The careful shopper, thought Kohler, raking the sous-directeur with the look he reserved for duplicity. ‘Anything else, eh? Just what the hell did he really get from that “private” safe of yours?’
‘Nothing else. Apart from those items, that safe was empty.’
Kohler took out the cigarette case to run a thumb over its amber in doubt. ‘He’s lying, Louis. They’d have kept the accounts ledgers in that safe, in case of fire.’
St-Cyr took the cigarette case from him, nodding at Laviolette to indicate that he should accompany them to the office at the back of the shop.
‘Inspectors … a little oversight, yes? These days one has to watch what one says.’
‘Of course. Now the truth about that safe of yours,’ said the Surete, stopping him in the corridor to tap him on the chest with the cigarette case the Gypsy had ordered.
His back to the wall, Laviolette frantically threw a glance into the shop to where anxious clerks were trying to pick up the pieces of their little lives but had stopped to gape at the front entrance.
‘Herr Max, Louis.’
The crowd on the street had not diminished but now a gatecrasher was forcing his way through.
‘The truth, monsieur, and quickly before that one sinks his teeth into you,’ hissed St-Cyr.
‘The blanket laissez-passer I have which allows me to travel anywhere outside of Paris except for the zone interdite.’
The Forbidden Zone next to coastal areas and along the Swiss and Italian frontiers.
‘My first-class railway pass. My spare pocket-watch and …’ He licked his upper lip and tried to hastily tidy his moustache. ‘And four packets of capotes anglaises, two bottles of Ricard pastis, one of vermouth and … and the keys and deeds to a little house I have in … in the fifth.’ Ah maudit! would God help him in this moment of crisis?
‘Booze and a woman, and wouldn’t you know it, eh?’ snorted Kohler, blocking the way, thus hiding them from Herr Max who was making noises about the crowd. ‘Is that all?’ asked the Kripo.
‘Oui. Positive.’
‘No it isn’t,’ said the Surete. ‘We want the name of the woman and the address of that little nest for which he has taken the keys.’
‘My wife … My daughters …’
Laviolette was sweating.
‘Hey, they won’t even hear of it if you behave and keep all this between the three of us. Silence, eh?’ said Kohler.
‘Numero trente-cinq, rue Poliveau.’
‘The quartier Saint-Marcel,’ said Louis.
‘Suzanne-Cecilia Lemaire, veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper – zebras, hyenas, jackals, wolves, wild boar and foxes at … at the Jardin des Plantes.’
How the hell had they met? wondered Kohler, pulling down a lower left eyelid in disbelief. ‘Age?’ he demanded. It took all types, and when Laviolette said, ‘Thirty-two’, patted him on the shoulder, all sixty-two years of it, and said, ‘Don’t get bitten. Women in their thirties are even more dangerous than those in their early twenties.’
‘Now go and entertain our visitor from Berlin while we lock ourselves in your private office to have a look for ourselves,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Let this be a warning to you.’ The Jardin des Plantes … ah merde.
They were moving swiftly. ‘The back door, Louis. The cellars.’
‘Get the car. Meet me in the rue Volney! Fire some shots in the air if you have to, but get it, Hermann, and hurry!’
There was just a chance the Gypsy might have holed up in that house. If so, he was a gambler and was prepared to take risks but had thought the sous-directeur would not have said a thing.
The safe was open, and from the door to the private dressing-room, there was more than a clear enough view of the dial but not of the numbers. Gabrielle could easily have stood here, waiting for Laviolette to bring her the pieces but …
Pulling open the dressing-table drawers, St-Cyr soon had what he wanted, and closing the door to the wall safe, set the vanity mirror with its little stand on top of one of the filing cabinets. Tilting it until he had the dial in view, he retreated to the dressing-room. It was no good. She would have had to stand much nearer the desk but from there, with the use of the mirror, she could have watched the dial and, after several visits, have had the combination or close to it, but had she done so?
They might never know.
And why, please, he asked, would Laviolette not have noticed the subterfuge and put a stop to it?
No, then. She must have done it some other way or not at all. But if she had, then that, too, implied she had known of the Gypsy and had made a thorough survey of the target for him.
The quartier Saint-Marcel had been going downhill for years. Built mainly in the first half of the 1800s, its houses of two and three storeys still held that sense of a small provincial town or village. The slanting roofs were often cut off and at odd angles with the sky but also with a towering wall of dirty yellow brick which represented ‘redevelopment’ into a monotony of identical flats.
‘It’s unprotected,’ said Louis of the district. ‘Ripe, sadly, for tearing down. That thing’, he indicated the apartment building, ‘was built in the 1920s.’
Still a stronghold of le petit commerce and of retired shopkeepers, sales clerks and maids of all work, its shops were small, its ateliers struggling, the narrow courtyards far too long and far too handy.
Neither of them liked the look of the place. The doorway to number 35 hadn’t been used in years. The black paint was peeling, the monogrammed ironwork over the curved bottle green light above was First Empire but badly rusted.
They had left the car around the corner but even so, two plain-clothed detectives, no matter how casually they kept their hands in the pockets of their overcoats, could not fail to attract attention.
A lace curtain fell in a first-storey window across the street. Stares were given from behind the window of the cafe-bar below.
‘Louis, you watch the street, I’ll take the courtyard.’
‘That door has been sealed with iron spikes as long as my hand. He’s not Hercules is he, our Gypsy?’
The courtyard was close, the stucco walls mildewed, the house separated from others by yet another courtyard behind it.
Lines of grey washing were frozen stiff. There were clouds of breath not just from the neighbours but from the ateliers of a mender of cooking pots and a scavenger of roofing slates and floor tiles.
Steps pitted by frost and worn into hollows by long use led up to a side entrance. Unattractively the number 35B in cardboard was pinned to a door that had been left off the latch.
Cautiously, St-Cyr took the Lebel from his overcoat pocket and, pulling back the hammer, gave the door a quiet nudge. Hermann was right behind him and had drawn his Walther P38. ‘Louis …?’ he softly said and in that one word there was consternation and terror – ah! so many things.
They had both smelled it. They hesitated when they ought really to have run. The shutters were all closed, the cast-iron stove was cold, the air ripe with the stench of bitter almonds. ‘The kitchen!’ managed Hermann, removing his hand from the stove; they were moving quickly now, delicately.
The aluminium stew-pot on the hotplate was still boiling, the fumes were thick and white and acrid … ‘Ah nom de Jesus-Christ, be careful!’ hissed St-Cyr.
Both of them looked questioningly at the ceiling above. Both looked to the pot where the remains of several broken-up sticks of dynamite in water bubbled thickly beneath an oily, pale yellow scum, the nitro.
Two eye-dropper bottles had already been skimmed. A small glass funnel lay on its side. There was a ladle, a long-handled wooden spoon. Absolutely no friction could be tolerated, no sudden shocks, no sparks, no matches or cigarettes. Both bottle and funnel would have been tilted during the filling so that the nitroglycerine would trickle smoothly down the inside of the glass. A master of self-control, a fearless idiot but desperate.