The crowd on the street had not diminished but now a gatecrasher was forcing his way through.
‘The truth, monsieur, and quickly before that one sinks his teeth into you,’ hissed St-Cyr.
‘The blanket laissez-passer I have which allows me to travel anywhere outside of Paris except for the zone interdite.’
The Forbidden Zone next to coastal areas and along the Swiss and Italian frontiers.
‘My first-class railway pass. My spare pocket-watch and …’ He licked his upper lip and tried to hastily tidy his moustache. ‘And four packets of capotes anglaises, two bottles of Ricard pastis, one of vermouth and … and the keys and deeds to a little house I have in … in the fifth.’ Ah maudit! would God help him in this moment of crisis?
‘Booze and a woman, and wouldn’t you know it, eh?’ snorted Kohler, blocking the way, thus hiding them from Herr Max who was making noises about the crowd. ‘Is that all?’ asked the Kripo.
‘Oui. Positive.’
‘No it isn’t,’ said the Sûreté. ‘We want the name of the woman and the address of that little nest for which he has taken the keys.’
‘My wife … My daughters …’
Laviolette was sweating.
‘Hey, they won’t even hear of it if you behave and keep all this between the three of us. Silence, eh?’ said Kohler.
‘Numéro trente-cinq, rue Poliveau.’
‘The quartier Saint-Marcel,’ said Louis.
‘Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire, veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper – zebras, hyenas, jackals, wolves, wild boar and foxes at … at the Jardin des Plantes.’
How the hell had they met? wondered Kohler, pulling down a lower left eyelid in disbelief. ‘Age?’ he demanded. It took all types, and when Laviolette said, ‘Thirty-two’, patted him on the shoulder, all sixty-two years of it, and said, ‘Don’t get bitten. Women in their thirties are even more dangerous than those in their early twenties.’
‘Now go and entertain our visitor from Berlin while we lock ourselves in your private office to have a look for ourselves,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Let this be a warning to you.’ The Jardin des Plantes … ah merde.
They were moving swiftly. ‘The back door, Louis. The cellars.’
‘Get the car. Meet me in the rue Volney! Fire some shots in the air if you have to, but get it, Hermann, and hurry!’
There was just a chance the Gypsy might have holed up in that house. If so, he was a gambler and was prepared to take risks but had thought the sous-directeur would not have said a thing.
The safe was open, and from the door to the private dressing-room, there was more than a clear enough view of the dial but not of the numbers. Gabrielle could easily have stood here, waiting for Laviolette to bring her the pieces but …
Pulling open the dressing-table drawers, St-Cyr soon had what he wanted, and closing the door to the wall safe, set the vanity mirror with its little stand on top of one of the filing cabinets. Tilting it until he had the dial in view, he retreated to the dressing-room. It was no good. She would have had to stand much nearer the desk but from there, with the use of the mirror, she could have watched the dial and, after several visits, have had the combination or close to it, but had she done so?
They might never know.
And why, please, he asked, would Laviolette not have noticed the subterfuge and put a stop to it?
No, then. She must have done it some other way or not at all. But if she had, then that, too, implied she had known of the Gypsy and had made a thorough survey of the target for him.
The quartier Saint-Marcel had been going downhill for years. Built mainly in the first half of the 1800s, its houses of two and three storeys still held that sense of a small provincial town or village. The slanting roofs were often cut off and at odd angles with the sky but also with a towering wall of dirty yellow brick which represented ‘redevelopment’ into a monotony of identical flats.
‘It’s unprotected,’ said Louis of the district. ‘Ripe, sadly, for tearing down. That thing’, he indicated the apartment building, ‘was built in the 1920s.’
Still a stronghold of le petit commerce and of retired shopkeepers, sales clerks and maids of all work, its shops were small, its ateliers struggling, the narrow courtyards far too long and far too handy.
Neither of them liked the look of the place. The doorway to number 35 hadn’t been used in years. The black paint was peeling, the monogrammed ironwork over the curved bottle green light above was First Empire but badly rusted.
They had left the car around the corner but even so, two plain-clothed detectives, no matter how casually they kept their hands in the pockets of their overcoats, could not fail to attract attention.
