Mayhem

by J. Robert Janes

  Lafont smiled inwardly. Teasing St-Cyr was like teasing a fish. ‘Perhaps, but my sources think the mackerel knew of the girl but she didn’t know of him.’

  Then she was being watched, sized up for future working perhaps. ‘And the owner of the carousel?’

  The detective had taken the bait. Was it to be so easy? ‘We’ve not been able to find him yet.’

  Then they were still looking for him. ‘Any ideas?’ asked St-Cyr.

  ‘A room facing on to the quai Jemmapes, above the Café du Paradis.’

  The Canal Saint-Martin, in the 10th arrondissement not far from the Hospital of Saint-Louis.

  ‘He hasn’t been seen since early this week. The concierge says he went to visit his dying mother.’ Lafont shrugged. ‘Mothers do eventually die.’

  ‘Where?’

  Again there was that shrug. ‘The Kommandantur has turned up nothing. The ausweis must have been a forgery.’

  ‘Or he never left the city. Who was he? Surely you must have a name?’ insisted St-Cyr.

  ‘That’s for you to find out. The Préfecture will give you nothing, and neither will your famous “Records”. The carousel was here in the city before the Defeat but the thing was sold for a song, dumped during the invasion. The guy who bought it could be anyone.’

  ‘And not have a proper licence? Come on, you know me better than that!’

  ‘Find out. Try the previous owner. Maybe he can shed a little light on things.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Someone, obviously, but there is no record left. It was lifted. Destroyed.’

  ‘And the girl?’ They were giving him the run-around.

  ‘Pierre has the dope on that. Ask him.’

  Nicole de Rainvelle’s eyes lit up with excited anticipation at this new development. She uncrossed her slender arms and, smiling, pointed to the back of the room, to a far corner and the insignificant desk behind which sat that face from the past.

  The trembling couldn’t be stopped – ah, Mon Dieu, the lime squash!

  A little of it ran down over his fingers. Hastily St-Cyr fumbled for a handkerchief. The carpet … he’d damage it! Another Aubusson.

  The girl was laughing.

  Bonny didn’t smile. The squat figure with its squat neck, wide head and face sat so still. The dark eyes were sad and empty and slanting slightly away from the nose to take him in. Not a word of greeting, just hatred seething behind that look.

  At fifty-seven, Pierre Bonny was his senior by a little more than five years. The greying hair had receded well back of the broad, flat forehead. The heavy cheeks were tightened to single creases that ran straight up the middle of each cheek. An ox of a man. Round-shouldered, the dark blue-black serge suit new but the fit still too tight; the silk tie a wash of pearl-grey, pink and white. The neatly cornered handkerchief in the jacket pocket was white.

  Bonny sucked on a tooth. Louis hadn’t changed. He was still the prick he’d always been. ‘So, my friend, what brings you to us, eh?’

  There were three card-index drums to Bonny’s left, a bank of them behind him. He was famous for them. His own little file on everyone and everything he thought of importance.

  St-Cyr set the glass down on the desk. The urge to tip it over was strong but he resisted doing so.

  One single droplet of blood marred the stiff white collar of that too-tight shirt.

  Bonny had thrust his face at that girl upstairs. He’d grabbed her by the throat or blouse. There was blood on the cuffs of his shirt, but like Nicole de Rainvelle, he’d yet to notice this.

  So many things surfaced in that instant. The years of being subordinate to him, of having to say good morning and have him look over the reports; the years of secretly questioning things that hadn’t looked right even though a colleague had been behind them, then the accusations, the evidence that had been patiently and secretly gathered, finally the destruction of that colleague.

  A file card, together with a head-and-shoulders photograph of the girl who’d called herself Christiane Baudelaire, was flattened beneath those pudgy hands.

  ‘What have you to say for yourself?’ asked St-Cyr with barely controlled fury.

  ‘You’re shaking in your fucking boots, Louis. Fill that pipe of yours. Sit down and shut up.’

  ‘Never.’

  Cops could breathe that way. ‘Suit yourself. The cockerel still wants to crow, Henri. Shall we bring on the hen for him to shag?’ he called out.

