‘That collection was stolen, as I’ve stated, Standartenführer. Since it is a key link in a long chain of murders and assaults, it must be held by me as evidence.’
‘Judge, lock it up,’ chuckled Langbehn as he handed it back to Rouget.
‘Standartenführer …’ One had to try.
Langbehn reached for his cognac in salute. Sonja Remer didn’t waver, but sipped only water, Denise Rouget all but knocking her glass over, Vivienne softly saying, ‘Hercule.’
‘A speech, then, Judge. Begin, please, by telling me the names of all who had access to and the use of that flat of yours on the rue La Boétie. “Important people,” Concierge Louveau has stated. Former military men, the latest of which, some five weeks ago, was a retired general who … Ah, excusez-moi un moment, the notebook—so many items are collected on these investigations. Little things that are carelessly left behind. The red ribbon of a Légion d’honneur, Judge. Ah! here is the note I want.’
He’d give them a moment now to set their glasses down, as had the Fräulein Remer, whose regulation black leather handbag couldn’t help but be seen since it was on the table next to her left hand.
‘ “A general with the snow-white moustache and hair just like the Maréchal Pétain.” ’
‘I know nothing of this. Abélard …’
‘Judge, this is not a courtroom yet. Colonel Delaroche has a key to that flat, has he not?’
Had that idiot of a concierge actually told St-Cyr this or was he simply assuming it?
‘WELL?’
Élène’s keys could just as easily have been used, and St-Cyr must know this, but to admit that Abélard had one might be useful. ‘I let him use the flat as often as he wishes. Surely there is no harm in that?’
Rouget knitted those thick fingers of his together as if on the bench and condemning this Sûreté to bite the tongue while dangling by the neck. ‘Harm? Perhaps not, but first this general who enjoys cigars as much as you and the Standartenführer.’
‘They all do!’ scoffed Langbehn. ‘Show me a general relaxing and I’ll show you a cigar smoker.’
‘Relaxing with an auburn-haired prostitute who was no older than the Fräulein Remer, Standartenführer?’
‘A whore …’ breathed Vivienne Rouget. ‘Married, too, was she, to one who is absent and can do nothing whatsoever to stop her from debasing herself with another man?’
Madame Rouget had best be ignored to prod her into saying something else. ‘Judge, is it that you allow Colonel Delaroche to let former French army officers use that flat? Remember, please, that you’re a member of the Cercle de l‘Union Interaliée, as is the colonel.’
‘You leave the Interaliée out of this. Fail to do so and you will pay for it.’
‘But not with cash, eh, as this general and others paid the girls they used in that flat, yourself included?’
‘Maudit salaud, must you rant on and on about my fucking that cunt. She was nothing but a bit of fun, a …’
‘Hercule, Hercule …’
‘Vivienne, ferme-la! Don’t, and I will shut it for you. Denise …’
‘No, Judge. They’re to remain. Now answer, please, as you are required by law, if there is any law left in this nation of ours.’
‘Salaud, of course I let Abélard use the flat, and others, too, of the Interaliée. It helps with the rent. Am I not free to do as I please with my own property?’
‘Inspector …’
‘Standartenführer, this is a murder inquiry.’
The Fräulein Remer would kill St-Cyr and Kohler, and if not her, the Agence Vidocq. That had all been arranged. The matter of this one and his ‘partner’ would then be closed.
‘Very well, proceed.’
‘Ah, bon. You see, Judge, two men were involved in the murder of Élène Artur. Just why they chose to kill her in that flat of yours, and not in some darkened passage, is another matter my partner and I will eventually get to, but for now, one of the assailants knew that flat of yours very well and took care of it even after what they had done. Perhaps he held her down, Madame Rouget, while the other raped her, slashed her breast and shoulder, for they’d torn her clothes from her, and then—and we are not certain yet which of them did this but now must think it the same person as committed a recent murder—cut her open and let her go so that she ran from them, trying desperately to hold her intestines in and …’
‘That is enough, Inspector!’
