Tapestry
Page 30
‘Hermann, be so good as to check on our Trinité victim. The Hôtel-Dieu is just along the quai de la Tournelle and across the pont de l’Archevêché. Take the first turning to your left when you are on the Île de la Cité. That will lead you quickly to place du Parvis and the hospital. It’s dark outside, but … Ah! I hate to ask it, Mademoiselle de Brisac, but would you be so kind as to show him the way? A few moments of your time. Nothing much, I assure you.’
‘But required of me, is that it?’
Must beauty come in so many forms? ‘Oui, and please don’t bother to argue, Judge. This party of yours is now over.’
Louis had seen it too. The judge’s birthday present.
11
The folio was also from Vuitton and of dark-blue leather like the secretarial cases. Imprinted in gold leaf, a boldly handwritten flourish gave Juge Hercule Rouget, and below this, in somewhat smaller writing, Président du Tribunal Spécial du Département de la Seine.
The night-action courts.
It would be best to let the fingers of an apparent envy caress the folio. ‘May I?’ asked St-Cyr—he wouldn’t set the pipe aside, would simply clench its stem between the teeth. Unaware of what she’d done as the daughter had released her hand, Vivienne Rouget had gripped the dessert spoon she had been using when so rudely interrupted.
‘IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT SLUT!’ she spat, crashing the spoon down flat on the table to disturb the adjacent diners.
‘VIVIENNE!’ hissed the judge.
‘Of course the death of Élène Artur has apparently nothing to do with this, madame, but as I once collected stamps, I would appreciate the opportunity. Judge?’
‘Look if you must, but it will be your last.’
The cloud, the hurricane, the fierceness were all there as if on the bench. ‘She was cut open, that mistress of yours, Judge. Deliberately disembowelled and allowed to run—ah! forgive me, Madame Rouget, mademoiselle. The detective in me slips up from time to time.’
‘Cut open …’ blanched the daughter, throwing wounded eyes at her mother who savoured the news only to realize this Sûreté had seen beyond such an impulse to its harder truth.
‘Ah, mon Dieu, Judge, the 1849 to 1850s twenty-centime black. The blue also, though it was never issued. The Vervelle, the colonials … A stunning collection. Perfect if donated—is it to be donated to the Nation on your death?’
‘Inspector …’
‘Madame, this collection, except for its rebinding, matches entirely one that was stolen at between twelve twenty and twelve thirty a.m., Friday, but it’s curious, I must admit. You see, though my partner and I were definitely not to have investigated that crime, the gold louis that were also in the safe were not taken by the thief or thieves. A simple smash-and-grab one would otherwise have thought, but done to order. It must have been, that little something left as hush money.’
Everyone said St-Cyr was despicable, thought Vivienne, a cuckold who would gladly have forgiven that wife of his if he could have. A seeker of truth with the holier-than-thou attitude of a martyr!
But when met and held, the deep-brown eyes registered neither condemnation nor forgiveness and understanding, only an inherent curiosity. ‘If you think I am about to inquire as to how it is you have concluded such a thing, Inspector, you are very much mistaken. I purchased that collection from a very reputable source, and only after much deliberation.’
‘I’m sure you did, but please bear with me. You see, those gold louis were borrowed by the flic who was first on the scene.’
‘The fool! Did you arrest him?’ demanded Rouget.
‘Judge, don’t look for sparrows among the crumbs. Leave such things to the hawks of a reformed conscience since the flic, though tempted, has a family and he put the louis back next day for me to find when I called on Monsieur Félix Picard of Au Philatéliste Savant in the passage Jouffroy.’
‘Denise, take your mother to the toilettes for a tidy-up.’
‘Judge, you are under instruction. Please don’t be difficult. We’ll get to Élène Artur and the child she was carrying soon enough.’
‘ESPÈCE DE SALAUD! LÉCHEUR DE CHATTE!’
Fucking bastard; cunt-licker … ‘HERCULE, NOT IN PUBLIC!’
‘MAMAN, LOWER YOUR VOICE!’
