Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  Nana Thélème took charge, urging the girl to leave. ‘Give him time. They won’t be long.’

  ‘He means it,’ the poor thing wept. ‘He’s been so cruel to me. Always it is like I am a dog at his feet!’

  ‘Then why not give him up?’

  The sea green eyes that were so large and innocent blinked their tears away with candour. ‘I have to eat. I have to have a place to stay. He buys me things and yes, I love him. I like it. Can you understand that? I can’t.’ She shrugged her slender shoulders. ‘I’ve tried but always the inner self, it fails to answer me except with temptation.’

  There were stares from the others in the gym, looks that were not nice. The SS who had brought the teenagers still hung around, spoiling for a fight.

  ‘Sit down. Here, have a cigarette.’

  ‘I’ve plenty. Let me give you one.’

  Her fingers shook. Grabbing the hand, Nana steadied it. ‘Inhale. Fill your lungs. Count to ten and then exhale.’

  Calmed a little, the girl sat back on the bench but shrank into herself. ‘I hate this place. Every time I come here I feel as if they are going to rape me. All of them and all at once in the ring. I want that too, don’t you understand? Secretly I’m so afraid of it and this … why this gives me great pleasure.’

  ‘Relax. They’re nothing.’

  ‘You were at the party. You were the one who came to sing.’

  Though the eyes were dark brown, the left one was cloudy, and when Doucette looked directly at a person, it was not quite on a level with the right eye, but tilted up a little.

  ‘What do you want with me?’

  He had never liked the police but was from Belleville. ‘A few questions. Nothing difficult,’ said the Sûreté.

  The Spade threw the visitor from Berlin a questioning look only to see that one nod curtly in agreement.

  ‘What about you putting me down like that, eh? Why should I do anything to help you?’

  ‘Ah! easy, Henri. Easy,’ soothed St-Cyr. ‘Forget it, mon ami. Be magnanimous. Everyone will know it wasn’t fair. They’ll say I tricked you. It’s me they’ll blame, not yourself.’

  Again the visitor nodded.

  ‘Okay. Shoot. Let’s have it.’

  ‘Bon. Take us back to last Thursday, the fourteenth. You and your wife went to Tours.’

  ‘She’s not my wife. I disowned the slut the day I used her father’s whip on her, since he wasn’t man enough to do it. She’d been running away from me all the time. Weeks, months … She deserved it.’

  ‘But you’re her conductor now?’

  Again he looked to Herr Max for guidance. ‘Okay, so I took her to Tours. It was all laid on. She was to bump into the Gypsy. Perhaps he was suspicious, perhaps not, who’s to say? She was to call in on a regular basis. She was to tell me everything he planned and did, and who he met, but she’s buggered off with him and I haven’t heard from her since Monday when she called in to warn us of the robbery at the Ritz.’

  Hermann was translating for Herr Max. ‘But is she with him now?’ asked St-Cyr.

  Dumbfounded, Doucette threw Engelmann another look, and wiping sweat from his chest, asked, ‘With who the hell else could she hide?’

  ‘That’s what we want to know.’

  ‘Then think again, cow. Her family’s gone. She has no one else she can trust, no friends, eh? She knows no one and yet she still evades us? How can this be?’

  The Gestapo and the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston had people out looking for her, then. A city-wide search in addition to that of the police and the Wehrmacht. ‘You do the thinking, Henri. You took her to a party on the eleventh. She danced.’

  ‘That one was there.’ He pointed to the door beyond which were the gym and Nana Thélème. ‘You brought her here. Why did you bring her?’

  Nervous now, Doucette used both hands to grip the towel that was draped over his shoulders. He was sitting on the edge of the table, dangling his feet into space, and looked evasively down at his boots.

  ‘Why did we bring her, Henri?’ said Louis. ‘You tell us. I think you’d better.’

  ‘Her … her bonne à tout faire was …’ He threw Max a tortured look.

  Engelmann understood enough of what had gone on to help him out. ‘On 15 December last, her maid of all work was arrested. It was nothing. A week in the women’s cells of the Santé.’

  The Santé … Paris’s largest and most overcrowded prison. Population 12,000 normally but now about 18,500, since it varied from day to day and there was always a desperate need for space.

