She had given him a moment to think about a life of crime and then had said, ‘He died in agony, screaming for his mother.’
Beyond the high iron fence that surrounded the park where duels had once been fought, the ruins of last summer’s community vegetable plots made their graveyards among the severely pollarded plane trees. Lonely on his stone steed, Louis XIII ignored the wet snow that struck him and indicated the plots as if mystified to find them here.
The house at Number 25 was crowded but the presence of a police officer had rapidly filtered on ahead. Gingerly he went up the stairs, keeping as close to the wall as possible. From somewhere distant came the impatient pause-by-pause thumping of wood on wood, but soon that ceased. Even the concierge had broken the law and shut her loge, failing entirely to respond to his earnest knock. He’d read the ‘flat’ number from the decaying list she had posted in 1935, having crossed out names and added others since.
With frozen laundry to his left and a mildewed wall to the right, he came to the room or rooms of the Jourdan father and daughter, the mother having died probably some time ago, Hermann had said.
There was no doorknob, no latch, no lock-nothing but a dirty bit of string to be tied to a nail, no nameplate either, its bronze frame having been unscrewed and sold.
The distant sound of pigeons came, the scrabbling, too, of caged guinea pigs and other livestock. Nudging the door open would be easy, the string having been left to dangle. Knocking with the muzzle of the Lebel would be best.
‘Entrez,’ came the gruff response, exuding, though, both strength and determination, its owner having been forewarned by the bush telegraph. A corridor connected open room to open room, its floor bare but catching the grey light of day from the far end.
Jourdan was sitting at an iron-legged garden table before French windows the constant rain had done nothing to clean. ‘Monsieur … ’ began St-Cyr.
Guiltily the revolver was tucked away. ‘It’s Sergeant, Inspector. The Fifty-Sixth Chasseurs a Pied under Driant.’
‘The Bois des Caures and a key defence at Verdun. The eastern bank of the Meuse and a forest no more than five hundred metres by a thousand.’
‘Into which the Boche poured eighty thousand artillery shells.’
‘Early on the morning of the twenty-first of February 1916, after days of rain, a little sunshine came to dry the ground and prepare it for the assault but did God really want it to dry, I wonder, though I commend you, Sergeant. We all did, all of us who were at Verdun.’
The red ribbon of the Legion d’honneur was not present and should have been, but that of the Croix de guerre was there and the yellow and green of the Medaille militaire with its rosette in the buttonhole.
‘They couldn’t kill all of us Chasseurs, could they?’ taunted Jourdan.
Falkenhayn’s Operation Judgement had met surprisingly stiff resistance when the advance had been launched after that opening barrage.
‘The tempest of fire,’ said Jourdan, watching him closely. ‘Nine out of ten of us were finished in that first barrage, myself among them. Though I’ve the Boche to thank, I’ve hated them ever since for having saved me. Now, to what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from a fellow veteran?’
Jourdan was a grand mutile and had lost the left arm at the elbow and the right leg just below the hip. The crutch that had made its sound of wood on wood had all but lost its rubber stopper and was leaning against the only other chair. He was bundled up against the cold and the damp and with writing materials, the prosthesis he used lying ready beside a neat little stack of at least seven letters waiting to be taken to the post.
‘When the ink isn’t frozen, I write to my friends,’ he said, the accent clearly of the east and Nancy. An open packet of Gauloises bleues and a scattered box of matches indicated impatience.
‘One of those fucking matches threw sparks into my face.’
They were always doing that. ‘At least you have cigarettes.’
‘I budget myself. The half, and then a few hours later, the other half.’
And the agony between. ‘Sergeant, your daughter …’
‘Yes, yes, was dismissed from the Hotel-Dieu. Now what are we to do, eh? Am I to send her out on the streets like all those other bitches are doing? She’s young, she’s beautiful. Certainly she has the urges-what girl of that age wouldn’t-but she’s mine, Inspector. Mine, and comes from a good home. The two of us would rather starve to death than sacrifice her little capital to one of those bastards from the other side of the Rhine. Some crimes can never be forgiven or forgotten, and a woman’s having sex with the enemy is one of them.’
The black hair was thin, revealing patches of shrapnel-scarred skin, the dye job refreshed each day by that daughter, as was that of the full brush of a moustache, which hid its own scars. Others marred the left side of a face that was thin and drawn, the expression given to a wariness that could only make one uneasy.
The olive-dark eyes with their thin brows dropped as that same thought registered. Nothing could be said since pity was the last thing this one would want.
Three tubes of Veronal, one having been squeezed so often it was skeletal, lay next to the pen and ink bottle. Jourdan noticed right away that this Surete had seen them and would think the worst.
‘I need it, Inspector, for the stumps and the fragments of metal that are still inside me.’
The tubes had been stolen from the Hotel-Dieu. There wasn’t any question of it, but neither he nor that daughter of his would yet have found a way of replacing them when this supply was gone: a long-acting barbiturate, of the weakly acidic form, it was rapidly absorbed through the skin, but such continued use dramatically lessened its effects while increasing the user’s need. ‘Why did your daughter consider it her duty, Sergeant, to allow the press to photograph that poor unfortunate woman?’
‘Unfortunate? The slut was selling herself and got what she deserved! The wife of an officer, a prisoner of war? Her throat should have been cut and her chatte sliced to ribbons! I told my Noelle that she had done absolutely the right thing by letting them make an example of the woman and that the hospital should never have accepted such a patient.’
Mon Dieu, such vehemence. ‘Old wounds make you incautious, monsieur.’
‘It’s Sergeant, and I’ll say what I please, but obviously couldn’t have done it, though I would most certainly have liked to.’
The smile Jourdan gave deliberately invited censure. ‘Where is your daughter, Sergeant?’
‘Out looking for food and work that won’t tarnish her good name.’
The house had begun to crawl back to life. When something fell in one of the garrets above, Jourdan tossed his head up in alarm to desperately search the plaster skies and fix his gaze apprehensively on the supposed source.
He strained to listen. He didn’t move and hardly breathed. ‘It’s all right, mon ami,’ said St-Cyr, as if still in the trenches of that other war, ‘that one missed us.’
‘Night is far worse, isn’t it? When they come at night, I scream and have to hide my head.’
‘NAME?’ demanded Kohler.
Given in Deutsch, the shriek filled the Cafe de la Paix, making a sweet young thing at a nearby table leap to her feet and drop her cup. Coffee showered over her lover boy. ‘Name?’ he asked more reasonably. He’d been getting nothing but the runaround from the waiters.