‘Monsieur …’ began Louis.
‘Henri …’ pleaded Madame Rachline. ‘Henri, let me come to you.’
He must have thought this over, for he gave her a brief, sad smile before shaking his head. ‘It’s too late. It’s over, Ange-Marie. Tell them I’ll give you time to escape but only yourself.’
There was gasoline on the floor and when she reached it, she hesitated, for it was all around him and he sat right in the middle of it. ‘Henri … Chéri, listen to me, please. Martine … You know how much she loved to play in the orchestra.’
His face stiffened. The jars were raised threateningly. ‘Only because I made her,’ he said. ‘Me, Ange-Marie. Me, the brother who loved her more than anyone.’
The music of Haydn went on and on, over and over again. ‘No … no, that isn’t true, Henri. After her Max was killed, she threw herself into her music and her teaching. They were the only things that took the pain away and you know it. Don’t destroy the theatre she loved.’
‘As grandfather did?’ he snapped back at her acidly.
St-Cyr let her go ahead of him. He tugged at Weidling’s sleeve and finally whispered, ‘Put the gun down where he can see it.’
‘Dummkopf, don’t be a fool!’
‘If you shoot, the jars will break and we’ll never get out of here alive.’
Hermann was working his way around to one side. Momentarily the woman blocked the torchlight from the Salamander but then its beam fell on Charlebois again so that they could see the jars more clearly.
‘Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, Louis, he’s got the lids off!’
He had.
St-Cyr motioned to Weidling to stay put and began to ease himself away and around in a flanking motion. They’d have to try. They had no other choice. They were in too deep … too deep.
He brushed a cobweb from his face. With difficulty he eased himself under a crosspiece. Hermann was now some two metres to the other side of Charlebois; Leiter Weidling still perhaps four metres towards the entrance; Ange-Marie Rachline was resting back on her heels in front of her childhood friend.
‘Henri, do you remember Concarneau?’ she said.
The thought brought only despair. ‘How could I ever forget it?’
She brushed her tears away and tried to smile at him. ‘The smell of the sea, the sound of the waves, Henri.’
‘You would let Claudine hold your hands and I would pass the flame over her until …’
‘Until I told you where to touch her.’
‘Ah Jesus, Louis!’
That name was strung out for ever as the melody began again its strident surge. The tripline would be yanked, the bottles would be thrown … They could not get to them in time … time … Flames … There’d be engulfing flames … Phosphorus … searingly hot … Blinding … The stench of garlic … garlic … White smoke … dense white smoke and erupting gasoline …
Gently the woman took the jars from Charlebois’s hands and set them carefully to one side, ‘Bless you, Henri,’ she said, a tender whisper. ‘Your memory will live for ever for not having destroyed this place.’
‘Then shoot me!’ he screamed, and it was done as the sound of the cellos rose above them.
Paris was just not itself. Gripped in the iron fist of winter and that of the Occupier, the city was more than ominously silent. St-Cyr paused as he turned the corner on to his beloved rue Laurence-Savart. He knew the house at Number Three would be a shambles—shattered windows and splintered boards, the front wall and yard a wreck, a mistake … a Resistance bomb. Yet he was too tired and depressed to care. Lyon had left its mark on him and Hermann … Hermann had not wanted to share a belated bottle of the Moulin-à-Vent or to spend a moment in holiday salutations no matter how late.
Instead, hungry for his little pigeon and his Dutch hausfrau, he had made feeble excuses and had left the Sûreté’s little Frog to his own designs.
Gabi was still away at the château, the invitation for him to join her but a painful memory. The house, as he was just saying, was … ‘Ah no, Hermann No!’
In their absence, the Organization Todt, which did all the building for the Reich, had completely rebuilt the place! Three days, four days … what had it been?
In spite of knowing the street would now hate and distrust him as never before—A collaborator and why not, eh? Just look at what has happened!—he had to marvel at the job and to wonder how much Hermann had paid them.
There was a note tucked into a beautifully painted brand-new door. ‘Louis, go out and get laid. You need it.’