  ‘She wept most of the time,’ said Doucette. ‘The others had to beat her to shut her up. Two of them fell in love with her and wouldn’t leave her alone except to fight over her.’

  Ah merde … ‘And what, please, did this girl tell your ex-wife a month ago?’

  ‘That her mistress was mixed up in something and that she was afraid she had been arrested because of it.’

  ‘Henri knows a lot about you,’ confided Nathalie. ‘There are things he hasn’t told that one in there from Berlin, things he is keeping quiet even from his friends at the rue Lauriston.’

  Sitting before Nana Thélème on the bench, the girl in green velvet paused. The noises of the gym grew. The skippings, the punchings …

  ‘What things?’ asked Nana warily.

  ‘Things a petite oiseau told him. Well, actually, it was a mouton.’

  ‘Tell me, damn you!’

  The girl looked up. Her cleavage dropped to reveal bruises, scratches and bite marks. ‘Tshaya. The one he … Well, you know,’ she shrugged.

  ‘Am I the reason she was invited to that disgusting party?’

  ‘She was the reason you were invited.’

  Nana Thélème looked away in despair. ‘Tshaya can’t know anything!’

  ‘She does.’

  The dark eyes leapt with fierceness. ‘Such as?’

  ‘A prospector.’

  ‘Ah no …’

  No, mademoiselle? Despair now, was that it, eh? and Henri knowing secrets which must not be revealed to anyone. ‘You made several visits to the prospector’s house in Tours. He wrote letters to you. He had something he wanted you to do for him.’

  ‘Tshaya can’t have met him recently. She can’t! Not in years.’

  Sweat poured from the pugilistes in the ring. A nose was bloodied. A tooth was spat …

  ‘She has met him recently.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  How shrill of this beautiful Andalusian who had had the Gypsy’s bastard and had just recently had her face bashed. ‘A place, a very special place. His favourite bordel.’

  ‘The fool!’

  Would Henri beat this Nana Thélème? Would he fuck her, torture her? Between 50,000,000 and 70,000,000 francs were missing. A fortune. Diamonds … lots and lots of those and sapphires too. Pretty things Henri wanted for himself, well, some of them, for his little retirement. ‘A lupanar with a chambre de divertissements détachés.’

  ‘The house on the rue de la Bourde in Tours.’

  The street of the blunder, the heart sinking at the news. Was all now lost? Was that it, Mademoiselle Thélème? ‘The same. The House of the Hesitant Touch.’

  ‘What?’ demanded Kohler, only to see Louis raise a cautioning hand.

  The atmosphere in the dressing-room was tense. They were still discussing Nana Thélème’s maid giving secrets away in a prison cell.

  ‘Something about a prospector,’ muttered the Spade, wiping sweat from his face.

  ‘The diamonds,’ breathed Kohler.

  ‘No, not those,’ insisted Doucette, resigned to telling them. ‘That was almost settled. It was something she had to take to a place near Senlis, the girl thought. Something bad the Mademoiselle Thélème could then get from there if she wanted.’

  The dynamite – was that it? wondered St-Cyr. There were stone quarries nearby.

  Herr Max reached out to hand Henri a clean towel. ‘Go und have a Brausebad. Ja, ja, mein lieber bo
xer, you have said all that is necessary for now.’

  ‘Where is she? I want her,’ said the Spade.

  ‘Tshaya?’ asked Engelmann.

  ‘No other woman can fuck like her. No other.’

  Frantic, Kohler stopped the Spade on the way to the shower-baths. ‘Which lupanar did you find her in, eh?’

  ‘Le bordel de la touche hésitante in Tours. La grille de la treillis indochinois. She was the one behind it.’

  ‘Louis, we’re going to have to go to Tours.’

  ‘Of course, but first there are things we must do.’

  Nana Thélème sat in the front seat between the two of them. Engelmann had released her into their custody. It was to be their necks against hers and she knew they were trying to get her to tell them everything but she couldn’t do that. She mustn’t.

  ‘Four women,’ mused the Sûreté, scraping frost from his side window to stare out into the pitch darkness Paris had become at nine o’clock in the evening. ‘One a gypsy herself. One a singer of their songs. One a veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper, the mistress, if we are to believe it, of the sous-directeur of Cartier’s.’

