Mayhem

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Hermé, do as he says,’ shrilled the wife, running into the shop with a breast bare and the child still suckling.

  At once the place was in an uproar. ‘I haven’t done anything!’ cried the photographer. ‘I’ve got a christening at nine!’

  ‘Gestapo!’ shouted Kohler, flashing his badge. ‘You can piss on the brat’s head at nine thirty.’

  The photographer threw a terrified glance at his wife. Hard-eyed, brown-haired, about thirty-five years old and not quite over the hill. ‘Do as he says, Hermé. Don’t be a fool.’

  The man bolted. Kohler gave the place the once-over before letting his eyes settle on the woman.

  ‘Will you pay?’ she asked defiantly.

  ‘Of course,’ he breathed. ‘We wouldn’t think otherwise.’ He began to look about the shop more closely. Against one wall there were several painted backdrops, thousand-year-old scenes in front of which newly married couples could stand or puke: a rose arbour, a lake with mountains in the distance and a cream-coloured sun, a cottage that needed a new foundation … ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’

  The woman burped the child but didn’t cover the breast. ‘What’s the painting of the Eiffel Tower for?’ he asked.

  She was too watchful.

  ‘German soldiers on leave. They like to have their pictures taken in front of it so that they can say they’ve been to Paris.’

  Kohler cocked an eye, then used a stumpy forefinger to pull the lower lid down so as to emphasize the fact. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘So what’s taking the husband so long?’

  ‘He has to cut the film. It’s in such short supply …’

  Kohler nodded and went right past her. He flung the curtain aside, strode down the mangy corridor to the red light, but stopped at bursting in.

  ‘You’ve got enough film,’ he said.

  The light went out. The door opened. ‘Now let’s have a look, my friend,’ he said, pushing past the photographer who closed the door and switched on the light.

  My God, it was dull in here. How could a guy work in a place like this? Ribbons of newly developed negatives hung above the sink. Kohler thumbed a couple. The woman had a passable figure. Was that lust in her eyes? Did she really enjoy being photographed like that? The Eiffel Tower seemed a little out of place.

  ‘So, okay, my friend, I’ll ask you only once. From whom do you get your film?’ The canisters were big enough to have belonged to Goebbels himself.

  Merde! The Gestapo! They were all the same. ‘I buy it on the black market.’

  ‘Like hell you do. Paris is too far. You’d need an ausweis – a goddamned laisser-passer – six times a week.’

  ‘One of the soldiers gets it for me.’ That was closer to the truth. ‘He takes things into the city and he brings things back.’ That was better. ‘The Feldwebel takes a cut.’ The Staff Sergeant … Better still. ‘As does the Lieutenant but you mustn’t …’

  Again he exhaled. ‘I won’t. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it in the bank. Now come on. We’ve a different kind of body for you to work with.’

  The frost had all but gone from the rims of the bicycle but still clung to the spokes. The blood on the stone had absorbed the sun’s earliest rays but had failed to run. A curious thing.

  St-Cyr stood over the corpse, talking to it as was his custom when in private. He no longer asked the routine stuff – Who are you? Where were you heading? Why did she kill you? – he’d been through all that.

  Instead, he asked, Why me? Why here? Why now?

  There was something, call it what you will, but the corpse of this boy made him feel uneasy.

  No matter how hard he tried, this feeling wouldn’t leave him. He had the frightened photographer take shots from several angles, including two of the place where the purse had been found and one of Kohler’s spoor, just for the record.

  When the Bavarian insisted that the two of them be captured on film, he knew he couldn’t object. Chummy photographs with the Gestapo were too dangerous, but a sort of counter-blackmail-insurance for that shot of the spoor with its handkerchief.

  Damning evidence he’d rather not have around. ‘It’s bad enough having to work with them, eh?’ he said to the photographer. ‘You send me the negatives and I’ll see that you get paid. No extra prints, you understand?’

  The Gestapo pouch at the Kommandantur would be used.

  ‘He won’t say anything, will he?’ asked Hermé Thibault.