‘Ah merde, Hermann …’ Eyes smarting, he searched the long, narrow canyon of the street in hopes of seeing his partner, only to know the Bavarian would be sound asleep in his flat with a woman on either side of him.
‘Monsieur the Chief Inspector …?’
It was Dédé Labelle, whose mother took in laundry. ‘Monsieur, my friends and I, we wish to … to beg your forgiveness. We are sorry we have not given you the benefit of doubt in the matter of your … your collaboration. The people who have fixed your house, fixed the windows of all the others and gave them also the pleasure of burning the scrap boards.’
He went out to the boy and opened the brand-new gate for him. ‘That’s all right. You are forgiven. Come … come in. Let’s have a look at the workmanship, eh? The Boches—hey, those lousy Krauts, Dédé, there are some things they can do very well.’
The boy was not smiling and had no desire to enter. ‘What is it, Dédé? Is something the matter? Come, come, my partner and I have just finished a most difficult case in which a Salamander, realizing that a German fire marshal was hot on his trail, set fire to a cinema killing 182 innocent people and a priest who knew all about him. Unfortunately the fire marshal’s wife, who had been lured to the cinema by a friend of the Salamander and who also knew too much, was not locked in the toilets as planned and failed to die in the blaze.’
‘Monsieur …’ The boy broke into tears. Ah nom de Dieu, what was this?
‘My sister, Monsieur the Chief Inspector … Joanne, she is missing now these past two days and we … we were afraid she has … Grand-mere, she says Joanne, she should never have answered the advertisement in the Messages Personnels, that these days mannequins are no longer in demand, and that even if a girl is ripe and beautiful, no one would have the money to buy the film with which to take the necessary photographs of her.’
St-Cyr gazed down at the crumpled scrap of newsprint. Little Joanne, missing …? He saw her as a babe in arms, as a toddler playing with her friends, saw her as a schoolgirl in her blue smock and beret, and saw her in the shop where she had found a job. ‘Eighteen … she’d be eighteen now,’ he said aloud, but to himself and then sternly, ‘It’s a matter for the préfet, Dédé. It’s Paris. It’s his turf.’
Ah nom de Dieu, how could one explain the politics and territorial insanities of policework to a boy of ten who was desperate?
‘Let’s go inside, eh? Let’s have a cup of that wretched coffee we all have to drink, and you can tell me everything while I have a wash and a shave.’
‘She … she wanted so much to be a mannequin, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. It was to be her great escape. She was going to buy us all so many wonderful things. A new bicycle, a—’
‘Yes, yes, the coffee first, eh, Dédé? You can make it for me while I telephone my partner.’
‘There … there was also a bank robbery.’
‘Pardon?’
‘And a murder, a shooting.’
‘Please don’t pile it on. Let’s just stick to the disappearance. Let’s find her first before it’s too late.’
‘But … but she will have seen the robbery and the shooting? That’s what we all think, all of us. The other boys and myself.’
A bank robbery and a shooting … ‘How much was stolen?’
Blinking away his tears, the boy looked steadily up at him and for a moment there was only the silence of honesty between them. Then, ‘Eighteen millions, Monsieur the Ch
ief Inspector. Eighteen.’
One for every year of her life … ‘Good. My partner’s broke. That will be enough to tempt him out of bed at such an early hour.’
Turn the page to continue reading from the St-Cyr and Kohler Series
1
THE GIRL WAS ONLY EIGHTEEN AND SHE HAD been missing for four days. In photo after photo she stared up at them from among the dozens of photographs of herself and others who, like her, had worn the clothes and jewellery of the fashion trade and only by degrees had been cajolled into removing everything.
Now her nakedness, her dawning uncertainty and finally her terror lay underfoot among the scattered twenty by twenty-five centimetre enlargements that littered the parquet floors and staircases of an all-too-empty house.
Every stick of furniture had been removed, every designer blouse and slip or bit of cloth.
‘Who blew the whistle, Louis?’ breathed Kohler with barely controlled fury. Not a half-hour ago, thinking the girl might still be here, he had broken the lock with their stonemason’s hammer, hadn’t hesitated.