‘Judge, murder is murder, the details never pleasant. After all, she was a person you kept seeing, one to whom you paid at least two thousand francs a visit and who did things …’
‘Inspector, this really has gone far enough.’
‘It’s Chief Inspector, Standartenführer, and before you start interfering again, pause to consider that my partner and myself were assigned to this matter by Gestapo Boemelburg and that the Kommandant von Gross-Paris ordered my partner to provide him with up-to-the-minute progress reports.’ This wasn’t exactly true, but what else could have been done in such circumstances? ‘Hermann will have taken care of this even as we speak. That’s why I sent him away. He will, of course, have placed our latest synopsis on the Kommandant’s desk so as to have it ready for him at 0700 hours. He’s an early riser, our Kommandant. We both know him well, Standartenführer, and know, too, that he will tolerate absolutely no interference and that everything that is being done by us will and must be done to make the streets safe again.’
‘Even for those who would sell the use of themselves, Inspector?’
‘Vivienne …’
‘Hercule, that is the crux of this matter. Women who betray their husbands or fiancées who cannot, because of circumstance, carry out the punishment themselves but must hope and pray that others will see to it for them.’
The room was empty, the bed empty, the Hôtel-Dieu in a crisis and short-staffed. In panic, Kohler ran his gaze over the stark sterility. The kids … her Henri and Louisette … Just how the hell was he to tell them their mother hadn’t made it? They’d hate him for the rest of their lives, would hate every last one of the Occupier no matter what.
‘Come on you,’ he demanded.
Green eyes rebelled. ‘I’m not going anywhere further with you.’
Grabbing her by the wrist, he yanked her after him, would go down the staircase three steps at a time, would catch her up as she tripped and had to pull off those high heels of hers, would make her follow and ruin those silk stockings, would teach her not to treat others the way she and Denise Rouget had. ‘I want answers, damn you,’ he called out as the stench of overworked drains, disinfectant and cold, no-soap, eau-de-Javelled laundry hit them.
Dimly lit, the Hôtel-Dieu’s morgue was in the cellars.
‘Monsieur …’
‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central. The body of Adrienne Guillaumet.’
‘Guillaumet …?’ muttered Martin Thibodeau, blinking to clear the eyes of much-needed sleep, not that this Kripo or the one that was with him would care in the slightest.
‘Thirty-two years old,’ said Germaine de Brisac. ‘Residence: 131 rue Saint-Dominique in Gros-Caillou. No wedding ring. That was stolen along with her handbag.’
‘Merci, madame. Such information as you have so succinctly imparted is of inestimable value.’
A man of big words at a time like this!
‘Badly bruised,’ she went on.
‘That, too,’ clucked Thibodeau. He would toss the head, to indicate knowledge of the terrible injuries sustained. ‘She’s the one. We’ll soon find her.’
A drawer was pulled, and then another, the shrouds flicked to half-mast, an old man, a teenaged boy … a traffic accident? ‘Autopsy?’ asked Thibodeau. ‘Sometimes the doctors still do them, but with the suspension of all medical studies late last year and now the threat of the forced labour, the students have left for the hills and the maquis or gone into hiding elsewhere, or been sent into that same forced labour.’
The green-eyed one was startled by such an evident affr
ont to the status quo but looking pale, the Gestapo about to regurgitate. ‘This way, please. I think they must have cut her open but let’s hope she’s been stitched.’
Kohler knew he had paled at the thought and had almost turned away, for this socialite who played at being a social worker was now smirking. Louis would have forced her to view the corpse from head to toe. Louis would have told her they weren’t just concerned with Madame Guillaumet but with Giselle who had been followed by those bastards she and her friend and their mothers had hired. He’d say, my partner is sick with worry about this Mademoiselle le Roy, moi-même aussi since we haven’t yet been able to find her.
He’d make this ‘parasite’ tell him everything she could about Colonel Abélard Delaroche and company.
Somehow a cigarette was found, somehow lighted, but he was all but crying, this giant of a Kripo, thought Germaine. He was standing before her in this examining room with its pallets and drains and bottles of preserved organs and collection of fetuses in all stages and he didn’t know what to say, flung down that cigarette of his in disgust, was as quivering custard, the attendant puzzled, alarmed and looking back at them, having completely removed a shroud.
