‘Let me ask Rene to take you to my room. As soon as I can, I’ll join you there.’
‘Rene is needed here to fill your late husband’s shoes.’
Damn him! ‘Then give me a moment to speak to Jeanne.’
Any excuse. Was it to be like that? ‘The countess won’t miss you, Mademoiselle Arcuri, so please, which door must we use?’
He was sharp – but she’d felt this since that first sight of him at the club. ‘The main one but wait until I’ve left. I don’t want the general seeing us together.’
‘He already has.’
She found a clean glass and filled it. ‘Then follow me, Inspector. This place is like a warren. Secret doors and secret passageways. I wouldn’t want you to get lost.’
Corridors and corridors, room and rooms. They walked and walked, neither of them saying a thing, and when they entered yet another wing there was at last a distinct change in the decor.
‘The servants’ quarters,’ he said.
‘Paris is where I live. Remember?’
The room was plain – excruciatingly so when one thought of the flat she had in Paris. The single iron bed with its high, curved iron tube and straight rod ends had been painted white so long ago that the ivoried, flaking paint lent a flea-market desperation to the thing.
The quilted coverlet was a homespun green with pink and cream-coloured roses. Two hooked rugs half hid the bare wooden floor. There was a bureau, a mirror, none too big at that and mounted at an awkwardly low angle for a woman as tall as she … an armoire, a chair, a chamber pot beneath the bed …
Few pictures were on the walls – country scenes that had been cut from magazines and then pasted into rescued frames. A cross.
An antique chiffon dress, a gorgeous thing whose gladiolus print fairly leapt from the off-cream fabric, hung from a hanger to one of the armoire’s hinges.
St-Cyr was at once puzzled and deeply troubled by the sight of the dress. Was it to be something to wear at the club or in a casket? It had that look about it. The bed, the room … Had she chosen the room to spite the countess? Perhaps.
She found the will to laugh at him and to smile with her lovely eyes as she unpinned her hat and veil and tossed them on the bed, but had she misinterpreted his concern?
‘So, Inspector, you find me at home in the ChaTeau Theriault. No secrets any more.’
‘Madame, I …’
‘Charles is very dead, Inspector. He isn’t here. We’re not hiding him. That’s all a crazy notion.’
‘I didn’t ask if you were.’
Her gestures were quick. ‘Not yet, but me, I know you’ll get around to it, eh? It’s not possible to discuss things without considering him.’
She began to unhook the back of her dress. ‘I hate black. I always have, ever since I was a little girl and they made me watch my grandmother’s funeral. The Russian Orthodox Church, Inspector. Black is very black there, and most of the priests have black beards or ones that are fiercely grey with black hairs in them.
‘Could you …? Would you …?’ she asked. ‘This blasted hook … Jeanne insisted I wear the dress. It’s one of hers. How any woman could possess two mourning dresses is beyond me. You’d think she would have given it away years ago but not her. Ah no, not that one, my fine Inspector. A miser, a real miser.’
The hook was bent. The touch of her – the crescent of black mesh, of very fine lace across the back, the feel of her skin was like satin and warm, so warm … Ah, Mon Dieu, was she taking him back through the years to the streets? Would that be her method of attack?
‘When my family and I became separated during the flight from the Revolution, I saw black funerals night after night and sometimes now, I see them at the oddest times.’
She was waiting for him to undo the buttons. ‘My funeral,’ she said. ‘Jerome’s – Yvette’s, of course. Those two are still so fresh in the mind, isn’t that so, Inspector?’
‘Mademoiselle Arcuri …’ Her hair was so soft …
‘Gabrielle … I thought we’d agreed to that at the mill.’
Still her back was to him. ‘Gabrielle, then.’ He hesitated. At last he began to undo the buttons.
‘Jean-Louis St-Cyr. It has a nice ring to it. Like Natasha Kulakov Myshkin, Inspector, but once a cop, always a cop, eh? And once a girl of the streets, always one. Me, I think I liked you better at the mill. Then there was a confrontation, and once that was over, a sense of kindness, a genuine concern. You’re a man of the world. You know all about life, all about young girls who have nothing and must somehow eat. Girls who are caught, trapped …’
The last button was just above the slender waist and when it was undone, she slid her hands deftly under the shoulders and stepped out of the thing.
‘Mademoiselle Arcuri …’
‘Gabrielle, remember?’
‘Yes … yes … Ah, Mon Dieu, madame.’
‘It’s not as if I was naked, Inspector. This slip is decent enough and if not it …’ She dragged the thing off. ‘… then what is underneath.’
St-Cyr watched as she crumpled the slip into a ball and threw it at the bed. ‘A warm shirt, I think, and a sensible skirt – I mustn’t taunt my mother-in-law too much by wearing trousers on a day like this even though she often wears them herself. Relax, Jean-Louis St-Cyr, I’m not about to seduce you.’
‘Mademoiselle Arcuri, a few questions … Please, we must…’
‘There you go again,’ she said, tossing a hand as she went over to the armoire to open one of its doors. ‘Mademoiselle this and Mademoiselle that. My God, it’s freezing in this lousy place! Always freezing or boiling or damp. God, it’s damp when the rains come in the spring and in November. Water pissing on that roof, pissing, always pissing.’
A soft yellow hunting shirt, forest-green pullover and flecked beige skirt came out of the armoire, she handing them to him and then pausing to run her fingers through her hair before shaking it out. ‘Funerals, ugh! Why can’t we just be allowed to go to sleep in peace? They’re so undignified. No privacy whatsoever. One can’t even be allowed to remember what a person once looked like.’
The shirt went on but she wouldn’t button it just yet. Ah no, she’d let him have an eyeful of her breasts. She would grab the skirt and purposely bend forward as she stepped into it, then think better of the brassiere. ‘I hate these things,’ she said. ‘Would you mind?’
‘What?’ he managed.
Petrified now, the poor man. ‘Holding the shirt again.’
‘Mademoiselle Arcuri …’ Ah, Mon Dieu, such magnificence! So round and firm and gently uptilted, the nipples rosy … the scent of perfume in his nostrils. No thoughts of Marianne … no thoughts … A mirage … a mirage … ‘Please cover yourself,’ he winced. The bed … He felt hot, confused … What was she really up to? Death … was she defying death by forcing him into a corner?
‘I thought you were a man who understood the streets, a hunter of animals,’ she said. He looked so ill at ease it was almost comic. Perhaps after all his wife had had good reasons to leave him? ‘You poor, poor man. They’re good breasts, aren’t they? Nice to look at, but I won’t let you touch them,’ she said harshly.
A girl of the streets.
‘The past must always be forgiven, madame. Circumstance is the measure of us all.’
And one must not be bitter, eh? She let go of her breasts and began to tuck the shirt into the skirt and to button up. ‘How did you find out?’
‘I went to the Lune Russe and had a talk with its proprietor. He didn’t say you’d once worked the streets. He said you would never have done such a thing.’
‘All Russian men are the same. Full of sentiment in a world that has no place for it.’
Dressed, she brushed out her hair and tied it with a red velvet ribbon. ‘You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’ she asked.
At the sight of the cigarette case she was momentarily lost in thought. ‘Victor’s a good man, Inspector. The Lune Russe treated me like a real chanteuse, but since I’ve gone back to Paris to live I’ve not had the courage to face him.’
‘No artist would, but why work at the Club Mirage? Oh, for sure, you had a deal with the Corsicans. Ten per cent of the take and you knew with that voice of yours, you’d soon pack the place. That was very shrewd of you, and me, I admire such a quality in a woman.’