She hated to have lied about the children, but that had been said in the other place and he must have picked it up. She could not remember when she had said it, or even if he had only just come in.
‘My dear, women like Madame Morelle have only one goal and that is to accumulate as much money as possible no matter the cost to others. She takes the half of everything—I know. The girls, they have complained to me endlessly about it. It’s all reinvested in real estate—Nice, Cannes, Bordeaux. That wretched woman even has property in Madrid and Barcelona and a fat bank account in each as well.’
Father Debauve waited while the waiter set the soupe du jour in front of them and placed a basket of bread and dish of butter near her—real butter and real bread, not the National stuff. Fresh and made with sifted white flour. No weevils, no rat shit, no ration tickets either, only a nod, and as good a black-market restaurant as she had been in. Better, perhaps, since the patrons wanted God on their side and treated the clergy with respect and kindness, for insurance purposes in the hereafter, of course.
‘Enjoy,’ said the priest. ‘Warm your insides and think on what I’ve said. That husband of hers controls only the little café-bar she bought him. He’s handy to have around, since he keeps track of the maquereaux her girls use. She’s one who always has her ear to the ground, and he is often that ear.’
‘He’s a bad one,’ she said, breaking bread and realizing suddenly how famished she was.
‘A type,’ acknowledged Father Debauve, not looking up.
‘A number,’ she added, casting the patron of the Turning Hour down a bit further but not yet relegating him to the rank of an ‘individual’. The soup, a thick and fragrant purée of lentils, ham stock and onions, was magnificent.
‘I come here often,’ acknowledged the priest. ‘They know me and do not question my not drinking alcohol of any kind like the others you see at this hour. Always the soup and a coffee perhaps; always a guest if suitably dressed. If not, why, I must use discretion and visit another of my places.’
Had he once been under the empire of alcohol? she wondered and decided that, yes perhaps the face so ravaged by time held memories of it. He was really very kind and again she felt guilty about the lie of two children, but such a thing had been necessary at the time and would be very difficult to retract. ‘Do you visit all the brothels?’ she asked.
‘The forty or so, yes. I have a letter signed by the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, so have little trouble. He feels, as does the Bishop, that even the most depraved need to accept God into their hearts.’
And you, my dear? What of you? she could hear him asking and ducked her eyes away to her soup.
A bit of bread floated up, briefly resisting the clutch of the ground lentils until she had drowned it. ‘I go to Mass every Sunday, Father, and twice on all the holy days. I do say the Angelus in Latin—it’s the only way, isn’t that so?—and the Our Father.’
‘The Hail Mary?’ he asked.
The Ave Maria. ‘Of course,’ she said demurely and wondered why he had not used that other name since he was so concerned about the use of Latin. ‘I was raised in a convent school just … just as was that little girl who was murdered yesterday.’
He kissed his ring and bit a knuckle to stop the pain of such an anguish. Tears formed in his eyes. He said, ‘That poor child. Was she subjected to the indignities of a lorette? Did he do that to her first? The female body is a chalice, my dear. A chalice. Respect is its due. How could any man do such a thing to a …’
‘Father … Look, I’ll be honest, shall I?
She had such lovely eyes, a skin so clear, and lips that would form each word of the Angelus with care and with but traces of timidity. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘feel free to take me into your confidence. It’s why I’m here.’
It’s my job, my raison d’être. ‘Hermann, my … my husband, is a detective.’
‘But … but you wear no ring, my child?’
‘I do, Father, but I had to remove it when I went into that café.’ Another lie. Then why not put it on now—was he asking this? she wondered and said, ‘Hermann needs the name and address of the maquereau of Violette Belanger.’
He spooned his soup. ‘A mean one. A sponger, a depraver of young girls and innocent women. A good-for-nothing that wilful child dotes on.’ He reached for more bread and tore it in half. ‘She has a sister in a convent, Sister Céline, much admired by the Reverend Mother, loved by her students and very devout. The good sister and I pray for Violette, but …’ His eyes grew sad as he sought her out and shrugged at life. ‘But Violette will have none of it.’
‘And the maquereau?’ she asked earnestly.
