Kaleidoscope

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Molotov cocktails?’ asked the Frenchman.

  Kohler shook his head and nudged the bandanna farther up on a nose that had been broken several times in the course of duty and elsewhere. ‘More subtle than that. Two women were seen entering together. One carried a woven rush bag large enough for the shopping.’

  ‘And those two women?’

  The Bavarian’s gaze didn’t waver. ‘Seen leaving in a hurry, Louis, just as the fire struck. They were the first to get out.’

  ‘Two women.’

  ‘Yes. They came in late, and the usherette found them seats at the very back, the right aisle, left side, nearest the aisle.’

  ‘It’s not possible. No woman would do this, Hermann, and certainly not two of them.’

  ‘Then talk to the usherette. See if you can get any sense out of her. The poor kid’s still so deep in shock, she couldn’t even tell me her name. I told her to go home and think about it. All the others had buggered off. She alone had stayed.’

  Hermann was really upset. The faded blue eyes that could so often hold nothing but saw everything, were moist and wary. Frost tinged the strongly boned brow round the edges of its bandage—a bullet graze there from a last investigation and blood … blood everywhere, some still seeping through. Too worried to even change the dressing. Yes, yes, that last case and what it had revealed to him about the growing resistance to the Occupation. Provence and a hill village. Murder then and murder now, and no time to even take a piss. Just blitzkrieg, blitzkrieg, because that was the way the Germans wanted everything solved. No time even for Christmas and a little holiday.

  ‘We’ll leave the usherette for now, Hermann. The relatives will want the dead released for burial. It’s the least we can do.’

  Then you take this aisle, I’ll take the right one. Meet me in front of what’s left of the stage.’

  ‘Look for little things. House keys, cigarette lighters, bits of jewellery, brass buttons, anything that might let us get a feel for what really happened here. Then we will know better how to proceed.’

  ‘Guns?’

  ‘Yes, guns. They were railway workers. Communists. Resistants. Perhaps the fire was an act of vengeance after all.’

  ‘Gestapo Lyon wanting to get even, eh?’

  ‘Perhaps, but then …’

  Kohler snorted sarcastically. Always Louis couched things by saying Perhaps but then … mais alors … alors … And of course Gestapo Lyon could well have lit the bloody thing just for spite to nail a couple of Resistants yet would try their damnedest to blame it all on someone else!

  Worried about him, St-Cyr watched his partner and friend pick his way between the seats. No row gave easy access to the far aisle, but once committed, Hermann moved deliberately, stepping over a corpse, pausing to examine something. A big man with tired, frizzy hair that was not black or brown but something in between and greying fast. A man with the heart and mind of a small-time hustler. A petty thief when need be. These days, food and everything else was in very short supply and ration tickets often unavailable to one who was not a ‘good’ Gestapo but a damned good detective. Hermann lived with two women in Paris, so was always on the look-out for things. Unfortunately there was a third back home on her father’s farm near Wasserburg, the wife. But ‘his’ Gerda was suing him for divorce, having taken up with a conscripted French labourer, and the Gestapo’s Bavarian detective was feeling betrayed by his own kind. Ah yes. Gerda’s uncle was a big shot in Munich. Gerda’s uncle had pull enough to see that the divorce went through in spite of all the laws against such a thing. Problems … there were always problems and they had only just got word of the divorce.

  When a bit of roof came away, Hermann jerked his head up and froze in panic with a hand inside his overcoat, clutching the pistol in its shoulder holster.

  Yes, Hermann was just not himself. The German Sixth Army was surrounded at Stalingrad. In North Africa, the Americans had landed. It was only a matter of time until the Germans packed up and left, and they both knew it.

  Uneasy at the thought of their parting and what it might entail—a shoot-out perhaps, though they had become more than friends—St-Cyr went back to work. A child, a girl of six he thought, had tried to escape by worming her way under the seats. Her hair had caught fire, she had tried to get to her knees but one of the seats had held her down.

  The mother’s hand was still firmly about the child’s slender wrist. She’d been racing to reach the daughter, had gone down on all fours and had scrambled between the next two rows of seats only to flatten herself as the fire had swept over them, and to reach out to the child.

