‘The charge was over nothing, meine Liebling. A mere mistake on my part, but …’ Schlacht savoured his cigar as if searching for the right words. ‘But these days, little one, such mistakes once made cannot be retracted and unfortunately seem always to lead to far-reaching consequences. You should have warned them to move, or at least to take no notice of my comings and goings.’
He was gone then. Too soon he had reached the bend in the courtyard and had passed from view.
As Kohler stepped from the building, he realized Schlacht had seen his footprints in the snow. Louis, he said silently. Louis, I think we’ve got a problem.
The room with the gravestone was in the attic of the brothel. Like all such maisons de tolérance, the house catered to the special needs of as many of its regulars as possible. But here …
‘Sacré nom de nom,’ breathed St-Cyr softly as Josiane and her sister stepped aside. Floor-to-ceiling murals covered the walls, giving ersatz views of the Père Lachaise’s tree-lined boulevards. The tomb of Honoré de Balzac was in the near distance — was it really Balzac’s tomb?
The entrance to the Ossuary was a parody of Bartholomé’s magnificent high-relief sculpture. Instead of a naked couple standing hand in hand ready to step through the doorway into the pitch darkness of eternal peace, here each had a hand on the buttocks of the other.
‘My partner should see this,’ he said drolly. ‘Hermann is a student of all things French, especially its lupanars.’
Its ‘rabbit hutches’.
‘This is the stone,’ said Georgette, picking her way down a narrow aisle between bits of sculpture and other stones. ‘Her name, as you can see, is beautifully inscribed.’
‘The stone is real, as are all the others,’ said Josiane quickly. The Inspector would immediately see that others must also have used the room to fulfil their fantasies or to view it in fun, but would he accept that Alexandre had never once complained of this, that to him the room had still been just as sacred a trust as when it had begun, secure and totally private?
A low, Louis XIV iron fence surrounded the plot where masses of silk flowers were forever in bloom. Verbena, fuchsia and hibiscus, thought St-Cyr. Chinese Bell Flower, too, and Mignonette, but not the dreary bunches of red and white carnations so typical of such places.
‘When Alexandre asked his sister to gather flowers for him,’ confessed Georgette, ‘he told her to take only the not-so-common.’
Carved into the grey granite was the name Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies, and then: Born 17 June 1897; taken in the flower of her youth, 20 August 1912.
‘But … but she isn’t dead?’ he heard himself saying.
It was Josiane who, ever wary of his reactions, answered, ‘Ah no, Inspector, but she might just as well have been.’
‘Did de Bonnevies pay for this room?’ he asked and saw her start, heard her sister saying, ‘Everything, and for its continued maintenance. Inspector, none ever knew at whose stone the girl had been violated, so no other name was possible, isn’t that right? I would pretend to be gathering samples of these flowers, Josiane would be over there out of sight. The custodian had forgotten all about us and had locked the gates, so we were both a little nervous and would … would call to each other.’
‘Angèle-Marie, have you found any other flowers? Hurry. We must hurry,’ sang out Josiane softly and no longer seen.
Georgette was now on her knees, awkwardly reaching well over the fence to almost touch the foot of the stone …
‘I would say, “I’ve found some,” but so soft was my voice, the name of my friend could never be heard.’
‘They would come upon her,’ grated Josiane. ‘Two, maybe three of them — four sometimes. Young, not old. Boys, he thought but never really knew. I swear it. He … he always changed his mind about the number and … and the ages of them.’
‘First one and then another would take me, Inspector. My clothes would be torn from me, my legs forced apart, my head pushed down … down …’
‘Yes, yes. Enough! And this friend of Angèle-Marie?’ he asked grimly. ‘What of her, please?’
They didn’t say a thing, these two. Josiane made her way among the stones to help her sister tidy the flowers.
‘The friend cried out encouragement,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Instead of watching in horror at what was happening, she egged them on and had probably agreed beforehand to set the whole thing up. Did he find out who this “friend” was? Please, you had best tell me now.’
Both shrugged and shook their heads. ‘Afterwards, as we would soothe him and ourselves,’ said Josiane, taking her sister by the hand to comfort her, ‘he would always speak of a settlement of accounts, Inspector. Things were to be done on the quiet, though.’
‘But at any price; at all costs,’ managed Georgette.
‘How many were there?’ he asked. ‘Come, come, you must have some idea.’
‘Four,’ confessed Georgette. ‘He had finally settled on four of the local boys.’
‘When?’
‘Last Thursday. After he had been to see his sister,’ said Josiane, ‘and … and before he was poisoned.’
With a flash, the last of the lead was oxidized and carried away by the strong jet of air from the blowpipe, leaving a white-hot bead of gold and silver in the bottom of the cupel. Kohler was entranced. ‘Mein Gott,’ he exclaimed, ‘bubbles are erupting from the surface. It’s like a tiny volcano.’
‘That is oxygen the silver has absorbed. It sprays the metal up.’
The Hauptmann Kohler nodded. As he continued to peer into the cupel, sweat made rivulets down the savage scar on his left cheek. ‘And the temperature now?’ he asked.
Andrei Dmitreyevich Godunov looked into the cupel through his goggles and said, ‘Below one thousand and dropping fast. A skin is forming.’
‘It gets shinier as it cools.’
The silvery bead was soon dumped into an iron saucer where it rolled about. ‘Now we will weigh it, mein Herr, and that will give us the combined assay and tell us how best to refine this latest batch.’
Louis would be intrigued but horrified and in despair at what Schlacht was up to most probably for Oberg and the SS of the avenue Foch, among others. Scrap jewellery that had been stripped of its gemstones, unwanted or no longer needed wedding rings and dental fillings, smashed wrist- and pocket-watches, even bits of gilded picture frames and worn or clipped louis d’or — some of the earliest of these — had been run through the chopper and blended. Pale yellowish soda, the peroxide of sodium, would soon be added, along with bone ash, lead oxide, charcoal and sand, after which the whole mass would be melted in large crucibles. As the precious metals sank to the bottom with the lead, the lighter, glassy-brown to greenish-brown siliceous slag would rise to carry upwards the unwanted copper and other metals found mostly in the cheaper grades of jewellery.
When cooled sufficiently, this slag would then be broken away and the lead, containing all the gold and silver, would be subjected to cupellation, a process as old as 2,000 years.
‘We can handle most things with little or no problem,’ said Godunov. ‘All we need is a few days. Once we have the gold and silver together, we then dissolve the silver with nitric acid but recover it later by electrolysis.’
A tidy operation. ‘And you get to keep the silver?’ asked Kohler.
‘As our fee, yes.’
Pot-shaped, rectangular and square furnaces constantly roared, their firebrick linings glowing degrees of yellow. One man broomed slag into a heap. Another began to weigh the bead they had just made. Sterling silver flatware was being thrown into a pot furnace. Charcoal dust and acrid smoke were everywhere, the ventilation terrible. While the Alsatian guard dogs took no interest in him, they did look hungrily away. Along one entire wall, and nearly to the ceiling, wire cages held several dozen pairs of guinea pigs, the latest of the Occupation’s food fads and another source of income for the smelter boys. Stews … had they a recipe he could get? wondered Kohler.