They left the kitchen and took the steep, narrow staircase on and up – they didn’t want to. He’s armed and dangerous, they would have said if they could have found the words. Their heads were buzzing so hard from the fumes and the dizziness, it was all they could do not to bolt and run, to gag and clear the street.
The Empire bed was huge and sturdy and heaped with rumpled covers. No one hid in the massive Breton armoire that held the woman’s clothing. No one was in the spare room, a nursery perhaps in bygone days or a tiny sitting-room, but now jammed with suitcases and the bits and pieces from the mistress’s former flat.
The bathtub on its four cast-iron legs had been painted green too many years ago. The geraniums were wilted, the towels cold.
Kohler nodded towards a shuttered door. Louis saw him do so in the gilded mirror above the tub.
Shots would be exchanged out on that roof – there was no hope of preventing them. Hermann ducked out on to the little porch where in summer the veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper would have sunned herself or cooled herself after a bath, her lover too. He slipped and fell, went down hard, the Walther P38 banging off two rounds as he rolled aside and threw himself behind a low railing that was lined with stone planters.
Nothing … there was no answering fire. ‘I thought …’ he blurted.
‘You thought incorrectly, so did I.’
They heard the Citroen start up – hell, there were so few cars in Paris that wasn’t hard to do – and when it left the street where they had parked it, they knew he had taken it.
‘The keys,’ swore Kohler. ‘I put them under the driver’s seat when I got our guns.’
‘Idiot! Now what?’
‘We find us a telephone and call the bomb-disposal boys, but first we turn off that hotplate before the soup boils dry.’
Suzanne-Cecilia Lemaire lay under the covers, bound hand and foot and gagged. A not unpleasant-looking young woman, she was furious at what had happened to her and embarrassed that anyone should see her wearing four heavy flannelette nightgowns, two sweaters, three pairs of thick woollen kneesocks and gloves, her auburn hair put up in papillotes for the night, her eyes weeping from the fumes.
‘Batards!’ she shrilled when released. ‘Who the hell are you, and who the hell was he?’
The hands of caution were raised and she was told the street would have to do for the moment, and quickly.
Hermann almost kicked over one of the little bottles. It had been left for them on the doorstep. Sickened, he watched as the woman paled and sucked in a breath. Tears streamed from her. A lower lip quivered. ‘No one told me this would happen,’ she blurted. ‘He’s crazy! He said that if I knew what was good for me, I should lie very still.’
The quartier Saint-Marcel had been cleared of every living soul but those of the Wehrmacht’s bomb-disposal unit. The Cafe of the Deceiving Cat, on the avenue des Gobelins, was teeming with disenchanted residents and merchants all shouting about Surete incompetence and loss of income. The Gestapo never got publicly blamed. Never!
‘By five o’clock it’ll be in all the newspapers,’ sighed Kohler ruefully. ‘Hero boils it up. Shots exchanged. Surete car stolen in getaway.’
‘They’ll make a living legend of him,’ said Suzanne-Cecilia Lemaire, her soft brown eyes clouded with worry, hesitantly cradling her ‘cafe au lait’, no milk, no sugar, no coffee but hot. With the paper curlers removed and her hair combed, she looked a little better but was far from sure of things.
‘Why not go and find the car, Hermann? Try the quartier de l’Europe. He may have friends there. He can’t drive around, not for long.’
Louis wanted to be alone with the woman. ‘And if not there?’
The woman threw Louis an apprehensive glance, was watching everything.
‘The Avia Club Gym but I would prefer to be with you for any interviews.’
She took this in.
‘The Spade, ah yes. Okay, Chief. I’ll find you back at the house on the rue Poliveau?’
As if on cue, the thud of a massive explosion several blocks away brought dust from the ceiling and everyone to a crouch.
Silence followed. It was as if the rain of rubble was still up in the sky and had yet to come down.
‘Ah Christ, Louis. Widows and orphans!’
Everyone began to move. A hand shot out and grabbed Suzanne-Cecilia by the arm; she threw the Surete a look of panic, more tears springing from her.
‘Sit down!’ he ordered. ‘Hermann, go and find the car. Neither of us can do anything for them. It’s impossible, mon vieux.’
‘Boemelburg, Louis. He’ll demand hostages. He’ll say it was a Resistance plot. Ah, hell!’
‘Calm down. We can only take it as it comes.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
He left them then and they had a last glimpse of him agonizing over things on the boulevard. Like the soldier he had been, Hermann began to run towards the disaster knowing exactly what he’d find because he’d seen it all before.
‘My partner was a bomb-disposal expert, among other things, in the last war.’
Filled with despair, she darted her eyes away, and for a moment could not find her voice, then said abjectly, ‘You must know each other very well. What one thinks, the other is aware of.’
‘Usually, but not always, and he’s the stubborn one. Now please, mademoiselle …’
She pulled her shoulders inwards to wrap the bathrobe about herself more tightly. Terrified by this new development, she said hollowly, ‘It’s Madame Lemaire. My husband was killed in 1940 at Sedan. A woman has needs, Inspector. My Honore left me no money but the widow’s pension and, as we have no children and I’m too young to stay that way, I have to think of the future.’
‘Laviolette …’ he muttered, passing her his handkerchief which she took with a faint, ‘Merci.’ ‘It seems an odd choice. Your lives are so different, your interests … Do you share anything in common?’
Ah Jesus, Jesus, she said to herself, why must he ask a thing like that at a time like this? The house in pieces – had it really been the house? How many dead, and she the only tenant? The Gestapo would come for her – they would have to, yet here he was trying to distract her. ‘We … we met in the zoo. Clement would come to feed the animals – he knew we had little to give them and for him, it took him away from his wife on a Sunday afternoon and allowed him to exercise a kindness. I found him one day with oats he had gathered handful by handful in Normandy – can you imagine him doing such a thing?’ Quickly she dried her eyes. ‘My zebras loved it, Inspector, and he genuinely loved them and was not at all like most who come to see them. And to think,’ she sighed and shrugged and tried desperately to smile faintly, ‘he had brought the oats from far away. Not for himself, you understand, but for my animals.’
‘Bon. Compassion’s rare these days. You met when, exactly?’
‘Inspector, is my private life suspect?’
‘Ah no. No of course not. I merely wish to establish why Monsieur Laviolette should leave the keys to that house in his private safe.’
Again she threw an anxious glance towards the street as if expecting the Gestapo momentarily.
‘They … the keys were with the deeds. For this, you must understand that Madame Laviolette holds him constantly under suspicion and frequently includes his private office and desk among her searchings.’