  The ice that encased her body had cracked. A gossamer of dirty, whitish-grey lines now made an angular web over the charred back and blackened head.

  The child had been trying to reach the stage but had only got about one-quarter of the way. Had the mother seen her dive beneath the seats? Had she simply been searching madly for her daughter by the light of the flames and suddenly come upon her at the last moment?

  And why, please, had the child been here at all? La Bête humaine, madame? Marital infidelity and murder? Was there no one to look after your daughter, or did you think it necessary for her to see that railwaymen were really human? That among them there could be both good and evil, just as there is in any other class or occupation? That they, too, could lust and hate with passion?

  There was little left of the woman’s purse, no chance of readily determining her identity, though he knew her flesh and skin would be better preserved next to the floor and that if he turned her over, parts of her clothing might still remain.

  From across the bodies and the ice-encased wreckage, Kohler secretly watched as Louis tried to rationalize the child being with the mother. He’d be ‘talking’ to them, he’d be asking questions of the mother. Louis was stocky and tough, rarely belligerent and normally the diplomat even in very tight situations. Plump and chubby in the face, with the brown ox-eyes of the French and a broad, bland brow that brooked no nonsense. The hair was thick and brown and needing a trim, the scruffy moustache wide and thick. A fisherman, a gardener, a reader of books in winter when he could get the time, but now year round since fishing was no longer allowed under the decree of June 1940. Verboten to drop a line in the Seine of a Sunday. Verboten! Gott im Himmel, what had they been thinking of in Berlin when they’d written that decree? It had baffled the Bavarian half of their partnership as much as the French, and they both had had the idea then that this lousy war could not possibly last for ever. Take away the potatoes and you create, hunger; take away a man’s right to fish and eventually he’ll begin to question why.

  Against all odds, Louis and he had got on—common crime: murder, arson—oh yes, arson!—rape, extortion, kidnapping, et cetera, et cetera. None of the rough stuff—not that kind anyway. Not Gestapo brutality. Ah no. Only its witness in passing.

  Decidedly uncomfortable and uneasy at the memory of a naked seventeen-year-old girl horribly tortured by the Gestapo but a few days ago in Cannes, Kohler tried to put all thought of the French Resistance out of his mind. But as he searched among the wreckage, he had the thought his two sons would die at Stalingrad and he’d never see them again. Gerda would leave him, she’d get her divorce, and there’d be no one at home to run to when this whole sad business was over. He’d be tarred Gestapo along with all the rest. God forbid that Louis should still think, as he had at first, that their partnership would have to end in one of them killing the other.

  Ironically, there was a revolver lying under the ice, an old Lebel, Model 1873, a swing-out six-shooter exactly like the gun Louis still carried.

  ‘Ah, shit!’ swore Kohler, exhaling the words exasperatedly. ‘I forgot about his shooter and Louis didn’t remind me of it!’

  As the Gestapo member of the flying squad, Kohler was to keep their weapons under German control at all times. Well, at least until the shooting started and the time for questions was over.

  Swiftly Kohler sought him out again. Lou
is had gone back through one of the gaps in the rear wall and was now standing in what had once been the foyer. The grey light of day was louvered with shadow. Just his head and shoulders were visible beyond that tangled, horrible pile of humanity he was calmly studying. The brown felt trilby was yanked down over the brow for warmth and as a warning of determination. He’d get whoever had done this. One could read it in him in spite of his calmness.

  The head and shoulders vanished and Kohler realized that Louis hadn’t wanted to be seen just then.

  Merde again! ‘If we can’t trust each other, we’re done for,’ he said, muttering it to himself. With difficulty he freed the revolver and, looking about to see that he was unobserved, quickly pocketed the thing, determined to drop it in the nearest sewer.

  ‘There’s no sense our getting Gestapo Lyon all worked up. Hell, they’d only rip the town apart and shoot thirty or forty hostages we might need to question.’