A lace curtain fell in a first-storey window across the street. Stares were given from behind the window of the café-bar below.
‘Louis, you watch the street, I’ll take the courtyard.’
‘That door has been sealed with iron spikes as long as my hand. He’s not Hercules is he, our Gypsy?’
The courtyard was close, the stucco walls mildewed, the house separated from others by yet another courtyard behind it.
Lines of grey washing were frozen stiff. There were clouds of breath not just from the neighbours but from the ateliers of a mender of cooking pots and a scavenger of roofing slates and floor tiles.
Steps pitted by frost and worn into hollows by long use led up to a side entrance. Unattractively the number 35B in cardboard was pinned to a door that had been left off the latch.
Cautiously, St-Cyr took the Lebel from his overcoat pocket and, pulling back the hammer, gave the door a quiet nudge. Hermann was right behind him and had drawn his Walther P38. ‘Louis …?’ he softly said and in that one word there was consternation and terror – ah! so many things.
They had both smelled it. They hesitated when they ought really to have run. The shutters were all closed, the cast-iron stove was cold, the air ripe with the stench of bitter almonds. ‘The kitchen!’ managed Hermann, removing his hand from the stove; they were moving quickly now, delicately.
The aluminium stew-pot on the hotplate was still boiling, the fumes were thick and white and acrid … ‘Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, be careful!’ hissed St-Cyr.
Both of them looked questioningly at the ceiling above. Both looked to the pot where the remains of several broken-up sticks of dynamite in water bubbled thickly beneath an oily, pale yellow scum, the nitro.
Two eye-dropper bottles had already been skimmed. A small glass funnel lay on its side. There was a ladle, a long-handled wooden spoon. Absolutely no friction could be tolerated, no sudden shocks, no sparks, no matches or cigarettes. Both bottle and funnel would have been tilted during the filling so that the nitroglycerine would trickle smoothly down the inside of the glass. A master of self-control, a fearless idiot but desperate.
They left the kitchen and took the steep, narrow staircase on and up – they didn’t want to. He’s armed and dangerous, they would have said if they could have found the words. Their heads were buzzing so hard from the fumes and the dizziness, it was all they could do not to bolt and run, to gag and clear the street.
The Empire bed was huge and sturdy and heaped with rumpled covers. No one hid in the massive Breton armoire that held the woman’s clothing. No one was in the spare room, a nursery perhaps in bygone days or a tiny sitting-room, but now jammed with suitcases and the bits and pieces from the mistress’s former flat.
The bathtub on its four cast-iron legs had been painted green too many years ago. The geraniums were wilted, the towels cold.
Kohler nodded towards a shuttered door. Louis saw him do so in the gilded mirror above the tub.
Shots would be exchanged out on that roof – there was no hope of preventing them. Hermann ducked out on to the little porch where in summer the veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper would have sunned herself or cooled herself after a bath, her lover too. He slipped and fell, went down hard, the Walther P38 banging off two rounds as he rolled aside and threw himself behind a low rai
ling that was lined with stone planters.
Nothing … there was no answering fire. ‘I thought …’ he blurted.
‘You thought incorrectly, so did I.’
They heard the Citroën start up – hell, there were so few cars in Paris that wasn’t hard to do – and when it left the street where they had parked it, they knew he had taken it.
‘The keys,’ swore Kohler. ‘I put them under the driver’s seat when I got our guns.’
‘Idiot! Now what?’
‘We find us a telephone and call the bomb-disposal boys, but first we turn off that hotplate before the soup boils dry.’
Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire lay under the covers, bound hand and foot and gagged. A not unpleasant-looking young woman, she was furious at what had happened to her and embarrassed that anyone should see her wearing four heavy flannelette nightgowns, two sweaters, three pairs of thick woollen kneesocks and gloves, her auburn hair put up in papillotes for the night, her eyes weeping from the fumes.
‘Bâtards!’ she shrilled when released. ‘Who the hell are you, and who the hell was he?’
The hands of caution were raised and she was told the street would have to do for the moment, and quickly.
