A pede that one had said about the victim here and had laughed. A cucu, a pansy.
‘Why here, Louis? Why at the very place Prefet Talbotte trains his cops?’
The call had apparently come in to the district’s commissariat at 11.13 p.m. from the Lido, at 78 Champs-Elysees and not far. A girl in tears and largely incoherent but one who had, in spite of this, managed to blurt that the cows-the cops-should look for something at the school and right under their noses and that she hoped it wouldn’t get splashed all over the newspapers because she had already sent those boys to have a look.
‘Perhaps the killer wants the publicity,’ sighed St-Cyr, but what is of more immediate concern is what has happened to that caller.’
Had they not one but two corpses waiting for them? wondered Kohler. Making such a call couldn’t have been easy at the best of times. Between sets then, the girl a dancer perhaps, the others hurrying to change while she stood freezing in a poorly lighted corridor fumbling first to get the token into its little slot-she’d have had to have a jeton. No calls were free, especially not those of chorus girls, even if reporting a murder. Had she dropped it in her panic? Had it rolled away, she thinking that the one who was forcing her to make the call would have to get another from the bar and that maybe, just maybe she could escape?
‘But again we have a delay in sending someone to look into things,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s been six hours since she rang them.’
‘The salaud said the girl must have been pissed to the gills and that he had thought her just buggering about. At midnight, the quartier’s sous-prefet went through the call notes and sent two of his boys to have a look.’
‘And since then?’
It would have to be said. ‘Spent his time trying to track us down, seeing as our names were on the duty roster Prefet Talbotte had circulated to all commissariats.’
‘On purpose?’
‘Why else?’
‘Just what the hell is going on, Hermann? We arrive, are thrown into the breech and everyone seems to welcome it but us!’
Together, they got out to stand in the sleet. Dark in silhouette and huge-ugly at this time of day and probably always-the 160-bed hospital and hospice that the financier Nicholas Beaujon had had Girardin build in 1784 for the children of the poor impassively waited.
‘It’s this way,’ said Louis. ‘I was last here in ’32, on the sixth of May when Monsieur le President Paul Doumer was assassinated while holding a freshly autographed copy of Claude Farrere’s latest novel.’
‘I’m getting not to like your authors.’
‘Gorguloff, the White Russian fanatic, succeeded in giving the president the coup de grace. Farrere, no slouch, tried desperately to stop him. Myself and four others weren’t quick enough, you understand. Farrere was hit in the wrist, blood splashed all over the pages of a novel whose title escapes me since the rest of us had to grapple with the Russian, but by the time we had that one on the floor and bleeding himself, the book was ruined. No doubt there are some who will make a monument of it for tourists to gawk at. We carried the president here, though it couldn’t have been of any use.’
End of story, but was it still to be a time of truth between them?
‘Prior to the presidency, Hermann, Doumer had been the governor of Indochina. Having effectively ended the power of the mandarins, he used brutal taxation to open up the colony with roads, railways and bridges. A new and very well-educated middle class was born that, largely educated in France and rightfully considering themselves French, helped to make the colony what it became. Immensely wealthy and profitable.’
But since 7 December 1941 entirely controlled by the Japanese in spite of still being governed by France and run by its civil servants.
‘Gorguloff went early to the widow-maker.’
The breadbasket, the guillotine. Louis would have had to watch the head fall.
‘In ’36 the hospital became the prefet’s school,’ he went on as if the travelogue had to be given to keep his partner’s mind from what was to come. ‘The entrance to the cellars is along here and not easily seen even in broad daylight.’
Or heard? wondered Kohler. The stairs would be steep and coated with ice. ‘Hadn’t I best light the lanterns?’
‘I’ll just go down and have a little look.’
At one point Louis very nearly slipped and the beam of the torch shot up over the soot-blackened stones only to begin to feel bottom and focus on the corpse.
Pale … The skin was wet and waxy-looking where not scraped, bruised or welted, the legs hairy, with the same across the back of the shoulders and between, the buttocks up, the torso and face down-had he been pitched in there? wondered Kohler. Had he been dead before hitting that doorsill against a corner of which the face was crammed?
‘HERMANN, DON’T!’
‘I have to. Aren’t I supposed to give the orders? Aren’t I the one from the Occupier who’s supposed to watch over you?’
A former captain in the Kaiser’s artillery. Shielding the lanterns as best he could, Hermann started down, the shadow of him reaching behind and back up the staircase.
‘I warned you,’ said St-Cyr.
‘He hasn’t just lost all of his ID, has he?’
Not a scrap of clothing remained. ‘A broken neck. The shovel that hit him in the face …’
‘The spade, damn it, Louis! Why can’t you call it that?’
Many these days spoke in whispers of the torture of the spade, the coal shovel the Gestapo and their French counterparts were fond of using on the difficult, but this one’s handle had been much longer, its blade far sharper. The fingers of both hands had been removed. They’d have one hell of a time identifying him.
‘His teeth …’ began Hermann, only to gag, to turn away and throw up. Merde!
‘Did they crush his balls, Louis?’ he wept. ‘Was he a resistant?’
Sometimes the Gestapo or their friends would dump a victim for others to find, but not this one, not here. ‘A maquereau?’ asked St-Cyr to keep Hermann busy.
A mackerel, a pimp and not a homosexual at all? He’d been young and healthy, maybe twenty-two years of age. Well groomed, thought Kohler, blinking away the tears. In good shape, well fed, the pomade having greased the jet-black hair down and still shedding the rain.
‘He’s not languishing with all the others in the Reich, is he?’ said Louis.
There were one-and-a-half million French POWs in Germany, millions of Allied ones too. ‘And not an STO conscript either,’ managed Kohler. The Service du Travail Obligatoire, the forced labour shy; call-up, but liebe Zeit, how could Louis and he talk like this, as if nothing were out of the ordinary and they’d seen it every day, which they had.
There was no smell of cordite, though, he thought warily. Not even that of broken geranium stems-mustard gas. Nor had the sweetness of rotting human flesh and the stench of erupted bowels come to him yet, or that of mouldy earth with its bits of tattered clothing and blood-shredded arms and legs.
Late autumn 1914, that, and on into the winter of 1914-1915 in Alsace, then later at Verdun, but did it matter a damn now, those dates with Louis firing at him from the other side?
‘Hermann, please don’t be so hard on yourself. Go and bring us a blanket. Let’s make him decent. You know that always helped. Respect we used to call it, you boys as well. Respect for those who wouldn’t be going home.’
‘The press, Louis. If they’ve already been here, Boemelburg is going to tear his hair, what little he has left of it.’