Kohler shattered the air with expletives. ‘Come on! You couldn’t have seen all that! How’d you really know which was which?’
‘Experience. When you have had to examine people as much as I have, Hermann, you learn. Have patience. That banker sat and ate like a banker; the insurance agent like one of his kind; so, too, the notary.’
‘And the owner?’
‘Ah yes, Monsieur Fabien Artel. The fleshy lips and closely shaven cheeks blue with shadow. The dimpled chin, eh? and the puffy eyelids whose eyes were hooded beneath arched, dark brows that were not thick. The rapidly receding hairline, the touches of grey that have been patiently hidden. The arrogance of that nose, the corpulence-the wedding ring that should most certainly have been cut off and expanded to prevent loss of circulation were he not so parsimonious and busy. Whereas the banker’s eyes might hold a momentary trace of sympathy for a needy client, untrue of course, this one’s could never hold any. He views the world as a notecase and asks only how much is in it for him?’
‘Suffers from a crisis of the liver, does he?’
‘And the misused prostate!’
Good Gott im Himmel! ‘Don’t hate him, Louis. Don’t let all those bodies get to you. It’s best not to.’
‘Then ask the mother who tried to reach her child, Hermann. Ask the woman who was tied to a bed she had probably slept in every night of her life. Ask your priest who it was that lit the fire. Ask him why he was in the cinema and not about his duties at such a busy time.’
‘Ask the Bishop, Louis. Ask the one who employed him.’
‘That is exactly what I intend to do when he gives me the wafer, Hermann. You’re learning, eh? A few more months with me and I will consider you polished enough to go home.’
Normally Hermann would have risen to such bait and loudly proclaimed the Thousand Year Reich was in France for ever. Instead, he walked away into the night and when he commandeered a carnage, he asked first if it was waiting for the Prefet of Police and the Obersturmfuhrer Klaus Barbie. ‘Then we have need of it, my friend,’ he said. ‘Gestapo Central, Paris. Don’t argue or you will face the wrong end of my pistol.’
The carriage was only of limited use and that was probably just as well. Dropped at the foot of the montee des Chazeaux, St-Cyr made excuses-the terrain, the height and steepness of Fourviere Hill, the narrow, medieval streets of Vieux Lyon, the impassibility to carriages beyond certain points, the Roman origins of Lugdunum and prior need to defend the city from them by fortifying the heights. ‘Ah, so many reasons, Hermann. Please, it is but a little climb up to the Basilica.’
‘Little? I see nothing but a steady stream of penitents bundled in black on a pitch-black night and mumbling over their beads with regret.’
‘The funicular is closed. A power failure of Germanic origins-i.e., punishment for some slight. Probably graffiti splashed on some wall in stolen white paint that ran Vive le General de Gaulle, Vive la France libre, or some such thing.’
‘If you French had guts you would have levelled this hill! I can’t understand why the Romans didn’t. Christ, it’s cold!’
They started up the 242 steps of the montee, no sand on the pavement as a special treat in these frozen times. Shuffling old ladies, old men grinding their false teeth and carefully budgeting their cigarettes, coughing, spitting, hawking up their guts, boys, girls, babes in arms, single mothers, grass widows, war widows and older men with younger wives, one of whom was painfully pregnant and could no longer button her overcoat. Triplets? wondered Kohler anxiously. The rope around her belly was frayed. She’d worn three aprons beneath it to help keep the cold at bay. Piety shone in her eyes and the flic on duty hadn’t the heart to warn her to extinguish her candle.
‘Gott im Himmel, you French are stupid!’ seethed Kohler. ‘If it isn’t ten thousand steps up to some rathole of a fucking flat in Montmartre or Saint-Denis, it’s an elevator with a two-strand cable that ought to have been replaced ten thousand years ago!’
‘We are going up to the Basilica, Hermann. Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think they had elevators then, though I am positive they came into use about 1850.’
‘Another lecture, eh? Then let me tell you, you French have been using the same goddamned elevators ever since!’
Hermann hated using the elevators in Paris or anywhere else. He had been caught once, left hanging by a hair, and the memory of that near-catastrophe was always fresh. Always! Now he would use the stairs but, as he hated them too, there was no solution short of parachuting him in. And he hated heights more than anything.
As if ashamed of his behaviour, Kohler mumbled, ‘Madame, permit me, please, to offer you and your husband a little assistance. The steps are steep and I gather there are far too many of them.’
In alarm she dropped her candle, let out a shriek, gasped, ‘Georges!’ and fainted. Christ!
It took fifteen minutes to bring her round and get her back on her feet. In all this time the shuffling stream never stopped, but only pinched down as it passed them, then opened up again. Shoulders rubbing shoulders. Coughs chasing coughs. Step after step. Christmas Eve, 1942.
‘Your face, Hermann. She saw your face. The mark of that whip, eh? The scar, it is still too fresh. The frost must have made it glisten.’
‘She knew I was Gestapo, Louis. She was so damned scared, she practically dropped her babies right there. Could we have delivered them?’
‘Of course. Under the Third Reich all things are possible.’
‘I did once. Did you know that? She’d been knifed and was dying, Louis, and I held her little boy up for her even as she closed her eyes and smiled. Berlin, 13 June 1939, right after one of the rallies. Always there were the rallies. Thinking he’d be safe in the crowd, some son of a bitch had to let her have it for no other reason than that she looked a trifle Jewish, I guess. We never knew the reason and we never caught him.’
‘Remind me to buy you a drink and a bit of supper, eh?’
‘Those ration tickets Marianne left for you are now at least a good four weeks out of date, idiot! I’ll find us a place. I’m not hungry anyway.’
‘That priest just knelt and let it happen, Hermann. He didn’t try to save himself like all the others.’
‘Did he tie the woman to her bed? Is that what you’re wondering?’
‘Or did he know the Salamander would strike and is that why he was in the cinema?’
There were so many questions, so little time in which to get things done. At the top of the montee they began yet another steep climb, the switchbacks of the Sacre Coeur snaking through scant woods where the nubby branches of the trees reminded Kohler of battlefields long passed and of sanctuary woods after weeks of constant shelling.
The French always pruned their trees too much. They liked them wounded into stumps and fingerless fists.
‘That priest was going to sodomize the woman, Louis. Guilt stopped him and he went downstairs into the cinema only to find the flames of hell had descended upon him.’
‘We’ll ask the bishop. We’ll tell him the Church’s secret is safe with us.’
For some time now the litany of the Mass had had a lulling effect. There was far less coughing and clearing of the throat or blowing of the nose. More rhythm to the responses, more unity of intonation and automatic signing of the Cross.