  Kohler knew that if Louis had found the revolver he, too, would have hidden it away and said nothing of it, but Louis was French and had every reason to do so, whereas his partner was …

  When the revolver had disappeared, and Hermann had busied himself elsewhere, St-Cyr heaved a contented sigh. For a moment, he’d thought Hermann undecided. He was glad that they were beginning to think alike on this issue, but of course, Hermann might yet weaken and quite obviously there had been Resistants in the cinema. Railway workers were notoriously Communist, pro-Russian and therefore anti-German.

  Distracting himself from such an uncomfortable thought, for things would be far from easy if the presence of the Resistance was as obvious to others, St-Cyr went back to searching the ruins. There were rings of gold and those of silver. If anything, the fire had deepened the colour of the gold wedding bands, while that of the silver had either been dulled by oxidation or swept clean by the flames. One gold wedding band had fallen and rolled ahead of its owner and he wondered about a last act of contrition. An illicit love affair? The wedding ring removed and then … then the fire and the realization that the ring would have to be put back on the finger or else …

  He thought of Marianne, of how she must have removed the ring he’d given her on their wedding day. How she must have slipped it into a pocket only to guiltily put it back on when coming home late, satiated from the arms of her German lover. Yes, lover!

  But Marianne was dead and so was their little son Philippe, killed by mistake! A Resistance bomb that had been meant for him. Ah yes, they had had his number—still did for that matter. They thought him a collaborator because he worked under a German, a Bavarian, and for the enemy. What else was he to have done, eh? God had frowned, and God had not thought to tell the Resistance otherwise.

  With difficulty, he freed the ring and managed to force it back on the proper finger. He said to himself, Hermann was watching me just then. He has realized I’ve kept my gun and said nothing of it.

  There was one corpse whose hand still clutched the clasp knife the man had used to kill those around him in his struggle to get out. The blade was a good fifteen centimetres long and not exactly what he should have been carrying around. Ah no, most certainly not.

  Railwaymen! he said to himself. Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, how on earth were they to settle this business? How could they possibly hope to catch this … this maniac, this Salamander who had supposedly set the fire? Salamander, the telex from Mueller, Head of the Gestapo in Berlin, had read with all the brevity of a command from on high and all the warning too. ‘Find him before he kills too many more,’ Boemelburg had said in Paris. The Sturmbannführer Walter Boemelburg, Head of Section IV, the Gestapo in France. Hermann’s boss.

  Two women, not one man, a Salamander, had been seen. It made no sense to tell them so little yet expect them not only to find out everything in the space of one or two days—would they have that much time?—but also to put a stop to the arsonist or arsonists immediately.

  And how, please, had Berlin found out about it in the first place?

  Back inside the cinema, Kohler came upon what must have been a priest. Only the top of a richly jewelled cross protruded from tightly clasped hands that had been roasted. The corpse was jammed between two rows of seats and on its knees facing the foyer. A chain, of many links and stones, was wrapped around the right hand, and why must that God of Louis’s make him do things like this? Gingerly he broke the encasing ice away and teased the cross free. It came quite easily, the flesh clinging a little, but unravelling the chain was more sickening. His fingers trembled. His breath was held. He knew he was on to something.

  Rubies and sky-blue sapphires and diamonds … tiny fleurs-de-lis in gold … 150,000 marks? 175,000? Renaissance? Was it that old?

  No ordinary priest. The Bishop of Lyon’s secretary? he wondered. A cardinal perhaps or some ambassador from the Vatican? But why wear a thing like this to a film? Surely he must have known robbery was a distinct possibility?

  Had he come fearing the worst, the fire, and then knelt to pray it would not happen even as it did?

  All around him were the remains of dinner pails, boots, goggles and heavy leather-and-asbestos gauntlets, indicating that some of the men had only just come off shift from the marshalling yards in Perrache, right in the centre of the city not far from here and on the end of the tongue of land that lay between the Saône and the Rhône.

  Gestapo HQ Lyon was in the Hotel Terminus facing the Gare de Perrache, an uncomfortable thought. Questions … there were bound to be questions. The Resistance thing if nothing else. Verdammt!

