The steps began again—again they hesitated. Two … were there two men following them?
‘The bastards are learning,’ breathed Kohler, exasperated that the préfet—it had to be him—was having them tailed. ‘Louis, are you certain we’ve got the right place? This medieval street of sewers, it seems too … too unfashionable for a whorehouse with a name like La Belle Époque.’
St-Cyr kept silent. They were in one of the oldest parts of Vieux Lyon, right below Fourvière Hill, right next to the quai Romain Rolland, the Saône and the bridge Alphonse Juin.
‘Wait here, then. Let me handle this. Don’t argue,’ hissed Kohler.
‘Of course.’
One seldom heard Hermann when he didn’t want to be heard. His ability to tail or find a tail was uncanny.
Somewhere over in Perrache, perhaps, tyres squealed, an engine raced … Gestapo … Gestapo …
Otherwise the city was silent. Unearthly and eerie in the clutch of the Occupier.
Time didn’t want to pass. It was so still. Then the scent of stale cigarette smoke came to St-Cyr, that of sweat, warm wool, urine and garlic.
The man was not two metres from him. Somehow he had slipped past Hermann and was now searching the Gothic entrances with their narrow sills.
Even as he watched the silhouette, dark against the deeper darkness of the opposite wall, he saw the man being rushed against the wall—heard the soft, sickening crush of flesh and bone, a smothered cry.
Smelled blood, then heard nothing more. Knew Hermann had dealt with the fellow.
Kohler cursed himself. He had let things get to him and had probably put the bastard in hospital for six months when a light tap would have sufficed! Now the bastard wouldn’t talk because he couldn’t, and the préfet would be in a rage.
Though he searched—went right back down the cramped and narrow street to stand among the tall stone columns of the austere and forbidding Palais de Justice, he could not find the other man.
He listened to the night. He tried to sort out its myriad odours and hear the heartbeat he knew must be near. The Salamander? he asked himself. Was it possible Préfet Guillemette had only sent one man to tail them, and the other was …
Perfume … was that perfume he was smelling?
La Belle Époque …? he wondered. Mademoiselle Claudine Bertrand, age thirty-two, born 18 November 1910. Occupation: prostitute. Hair: black and long—most wore it short these days. Eyes: dark brown. Face: oval. Nose: normal—i.e., not Jewish. Height: 173 centimetres.
A little taller than the usual Lyonnaise—but why had the one with the bicycle dropped this one’s card? Surely the two were not one and the same. A wig? he asked and answered, The one with the bike was too young and far too timid.
Then why had she had the card in her hand?
The house was at the other end of the street. From there, the rue de la Baleine ran the short distance to the quai Romain Rolland and the Saône. There was a bell-pull. There were no lights.
They spoke in muffled tones. ‘Louis, maybe we should come back another time.’
‘Did you kill the other one?’
‘No. No, I couldn’t find him. The bitch got away.’
‘The bitch …? But …’
Kohler yanked savagely on the bell-pull. Jarred out of his wits, St-Cyr leapt and only realized then how pissed off Hermann must be.
Still no light showed. He switched on his torch. Instinctively ducking her face away, the woman who had answered the door tried to shield her eyes, then her flesh—her corset had slipped, the flimsy night-gown was open. It was freezing. Her long dark hair was everywhere. About fifty-five, if a day, and flushed … still flushed!
‘Messieurs, the house … Please, I must insist. The curfew. It is forbidden to …’
‘That does not matter,’ said Louis grimly. ‘We’re detectives.’
‘Detectives?’ she shrilled. ‘And have you brought the magistrate? Ah, you could not do so, could you, my fine messieurs, because that one, he is already here!’
‘We knew he was,’ snorted Kohler, impatiently pushing past her scented plumpness and into the foyer, into the warmth and the lively smells of wine, food and perfume, ah yes. Lots of it.
She closed the door and slid a bolt home. Louis switched off his light and crowded her.
‘Please, messieurs, I beg you not to disturb the clients. We have had the révellion, yes? The Christmas Eve feast. Ah it was such a meal but now they … why they are at the moments of their hearts’ desires. Please, I am Madame Berthe Morel, the sous-maîtresse of this place. What is it you want?’