All conversation ceased in this culinary paradise, all eyes were on the table. Some stood for a better look, among them the Standartenführer Langbehn, who let his napkin fall to the floor and then cautioned a waiter not to pick it up.
‘Judge, before that one reaches us, it’s my considered belief that Élène Artur was disembowelled to find the fetus she was carrying and dispose of it. Fortunately my partner recovered the body of what would have been your son.’
Kohler let the match flame linger as a shiver ran through Germaine de Brisac, green eyes wincing as she drew on the cigarette he’d given her. ‘Merci,’ she muttered—guilty, was she, of knowing too much? Damned afraid, in any case. He’d make her sit here in the car on place du Parvis, would let her feel the pitch-dark silhouette of the Hôtel-Dieu, would let her freeze in that woven shawl with its threads of burnished copper-gold that set off the colour of her hair and eyes, the Schiaparelli dress, silk stockings, high heels and brand-new camel-hair overcoat with its broad lapels and turn-down flaps, her perfume exquisite. A woman of exceptional taste, with emerald drop earrings from Cartier to catch the last of the match’s flame, and so much for the cigarette lighter that had recently been acquired. He’d take his time with her until she realized he wasn’t going to get out from behind the Citroën’s wheel until he had squeezed every last little thing out of her.
Then he’d make her visit Adrienne Guillaumet. ‘So, tell me about Lulu. On the evening of Monday, January eleventh, you left your mother’s Irish Terrier in the car outside Chez Bénédicte at about six thirty and went down into the Lido to find out what was delaying Denise Rouget.’
Did he know everything? ‘Maman worshipped that dog. When one is dying, Inspector, a companion such as Lulu means all the more. Lulu gave my mother life. To have stolen her … to have killed and eaten her was to have …’
‘You knew she’d been eaten?’
Ah, merde! ‘We assumed she had. Don’t those people eat dogs?’
Deliberately Herr Kohler gave her a moment to calm herself.
‘Correct me, Mademoiselle de Brisac, but wasn’t Colonel Delaroche still looking for Lulu? If so, how is it that you knew Lulu had ended up in the soup pot? It’s probably a culinary delicacy, just as was horse meat here in France before this lousy Occupation.’
‘ “Lousy,” is it?’
‘Just tell me.’
‘I didn’t know. I … I only assumed.’ Ah Sainte-Mère, Sainte-Mère, why had Monsieur le Juge not insisted Denise accompany her?
‘You knew, mademoiselle. You have just stated it as if you did, which can only mean …’
Must he pause like this and make her catch a breath in fear of what was to come? ‘All right, damn you! Abélard also knew or suspected it but didn’t want to tell Mother such a thing.’
‘A good friend of the family, is he?’
‘The best! Like a father. Always there for Mother when needed, always interested in how I’m getting along. Mine was killed in action. He … Colonel Abélard-Armand Delaroche tried his best to take that place for Mother and me. I was only eight years old when we got the news about Papa, nine when Abélard was first able to come home to see how we were.’
‘But he didn’t think to confront Madame Élène Artur with the theft?’
‘WHY SHOULD HE HAVE? HE …’
‘Had other plans for her?’
‘I … I don’t know what you wish to imply, Inspector. I really don’t. Abélard would not have harmed that girl. He was only asked to have her followed.’
‘But I thought he was looking for Lulu? Surely he wasn’t told to follow Élène?’
‘You know very well what I said. Mother and …’
‘And whom?’
Hired not asked.
‘Must you sigh like that?’
‘Vivienne knew all about the judge and Élène and didn’t like it one bit, did she?’
‘Should she have? That bitch wasn’t the first but the latest of many. La syphilis, la blennorragie—the clap to you, la chaude-pisse that burns, n’est-ce pas? To have had to live in terror of his contracting such … such filthy diseases and then giving them to her as he did time and again? Is that not reason enough?’
‘And he has a taste for the exotic, hasn’t he?’
‘If you wish to call it that, I don’t! The wife of a prisoner of war? The mother of a child she should have been home looking after yet who constantly flaunted herself naked on stage and sold herself to the highest bidder while her husband languished behind barbed wire? How could she have done such a thing?’
‘Here, have another of these. That one will only spoil your nail polish.’
