Must the police always be so stubborn? wondered Madame Ribot. ‘As I have told Monsieur le Premier many times, Inspector, both here and over the telephone, each of those girls came to me. After their little moments in Room 3-17, they would often feel the need, the one believing herself deliciously wicked and triumphantly so, another guilty for having betrayed her husband and wanting to know if he would discover what she’d been up to, the third simply naive enough to have hoped marriage possible. And the fourth, you ask?’ She would pause now, she told herself. ‘A realiste who came to believe her life and that of Lucie Trudel were in grave danger.’
‘You saw her on Tuesday, between five and seven in the afternoon,’ said Ines, finding the words hard. ‘You warned her to be careful.’
‘My dear, I told her death was imminent. Here … There it is. Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, see for yourself. Your hand, a forefinger, s’il vous plait! Press it to the glass, to this area, to just beyond the Mount of the Moon and nearest the break in the Line of Fate. Death by one’s enemies!’
Celine would have had to have bared the scars of her attempted suicide in order for Madame Ribot to have made the prints …
The Inspector was going through those prints that had been set aside. ‘No names,’ he grumbled. ‘How, please, do you identify them’
‘By memory,’ breathed the woman, watching him closely. There must have been thousands and thousands of such prints, thought Ines, and surely no human being could ever have remembered them all?
‘Come, come, Madame, you always make two sets,’ he said. ‘The one, when dry, goes into the file with the name written below each hand; the other you use when writing up or giving your analysis. Then those, too, are kept. A truly professional clairvoyant such as yourself would not do otherwise.’
This was no ordinary Surete. ‘That is correct. An attic room holds the legacy of the years, this office the most recent, but it is not from among any of those cabinets that you will find the ones you seek.’
‘Monsieur Laval wouldn’t have telephoned you so many times today, Madame, unless he was worried, and not simply about himself and his Government. The iron man’s fingerprint sweeps haven’t yielded anything useful because the commissariat de police hasn’t anything on file with which to compare them!’
‘Only the thumbprints each of us must leave in order to obtain our cartes d’identite, and those prints were, alas, not clear.’
‘When did he last telephone?’
‘Not two hours ago.’
‘While we were at the clinic …’ managed Ines.
‘Four murders, Inspector, and in the autumn of 1925, one woman and three of her lovers juxtaposed here on this glass. Noelle Olivier was a Gemini and possessed of an Air Hand, which is usual for such a one; August-Alphonse a Capricorn and …’
‘And Charles-Frederic Hebert?’ he demanded.
‘Noelle brought each of them to me for a reading, yes.’
‘What about Edith Pascal and Albert Grenier?’ bleated Ines, sickened by what was happening and wondering why Herr Kohler hadn’t rejoined them.
It was St-Cyr who snapped, ‘The files on Olivier and Hebert, Madame. All prints. You have no choice and must shout it out to anyone who comes for them that I have taken them.’ Hermann … Where the hell was Hermann?
Madame Ribot did as asked. Two files … only two, Ines told herself, giving a last glance at the light-table, at Celine’s prints and those of Lucie.
Olivier, she said silently. It was Olivier and he’ll have Edith Pascal with him and she’ll have Albert, who has already tried to kill me, not because I’m a threat to the Marechal or ever was, though Mademoiselle Pascal must have convinced him of this, but because I know too much.
The letter boxes of the FTP in Paris … the messages I had to deliver for him but worst of all, who he, himself, is, their Vichy leader.
Auguste-Alphonse Olivier.
This is the title of the French version; the one translated into English for the British troops is ‘Lilli Marlene’; the German, the original, ‘Lili Marleen’.
11
Louis wasn’t in Room 3-17 and neither was the sculptress. Frantic now, Kohler rang downstairs to the front desk to beg that son of a bitch of a receptionniste to ignore the Gestapo rough stuff and stop the two from leaving the hotel.
There was no answer. None at all. The unmade bed looked lonely; the bevelled mirror threw back his reflection and he saw himself grey and dissipated, the shabby greatcoat undone, his scarf dangling as if to slip away, fedora pulled down hard and gun in hand.
‘Louis …’ he said, feeling caught, trapped, the moments ticking by too fast.
‘The fire alarm,’ he told himself and, rushing out on to the gallery, threw a look along it both ways beneath gilded plaster grapes, seashells and putti blowing horns before shattering the glass with his pistol butt and yanking on the little bronze lever.
‘Nothing …? Scheisse! No fire inspectors?’
Again he yanked on the wretched thing and again, cutting himself, the blood pouring from a forefinger to race down his hand. ‘Verdammt!’
Back in Room 3-17, he ripped a pillowcase apart, wound and tied the bandage tightly; saw a clutch of hairpins; remembered Celine Dupuis’s bed, that other room and the depression she’d left there in her mattress at the Hotel d’Allier on waking; knew that here, too, on that last day of her life she’d had to hurry, that she must have fallen asleep after the lovemaking.
Picking up the Walther P38, he headed for the door again, the mirror throwing back a glimpse of him that popped, blinded — seared its image on memory as the lights went out and the sound of the lift … the Christly lift … ground to a mid-floor halt!
‘Merde,’ came Louis’s muffled curse from out of the pitch darkness of the shaft. How many times had he been warned by his partner never to trust the lifts of France?
Other voices were heard both from above and below, some old, some middle-aged, some male, some female; complaints were muttered. The door to one of the rooms opened. A head and shoulders were stuck out. Neighbour began to question neighbour even from gallery to gallery. ‘An air raid?’ ‘I heard no siren.’ ‘Les Allemands?’ ‘As a punishment for what, please?’ ‘They often do this in Paris. Arrondissement by arrondissement if necessary, quartier by quartier if during a rafle.’
A house-to-house round-up with searchlights ready on the streets below to nail those on the roofs above.
Steps sounded — boot cleats on the marble floor of the foyer, rushing cleats …
The voices ceased, the doors were silently closed. Like hotels the world over, news of trouble travelled quickly and silence was often the best and only defence. Lock bolts were gently eased in place.
The bars of the lift-well were criss-crossed, their bronze cold. ‘Louis … Louis, it’s me. Stay where you are,’ he whispered. ‘Ferbrave and the Garde Mobile are here. I’ll find the hand crank in the cellars and try to ease you down.’
‘Madame Ribot, Hermann. The clairvoyant may be their first target, though I’ve already taken what they want. Her suite is to your left.’
‘Three doors and then the one just after you get to a life-sized terracotta wood nymph with garland, by Fremin,’ said Ines faintly. ‘I know because I … I have always now to memorize such things. Both breasts are exposed; the left arm is missing at the shoulder, and she is stepping forward with that foot.’
The furniture was old, the suite musty, but what Kohler couldn’t understand was why the door had been left off the latch and ajar because Louis wouldn’t have done that. Had the clairvoyant managed to slip away in the short time he’d been at the lift, or had it been left that way for a cat who liked to stray?