Four more shots were fired with uncanny ability. ‘He’d been following her for months, eh? He knew where she went and what she was up to. One night he even followed her into the villa at Number twenty-three and stole a few things for himself. Now leave me alone. Alone, I say, or I’ll do something crazy. CRAZY! A virgin … she was a virgin, you idiots!’
The bastard was completely mad. ‘Louis … Louis, where the hell are you?’
‘Nowhere,’ came a timid voice, quite near now. ‘He’s got two guns, Hermann. Remember?’
‘In the Name of Jesus, messieurs, your company is a great trouble to me!’
‘Be quiet, madame. Don’t interfere with police officers engaged in their duties. Keep your head down and your heart beating.’
Five minutes passed and then another five, but by then Kohler had finally found them.
‘He … he has gone out by the other way, messieurs. Through the tunnels. He will not come back, not that one.’
‘Where … where do the tunnels end?’ asked Kohler.
The woman gasped as she struggled to sit up. ‘Beneath the church. That one will go there, to Father Eugene. He will seek sanctuary.’
‘With two guns and on crutches?’ scoffed Kohler, finding his matches at last.
‘Yes … yes. With two revolvers or pistols. I … I never can remember which are which.’
But she’d known he’d had them in his room!
Kohler struck a match. ‘One has a cylinder like that, madame, the other hasn’t.’
She licked her lips in doubt. ‘Then he has one of each, monsieur. The pistol and the revolver.’
‘A nine-millimetre, Louis?’
‘Probably, Hermann, but then … Ah, my new suit, my new coat! Son of a bitch!’
Another match was called for and then a bundle of them. Madame Minou was still wallowing at their feet. ‘He has the wire, messieurs. A coil of it to … to tie up the bedsprings. Me, I … I have forgotten about this until now.’
The deceitful old sow.
St-Cyr leaned down to help her up. ‘Your memory amazes me, madame. We’ll be lucky to keep one jump ahead of it. The church, Hermann. We must go there now.’
‘I’ll get Oona and Audit. They’ll have heard the shots, Louis, and thought the worst.’
A gun battle. ‘Dupuis must have seen you taking them past his room, Hermann. He panicked and thought we’d come for him. Madame and I saw him hurrying down the stairs, but he was nimble, so nimble. He shot past me and made for the cellars.’
‘Wait for me. Let me find out what’s happened upstairs.’
The room was empty. The iron bedstead had been removed and now that end of the mattress and springs rested on the floor.
‘Oona?’ he cried out. ‘Louis … Louis …’ Gott im Himmel!
Kohler began to run. There was a Turkish at the far end of the corridor, the handle a piece of porcelain slime. He put a foot up and yanked. Major Corbet, that shit Dupuis had been roundly castigating in the cellars, was squatting. ‘Where … where the hell did they go?’ shouted Kohler.
‘Both to the street. The woman first and then, at least some ten minutes later, the giver of unwanted pates and liqueurs.’ Was nothing private in this place? ‘Please do me the honour of closing the door.’
Kohler left him to it. Oona … Oona … Bastard … Bastard. The door slammed shut only to bounce back but by then he was going down the stairs two at a time.
‘Louis … Louis, they’re gone! I can’t believe it.’
St-Cyr squeezed the last of the water from a trouser leg and went calmly up the stairs.
Yes … yes, it was quite true. Audit had escaped custody. There was a small notebook in the hall. As he thumbed through it, the telephone number of the Bureau Otto came up and he, too, started to run.
The bedstead was jammed into a crack in the courtyard’s outer wall. One loop of iron had been snapped off.
Audit was now a free agent. There was no sign of Oona Van der Lynn.
‘The Villa Audit, the Church of Saint Bernard, the bal musette on the corner?’ offered Hermann.
Since there were no lights, St-Cyr said, ‘You to the bal and the villa. Me to the church.’
‘Take care.’
‘You too my old one.’
‘That God of yours won’t care, Louis. He’ll simply laugh at us.’
Which was true. God mocked. God was the High Court Jester on the carousel.
From the zinc to the cluttered tables, the sea of faces measured zero, and in the bal musette behind the cafe, the crowded couples clung to each other as much for warmth as love.
Kohler hunted the dance floor beneath the ball of slivered mirrors. The lights were low, the tobacco smoke thick and reeking of cheap perfume. Older men with young girls; middle-aged wives with husbands or lovers they could no longer trust. Couples turning, turning, going round and round. Where … where the hell was Oona?
The accordian wept, a disinterested drummer made eyes at the ceiling while the piano player forgot one hand to lift a glass to his lips. There wasn’t a German uniform anywhere, not one Nazi or one of their sympathizers. Only himself.
People were beginning to take notice of him. The music was braying Resistance … Resistance … The place began to smell of it, to cry out Hostages … You bastards took thirty of them!
He headed for the toilets at a run. Couples were shoved aside, the gaps closing behind him, now opening in front … Oona … Oona …
The corridor was narrow, lit dimly and layered with smoke. Laughing, ox-eyed girls stopped laughing; one old tart in a tight turquoise suit gave up trying to fix a face that could never make it.
‘A girl … a tall woman … a blonde, for Christ’s sake? About forty, with blue eyes -’
‘Gestapo?’ she asked, giving him an uncertain quiver of wide, painted lips, eye shadow and plucked eyebrows beneath bleached curls that were fast going limp.
Kohler grabbed the woman by the arms and slammed her up against the wall. The compact’s mirror shattered, the lipstick tumbled from that fleshy hand. ‘GESTAPO!’ he roared. ‘Now out with it! A Dutch woman in a light-brown overcoat and scarf.’
‘With blue eyes?’ managed the woman, feeling the urine run freely down her legs. Ah, merde! her bladder. The evening was ruined. Ruined! Lie then. Say anything. Say what he wants. ‘In the toilets,’ she gasped.
He flung her aside and went through the chipped door into the stench. ‘Ah Jesus … Jesus.’ Some shrieked, some stood as if struck dumb and unable to move. There were holes in the floor. Turkish again … girls squatting, girls fixing their garter belts, one caught rinsing rags and glad of it, only to lose all colour at the sight of him. ‘A blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman of forty wearing a light-brown overcoat and scarf,’ he said.
It was all for nothing – hopeless. Now none of them moved. The girl with the rags discreetly let them fall as the colour flamed back into her cheeks.
‘Look, the woman’s life is in danger. I … I only want to help her,’ he said.
‘Then try the door to the courtyard. Perhaps she went through that one!’ said someone acidly.
‘Yes … yes, she did. Me, I have seen such a one, but that was some time ago, monsieur.’
‘Was anyone following her? A man, for Christ’s sake! Sixty years of age and French.’
The girl with the rags didn’t know. The shrug was genuine. ‘About half an hour ago?’ he asked and heard her say, ‘Three-quarters of an hour, I think.’
The courtyard was dark and he didn’t like it. The city was too quiet. Louis … why the hell hadn’t they stuck together?
He began to move silently along the narrow pavement. Oona had a little less than an hour before curfew. Would she try for the house overlooking the quai Jemmapes? Would she simply keep walking?
The courtyard door to the villa at Number 23 was off the latch. The street was dark. The shop awnings were folded in and there was nothing … nothing. Were they saving kerosene tonight? None of the blue pot-lights were in sight.