And afterwards? she asked, still finding it hard to resist not being bitter. Afterwards so few men had remained, God had left no one for her. Two casualties: the husband and the wife.
6
One by one the girls came down to the viewing room at the House of Madame Chabot. Some wore slippers and a flimsy chemise or see-through negligees, one a dishevelled schoolgirl’s tunic. They didn’t cry as friends should over Giselle’s not being found. Their expressions were hard and watchful, the odours of them mingling with the ever-present fug of Gauloises, the acid of vin ordinaire and the perfume each had chosen as her own little signature but Hermann hadn’t come by. ‘I want answers, damn you,’ rebelled St-Cyr. ‘Giselle is not at the flat, as Madame Chabot has claimed!’
That one, that fifty-eight-year-old with the made-up eyes, blonde wig, round rouged-and-powdered cheeks, vermillion lips and double chin who still insisted on claiming she was thirty-eight, gave but the swiftness of a green-eyed gaze that would have startled a cobra.
‘She has said she would spend the night there, Inspector. Who am I to …’
‘It’s Chief Inspector!’
Ah, bon, he was now shouting. ‘That’s a zéro to me, you understand. The police are the police, but the girl came to the house asking of Herr Kohler and expecting—yes, expecting, I must emphasize—to pass the time of day with friends? What friends?’
‘Now, listen. Giselle le Roy was one of your girls. My partner …’
‘Decided to make a petite amie of her and rob the house of one of its top earners? Rented a flat around the corner to constantly remind me of my loss and to tempt others into giving up the profession and moving in with another of les Allemands? Pah, quelle folie! When spring comes, the Résistance will strip her naked and cut off that jet-black hair your partner loves to rub his fingers and other things through.’
And never mind Hermann’s sex life, interesting as that might well be. ‘When spring comes’ meant the Allied invasion. It could be years away and yet …
‘That is,’ she said tartly, ‘if the blackout sadists who prowl the streets in search of such women don’t get to her first!’
‘She’ll try to hide in the darkness of a passage like the Trinité,’ muttered one of the girls.
‘He’ll ram a table leg up her for good measure,’ said the brunette called Gégé.
‘But first, he’ll give her a terrible beating,’ said Bijou.
‘He’ll not stop until her throat has been slashed,’ said another, clasping her own as the cat wandered in to lift its tail and rub against her legs before arguing with a pom-pom.
‘I can’t afford to have the house endangered, Inspector,’ went on Georgette Chabot. ‘This house—any such house—must always guard its peace. The girls move around enough as it is and are subject to temptation that needs no further encouragement.’
‘Giselle didn’t encourage us to leave, madame. I swear it,’ blurted Didi.
‘ARE YOU TO PACK YOUR BAGS OR DO YOU WANT ME TO PUT YOU ON THE STREET WITHOUT THEM?’ shrilled the woman.
‘Madame, please! I only meant…’
‘SEE THAT YOU MAKE UP FOR IT! Here the house and the licence are French for French, Inspector. Citizen with citizen, patriot with patriot, and that is all there ever has been or ever will be. When that Le Roy person showed up late this afternoon, I told her to get lost and not come back. I can’t afford to endanger my girls.’
‘You did what?’
‘Are your ears not sufficient?’
Threatening her would only prolong the agony. Oh for sure, two of the German military police often paid prolonged visits and the house was heated, its larder sufficiently supplied at a cost, no doubt, to feed the girls, but … ‘Look, Madame Cliquot, the concierge of that building where Hermann insists on renting a flat, has said the girl never went there today.’
‘That woman would say anything,’ chided Georgette. ‘Frankly, she doesn’t want your partner and his women as tenants and is determined to have the owners cancel their lease. She doesn’t want trouble either, does she, a French girl who offers herself entirely to one of the enemy?’
‘Since when was Hermann ever considered one of those?’
‘Since June of 1940, I think. I do know, also, you understand, that Irène Cliquot is intelligent enough not to want such scores settled in her house.’
‘And Hermann?’
‘Isn’t welcome. The law is the law, isn’t it? Who am I to challenge it?’