  ‘Show him the photos,’ came the answer from the other end of the room.

  Bonny’s look never varied. The widely spaced eyes beneath dark, greying brows took St-Cyr in again.

  Christiane Baudelaire had visited one of the flea markets – the Saint-Ouen most probably. The photographer had caught her unawares, not once but many times over several weeks or perhaps even months.

  Had she been trying to sell something? wondered St-Cyr. He had the idea they’d keep this from him, but that they’d have photographs of the items the girl had clutched in her coat pockets.

  Small things. She’d been afraid.

  A last photograph showed her naked on the floor of that room at the Hotel of the Silent Life. Quite obviously the rue Lauriston had managed to get there before Hermann and himself. Ah yes.

  In the top right corner of the card-index file Bonny had written: ‘A Big One.’

  ‘Seen enough?’ he asked, not showing a ray of sunshine.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ve seen enough.’

  ‘You can take these with you. I’ve copies.’

  That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Suit yourself. You always did think yourself better than the rest of us.’

  The crooks that had been in the Sûreté and still were! ‘Not better, my friend. Just more dedicated.’

  Nicole de Rainvelle had joined them. Leaning over to expose even more cleavage, she plucked one of the photographs from among the litter.

  ‘Take this one. Henri says you should. Me, I will escort you to the elevator.’

  ‘I’d prefer the stairs. My partner, Hermann, has learned the hard way not to trust the elevators in establishments such as this.’

  The stairs would be better. ‘So be it then, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. Allow me …’ she indicated the door, handing him the shabby hat he’d somehow forgotten.

  ‘Next time you must wear your rubbers. We don’t want you to catch a cold.’

  Out in the hall she breathed in quickly, the excitement building. It was always like this, the smell of danger, the smell of blood. Of perfume. Of Mirage. Fingertips lingered lightly on his neck. His skin was hot. ‘Adieu, my poor inspector. Please do not forget to come to see us soon.’

  ‘Who was she?’ He tossed his eyes to indicate the floor above.

  He’d break to pieces. For a moment she was tempted to tell him. ‘Just someone who wouldn’t co-operate.’

  ‘Why are you wearing that scent?’

  ‘You know you should not ask such a thing of a woman such as myself.’

  He shut his eyes. He clenched his fists, crumpling his hat and mangling the photograph. It was exquisite to see such pain. It made her body crave rapture. Henri would be pleased.

  Gabrielle Arcuri, a chanteuse with a Russian past and an evident interest in Jean-Louis St-Cyr, had worn the perfume Mirage.

  Giselle le Roy, the young prostitute from the rue Danton and the house of Madame Chabot, was Hermann Kohler’s latest girlfriend.

  With just such strings were detectives pulled and made to dance.

  The butterfly pin was of silver, its enamelled surface smooth, the street ahead narrow.

  Kohler sat alone in the car. Giselle would have liked this little thing, but the girl was nowhere to be found and he had the uneasy feeling he’d never see her alive again.

  She’d not been in the Red Room at Madame Chabot’s, not in the Easter Parade or in the Forest Glade with its battleship-grey bathtub that had been made over into a grotto pond with silk water lilies that seldom stayed in one
place or held their shapes for very long.

  She’d not been in there with someone else, not on her hands and knees or on her lovely back. Not in the schoolroom either, with the other young girls who played at being teenagers for older men who liked to think of things like that.

  Giselle le Roy, age twenty-two, half Greek, half Midi French, a perfect hourglass when standing or bent over fake Empire tables in the Red Room, she throwing him that little look of hers. Stockings of black mesh or Prussian blue right up to her working parts; all the rest of her clothes gone. Damn it, where the hell was she?

  Not in the Bal Saint-Séverin, the dancehall she liked to dream in, which was just around the corner from the house on the rue Danton and not too far to walk.

  She hadn’t been in the Odéon either, soaking up a tired bit of unwanted culture to get in out of the rain, nor in any of her three most-favoured movie theatres watching ancient reruns in hopes there’d be a banquet scene to drool over. Hell, the whole of Paris did that now and then. It was the only way they got a decent feed.

