by Allan Massie
XII
April 23, 1940. Late evening.
It was young René Martin.
‘Sorry to disturb you, chief, but it’s not good.’
‘Bad?
‘Bad as could be. Can you come here?’
There was no need to say more. René gave him the address, in Meriadeck, a poor quarter, part Jewish, the rue Xantrailles, near the barracks. Lannes knew the district and liked it. An aunt had lived there when he was a boy.
He called a taxi, explained he had to go out, urgent. Sorry. No one asked why. Policemen’s families know when not to. He kissed Marguerite and the twins, told them not to wait up, Lord knew how long he’d be, shook hands with Maurice, thanked him for coming, told him to keep in touch, hoped he would eat with them again. As he left to wait in the street for the taxi, he heard Alain say, ‘But, seriously, it’s impossible to believe in this war, and yet you can’t deny its reality. We exist in freedom, but necessity holds us prisoner. Isn’t that so, Maurice?’
Lannes didn’t wait for the reply. Descending the stairs, he thought, ‘Alain’s right, we know we’re free – that’s what our consciousness tells us; yet we are caught up in a web of circumstances that deprives us of the freedom to act.’
The rue Xantrailles was a street of small two-storey and three-storey houses, dirty yellow in colour, the soft stone covered with a blanket of grime. He stopped the taxi at number 35, under a line of washing stretched out on a pole. The door was open and he went upstairs. There was the sound of dance music from a radio in the apartment to his left. He knocked on the door across the narrow landing, and heard a bolt being withdrawn.
René said, ‘I haven’t called anyone else. I thought you’d want to see it for yourself first. It’s not pretty.’
He led the way through to the back room. The Catalan, Javier Cortazar, was stretched out on the bed. He lay on his back. There was a stink of vomit. His eyes were open but he saw nothing, would never see anything again.
‘There’s no sign of a wound, chief, but . . . look at his hands.’
He turned away as if he couldn’t bring himself to look at them again. Lannes saw why. The nails of all ten fingers had been pulled out.
‘He must have screamed. Surely. Anyone would,’ René said, ‘but I asked across the way and they didn’t hear anything. They’re French, a couple, middle-aged, respectable. But how do you think he died? Could that have killed him? It doesn’t make sense.’
The boy’s distress was evident. Not for the first time Lannes wondered if young René wasn’t too sensitive to be a cop. He leaned over and closed Cortazar’s eyes. Was it imagination or did they look as if they couldn’t believe the horror? He found himself remembering the man’s solidity, self-assurance, obstinacy and humour; he’d liked him.
‘There’s something else,’ René said, and pointed to a high-backed wooden chair between the bed and the window. ‘Ropes, just like in Gaston’s apartment, which connects the two cases even more closely than they were already connected. They don’t care much about leaving evidence, do they?’
‘No, they don’t.’
‘It’s as if they were laughing at us.’
Perhaps they were
‘Go and call Paulhan, will you?
‘There’s no telephone here. I had to go out to a café on the corner to ring you.’
‘Right. You know the doctor’s number?’
Left alone, Lannes took stock of the apartment. It was his habit to try to fix everything in his mind, a mental photograph. But here it was too easy. There was little to note. The place was almost as bare as a monk’s cell. A pair of socks drying on a rail below the window looked pathetic. The stink was vile; not only vomit but shit. He stretched up and opened the window.
‘Poor bugger,’ he muttered and thought again how much he had liked him.
There was a shelf of books, political mostly, in Spanish and Catalan. A copy of Don Quixote, a few French crime novels and also, he saw with a pang, that book of Sartre’s which Alain and Maurice had been enthusing over. Alain had quoted something as ‘a marvellous sentence’; ‘as if there could be true stories; things happen one way and we tell them in the opposite sense’. It wasn’t absurd, that observation. Every policeman knew the truth of it.