At 10.37 p.m. the little blue lights that dimly marked the most important street corners suddenly went out. The last trains of the métro would have begun their runs at ten and maybe the most distant ones still had a ways to go.
One thing was certain. The Occupier had again ordered that the plug be pulled. Kohler stood a moment at the corner of the rue La Boétie and the Champs-Élysées. Louis must have known who Denise Rouget’s father was, but Louis wasn’t here.
‘I have to do it,’ he breathed, the street suddenly damned lonely. ‘Either I’m finished as a detective and ripe for the Russian front, or I’m not. That petite amie of the judge’s may have made our phone call.’
Feeling his way in the rain, he started up the rue La Boétie. Through the hush of the city, sounds came. The throb of a distant motorcycle patrol, the squeal of Gestapo tyres, the clip-clop of high heels with their hinged wooden soles one hell of a lot closer, the heavy scent of too much perfume mingling with that of fresh tobacco smoke.
A lonely car, an Opel Tourer by the sound, turned off the rue de Ponthieu to begin its pass as a figure darted from the shelter to urgently rap on a side windscreen. ‘There’s some bastard lurking around here,’ shrilled the girl as she scrambled in, and didn’t the Occupier drive virtually all the cars, and wasn’t that one just as capable of attacking her?
A cigarette was accepted and a light. The blinkered headlamps went out. The engine continued wasting petrol. Kohler left her to get on with the client’s little moment and went along the street thinking of Giselle and how he had saved her from just such a life. No matter what Louis said, she’d be perfect for that little bar on the Costa del Sol, but the sooner they were out of France and into Spain, the better. ‘False papers,’ he muttered. ‘Cash, too, and plenty of it.’ The lament of the damned.
When he came to what must be the rue d’Artois, he backtracked. Each of these former mansions was cloaked in darkness but at one, the concierge had lit the stub of a candle and that could only mean one thing, of course. The house was warm, too. Though this last didn’t surprise, it did raise a note of caution, but once committed, always committed.
‘Monsieur …’
He would have to say it firmly, couldn’t waver, not with a tenant or tenants from among the Reich’s most privileged. ‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central. The flat Judge Rouget leases. Gestapo HQ have ordered me to take a look around. Lead me to it, then wait down here. Lend me that torch of yours and forget you ever saw me.’
‘Inspector,’ said Laurent Louveau, concierge of this building and with some authority of his own, ‘Monsieur le Juge hasn’t been in for some time.’
‘Don’t get difficult. It’s Élène Artur I’m interested in.’
Louveau tossed his head. ‘Has the girl done something she shouldn’t?’
‘Was she here last night?’
‘Why, please, would she have been if Monsieur le Juge wasn’t?’
Logic was one of the finer points of the French, their brand of it anyway, but there was no sense in arguing. ‘That’s what I’d like to find out, among other things.’
‘Then I must inform you that the girl wasn’t here either.’
‘Good. You’ve no idea how relieved I am. We’ll take the stairs. I don’t trust the lifts.’
Had this one not even noticed? ‘It shall be as you wish, Inspector, since the electricity is off in any case. The flat is on the third floor.’
‘And easy to a side staircase and entrance?’
Sacré nom de nom, what was this?
‘Oui, but … but there’s a little bell above that entrance and I would have heard it, had that door not been locked as it was and is.’
‘Aber natürlich. Ach, sorry. I keep switching languages. That means, of course.’
‘Monsieur the Lieutenant Krantz sometimes also forgets, as does the Mademoiselle Lammers. They make a big joke of it and tell me I’d best learn a proper language, but …’
‘Krantz … Isn’t he one of those who oversee the Bank of France?’
‘Ah, no. He is at the Majestic.’
The offices of General Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France. ‘And the Mademoiselle Lammers? Thesima, was it, or Mädy?’
‘Ursula. She’s also at the Majestic. A translator, as is the lieutenant.’
