Stonekiller

by J. Robert Janes

  The house at Number 47 rose five storeys to shroud its broken-shuttered attic dormers and hide unfriendly slates and moth-eaten copper sheathing. Liline Chambert had had an assignation here at 2.00 p.m. yesterday. It was hardly the place for an innocent girl of eighteen from the provinces to venture alone. She must have been desperate.

  ‘Hermann, talk to the concierge. Leave the room to me.’

  Though officially illegal and subjecting those involved not just to prison but to the threat of the guillotine, abortions could be obtained if one had the right connections and knew of a doctor and his clinic or hospital, but this …

  ‘The place bears every attribute of housing a clandestine abortionist, said St-Cyr bluntly.’

  ‘Then I’ll kick the door in and scare the hell out of the concierge.’

  It would do no good to argue. ‘Please announce our presence.’

  The glass shattered, the wood splintered. The door banged back and forth to screams and cries from within and then silence as they took the stairs.

  ‘Kohler, Gestapo Paris-Central, to see the occupants of Room thirteen.’

  Death would have a better voice, thought the woman. A giant …

  Kohler swept his eyes about the cage. Her teeth were still in their foggy glass beside the armchair, leaking stuffing. Her cheeks were sucked in, the faded blue eyes watered instantly. ‘Messieurs …?’ she began, still concentrating on him as he reached over her head to pluck the ring of keys from their hook and hand it to his friend.

  ‘Sit down, madame. Just a few questions to start your day off. See that they’re answered truthfully. Otherwise you’ll spoil mine. Right?’

  Yvette Grégoire crossed herself and wet her hairy lips in uncertainty. He was formidable, this one. Had she the courage to face up to him? ‘The magistrate’s order, monsieur.’ She snapped her ringless fingers. ‘Vite, vite.’ Hurry, hurry.

  Hers had been a life of strife, penury and little joy, but he couldn’t let sympathy interfere. ‘You should have been a magistrate yourself, madame, but don’t be silly.’ He leaned a hand on a well-padded shoulder. ‘Sit down. It may be the last time you ever do.’

  Kohler found two U-boat cigarettes and lit up, then placed one between her lips. ‘Now start talking. The girl in this photograph came here yesterday.’

  Quickly her chest was crossed, her eyes refusing to avert themselves but staring up at him as if he had just come back from the dead.

  ‘Look, my partner’s difficult, madame. He has a thing about hatchet abortions. You may pray if you like, but if that girl is dead from shock or anything else, he’ll be demanding the guillotine for you.’

  ‘I did not see anything! I was taken to the public baths.’

  This was a new one. ‘Explain yourself.’

  Gestapo … he’s Gestapo, she cried inwardly and winced. ‘Once a month, on a Sunday, it is my practice to wash and tidy myself.’

  He grinned but it was not a nice grin. He reached for her register and began to peruse it.

  ‘Monsieur …’

  ‘It’s Inspector. You stink too much to have just had a bath, and don’t try to tell me it’s the fault of a miserable cube of that gravelly ersatz “National Soap” they make out of ground horse chestnuts and lye.’

  ‘Inspector, the … the regular tenant was away in the north on business, so I … I have rented the room briefly to … to a Madame Proulx. A very suitable tenant. No trouble. Very quiet. A sweet lady in her middle years, a professional woman. Her …’ He was still not listening. Did he always doubt? ‘Her brother came to see her yesterday, and … and together they left the premises at …’ She indicated the register. ‘At four-thirty in the … the afternoon. Her … her son had been taken ill.’

  ‘The brother came.’

  ‘Yes. A priest. A man of the cloth.’

  ‘His age?’

  ‘About sixty perhaps. The sad blue eyes, the greying temples, the high forehead and …’

  Kohler flicked ash from the cigarette he had given her. ‘Tell me something, Madame …? Grégoire, wasn’t it? Yes, yes, that was it. I never forget a name and it’s on your licence right up there.’

  He ripped the licence down and stuffed it into a pocket, thus putting her right out of business until she could get another. ‘Now look, I told you not to lie to me, so how is it that you know they left when you’ve just said you were at the public baths?’