He opened the drawers of the chest that stood against the wall to the right of the bed. Shirts, socks, pants, a couple of shirts and jerseys, handkerchiefs. No papers. He went back to the other room: a half-eaten loaf of bread on the table and a sausage from which several slices had been cut, a litre of vin ordinaire, half-drunk, and a box of cheap Brazilian cigars. Beside it, a wireless. He turned it on and got a burst of static.
The drawer of the little desk to the left of the window had been pulled open and hung loose, empty. Any evidence of the Catalan’s history and concerns was gone. And how much living in any case had he done in this apartment?
From across the street came a burst of music. Piaf, singing her song of love: ‘Heaven and earth may crumble, but nothing matters if you love me.’
If only that was true.
René returned to say Dr Paulhan was on his way.
‘Right,’ Lannes said, ‘when you got here . . . no, tell it from the start.’
‘It’s not difficult. I went first to the bar, as before. It’s only a couple of streets away, in the rue de Madrid. Indeed it’s called the Café de Madrid, no doubt why they chose to frequent it. But they said they hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. That wasn’t unusual. “He’s a serious man,” one said, “who spends his evenings reading and writing, not really one of your boozers.” “And fucking, don’t forget that,” another said.’
René blushed because it wasn’t a word he would have used himself and it even embarrassed him to repeat it.
‘I think they didn’t want to say more because they know now I’m a cop. But of course I had his address and so I came straight round here. The outer door was open and so to my surprise was the door of this apartment. It’s as if whoever killed him didn’t care how soon he was discovered, which is unusual, surely. I called out but got no answer, so came in and found, well, you know what I found. I didn’t touch anything, just established that he was dead. Then I went to call you, shutting the door behind me of course. When I returned I spoke to the people across the way. As I said, they seem respectable, he’s a clerk in the municipality, not the kind that ever gets promoted, I should say. Anyway it was his wife who did all the talking. She insisted they had heard nothing, which I find hard to believe. She kept saying, “we keep ourselves to ourselves”. My impression is that she disliked the Catalan simply because he was a foreigner.’
‘I’ll have a word with them myself, though I’ll be surprised if I get anything more from them than you did. Call me when the doctor arrives. You’ve done well.’
The door was opened on a chain. Lannes showed his identification and was admitted by a scrawny woman, with her hair pulled back tightly into a bun. She wiped her hands on her skirt and led him into a small stuffy sitting-room. She turned down the wireless that stood on a table beside the chair where her husband sat. He had removed his collar and wore carpet slippers.
‘We’ve made more complaints than I can number,’ he said. ‘As we told your young colleague we prefer to know nothing of our neighbours. It’s better that way in our opinion. Nevertheless there are things you can’t ignore.’
‘That’s enough of that, Benoit,’ his wife said. ‘It’s up to this gentleman to ask questions and for us to answer them if we can. Which is unlikely, monsieur, for, as my husband says, we keep ourselves to ourselves. There’s no law says you have to take notice of your neighbours, especially when they are foreigners.’
‘Quite so,’ Lannes said. ‘How long has Senor Cortazar occupied the apartment across the way?’
‘Too long, at least eighteen months too long, it’s a scandal. There are decent French folk, my own sister’s niece and her husband, for example, who would be happy to find such an apartment, but a foreigner gets it
and my husband here, though he works in the town hall, can’t do anything about it. It’s a scandal and I don’t care who hears me say so.’
‘A Red too, not only a foreigner but a Red.’
‘Don’t interrupt, Benoit, though my husband is right all the same, superintendent – or is it commissaire – in drawing your attention to the man’s politics. Why do we let such people into the country, that’s what I’d like to know, Reds and Jews and other foreigners – the country’s overrun with them. Why can’t they stay where they belong, that’s what I’d like to know. And if they’re here we should shut them up in a camp. There: that’s what I think.’
‘Does your neighbour have many visitors?’
‘Too many and, from the looks of them, people I would cross the street to avoid.’
