Reaching the corner of the Avenue Giap she flung off the images of Quatch and the slimy hypocrisy of her grandmother. Other thoughts jostled for attention as she pushed her way through the crowded streets. Most of all thoughts of her father. An American whose name, she was convinced, was known to Bernadette. But for some reason a name not to be discussed even now. All these years since her birth, more than fifteen years since the Americans had carried their flag from Vietnam.
Why?
Chapter Three
Halfway round the world a taxi drew up before a small Paris hotel on the lie St Louis. It was a little after dawn and the young American who stepped into the first rays of morning sunlight blinked and rubbed at his unshaven cheek as he paid off the driver.
‘It’s going to be a good day,’ the driver said, nodding towards the pale sky.
The American’s eyes roamed the balconied windows of the hotel. ‘I wonder,’ he said. In truth he was wondering behind which of these balconied windows his father had been murdered fifteen years ago.
Max Benning picked up his duffel bag and stood for a moment as the cab pulled away. Blond-brown hair, a little over six feet tall, lean but heavily boned, it was not difficult to see a north European ancestry. He was casually dressed: jeans, Chelsea boots, a pale tan patch-pocket shirt, a tan leather jacket hooked over his shoulder by an index finger through the tab. His face, now drawn from the half-sleep of an overnight flight, seemed to hold a permanent weariness. A foreign correspondent’s face, those who knew him said; a classical mercenary’s face, others thought, the face of someone used to sleepless nights and long marches. Meeting him for the first time, people overreacted to his physical presence. Most men saw him as competition; most women as sensual excitement.
The black duffel bag in his right hand was pulling at his shoulder socket. He glanced up at the brass-lettering that read Hotel Kandler and walked through the open door into the dark lobby.
The woman who emerged from the breakfast room and shuffled behind the desk was small with gypsy dark eyes, her black hair greying. While she went through the formalities of checking him in, Max took in the cracked pattern-tiled floor, the dark green panelling, the curving iron banister of the staircase his father must have climbed.
The old woman did not react to the name Benning on Max’s passport. She pushed it across the counter and turned to reach down the key to his room. ‘Number five,’ she said. ‘It overlooks the Seine.’
‘Merci, madame.’
‘Mademoiselle.’
‘Mademoiselle,’ Max corrected himself. He took the key. ‘Have you been here long, mademoiselle?’ he asked her.
‘All my life,’ she said. ‘I worked here as a chambermaid, starting at the age of twelve. When my patronne died in 1960 she left the hotel to me.’ She shrugged away the idea of gratitude. ‘There was no one else,’ she said.
‘Do you remember, fifteen or more years ago, when a man was murdered here?’
‘The German, yes.’ Her black gypsy eyes held his.
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘Yes.’ A caesura rather than a hesitation. ‘The same as yours.’
‘He was my father.’
She pursed her lips. ‘He was a German.’ She glanced down at his American passport.
‘My mother’s American. I was born there.’
‘You speak French well. Like your father.’
‘You remember that.’ She shrugged. ‘Will you tell me about that night?’
She lifted a flexible brass-ringed pipe from beneath the counter and blew a whistling note into the ivory coloured mouthpiece. ‘Madeleine,’ she said. ‘Two coffees, please. And croissants.’ She turned back to Max. ‘Do you want to see your room first?’ She smiled spectrally. ‘It’s not the same one.’
He shook his head, bent to pick up his duffel bag and followed her shuffling walk into the musty breakfast room.
They sat down at a table near a window. Something linked him to this woman with her odd bitter smile. He was not certain why he decided to tell this stranger the truth. ‘My mother has always told me that my father was killed in a car crash a few years after I was born. It seemed a more respectable story.’
‘Ah.’ The exclamation was without expression: without surprise, disbelief, understanding or even encouragement to continue. ‘And now at last she’s told you the truth.’
‘She’s in a clinic in London,’ Max said. ‘She has a cancer. Her doctors say she’s not expected to live long.’
The maid came in with coffee and a plate of croissants. The patronne pushed the plate towards Max. ‘In those days,’ she said, ‘a small hotel like this might let a room or two on a permanent basis. A year say. Sometimes more. A lot of artists like to live like that. The top floor in some of these old places is arranged as a studio and sleeping salon. My old patronne used to claim Picasso lived here in 1905. Lying, I expect.’ She poured hot milk in his coffee and broke a croissant so that the shards of its carapace scattered across the bare table.
‘Early in 1974 a Vietnamese woman came here and paid me a year’s rent on the top studio. She was the sort of woman some men like,’ the patronne said.
‘Beautiful?’
‘Perhaps. A putain. A prostitute.’
‘Local businessmen used to visit her?’
‘Foreigners, mostly. A few French.’ She sat back, thinking. ‘I remember telling the investigating inspector at the time of your father’s death. They never stayed long. Not really, on average, long enough,’ she said without a smile.
‘What was her name?’
‘Mademoiselle Bernadette Hyn. Yes,’ she said with some satisfaction. ‘Bernadette Hyn.’
‘Did she pay in cash?’
‘Cash. Always. There was no shortage of money. When the North Vietnamese marched into Saigon, her bel ami, her pimp, became the new Communist charge d’affaires here in Paris.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
She puffed her lined cheeks. ‘Do reptiles have names? Quatch, his whore called him.’
Max finished his coffee. ‘Can I look at the attic?’
‘Of course.’
‘Will you come with me?’
‘If you wish.’
They left the breakfast room and climbed the iron banistered staircase. Halfway along the corridor on the top floor, the patronne stopped and opened a brown-painted door. ‘There’s not a lot to see,’ she said.
It was a bare, uncarpeted room with a good north skylight. A second room leading off it had a large double brass bed and a few pieces of furniture.
‘Monsieur Benning was found on the floor,’ the woman gestured carelessly.
Max walked to the skylight and looked out across the grey slate roofs gleaming in the spring sunlight. He tried to imagine his father standing here. What was he doing in this room fifteen years ago? What had he come for?
‘The police recovered a knife,’ the patronne said. ‘They talked of suicide.’
‘But you don’t think so?’
‘Who knows what really happened?’
‘How long did the woman live here?’
‘A year. But she had been in Paris longer than that. Long enough to adopt our ways. A foreign whore who thought herself better than a French patronne.’
‘Did my father come here just that one time?’
The woman gave her strange savage smile. ‘One time was enough, monsieur.’
He caught a few hours’ sleep. At just before midday he made his way down to the Rue Boileau where the Vietnamese embassy stands. Max Benning had been a journalist long enough to be without real hope. If Bernadette’s lover had become charge d’affaires he wasn’t going to get much from the embassy. But it was still worth a try.