‘He has a temper,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘If she’s dead, he will simply have left her for us to find and will claim he knows nothing of it.’
The rue Nollet was perfect. Les Batignolles was in the seventeenth arrondissement and largely industrial. One of the city’s garment districts, it had formerly been a quiet little village but had suffered repeated incursions of slum-housing.
The huge railway depot and switching yard that serviced the whole of the Occupied North was but a street away and offered unparalleled chances for escape. Not far to the south, and in line with the yards, were those of the Gare Saint-Lazare. The quartier de l’Europe was to the east; the Club Monseigneur not far.
‘The citizens of this district have a total allergy to authority and a complete aversion to the police,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘That is why all attempts have failed to find her.’
Even the reward of 100,000 francs hadn’t been claimed, Je suis partout were co-operating but could only say that they had received the news by telephone.
‘He knocks off the Ritz on the night of the eighteenth, then fades up the rue de la Paix to Cartier’s where Tshaya is waiting for him,’ snorted Kohler. ‘Then the two of them knock it off and hit the ticket office of the Gare Saint-Lazare.’
‘After which they simply fade away to here and let the police and everyone else hunt for them.’
‘Then the son of a bitch boldly hangs around the Gare Saint-Lazare waiting for me to blow myself up!’
That had been in the small hours of Wednesday, and afterwards the Gypsy had gone on to the Gare de l’Est to knock off the pay-train before the curfew had ended.
Fifteen or so hours later, they had emptied the wall safe of the villa in Saint-Cloud.
‘Their timing’s perfect, Hermann.’
‘And they still have plenty of explosives.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No you won’t. You’ll try to look after Giselle and Oona if anything happens.’
A knock on the windscreen was soft, though it had the sound of finality about it.
‘Au revoir, mon vieux,’ breathed Kohler.
Hermann’s grip was far from firm. ‘À bientôt, mon ami. Bonne chance.’
St-Cyr got out of the car to silently close its door. Standing in the darkness and the freezing cold, he looked up at the house and wondered what awaited his partner. Another tripwire, another bomb?
Gabrielle and Nana and Suzanne-Cécilia were now all being held at the Neuilly villa. They would not be allowed to talk to one another and would be kept completely separate.
‘But will they try to escape?’ he said quietly to the night. ‘If so, Herr Max will be waiting for just such a thing.’
From where she stood behind her door, Gabrielle could see the head of the main staircase. The corridor was well lit. There were lights on in the foyer below. Apparently the house slept, but she could not understand why she hadn’t been locked in.
It was suicidal to try to escape, suicidal to stay. Jean-Louis and Hermann would find the house at 15 rue Nollet. Both would be only too aware of what Henri Doucette would do to Tshaya. And then? she asked, and closed the door to let its bolt click softly back in place. ‘And then they will find the truth but will they accept it?’
Henri Doucette would want Tshaya to tell him where the Gypsy was hiding, but more than this, he would want her to tell him where the loot was hidden. And Tshaya, Jean-Louis? she asked. What will Tshaya do if she wants to get back at that husband of hers before she and the Gypsy vanish into thin air?
Would she not have notified je suis partout, knowing such a notice would be certain to bring him to her and that he would have been forewarned of it by one of the reporters and would tell no one of it until he had had a chance to get to her?
The house at number 15 had been condemned, the notice on the door was all too clear. For the acts of terrorism committed by the son, André Lemercier, in place Bellecour on 14 and 17 October in the city of Lyon … All members of the boy’s immediate family had been taken. The house had been sealed, and so much for the folly of committing terrorism.
There was no mention of what the boy had actually done. Kohler tried the door and found it opened easily. Nudging it, he stepped inside.
Freezing, the place smelled of mould and dampness. All the furnishings had been taken. The bastards had even unscrewed and removed the coat-rack in the foyer and the light fixture. A door led straight ahead, another to his left, a third opened on to a staircase whose steps, when he shone the torch up them, looked uninviting.