  Two women and a priest, but no ordinary cleric. A large handbag woven out of rushes. A bag for the market, though nowadays market pickings were slim unless one dealt on the black market and had things to sell or trade.

  A telex from Mueller, an order from Boemelburg. Shit!

  Kohler sought the seats where the two women must have sat but, of course, they were now under a pile of humanity. Surely the priest could not have been looking their way. Not at the last. But had he known of them? Could it be possible?

  Pocketing the cross, he moved away, found a broken wine bottle and another dinner pail, wondered again at the avidness of the railwaymen. Clearly they’d all agreed to gather to see a favourite film, but since the film had first come out in 1938, presumably most had seen it already.

  Then why the gathering? he asked himself. Such meetings could only mean trouble.

  He began to search further. Nearly everywhere there was the rubbish of railwaymen or members of their families. The gun he had found weighed on his conscience and he experienced a spasm of cold panic. He saw again that girl in the cellars of the Hotel Montfleury in Cannes, saw the blood trickling from her battered lips and nose to join the swill of vomit and excrement on the floor. Dead … dead at such a tender age. She’d known nothing, hadn’t even been involved. Well, not really.

  ‘Hermann …’

  He leapt. ‘Louis, good Gott im Himmel, what the hell do you mean by startling me like that?’

  Ah mon Dieu, Hermann was really not himself! ‘Nothing, mon vieux. Nothing, eh? Forgive me. The fire marshal wants a word.’

  ‘Then talk to him. I’m busy.’

  ‘Don’t be so gruff. His German counterpart is present and speaks no French. Kommandeur Weidling requests your presence as interpreter.’

  Kohler pulled down a lower eyelid and made a face behind the bandanna. ‘Doesn’t he trust you to do it accurately?’

  ‘Please don’t give me horseshit, Hermann. Both men are nervous and not without good reason. They are afraid this will happen again and soon.’

  ‘Then there really is a pattern and there have been other fires?’

  ‘Ah yes, a pattern.’

  ‘The Salamander?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  A shrug would be best. ‘Just little things. Nothing much. We’ll look again, eh? After the conference.’

  ‘Piss off! The Feuerschutzpolizei back home can’t know anything
about this, Louis. What the hell’s he doing here?’

  Again there was that massive shrug. ‘Ask Gestapo Mueller; ask Herr Weidling but proceed gently. We can use all the help we can get.’

  ‘A visitor from home who just happens to be a fire chief and on the scene of a major fire? The son of a bitch shouldn’t even be here, Louis, not with all those incendiaries the fucking RAF are dropping at home!’

  Hermann always had to have the last word. It was best to let him so as to avoid argument, but … Ah, what the hell. ‘Then let us have a look at our surroundings first, so as to have everything in perspective. Please, I think it is important.’

  Kohler’s grunt was answer enough. Picking their way past the ticket booth, they stood a moment at the entrance, gazing out across place Terreaux. Bartholdi’s four magnificent horses were caught frozen in their imaginary flight to the sea. Shrouded in ice, the Goddess of Springs and Rivers looked unfeelingly down from her chariot at the corpse of a man who had run to her in flames for help.

  French police and German soldiers kept the crowd at bay behind a rope barrier. The debris of firefighting was everywhere. Pumper trucks, whose snaking hoses were now collapsed and clinging to the icy pavement, were being attended to by exhausted firemen whose disillusionment at having failed to save so many was all too evident.

  The square, one of the finest in Lyon and right in the centre of the city, would normally be busy in the afternoon, even under the Occupation. Now the curious and the grieving huddled around its periphery and, in places, beneath shop awnings that had been folded out of the way.

  Collectively the mood of the crowd was one of outrage and fear. They’d be blaming the authorities. They’d be whispering How could you let a thing like this happen? Why were the fire doors padlocked? It was that bastard who owned the place. He did it for the insurance. No, no, it was a sadist, a maniac. It’s going to happen again. Oh yes it is!

  A murmur intruded, a disturbing puzzle for it was not coming from the crowd. Now and then the sporadic chipping of firemen’s axes broke through the hush and the murmur as the hoses were freed for coiling.