The place was packed. Several were dressed for an evening at the Opéra, though the performance would have ended early for those who needed the métro, and most here would simply stay the night unless they’d a pass allowing them to be out after curfew.
Embarrassed by his continued scrutiny, she finally lowered her gaze. Twenty-two if that, thought Kohler. A gorgeous figure, beautiful lips …
‘The oyster bar is superb, Hermann. Belons, portugaises and marennes. Ah, mon Dieu, the bouillabaisse is magnificent, the filet de sole Drouant a bishop’s sin.’
‘You’ve eaten here?’
‘On my pay? People such as myself only hear about places like this. Monsieur …’
The maître d’ had arrived to shrill, ‘Inspectors, why are you not keeping the streets safe? A mugging? A slashing? A groping? This homme sadique has ruined the dinners of everyone and has upset the chef and sous-chef, my waiters as well as myself most especially.’
‘Monsieur, just lead us to the victim,’ said Louis. It was a night for sighs.
‘Victims!’ cried Henri-Claude Patout. ‘The hysterics. The splashes of blood on the carpets—how are we to clean them? The oceans of tears and screams? The shameful clutching of a woman’s parties sensibles as the ring is torn from her finger and she has thought the virtue, it would have to be sacrificed or else the throat, it would be slashed? Yes, slashed! Monsieur Morel, he has been unable to defend her from this animal. Struck down, he has fallen into the gutter to ruin the tuxedo and has been robbed. ROBBED, DID YOU HEAR ME, of the wallet, the gold pocket watch of his wife’s father, the silver cigar case …’
‘Calm down, monsieur,’ snapped Louis, stopping him on a staircase whose wrought-iron balustrade curved up from ground-floor ears and eyes to sixteen private dining rooms.
‘WHY SHOULD I BE CALM WHEN YOU PEOPLE DON’T KNOW YOUR DUTY?’
‘They don’t appear to have stopped eating.’
‘THE ATMOSPHERE HAS BEEN PLUNGED, INSPECTOR. PLUNGED!’
‘Louis, let me.’
‘Hermann, a moment please, and then he is all yours to arrest for obstructing justice. Which of the rooms, monsieur? Come, come. Out with it.’
‘The Goncourt’s.’
The Académie Goncourt had held their meetings here since 31 October 1914 to award the country’s most prestigious literary prize. ‘Take care of him, Hermann. Scrutinize the papers of everyone. Be sure to take down all the necessary details. One never knows when something useful might turn up. And make damned sure those who are allowed to leave have the necessary Ausweis and are not required to stay cooped up in this doss-house of the elite until five a.m!’
Thank God Louis had got that off his chest.
‘Messieurs … Inspectors …’
‘It’s Chief Inspector St-Cyr and Detective Inspector Kohler of the Gestapo,’ said Louis.
‘It … it is this way, please.’
And so much for not knowing their duty. ‘We’ll leave the papers for the moment,’ said Kohler, plucking at Patout’s sleeve and using his best Gestapo form. ‘Just see that a little something is sent up from the kitchens.’
Not even an eye was batted, thereby revealing that the house was quite used to such.
‘Hermann, we haven’t time. Besides, you know the stomach, accustomed to those little grey pills that keep the Luftwaffe’s night-fighter pilots awake, will not sit well with such richness.’
The Benzedrine, but still the stomach would like to try.
M. Gaston Morel, victim number three, was not happy. Big in every sense below a blood-soaked bandage, he lifted lead grey eyes from an all but drained bottle of the Romanée-Conti, the 1934 and a superb year, to impassively gaze at Louis first and then at this Kripo.
Grizzled cheeks wore the eight days of customary growth that hid the pockmarks of childhood but served also to make him look like a slum landlord after arrears. The starched shirt collar was no longer tight, the black bow tie having been yanked off in disgust.
‘Ah, bon, you’ve at last condescended to show up,’ he grunted. ‘Considering that the assault occurred at eleven fifty-two p.m. yesterday, and that it is now two thirty-five a.m., we should think ourselves lucky, but please don’t bother to claim you were delayed or that the dispatcher fucked up and sent you to the wrong address.’
