Deciding that their brief encounter of today was more than sufficient to last her for the rest of her life, Madame Thibodeau hurried into the waiting room to hush the whispers.
‘Josiane and Georgette, that parasite from the Sûreté wishes to prolong his moment at the expense of the house. Take him up to the graveyard. Strip if you wish, but watch out with him. He’s a bloodsucker.’
‘It’s freezing up there. It’s always so cold,’ lamented Georgette.
‘Cold or not, ma petite, it is exactly what you will do. Now go. Hurry. Hurry! Then get him out of here!’
No cat would venture down the courtyard to the smelter, no rat either, thought Kohler, for here they’d all been trapped and eaten. He was certain of it, was damned cold and tired of waiting in the building across the way. But at last Herr Schlacht left the smelter. Seen briefly through the grime of a broken, iron-barred window, the Berliner appeared even more of a pugilist, very sure of himself and satisfied with the latest of the day’s efforts. Business was booming, and all that really mattered to one such as this was business.
The chubby chin wore its midday shadow, not brown, not blue-black but something in between; the collar of the beige tweed, herringbone overcoat was tightly buttoned up under it. Pausing to relight the cigar stub, Schlacht then collected the shiny black attache case he had set on the paving stones at his feet. A man in his mid-fifties with beautifully polished, alligator-leather shoes – Italian? wondered Kohler. The case was hefted, the grey eyes passing swiftly over the window to come to rest on the canary in its cage.
Crossing the courtyard, Schlacht looked up at it through narrowed eyes and said, ‘Meine Liebling, are you cold? As cold as those who put you in your cage? Forgive me but I had to send them away. They were taking too much notice of things and I couldn’t have that.’
Berliners, like Parisians, loved their birds, and this one, by his accent, was solidly of the Luisenstädter Kanal. Scrap metals, Kohler reminded himself. And, no doubt, crowded tenements near the Schlesischer Bahnhof in the Fiftieth Precinct.
‘The charge was over nothing, meine Liebling. A mere mistake on my part, but …’ Schlacht savoured his cigar as if searching for the right words. ‘But these days, little one, such mistakes once made cannot be retracted and unfortunately seem always to lead to far-reaching consequences. You should have warned them to move, or at least to take no notice of my comings and goings.’
He was gone then. Too soon he had reached the bend in the courtyard and had passed from view.
As Kohler stepped from the building, he realized Schlacht had seen his footprints in the snow. Louis, he said silently. Louis, I think we’ve got a problem.
The room with the gravestone was in the attic of the brothel. Like all such maisons de tolérance, the house catered to the special needs of as many of its regulars as possible. But here …
‘Sacré nom de nom,’ breathed St-Cyr softly as Josiane and her sister stepped aside. Floor-to-ceiling murals covered the walls, giving ersatz views of the Père Lachaise’s tree-lined boulevards. The tomb of Honoré de Balzac was in the near distance – was it really Balzac’s tomb?
The entrance to the Ossuary was a parody of Bartholomé’s magnificent high-relief sculpture. Instead of a naked couple standing hand in hand ready to step through the doorway into the pitch darkness of eternal peace, here each had a hand on the buttocks of the other.
‘My partner should see this,’ he said drolly. ‘Hermann is a student of all things French, especially its lupanars.’
Its ‘rabbit hutches’.
‘This is the stone,’ said Georgette, picking her way down a narrow aisle between bits of sculpture and other stones. ‘Her name, as you can see, is beautifully inscribed.’
‘The stone is real, as are all the others,’ said Josiane quickly. The Inspector would immediately see that others must also have used the room to fulfil their fantasies or to view it in fun, but would he accept that Alexandre had never once complained of this, that to him the room had still been just as sacred a trust as when it had begun, secure and totally private?
A low, Louis XIV iron fence surrounded the plot where masses of silk flowers were forever in bloom. Verbena, fuchsia and hibiscus, thought St-Cyr. Chinese Bell Flower, too, and Mignonette, but not the dreary bunches of red and white carnations so typical of such places.
