‘But what I can’t understand is why, if you were expecting him to give you a lift to the train on Saturday – and you were, I think – he left a note on Friday that implies he would meet you in Paris and not here first.
‘Two visits, then, to this hotel, mademoiselle, the first not on Friday as the note claims but on Saturday. He knew you were worried about the abortion, knew you might not join him, so he told his driver to wait and came up here to this room, but what did he find?’
He would let her consider this, thought St-Cyr. He would pocket the snapshot of the four victims on the terrace of that inn and the one of her with the riding crop. ‘Did he find you, not in bed as you’d hoped, but crammed into that armoire? Is that not why he wrote Friday’s note and then … yes, then returned on Tuesday to leave the other as proof positive that he hadn’t been here on Saturday. Old Rigaud, the concierge, could well not have noticed that Friday’s note had been hurriedly left on Saturday.
‘The train took him to Paris, mademoiselle, but had he discovered why you couldn’t join him?’
I was cold, she seemed to say. So cold in bed, but I wanted Gaëtan to make love to me. I needed that reassurance, Inspector.
‘You had left the door unlocked. He was early – too early for the Paris train, but you said “Entrez” anyway when he knocked, only it wasn’t him,’ said St-Cyr, his voice gentle as he crouched to look closely at her. ‘Did you know your killer or killers, Mademoiselle Trudel? There is no sign of a struggle – of course things could have been tidied, but I doubt this. You didn’t scramble out of bed to try to escape, didn’t scream – although others would have been awakened and would have rushed to your assistance. Had you drifted off? Had someone intercepted you as you carried that bottle of Chomel from the Hall des Sources? Did they demand you tell them where the key to the Hall was kept? Had they known then that Céline Dupuis, your friend, would pay the Maréchal a visit?
‘Did they know your lover would pick you up on his way to the train and was their intervention the reason you decided not to go home?’
As the sous-directeur’s shorthand typist, it would have been reasonable for her to accompany Deschambeault to Paris to cover whatever meeting he had to attend. ‘But he was worried you would bolt for home. He had to be certain you would take that train, mademoiselle, and so had told you he would be giving you a lift to the station.’
Again the killer or killers hadn’t chosen the logical target, but had left, in the rats, every indication that he, she or they would now do so.
There were 25,000 francs in the Paris handbag – more than a year’s wages for a girl like this – all in brand-new notes with Vichy’s Labourage et pâturage sont les deux namelles de la France on the reverse. Ploughing and grazing are the two udders of France. ‘Merde alors, some ploughing, some grazing, eh?’ And no thought of theft on the part of her killer or killers, just as with their next victim.
An embossed, gold-lettered card allowed entrance to the Cercle Européen, that supper club of the elite on the Champs-Élysées, which was owned and operated by Édouard Chaux of Lido fame.
Anyone who was anyone sought membership to the Cercle but only a select few gained it.
‘And vans from the Bank of France were hauling things other than banknotes. Gaëtan Deschambeault’s vans.’
A gold cigarette case from Cartier, at 23 place Vendôme, held only Chesterfields, the case filled in preparation for the trip. No mégot tin accompanied it – either she would have had no reason to scrounge while in Paris, or hadn’t wanted others to see her doing so.
The tin was in her day-to-day hangbag and had once contained small, pearl-shaped bonbons, Anis de l’Abbaye de Flavigny; the illustration on its lid was of a shepherd and his girl at a well.
‘Dijon,’ he said, and taking out his own tin, which was far more worn than hers and one of several he used, confided, ‘We share this love, mademoiselle. A tin that harkens back to a quieter, gentler time.’
Humbled by the coincidence, he prised off the lid of her tin to reveal six half-smoked cigarettes. ‘A Balto, two Gauloises bleues, and three Wills Gold Flake – British,’ he muttered. ‘But why, please, did the girl you were talking to smoke only half of each of the last three cigarettes? Nervous … was she nervous? Was it yourself and Friday night here in your room and alone? Alone, I think, with your thoughts.’