And probably working for the Verwaltungsstab, the administrative staff that dutifully subordinated every facet of the French economy to those of the Reich. Fully five hundred million francs a day in reparations and payments had to be coughed up for losing the war and housing one hundred thousand of the Wehrmacht in France, along with lots of others. Converted from its hotel rooms, there were now more than a thousand offices in the Majestic alone, and wasn’t it on the avenue Kléber at the corner of the avenue des Portugais and but a short walk to the avenue Foch and the SS, and hadn’t von Stülpnagel and Oberg served in the same regiment during that other war?
Of course they had, and yes, Von Stülpnagel left all ‘political’ matters, like the retaliatory shooting of hostages, to Oberg, thereby disassociating himself entirely from the extremes of the latter.
No one could have brought the Lido’s telephone caller here last night. They wouldn’t have dared.
The Club Mirage was a crash of noise. Packed to the limit with German uniforms, there wasn’t even standing room for one lone Sûreté, the bar impossible to approach.
Up onstage, all-but-naked girls, some nearly fifty, one sneezing at the ostrich plumes they wore, presented a shocking tableau of the boy-king Tutankhamen’s spate of pyramid building. Whips cracked. Those being punished cringed. Cymbals reverberated as a bleary-eyed sun began to set but faltered and the guards in their pleated loincloth-skirts stood sentinel with spears if not otherwise employed.
Merde, a tableau such as this could go on for hours! Even those at the bar had stopped attempting to quench their thirst.
‘St-Cyr, Sûreté, meine Herren. Entschuldigen Sie, bitte. I have to see if my partner’s here. It’s an emergency.’
Excuse me, please? Ach, what was this? ‘Piss off, Franzose.’
‘But …’ Nefertiti had turned to face the audience and raise her arms. The politically correct albino Nubian began to sponge her naked back while the sun threatened to drop right out of sight behind the screen of a rose-red horizon but decided to hesitate.
‘Verfick dich!’ came a Wehrmacht hiss. Fuck off.
Jumping and waving a desperate arm to signal the bar was useless, but something must have been said, for as Nefertiti’s pseudo-Nubian sponged her ankles and calves, Remi, with the face of a mountain that was all crags, clefts and precipices, motioned.
A pastis, a double, had been set on the zinc, the Corsican adding a touch of water to cloud it green as if by magic. ‘Down that, mon ami. And another. You’re going to need it.’
‘Hermann … ? Has something happened to him? To Gabrielle?’
That massive head with its thick, jet-black, wavy gangster’s hair gave an all but imperceptible nod to indicate the dressing rooms as the crowd erupted into cheers through which came calls for the slaves to pluck their feathers and for the guards to drop their spears and loincloths.
Torchlight pierced the darkness of the judge’s flat. Briefly Kohler shone the light over a chinoiserie panel of leaves, vines and exotic birds before letting it fall to the Louis XVI table where Rouget would have left hat, walking stick and gloves. Judges were way higher up than detectives; judges had friends and friends of friends. Lieber Christus im Himmel, why did it have to happen to Louis and himself? The building had given no hint of warning. From somewhere distant, though, came the metallic clunking of a hot-water radiator.
There was no dominant smell except for that of the mustiness of old buildings and antique furniture. ‘Please use the candles, Inspector,’ the concierge had earlier said. Candles weren’t common anymore. Even in the South, in the former Free Zone, they hadn’t been seen by most since that first winter of 1940–1941.
Torchlight found her dark-blue leather high heels. They’d been soaked through last night but were now dry and needing a good cleaning and bit of polish. ‘Louis,’ he softly said. ‘I don’t think I can go through with this.’ Questions, Hermann, Louis would have said. You must concentrate on those. The time of entry? That call she made from the Lido last night didn’t come in to the quartier du Faubourg du Roule’s commissariat until 11.13 p.m. There would have been lots of time for her to have joined the judge at his table between sets …
Lots of time for others to have seen her sitting there with him. She had a child—was she married to a POW? She hadn’t been feeling well, had gone home early, the stage doorman said, but when, damn it, when? Early in a place like the Lido could mean anything up to midnight at the least.
Torchlight shone into the salle de séjour to settle on a gilded sconce. The cigarette lighter on the glass-topped coffee table was heavy. The matching cigarette box with its tortoiseshell repousé hadn’t had its lid completely replaced. Had her assailant dipped into it?
