‘Louis … Louis, aren’t you going to go to bed?’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t, Hermann. I must force myself to think.’
‘Then take two of these. I saved a few from that last job.’
Messerschmitt benzedrine. St-Cyr lifted the tired hand of dismissal. ‘Sleep well, my old one. I will awaken you when it is time.’
Delphane obviously knew the weaver from before. It was her father’s villa Stavisky had used in those last few days before his death.
She had moved out at the request of the father, had been there in Chamonix with someone, but would rather not say.
St-Cyr tapped out his pipe and refilled it without even taking his gaze from the fire. He really ought to destroy the woman’s notebook so as to save lives. Could they take the chance of keeping it a moment longer?
Tucking it away, he looked at the photograph of Josette-Louise Buemondi. A warm day in the early fall perhaps; Paris, the off-white linen suit well-cut and fitted. The handbag over the shoulder, the wide-brimmed felt hat, the woman’s version of the fedora, pulled down to the left, almost to the level of that eye.
A troubled young woman, caught in the street perhaps but not avoiding her photographer, ah no. Simply facing the camera. Thin. Once quite beautiful, yes, and dressed up for what? To meet someone or to take the train to see her mother in the south?
For this last, she would have needed an ausweis, not easily obtained. The forger in Marseille? he asked. Had she betrayed her mother to Delphane? he wondered. Had Jean-Paul convinced her to co-operate?
She seemed so … ah, what could he say? Tragic? Resigned? Unhappy – yes, yes. Not in love, not on her best feet either, in spite of the clothes. No, ah no. Circumstance had not been kind to this one.
Shutting his eyes, he ran his fingers slowly over the photograph just as Madame Peretti would have done had the girl been before her in that farmhouse on the hillside. He willed himself to step into her shoes and asked, Had she no friends? A pretty girl like this? Young … so young and yet, and yet …
The right eye must be slightly lower than the left as in the sister. Hence the stylish tilt of the hat which had the effect of distracting the viewer from the bad eye.
But surely that same eye would have hampered her ability to fire a crossbow?
What was it Josianne-Michele had said about her sister? That Josette-Louise had become everything Josianne had ever wished.
The santon of Ludo Borel drew him then and he said, as if to Josianne-Michele, Everything, mademoiselle, but a lover. That boy in the hills, eh? The one thing your sister in Paris did not have.
The clerk who was forced to open up the pawnshop in Bayonne was a shrill-minded little shrew with pencil moustache and teeth like a rabbit in rigor mortis. He hated cops, loathed intrusion, loved order and basked in his supreme sense of power.
Livid, he raked the heavy iron key round in the lock, gripping the door handle in fury only to find himself picked up and slammed against the outer wall.
‘Stay put!’ hissed the Surete every bit as livid. ‘Don’t do so and me, I will personally break every bone in your body with absolute joy!’
For good measure, St-Cyr slammed him up against the wall again, knocking the pancake beret to the road and the gold-rimmed specs askew.
Kohler was impressed. For once their roles were reversed. Pocketing the keys, Louis told him to wait outside. ‘A moment, my old one. That is all I ask. I must experience it as it was, alone.’
The rabbit leapt. ‘The regulations require that I be present! It is the Lord’s Day! Monsieur le Directeur, he has said …’ He choked. The Bavarian was grinning at him.
When the uninviting black iron door had closed behind Louis, Kohler grinned again and said, ‘He just wants to get the feel of it again. The Chief Inspector St-Cyr was in on the Stavisky Affair and is not entirely certain that business is over.’
Oh-oh. Nine years had not been enough to erase the memory of the scandal. Everyone who had lost still bitched volubly and grumbled about having been taken to the cleaners. ‘I am not from here, monsieur. I know nothing of that business. I was assigned this post after the crisis and have many times applied for the transfer.’
The Gestapo nodded. ‘Maybe we could help. Would Paris suit?’
These days one had to beg even though such an offer could only be suspect. ‘The Basques, monsieur. They do not like the outsiders. My wife and son, we do not speak their devil’s tongue, so it is very difficult and sometimes it gets on the nerves, the isolation of a foreign posting.’
So much for the far corners of the empire. Fog had rolled in from the Atlantic up the Adour to smother its confluence with the Nive and shroud the ancient bridges of the old town. Their landing had been a bitch. The drive in from the aerodrome outside Biarritz something else again.
Kohler dragged out the Luftwaffe’s fags and offered one. ‘Tell me about the Inspector from the Deuxieme Bureau, eh? We know he’s been to see you. Why’d he leave that little item in there for us to find?’
Rabbit-teeth jerked round to stare at the door above which had been chiselled the words: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. ‘He … he has said we must report the names of any who come to collect the kaleidoscope, monsieur.’
‘The “kaleidoscope”?’
‘Yes, yes. A child’s toy but very beautiful. In silver with much eloquent scrollwork and such colours when held to the sun. We gave Madame Buemondi 35,000 francs. It is a lot, but an item of such curiosity and craftsmanship deserved at least that much. I had to consult with the Director several times, you understand. Madame needed the cash, she said, and since she comes from a very old family, we gave it. But … but why are you here, monsieur? Has something happened to her?’
Again Kohler found himself saying abstractedly, ‘No … No, nothing. It’s just a small matter of her father’s estate.’
‘The taxes …? Ah, no! Yes, yes, of course. The taxes. The father was very wealthy. That one had many investments in the companies of the scoundrel Stavisky but managed to extricate himself well before the scandal erupted.’
‘Made a bundle, did he?’
‘Yes, yes, the bundle.’
‘Then why did Madame have to pawn her little toy?’
‘This … this I do not know, monsieur. The wealthy often come to us. Along with the poor and the destitute, they, too, require the funds from time to time. The stocks and bonds, the fine paintings one has overbought at auction … Monsieur, could we not …’
‘Go in?’ Kohler shook his head. ‘The Chief Inspector has to be left alone to soak up whatever vibrations this place of yours can give that memory of his. Find us a cafe and I’ll let you buy me a coffee and a marc’
‘It is not a day for alcohol and there is no coffee.’
The shops were barren or making hollow pretence. A plaster ham in a place where the hams had been famous. Chocolate looking suspiciously like painted mud. No bayonets in a shop of no knives – too dangerous probably in a town that had been named after the bayonet.
Rope-soled espadrilles for Christmas? wondered Kohler, thinking of the espadrille Louis had found in that cottage. Moth-eaten berets, oyster shells where no oysters were to be had because it was against the law to fish and the town was in the Forbidden Zone, that deep swath of terrain along the coast the Wehrmacht had sealed off from the rest of the country. Controls, controls …
‘Louis won’t touch a thing. Relax, eh? And we’ll see what we can do about Paris while you try to remember everything you can about Jean-Paul Delphane.’
‘He looked at the box. He looked through the tube and said to leave it.’
‘Did he mention the Stavisky Affair?’
‘No, but … but Monsieur le Directeur, he has said that one must have murdered the financier or been very close to the one who did. A man from the Deuxieme Bureau, Inspector? A man from the police?’