The lipstick on the cigarette butts had been thickly applied. When touched, a little of it remained on his fingertip, a sure indication of how cheap and ersatz things were these days. ‘But you wear none, mademoiselle, and would not have applied it so heavily, not if about to kiss a lover who demanded discretion.’
Turning from her, he began again to look about the room, saw the records she had brought from Paris on previous trips. One sleeve was empty. No portable gramophone was in evidence, but a cleared space, square and empty, had remained.
‘“Sans Toi”,’ he muttered as he read the sleeve’s label and, looking uncertainly at the door, said, ‘Ah mon Dieu, Hermann, be careful. I heard that song being played as I came up here.’
There were sixty-seven rooms in the bloody hotel, five of them kept as spares in case needed by visiting secretaries, accountants, pimps, card-sharks, assorted bagmen and hangers-on. Of the sixty-two registered residents, fully half had been here since the Defeat.
It would be a detective’s nightmare to sort it all out, but as if this was not enough, the conservatory had been and still was used as a général overflow and dosshouse. Beds everywhere under the blue-washed, sticking-papered glass, clothing here and there, scant food on makeshift shelves, in trunks, on suitcases and in boxes. Hotplates warm, thin soup in a pot. A crust of the grey National, a half-eaten clove of garlic.
‘And not one of these unregistered visitors,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Have they all vanished?’
The ‘room’ smelled of sweat, no wash-water and mould.
‘Three males, two females,’ he said, ‘and the hotel, having learned by its bush telegraph of the murder and the presence of two decidedly interested detectives, has emptied itself.’
Ach! what was he to do? Go back up to Louis who would still be ‘talking’ to that poor thing, or try to find someone?
Rigaud was reading Proust! Closeted in his loge, the concierge was taking time out in a tattered club chair.
‘Run the lift up and down for me,’ said Kohler. ‘Create a diversion. Do it twice.’
‘The electricity … The shortages, monsieur.’
‘Fuck the shortages. Just do it or I’ll have Herr Gessler and his boys turn the hotel upside down and tumble everyone out in the cold.’
‘It’s freezing in here anyways. Besides, most are away at work. Only the entertainers, the hat-check girls, night waiters, croupiers, telephone and telegraph operators and the sick are in their rooms, or were. After all, isn’t the flu season upon us?’
A wise one to whom the offer of a cigarette, had he any to give, would only have been accepted but ‘for later’.
The Gestapo is harried, thought Rigaud, but heard the voice of his mother saying, Daniel, have courage. This one and his kind are living like God in France, therefore you must show the muscle! Only then will he and his little Sûreté collabo gumshoe realize that the hotel is indeed empty except for the corpse they have found.
Maman had always had something to say about everything. ‘Corpses should be removed immediately, Inspector,’ he said testily. ‘It’s unsanitary to leave them for so long. The room is needed also.’
‘Nom de Dieu, don’t you listen? Stop at each floor. Open and close the cage door and don’t bother to tell me you haven’t an operator’s licence or that you’re not paid to run that thing!’
This Boche, like the others, just had to have the last word, snorted Rigaud silently. Well, he’d see about that!
When the lift started, it went down into the cellars and there it stayed. ‘Salaud!’ muttered Kohler as he went up the back stairs. He’d find Lucie Trudel’s floor and start there. He
’d wait, he’d listen. Some may not have made it out yet, he told himself. And trying door after door, silently went along the narrow halls.
Even Louis was listening to the hotel. Caught like a thief with an empty record sleeve in hand, he was startled when the door opened without a sound.
Then he brought a finger to his lips and pointed to the room above.
Hermann indicated he would go left. A nod would suffice.
Louis softly closed the girl’s door and eased its key around in the lock before pocketing it.
Guns drawn, they started out.
The staircase was old, the carpet thin and faded. Wincing, cursing the pain in his left knee, Kohler took the steps two at a time. There wasn’t a sound but then, distant and deep below him, came the metallic clunk of a spanner, the noise rocketing up the lift-well from the cellars.
BANG! BANG! came the voice of a bloody great hammer hitting the spanner to jar the bolt and make it come loose.
‘You’ll bugger your tools, idiot,’ he breathed and, going up the last of the stairs, saw Louis at the far end of the dimly lit corridor. He was pointing to the floor above. Ah merde, this was serious.