‘So many, Hermann. Ten, twelve—fourteen or fifteen young women,’ said St-Cyr, still aghast at what they had stumbled on to.
Breasts, thighs, buttocks, arms, legs and eyes formed a montage that only served to sharpen what must have happened.
‘All of about Joanne’s age, her hair, her …’
‘Yes, yes, but why was the house emptied, Hermann? Did they fear we would find their fingerprints? Did she cry out to them that Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté Nationale was a friend and neighbour? Did she tell them they had best release her?’
‘Don’t be a dummkopf. If she had yelled that at them, they would have killed her. There’s no evidence of that’
‘Ah merde, Hermann. To not know what has happened to her is to fear the worst and share the family’s agony.’
It was now Monday, 28 December 1942. The girl had last been seen at 11.45 a.m. on Thursday the 24th. Parisian to her very being, she had missed Christmas with her family, had simply not come home.
‘Have the others also been declared missing? Have some of their bodies been found? Mutilated? Raped? Sodomized? Tortured?’
‘Louis, cut it out! Quit jumping to conclusions. Quit taking it too personally.’
Clearly things had been going on for some time, and just as clearly the house had been emptied in one hell of a hurry.
‘Christ! What am I to tell her parents?’ demanded St-Cyr.
‘Nothing. Just progress is being made. You know the drill. You don’t need your Gestapo partner to tell you that.’
They began to sort through the photographs. In one photo Joanne Labelle, whose mother took in laundry and who, with her family, lived up the street from Louis on the rue Laurence-Savart in Belleville, lay on a superb Louis-Philippe chaise-longue staring up into the camera with so much doubt and fear in her eyes, they both knew she had realized all too clearly she was in too deep.
In another photo, the girl gripped the edge of a very fine Louis XIV commode as she stood starkly facing a wall mirror with her breasts squeezed between stiffened arms. The hair, loose and thick and falling almost to the waist, had been thrown back, the chin uplifted, the lips parted in a gasp, eyes clamped shut.
‘The bastards must have told her what was going to happen to her, Louis.’
St-Cyr took the proffered photo. ‘She’s not bound …? She’s not restrained in any visible way …?’
‘A gun then,’ snapped Kohler. ’That would imply there were at least two of them. One to take the pictures and the other to make certain she didn’t escape.’
Joanne stood on tiptoes in the photo and the thick and disconcerting triangle of her pubes was caught in the glass whose richly carved frame spoke of money. Lots of money. Old money probably.
In yet another of the prints, she had turned swiftly to challenge her abductors and must have shouted something, for the photographer had caught her biting back the tears, pinned as she was to the edge of that same commode, again reflected in the glass.
In another, she grovelled on a magnificent Savonnerie carpet. In another, she lay there weeping.
Kohler was grim. This wasn’t the usual. The clothes are too classy, too damned expensive and hard to come by.
Ah yes, the shortages, thought St-Cyr. Paris under the Occupation of the Germans in late 1942 was a city destitute and in hunger, yet still it attracted all sorts of ‘tourists’ from the Glorious Third Reich of the Nazis. Soldier-boys in field grey-green or air-force and navy blue. Rest and recupe’ for generals, businessmen from the Reich, spies and fellow-travellers. Fine restaurants, lots to eat, smoke and drink for them, all the clubs doing a roaring business, and any of the forty or so brothels that were reserved for the Wehrmacht, to say nothing of those for the officers, the SS, the bigwigs, their French friends and collaborators and the gangsters too.
Joanne had answered an advertisement in Le Matin, a newspaper that, like all the others, was now totally controlled and used by the Germans. It was a common enough scheme in prewar times when a fee would have been charged. Normally the girls didn’t disappear but were forced to bear the discomfort of their indiscretion when the photos were sold on the streets and in the bars. But now it was a racket that puzzled if for no other reason than the almost total absence of photographic film unless purchased on the black market at astronomical rates or stolen from the Germans.
