Two women, not one man, a Salamander, had been seen. It made no sense to tell them so little yet expect them not only to find out everything in the space of one or two days-would they have that much time?-but also to put a stop to the arsonist or arsonists immediately.
And how, please, had Berlin found out about it in the first place?
Back inside the cinema, Kohler came upon what must have been a priest. Only the top of a richly jewelled cross protruded from tightly clasped hands that had been roasted. The corpse was jammed between two rows of seats and on its knees facing the foyer. A chain, of many links and stones, was wrapped around the right hand, and why must that God of Louis’s make him do things like this? Gingerly he broke the encasing ice away and teased the cross free. It came quite easily, the flesh clinging a little, but unravelling the chain was more sickening. His fingers trembled. His breath was held. He knew he was on to something.
Rubies and sky-blue sapphires and diamonds … tiny fleurs-de-lis in gold … 150,000 marks? 175,000? Renaissance? Was it that old?
No ordinary priest. The Bishop of Lyon’s secretary? he wondered. A cardinal perhaps or some ambassador from the Vatican? But why wear a thing like this to a film? Surely he must have known robbery was a distinct possibility?
Had he come fearing the worst, the fire, and then knelt to pray it would not happen even as it did?
All around him were the remains of dinner pails, boots, goggles and heavy leather-and-asbestos gauntlets, indicating that some of the men had only just come off shift from the marshalling yards in Perrache, right in the centre of the city not far from here and on the end of the tongue of land that lay between the Saone and the Rhone.
Gestapo HQ Lyon was in the Hotel Terminus facing the Gare de Perrache, an uncomfortable thought. Questions … there were bound to be questions. The Resistance thing if nothing else. Verdammt!
Two women and a priest, but no ordinary cleric. A large handbag woven out of rushes. A bag for the market, though nowadays market pickings were slim unless one dealt on the black market and had things to sell or trade.
A telex from Mueller, an order from Boemelburg. Shit!
Kohler sought the seats where the two women must have sat but, of course, they were now under a pile of humanity. Surely the priest could not have been looking their way. Not at the last. But had he known of them? Could it be possible?
Pocketing the cross, he moved away, found a broken wine bottle and another dinner pail, wondered again at the avidness of the railwaymen. Clearly they’d all agreed to gather to see a favourite film, but since the film had first come out in 1938, presumably most had seen it already.
Then why the gathering? he asked himself. Such meetings could only mean trouble.
He began to search further. Nearly everywhere there was the rubbish of railwaymen or members of their families. The gun he had found weighed on his conscience and he experienced a spasm of cold panic. He saw again that girl in the cellars of the Hotel Montfleury in Cannes, saw the blood trickling from her battered lips and nose to join the swill of vomit and excrement on the floor. Dead … dead at such a tender age. She’d known nothing, hadn’t even been involved. Well, not really.
‘Hermann …’
He leapt. ‘Louis, good Gott im Himmel, what the hell do you mean by startling me like that?’
Ah mon Dieu, Hermann was really not himself! ‘Nothing, mon vieux. Nothing, eh? Forgive me. The fire marshal wants a word.’
‘Then talk to him. I’m busy.’
‘Don’t be so gruff. His German counterpart is present and speaks no French. Kommandeur Weidling requests your presence as interpreter.’
Kohler pulled down a lower eyelid and made a face behind the bandanna. ‘Doesn’t he trust you to do it accurately?’
‘Please don’t give me horseshit, Hermann. Both men are nervous and not without good reason. They are afraid this will happen again and soon.’
‘Then there really is a pattern and there have been other fires?’
‘Ah yes, a pattern.’
‘The Salamander?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Did you find anything?’
A shrug would be best. ‘Just little things. Nothing much. We’ll look again, eh? After the conference.’
‘Piss off! The Feuerschutzpolizei back home can’t know anything about this, Louis. What the hell’s he doing here?’
Again there was that massive shrug. ‘Ask Gestapo Mueller; ask Herr Weidling but proceed gently. We can use all the help we can get.’
‘A visitor from home who just happens to be a fire chief and on the scene of a major fire? The son of a bitch shouldn’t even be here, Louis, not with all those incendiaries the fucking RAF are dropping at home!’
Hermann always had to have the last word. It was best to let him so as to avoid argument, but … Ah, what the hell. ‘Then let us have a look at our surroundings first, so as to have everything in perspective. Please, I think it is important.’
Kohler’s grunt was answer enough. Picking their way past the ticket booth, they stood a moment at the entrance, gazing out across place Terreaux. Bartholdi’s four magnificent horses were caught frozen in their imaginary flight to the sea. Shrouded in ice, the Goddess of Springs and Rivers looked unfeelingly down from her chariot at the corpse of a man who had run to her in flames for help.
French police and German soldiers kept the crowd at bay behind a rope barrier. The debris of firefighting was everywhere. Pumper trucks, whose snaking hoses were now collapsed and clinging to the icy pavement, were being attended to by exhausted firemen whose disillusionment at having failed to save so many was all too evident.
The square, one of the finest in Lyon and right in the centre of the city, would normally be busy in the afternoon, even under the Occupation. Now the curious and the grieving huddled around its periphery and, in places, beneath shop awnings that had been folded out of the way.
Collectively the mood of the crowd was one of outrage and fear. They’d be blaming the authorities. They’d be whispering How could you let a thing like this happen? Why were the fire doors padlocked? It was that bastard who owned the place. He did it for the insurance. No, no, it was a sadist, a maniac. It’s going to happen again. Oh yes it is!
A murmur intruded, a disturbing puzzle for it was not coming from the crowd. Now and then the sporadic chipping of firemen’s axes broke through the hush and the murmur as the hoses were freed for coiling.
Unsettled that he could not readily find the source of the murmur, St-Cyr scanned the length of the square. The Hotel de Ville, the city’s seventeenth-century town hall, faced on to it at the far end, with a domed clocktower rising above and behind the entrance. The Palais des Arts-the Palais Saint-Pierre-took up the whole of the opposite side of the square. Eighteenth century. All solid, well-built buildings. Staid but baroque too, and emitting that singularity of purpose so evident in the Lyonnais character. Good business and sound banking: silk and explosives, leather tanning and many other industries. A city of about 700,000, with blocks and blocks of nearly identical, shoulder-to-shoulder buildings from three to five windows wide and from four to six storeys high, as were some of these. The stone grey or buff-grey, the stucco buff-grey to pale pink. The roofs of dark grey slate or weathered orange tile, the chimneys far more solid than those of Paris and of brownish-yellow brick with chimneypots that were rarely if ever canted because the people here would have seen to them.
Mansard roofs with small attic windows and tiny one-or two-room garrets for servants, shopgirls, clerks and students were to the left and right. Below them were ornamental iron railings before tall french windows behind which most of the lace or damask curtains were now parted. Drop-shutters were pulled up and out of the way or, in a few places, lowered to half-mast like weary eyelids, and in one case, closed completely as if to shut out what had happened.