‘He’s home at last,’ said Guy Vachon with a sigh. They’d be late for school.
‘It’s been ages since we’ve seen him,’ said Dede Labelle. ‘At least a week.’
Together they stood in the rain those two detectives. ‘They look exhausted,’ whispered Guy. ‘Has there been trouble?’
‘There’s always trouble for them,’ whispered Antoine. ‘Maybe your papa can find them another set of side mirrors.’
They all knew that Monsieur Jean-Louis didn’t like using the black market or imposing on the neighbours. Hadn’t Antoine been the one to suggest his mother look after the house in the chief inspector’s absence and that of the second wife and little son?
‘That wife and son having been killed when the Gestapo left a bomb the Resistance had hidden on the doorstep for him,’ said Herve Desrochers, shaking his head just like everyone else did at the thought. ‘A collabo, that’s what those people in the Resistance think he is because he has to work with a German. The wife hadn’t helped either by coming home from the flames of a love affair with one of the enemy simply because the thrusting, it was over, and that one had been sent to the Russian front.’
‘It was the long absences,’ muttered Dede sadly. ‘She never knew if Monsieur Jean-Louis would come home.’
‘He only has a Lebel Modele d’ordonnance 1892 six-shot, swing-out, double-action revolver. The eight millimetre,’ said Herve with a sigh.
‘It’s not the 1892, idiot!’ said Antoine. ‘I don’t think he’s ever been allowed one of those. It’s another 1873. Don’t you remember that he was first issued an 1873 by Gestapo stores but that he then lost it in the Rhone at Lyon?’
A case of arson. A packed cinema …
‘The 1873 uses black powder, low-pressure, eleven-millimetre cartridges,’ admitted Herve reluctantly.
‘They’re almost as big as those for the British Webley Mark VI, the .455 inch.’ said Dede with a sigh.
‘The 11.6 millimetre. He looks as exhausted as his geraniums,’ said Antoine. ‘Maman says he needed that second wife and is going completely to seed in her absence.’
‘He needs another gun,’ said Herve tartly. ‘That old Lebel is no match for the Walther P38, nine-millimetre Parabellum automatic Herr Kohler packs. Eight in the clip, mes vieux. Another up the spout and a little pin that sticks out to tell him all is safe but ready. Three hundred and fifty metres a second muzzle velocity and almost double that of the Mark VI.’
‘It’s a semiautomatic,’ said Guy. ‘Bien sur, you don’t have to pull the slide back when there’s one in the chamber, but Monsieur Jean-Louis, he can hit a swallow at forty paces.’
Everyone knew swallows were among the fastest of birds but … ‘Imbecile,’ hissed Herve, ‘a slug like that would blast the bird to pieces. He’s a nature lover and would never shoot such a thing!’
‘But those old cartridges,’ muttered Dede, ‘they’re so tired sometimes they don’t even bother to wake up when struck by the firing pin.’
It was a worry. Ex-champion boxer of the police academy and soccer forward, ex-sergeant in a signal corps in that other war, Monsieur Jean-Louis had been wounded twice, the left side as usual. No medals, no citations-he wasn’t a man for those but had never complained of it. ‘I always tried to duck,’ he had once said, ‘but honourably’.
‘BOYS, WHY ARE YOU NOT IN SCHOOL?’ came the yell.
‘THE STREETS, THEY ARE NO LONGER SAFE AT NIGHT FOR OUR SISTERS AND MOTHERS, MONSIEUR L’INSPECTEUR PRINCIPAL. WE ARE PROTESTING AND HAVE GONE ON STRIKE!’
Good for Herve.
‘IT’S TOO WET AND SLIPPERY FOR SOCCER,’ added Guy. ‘WE CAN’T KICK THE BALL TO YOU.’
‘Louis …’
In hooded rain capes, the boys waited to see what their response would bring. Hollow-eyed and gaunt, each of the little buggers gazed guiltily up from under shelter.
‘Now what’s this about a strike?’ asked Louis.
