Kohler shone the torch upwards. Four cherubs, two facing outwards, two inwards, held a flowering platform on which stood and stretched the statue of a naked girl of eighteen or so. Beautiful, graceful — athletic — the absolute picture of health, the left arm crooked above her head, the right arm bent at the waist, the thighs slender, the buttocks perfect.
Stone faces — two male, two female and mature — gazed benevolently out from around the base of this heap of pulchritude.
He shone the torch behind the bar and over the floor. Had Celine Dupuis been able to break free? he wondered. Had she tried to hide where he was now standing? Was that when she had removed the earring or simply lost it? Her left lobe hadn’t been torn, so robbery couldn’t have been the motive, could it? Her killer would have taken the remaining one unless interrupted.
Again he looked towards the Buvette de Chomel. Louis had put the lantern on the bar and had taken off his overcoat and scarf, but was nowhere in sight, was distant across a floor whose bluntly triangular pieces of dark grey stone, each of about five centimetres in length by half that in width, provided thousands of shallow hollows. Enough and more to hide an earring if thrown.
But why thrown? Fear of being discovered wearing them? Then why have them on if visiting the Marechal?
Round brilliants — Jagers, or had they been Top Cape or Cape? — but worth plenty in any case.
Two stones each, the one of about two and a half carats, the other much smaller — and linked to the larger diamond by a tiny loop of gold.
But why remove it? And where, exactly, had the Marechal’s bodyguards been when all of this was happening?
Finding each tap, he felt the subterranean warmth, saw one dripping here, too, and heard the escape of effervescing bicarbonate of soda and hydrogen sulphide: 42.4 degrees Celsius, Louis had said.
In a nation where warm water was rarely if ever seen, used or felt, Kohler longed for a good soak. It would ease that right shoulder he had failed to tell Louis about, it would ease the knee those ‘horse chestnuts’ had really been for.
‘I should have told him about the shoulder. He depends on me. He says I’m his “alter ego”, whatever that is.’
Ashes had fallen on the counter, grey and soft against the polished stone. When he touched them, they smeared and he knew the girl had hidden here and then had run.
To where? he asked. Her boots would have sounded harshly on a floor that was warm in places, due to the pipes that passed beneath it.
‘Louis, she got away from him,’ he called out, his voice muffled by the fog and the distance.
‘Track her, Hermann. The other earring has been loosened. Its disc has almost been unscrewed.’
The right earlobe was cold, the skin soft. Having gone behind her, and now kneeling near her head, St-Cyr gingerly turned the disc through the last of the threads.
Gently pulling on the larger diamond, he felt the post slip free of her ear. ‘There,’ he said and sighed, asking, as he held the earring to the light, ‘Were you greatly troubled by having worn them, madame?’
Cartier’s were at 23 place Vendome in Paris, Van Cleef and Arpels at number 22, Chaumet at number 12. ‘But Boucheron has been at number 20 since 1893 and is the favourite of the beau monde, and these, I am all but certain, came from their house. They would easily fetch 350,000 francs, or about?1,750 at the official rate, or 7,000 American dollars, but at least twice those amounts on the Black Bourse. Were you wearing someone’s freedom? I ask simply because I must. Several do try to buy their way to Switzerland and other such places.’
If she thought anything of it, she didn’t let on and this made him sigh more heavily and chide, ‘You must trust me, madame. My partner and I will see that your daughter receives them, have no fear.
‘A young man?’ he suddenly asked, gazing down at her, she staring up at him. ‘Not Honore de Fleury, madame, but someone in the Resistance. Were you thinking of making the Marechal a present of them in return for allowing that young man to escape and is this why you felt it best to remove them when threatened?’
Moisture seemed to well up in her eyes, brightening their blue under the lantern light. Her lips seemed to draw in a breath, her wounded chest to rise.
He would have to tell her what he knew of the diamonds. ‘Blancs exceptionnels, madame. Dancers don’t wear such things when on stage — they would only be lost, n’est-ce pas? — so you must have put them on before you left your dressing room and Monsieur de Fleury must have seen them.
‘Unless, of course, you put them on after he had let you out of his car.
‘After, I think, because that one, if he’d given them to you, would not have wanted us to find them on you. They’re from the Belle Epoque, aren’t they, and were doubtless someone’s mother’s or grandmother’s.’
She couldn’t smile but would have wanted to softly, he felt, and when he took her by the left wrist, he knew she wouldn’t have minded his running a thumb over its scars. So many young women had lost their men during the Defeat, either to the grave or to POW camps in the Reich where one and a half million of them still languished in spite of all promises to repatriate them.
The scars indicated the wounds had been deep and decisive. As with the other wrist, they’d been carefully stitched so as to lessen their visibility but still she’d camouflaged them with a thin smear of greasepaint and a dusting of powder. ‘You wanted to die in 1940, but now wanted very much to live. Had you found another lover, and I don’t mean de Fleury?’
Her hair had been deliberately stiffened so as to accentuate the scraggly look of a loose woman. Bending closely, St-Cyr smelled it. ‘Inconclusive,’ he said, leaning back but still fingering it. ‘Was it Dr Menetrel who set this whole thing up and excused the guards from their duty? Come, come, madame, Monsieur de Fleury was only the go-between, the procurer, the standby, the pimp.’
Would she really have gone to bed with the Marechal? Petain certainly did have a legendary reputation as a tombeur de femmes, a Casanova. While engaged to his present and only wife, that moralizing hypocrite had carried on a torrid affair with Germaine Lubin, aged twenty-nine and singer to the troops. Madame Lubin was to have been his ‘war godmother’ but, unlike so many of his lovers, had apparently been reluctant to leave her husband.
‘“What I love best is infantry and making love,”’ sighed St-Cyr, quoting him. ‘And you, I think, madame, went to him under duress but hoping perhaps to exact a promise. A little something over and above the “reward” Dr Menetrel had so generously promised you and Monsieur de Fleury? Or were you even aware of that little arrangement?’
Vichy was a nest of vipers — the whole nation knew of this, rumour building on rumour in an age rampant with them. Menetrel, along with Premier Laval, was known as an eminence grise, a grey eminence who was responsible for many of the Marechal’s mistakes and for a lot of other things.
‘But he would not have spoken to you directly about this liaison with Petain. Everything would have been done through Monsieur de Fleury and if asked, I’m sure the doctor would disclaim all knowledge of you. After all, he’s a family man with a wife and three children.’
There was perfume but far too much time had elapsed since it had been applied. ‘Expensive, though,’ he sighed, leaning back again to gaze at her, the cameras of the mind searching out each detail. The way the killer must have yanked her nightgown open — a broken tie-string — the way the black lace showed through the white but also revealed her skin. The grey smear of the cigar ashes, the left arm stretched out above her head.
It had to be asked. ‘Why, really, did you have to die? Why here of all places? And please, madame, though my partner wants to be convinced that your killer was a man, I still require further information.