Debauve clucked his tongue in distaste and tossed his head. ‘Broken sugar is his weapon, the slash across the face that leaves a welt far crueler than the knife. A monster. Morelle will have the address. Tell your husband to ask him.’
She swallowed hard at the mention of such cruelty, and he noted she understood only too well what the ruin of a pretty face could do to a girl of the streets.
‘My dear, these things are harsh. You must forgive me. Please finish your soup. Here, put more bread in it. Break it up and let the soup soak into it. That’s always best.’
And my Hermann, Father? she wondered. Why is it, please, that you do not ask where he is? Does your mind leap so far ahead of me you know he is at the house of Madame Morelle and have no need to ask?
Their coffee came, and it was the real thing and strong—ah! she wanted to drown herself in it and linger forever with the taste of it on her tongue. But gangsters used the chunks of sugar. These days, only in such places as the Café of the Turning Hour, for sugar was almost impossible to come by.
‘My dear,’ said Debauve earnestly, ‘you must leave all thought of that house behind you. You’re presentable—you’ve a fragile, very delicate beauty, if I may say so. Find some other type of work. Can you speak German?’
‘A little,’ she said softly.
He thought this excellent. ‘They’re always looking for people. Ah. I know of an escort service on the Champs-Élysées. Very classy, very aboveboard. Generals, lieutenants—they come to Paris and are lost without a little companionship. They simply do not know their way around and need guidance. The pay is, I believe, quite good. The Louvre, the Tuileries, the Tour Eiffel and such places.’
He searched his pockets and, finding pencil and scrap of paper, wrote the address down. ‘This one’s okay,’ he said. ‘The Germans won’t bother you if you’re stopped in the street and they find this slip of paper. Number 78. It’s in the building next to the Lido. There’s a Bavarian who has a restaurant across the street. Chez … Ah, what is it now?’
‘Chez Rudi’s,’ she said and saw him nod.
‘Ask for Mademoiselle Monique or Mademoiselle Claire. Tell either of them I sent you. They’ll both understand and will look after you. Dresses and evening gowns they can supply. Their wardrobes are at your disposal, so you need have no worries about such expenses.’
Monique or Claire. It was like a dream. One never knew these days, and what was it her horoscope had said? The one in Paris-Soir, not the one in Le Matin—it was never any good. You will meet someone new and exciting. Use caution at first—it’s only natural—but when the time is right, give yourself to him entirely.
A priest.
Kohler was intrigued and cried out inwardly, Louis, mon vieux, you should see this, but Louis wasn’t here.
The dark brown hair was dishevelled and fell thickly to hide all but the centre of the girl’s forehead, framing a soft oval whose deep brown eyes were shrewd and calculating.
Innocence sized him up and read him right to the core but did not smile or frown, though kept that hesitant stillness as if, knowing the worst, she waited only for it to happen.
‘Monsieur, what is it you want of me if not the use of my body?’
Ah merde, she even had the voice to go with it. Violette Belanger’s naturally red lips were lovely, her nose perfe
ct, the set of the eyes neither too wide nor too narrow. And as for her age, he thought, she could be twenty-three all right but looked no more than seventeen.
‘Just a few questions. Nothing difficult,’ he said and heard his voice sounding uncomfortably strange above the general hubbub of the place, the constant comings and goings, the latest raft of whores lounging around in various states of undress but no longer boredom.
‘Violette, you may sit,’ said Madame Morelle.
The girl made no move to do so but stood demurely before them in her dark blue tunic with shoulder straps, white shirt-blouse and dark blue tie. Hands folded now in front of her as if waiting for the Mother Superior to begin, and why is it, he asked himself, that schoolgirls in uniform seem to drive most men crazy?
Grey smears and droplets of semen marred the pleated skirt and hem of the tunic. There were more of them on its upper part and some were still damp. ‘Well?’ she asked but not sharply.
