‘They’re on the balcony. Hurry! We haven’t much time.’
They dragged her up and took her with them, plummeting down the stairs at breakneck speed. ‘No … No! I won’t tell you!’ she gasped frantically and, racing still, was pulled along and out on to the rue de Valois. ‘The shop,’ she heard Kempf breathlessly say. ‘She must have hidden the money there. She couldn’t have moved it.’
‘I did!’
They stopped. The freezing rain came down through the blue-washed light of the only street lamp, and the sound of the ice pellets was all around them, striking the frozen ground and each other, bouncing from the lamp above them.
‘I’ll never tell you. Never!’ she swore.
Grimly St-Cyr nudged the door to the shop open a little more. Gone were the slipping and sliding, the tumbles that had barked the shins, torn muscles, bruised a shoulder and hurt an already injured hand. Gone Were streets impassable to all but ice-skaters!
Hermann was no better off and was decidedly favouring the arm Peguy had put the knife into long ago, it seemed, and forgotten until now.
The smells of the place came to him as the Bavarian softly closed the door behind them and eased the lock on with a finality that troubled, since there could now be no easy escape for anyone, themselves included. There were the smells of perfume and bath salts, of oils and soaps that only the privileged could buy and the black market provide. Smells of new silk, old silk, warm wool, cold linen, glass display cases, scarves and leather gloves, shop-girls who had gone home hours ago, pencils, cash drawers and bills of sale.
At a nudge from Hermann, he moved to the left, his partner working to the right. Now the front of the shop was behind them and he wondered if he shouldn’t check the floor for Marie-Claire de Brisson. Had they killed her, had they left her here? Blood … there was the faint smell of blood, but from where was it coming?
Silently St-Cyr moved among the displays- dresses, suits, skirts and overcoats … the feel of each telegraphing its identity to him, no sign yet of Mademoiselle de Brisson. She’d been wearing a mohair dress …
He touched a plaster bust and felt the lace of a brassiere. Delicate … so delicate. A spill of silk briefs suggested someone must have thrown out a hand.
Crouching, he searched the floor, gathering undergarments, finding nothing else and wondering if Kempf and le Blanc were in the office at the back? Had they killed Mademoiselle de Brisson, had they silenced her for ever, or would they try to use her as a hostage?
When he found her overcoat on the floor, St-Cyr felt its lining and knew it had been ripped apart.
Kohler ran his left hand over the surface of one of the glass display cases, touching lipstick cartridges, compacts and boxes of face powder, rouge and other things The stillness told him Kempf and le Blanc were waiting, but where? Ah Gott im Himmel, was it blood he had just smelled?
It was.
The smell of women and girls came to him as, silently, he moved aside the curtain of one of the changing cubicles and felt inside it.
Nothing. Verdammt! Where were they? Behind the shop there’d be the office and a storeroom, a lavatory and powder room-a place for the shop-girls to hang their coats and hats. Kempf … what the hell would Kempf do?
Louis … where was Louis?
St-Cyr reached the far corner of the shop. Racks of evening dresses were to his left-he felt them, felt silk and satin, lace and chiffon-sequins hard and cold, rhinestone beads and tiny seed pearls in seductive patterns. Merde, what had Kempf and le Blanc done with the banker’s daughter?
Behind the shop there was a corridor, a dark alleyway to what? he wondered and told himself, The office …
But other things too. More changing cubicles. He moved a curtain aside and hesitated. He let it fall back into place.
There were three cubicles and he checked each of them thoroughly. The office door was directly across the corridor.
Gingerly he felt around it but, yes, it was tightly closed.
Kohler came to join him and, crouching at his feet, the Bavarian ran fingers delicately along the bottom of the door. A rug, he tapped out the letters, letting them fall uneasily on Louis’s ankle.
Gently tugging at the rug, he moved it just a little and a faint sliver of pale blue light intruded into the corridor at their feet. Louis, he said to himself as he tucked the carpet back in place. Louis, they’ve …
Urgently he tapped out another message in Morse that had been learned by all above the rank of sergeant or Unterfeldwebel in that other war. Me … corridor … storeroom … time. Kick door open, stand back.
There must be another door to the office, connecting it to the storeroom behind. As St-Cyr waited, the cinematographer within him could not help but see Marie-Claire de Brisson hanging above that lamp in there, stretched out, spread-eagled over it as all those other girls must have been in that house, naked, their hair chopped off, their breasts …
He hit the door. It flew open-crashed against a chair, the wall … The desk lamp was on the floor below her … below her … shrouded with a dark blue silk scarf … Ah no …
He shuddered at what they had done to her and tried to think-Think! he cried to himself. Hermann … Hermann, they have …
Now the blue lamplight flooded out into the corridor to touch the curtains of the changing cubicles, and the girl’s shadow was cast upon the ceiling.
Deep in the storeroom, Kohler took a step and then another. Racks of clothing stood on either side of him. All down the narrow space between them, there was only darkness and then … then a faint blue wash of light from beneath the back door of the office, the door through which Louis and he were to have come …
He chanced a look towards the corridor where a deeper blue light now shone. He wished he had Louis’s sense of smell. Louis could sort things out and tell not only when stale tobacco smoke was coming from a man’s jacket but how close it was.
Silently parting the clothes on the rack to the right of him, Kohler eased his gun-hand through … Gently … gently, he warned himself. You’ll never get him with these between you. He’ll only bolt and run and fire.
His little finger briefly touched a coarser fabric than that of the dresses. Immediately it backed away and the dresses on the rack closed silently as he withdrew his hand.
That’s one of them, he said to himself, but didn’t know if it was Kempf or le Blanc who had watched the corridor. Louis would have found Marie-Claire de Brisson by now. Had they slit her throat, had they strung her up and cut off her breasts?
There wasn’t a sound, only the heavy, close smell of wool and silk, linen, satin and cotton, of things from the thirties, things of quality.
Louis, he wondered. Louis … but stayed where he was.
Still in the office, St-Cyr could see that all around the shrouded lamp on the floor beneath Mademoiselle de Brisson were the scattered clumps of her dark red hair that had been hacked off. Hairs clung to her pale shoulders, they were webbed in the blood that drained steadily from wrists that were tied together so that she hung suspended from the ceiling lamp by a length, not of rope, but of silk, while her ankles were tied to the front legs of the desk by equal lengths of lingerie. Hairs were caught in the small of her back and over the mounds of her buttocks. They clung to her breasts that, like lumps of butchered meat, lay on the desk behind her.
They had cut her throat and had slashed her wrists.
He crossed himself and silently begged her forgiveness for not having arrived sooner. He knew that, though she might well have told Kempf and le Blanc where the money was, they wouldn’t leave until they had killed Hermann and him.
He knew that, though his eyes would have adjusted to the lamplight from the floor, still he would have to open the door to face the darkness of the storeroom and the bullets. Joanne demanded that he put an end to the Sonderfuhrer and his friend. The other victims demanded it too, and so did this one.