‘They come in a van,’ said Albert eagerly. ‘A van that has the Bank of France written on it. I know because I heard him saying so, and then saw it myself. I watched. Cartons and cartons of cigarettes from the Tabac National in Vannes, brandy from the Halle aux Vins in Paris – heaps of white flour, too, and coffee, this coff—’
The bloody Bank of France!
‘It’s all right, Albert. Don’t worry,’ soothed Lulu. ‘The Inspector’s a friend. You heard what he said to that one when he had me trapped in the lift. “You hit her and I’ll kill you. Maybe I will anyway.”’
‘I … I borrowed our coffee from the van,’ confessed Albert, not looking at either of them. ‘The driver and his helper were too busy to notice. It was cold and dark. I hid it but then … then I made the coffee, real coffee, for the boys and … and told them the sack had fallen off a German lorry. They all patted me on the back, my father especially.’
‘A bank,’ Louis had said of the woman. A full safe with extra strongboxes just waiting to be opened if one could find the keys!
‘Madame Pétain …’ he attempted, only to hear Lulu cluck her tongue and tartly say, ‘Is not a friend of Albert’s.’
‘She doesn’t like idiots,’ whispered Albert, ducking his eyes down at the floor. ‘She and the doctor think I should be sent away.’
‘But she did say something to her coiffeur on the day Madame Dupuis fell asleep …’ hazarded Herr Kohler, a slow learner perhaps, thought Lulu, but a learner all the same.
‘Asleep – there, you see, Madame Lulu. I was right!’
‘Of course you were. Of course. Inspector, I did not listen in as Dr Ménétrel supposes, nor do I tell anyone what I may or may not have overheard. Monsieur Laurence Davioud is coiffeur to many of the wives of important ministers and government officials, those of the foreign ambassadors, too, and even those of inspectors of finances, I believe.’
A treasure … ‘And Ferbrave?’
‘Is a very dangerous man, so Albert and myself, we will appreciate your continued protection.’
‘He knows things,’ said Albert darkly. ‘Secret things. I’ll bet if he knew what I’d found, he’d want to take it from me, but I’m not going to tell him my special secret, Madame Lulu. I’m not! I’m going to keep it all for myself.’
Ah Sainte Mère, why must the boy always be picking things up? ‘What, Albert? Show me what you found?’ she coaxed. ‘You know I won’t tell anyone, not even your mother, if you don’t want me to, and as for the inspector, why he’s here to help us.’
‘I hid it. I can’t tell.’
‘Now, Albert … One good turn deserves another.’
‘I can’t hear you. I’ve got to stoke the fire.’
‘Albert, I must insist. Yvette will only ask me and I want to be able to tell her how helpful you’ve been.’
‘The other one took my ring. He said it would be dangerous for me if I kept it.’
‘Yes, yes, but this … this assassin they’re looking for will know you found something else. Nothing is ever secret for long in this place. Nothing.’
The firebox was stoked, the coals rabbled for clinkers. Sparks flew up, mesmerizing Albert. Madame Dupuis had been asleep. She had!
‘Son, give it to him,’ said the elder Grenier, coming into the furnace room. ‘You must, Albert.’ His hand went out to caution the others. ‘My son knows how important it is, Inspector. Albert was just waiting for the right moment to turn it over to you or your partner.’
The hiding place, no doubt one of several, thought Kohler, was behind the access plate at the bottom of the chimney. Dusted with soot, some of this sprinkled away as the folded rag was opened.
Brass at its ends, rosewood along its gently curved and palm-fitting haft, the folded-in blade silvery, the pocket knife gleamed.
Herr Kohler was humbled, thought Lulu. ‘I’ll see you get another just like it,’ he said, so gently for such a big man. ‘Now tell me where you found it.’
‘In the toilet. On … on top of the shit.’
‘The drains to our outdoor toilets become frozen in winter, Inspector,’ interjected the elder Grenier. ‘Since we have so many visitors these days, the Government decided to install two portable toilets next to the permanent ones in the park. Among my son’s tasks is the job of checking these twice each day, just to see there is paper if needed.’
