Salamander

by J. Robert Janes

  Of medium height, square and tough … ah Gott im Himmel, yes … the préfet was nearly sixty years of age. There was Basque blood in him somewhere …

  The swift, hard dark eyes of a gangster savaged the intruder. The bully, the street bastard and top cock of the dung heap, roared up to the mincemeat from Wasserburg and snorted garlic at him.

  ‘Why are you and that fart of yours not in Lyon?’

  ‘Oh that. We wrapped it up in style and slept all the way home on the train. Smooth as silk. We’re raring to go.’

  ‘So, where is Louis?’

  A smile would be best and the offering of a cigarette. ‘Busy.’

  ‘You shit! I don’t smoke with traitors, Kohler. Traitors!’

  The insult echoed. It crashed all around them, shocking Kohler. It referred to a previous case, a lesson he had not quite learned …

  ‘What happened in Vouvray was justice, Préfet. Justice! If you were anything of a cop and not so fucking corrupt and in bed with the SS and their friends, you’d know all about it.’

  This was heresy. The cigarette was still shaking. Clearly Kohler was terrified his confrères might still wish to punish him for far too zealous an attention to ‘justice’, especially when one of their own had been involved.

  And just as clearly the Resistance still thought his partner and friend—a known patriot—was a collaborator, ah yes!

  Talbotte wagged a reproving finger. ‘You should not have got the Organization Todt to repair Louis’s house, mon fin. This Resistance you speak of may well have planted the little bomb that accidentally killed Jean-Louis’s fornicating wife and child instead of himself but they will come back if I should give the nod, eh? The nod.’

  The shit. Louis’s wife had been fooling around behind his back but had decided to come home.

  ‘The explosion took out all the windows,’ breathed Kohler, ‘to say nothing of smashing up the front of the house and getting his neighbours angry at him for costing them their windows too.’

  ‘Which you had the Todt replace as well, and at cost to yourself.’

  ‘So what? It was personal.’

  Talbotte lit up and blew smoke through flaring nostrils. Kohler’s French was really very good. ‘So out of charity to the two of you, let us agree to co-operate a little, eh? Let us show the good will among police forces so that your Führer will be pleased.’

  The hypocritical bastard! Kohler chanced an uncertain glance up the stairs to the spellbound audience. The préfet’s gaze never left him. Hooded under thick black brows, the eyes waited.

  A shrug would have to do. Louis wouldn’t like it but … ah what the hell. ‘So, okay, let’s co-operate. How many held the place up?’

  Still the eyes didn’t shift.

  ‘First you tell me why you are interested in this affair?’

  ‘My chief …’

  Talbotte flicked ash at him. ‘Your chief, as you call him, was just here. The Sturmbannführer Boemelburg is convinced the terrorists had nothing to do with the matter because, Inspector, I have said so and what I say goes.’

  ‘Bon. So, how many were involved? Three … was it three? One to watch the street, one to hold the gun on the employees and the last to …’

  ‘I’m still waiting, Inspector. Why have you such an interest in something that can concern you not in the slightest!’

  The sparrows on the mezzanine hadn’t moved. The Venuses gazed sublimely down upon the world … ‘All right. A small affair. A girl is missing. She may have seen something.’

  ‘A girl. So, good. Yes, that is good. Now a little more, I think.’

  ‘Her name, eh? You first. Were there three men or was there a woman with them?’

  ‘This girl, perhaps?’ asked the Chief of Police pleasantly enough. ‘Please, is this what you wish to know, Inspector?’

  Ah Gott im Himmel, the bastard … ‘Just, was there a woman with the men who robbed this bank?’

  Talbotte filled his lungs with smoke and held it in only to release it slowly through the nostrils as a dragon would before eating a peasant and his pig.

  ‘Then ask someone else but do so in the street.’

  The fingers were snapped, the voice thrown back over a shoulder and up the stairs. ‘You and you, accompany the inspector to his car and switch on the ignition for him. If he resists, give the sieve to his brand-new radiator and abort the tyres to remind him that in Paris it’s not only the gangsters who do things properly!’

  The birds took wing, drawing their guns as they came down the stairs.

