Kaleidoscope

by J. Robert Janes

  Unsettled that he could not readily find the source of the murmur, St-Cyr scanned the length of the square. The Hôtel de Ville, the city’s seventeenth-century town hall, faced on to it at the far end, with a domed clocktower rising above and behind the entrance. The Palais des Arts—the Palais Saint-Pierre—took up the whole of the opposite side of the square. Eighteenth century. All solid, well-built buildings. Staid but baroque too, and emitting that singularity of purpose so evident in the Lyonnais character. Good business and sound banking: silk and explosives, leather tanning and many other industries. A city of about 700,000, with blocks and blocks of nearly identical, shoulder-to-shoulder buildings from three to five windows wide and from four to six storeys high, as were some of these. The stone grey or buff-grey, the stucco buff-grey to pale pink. The roofs of dark grey slate or weathered orange tile, the chimneys far more solid than those of Paris and of brownish-yellow brick with chimneypots that were rarely if ever canted because the people here would have seen to them.

  Mansard roofs with small attic windows and tiny one-or two-room garrets for servants, shopgirls, clerks and students were to the left and right. Below them were ornamental iron railings before tall french windows behind which most of the lace or damask curtains were now parted. Drop-shutters were pulled up and out of the way or, in a few places, lowered to half-mast like weary eyelids, and in one case, closed completely as if to shut out what had happened.

  ‘The location is perfect, Hermann. Maximum exposure if fear of repeat fires is what was wanted.’

  ‘Publicity. Someone who knows the city well,’ grunted Kohler. ‘A pattern, Louis.’

  ‘An uncomfortable thought and an arsonist totally without conscience. But for every fire there is a reason, no matter how warped.’

  ‘Or sick.’

  Again the murmuring intruded but now there was that unmistakable feeling of never knowing if they were being watched by the arsonist.

  ‘Louis, our visitor is feeding the pigeons. There, over there. Behind the fountain.’

  The stiff woollen greatcoat was Prussian blue, the rubber boots, whose tops were folded down, were well used and black, of pre-war vintage. Little more could be seen of him beyond the stallions with their flailing hooves and wild-eyed muzzles, but the murmur increased and became more excited. The black leather gloves had been removed and stuffed into a pocket. The left hand held a torn loaf of white bread—white, no less and seldom seen on the streets these days!—while the fingers of the right hand ripped off bits and tossed them to the pigeons, his little friends.

  ‘Does he keep doves at home?’ hazarded Kohler, baffled that, in the face of such a catastrophe and hunger among the civilian population, anyone could be crass enough to unthinkingly undertake such a sentimental task.

  ‘Maybe he’s homesick,’ offered the Sûreté.

  ‘Maybe he wants to show you French exactly how unimportant you are!’

  Such inflammatory statements from Hermann were best ignored but why should they be? ‘Is it that he has seen it all so many times before, Inspector, or is it that he needs to find release from the horror in such a simple task?’

  Kohler grinned at Louis’s use of ‘Inspector’. The Frog was one up on him in rank and always pulling it. ‘Hey, Chief, cut the crap. He’s budgeting the crumbs. He’s making sure that the weak and not-so-weak get their fair share but like all good Nazis he admires the brave and the strong. See how he flicks the extra bits down at his boots as a reward.’

  It was St-Cyr’s turn to grin. ‘You’re learning, mon ami. Being stuck with me is good for you. Let’s hear what he has to say.’

  ‘Let’s ask him exactly why the fuck he’s here and what he intends to do about it!’

  The grunt of acknowledgement from the fire chief was terse, the bread summarily ripped into four large chunks and thrown among the pigeons so as to equalize the fight. ‘Leiter Weidling at your service, Herr Kohler. Lübeck, Heidelberg and Köln. This one’s done it all before. Same technique, same pattern. Gasoline poured on the floor to run under the seats and around the shoes and boots of the unsuspecting. Then across the entrances to the foyer or across the staircase. Then the match or cigarette lighter.’

  ‘But … but the usherette has said there were two women …?’ began St-Cyr in German that was far from rusty.