Compressed, the thin lips were grimly turned down beneath a nose and heavy black eyebrows that, with the stubble, were fierce. Had he been a union buster in the thirties? wondered St-Cyr. ‘Monsieur, mesdames, a few small questions. Nothing difficult, I assure you.’
‘Don’t be an imbécile, Inspector. My wife’s stepsister was very nearly murdered.’
‘And the others?’ asked Louis, indicating the wife who sat next to a female friend who was younger than her by a good fifteen years. A former debutante, a tall, auburn-haired, permed and very carefully made-up, sharp-featured socialite who’d be taut when pressed.
‘They stayed at our table while I accompanied Madame Barrault to my car,’ said Morel.
‘You’ve an Ausweis?’ asked Louis with evident interest.
‘And an SP sticker,’ came the dead flat answer.
The Service-Public sticker that had to be signed and stamped not only by the Kommandant von Gross-Paris but also by the préfet, and wouldn’t you know it, this one was a friend of both!
Before the Defeat there’d been 350,000 private autos in Paris and unbelievable traffic jams and smog. Now there were no more than 4,500 and here was one of their owners.
It wasn’t difficult to see what was running through detective minds, felt Gaston Morel, but he’d have to ignore it. ‘The rear tyres had been punctured but due to the rain, we didn’t see this at first. When we did, I sent my driver to telephone for replacements and that is when this bastard struck. First myself, as I was helping Marie-Léon from the car, and then herself to be thrown up against the wall, the overcoat ripped open, the dress down.’
Isolated from the others, Madame Barrault sat in one of the armchairs at the far end of the table. Huddled in a thin overcoat and cradling a bandaged left forearm and hand, she couldn’t bring herself to look at anyone, felt Kohler, was badly shaken, but terrified of something else as well.
‘See to her, Hermann. I’ll deal with the others.’
‘Leave her,’ grunted Morel. ‘She’s in no state to answer anything. He used a cutthroat to free her handbag and when she refused to give up her wedding ring, slashed her arm and the back of her hand before ripping the ring off and then grabbing her by the crotch for a good feel.’
‘Putain. … That is what he has called me,’ blurted the woman.
Madame Morel, the arch of a well-plucked, heavily shadowed dark black eyebrow sharply cocked, hung on every word as did her companion.
‘Madame Barrault’s husband is a guest of our friends—a prisoner of war,’ offered Morel as a gesture of cooperation. ‘Marie-Léon, I’ll see that your papers are replaced. Please don’t worry. The ration cards and tickets also.’
Had the wife sucked in the breath of ‘I told you so’? wondered Kohler. Certainly the companion knew what it was all about, for instinctively she had laid a comforting hand on Madame Morel’s.
Louis had seen it too, but wasn’t about to let on. ‘Can you give us any kind of a description, monsieur?’ he asked.
‘If I could, I’d find and kill him myself.’
Coffee and cognac arrived—real coffee and real alcohol, a Bisquit Napoléon, the 1903, along with a plate of petits fours, some pâté and bread—nothing ersatz there either. The former debutante poured. The night’s victims three and four refused nourishment, Madame Barrault first lowering her gaze out of despair or shame, and then stealing a glance at the petits fours as if guilt and pride had been tempered with … what? wondered Kohler. Need, for sure, but not for herself.
‘The wallet, monsieur,’ said Louis brusquely. ‘A few details. They’ll not be of much use, but threads we must have if we are to clothe the attack better.’
&nbs
p; Was this Sûreté a tailor? ‘Bought in Algiers, in a bazaar in 1938 and with me ever since.’
‘The leather the usual?’ asked the inspector, meaning the Arabic design, Henriette Morel told herself with a curt nod as she waited for the rest.
‘Of a soft morocco,’ went on Gaston, ignoring her as usual, ‘and one I will miss. Loaded with fifty big ones simply because they’re easier to carry.’
With 250,000 francs, the leather as soft as a lecher’s extended organ, Gaston? Henriette wanted desperately to say but couldn’t—the detectives would find out soon enough.
‘Any Reichskassenscheine?’ asked St-Cyr.
The Occupation mark at twenty francs to one. ‘Ten thousand.’
