Flykiller (15 page)

Then, too, there was the Bickler Unit of the Alsatian, Karl (Hermann) Bickler, who trained infiltrators and agents for the Gestapo – assassinations, kidnapping and extortion also – but primarily directed against the Résistance.

‘And otherwise?' he asked himself, for there were still possibilities of a political nature. ‘A jealous wife or lover, but surely not with all three of the victims.'

There was still no sign of Hermann, nor the tisane he had ordered. When looking out of the restaurant at the crowd, he couldn't help but notice their footwear. Shoes indicated the health of the nation: carpet slippers in winter, but stuffed with bits of newspaper or twists of straw and worn sometimes even in mismatched pairs; open-toed high heels with thin straps, but with woollen socks instead of the silk stockings for which they'd been fashioned, hence the tightness, the rubbing, the painful chilblains one often noticed on the female corpses one had to examine. Wooden-soled shoes with their cleverly articulated hinges and cloth or ersatz leather uppers were everywhere, sabots also, and then, too, shabby leather or rubber boots that were far too big for the wives of those who were locked up in POW camps in the Reich.

‘We've become a nation that will wear anything and that no longer cares about appearances,' he said and then, getting back to the matter at hand, ‘Camille Lefébvre's father will have to be interviewed. There is also Céline Dupuis's love of birds and her use of their quills that will have to be looked into.
Merde
, where is that partner of mine?'

Hermann functioned best with a set of wheels under him. In September 1940, when they'd first met, he'd seen that big, black, beautiful Citroën
traction avant
, that front-wheel drive, and had said blithely, ‘You'd better give me the keys.'

‘My car! The years of diligent service, the rise to Chief Inspector, and then … then to have it all taken away!'

Hermann was a terrible driver. Heavy on the foot, careless on the straight and narrow, insane on the blind curves. ‘It's a wonder I haven't been killed or forgotten how to drive.' But Hermann, for all his faults, was desperately needed.

‘Bousquet has not come completely clean,' St-Cyr grumbled when, grinning and loudly exclaiming, ‘I knew I'd find you here!' the Bavarian at last appeared in a rush. ‘He's still trying to hide something, Hermann.'

‘Cheer up and shut your eyes – come on, do it – and hold out your hand.'

Louis sucked in a breath as he felt for the thumbnail groove and carefully opened the blade to cradle the pocket knife in his hand. ‘A Laguiole, Hermann. A woman's knife – there is no awl or corkscrew as with those of the men. It's an unwritten rule of etiquette that women flash only open blades. The bee under my thumb at the head of the haft supposedly symbolizes Napoleon's warrant but I doubt it. The village is well to the south of Clermont-Ferrand and a good distance from here. Still, the knives travel, and in the Auvergne it is preferred over the simple Opinel most of our peasants favour. Beautifully made, not cheap now, but razor-sharp because the steel is similar to that of surgical instruments – one per cent carbon, seventeen per cent chrome and point eight per cent molybdenum – but always the love of one's craft goes into them.'

Opening his eyes, Louis laid the knife on the table, the cinematographer within him taking in each detail: the length, in total, some twenty centimetres, the blade being a little less than half of that: silver-coloured, then brass and rosewood with brass rivets, then brass again in the softly curved end to fit the hand perfectly – any hand.

‘She knew her weapons, Hermann, if she killed them all.'

‘But had she the Maréchal in mind?'

‘Or Bousquet, or Alain Andre Richard, Minister of Supplies and Rationing?'

There was a pattern in the steel along the back of the haft and this extended from the bee to the very end. One of art deco hills – volcanoes, perhaps, and each of a wide, low triangle with incised, deeper and much smaller triangular cuts both above and below to give the impression of the forested hills and valleys of the Auvergne.

‘It's light,' said Kohler. ‘It can't weigh any more than two hundred grams.'

‘One hundred. A marvellous weapon and so easily carried in a handbag or pocket. The style is Spanish, though that of the blade goes much farther back in time and is Turkish, I believe. In the twenties and thirties the knives became increasingly popular outside of the Auvergne as tourists visited the village, and many were made to individual specifications, each client stating their needs and even the design on the haft and the choice of wood or horn. In short, the Laguiole became a cult item and expensive, a mark of distinction that others who also owned one would recognize and appreciate.'