He searched the wainscoting for tripwires, searched for steps whose boards had been pulled loose and put back, turned the torchlight so that it shone up at the ceiling above himself. There was nothing up there … not a damned thing that he could see, ah merde …
The first step was solid but deeply worn. The faded wallpaper was peeling. The second step was as solid as a rock, and so was the third one. Confident, he found the fourth step suddenly giving way beneath his weight. He was caught and dropped the torch, cried out softly, ‘Verdammt!’
No bomb exploded. Apprehensively he looked up the stairwell, thinking Tshaya or Doucette would be up there but no one came. No one.
The door up there was still closed, half lost in the gloom.
He ran his fingers over the next step, felt the nails in place and chanced it. Progress was painfully slow. No flask of nitro dangled from the ceiling of the stairwell. No detonator had been wired to sticks of leaking dynamite. There wasn’t the smell of it. Was the place clean of explosives?
The Lemercier family had occupied the first storey. Making his way from room to room, Kohler picked out those in which they had eaten, slept or relaxed. He could imagine the heavy, stuffed armchairs with their lace antimacassars, the ashtrays. The outlines of the pictures that had hung on the walls were there, those of the crucifixes too. The water closet was nothing but a bucket under the kitchen sink. Ah Christ!
There was a second and a third storey which had been let to others and in their rooms the smells were different.
Now only the garrets remained. Louis, he said silently to himself. Louis, I don’t like this.
He heard a noise below him. He thought that it must be his partner but neither of them had a gun. Those had been taken from them at the Ritz’s swimming pool.
The garret at the head of the stairs, he told himself and, looking up at the attic’s door, shone the torch fully on it. But was there a bomb? Had she wired herself in? And who the hell had let Je suis partout know about her hiding here? Who unless … Ah maudit! had it been herself who had told them?
St-Cyr could hear nothing. The darkness was absolute. The fronts of opposing houses on either side of the street tended to shut one in. No stars shone from above.
‘Louis …’
A side window of the Daimler had been rolled down a fraction. ‘Yes, Walter?’
‘Get in there and see what’s taking that partner of yours so long.’
The stairs were steep. One of the steps had been broken. Hermann had never let anyone hear him if he hadn’t wanted them to. Had he been so nervous he had become careless?
When he reached the garret, St-Cyr switched off his torch in alarm. Drunkenly the beam of Hermann’s torch shone across a barren floor. There was no sound, only the smell of charred wood and burnt flesh. Ah nom de Dieu …
Hermann was on his hands and knees. He had tried to vomit but had had nothing to throw up. His hat had fallen off. The collar of his greatcoat was up.
‘Merde, mon vieux, you have given me a scare,’ said St-Cyr gently as he took his friend by the shoulders and felt the splash of tears.
‘In … in the next room. I can’t take any more of this, Louis. I want out. I want to take Giselle and Oona to Spain, to live like decent human beings.’
‘Stay here – here, sit with your back to the wall. Switch off your torch. Save the batteries. You know how difficult it is for us to get replacements.’
Frisking him, and hims
elf, St-Cyr at last found what was needed, and lighting the bent and crumbling cigarette, placed it between his partner’s lips.
‘You’ve been holding out on me,’ came the complaint, a good sign.
‘Only for the emergency of emergencies. You’re having a breakdown. You know that, don’t you? Try to be calm.’
Kohler motioned with a hand and gasped, ‘In there, like I told you. Look for yourself. It’s … it’s been cleaned.’
There were no bombs – Hermann had forced himself to check it out thoroughly. The garret was the equal of the other one but when the beam of the torch fled from the window to the floor, rats scurried away. ‘Ah merde!’ exclaimed St-Cyr as the sickly sweetness hit him. Henri Doucette was spread-eagled on the floor. His wrists and ankles were tied to ringbolts. The light fled over a patchwork of horribly charred and blistered skin where fluid-filled encrustations had become glued to the tatters of clothing and then frozen.
