‘Céline was an Aries; Lucie a Virgo,’ said Madame Ribot, conscious of the sculptress’s pallor and wondering if she could convince the girl to allow prints of her own hands to be taken. ‘Camille Lefèbvre was an Aquarian, Marie-Jacqueline a …’
Firmness would be best. ‘But you weren’t examining any of those when we came in here,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Please replace the ones you were studying.’
This was the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté whom Monsieur Laval had requested from Paris. ‘Very well, as you wish.’
A suitcase, set to one side on the day of the Defeat, its brass studs and corners scoured by years of travel, bore once-colourful, now tattered and long-faded labels: The Peter’s-Bad Hotel um Hirsch, at Baden-Baden … The Splendide, at Evian-les-Bains … The Nassauer Hof, at Wiesbaden … The Hotel les Bains, at Spa, in Belgium … The Grand, at the Montecatini Terme in Tuscany …
Not for a moment would this one have entertained the thought of taking less expensive lodgings and surreptitiously acquiring the stickers. She had gone from one to the other during each season for years and had stayed at nothing but the finest hotels.
‘Two prints, the left hands first, Inspector. Monsieur le Maréchal would most certainly not have allowed me to take one had Noëlle Olivier not begged him to join her for a reading on my return in the early autumn of 1924. I saw suicide even then, but could not bring myself to warn her and have chastised myself ever since.’
‘And the other print?’
‘Is Monsieur le Premier’s, whose excellent wine, so generously given, and whose wood and coal keep these old bones warm because he is genuinely concerned with my well-being.’ There, that ought to stop him from questioning her about having them! ‘A Taurus,’ she said of Pétain, ‘and a Cancer; the one ruled by Venus, the other by the Moon. The one an Earth Hand, the other, a Water Hand, but there are many complexities with both and I cannot convince myself that the analysis is wrong. Regrettably I must disagree with what Herr Kohler and yourself have told the Premier, Inspector, for I feel assassination is a very distinct possibility. Though I seldom use Belot, I have consulted his sixteenth-century work on palmistry and its relationship to the signs of the zodiac. Between the line of Life and that of Fate, and just near the latter’s juncture with the Line of Head, there is a region where, if the fine lines criss-cross many times and the Line of Life is broken, one can, after consulting the zodiac, deduce assassination. The analysis is not much used, if at all today, and has been widely discredited, but it does reinforce the others I’ve made, and when one seeks answers for such a man as the Premier, at a time of such crisis, one leaves no stone unturned.’
Hermann should have heard her but where was he? Why hadn’t he rejoined them? Trouble …? Had there been trouble?
‘I have, of course, also used Belot’s analysis of the first joint of the middle finger and have found there morte en prison both for Monsieur le Premier and le Maréchal. Contradictions … There are always those. In life one tries. Isn’t that all one can do?’
She was genuinely upset. Part Gypsy, part Jewish, part Russian or Hungarian – the possibilities were limitless, the roots deep – she had probably not left the hotel in all the years of the Occupation. ‘Madame, the fingerprints?’ he said gently, having suppressed the impatience he felt.
Must the police always be so stubborn? wondered Madame Ribot. ‘As I have told Monsieur le Premier many times, Inspector, both here and over the telephone, each of those girls came to me. After their little moments in Room 3-17, they would often feel the need, the one believing herself deliciously wicked and triumphantly so, another guilty for having betrayed her husband and wanting to know if he would discover what she’d been up to, the third simply naive enough to have hoped marriage possible. And the fourth, you ask?’ She would pause now, she told herself. ‘A réaliste who came to believe her life and that of Lucie Trudel were in grave danger.’
‘You saw her on Tuesday, between five and seven in the afternoon,’ said Inès, finding the words hard. ‘You warned her to be careful.’
‘My dear, I told her death was imminent. Here … There it is. Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, see for yourself. Your hand, a forefinger, s’il vous plaît! Press it to the glass, to this area, to just beyond the Mount of the Moon and nearest the break in the Line of Fate. Death by one’s enemies!’