  The banker blinked and wiped sweat from a worried brow. Now why was that? wondered Kohler. A banker in trouble after the fact!

  Out on the street, he grinned and said, ‘Okay, okay, you win, eh, until we meet again.’

  The custodian of the gates to the garden of the Palais Royal couldn’t remember seeing anyone remotely resembling Joanne Labelle. ‘In here, a girl like that?’ he said. ‘Ah no, no, Inspector. I would most certainly be aware of such a one.’

  You snob! grimaced St-Cyr, disliking the man intensely for looking down on the citizens of his beloved Belleville but nodding in agreement several times. ‘How stupid of me. A girl like that in a place like this …’ He waved the snapshot Dédé had given him. ‘Other girls perhaps but not such a one as her, especially as there were ten degrees of frost and the garden would have been all but deserted.’

  Vincent Girandoux drew himself up until his dark blue cap with the gold braid and badge of authority all but touched the roof of his tiny kiosk. ‘Inspector, the domestics aren’t appreciated in the garden. Nannies are, of course, and the nurses, the companions of the elderly ladies who live here but …’ He teased a cuff of his dark blue greatcoat with gold braided epaulets and brass buttons down a bit. ‘But if the tenants thought for a moment …’

  ‘That you were disloyal? Now listen, she was not someone’s mistress. She was …’

  The dark horn-rimmed bifocals leapt. ‘I didn’t say anything about mistresses!’

  ‘Okay, okay, so those are all more classy. Please, I come from Belleville myself, eh? She’s just a girl we are looking for.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That doesn’t concern you but … Ah but if she’s been murdered, it’s entirely possible we’ll have to summon you to testify.’

  ‘Murdered … Here? Let me see the snapshot again. Why doesn’t she wear an overcoat and galoshes?’

  The photo had been taken in the fall of 1940. ‘Imagine her in a beige double-breasted overcoat with the collar turned up. Give her a golden yellow mohair scarf from Hermès, monsieur, and a cocoa-brown beret. Gloves of brown suede—pre-war of course— and most probably not winter boots but rubbers over shoes with medium heels. Pumps.’

  ‘Silk stockings?’

  The quality of the scarf had done its work. ‘Perhaps. Yes, it’s entirely possible but, like the rest, they would have come from long before this war.’

  ‘Then the clothes would have been handed down.’

  Their eyes met. The detective waited, then said guardedly, ‘Hand-me-downs and recently made over yet again to suit, yes. They were my first wife’s and I gave them to the girl’s mother in the spring of 1934 when that first wife left me because she could no longer stand the nights and days of never knowing if I would return from work alive. She just walked out and left, and one day I came home to find her gone.’

  Had it been a warning, wondered Girandoux and if so, was it but an affair of foolishness then, this matter of the girl? The affectation of one who had adopted the position of surrogate father or ‘uncle’. ‘The girl was afraid, Inspector. I noticed the coat, the scarf and gloves, yes. She was quite handsome but …’

  ‘When … At about what time? Please be as precise as possible.’

  ‘At … at about 1.15 or 1.20 perhaps.’

  About half an hour after the robbery. ‘And she was afraid?’

  ‘Yes. A frown, the constant looking back over her shoulder. Once a pause beneath the trees to wat
ch the gate for a few minutes. Five, I think. Then again under one of the arches, and once more from the arcade in front of the shop of Monsieur Meunier, the engraver.’

  ‘Please, this shop, which is it?’

  A Pétainiste through and through, a man who liked order above all else, Girandoux removed a black leather glove to place a forefinger on the plan of the garden that was tacked to the wall precisely in front of the plain wooden table and chair that were the sole furnishings of his office, apart from a calendar whose days had been meticulously X’d.

  ‘It’s at number 27, Inspector.’

  Directly across the gardens from the house …

  Perhaps the frost was the cause of the moisture in the detective’s eyes, thought Girandoux, perhaps the knowledge that the girl had quite possibly been followed and most certainly must have known of this.

  ‘Was she with the Resistance, Inspector?’ he hazarded. One never knew quite what to say in these times.

  A copy of the Paris weekly Je Suis Partout was sticking out of the worn leather briefcase on the floor. The lunch packet was empty.

