Mayhem

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘I’d sooner have the Devil’s.’

  ‘They are one and the same, or hadn’t you noticed?’

  In alarm, the concierge threw her jaundiced grey eyes up at them. ‘Messieurs …’ she began, thinking to huff and fart about.

  ‘Sit down!’ roared Kohler, turning swiftly to slam the slot of her cage closed even as Louis shut the door.

  Now the hall and the entrance to the hotel were hidden and she was trapped in her cage as never before.

  ‘So …’ began Kohler, towering over her in the cramped enclosure with its shabby divan and dusty, faded purple cushions.

  Lisette Minou gripped the armrests of her chair. The big one was formidable. A fresh wound …

  The mouse elbowed his way between her and the giant. His voice would not be like a balm but the salve of a cop!

  ‘Oil your way, monsieur,’ she shrilled with admirable tartness. ‘It will do you no good. I know nothing. Nothing, do you hear? Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘A tough one, eh?’ breathed the Frog. The place was a rat’s nest! They’d get lice if they weren’t careful. ‘Mademoiselle Baudelaire has been murdered, madame. Ah yes, please do not distress yourself too much. Save that for later, eh?’

  ‘A murder in my hotel?’ gasped the woman, visibly shaken.

  St-Cyr nodded. Hermann glowered.

  ‘Did you see the man who went up that staircase to kill her?’ asked St-Cyr.

  The furtive gaze slid away to the mange of a torn-eared cat whose one encrusted eye wept as it limped towards her.

  They would discover the truth, these ones. She just knew they would. ‘My aching bones, monsieur …’

  ‘Fuck your bag of bones! I’m tired. I’ve not had any sleep for days. I’ve not even been home yet!’

  ‘Hermann, please! Madame Minou has had a long and difficult life. There is also the shock of what we have just told her.’

  The eyes rose up in doubt and deceit from the doughy pan of her face. The rounded shoulders hunched, folding the knitted grey cardigan with its holes.

  ‘I did not see anything, Monsieur the Inspector. Arfande, my cat – I was at the moment feeding him a little titbit. These days … Ah what can one say, eh? Things are so hard to get. I had acquired a tin of –’

  ‘The black market?’ leapt Kohler expectantly.

  Her calm was shattered. ‘Hermann, please! For the love of Jesus, just let me deal with this one.’

  ‘She’s all yours, chum.’

  The rolls of flesh about her throat rippled. ‘A tin?’ reminded St-Cyr.

  The woman swallowed. A murder … She had known it would come to no good, an arrangement like that. ‘A tin of sardines, Inspector. My back was turned to the wicket – for just a moment, you understand.’

  St-Cyr feigned surprise. ‘You heard someone come in, yet you did not turn to look?’

  ‘My bones. My back. This world. This work. The war. The Naz … is.’

  ‘All right, all right. What time?’

  The cardigan rose. The tired bosom, with its twin soccer balls, was held.

  ‘About nine?’ offered St-Cyr.

  Eight as in the old days, but now that Paris ran on Berlin time, nine of course. The Sûreté was plucking at straws and that was good. So, they would barge into her office, would they?

  ‘About nine. Yes, yes, but I heard nothing more, Inspector, and no one came back down so, you see I was not sure anyone had actually come into the hotel.’

  They’d never get done with her.

  Hermann lit a cigarette – one of the woman’s. He tapped Louis on the shoulder. The swollen eye opened a little. The lower lid of the other one was pulled well down. ‘The wireless,’ he breathed.

  St-Cyr sought it out, noting with alarm the position of the tuning dial even as the woman noted this herself and the cat bolted off her lap and went to hide under the divan. Oh-oh.

  It wasn’t illegal to own a wireless set, ah no. It was simply illegal to listen to forbidden broadcasts.

  Smoke billowed from the dragon’s lips. The voice, when it came, was decisive. ‘The slut’s been listening to the BBC Free French broadcast from London, Inspector. That’s an offence under article seventeen. The nine o’clock time is okay but she had her ear screwed to the set. She’d have been so wrapped up in the Russian Front, God Himself could have farted and she’d not have heard Him.’

  Or seen him. ‘Hermann, must I ask again that you go easy, eh? Madame Minou is in a very difficult position. The killer – the rapist, madame, a specialist with the garroting wire, a sadist! – might well come back.’ He paused. ‘And yet, Hermann, if she does not open the purse of her lips, she will not have the protection of those she and her kind so despise.’