Paper was in such short supply it was a wonder it wasn’t repeatedly stolen, unless, of course, Albert kept his eye on those two portables more than twice a day … ‘And the knife was lying there as if dropped?’
‘Albert washed and oiled it.’
‘I polished it. I shined it up. It’s brand-new and hasn’t …’ His voice trailed off. ‘Ever been used, I guess.’
‘Had the person who dropped it been sick?’ asked Kohler.
Albert gave an eager nod, then frowned and said, ‘It … it must have slipped and fallen. Yes … yes, that’s what it did!’
‘Open or closed? The blade, that is.’
‘Open. Straight up, and in like a dagger!’
‘Blood … was there blood?’
‘Frozen. It had been washed,’ grumbled Albert, gritting his teeth. ‘There wasn’t any blood. Why should there have been?’
‘When … when did you find it?’
‘In … in the morning, after the … the vomiting.’
‘A cigar? Did you find one?’
‘No.’
‘The key …?’ prompted Lulu, meaning the one to the Hall where the murder had taken place. Merde, the tension was terrible, but had Albert lied to protect the killer?
‘Those portable toilets are never locked, Inspector, only the permanent ones,’ said the elder Grenier.
The kid, the boy, the man, deserved a medal, but would Louis still be at the morgue?
‘A tisane of lime flowers with apple skins, or the carrot greens with liquorice. If I can’t drink it, I can always smoke it,’ said St-Cyr.
A wise one reeking of Sûreté and Paris and pissed off at having to wait his turn! The forlornly clutched pipe was empty, the tobacco pouch also, as further evidence. ‘A moment, m’sieur. I will see if there is anything beyond ashes. Sometimes the urn contains a few leaves.’
Verdammt, Louis, how many times have you told me never to try to joke with a waiter? Hermann would have gone on and on about the ‘lessons’ in French etiquette he constantly received from his partner, but Hermann wasn’t here as anticipated and perversity had won out!
Vichy’s railway station stank of cold, damp soot, unwashed bodies, disinfectant and urine. Dirt was everywhere: in the saucer that was used for powdered saccharin, on the floor that hadn’t been swept in months, in the shabbiness of the crowd that mingled or came and went but that held few happy faces. Papers being checked – plain-clothed Gestapo on the hunt; GFPs too, the Wehrmacht’s secret police, looking for deserters; its uniformed military police also, the Kettenhunde, the ‘chained dogs’ who wore their badge of office on a chain around their necks. Tough, brutal, no-nonsense men to whom even the Vichy goons and flics gave a wide berth.
The sculptress had taken the same train as Hermann and himself, but try as he now did, St-Cyr could find no memory of her having been in any of the waiting queues, either at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on Wednesday, the day after Céline Dupuis’s murder, or at the Demarcation Line.
‘Inés Charpentier,’ he said. Oh for sure, her name had been in the register. She’d taken a sleeper – normally one would think nothing of it except that, as an artist and poor, how could she have afforded such a luxury when even detectives didn’t dare to do such a thing?
Then, too, since the Defeat, the trains had been policed, not by the Sûreté, but by the German railway police. And everyone, including most especially the Resistance, was well aware of the respect and admiration given to wealth and position by the common and ordinary of the Occupier.
Even at the Demarcation Line they seldom bothered to disturb those in the wagons-lits, the Schlafwagens
.
‘A man and a woman, but one of the latter,’ he said, ‘who knows well how to come and go and now has a reason for staying here.’ Had someone paid her fare, someone in the Résistance?
It was an uncomfortable thought and, as always these days, things could be so complicated. Many of the railway workers, especially in Lyons, had been communists until the party had been banned, and when the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941, the cheminots formed what was to become, in 1942, the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, but by then the assassinations they had initiated were being carried out in earnest. Prominent collaborators, Wehrmacht corporals and higher-ups. In December 1941, Général Keitel signed the Nacht und Nebel Erlass, the Night and Fog decree. In retaliation for the killings, all those arrested whose innocence could not be quickly determined were to be deported to the Reich under cover of darkness.