  Unimpressed that a Frenchman could speak his native tongue, Weidling fastidiously brushed crumbs from thick, strong fingers before pulling on his gloves. Again he spoke only to Hermann. ‘Lübeck first, in late May of 1938. A cinema in the student quarter near the university.’

  The blue eyes were lifeless in that rosy, apple-cheeked countenance. A man of sixty or sixty-five, a father probably and a grandfather. The lips were thin.

  ‘Heidelberg in early July of the same year, a crowded lecture hall, a Party meeting. The first fire killed sixty-seven, the second only twenty-eight. Then Köln and a night-club in mid-August—again the same technique, again a good number—sixteen to be precise—but most escaped through the stage doors and I count the thing a failure.’

  Was he really telling them everything? ‘Two women?’ asked Kohler, watching him intently.

  Weidling returned the look. ‘Perhaps, but I happen to think not.’

  ‘And since those fires?’ hazarded the Sûreté.

  Again he was ignored. ‘Nothing of a similar nature, Herr Kohler. Other arsonists, of course, but now this, yes? A student perhaps who visited the Reich in 1938 and then went home to Lyon. My people are checking into things and will send me the case files. You can read them yourself.’

  A student, a citizen of Lyon …

  ‘Leiter Weidling is to become a professor at the Fire Protection Officers’ School in Eberswald. We are fortunate to have him with us. He’s the only fire marshal in the Reich to have been decorated three times for bravery beyond the call of duty.’

  This had come in French from Lyon’s fire marshal, Julien Robichaud.

  ‘On holiday, is he?’ snapped Kohler in French, for that was the way one got things done quickly.

  Weidling grinned, for though he hadn’t understood a word, he had understood only too well the drift of Herr Kohler’s thoughts. Hero firemen sometimes lit their own fires. ‘Here for the International Fire Marshals’ Convention and staying on a few days.’

  It was Kohler’s turn to be unimpressed, but he tried hard to hide his feelings by offering precious cigarettes all round and insisting Louis take one. ‘A coffee, I think, and a glass of marc?’

  Robichaud strode over to the nearest pumper truck and returned with a thermos jug, four tin cups and a bottle. ‘Emergency rations, messieurs,’ he said, gritting his teeth self-consciously. ‘It’s not a day for alcohol but …’ He gave the shrug of a man uncertain of his position and definitely worried about it. ‘But one has to have a little something, eh? to settle the stomach.’

  Kohler took the bottle from him and uptilted it into his mouth, shutting his eyes in blessed relief. ‘Merci,’ he said, wiping his lips. ‘Louis?’

  St-Cyr shook his head. ‘In the coffee, I think. Yes, yes, that will be sufficient.’

  They were a pair, these two detectives, thought Weidling. Gestapo Leader Mueller’s telex from Berlin had said to watch them closely. Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris had been emphatic: St-Cyr was a patriot and therefore untrustworthy; Kohler a doubter of Germanic invincibility. They’d been in trouble with the SS far too many times. They had made disparaging remarks about some of its members and had held them up to ridicule.

  Weidling helped himself to the bottle. The coffee was good—the real stuff—the brandy barely passable, the French fire chief nothing but a nuisance to be got rid of quickly. ‘You will need a list of all those who were in the cinema, Herr Kohler, both the victims and those who escaped.’

  ‘It’ll be impossible to get a complete list.’

  ‘Nothing is impossible. Get one. Also the employees, the night-watchman and the cleaners, the concierge if that’s what they call him, the manager and
the owner and their closest relatives. Also all previous employees over the past four years. Grudge fires are not uncommon.’

  Kohler grinned. ‘I thought you said it might be a student? Lübeck, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Or Heidelberg or Köln. Ja, ja, you will still require the lists. It’s best that way. Find out if the staff have been turning anyone away. Sex in the back rows. Some filthy Frenchman or Algerian exposing himself to women and little girls or boys. Some black or brown bastard making suggestive remarks. A woman betrayed by a husband with a lover. A Jewess. Those are always possibilities but you are correct, Herr Kohler, hero firemen could very well become ‘hero’ arsonists to advance themselves, but not this one. You will find me at the Bristol. Inquire at the desk. Get a list of the tenants too. There were apartments above the foyer and behind the balcony and projectionist’s booth.’