  Kohler’s fingers shook. She hadn’t been happy to see him back in Paris. Come to think of it, she’d been damned worried and distracted.

  Had she bolted from the car in fright? Had that been it?

  The butterfly took wing and he cursed himself for being in love with man’s worst enemy, a young and very vibrant hooker.

  Gerda wouldn’t like it, but then Gerda was back on the farm and this was Paris. Besides, he hadn’t seen the wife in nearly two and a half years, not since his transfer here. Well, once a quick visit to settle her fears about the boys, but that had been so long ago, he couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like any more. Besides, she’d only laugh at him and double her fists!

  The butterfly lay in the crumbly mud on the floor beneath his shoes, the mud of Vouvray. Louis would be needing him. He would have given the Frog the butterfly along with the other things but the insect had become tangled in the lining of his pocket. Threads still clung to its tiny claws – did butterflies have claws?

  The Fabergé wings played their greeny-blue iridescence on the mind when he turned it this way and that. The eyes sparkled as tiny, well-cut sapphires should. Giselle would have been quite taken with it, it would have gone with the colour of her eyes, her hair, her smile.

  Thumbing the jet-black body, he heaved the sigh of a wounded detective who was getting just a little too old for this sort of thing. Records had turned up nothing. Only acid had greeted his request. The photos of the corpses hadn’t yet been sent over. They’d virtually nothing to go on.

  The same with the operator of the carousel, but there he had the feeling that once they’d tied a name to that one, they’d find his file missing.

  When gangsters ruled, they always cleaned the nest.

  Christiane Baudelaire had been murdered between 9.00 and 9.30 last night, Thursday; the mackerel at about the same time the night before. And very early today, or late last night, a Wehrmacht corporal had been killed in the rue Polonceau. And now thirty hostages had been taken.

  A priest had reported that last murder. Somehow they’d have to get stays of execution and deportation. They couldn’t have potential witnesses vanishing before they should. Besides, thirty was far too many for a lousy corporal who probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It implied that Boemelburg had been told precisely how many to choose, and that could only mean Oberg had known the exact number of coins in that room and had said ‘Or else.’

  The gear shift was sticky, the Benzedrine still hammering in his veins. He’d best be careful. Taken with alcohol, that stuff didn’t go down so well. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and he wasn’t getting any younger. Crime didn’t pay. He should have been a farmer like his father and grandfather before him.

  ‘Up to my ears in shit, no matter what!’ he snorted, goosing the Citroën. He’d find the Church of Saint Bernard in Montmartre, he’d hear what the good father who reported the corporal’s body had to say.

  But had he forgotten something to do with that dead girl? Had Giselle’s disappearance made him forgetful?

  All Germans were tourists. To treat them any differently was to admit they existed for purposes other than tourism and that they wouldn’t eventually go away.

  Father Eugène Delacroix rubbed his hands in anticipation of payment. ‘The chapel of our patron saint lies on the hallowed ground’ – he ducked his head to indicate the very place – ‘of the much smaller edifice that was first erected here, monsieur, in the twelfth century.’

  Kohler took the bandy-legged little bastard in. Seventy-two, if a day, with narrowed, watchful eyes, a grey brush cut and a grizzled beard that showed the severe shortage of razor blades in bloodied nicks and bits of sticking-plaster.

  ‘Listen, you ragged little bag of bones, your history’s a little too old for me.’

  Delacroix ignored the warning. ‘In 1852, monsieur, the Baron Lepic laid the first stone even as the nuns of the Josephine mixed the Holy mortar.’

  A heavy door slammed. The priest went on anyway. ‘The Monsignor Christophe, the Bishop of Soissons himself, has consecrated this house of God not three years later, monsieur. Three!’ as if it had been Rome itself and built in such a shortness of time.

  ‘Father, I’m here on business.’

  The distant steps had grown nearer but now paused. ‘What sort of business?’ shot the priest, raising his voice to sound a warning.

  ‘Murder,’ breathed the detective.

  Kohler moved swiftly. He hit the vestry door and shrieked, ‘GESTAPO, FREEZE!’

  The novice flattened himself against the far wall and went as white as a sheet.

