Hermann nudged his arm with a pair of borrowed opera glasses. ‘You take the left down there, Louis. I’ll take the right. He’s not up here.’
‘Or is he, eh, my friend? Come, come, how can you be so sure?’
The sound of violins filled the theatre. ‘She’d have recognized him even if he’s dressed as a woman.’
‘Who would have?’
‘Madame Rachline, idiot! She’s right here with … Ah nom de Jesus-Christ, Louis, she’s vanished!’
‘So we look for her and we find him, Hermann. Is that the way it is to be?’
‘And we ask, will he also use gasoline?’
The elevator shaft went up to a drum hoist on the roof and down to a well in the cellar. Hermann hated lifts. Old ones, new ones, it did not matter. They seldom worked properly. Life too often hung by a thread when least expected. There was pork grease on the cable, not petroleum grease, a bad sign. Strands of wire had become frayed and some had parted.
The grease was pale whitish grey and glistened in the beam of the torch as they gingerly stood on top of the cage and the fucking thing rocked in its housing.
Which of them saw it first, they’d never know. Gasoline was trickling down the cable in a little river of its own. Already it had formed a puddle in a corner of the roof, and from there, had seeped down the outside of the cage until droplets were released to hit the floor far below them.
Hermann looked questioningly up into the darkness of the shaft above. ‘You know I don’t like heights, Louis.’
‘Time, Hermann. Is there time? Let us use the stairs and not the ladder.’
‘Leiter Weidling will have checked the drive house. It must be between here and there.’
A different droplet fell and then, after an indeterminate pause, another. ‘Louis …’ Again the torch beam probed the darkness but Occupation batteries were subject to failure. ‘Water, Louis,’ he muttered. ‘It’s dripping on my head.’
‘Water?’
‘Yes.’
The cold and impersonal iron ladder beckoned. It went up one side of the timbered shaft but neither of them had thought to tell anyone the lift must not be used while they were up there.
When the hoist drum began to turn, it filled the shaft with its sound and through this came the muted strains of Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony, Opus 90, the second movement, ah yes. The whirring soon filled the shaft and then the clunking of the stops as the cage descended to leave them stranded.
Mendelssohn … If one tried, one could almost see the cellos as they carried the countermelody. Lovely … it was lovely. Did Charlebois know his music so well?
Half-way to the hoist there was a cable guide and stop, and it was here that the Salamander had tied a jerry can of gasoline. They could just pick it out in the feeble beam of light.
Again there was dripping water, and again Hermann felt it, this time on an outstretched hand. With almost haunting, terrifying progression, the music reached them. They thought of heating and ventilating ducts, they thought of all the places Charlebois might hide and never be found.
‘A condom,’ grunted Louis. ‘It’s hanging from a bit of wire, Hermann. It bulges with water like a woman’s breast with the milk of my dreams.’
‘Milk? Dreams? Can you get it? Don’t drop it.’
‘The cube of phosphorus will be in the centre at the bottom, Hermann, just above the pin-hole of the nipple.’
‘Nipple?’
‘You’re taller,’ said Louis, straining. ‘Your arms, Hermann, they are longer than mine. Please, I am sorry for the inconvenience but if I were to climb down and you were to climb up …’
The torch fell away, and they listened for it until it was heard.
‘Hang on, Louis! Ah Gott im Himmel, idiot! Give me some room.’
‘My foot! You are standing on my foot!’
Hermann paused as the echoes chased their words. ‘Maybe you’d better find us a bucket of water, Louis. Just in case.’
‘Shall I stand on the cage and hope to catch the condom in the dark, eh? Get up there, my friend. That’s what they pay you for. Please don’t piss on me.’
Hermann unbent the wire in the darkness-he was really very good at such things, having once been a demolitions expert.
Gingerly the bag was passed from hand to hand. ‘Easy, Louis. Easy. You’re right. It’s like a pregnant woman’s tit just before the kid comes.’
‘Is he trying to tell us something, Hermann? Is this nothing but a decoy?’
‘No phosphorus, is that what you mean?’
‘We will have to see, once we get it under water.’
Grey-white and looking just as Martine Charlebois had said it would, the phosphorus appeared harmless as the flaccid rubber of the cut-open condom, stirred by some hidden current, drifted silently away only to cling to the side of the galvanized bucket like a manta ray in a distant ocean.
‘Now are you satisfied there is a threat, Herr Weidling? And you, Herr Obersturmfuhrer Barbie? Will you not now empty the theatre in an orderly fashion before chaos descends on us?’ asked the Frog. Verdammt, but he looked worried sick. Proud though he was, at any moment Louis would go down on his knees to them. A patriot.
It was Barbie who said, ‘It is not necessary. He will be found and stopped.’
There was a cube of phosphorus safe under water in one of the toilets, a reminder. There was another in a condom, hanging from the nozzle of the only showerbath to service the dressing rooms.
The French horns were very regal, very stirring as they reached high into the heavens of the first Brandenburg Concerto, in F, the third movement. They sounded as if greeting a royal coach that came at full gallop. They were very distracting.
Leiter Weidling was grey with fatigue and sweating. Anxiety tore at him for he knew he must now face their questions. The three of them were alone for the moment in the manager’s office on the second floor.
‘My wife did not know the identity of the Salamander. I swear it,’ he said gruffly even though they hadn’t asked. ‘Oh yes, my Kaethe went to meet someone special in Lubeck and those other places, and here in the cinema also, but,’ he raised the stump of a reproving finger, ‘she did not know him and expected another woman, a friend of the one she had been … well, you know.’
‘Fucking,’ said Hermann, to clarify things.
‘Claudine Bertrand set her up,’ said Louis quietly. ‘In each fire a scapegoat was needed, someone upon whom suspicion would fall until, finally, Martine Charlebois’s fiance was killed. Then the fires stopped.’
‘Weidling removed his cap and ran a hand wearily over his thinning hair, touching the bald spot she had ridiculed. Two “women”, and my future wife, gentlemen. Ja, ja, Herr Kohler, I knew perfectly well what she had been up to. I needed her. How else could I find the Salamander? But she was not the cause of the fires and took no part in them, of this I was certain. She was the bait I used and watched and finally trapped into a confession and … and marriage.’
‘You knew Claudine had come from Lyon,’ said Louis. ‘Did you trace Martine Charlebois here as well?’
The French. Always they were a nuisance. ‘I had no time. I was kept far too busy. My superiors chose not to let me continue the investigation and go after the Salamander for fear of antagonizing France at such a critical time.’
‘The war came, then the Occupation and finally a chance to visit Lyon and reopen the case,’ breathed Hermann. ‘Gestapo Mueller gave the okay and you brought your wife along, thinking to use her to flush the bastard out, but he got wind of it and now you’re going to have to bury her.’
Weidling reached for his cap to put it on. ‘And the man she sought but understood to be a woman like herself, Herr Kohler, until the two of them finally met. We must concentrate on the stage. I am almost certain that is where the Salamander will have planned his little surprise. The audience, yes? In full view of everyone.’