Some leader. Very quickly Louis had lost whatever respect he’d had for the Marechal.
‘Come on,’ breathed Kohler. ‘I guess it’s this way.’
‘It is, and we walk as the curistes — those seeking the cure — walked beneath Emile Robert’s marvellous thistledown of wrought iron, which graced the Great Universal Exposition of 1890 in Paris and was moved here in 1900.’
‘I can’t see a hell of a lot of it. Too dark, I guess.’
‘Yes! But I’m trying to remember it as I first saw it when a boy of eleven going on twelve, Hermann. In the summer of 1902 Grand-mere thought she had a load of gravel in her guts and made me accompany her. My father urged me to do it, and I could not bear having him suffer her tongue any more. Of just such things are heroes made, but look at me now. Sacre! My left shoe has come apart again.’
‘I’ll reglue it for you later.’
‘That glue you bought on the marche noir won’t be worth the lies that budding horizontale told you. Just because she was young and pretty and headed for a life on the streets was no reason for you to have trusted her!’
And still bitchy about Bousquet! Glue was all but impossible to find these days; shoes only more so, unless one bought the hinged, wooden-soled ones with their cloth or ersatz leather uppers. Twenty-four million pairs of the things had been sold to date in a nation of forty million, which only showed how lousy they were!
‘Think of La Belle Epoque,’ muttered Louis, mollified somewhat by his own outbursts and wanting to be calm. ‘Think of high society from 1880 until we all bid adieu to such splendour in 1914. Think of the grand hotels that were built here with their covered terraces and art nouveau ironwork and interiors, their verandas, dining rooms and atriums delicately graced by Kentia palms and other exotics. Of silk or satin gowns, jewels and sensuous perfumes, of princes, duchesses, lords and ladies — marquises, courtesans and counts.
‘Then think of the hordes who followed them, especially in the twenties and thirties, Hermann. Old maids and war widows, shopkeepers, postal clerks and accountants, lawyers too, and judges and young girls of easy virtue. Gamblers also.’
‘Think of a swollen liver, an attack of gout, an enlarged prostate or constant dose of the clap. And then think of guzzling or gargling that Quatsch, that crap! An international spa, eh?’
‘But, Inspector, opera singers did it, actors and actresses too, and artists. All such believers came here for the cocktail therapeutique and the baths.’
‘And other things, so don’t get pious. Nom de Dieu, Louis, will you look at that!’
They had finally reached the Hall des Sources. Under torchlight, great daggers of discoloured ice hung from the rusting, green-painted frieze. Sheets of that same ice coated the tall, arched windows as a frozen signboard above the entrance spelled it out for them: FERME POUR LA SAISON.
It had been left here in July 1940, and no one in the Government had seen fit to have the sign removed!
‘None of our politicals have a sense of humour, Hermann. This, too, we’d best remember.’
In addition to the Government of France, thirty-two embassies and legations had moved to Vichy in those first few months of the Occupation. Now, of course, there would be far fewer of them — cold and empty villas as of last November, but still there would be the Italians and Japanese, the Hungarians and Rumanians, the Finns too, and neutrals like the Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, thought Kohler. Could Ausweise for Giselle and Oona be prised out of the Swiss?
‘Don’t even consider it,’ mused St-Cyr, having easily read his partner’s mind after the two and a half years they’d spent constantly in each other’s company. ‘It’s far too expensive a country for you. Concentrate on the murder. All things in their proper place and time. Besides, the Swiss are turning them back.’
Freeing the tall iron-and-glass doors brought only grunts and curses and then, at a sudden yank, the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphide and that of warm, wet mould.
Water dripped. Effervescing carbon dioxide hissed as it escaped, but from where? wondered Kohler. Pipes banged in protest as if throttled.
Through the pitch darkness of the hall, the beams of their torches began to pick things out. Pollarded lime trees that were dead — those palms Louis had mentioned were coated with so much ice their blade-like foliage had collapsed about the glazed jardinieres of another time.
The hall must be huge and would have held five hundred or a thousand at a time. Breath billowed, and as they looked at each other and then shone their torches around and upwards, they found that the beams of light would penetrate only so far. The air was filled with vapour, grey and layered, especially when not stirred by footsteps.
‘Four sources have their buvettes here, Hermann. Their pump kiosks. La Grande Grille, which issues at a temperature of 42.4 degrees Celsius (108.3 degrees Fahrenheit); Chomel, at 43 degrees Celsius; Lucas, at 28.1 degrees Celsius; and Parc, at 22.5 degrees Celsius (72.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Although Grand-mere should have warned me, she said, “Why not try them all, mon petit?” I foolishly did and spent the next twenty-four hours locating the toilets, something she probably had had in mind for me to do in any case.’
By just such little exchanges do we keep ourselves sane, thought Kohler, dreading what they’d find. The throat probably hacked open but not before the breasts had been slashed, the womb repeatedly stabbed, the buttocks and … Jesus, Jesus, how much more of this could he stand? ‘Chomel, Louis. There it is. Bousquet said we’d find her behind that counter.’
Though seen under the scanning beams of their torches, the Buvette du Chomel was much as St-Cyr first remembered it. A marvellously curved and ample art nouveau, glass-topped table, perhaps five metres by three, whose ringed ridges, atop the glass, had given the image of water flowing outwards from its source in a curved, eight-sided, glass-and-gilded, beehived dome with interlaced crown. Both the table and its source had been suffused with the soft glow of electric lights, as if shining upwards from deep underground.
Wicker-clad bottles, vacuum flasks, jugs and measured glass cups with handles were still much in evidence. Had those in their hundreds who had come to take the waters, and those who had served them from behind the enclosing counter, simply departed in haste?
‘Take a little stroll, Hermann. Look for things Bousquet and whoever first found her will not have seen.’
‘I’m okay. Really I am.’
‘You’re not and you know it!’ Hermann had seen too much of death — at Verdun on 21 February 1916 when 850 German artillery pieces had suddenly opened up at dawn in a sheet of flame, his battery among them, and the flash of thunder had been heard 150 kilometres away. Death then, and later. Death, too, as a detective in the back alleys and streets of Munich, then Berlin, then Paris. Ah yes, Paris.
Celine Dupuis was but a short distance from one of the gaps in the counter. She was lying on her back, but the hips and legs were turned towards her left and that arm was stretched well above her head, as though, in her final spasm, she had sought to pull herself away from her assailant.
The coat of the nightgown was unfastened, the bloodstained decolletage of antique lace clasped instinctively by a right hand that had then flattened itself and now hid the wound.
The blue eyes, their lashes long and false, were wide open and she was staring up into the light of the lantern Hermann now stubbornly held over her.
A black velvet choker encircled the slender neck; the face was not the classic oval but long and thin, the cheeks pinched even in repose, the painted lips parted, the blonde hair askew and of more than shoulder length.