  ‘And the last one?’ she asked.

  ‘That is the one who most concerns me, mademoiselle. You see, when we first met, you said you did not know of her yet she has a little car and is allowed that privilege.’

  ‘And sings to eight hundred war-weary men a night, you said. The Club Mirage is in Montparnasse on the rue Delambre. All right, I do know Gabrielle Arcuri and she did drive me to Senlis to visit the dying mother of Monsieur Jacqmain, the prospector. That was one of his conditions. He and his mother had not spoken in years. He had received a letter from the woman’s housekeeper, but by the time we got there, Madame Jacqmain had passed away.’

  ‘And when was this trip to Senlis?’

  Ah damn him! ‘Right after I went to Tours. On … on the following day, on Wednesday, the … the thirteenth.’

  ‘Then why did you lie to me about not knowing Gabrielle?’

  She gave a nonchalant shrug he would be certain to feel since their shoulders were touching. ‘One lies these days. It’s an age of them, is it not?’

  ‘But to lie successfully one must be consistent.’

  She sighed. She said, ‘Chance plays such a part in life. You have heard, perhaps, of the arrest of my little Juliette, my bonne à tout faire. Who would have thought of her saying anything to anyone? What did those women do to her in that prison, Inspector? She’s tender. She’s pretty. She’s a very gentle creature and very loyal, but now … now she says so little. She’s not been herself since.’

  ‘Did you tell Janwillem De Vries of the contents of that safe of the Generalmajor Wehrle’s?’

  ‘I didn’t, but it was not necessary for me to do so, not if the Gestapo of the rue Lauriston had been keeping an eye on things and smelling a fortune. If only they could get their filthy hands on it before Hans did. If only they could get at those people through me. My maid, my Juliette, knew nothing of what I was doing for Hans, nothing of the diamonds or of that safe.’

  ‘But knew of the prospector?’

  ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘Do you know Madame Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire?’

  They would check with Céci. ‘My Jani loves to visit the zoo. Madame Lemaire was most kind and let him help her feed the wolves. He’s only a little boy. Don’t ask me why he is so fascinated by such animals. The fables Juliette tells him at bedtime, the nightmares, I suppose.’

  She grew silent, but then said sadly, ‘A mother has to be present at all times when a child is young, yet when she has to earn a living, such a duty is not possible.’

  ‘Gabrielle’s son lives at the château near Vouvray with his grandmother, the Countess.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been there too. Once or twice. I can’t remember.’

  And what of the dynamite? he wanted so much to ask but thought it best to go carefully.

  On the way up in the lift, in its privacy, he said, ‘Mademoiselle, it’s the silhouettes that so often defeat a boxer for he can’t hide behind them. They reveal his every weakness.’

  ‘And mine?’ she asked.

  Her expression was tragic but she would have to be told. ‘The SS or the Gestapo won’t use the guillotine. They’ll use an axe, so if you wish to confide in me, please do so now before it’s too late.’

  ‘It already is. Janwillem saw to that when he parked your car below my windows.’

  ‘But why did he do so? That is the question?’

  ‘Ask him when you find him. Ask him why he wanted to kill the son he has never seen. Only he can give you the answer.’

  The caviar was malossal, the Russian for slightly salted, and it was to be eaten with the little pancakes those courageous people called blini. Wedges of fresh lemon were provided – all but unheard of these days; also a small dish of finely chopped fresh green chives.

  The vodka was crystal clear and so cold, the bottle still wore its coat of frost. The dressing-room at the Club Mirage was tiny and bugged by Gestapo Paris’s Listeners and yet Gabrielle would use her voice.

  ‘So, mon amour, you have come to see me and as you can surmise, I’ve been expecting you and have prepared myself for your questions. Once again I am suspected of something? These robberies, Jean-Louis, that terrible explosion, have been in all the newspapers. Don’t keep me in suspense a moment longer.’

  ‘Gabrielle, please! It’s difficult enough. A few small questions just to help the investigation along.’

  ‘Nothing difficult?’ she arched, catching him unawares.

  He winced. ‘Not difficult. No.’

  ‘And Hermann, where is he, please?’

  ‘Gone to see Giselle and Oona, and then to have a look into the Gare Saint-Lazare robbery.’

