Still she didn’t leap forward. She mustn’t. Ashes soon fell.
‘Why did you break up? Come on, mademoiselle. If lovers, why the sudden split?’
‘Madame-’
‘Thought Jennifer might have been stealing things?’
‘Yes!’
‘And after you, Jennifer then takes up with Caroline. That must have been hard, or was it merely a necessity since Jennifer was then able to come here again?’
‘Those American bitches with their Ivy League crap,’ grunted Léa.
‘Alpha Beta Theta bullshit!’ shouted someone out in the corridor.
‘Pi Beta Phi!’ said another.
‘Sororities?’ he asked.
Léa let him have it with a laugh. ‘If that’s what they’re called, we’ve got the biggest of them!’
The ball began again to roll, Marguerite Lefèvre to hesitate with fingernails to her lips and eyes rapidly moistening, yet still she didn’t step forward-couldn’t, wouldn’t, Léa having given her a scathing look.
‘Please,’ she wept. ‘Herr Kohler, I beg you.’
‘Smoky quartz, wasn’t that what you started Jennifer on?’
‘Yes! Then the rose and. . and then the clear.’
‘And in between sessions, the simply being together.’
Again he caught the ball, snatching it up in midair, but this time he placed it securely in her trembling hands and she. . why, she could only let him see her tears and hear her gratefully whispering, ‘Merci.’
He stepped away from her, began to close the gap between himself and Léa, said, ‘I think I’ve seen enough for now,’ but turned at the last, as Léa and the others began to make way for him, Herr Kohler to catch sight of her frantically examining the cloth and brushing the ashes away to fastidiously tidy it before passing a final smoothing hand lovingly over it, only to then pause as he continued to look at her, she now steadily at him.
Then he was gone and Léa was saying, ‘You little fool. Wait until Madame hears of this.’
8
They were moving now as detectives should; they weren’t wasting time but all along the corridors of the Grand, crowds lined the walls and the shrillness, the shrieks, the jeers, and banging of pots and pans was deafening.
‘Léa Monnier, Hermann. Cérès knew of that Star of David,’ managed a visibly harried Louis, for several had tried to hit him.
More couldn’t be said until, at a shout from a clearly ruffled Brother Étienne who had ducked out of a doorway, the uproar died as suddenly as the nod from Léa had started it up.
Now the pots and pans were lowered and the rabble, dressed in separates often of the most incongruous kind, some sucking on their fags, others wishing they had one, fell to a watchful silence and then. . then, as these two detectives hurried past, a whispered hiss, ‘None of us did it!’
‘We’re clean,’ said one whose breath alone claimed otherwise; another, ‘Caroline Lacy was the thief. Becky Torrence was seen going into the Chalet des Ânes after her.’
‘Nora Arnarson, inspectors. Ask Nora why she tried to grab but shoved Mary-Lynn.’
‘Her friend. . Some friend.’
‘Ask Angèle,’ whispered another. ‘Ask that nag of Brother Étienne’s what Nora likes to share with her.’
‘Oh yes, to share when there is so little.’
‘Louis, what the hell are they talking about?’ asked Kohler.
‘Something so simple I should have seen it.’
Out on the terrace, the light of day had left and the shops were closed.
‘That sprig from a beech tree, Hermann, and three curls of the inner bark. Though mention of these implies Cérès knows what we found with Caroline Lacy, who else in the camp but Nora would think to nibble on them?’
‘Not Caroline?’
‘Not Jennifer either, nor Madame de Vernon or even Becky.’
‘Caroline wasn’t just going to tell the Kommandant who had pushed Mary-Lynn, Louis.’
‘Nora saw her being followed by Becky and must have thought Caroline would tell Colonel Jundt about that girl’s fiancé, but that Becky wasn’t strong enough to have dealt with her.’
‘And that’s why Becky came back the next morning to find out what had happened.’
‘Nora having told me that at first she had thought it out of character for Jennifer to have taken up with Caroline, and then opportunistic.’
‘Jennifer having been in love with our kleptomaniac, Louis, with Marguerite Lefèvre, Madame Chevreul’s maid, something Nora may well have known.’
Had Hermann really pinned the thief down? ‘The evidence?’
Kohler told him, Louis muttering, ‘C’est possible, mon vieux, but. . ’
‘Gott im Himmel, why must you continually doubt the obvious? I caught her red-handed!’
‘And she made a visible impression on you.’
‘Deliberately?’
‘Hermann, how many times must I tell you not to be putty in the hands of the female sex? You share yourself with two women in Paris, can’t bring yourself to decide between them and they know this yet live together in harmony and have become fast friends.’
‘They’ve left me, and you know it. Giselle to become a mannequin, Oona to. . ’
‘Yes, yes, but they’ll be back as soon as you are.’
‘And Marguerite Lefèvre?’
‘Could well have sized you up and seen right through you.’
‘No crystal ball needed?’
‘None.’
‘Then she was trying to shield Jennifer.’
‘Her former lover, Hermann? If still former, Madame having been kind enough to have warned me that Cérès has claimed Jennifer is in great danger.’
‘Since Madame had stopped her from seeing Marguerite until Caroline came along. Two days, Louis. That’s all Jundt and Weber are giving us, and one of them’s gone. If we don’t come up with answers today they’ll call in Berlin-Central and we both know what that means.’
Unlike the Grand, the Vittel-Palace was as silent as a tomb. All doors were closed, the smells still everywhere: ersatz perfume and pomanders but especially those of burning rutabaga steaks, boiling cabbage, and frying SPAM, or the smoke from innumerable stoves, some with the taint of refuse, others with that of the caramelized sweetness of toasting black bread, then too, the pungency of overheated electrical wires and the reminder, of course, that the damned place was nothing more than one hell of a fire trap.
A knock at Room 3-54 brought nothing, the room uninhabited, that of Room 3-38, the crowded waiting looks of apprehension. Clearly the two rooms had gotten together to discuss things.
Becky Torrence sat on her cot with Marni Huntington to one side and Jill Faber to the other. Dorothy Stevens, the tall, thin brunette from Ohio State with the uncooperative hair, was standing by the stove, where she had been eagerly licking a cone of what looked to be some sort of ice cream.
Candice Peters, the all-but-forty-year-old with the frizzy brown hair from North Carolina State, was sitting on Nora’s cot. Droplets from the newspaper-covered cone she held fell to her slippered feet.
Barbara Caldwell, the auburn-haired thirty-two- to thirty-six-year-old from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, was standing beside Marni’s cot on which sat Lisa Banbridge, the twenty-two-year-old brunette from Duke with the lovely hazel eyes and ponytail.
There was no sign of Nora, none either of Jennifer or of Madame de Vernon.
‘The washing, Louis. Diese Pariser.’
The condoms. Three of these hung limply from the curtain cord that had shut Caroline Lacy and Irène de Vernon off from the others.
‘It was just fun,’ confessed Jill with a shrug. ‘All we wanted was to be by ourselves for a little like it used to be when Mary-Lynn was with us.’
‘Une veillée, inspectors,’ offered Lisa. ‘For centuries such evening gatherings of women have been a tradition in France, a chance to talk things over, to recall the past while doing a little sewing or mending. Jill was telling us about Madison, Wisconsin, and the farmers’ markets she used to go to every Saturday morning as a student. The apples. . ’