knew them by heart. ‘That is evidence, Premier. Your unauthorized visit to the corpse?’
‘And before the local gendarmes could even get a look at it? Ménétrel, mon cher détective. Ménétrel makes a great thing of his medical expertise. Electrical shock treatments for the Maréchal, daily massages, injections of ephedrine, it’s rumoured, and it is not all beyond that charlatan, but even I, a simple peasant, have doubts. I had to decide for myself. Was it yet another killing – the third of those girls – or a planned campaign of terror?’
‘But … but, Monsieur le Premier, by not informing us of your visit and by leaving this little memento, you have caused us to believe that a woman might have killed Céline Dupuis! Two assailants, not one, as has been indicated by the sketchy police reports of the other killings. Merde alors, how could you have done this to us?’
Hermann let him have it flatly. ‘They were all informants.’
‘For Herr Abetz and Company?’ asked Laval swiftly, his dark eyes narrowing. ‘Then let me tell you why I’m not surprised. Vichy’s like a sieve, Inspectors, the Hôtel du Parc its main orifice and Ménétrel its incompetent dyke-plugger who runs from hole to hole with cork and hammer. But that’s not why I came to find you both. Are the boys next, as they are given to believe?’
‘And yourself and the Maréchal?’ asked Louis.
The fag end was plucked from that lip and flung away. ‘Pétain doesn’t count. Only a fool would make a martyr of him. The terrorists, the résistants, if you wish, are too well versed in the national psyche for that. As a people, we love our martyrs, so we’re stuck with that reedy skeleton, and until the coming of the Divine Reaper he has taken to praying to, he’ll go on playing Gilbert and Sullivan and other operetta recordings in that “bedroom” of his, and if I have to hear the HMS Pinafore again while trying to write letters or decide something crucial, I swear to God I’ll smash his machine! The boys?’ he asked calmly. Les gars.
Richard, Bousquet, Deschambeault and de Fleury. Hermann indicated that for the moment he would leave that one to his partner and Chief. ‘I don’t think so, Premier,’ said Louis guardedly. ‘Though Herr Kohler and I are badly in need of a chance to compare notes, everything we’ve uncovered so far indicates exactly the opposite. Whoever killed them did so because of what they’d become.’
‘Lovers and informants. The wives, then, or the doctor, who is not above murder, I must say, but … but come. Before we decide, let me show you both why I’ve left a perfectly good lunch to find you. Réal,’ he called out to one of the durs. ‘Take Herr Kohler’s vehicle and follow. Tell the others to pile into it. Albert in the back seat with Mademoiselle Varollier. The sculptress in front, but keep an eye on her and your weapons.’
‘Monsieur le Premier,’ called out Inès, ‘would it be possible for me to go with Madame Richard?’
Laval looked to each of them, Hermann giving him a nod.
‘Then it’s settled. Madame Richard and Mademoiselle Charpentier to join us as we view the latest artwork.’
LAVAL AU POTEAU! ‘Laval up against the post’ had been plastered in huge, dripping, now-frozen black letters over the wall of Charmeil’s eighteenth-century school. Above the Premier’s name, and just beneath the tops of its letters, were two side by side and freshly mounted posters. BEKANNTMACHUNG – Official Notice – as if any of the kids or their parents could read Deutschl snorted Kohler to himself. AVIS. Notice APPRÉHENDÉS. Apprehended. PEINE DE MORT. Penalty of death. FUSILLÉS. Shot. Ah, Christ! Paul Panton, Edgar Guerledan, Francine Aubret and Marcel Boulanger. Kids, just kids.
‘Herr Gessler’s quick off the mark, isn’t he? Ages eighteen to twenty. Fools!’ swore Laval, indicating the names of the dead and angrily finding himself another cigarette to light hurriedly.
Everyone had got out of the cars, Mademoiselle Charpentier sickened by the notices, thought St-Cyr. Beyond them, and the letters, its whitewash faded by the years of the Occupation so that the wall became a mirror of the times, were the words that had been written in despair by retreating soldiers in early June 1940, not realizing then that the Government would soon be installed in Vichy. QUI NOUS A TRAHIS? Who has betrayed us?
No one had apparently thought to enqui
re about, the bicycle that leaned against the wall. A sturdy, pre-war Majestic, its worn seat rested against the edge of the stripped-away stucco. Below it, the bare lava-stone blocks had been scratched by centuries of schoolboys and girls who had wished to leave their little mementos to posterity. A woman’s bike, then, said St-Cyr to himself. Tallish, long-legged and long-armed.
The faded wicker carrier basket was frayed to twigs around its edges and held an all but empty, two-litre tin of coal-black paint and a ten-centimetre-wide brush that must date from 1930 and had been used many times to whitewash the inside of a cowshed. A good farm, then, and well above the usual, but perhaps this was the very brush the soldiers had found to use?
‘There are also these, Inspectors,’ said the Auvergnat, giving a quick wave of salutation to schoolchildren who had found the view from the classroom windows more interesting than their lessons.
Cartoons had been cut from a magazine and a newspaper.
‘Both date from 30 October 1940,’ said Laval. ‘Punch Magazine and the Daily Mirror. I had them checked.’
The first portrayed him as the Great Laval in white bow tie, black waistcoat and tails and juggling swastikas, holding a Francisque rolling pin with rubber spikes like those guaranteed to remove excess fat, and bottles of his very own Vichy water, one of which had shattered at his feet.
The second clipping, that of the newspaper, depicted the Premier as a hideously grinning, squat and moustachioed bullfrog cradling a bouquet of chrysanthemums – the press’s funereal choice had been perfect! – as he came courting to knock at a door whose emblem was a large black swastika.
‘Vichy is Vichy, Inspectors. There is no other place like it in the world. There never will be nor can be, and I am at the centre of it. Inheritor of the decisions of others, cementer of bargains that are seldom adhered to. Reviled, hated, ridiculed by an ever-growing number, ah oui, but to be ill thought of and yet useful is better than to be ill thought of and useless. That bicycle must have been stolen; God knows where the artist found the paint. Footprints indicated the général direction of retreat but the children soon put paid to them, though they did establish the time of the atrocity, since the paint they touched on first inspection was then not frozen.’
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