  Brusquely he shook hands with Robichaud and made excuses about having to tidy up for dinner. ‘The wife,’ he grunted. ‘She’ll have purchased the last of her silks by now and I must examine them. Have the lists compiled, Herr Kohler. You can bring them over at dawn. Gestapo Mueller wants this solved before it happens again and wishes me to give the matter my fullest attention. Even here in France people have a right to know they are safe under our administration. Heil Hitler.’

  Shit!

  They watched as he strode the short distance to his car. Robichaud sucked grimly on his cheeks and held his breath in exasperation.

  It was Hermann who said, ‘You have our sympathies.’

  Lyon’s fire chief nodded. ‘But you have not had to introduce him at far too many banquets, monsieur, and you do not have to answer for your sins or blame yourself for letting this one happen. You see, messieurs, I was in the cinema. It was myself who turned in the alarm and unfortunately he knows of this.’

  There was dead silence but only for a moment. St-Cyr took the bottle from him and cautiously filled the fire chief’s cup. ‘Two women?’ he asked, pleasantly enough.

  There was a hiss. ‘Of this I am certain! I saw them vanish into a tram-car right over there.’

  Right across the square beyond the fountain and obscured by it at the moment of escape, right in front of the Palais des Arts.

  It was on the tip of St-Cyr’s tongue to ask, Why did you not blow your whistle and summon a gendarme to chase after them? but he let the matter rest. Obviously Robichaud had had his hands full.

  Finishing his cigarette, he carefully put it out, then handed the butt to Hermann for his little tin. These days tobacco was in such short supply it was the least he could do. The crowd seemed intent on their every move. Again he cautiously looked around the square—always there was the possibility that the arsonist would hang about to watch the fun and come back again and again. Sometimes they would offer help or pitch right in unasked. Sometimes they would even turn in the alarm and make suggestions as to how the fire might have started. But not Robichaud, never him. Other things perhaps but not arson.

  No one seemed out of the ordinary until St-Cyr spotted a lone girl with a bicycle. She had only just arrived and now stood uncertainly where Herr Weidling’s car had been. She had come up the rue Paul Chenavard. Her carrier basket held a cloth bag that was square and no doubt full of books. About twenty-five or-six but looking a little younger. Still a student? he wondered apprehensively, but thought not. Of medium height, with short, light brown hair and a fringe. The deep, wide-set eyes earnestly searched. The pale oval of her face was not wide or narrow but something in between. There was no lipstick or rouge that he could discern from this distance. A bookseller? he asked. A librarian? A girl in a cocoa-brown beret and long white scarf that was tied under her chin and thrown over the shoulders of a fawn-coloured double-breasted overcoat. A grey plaid skirt and dark grey woollen argyle socks that would come to her knees. Flat-heeled, brown leather walking shoes, not winter boots. Knitted beige gloves gripped the handlebars. Gloves were not so easy to knit, and he wondered if she had made them and thought that perhaps she had. Trained in those arts, then, he said. Yes, she has that capable look about her. Not beautiful, not plain. Does she keep house for someone in addition to her job? Two women …

  ‘Hermann, wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  ‘She’s already turning to leave, Louis. She’s seen you looking her way, dummkopf.’

  ‘Damn!’

  Lyon’s fire marshal said nothing but he, too, had noticed the girl. Robichaud seemed a decent enough fellow. Tough and experienced and carrying a cross no fire chief would wish to bear. A man of middle age and grey, a veteran with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour to prove it. A father? wondered St-Cyr. A man who, like most these days, worried about his pension and had gone to work under the Nazis grudgingly, no doubt, but out of necessity and to ensure that pension. We French are realists, he said sadly to himself, especially the Lyonnais.

  It was Kohler who, having gathered up the cups and the thermos, returned them to the pumper truck, then led the way back into the ruins. Only the neck of the cognac bottle protruded from his already bulging overcoat pocket.

  The girl with the bicycle might have a relative among the victims. Perhaps a husband she didn’t want or a former lover? he asked himself.