  ‘Because I had returned before then. It does not take an old woman hours to have a bath, only the half-hour, since one has to pay for it and one is not allowed to have company even though one might still desire such a thing now and then.’

  A tough one. ‘And the girl?’ he asked.

  Dear Jesus save her now. ‘Still in … in the room. That … that one, she has not come out. “She’s resting,” the good father said. “Resting.”’

  A priest … a black over coat … and a maker of little angels.

  Alone, St-Cyr clenched a fist. Noise from the docks filtered into the shabby room on whose plain iron bed and rumpled sheets Liline Chambert lay with fists tightly clenched on her upper chest. The woollen dress and cotton slip were hiked just above her middle, the underpants were nowhere to be seen. Her black lisle-stockinged legs were spread slackly, revealing a slash of dark brown pubic hair and a large stain. And damn Maréchal Pétain and his bigoted, hypocritical government in Vichy that allowed things like this to happen so that the youth of the country could be replaced no matter the cost.

  A squeeze-bulb syringe and nozzle long enough to penetrate the cervix lay with dirty rubber tubing on the floor beside two chipped enamel bowls of soapy, filthy water.

  The abortion had failed. Air had entered her bloodstream to block its circulation, causing instantaneous death. One moment the girl had been alive and apprehensively feeling that thing going inside her as she lay anxiously praying with her knees up and spread, her shoes still on; the next, her slender frame had jolted as she had been flung back to grip her fists and gasp and stare at the ceiling.

  Lying on a cloth, and unused, were long, pliable steel needles and a catheter in case the syringe’s douche hadn’t worked and the foetal sac had needed to be punctured and drained. Sepsis and gangrene would have been assured, a terribly painful death.

  When Hermann tapped on the door, he wasn’t allowed to enter. ‘Vernet should be forced to see this,’ grunted St-Cyr grimly. ‘Call the sous-préfet and tell him the fingerprint boys and a photographer are necessary, also the stretcher-bearers. We’ll put her on ice with the other one and let Belligueux have a go at her.’

  ‘And Nénette Vernet?’

  Hermann was visibly shaken, but it would do no good to avoid the truth. ‘Is now without friends or parents and all alone if still alive.’

  ‘Then I’ll put a first call in to the industrialist and we’ll have the bastard over for a little chat.’

  ‘He can refuse to come.’

  ‘I’ll let Old Shatter Hand do the telling.’ Messy … why must things always be so messy? Verdammt!

  Sitting with the dead was always troubling, only the more so if young. She’d been an attractive girl, Liline Chambert, not beautiful, but with that blush youth so often wears so as to successfully find a mate and reproduce the species in love and honour. A sculptress, a student … Was this why the child had had the Faber pencil case in her pocket and the tube of Mummy Brown?

  With difficulty St-Cyr found the items. The tin pencil case had seen years of use, but the child and her little friend would both have admired the picture of jousting knights on horseback and in colour. The red knight’s lance was true and strong and outlasting all battles, an A. W. Faber Castell HB from Bavaria, the firm established in 1761. The white knight’s lance had snapped in half, a not uncommon thing with cheap pencils, and now he was about to fall from his mount, stabbed right in the chest. There was a distant castle on a hill in the background.

  He uncrumpled the tube of paint—the girls would have been fascinated by it. Without breaking th
e rigor, he could not examine her fingernails but wondered if there would be traces of the paint.

  Suddenly he said aloud, ‘Where are your underpants? It is a puzzle, for a girl such as yourself would not have gone without them. Not to here, not to any place, and they would have been freshly laundered and ironed as well.’

  Though he searched the room as best he could without disturbing things, he could not see them. They’d been taken—he was certain of it. An interrupted attempt at tidying up, he wondered, or simply to either reuse or sell on the black market? Underwear was constantly in demand—after every film performance the usherettes in the cinemas collected the forgotten or misplaced underpants of those females who could find no other suitable place in which to make love. Needless to say, the boyfriends kept theirs on. Women had all the hard luck. Illegitimate babies were an ever-increasing aspect of the Occupation the Germans patently ignored, yet syphilis they dreaded and it, too, was rampant.