He knew she was here. Instinct told him this. Detective instinct.
Resting on the mantelpiece behind glass was a framed poster: Une Nuit à Chang-Rai, 7 Mai 1926 at the Magic City. Had the judge had a taste for showgirls even then?
Deep blue irises encircled soft pink roses that surrounded a scantily clad eighteen-year-old pseudo-indochinoise dancer. Slender, upraised arms crisscrossed above the coolie hat she wore. The look was squint-eye, the black lashes long and straight, the short hair curled in about her neck, and wasn’t the thing a parody Élène Artur must have definitely not appreciated, the judge a hypocrite? The dark-blue heels were every bit the same as those he’d just found.
‘Élène Artur,’ he said again, and weren’t names important? Hadn’t all the dead of that other war had names that had counted for something?
A vitrine held enamelled boxes, spills of jewellery, strands of pearls and beads, Fabergé eggs, Sèvres porcelain figurines, a Vénus, a marchioness … Had Hercule the Smasher used them to tempt his girlfriends into doing what he wanted or to pay them off by letting them choose some little memento as they left, one that said in no uncertain terms, Ferme-la, chérie? The kitchen was hung with copper pots and pans, Judge Rouget, Président du Tribunal spécial du Département de la Seine, immune to the scrap-metal drives that demanded everyone else cough up such items. The copper-sheathed zinc bathtub hadn’t been used to hold her corpse but the bidet had cigar ashes floating in it. A Choix Supreme? he demanded. Had Vivienne Rouget chosen to offer this Kripo one of those not because the Vichy gossip could be used if needed to shield that daughter of hers, but because she had damned well known or suspected this might happen?
Clothing clung to the open doors of an armoire whose mirrors threw back light from the candle in his hand. A necklace of sapphire beads had been broken. A dark-blue velvet off-the-shoulder sheath lay crumpled on the floor with a blue lace-trimmed silk slip and brassiere, silk stockings, too, that were scattered and had been yanked off—two men, had two of the bastards done it? The garter belt was entangled with the stockings and her step-ins.
Everywhere things had been broken, everywhere things torn or thrown, he waiting for the shakes to come, knowing, too, that that damned Messerschmitt Benzedrine he and sometimes Louis took to stay awake, wouldn’t help matters, but Louis who would, just wasn’t here …
The hush that enveloped the Club Mirage was every bit as deep as that first time St-Cyr had seen Gabrielle walk out onstage, a mirage of her own. Always she would have to si
ng ‘Lilli Marlene,’ and always that voice of hers would be carried over the airwaves by Radio-Paris and Radio-Berlin to be picked up by the Allies who avidly listened in, and wouldn’t being such a celebrity damn her in the end when finally France was freed? Hadn’t she best be got out of the country? A résistante!
Her dressing room was at the end of the corridor and right next to the stage door and stairs that led down into the cellars or up to the Rivard living quarters and storerooms and from those, down other sets of stairs to independent exits or up to the roof and from there to others.
Certainly Gestapo Paris’s Listeners had bugged that dressing room and just as certainly Gabrielle had left those bugs in place. Apparently, though, she had taken to keeping a bicycle handy. Unlocked, this shabby, third-hand instrument leaned against a wall, facing the exit and ready at a moment’s notice. Age and wear gave it a little less chance of being stolen, and wasn’t a bike by far the best means of travel these days? Didn’t it allow one to avoid the checkpoints and roundups that increasingly plagued the métro? Didn’t it also give advance warning of street controls since one could often see well ahead and reroute if possible or walk the bike up into a courtyard as if one belonged?
The dressing room was starkly Spartan, the more so from when he had met her during the investigation of a small murder, a ‘nothing’ murder Hermann had called it, only to then find otherwise. ‘Standartenführer … ? Forgive me, please. I didn’t know Gabi … the Mademoiselle Arcuri had someone waiting for her.’ Remi Rivard had tried to warn him. Remi …
‘St-Cyr, Sûreté—am I correct?’
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