‘Don’t!’
Both of the Rivard brothers had spoken at once. ‘So, okay, my fines. First the dice are to be returned from your floor, and then a few small words of answer to the question I have been asking you for far too long.’
Kohler downed a nearby beer and wiped his lips with the back of a hand. ‘Louis, I think I know what you want. His name’s Rejean Turcel or something very close to it. About sixty-three years of age and tough as hell, good with the knife and good on his feet. He was shacked up with Madame Van der Lynn in the house on the quai Jemmapes. He’s the new owner of the carousel.’
‘Rejean Turcel?’ shrilled the Frog. ‘Rejean Tourmel perhaps, EH?’ he shouted fiercely at the Rivard brothers.
They didn’t even flutter. All grace and fluid motion of their own, they continued serving up the drinks, taking the cash and running their swift dark Corsican eyes over the crowd.
‘Rejean Tourmel, so what’s he done, EH?’ answered the one with the face of a mountain.
These Corsicans were all related. ‘Slashed my hand, I think,’ mused the Frog, now somewhat subdued and trying to figure things out.
Kohler plucked at the mountain’s leather jerkin. ‘Give him another pastis and a little more water. Make it two of them, then leave us alone or we’ll torch the place. I’d like another beer.’
‘Steal one then.’
He took out the Walther P-38. ‘Louis, ten francs a bottle, eh? and fifty says the place will empty in less than five minutes.’
‘Too many would be trampled to death, Hermann. It’s all right. Me, I think I know what’s up.’
Kohler added a touch of water to that filthy yellowish-green muck Louis drank. Insipid, cloying, the taste of liquorice that, after indulging only once, some two and a half years ago, had stayed with him ever since.
Oona watched as the liquor became milky. St-Cyr made room for her and when she hesitated, he noticed she was wearing nothing under the coat.
‘Louis, we had a bit of trouble over on the Ile Saint-Louis. A collector of stuffed canaries. She’s okay now, I think.’
‘Good!’ The pastis vanished. The glass was slid the length of the bar. ‘Another,’ said the Surete.
The cheering and the applause had subsided again into that breathless hush of expectancy. Again the voice of magic came. ‘My friends, I have a little something for you now that is very dear to my heart. It is a song of a boy in the trenches of that other war. He is standing watch, is he not? He knows the battle will come and that in the morning he and others will die. His thoughts are therefore of home, of a girl he once knew. If only he could have made her understand, if only he hadn’t said what he did.’
Louis grimaced and shut his eyes as he gripped the edge of the zinc.
Oona Van der Lynn tried to understand these two men. Quite obviously there was a bond between them that went much deeper than that of mere friendship.
The pistol was put away. The song reached into their hearts. All around them fistfuls of new francs which had to be spent in the occupied country were lowered into waitfulness.
The zinc was wiped. The taller of the two Corsicans let his eyes sift over the crowd, looking always for trouble.
‘Rejean Tourmel, Hermann. Now I know why that coin was left on Christabelle Audit’s forehead. I put that one away for seven years. Robbery with violence and extortion. The attempted murder of a police officer and a detective from the Surete. This one!’
‘Devil’s Island?’ asked the Gestapo.
St-Cyr shook his head. ‘Not me, someone else. Ten years, from 1905 until 1915, Hermann. I put him in the Sante.’
Right here in Paris. ‘Along with Victor Morande?’
‘Perhaps. In any case, Lafont and Bonny both knew of Rejean’s association with me. Pierre will have been the one to leave the coin. He’ll have thought it funny.’
‘Actually, he got Nicole to do it for him.’
Louis clucked his tongue and downed his pastis neat. ‘Salut! my old one. Let’s go and have a little talk with them.’
To approach the table was not easy due to the crowd, but as they neared it, Hermann Kohler automatically went to the right and the one called Jean-Louis St-Cyr went to the left. There was no signal, no word or sign one to the other. They simply moved as extensions of one being.
Oona did her best to follow first Kohler, then St-Cyr, only to find they had left her to approach the table on her own.
They had their hands on their guns. Because they and she were standing, they blocked the view of some and there were objections. One soldier said, ‘Here, you can sit on my lap’; another pulled at the coat and she had to wrench it away from him.
The spotlight was concentrated on the stage. The chanteuse sang her heart out.
When Oona reached the table, Hermann Kohler was still some distance to the right; St-Cyr well off to the left.
‘You … you killed my husband,’ she said, but knew her words could not possibly have been heard. He was incredibly handsome, this man she’d spoken to. Tall, virile, clean-cut and well groomed. A film star, a banker … polished, so polished but with small, dark, round eyes that were hard and glistening with hatred.
‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating a chair that had been taken at another table but whose owner now stood giving applause.
She hesitated. The German owner of the chair would not know it had been taken … Lafont gave a high, falsetto laugh that startled her and made her skin crawl. ‘Take it!’ he hissed, and the girl in the canary-yellow dress who sat beside him, the girl with the shaggy mop of curls and the lovely eyes, watched with a tenseness that was both carnal and demented.
The pasty-faced older man, the one with the receding hair and the heavy cheeks, had no interest in this … this Madame Van der Lynn. To him, she was already dead.
The battered girl wept and cowered in her overly large fur coat. Kohler took a chair; St-Cyr, one also.
‘So, my friends,’ began the one called Henri Lafont, ‘a little progress report, eh, Louis? Then the latest ground rules.’
St-Cyr cocked his revolver and took aim at the banker. Kohler pressed his pistol into the fleshy stomach of the balding one.
‘No rules, no game,’ breathed the Surete’s detective. ‘Hands off, or you get nothing. I know where the gold is hidden.’
‘Louis …?’ began Hermann.
The falsetto laughter was harsh against the songbird’s voice. There were angry shouts – threats from the audience.
Lafont pushed St-Cyr’s revolver aside, leaning heavily over the table as he did so. ‘Listen, my fine, you hold no cards. That one’, he indicated the stage, ‘is mine. Cough up and we’ll see if we can find the right syrup for you.’
The one called St-Cyr could barely contain his rage. Hidden beneath the table, the battered girl’s hand reached out to hers and Oona took the trembling fingers into her own.
The guns were put away. The Corsican brothers fluttered closely. Two magnums of champagne had been brought. ‘They’re on the house, Monsieur Henri,’ said the one with the face of ground meat. ‘If anything else is required, just ask,’ said his brother.
Lafont smiled at the homage. ‘I hate all of you,’ he said of Corsicans, ‘but some I hate more than others.’
‘Then listen,’ hissed the Surete. ‘Paul Carbone is not involved.’
Rage leapt into those little eyes, a magnum swung and smashed on the floor!
Leaning over the detective, Lafont held a spine of glass at St-Cyr’s face. ‘THEN TALK, COW! TALK!’ he shrieked.
The song kept on. The song did not stop. It was about a man who had lost his wife and only child, a little boy, but had found quite by chance someone else who had lost a husband but had a son. They could not meet; they could not even be seen together.
The ring of angry servicemen who had gathered to silence their table cautiously withdrew as Henri Lafont put down the spine of glass and settled back into his chair. ‘So talk, then, talk,’ he said.