‘Some coffee and a marc. A cigar,’ breathed Kohler. ‘And a little information.’
A Nazi, then. A fresh duelling scar, a bullet graze on the forehead … ‘Please come this way. Come into the grand salon. Yes, yes, that would be best. It is a little untidy, you understand, but it will do. Madame will perhaps receive you there.’ She gestured impatiently and spoke her thoughts aloud and only to herself as she turned away. ‘It’s her affair. She’s the one who pays the sharks that come to feed in spite of the préfet’s blessing. How could I have stopped such as these? Les Allemands …’
‘I’m French,’ hissed St-Cyr, not failing to notice her comment about the préfet.
She tossed her head and didn’t look back over her shoulder. ‘Well, that’s not bad, your being French, but it’s not good either. Courage, my little one. Courage. Each saint has his candle.’
Ah merde, a tough one! ‘And to a good cat a good rat, eh, madame?’ he snarled. ‘Tit for tat, eh? Come, come, you insult an officer of the Sûreté, a chief inspector of detectives!’
‘Very well, it’s all right. It’s just as you please, monsieur.’
Her corset slipped but she would not bother to pull it up or close the négligé. She would face them coldly with her two pistols and her hairy snatch! ‘Wait here,’ she said. ‘Please do not move about the house until Madame has spoken to you.’
She was plump and round and curved in all places, and her splayed feet with their bunions were as bare as the rest of her beneath the corset and the frilly, see-through thing she wore. The peignoir blew about like cheesecloth in a storm as she strode away, soon disappearing behind the little jungles of palm and fern and rubber plant, leaving them utterly alone in this jade-green and gold paradise.
‘Don’t let her bother you, Louis. Hey, me, I know you’re a patriot.’
‘Then perhaps you’d best tell me what happened in the street?’
‘A woman, Louis. Perfume. Too damned good, that’s all. I couldn’t find her.’
St-Cyr nodded grimly and swept his eyes around the room. Ah mon Dieu, it lived and breathed la belle époque. Against a backdrop of gold and gold-tasselled drapes that fell from ceiling to floor, an immense chandelier glowed with lozenges of clear crystal and fountains of gold that rose and arched or twisted to white candles that could no longer be lit because they would drop wax on the carpet.
‘It’s magnificent, Hermann. Rosewood and ebony. Mahogany in the style of the Second Empire but updated a little. Yes, yes. Refined. Squared off—fluted and trimmed with gilding. Green baize-covered armchairs that are so wide and comfortable one could spend a whole day reading and never move. Wine-red morocco on the sofas and settees with throw-cushions of paisley in rich, dark blues, red and saffron.’
Two faience cockerels in their glory of peacock-hued glaze and gold crowed lustily from either side of the room. There were maidenhair ferns in porcelain pots on which storks flew. The walls were a wash of pastel water-lilies with naked nymphs lurking in the depths or riding frogs or lying asleep on beds of reeds or frolicking with male dragonflies.
Corsets and stockings—a garter that would have encircled a shapely leg just below a shapely knee …
A woman’s ivory fan, a singularly tall dracaena with spiked leaves that were slender and jade-green, a bamboo palm with long and elegant fronds. Jungles of plants everywhere. Oil paintings between the murals. Cigar butts i
n manly ashtrays beside deeply sunken armchairs. Empire table lamps in malachite and gold with parasol-shaped shades of pleated cream silk.
Everything was of that period from about 1890 until just prior to the Great War.
‘I like it, Louis, but are we supposed to think one of those two women came from a place like this? The one I tried to follow in the street out there?’
‘Was the girl with the bike leading us, eh?’
‘Perhaps, but …’ began Kohler like a parrot only to shut up.
The sous-maîtresse had come back. In defiance, her corset had not been yanked into place or used to draw in the fleshy waist and make it the stem of the hour-glass figure the fashionable women and demi-mondes of that era had so desired.
‘Messieurs, if you will come this way, I will take you to Madame.’
‘Louis, you handle it. I’ll wait here.’
Madame Morel knew enough not to argue but even so the plump cheeks tightened and the dark eyes narrowed in warning. ‘All our doors are locked, monsieur. Absolute discretion is our policy. To each in his own taste, the extended hour of privacy since all have paid for the night.’