Céline would have had to have bared the scars of her attempted suicide in order for Madame Ribot to have made the prints …
The Inspector was going through those prints that had been set aside. ‘No names,’ he grumbled. ‘How, please, do you identify them’
‘By memory,’ breathed the woman, watching him closely. There must have been thousands and thousands of such prints, thought Inès, and surely no human being could ever have remembered them all?
‘Come, come, Madame, you always make two sets,’ he said. ‘The one, when dry, goes into the file with the name written below each hand; the other you use when writing up or giving your analysis. Then those, too, are kept. A truly professional clairvoyant such as yourself would not do otherwise.’
This was no ordinary Sûreté. ‘That is correct. An attic room holds the legacy of the years, this office the most recent, but it is not from among any of those cabinets that you will find the ones you seek.’
‘Monsieur Laval wouldn’t have telephoned you so many times today, Madame, unless he was worried, and not simply about himself and his Government. The iron man’s fingerprint sweeps haven’t yielded anything useful because the commissariat de police hasn’t anything on file with which to compare them!’
‘Only the thumbprints each of us must leave in order to obtain our cartes d’identité, and those prints were, alas, not clear.’
‘When did he last telephone?’
‘Not two hours ago.’
‘While we were at the clinic …’ managed Inès.
‘Four murders, Inspector, and in the autumn of 1925, one woman and three of her lovers juxtaposed here on this glass. Noëlle Olivier was a Gemini and possessed of an Air Hand, which is usual for such a one; August-Alphonse a Capricorn and …’
‘And Charles-Frédéric Hébert?’ he demanded.
‘Noëlle brought each of them to me for a reading, yes.’
‘What about Edith Pascal and Albert Grenier?’ bleated Inès, sickened by what was happening and wondering why Herr Kohler hadn’t rejoined them.
It was St-Cyr who snapped, ‘The files on Olivier and Hébert, Madame. All prints. You have no choice and must shout it out to anyone who comes for them that I have taken them.’ Hermann … Where the hell was Hermann?
Madame Ribot did as asked. Two files … only two, Inès told herself, giving a last glance at the light-table, at Céline’s prints and those of Lucie.
Olivier, she said silently. It was Olivier and he’ll have Edith Pascal with him and she’ll have Albert, who has already tried to kill me, not because I’m a threat to the Maréchal or ever was, though Mademoiselle Pascal must have convinced him of this, but because I know too much.
The letter boxes of the FTP in Paris … the messages I had to deliver for him but worst of all, who he, himself, is, their Vichy leader.
Auguste-Alphonse Olivier.
*
This is the title of the French version; the one translated into English for the British troops is ‘Lilli Marlene’; the German, the original, ‘Lili Marleen’.
11
Louis wasn’t in Room 3-17 and neither was the sculptress. Frantic now, Kohler rang downstairs to the front desk to beg that son of a bitch of a réceptionniste to ignore the Gestapo rough stuff and stop the two from leaving the hotel.
There was no answer. None at all. The unmade bed looked lonely; the bevelled mirror threw back his reflection and he saw himself grey and dissipated, the shabby greatcoat undone, his scarf dangling as if to slip away, fedora pulled down hard and gun in hand.
‘Louis …’ he said, feeling caught, trapped, the moments ticking by too fast.
‘T
he fire alarm,’ he told himself and, rushing out on to the gallery, threw a look along it both ways beneath gilded plaster grapes, seashells and putti blowing horns before shattering the glass with his pistol butt and yanking on the little bronze lever.
‘Nothing …? Scheisse! No fire inspectors?’
Again he yanked on the wretched thing and again, cutting himself, the blood pouring from a forefinger to race down his hand. ‘Verdammt!’
Back in Room 3-17, he ripped a pillowcase apart, wound and tied the bandage tightly; saw a clutch of hairpins; remembered Céline Dupuis’s bed, that other room and the depression she’d left there in her mattress at the Hotel d’Allier on waking; knew that here, too, on that last day of her life she’d had to hurry, that she must have fallen asleep after the lovemaking.
