‘Or were you the one to do the tying up? Did you brush their skin with flames as they tried to cry out through the gag you had stuffed in their mouths? Did you singe the hairs on the stomach, the groin, the face, eh, until, in ecstasy, they finally came?’
He gave her a moment, then asked, ‘Did you go only with women, Mademoiselle Bertrand? Did you enjoy making them so afraid, that fear then heightened awareness until they shuddered with release at the touch of your tongue? Was that the only way they could ever attain sexual climax? The striving, mademoiselle, the straining for it until suddenly, the fire, the flames were too much for them and finally they yielded?’
Her expression of total innocence made him furious at his own inability to fathom this thing. Was there to be another, even more horrific fire?
‘Who did you go to that cinema with, mademoiselle? Your childhood friend Madame Rachline? Come, come, I know you were there. You were sitting in that projection booth talking to the projectionist. When the cry of fire came, you lost a shoe, you dropped these …’
He tossed the bent and twisted cigarette case on her bed. The compact and lipstick tube followed, then the steel shank of that other shoe. He found the remains of the fountain pen and tossed it into the pile. He found the jewelled cross. ‘Father Adrian Beaumont, mademoiselle,’ he said so very quietly. ‘Did you know of him? A Monsieur Henri Masson gave this cross to him.’
According to the bishop, Masson had died ten or twelve years ago. She’d have been twenty-two or twenty at the time. Had he been a former client of La Belle Epoque? Had he been alive when Claudine first went to work for her childhood friend?
He took out the anonymous letters the prefet had given him.
My dear messieurs
As a concerned and loyal citizen I must tell you that Father Adrian Beaumont, secretary to Bishop Dufour, has been breaking his vows. Day after day I have seen Father Adrian enter Mademoiselle Madeleine Aurelle’s building, sometimes right after her.
Always there is the long pause, the visit of two and sometimes three hours-once four hours. Always that one would return to the street like a thief, while Mlle Aurelle, the shameless harlot that she was, would gaze down upon the object of her lust, the vanishing figure of her confessor, from the bedroom window.
Once her night-dress, it was open and once she waved to him and he, caught by guilt, stood transfixed in the street unable to move.
I heard him whisper, ‘Cover yourself, Mlle Madeleine. For God’s sake, cover yourself,’ and when he looked at me, aghast that I might have overheard, there was nothing but terror in his eyes.
There was no signature. Depressed that such letters had become all too common a means of getting back at others, St-Cyr ran his eyes over it again. The penmanship was excellent, the handwriting neat and small and precisely budgeted, the straightness of the lines perfect, the paper good but not overly expensive by pre-war standards-one always had to measure such things by those bygone days. Paper like this would no longer be readily available.
A woman? he asked. One didn’t give much credence to such letters. Indeed, there was always distaste, yet one was forced to read them from time to time.
It must have come in early, just after the fire. Either it had been delivered to the Prefecture or Guillemette had got it from the Gestapo over at the Hotel Terminus.
He put the letter down on her bed and placed the cross with its chain on top of it.
Bishop Dufour had not given answers readily. There had been hesitation over Father Adrian but that would only have been natural. ‘Ah merde,’ he said of the letter, ‘it’s wrong of me to be trapped into paying any attention to this.’
The other two letters were equally condemning. Monsieur Artel had always ‘talked of burning his cinema down to collect the insurance’. He had ‘never treated his employees well’. He had ‘cheated them of their wages and had done other things’. He had ‘always kept the fire doors padlocked in spite of the regulations’.
The fire marshal’s wife had ‘known of her husband’s love affair with Madame Elaine Gauthier’. She had been jealous and had ‘sworn she would get the two of them’.
Madame Robichaud ‘suffered from acute depression’, was ‘suicidal’ and ‘possessive’.
She had ‘consulted the prefet on the matter and had asked for that one’s help’.
She had been ‘out’ on the night of the fire. Her eldest daughter, who had been staying with her mother ‘to calm her down’, could give no ‘adequate answer as to where her mother had gone that evening’.
Lined up in a row, the handwriting and the paper were as different as the other objects on the bed. The cheap and shoddy compact and cigarette case, the richness of the jewelled cross.
But, again, he found himself asking, Had a woman written each of them?
Three distinctly different women, one well-educated perhaps, another-that of the insurance letter-a disgruntled employee.
And that of the Madame Robichaud letter? he asked. The fire chief’s concierge perhaps? The family would live in a reasonably good area, quite central probably and very middle class.
The writing was not so brutal or so refined but was something in between.
Clearly it was implied that the writer of the Madame Robichaud letter was a confidant of the woman, or knew some indiscreet person who was close to her. He was surprised the writer hadn’t made derogatory remarks about the fire marshal, and he wondered then, in spite of telling himself he shouldn’t, if it had not come from Robichaud’s mistress, from Madame Elaine Gauthier.
The ‘a’s, though different, were the classic classroom ‘a’s of a schoolteacher. The ‘l’s were similar, the crossing of the ‘t’s. Ah nom de Dieu, they had all come from the same hand. He was certain of it. Certain! But had that girl with the bicycle sent them? Had she dropped this one’s work card on purpose?
Like Hermann, he found himself staring across the street in the direction of La Belle Epoque. He could not see its chimneys, though he knew there would be smoke issuing from them even when there was little or none from most of the others.
Holidays were always the worst of times for such arsonists. A crowded cafe, a railway station, another church perhaps-yes, another cinema … any of the many blocks of flats. They were so old, they were just asking for a fire. The streets were often so narrow.
Lubeck, Heidelberg and Koln were all very old cities. Had those two women paid them each a visit or had they absolutely nothing to do with any of the fires?
And what of Madame Rachline and her continued evasiveness? The woman had lied about being at midnight Mass and walking home. But had she come here to see Claudine only to stand, perhaps, in the street below, gazing up at this very window in doubt and fear?
Yes, he said to himself. Yes, that is what she must have done. Then she does not yet know Claudine is dead, but only suspects there is something very wrong and is herself in danger.
In the kitchen he found an open bottle of friar’s balsam. It was simply the usual alcoholic solution of benzoin, the balsamic resin from tropical trees of the genus Styrax, especially those from Java and Sumatra.
A spoonful or two into the hot water to clear the sinuses and chest by breathing the steam. A sweetly aromatic, quite resinous odour that strangely lasted long after inhalation. A clinging odour.
The Gare de Perrache was frozen in the pearly-grey light. At twenty degrees of frost, the swastika that flew above the central railway station hung as if in fright and wanting to disappear.
People came and went, all bundled up and grim about it. Just across the Cours de Verdun, at Number 12, two SS guards stood sentinel outside Gestapo HQ, the Hotel Terminus, a flag above them.