He turned on the projectionist and shouted, ‘You say no one was with you in that booth? No one? Then why did you not sound the alarm?’
The mouse-brown eyes in that pinched and angular face watered with alarm and deceit. Torn out of bed in the dark of night, the poor bastard had managed a robe and felt slippers that might have been all right fifty years ago but now looked downright shoddy.
Weidling clutched the napkin more tightly. A second usherette waited tensely but he passed her over to nail what must be the concierge of the flats at the cinema. He dropped his voice and stared the man in the face. ‘You were responsible, mein Herr,’ he said. ‘You let him in.’
‘Who?’
A tough one.
‘The Salamander,’ said Weidling. Quickly this was translated, the concierge seeming to chew on the name before saying, ‘There are no such lizards in Lyon, monsieur. Please address the matter plainly.’
Ah merde, an arrogant imbecile! Kohler hissed in French, ‘He’ll have your balls on toast, idiot! Salamander is the codename for the arsonist or arsonists.’
‘Ah!’ The man raised his bushy black eyebrows in acknowledgement of Germanic French that was at least passable. ‘Then please tell this one, monsieur, that for me there can be no thought of such lizards. I let no one in but my tenants. There were no callers.’
This was all being rapidly translated. ‘None?’ blurted Kohler. ‘What about the priest, Father Adrian Beaumont?’
‘None, monsieur. Not Father Beaumont. Not anyone else. Of this I am positive.’
The bishop had got to him. The man didn’t even throw a sideways glance at Artel for approval, was simply smug and steadfast about it. ‘Loyal to the bitter end, eh?’ snorted Kohler in French. ‘Then perhaps, mon fin, you ought to know one of your tenants was murdered and that if you should lie, you’ll be implicated.’
‘Which tenant? Come, come, monsieur, you make accusations. Is it that you can supply the proof of this … this murder?’
They’d get nothing from him. Weidling turned on the girl who sold the tickets and the thing went round again. First the questions—‘Who did you sell tickets to? Surely you noticed something out of the ordinary? Lists … I must have a list of all who attended.’
Helpless, the kid burst into tears, and dragging up the heavy flannel night-gown between the open overcoat, began to wipe her eyes and blow her nose, disregarding entirely that she was quite visibly naked below the waist.
That put a momentary stop to things and a modicum of sense entered. Kohler sent the interpreter off for brandy and coffee, then suggested they use the bar as it would be more private and less formal. Weidling grunted approval. A last woman sat alone, having left an empty chair between herself and the girl that sold the tickets.
Her eyes were grey and she did not retreat from the puzzled frown Kohler gave her.
He took the gloved hand that was offered and knew at once that no matter what the boys in blue or black had shrieked at her, she had remained calm and had insisted on getting dressed.
‘Madame Élaine Gauthier,’ she said. ‘Julien’s mistress, Herr Kohler, and proud of it.’
Oh-oh. ‘Does Robichaud know you’re here?’
‘I hope not but,’ she gave a lovely shrug, ‘I am prepared even for that.’
Ah nom de Dieu, Louis should have been here! She was an absolutely fine-looking woman in her early forties with a wide, clear brow and high, strong cheekbones. Her hair was ash blonde, short and waved, the nose aristocratic but not arrogant and the lips perfect.
A scar of about two centimetres in length cut across her chin just below the lower lip. It was something from childhood days he thought, and admired her for not trying to hide it.
Kohler took her by the arm to walk with her to the bar. ‘This is not an arrest, so don’t worry. Herr Weidling feels he has to prove to everyone he’s on top of this thing and that he’ll be the one who’s responsible for solving it. Gestapo Mueller must have given him a blast.’
‘And yourself?’ she asked.
‘My partner and I will just have to help him but we’ll see what we can do for Robichaud.’
‘Julien is very worried the Salamander will strike again. The ice on the streets, Herr Kohler. There is no sand to be had and the pumper trucks are having trouble getting around. We were in that cinema together, holding hands and kissing—yes, it must seem odd for a grown woman to say this, but where else can a couple secretly meet for a few moments of intimacy? When the fire started, Julien made me pull my coat over my head. He ran with me through the flames. He would not leave me. Then he told me to hurry home and tell no one I had been there.’
