‘Bon. So, how many were involved? Three … was it three? One to watch the street, one to hold the gun on the employees and the last to …’
‘I’m still waiting, Inspector. Why have you such an interest in something that can concern you not in the slightest!’
The sparrows on the mezzanine hadn’t moved. The Venuses gazed sublimely down upon the world … ‘All right. A small affair. A girl is missing. She may have seen something.’
‘A girl. So, good. Yes, that is good. Now a little more, I think.’
‘Her name, eh? You first. Were there three men or was there a woman with them?’
‘This girl, perhaps?’ asked the Chief of Police pleasantly enough. ‘Please, is this what you wish to know, Inspector?’
Ah Gott im Himmel, the bastard … ‘Just, was there a woman with the men who robbed this bank?’
Talbotte filled his lungs with smoke and held it in only to release it slowly through the nostrils as a dragon would before eating a peasant and his pig.
‘Then ask someone else but do so in the street.’
The fingers were snapped, the voice thrown back over a shoulder and up the stairs. ‘You and you, accompany the inspector to his car and switch on the ignition for him. If he resists, give the sieve to his brand-new radiator and abort the tyres to remind him that in Paris it’s not only the gangsters who do things properly!’
The birds took wing, drawing their guns as they came down the stairs.
The banker blinked and wiped sweat from a worried brow. Now why was that? wondered Kohler. A banker in trouble after the fact!
Out on the street, he grinned and said, ‘Okay, okay, you win, eh, until we meet again.’
The custodian of the gates to the garden of the Palais Royal couldn’t remember seeing anyone remotely resembling Joanne Labelle. ‘In here, a girl like that?’ he said. ‘Ah no, no, Inspector. I would most certainly be aware of such a one.’
You snob! grimaced St-Cyr, disliking the man intensely for looking down on the citizens of his beloved Belleville but nodding in agreement several times. ‘How stupid of me. A girl like that in a place like this …’ He waved the snapshot Dede had given him. ‘Other girls perhaps but not such a one as her, especially as there were ten degrees of frost and the garden would have been all but deserted.’
Vincent Girandoux drew himself up until his dark blue cap with the gold braid and badge of authority all but touched the roof of his tiny kiosk. ‘Inspector, the domestics aren’t appreciated in the garden. Nannies are, of course, and the nurses, the companions of the elderly ladies who live here but …’ He teased a cuff of his dark blue greatcoat with gold braided epaulets and brass buttons down a bit. ‘But if the tenants thought for a moment …’
‘That you were disloyal? Now listen, she was not someone’s mistress. She was …’
The dark horn-rimmed bifocals leapt. ‘I didn’t say anything about mistresses!’
‘Okay, okay, so those are all more classy. Please, I come from Belleville myself, eh? She’s just a girl we are looking for.’
‘Why?’
‘That doesn’t concern you but … Ah but if she’s been murdered, it’s entirely possible we’ll have to summon you to testify.’
‘Murdered … Here? Let me see the snapshot again. Why doesn’t she wear an overcoat and galoshes?’
The photo had been taken in the fall of 1940. ‘Imagine her in a beige double-breasted overcoat with the collar turned up. Give her a golden yellow mohair scarf from Hermes, monsieur, and a cocoa-brown beret. Gloves of brown suede-pre-war of course- and most probably not winter boots but rubbers over shoes with medium heels. Pumps.’
‘Silk stockings?’
The quality of the scarf had done its work. ‘Perhaps. Yes, it’s entirely possible but, like the rest, they would have come from long before this war.’
‘Then the clothes would have been handed down.’
Their eyes met. The detective waited, then said guardedly, ‘Hand-me-downs and recently made over yet again to suit, yes. They were my first wife’s and I gave them to the girl’s mother in the spring of 1934 when that first wife left me because she could no longer stand the nights and days of never knowing if I would return from work alive. She just walked out and left, and one day I came home to find her gone.’
Had it been a warning, wondered Girandoux and if so, was it but an affair of foolishness then, this matter of the girl? The affectation of one who had adopted the position of surrogate father or ‘uncle’. ‘The girl was afraid, Inspector. I noticed the coat, the scarf and gloves, yes. She was quite handsome but …’
‘When … At about what time? Please be as precise as possible.’
‘At … at about 1.15 or 1.20 perhaps.’
About half an hour after the robbery. ‘And she was afraid?’
‘Yes. A frown, the constant looking back over her shoulder. Once a pause beneath the trees to watch the gate for a few minutes. Five, I think. Then again under one of the arches, and once more from the arcade in front of the shop of Monsieur Meunier, the engraver.’
‘Please, this shop, which is it?’
A Petainiste through and through, a man who liked order above all else, Girandoux removed a black leather glove to place a forefinger on the plan of the garden that was tacked to the wall precisely in front of the plain wooden table and chair that were the sole furnishings of his office, apart from a calendar whose days had been meticulously X’d.
‘It’s at number 27, Inspector.’
Directly across the gardens from the house …
Perhaps the frost was the cause of the moisture in the detective’s eyes, thought Girandoux, perhaps the knowledge that the girl had quite possibly been followed and most certainly must have known of this.
‘Was she with the Resistance, Inspector?’ he hazarded. One never knew quite what to say in these times.
A copy of the Paris weekly Je Suis Partout was sticking out of the worn leather briefcase on the floor. The lunch packet was empty.
Pro-Nazi and violently anti-Third Republic, the weekly reflected the views of such fascists as this one, thought St-Cyr. The lighted candle would give the illusion of warmth. The black-out curtain was drawn.
‘Inspector …’
‘Yes, I understand perfectly, Monsieur Girandoux, custodian of the gates to the garden of the Palais Royal. Is it that you’ve missed out on the reward of 100,000 francs by not notifying our German friends of such a suspicious character? If she had been apprehended, and if forced to confess, then of course the money would have been paid and you could rest a good deal easier knowing you had rid the world of such a terrorist. But, ah but, you see, monsieur, she wasn’t of the Resistance, was not even suspected of such of thing.’
The man heaved a grateful sigh. St-Cyr thought to ask further questions-they desperately needed to know what had happened- but he couldn’t bring himself to do so and was angry his feelings should intrude so harshly.
Without another word, he snuffed out the candle and left the bastard in the dark.
Meunier, the engraver, was more co-operative and with good reason. To the quiet, steady trade of engraving cigarette cases and bits of silver and gold for German officers, had been added the engraving of embossed and gilded notices for official receptions and calling cards. ‘Beautiful paper, tireless and exquisite workmanship,’ said St-Cyr. ‘I commend you, m’sieur, and your son. That is your son in the workshop, is it not?’
It was. ‘His chest, Inspector. The lungs are not very good.’
‘So, free of the call-ups of ’39 and ’40, and free of the forced labour in the Reich.’ There would be an exemplary doctor’s certificate stating absolutely that the boy’s health wouldn’t for a moment allow such activities.
The speckled, grey-black, neatly trimmed aristocratic beard didn’t move. The dark eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses were limpid.