‘How can I help?’ she asked. There were so many things crowding them. The scars, the ruin of her face, the stacks of unpainted plates, the simple work table with its candle and tiny pots of colour, her chair, the windows and the confines of an empty courtyard below.
‘Why is it you choose to work up here, mademoiselle?’ asked the Surte when, of course, he already knew the answer.
‘So as to watch the comings and goings of my father’s house. One has to these days, is that not so?’
She looked with apology at Hermann and saw him nod. Nervousness made her hesitate, but then she leaned down to blow out the candle and took up a rag to wipe her hands.
A new design, or one remembered, covered the back of her left hand with a delicate tracery of dark green and gold, but all too soon this vanished.
‘Well?’ she asked, removing her apron. They were making her nervous and she didn’t like this because … ah, how could she put it? They were themselves nervous and trying to feel their way. Then she had been correct to meet them here and not in the salon.
Kohler noted that from the right, apart from a few scars, she was still a very handsome woman. Tall for a Burgundian. Even in a heavy beige sweater, white blouse and dark brown skirt, she had that certain quality, that tremendous sense of presence only a top mannequin possessed.
‘Can we begin at the beginning?’ asked Louis with apology in his voice, so much so she couldn’t help but note its sincerity.
Fingers touched her lips to feel their scars. ‘The beginning …?’ she blurted. ‘Which beginning?’
St-Cyr handed her the engagement announcement. It took but a moment for it to register. Angelique Desthieux turned suddenly away to face the stacks of plates in their straw-filled racks. ‘What has Gaetan to do with this?’ she gasped.
‘We don’t know, mademoiselle,’ confessed Louis.
‘I was only twenty and did not understand what the war could do to a man.’
‘Of course. We were both caught up in it, mademoiselle. We both know how you must have felt.’
‘Do you? I screamed when I saw what the Boches had done to him! I shrieked my silly head off and had to be taken from the ward. I cried out, Inspectors, and yelled at God, I hate You for what You’ve done to me. To me! Not to them.’
It was all coming back, Ward 5 at the Val de Grace in Paris, and les baveux. ‘They … they had no lips, no jaws, no noses or even eyes, some of them. There were towels around their throats to keep their constant droolings from soiling their pyjamas. Vacant, horribly twisted faces-faces that stared hatefully at me from among the bandages. The … the doctors showed me Gaetan’s face and … and I shamed myself and my father and mother in front of all of them, messieurs. Me, who was so beautiful. Even in my nightmare, I could feel the hunger in them for a woman and felt violated as I screamed.’
After the Great War, veterans’ groups had proliferated out of a desperate need. The droolers had taken the motto, Keep smiling. Don’t become a victim. The aveugles de la guerre were those who had been blinded; the ailes brisees were the broken wings, the disabled aviators with their terrible burns.
The gueules cassees, the broken mugs.
‘Did Gaetan Verges hate you for refusing to marry him?’ asked Louis.
‘Is that why the acid in the face? No! No, a thousand times, Inspector! Gaetan understood.’
Her back was to them. The eye was hurriedly wiped, the nose touched with a handkerchief. Her shoulders quivered.
‘Then who threw the acid?’ asked Hermann.
‘Why must you ask? I have said all there is to say, messieurs! That business, it is closed!’
‘But must be reopened,’ said Louis. Clearing a space on the table, he laid out single photos of each of the missing girls then quietly told her why they had come.
‘So many?’ she asked, trembling at the sight of them and what their hair, their eyes and ages must imply.
‘If Gaetan Verges didn’t throw acid into your face, Mademoiselle Desthieux, who could it have been?’
‘Luc’
Ah merde. ‘Albert Luc Tonnerre?’ he asked, tossing Hermann a look of alarm.
They must know something of her past, but who had told them? she wondered. ‘My former business agent was among les baveux, Inspector. It’s God’s irony that the two men in my life should have been disfigured by the same cloud of shrapnel. I didn’t know this at the time of my visit to the ward of that hospital. I discovered it only later when the letters began to come.’
‘The letters …?’ asked Kohler uneasily.
‘Letters of such hatred, I destroyed them and told no one.’
‘Not even when the acid …’ began Kohler.
‘It was thrown a year later. By then the letters had stopped. I had my life in Paris. I didn’t even think I was in danger.’
‘The Gare de Lyon?’ prompted St-Cyr.
‘How is it that you knew?’
‘I didn’t. I merely guessed. The platform would have been very crowded. Hundreds of soldiers heading for the Gare de l’Est and the war, or returning homeward on crutches and stretchers, the ambulances and nurses, a few civilians …
‘Believe me, I saw nothing. I was blinded. Burned! I screamed in agony just as they had done. I panicked and tore at my face, my beautiful face. My lips were on fire, my skin, my cheeks, my eyes … I rolled and thrashed about and finally someone pinned me down and I fainted. When I awoke, I was just like them.’
‘How close in friendship were Tonnerre and young Verges?’ asked Louis.
‘Very. They were comrades in arms, Inspector, two of the droolers.’
‘Could your fiance have …’
‘My ex-fiance.’
‘Could they have decided it together?’ he asked.
She had to sit down before them. She must try to compose herself and tell them how it really was. ‘It’s a question I’ve had the years to answer, Inspectors, and yet my answer has always been the same. Gaetan would never have harmed me. He was far too gentle and kind-not bitter, I think, as so many would have been, but philosophical. If he had even in the slightest suspected Luc of such a thing, he would have gone to the authorities.’
Yet she had so readily given them Tonnerre’s name. ‘Then could it have been another of the patients on that ward?’
This was a question that deeply troubled them for they had the life of this one girl to consider and the deaths and mutilations of the others. ‘Luc must have had an alibi Gaetan was positive he could accept,’ she said blankly.
Ah nom de Dieu, it was evident she had counted on Verges coming forward to accuse his friend! ‘Was it Tonnerre who threw the acid, mademoiselle?’ asked St-Cyr, determined to settle the matter.
Her gaze was unrelenting. ‘That I will never say, Inspector. You see, I’m now one of them.’
‘Not quite.’
How cruel of him! ‘No, not quite, but in spirit.’
They prepared to leave. The Frenchman gathered the photos, the other one held the briefcase open. Both were disappointed in her responses. Both had a young girl to find before it was too late.
‘Inspectors, I … I’ve not seen or written to Gaetan since the summer of 1917 when I saw his face so clearly I can still recall it.’
‘The letters, then, had begun to arrive in the fall?’ asked Louis and saw her nod.
He wouldn’t leave it alone. She had best tell him. ‘But then they stopped on the day of their anniversary, the day the shrapnel hit them.’
‘Pardon?’ he asked.
‘Both were wounded on 2 October 1916, Inspector. I saw the damage the following summer, and in the fall of that year, the letters stopped on that very day, 2 October 1917.’
‘Then the acid the following summer, Louis. 1918 …’