Hermann almost kicked over one of the little bottles. It had been left for them on the doorstep. Sickened, he watched as the woman paled and sucked in a breath. Tears streamed from her. A lower lip quivered. ‘No one told me this would happen,’ she blurted. ‘He’s crazy! He said that if I knew what was good for me, I should lie very still.’
The quartier Saint-Marcel had been cleared of every living soul but those of the Wehrmacht’s bomb-disposal unit. The Café of the Deceiving Cat, on the avenue des Gobelins, was teeming with disenchanted residents and merchants all shouting about Sûreté incompetence and loss of income. The Gestapo never got publicly blamed. Never!
‘By five o’clock it’ll be in all the newspapers,’ sighed Kohler ruefully. ‘Hero boils it up. Shots exchanged. Sûreté car stolen in getaway.’
‘They’ll make a living legend of him,’ said Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire, her soft brown eyes clouded with worry, hesitantly cradling her ‘café au lait’, no milk, no sugar, no coffee but hot. With the paper curlers removed and her hair combed, she looked a little better but was far from sure of things.
‘Why not go and find the car, Hermann? Try the quartier de l’Europe. He may have friends there. He can’t drive around, not for long.’
Louis wanted to be alone with the woman. ‘And if not there?’
The woman threw Louis an apprehensive glance, was watching everything.
‘The Avia Club Gym but I would prefer to be with you for any interviews.’
She took this in.
‘The Spade, ah yes. Okay, Chief. I’ll find you back at the house on the rue Poliveau?’
As if on cue, the thud of a massive explosion several blocks away brought dust from the ceiling and everyone to a crouch.
Silence followed. It was as if the rain of rubble was still up in the sky and had yet to come down.
‘Ah Christ, Louis. Widows and orphans!’
Everyone began to move. A hand shot out and grabbed Suzanne-Cécilia by the arm; she threw the Sûreté a look of panic, more tears springing from her.
‘Sit down!’ he ordered. ‘Hermann, go and find the car. Neither of us can do anything for them. It’s impossible, mon vieux.’
‘Boemelburg, Louis. He’ll demand hostages. He’ll say it was a Resistance plot. Ah, hell!’
‘Calm down. We can only take it as it comes.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
He left them then and they had a last glimpse of him agonizing over things on the boulevard. Like the soldier he had been, Hermann began to run towards the disaster knowing exactly what he’d find because he’d seen it all before.
‘My partner was a bomb-disposal expert, among other things, in the last war.’
Filled with despair, she darted her eyes away, and for a moment could not find her voice, then said abjectly, ‘You must know each other very well. What one thinks, the other is aware of.’
‘Usually, but not always, and he’s the stubborn one. Now please, mademoiselle …’
She pulled her shoulders inwards to wrap the bathrobe about herself more tightly. Terrified by this new development, she said hollowly, ‘It’s Madame Lemaire. My husband was killed in 1940 at Sedan. A woman has needs, Inspector. My Honoré left me no money but the widow’s pension and, as we have no children and I’m too young to stay that way, I have to think of the future.’
‘Laviolette …’ he muttered, passing her his handkerchief which she took with a faint, ‘Merci.’ ‘It seems an odd choice. Your lives are so different, your interests … Do you share anything in common?’
Ah Jésus, Jésus, she said to herself, why must he ask a thing like that at a time like this? The house in pieces – had it really been the house? How many dead, and she the only tenant? The Gestapo would come for her – they would have to, yet here he was trying to distract her. ‘We … we met in the zoo. Clément would come to feed the animals – he knew we had little to give them and for him, it took him away from his wife on a Sunday afternoon and allowed him to exercise a kindness. I found him one day with oats he had gathered handful by handful in Normandy – can you imagine him doing such a thing?’ Quickly she dried her eyes. ‘My zebras loved it, Inspector, and he genuinely loved them and was not at all like most who come to see them. And to think,’ she sighed and shrugged and tried desperately to smile faintly, ‘he had brought the oats from far away. Not for himself, you understand, but for my animals.’
‘Bon. Compassion’s rare these days. You met when, exactly?’
‘Inspector, is my private life suspect?’
‘Ah no. No of course not. I merely wish to establish why Monsieur Laviolette should leave the keys to that house in his private safe.’
