“What we’re left with,” Custine concluded, “is an odd American woman who liked to mess around with wirelesses, assuming that she did that and not some previous tenant.”
“We’re left with a bit more than that,” Floyd said. “We know she had an odd interest in a manufacturing contract in Berlin. We know that when she died, her typewriter died with her. We know she had a habit of accumulating books and things.”
“Unusual observations collectively, but all perfectly explicable in and of themselves.”
“But taken together—”
“Not enough to make a convincing case that she was a spy.”
“What about the children?”
Custine gave Floyd a reproving look. “I was rather hoping you wouldn’t mention the children again.”
“I still never got to speak to the one tenant who had a really good look at the girl.”
“I’ll visit him again tomorrow, if it will make you happy. In the meantime, might I suggest that we restrict ourselves to firm leads?”
Floyd thought for a moment, his mind adrift on the rise and fall of Bechet’s saxophone. The disc was scratched and ancient, the music almost buried in a surf of hisses and clicks. He could have replaced it with a cheap bootleg tomorrow, and the sound would have been as clear and clean as a tin whistle. But it wouldn’t have been the right kind of clarity. The knockoff might have fooled ninety-nine people out of a hundred, but there was something raw and truthful engraved into this damaged old shellac, something that cut through the noise and thirty years like a clarion.
“The Berlin connection’s a dead end,” he said. “And we don’t know what she was doing with the books and magazines.”
“And records,” Custine reminded him. “Except, of course, that we have Monsieur Blanchard’s sighting of her entering Cardinal Lemoine Métro station with the loaded suitcase, and her subsequent reappearance with an empty one.”
“As if she’d exchanged the contents with another spy.”
“Precisely. But again, it’s circumstantial. She could just as easily have handed the contents to a shipping agent.”
“This is the bit that doesn’t make sense,” Floyd said. He anticipated the record sticking on a particular phrase, timing the stamp of his foot against the floorboards to coax the needle into the next groove. He did it so expertly that the jump was barely audible. “Whether or not it would ever stand up in court, we have more than enough evidence that she was engaged in some kind of espionage activity. But what was she doing with the books and things? Where did they fit in?”
“Part of her cover story as a tourist?”
“Perhaps. But in that case, why not behave like a respectable tourist instead of some cultural magpie, filling steamer trunk after steamer trunk with all that stuff?”
“Unless there was something vital buried in all that material,” Custine said. “It’s a pity we don’t know what was in the suitcase.”
“But we know what was left in her room, and there’s every reason to believe she would have continued shipping it out if she hadn’t been distracted.”
“And yet nothing we saw looked in any way to be worth the attention of a spy. Books, magazines, newspapers, records… all of which could have been obtained in the United States, with varying degrees of difficulty.”
“There was something about them that mattered to her,” Floyd said. “Here’s another thing: ‘silver rain.’ ”
“Silver rain?”
“Mean anything to you?”
“I can’t say it does.”
“Susan White made a point of underlining just those words on a postcard she never got round to sending.”
“Could mean anything. Could mean nothing at all,” Custine said, shrugging.
“Sounds like a codeword to me—a codeword for something unpleasant.”
“It would,” Custine said, smiling at Floyd. “But that’s because you’ve got spies on the brain.”
“There’s still the matter of the typewriter.”
“Well, that’s a funny thing. I’ve been thinking about the typewriter, and there may be more to it than meets the eye. Do you remember Blanchard showing us the box it came in?”
“He said it was a German model,” Floyd said.
“Yes. And when he showed us the box—and mentioned the name—it made me think of something. The trouble is, I can’t quite work out how the two are related.”
“What did it make you think of?”
“A room in the Quai: a windowless cell in the section where the interrogations used to take place, lit by a single electric light. A cell with ceramic tiles on the walls—the kind you can clean easily. The problem is that I can’t quite see why there’d be a typewriter in that sort of room.”
“To take down minutes?”
“What went on in those rooms, Floyd, was very much not the kind of thing that made it into minutes.”
“Then why the typewriter?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll remember later, when my mind’s on something else.”
They said no more as the Bechet record played out, and then for a long while they sat listening to the hiss and scratch of the needle in the run-out groove, as if hoping for a message in the scuffing noise, some whisper of a clue that would crack open the case. Nothing came.
Floyd stood up and pulled the needle from the record. They left the office and walked down the stairs, stepping around the telephone engineer who was still sitting there with the racing pages, waiting for his replacement part to crawl across Paris. They drove to Montparnasse, Custine waiting in the Mathis while Floyd fetched Greta.
She stepped out into the twilight air, thin and angular in black, like a sketch in Vogue. She wore a black fur stole and a black pillbox hat with a spotted veil, and when she stood under the lamplight she looked like a million dollars, until she was near him, and then she looked tired and sad and on the edge of something she couldn’t face.
“Let’s go eat,” Floyd said gently. “And then let’s go hear some real music.”
They drove to a little Spanish restaurant Floyd knew on the quai Saint-Michel. He ordered a good bottle of champagne, a 1926 Veuve Clicquot, waving aside the others’ objections that he couldn’t possibly afford it. It was true, technically, but Custine had worked hard and Greta deserved a good night out, a chance to forget about Marguerite for a few hours. The food was as good as Floyd remembered, and even the roving guitarist, Greta had to admit, was not as atrocious as some she’d heard. While Floyd settled the bill, Greta and the guitarist talked about tunings and fingerings. The handsome young man in a black shirt offered Greta his guitar and she played a few tentative notes before shaking her head with an embarrassed smile. The guitarist said something kind in return as he shrugged the guitar strap back over his shoulder. Floyd smiled, too: Greta had been holding back, not wanting to blow the kid away. He must have been new in town.
After the meal they drove to Le Perroquet Pourpre, a club on rue Dauphine. Only a few years ago there had been six or seven like it a row, but most of its neighbours were gone now, boarded up or turned into cheap bars with jukeboxes and flickering altarlike television sets in the corner. Le Perroquet was still clinging to business, and was one of the few places still willing to let Floyd and Custine on to the bill without Greta. The walls were covered with photographs of jazz men, from Jelly Roll and Satchmo, through Duke and Beiderbecke, Coleman Hawkins and Django. Some of them had even played on rue Dauphine. The owner, an amiable, bearded Breton called Michel, spotted the three of them entering and waved them over to the bar. He asked Greta how her tour was going and listened as she told a white lie about leaving the band for a few days while her aunt was unwell. Floyd asked Michel if business was satisfactory, and Michel offered his usual pessimistic shrug, which hadn’t changed much in nineteen years.