Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  At noon a wet snow clung to everything and the black overcoats of forty years ago were as glued to it in misery. The heart of Tours, its life, its beauty, its charm had been charred and gutted. Down by the Paris-Bordeaux bridge, the white-stone, blackened wall of a sixteenth-century mansion still retained the sumptuous foliage of Renaissance carvers. Gallo-Roman walls and medieval graveyards had been thrown up as by the hand of a demented archaeologist. Twelfth-, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century half-timbered houses had simply been consumed.

  ‘Incendiaries,’ breathed Kohler sadly. ‘Stukas.’

  Düsseldorf, London, Abbeville, Köln and many more cities and towns had had their firestorms of varying severity. It was still happening. Gone were the quaint little crooked streets where a person could delight in echoes of the past. For three days and nights the city had burned. On 21 June 1940 the provisional government which had fled to here, journeyed to Compiégne to sign the Armistice in the very same railway coach that, twenty-two years earlier, had seen Germany surrender.

  ‘Marianne loved this city. To her, our short honeymoon was the one great adventure of her life.’

  It would do no good to remind Louis of the Hauptmann Steiner. War was war. Lovers came and went. Friendships were instant, seldom lasting. ‘Cheer up, eh? We got here.’

  ‘Grâce â Dieu. Oh bien sûr, the Occupation has cleared the roads of traffic – you have said so yourself – but at 120 kilometres an hour, while passing a convoy in blinding snow, was it necessary to lean on the horn?’

  ‘There were only two convoys.’

  ‘Seven! Can you not count?’

  ‘Hey, relax, eh? I’ll make it right. I’ll buy you a pastis as soon as we can find a trough.’

  ‘It’s another of your alcohol-free days or had you forgotten that as well?’

  ‘I’ll use my Gestapo shield. I’ll threaten them.’

  It would do no good to argue. Hermann always had to have the last word. They turned left off the rue Nationale, passing through more devastation. Here the Wehrmacht had simply bulldozed the rubble aside and had dynamited the shakiest of walls. There were no glimpses of the Loire. It would be grey in any case. Marianne had loved bathing in it. She had laughed, had smiled at him and had said, ‘Tonight, Jean-Louis, we shall make us a baby.’

  It hadn’t happened then. He’d been summoned back to Paris and had been sent to the south, to Perpignan and yet another murder, the hatchet slayings of wild goats and equally wild women. ‘Ever since then I have ceased to trust shepherds,’ he said aloud, baffling his partner and causing Hermann to toss his head in alarm.

  ‘You think it too,’ said the Kripo. ‘They damned well lied, didn’t they – Nana Thélème and the Generalmajor Wehrle? There’s no prospector, nothing, Louis. That house he lived in was destroyed during the blitzkrieg!’

  Not so. On place Plumereau the ancient houses crowded close as if in defiance of centuries of human idiocy. Some were half-timbered, others faced with the white tufa common to Touraine. Beneath an unwelcoming sky, their dizzily pitched roofs fell to attic dormers above two storeys and ground-floor shops.

  The feet of nervous pigeons too hungry to escape were mired in wet snow. An old woman in black trickled scant crumbs she could not spare from a withered hand.

  Other people were about but tried to take no notice of the Citroën and its two occupants. A gazogène lorry perfumed the dank air with the pungency of green willow, the warren of tubes and cylinders on its roof banging and clanging as it farted its way across the square to disappear up a street.

  Timidly St-Cyr approached the woman. The Sûreté … Paris … she’d have noted both even though her back was still turned to them. ‘Madame …?’

  ‘Oui?’ she snapped, letting the last of the crumbs fall.

  ‘A Monsieur Jacqmain …’

  ‘What’she done?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Women. Fancy women. Late comings and goings. Whores if you ask me.’

  Ah merde … ‘We only want to know where he lives.’

  She jerked her head. ‘Above the Boucherie Leplat. Next to Au Petit Moka which has, alas, been closed for the Duration due to the extreme shortage of coffee for those of us who haven’t the money to afford it.’

  ‘What fancy women?’

  ‘Two from Paris. Très belles, très gentilles. The blonde went in at noon. The raven-haired one came by train and followed later. Then that one went out and into the marchand de couleurs of Monsieur Gabon.’

