A treasure, Madame Ribot had said. A treasure.
‘The baths,’ he muttered, coming upon an arched, oaken door with mounted placard, as yet another light switch was found and thrown on well behind him.
The door’s lock was flimsy. Jesus, merde alors, would it hold long enough for him to hide the files?
There was a notice on its back: Etablissement Thermal — Service Medical … The names of Vichy’s ‘medical’ consultants, Raoul Normand among them …
The towel room? he wondered.
TARIFS DES BAINS, DOUCHES ET AUTRES SERVICES … BAIN DE CESAR … Caesar’s bath, 2 francs … GRANDE DOUCHE CHAUDE … the hot shower, 1 franc 50, PETITE DOUCHE LOCALE, 1 franc 25…. BUVETTES … a season’s pass to all of them, the Hall des Sources, the Chomel, the Parc and Celestins, et cetera. Ten francs.
Where … where the hell could he hide the files and not be caught with them?
Gossamer-clad maidens combed their hair or bathed in the buff as coy little half-submerged virgins beckoned to a young lad from among a mural of dark green lily pads. Blue and gold tilework paved the floor. Mustn’t slip, he warned himself. Must keep going in spite of that knee of mine.
From the half-shell of a giant scallop, a life-sized marble statue of a naked girl stood on tiptoes with slender arms upraised and entwined as a bearded, ancient Neptune summoned her by blowing on a conch.
Water fell over marble bas-reliefs of romping, life-sized nymphs. Sumptuous things, gorgeous things, pure and innocent in their nakedness and completely at ease with one another among tall reeds at the bank of a river, the Nile … Was it the Nile?
The sculptor Girardon, Louis would have said, as he had when they’d visited Versailles in the autumn of 1940, Occupier and Occupied getting to know one another. The original had been cast in lead, in 1670 or thereabouts.
‘Kohler, that’s enough!’ cried Henri-Claude Ferbrave. ‘Be reasonable. All we want are the files. We’ve burned the rest.’
The rest … The rest, came the echoes. What rest? he wondered, frantically tossing his head as he looked for a way out and muttered, ‘The handprints they took from Madame Ribot.’ Four, five … no, seven of the bastards were heading for him. Hard, no-nonsense sons of bitches, tough … mein Gott they were tough. Charles-Frederic Hebert was the last of them and the only one without a weapon.
The baths, separated by reclining mermaids, were surrounded on three sides by the bas-reliefs, and it was among these that the mildly effervescent water fell over pleasing thighs and breasts and gorgeous backsides to stream on to the head of a laughing nymph who playfully splashed another but seemed to mock this Kripo.
His Gestapo shoes, broken at the seams, were soaked through, his feet warm. His left sock protruded. There was a hole in its toe.
Verdammt! He was standing on the walkway between the bas-reliefs and the baths. Coursing around and over his shoes, the water gave up the smell of its sulphur, and he heard, as if in the distance, the trickling music of it and finally the gentleness of its fizzing.
Vapour rose up from the baths and for an instant he thought, Please just let me lie in one of the them, but …
Louis … he said silently. Louis, I tried.
The lift had descended to the cellars, its gate opening and closing, but no words had been spoken, or not that he had heard, thought St-Cyr. And as for Hermann, the Garde seemed to have vanished with him.
There were none of them in the foyer when he chanced a look over the third-floor gallery railing; none, apparently, on the staircases, rushing to overtake him; yet surely by now they must know he was no longer in the lift with the sculptress? Surely they’d want her out of the hotel and safely tucked away in her boarding house, if for no other reason than to finish things here in private? Surely Menetrel would have insisted on that?
A cover-up, a frame-up, too, and if not the wives, as Dr Normand’s file on Julienne Deschambeault had indicated and Charles-Frederic Hebert had stated, then Blanche and Paul Varollier or Albert. And if not Albert, then Edith Pascal, and if not Edith, then Auguste-Alphonse Olivier, recluse, ex-banker, old. enemy and cuckold. But had Olivier really tried to stop the murder of Celine Dupuis? Had he been right in this? She would have constituted a distinct threat to the FTP had she been taken and questioned by the Gestapo.
Hermann had found no evidence of anyone having tried to intervene. There had been no signs of Celine’s having tried to get away until she had reached the Hall des Sources. Why hadn’t she tried to escape beforehand, why hadn’t she run?
Merde, this investigation, he swore. No time to think things through; Hermann needing him now. Hermann …
Albert was to have delivered a hamper to Chez Crusoe early on Tuesday evening. Some caviar, a little pate … a bottle of the Bollinger Cuvee Speciale, one also of the Remy-Martin Louis XIII, but that hamper hadn’t turned up and neither had Celine Dupuis’s rucksack and handbag, only her ID, which had been left in her room for Bousquet to find.
Hebert’s pocket knife — the Laguiole he had had since a boy — had been in that hamper, or so he’d stated, a reminder to the Marechal of better days and other conquests: that of Noelle Olivier.
Albert had left that knife in the sacristy of the chateau’s chapel, thinking Hermann wouldn’t notice the difference. He had then tried to kill the sculptress with Madame Olivier’s knife, having perceived her a threat to his hero, but what threat, please? he asked himself. Herr Gessler and Herr Jannicke had vetted the girl’s valise and, having satisfied themselves, had then asked her to make certain nothing had been taken.
Albert had emptied a phial, causing the case to reek of bitter almonds. The girl had been certain he had known who had killed her friend, but she couldn’t be a threat to Petain, could she? Certainly she’d been a courier, had received and delivered messages for Olivier and was, yes, like Celine had been, a distinct threat to the FTP should the Gestapo get their hands on her. A threat Olivier had naturally made no mention of, even though Edith Pascal had called him a fool for having divulged he was their leader, a man who had known beforehand everything that would happen.
Had that hamper and Albert been intercepted en route to Chez Crusoe? Had Lucie Trudel been stopped on her way back to the Hotel d’Allier after Albert had helped her to get a bottle of the Chomel for her father?
Had Olivier, knowing full well what must happen to those girls, not intervened but waited instead, and then used the killings, particularly the two most recent, to let Bousquet and the others know their every action was being watched and that they would be called to account?
If so, then the civil war they feared had, as the sculptress had said, already begun. Cruelty would be matched by cruelty, the innocent caught between the two sides. Henri-Claude Ferbrave and the Garde, the Milice and all the others on the one hand; the Resistance on the other.
Still St-Cyr heard nothing. Timidly a door opened and a head darted out only to be withdrawn at the sight of him. Again he looked over the railing, this time letting his gaze sweep round the galleries until it came to rest on the fountain below. If the water were turned on, the dust blown away, the chandeliers lit and there were couples about, arm in arm to laughter, music and whispered tete-a-tetes, it would be so like the Vichy he had experienced as a boy. Grand-mere and he hadn’t stayed in anything so opulent. ‘A pension will serve us just as well, Jean-Louis,’ she had said, ‘but we will take our meals in nothing but the finest restaurants, if they have such establishments in this place.’
This Vichy. This tourist trap, she had finally come to call it. Aurore Irene Molinet, he reminded himself. She’d favoured Balzac, Victor Hugo and Dumas for the sheer pleasure they had brought her as a girl who’d been forbidden to read them.