  The flics. Kohler’s grin was huge, and it drew beads of blood from between the sutures on his cheek.

  The woman rebelled at the sight of them. ‘Pigs!’ she boiled. ‘You call yourselves cops? Is that it, my fine sweet lemons? If you’d been doing your jobs instead of fighting whores, you’d have saved that one.’

  Ah yes. She tossed the frowzy grey mop of hair as she lifted her eyes to indicate the fourth floor and a certain room.

  The folds of her neck revealed their creases. The acid came. ‘You have not asked my permission, messieurs. That,’ she simmered, ‘is against the law. The search warrant, please? Come, come – quickly now, mes amis, before I take offence.’

  Kohler let her have it. ‘It’s your job to watch and notify the cops of anything suspicious!’ he shouted, richly enjoying the exchange.

  The jaundiced eyes narrowed. ‘No prune could have an anus mouth like yours, monsieur. Kindly telephone the Préfet of Police.’

  The slut! ‘There is no telephone.’

  ‘Of course there isn’t! Find one.’

  Stung by her, Kohler again nudged the Frog aside and pulled out his shield, which he flung up in front of the woman. ‘Gestapo,’ he whispered. ‘Now open that hairy twat of yours, my fine garlic loaf, and spill the lentils, eh?’

  The felt carpet slippers were shabby, the toes turned in. The half-stockings were of that heavy combination of beige cotton, wool and other things. One had lost its elastic.

  She saw the Frenchman’s gaze travel up her. Was he weeping for her or calculating the space she’d need in one of those boxcars nobody talked about?

  ‘I have not seen the man who has done this thing, messieurs. I … Oh, Mon Dieu, may Jesus forgive me. Yes, I was listening to the forbidden. Me, Lisette Minou, whose husband could have been one of the Broken Mugs and proud of it! readily and gladly, messieurs, GLADLY admit it!’

  The hairy upper lip was licked in doubt.

  A confession. ‘Her heart’s glowing like a furnace, Louis. She wants to become a martyr.’

  One of the Broken Mugs, one of the badly disfigured from the last war, but she’d qualified this by saying ‘could have been’ … St-Cyr heaved an inward sigh.

  ‘Such are the ways of simple folk, Hermann. The brave. Now look, madame. The girl – who was she? We know she did not live here but came only at certain times.’

  The woman filled her lungs. ‘Gestapo pig!’ she shouted. ‘Lackey! Bootlicker! Collaborator! How can you live with yourself, eh? No one else would!’

  He ignored the slurs, though struck to the quick. ‘What were those times, madame? Who was it came to visit her? Why was she killed? You will have a thought or two, perhaps something the girl has said, isn’t that so? Perhaps something her lover has said in passing – he could not have come and gone without your knowledge.’

  She drew herself up in the chair. ‘You have too many questions, monsieur.’

  ‘They are but the first of many,’ he said softly.

  ‘My head, my memory – I am an old woman, Inspector, but I do know my rights.’

  ‘You have none,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Let’s take her with us, Louis. The schmuck might come back to feed her tongue to the cat.’

  ‘There is the matter of the girl’s papers, Hermann.’

>   ‘This one won’t know where they’re hidden. The girl would have been too smart for that. We’ll take a look later on.’

  ‘The carousel?’

  ‘We have to, Louis. This chicken’s too old for the pot. It might help her to see a little blood.’

  ‘Then drive by the house. That might also help.’

  The street was narrow, the hill steep, the car flat out. At 1.35 a.m. Berlin time, the rue Laurance Savart gave up the gun barrel of its rabbit’s burrow.

  As the houses flashed past, the concierge, trapped in the back of the car, broke the long-forgotten rosary she’d been telling. The beads went everywhere, and the houses … the houses … two-and three-storeys high perhaps, some too close to the road, some … The rain – they’d skid! Oh Mon Dieu!

  Kohler slammed on the brakes! The woman screamed. St-Cyr swore. ‘ HERMANN, THE BRAKES WILL FAIL ONE OF THESE DAYS!’

  The car swung tightly across the road. As it rocketed into the doorway of someone’s house, it bumped up over the narrow sidewalk.

