Had it been wise to tell him of the money, of loans that could never be repaid?
Henri said nothing. What could he have said about those days when the three of them were young and so much had happened?
An interruption at the door brought the impasse to its close. She would let Henri do the answering. Yes, yes, it would be best to get him away from the detective.
It was Jean-Pierre and Fernand and Lorraine, her three zazous in dark glasses, and they had come with a little gift for their teacher. Henri was irritated and upset on seeing them at his door. He did not like their grins or constantly erratic motion. He did not value the attentions they paid his little sister and thought such an extracurricular association undignified and unprofessional of her. Yet he could be very nice to them when he wanted. Had they startled him for some other reason? she wondered. Had their presence alarmed him? He was afraid.
With difficulty and muttered apologies, he allowed them to come in and called her from the kitchen.
She would throw on an apron and seize a tea towel—would pretend to wipe her hands as she went toward them. Each removed the dark glasses and the huge cock-hate, the earmuffs of gold and orange and livid green. Ear-rings on the boys no shirts this evening but leather jackets open to the navel in spite of the freezing cold. And pegged trousers that exposed bare ankles and sockless feet that were tucked into laceless shoes which had not a trace of polish. Lorraine was opening the umbrella that was always carried closed in the rain to infuriate passing adults who had none. There was long, greasy hair on all three of them. Lorraine’s pleated skirt was so short her shapely thighs half exposed their pinkish blush of frost. They’d all get pneumonia. They were rebellious youth unleashed and wanting to show the Occupiers and everyone else exactly what they thought of them. But ah mon Dieu, mon Dieu, they were so lovely! Her two heroes and her little heroine.
St-Cyr watched the greetings of the sister with interest. While the brother remained aloof and uncomfortable, the sister hugged each of them, kissed their cheeks and made a fuss.
‘Come in … come into the kitchen and warm yourselves. A little gift … Ah, you shouldn’t have. What is it?’ And so the chatter went until the three of them clutched mugs of herbal tea that had been sweetened with a purée of chestnuts.
‘Inspector …’ began Charlebois, hoping to get him back into the salon.
‘Ah no, monsieur. For me, the kitchen is fine.’
The teenagers were ebullient. They threw themselves around in states of sloppiness but were grateful for their teacher’s warmth and admiration. ‘A detective,’ said the one called Jean-Pierre with awe. ‘Paris … Monsieur, permit me, please, to ask are we …’
‘Are we like the zazous of the clubs on the Champs-Élysées? The Ledoyen?’ asked Lorraine with a seriousness one found disconcerting.
He would take them all in with a sweeping glance. He would exercise caution and preach patience to himself. ‘Very,’ he said, finding the will to grin. ‘Exactly as those I’ve seen at the Colisée, the Bar Select and other places.’
This set them to talking rapidly amongst themselves while their teacher basked in the praise and fluttered around with ersatz biscuits of some sort. Fig perhaps.
Fernand, a pimply-faced youth of fifteen, produced Swiss chocolate with a flourish. Jean-Pierre ignored the loot and offered real coffee and cigarettes.
Lorraine had several tubes of lipstick to display. All the items were offered for sale and this was quietly understood.
‘Inspector …’ began Mademoiselle Charlebois. ‘It’s Christmas Day. Please do not be too hard on them. These are little things, isn’t that so? Lyon, it … it is not under your … your … well, you know. The préfer, he …’
‘My jurisdiction, is that what you mean, mademoiselle?’
‘Martine, how could you?’
‘Henri, the coffee was to be for you, the chocolate also.’
‘And the lipstick?’ asked the brother sharply. ‘You know how much I hate the sight of your wearing such things. It cheapens you.’
‘And the present?’ asked the Sûreté, for it still lay on the table. Clearly the students were working the ‘System D’*, making do and taking care of themselves by playing the black market. Every lycée had its System Ds and the zazous were a part of it. A chicken for the pot, a roast of veal perhaps or packet of salt—clothes, the leather jackets, the girl’s skirt … all were products of the system.
‘The present …?’ he said again, seeing them look questioningly at each other while the brother watched them with alarm.
