‘Ah yes, lots of times.’
‘Did she have a monogrammed cigarette case?’
‘With the initials NKM?’ asked Chantal mischievously. Oh, it was all so exciting. Muriel and she would discuss it for days.
‘NKM,’ confessed St-Cyr. ‘You knew of this?’
Bird-like, the designer flashed him a brief, shy smile. ‘But of course. One notices such things, isn’t that so? But me, I could never get up the courage to ask her what the initials stood for. A man, perhaps. A lover – discretion, Louis. Me, I had to use discretion.’
‘And Muriel?’
‘She is convinced Gabrielle bought it in a flea market.’
A flea market! ‘Had she had it long, do you think?’
Again there was a brief smile, no longer shy. ‘What you really want to ask, Louis, is could she have been given it by the people at the Lune Russe when Charles Maurice Theriault asked her to end a fine career and marry him.’
St-Cyr heaved a helpless sigh. Outwitting the ‘girls’ was almost impossible. Age had put the mustard of wisdom on them. ‘Well, yes, that is what I would have liked to ask.’
‘If you had trusted me completely, Louis, there’d have been no holding back but I shall tell you, my friend, that if Gabrielle had been given it as a going-away present, the initials would not have been NKM unless her real name was something else.’
‘Something Russian?’ asked St-Cyr, catching a fleeting glimpse of the mirage Gabrielle Arcuri had created and wondering about it. What had the woman been hiding then, what was she hiding now?
‘My poor Louis, she’s exactly what you need. A beautiful woman not all that much younger than yourself, eh? A woman of mystery, not a Bretonese plough horse, even if she is pretty. But sleep well, my dear. Have fabulously exciting dreams, not nightmares. Muriel is usually right about such things.’
A flea market.
‘Natasha Kulakov Myshkin. It was our little secret.’ As he fingered the cigarette case, the White Russian proprietor of the Lune Russe gazed into the distance of memory. A big, sad man with the nomad’s yearning for home, he tugged at the iron-grey beard. ‘In 1917 she fled the Revolution of the Bolsheviks and became separated from her family, all of whom were killed perhaps, who knows? At the age of fourteen she arrived in Paris but she didn’t do what most penniless girls of that age are forced to do. Natasha was a chanteuse, Inspector. She’d always wanted to be one, right from the earliest days. A real artist. It took her time to achieve success. Ah yes, a thing like that often does. She changed her name to Gabrielle Arcuri. Me, I knew right away that she was Russian but I let her tell me in her own good time and I was happy to have her here for nearly five years.’
‘But then she met Charles Maurice Theriault and he wanted her to quit.’
‘That one insisted. Some men are like that, Inspector. They can’t stand to see their wives a success – so popular in Gabrielle’s case she could wring tears from the coldest of hearts but… but why is it you have not known of her? Surely …’
St-Cyr gave the shrug he reserved for fate and time and internal politics. ‘Paris and its environs are the Prefet’s beat; the Surete has the rest of the country. Me, I’ve usually been out there some place or in the sewers. You were saying …?’
‘Theriault, yes. He was madly in love with her. Night after night he’d sit here listening to her. She hesitated, she wanted to keep on singing. Gabi’s like that – a natural. She just has to sing. His family … Ah! what can one say, eh? Snobs, if you ask me. The mother didn’t like it one bit. He took Gabi away to the country, took her from us – my God, the trouble I had explaining things to the patrons. From time to time she’d come back and if she could, she’d sing a little for old times’ sake. Never when he was around, of course. She was like a daughter, Inspector. A daughter.’
‘But she always insisted on being called Gabrielle Arcuri?’
‘Yes, of course. Arcuri was the name of a family that had helped her. The Natasha was from a time before, a time of great sadness.’
‘Yet she kept the cigarette case, knowing it would identify her?’
‘She told people she’d bought it in a flea market. Me, I didn’t mind. It was a part of her, Inspector, our little secret. Natasha Kulakov Myshkin came from a very wealthy family. They had a dacha in the Urals and a fine big house in Leningrad. Her father had been a doctor in the court of the Romanovs.’
‘And you gave her the cigarette case?’
‘But of course. A parting gift as I’ve said.’
‘Would she have told her husband her real name?’
‘Perhaps, but me, I don’t think so. You see, Inspector, with that ear of hers, Gabrielle had picked up a pretty good accent. She’d have told her husband her parents were dead. The Arcuri name is what’s on her papers. You won’t tell the Germans, will you? She’ll not have done anything, not that one. A heart of gold and kindness itself. A real diamond in the rough, but not so rough at all. Ah no. Please tell her that we wish her well and miss her. The Club Mirage is no place for her.’
And the husband? asked St-Cyr of himself. Could the husband or the mother-in-law have now wanted to get rid of her?
The cutting room of the Salon Chez Nadeau was as busy as ever. No sign of Julian Nadeau but his assistant, Sylviane Valcourt, waited impatiently for him to speak.
St-Cyr stood to one side of the cluttered windows looking down at the rue de la Paix. There were lots of pedestrians, lots of German officers and their French girlfriends, cyclists and velo-taxis. Good places to hide, good places from which to watch.
When he found the man, apparently window shopping and using the glass as a mirror, he passed on until he had the other one. Both of them were in their forties, dressed as if notaries or accountants – so nothing shabby about them. Good papers, no doubt, and good on their feet and on their bicycles. Ex-Army? he wondered. They had that look about them. Had it not been for his dodging the Gestapo earlier, he’d have spotted them.
He picked their bikes out, noting that each was chained to something. Were they armed and out to kill him? Had it gone that far? Surely they’d have had opportunity enough this morning. The bikes would be left as a diversion. They’d vanish into the crowd on foot.
Sylviane began to fret. ‘Julian is out to lunch, Monsieur Louis. Me, I have to go myself. Is everything all right?’
She’d been fifteen years of age when he’d plucked her from the streets, not much older than Gabrielle Arcuri had been when she’d first come to Paris.
Again the girl asked if everything was all right. The incessant sound of scissors and sewing machines formed a background to their voices.
Still St-Cyr didn’t turn from the window. ‘Yes … yes. For the moment. Sylviane, I have only one question for you, but it’s very important. Did Mademoiselle Arcuri’s maid, Yvette Noel, call to ask you to make her mistress another purse?’
Snatching up a pair of scissors and a remnant, the girl moved to the window and began to study the street with the eye of an expert. ‘Is someone after you?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Sylviane, please answer my question – there are two of them. The one looking at the ladies’ hats, the other pretending to tie a shoe.’
‘Me, I have already spotted them. Yes, the girl called and asked me to make another. She said the original had been stolen.’
‘Not lost?’
‘No, stolen, Monsieur Louis. Of this I am positive.’
‘Was she in great distress?’
The girl continued to watch the men. ‘In tears. Yes, she was in tears. It … it was not two days before she … she was murdered.’
‘Who took the purse over to her?’
‘Myself. Julian … You know how he is, Monsieur Louis. She was special, this Gabrielle. He … he had his eye on her, I think. Ever since the dress, you understand, the fittings. Julian, he is like the miser who always has a little something under the floorboards. Another prospect. A war widow. What could be better?’