Picking up the Walther P38, he headed for the door again, the mirror throwing back a glimpse of him that popped, blinded – seared its image on memory as the lights went out and the sound of the lift … the Christly lift … ground to a mid-floor halt!
‘Merde,’ came Louis’s muffled curse from out of the pitch darkness of the shaft. How many times had he been warned by his partner never to trust the lifts of France?
Other voices were heard both from above and below, some old, some middle-aged, some male, some female; complaints were muttered. The door to one of the rooms opened. A head and shoulders were stuck out. Neighbour began to question neighbour even from gallery to gallery. ‘An air raid?’ ‘I heard no siren.’ ‘Les Allemands?’ ‘As a punishment for what, please?’ ‘They often do this in Paris. Arrondissement by arrondissement if necessary, quartier by quartier if during a rafle.’
A house-to-house round-up with searchlights ready on the streets below to nail those on the roofs above.
Steps sounded – boot cleats on the marble floor of the foyer, rushing cleats …
The voices ceased, the doors were silently closed. Like hotels the world over, news of trouble travelled quickly and silence was often the best and only defence. Lock bolts were gently eased in place.
The bars of the lift-well were criss-crossed, their bronze cold. ‘Louis … Louis, it’s me. Stay where you are,’ he whispered. ‘Ferbrave and the Garde Mobile are here. I’ll find the hand crank in the cellars and try to ease you down.’
‘Madame Ribot, Hermann. The clairvoyant may be their first target, though I’ve already taken what they want. Her suite is to your left.’
‘Three doors and then the one just after you get to a life-sized terracotta wood nymph with garland, by Frémin,’ said Inès faintly. ‘I know because I … I have always now to memorize such things. Both breasts are exposed; the left arm is missing at the shoulder, and she is stepping forward with that foot.’
The furniture was old, the suite musty, but what Kohler couldn’t understand was why the door had been left off the latch and ajar because Louis wouldn’t have done that. Had the clairvoyant managed to slip away in the short time he’d been at the lift, or had it been left that way for a cat who liked to stray?
Ferbrave and the others had gone into Room 3-17 but had soon left it. He’d have to let them find the door of Madame Ribot’s flat just as he had, would have to let them enter and notice, as he now did, that a faint light shone out into the darkness of a distant corridor.
Maybe that would draw the moths and he could come up behind them …
The pungency of burning black tobacco came to him. A Gitane – one of Laval’s? he wondered as the door was swung softly open and a single torch beam penetrated the frayed carpet first, with its floral patterns in dark blues and red, then a small round table, carved at its edge and with a lamp and photos in silver frames, then a chaise, a fauteuil, a landscape on the opposite wall and, finally, the distant corridor.
‘Henri, is she alone?’ whispered one, only to be silenced.
‘Messieurs,’ she called out. ‘Entrez, s’il vous plaît. I have, I think, what you’ve come for, since Monsieur le Premier has telephoned to ask that I get them from the files.’
There were three others, with Ferbrave in the lead, and all were wearing black, hobnailed boots, white gaiters, black trousers, black three-quarter-length leather jackets and black berets.
Schmeissers, Bergmanns, Lugers with drum clips, and stick grenades – the much-coveted weapons of the Occupier – were carried, yet still they were careful, still they touched nothing, knocked nothing over, smashed nothing. Were careful, considering they could well have instantly wrecked the place and should have done. A puzzle.
‘Ah, Dieu merci, it’s you, Capitaine Ferbrave, and your men,’ said Violette Ribot as they gathered in front of her desk. Durs, she swore silently, pointing those guns of theirs at her. Gars whose mothers hadn’t suckled them enough! ‘These are the palm prints of Monsieur Auguste-Alphonse Olivier, and these, of Charles-Frédéric Hébert.’
‘She’s lying, Henri. The phone’s been left off the hook.’
‘But … but he has only just telephoned, monsieur,’ she exclaimed, not touching the thing, not replacing it.