‘Open it, please,’ breathed the detective, ‘or would you prefer I did?’
It was the girl who kept her eyes focused on the thing while Monsieur Charlebois stood across the table from her, frantically trying to get her to give him a hint as to what it contained. She refused to raise her lovely blue eyes to meet his gaze but whispered, ‘Mademoiselle Charlebois, our Assistant Professor of Germanic studies, must open it, Monsieur the Detective from Paris. It is just a little something. It is nothing much.’
‘Henri, you open it,’ said his sister but the brother refused and went into the other room saying, ‘You should be ashamed. They should not have come here.’
Upset by his words, her pale lips quivered, and her fingers shook as she undid the wrapping and tried not to damage the paper.
There was a small cardboard box and, inside this in tissue, a ring of keys that made her gasp and burst into tears of relief and gratitude. ‘My keys!’ she blurted, fondly touching each of her students and hugging them. ‘The keys to the Lycée du Parc, Inspector. I dropped them some place. I never lose a thing—I’ve never lost anything until … Ah, I was so upset and distracted—the examinations, their grades. My Director, le Docteur Taillander, he … he would have dismissed me, had he known of my carelessness.’
She clutched the keys in her left hand, held them to her lips and, shutting her eyes with relief, bowed her head to steady herself.
The zazous reached out to her comfortingly. They were distressed and embarrassed at the depths of her relief. Perhaps they had not known she would have been dismissed. Perhaps one of them had taken the keys and now all three were united in the shame of returning them.
It would be some moments before she recovered. St-Cyr signailed to them to leave and went with them to the front door. ‘Who found the keys and where?’ he asked. ‘When were they lost and when was their absence first discovered? Come, come, answer truthfully.’
It was Jean-Pierre who reluctantly confessed. ‘I found the keys last Tuesday, Inspector, beside the lake in the park. There is a pavilion which is used for the band concerts. It …’
‘It is one of our meeting-places, Inspector,’ said Lorraine, not looking up. ‘The keys were lying in the snow below the railing.’
Ah mon Dieu, what had they been up to? ‘Tuesday the twenty-second and you have let her suffer all this time? When did she lose them and for how long has she had to live in fear their loss would be discovered?’
‘A week prior to that Tuesday,’ offered the boy Fernand. ‘We searched everywhere, Inspector.’
A week! The fifteenth … ‘And yet you kept the keys a further three days knowing how distressed she was?’
‘Only to make the present more suitable,’ said Jean-Pierre.
‘Pah! If I were your father, I would soon straighten you out! Wearing rubbish like that. Dealing on the black market. Now get out of here. Be home and indoors well before curfew.’
‘It was only a set of keys, Inspector,’ said the girl.
He stepped out into the hall after them and closed the door behind him. He knew he was edgy and unreasonable—that he’d defied authority himself as a boy and had paid dearly for it, but this … this was something else, something so deliberate it hurt. ‘One hundred and eighty-three are dead, my little birds. Three others also. Some sixty are still in hospital, some so badly burned they will be horribly disfigured for the rest of their lives. At present, I do not know
if the keys have even the slightest importance, but if they have, you had best tell me everything and do so immediately.’
They objected. They said the keys could have nothing to do with the fire, that he must be crazy.
They begged him not to tell their teacher. They said she must have set them on the pavilion’s railing and that she’d been upset and distracted for days prior to their being lost.
Days prior to the fifteenth. The Weidlings had arrived on the tenth. Claudine had had to get away …
When he returned to the flat, the sister had excused herself and gone to her room, the brother held his coat, scarf and hat at the ready.
The desire to ask where Charlebois had been on that Tuesday of the lost keys, and from then until the finding of them on the twenty-second was there, but for now had best be left. ‘Monsieur, if it would not be too much trouble, could I ask that you drive me to Number Six, rue du Boeuf? I must take another look at the flat of your childhood friend and link up with my partner, Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo.’
‘Is this necessary?’
Ah mon Dieu, the guarded anger. ‘Absolutely, monsieur. Lyon is a city in fear and we must put a stop to it before there is another fire.’
‘Don’t the Sûreté and the Gestapo grant their detectives transport?’
