Satan had many forms. The breast was being clasped by the greedy tyke and the milk was dribbling down its little chin. Father David brushed a fond hand over his child and in that instant, Kohler knew he’d witnessed a rare and resigned bravery.
The old priest had let the young one continue in his priestly duties even though he’d broken his vows on the altar of this one’s bed. It was that or forced labour. Of just such things was Paris made.
‘You have thirty, my friend. Try to spare us this one.’
The eyes of the old priest revealed the bond he felt for his protégé. Kohler nodded. ‘Just tell me everything you can about the corporal, most specifically who might have killed him.’
‘It was not a Resistance killing, monsieur. Of this we are certain, but,’ Father Eugène gave a shrug, ‘you may choose to think we would not say otherwise.’
‘If not the Resistance, then who?’
The child was switched to the other tank, the woman not bothering to cover either of them, her dark eyes watchful now.
It was the young priest who said, ‘Someone who wanted the authorities to take hostages and who didn’t care how many your people took.’
‘The killer of that girl?’ asked Kohler incredulously.
The old priest nodded. ‘Word was left on my doorstep, monsieur, that the Resistance had nothing to do with the killing.’
From the folds of his cassock he drew an envelope and, opening it, handed the Gestapo the note. ‘Read for yourself, since you are one of the few who bother to speak our language.’
Look not to the Resistance for this one. Try the rue Lauriston and if not them, then the rue de Villejust. Those bastards must have killed the girl as well.
‘Show me where you found him. Tell me how he was.’
The coins had been scattered about the girl’s room but one had been dipped in blood and left in the centre of her forehead as a warning.
Louis should have got clear of the rue Lauriston by now. That left the rue de Villejust, the Intervention-Referat, the shock troops of the avenue Foch, who used them when they didn’t want to become involved.
The dead corporal had just taken on another meaning, but had he been killed for what he knew or simply because he’d happened along at the wrong time and had, perhaps, called out in alarm, in a drunken stupor?
Blood marked the paving-stones near a side-entrance to Madame Ouellette’s house and empty shop. ‘I thought he was drunk,’ said the woman. ‘I didn’t know what to do, so I went to find Father David.’
Even now she’d cling to calling the young priest that. And at the height of passion too? wondered Kohler.
‘I touched him. I knew he was dead, monsieur. I … I went to fetch Father Eugène,’ said Father David.
‘Did the corporal have anything with him?’
The three of them exchanged rapid glances. The baby had to be burped and brought up a mouthful which hit the paving-stones.
‘A small thing in his fist, monsieur. A dragonfly.’
‘A brooch,’ said the woman, finally thinking to cover herself while at the same time wiping the child’s lips with a corner of her blouse.
‘A dragonfly,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Was it like this?’
They studied the butterfly. They hid their thoughts. It was Father Eugène who said, ‘Madame Ouellette has it in her house, monsieur, because I gave it to her for safe keeping and the authorities who came to remove the body were far too busy to ask, just as were those who removed the hostages.’
‘You were there. I saw you,’ accused the woman.
‘Only as an observer. That’s not our department. We’re strictly murder.’
‘Marie, please go and find the dragonfly. Here, let me hold Jean-Guy,’ said Father David.
The child had the young priest’s eyes and hair, though both might darken with age.
‘God help you if the husband comes home,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Don’t try to leave town until I’m done with you or I’ll hound you to the ends of the earth. Keep quiet about this too. Don’t even confide it in that God of yours. The Corsicans of the rue de Villejust and the other boys of the rue Lauriston both have direct pipelines to Heaven.’
Father Eugène knew only too well what he meant.
Louis would be intrigued. A dragonfly and a butterfly. The poor Frog would be pounding the beat, trying to figure things out and biting the bullet with good reason!
‘The Préfet has a cold, monsieur. He extends the regrets but suggests your health is foremost in his mind and that he would not wish for you to catch it.’
There was no sense in arguing with the housekeeper. To ask for help had been a mistake, an act of cowardice. Talbotte had the shutters closed.