She had stopped him in the lobby and had held him with those eyes, a very straightforward, honest woman. She had made up her mind about him and had taken a chance.
‘Herr Weidling is demanding that Julien be relieved of his duties and dismissed, Herr Kohler. In this he has the backing of the préfet and Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie. He will ruin a man France and this city have every right to be proud of.’
Kohler nodded grimly and took her into the bar. He felt there was more she could confide if convinced but this would have to await another time. He was glad she had trusted him. ‘Does Barbie suspect Robichaud of being involved with the Resistance?’
The scar on her chin quivered. ‘No. No, of course not. How could he think such a thing? What … What have they to do with that fire?’
Fear tightened all her features but she faced him bravely. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m only asking in case I have to have an answer ready.’
It was a warning—she knew this with an absoluteness that chilled. He had seen right through her. Had she been so transparent? ‘Your partner, he is not coming here?’ she managed.
He shook his head. ‘Louis is busy elsewhere. One of the two women we believe left the cinema early is now dead.’
‘Ah, no …’ She turned swiftly away. Kohler hated to do it to her but she had to know exactly where she stood.
‘Louis will sort it all out, madame. Louis is always good at such things. The best.’
‘How did she die?’
‘I don’t know the cause yet. In her sleep and peacefully. She couldn’t have felt a thing.’
The shards were conchoidal and of gilded glass and they had come from beneath the threadbare carpet beside Claudine Bertrand’s bed. Gingerly St-Cyr turned each of them over. He could hardly contain his excitement. A Christmas-tree ornament had been dropped and crushed under foot, he was certain of it. But the rest of the pieces had been carefully gathered and disposed of elsewhere.
Lost in thought, he looked up. Vasseur, long into retirement, had been called back to work because of the fire. An excellent coroner in his day, the old man was diligently bent over the body, searching for needle marks.
He seldom spoke but often ground his teeth and swallowed as if constantly thirsty. A man of some eighty-four years dressed in a black serge suit, vest and tie. There’d be elastics at his elbows when the jacket was removed. And suspenders. Men like Vasseur knew only too well that comfort’s enemy was a leather belt no matter how loose.
‘Monsieur the Chief Inspector,’ said the coroner, straightening to ease his back. A legend of formality and correctness, he had been pleased to be called in. ‘This one has allowed her private parts to be burned from time to time and most recently.’
He had said it with sadness and was still shaking his head. ‘The labia, the vagina and the clitoris all bear the scars of cigarettes perhaps. The inner thighs also and no doubt the buttocks and the anus. Some are from a few days ago, others quite old. Some even from childhood perhaps. But there are no needle marks as yet.’
‘Childbirth, Monsieur the Chief Coroner Vasseur?’
It was like old times. ‘At least one difficult birth, perhaps two,’ he indicated, tracing the marks with a forefinger. ‘What sort of men would burn a woman like that? What sort of woman would willingly submit to it?’
These questions wer
e always asked no matter how accustomed one became to the depravities of human existence. Carefully St-Cyr folded the shards into a tiny packet and put them away. ‘A special woman,’ he said—one had to speak clearly even when wishing to do so quietly. The hearing, it was not so good any more but the eyes and mind still inspired confidence. The former were aided by spectacles. ‘She was a prostitute, Monsieur the Chief Coroner Vasseur. I should have informed you of this but felt the préfet would have filled you in after my telephone call to him.’
‘Monsieur the Préfet Guillemette is a busy man these days,’ grumbled Vasseur testily. Saying no more, he went back to searching. Painstakingly notes were made and for the first time, St-Cyr had a twinge of doubt, for the handwriting was not as steady as it should have been were someone else required to read the notes.
‘There was a powder, Monsieur the Chief Coroner Vasseur.’
The old man paused over a left breast whose nipple and aureole bore the scars of burns. ‘What sort of powder? Come, come, Monsieur the Chief Inspector St-Cyr, you have said nothing of this powder and now … now you tell me of it? Morphia?’