Rigor had set in. He’d been dead at least a day. Lengths of a rawhide whip had been used to tie him down. Anointed with cognac, he had been set afire and had been allowed to scream.
But not to see.
‘A skewer,’ St-Cyr heard himself saying, detached and remote, for this was murder. ‘His killer used a skewer to blind him, Hermann. Is this what caused you to be so ill?’
From the darkened corridor came the broken response. ‘That and … and the rats.’
The cognac bottle had been left near the corpse. It was empty and one look at the blistered, encrusted face with its gaping mouth and eye sockets, told St-Cyr the killer had forced Doucette to drink.
Then she – had it really been Tshaya? he asked, for he had always to question such things – had found a match and had sat back to look at the victim before striking it. Had he been tormented first with the skewer? Had the killer then provided another mouthful of cognac? The Gypsy … had it been De Vries who had done it?
Revenge.
The skewer had been stabbed into the floor next the head. No attempt had been made to hide the thing. It was simply from a kitchen and would have been readily available in most households. ‘But why put out his eyes, Hermann? Did hatred run so deep, or did the killer not want him to see something should death fail?’
‘Don’t they skewer the eyes of live rabbits in the markets of the Loire?’ blurted Kohler shrilly from the darkness of the corridor. ‘Don’t the peasants swear it makes the poor things taste better?’
How could you French do such a thing? – the accusation was very clear. Hermann had a file as big as a mountain in that brain of his about all things French and the curious. In 1850 a law had been passed forbidding such cruelty but it had been found unenforceable.
‘Well?’ he demanded.
Tshaya had worked in a brothel in Tours and would have seen or heard of such a thing. ‘Yes. Yes, they still do it but now, of course, rabbits are so very hard to come by.’
‘But do they taste better?’
‘Did she tell the Spade she was doing it for the sake of the rats?’
‘You know that’s what she’d have said!’
‘Go downstairs, Hermann. Immediately! Tell Boemelburg we’ve got a murder on our hands and that I will have to go over this place thoroughly.’
‘She did it, Louis. Don’t get to thinking otherwise. We haven’t time.’
‘Of course, but then … ah mais alors, alors, mon vieux, the cognac.’
‘What the hell’s the matter with the cognac?’
‘Nothing. It must have been superb. A Bisquit Vieille Réserve, VVSOP and fifty or more years in the cask for the youngest of its crus, the youngest, Hermann.’
‘So, what’s the problem?’
‘Tshaya. Wouldn’t any marc have done as well? Why choose something so fine and rare? Why not use something cheap and rough and easily obtainable, since it would burn just as well and for just as long?’
‘Are you trying to tell me Tshaya had expensive tastes?’
‘No. I am simply saying that not everything is as one would think it should be.’
9
The last of the papier-mâché balls went into the kitchen stove. Alone, cold and deeply troubled – afraid, yes – St-Cyr brought the lighted taper to the bowl of his pipe, but chopped blotting paper, sun-dried herbs, sawdust, carrot tops and beet greens were no substitute for tobacco.
‘Diable!’ he cried, and spitting furiously several times, cleaned out the pipe and laid it on the table, another failed experiment in what the Occupation had produced, a nation of experimenters.
The house, he had to admit, was lonely without the veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper who could, in moments, bubble with laughter or play the imp only to become serious. A terrorist, a résistant.
Suddenly he remembered the book he had taken from her shelf and cursed himself for having carried it all this time. Page by page he burned it, watching the flames but seeing her standing between the cages of poisonous snakes, ready to kill herself.
Three women, all very intelligent and resourceful but desperate and driven to extremes – each asking what they could possibly do to save themselves when … when, really, nothing could be possible.
That business in the house on the rue Nollet was not right. Oh for sure Tshaya would hate the Spade and would want to kill him but would she have taken such a risk as to notify Je suis partout ahead of time, knowing only he would come and not with others? At the least, she would have requested a private meeting there ahead of time and would have notified the paper later. And where, please, had the Gypsy been? In hiding, in a forest somewhere, among old ruins and in an encampment known only to other gypsies who were now with him, or in Paris at the killing with Tshaya? It must have taken at least two persons to have forced Doucette to lie on the floor like that and then to have tied him to the ringbolts. A gun would have been necessary also.
