That address had turned out to be nothing more than the box office of the Théâtre du Palais Royal. The custodian there had given Joanne her last letter of instruction, but it was only because the girl had opened it right away that the man had overheard her reading it to herself in the lobby and had been able to give them the final address. A stroke of luck in a world where luck was not common.
No other such letters had been left there, though the theatre often received and held mail for the actors and actresses. Hence nothing untoward had been suspected and the letter had simply been put in with the rest of the mail.
As a result, her family hadn’t known exactly where her interview and photo session were to be held and neither had Joanne until the very last moment.
‘A house on the rue de Valois whose rear windows face onto the garden, Hermann,’ he called out. ‘A residence whose owner, I am sure we will find, is still in the south or in the countryside, having felt it prudent to pay off the authorities so as to keep the house, and to stay away from Paris for the Duration.’
‘For eternity, you patriot,’ came the shout. ‘The Thousand-Year Reich is here to stay.’
‘Ah bien sûr, if you say so, Inspector, but if I might say so without being thrown up against a wall and shot for heresy, perhaps you are wrong.’
The Führer was an idiot and both of them knew it, but baiting Louis was good for him. ‘Quit feeling your oats, eh? Rommel will turn the Allies back in the desert. Stalin’s armies will collapse at Stalingrad and my two boys will come home safely. My Gerda won’t get the divorce so that she can marry her indentured French peasant! It’s all a cruel joke.’
Hermann was moving from room to room just begging for an answer! ‘A joke God has perpetrated on the two of us because He is punishing me for something I did as an altar boy’, sang out St-Cyr. ‘The stealing of the Blood of Christ and substitution of absinthe. The salting of the wafers with iodine in revenge for punishments received!’
‘Admit it, you were unruly,’ shouted Kohler, delighted to have stirred Louis out of himself.
It was all a game with them, this banter, to hide the horror of what they might find. Hermann must be on the first landing of the staircase but listening for him now would do no good. He could be far too quiet when he wanted, too noisy also, of course, at other times.
The six-acre quadrangle of the Palais Royal garden was bounded on three sides by identical houses of three storeys whose entrances faced not onto the garden but onto one of the adjacent streets: the rue de Montpensier was direcdy in front and to the west of him, the rue de Beaujolais off to his right at the far end, and the rue de Valois was behind him, the house being, like most others on that street, directly across from the Bank of France.
Down at the other end of the quadrangle, the original palace had been bequeathed to the Royal Family by Cardinal Richelieu in 1642. As a boy, Louis XIV had sailed toy boats in the fountain and later had played with the daughters of his servants. In 1715, when Philippe d’Orléans became regent, the Palais Royal acquired a rather risqué reputation which only increased during the Restoration when whorehouses and gambling dens surrounded the garden and Balzac wrote of them.
But Louis-Philippe put a stop to it all and gradually the garden and the houses, with arcaded shops below and apartments above, had slipped into that genteel quietude of polite insularity that so characterized the place even under the Germans.
Heavy iron gates kept the public out except at certain hours: 7.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. in winter, an hour earlier and two hours later in summer.
The custodian of the gates might have seen Joanne, for the girl would have made certain she had plenty of time to spare before her appointment, even after picking up her final letter unless, of course, she had been delayed.
Back came the plaintive voice of her little brother, Dédé. ‘The robbery, Inspector. Eighteen million. One for every year of her life!’
The main Paris branch of Crédit Lyonnais nearby had been hit and a teller shot in the face and killed at 12.47 p.m. on that same Thursday. Bundles of 500- and 1000-franc notes had been crammed into two leather suitcases of good quality just waiting to be snatched. Pre-war cases of course. Unheard of now if new, and why would the bank in Lyon not have sent the money in dispatch cases or strong-boxes? Even at the ‘official’ Vichy rate of 200 francs to the British pound, it was at least £90,000. A fortune.
But had Joanne been a witness to that robbery? Had she been followed by someone connected with it? Had things been interrupted here by them because she could perhaps identify one of the men?
