The traffic took on more motion, the speed increasing as a horn blared angrily and he thought, he hoped that it was Hermann. But it was a white Bentley, and when it passed, showering a wall of water over him, Nicole de Rainvelle smiled and laughed and left her silk handkerchief in the gutter.
St-Cyr picked it up. Mirage … the perfume of Gabrielle Arcuri. ‘BASTARDS!’ he screamed. ‘YOU LEAVE THAT ONE ALONE!’
Still quivering, he threw up a hand and whistled sharply. The velo-taxi skidded as it swirved to avoid a cyclist and swung in to the kerb. ‘The corner of the boulevard Raspail and the rue du Cherche-Midi, and hurry,’ he said. ‘Hurry! I have to get there.’
‘The prison?’ gasped the girl, dismayed by the fare.
‘Just do as I say. Don’t argue! I’m from the Surete. It’s a matter of life and death, mademoiselle. Death!’
‘Ah no, the rue des Saussaies?’ The dreaded rue des Saussaies! She swallowed. Drenched red curls were matted to her brow.
‘Look, just take me to the convent, eh?’
‘The convent! The prison, monsieur! Four hundred and sixty francs.’
Forty times the going rate! He thrust his bandaged hand at her and shouted, ‘It’s getting wet, eh? I’ll give you ten francs and that’s an order!’
Gestapo! she said to herself. Merde, what was she to do?
The velo was a converted antique settee of little value on wheels that wobbled. The cushions were, of course, soaking!
‘Drive on. Relax, eh? I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, mademoiselle. I’m on a murder investigation. Assassins are out to kill me and I have, alas, no weapon.’
She began to peddle much harder and, as they joined the flow, the casserole of the settee floated well enough.
Hostages … potential witnesses. Lafont and Bonny – had they killed those who might count, thereby eliminating critical information they themselves already knew?
Four murders … and where was Hermann? Had he followed up on Schraum? Had he found the warehouse where the corporal had worked? Had he managed anything at all on the collector of stuffed canaries?
Christabelle Audit could well have been killed by Captain Dupuis. The girl Mila Zavitz lent weight to this. Had her death not come to light, things might have been more difficult. Hers was the wild card every criminal dreaded, but it didn’t quite fit. Ah no, it didn’t.
Yet Mila Zavitz could well have looked in those two suitcases and been caught in the act by Charles Audit, Roland Minou or someone else. Except that Father Eugene had said the cases had been locked … But had they really been so? Had they? Ah, Mon Dieu, why couldn’t this girl hurry? If only God would not mock His lonely detective so much, if only He would give but once, the kind whisper, the little benediction, not the sacrament of death by assassination! The witnesses …
‘Monsieur, we … we are almost at the corner of the boulevard Raspail. Could you … Would you, for my sake? I …’
He blinked. He saw the girl straddling her bike, still holding on to it by the handlebars and turned so as to face him.
They were on the rue du Cherche-Midi. ‘Monsieur …?’ she said again.
St-Cyr heard himself saying, ‘Drive on. Don’t be afraid. I won’t be long and when I come out, I hope my clumsiness has not made me too late and that there will be two of us and one hundred francs for yourself.’
His rumpled fedora was soaked. The Surete looked like a tramp, except that the Nazis had all but ‘cleansed’ the city of such people.
The rue du Cherche-Midi was in the sixth arrondissement. In better times St-Cyr would have thought it a pleasurable journey back into the seventeenth century and if he could but shut his eyes as a cinematographer would, the tumult of those times would come readily enough. But, ah! one had so little time for life these days. The pleasurable lunch had practically vanished except from the lies of the cinemas where the crowds gathered to watch in rapture celluloid diners eating celluloid meals. The better the banquet, the greater the rapture.
The Prison of the Cherche-Midi beckoned. Even the blush of exertion had disappeared from the girl’s cheeks. ‘Wait for us, please,’ he said grimly. ‘We shouldn’t be long.’
Her green eyes glanced uncertainly at the heavy door and though he hated himself for saying it, he felt he had to. ‘Please do not run off, mademoiselle. I have taken down your licence number.’
She crossed herself and he left her to the mist.
The prison had been a convent in the days of the Sun King. Its airless, windowless cells had found another use during the Revolution and ever since then it had kept that use, God having deserted the place along with the nuns.
‘St-Cyr of the Surete to see the prisoner Madame Gilbert. She was one of the hostages taken from the rue Polonceau after the shooting of the Corporal Schraum.’
She was the housekeeper at the Villa Audit.
The flic on duty took in the clothes, the rips in the overcoat, the leaking shoes. ‘Gilbert … Gilbert?’ he said. ‘I seem to remember seeing that name, monsieur.’
‘It’s Chief Inspector St-Cyr.’
‘Don’t they pay you people any more?’
‘Not the honest ones, so don’t get wise.’
‘Pneumonia then.’
‘The rue Lauriston?’ Nom de Jesus-Christ! could nothing go right?
The flic got stiff. ‘That name does not pass my lips, Inspector. It was simply a case of double pneumonia. Paris in winter is the shits!’
‘Chantal, you must excuse my appearance. I have come the back way so as not to bring trouble to your door.’
She touched a blonde wave delicately, so delicately. A flutter. ‘But my poor Louis, you have hurt yourself! Ah, there is blood …’
He swept the hand behind his back. ‘My pardons, my pardons, please forgive me.’
That little bird from yesteryear, vivacious as always, had to fan herself as she sat down. St-Cyr said, ‘Please don’t let it upset you, Chantal. A cat after a canary. Nothing more, I assure you. Merely a scratch.’
‘You are wrong to come to me in this … this state, Monsieur Louis! Your shoes, your trousers – that coat. Muriel … Muriel, a moment, please,’ she called out urgently. ‘Ask one of the girls to join us. Louis, you must remove those things at once. Hurry! Hurry, I say. They stink. You need a bath.’
His ‘Forgive me,’ sounded weak and lame. Unable to shrug out of the overcoat with ease, he was clumsy. ‘The hand … it really is nothing.’
A scratch! ‘What have you been doing?’
Chantal Grenier and her friend Muriel were both over seventy and had run their shop Enchantment on the place Vendome for almost fifty years. Lingerie – silks, satins and lace, perfumes, bath oils and soaps.
‘Another murder case,’ he apologized, handing the girl his coat but telling her please to empty the contents of its pockets on to the desk for him. ‘I must lose nothing, you understand.’ She was really quite obliging, but then they all were.
The office was cluttered with bolts of material, books of fabric designs and samples, perfumes from everywhere, so many things the years had brought to light and they had stored. Muriel, in a severe grey pinstripe with wide lapels, smoked one of her endless cigarettes, did the designing, the buying and made up the perfumes; Chantal, in flowered silk today, handled the sales, helped pick the trends, fought off the creditors when Muriel couldn’t, which was seldom, and managed the staff, though Muriel always got to choose the girls.
‘Now the tie and shirt, Louis. We will find something to keep you warm.’
‘Me, I will retire to the bath, please. Your hospitality is more than I deserve but,’ he gave the shrug of a vagrant on the run, ‘I have no place to call home at the moment.’
‘No place …’ Those large brown eyes flicked apprehensively to Muriel’s stern grey gaze. ‘You shall stay here, Louis. It is the least we can do.’