Families could not even find out where their sons or daughters had been taken or if they had even been arrested. Brothers lost brothers; sisters the same. One simply vanished without a trace.
Hostages were also taken and shot. At first only a few, then ten for each German killed, then more, people being rounded up and held as Sühnepersone – as expiators – for those who’d been killed.
And yes, a civil war between Vichy’s newest police force, the Milice, and the Resistance was definitely possible. And yes, Hermann and he himself would be caught up in it, his Giselle and Oona too; Gabrielle also.
But these killings, he reminded himself, these failed assassination attempts, if indeed that is what they’d been, might not have been the work of the Resistance at all.
First there was the extreme right of Paris who hated Vichy and wanted power. The Intervention-Referat, at 48 rue de Villejust, recruited and trained teams of assassins from among members of the Parti Populaire Français of Jacques Doriot whose newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, didn’t just shrill collaboration beyond that of Vichy, but total union with the Reich. True, these killers did the work of the Gestapo when they wished to appear dissociated from it and, true, they did the PPF’s work as well, even when it didn’t necessarily agree with the Gestapo’s position.
Then, too, there was the Bickler Unit of the Alsatian, Karl (Hermann) Bickler, who trained infiltrators and agents for the Gestapo – assassinations, kidnapping and extortion also – but primarily directed against the Résistance.
‘And otherwise?’ he asked himself, for there were still possibilities of a political nature. ‘A jealous wife or lover, but surely not with all three of the victims.’
There was still no sign of Hermann, nor the tisane he had ordered. When looking out of the restaurant at the crowd, he couldn’t help but notice their footwear. Shoes indicated the health of the nation: carpet slippers in winter, but stuffed with bits of newspaper or twists of straw and worn sometimes even in mismatched pairs; open-toed high heels with thin straps, but with woollen socks instead of the silk stockings for which they’d been fashioned, hence the tightness, the rubbing, the painful chilblains one often noticed on the female corpses one had to examine. Wooden-soled shoes with their cleverly articulated hinges and cloth or ersatz leather uppers were everywhere, sabots also, and then, too, shabby leather or rubber boots that were far too big for the wives of those who were locked up in POW camps in the Reich.
‘We’ve become a nation that will wear anything and that no longer cares about appearances,’ he said and then, getting back to the matter at hand, ‘Camille Lefébvre’s father will have to be interviewed. There is also Céline Dupuis’s love of birds and her use of their quills that will have to be looked into. Merde, where is that partner of mine?’
Hermann functioned best with a set of wheels under him. In September 1940, when they’d first met, he’d seen that big, black, beautiful Citroën traction avant, that front-wheel drive, and had said blithely, ‘You’d better give me the keys.’
‘My car! The years of diligent service, the rise to Chief Inspector, and then … then to have it all taken away!’
Hermann was a terrible driver. Heavy on the foot, careless on the straight and narrow, insane on the blind curves. ‘It’s a wonder I haven’t been killed or forgotten how to drive.’ But Hermann, for all his faults, was desperately needed.
‘Bousquet has not come completely clean,’ St-Cyr grumbled when, grinning and loudly exclaiming, ‘I knew I’d find you here!’ the Bavarian at last appeared in a rush. ‘He’s still trying to hide something, Hermann.’
‘Cheer up and shut your eyes – come on, do it – and hold out your hand.’
Louis sucked in a breath as he felt for the thumbnail groove and carefully opened the blade to cradle the pocket knife in his hand. ‘A Laguiole, Hermann. A woman’s knife – there is no awl or corkscrew as with those of the men. It’s an unwritten rule of etiquette that women flash only open blades. The bee under my thumb at the head of the haft supposedly symbolizes Napoleon’s warrant but I doubt it. The village is well to the south of Clermont-Ferrand and a good distance from here. Still, the knives travel, and in the Auvergne it is preferred over the simple Opinel most of our peasants favour. Beautifully made, not cheap now, but razor-sharp because the steel is similar to that of surgical instruments – one per cent carbon, seventeen per cent chrome and point eight per cent molybdenum – but always the love of one’s craft goes into them.’