There were butterfly palms and rhododendrons, fiddleleaf figs with deep green, papery leaves—did they wear them sometimes? thought Kohler as he waited. There were orange and lemon trees in fruit—none of the Occupation’s horrible ‘approximate’ jam or marmalade for this place. Ah no. They grew their own fruit and would have plenty of sugar.
Two ornately carved, high-backed ebony armchairs with Gobelin tapestry coverings flanked the open doorway to which Louis and the woman headed. Beyond this doorway, beneath the raindrop cascades of another chandelier, a huge, dark green and flowered jar stood on bent golden legs holding the establishment’s Christmas tree: a gorgeous kentia palm that had been simply and tastefully decorated with but a few small handfuls of golden pear-shaped ornaments.
‘Wait here, please,’ the woman said. Louis reached out to touch one of the pears. They were so light, so exquisite. Gilded Venetian glass and worth a small fortune because they were so old.
Ivy trailed over the lip of the pot. The carpet was an Aubusson. Crimson and mauve. Ah mon Dieu, the money in this place. The need, perhaps, to constantly replace things, thought St-Cyr.
‘Monsieur, please state your business.’
The madam of the house was dark-eyed and dark-haired but here the similarity to the sous-maîtresse abruptly ended. The long, tight-bodiced dress of black silk that positively glowed was matched by swept-up hair, diamond pins and dangling ear-rings that glittered. Black silk gloves extended to her elbows. There was a choker of black velvet around her slender neck. Her skin was perfect and of a satiny lustre, the cheeks not rouged but red as if from frost. Had she only just come in from outside? Her perfume … it was so fresh. She was taller than himself—almost as tall as Gabrielle and slim, would have the figure of a goddess too, just like her.
‘Madame,’ he began. ‘Please forgive the intrusion. One of your girls …’
The dark eyes in that finely boned, aristocratic face remained impassive.
‘Mademoiselle Bertrand,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘We would like a few words with her. Please, it is urgent.’
‘She’s not here, Inspector. She has a bad chest, a little crisis of the lungs—it’s nothing. A cold, that’s all. I told her not to come in until she was over it.’
Merde, why could God not have given them a break? ‘Tell me about her, please.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. Claudine has been with me now for the past ten years. There has never been any trouble, Inspector. There never is with any of my girls.’
‘Your name, madame?’
‘Ange-Marie Céleste Rachline.’
Was he talking to a block of wood? Her lips were naturally red and beautiful but also cold, he thought. Yes, cold. Were they always that way, or is it because she really has only just come in from being outside? ‘Age?’ he asked sharply, not liking things one bit.
‘Thirty-four. Inspector, what is it? Please, the house … these times. You do understand?’
‘Husband?’ he demanded.
‘Am I under suspicion?’
‘No. Not at present.’
‘Then let us keep my husband out of this. We don’t see each other, Inspector. He goes his way and I go mine as we have now for the past ten years.’
‘Then Mademoiselle Bertrand has been with you from the start?’ he asked. Yet there is nothing to tell?’
‘Claudine cares for her bedridden mother who knows nothing of this place and thinks, in her confused state of mind, that her husband, who died in the invasion of 1914, still provides for her. They live alone here in Vieux Lyon, on the rue du Boeuf at Number Six.’
Not far away. ‘She has no pimp?’
Madame Rachline shook her head slightly. ‘None of my girls has one, Inspector. It’s not permitted. It’s a rule of the house that ensures each gets fair recompense for her services and there is no trouble.’
‘And the doctor?’ he asked. What was it about her that alarmed him in addition to the colour of her cheeks and lips?
‘Dr Sévigny comes three times a week for their sake, Inspector, more than for that of the clients, though of course I am concerned on their behalf as well. My girls are good and I give them all the protection I can. It’s a profession, isn’t it? Therefore, let us put a little dignity into it. Each has money in a safe place but can draw on future earnings if necessary up to one-quarter of her annual take which is split fifty per cent for them, thirty for the owners, five for myself, and fifteen for the house.’
