by Pirate Irwin
Or he could go to Massu, tell him the facts and then hopefully both of them would deal with their overall superior. None of the options appealed to Lafarge.
Feeling heavy–footed and weighed down with this extra burden, Lafarge dragged himself into the main bedroom, the spare one having yielded nothing of interest. Indeed, the bed had not been slept in, and the cupboards and drawers were filled simply with the overflow of Marguerite’s clothes and hats.
He searched under her bed, and her bed linen, and checked the drawers of the bedside tables, again nothing of note. Final stop was the table where she had met her end, with the jewels strewn all over it and indeed some were on the floor.
It certainly was a fine collection, fortunate for her she was a friend of Lescarboura, because otherwise, she would have been a lucrative target for his twitchy hands. He lifted up the splendidly decorated box and felt under it to see if there was a hidden compartment, or a key, and chastised himself for beginning to act like Charlie Chan. He performed a similar exercise with the table, and there he did retrieve something.
It was a piece of paper, which had been slotted into the join of a corner of the table and the back right leg. He unraveled it and saw that something had been written on it. The lighting being so dull in the bedroom – she was evidently not much of a reader of books, he surmised – he took it out into the corridor and read what was scrawled on the note.
There were a series of to do’s on it: ‘1 – Invite the Countess for dinner, 2 – René hides in spare bedroom. 3 – Once she arrives, he leaves. 4 – Keep her here till he returns. 5 – Guard them till safe to go to middleman.
Lafarge was stunned not for the first time that day.
Just to double check, he compared the handwriting to that on a piece of paper he had seen in the drawing room, and it matched.
Bloody hell, he thought, Mathilde couldn’t have put it better, for Marguerite Suchet and René Lescarboura, childhood friends, had indeed been as thick as thieves, only for real. Next stop Lescarboura, and at least he knew he wasn’t going anywhere as he was tucked up in Fresnes prison awaiting his transfer to where he would serve out his sentence.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lafarge woke early after a disturbed night’s sleep. Despite his state of exhaustion there had been no sweet dreams for him, the size of the task facing him and the political minefields he would have to traverse intervened to disrupt any hope he had of recharging his batteries.
He stumbled into his small bathroom, and one look in the mirror confirmed how he felt, deep bags lay under his deep blue eyes, his tousled hair required more than just a brush to make it neat and tidy, but he was out of priceless shampoo, and only a sad cheap block of soap was at hand to remedy that problem.
Well make do with what you have, Lafarge mumbled. He was interrupted in his train of thought over his toilette by the phone ringing in his equally small drawingroom. He sighed and decided he’d postpone his ablutions for the moment.
“Hello, is that you Lafarge?” asked the person at the other end of the phone.
“Yes, it is. Good morning to you too,” Lafarge replied grumpily down the phone to Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, whose crisp tones he had recognized immediately.
“Hope you are keeping well Lafarge. I was just wondering whether we could meet?” asked Drieu, his tone agitated.
“Well Drieu, I don’t really know whether I have the time right now to see you, much as it would give me pleasure to,” replied Lafarge with as much enthusiasm as he could muster for he was talking to one of his friends who had embraced the German occupation with unbridled joy.
“That is a shame, Lafarge. You must be a very busy man, is it an interesting case you are working on?” Drieu asked, though his tone suggested to Lafarge that he knew very well what his case was.
“I think you know exactly what I’m working on. So let’s cut to the chase, shall we, of what interest is it to you?” asked Lafarge, who was desperate to end the conversation as he had better things to be doing.
“Well, let’s just say that I could be of help in relation to one of the persons involved,” said Drieu in his most mellifluous tone.
Lafarge knew that his phone was tapped – all members of the Vichy administration and important members of the security forces were subject to this eavesdropping – and Drieu would also be aware of this hence his reticence to expand on what he had rung him about.
“Okay. Let’s meet at the Café de Flore, say at seven o’clock this evening?” said Lafarge conceding that Drieu may have something useful to tell him.