  Crime … it brought out the worst in one. It made one see motive behind everything, even the most insignificant of things.

  Yet the girl continued to haunt him as her presence would Louis. Why had she come for such a brief look? Why had she fled before their eyes?

  No shred of film had escaped the fire. Funnelling flames through to its skylight, the projectionist’s booth, never roomy at the best of times, had been turned into an inferno. Bent and twisted film canisters and other rubbish were now heaped in the far corners and against that wall by the pressure from the last hoses. Only the twin projectors, once magnificent pieces of complex engineering, stood sentinel but in ruins on their jackleg pedestals whose tripod feet were securely bolted to the floor.

  A lover of the cinema and a cinematographer at heart, St-Cyr ran his eyes ruefully over the control panel. Eighteen Bakelite-handled switches had operated the lights, the screen, the curtains and the sound system. Subdued lighting at the sides, please, behind torch-bearing Venuses that were no more. Spotlights on the manager if some sort of an announcement were to be made—an air-raid warning perhaps. Starlight on the ceiling. Now the full or half-moon and the shooting star. The magic of the cinema.

  At once, the whole thing was there before him, that sense of power and control the projectionist must feel, that sense of boredom too, for how many films—even a masterpiece like La Bête humaine—can be seen thirty or forty times?

  Picking through the canisters, he uncovered the charred remains of the projectionist’s stool and beneath it, a woman’s shoe that had survived only in its spiked heel and shank. Had someone been in the booth alleviating the boredom? There were no bodies. Presumably the projectionist and his visitor had survived. Perhaps the shoe was from an earlier time and had no bearing on the case.

  Searching, he found a warped cigarette case, not expensive. With difficulty, he pried it open but there was no name. A woman’s, he said, pocketing it and the remains of the shoe.

  A fountain pen was next. Had the woman come for payment? Had the projectionist been writing her a cheque? Had she forced him to do so?

  All manner of possibilities came to mind, the cinematographer discarding most of them as soon as they flashed on the screen of his mind. Once the feature film had started, the projectionist would have rewound the newsreel on the other projector before placing it back in its canister. Since all newsreels these days were German and from the Propaganda Staffel, this had to be done carefully, but had the woman arrived by then? Was she sitting on the stool? No cigarette smoking would have been allowed up here but plenty broke the rule and some had suffered as a consequence. Photographic and motion picture film had a nitrate base that made it highly inflammable. Perhaps she had taken out her cigarettes and he had told her to put them aw
ay?

  Those two women had come in late. The feature film had already been in progress … Had this woman been one of them? Was it too much to hope for?

  A lipstick was uncovered, the thin tube still bearing traces of its fake gold plating. A cheap compact followed, its mirror gone, the thing open—dropped—had it been dropped in panic at the cry of Fire?

  He thought it had, and saw her sitting on the stool, bundled in her overcoat, hat and scarf. No heat in this place—no heat anywhere these days but in the rooms of the Nazis and their collaborators. She was touching up her face, turning a cheek sideways. She was doing her lips, a corner … yes, yes. The projectionist had paused in coiling the newsreel’s leader on to the spool. He was looking at her, grinning. He knew all about her little hopes and desires. He had seen her naked many times, had heard her saying … saying …

  Only the sound-track of the film came to St-Cyr along with the whirring of the fans that sucked air past the lamp to cool it. But that could not be, not now.

  The door would have been closed. Yes, it had a simple hook and eye. Would Lantier and his partner have discovered the hotbox that was to keep their beloved locomotive from returning to Le Havre, thus triggering the story? Had the film progressed much further? Had Séverine kissed the husband she would later beg Lantier to kill, having first had sex with the engineer in a railway shed among the boxes of bolts and piles of oily rags?

  Had the engineer betrayed his true love, La Lison, the locomotive, for that of the innocent though shrewd and calculating Séverine?

  In Zola’s novel, Lantier had been born with an obsession to kill women—his cousin first. In the film, a passing train had stopped Lantier then, and later, when Séverine had asked him to kill for her to cover up the murder she and her husband had committed, the engineer had found he couldn’t. She had told him their affair was over—fini—and he had snatched up a knife and had plunged it into her throat.