  St-Cyr was solicitous. ‘Him? Not a whisper. Hey, it’s simple with them, my friend. You give them what they want and they go to sleep.’

  Like dragons in their dens.

  The boys in blue came with their black gasogene van and the corpse was wrapped up. ‘You sure you know what you’re doing?’ asked Kohler as they started off to overtake the van. ‘Laying that stiff on ice in Paris makes more of him than he deserves.’

  St-Cyr stared out the window. They’d begin to accelerate about now. Yes … yes, here it comes … ‘Why won’t you let me see the contents of that purse, Hermann?’

  The Bavarian rapped the horn and pushed the accelerator to the floor. Gravel beat the fenders. ‘Because I can’t, my friend. Look, I’m sorry, eh? It’s just the way things are. Let’s put him in a pauper’s grave and forget it.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘Yes, an accident.’

  ‘But it’s gone a little too far for that, hasn’t it? From Kommandant to Kommandant, I think. Questions, Hermann. Answers will be needed. Von Schaumburg’s no fool.’

  ‘Von Schaumburg’s an ass! The purse has nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Then with whom does it have an association?’

  Kohler lifted a tired hand to signal thanks to the boys in blue as the car shot down the road. ‘I’m not sure, Louis. I want a little time to think it over. For now, the matter’s private.’

  ‘So, I’ll catch a bit of sleep then, if you don’t mind, Inspector.’

  ‘Don’t get in a huff. You know there are things I can’t tell you.’

  St-Cyr pulled the fedora down over his eyes but couldn’t resist a sigh and then, ‘Just don’t expect me not to find out.’

  Photographs with the Gestapo, silk purses and bodies on ice, where would it all end?

  ‘I don’t like it, Hermann. No, me, I can honestly say I don’t.’

  ‘Then that makes two of us.’

  Idly St-Cyr wondered what racket the photographer had been involved in. ‘Dirty pictures of his wife,’ snorted Kohler. ‘Now catch a few winks while you can.’

  A reader of minds, eh? ‘Remember to get my car serviced. The carburettor needs adjustment.’

  ‘That’s only water in the fuel. I’ll give it a dose of alcohol. That’ll help burn off everything.’

  That and the speed.

  ‘It’s nice not to have to worry about other cars,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘That’s one thing the war’s done for us. Cleared the roads of unnecessary traffic.’

  ‘There’s a convoy ahead. Hang on.’

  One of them had to have the last word, so for now he’d let it be but he wished the worry would go away, wished Hermann hadn’t insisted on that photograph of the two of them. If that should ever get into the wrong hands … Who’d understand that the smile or the grin had been partly out of necessity and partly out of … what? Respect? Ah no, not quite – that wasn’t the word he’d use though there was respect. There had to be after what the two of them had been through.

  Friendship then? Partnership? A certain begrudging loyalty? God forgive him, he didn’t know. It was so hard to define. With Hermann it was as if, to survive and live with himself, he had to leave his body, to rise above it all and look down on the two of them only to laugh at some of the Gestapo’s antics and laugh at his own predicament. God’s curse.

  Laugh if you will, my friend, he said, but it’s no laughing matter.

  Ah no, it certainly wasn’t.

  The street was narrow and slicked by the rain that had departed. At four o’clock the granite
paving bricks were dark, and the shouts of the boys echoed in the distance as the street rose up to their angular shapes which were etched against the hurrying dusk.

  Small, square, two- and three-storeyed houses of brick or stucco crowded in but here and there a bit of garden had been left.

  There were no cars – how could there have been? All bicycles, and the vèlo-taxis some used to earn their living, were either still on the streets in the heart of the city, or carefully put away.

  Alone, St-Cyr walked towards the boys. Would it be France against Germany today, or the Resistance against the Gestapo?

  Being boys, they wouldn’t say if asked but would only dart secretive looks at one another as their leader stepped forward to answer, Priests against the Nuns, or some such thing.

  Not that they ever really made fun of him. Being a cop did set one apart from all others, no matter how much one wanted to be included.

