The feet of nervous pigeons too hungry to escape were mired in wet snow. An old woman in black trickled scant crumbs she could not spare from a withered hand.
Other people were about but tried to take no notice of the Citroen and its two occupants. A gazogene lorry perfumed the dank air with the pungency of green willow, the warren of tubes and cylinders on its roof banging and clanging as it farted its way across the square to disappear up a street.
Timidly St-Cyr approached the woman. The Surete … Paris … she’d have noted both even though her back was still turned to them. ‘Madame …?’
‘Oui?’ she snapped, letting the last of the crumbs fall.
‘A Monsieur Jacqmain …’
‘What’she done?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Women. Fancy women. Late comings and goings. Whores if you ask me.’
Ah merde … ‘We only want to know where he lives.’
She jerked her head. ‘Above the Boucherie Leplat. Next to Au Petit Moka which has, alas, been closed for the Duration due to the extreme shortage of coffee for those of us who haven’t the money to afford it.’
‘What fancy women?’
‘Two from Paris. Tres belles, tres gentilles. The blonde went in at noon. The raven-haired one came by train and followed later. Then that one went out and into the marchand de couleurs of Monsieur Gabon.’
It was too much to resist, and he sighed. ‘What did the raven-haired one buy?’
Ah! she had their interest at last. ‘Flypapers in winter? Sufficient for six summers of infestation? And what, please, are decent citizens to do when the flies visit us again?’
‘Flypapers?’
‘Is that not just what I said?’ Madame Horleau waited for a suitable apology and when one didn’t arrive, she let the two of them have the last from her lips. ‘Monsieur Jacqmain has not left the house since the newspapers arrived from Paris, so I ask again, what has he done?’
They started out. The pigeons scattered. People took notice but tried not to let on. Everywhere the air was suddenly of trouble.
The house had a white, cut-stone facade, with its entry to the right. Directly above the butcher’s shop, there was a wrought-iron Louis Philippe railing that enclosed a narrow balcony behind which there were two tall, tightly shuttered French windows. On the floor above, there were equal but unshuttered windows. Then, as the roof climbed to its peak, there were two large attic dormers, side by side and also tightly shuttered.
Beyond the hardware store next door, there was a hat factory with little business.
‘Louis, the flypapers … is it what I think?’
‘Perhaps but then … ah mais alors, alors, mon vieux, isn’t it a little too early to say?’
‘Not if he’s up and died of strychnine poisoning.’ An agony if true.
Flypapers, the half-metre long pull-out coils of sticky brown celluloid which were hung from kitchen ceilings in summer, offered the greedy, the calloused, the intransigent and the jilted lover a ready means to an end. Boiled in water until it was all but dry, their last few remaining droplets were deadly.
‘Let’s ask Jacqmain,’ said St-Cyr. Hermann banged on the door but of course, there could be no answer, not after such thoughts.
The flic on the beat was swift. They’d need the magistrate’s order. Kohler flashed his Gestapo shield and was about to kick the door in when the butcher came huffing out with a spare key.
All others were prevented from entering. ‘We’ll be certain to consult you,’ soothed the Surete. ‘Certain!’ He slammed the door and locked it.
Then they stood a moment in the entrance before the dished and hollowed steps of the staircase. Neither knew, really, what to expect.
‘The newspapers from Paris, Louis,’ said Hermann as he started up. ‘News of the Gypsy, the Ritz, the safe of Hans-Albrecht Wehrle, diamond buyer for the Reich.’
‘Nana Theleme and Gabrielle … both have not confided everything in us.’
‘Since when would women ever do that?’
He was sitting in his study, had been looking fondly through a photo album but had set this carefully aside on top of the Paris papers. A much-used pair of field glasses, a water bottle, compass, loupe on its lanyard, sheath knife, match tin and cigarette case were also there.
It was Louis who said, ‘Hermann, please go into the salon and have a little look around. Take no more of that benzedrine – I’ve been warning you it’s addictive and that your heart will pack it in when I need you most. You’re not flying a nightfighter over Stalingrad.’
Always it was blitzkrieg for them, thought Kohler. ‘Why couldn’t the son of a bitch have been tidier?’
St-Cyr could hear his partner throwing up into the kitchen sink. Hermann was just too tired of the sight of death. Afraid of it, haunted by it, the bodies of his two sons now frozen in the clay of Russia but still a constant nightmare.
The twin barrels of an old-fashioned Paradox elephant gun had discharged their number 4 calibre shots into the roof of Jacqmain’s mouth after which the head had simply disintegrated.
The gun, which must weigh nearly ten kilos, had been propped against a partially opened upper drawer, Jacqmain holding the muzzle in his mouth.
Recoil had splintered the wood and had caused the gun to hit a framed wall map of the Congo, shattering its glass and breaking a lamp.
A single length of string was tied to the left trigger – Jacqmain had known from experience that cocking both hammers, though pulling only one trigger, would discharge the two. He must have run the string behind a front leg of the desk to give purchase.
Powder smoke would have filled the air, the sound deafening – had no one heard it?
Blood and brains had been sprayed across the wall behind the chair and on the ceiling too. An eagle, a honey guide, a francolin, stork and marabou all stared at the carnage through glass eyes.
A grey parrot roosted on a perch above the desk, a former camp-friend no doubt.
The soft-nosed slugs, each weighing more than a hundred grams, had embedded themselves in the ceiling timbers which were now exposed and freed of their centuries of plaster. There were patches of scalp whose short, iron-grey hair looked like some strange sort of fungal growth. There were teeth, bits of bone … The eye of the cinematographer in St-Cyr recorded everything. It helped. It gave distance. It fed that curiosity which was so necessary.
‘The Generalmajor Wehrle … his presence here, monsieur, it frightened you, did it not?’ he asked aloud. Always he had found talking to the victim and to himself helped. ‘You had had the assurances not just of Mademoiselle Theleme but of Gabrielle Arcuri. Two beautiful women. Both chanteuses. What, please, did you do with the money the Generalmajor paid you? You could not have deposited it all at once. There would have been far too many raised eyebrows. Ah! the neighbours – one of them at least – watched your every move.’
It was now Wednesday the twentieth. The money had been paid out, and the diamonds collected, on Tuesday the twelfth.
‘850,000 francs,’ he muttered. ‘About one-tenth of the value. Among them there were 657 carats of Jagers, Top Capes and Capes. “An excellent haul,” the Generalmajor said.’
The Paris papers were yesterday’s, and he must have got them in the late afternoon or early evening.
Rigor had set in, and from the presence of the newspapers, it was clear enough Jacqmain had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. ‘Last night, then. A small supper, a glass of wine. Perhaps a brandy or two afterwards,’ he muttered, but Dutch courage would not have been needed. Many times you had faced the charging lion or tiger, the elephant too.’
Yet he had been afraid of arrest.
The money … a good portion of it … had still to be in the house, but where? Neither Nana Theleme nor Gabrielle could have taken it, could they? since the Generalmajor had come at 7 p.m. and at so late a time, he had been forced to spend the night in a hotel room, he’d said.