She had then turned over and had plunged to land facedown with arms flung out atop the elevator between its two cables, the rest of her bent over the iron bars to which those same cables were bolted.
Blood had drained. Within about twelve hours, postmortem hypostases had coalesced and made the face, ears, and neck livid in their lowermost parts. The eyes bulged, the mouth, teeth, forehead, and nose were broken, as were the arms, legs, ribs, and shoulders. Having emptied herself instantly, the rats had got at her.
‘Ah, mon Dieu, Mademoiselle Allan, Hermann had best not see you. Death has haunted him since his days in the Great War from which a prisoner-of-war camp saved him but allowed time to dwell on the matter. Outwardly he puts on a veritable show, but inwardly. . It’s not just that the big shots of the Gestapo and SS will use this against him, a detective of theirs who no longer has the stomach for it, but though he would never admit it, he’s far too old for the Russian Front and has already lost his two young sons to that. Boys. . They were only boys. Yet, still, it’s really just Hermann himself. We’ve been through so much, have constantly been in each other’s company and yet have survived while displeasing virtually everyone else. Those who stood to gain and those who hoped to, even those remotely connected who simply wished the status quo to continue.’
The thighs were bare, the foetus absent, the placenta wrapped around the remains of the umbilical cord.
As gently as he could, he covered her. ‘Two months, three, mademoiselle? Had you told anyone, the father perhaps? Was he a guard, one of the doctors. . the electrician who comes from town? The dentist, or one of the camp’s officers?
‘And why, please, was that gate deliberately opened when it should have remained closed and locked?’
The candle stub flickered in a down-draught that drew the little flame to one side, threatening darkness. Several photos lay about-snapshots from home she’d been carrying, and also a beautifully carved cavalier, a knight from a chess set, the wood light-red to reddish-brown.
‘And hard, and moderately heavy, and very straight grained.’ It had fortunately tumbled to the far left front corner of the elevator’s roof, where it had remained clear of everything else.
‘Mary-Lynn Allan was twenty-seven years old, Louis. Two brothers in the service, the girl the youngest. Father Ed. . ’
‘Killed during that other war?’
‘Ah, mon Dieu, how the hell did you. . ’
‘The snapshots. An officer.’
‘Killed during the Meuse-Argonne advance of. . ’
‘Hermann, I’m aware of the date. Twenty-six September, 1918. Fog got them. Buried tank tracks and other shot-up armour threw their compass bearings off, they failing to realize this until it was too late.’
The poor bastards had been green and almost straight off the boat from home, but Louis, like most of the French, would still be thinking les Américains sont toujours merveilleux. ‘They’d not had any food for at least four days and little if any sleep, mon vieux. You know how it was. End of story. First Army, Thirty-Fifth Division under Major-General Traub.’
‘The east bank of the Aire River well to the northwest of here and of Verdun, Hermann.’
‘She couldn’t have known him, would only have been about two years old but wondering all her life.’
The photos had been of the deceased father, the cavalier having belonged to him. ‘That why the séance with Madame Chevreul?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘For which she handed over a cheque for the princely sum of fifty dollars American.’
This investigation was getting deeper and deeper. ‘Which bank?’
‘The Morgan.’
‘With headquarters in New York but a branch office in Paris, Hermann, the cheque negotiable after this war since Madame Chevreul could not possibly get there to cash it even though that bank is still open. Ah, merde. . ’
The candle had snuffed itself. ‘Two of the guards are bringing an extension cord,’ said Kohler. ‘They’ll lower a light to you.’
‘Why don’t they open the ground-floor gates?’
‘Ach, I didn’t think to tell them. The crowd, I guess.’
‘Then be so good as to clear all corridors and find our trapper. Pick up where I left off by asking if any of that datura has gone missing before.’
‘Missing. .?’ Did Louis want to warn everyone of it? ‘Was she drugged?’
Good for Hermann. ‘At this point, it’s simply an alternative to the effects of alcohol. She’d have lost focus, been very unsteady on her feet. . ’
‘Hallucinogenic?’
They’d all be listening now, felt St-Cyr. ‘It’s just a thought.’
‘But don’t jump to conclusions, eh? And Madame Chevreul of the Hôtel Grand?’
‘Leave her for now. Let others tell her of our interest. Chevreul was the nineteenth-century Frenchman who popularized the use of a pendulum to induce hypnosis. She may have borrowed the name, which would imply study of the process, or simply have married someone related or totally unrelated.’
The listeners would think about that too. ‘In addition to getting in touch with her father, Louis, Mary-Lynn Allan wanted to know where he was buried since he was one of the hundreds of thousands who were never found. Blown to bits probably, or simply left in the cesspool of a shell crater to eventually be covered.’
A sigh would do no good. ‘Hermann, please do as I’ve asked. Since you’ve already been talking to Nora Arnarson, continue your conversation with her, then find out whatever else you can here.’
‘But leave the Hôtel Grand for later. A pendulum and two bodies.’
‘The theft of little things of no consequence.’
They’d all know of that anyways. ‘A trapper, Louis, a bell ringer, and a flunky.’
‘And a chess piece, Hermann.’
‘Oh, that. The wood’s from a Kentucky Coffeetree. The father carved it when he was a teenager. The mother sent it over with the snapshots in a Red Cross parcel. That’s why the ex-Kommandant who asked for us but left without leaving any information readily agreed to the late-night visitation and attended it himself as a firm believer.’
Ah, sacré nom de nom!
Room 3-38 was far from happy, thought Kohler. The blue-eyed blonde whose cot was under the St. Olaf College pennant tried to light a cigarette but was so nervous, match and fag fell to her lap, scorching the grey tweed of a slender skirt.
‘Shit!’ she cried in English. ‘Don’t, Marni. I’m warning you.’
That one, whose cot was next to the innermost wall and under the Marquette U. pennant, and who had helped herself without the chef’s permission to a cup of the rabbit broth, had been about to quench the fire.
‘Should I have let you torch your beaver?’ she yelled. ‘The préfet de police’s goatee, eh?’
The police chief’s beard and prostitute talk, the insult not really meant but. .
‘That’s it!’ cried the blonde. ‘I’m not living here a moment longer. I can’t stand the stench of that!’
The rabbits, to which the trapper, Nora Arnarson, having flung a desperate look of censure at the green-eyed redhead with the mass of curls who’d helped herself to the broth, was now slicing peeled sow-thistle roots to be added to the pot.
She dumped the lot in and began to slice the hell out of an onion, though how she had come by such a rarity was anyone’s guess unless on the black market.
‘I don’t know how you can kill things like that, Nora,’ started up the blonde again. ‘I really don’t. They’re God’s creatures.’
‘As was the pig from which the SPAM you eat must have come,’ came the retort from Nora.
‘At least I was spared the agony of having to watch the poor thing being skinned and butchered!’