Opening his eyes, Louis laid the knife on the table, the cinematographer within him taking in each detail: the length, in total, some twenty centimetres, the blade being a little less than half of that: silver-coloured, then brass and rosewood with brass rivets, then brass again in the softly curved end to fit the hand perfectly – any hand.
‘She knew her weapons, Hermann, if she killed them all.’
‘But had she the Maréchal in mind?’
‘Or Bousquet, or Alain Andre Richard, Minister of Supplies and Rationing?’
There was a pattern in the steel along the back of the haft and this extended from the bee to the very end. One of art deco hills – volcanoes, perhaps, and each of a wide, low triangle with incised, deeper and much smaller triangular cuts both above and below to give the impression of the forested hills and valleys of the Auvergne.
‘It’s light,’ said Kohler. ‘It can’t weigh any more than two hundred grams.’
‘One hundred. A marvellous weapon and so easily carried in a handbag or pocket. The style is Spanish, though that of the blade goes much farther back in time and is Turkish, I believe. In the twenties and thirties the knives became increasingly popular outside of the Auvergne as tourists visited the village, and many were made to individual specifications, each client stating their needs and even the design on the haft and the choice of wood or horn. In short, the Laguiole became a cult item and expensive, a mark of distinction that others who also owned one would recognize and appreciate.’
‘Let’s hope we do.’
The tisane finally arrived in a dirty mug but was brusquely shoved aside. ‘Bring the Chief Inspector St-Cyr a pastis. He’s going to need it. I’ll have a beer and not one of those near-beers, eh? Gestapo, mon fin. Gestapo, and don’t you forget it or spit in our drinks either.’ The Walther P38 was taken out and laid on the table. ‘That’s so as to have it ready,’ he said to the waiter.
The knife and the pistol were stark against the worn glass of the table top beneath which a faded menu listed the brioches and croissants of long-lost days. ‘It shall be as you wish, m’sieur. Who am I to object to your breaking a law that was made only for us?’
‘Piss off!’
‘Certainly.’
‘Now he’ll cough into our drinks, idiot! How many times must I tell you that a little patience is always necessary?’
‘We haven’t time. The Bank of France has been humping stuff from Paris for friend Ferbrave.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Gut. I’ve finally got your attention.’
As was their custom when on short rations and at other times, they shared a cigarette, Hermann managing to find
one in a pocket. Damaged, of course, and dribbling stale tobacco, but still … ‘Merci.’
‘Take two good drags and take your time, eh?’
‘Three murders, three supposed assassination attempts that failed to find their respective targets but chose another.’
‘A lover, a mistress.’
‘The first of whom was known to flaunt her liaisons and no doubt to laugh in the face of Madame Richard.’
‘Did her husband know the vans were being used to haul rationed goods that had been purloined?’
‘We’ll have to ask him.’
‘A shorthand typist with the Bank of France, Mademoiselle Lucie Trudel, asked Albert to let her into the Hall des Sources, Louis. A bottle of the Chomel for a sick father, at just after 5 a.m. last Saturday.’
‘And not seen since?’ blurted St-Cyr, alarmed, no doubt, by the prospect of a killing as yet undiscovered.
‘Away on compassionate leave. I … I forgot to ask where. Sorry.’
‘We’ll deal with it.’
‘She lives in the. Hôtel d’Allier.’
‘And is not away at all, but staying in her room and able to enter Céline Dupuis’s at will to leave these?’
Louis set the love letters on the table and then the carte d’identité with its head-and-shoulders profile. The knife was still there …
‘Someone who can come and go at will,’ said Kohler, ‘and must have damned well known the Garde Mobile and lift operator would be absent.’
‘Ménétrel gave them the night off.’
The cigar band was added to the collection, the earrings also and the sapphires, lastly the cufflink’s stud.
‘And a dress, plus a pair of high heels,’ muttered Kohler.
‘Why leave the ID like that for Bousquet, mon vieux? In neither of the other killings was such a thing done. Though the reports are thin and add little, both of those victims had their handbags with them – Camille Lefébvre’s was found untouched with her clothes in the cabin; Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux’s was in the lockup at the Grand établissement thermal, also untouched and with her clothing.’
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