‘That’s perfect! Now let me have the whereabouts of the other two.’
‘Both are married. Both have families …’
‘Of course.’
She had him now and rejoiced in it! ‘Both are in prisoner-of-war camps in the Reich!’
‘Which camps?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘Oflag 17A, madame?’ An officers’ camp, but … The same as Étienne de Bonnevies …
‘I … I couldn’t say, Inspector. Really I couldn’t.’
He’d sigh, thought St-Cyr. He’d put his tobacco pouch and matches away. ‘Then all we need is the address and name of the one who comes by metro.’
‘Or those of the wives, the mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers of the other three?’ shrilled Madame Thibodeau. ‘Each of them will want to keep silent the identities of those who violated that sister of his!’
‘I’m listening, madame.’
Why had he had to come here like this today? Had her number come up? wondered Madame Thibodeau. ‘Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies was très belle, très intelligente, but flirted with the boys and wanted to be like the other girls. Her father had to beat her but not about the face, you understand. He wouldn’t let her ask her friend into the house. The friend was “dirty”, he said. “The poor always have lice.”‘
‘And the name of this friend, madame?’
The Inspector had taken out his little black notebook. ‘I will have to sell the house and move to the country. Les Allemands don’t like issuing such permits. I’m getting on — you can see it for yourself. Would you throw me out on the street?’
The urge to say, You’ve been hiding the identity of one who aided and may even have incited a crime, to say nothing of those who committed it, but one must be kind. What she had said was absolutely true. ‘My partner and I will go carefully.’
‘It won’t be enough.’
‘Then I will still need the name.’
Even as a flic he’d been a lousy shit! ‘Madame Héloïse Debré, 7 rue Stendhal, top floor, but … but there’s no husband and no one knows where he got to. He used to knock her about terribly but then … why, then, one day he vanished. Just like that, and she swore she did not know where to.’
‘Please don’t try to distract me, madame, with suggestions of another domestic killing. Just give me the names of the three families.’
Hermann would be pleased with the progress. The hive of this little murder, if it really was murder, had been truly opened, its cells disgorging honey and uncovering the larvae.
But was there a rival queen?
The Paris auction house wasn’t far from the smelter. Just up the rue Montmartre and over past the mairie of the ninth arrondissement. It was in a large building on the corner of the rue Chauchat and the rue Rossini. All alone, and by itself, the Renault was parked out front — big, blue and shiny in the wind-driven snow. 110 kilometres per hour, no problem; 120 and still none. A b…e…a…utiful set of wheels for a hot little scrap-metal dealer.
Kohler plunked the birdcage down on the bonnet, right up by the windscreen where it wouldn’t be missed, then drove back up the rue Rossini to leave the Citroën next to the town hall and walk back.
No one would steal the birdcage. No one.
It being noon-hour and at its tail end, no auctions were in progress. Instead, the public were allowed to peruse the up-and-coming items. Room upon room of bailiff’s gleanings were on the first floor; those, too, of lesser items being sold off to settle a grândmother’s or dead husband’s estate. Beds, bureaus, cutlery, pots and pans, stacks of dishes — linens. Housewives mingled with shy newlyweds, the bridegrooms all a lot older than their brides. Hell, most of the younger men were dead or in POW camps in the Reich, or on the run from the forced labour and hiding out with the maquis.
The second-floor rooms were reserved for the better quality merchandise. Here there was silence, although the undercurrent of muffled conversation from below formed a constant background. Tiffany, Lalique and Gallé glass filled a room with lamps, vases and figurines. No sign of Herr Schlacht, though.
Limoges and Sevres porcelains were in another room, the belles mondaines and the dealers noting the lot numbers and jotting down, after much deliberation, the sums they would be prepared to bid. One glance was enough. The ebb tide that Paris had become, had left its wide strand littered with the debris of all such items. Things that had been in the family for years had had to be parted with. If one wanted to eat, let alone to eat as one had before the Defeat, then one had to pay black-market prices.
But one had to be so very careful. All items over one hundred thousand francs in value had had to be reported to the authorities in the early fall of 1940 and couldn’t be moved or sold without permission.
A Regency mirror gave him a glimpse of Schlacht. The overcoat collar was still tightly buttoned up under the double chin; the wide-brimmed trilby was still pulled down a little over the brow. He was feasting his eyes on a pure white sculpture, something that would once have been set on a table in a place of honour.
‘Hermann … Hermann, is it really you?’
Merde, it was Gabrielle, Louis’s girlfriend, a chanteuse, a White Russian who had fled the Revolution in 1917 and had arrived in Paris at the age of fourteen and all alone.
Kohler took her by the elbow and hustled her into the adjacent salon, to stand among beautiful pieces of marquetry. ‘Beat it, please,’ he begged. ‘We got back late last night and …’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘And haven’t had a moment since.’
She was a good head taller than Louis, was almost as tall as himself, and when her lips brushed his scarred left cheek, he felt the warmth, the lightness and gracefulness of her. Breathing in the scent of her perfume, of Mirage, he recalled, as he always did when coming upon her like this, their first meeting.
It had been during the investigation of a small murder in Fontainebleau Forest, the murder that had earned him the scar she had just kissed and the one from his right shoulder to his left hip. She’d been a suspect then, had lost a small pouch of diamonds …
‘How are René Yvon-Paul and the countess?’ he asked. The boy lived with his grandmother at Chateau Thériault, near Vouvray, overlooking the Loire.
‘Fine. Both are fine.’ René was ten years old and had been missing the two of them, Jean-Louis especially, thought Gabrielle. René had also saved Hermann Kohler’s life, and Hermann, to his credit, had never forgotten it. But, then, he liked children almost, if not more than Jean-Louis. ‘You look beat, mon vieux. Are you hungry?’ she hazarded and ran a slender hand over a table whose marquetry glowed in shades of amber, some so soft they matched her hair.
She had the loveliest eyes. Violet, just like Giselle’s. Tall, willowy, a gorgeous figure — Louis was an idiot not to have gone to bed with her yet and now … why now, might never get the chance! ‘Look, this isn’t easy, but it’s best we not be seen together.’
‘Not by the one you are following,’ she said and sadly nodded. ‘Is he so important you would deny me the pleasure of your company? Ah! He must be. Don’t look so pained.’
‘Let’s just say he’s connected to the avenue Foch, Gabrielle. I wouldn’t want …’
‘Them to take an interest in me? They already have, as you well know. Bugging my dressing room at the club, keeping track of when and where I go, so …’ She shrugged. ‘What’s the problem?’
She was a member of the Résistance, had been detained during a previous case, but had managed to get away with it. ‘Gabi, please.’
‘Do you like this table? It’s Russian. Eighteenth century. I’m going to buy it.’
She would, too, and then would slap heavy coats of paint on it!
‘For to hide best is to expose those things you value most to view,’ she said, having read his mind. ‘Now take me by the arm like the gentleman — the wishful lover, perhaps — that I know you to be. Escort me into that room, Hermann, so that you may better study this man you want to follow.’