‘And this?’ snapped Kohler, shining his torch on the thing. ‘A sketch map of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, Louis. The riding trails they followed, the stables, dressage grounds, pigeon-shoot and cage, ah damn.’
‘All with the distances marked off. The puppet theatres, the children’s zoo, the restaurant with its salon de thé, the Musée en Herbe where he and Liline Chambert taught.’
‘“Sunday 10 January at about 3.20 p.m.” He’s got that written down too. The cemetery, Louis, the convent school. Ah Gott im Himmel, mon vieux, what the hell are we to do?’
Sickened by the thought, they had no other choice but to continue. They had to find Julien Rébé, of course. They had not forgotten him. It was only that the SS had inadvertently put Hasse foremost in their minds by trying to shield Debauve and save that bastard from arrest.
They had to find Violette Belanger, they had to find Nénette.
And when all of that was done, or before it, they had to talk to Sister Céline. They had to find the Sandman.
Montpamasse was alive in darkness. At the carrefour Vavin, the intersection of the boulevards Raspail and du Montpamasse, the firefly-glows of hustling cigarettes and probing torch pinpricks were turbulent. The great brasseries of the late 1920s and before, the Dôme, the Rotunde, Sélect and Coupole, were all doing a roaring business. Troops eddied and flowed, staff cars emitted tiny, piercing beams from their headlamps, there was much honking among the vélo-taxis, the gazogènes and ancient, nag-drawn calèches. Lorries brought the boys in. Later the Feld-gendarmen and the Paris gendarmes would either lock them in each establishment at curfew or drag them back to their Soldatenheime.
Girls stood on the street corners. Girls sold themselves in the freezing cold. In desperation, for it was against the law for her to make the approaches but okay if the man went to her, one banged on the Citroën’s side window. Louis rolled it down a centimetre.
Not realizing to whom she was speaking, she said, ‘I will do anything, monsieur. Anything.’
Kohler avoided argument by leaning over Louis to stuff a 100-franc note through the gap and tell her to go home. ‘You’ll only catch the flu.’
‘I already have it!’
The window closed. They nudged on ahead, the acid of ‘Must you waste our money?’ ringing in the driver’s ears. They tried to pass a disgorging lorry. Sailors beat upon the car, hooting, shouting, rocking it until the accelerator was touched.
The boulevard du Montpamasse was pitch-black but through this the white metal studs of a passage clouté, a pedestrian crossing, glowed eerily. A whistle was blown.
‘Turn here,’ said Louis.
‘It’s one further.’
‘Idiot! How long have you lived in this city?’
‘Okay, you win! Don’t get so uptight.’
The Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where sculpture and painting had been taught since 1904, was at Number 14. It was a street that, in the 1830s and ’40s, Louis Philippe had frequented, dining and playing nearby in a dance hall-one could call it no other-which sadly was no more, thought St-Cyr. Well, no matter. If not the boulevard du Montpamasse, then the clubs, the bars and cinemas of the rue de la Gaîtè, the rue Delambre, ah yes, and others. Yet here it was reasonably quiet. Here the steam had not yet been released from a boiler of a different kind.
No one could have been less intelligent or more desperate for money than Julien Rébé. The fortune-teller’s son was the mannequin. The drawing studio was huge, antiquated, panelled in darkly stained tongue-and-groove cedar and, because of the electricity outage, lighted by kerosene lamps that smoked. It was crowded and stepped down in tiers, while a balcony above was reserved for those who wished only to think about art as a life’s work and could dwell on the subject from rows of wooden benches. Far below them, the budding artists stood or sat and the scratches of their charcoal sticks on drawing paper rose up to fill the hall. Now a cough, of course, for it was the season for them. Now a quiet exchange with the drawing master, now a look, a line, a scratch, a rubbing with the thumb to shade and work the charcoal in.
Kohler heard Louis lightly tap the brass railing that kept them back from the precipice. ‘Down there. To the far left. Herr Hasse, but he is not sketching our mannequin. He’s working on something of his own.’
Two flics, one a giant, were far too conspicuous. They sat down. They took off their fedoras but kept their overcoats on. More than half the students were men of the Occupier and most were in uniform. All were bent on sketching, all were very serious about it. Laced among them there were a few older Frenchmen, many more women, some of the grey mice but most French. Old, young, lots of the not so young, the lonely whose husbands were locked up in prisoner-of-war camps or eternally in the arms of death.
A discus thrower Julien Rébé was not-well, not tonight. Tonight he was the standard bearer who clutched his staff and wore a Roman centurion’s expression but nothing else.
He had a good body, was of medium height and well proportioned, lithe and muscular, with lots of dark reddish brown hair on his legs, groin and chest, far less of it on his head, for he’d saved money and had had the haircut of haircuts. It was not the Fritz-cut of the Occupier. It was far shorter. A bristlework for the ladies to rub.
He had started to grow a beard but it simply made the narrow face, high forehead and deeply sunken eyes look damned scruffy, though somewhat older perhaps than his twenty-six years. Two of the kerosene lamps stood on the dais before him, one on either side. The only heat in the place, of course, was from those lamps and from the students.
The girls, the women with fingerless gloves, were attracted to him and had obviously arrived early, since most of the nearest positions had been taken up by them. Rébé, though he held his pose, was still free to seek and maintain eye contact with some of them. There would be smiles, demurely affected or boldly provocative, given by some of the women but not visible from up here. Unspoken exchanges. Slender hopes perhaps or silently-agreed-upon assignations.
‘That clairvoyant mother of his must have looked in her crystal ball and then thrown him out without a sou, Louis.’
‘And disowned him. At break-time he will go into the corridor to where his clothes are and will try to use them to get warm.’
‘I’ll tie them in knots, shall I?’
‘Herr Hasse seems not to care about him at all.’
Was the centurion so completely without conscience or so desperate he could ignore the killing of Andrée Noireau, or had he silenced Nénette and now thought he had no further worries? And what, please, then, of the Attack Leader who now spoke quietly to the drawing master?
Rébé heard two of the young women giggle. There was a faint murmur, another giggle, a hand to a mouth, a burst of ribald feminine laughter. One old man threw down his charcoal in disgust and cried out, ‘Shut your mouths, you silly bitches! Let those who wish to work do so.’
Rébé had noticed them up in the balcony. Unbidden, the erection he had been thinking about because of some attractive woman had suddenly become a strong reality. In panic, he turned and bolted from the dais, tripped, went down hard, knocked an easel over, and fled. There were hoots of laughter, much thrown charcoal, dismay on the part of some, and a sketch torn to shreds and offered up as a confetti.
He was trying to drag on his trousers when Kohler slammed him against a wall and put the bracelets on him.