‘No. Ah, no, monsieur. I think it is something else. It will need a chemical analysis.’
The teeth were ground. ‘The little hairs of this aureole have recently been curled by the heat of a cigarette but the flesh nearest them, it has not been recently touched by fire. Did your woman do this to herself, Monsieur the Chief Inspector? Did she so enjoy the excitement, she willingly submitted herself to its threat?’
Vasseur was apologizing for the lecture about holding back on the powder. St-Cyr found its tiny packet and once more the coroner straightened up. Adjusting his glasses, he took hold of the proffered hand so firmly, St-Cyr was surprised and pleased by the strength.
The open packet was placed under the lamp. ‘Sugar. Refined sugar,’ said the coroner distastefully since the black market was implied.
‘The granules are not cubic or nearly so, Chief Coroner. Their adamantine lustre is much less.’
Their eyes met. ‘There is enough for an analysis,’ said St-Cyr.
‘You’ve divided it in half?’
‘For security? Yes. Yes, I have.’
‘Then let me have the other half, just in case. The préfet need not know until long after the fact, if that is your wish.’
A curt nod would suffice. ‘We’ll need a …’
‘Yes, of course, the blood tests. It’s not arsenic or cyanide. I will do the carbon monoxide test first since she bears every indication of having died that way. The rapid relaxation of the sphincters, the very pale pinkish cast to the skin—it would have been more noticeable at first. The collapsed state of the body. Vogel’s test is still the most reliable for me.’
‘Do it privately, then, and let only myself or Hermann Kohler know of the result.’
It could not be nice working under the Nazis but everyone had to do that these days. Vasseur patted St-Cyr’s wrist and asked how he’d found the powder.
‘Among the bristles of the broom in the kitchen. All the rest must have been disposed of elsewhere or washed down the drain.’
The old man was not above giving praise where it was due and sagely nodded. Again the room fell to silence as he hovered over the woman’s right breast, noting two small bruises on its underside, three small and very recent burns and yet more singed hairs which could not have come from the cinema fire since the hairs on the head and the eyebrows had not been touched.
The old scars on the breast were deep and there were several of them, indicating again that she’d had a long history of submission to the exquisiteness of pain brought on by fire.
Patiently St-Cyr stood watching him. Carbon monoxide preferentially united in the lungs with the blood’s haemoglobin preventing it from taking in the oxygen necessary for life. At one-twentieth of one per cent in air, giddiness resulted on exertion, if breathed for a half to two hours.
One-tenth of one per cent prevented walking. One-fifth of a per cent led to loss of consciousness and quite possibly death. Four-fifths of one per cent brought almost certain death within a very short time.
With one per cent, the victim became unconscious in but a few minutes, and this was followed quickly by death. There was no odour. The victim would never know the silent killer had done its work.
Uniting with the haemoglobin, the carbon monoxide formed a cherry-red carbonyl haemoglobin and it was this which, when the blood was diluted by 200 times its volume with distilled water, gave a decidedly pink solution not the yellowish-red of uncontaminated blood.
‘I will do the test on the mother, Jean-Louis, and spend a little time with her at the morgue. It is best, is it not, for us to keep this one on ice? Now, please, if you will assist, let us turn her over. I am most interested in the back of her neck and ears, the knees and the base of the spine as these are often among a woman’s most sensitive places. The shoulders too. Oh by the way, I believe she was wearing that perfume.’
St-Cyr nodded. Claudine Bertrand had allowed herself to be burned by cigarettes or some such object in all those places and in others and very recently, yet there were no rope-burns at her wrists or ankles.
Again he said she was special, but he said it to himself. Even the soles of her feet bore the scars. They were even between her toes.
Kohler leaned forward in his chair to let the words come carefully. ‘What do you mean, Mademoiselle Bertrand was “interesting”?’
