The pudgy cheeks with their glazed-over nicks from a morning’s dull razor, their shadowed hairy moles and warts and aftershave, tightened. The Schmeisser lifted. Its muzzle was now pressed firmly against her stomach, Oona … Oona looking only at the cook, she watching that one’s eyes closely, too closely … Ah, merde, Hermann. HERMANN, ME, I DIDN’T REALIZE SHE WOULD WANT HIM TO KILL HER!
The silence hurt like hell, the sense of loss was total. Over and over again Kohler silently said, ‘Louis, why couldn’t you have waited?’ He knew Louis had gone to find Oona for him. Louis would do something like that. Louis.
The trickle of another rain of porcelain trailed itself away. Another large wedge of vitrine glass or mirror collapsed. The stench of cordite was all too evident, the ears still rang with the emptying of a Schmeisser’s box magazine, all thirty-two rounds at five hundred a minute.
There were no torchlights. These had instantly gone out with the firing. There’d been no shouts-nothing like that from Garnier or any of the others. Nor had there been a sound from below them, from the cellars.
Quevillon had pissed himself and was still quivering. The butcher knife and torch he’d held when found were lying on the floor at his feet, the urge to kill him all too …
‘Hubert?’ came a whisper at last from out of the surrounding darkness, calm, though Kohler nudged the back of Quevillon’s neck with the Walther P38’s muzzle.
‘FLAVIEN, WHAT HAS HAPPENED?’
Must Hubert be so shrill? thought Garnier with a snort. Blindly, gingerly he felt his way forward. He had to find a gap in all this rubbish, had to get through to Quevillon’s corridor before Kohler realized what was happening.
‘Flavien?’ hazarded one of the sous-chefs some distance from him.
Again there was no answer.
‘Eugene, are you okay?’ whispered that sous-chef. Kohler was certain of it. Had Louis found Oona? Had they both been killed?
Instinctively Garnier knew he had reached the far end of the aisle. There was that sense of openness, of being free of things. Stretching out his left arm, torch in that hand, Schmeisser in the other, he would take a silent, tentative step forward, would hurry yet chance nothing.
He had to make his way well around Hubert, couldn’t let Kohler realize this. Had it not been for that burst of firing, Kohler would have been taken, but now … now that Kripo must have Hubert. Eugene Roulleau would see that things weren’t good and would retrace his steps to find out what had happened to Claude Beaupre, the cook. Victor Denault would hold his position. Those three had often worked together but never at anything like this since Verdun.
The dressing table had its chair. Kohler nudged Quevillon into it. Louis wouldn’t have shot this agent prive or anyone else, not unless absolutely forced to in self-defence. Louis simply wasn’t like that.
A wrist was taken and pulled back behind the chair, the other one, too, Quevillon not objecting but waiting only for help-was that it, eh?
Metal clicked against metal and clicked again. Instantly Garnier knew the bracelets had been applied but Kohler wouldn’t hang around. And what of St-Cyr? he wondered.
Claude Beaupre must have found the woman, but had that Surete found the cook with her? It wasn’t like Claude to have emptied that gun. Had the finger of a dying man been jammed against its trigger? Had the woman been killed?
When he found Hubert, Garnier felt the silken nightdress that Kohler had crammed into that one’s mouth. He waited. Vehemently Hubert shook his head but had Kohler done the unexpected and hung around?
Only the soft fluttering of the silk as it moved in and out at its corners with each attempted whisper came to him. There was no other motion now, simply a stiffness in Hubert that gave warning enough.
Kohler … Where was he? Near, so near-watching through the darkness? Waiting for what-the torch to come on, the Schmeisser to be swung away from Hubert and what must be beyond him? Did Kohler actually believe he would spare that little shit?
A wash of perfume had been released on to the dressing table in front of Hubert, the flacon lying on its side but with the stopper deliberately set upright, the scent that of a woman of exceptional taste-was this what Kohler wanted to suggest? A Jewess? A wife, mother, daughter, mistress, the perfume still flooding from its little bottle?
The folding mirror under hand was in three panels. Hubert would see himself in it when the lights came on. Was this what Kohler had had in mind?
Blood, brains and bits of bone had been sprayed across the floor and over the nearby armoires and vitrines with their bullet-shattered doors and broken glass. It didn’t need a light for one to realize this, thought Eugene Roulleau. The cook had been hit in the back of the head at very close range, the slug racing around in there before tearing away much of the forehead and the eyes on exit.
One of the old Lebels, he silently swore. The fingers that had found the wound were wet and greasy. The Schmeisser Claude had held might have slid away but he doubted this and couldn’t recall having heard the clatter it should have made.
Merde, this wasn’t good. What the hell had the colonel got them into? Bien sur, the odd job at night. It had been right of them to take care of those bitches, to teach them lessons their husbands couldn’t give. The schoolteacher, an officer’s wife, had been given hers hard, the stamps had then been recovered but …
There was no sign of St-Cyr, nor of the Dutch woman. With the Schmeisser’s burst there had been no sounds other than the terrified shriek she had given.
Wasn’t there an escalator nearby? Of course there was.
The muzzle of a Lebel has a signature all its own and much different from that of a Schmeisser or Luger. Sometimes warm, often cold, all are individuals when one has experienced such things, and all mean the same. Would a nod suffice?
The Luger was teased away. Roulleau waited. One didn’t think St-Cyr would shoot-Claude had been unavoidable and maybe the woman was dead and lying crumpled up in one of the armoires.
One would just have to try to duck aside or bend the knees on impact so as to soften the blow. Those old revolvers weighed a tonne. He’d have a king-sized lump.
Garnier heard the blow and the gasp it brought before the body collapsed. Stiffening, he looked away through the pitch-darkness towards where Claude Beaupre must have been, knew that Eugene Roulleau, the one who had raped the Guillaumet woman, had been taken, wanted to call out to Victor Denault of other such attacks and the robbery, with Roulleau, of Au Philateliste Savant, but stopped himself, wanted to use the torch but found he couldn’t.
‘Gently,’ breathed Kohler, taking the Schmeisser from him. ‘We wouldn’t want to ruin anything else, now would we?’
In the cold, grey light of dawn they shared a cigarette but would it be their last? wondered Kohler. What they had uncovered wasn’t good. Too many in high places were being threatened; all would flock together, none would let two dumb Schweinebullen continue to interfere as they had most definitely. Jeannot Raymond might well arrive thinking to find Suzette Dunand waiting for him, but what of Delaroche, or of Sonja Remer and the Standartenfuhrer Langbehn?
What of Oberg and even of von Behr, who wasn’t going to like the problem they had left on that Levitan doorstep?
What of Judge Rouget and Vivienne, of the others too, that still shadowy and probably never-to-be-named group of men of influence who met at the Cercle de l’Union Interaliee to finance and advise Delaroche’s campaign of teaching POW wives and fiancees not to misbehave?
‘Too much is at stake, Hermann, too many are threatened.’