He wished he could be alone with her. She was making him unsettled for even daring to look at her in a place like this, but the other girls were a damned nuisance. Some glared at the schoolgirl, pouting with jealousy. Others giggled and pointed hurriedly at her kneesocks or confided lewd whispers about him to each other. Then, too, there was the godawful heat of the place, the smell of soap and disinfectant, toilet water, cheap perfume, sweat, lye, semen, farts, talcum powder and hydrogen peroxide. Sloshed, watered wine, too, and cheap champagne, beer and cigarette and cigar smoke. Vomit also. The din was constant. So, too, the sound of boots on the bare planks of the staircase that did, indeed, go up and up.
‘Madame, has this one paid for the time he is taking to undress me with those empty eyes of his or will he not pay until I remove my clothes?’
‘Monsieur, please address your questions to our Violette.’
Kohler dragged out his notebook. ‘Your sister, mademoiselle. Sister Céline. Did she come to see you yesterday?’
The day that child was killed—she knew this was why he had asked, but were his eyes always so empty? ‘Céline did not come to see me, as was her custom. I waited—yes, of course. One cannot deny God’s little messenger, but …’ The girl shrugged.
‘How often does she come to visit you?’
Had they found something? she asked herself. ‘Not often. Twice a month. Sometimes three or four times if she’s really upset, and not always on a Sunday. Usually on a Monday, a Wednesday or a Friday. It depends on her schedule.’
What was it Father Jouvand had said about the soup-kitchen days? Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Ah merde. The same. ‘Upset about what?’ he asked.
Ah! The police, they were all alike. ‘About myself, my profession. Her knees are always red and swollen. If she’s really upset, I put ointment on them. She makes me do it as a penance.’
There, does that satisfy you? he could almost hear her asking.
One of the other girls came into the room to hand Madame Morelle the coffee can that sat on the floor beside every whore’s bed or washstand to catch the rubber leavings, which were, of course, resold, especially in these hard times. ‘Ten?’ asked Madame Morelle, peering into the thing. ‘What is this, Lilou?’
‘I’m sore, madame. It itches.’
‘Ah! such foolishness. Give it a wash. Go on. Get out and take this with you. Bring it back to me with thirty, you understand? Thirty or else! Now where were we?’
She wet her lips and took another sip of the advocaat and port that kept her going. One of the girls passed her a lighted cheroot, wine-cured and dark.
‘Did your sister ever come with a priest?’ he asked.
‘A priest?’ Violette swallowed, recovering quickly. ‘No. No, she always … Ah now, a moment. Of course, you mean Father Jouvand. Yes, yes, they sometimes came together. The sisters, they must always be accompanied when they go out, isn’t that so? They cannot walk alone.’
‘Does a priest not call?’
‘Those who wish to attend Mass go out.’
‘That old priest is like a chancre,’ seethed Madame Morelle. ‘Always interfering, always telling us God condemns His daughters who fall by the wayside but never the men who use them. Never! Ah, celibacy is to the priesthood what marriage is to the maisons de tolérance. Both are to be sworn while making the lofty claims of sainthood when God knows the frock is up, the trousers down, and if not the anus of another, then the correct and God-demanded entrance of one of my girls.’
They roared, they hooted, and all the while a sous-maîtresse dispensed clean hand towels, marked the slashes in the little book, took the money and brought the girls out to meet their clients, since the room was occupied.
But Violette didn’t alter the look she had first given him.
‘I want another priest,’ he said and watched as the faintest shudder of alarm passed through her. ‘A man with a black overcoat.’
One by one the other whores looked at each other and for a moment an uncomfortable silence fell on the room.
‘There is no other,’ said Violette. ‘When my sister does not come with Father Jouvand, she brings along one of the other sisters. It’s most uncomfortable for me—ah yes, of course—but what can one do with such as them? We talk, we walk. I hear the same old admonitions, the same scolding, the same tiresome prayers. I wasn’t a virgin when I first became a girl of the streets, Inspector. My father took that from me at the age of eight, but to Céline he is still a saint and blameless.’
‘Blind … Céline, she was blind to it,’ acknowledged Madame Morelle, puffing on her cheroot and glad they had got over the impasse. A priest, a maquereau …
‘He broke my heart but taught me only one thing,’ said Violette of her father, ‘and that is that men want everything a girl has and they can take. Now, please, this is costing me money. May I return to my customers?’