  ‘Kohler of the Gestapo, my fine young sackcloth. A few questions or would you prefer the ashes?’

  The old priest came to stand in the doorway. ‘It’s all right, David. You may go now. Do the silver. See if we haven’t enough wafers – perhaps you could break them in half. Yes, yes, that would be best. The shortages,’ he clucked his ancient tongue. ‘Leave the wine alone. I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘Just a minute. No one leaves until I’m done.’

  The vestry door closed. The young priest couldn’t seem to pull himself off the wall. The older one scratched the three-day growth, opening a wound and flaking off a bit of sticking-plaster that wanted to go somewhere else. ‘David, sit down. It’s all right. God will protect you.’

  Kohler knew he ought to ask, why he needed God to protect him. ‘Which of you reported the body of that corporal?’

  The novice swallowed hard, glancing to the elder priest for reassurance. Receiving none, he said, ‘I did. It was me,’ and, shutting his eyes in a grimace, thrust out his arms for the handcuffs.

  Well now, how about that? ‘Start talking. We’ll see about the bracelets later.’

  ‘One of our parishioners called David in, Inspector. Me, I was indisposed at the time.’

  ‘Drunk and sleeping it off, eh? Let him sing his own song, Father. Yours is too rich for the blood.’

  ‘Monsieur, your people have taken thirty souls from my parish. Is that not rich enough for your blood?’

  ‘Stung, eh? Let him tell me himself. I’ll get to you soon enough.’

  The young priest was now sitting on the bench, wringing his hands in despair. ‘It’s all over, Father. I knew they’d come for me.’

  ‘David, God will guide you. Put your trust in Him.’

  The tears were very real, the face was pinched, the forehead high and narrow so that the rampart nose gave steep access to the close-set blue eyes and thin, fair hair.

  A cigarette might help. Kohler shook one out, only to have the old priest accept it on the novice’s behalf. ‘I’ve warned him, Inspector. It’s a penance. These days the young should not smoke. It’s bad for the lungs and too expensive.’

  Father David’s voice was toneless. ‘I found the body in the courtyard. Someone had dragged it in from the street. They’d stolen his boots and socks but had left th
e rest.’

  There, he’d said it at last and God would have to answer for him.

  ‘Where had he been shot?’

  ‘Right between the eyes. It … it was not so pleasant to look at, monsieur.’

  Fair enough. ‘How long had he been dead, do you think?’

  The novice shrugged.

  They’d find out soon enough. ‘Who told you where the body was?’

  ‘M …’

  ‘The person was taken away in this morning’s rafle. To the rue du Cherche-Midi, Inspector. I have only just discovered this.’

  Kohler ran his eyes over Delacroix. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your tongue, Father. Is it that this one might choke if he used his own?’

  The old priest gave a deferential nod. ‘So be it. Let God decide.’

  ‘Madame Ouellette. It … it was in her courtyard. She … she is the one who told me of the body.’

  ‘Her husband, our horse butcher, is in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, Inspector. David, he is young.’

  ‘I think I get the picture. Come on, son. Come and show me.’

  ‘I’ll come too, just in case you have need of my tongue.’

  They were a pair, these two, and as sure as that God of theirs had made little green apples, this Madame Ouellette hadn’t been carted off this morning. She and the young priest had been up to something and hadn’t heard a thing in that courtyard.

  With the two of them hurrying before him like rooks, Kohler went through to the back of the church and from there stepped on to the rue Saint-Luc, a short bit of nothing.

  The house with its shop and golden horse’s head above the door was nothing much either. The shelves were bare. Madame Ouellette didn’t take to butchering and when he saw the woman, he instantly knew it wasn’t just because of the shortage of horsemeat.

  She had a child at the breast and that kid could not possibly have been the husband’s unless their God had made it by mail.

  The woman’s hair was long and brown. The doe eyes were full of alarm and likely to beg forgiveness.

  Apparently the penance didn’t just extend to cigarettes but to twenty-six-year-old war widows with earthy minds and needs below the waist.

  ‘Marie, you must forgive us the intrusion,’ managed the young priest. ‘The Inspector is here to find out what he can about the body of that German soldier.’