“Perfect. It will be good to catch up with you. See you at seven.”
*
Lafarge strolled into Quai des Orfèvres, feeling somewhat refreshed after his rigorous toilette, though, he acknowledged washing his hair with the soap had left it looking most unruly.
He put in a call to Massu’s secretary asking to see his superior, and was told he could see him in 20 minutes. Prior to that, Lafarge drew up a plan of attack: He would ask to see Lescarboura first for he held perhaps the key to the murder, although, of course he was not the perpetrator, as he had a cast iron alibi, for he had been behind bars.
However, he could tell him, if he proved amenable, how far Marguerite’s involvement went and if the plan he had come across taped onto her dressing table had been the one put into action.
The German, he would keep waiting. For not only did it give him some pleasure that a man used to giving orders to him and his compatriots should be at his behest, but also perhaps Lescarboura would be able to provide him with some information concerning his relationship with the victim.
After that, he would broach the subject of Bousquet, for he had not decided yet whether to tell Massu of his discovery at Marguerite’s apartment. A trip to the imposing Fresnes prison and then on for drinks with Drieu La Rochelle at the fashionable Café de Flore, a stark contrast indeed, he mused. From a place where brutality is the daily routine to a literary master in a café frequented by the literati, what a varied life being a policeman is, he reflected dryly.
He thought of Drieu La Rochelle and their friendship, forged at university and which had survived through the political turbulence that had marked France and indeed mainland Europe since the end of the Great War. Drieu had indeed travelled a long way from the left to the far right, a journey taken by many of their generation and a route which Lafarge had taken to a certain degree, but one which he had refused to go as far as his father had done.
For his father’s closeness to Pétain was a blessing and a curse to Lafarge at the same time. A blessing because it probably earned him the official stamp of approval to return to the force, but a curse because it had sparked some of the trouble between him and Isabella, who despite being the daughter of a diplomat loyal to the far right dictator of Argentina, Juan Peron, repudiated such politics.
She had been delighted that Lafarge had enlisted for his second dose of a continental war, which had not been the case for many of his contemporaries who had decided one was quite enough thank you.
However, she had expressed horror when he had announced on his return from the camp that he was to rejoin the force. They had had a blazing row, which had also brought out her disgust at his father’s craven decision to devote himself to Pétain and the reprehensible policies of Vichy, which had a few weeks later prompted her to depart with the children for the South of France.
He admitted his father’s behaviour decision to follow the Marshal while his eldest son languished in a POW camp had been beyond explanation, but given the divisions that had developed within families all over France since the humiliation of the defeat, their family was not any different.
His two brothers exemplified this. One, Patrick was an officer in the Vichy Army in Lebanon, the other, Albert, was a pilot with the Free French Air Force based as far as he knew in England.
His sister Vanessa was the mistress, to his horror, of one Pierre Bonny, a disgraced former detective who had done time in prison
and was now with a crook called Henri Lafont, one of the two heads of the French Gestapo as they were known in the chic Rue Lauriston. Ironic, Lafarge mused, that Bonny should be having an adulterous relationship when after being released from prison he had made money out of exposing errant husbands.
Lafarge arrived on time for his rendez–vous with Drieu and he was in a foul humour because having made the trip out to Fresnes Prison, he had been told by a distinctly unapologetic prison governor that Lescarboura was not there at all and was in fact at the Cherche–Midi prison.
It was even more infuriating as geographically it fell nicely with meeting Drieu at the Café de Flore as both were in walking distance of each other.
Still, the governor in charge of Cherche–Midi, which housed those political prisoners or criminals who the present authorities had the most interest in keeping a close eye on and interrogating, had been more compliant when Lafarge had rung him. He said that so long as the chief inspector was at the prison by nine thirty that evening, he could see the prisoner.