‘When Alexandre asked his sister to gather flowers for him,’ confessed Georgette, ‘he told her to take only the not-so-common.’
Carved into the grey granite was the name Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies, and then: Born 17 June 1897; taken in the flower of her youth, 20 August 1912.
‘But … but she isn’t dead?’ he heard himself saying.
It was Josiane who, ever wary of his reactions, answered, ‘Ah no, Inspector, but she might just as well have been.’
‘Did de Bonnevies pay for this room?’ he asked and saw her start, heard her sister saying, ‘Everything, and for its continued maintenance. Inspector, none ever knew at whose stone the girl had been violated, so no other name was possible, isn’t that right? I would pretend to be gathering samples of these flowers, Josiane would be over there out of sight. The custodian had forgotten all about us and had locked the gates, so we were both a little nervous and would … would call to each other.’
‘Angèle-Marie, have you found any other flowers? Hurry. We must hurry,’ sang out Josiane softly and no longer seen.
Georgette was now on her knees, awkwardly reaching well over the fence to almost touch the foot of the stone …
‘I would say, “I’ve found some,” but so soft was my voice, the name of my friend could never be heard.’
‘They would come upon her,’ grated Josiane. ‘Two, maybe three of them – four sometimes. Young, not old. Boys, he thought but never really knew. I swear it. He … he always changed his mind about the number and … and the ages of them.’
‘First one and then another would take me, Inspector. My clothes would be torn from me, my legs forced apart, my head pushed down … down …’
‘Yes, yes. Enough! And this friend of Angèle-Marie?’ he asked grimly. ‘What of her, please?’
They didn’t say a thing, these two. Josiane made her way among the stones to help her sister tidy the flowers.
‘The friend cried out encouragement,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Instead of watching in horror at what was happening, she egged them on and had probably agreed beforehand to set the whole thing up. Did he find out who this “friend” was? Please, you had best tell me now.’
Both shrugged and shook their heads. ‘Afterwards, as we would soothe him and ourselves,’ said Josiane, taking her sister by the hand to comfort her, ‘he would always speak of a settlement of accounts, Inspector. Things were to be done on the quiet, though.’
‘But at any price; at all costs,’ managed Georgette.
‘How many were there?’ he asked. ‘Come, come, you must have some idea.’
‘Four,’ confessed Georgette. ‘He had finally settled on four of the local boys.’
‘When?’
‘Last Thursday. After he had been to see his sister,’ said Josiane, ‘and … and before he was poisoned.’
With a flash, the last of the lead was oxidized and carried away by the strong jet of air from the blowpipe, leaving a white-hot bead of gold and silver in the bottom of the cupel. Kohler was entranced. ‘Mein Gott,’ he exclaimed, ‘bubbles are erupting from the surface. It’s like a tiny volcano.’
‘That is oxygen the silver has absorbed. It sprays the metal up.’
The Hauptmann Kohler nodded. As he continued to peer into the cupel, sweat made rivulets down the savage scar on his left cheek. ‘And the temperature now?’ he asked.
Andrei Dmitreyevich Godunov looked into the cupel through his goggles and said, ‘Below one thousand and dropping fast. A skin is forming.’
‘It gets shinier as it cools.’
The silvery bead was soon dumped into an iron saucer where it rolled about. ‘Now we wil
l weigh it, mein Herr, and that will give us the combined assay and tell us how best to refine this latest batch.’
Louis would be intrigued but horrified and in despair at what Schlacht was up to most probably for Oberg and the SS of the avenue Foch, among others. Scrap jewellery that had been stripped of its gemstones, unwanted or no longer needed wedding rings and dental fillings, smashed wrist- and pocket-watches, even bits of gilded picture frames and worn or clipped louis d’or – some of the earliest of these – had been run through the chopper and blended. Pale yellowish soda, the peroxide of sodium, would soon be added, along with bone ash, lead oxide, charcoal and sand, after which the whole mass would be melted in large crucibles. As the precious metals sank to the bottom with the lead, the lighter, glassy-brown to greenish-brown siliceous slag would rise to carry upwards the unwanted copper and other metals found mostly in the cheaper grades of jewellery.