‘Extend to him my sincere condolences, madame, and tell him, please, that Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr has paid his respects. From now on I wear my muffler and gloves, eh, to keep the influenza at bay.’
All of which made the woman toss her head before closing the door in his face.
‘Horse hamburg steeped in bouillon is supposed to be good, madame!’ he called out for the sheer pleasure of it. ‘I always knew the Préfecture was a draughty place. Beware the currents of air, madame. Keep him away from the rat-holes!’
Like those of the rue Lauriston and the avenue Foch! Currents of air that would blow over a dead girl’s naked body or brush a carousel into motion.
The Préfet’s house was one of two that overlooked the boulevard du Palais on the Île de la Cité. Behind it rose the massive stone edifice of a former barracks, the Préfecture. He ought to see about the carousel licence. He ought to force them into doing something.
Talbotte had sent his chief coroner to the carousel. That was something. But now the draught was too much. Word must have got round that St-Cyr and Kohler were dead.
Shunning the quays, he tried to find a bit of solace in the Flower Market nestled between the Préfecture, the Tribunal of Commerce, and the Hôtel-Dieu. The stalls were empty. Few people were about and those that were appeared nervous.
He touched the canary in his pocket. He remembered the coin in the centre of that girl’s forehead … a warning, ah yes. Maudit!.
Beyond the mist of condensation there were a few tired poinsettias in an otherwise empty shop. Distraught, St-Cyr stared at the plants. Where once there would have been a riot of blooms, a jungle, there were now only these and a single rubber plant that should have stayed at home.
Henri Lafont was capable of the utmost cruelty yet loved with the passion of an innocent child, all types of flowers. He had them in his office – there’d been hothouse begonias on a corner of that desk. White ones. A mass of red roses over by the windows. A lemon tree.
Every day the flowers were changed no matter the season. Orchids were a favourite. Orchids and women like Nicole de Rainvelle.
He pushed open the shop door.
‘M’sieur?’ asked the startled reed in glasses who was warming his hands by furiously rubbing them with cat’s fur.
‘Ah yes. I’d like a cactus. The pricklier the better.’
Alphonse Bilodeau didn’t like the look in this one’s eyes. Taxes – were they after him again for the taxes?
‘A cactus?’
‘Yes. Cleistocactus strausii perhaps.’
‘Something with spines. These days that’s about all we have.’
Bilodeau motioned him to follow. Behind the shop, which was less than three metres wide and four in length, a thin partition separated the living quarters, some three metres by one and complete with larder, hotplate, cold-water tap, sink, clothes rack, chamber pot, et cetera, et cetera.
‘My apartment,’ said the florist apologetically. ‘These days …’
‘The Thirties too, and the Twenties,’ said the detective, taking it all in. How in the name of God had he managed to sleep and cook under that thing without hurting himself?
The pot was huge, the main column of the cactus bent where the ceiling had given it no more room. A secondary column lean
ed directly over the unmade bed. Another scratched the wall; a third caressed the photograph in glass of a dancer who’d forgotten her clothes and had shyly turned her back to the camera.
‘Cereus Peruvianus,’ enthused St-Cyr with admiration. ‘It’s perfect, my friend. Perfect!’
‘You can’t mean that. You’re just saying it. You flics are all the same! None of you buy a thing but you all come here …’
‘Please, I did not hear that, monsieur. If I buy, I pay.’
‘You can’t want my Titan.’
He’d even named it. ‘Oh but I do.’
‘It’ll take four men to move it,’ seethed cat’s fur. ‘Men are in short supply these days and costly.’
A real tiger. St-Cyr drew out the black leather billfold his mother had given him thirty years ago. ‘I have little time to negotiate. Here is three hundred francs. Deliver it to Number 93 the rue Lauriston, and see that you do or I will come back to haunt you.’
Number 93 the rue Lauriston … ‘I will need the vélo-taxi, monsieur.’