‘Does your sister hate young girls?’
‘Ah! why do you ask? She’s not a suspect, is she?’
He did not grin, this detective. He flipped his little notebook closed, stood up, got his overcoat and hat, and said, ‘Go fill up your coffee can. I’ll be back, and when I am, see that your tongue is loosened or I’ll shut this place down so hard Madame’s ears will flap for ever. Old Shatter Hand may be a friend of the house, but he’s our boss on this and what we say goes.’
It wasn’t Violette who made the sign of the cross, or even any of the other girls, but Madame Morelle herself, and the look she gave Violette told him he would have to come back.
‘Your maquereau?’ he asked, stopping the girl in the hall and seeing her wince with dismay. ‘What’s his name and where can I find him?’
She shrugged. She said, ‘I haven’t seen that one since he was knifed where he shouldn’t have been and died in the street. Since then I have kept my share of my little gifts for myself. At the end of the year I will have enough to leave this place. I’m going to Provence, to a farm I know of. I’m going to grow vegetables and raise birds. Peacocks and parrots to sell in the markets. Céline doesn’t believe me, but you can if you wish.’
He felt her fingertips lightly trace the scar on his cheek and explore the bullet graze across his brow. ‘Have you a woman?’ she asked—he could hear the earthiness deliberately grating in her voice. She was lying, of course, about the maquereau and financing the dream. At the church and convent school Father Jouvand had said, ‘Violette Belanger makes a mockery of that same sister … If it is someone in the guise of a nun you are looking for …’
A ‘nun’, a ‘priest’ and a ‘schoolgirl’. Ah merde, Giselle …
‘I don’t like farming. I had enough of that as a boy, but I’ll be sure to let my partner know. He’s always going on about his retirement.’
‘You do that, and if you see my sister, please tell her what our father did to me on my birthday.’
‘You weren’t to blame, were you?’
‘No. No of course not. I was a child.’
5
FROM THE DEEPER DARKNESS OF THE FOLLY’S columns, S
t-Cyr looked down over the garden towards the Villa Vernet. He was so cold he was numb to it, but waited, and when a door softly closed behind the receding figure, he turned and disappeared inside the folly to strike a match over the stone table in its centre. He struck another and another, the wood so cheap and brittle, the nation’s matches were all but useless, especially at times like this.
At last he had one lighted. Steam issued from the plate of soup that had been covered with a porcelain lid and wrapped in towels. The soup was a golden yellow and piping hot … ah nom de Jésus-Christ! Why did God put such temptations in front of him?
The match went out and he stood in absolute darkness breathing in the last traces of sulphur and the first of an ambrosial aroma that made the juices run.
‘A potage purée de volatile à la reine, the original,’ he sighed. ‘A soup whose recipe must date from the sixteenth century.’
Had the child arrived? he wondered. Was she now secretly watching him or a prisoner of the one who had been following her at 2.00 p.m., the one, most likely, who had killed her little friend? Dead …? Was she now dead?
Exhausted from searching for her, and still arguing with himself whether to ask von Schaumburg to authorize an all-out search, he had not even been able to confirm she really had been seen. But to call out the troops would be to panic the killer if he had her, and that could not be risked for he would then simply kill her, too.
And if she is still free and hiding out, he asked, will she not simply freeze to death?
The soup was a purée of finely pounded breast of chicken that had first been roasted to a golden brown on a spit. The flour of a dozen sweet almonds and three or four bitter ones had been added, so, too, the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs.
A fortune in these hard times, or at any time. A treat the child must adore, and so the Vernet chef had prepared it.
‘A consommé of chicken stock,’ said St-Cyr aloud and into the surrounding darkness should the child be there to hear. ‘Finely chopped leeks and celery stalks in season are added, the celery seed used now. Then cream or milk once the puréed ingredients have been given a final pass through the sieve. Saffron and honey, essence of roses, and a few pinches of thyme. Me, I admire your choice. Spooned over crumbled bread crusts to further thicken it, your soup, it is magnificent.’
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