Was that why the house had been emptied in such a hurry?
He’s lost to things, thought Kohler. He hasn’t even heard me come downstairs. Well, I’ve news, mon vieux. News.
Louis didn’t even turn from the windows. ‘She would have got here early, Hermann, and come timidly into the garden to have a look at the place. A girl from working-class Belleville would not have announced her presence at the front door before having a little look around. She would have been going over how best to behave, and fretting about her atrocious accent, the slang of the quartier also, of course.’ He tossed the hand with the pipe in salute.
‘You heard me come downstairs,’ grumbled Kohler.
Again the hand was tossed, ‘It’s nothing. The eyes in the ass of the trousers, just like the reflections in a shop window, are used to see if the coast is clear or to observe a little something like a bank robbery perhaps.’
The robbery … ‘You’re full of surprises,’ snorted Kohler. Somewhat diffident, somewhat chubby, a gardener, a muse, a reader of books and a fisherman when he could break the law and get away with it and find the time, Louis was fifty-two years of age, himself a little older. The scruffy brown moustache was tweaked, a shred of tobacco plucked from generous lips and examined closely in case it was worth saving. The shortages, the things one did to overcome them.
‘Well, tell me what it is you’ve found, Hermann. Please, suspense I do not need in my life, having had enough of it already with you.’
‘She was chloroformed up in the attic.’
The Frenchman spun round. ‘She was what?’
Kohler grinned hugely and pulled down his lower left eyelid in mock salutation before triumphantly thrusting the crumpled cotton pad at him. ‘I found this behind the bathtub. They couldn’t have had time to search for it. She may still be alive, Louis. Alive!’
‘Chloroformed …’ squawked the Sûreté, alarmed.
‘And why not? What better place?’
‘Then is it that those who emptied the house in such a hurry were the same as those who abducted the girls?’
Kohler swallowed hard. ‘The bastards who pulled off that bank job wouldn’t have had chloroform, would they? There’s nothing to suggest it was them, Louis.’
‘Then why were the photographs scattered if not to tell the police what happened here?’
Why indeed? Surely the kidnappers wouldn’t have deliberately left the photos to point the finger at themselves?
Hermann found a broken cigarette and lit up. A giant with frizzy, greying hair that was not black or brown but something in between, the Bavarian had the heart and mind of a small-time hustler and the innate suspicion of the farmboy he had once been. A bad Gestapo—lousy would be a better word—he was a doubter of Germanic invincibility who had suffered for such doubts. The scar down the left cheek from eye to chin and the other one across the chest from shoulder to hip were from another case, a rawhide whip and a lesson he was supposed to learn.
An older brother had inherited the small farm near Wasserburg but, long before the deaths of his parents, Hermann had wanted to become a big-city detective. Now he was no longer sure of this but nothing short of a bullet or the piano-wire garrotte of Gestapo retribution could intervene. He was stuck with it, and with the Occupation, and so made the best of a bad bargain.
He had two women in Paris to warm a bed he seldom used. Giselle, a young and very vibrant hooker from
the house of Madame Chabot around the corner on the rue Danton, and Oona, a Dutch alien he sheltered, though everyone in Gestapo circles must know of it.
A man for the times and in his element. A man on holiday. Well, almost.
‘Let me keep the pad, Hermann.’
‘Certainly. Just tell me where the photographer got the chloroform.’
‘And the film.’
Questions, there were always questions.
Patiently they gathered the photographs into a pile for each victim. From time to time they studied them and made terse comments or paused to ease an aching back or knees, but for the most part they were tireless. Two very determined men who knew they had little time in which to find Joanne alive.
All of the girls had good bodies—hell, most of that age were biological honey pots, thought Kohler, and wasn’t it a pity so many of the young men were dead or away in the Reich in POW camps or with the forced labour brigades or hiding out in the woods and hills of France with the maquis, the ‘terrorists’, the fledgeling Resistance? ‘But why the stipulation of chestnut hair and eyes, Louis?’
‘Such specifics demand a rationale.’