  Belleville was Belleville – the XX Arrondissement and the home of so many little people. All walks of life, several races – immigrants not just from the Auvergne in the early days, but from Russia, Armenia, Hungary, and more recently, in the late 1930s, Jews fleeing from the Nazis in Germany. Algerians too. Even a family of Negroes who now lived in almost total seclusion and terror for their lives as did the few remaining Jews.

  The rue Laurence Savart was little different from so many others. Shopkeepers, artisans, bank clerks and brick-layers (if not taken by the Todt Organization to build the defensive works of the Atlantic Wall); tailors, seamstresses, insurance brokers, printers, cooks and doormen. Perhaps that was what he liked most about the place. Its life.

  The chestnut tree in Madame Auger’s garden had been newly pruned – firewood again! Given another winter like the last one, the woman wouldn’t have a stick left.

  The Vachons were tidy people; their garden, what he could see of it, had been well put to bed. Leaves had been worked into the soil. Vachon grew such fabulous tomatoes, the jungle of them could only have been fertilized by secret additions of the family’s excrement.

  The beans had been magnificent too, whereas …

  The house at number 3 was very pleasantly situated behind a low brick wall and imitation Louis XIV wrought-iron fence. The gateposts were of brick and the iron gate was substantial.

  St-Cyr went to open the gate, then thought better of it. Pausing, he swept his eyes over the garden. All the plants had had to be removed – the rose bushes and the magnolias his mother had loved, her irises and hyacinths …

  Like so many others these days he’d raised what crops he could. But work with Kohler had often taken him away and the wife … well, Marianne, she was no lover of the soil.

  At a shout, ‘Hey … oo-oo, Monsieur the Detective,’ he turned and saw the ball bouncing towards him down the long slope of the narrow street, dark against the dark.

  ‘A moment, boys,’ he shouted, dropping his briefcase to meet the ball and begin to work it up to them. ‘Split … come on, you – you also, my friend. Hup … Hup … Go for it!’

  He was past the first of them, deftly working the ball from foot to foot before expertly passing it to a forward. For the next ten minutes he forgot himself, forgot the war, the murder,the wife – all of it.

  As he walked back to the house, he threw a tired but grateful salute to his friends.

  Unseen by him, one of them whispered to the new boy from Alsace, ‘He’s a specialist in murder but has lost his beautiful car.’

  ‘Does he carry a gun?’

  ‘Ah no, they have taken that from him too.’

  ‘Marianne, I’m home.’

  St-Cyr flung the briefcase into a chair and went through to the kitchen. ‘Marianne,’ he called again.

  Five days in the south on a dead end that had seen them camping overnight in Barbizon and on the road at dawn.

  ‘Marianne …’ The house was cold, the draining board, sink and table empty.

  He went back through to the sitting-room to stare at the wireless, then at the couch with its little bits of Chantilly lace, then at his favourite armchair by the fire.

  Nothing … the books he’d been reading – the volume of Daudet was still spread open on an arm. Everything was just the way he’d left it when Kohler had barged in to take him away.

  Parting the curtains, he looked out into the darkness. ‘Marianne …’

  She’d been unhappy, upset – so many things. Being the second wife of a cop hadn’t been any better for her than it had been for the first wife of that cop.

  Too many late nights, too many murders, and now, why now the war and all that it entailed.

  Had she taken their son to see her mother? She’d have needed a special ausweis for that, a thing not easy to come by. No, not at all. Quimper, like the rest of the coastal areas, was in the Forbidden Zone. The boy was only four years old and very close to her. Though she would have been worried about him, she could have done it. She was a girl of great determination, a woman with a mind of her own and the body to go with it. Ah yes, the body.

  St-Cyr pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. This war, he said. This lousy war.

  Kohler and his Gestapo associates lived at the Hôtel Boccador which the Gestapo had requisitioned for the duration. Hermann could find him a fast answer but would it make any difference?

  Heading back through to the kitchen, he collected the briefcase on the way and took from it the three, fist-sized lumps of coal he’d managed to pick up from a railway siding near Lyon. The loaf of bread Kohler had squeezed out of a baker in Beaune had got a little stale and dirty, but the round of cheese the Bavarian had stolen was just as good as ever.