  Nothing else had been taken. Not her gloves, her beret, her scarf or overcoat, all of which were of good quality and would have fetched far better prices.

  Impulsively he yanked the dusty drapes aside to let in the cold grey light of day and stare emptily down at the Seine and ask, ‘Did Vernet force his attentions on you—is that why you didn’t go to him for help—help that would have saved your life? And what, please, of Madame Vernet? Surely she must have known or suspected what was going on?’

  The industrialist should have taken precautions. It was a logical assumption, but he knew beyond doubt Vernet would have done no such thing. Too arrogant, too wealthy—why spoil the fun when you’ve got a naked eighteen-year-old girl in your lap? So many of the wealthy played around, their affairs were legend.

  There were no bruises on her inner thighs, no love bites though he hated the necessity of looking and apologized. No scratches, no signs of resistance or passion. Had she simply let Vernet do it to her in that room at the head of the stairs or in the flat he had rented for her friend?

  And where, really, was that boy, that fellow student? Probably vanished into thin air like so many these days.

  Von Schaumburg would hit the roof. Criminal abortions, sex out of wedlock … A boyfriend who was a homosexual—that, too, would cause trouble.

  Liline Chambert’s identity papers gave her age as nineteen years seven months, a home address in Orléans, where the Vernet interests manufactured farm machinery, tractors and gasoline engines. It was a good place for an accountant to reside, especially if one’s trusted employer was to assist in a daughter’s education.

  She hadn’t even cried out as she had died. She had just been hit by the shock; a waste, a crime, a shame, a tragedy. There was no law that would blame Vernet. All would blame the girl. It simply was not fair.

  ‘Where is Nénette?’ he asked her gently. ‘Has this business here or these things in my pockets any connection with your visit to the belfries of the Notre-Dame and the Sandman, and if we should be so fortunate as to find her alive, will she then lead us to him before it is too late for her, even though he may not have killed her friend? Or will the killer of that friend also hunt her down and kill her to protect himself?’

  Only then did he take out the toy giraffe to stand beside the girl, looking down at it. A crèche …

  ‘Louis …?’

  ‘Ah! Hermann.’

  ‘The kid still hasn’t come home. Vernet’s gone to Rouen. Bomb damage last night. One of his factories. A necessary trip perhaps, or simply stalling for time.’

  ‘Stalling, I think.’

  ‘I’ll tell the boys in blue to come up, shall I?’

  ‘Yes, yes, but none of their lewd remarks. The photographs first, then the fingerprints. The others can wait in the corridor until everything else has been done. We’ve got to find the heiress, Hermann. Everything depends on her now.’

  A kid at large in a city where virtually everyone had to walk or ride their bicycles or take the métro or the autobus au gazogène to get from place to place and it was still far too easy to hide even with all the watching that was going on. ‘We’ll try the convent school first, and then the ancien Cimetière de Neuilly. She has to be somewhere.’

  But where? ‘The salon de thé in the children’s restaurant but at between three-thirty and four,’ said Louis, a hope, a prayer if all else failed.

  Kohler hated to tell him. ‘You’re forgetting she hasn’t any money.’

  ‘And you’re forgetting her little friend could well have brought along a change purse of her own. This the Mother Superior may be able to confirm.’

  ‘Or Sister Céline, the one the kid said hated her students. “We are the cabbages she feeds to her pigs after first giving them the names of each of us. We are her droppings.”’

  ‘Optare, optari.’

  The voices of twenty-two uniformed girls in dark-blue tunics and white middies, and ranging from nine to twelve years of age, rose in unison. ‘To desire, to be desired.’

  ‘Optavisse, optatus esse,’ announced Sister Céline from behind the Iectem, tall and straight and determined to drill the students even though most were in tears and ashen at the brutal loss of one or perhaps even two of their classmates.

  ‘To have desired, to have been desired.’

  ‘Optaturus esse, optatum iri.’

  ‘To be going to desire, to be going to be desired.’

  ‘Optat!’ said the sister sharply, causing them all to lower their eyes and voices in modesty.

  ‘He desires, he is desiring.’

  ‘Optabit!’