When cooled sufficiently, this slag would then be broken away and the lead, containing all the gold and silver, would be subjected to cupellation, a process as old as 2,000 years.
‘We can handle most things with little or no problem,’ said Godunov. ‘All we need is a few days. Once we have the gold and silver together, we then dissolve the silver with nitric acid but recover it later by electrolysis.’
A tidy operation. ‘And you get to keep the silver?’ asked Kohler.
‘As our fee, yes.’
Pot-shaped, rectangular and square furnaces constantly roared, their firebrick linings glowing degrees of yellow. One man broomed slag into a heap. Another began to weigh the bead they had just made. Sterling silver flatware was being thrown into a pot furnace. Charcoal dust and acrid smoke were everywhere, the ventilation terrible. While the Alsatian guard dogs took no interest in him, they did look hungrily away. Along one entire wall, and nearly to the ceiling, wire cages held several dozen pairs of guinea pigs, the latest of the Occupation’s food fads and another source of income for the smelter boys. Stews … had they a recipe he could get? wondered Kohler.
To a man, the Russians and their families ate, lived, slept and worked here. ‘Your papers can’t be very good,’ he said.
Wearily Godunov pushed up his goggles. ‘Herr Hauptmann, is it that you are asking for a little silver or gold perhaps?’
A pay-off, so it would be best to grin and offer a cigarette. ‘Not at all. Just a little information. Has someone been bothering you?’
Was this one really from the Procurement Office as he’d claimed? Only a fool would have believed it. ‘The local Milice. Herr Schlacht is aware of the matter, but says it is entirely up to us to take care of it. What can one do?’
‘But keep silent and roll it around your little finger, eh?’
Thinking it over and remembering it. A Russian saying, so at least the Hauptmann was trying to be polite!
‘How much do you pay them for the privilege of being left alone?’ asked Kohler.
‘Four of the wafers each week. One hundred grams.’
‘Out of how much?’
‘It varies. Sometimes we are busy refining silver only, on consignment for others, you understand. Sometimes Herr Schlacht has sufficient gold for twenty or thirty wafers. Perhaps two hundred at the end of each week. Perhaps and often much less than this.’
Or more. ‘So you set aside a little something to pay off the Milice?’
‘We have to. After all our employer …’
‘Told you to take care of it. So, where does the gold end up?’
It would be best to sigh and say, ‘That we do not ask.’
‘Switzerland?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps Argentina, too, or Spain or Portugal.’
‘And what’s Schlacht’s take from here?’
‘That, also, we do not ask, but I should tell you he came here once with two SS, a Generalmajor with thick glasses, and an Obersturmbannführer. They were pleased, I think, but one can never really tell with people like that, and they did not stay long.’
Oberg, then, and his right-hand man, the Herr Doktor Helmut Knochen. Christ! ‘Forget I was in.’
‘Certainly.’
‘But let me have the bead, will you? A small souvenir.’
‘Of course. It shall be exactly as you wish. Polished, and like a ball bearing to facilitate its rolling around your little finger.’
Out in the courtyard, Herr Kohler took the birdcage down from across the way and carried it off. Now why, please, would he have done such a thing? wondered Godunov, not that they would miss it.
There were cellars below the smelter, and from one of these there was access to the sewers. An alternate escape route had been fashioned through the attics from house to house and then across the roofs, but would either of them be of any use if they had to escape?’
Sadly he shook his head. The Germans would block all exits and bottle them in. No one would be left alive here, not even the children. There were far too many secrets in the furnaces.
‘Life is like that,’ he said to one of the guinea pigs he had taken from its cage. ‘You just think things are sailing along like the moon when some son of a bitch of a tovarisch decides to tip the old man right upside down!’
He kissed the guinea pig and stroked his bristly, sweat-streaked cheek and damp, grey-white moustache against it. ‘Don’t worry, little one. We won’t eat you today.’