‘Keep it warm. Enclose a card. Say it’s from Louis. Use two vélos if necessary but don’t break it. Me, I want this thing just as it is.’
He pulled out a further hundred-franc bill. ‘Does stroking cat’s fur really help to make the hands warm?’
The man tucked the finances away. ‘The plants used to, but now …’
St-Cyr thought to ask him if it had been his cat but left it unsaid. There was no sense in pushing his luck. ‘Use a couple of blankets to keep the cactus warm in transit. If anyone bitches, tell them you’re doing a little job for the Sûreté as it used to be.’
Bilodeau watched the cactus-buyer walk away. There was a briskness, a looking-up to see his God perhaps. A smile, a wave to the heavens. All the world was crazy these days. Cat’s fur! Of course it helped to keep one warm. How the hell else could half the population of Paris exist and half the cats have died if not to be eaten?
Locking the shop, he prepared to go and negotiate the help, but the cactus-buyer came rushing back.
‘Talbotte – you know him?’
The Préfet, the sourest bastard in France! ‘Of course, m’sieur.’
There was one poinsettia that had lost all but two of its leaves. ‘Send this to him. Gift-wrapped! Say, I hope you’re feeling better.’
‘A coffee without milk or sugar, please.’
A polite one at last, a man of great sensitivity.
St-Cyr threw his hat on to a chair, then dumped his overcoat on top of it. Pipe, tobacco and matches were arranged. The view was suitable, the water of that grey-brown shade it always seemed to acquire in winter. Silt from Troyes, from Châtillon-sur-Seine, from upstream anyway, and more murders, rapes, muggings – crimes of passion than he’d care to remember.
There were no barges and the river, with but a few old men breaking the law along the quays to fish, looked desolate and empty.
He wondered if he’d ever see it from freedom’s eyes again. In the autumn of 1940 the Germans had taken the barges and the larger of the tour boats for the invasion of England that had never materialized.
Russia would be their nemesis as it had been Napoleon’s. Winter was everyone’s curse in these wretched latitudes; ice and snow, the punishment rain had forgotten.
The tobacco was good – pre-war and Belgian, a gift from Hermann, for whom he could not, even with all his inner rage against what had happened to France, find in his heart of hearts anything but a wary affection. But would Hermann be forced into choosing loyalties again, as he himself had been forced?
It was a particular punishment God had laid on detectives these days.
The coffee wasn’t ersatz, and the taste brought tears to his eyes. Ah Mon Dieu, what were they missing?
He knew the waiter would be watching for some sign and that he’d have seen the cup hesitate and been held out as if a chalice of holy wine or water.
Nothing more was needed, no further demonstration of appreciation.
The spires of the Church of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais were just visible, submerged and set against the ramparts of the rooftops. The Hôtel de Ville flew the German flag of course, but if one did not look that way it was almost as it once had been, except for the absence of the barges.
The table was reasonably private. The canary would cause some notice but the desire for a quiet think was too much.
Little birds were among the hardest to mount. This one had been done by an expert who knew both taxidermy and his birds. The feathers were all in place. There’d been a few bald spots – all birds had them. These spots had been carefully hidden as they would have been in life.
The wires that held the skeleton and filled out the shape in unsupported parts had been implanted properly. There’d have been no flesh left to putrefy after mounting. The bird smelled clean but of lavender, and he wondered then if it hadn’t been kept in some other bureau drawer for years.
Taxidermists were not having an easy time of it these days. Mementos of household pets were not in fashion but consigned instead to the stew pot and the fur made into gloves and hats or used to rub oneself to keep warm.
There’d been an elastic band around the bird, a reminder perhaps, something with which to hold a little note that was now absent?
The possibilities were there. Always questions and more questions.
The choker of pearls was very fine, from the Belle Époque, that period before the last war. There were six strands of perfectly matched pearls, five millimetres in diameter, all of them curved outwards from a hinged plaque of silver on which were opposing poppies that had lost their petals. The fruit of the opium poppy? he wondered, alarmed, only to remember the avant-garde of that period had often played with it to their detriment and disgrace. The stems of the poppies were sinuously curved and folded in upon each other, though juxtaposed so that the seed heads faced away from each other at the top of the plaque.
