Grabbing him by the neck, he pitched him back into the drawing studio, where the students now stood and gaped or sat still, not wanting to believe their centurion had been arrested.
‘Hasse,’ swore St-Cyr, moving up the tiers, knocking things over. ‘Hasse …’
The easel was there, a tin of pencils, one of charcoal sticks … little else but a small rag and an eraser.
Out on the street, they heard the Attack Leader’s car join the traffic on the boulevard du Montpamasse.
The drawing he had been working on was not of Andrée Noireau but of Nénette Vernet and obviously done from memory. She did not smile. The silent scream she gave leapt from the sketch. Her sealskin hat had fallen off, the overcoat padded with leaves was buttoned up. She looked an urchin, a child caught up in a war zone. The Blitzkrieg in the East and Poland … Poland …
‘Come on, Louis. Let’s take this one to where he won’t cause trouble any more, then we’ll go after Hasse.’
The look in Rébé’s greeny-brown eyes was empty of all feeling, of all conscience. Staring straight back at them, he refused to say a thing.
‘Good. That is as it should be,’ said the Sûreté softly. ‘Save it all for when you face Madame Vernet. We’ll let her accuse you, then maybe you will accuse her and the child you share can cement the relationship by giving you both away.’
‘The heiress is dead. He killed her. The one you chased. The German.’
They could not leave Rébé in the cells of the rue des Saussaies for fear the SS would silence him to protect Hasse, they couldn’t call for a salad basket and request a guided tour of the Santé Prison, not just yet.
They would have to leave him somewhere safe.
‘The Club Mirage,’ breathed Louis. ‘The Corsicans can take care of him. It’ll be their contribution. It’s time they did something useful.’
‘Is the kid really dead, Louis?’
‘Ah, let us hope this one was lying to save himself.’
‘I wasn’t. I saw the German in the Jardin d’Acclimatation this afternoon. He was following Nénette. She got into his car.’
Ah no …
The lion was tame. He had had his canines and his claws pulled but still could inspire unease, for he was uncaged and nervous when there was too much shouting, and eight hundred servicemen on leave did tend to make noise.
The Club Mirage was on the rue Delambre-just a brie hustle from the Gande-Chaumière and convenient even in the dark, but now there was light, now the thirsty thronged the zinc Now eighteen all but naked women who should have been ashamed kicked their gams and thrust their bare bottoms at the troops as the band hit everything it had and the clarinetist pinched his reed and blew the highest possible C.
It was deafening, and under normal circumstances Kohler would have grinned and lapped it up from the front-centre table he had appropriated by kicking others out. He fed the lion a titbit, some salty ersatz thing the troops seemed to gorge on with their beer. He said, ‘Nice pussy, rest your head in Prisoner Rébé’s lap. Yes … yes, that’s just the way. Uncle Hermann has to find us another beer.’
The lion’s handler was wrapped in narrow straps of gold satin that let her skin breathe a little too much on the flimsy bed she and the lion shared on stage among other things, but it was a nice outfit all the same. Blonde and blue-eyed, with extra long lashes, she was about forty-five, had had three kids, and was trying desperately to make enough to feed them and get on with her career as a torch singer.
‘Bijou, I won’t be a minute,’ said Kohler kindly, even though he was really worried. Ja, really worried. ‘If the son of a bitch farts, slap him for me. If he bolts, tell Hercules here to bring him back. If the lion is too tired, I’ll have my shooter out before this one gets to the doors, no matter what the crowd want to do with him. Right, eh, Julien?’ The guns had been under the seat of the car.
Now clothed but still handcuffed, Rébé had wet himself. The lion was refusing to rest his head in the stableboy’s lap but was curious.
‘Naughty, naughty,’ said Kohler. ‘Champagne, was it, Bijou?’ Christ, the champagne in this place was usually owl piss.
The lady nodded. The throng at the zinc parted easily, for by now they were certain, without having been told a thing, that the Sandman had been apprehended, and if Herr Kohler should turn his head, they would tear Rébé to pieces.
Rémi Rivard, the taller of the two Corsicans who owned the club and worked the pumps, was not happy. The face that was all clefts, crags, blackheads and paralysing cliffs was grim. The jet-black greasy hair was that of a gangster, the barrel chest that of the Marseillais stevedore and smuggler he had once been, though both were still vehemently denied under the happy guise of having been ‘a fisherman’.
The Corsican had caught the temper of the crowd. ‘Okay,’ he breathed, leaning over the zinc when he saw Kohler returning for an answer, ‘take the bastard out back and wire him to the pipes. Let him freeze to death. That way he won’t wear out the bread-slicer.’
‘Worried, are you, about your own neck and a nice clean cut, eh?’ snorted the opposition. ‘I told you what we want. A small favour in return for our magnanimous custom. We need him to sing. So, soften him up with the lion, eh? Let us lock the two of them in a closet.’
‘Bijou might not like it.’
She would be a few acts short and would lose money. Ruefully Kohler dragged out the remains of the bankroll he had once had on the Breton coast and found two miserable five-hundred-franc notes. ‘There’ll be more. Hey, I’ll make it five thousand each and another ten for her.’ Rivard stank of onions, fish, olive oil, garlic and peppers and the smell was nearly as bad as that of the lion, though different, of course.
‘Why should we trust you?’ he asked.
‘You don’t need to. Your chanteuse will okay it.’
‘You must really want him.’
‘We do.’
‘Then walk him out of here, my fine detective. Bring him back inside via the courtyard, eh? Use your head. Gabrielle will let you keep him in her dressing room. That way, if the SS and the Gestapo want to keep him silent, she’ll be responsible.’
‘Now look …’
Rivard held up a hand signaling finality. ‘That’s how it is because that’s how it has to be. She has friends we don’t have. Generals, people in high places. Others who can take care of things for her if necessary.’
The Resistance … Kohler knew that was who Rivard meant and nodded. It would have to do, but Louis wasn’t going to like it, especially since the dressing room had been bugged by Gestapo Paris’s Listeners, though the Rivard brothers weren’t supposed to know this and neither was anyone else.
Nothing had been said yet in the tiny dressing room into which St-Cyr had slipped after first quietly knocking. His nostrils still taking in the scent of Mirage, that exquisitely delicate perfume Gabrielle always wore-it had been made especially for her-he stood hesitantly facing her.
Trouble … we’ve really got trouble this time, his look seemed to say.
She touched her lips again, a reminder of the hidden microphones, and silently formed the words, Things, they are not good here either. The Gestapo still suspect me but of what I do not know.
Ah merde. Perhaps they had picked up someone connected to the tiny Resistance cell to which she belonged and that person had said something, perhaps they only thought to monitor her since she knew so many big shots among the Occupier and the Occupied.
‘What is it? What has happened?’ she anxiously whispered into his ear, breaking the rule.
He trembled at her touch. He found a scrap of paper he would destroy as soon as possible, and wrote: A child is missing. An heiress. A voyou a Nazi has picked up. He may already have killed her.
‘Ah no. The Sandman?’ she asked, a whisper.