‘Let's hope we do.'

The tisane finally arrived in a dirty mug but was brusquely shoved aside. ‘Bring the Chief Inspector St-Cyr a pastis. He's going to need it. I'll have a beer and
not
one of those near-beers, eh? Gestapo,
mon fin.
Gestapo, and don't you forget it or spit in our drinks either.' The Walther P38 was taken out and laid on the table. ‘That's so as to have it ready,' he said to the waiter.

The knife and the pistol were stark against the worn glass of the table top beneath which a faded menu listed the brioches and croissants of long-lost days. ‘It shall be as you wish, m'sieur. Who am I to object to your breaking a law that was made only for us?'

‘Piss off!'

‘Certainly.'

‘Now he'll cough into our drinks, idiot! How many times must I tell you that a little patience is always necessary?'

‘We haven't time. The Bank of France has been humping stuff from Paris for friend Ferbrave.'

‘Pardon?'

‘
Gut.
I've finally got your attention.'

As was their custom when on short rations and at other times, they shared a cigarette, Hermann managing to find one in a pocket. Damaged, of course, and dribbling stale tobacco, but still … ‘
Merci.
'

‘Take two good drags and take your time, eh?'

‘Three murders, three supposed assassination attempts that failed to find their respective targets but chose another.'

‘A lover, a mistress.'

‘The first of whom was known to flaunt her liaisons and no doubt to laugh in the face of Madame Richard.'

‘Did her husband know the vans were being used to haul rationed goods that had been purloined?'

‘We'll have to ask him.'

‘A shorthand typist with the Bank of France, Mademoiselle Lucie Trudel, asked Albert to let her into the Hall des Sources, Louis. A bottle of the Chomel for a sick father, at just after 5 a.m. last Saturday.'

‘And not seen since?' blurted St-Cyr, alarmed, no doubt, by the prospect of a killing as yet undiscovered.

‘Away on compassionate leave. I … I forgot to ask where. Sorry.'

‘We'll deal with it.'

‘She lives in the. Hôtel d'Allier.'

‘And is not away at all, but staying in her room and able to enter Céline Dupuis's at will to leave these?'

Louis set the love letters on the table and then the
carte d'identit
é with its head-and-shoulders profile. The knife was still there …

‘Someone who can come and go at will,' said Kohler, ‘and must have damned well known the Garde Mobile and lift operator would be absent.'

‘Ménétrel gave them the night off.'

The cigar band was added to the collection, the earrings also and the sapphires, lastly the cufflink's stud.

‘And a dress, plus a pair of high heels,' muttered Kohler.

‘Why leave the ID like that for Bousquet,
mon vieux
? In neither of the other killings was such a thing done. Though the reports are thin and add little, both of those victims had their handbags with them – Camille Lefébvre's was found untouched with her clothes in the cabin; Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux's was in the lockup at the
Grand
é
tablissement thermal
, also untouched and with her clothing.'

‘They'll have sold Céline Dupuis's other papers. You know as well as I do there's one hell of a racket in stolen bread cards, to say nothing of the other ration tickets.'

Before the Defeat, the French had become accustomed to eating – and tasting – their food only if it was accompanied by bread. From around a kilo per day, the adult consumption had dropped to about 200 grams if one could get it, and then it usually came in the form of 25-gram slices of the grey National, or in its thumping-hard and very questionable loaves.

‘If they were that desperate, Hermann, then our two assailants are not entirely the professionals we've come to believe and could well be
résistants.
'

‘The one was sick, Louis. She threw up in the portable toilet when she dropped the knife. No sign of the cigar, though, or of its ashes. I checked just to make sure.'

‘A killer with a queasy stomach!' Louis dragged out two
mégot
tins, one of which had once held mints; the other, dressmaker's pins. ‘Camille Lefébvre's,' he said of the former. ‘Bousquet let it slip that she greedily smoked cigarettes whenever she could get them and that her father had accused her of selling herself for them. That's what made me take this from her bag, and then, that of Marie-Jacqueline.'

The wealthy, the middle class and the poor, it didn't matter, thought Kohler. Priest, cardinal and gangster, pimp, prostitute and disgruntled housewife, schoolboy, urchin and banker, these days all of them had become butt collectors. If one didn't smoke, one sold or traded the tobacco for something else. Seldom was anything but life wasted.