‘Her kids!’ blurted Herr Kohler. ‘Not only will they not have the father who gave their dear maman such a hard time and made her keep everything in the flat exactly as he wanted it kept, they won’t have the mother who understood them so well she made a special place for them anyway. A room of their very own.’
One must be calm, must have dignity in the face of such an outburst. ‘She was an officer’s wife, Inspector, was of that class and had a duty to live up to but wouldn’t listen when reminded.’
‘The top and the bottom of the heap, eh? That why the difference between her punishment and that of Marie-Léon Barrault?’
‘Yes. I … I believe so. Abélard … Colonel Delaroche is—was—an officer himself.’
‘And when Vivienne and your mother raised the issue of these delinquent wives?’
‘He offered a solution.
‘Correction: He suggested he could put together the necessary manpower since he was already using some of them and helping others. Grands mutilés and their daughters, shopkeepers who were former servicemen under him and with axes to grind.’
And prejudices—it was clear that this was meant, and all the rest of it, the need for collaboration, for France to take her rightful place in the new Europe, the need to blame those responsible for the Defeat and to ensure that only those who had actually fought in this one would be considered as true veterans.
Ashen, he bleated, ‘Are there still others who are involved?’
Merde, but one wanted to smile! ‘Other veterans, Inspector? Those perhaps who are among les égoutiers?’
The municipal sewer workers …
It felt good to get the better of Herr Kohler, but perhaps the message should be reinforced. ‘Men you will find almost impossible to apprehend, Inspector. Oh, there aren’t that many, probably. Denise and myself really don’t know much about what’s been going on. Abélard has always been very close with his business dealings and keeps them even from Maman and Vivienne with whom we’ve talked a little about it, but … but these men, they are down there wading in the shit all the time, isn’t that so, and can come up anywhere they please.’
‘To rob a shop that sells used postage stamps and leave a wad of clay to silence an alarm?’
Had she startled him? ‘If necessary, I suppose, but why not ask Abélard yourself?’
This one was tougher than she looked and kept glancing past him to the body. ‘I will. How much are Vivienne and your mother paying that agency of his?’
Was Kohler too afraid to turn towards the corpse? ‘The work is by the piece. The more who are dealt with, the more the Agence Vidocq is paid.’
Was she really this cold? ‘But it’s gone far beyond your mother and Vivienne Rouget going through yours and Denise’s caseload files at home, hasn’t it? Others are now feeding that agency targets of their own, still others no doubt putting up the cash.’
Should she tell him that ten such men met regularly at the Cercle de l’Union Interaliée? A retired general with white hair and Pétain moustache, other former military officers, Préfet Talbotte, two industrialists, one the owner of …
‘That colonel you worshipped as a child suddenly realized he was on to a good thing, didn’t he?’
She said nothing. She just stood there looking up at him, he still unable to turn towards the body. ‘Judge Rouget is among the backers, isn’t he? Come on, tell me, damn you!’
All right, she would, and derive satisfaction from doing so. ‘How better, Inspector, to hide from others that which you are still keeping, or were until recently?’
He’d best sigh as he said it, thought Kohler. ‘The wife of a POW herself. But why kill her in that flat of his unless paid to do so?’
The lift began its journey. There had been no sign of Concierge Louveau, no sign of anyone else in this former hôtel particulier on the rue La Boétie, no other sound but that of the cage as it rose and the memory of saying, as they had crowded into the foyer, ‘Permit me, please, Monsieur le Juge, but I’d best go first.’ There hadn’t been room for all six of them.
Standartenführer Langbehn stood to one side in the cage, the Fräulein Remer to the other. Had she no thought but to win her little piece of this war regardless of the cost to others? wondered St-Cyr. So little had been said in the car en route from the Tour d’Argent, one had to think the worst. She neither smiled nor frowned.
They passed the first floor. Merde, but these old lifts could take their time. They reached the second, Sonja Remer having never taken her gaze from him. A Mausefalle, Rudi had told them, une souricière with Giselle le Roy as its bait. A narrow passage and SS floodlights suddenly coming on to help her target two honest detectives.