St-Cyr took out the torn bit of newsprint and read the advertisement again. Wanted by a noted fashion house, girls of suitable ability, poise and determination. Ages 18 to 22. Hair long and of chestnut brown, eyes of the same. Please, no others need apply. Height 168 to 177 centimetres, weight 52 to 57 kilos, waist 61 to 71 centimetres, bust 76 to 86 centimetres. No previous training or experience necessary. We will teach you everything you need to know. Apply box 169. Send snapshot if possible and personal details. Responds in two weeks. If chosen for an interview, bring acceptance letter to enclosed address.
It was the stuff of dreams and aspirations. Though he didn’t think it possible, he had to ask. ‘Were they being prepared for use elsewhere?’
‘In one of the brothels? Raped so as to force them to spread their legs? Hey, come on, Louis. It could only have been for a clandestin. An unlicensed house is too risky and definitely not classy enough for a set-up like this.’
Louis’s bushy brown eyebrows lifted in acknowledgement. The chubby cheeks that were perpetually touched with shadow, quivered. ‘Then did they tell her her lovely hair would be cut off and thrown at her feet to be pissed on? Is this what you’re thinking?’
Ah Gott im Himmel, the deep brown ox-eyes of the Sûreté’s little Frog were misting. Louis had watched the girl grow from a babe in arms. Her younger brother, Dédé, a ten-year-old who adored her, had come down the street to beg help. They had only just got in this afternoon from Lyon, from a case of arson and 183 dead. Shit! Was it all about to start again?
‘Look, I have to be honest. She was moved from here. That’s all we really know.’
‘Are you certain?’ asked St-Cyr suspiciously. Hermann seldom told the whole truth all at once.
‘Hey, don’t be so wounded. I’ll take another look. Stay put.’
‘How’s the stomach?’ Hermann hated finding dead bodies, especially those of young women and children.
The Bavarian didn’t waver. ‘Fine. Don’t worry. If it makes you feel any better, I think she’s still alive.’
In spite of the war and the conqueror-conquered relationship, they had got on since the fall of 1940. Two detectives of long standing. None of the Gestapo-SS brutality and sadism for them. Just robbery, arson, murder, extortion, other things also, and much trouble with the SS and the Gestapo. These days so many got in the way.
Kohler’s storm-trooper’s jaw, bulldog jowls and shrapnel scars tightened. The puffy, faded blue eyes that were so often empty but saw everything, passed doubtfully over him. ‘Are you really okay yourself?’ he asked.
> ‘Yes, I’m okay.’
It would be best to keep Louis busy. Then why not collate the photos and spread them out? We’ve had a break, eh? Someone was thoughtful enough to leave us the evidence.’
‘But why? That is the question, Hermann, and always with you Germans it’s the blitzkrieg for us. Always!’
Satisfied that he could safely leave him, Kohler tried to be cheerful. ‘Okay, Chief, don’t get tough. I’m on my way. I won’t be long.’
In rank, St-Cyr was above his partner who was only a Haupsturmführer, a captain and inspector. But Hermann had been a Munich detective long before this war and from there had gone to Berlin, so he knew all about what could happen to young girls who were foolish enough to answer such advertisements.
His pipe alight, St-Cyr picked his way over to tall french windows that were touched with frost. Down across the garden of the Palais Royal, the bare branches of regimented lindens threw their shadows on the sleet-encrusted snow. Not a soul stirred or strolled beneath the arcades to browse in dusty, forgotten shops where old stamps, books, second-hand military medals and lead soldiers were sometimes sold. Staid and eminently respectable, the identical, grey-stone facades and windows of the bourgeoisie frowned on intrusion of any kind. Doctors, lawyers, bankers and men of commerce lived quietly in this quietest of enclaves right in the heart of Paris and not a stone’s throw from the rue Saint-Honoré, the Louvre and the Bank of France.
Though he didn’t want to admit it, he was forced to tell himself the location was perfect. Who would think it possible such a thing as kidnapping, rape and … yes, murder, could ever occur in a place like this? Two hundred years ago of course, when the brothels were here, but not today and not for the past hundred years.
He and Hermann had obtained an address from the newspaper but only after threats and much baksheesh, Le Matin had run the ad for about a month—a first time for them, so other newspapers must have been used to trap the rest of the victims.
Salamander Page 31