  It was too much to resist, and he sighed. ‘What did the raven-haired one buy?’

  Ah! she had their interest at last. ‘Flypapers in winter? Sufficient for six summers of infestation? And what, please, are decent citizens to do when the flies visit us again?’

  ‘Flypapers?’

  ‘Is that not just what I said?’ Madame Horleau waited for a suitable apology and when one didn’t arrive, she let the two of them have the last from her lips. ‘Monsieur Jacqmain has not left the house since the newspapers arrived from Paris, so I ask again, what has he done?’

  They started out. The pigeons scattered. People took notice but tried not to let on. Everywhere the air was suddenly of trouble.

  The house had a white, cut-stone façade, with its entry to the right. Directly above the butcher’s shop, there was a wrought-iron Louis Philippe railing that enclosed a narrow balcony behind which there were two tall, tightly shuttered French windows. On the floor above, there were equal but unshuttered windows. Then, as the roof climbed to its peak, there were two large attic dormers, side by side and also tightly shuttered.

  Beyond the hardware store next door, there was a hat factory with little business.

  ‘Louis, the flypapers … is it what I think?’

  ‘Perhaps but then … ah mais alors, alors, mon vieux, isn’t it a little too early to say?’

  ‘Not if he’s up and died of strychnine poisoning.’ An agony if true.

  Flypapers, the half-metre long pull-out coils of sticky brown celluloid which were hung from kitchen ceilings in summer, offered the greedy, the calloused, the intransigent and the jilted lover a ready means to an end. Boiled in water until it was all but dry, their last few remaining droplets were deadly.

  ‘Let’s ask Jacqmain,’ said St-Cyr. Hermann banged on the door but of course, there could be no answer, not after such thoughts.

  The flic on the beat was swift. They’d need the magistrate’s order. Kohler flashed his Gestapo shield and was about to kick the door in when the butcher came huffing out with a spare key.

  All others were prevented from entering. ‘We’ll be certain to consult you,’ soothed the Sûreté. ‘Certain!’ He slammed the door and locked it.

  Then they stood a moment in the entrance before the dished and hollowed steps of the staircase. Neither knew, really, what to expect.

  ‘The newspapers from Paris, Louis,’ said Hermann as he started up. ‘News of the Gypsy, the Ritz, the safe of Hans-Albrecht Wehrle, diamond buyer for the Reich.’

  ‘Nana Thélème and Gabrielle … both have not confided everything in us.’

  ‘Since when would women ever do that?’

  He was sitting in his study, had been looking fondly through a photo album but had set this carefully aside on top of the Paris papers. A much-used pair of field glasses, a water bottle, compass, loupe on its lanyard, sheath knife, match tin and cigarette case were also there.

  It was Louis who said, ‘Hermann, please go into the salon and have a little look around. Take no more of that benzedrine – I’ve been warning you it’s addictive and that your heart will pack it in when I need you most. You’re not flying a nightfighter over Stalingrad.’

  Always it was blitzkrieg for them, thought Kohler. ‘Why couldn’t the son of a bitch have been tidier?’

  St-Cyr could hear his partner throwing up into the kitchen sink. Hermann was just too tired of the sight of death. Afraid of it, haunted by it, the bodies of his two sons now frozen in the clay of Russia but still a c
onstant nightmare.

  The twin barrels of an old-fashioned Paradox elephant gun had discharged their number 4 calibre shots into the roof of Jacqmain’s mouth after which the head had simply disintegrated.

  The gun, which must weigh nearly ten kilos, had been propped against a partially opened upper drawer, Jacqmain holding the muzzle in his mouth.

  Recoil had splintered the wood and had caused the gun to hit a framed wall map of the Congo, shattering its glass and breaking a lamp.

  A single length of string was tied to the left trigger – Jacqmain had known from experience that cocking both hammers, though pulling only one trigger, would discharge the two. He must have run the string behind a front leg of the desk to give purchase.

  Powder smoke would have filled the air, the sound deafening – had no one heard it?

  Blood and brains had been sprayed across the wall behind the chair and on the ceiling too. An eagle, a honey guide, a francolin, stork and marabou all stared at the carnage through glass eyes.