‘Your papers?’
Again Morel lifted his gaze from the glass and bottle. ‘Those I keep elsewhere. He’ll be disappointed.’
Everyone knew there was a roaring trade in false and stolen papers. ‘Your place of business?’ asked Louis.
‘It has no bearing whatsoever on what happened. You might as well ask me about the opera I had to endure.’
‘Very well, what was it?’
‘La Bohème,’ gushed Madame Morel. ‘It was magnificent, wasn’t it, Denise?’
The husband didn’t give the former debutante a chance. ‘Fucking Italians. A sick whore and a pawnbroker? Duels with coal shovels and fire tongs?’ He tossed a fist. ‘One hell of a lot of caterwauling I had to pay good money for, Henriette.’
‘You were constantly grumbling, Gaston. Several noticed.’
Again the companion rested a sympathetic hand on that of the wife but this time the other victim stole a longing glance at the petits fours and the pâté and bread. Her coat, like the dress that had been pinned up, had been made over. The early thirties, felt Kohler. No silk stockings like the other two would be wearing, but probably none of the leg paint either and brand-new button earrings of enamel from the Bon Marché’s bargain bin.
‘Place of business?’ demanded Louis with more force.
‘Cimenterie Morel,’ came the grunt. ‘The company I acquired in ’31, and which supplies the Organization Todt.’
Cement hadn’t always been good, not in the depths of the Great Depression, but with the Todt’s building of the submarine pens at Lorient and elsewhere in 1940 and now the massive fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, it must be a great comfort.
Leaving Louis to it, Kohler pulled coffee and cognac towards him and went to sit down with victim number four. ‘Why not tell me what you can, madame? You’ve a son or daughter and are understandably anxious to get home.’
Much taller than the other one, he’d a terrible scar, Marie-Léon noted, others too. Those of the shrapnel from that other war, but far more recent nicks and cuts as if from flying glass, also the crease of a bullet across the brow like his partner, she wondered, but a little more recent than that one’s?
There was a warmth though, to his pale-blue eyes. They couldn’t be those of a Gestapo, and yet … and yet he was one of them. ‘I can tell you little, Inspector. One minute the monsieur was crying out, the next, I was yanked from the car …’ She glanced at her wounded arm and hand, felt so ashamed, could not stop the tears. ‘Please, I … People like me never come to places like this. A night out? A little break from the endless days of never knowing when my husband will come home or if he will still feel the way he once did about me?’
Not well off, but well brought up, the stepsister was neither really, really plain nor pretty. Une jolie-laide, the French called them. Plain but not so bad after all, age: thirty-four, and a good twenty years younger than Madame Morel. The hair was long and of a deep chestnut shade, thick and clean and worn in a chignon that had come loose, the freckled brow still worried. The eyes were dark brown and normally frank, no doubt, but searching as now, the nose more robust than she’d want, the unpainted lips quite lovely, even if those of a woman who knew she was being assessed in such a manner by such a cop but had her pride.
The chin was determined. ‘Where’s home?’ he asked.
She wouldn’t even glance at Henriette or Denise Rouget, Marie-Léon told herself. ‘The rue Taitbout, near the corner of the rue la Fayette.’
He’d been wrong about where the earrings had been purchased, but it had been an easy mistake, for the flat wasn’t far from the Galeries Lafayette, another of the biggest department stores, not that there was much to find in them these days, but definitely not an up-market address. A one- or two-room flat, no bath, the toilet shared by everyone on her floor. ‘We’ll see that you get home safely, but first, do those cuts need stitches?’
Hadn’t he the evidence such wounds would leave? ‘There’ll be terrible marks, won’t there? Marks that will tell my husband everything my stepsister and that … that parasite who calls herself a social worker want him to believe!’
Gratified by the outburst, the former debutante condescendingly smiled as did Madame Morel, felt Kohler. Unlike them, though, this one hadn’t spent hours with her favourite hairdresser but had done what she could herself. ‘Look, do something for me,’ he confided, reaching for the cognac. ‘Down two shots of this and quit worrying about the petits fours, the pâté and the bread. I’ll see that you get to take them home without the others knowing. Now let me have a look at those cuts. We may need a doctor.’