  Pro-Nazi and violently anti-Third Republic, the weekly reflected the views of such fascists as this one, thought St-Cyr. The lighted candle would give the illusion of warmth. The black-out curtain was drawn.

  ‘Inspector …’

  ‘Yes, I understand perfectly, Monsieur Girandoux, custodian of the gates to the garden of the Palais Royal. Is it that you’ve missed out on the reward of 100,000 francs by not notifying our German friends of such a suspicious character? If she had been apprehended, and if forced to confess, then of course the money would have been paid and you could rest a good deal easier knowing you had rid the world of such a terrorist. But, ah but, you see, monsieur, she wasn’t of the Resistance, was not even suspected of such of thing.’

  The man heaved a grateful sigh. St-Cyr thought to ask further questions—they desperately needed to know what had happened— but he couldn’t bring himself to do so and was angry his feelings should intrude so harshly.

  Without another word, he snuffed out the candle and left the bastard in the dark.

  Meunier, the engraver, was more co-operative and with good reason. To the quiet, steady trade of engraving cigarette cases and bits of silver and gold for German officers, had been added the engraving of embossed and gilded notices for official receptions and calling cards. ‘Beautiful paper, tireless and exquisite workmanship,’ said St-Cyr. ‘I commend you, m’sieur, and your son. That is your son in the workshop, is it not?’

  It was. ‘His chest, Inspector. The lungs are not very good.’

  ‘So, free of the call-ups of ’39 and ’40, and free of the forced labour in the Reich.’ There would be an exemplary doctor’s certificate stating absolutely that the boy’s health wouldn’t for a moment allow such activities.

  The speckled, grey-black, neatly trimmed aristocratic beard didn’t move. The dark eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses were limpid.

  ‘I’ve nothing to hide, Inspector. This,’ Meunier indicated the displays, ‘is but a living. Were I to have shut up the shop of my great-grandfather and gone south into the Free Zone, I would simply have forfeited everything. Is that not so?’

  It was, for the Germans would have taken over and sold what they could or rented the shop to someone else and pocketed the rent, since that had been one of the first ordinances of the Occupier. Get back to work or else.

  Meunier had been bent over his desk patiently working on a copper plate, with an array of wooden-handled engraving tools before him and a jeweller’s glass to one eye. Now he reached for his jacket and, putting it on, buttoned it up over a grey vest and waited. The shop was warm, a rarity in these days of so little coal. A bad sign, since it implied outright collaboration.

  The son tried to continue to operate a small hand-press. A notice in heavy bond for the Kommandantur perhaps, or the SS over on the avenue Foch since it was the holiday season.

  ‘A small matter, monsieur,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Did either of you see this girl on Thursday last at about 1.20 p.m?’

  The engraver didn’t even look at the snapshot.

  ‘Is it about the house of Monsieur Vergès, Inspector?’

  ‘Monsieur Vergès?’

  ‘Yes. Directly across from us. The girl studied the house for some time, then entered the shop to ask whose it was. Monsieur Vergès hasn’t been back since the exodus of June 1940. I told the girl there couldn’t possibly be anyone there and that she must have the wrong address.’

  To offer information so readily was just not usual, especially not in these desperate times. ‘And how did she react to what you said?’ asked St-Cyr cautiously.

  ‘Distressed. Flustered. At first certain that I hadn’t told her the truth, then casting anxious looks through the windows towards the house. This … this morning when Paul arrived to open the shop, he … he noticed the curtains had been removed. Has something …?’

  ‘Ah yes, the curtains. The house is empty.’

  ‘Empty, but …’

  ‘But what, m’sieur?’

  ‘But … but Monsieur Vergès can’t have sold it, Inspector? The house has been in his family for generations. He swore he would never do so even though his only son is one of the droolers and was never allowed to show his face here.’

  One of the droolers … les baveux. A special branch of the gueules cassées, the broken mugs of World War I whose faces had been horribly mutilated by shrapnel and the bullets of snipers and machine guns.

  Without a lower jaw, or only a part of it and often no lips, one drooled constantly and wore always a towel around the neck to catch the saliva.

  ‘Surely Paris and the garden could have been allowed the son, monsieur?’