She should flick the butt into Herr Kohler’s face, but mustn’t. ‘Vivienne is a patriot. She does what she can. No one could do more.’
‘And your mother?’
‘Can’t do much, poor thing.’
‘But offer to help pay for things and is her confidante, as is Colonel Delaroche?’
‘Isn’t that what lifelong friends become? These bitches have to be stopped. They can’t be allowed to betray their husbands like others did in the last war. They’ve got to be taught a …’
Irritably Germaine de Brisac drew on her cigarette and turned to stare out her side windscreen. ‘I … I didn’t mean to say any of that.’
‘I think you did. I think your late husband fooled around a lot before he was killed during the blitzkrieg. You had already petitioned the courts to let you divorce him.’
Avoiding it would do no good. ‘And now I no longer use my married name. Oh, for sure, I’ve reason enough, just as Mother had before me. Fortunately for her, Papa didn’t return from the fighting, and fortunately for myself, neither did my husband.’
‘And when you went down into the Lido having left Lulu ripe for …’
‘Listen, you, I have blamed myself enough already and have asked countless times why I didn’t simply take her with me.’
‘You were worried about your friend. Lulu would have thrown herself at the judge and …’
‘All right, all right, I knew I couldn’t. Does that satisfy you? Monsieur le juge was besotted with that salope indochinoise. She was always in heat for him, always did things poor Vivienne couldn’t bring herself to do or submit to. Denise begged him to come home and never see the girl again but …’
‘He wouldn’t agree. He had made up his mind to see her again, hadn’t he? Men like the judge don’t just have urges. They’ve the erection of a constant, ego-driven need to conquer and an arrogance that can and does lead them into trouble. Last October, Élène asked him to meet her in the Parc Monceau. My partner and I believe she was going to tell him of the child she was carrying, and likely she did because when Lulu found them, the judge kicked hell out of that terrier.’
Fornicateur that he was himself, or so Denise had been told by her mother, Herr Kohler held on to the cigarette he had placed between her lips, making her tremble at the nearness of him, at the musk such men exuded. ‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘Denise was in tears when I found them at that table of his in the Lido. He had two thousand francs in the fist he had thrust at her, his daughter! She gripped my hand and held it to her lips. I felt her tears. I … I told her we’d best leave, that the car was running. So many of the women we have to deal with have no morals just like Élène Artur. They try to deny it to our faces when confronted with the evidence. Marie-Léon Barrault is the same. We’ve photos of her in the Hôtel Grand, waiting for the lift. Photos with Gaston Morel, sometimes the two of them even with her daughter, Inspector. A child of eight! Just what must Annette be thinking at such times, a mother who disappears upstairs in a huge hotel like that? A mother who …’
‘La fellation?’
‘Isn’t that what such men always want from such women?’ Ah, Jésus … cher Jésus, why had she let him drive her to say such a thing? ‘I didn’t mean that either. I really didn’t. Annette Barrault is very worried about her mother and missing her dear papa terribly just as I did my own.’
‘You’ve interviewed her separately from the mother?’
Did he know nothing of social work? ‘We always do that. It helps to get the children off by themselves. Things the mother won’t admit are then sometimes revealed.’
‘Just like detectives—the real ones anyway. Divide and conquer, eh? So when did it all begin, Denise taking client case files home and that mother of hers going through them?’
‘I don’t know. How could I?’
‘You and Denise are as close as your mother and Vivienne Rouget, if not closer.’
‘HOW DARE YOU?’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’m cold. Could we not go in and get this little visit of yours over?’
‘Adrienne Guillaumet has two lovely children who desperately need her.’
‘Then why didn’t she control herself? Why did she deliberately arrange to have an assignation with a man who was not her husband? Why hire a vélo-taxi to pick her up at an agreed upon time and the shouts of her name from another who would guide her to it?’
‘You knew there were two men waiting for her?’
‘I … I just assumed. It’s very dark on the rue Conté at that time of night outside the École Centrale. There’s always a rush after classes.’