  A grey parrot roosted on a perch above the desk, a former camp-friend no doubt.

  The soft-nosed slugs, each weighing more than a hundred grams, had embedded themselves in the ceiling timbers which were now exposed and freed of their centuries of plaster. There were patches of scalp whose short, iron-grey hair looked like some strange sort of fungal growth. There were teeth, bits of bone … The eye of the cinematographer in St-Cyr recorded everything. It helped. It gave distance. It fed that curiosity which was so necessary.

  ‘The Generalmajor Wehrle … his presence here, monsieur, it frightened you, did it not?’ he asked aloud. Always he had found talking to the victim and to himself helped. ‘You had had the assurances not just of Mademoiselle Thélème but of Gabrielle Arcuri. Two beautiful women. Both chanteuses. What, please, did you do with the money the Generalmajor paid you? You could not have deposited it all at once. There would have been far too many raised eyebrows. Ah! the neighbours – one of them at least – watched your every move.’

  It was now Wednesday the twentieth. The money had been paid out, and the diamonds collected, on Tuesday the twelfth.

  ‘850,000 francs,’ he muttered. ‘About one-tenth of the value. Among them there were 657 carats of Jagers, Top Capes and Capes. “An excellent haul,” the Generalmajor said.’

  The Paris papers were yesterday’s, and he must have got them in the late afternoon or early evening.

  Rigor had set in, and from the presence of the newspapers, it was clear enough Jacqmain had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. ‘Last night, then. A small supper, a glass of wine. Perhaps a brandy or two afterwards,’ he muttered, but Dutch courage would not have been needed. Many times you had faced the charging lion or tiger, the elephant too.’

  Yet he had been afraid of arrest.

  The money … a good portion of it … had still to be in the house, but where? Neither Nana Thélème nor Gabrielle could have taken it, could they? since the Generalmajor had come at 7 p.m. and at so late a time, he had been forced to spend the night in a hotel room, he’d said.

  But, had Gabrielle returned? Vouvray was near; the château of her mother-in-law, the Countess Thériault, a little closer. She could have come back easily, and would at least have called in to see René Yvon-Paul, her son.

  But had she come back here to take the money into safekeeping for Monsieur Jacqmain, and why, please, would he have entrusted it to her? Had he known her that well?

  Questions … there were always questions. Hermann could help with the search. ‘But I cannot ask him to enter this room again.’

  The figurine in the bell jar was of a classical nude, seated not on a stone bench but on some sort of creature, half lion, half hound. She was gazing questioningly to her left and rested that elbow on the creature’s head whose fangs were bared so that the snarl it gave was directed at the viewer.

  Executed in a fine, white alabaster, and perhaps in 1810, the piece was not valuable as such but curious only in that Monsieur Jacqmain had quite obviously admired it.

  The thing was on the satinwood writing-table in his bedroom and beneath a portrait of his mother. This young woman’s auburn hair was fashioned into a diadem from which silken wisps escaped. Her dress was of the belle époque. The ruffled neckline was low, the expression introspective, she was seated in a straight-backed chair that was all but hidden by the soft pink folds of her dress.

  There were other sketches, all of women, all clothed. Indeed, even with the figurine, Jacqmain’s bedroom could well have been that of his mother, of a woman of refinement. There was a dressing screen decorated with needlepoint vines and tropical birds on a black matt background. There was a sewing basket … no cosmetics, a hand mirror, no necklaces, rings or pins – Ah! he had not liked to dress up as his mother or as any other woman. There was nothing to suggest it.

  And still there was no sign of the money.

  There had been nothing in his bank book to record even a modest deposit. Simply the biweekly withdrawals of 350 francs in cash, a frugal life. Nor would the cash have been placed in a safe-deposit box – that would have been far too risky and by law, such a sum would have had to have been declared.

  Jacqmain had kept the diamonds in the house and must simply have put the money in the same place.

  When Hermann called down from the attic, St-Cyr went up with him to find those two rooms jammed with the still crated kit of a prospector whose safaris had been ended by the war.

  ‘Ah merde, where did he hide that money?’