  The detective had obviously been a soldier himself.

  Reading the engraver’s mind was easy. ‘A sergeant in the Signals Corps,’ said St-Cyr guardedly. ‘I’ve seen so many of them, monsieur. Begging in the streets. Shut up because … ah because one’s family and friends soon became so ashamed of the gah-gahing, they turned their backs on those heroes and loved ones in revulsion.’

  And you’re still bitter about it, thought Meunier, warning himself to go carefully. ‘Monsieur Vergès is the kindest of men, Inspector. The boy was to have been married but when his fiancée saw what had happened to his face, she screamed in terror and ran from him, refusing absolutely to have anything more to do with him.’

  A quite common response and quite understandable though regrettable. ‘So, let us proceed to the matter of the house and the girl in this snapshot. Did she stay with you long?’

  Meunier hesitated, but immediately regretted doing so and was flustered. ‘Ah, not long, Inspector. She asked again about the owner of the house and left in a hurry.’

  ‘But … but she thought she was being followed?’

  ‘Followed? Pardon?’

  Was it such a catastrophe?

  Swiftly Meunier went to close the door to the workshop and shut out his son. Then he came back to stand on the other side of the counter. ‘She said nothing of being followed, Inspector. Nothing!’ he hissed.

  ‘And did you not sense this?’

  ‘No, I did not. I saw a girl who didn’t belong in a place like this and had obviously been given an incorrect address, a girl who couldn’t understand that such a mistake had been made. When I told her the owner wasn’t there, she showed me a letter she had received in answer to an advertisement she had found in Le Matin.’

  So, the fish is fresh, thought St-Cyr. Now for the sauce. ‘And what did the letter say? Come, come, monsieur, an answer is required.’

  ‘That … that she was indeed to go to that address. This I cannot understand, Inspector, but at the time, I said there still must be some mistake as I hadn’t seen Monsieur Vergès in over two-and-a-half years.’

  ‘And do you think she went to the house?’

  As if the confrontation were over, Meunier began to relax. ‘Of that I have no idea. She left without tha
nking me and I paid not the slightest attention until …’

  ‘Ah yes. Until your son told you the curtains had been taken down.’

  ‘Yes, not until then,’ came the testy reply.

  ‘And were the curtains there yesterday?’ asked St-Cyr cautiously.

  ‘It was Sunday, Inspector. Though we’re very busy, the Lord’s Day is sacred.’

  ‘Saturday then?’

  What has happened in that house? wondered Meunier. ‘Yes, the curtains were there on Saturday. I myself saw them and can swear to this.’

  Then there’s no need for me to speak to your son, is that it? thought St-Cyr. ‘Tell me about this Monsieur Vergès, monsieur. Where does he live?’

  ‘Near Provins. He has a house there which has been in his family for over two hundred years.’

  ‘A house. A château?’

  Meunier thought a pause would be best. He would draw himself up. ‘I really wouldn’t know, Inspector. One never asks.’

  ‘Come, come, m’sieur. Monsieur Vergès would have used your services on a number of occasions, especially to announce the engagement of a son.’

  Ah damn the Sûreté and their meddling! ‘Le Château des belles fleurs bleues.’ The Château of the Beautiful Blue Flowers.

  Lupins probably, or violets along the wooded banks of the Seine. ‘And the name of the fiancée who ran away?’

  ‘Angèlique Desthieux, but surely that business happened so long ago, it’s of no consequence?’

  It would be best to give the engraver a moment and then to quietly tell him, ‘In crime everything is of consequence. The announcement, please. You will still have a copy of it.’

  Desthieux … It rang no bells until Meunier just happened to say, ‘She was a mannequin for one of the top fashion houses. Freelance also.’

  A mannequin … Starded, the detective threw him a look of savage puzzlement. ‘She was what?’ he demanded.

  Unsettled, Meunier thought to shrug the matter off. ‘Oh, she was from before that other war, Inspector. Very beautiful, very elegant. Tall and slender, with long chestnut hair and large dark brown eyes … Monsieur Vergès’s son was very much in love with her. I used to see them strolling in the garden from time to time. It was the young Monsieur Gaetan who, at his father’s wish, asked us to do the announcement.’