It was an amazingly fair relationship, almost unheard of. But if Madame Rachline had any further concerns about him, she hid them well. He asked if they might sit down. She did not hesitate but said, ‘Would you prefer my bedroom, the grand salon or the dining-room?’ He knew she had included the bed-room on purpose and he had to suggest it.
‘Then follow me. It is the only bed that is not yet in use.’
‘Were you outside in the street, madame?’
‘Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I was. I attended the midnight Mass at the Basilica.’
‘And walked home alone in those clothes?’
‘Yes.’
Ah merde.
Kohler helped himself to the foie gras de canard, the duck pâté with a mildewed crust that must be a good ten years old. He filled one of the ruby-rimmed, gilded Venetian goblets with Romanée-Conti, 1917—was it really that old?
Then he laid into the truffled veal sausage, had a finger-taste of the glazed fruit and then the Kirsch soufflé—all bits and pieces that still lay about the cluttered dining-room table with its tapestry cloth of deep red, green and white patterns beneath a chandelier of glass lozenges in shades of ruby, emerald, lapis and citrine.
He tried the oysters and then the Portugaises vertes—how had they come by them? A half-filled bottle of pepper vodka made him think of his two sons at Stalingrad. Were they saying it would be their last Christmas?
‘Salut!’ he said, pausing to spoon in the black Russian caviar. ‘Gott mit uns, eh, Hans? Shit! Tell Jurgen you both should have listened to your papa and gone to Argentina like I said.’
Ah merde. Merde! This lousy war. He took another swill of vodka. Those two bitches in that tower, that one out on the street—had it really been a woman?
He downed a snipe that had been hung until it had dropped from the hook, then roasted on a cushion of toast smothered in a paste of brandy and its rotted innards.
A wealth of bone-white porcelain and old silver covered the table. There was a ceramic crèche as the centrepiece—elephants and tigers led by Nubian slaves with jewelled parasols to keep the sun off their masters as they made their way to Bethlehem. Decanters and bottles—strands of pearls and cut-glass beads, beeswax candles like he hadn’t seen in years. Spirals and twists and fluted columns but plump, golden artichokes also, and bunches of grapes and fleurs-de-lis.
&n
bsp; More caviar was swallowed, more vodka, pâté and soufflé. Some of the candles had gone out or had been pinched out by licentious fingers. He could almost hear the gaiety of their laughter. Fifteen couples had sat here, the cream of Lyon industrialists, bankers, lawyers and merchants, no doubt. Money, money and more of it because business was booming for them, ah yes.
The vodka was gone. He refilled his goblet. When alternated with the Romanée-Conti, it wasn’t bad. A bit too peppery, but the Russians always had been driven to excess. Too emotional a people.
The braised goose had had all of its bones drawn out through its anus before being rammed with a forcemeat of foie gras and truffles. Small mushrooms lay like plump, ripe breasts among stoned ripe olives and small sausages that had first been fried in butter. All were mingled with a dark, rich sauce that had cooled and was now setting into a gel.
He spooned a bit, cut off a slice—tore away a larger piece—hell, there must have been a dozen geese scattered along the table. The potatoes were good. With the snipe and the pâté and the cold purée of leeks, a meal. Dessert too, and another shot of wine. He’d try the Clos de Vougeot this time or perhaps the Beaujolais Blanc.
‘You must be hungry.’
For seven seconds he paused, then hesitated knowing gravy was drooling down his chin.
Her hair was as red as the sunset over Essen with the Krupp furnaces going full blast. Her eyes were a lively green, wide and full of innocence, the lashes long and a shade darker than the loosened mass that fell richly to delicious shoulders. Nom de Jésus-Christ, she was absolutely gorgeous. About twenty-three years of age.
Kohler swallowed tightly—he really hadn’t realized how much he’d been missing his little Giselle back home in Paris, or Oona, his Dutch housekeeper. ‘Bonsoir,’ he said. ‘Pull up a chair. Here, let me fill you a glass. The Dom Pérignon, eh? Come on, I’ll join you. Some of the pâté? A little of the caviar? Your client …?’ He arched his eyebrows. She smiled softly and her lips … Ah nom de Dieu, they were perfect! Paris … would she consider coming to Paris when this thing was over?
‘My client, he is relieved of his little burden, monsieur, and will now sleep until it comes upon him again. Were you …?’
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