Again the hammering came, again it sent its shock waves through the hotel. Old Rigaud began to curse the imbéciles in Paris to whom instructions for repairs should have been sent had the ancestors of the members of the Ministry of Housing not been sired by incestuous Royalists and priests in the pay of the Sun King himself!
The gears to the lift had jammed, as Rigaud had known they would!
There was no sign of Louis in the sixth-floor corridor. Had he gone up to the attic, to Céline Dupuis’s room? Had he met the assassin or assassins on the stairs between the fifth and sixth floors?
They’re here, he said to himself. They’re waiting. Ach, it wasn’t good. No matter what the outcome, the Résistance would only think Louis was trying to protect the boys. A collabo.
Going up to the attic, he found all the doors were closed. Crossing the hotel, he started down, listened, heard nothing even from the cellars, but now the lift began its painful ascent. Straining, he waited for it to reach the ground floor which it did, the thing not stopping afterwards until the fourth floor and the end of its ride.
Still the cage doors didn’t open. Still there was no further sound.
‘Louis?’ he asked under his breath. Had they come for Louis? Early last December he’d been put on some of their hit lists. They’d even sent him one of the little black coffins they reserved for those they felt were due special attention.
A patriot. And sure, Gabrielle had tried to intervene and tell her contacts in the Résistance that Louis was innocent and at one with them, but such communications were difficult at best.
Silently he descended the stairs only to find Louis sitting on the top step to the sixth floor. A copy of L’Humanité, the clandestine newspaper of the communists and Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, was in his hands.
Liste Noire Numéro 10, he indicated. The Black List. It began with a blocked-out Definition of a Savage, implying brutality, cruelty, child butchering and all else, and then in heavy type that sickened: ST-CYR, JEAN-LOUIS, CHIEF INSPECTOR OF THE SÑRETÉ, DOMICILED AT 3 RUE LAURENCE-SAVART, BELLEVILLE, PARIS, AGENT OF THE GESTAPO CURRENTLY OPERATING IN VICHY AND ITS ENVIRONS.
There were a good fifteen other names but Louis’s was right at the top of the list. ‘Almost fresh ink,’ mused Kohler softly. ‘It’s dated Tuesday, 2 February 1943. Boemelburg hadn’t even sent us on our way.’
Were there ears everywhere? Were the walls also watching? ‘But it was left for me to find, Hermann, not you. Did our assailant or assailants know the very staircase I’d use?’
It was a good question, but something had best be said. ‘Dummkopf, it’s simply coincidence. It can’t have been anything else. Come on, we’d better see about the lift.’
‘Monsieur Rigaud was certainly pissed off by your ordering him around. You did, didn’t you? How many times must I tell you there’s a way to ask and a way not to?’
‘But has he paid for it? Have we another body on our hands?’
Again, as before, the hotel seemed to sense there was trouble and, keeping itself utterly still, waited for them to make their way down to the fourth floor. When they got there, Louis plucked at his sleeve and silently mouthed the words, ‘Let me take care of it.’
Tucking the newspaper into a pocket and securely out of sight, he went on ahead, shabby in that battered brown fedora and threadbare overcoat, unassuming, broad-shouldered and tough, mein Gott, tough. The Lebel Modèle d’ordonnance 1873 six-shooter, with its 11mm black-powder cartridges that had been left over from just after the Franco-Prussian War, was in his right hand. Double action and weighing nearly a kilo, the revolver also served as a club. Though Louis could hit a sou at thirty paces with the thing, it wasn’t even the 1892, 8mm smokeless, ‘modern’ version that had been lost in Lyons on another case!
The older Lebel was all that Gestapo Paris-Central would allow him and even then the gun was not to be handed over by his partner until after the shooting had started!
But rules were to be broken, especially at times like this.
Louis slid the gun away and, facing the brass and diamond-patterned mesh of the cage, stood waiting.