‘Lucky Strikes from downed American aircrew,' he said, fishing about in Camille Lefébvre's tin. ‘Baltos and Russians.' He savoured several, crumbling one after another, was good at this, thought St-Cyr. A connoisseur. ‘Gauloises bleues, with dried herbs, straw and other
Quatsch
added as usual, the bastards. Cigars … Three of them. No bands, but good. A cigarillo also. A wayside inn, I wonder. A place where both Occupier and Occupied can meet over drinks to discuss things.'

‘Like songs, sex and using vans that belong to the Bank of France?'

‘Chez Crusoe, and if you ask me,
mein Kammerad der Kriminalpolizei
, I think our groundskeeper's son must have watched a good deal more than those vans.'

They'd have to talk to Albert, have to get him alone and go to work on him, but gently. ‘
Merde
, we're going to be run off our feet, Hermann. Is that what Bousquet wants? To keep us so busy we can't possibly uncover the truth? And Ménétrel … What of the doctor? What, please, was his part in all of this?'

‘That driver of Bousquet's refused to cough up, Louis. I tried. I used every threat in the book, but our Georges's mouth has been zipped so tightly, you could put a bullet in his brain and get more.'

‘A cabin,' muttered St-Cyr. ‘A small hotel downriver of it, to which Bousquet's driver conveniently goes to stay the night.'

‘And a local inn to which some of the girls go after work.'

‘And where one of them meets that same secrétaire général to bum a lift home in the small hours – is that how it really was?'

Kohler opened the other tin only to find an almost identical selection, but here there were also two carefully flattened cigar bands: another Choix Supreme perhaps, and a Romeo y Julieta, both bright red and with gold coins on either side of the brand name.

‘Our nurse must have known Albert, Louis.'

‘She had a private practice. Was he one of her patients?'

‘Was she accustomed to caring for the girls at Camille Lefèbvre's school?'

‘Where Céline Dupuis may have taught ballet part-time?'

‘A bird lover, Louis. One who wore diamonds she tried her damnedest to hide.'

‘But hadn't worn the dress, the shoes or this because she couldn't have had them.'

The beads of a very wealthy flapper.

‘Which, by rights, should have been stolen from her room,' breathed Kohler. ‘The Hotel d'Allier,
mon vieux.
I think we'd better hear what our shorthand typist has to say if alive and still at home.'

The Hôtel d'Allier rose up from behind its iron fence, grey and slate-roofed against an even greyer sky. Shutters open, others closed.

In the foyer, a simple bell and desk stood before dark, wooden pigeon-holes with their infrequent messages. Keys absent or left on the run, others long forgotten. Maybe sixty or seventy rooms …

The head-and-shoulders portrait of Pétain in uniform, looking sternly down from the papered wall, was crooked.

‘St-Cyr, Sûreté. Mademoiselle Lucie Trudel, and hurry.'

‘Hurry?' yelped the ancient concierge, having ducked behind the desk. ‘The police are always in a hurry, no more now than before. Nor have they changed their coats or their politics, only the weight of their truncheons.' Cloves of garlic spilled from his left hand. ‘My lunch,' he hissed. ‘There's no bread.'

‘Kohler,
mon fin.
Gestapo, Paris-Central.'

‘Concierge Rigaud, it's a matter of some importance,' tried Louis.

‘My soup, is that not important? This place. The constant comings and goings and no one signing in or out, eh? What's it this time? Drugs? Syphilis? Or did she have something worse? Is that why she had to go home? Well, is it?' he shrilled.

Sacré nom de nom
, a tough one! ‘Did she really go home?' bleated St-Cyr.

‘Three messages now and not collected. Aren't they evidence enough?'

Rigaud, for all his years and apparent frailty, was fiercely protective of his territory but the snap of Hermann's fingers broke the air. Swiftly handed over, the slender slips of paper were quickly scanned and pocketed.

‘She was rounded up, wasn't she?' rasped the concierge, biting back on his gums, then clucking his tongue for good measure. ‘Grabbed off the street and hustled to the
commissariat.
Forced to strip for the doctor to have a look and a swab, eh? They're disgusting, the girls these days. Dropping their underwear whenever they get itchy. No morals. No sense of decency. These old ears of mine
don't
want to listen but cry when they hear the goings on!'