A half-empty wine bottle was to the woman’s left, her glass brimful. The cigarette clinging to her lower lip, she stood facing them, a tartan blanket draped over her shoulders, but would they kill her? wondered Kohler. Would he have to jab his pistol against Ferbrave’s head to stop it from happening?
Round and outwardly bowed, the vase on the desk before her was of sapphire-blue glass on which, as if from the health-giving depths of a sunlit pool, voluptuous sirènes playfully grappled, some hugging the knees of others as they rose to the surface.
Ferbrave and the rest looked at the girls. They had to, and she’d damned well known they would!
Two sets of palm prints on tracing paper lay on either side of the Lalique vase turned crystal ball whose flame gave the lie of motion to the bathers and flickering shadows to its time-ravaged owner.
‘Here are the names,’ she said. ‘Always I must write them in at the bottom of each print.’
If she had noticed that he, too, was in the room and now close behind them and armed, thought Kohler, she wasn’t about to let on.
‘Are there others?’ hazarded Henri-Claude, indicating the prints with a nudge from his Luger.
‘Ah oui, here in these file folders I have taken from the cabinets. Two sets, always I make two, Captain. Both are identified. See for yourself. The folders are dated, the one from before the Great War and the other during it, the exact times of the visits … You must excuse the memory. Always now I have to check, but is it that you require both sets, or only the one?’
Ménétrel must have warned them to go easy with her.
‘Both,’ grunted Ferbrave.
‘Then it is as Monsieur le Premier has said. Uncertainty still exists. And the détectives, messieurs? Monsieur Laval did say that they, too, would pay me the little visit, but the wiring in this old place … The electricity has gone off again and they have not yet arrived, so I have purposely left the door off the latch.’
Some of the boys were beginning to look up at the charts on the wall behind her.
‘Your maid, where is she?’ demanded Ferbrave.
‘Lisette Aubin? Gone to her mother’s. A bad cold I did not wish to catch, not at my age. The chest, never good, has got worse.’
She coughed deeply and did so again, swallowing phlegm. ‘The flu … Merde,’ she swore, ‘I can feel it coming on!’
Even so, one of them thought to down her glass of the red, but she was swift to respond and laid a hand on his. ‘Would you deny an old woman what the Premier has so kindly given?’
‘Leave it,’ said Ferbrave. ‘We’re here to help the two from Paris.’
‘And the terrorists?’ she asked, releasing the hand. ‘Is it true that they might invade the hotel, messieurs? Monsieur Laval, he was most concerned and has said there might be the threat of this. You will be careful? Please put the lock on when you leave. Ah! the receipt. I have forgotten. Please sign here, Captain. Read it first, if you wish.’
They did not know, were forced to wait, to agonize, herself especially, since she knew things she should have revealed.
‘Inspec—’
St-Cyr put a finger to her lips, then pointed to the floor above by simultaneously touching both her chin and the tip of her nose.
As always now, the smell of bitter almonds permeated the air about them and why, please, had Albert had to go into her valise to spill that oil and all but drain its little bottle?
Why, dear God? The smell would now give her away.
No sound was heard, no light from a torch passed over the shaft above – St-Cyr would have seen it, wouldn’t he? she wondered.
His overcoat collar was up. Her forehead touched his fedora. At last her lips found his right ear. ‘Olivier,’ she whispered. ‘He butchered those rats. He has a pocket knife like that.’
An Opinel.
He gave no response. He remained so still, she wanted to shriek, Inspector, believe me, I know who killed them!
Cold against the hand that clutched her bag and valise, she felt the metal of St-Cyr’s revolver. Three short, quick taps were given, three longer ones, and then, again, the first three.
An SOS. A warning.
Kohler knew he didn’t have much time, but Gott sei Dank, Madame Ribot had yet to toss off her wine.
Unaware of his presence, Ferbrave and the others had left the suite, even putting the lock on and closing its outer door. The woman reached to replace the telephone receiver only to find that this Kripo had slipped back into the room.
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