‘Not since some gangsters shot my Citroën all to pieces in Montmartre. It’s still under repair.’
‘Then I will drive you to Claudine’s and answer any further questions you might have of me.’ Ah damn, the Sûreté had found out about the car.
‘Just the ride to save time, monsieur. Perhaps if you could wait in the street outside Number Six, then the lift over to the temporary morgue? We can talk on the way. You can fill me in on Mademoiselle Bertrand and the cross of Father Adrian, I think, and then a little more about your sister, the Lycée du Parc and her studies to become an assistant professor. Yes, that would be excellent!’
Questions, there were always questions, thought St-Cyr. The streets were treacherous and the cold could easily cause the car to stall. Left alone inside, the two of them would talk as the windows iced up. Ah yes. Already the cinematographer’s cameras were rolling but there would be no floodlights, only darkness in the rue du Boeuf outside the house where a friend had been killed to keep her silent.
‘Oh by the way, Monsieur Charlebois. My compliments to your sister for the tastefully simple way she has decorated the fir tree in your salon. Those gilded glass pears are exquisite and must be very old. Venetian, I believe.’
Bishop Frédéric Dufour was not happy. A busy man on this busiest of days, he threw off his vestments, tossing hat, robe and dangling scarf—was it called a scarf?—into a chair. ‘That vile old woman, Inspector Kohler. May God have mercy on her. Saint Peter will have to cut out her tongue if the Devil doesn’t get her.’
He spotted the dregs of Calvados and one dirty glass. The detective still held the other.
Snatching up the scrubwoman’s glass, he threw it into the fire. ‘The bitch!’ he swore. ‘I’ll show her. This is the last time, absolutely, that she violates the sanctity of my study! Vermin … did she tell you my church was full of lice, eh? Well, she’s the one who is carrying them!’
‘Hey, calm down, eh? She was only doing what I asked.’
Dufour clenched a fist then dropped it, realizing that Philomena Cadieux would never change. ‘Father Adrian was a good man, Inspector, a true servant of Christ. Please don’t let the scandals of a wicked imagination sully a character that was without blemish.’
Kohler removed his scruffy shoes from the desk and helped himself to the last of the Calvados. He would give the bishop a moment to clear the cobwebs of religion.
‘Inspector, what is it you want?’
That was better. He’d let him sit down behind his desk, would take in the florid, frost-burned cheeks and carefully brushed iron-grey hair, the red nose and horn-rimmed glasses. The crinkly smile, the open-handed gesture of …
‘So, what is a little misunderstanding among friends, eh, Inspector? Mademoiselle Aurelle … that one believed the spirit of the devil was within her flesh and that her body had to be purged. Mademoiselle Bertrand … Ah with a woman like that, what is one to do? Father Adrian administered to his little flock, that is all.’
Son of a bitch, Mademoiselle Claudine Bertrand had been among them! ‘What about Mademoiselle Martine Charlebois, Bishop? Was Father Adrian also her confessor?’
Ah merde! ‘What … what has she to do with this, my son?’
Kohler flicked his empty glass over the bishop’s left shoulder. As it shattered among the flames, Dufour leapt, then settled down. ‘You tell me, Bishop. My partner found her name on the list at the temporary morgue. Did Father Adrian hear her confessions, too, and is that perhaps why he died?’
‘Monsieur … Monsieur, what is it you are saying?’
Dufour looked positively ill. ‘It’s Inspector, Bishop. Gestapo HQ, Paris Central.’
‘Yes, yes, Inspector, as you wish. Father Adrian was confessor to several. Mademoiselle Martine Charlebois was among them but her brother, Henri, he came to me.’
‘Good. Then start by telling me about him. We’ll work from there. Did he know Claudine Bertrand, Bishop? Claudine is also dead.’
‘Lost in the fire?’
Perplexed about it, was he? Kohler hunted among the clutter for the bishop’s cigarette box and relieved it of its contents. ‘Not in the fire, Bishop.’
The bushy, dark eyebrows lifted questioningly behind the horn rims. ‘Ah, not in the fire,’ Maudit, what was one to do? wondered Dufour. ‘Er … how … how did she die, monsieur?’
