The music of Haydn went on and on, over and over again. ‘No … no, that isn’t true, Henri. After her Max was killed, she threw herself into her music and her teaching. They were the only things that took the pain away and you know it. Don’t destroy the theatre she loved.’
‘As grandfather did?’ he snapped back at her acidly.
St-Cyr let her go ahead of him. He tugged at Weidling’s sleeve and finally whispered, ‘Put the gun down where he can see it.’
‘Dummkopf, don’t be a fool!’
‘If you shoot, the jars will break and we’ll never get out of here alive.’
Hermann was working his way around to one side. Momentarily the woman blocked the torchlight from the Salamander but then its beam fell on Charlebois again so that they could see the jars more clearly.
‘Ah nom de Jesus-Christ, Louis, he’s got the lids off!’
He had.
St-Cyr motioned to Weidling to stay put and began to ease himself away and around in a flanking motion. They’d have to try. They had no other choice. They were in too deep … too deep.
He brushed a cobweb from his face. With difficulty he eased himself under a crosspiece. Hermann was now some two metres to the other side of Charlebois; Leiter Weidling still perhaps four metres towards the entrance; Ange-Marie Rachline was resting back on her heels in front of her childhood friend.
‘Henri, do you remember Concarneau?’ she said.
The thought brought only despair. ‘How could I ever forget it?’
She brushed her tears away and tried to smile at him. ‘The smell of the sea, the sound of the waves, Henri.’
‘You would let Claudine hold your hands and I would pass the flame over her until …’
‘Until I told you where to touch her.’
‘Ah Jesus, Louis!’
That name was strung out for ever as the melody began again its strident surge. The tripline would be yanked, the bottles would be thrown … They could not get to them in time … time … Flames … There’d be engulfing flames … Phosphorus … searingly hot … Blinding … The stench of garlic … garlic … White smoke … dense white smoke and erupting gasoline …
Gently the woman took the jars from Charlebois’s hands and set them carefully to one side, ‘Bless you, Henri,’ she said, a tender whisper. ‘Your memory will live for ever for not having destroyed this place.’
‘Then shoot me!’ he screamed, and it was done as the sound of the cellos rose above them.
Paris was just not itself. Gripped in the iron fist of winter and that of the Occupier, the city was more than ominously silent. St-Cyr paused as he turned the corner on to his beloved rue Laurence-Savart. He knew the house at Number Three would be a shambles-shattered windows and splintered boards, the front wall and yard a wreck, a mistake … a Resistance bomb. Yet he was too tired and depressed to care. Lyon had left its mark on him and Hermann … Hermann had not wanted to share a belated bottle of the Moulin-a-Vent or to spend a moment in holiday salutations no matter how late.
Instead, hungry for his little pigeon and his Dutch hausfrau, he had made feeble excuses and had left the Surete’s little Frog to his own designs.
Gabi was still away at the chateau, the invitation for him to join her but a painful memory. The house, as he was just saying, was … ‘Ah no, Hermann No!’
In their absence, the Organization Todt, which did all the building for the Reich, had completely rebuilt the place! Three days, four days … what had it been?
In spite of knowing the street would now hate and distrust him as never before-A collaborator and why not, eh? Just look at what has happened!-he had to marvel at the job and to wonder how much Hermann had paid them.
There was a note tucked into a beautifully painted brand-new door. ‘Louis, go out and get laid. You need it.’
‘Ah merde, Hermann …’ Eyes smarting, he searched the long, narrow canyon of the street in hopes of seeing his partner, only to know the Bavarian would be sound asleep in his flat with a woman on either side of him.
‘Monsieur the Chief Inspector …?’
It was Dede Labelle, whose mother took in laundry. ‘Monsieur, my friends and I, we wish to … to beg your forgiveness. We are sorry we have not given you the benefit of doubt in the matter of your … your collaboration. The people who have fixed your house, fixed the windows of all the others and gave them also the pleasure of burning the scrap boards.’
He went out to the boy and opened the brand-new gate for him. ‘That’s all right. You are forgiven. Come … come in. Let’s have a look at the workmanship, eh? The Boches-hey, those lousy Krauts, Dede, there are some things they can do very well.’
The boy was not smiling and had no desire to enter. ‘What is it, Dede? Is something the matter? Come, come, my partner and I have just finished a most difficult case in which a Salamander, realizing that a German fire marshal was hot on his trail, set fire to a cinema killing 182 innocent people and a priest who knew all about him. Unfortunately the fire marshal’s wife, who had been lured to the cinema by a friend of the Salamander and who also knew too much, was not locked in the toilets as planned and failed to die in the blaze.’
‘Monsieur …’ The boy broke into tears. Ah nom de Dieu, what was this?
‘My sister, Monsieur the Chief Inspector … Joanne, she is missing now these past two days and we … we were afraid she has … Grand-mere, she says Joanne, she should never have answered the advertisement in the Messages Personnels, that these days mannequins are no longer in demand, and that even if a girl is ripe and beautiful, no one would have the money to buy the film with which to take the necessary photographs of her.’
St-Cyr gazed down at the crumpled scrap of newsprint. Little Joanne, missing …? He saw her as a babe in arms, as a toddler playing with her friends, saw her as a schoolgirl in her blue smock and beret, and saw her in the shop where she had found a job. ‘Eighteen … she’d be eighteen now,’ he said aloud, but to himself and then sternly, ‘It’s a matter for the prefet, Dede. It’s Paris. It’s his turf.’
Ah nom de Dieu, how could one explain the politics and territorial insanities of policework to a boy of ten who was desperate?
‘Let’s go inside, eh? Let’s have a cup of that wretched coffee we all have to drink, and you can tell me everything while I have a wash and a shave.’
‘She … she wanted so much to be a mannequin, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. It was to be her great escape. She was going to buy us all so many wonderful things. A new bicycle, a-’
‘Yes, yes, the coffee first, eh, Dede? You can make it for me while I telephone my partner.’
‘There … there was also a bank robbery.’
‘Pardon?’
‘And a murder, a shooting.’
‘Please don’t pile it on. Let’s just stick to the disappearance. Let’s find her first before it’s too late.’
‘But … but she will have seen the robbery and the shooting? That’s what we all think, all of us. The other boys and myself.’
A bank robbery and a shooting … ‘How much was stolen?’
Blinking away his tears, the boy looked steadily up at him and for a moment there was only the silence of honesty between them. Then, ‘Eighteen millions, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. Eighteen.’
One for every year of her life … ‘Good. My partner’s broke. That will be enough to tempt him out of bed at such an early hour.’