‘We’re late,’ confessed Dede. ‘We only wanted to see if you had arrived home safely so that the pretty lady would no longer be distressed.’
‘What pretty lady?’
‘Your chanteuse.’
‘She’s not mine or anyone’s but her own.’
Natal’ya Kulakov-Myshkin, alias Gabrielle Arcuri of the Club Mirage on the rue Delambre over on the Left Bank, in Montparnasse. ‘The one who sings to eight hundred of the Green Beans and over the wireless to all the others at the front?’ asked Kohler blithely.
Both to the Krauts and to the Allies, since those boys would also listen in and she had such a fabulous voice. ‘Oui, that one,’ said Dede. ‘After your train came back from Vichy and you had to leave for Colmar, she came from the station to stand outside the house of your mother, Monsieur l’inspecteur principal. She didn’t cry, though I thought she was going to.’
Louis’s mother had passed away fifteen years ago yet the house was still considered hers.
‘She didn’t think you and Herr Kohler would ever come back from inside the Reich.’
‘Nor did the other two who came to stand with her,’ said Guy, watching them closely.
‘Giselle and Oona?’ asked Hermann of his two ladyloves and saw the boys nod.
‘The blackout rapes, Inspectors. Are you working on them?’ asked Antoine.
‘The handbag snatching, too?’ hazarded another.
‘Oui, especially those if done in daylight,’ said yet another.
‘All last night and now here just for dry clothing,’ lamented Louis. ‘Antoine, be so good as to ask your mother to do what she can with what I’m still wearing, but please tell her not to alleviate the dampness by burning any more of my books. Give her the message after school, eh? Now get going. If there’s trouble, tell your teacher that you were delayed because we had to question you about the safety of the streets at night.’
‘But … but you haven’t done that?’ blurted Dede. ‘Grand-mere, she is saying things can only get worse and that you both should be worrying about your girlfriends.’
‘They’ll be found bound, violated, murdered and robbed, she says!’ swore Herve, ignoring his runny nose. ‘Their handbags snatched!’
‘We’ve already found one corpse,’ muttered Kohler, not liking what the boys had just said but wishing he had ersatz chewing gum to hand out. ‘You haven’t any cigarettes to sell, have you?’
In unison heads were swiftly shaken and, without another word, the army turned away and headed up the street.
‘Has the lawlessness of the black market reached such depths of innocence?’ bleated Louis.
‘Don’t be so naive. I should have asked for underwear and silk stockings.’
* * *
Long after the detectives had left the house at number 3, Jeanne Courbet continued to stare across the street at it through the lace of the bedroom’s curtain. She knew she didn’t have the time to loiter, that one had to be out and about very early if one was to get anything from the shops. Yet I can’t move, she silently said. Is it that I’ve offended God with my gossip about that house and the troubles the chief inspector has had with the first wife who left him and the dead one, too, the one who made the grand cuckold of him, even though he forgave her?
Word was that they had all laughed at him behind his back at the rue des Saussaies. Word was that he and his partner were hated so much for pointing the finger of truth, they would never leave the city alive this time.
Word was … But would either of them help her now? Antoine hadn’t just been up to mischief but to a crime so serious it jeopardized the whole family. A dirty stub of blackboard chalk had been in one of his pockets-was that not evidence enough of scribbled slogans on the walls: Laval aux poteau-Premier Laval up against the post; La guillotine pour Petain-the Marechal and Head of State; the V for Victory of Monsieur Winston Churchill; the cross of Lorraine, that symbol of the Resistance and Jeanne d’Arc? Victoire, eh? Liberte! Antoine knew nothing of such things. He was only ten years old, but that chalk had started her doing something she had vowed never to do in this room of his older brothers. The neighbours wouldn’t laugh if the family was arrested. They would sadly shake their heads and later whisper, ‘That mouth of hers. That gossip, she got what she deserved,’ but one arrest would lead to another and the families of all four would be taken. Didn’t that knave Desrochers operate his velo-taxi out of place de l’Opera? Wasn’t the stand directly across from the Kommandantur and wouldn’t Herve’s papa be known to several of those Germans?