Flykiller (28 page)

‘You're sworn to secrecy, monsieur. What you now know could well be dangerous for you and your son. Just let it rest in peace among your cigars and leave my partner and me to deal with it.'

The gate to 133 boulevard des Célestins was rusty, the gilding of its heraldic fleur-de-lis gone. Above twin neoclassical pillars of black Auvergne basalt, single Grecian urns of the same would once have held spills of ivy and fuchsias in season but were now broken and devoid of all but the last of their earth.

His breath billowing impatiently, Hermann lowered the beam of his torch to the rusty bell pull. Seizing its loop, he gave it a yank and then another. Like death, the dull, flat sound of a cracked bell thudded in the near-distance.

No lights would come on. It was now almost nine, the blackout complete, the boulevard unlit except for the soft diffusion of clouded moonlight on snow.

Across from them in the Parc d'Allier, where Napoleon III had had the river dyked, its marshes filled in and acacias, sycamores and cedars planted, there wasn't a sign of life. But then, these days, when automobiles of any kind pulled in alongside a house and two men in fedoras and overcoats with raised collars piled out, people tended to wait and watch from a distance or vanish.

Hermann shook the gate but the lock was fast. ‘And freshly oiled,' he swore, having dropped the beam of his torch to it. ‘So why the uncaring disrepair of the recluse yet the oiling, in a nation that has so little of that commodity nearly everything squeaks, even its
filles de joie
?'

He was in rare form. Again he yanked on the bell and again! ‘Patience,
mon vieux.
Patience. This is not one of Napoleon III's villas – those are downstream a little and nearer to the Parc des Sources and the Hotel du Parc. This is simply a private residence, an
hôtel particulier
, a mansion but …'

‘But another of your travelogues? Piss off. It's cold, I'm hungry and we still have to register at our hotel before curfew or those bastards will lock us up! They will, Louis. That Scharführer wasn't kidding. Those boys would like nothing better than to get their hands on two
Schweinebullen.
We should call back here tomorrow morning. Don't
you
be so impatient!'

Hermann had had difficulty in locating Inès Charpentier's boarding house, across the river on the outskirts of the suburb of Bellerive-sur-Allier. He had had to cross and then recross one of the bridges and had been hassled twice more!

‘Messieurs … What is it you wish?'

Ah
merde
, a woman, a dark silhouette, stood just behind the bars of the gate, shrouded in the cloud-shadow of one of the pillars.

‘Auguste-Alphonse Olivier. Sûreté and Kripo.'

‘Detectives … Whatever for? He can't know anything of use to you. He never goes out during the day, never walks up into town. You'll only upset him. His supper …'

‘
Ach!
Open up, Fräulein.
Sich beeilen! Dép
ê
chez-vous!
' shrieked the Kripo.

Hermann would use
Deutsch
and then French! ‘
Verfluchte Franzosen
,' he went on. Cursed French. ‘Always causing trouble.'

One shouldn't let that pass! ‘I thought it was
les Allemands
who caused the trouble,' snapped St-Cyr.

‘
Calme-toi
, Louis.
Calme-toi
.'

The key, though probably fashioned in the late 1860s, had difficulty finding the lock after that little exchange but once there, it turned smoothly and, surprise of surprises, the gate swung open without a sound.

‘I can answer whatever you wish to ask,' she said determinedly. ‘There is absolutely no reason for you to question him. Is it the house that you think to requisition? Well, is it?'

The path to the street had been cleared and freshly swept. Only her footprints dented the snow ahead. In the foyer, and once beyond the blackout curtain that shrouded all such doors these days, the light from a single sconce of mid-nineteenth-century brass and frosted glass was grey and dim. A plain walking stick leaned forlornly against a small, bare table. Another of those urns was to Hermann's left, on a short pillar of grey marble, the
fer forgé
balustrade and stone staircase rising majestically to a landing beneath a magnificent Beauvais tapestry before turning to lead to room upon cold room.

‘All right, messieurs,' she said tartly, ‘you will now answer me.'