And two men had been waiting for her—this was what Herr Kohler was now thinking as he pinched out his cigarette and added it to his little collection. ‘This precious Madame Guillaumet of yours had already sold a good deal of her clothing. What better, then, than to sell the use of herself?’
‘To whom?’
Ah, bon! ‘A general. Why not go right to the top, if you’re from a class that aspires to it and can speak the language fluently?’
‘A general …’
‘Oui. At the Ritz.’
She and Denise Rouget had checked it out. They must have. ‘His name? Just for the record.’
‘Schiller. Hans-Friedrich, from Baden-Baden and a very old and well-established family. The youngest of four brothers and an architect before the call-up.’
‘A lonely man?’
Must Herr Kohler still taunt her? ‘Why else his wanting the use of a woman? Oh don’t get the idea Denise and I have met or even spoken to him. It simply took a phone call to the desk and a little name dropping. Admit it, Inspector, the bitch was having trouble paying the rent and wouldn’t listen to our advice on how to budget more carefully. She could have gone to her in-laws and begged them to forgive her for stupidly having not asked her father-in-law’s permission while her husband was away. A holiday in Deauville she just had to have before the children were born? The husband’s parents would have gladly helped her now, had she but humbled herself, but …’
‘Adrienne didn’t want to listen.’
And got exactly what she deserved—was this what Herr Kohler wanted most to hear? ‘We tried, Inspector. We really did. Henriette Morel …’
‘Put up the money and you and Denise hired the Agence Vidocq to follow Madame Guillaumet and find the proof.’
‘That is correct.’
‘And with Marie-Léon Barrault and others it was the same.’
Did he have to hear that, too? ‘But fortunately she wasn’t hurt so badly. With some of the others, it …’ Ah, merde, merde, he had done it again!
‘Yet, if I understand things clearly, Mademoiselle de Brisac, her offences were even worse? Gaston Morel repeatedly; the manager of the Cinéma Impérial also—enough for some dark-minded little priest to write letters about her to the Scapini Commission
.’
‘Filth, and worse, yes, but is the sin of the one really any different than that of the other?’
‘Or that of Élène Artur?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
And really uptight about it. ‘But neither you nor Denise thought to ask Madame Morel to pay for having that one followed?’
‘Vivienne …’
‘Was behind it all, wasn’t she? The rapes, the beatings, the punishment. A little campaign that got out of hand.’
Standartenführer Langbehn was in mufti. Tall, handsome—polished, ah mais certainement, thought St-Cyr. The successful businessman or banker perhaps, the greying, dark hair close-cropped in military style, the forehead high, face thin, eyes iron-grey and always noting things but giving very little away, the lips wide and full, the expression sardonic, the chin sharp and closely shaven. Not a medal on him or a wound badge, only the SS-Dienstauszeichnung with runes and ribbon, the long-fingered hands with their meticulously pared nails and broad gold wedding band perusing the stamp collection of Monsieur Bernard Isaac Friedman, no doubt a guest of the SS-Totenkopfverbände if still alive.
All around them the Tour d’Argent had settled back into the heads-in-the-sand of its bons vivants. Oh for sure the SS and their Sicherheitsdienst would have made a point of knowing exactly where Judge Rouget was at all times, especially on his birthday. Langbehn had probably only intended to offer congratulations in public while reminding the judge and family of that one’s duties by bringing the Fräulein Remer along, but now the unexpected intrusion of this Sûreté would have to be dealt with.
Grinning, the Standartenführer leaned back to consider each of the family before saying, ‘It’s a splendid collection, Madame Rouget. My compliments. Judge, you’ll be the envy of all such collectors and must be immensely proud of this dear lady of yours.’
Coffee, cigars and cognac had been brought from Langbehn’s table. But what of this girl of the Belgian barley sheaves and handbag theft, this stalwart liar in an immaculately pressed, made-over Blitzmädchen uniform? wondered St-Cyr. The expression was one of cold appraisal, the look in those china-blue eyes one of what? Of the threat of ‘I dare you to try to stop me from condemning those four neighbourhood boys of yours to death or deportation along with every member of their families?’ After all, a uniform had been disgraced and the Germans … ah, mon Dieu, but they loved theirs.