Lafarge just prayed that Drieu would not be late. It being a warm late summer evening, he sat himself down outside on the terrace and ordered a glass of chilled white wine, light a cigarette and thought back over his meeting with Massu earlier in the day.
Massu hadn’t been in a particularly good mood, seemingly pre–occupied by something else. Lafarge had decided that the Bousquet discovery could wait till after he had seen both Drieu and Lescarboura, so he could at least hopefully give him some good news on how the case was progressing.
Massu had agreed with his stratagem of seeing Lescarboura first and then going together to see von Dirlinger, hopefully armed with some information they could use to get something out of him.
Lafarge didn’t bother to tell Massu about his meeting with Drieu because he was not sure whether it would be pertinent to the enquiry or not, and also if his friend wished to be publicly involved.
If he was not directly involved, then there was no point in implicating him in it. Lafarge was not in the habit of involving his friends in investigations if he could help it and Drieu was also one who was highly esteemed by the Nazis, not just for his writing, which Lafarge thought was too flowery for his own taste, but for his devotion to their credo.
“Deep in thought as ever, Lafarge,” said Drieu, causing Lafarge to jump. “Mind if I sit down? What’s that you’re drinking?” he enquired.
When Lafarge responded, Drieu’s lips curled up in dissatisfaction and he ordered a brandy when the waiter came to take his order. Lafarge noticed that as ever, Drieu was impeccably turned out, indeed he looked extremely well, healthily bronzed, looking fit and had a rather self–contented air about him.
Well, why shouldn’t he be, his heroes were winning the war even if with the entry of the United States it tilted the odds towards an eventual Allied victory, but the Soviet Union looked beat which meant mainland Europe at the very least would remain under their governance.
Anyway that wasn’t Lafarge’s concern, he had more mundane matters to deal with like the murder of a famous actress which could involve at least two members of the present establishment. Light fare indeed! It would be hard enough to probe under a democratically elected government, but under a dictatorship and an occupying force, almost impossible.
“You’re looking well, Drieu. You have obviously been prospering,” remarked Lafarge. Drieu smiled, raised his glass to his friend and downed the brandy in one.
“I have indeed been making hay while the sun shines Lafarge,” he replied, while trying to attract the waiter’s attention, who was involved in an animated discussion with a Wehrmacht officer and his well–decorated female companion.
Drieu rose to intervene but then thought better of it and continued his conversation with his friend.
“I have been writing furiously since I returned emboldened from the First European Writer’s Congress in Weimar last year. I gained so much from that trip, to see Germany as it is today, the all–conquering democracy that it is, only served to strengthen my belief that we have done well to integrate ourselves fully into their system. Of course we French also taught our German writing contemporaries some things too, but it has spurred me on in my own writing.
“Aside from obviously my diary, which will serve to be perhaps the reference book of this era, I am presently writing a novel.
“It isn’t pretentious and distant like Céline, but something that ordinary French people can read and relate to. I have already received a generous payment for it so these drinks will be on me. Judging by a detective’s salary, you would be hard–pressed to pay for drinks here anyway,” he smiled and swept his finely–manicured hand through his receding curly hair.
Lafarge was pleased for his friend, although he worried about his almost manic devotion to the Germans, for if the fortunes of war did turn there would be little reward for him other than the guillotine.
“Well, I’m pleased for you Drieu. Now, perhaps you could tell me exactly what you thought would be of help to me regarding my case.”
“Ah yes, that. Let’s order some more drinks, shall we, and then I will tell you”.
Again, Drieu smiled, this one though had seen the smug look return to his face. Lafarge nodded, looked at his battered watch and saw that he still had a good 90 minutes before he had to be at the Cherche–Midi prison, and waited till the grumpy waiter, who had obviously come off second best in his argument with the officer, had taken their order and returned with the drinks.
Drieu La Rochelle took a sip of his brandy this time. He lit a cigarette, having taken it from what Lafarge noticed was a similar cigarette case to the one of Bousquet’s he had found, obviously a job lot from Ambassador Abetz’s cellar he reflected, and prepared to tell his old friend his tale.