‘Inspector.’
‘Inspector, how did she die?’
‘First tell me if Henri Charlebois knew Claudine?’
‘Yes, yes, he knew her from a long time ago. Now, please, how did she die?’
‘Silently and without a struggle. I just had a call on your line and the other two, Bishop, so Madame Charlady may have listened in. Vasseur, the coroner, says that I am to tell my partner Claudine Bertrand died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Trouble is, it wasn’t an accident. When she breathed in what she thought were the steaming vapours of friar’s balsam, she took in enough CO to drop a horse.’
‘Murder?’
Kohler lit up and sat there drawing on the cigarette, watching the bishop closely.
Dufour silently cursed the unmitigated arrogance of the Germans. Oh for sure, he could claim the sanctity of the confessional, but this one, ah he wouldn’t listen. Too much had happened, too many had already died but Henri …? Henri Charlebois could have had nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing. ‘Philomena is not always correct in what she invariably states so emphatically, Inspector. It’s true that someone other than Mademoiselle Aurelle might—I say might—have telephoned Father Adrian in the twilight of that terrible day. But it could not have been Mademoiselle Claudine Bertrand or even Mademoiselle Martine Charlebois since neither of them would have known of her desires for Father Adrian’s person.’
‘Yet someone did, Bishop. Father Adrian knew very well what was about to happen to that cinema. It’s my belief, though I can’t yet prove it, that he found Mademoiselle Aurelle already naked and tied to her bed. He saw for the first time perhaps that others knew only too well what he’d been up to with her, and he went downstairs and into the cinema hoping to find his accuser and beg forgiveness, only to burn in hell.’
‘The anonymous letters … the préfet has given them to your friend but they … they can mean nothing, Inspector. Nothing! Merely the poison of the unforgiving.’
Dufour’s swarthy hands favoured the edge of his desk, caressing thoughts too deep and sad to reveal. He heard, in snatches, the mumbled, secretive words of a young woman who had brushed her body with flames while thinking thoughts no girl of such a tender age should think. He knew that spying on another’s confession was paramount among ecclesiastical sins and he begged God to forgive him. He had had to discover what h
old Father Adrian had over those women—there’d been too many whispers, too many visits outside the duties of a bishop’s secretary …
‘Who knew him well enough to borrow a spare pair of his shoes, Bishop?’
Irritated by the interruption, Dufour left off touching the desk. ‘Yes, yes, Philomena made me aware of the footprints but they could just as easily have been from the day before. She’s no detective, whatever else that old bag of bones and lice might claim.’
‘Tell me about the cross. Why was he given it? What favour was exacted in return?’
Mademoiselle Claudine was dead. The image of her at the age of seven came and then at the age of ten and then, alas, at the age of eighteen in the flower of her beauty. ‘Monsieur Henri Masson gave it to him as I have already informed your associate, Inspector.’
‘Yes, but why did he give it to him?’
The Gestapo lit another cigarette, pinching out the butt of the first and pocketing it for later use. The laws of the Church said to remain silent; the laws of humanity said that all must be revealed, that that same Claudine Bertrand, that same child had been tormented by and terrified of the beast within her. That she could not understand why God had made her the way she was and Ange-Marie and young Henri had … had revealed her to herself. ‘Henri Masson gave the cross to Father Adrian in return for his promise to … to watch over his … his only grandson.’
Henri Charlebois. Ah merde. ‘And not the boy’s sister?’
‘No, not the sister.’
‘Was he given it to keep silent?’
‘About what?’
‘Bishop, you know damned well what I mean! Don’t fuck about with me.’
‘Then God must answer you, Inspector. When he was presented with the cross, Father Adrian did not tell me the reason for such a gift. It was Monsieur Henri Masson who felt it necessary to ask in return that I keep Father Adrian on here as my secretary.’
‘Would the grandson and/or his sister have known the workings of this place?’
‘Of course, but so would others. People come and go all the time. Both Father Adrian and myself and my other clerics have had many visitors in the past. Once a month we dine with close friends at the manse; others come for an apéritif or cup of tea or coffee in the afternoon. It’s natural when one is at the centre of a city’s religious life.’
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