‘A sister, a former lover, a mistress or hated mother,’ offered the Gestapo.
‘Or nanny.’
‘Right back to the crib, eh?’
‘They’ve all been photographed in exactly the same poses, Hermann.’
‘On or against the same pieces of furniture? Naked and trapped in the same …’ Quickly Kohler sorted through three of the piles, then sat back on his heels and sighed. ‘That corner over there, I think. Behind the armchair and sofa, beside the lamp—squashed in next to the desk and with the vitrine full of porcelain and silver directly behind them so that the light reflected off the curvature of the glass for special effects. Ah merde, Louis, with what are we dealing?’
Each of the girls had retreated in shock to cower in that same corner, dismayed and in tears, with a breast clasped hard or the base of the throat and, in two of the photos, the other hand tightly gripping the crotch.
St-Cyr tried to clear his throat, but still a catch remained. ‘Surely someone bent on humiliating a succession of young women would have been distracted sufficiendy by fear of discovery and would not have chosen the same settings for all fourteen girls?’
Yet when the photos had been spread out in broad arcs across the living-room floor, they realized that, indeed, each girl had been caught in almost exactly the same poses and settings. On the chaise-longue and looking up into the camera, most with doubt and fear, one self-consciously smiling, for she had got the message and had thought perhaps that by offering the use of her body she could escape. Poor thing.
‘They were all photographed in a prearranged sequence, Louis. First the clothes and the modelling, the girls modestly getting undressed and dressed behind a screen.’ Kohler tapped a photo. ‘Then, having got used to the camera, a few shots in evening gowns on the staircase with the chandelier’s glimmer in the eyes and diamonds around the neck and wrists—are they really diamonds?’
‘Perhaps, but then …’
‘Paste perhaps. So, okay, it’s something to think about, seeing as there’s gold or silver jewellery elsewhere—it is gold or silver, isn’t it? Hey, it looks like it.’
‘Then a few more shots in the bedrooms, Hermann, and on up the stairs to the attic but never were any photos taken in the rooms up there. Never.’
‘But into the main bathroom and finally, the insistence that it would really be best if a shoulder was bared or a bit of thigh.’
‘Still no gun and no threats,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘But to ease the minds of nervous young ladies whose stations in life might not have matched this place, there would have to have been more than just words of reassurance. The presence of another woman perhaps?’
A man and a woman, and a kid from Belleville … ‘Good. Yes, that’s very good, Chief. Having to work with me is toning you up, eh? So, come on, my fine flic from the Sûreté, let your big brother from the Gestapo show you a little something else.’
‘The balcony off the attic?’ mused St-Cyr.
‘Verdammt!’ snorted Kohler. ‘And here I thought I was going to be one up on you.’
From the french windows of what might have been a bedroom or the sitting-room of an attic suite, they looked out into the rapidly fading light across a balcony that ran to a stone balustrade and urns and continuously around the three sides of the quadrangle, servicing every one of the houses and offering a ready means of coming and going.
‘I’ll quiedy ask of the neighbours, Hermann. Nothing so alarming here as your presence, I think. Not just yet.’
‘Then I’ll chase up the robbery details and see if I can find out if the other girls are listed as missing.’
‘Of course, but please don’t alert the préfet. To invade his territory is to stamp on his balls and disturb the city.’
Paris and its environs were Talbotte’s beat. The Sûreté and its Gestapo counterpart in the fight against common crime had the rest of the country to forage, and in any case, their investigation was totally unofficial.
Intuitively Kohler understood that Louis needed to be alone. ‘Take care, mon vieux,’ he said, gripping him by the arm. ‘I’ll drop back in a couple of hours and we’ll go over to Chez Rudi’s for a bite to eat.’
The head was shaken, the battered brown felt trilby pushed a little further back off that broad brow. ‘There’s no time. None, Hermann. Meet me at my place.’
‘The club, I think. Won’t Gabi be back?’
‘Yes, yes, all right, the club. I must pay my respects.’
To a woman who loved him but to a love that had yet to be consummated.