‘Women too,’ her husband said.
‘Sluts, that’s what I would call them, sluts and prostitutes.’
‘And this evening, did you see any visitors he might have had?’
‘Certainly not! It’s not as if I look out for them. Quite the contrary. We keep ourselves to ourselves. It’s the best policy in the world today.’
‘And did you hear any noise from his apartment this evening?’
‘Nothing at all, not even a door banging, no shouting on the stairs as there often is. Besides we’ve been listening to the wireless. It’s a cheap pleasure and one we can afford. But even if we’d heard anything, which we didn’t, we would have paid no heed. There are things one doesn’t choose to get mixed up in.’
‘What do you mean by that? What sort of things?’
‘Just what I say. I believe in minding my own business and so does my husband. Your young colleague tells us the Spaniard has been murdered. Good riddance, I say. We’ve been troubled by him and his likes long enough. Perhaps the apartment will now be let to a decent French person, my sister’s niece, for instance, though I have to say her husband isn’t all he might be.’
Lannes was happy to be interrupted by young René coming to say Dr Paulhan had arrived. He had no doubt that this disagreeable couple knew more than they were ready to admit, but was equally certain that they would insist they knew nothing even if he made it clear he was sure they were lying. He knew the type only too well.
Paulhan shook hands, muttered a greeting, without removing his Boyar cigarette from his mouth. It would dangle from the right corner of his lips while he examined the corpse. Indeed he chain-smoked even when performing an autopsy; it was a protection against infection he used to say.
‘You’ve spoiled my evening’s Bridge,’ he said, ‘but fortunately I was dummy when young Martin called. A contract of four hearts, doubled. I don’t think my partner will have made it.’
He passed through to the bedroom and Lannes saw him lean over the body, blowing smoke from his nostrils. Then he told René to go and ask the tenants of the ground-floor apartments if they had seen or heard anything. He picked up the bottle of wine and found a couple of clean glasses. The wine was rough. His hip hurt. He felt immensely weary and it was hard to believe that only a couple of hours ago he had been happy as they sat at the dinner-table and he listened to the enthusiasm in the young people’s voices. He drank the wine and poured himself another glass.
Paulhan came through from the bedroom.
‘Give me a glass of that too, old man,’ he said, and lit another cigarette from the tip of the one he had been smoking. ‘Nasty business, but I may be about to disappoint you. I can’t be sure till I’ve done my autopsy, but my impression is a heart-attack.’
‘Brought on by torture?’
‘Can’t say, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis. Does that count as murder? Not for me to decide. Get him round to me and I’ll deal with him first thing in the morning.’
‘Time of death? Any idea?’
‘This evening, certainly. Four hours ago, maybe five, maybe six. Can’t tell.’
‘The couple across the landing claim to have heard nothing. Is that likely?’
‘Shouldn’t think so. I’d have screamed if they done that to me. He may not have. He looks as if he might have been a tough customer.’
‘I think he was. He was probably gagged of course. Nevertheless I’m sure they are lying.’
‘Can’t surprise you, surely. This is rough stuff. Still . . . ’ he picked up the bottle and poured himself another glass and one for Lannes. ‘What we need, I’d say. Not a pretty sight through there. What word of your boy?’
‘Dominique? He says he’s bored.’
‘That won’t last, I’m afraid. Word is the English are pulling out of Narvik. It was on the wireless. That’s Norway gone then. Won’t be long before Hitler turns his attentions to us.’
‘You think so?’
‘Don’t you?’
Lannes nodded and drank.
‘We had worse pinard than this in the trenches,’ he said.
‘We’ll win because we are stronger,’ the doctor quoted the popular slogan. ‘Wish I could believe that.’
‘Quite.’
‘Well, I’ll be on my way. My partner needed a risky finesse to make that contract. I’m afraid I’ll be out of pocket. Make sure chummy’s ready for me first thing. As I say, I think it’s a heart attack, but, all the same, poor sod. Does it ever strike you, Jean, as trivial that we fuss over a single death when the whole balloon is about to go up?’