There’d been whispers – there must have been – but these had stopped. Unsmiling, Bousquet stood beside a tall, grim-faced, black-overcoated, broad-shouldered, white-shirt-and-tie man whose black homburg was loosely held in the left hand. Wedding ring and all, thought Kohler. Married and no doubt with a grown or nearly grown family. Wealth and power, the face broad and determined, the hair jet black but unfortunately thinning where vanity would be sure to notice, the nose wide and fierce.
‘The lower lip is thicker than the upper,’ confided Louis quietly, not turning to face his partner. ‘The cheeks and chin are freshly shaven, Hermann, and still tingle from the lotion his coiffeur had just applied as the chair had suddenly to be vacated due to an important and unpleasant summons. He’s missed his luncheon engagement and looks at us as if at a plate of soup in which a fly has had the audacity to make a crash-landing. Be careful. Let me do the talking.’
‘Jean-Louis, I came as soon as word reached me,’ began Bousquet, forcing a grin as he opened the cage.
‘And Rigaud, Secrétaire?’
‘Is at his desk. We just saw him.’
‘Ah bon, then come with me. Hermann, please check the fifth-and sixth-floor rooms that are directly above that of the victim and her child. I heard something up there. Fire twice if needed and the three of us will join you.
‘It’s police work, Secrétaire,’ he continued. ‘I’m sure you know all about it. Mes amis, this way, please.’
*
Threads and patches of dark blood were interwoven with the waste she had evacuated. The umbilical cord was a deep bluish purple to flaccid grey and netted with dark veins, the child, the foetus, tiny and curled up in the puddle.
Eyes stinging as the stench rushed in at him, Deschambeault jerked his head back and clapped a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Rage, fear, doubt … ah, so many things were in the look he gave. Bousquet, to his credit, exhibited only concern and worry, a touch of sickness also.
‘Enough, damn you!’ choked Deschambeault. ‘How dare you force me to look at her squatting in her filth? She’s gone. Finie, eh? Isn’t that enough for you?’
‘Jean-Louis …’
‘Secrétaire, a moment …’
‘A Sûreté? A Chief Inspector? Rene, is this imbécile the one that Laval insisted Paris send us? Well, is he?’
One should never back away from an insult, especially not from a haut bourgeois and a political! ‘Monsieur, you will excuse the first-hand experience, but it’s necessary. You see, she was rendered unconscious by smothering and then placed here. Look closely … Come, come, both of you. Another simple introduction to police work, eh? You see there are fibres in the frothy, bloodstained, oedematous fluid that has er
upted from her mouth. Some cotton wool, perhaps, or ersatz cloth you ask? Her killer found that the pillow he had used was insufficient, n’est-ce pas? A sock was jammed into her mouth while she was unconscious, then the nostrils were tightly pinched until the body’s convulsions had ceased and the child had been aborted. That sock, in so far as I can presently ascertain, is missing but I may, perhaps, have found its mate. Now talk. Give me everything. Avoid arrest for the moment, Monsieur Gaëtan-Baptiste Deschambeault, Sous-directeur of the Bank of France, since there are more pressing matters.’
‘Arrest? What is this he’s saying, René?’
‘Jean-Louis …’
The room was close, the door closed, the hotel silently listening no doubt, but it was now or never and they had to be made to cooperate. ‘Secrétaire, all four of the victims knew each other, yet you failed to tell us this. I need not remind you that such a lapse of memory could well bring arrest, dismissal, disgrace and a penalty of no less than five years.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ breathed Bousquet, the life draining from him.
‘Don’t try me, Secrétaire. Please don’t. This one went to Paris knowing of the murder yet failed to inform you of it even when he returned.’
‘Gaëtan, is this true?’ blurted Bousquet, sickened by the thought of such a betrayal.
‘Two notes, monsieur. One written, I believe, not on Friday, but on Saturday morning early. Argue if you wish, but failing to report a murder can only add weight to the charges of counselling and arranging an abortion. That girl was expecting you, in any case!’
‘Salaud, you’re a cold one, aren’t you?’ retorted Deschambeault acidly. ‘You don’t like us much, do you?’
‘Liking or not liking you has nothing to do with it. You came here on Saturday not only because you were afraid Mademoiselle Trudel would decide to go home but because you’d arranged to give her a lift to the train.’
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