  Lisette Minou shrilled; ‘In the Name of Jesus, monsieur, you should not be allowed to drive a car!’

  The headlamps began to fall, the car backing slowly away to bump down off the sidewalk. Kohler drove on a little. The front of Number 3 came into view, held by the stabbing lights. ‘Louis, don’t! Leave it, for Christ’s sake. Marianne was no good for you. She made a cuckold out of you, damn it!’

  A cuckold … Ah now, what was this? The one from the Sûreté …

  ‘Just leave it, will you, Louis? Please.’ The front of the house was a shambles – nailed-up boards and vacant windows. There might still be chunks of meat.

  ‘I must, Hermann. If only for a moment.’

  ‘You’ll get wet.’

  ‘That does not matter.’

  The car door slammed. Lisette Minou filled her lungs. The French one flipped up the collar of his overcoat and pulled down the brim of a misshapen hat. The Gestapo one was lighting a cigarette. Suck lemons, you dog’s offal, she wanted to shout. They’d get nothing more from her. Nothing!

  Without a word, Kohler passed the fag back to her, then lit another for himself.

  The windscreen wipers beat the rain away and the lights shone upon the Frenchman.

  ‘That one stands like Judas before the Cross,’ she said.

  ‘The Resistance did this, madame. A mistake of course. He’s far too loyal to France, but …’ Kohler hesitated. ‘His wife and son, a boy of four years, got it instead. The woman was coming home to him. She hadn’t wanted to leave the nest of sin but … Ah, what the hell.’ He hit the steering-wheel with both hands. ‘War is war.’

  ‘Did he beat this wife of his?’ she asked. When no answer came, she added begrudgingly, ‘Some men do, monsieur. Mine did, but he’s gone to his reward on the end of the Kaiser’s bayonet and me, I’m glad he got the spit right up the ass!’

  Kohler ignored the venom. ‘Louis didn’t beat her. He loved her. Now shut that cavern of yours and don’t try to keep the car warm with your farts. I’d better go to him.’

  There’d been a small garden behind the half-wall of bricks. The cement, Louis XIV urns that had once stood atop the posts were gone. Cucumbers had been grown there in season, in defiance of ration tickets and famine. Cucumbers and pole beans.

  Marianne St-Cyr had not been a gardener – she’d hated it – and the cucumbers and beans had been stolen. Or had they died from lack of watering?

  All the lower windows had, at best, been crudely boarded up. By order of the SS General Karl Oberg, the Supreme Head of the SS and the Gestapo in France.

  The house had been ‘sealed’. Trespassers would be shot, looters … Even possessing one of the stray bricks would command the threat of death. It was a plague upon the house, but had the notice been deliberate on Oberg’s part?

  Of course it had. A worry.

  Louis was reading the word TRAITOR someone had scribbled across it. There was glass everywhere, smashed cakes of the white-painted stucco that had once covered the front of the house.

  ‘Louis, come away. We’ve a job to do.’

  St-Cyr tried to find his voice. ‘I could have stopped this, Hermann. I wanted to warn her. I knew there would be trouble. The Resistance, they … they had my number.’

  ‘They probably still do.’

  Louis stooped to pluck a shred of cloth from the rubble, the remains of Philippe’s shirt.

  ‘Stop punishing yourself. Come on, let’s get to work, eh?’

  ‘The house will have to be repaired, Hermann. Building materials are so hard to come by.’

  ‘Look, I’ll see what I can do. The boys down at the Todt owe me one. They should be able to pull a few things for us. We’ll nail them up together.’

  The Organization Todt handled all the construction for the Reich and had, of course, an insatiable appetite. Hence the shortages.

  ‘Sons should never make their wives live in the houses of their mothers, Hermann. That was part of the trouble. It was always Mother’s house, never hers.’

  His mother had died more than fifteen years ago! Kohler reached out to him.

  ‘The trouble,’ muttered St-Cyr, still staring emptily at the shred of cloth. The house and the Sûreté, the murders, et cetera, et cetera that had kept him away from his first wife and had left that one so terrorized he’d never come home, she could stand it no longer.

  Then Marianne, his second wife, a Breton and quite a looker.

  ‘Marianne’s eyes were sky-blue, Louis, not violet.’