Closeted in the kitchen with the brothel’s cook and two of the girls, Louisette Thibodeau looked up from her soup and choked.
‘Madame,’ said St-Cyr and saw her wince, ‘when, please, was the Salon du cimetière constructed?’
Had he not recognized her? Had she changed so much from the girl he had dragged naked from the arms of her client? wondered Madame Thibodeau. ‘Constructed?’ she bleated. ‘In … in 1919, after Monsieur de Bonnevies came back from the war. He … he said he had felt the need when on the battlefield and had had plenty of time to … to think it over.’
‘And for twenty-four years now he has used that room?’
‘Yes. Yes, that is so. Always the tombstones, always those two.’
It had to be said. ‘Yet he never takes Josiane.’
‘Never.’
The whole neighbourhood would have heard of it ages ago, no matter how private the house claimed things were. ‘Your ledger tells me the room was used mostly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, presumably by the victim, but there are also visits on Saturdays, in the afternoon, and on Sundays.’
‘By him, but not at the times of the Masses,’ she said swiftly. ‘This is a God-fearing house.’
‘Of course, but on Sunday evenings, once a month and late, the room is used. Charlotte attends.’
With Father Michel – was this what he thought? Well let him! she told herself and, shrugging, set her soup spoon aside. ‘Charlotte is always in demand.’
‘She’s pretty,’ said one of the girls coyly, ‘and pretty young, too.’
‘Eighteen,’ said the other one.
‘Milou, please leave us this instant! Élène, go with her. Some coffee, Inspector?’ asked Madame Thibodeau, her words brittle. She’d deal with those two later, and as for this one from the Sûreté, well, now that he had whetted his appetite, one had best feed the leech a few bits of flesh so as to send him away happy.
His kind are never happy, she silently said and steeled herself to meet all onslaughts.
He took out his pipe and tobacco pouch, preparing to stay for as long as necessary. Ah mon Dieu, she thought, it’s just as it was when we last met and my licence had expired.
The cook thought it best to be busy. Setting the steaming pot with its roasted acorn-and-barley water on the table, she took refuge next to the sink where carrots were to be peeled and onions sliced.
‘Louisette Thibodeau née Grégoire,’ he said and sighed at the memory.
Her heart sank. ‘Inspector, what can I do for you?’
‘That depends,’ he breathed and let the threat of silence hang in the air while he stuffed that pipe of his until he had force
d her to finally yelp, ‘On what, please?’
‘On your reading of history, I think.’
Nom de Jésus-Christ, he hadn’t changed a bit!
She’d been an ample woman in her late twenties and not beaten by her pimp as so many he had encountered. But down on her luck and with a five-month-old baby boy to nurse. ‘We both know the beekeeper’s use of that room must have attracted the attention he wanted, madame. Save my partner and me a lot of time. Help us out.’
For old times’ sake – was this what he thought? Maudit salaud, the nerve!
‘Whoever tried to poison him may poison others, with even more success,’ confided St-Cyr. ‘It’s just a thought – please don’t trouble yourself. But my presence here … Our having talked things out.’
The bastard! ‘All right, it is as you have ascertained. Some of our clients – the female ones, too – ridiculed his strange desire. Others tried out the room once or twice, but found it not to their taste. A few have come to use it on a regular basis, yes.’
He’d want the names of those few; he’d want every little titbit he could get!
Feigning boredom came easily to him. He examined a fingernail, said only two words. ‘Four names.’
‘I … I can’t tell you. I mustn’t.’
‘I think you’d better. While there’s still time, that is.’
‘One was killed at Sedan in 1940. A corporal.’
He waited for her to crucify herself. Had he no heart? Did he not think of the slashed face she would earn, the wrists also, her body stripped naked at her age and dumped into the Seine with ropes and stones? ‘One no longer lives in this quartier but comes by métro when he feels the need.’
‘And takes Charlotte once a month, late on Sunday evenings in that little graveyard of yours?’
May God forgive her for telling him. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s perfect! Now let me have the whereabouts of the other two.’
‘Both are married. Both have families …’
Madrigal Page 39