  ‘Cartier’s … my sapphire necklace … the bracelet, ear-rings and ring. The 8,600,000 francs they will have to return now that this … this Gypsy has stolen them from me, yes from me! Jean-Louis. How could you even think I had anything to do with that business?’

  ‘We don’t! Hermann and I are both convinced of this but others must be satisfied. It’s the way things are. Berlin are insisting.’

  ‘Berlin …?’

  She blanched. He reached out to comfort her. ‘The Reichsführer Himmler,’ he said. ‘The Führer himself, perhaps.’

  ‘Those poor boys who were killed … What will become of their families and loved ones? I must hold a benefit – yes, yes, that’s what I’ll do. Please, a moment, my fans will see the need and we can send the money off tomorrow morning. Wreaths for the funerals, condolences and then … then some lasting financial help for the old ones. It’s the least we can do, isn’t that so? and I must do it now! 100 francs from you. 500 … No, 1000, I think. Merci.’

  She left him, she with his wallet in hand and soon he could hear the crowd shouting for her and, when the tumult had subsided, her saying, ‘Mes chers amis …’ And the hush was so great, not a breath stirred. ‘We must open our hearts to the families of those brave boys who have so valiantly given their lives in the rue Poliveau so that the safety and homes of others could be spared.’

  When she sang ‘Lilli Marlene’, tears fell and St-Cyr could imagine the men spellbound even as his own eyes moistened, for it was a soldier’s song, and he’d been one himself. She had a voice that transcended everything. Clear, pure, bell-toned and soul-searching, but for how much longer would it be allowed to continue?

  He remembered an ancient grist mill on the Loire close to the Château Thériault, not two months ago. The Resistance had sent her one of the little black coffins they reserved for those they thought were collaborators who should become examples to others. He, himself, had received one. She’d got the drop on him with an ancient double-barrelled fowling piece in that mill of her mother-in-law’s and ever since then, he’d borne her a healthy respect.

  A White Russian who had fled the Revolution with her family, she had, having lost them, arrived alone in Paris at the
age of fourteen and had been a chanteuse ever since. She was a widow whose husband had been badly wounded at Sedan in May of 1940 and had then died in the late summer of that year. And, yes, she was suspected by the Gestapo but not yet sufficiently to drag her in for questioning or to put her under constant surveillance. Or perhaps it was simply that she was known to too many high-ranking Germans who adored her and therefore extreme care had to be taken.

  Sonderbehandlung here, too, he wondered. Sickened by the thought, he opened one of the small vials of her perfume. Its twists of cobalt blue crystal poignantly reminded him of that nothing murder in Fontainebleau Forest, that small murder which had led to Hermann and himself being reviled by many at Gestapo Paris-Central and in the SS, but which had brought Gabrielle and himself together.

  There was civet, a little too much jasmine he had thought then and still did. Angelica, vetiverol and bergamot. Lavender of course … Mirage it was called and he had known the creators of it, old friends.

  The Club Mirage had been named after the perfume.

  Though he wanted desperately to make certain there was nothing incriminating the Gestapo might find, he forced himself not to search through her things. The perfume and the sky blue, shimmering silk sleeveless sheath were among her trademarks, the dress electric with thousands of tiny seed pearls arranged in vertical rows from ankle to diamond choker. Her hair was not blonde but the colour of a very fine brandy, her eyes were the shade of violets, matched only by those of Hermann’s Giselle.

  ‘So,’ she said on catching him out once more, and he could see by her delight how successful the fund-raising had been but also how pleased she was at finding the vial of perfume in his hand. ‘A few questions, Inspector. Nothing difficult.’

  ‘It’s Chief Inspector. Hermann is always reminding me of this.’

  ‘He’s going to be a father again. Isn’t it splendid? A baby, Jean-Louis. A baby!’

  ‘Oona …? Giselle …?’

  The flat on the rue Suger was empty, freezing as usual but in complete darkness too. And when Kohler found the black-out curtains wide open, he saw a lamp on the table in front of the windows and panicked. Had Giselle been arrested? Had Oona been taken with her? It had been deliberate, this placing of the lamp. The stub of an unlighted candle was beside it with a box of matches in case of a power outage.