Why had the girl had it in her room if not to wear when her clothes were absent, if not to remind some successful middle-class roué of his daughter or his grandmother perhaps? It took all types and a young woman’s body usually brought out the worst in most men.
The single strand of pearls was of an even finer quality but much older. Perfectly matched and sized, the stones began with one superb pearl of five millimetres in diameter and then diminished to those of less than two. It made one think of the South Seas, of native girls and cannibals, of drums and rum and firelight and sweat in the night, of mosquitoes, of so many things.
The emerald earrings were indeed from South or Central America, Peru or Colombia perhaps. Very, very old, taken from some tomb perhaps.
Had all the pieces of jewellery belonged to the same person? Had they been from some legacy to the girl who had called herself Christiane Baudelaire, or had Madame Minou’s Monsieur Antoine brought them to her?
Pierre Bonny’s card-index file on the girl had held the notation, ‘A Big One’. – lots and lots of loot to be gained. Ah yes.
The crumpled photograph showed the girl anxious and yet entirely unaware that she was being followed. She’d been in a hurry and had turned away from a cluttered table in the flea market, perhaps to see if the next bus had come in, and if she could possibly catch it.
St-Cyr glanced at his watch. Ah Mon Dieu, it was almost four and he had one further thing to do before the morgue.
With the Benzedrine still floating around inside him, he felt as though he could go on for another forty-eight hours.
The canary lay atop the counter beneath which a lynx from Canada held a Hungarian partridge in its jaws while clinging to the branch of a birch tree.
The taxidermist, M Édouard Verdun, was thin and lofty and not inclined to inspect the work of others, no matter how good. It had been a long time since this one had paid him a visit. A dog that time, a pink ticket for a beagle bitch that had been left for mounting in the spring of 1937, the 15th of April to be exact. Number 603. A wealthy widow in her eighties from Chartres,
a customer for years.
The woman had been murdered in her bath and the Sûreté had never paid up. He still had the dog in the window.
‘Look, I know all about it, eh?’ grimaced St-Cyr. ‘I put it in my report, an absolute recommendation that the estate be made to pay you, but’, he shrugged, ‘such things take time.’
Verdun drew himself up. ‘Patience is not bought with words, Inspector.’
‘It’s Chief Inspector.’
‘No matter. As I was saying …’
‘Yes, yes, get on with it.’
‘Do you want my help or not?’ snapped Verdun, defying answer until an apologetic nod was received. ‘These days no one hunts or fishes. There are no safaris, Inspector. Only German generals bring me their pets.’
St-Cyr ducked his head subserviently. Why was it that taxidermists – this one in particular – always engendered a whining servility?
The shop was full of lions and tigers, the heads of zebras and Thomson’s gazelles, their skins, their pelts and more of them, all left to be picked up later. After the war, after the Occupation, or not at all. Out on the rue des Lions a few bicycles passed by and then the staff car of a German general, but it continued on and he heard the sigh of disappointment the taxidermist gave.
‘Look, I will personally see that you get paid for that other job.’
The slender fingers hesitated as they delicately felt the bird. ‘Five thousand francs, with interest.’
Ah Mon Dieu, the pinch was excruciating! ‘Tell me who did this one.’
‘First, the consultation fee is one hundred francs, Inspector. Out of necessity our prices have risen.’
In the name of Jesus, why must God do this to him? St-Cyr smoothed the bill but continued to hold on to it. Verdun moved the canary out of the detective’s reach. ‘Usually I can tell whose work it is – if he’s been in Paris and is long established. Usually, too, there is some sign. A tiny initial on one of the claws perhaps. Birds like this aren’t easy, Inspector. If one takes pride in one’s work, one likes to leave a little something.’
Mayhem Page 39