  ‘He … he … he will desire, Sister. He … he will be desiring.’

  There were more tears, more burying of the faces in the arms and gnashing of teeth. Ah Gott im Himmel, stormed Kohler inwardly, how could she do it to them? Were they all little sluts to her?

  ‘Easy, mon vieux,’ cautioned St-Cyr, and softly closing the door of the classroom, left them both with a lasting image of Sister Céline, one that was haunted by tragedy, gaunt and raw and full of anger, the woman not unhandsome but street-wise, they thought, and ever watchful. A woman in her mid-thirties whose every look and gesture reeked of punishment to be meted out for sins imagined and otherwise.

  The firm round chin and not unsensuous lips had only added to the fierceness of a straight and defiant nose, high and prominent cheekbones and wide-set deep brown eyes under brows that in another would have been an asset.

  Kohler could imagine her blowing cigarette smoke through both nostrils as she had read the signs while still going on with her class and had sized the two of them up as if they were sailors in place Pigalle: five francs in exchange for ten minutes, or a couple of cigarettes, such was the scarcity of tobacco.

  Not a sound was heard from beyond the door that had opened to put them so close to the sister she could not have avoided looking sideways at them in stark assessment.

  ‘Inspectors, please,’ whispered the little nun who had met them at the gate and had let them into God’s sanctuary, she too upset and unsettled to object when they had asked to be conducted here without permission.

  ‘Now you may take us to the Mother Superior,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Please leave this matter for me to explain. There will be no problem and you need say nothing of it, since I doubt very much if Sister Céline will mention it.’

  ‘Then you do not know her, Inspector!’ blurted the nun, swiftly crossing herself and begging God’s forgiveness under her breath as she hurried away and they were forced to follow.

  But once outdoors, and under a colonnaded walkway, she paused and, with eyes downcast, confessed. ‘Sister Céline has not had an easy life, Inspectors. Her younger sister, Violette, is a woman of the streets, une fille de joie—a paillasse, a mattress, in the brothel of the rue Chabanais. Sister Céline is wise in the ways of sin and is only trying to warn our girls to be wary of it.’

  ‘And the Mother Superior, Sister, does she agree with the warnings being given?’

  ‘No. The … the two of them do constant batt
le over it. Innocence against reality, ethereal love against life’s harshest truths.’

  From one stone gateway to another, the inner courtyard of the convent school and Church of Our Lady of Divine Humility and Obedience held a world within its walls, a formal garden and potager of utter peace and contemplation. Now that the snow had been swept, sparrows fed on thin crumbs at the feet of the statues of the Christ and the Blessed Virgin, and in the hush of the garden, whose every branch and line of stone was defined, their tiny voices were muted.

  Alone and with her back to them, the Mother Superior stood out so sharply in black she was set in memory against the grey of sky and spiked-iron walls and the whiteness of the snow.

  ‘Reverend Mother …’ hazarded the sister. ‘Forgive me for disturbing your meditations, but two detectives are here to see you.’

  ‘Detectives?’ she asked without turning.

  ‘Yes, Mother. I’ve told them Nénette Vernet did not come to school this morning as she should have.’

  ‘Then leave us, Sister. Please return to your duties. The brasses is it their turn today?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  The nun retreated swiftly with head demurely bowed, and they waited until the colonnades had swallowed her up. Only then did the Mother Superior turn. ‘Messieurs, this is a terrible hour for us. Our little Andrée taken from us so brutally? Our Nénette … What has become of her? A voyou, the Sister Céline would call that one. A delinquent, a guttersnipe, a picker-up of refuse. Never have I seen a child so impulsively committed to collecting the incidental things of life’s tiny misfortunes. A button, a badge, a bit of string … Dear blessed Jesus, what did that child not pick up?’

  They gave her time. They knew she was greatly distressed and had been trying to come to grips with things, since Paris-Soir and all the other rags had somehow managed a photograph of the victim and had splashed the news and her true identity across the city to pay the flics back for beating them up and denying them access to the murder.

  She was not young or old, thought St-Cyr, but of that vintage the last war had left with a lover buried or the self rejected in favour of another after too long an absence.