Had the wife sucked in the breath of ‘I told you so’? wondered Kohler. Certainly the companion knew what it was all about, for instinctively she had laid a comforting hand on Madame Morel’s.
Louis had seen it too, but wasn’t about to let on. ‘Can you give us any kind of a description, monsieur?’ he asked.
‘If I could, I’d find and kill him myself.’
Coffee and cognac arrived-real coffee and real alcohol, a Bisquit Napoleon, the 1903, along with a plate of petits fours, some pate and bread-nothing ersatz there either. The former debutante poured. The night’s victims three and four refused nourishment, Madame Barrault first lowering her gaze out of despair or shame, and then stealing a glance at the petits fours as if guilt and pride had been tempered with … what? wondered Kohler. Need, for sure, but not for herself.
‘The wallet, monsieur,’ said Louis brusquely. ‘A few details. They’ll not be of much use, but threads we must have if we are to clothe the attack better.’
Was this Surete a tailor? ‘Bought in Algiers, in a bazaar in 1938 and with me ever since.’
‘The leather the usual?’ asked the inspector, meaning the Arabic design, Henriette Morel told herself with a curt nod as she waited for the rest.
‘Of a soft morocco,’ went on Gaston, ignoring her as usual, ‘and one I will miss. Loaded with fifty big ones simply because they’re easier to carry.’
With 250,000 francs, the leather as soft as a lecher’s extended organ, Gaston? Henriette wanted desperately to say but couldn’t-the detectives would find out soon enough.
‘Any Reichskassenscheine?’ asked St-Cyr.
The Occupation mark at twenty francs to one. ‘Ten thousand.’
‘Your papers?’
Again Morel lifted his gaze from the glass and bottle. ‘Those I keep elsewhere. He’ll be disappointed.’
Everyone knew there was a roaring trade in false and stolen papers. ‘Your place of business?’ asked Louis.
‘It has no bearing whatsoever on what happened. You might as well ask me about the opera I had to endure.’
‘Very well, what was it?’
‘La Boheme,’ gushed Madame Morel. ‘It was magnificent, wasn’t it, Denise?’
The husband didn’t give the former debutante a chance. ‘Fucking Italians. A sick whore and a pawnbroker? Duels with coal shovels and fire tongs?’ He tossed a fist. ‘One hell of a lot of caterwauling I had to pay good money for, Henriette.’
‘You were constantly grumbling, Gaston. Several noticed.’
Again the companion rested a sympathetic hand on that of the wife but this time the other victim stole a longing glance at the petits fours and the pate and bread. Her coat, like the dress that had been pinned up, had been made over. The early thirties, felt Kohler. No silk stockings like the other two would be wearing, but probably none of the leg paint either and brand-new button earrings of enamel from the Bon Marche’s bargain bin.
‘Place of business?’ demanded Louis with more force.
‘Cimenterie Morel,’ came the grunt. ‘The company I acquired in ’31, and which supplies the Organization Todt.’
Cement hadn’t always been good, not in the depths of the Great Depression, but with the Todt’s building of the submarine pens at Lorient and elsewhere in 1940 and now the massive fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, it must be a great comfort.
Leaving Louis to it, Kohler pulled coffee and cognac towards him and went to sit down with victim number four. ‘Why not tell me what you can, madame? You’ve a son or daughter and are understandably anxious to get home.’
Much taller than the other one, he’d a terrible scar, Marie-Leon noted, others too. Those of the shrapnel from that other war, but far more recent nicks and cuts as if from flying glass, also the crease of a bullet across the brow like his partner, she wondered, but a little more recent than that one’s?
There was a warmth though, to his pale-blue eyes. They couldn’t be those of a Gestapo, and yet … and yet he was one of them. ‘I can tell you little, Inspector. One minute the monsieur was crying out, the next, I was yanked from the car …’ She glanced at her wounded arm and hand, felt so ashamed, could not stop the tears. ‘Please, I … People like me never come to places like this. A night out? A little break from the endless days of never knowing when my husband will come home or if he will still feel the way he once did about me?’
Not well off, but well brought up, the stepsister was neither really, really plain nor pretty. Une jolie-laide, the French called them. Plain but not so bad after all, age: thirty-four, and a good twenty years younger than Madame Morel. The hair was long and of a deep chestnut shade, thick and clean and worn in a chignon that had come loose, the freckled brow still worried. The eyes were dark brown and normally frank, no doubt, but searching as now, the nose more robust than she’d want, the unpainted lips quite lovely, even if those of a woman who knew she was being assessed in such a manner by such a cop but had her pride.
The chin was determined. ‘Where’s home?’ he asked.
She wouldn’t even glance at Henriette or Denise Rouget, Marie-Leon told herself. ‘The rue Taitbout, near the corner of the rue la Fayette.’
He’d been wrong about where the earrings had been purchased, but it had been an easy mistake, for the flat wasn’t far from the Galeries Lafayette, another of the biggest department stores, not that there was much to find in them these days, but definitely not an up-market address. A one- or two-room flat, no bath, the toilet shared by everyone on her floor. ‘We’ll see that you get home safely, but first, do those cuts need stitches?’
Hadn’t he the evidence such wounds would leave? ‘There’ll be terrible marks, won’t there? Marks that will tell my husband everything my stepsister and that … that parasite who calls herself a social worker want him to believe!’
Gratified by the outburst, the former debutante condescendingly smiled as did Madame Morel, felt Kohler. Unlike them, though, this one hadn’t spent hours with her favourite hairdresser but had done what she could herself. ‘Look, do something for me,’ he confided, reaching for the cognac. ‘Down two shots of this and quit worrying about the petits fours, the pate and the bread. I’ll see that you get to take them home without the others knowing. Now let me have a look at those cuts. We may need a doctor.’
‘Fish oil, Inspector. The one who did this stank of it. He was big too. Big in the stomach.’
* * *
Alone as always, just the two of them, they shared a cigarette in the car, in pitch-darkness as the curfew lifted and the city, with its millions of bicycles and metro riders awakened.
‘A savage rape, Louis-an example to all females who would run around with the Occupier?’
Hermann lived with two of them: Giselle and Oona, so must be worried. ‘A safecracking to which we are sent by mistake.’
‘Delaying us from getting to the Drouant.’
It would have to be faced. ‘Whoever committed that latest attack had the timing down perfectly, mon vieux. He knew exactly when Morel would take the stepsister home.’
‘And was watching for it, even to knowing Morel would send his driver in to the telephone.’
‘But this time the attack is not so severe. The warning to such wives, if that was it, is more muted.’
Both looked out to what awaited them, a corpse. The rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore was shrouded in that same silvery darkness. Ethereal, if one was of such a mind; desperate if not. Even the little blue light that should have been above the entrance to the Ecole des Officiers de la Gendamerie Nationale had still not been given the juice it needed.
‘That flic on duty at the quartier du Faubourg-du-Roule’s Commissariat, Louis. Like your friend Belanger, he had heard the gossip about us and could hardly contain himself as he handed me the lanterns and asked if we were being kept busy tonight?’