The small cafe was next to the bakery. From there he watched for Hermann and for the flics who would cart the girl’s body off to the morgue. The photographer had already left. The boys were just winding things up. The crudities would be over. She’d be covered by a piece of filthy canvas. They’d not be saying dirty things about her now.
He knew there’d be fingerprints in plenty, that the girl’s killer hadn’t cared a damn about those. That the man had considered himself above prosecution was only too evident, a bad sign these days. Ah yes.
The roasted-barley water was bitter. There was no sugar. One didn’t even ask.
Salt would not help.
When Kohler found him, Louis was sucking on his pipe and staring off into oblivion at pigeons huddled high above the rue Polonceau. An old man, a retainer of some sort, was sharing the last of his bread ration in contemplation of a winter’s funeral and a pauper’s grave.
Kohler indicated the man. ‘How the hell could he have climbed the stairs, Louis?’
Hermann didn’t care for stairs. Having been caught once between floors, hanging by a thread, the lifts of Paris were too untrustworthy for him, and in true Germanic style he considered everyone else must feel the same. Stairs had to be conquered.
‘The exercise will be good for him.’
The last few crumbs were thrown into the frigid air. The birds fluttered to the street below. There was no traffic apart from a few bicycles, two velo-taxis and an ancient gazogene.
Kohler filled him in, then said, ‘You’re hungry, Louis.’
‘A little, yes. Hermann, don’t! Please. Just this once. Be my guest and have a coffee, eh? We’ll eat later. Somewhere else.’
The Gestapo shield was reluctantly put away. Highly nervous, the proprietor spilled the coffee, but took the trouble to wipe the table with a fistful of apron.
Kohler thanked him. No one had chosen to sit near them. The talk had all but ceased.
He lowered his voice. ‘So, Louis, what do you make of things?’
The traffic posed no danger whatsoever to the pigeons. ‘The Tuesday-afternoon rendezvous presents us with a problem. Quite obviously they had some means of communicating in emergencies. This Monsieur Antoine, whoever he is, said something that upset her.’
‘He didn’t stay long.’
‘But did the girl?’
‘Madame Minou didn’t say.’
‘And you didn’t ask! Was it that you were preoccupied, Hermann, and thinking of using those “gold” coins for yourself?’
‘No one in their right mind would buy them.’
‘But obviously someone did.’
‘And sent the killer to pay her back.’
‘Precisely.’
Louis tapped out his pipe and debated whether to ration himself, deciding only with difficulty to tuck the furnace away.
Kohler asked, ‘Was the client the one who bought?’
‘Perhaps, but then why the quick visit of last Tuesday, Hermann? Why the distress, the agitation of our little angel? Was it that she knew this Monsieur Antoine could be hard with her if necessary and if so, where and how did she come by those coins?’
‘Perhaps she thought they were for real. An honest mistake?’
‘Perhaps, but then if she did, did she steal them from their rightful owner who, in turn, had considered that such a possibility might happen some day and had substituted the fakes?’
‘And didn’t think to warn her, eh?’
The urge to add ‘Perhaps but then,’ was all but overpowering. Instead, St-Cyr finished his coffee with a grimace. ‘That was positively awful, my friend.’
‘What? The coffee, or the suggestion that she wasn’t warned?’
‘Both, my old one. Both.’
Kohler knew he’d best tell him. ‘The fakes aren’t all that bad, Louis. The girl might not have known, and neither might their owner.’
‘Merde! Why must you torment me this way? At a time like this, Hermann? Come, come, give, you Bavarian son of a bitch! Don’t keep an honest French detective waiting.’
‘You’re scared.’
‘Damn right!’
Kohler found three of the coins and thumbed them out into the middle of the table. ‘So, okay, the dies were good and probably made by casting them from the real thing.’
‘The letters?’
‘All okay. C(aius) CAESAR CO(n)S(ul) PONT(ifex) AVG(ur), et cetera.’
There were traces of brownish discolouration that both disappointed and disheartened. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked. ‘We’re in this together, Hermann. If I fall, so too do you. Isn’t that right?’
It was – a sheepish grin said so. ‘Sorry, Louis. All right, there was some brown, some gold present. It … it just came over me.’
To lie about it! ‘How many were there?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘Is that what you confided to Madame Minou?’
‘I didn’t tell her about them. I just hinted at it.’
St-Cyr knew there could well be thirty of the coins, or even forty. Madame Minou might even have heard them being flung at the girl’s body.
Thirty aurei and sestertii. Damn Hermann for holding out on him. ‘I would have thought you’d have learned your lesson by now.’
The coins were good and of billon, a mixture of gold and silver with lots of copper, but gold in colour, every gram. A gold-buyer’s file had been used on each. The nitric acid had penetrated to the truth.
‘A few are scratched, but that’s in keeping with their supposed age.’
‘Touched up?’ demanded St-Cyr.
Kohler nodded. ‘The counterfeiter’s good, Louis.’
Given the inflation in such things and the fact that new francs were at the usurious exchange rate of twenty to the mark, they were still looking at a considerable sum. Perhaps 5,000 marks. One hundred thousand new francs.
For thirty of the coins. If there were only thirty. ‘Don’t try to sell them, Hermann. Not a one. For my sake and for your own.’
‘Don’t get in a huff. I would have told you anyway.’
The Sturmbannfuhrer Walter Boemelburg was waiting for them. Gestapo HQ Paris and the Surete’s offices were on the rue des Saussaies, just off the boulevard Malesherbes and the Place de la Madeleine.
‘A full report, Kohler. Leave nothing out. Some son of a bitch of a terrorist has shot and killed a Wehrmacht corporal.’
‘When?’
‘Late last night or early this morning. We don’t know yet. Louis, listen to his song and tell me if it’s off-key.’
Boemelburg’s fist hit the boards that enlarged the antique lime-wood desk Osias Pharand had once favoured. He threw the fairy nuisance of a Louis XIV inkstand into the plain galvanized milk pail he’d chosen as a waste-basket. ‘Commence!’ he bellowed. ‘Don’t piss in your trousers.’
Hermann started to take something out of a pocket but thought better of it. Boemelburg sat down heavily. A big, tall, heavy man, his bristled grey dome and broad forehead showed the creases of anger and worry. France’s top cop, the Head of SIPO-SD Section IV, the Gestapo, was not happy.
Boemelburg spoke perfect French, even to argot, the slang of the quartiers. He was a wizard of a cop when he wanted to be, which was usually always.
St-Cyr turned away to take shelter by one of the windows. The rue des Saussaies looked lonelier than ever. The merry-go-round that Paris had become had suddenly stopped. A dead corporal …
‘Listen, Louis.’
‘Of course, Walter. You have my ears.’
‘And your asses! Don’t either of you forget it!’
He was in rare form. Hermann began again, but Walter was hardly listening. The killing of the corporal was not good. Ah no. It meant trouble, always trouble for him. There’d not been many of these killings yet. Just a scratch or two.
Before the war Boemelburg had been a much respected policeman. They’d worked together on several occasions, notably the visit of King George VI to France in July of 1938, when the government had been worried about yet another assassination and the Vienna office of the International Organization of Police, the I.K.P.K., had been all aflutter.