  Looking at the cheese, St-Cyr nodded sadly and said to the walls as if to a priest, ‘Someone’s loss is my gain.’

  There was virtually no milk in Paris. The boy had had to have his calcium. Kohler had insisted.

  Spread on the table were St-Cyr’s bread coupons and the green tickets for the week’s ration of meat, wine and potatoes et cetera, should he be able to purchase such things.

  As he put through the call, he experienced again the humiliation and sadness the defeat of France had brought. ‘Hermann, it’s me. My wife’s gone.’

  As expected, Kohler gave him the name of a whore on the rue Mouffetard but said he’d see what he could do. ‘Want me to tell them to bring her back?’

  ‘No. No, just ask them to let her know I was worried.’

  The call done, he climbed wearily to the bedrooms. A fallen négligé brought back its memories, a pair of briefs reminded him that older men and younger women don’t always mix.

  Philippe had taken his favourite toy, a water pistol that had been made in Hamburg before the war. The gift of a German soldier in the street, or so his wife had said.

  A German soldier.

  *

  ‘Steiner, the Hauptmann Erich, age thirty-two, attached to the Ministry of Supply. Wife: Hilda, age twenty-eight; children: Johann, age four, Stephanie, age three, Hans, age two, and young Erich, age one month, two days. The wife and kids are at home in Regensburg.’

  ‘Anything else?’ demanded Kohler, pinching the last possible smoke from the butt before carefully grinding it out in the ashtray and saving the remaining tobacco.

  ‘Good-looking. A real ladies’ man. Been here since last August, arrived in all that heat – that’s when he first met her out walking in the Bois de Boulogne. She had the kid with her. Steiner used the boy as an intro – My son, your son, Frau …? Pictures from home and all that shit. She didn’t fall for it, not at first, not that one. It took him a month’s hard labour.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I notified?’ grumbled Kohler, more offended by the omission than by the infidelity of his partner’s wife. These days no one really knew everything the others knew, not even about oneself.

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ commented Glotz, of Countersubversion Special Unit X, the Watchers in charge of keeping tabs on the Sûreté Murder Squad, among other things.

  ‘So, oka
y. What’s the address?’ asked Kohler, feigning apology and a tiredness that was genuine. Crises, there were always crises these days.

  Glotz reached for his coffee. ‘Hermann, I’d leave it for now, if I were you.’ Overweight and overstuffed, he blew on the mug before taking a sip.

  Kohler spread his meaty hands on the counter. He hated shits like Glotz but acknowledged they were necessary. ‘My partner needs his wife. If he doesn’t get laid it puts him off his feed. Besides, my friend, I think the poor bugger really loves her. The Frogs …’ He sadly shook his head. ‘Come on, be a buddy. Don’t be so tight about it.’

  ‘You planning to kick down the door?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  The grin was wolfish. Glotz enoyed baiting Kohler. ‘A flat in one of those modern apartment buildings over by the Bois de Boulogne.’

  The fashionable West End. ‘The address,’ breathed Kohler. It was nearly 3 a.m.

  Glotz didn’t like the look. ‘Number 33, avenue Henri-Martin.’

  Double the address number of St-Cyr’s house and double that of the clock!

  The date of the murder also, and of St-Cyr’s birthday. Jesus Christ!

  Kohler was impressed by the coincidence but didn’t believe in omens. ‘The apartment number?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Thirteen. It’s on the third floor at the back. There’s a roof terrace. He likes to sunbathe.’

  ‘In this weather?’

  Glotz grinned and shook his head. ‘In the heat and in the nude. The woman as well. Last October 11th to be precise.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. He’s a nephew of von Schaumburg.’

  ‘He’s what?’

  ‘I just thought you ought to know.’

  Von Schaumburg’s nephew.

  ‘Leave it for a bit, Hermann. He’ll soon tire of the woman and she’ll have to go home to your buddy.’

  ‘He’s not my buddy. He’s my partner. That used to mean something to a man like me but you wouldn’t know about it.’