Again she threw an anxious glance towards the street as if expecting the Gestapo momentarily.
‘They … the keys were with the deeds. For this, you must understand that Madame Laviolette holds him constantly under suspicion and frequently includes his private office and desk among her searchings.’
‘Henpecked, is he?’
‘The roots of your suspicions are deep, Inspector. Why is this, please?’
‘Just answer the questions.’
‘Or you will get angry with me, eh? Hey, monsieur, you’re perturbed enough when it is I who have been subjected to such indignities, I …’
He wasn’t having any of it. ‘Yes, then. He is henpecked and not just by that wife of his, by his four daughters, two of whom are married. They constantly examine every aspect of his life and criticize him amongst themselves.’ She blew her nose.
Creases framed the frown she gave. Her lips were parted slightly as if she wondered, still, what he was thinking of her answers. The nose was not big or small but decidedly impish. The thick, auburn hair was a little less than shoulder length, in waves and curls, masses of them, and worn over the brow with only a part in the middle to all but hide her frown and emphasize her eyes.
‘Life on the sly with a thirty-two-year-old zoo-keeper and veterinary surgeon must be better,’ he grunted. ‘Should they ever discover the affair, your Monsieur Laviolette will immediately blame his wife and daughters to their faces for having caused him to stray!’
Taken aback, she said softly, ‘He’s not vindictive. Oh bien sûr, the house, it was an investment and not much – he wouldn’t let me spend a sou fixing it. He always said she would only find out if he did. But …’ She clutched the robe about her throat and tossed her head. ‘But he has made his promises and I believe he’ll keep them.’
New laundry for the old and she beginning to distance herself from the explosion. ‘You’re far too intelligent to believe it, Madame Lemaire. So when, please, did the two of you first meet?’
Ah damn him. ‘Last summer. 13 June.’
‘And he was feeding oats he had gather
ed in early summer to the zebras?’
Merde! how could she have been so stupid? ‘He had purchased a small sack of last year’s harvest from a farmer. I thought …’ She shrugged. ‘Well, that you would understand that’s what I meant.’
‘And when, exactly, did the affair begin?’
Laviolette would be questioned closely, therefore she had best answer as truthfully as possible. ‘The end of June,’ she said. ‘I … I only make 650 a day, Inspector. It’s not so much for a woman who does a man’s job, is it? That’s when we decided on our little arrangement. He wanted someone to live in the house, otherwise the authorities would have taken it over, isn’t that so? It was close to my work. In a few minutes by bicycle, a little longer on foot, I could be there without the expense of the métro or autobus but now … now I don’t know what I’ll do. His wife is bound to find out. The press … Ah nom de Dieu, I had not thought of them.’
A study in contrasts, the expressions she gave in quick succession changed from firmness of resolve to doubt, hesitation and despair as she realized they had already mentioned the press.
‘The bolts on your side door, madame?’ he said.
‘Pardon?’ she managed, startled by this new direction.
‘Why were they left open? Ah certainement, the Gypsy had the key but there were two other bolts, one at the top, the other at the bottom. The owners of those old houses felt they never could take chances. The cambrioleurs of those days were tougher than they are today.’
The housebreakers … ‘The bolts stick in winter because the cold freezes the dampness in the wood, so I …’ She shrugged. ‘I left them open, otherwise it would have been a window for me and those are – were, I should say – stuck tightly and shuttered also.’
She’d try to have an answer for everything. ‘Then only the key was necessary. The Gypsy entered at about 4 or 5 a.m. Did he have two suitcases or a rucksack – what, please?’
She drew back, and again threw a frantic look towards the street. ‘I … I wouldn’t have known, would I? He wouldn’t have carried all that loot upstairs. He’d have needed his hands, his wits …’ Why was the Sûreté so suspicious of her? Why? she wondered anxiously. ‘I awoke to find a gun pressed under my chin and a hand clamped over my mouth. He was lying on top of me, Inspector. Me! Can you imagine what I thought? Ah! a woman’s worst nightmare. He assured me that wasn’t the case, and since he had the gun, I did not resist.’
Gypsy Page 8