“That tart, Marguerite Suchet, who was murdered, I had dinner with her the other night. I just thought I ought to tell you that before I go on,” said Drieu La Rochelle.
“There’s nothing really more to our relationship than that. I didn’t sleep with her, she refused my advances, though, heaven knows why as she has slept with pretty much anyone since Germany came to our rescue.”
Lafarge sighed loudly to indicate he wasn’t for the moment interested in Drieu’s social activities and indicated he preferred he moved on.
“Anyway Lafarge, much to my surprise the other night I was at home, having returned from a most pleasant evening at Guitry’s house when my bell rang. It was around midnight. Being after curfew, I thought it must be my rather attractive neightbour, who I have serviced from time to time, and so I opened my door.
“Well I can tell you my smile quickly disappeared when I saw that it was not her but the much sought after fugitive Pierre–Yves de Chastelain,” and there, Drieu La Rochelle, ever the dramatic tenor, stopped waiting for Lafarge’s reaction. He was to be disappointed for all Lafarge said was “Go on.”
Drieu didn’t bat an eyelid even if he was disappointed and moved on.
“Well I was stunned. I hadn’t seen him for a few months, perhaps just after I had returned from Weimar and we had had a lively discussion about what he termed collaborating with the enemy. So he was the last person I expected to come to me for help.”
“Help, what sort of help?” asked Lafarge, intrigued as much as Drieu was by de Chastelain’s behaviour which seemed very out of character even if he was on the run.
“I’ll come to that in a moment,” replied Drieu La Rochelle, enjoying the fact he had a captive audience.
“He was, I must say, looking the worse for wear, his hair was unkempt and his clothes smelt. Far from being the neat, dapper lawyer we grew accustomed to seeing in court. Anyway I let him in, for as you know, Lafarge, I am loyal even to those who have contrary views to mine. I gave him a drink and he took his time to gather himself before he asked me for a huge favour.”
“And that was?” asked Lafarge somewhat impatiently.
“He said he needed to get out of Paris immediately and that
with my contacts I could facilitate that. He wanted me to get him an Ausweis! An Ausweis for God’s sake! I retorted that it was quite impossible, that I would need a photograph and other papers which even if it were possible would take a long time.
“So then he said, well you have a car, you can drive me to Limoges. Well really, the man had lost all sense! I told him as such but he was insistent. He called on all our links going back two decades, including the fact we are second cousins, though our families rarely saw each other.
“I said I was tired and would need to think it over. He then asked whether he could stay the night, to which I gave in.”
“And was he there in the morning?” asked Lafarge.
“Oh, yes, and you know what I did my friend? I like the stupid cavalier fool that I am, I drove him to Limoges.” Drieu La Rochelle smiled weakly and signalled to the waiter to bring them another round of drinks.
“You drove him to Limoges! How did you manage that? Even with papers he would have been arrested as his name was listed as top priority. I don’t believe you, Drieu,” said Lafarge.
“Well, it was really rather simple Lafarge. I put him in the back seat, covered in books and blankets, and with my Ausweis and my relaxed manner with the guards at various checkpoints, of which there were not many, I succeeded in getting him to Limoges.”
“Christ, Drieu. You know that I should arrest you for this. You have aided a wanted man to escape.
“Imagine what Bousquet would say. His prize catch snatched from him, humiliating him in the process, and then one of his fellow travelers makes it even more difficult to make up for that episode by driving him several hundred kilometers out of Paris. It’s barely credible,” said Lafarge angrily.
“Well Lafarge, loyalist as I am to the Germans, I am not so well disposed to people such as Bousquet and their overweening desire for personal aggrandizement,” sneered Drieu.
“Much as his enthusiastic work in resolving the Jewish problem pleases me, I do not care for the man. Any embarrassment I can inflict on him or barricade I can place in his way gives me great pleasure.