She would know that he and Hermann would have been told her version of the ‘attack’ as she had recounted it to Judge Rouget in front of the Butcher of Poland, would know, too, that they had had the boys’ version of the same, since the Sicherheitsdienst would have paid Rudi a visit to question him and his sister most thoroughly as to exactly how it was possible that this Blitz’s handbag should have turned up at the restaurant.
In Deutsch, he said, ‘I understand, Fräulein, that your fiancé was killed in Norway during the invasion. Please accept my condolences.’
Did this verfluchter Franzose think to engage her in conversation to soften her resolve? wondered Sonja. The Standartenführer gave her the curtest of nods and she must do exactly as indicated, responding curtly as ordered but not in Deutsch. ‘Oui, mon Erich.’
Nothing else. The lift stopped, the cage door was opened by Langbehn who indicated the corridor.
The seals were all there, but Hermann had a system. Sometimes a hair would be placed across the crease between the door and the jamb and exactly two centimetres below the lowest hinge, sometimes a clot of household dust or pocket lint and with only a touch protruding, sometimes the tiniest bit of paper.
Never white or brightly coloured, this last was there but much, much closer to that hinge than it should have been.
Uncertain still of what to expect from this Kripo, Thibodeau indicated the corpse on its pallet in the morgue of the Hôtel-Dieu.
She had been wearing a hospital gown, but such things must be in very short supply and she’d not have needed it in any case, had been beaten to hell. The left shoulder and wrist, Kohler knew, had been badly sprained but not broken. There’d been blood on her lips and chin when Louis had taken her from that taxi and this Kripo had had to carry her to the car, she having passed out.
The lips were now a deep, dark plum-purple and slack, no rigor yet. An upper front incisor had been broken, the rest all stained by nicotine, a heavy smoker …
‘A fingernail was recovered,’ he heard himself mutter, and then, as Louis would have done, ‘Forgive me, madame, but I have to look more closely.’
&n
bsp; She was cold, smelled of death and of the cheap, ersatz perfume with which she had regularly dosed herself. The skin of the right hip didn’t rebound, of course, when pressure from his fingers was released after having nudged her side up a little.
The forehead had been opened in a five-centimetre gash but what the hell had done it? Blood would have blinded her in that eye. The nose had been broken, the bony, pasty knees and thighs badly scraped. Fibres from her skirt or coat were still glued to the legs, black hairs also, black pubic hairs …
‘TAKE A LOOK AT HER, DAMN YOU,’ he cried. ‘COME ON. SEE FOR YOURSELF WHAT YOU AND DENISE ROUGET AND THOSE MOTHERS OF YOURS HAVE HELPED TO CAUSE!’
Germaine de Brisac turned away and had to be caught. Dragged back and forced to look, she gagged. Madame Guillaumet’s eyes hadn’t yet been closed, the darkness of the lips matching that of the bruises on the neck of this … this officer’s wife who would sell herself to another, her head forced back as the rapist had …
She coughed, she cried, she threw up the pommes d’amour flambées à l’Amaretto, the salade d’endives de Belgique, canard à la presse, caviar russe malossol et bisque de homard à l’armagnac et huitres à la florentine, the Romanée-Conti also, or Nuits-Saint-Georges and the champagne, mustn’t forget that, thought Kohler. They’d a fabulous cellar at the Tour d’Argent. Legendary, Louis had once said, though he’d never been able to afford such a place.
Her throat still stinging and eyes still watering, Germaine could see that the woman’s mascara had been smeared by the rain and the rapist’s fingers. The pencilled eyebrows were grotesquely crooked. There were scars from two Caesarean births, that of an appendectomy. Moles, warts, the red blotch of a nasty birthmark … Ah, Sainte-Mère, what the hell was this?
‘Smell her,’ demanded Kohler.
‘No! I refuse!’
‘INSPECTOR!’ shouted Thibodeau. ‘PLEASE EXHIBIT SOME RESPECT!’
Tapestry Page 31