The leather binding of La Cryptographie Nouvelle refused to burn – the fire was simply not hot enough. The gilded letters on the spine remained, a damning indictment should they be found.
Cutting them off the charred leather, he ate them – it was the only thing to do. The ground outside was frozen solid, the drains could be opened and searched …
‘We were in Tours,’ he said so silently no Gestapo bug could have picked it up. ‘On Wednesday the twentieth we were away from Paris and on Thursday also, until 0500 hours Friday.’
Early on that Wednesday, before the curfew had ended, the Gypsy and Tshaya had robbed the pay-train at the Gare de l’Est. Then on the night of that same Wednesday or early on the Thursday they had cleaned out the wall safe of Nana’s former villa.
After the Gare de l’Est robbery, Tshaya and the Gypsy could have lain up in the house on the rue Nollet but search as he had, there had been no conclusive evidence of this.
Fighting sleep, he sat down at the table to strip the leather from the boards and to cut it into digestible shreds. ‘I can’t be the cause of her arrest,’ he said, but wondered how she had hidden the wireless set so well, no one had been able to find it.
And what of Gabrielle? he asked. A handkerchief had been dropped in the powder magazine at the quarry but this could just as easily have been done by accident on the first visit, on the thirteenth. On Thursday, the twenty-first, she had been returned to Paris by the Gypsy and the résistants who had taken her car and had immediately informed the police of what had happened. As much as twelve flasks of nitroglycerine and at least two cases of dynamite were missing but how much had been taken on her first visit with Nana? One flask and a few sticks, or all the rest as well?
The Gypsy had run out of nitro by the time they had encountered him at the house on the rue Poliveau. Nitro was far more portable and therefore preferred but now … did he have all he needed or had she lied to the police? Had there never been a second trip? Had they simply held back on the explosives, storing them for De Vries? Hermann and he had seen no tyre tracks, no evidence of that second visit, but, yes, the Gypsy could easily have come and gone. T
hen why had he not left a surprise for them, especially since he had been trying to kill them?
And what of Nana? he asked. Nana had had one of the revolvers from the Gare Saint-Lazare in her purse but had claimed she’d not been given a chance to tell Herr Max about it. Another good citizen unjustly wronged, but where, please, were the other two Lebels that had been taken during that robbery?
None of them had confided much. Indeed, the lies and half-lies had been piling up to screen the whole thing. Henri Doucette would have been a threat to them. He’d have held back from letting Herr Max know everything. Tshaya could well have told the Spade things Nana and the others couldn’t have him repeating.
Certainly the murder implicated Tshaya. Certainly it would send a definite message to the Gestapo of the rue Lauriston and to all such types. It would say exactly how great had become the hatred of them. But had it been Tshaya who had killed him?
Still deeply disturbed by the murder and by the horror of it, he sadly shook his head but spoke aloud and softly. ‘Tshaya must have obtained the cognac during the villa robbery while with De Vries. The SS always drink the most expensive stuff since they don’t have to pay for it.’
From the rue Nollet to Saint-Cloud was half-way and some across the city, easy enough if the Gypsy had had a car and had been able to hide it safely. But in her statement to the police Gabrielle had sworn that just after curfew on Thursday morning she had been forced to drive De Vries to the quarry. They had used her car. Tshaya had had the flu and had not been able to go with them.
Only the coroner could give a reliable estimate of the time of the Spade’s murder, but had Doucette been killed when Hermann and himself had been in Tours on Wednesday?
By then Nana had come face to face with Doucette not only at the Avia Club but at the party in her former villa on the eleventh. She had also talked to the Spade’s latest pigeon who must have been at the party too.
Tshaya had been at that affair. The cognac could have been taken then, her mind set in its intention to kill.
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