‘Fish oil, Inspector. The one who did this stank of it. He was big too. Big in the stomach.’
* * *
Alone as always, just the two of them, they shared a cigarette in the car, in pitch-darkness as the curfew lifted and the city, with its millions of bicycles and métro riders awakened.
‘A savage rape, Louis—an example to all females who would run around with the Occupier?’
Hermann lived with two of them: Giselle and Oona, so must be worried. ‘A safecracking to which we are sent by mistake.’
‘Delaying us from getting to the Drouant.’
It would have to be faced. ‘Whoever committed that latest attack had the timing down perfectly, mon vieux. He knew exactly when Morel would take the stepsister home.’
‘And was watching for it, even to knowing Morel would send his driver in to the telephone.’
‘But this time the attack is not so severe. The warning to such wives, if that was it, is more muted.’
Both looked out to what awaited them, a corpse. The rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was shrouded in that same silvery darkness. Ethereal, if one was of such a mind; desperate if not. Even the little blue light that should have been above the entrance to the École des Officiers de la Gendamerie Nationale had still not been given the juice it needed.
‘That flic on duty at the quartier du Faubourg-du-Roule’s Commissariat, Louis. Like your friend Bélanger, he had heard the gossip about us and could hardly contain himself as he handed me the lanterns and asked if we were being kept busy tonight?’
A pédé that one had said about the victim here and had laughed. A cucu, a pansy.
‘Why here, Louis? Why at the very place Préfet Talbotte trains his cops?’
The call had apparently come in to the district’s commissariat at 11.13 p.m. from the Lido, at 78 Champs-Élysées and not far. A girl in tears and largely incoherent but one who had, in spite of this, managed to blurt that the cows—the cops—should look for something at the school and right under their noses and that she hoped it wouldn’t get splashed all over the newspapers because she had already sent those boys to have a look.
‘Perhaps the killer wants the publicity,’ sighed St-Cyr, but what is of more immediate concern is what has happened to that caller.’
Had they not one but two corpses waiting for them? wondered Kohler. Making such a call couldn’t have been easy at the best of times. Between sets then, the girl a dancer perhaps, the others hurrying to change while she stood freezing in a poorly lighted corridor fumbling first to get the token into its little slot—she’d have had to have a jeton. No calls were free, especially not those of chorus girls, even if reporting a murder. Ha
d she dropped it in her panic? Had it rolled away, she thinking that the one who was forcing her to make the call would have to get another from the bar and that maybe, just maybe she could escape?
‘But again we have a delay in sending someone to look into things,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s been six hours since she rang them.’
‘The salaud said the girl must have been pissed to the gills and that he had thought her just buggering about. At midnight, the quartier’s sous-préfet went through the call notes and sent two of his boys to have a look.’
‘And since then?’
It would have to be said. ‘Spent his time trying to track us down, seeing as our names were on the duty roster Préfet Talbotte had circulated to all commissariats.’
‘On purpose?’
‘Why else?’
‘Just what the hell is going on, Hermann? We arrive, are thrown into the breech and everyone seems to welcome it but us!’
Together, they got out to stand in the sleet. Dark in silhouette and huge—ugly at this time of day and probably always—the 160-bed hospital and hospice that the financier Nicholas Beaujon had had Girardin build in 1784 for the children of the poor impassively waited.
‘It’s this way,’ said Louis. ‘I was last here in ’32, on the sixth of May when Monsieur le Président Paul Doumer was assassinated while holding a freshly autographed copy of Claude Farrère’s latest novel.’
‘I’m getting not to like your authors.’
‘Gorguloff, the White Russian fanatic, succeeded in giving the président the coup de grâce. Farrère, no slouch, tried desperately to stop him. Myself and four others weren’t quick enough, you understand. Farrère was hit in the wrist, blood splashed all over the pages of a novel whose title escapes me since the rest of us had to grapple with the Russian, but by the time we had that one on the floor and bleeding himself, the book was ruined. No doubt there are some who will make a monument of it for tourists to gawk at. We carried the président here, though it couldn’t have been of any use.’
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