  ‘Maybe he never had it, Louis. Maybe our Generalmajor promised to pay it but conveniently forgot, though he told us otherwise.’

  ‘Herr Max was a witness to what he said. Have you forgotten this?’

  ‘Not for a moment. Something’s not right. This thing is beginning to smell even worse than we thought.’

  ‘Happy hunting then.’

  ‘We’ll be here all night, have you thought of that?’

  ‘Of course. It’s all in a day’s work. When one finds the indicator minerals, one must search for the diamonds, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Piss off. Go on back to his bedroom but don’t take too long!’

  In a bedside table drawer there were two small albums of photographs. The first was of Nana Thélème as chanteuse and dance instructress or caught on the street with a friend or in some café, and it was obvious Jacqmain had been infatuated by her, for the album had been well thumbed. The second was far newer and of Tshaya, of Madame Lucie-Marie Doucette, wife of the Spade. All of the photographs revealed her without a stitch. Back and front, but there were more shots of the back. They were brutal photographs in the coldness of their portrayal which she had fiercely defied when facing the camera.

  ‘The house on the rue de la Bourde,’ breathed Kohler, having given up the search.

  ‘You go. I’ll continue looking.’

  ‘Not at those. Gabi might not like it.’

  ‘Then take them with you. They might help loosen a tongue since they could not have been taken without the madam of that place having agreed.’

  ‘And for payment, eh?’

  ‘Surely not 850,000 francs!’

  When he found a bullwhip made out of the grey and plaited hide from the belly of a ‘white’ rhino, St-Cyr began to think he understood the prospector’s secret desires.

  *

  The chambre de divertissements détachés of the house of the hesitant touch held a carpet and a well-padded, ancient armchair. An ashtray and champagne bucket were provided, as were a few cushions should the viewer need them to glue himself better to the eyepiece in the wall.

  A Défense de parler notice warned the client or clients to control any such urges. Kohler had seen it elsewhere on numerous occasions. A student of the maisons de tolérance, he looked only for what was unique.

  Madame de Bonnevies … ‘Madame Charlotte’ to her girls … was not happy. This perfumed battleship of fortitude was in trouble and knew it. She had broken the law on two counts
and he’d told her this straight off so as to level the playing field and save time.

  ‘Monsieur l’inspecteur,’ she huffed and whispered, teasing dyed red curls. ‘Lucie-Marie Doucette – this “Tshaya” you speak of – was intransigent and known to us by another name and with good papers. Mon Dieu, what was a poor, delicate creature such as myself to do with that one? She was rebellious, moody, deceitful, silent, wicked, cunning and utterly uncontrollable. Many times she had to be held down or tied so that the client could have the little moment he had paid for and not suffer the indignities of rejection and her fingernails.’

  ‘Or her teeth,’ breathed Kohler softly, causing Madame de Bonnevies to jerk her head as if struck.

  The ruby lips were pursed in defiance. Rouge rained from quivering cheeks. ‘The teeth, of course.’

  She was superb! Big, tough, all business and not in the least about to back down even if in trouble. ‘So Tshaya came to you in the summer of 1941 and on the run from deportation?’

  It had been and still was a criminal offence to hide such people. ‘In late August, or was it in the first week of September?’ she asked herself. ‘I … I did not know she was on the run. Her papers were perfect. Her name was …’

  ‘Yes, yes, but you saw profit in her ass.’

  Must he be so crude? ‘I saw profit in her body, yes.’

  ‘And Monsieur Jacqmain … we’ll get to why you allowed him into a lupanar that was reserved for the Reich, so don’t hold your breath. What was his reaction?’

  Even with the need to whisper this one was formidable. The scar down the left cheek from eye to chin was the mark of a duelling foil, or was it, perhaps, that of a rawhide whip? ‘All men have their bêtes noires, is that not so?’

  Their pet hates. ‘Mine’s not women who I feel need to be whipped.’

  ‘He … he liked to watch. He … he always said the scars, they … they relieved him of the agonies he felt towards his mother.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Ah! Inspector, is it that you also have visited such foreign parts and have become accustomed to tastes a mother would not wish to hear of her son?’

  She was roasting him now with those swift brown eyes of hers. ‘Explain yourself,’ he managed.