‘It saves on the washing-up, eh, Dede? Now listen.’
He shoved plate and spoon aside and brushed a few crumbs into a hand before eating them. ‘She got to the appointment early. She used her head and looked the house over first. Very cleverly she let others know where she was going. This has made our job much, much easier. It tells me Joanne has her wits about her and will, perhaps, leave further clues for us to follow.’ Merde alors, how could he lie like this to the boy?
Further clues …
‘We’ve gathered a great deal of information, Dede, in a very short time thanks to her quick-wittedness.’
The Chief Inspector used the candle flame to light his pipe, tilting both away from each other so that the wax fell not into the bowl of the pipe but onto the table. For a moment there was silence as he drew in those first few puffs and wished for the luxury of contentment, but his mind was churning.
‘She would have got off the Metro at the station Bourse, Dede. From there, she would have walked west along the rue Quatre Septembre, approaching the scene of the robbery. The time …’
‘12.15, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. I followed in her steps and …’
‘Pardon?’
There was such a look of hardness in the Chief Inspector’s eyes. ‘We … that is, myself and the other boys, decided to follow in her steps.’
‘To where?’
Had they done the wrong thing? wondered Dede apprehensively. ‘The bank and … and then back towards the station Bourse and down past the Bibliotheque Nationale to … to the Theatre du Palais Royal.’
This in itself was trouble, but one must go easy. After all, how else were the boys to stand the awful waiting? ‘The bank then. At what time would she come close to it, before retracing her steps to turn down the rue de Richelieu and make her way to the theatre?’
Disappointment registered and then a massive frown. ‘12.27 perhaps, so she might not have seen anything of the robbery, Monsieur the Chief Inspector.’
‘Good.’
‘But … but Joanne, she has had plenty of time? She might have …’
‘Window-shopped, is this what you mean? Those shops … those places, Dede, they make us feel uncomfortable. Besides, the prices are far too high for her, myself also.’
Again there was that frown. ‘But Joanne was going to have to model such clothes, Monsieur the Chief Inspector? Seeing them is to learn something of them, is it not? We … we think she would have taken a little of her time for this.’
Though he would have to check it out, he knew the boys were right. ‘So, she might well have been in position at 12.47 when the robbery and shooting took place …’
‘Did one of them follow her? That is the question,’ said the boy with all the gravity of his tender years.
‘You should become a detective, Dede, but I wouldn’t wish the life on my worst enemy!’
Someone had followed her, thought Dede. He was almost certain of this now. Why else the sudden outburst from the detective? Why else the compliment? But had it been one of the robbers?
If not, who could it have been? ‘Was she followed, Monsieur the Chief Inspector?’
‘Ah, Dede, you have me. Yes. Yes, she was followed but by whom?’
More he couldn’t say. Concluded, the conference ended with his gruffly pressing the tin of mints into the boy’s hands and telling him to share them up. ‘Don’t go around looking for any more answers, eh? Wait for my instructions. I may need you for something special.’
But then at the door, he said, ‘Stay out of trouble. It’s dangerous. We don’t want to ruffle any feathers until we’ve found Joanne and got her safely away.’
St-Cyr was thinking of Paul Meunier, the son of the engraver, as he closed the door. He was thinking of the world he found himself in. One of watchers upon watchers. Why the hell had someone followed her? Had it been someone from that house making sure she was alone?
In pencil, with a fine and very artistic hand, Paul Meunier had deftly sketched Joanne as he had seen her in the shop, even to etching the worry in those lovely eyes, the strain of her not knowing why she was being followed though certain that she was.
Giving life to her, so much so, he could still hear the sound of the pencil on paper and how the younger Meunier’s breath had quickened as the girl had grown before him.
To have such a remarkable recall was not common. Clearly the engraver’s son should have been free of the shop and allowed to follow a career as an artist.
Young Meunier had broken all the rules of his class and his father’s establishment and had offered Joanne a cup of coffee which the girl had taken standing up with, yes, two heaping teaspoons of white sugar and milk. Yes, milk.
Some have all the luck, especially engravers of cigarette cases and other knick-knacks for the Germans.
Now where was Hermann? Suddenly the need to see him was all-consuming.
Pigalle was usually fun, but the Bar of the Broken Cat, in a cellar off the rue Fontaine, was most definitely off-limits to the Occupier. Kohler wet his throat as he stood in the entrance. The music had stopped and so had all talk and motion.
From a smoke-filled sea of tables, huddled gangsters stared at him while in the distance, a three-piece orchestra waited. There was only trouble for him here and he had walked right into it. A ‘friend’ at Gestapo Paris-Central had given him the address. A friend, the laughing bastard!
Where the girls clung dolefully to each other circling round and round on glass that scratched and scoured the music, there was now only an electrified stillness. Not even a look from half of them, the breath held.
He wished that Louis was with him. Louis was good in situations like this. But Louis wasn’t with him and they needed answers quickly if they were ever to find Joanne alive.
The prefet had his informants, his mouchards. The ‘word’ from Gestapo HQ, such as it had been, was that the one who would have the most to say could be found here. Henri Roland Peguy, one of the durs, the hard ones who had spent time in prison and would wear the three dots on the web of skin between the right thumb and index finger. M.A.V.-Mort Aux Vaches, Death to the Cows, the cops. Ah yes.
He had last been in the Sante awaiting trial for the murder of two pensioners from whom he had been trying to squeeze their life savings. But that had been in the fall of 1940. The jails had been emptied of their most useful occupants who had then gone to work for the SS and the Gestapo.
Peguy had been passed over in the first rush but then miraculously sprung by the very man who had put him there, the prefet of Paris, though that little bit of information was supposed to remain a secret for ever.
Now the secret was in jeopardy and Peguy waited.
He was a mean-eyed, hard little bastard of forty-four with one prominent gold tooth, the upper right lateral incisor. Hence the nickname of ‘Fortune’.
Kohler found him at last, three tables back of the postage stamp dance floor, holding court with four others amid a clutter of wine bottles and cigarette butts. ‘Now, look, all I want is a little information,’ he said quietly.
There were five empty bottles and spills of red wine on the linoleum table-top.
‘Eat dung. Kiss your mother’s ass.’
‘Don’t be tiresome.’
A flick-knife came out; the blade leapt! Fifteen centimetres of highly polished, hardened steel straight from the Reich and bearing the much-coveted logo of the SS, the death’s-head.
A man of few words, then, but with them, the sickening realization that, though it was forbidden to kill any member of the Occupying Forces, there was one exception. Hermann Andreas Kohler. Fair game and no one’s loss.
‘Put the knife away. Please. Let’s not get heavy, eh? Just a few small questions,’ breathed Kohler.
A bottle fell, the table quivered, neckties and faces were blurred. Kohler grabbed another bottle and smashed it. The sound of breaking glass shattered the silence. A girl screamed but was slapped into silence.