  ‘Ah yes, not like the girl who called herself Christiane Baudelaire. Not like Gabrielle Arcuri’s either, eh?’

  ‘Come on. I really will see if I can’t get the boys down at the Todt to help us out.’

  ‘You do and my neighbours will hate me, Hermann. No, my friend, I must fix it myself.’

  It hadn’t been Louis’ fault at all, but there was little sense in trying to tell him this. They retreated to the car. Madame Minou, looking like God in hiding, was peering out at them.

  ‘Hermann, let me tell her how it really was.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Let her think this is what will happen to that dosshouse of hers if she doesn’t co-operate.’

  ‘She’s protecting someone.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly.’

  They both threw a last glance at the house. The trip-wire that had set off the Resistance bomb had been deliberately left in place by Glotz of Gestapo Section IV, the Watchers.

  These days one could be an enemy of more than one group, ah yes. ‘Madame, I am not one of these people.’

  In desperation the one called St-Cyr tossed his head to indicate the scarface called Kohler.

  Lisette Minou exhaled. ‘Beware of what you say, monsieur. The carp are always easiest to take when the pond is shallow.’

  The cop on guard at the carousel had fired up the boiler to keep himself dry and warm. Seen in the near distance, the chimney pipe from which the whole apparatus of the roundabout was suspended, funnelled sparks into the darkness of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in flagrant defiance of the blackout regulations.

  Kohler drove on up the steep incline to the tableland, a fairground in former days, perhaps. Light was also leaking out through gaps in the sideboards.

  ‘My friends, if it is all the same to you, I should prefer to stay in the car.’

  ‘You don’t prefer,’ said the Gestapo, flinging an arm over the back of the front seat. ‘You have to come in there with us, madame. We can’t have you walking home. It’s after curfew.’

  She crossed herself, wincing as she did so, making him experience a misguided pang of sympathy.

  St-Cyr opened the door for her. ‘It will be warmer inside,’ he said.

  Her knees were not quite right. The drive perhaps. ‘Is it that you know the dead one here, madame, or is it simply that you fear the worst has happened and must therefore shrink from it?’

  She gave him a terrified glance. Blinded momentarily by the blazing ligh
ts, they left the night and the rain behind. The brightly painted menagerie, poised in collective silence, stood suspended in motion, caught frozen on the roundabout, waiting for the gears to mesh and the music to begin.

  In this day of missing lightbulbs not a one was absent. There were mirrors of bevelled glass, barley-sugar brasses, spiralling brass poles through each of the animals, an eagle in hot pursuit, a rabbit on the run, a leaping pig, a duck, a goat, stallions with wild eyes, the great, thundering herd foaming at the mouth.

  Five rows of animals, each seen against a background of others and the glitter of carvings in gold and mirrored glass, of nymphs, yes, and golden cherubs blowing golden horns among billowing white clouds. All the animals racing, racing, crowding each other. Not a one of them moving, all caught in motion. Not a sound but that of the falling rain and the hiss of escaping steam.

  The flic on duty was calmly eating a snack not a metre from the corpse. He was sitting on the very edge of the carousel, dangling his boots just above the earthen floor.

  Blood had long since ceased to drip from the slashed throat of the victim. What there was of it – a lot – had congealed on the wooden feathers and at the splayed feet of the chicken to which the victim, riding backwards, had been tightly tied.

  The expression of death was unpleasant. Frozen, too, like the expressions of the animals who now seemed to rebel and brake at the sight of what had happened and yet were still forced by their momentum to race towards the corpse.

  The victim was young, with jet-black hair that despite the struggle which must have occurred was still glued into place by pomade. Everything about him said gigolo or pimp, yet Madame Minou forced herself to search out the gruesome face. Again and again she muttered, ‘It is not him. It is not him. May God be praised.’

  St-Cyr took the flic’s tin cup and poured her a stiff tot of the Armagnac he’d brought from the car.

  ‘That’s the monkey’s cup,’ offered the flic, tossing his head but not neglecting the crusty sandwich with its mound of sausage – real sausage – and cheese. Real cheese. A point to consider.

  ‘I have not yet had the opportunity to wash it out,’ he added. ‘There’s no water here.’

  ‘There is outside,’ said Kohler, noting the richness of the feast and implying that the man had not only overstepped his mandate but would suffer for it.