The projectionist’s grin was small and short-lived and utterly revealing. Quickly he ducked his eyes away to hide the truth, settling them on the coffee table, the floor, the usherettes and then Madame Élaine Gauthier, before turning to Thérèse Moncontre, the young woman who had operated the ticket booth at the cinema. Fiercely she returned his gaze, colouring as she doubled her fists and held them defiantly against her thighs. Ah now, what was this? The expected? asked Kohler, inwardly patting himself on the back. All had not been well among the staff of Monsieur Artel’s little nest of celluloid.
He exhaled softly. ‘Your answer, eh, my friend?’
The man shrugged nonchalantly and muttered, ‘The usual.’
His chin was forcibly tilted up so that their eyes had to meet. ‘How usual?’ asked the detective.
Flustered, the projectionist blurted angrily, ‘Oh come now, monsieur. It’s quite natural for a man to—’
‘It’s Inspector Kohler to you, mon fin. Sure I know that job must have been boring. Night after night the same film. You’d seen it all before, eh, so you had to have a woman in. What’d you get Mademoiselle Bertrand to do? Go down on her knees between your legs while the film rolled on?’
Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, the detective would stop at nothing! Suzie and Jacqueline were fidgeting. Thérèse was still staring at him—Well stare, you little bitch! Some day I’ll have a knife at your pretty throat and your underpants in my fist, eh? Then we shall see how you beg for it!
Kohler read the bastard’s mind. Hunting among the cigarette butts, he found one with lipstick and lit up. The shortages these days were always trouble. ‘After you were done with her, Mademoiselle Bertrand asked you for the key to the toilets.’
‘You have no proof, Inspector. I know my rights.’
‘Do you? Hey, I thought I told you it was Inspector Kohler? Now don’t forget or you’ll find yourself on a train you’d rather not be on.’
A train to nowhere but the dark and brooding forests of Poland or the Reich.
Blonde, pale and quivering, the usherette Suzie Boudreau blurted, ‘It was my job to unlock the door to the toilets before each performance, Monsieur Martin, but you … you would not let me have the key that night. Always you are bothering us girls. Always you are wanting to get your filthy hands …’
Watching them impassively, Madame Gauthier calmly drew on her cigarette. Herr Weidling hesitated long enough in his interrogation of Artel to demand of his interpreter what had just been said.
The concierge kept to himself like a block of stone.
‘Your filthy hands up their skirts?’ asked Kohler. ‘Hey, were you the one who tied Mademoiselle Aurelle to her bed for a little fun later on?’
One could have heard a pin drop. Frantically the projectionist looked for an out, then hissed, ‘There was no easy way I could have done that, monsieur. I’d have had to go downstairs to the street to come in at the other door!’
‘She was naked, and you could have played around with her all you wanted.’
It was Suzie who, brushing tears away, said bitterly, ‘He has tried to take advantage of each of us, Inspector. First Jacqui because she is so young, then Thérèse whose husband is away in a prisoner-of-war camp in your country and then myself, but all three of us still.’
‘And if you didn’t yield, he’d bitch to the manager and you’d lose your jobs,’ sighed Kohler. ‘Hey, come to think of it, where is the manager?’
Weidling’s interpreter tried to be helpful. ‘Monsieur Thibault was not at his place of residence. The Gestapo, they … they are now searching for him.’
In brutal German the fire chief from Lübeck, et cetera, et cetera said, ‘Herr Artel has sent that one into hiding, Herr Kohler.’
Artel shot to his feet, demanding legal counsel. Weidling shouted at him to sit down. The interpreter tried to intercede … They’d be at each other’s throats!
Kohler separated the two men, patting Weidling on the shoulder. ‘Look, I know you want to solve this thing and get back home to your duties. If he’s done as you think, I’ll see that he hangs.’
He turned to Artel and translated everything but used the guillotine and the wicker basket instead of hanging. ‘Cooperate, eh? Or else my partner and I will take you down to whichever river you choose and drown you.’
As he went back to his chair, Suzie blurted, ‘We were all under their thumbs, Inspector. Monsieur Thibault, the manager, he … he was just as bad as this one only … only not so …’
‘Sadistic?’ breathed Kohler quietly.
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