Kohler thought to have the last word but turned away only to call back up the stairwell, ‘Hey, I’m going to slap a verboten notice on the door and leave you a bit of wire to tie it shut. Okay?’
The hand of acknowledgement would automatically be lifted in salute he knew, the pipe and tobacco pouch taken out with feelings of doubt—short on rations again. Ah nom de Dieu, I’d better find him some, swore Kohler inwardly as he got into that big, black, b … e … a … utiful Citroën of Louis’s.
It had been repaired at last, and repainted. No more bullet holes, broken glass and shot-out tyres. So, good. Yes, good.
As the tyres screeched on the rue de Valois and then at the corner of the rue de Beaujolais, St-Cyr followed him with his mind’s eye and grimaced furiously.
Right to the main branch of Crédit Lyonnais over on the rue Quatre Septembre, he grimly followed the sound of the Citroën— there were so few cars on the streets these days, a hush like no other. Then all the way back again to fix a forgotten notice to the door, leave the wire and gather up the photographs to stuff them safely in the boot!
At last St-Cyr was able to pack his pipe and strike a match. Well, strike three of them in succession because they were so terrible but they’d always been that way, war or no war, Occupation or no Occupation. Like taxes, the government made them.
Letting the silent house come to him, he willed away all thoughts but those of Joanne and the other victims and heard in that terrible loneliness their earnest cries for help.
* * *
French banks were a bugger—Kohler was positive of it! They opened and closed at their convenience, took offence when none was intended, and had three hour lunches when they damned well felt like it, even in wartime.
But this one was different. Below stone carvings, in front of bronze plaques, two flics in dark blue kepis and capes stood guard in the snow with iron-cleated boots and black leather truncheons, a bad sign.
Flashing his Gestapo shield and looking grim and determined, he blithely rocketed between them and in through bronze doors too heavy for old ladies to open. Shit! The place was all but empty.
Surrounded by a floor whose sea of mottled grey marble lapped a magnificent staircase of the same and rose in plush red carpeting, he looked up into the frescoed vault above a
nd then slowly brought his gaze down to the mezzanine.
Two superbly sculpted golden Venuses flanked the préfet of Paris, two of his detectives, the suave, bespectacled manager of the main Paris branch of Crédit Lyonnais and an assistant. There was a huge tapestry on the wall behind them, a gift no doubt from the impoverished silk weavers of Lyon in hopes of sales.
For perhaps ten seconds the gathering was overcome by the intruder and speechless, then Talbotte ripped himself away and bellowed, ‘What the fuck do you think you are doing here?’
Ah merde … ‘My chief wants me to look into things,’ sang out Kohler so that his voice would echo too. It was a lie of course.
‘Your chief …? Piss off. You’ve no jurisdiction here. Boemelburg …’
‘Cash is cash, Préfet. The Resistance may have knocked off this little nest egg to buy guns and explosives from naughty boys who shouldn’t sell them.’
‘The terrorists?’ snorted Talbotte, doubling a fist. ‘Don’t be an imbecile, Haupsturmführer. It was a straight gangland snatch and shooting. The coup de grâce at one metre for misbehaviour.’
In other words, pushing the right bell at the wrong time! ‘Done with an eleven millimetre service revolver, Préfet?’ sang out Kohler like a buzzard trying to pick the bones before the lions closed in.
Talbotte shrugged magnanimously. Yielding a little information could not matter. A gram or two of the flesh so as to discover why Kohler had shown up unannounced. A little of the blood.
‘Yes, yes, an eleven millimetre most probably. Ballistics are still working on it.’
‘After four days? Hey, that’s a typical Resistance gun, my friend. I’d better jot that down and let the chief know of it.’
‘Nom de Jésus-Christ, now wait a minute! We are not sure of this.’ Talbotte turned to the others and raked them with a hiss. ‘A moment, you understand? Let me deal with this one personally.’
Clapping his fedora on one of the Venuses and throwing his overcoat over the other, the préfet launched himself down the stairs with both fists at the ready. Blue serge suit and tie and all the rest. Dressed like a banker too.
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