Neither of them wore a thing. ‘Which of you is Malou?’ he asked, ‘and which is Brigitte?’
His grin was nice and the look in his eyes one of warm appreciation. A gentleman for one so big and frightening. Would he take both of them or only the slave?
Kohler downed the brandy and patted each of them on the rump. ‘Another time,’ he sighed. ‘Merde, the life a poor detective leads. I want to stay but duty calls.’
He kissed them both and held them a moment so that neither would feel slighted and the house could rest in peace.
A last look revealed that the girl behind the lattice had vanished and that the lights there had been switched off. Had they done it with mirrors? he wondered.
The sergeant was doing up his boots, the blonde was smoking a cigarette and fixing her nails, having forgotten all about the ‘lover’ who had just ‘possessed’ her.
He’d had his moment, and it would soon be time for the next one.
The Paradox gun had been considered too old to confiscate and the authorities had unwittingly let the prospector keep it as a curiosity. Sometimes such things happened in the provinces, but seldom if ever in Paris. Each lead ball was nearly two and a half centimetres in diameter – enough to drop an elephant at one hundred metres. Each cartridge held nearly thirty grams of black powder. A hero’s gun.
Pocketing two of the lead shot for the library of the curious one always tried to build, St-Cyr went through to the sitting-room. Both Gabrielle and Nana Theleme had come here on that Tuesday. Jacqmain had needed Mademoiselle Theleme’s continued reassurances that it would indeed be safe for him to sell the diamonds to her friend.
Yet the 850,000 francs were nowhere to be found.
The Generalmajor Wehrle had come at 7 p.m. that night. The woman feeding the pigeons in the square had complained of late comings and goings. ‘Whores if you ask me,’ she had said.
Enough flypapers to kill an elephant had been purchased by Mademoiselle Theleme.
Vouvray and the Chateau Theriault were quite close and it would have been easy enough for Gabrielle to have returned after Wehrle had departed.
The boucherie was closed, as was the marchand de couleurs, but banging hard enough brought the owner of this last, and it was from him that the woman’s address was obtained.
She lived directly above the shop but on the third floor.
‘Madame Horleau, a few small questions. Nothing difficult, I assure you.’
In the faded light of the landing, the rheumy grey eyes were suspicious, the door all but closed. ‘What’s happened to him?’ she asked. ‘I heard a dreadful bang.’
‘It would be best, madame, if you simply answered my questions and did not attempt to ask any of your own.’
‘Did he shoot himself with that blunderbuss the Kommandant was fool enough to have let him keep for the memories it held?’
‘Please, the blonde you said had arrived on that Tuesday morning a week ago. Did she return later that evening?’
‘A week ago … Why, please, did they come?’
He sighed. He retrenched and asked if she wished arrest for withholding information.
‘Arrest would be perfect for such as myself. Is it that you are unaware the Vichy Government and the police must feed their prisoners under the conditions of the Geneva Convention?’
He’d best not ask why she would consider herself a prisoner of war! ‘The soup is water, and unclean, madame. The bread, if they get any, is grey and full of harmful things your old insides could not withstand but, please, let me help with the war effort.’
A wallet was found, but its state was such that she had to say, ‘It needs remending. Have you no wife to call your own? Fishing line … Pah! men know nothing of such things and should all be raised in skirts for the first ten years!’
He grimaced. He said silently, Sometimes dealing with the provincials could be so very difficult.
He handed over 50 francs which she took and waited for more. ‘The pigeons,’ she said.
‘You can’t buy bread on the black market. No one can. It’s one of the few things which are, by some unwritten rule, forbidden by all, both buyer and seller.’
She snapped arthritic fingers and he handed over another 50. ‘Does the blonde from Paris drive a small Peugeot?’ she asked.
‘It’s dark blue.’
‘The same as arrived early that morning. That one returned at eight o’clock in the evening, the new time, but stayed no more than five minutes.’
‘And?’ he asked.
Did he always suspect there must be more? ‘She left with a small suitcase.’
‘But … but it was dark outside?’
‘Dark enough for an old woman to hear her bang it against the car as she opened the door. She said, “Merde alors, my nerves. I can’t drop it! Everything will be all right. We’ll soon get him on his way.”’
‘Was Monsieur Jacqmain going for a trip?’
‘The other one, I think. The one who came with the small suitcase at seven that night and left before this woman returned.’
The Generalmajor Wehrle. ‘How can you be sure it was the same suitcase?’
‘I can’t, but I can tell you the first was a brown alligator bag from Louis Vuitton in Paris. As the velo-taxi driver handed it to the man, he let a sliver of light fall on it. I have always wanted to possess such a bag.’
‘Your eyesight must be excellent.’
‘That’s because I don’t waste it reading books and newspapers like Monsieur Jacqmain did. Is she known to you, this one who returned?’
What could he say? ‘She was known to me, yes, but now I’m not so sure of it.’
The alligator bag had not been in the house – he was certain of this, certain too, that Gabrielle must have come back for it.
‘Madame, are you sure she said, “I can’t drop it?”’
‘Positive! She was terrified of doing so and gingerly put the bag on the seat beside her. Then the car she allowed only to creep away until, reassured perhaps, she finally gave the accelerator pedal the tiny push.’
‘And you’re certain she said, “We’ll soon get him on his way?”’
‘Must I repeat everything for you?’
‘Egg white,’ breathed Kohler, marvelling at it as he ran his fingers delicately over the scars on the black girl’s shoulders. ‘Who would have believed it?’
Madame de Bonnevies was firm. ‘You did. Monsieur Jacqmain did and so have all others. It is allowed to dry and then is sprayed with artist’s fixative before oiling.’
Exhausted, depressed and afraid perhaps, the Senegalese slept flat on her stomach in an untidy attic room. A well-squeezed tube of Veronal was nearby. Had she taken too much?
A half-bottle of cognac had been downed in an instant. The barbitone before the ‘performance’, the cognac right afterwards.
‘She was afraid you would ask for her and had prepared herself.’
‘Me?’ he managed.
‘The scar. The others too, that accompany it on your face.’
‘Shrapnel nicks from the Great War, and a bullet graze that’s too fresh not to remind me of the bastard who fired the slug that did it. That’s the one across the brow. You should have told her she need not have feared me.’
He was still looking at the negresse’s buttocks. Was he tempted perhaps? ‘She was afraid of Monsieur Jacqmain also, and of the others who took her.’
‘You said he never touched any of your girls.’
‘Yes! but this one “felt” his breath on her skin all the same.’
The girls would know everything that went on in the house. When awaiting a client, they would often spy on the entrance so as to get a little preview. She’d have seen him, then, talking to Madame.