‘Often, but what else can we do? It’s our duty, after all.’
‘So it is. Here’s your young man. We’ll speak tomorrow. Don’t take it to heart, Jean. It’s one death and there are going to be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Sorry, shouldn’t have said that to you, in the circumstances.’
They listened to his steps descending the stairs. Lannes fingered the stubby glass. They heard the car door shut and the doctor drive away. A dog barked from across the street.
René said: ‘On the ground floor left, there’s only a young mother and her baby, her husband’s at the Front. I’m afraid I woke her, she came to the door with a dressing-gown over her nightdress, very pale and tired. It seems that the baby’s teething and she got no sleep last night. So now, because the baby – a little girl called Véronique – was quiet and indeed sleeping, she had gone to bed early. Well, actually, she said, she fell asleep in a chair, woke an hour ago and got ready for bed then. She thinks it was steps on the stair or the banging of the outer door that woke her, but didn’t look out, and it was perhaps me that she heard. At any rate she’s sure that if there had been any loud cries from above the baby would have woken up, and I must say that seems likely to me, not that I know anything about babies. On the right there’s a couple, in their thirties, nice enough. He’s not in the Army because he’s a cripple since falling off his motor-bike. He works in an office as an accounts clerk and she is a shop assistant in a draper’s. I’ve got their work addresses, but I doubt if we need to check on them. They’d been out to the cinema and returned only half an hour ago. At the Olympia which, she said, “is a cut above our usual style – and our purse – but it’s our wedding anniversary.” They had something to eat on their way home in that big brasserie in the Place Toulouse-Lautrec. One of the waiters there is the woman’s uncle. I’ve got his name too. So I don’t think there can be any doubt about that. In any case I don’t suppose we’re regarding them as suspects. They say the Catalan was always polite, and the young woman with the baby, Madame Dourthe, says he always had a kind word for her and even gave the baby a soft toy, a blue cat apparently. “Poor man,” she said, “his own family is destroyed”. Incidentally the other couple – the Patinets – say that our friends across the landing are “a pair of bitches and she wears the trousers”. But I haven’t found out anything useful, I’m afraid, chief.’
‘Patience,’ Lannes said, as so often before, ‘patience and time’.
He left René to arrange for the collection of the body and for sealing the apartment. Then he set off for home. There were no taxis and he had to walk. A mist had closed in and it beg
an to rain.
XIII
April 24, 1940
It often happens that a slack period is brought to an end by a day when everything seems to happen, events pile up on you, demands come from every side, and you scarcely know which way to turn. It was like that now and it didn’t help that the rain had cleared away and it was a beautiful morning of Spring in full flower, with the candles aflame on the chestnut trees, a lightness in the air which invited you to pass the hours idly, sitting outside a café in the Place des Victoires or Place Gambetta. That was impossible, and, worse, Lannes had a sour taste in his mouth which he blamed on that rough vin ordinaire; moreover his damned hip was aching, though it usually behaved itself in warm weather. Then, to cap it all, the Sud-Ouest made depressing reading. There could be no doubt about it; the English were on the run from Norway, a humiliating defeat threatening others to follow. He stopped off at the Rugby Bar in the rue de Cursol, adding a nip of armagnac to settle his stomach and, he hoped, dull the pain in his hip.
Moncerre was already in the inspectors’ room. Lannes called him into his office and brought him up to date.
‘I’ll wait till I get Paulhan’s report before I alert the Parquet,’ he said. ‘It looks as if it may be hard to prove murder. Meanwhile I’d like you to go over there and find out whatever you can. We haven’t yet questioned anyone across the street. Then the couple I spoke to – what’s their name? – Brune – you have a word with the woman. You may get more out of her than I did, which wouldn’t be difficult.’