Arms tightly folded across her chest, she blocked further progress. Severe was the word one would most use to describe her, felt St-Cyr. Dark and very widely set eyes lay under fiercely plucked brows. The long straight black hair was tied behind but pulled down in front to hide the left side of her forehead, making her look like what? One of Man Ray's photos, the stern
maîtresse
of a girls' boarding school?

The nose was prominent, the lips thin, the face with its slanting knife-edged creases on either side of that nose, sharply angular. The ears were pierced and held wedding-ring loops of gold; the neck was no longer youthful, the head perched as if that of a tortoise protruding from the loose and cable-knitted cowling of a grey-blue, woollen, long-sleeved dress.

‘Well?' she asked harshly. ‘If not the house, then what?'

‘Your name, mademoiselle?' asked Louis, having raised a cautionary hand to silence his partner who was still taking her in, still trying to get a feel for this place. Ah yes!

‘Pascal, Edith, secretary and, since some time now, cook, housekeeper and maid of all work.'

She was in her early fifties. The cheeks were indented, the complexion sallow, or was it the lack of lighting? wondered Kohler. Black eye shadow had been used only at the extreme far corners of her eyes to emphasize their shade and severity. The eyebrows were much, much thicker nearest the bridge of the nose so that their arch tapered swiftly to pencil thinness and the gap between them was reinforced by their blackness.

In 1918 there had been so few eligible men left in France, Germany and Britain after the Great War that spinsters like this had been minted in. their hundreds of thousands.

‘Employed here since November 1925?' asked Louis pleasantly enough.

‘If you must know, yes,' she said, having read his partner's mind and not liked what she'd read.

‘A few pieces of jewellery,' he continued, unruffled as usual.

‘There is no jewellery here. Why should there be?'

‘Perhaps if you would simply take us to your employer, he might allow you to stay while we question him?'

‘Stay? of course I'll stay! Haven't I been at his side all these years since she …'

‘Drowned herself?' asked Louis, keeping up the heat.

‘How dare you say that in this house?'

‘Edith … Edith, who is it?' called out a distant voice.

‘Detectives, Auguste.'

‘Then have them come into the kitchen. Could we offer them a little of our soup and some of the National?'

‘No soup and no bread, Auguste. There's barely enough as it is.'

‘A little of the wine?'

‘It's a
pas d'alcools
day and the wine has been watered twice in any case.'

‘Then at least some of the tisane, Edith. It's very cold out there.
Mon Dieu
, two pullovers on under my coat and still I froze! Inspectors, what brings you to us?'

He had finished his soup and bread. Though his cheeks were still coloured by the frost and he'd doubtless been outside recently, newspapers were spread before him.
L'Humanité, Paris-Soir, Je Suis Partout
, the
Völkischer Beobachter, Das Reich
also, and still others … How had they come by them?

The couple had been arguing – that was abundantly clear, thought Kohler. Reclusive Olivier might be but those walks of his had served him well. The ex-banker's grip was strong, the hand roughly calloused. Once sure of himself no doubt, this
haut bourgeois
– never one of the
nouveaux riches
, for the house was of old money – had been reduced to avoiding the gaze of others but that's where it all stopped. On his lapel lay not only the red ribbon of the Legion d'honneur but that of the Croix de guerre and the yellow and green of the Médaille militaire. Though sixty- eight or seventy years of age, he was still quite handsome, if now rough and ready. The blue suit jacket had obviously been something he might have once worn to that bank of his, but now it had frayed cuffs and mismatched buttons. The pullover beneath it was one he must favour, the plaid workshirt beneath that, frayed right round at a collar that had already been turned.

There were bags and dark circles under the deep brown eyes and these made the still-averted gaze even more sorrowful. There was also the perpetual evening shadow of Paul Varollier, though stronger and definitely not sickly.

‘Inspectors, we tend to live in the kitchen,' he acknowledged with a gesture. ‘As a boy I spent much time here, so that is all to the good. Sit, please. Smoke if you wish. We've a fire as you can see, but the wood is from one of my own trees. A windstorm took it.'

Was the emphasized singsong accent of the Auvergnat deliberate? wondered St-Cyr.

Olivier slid a saucer their way, refusing Hermann's offer of the last of his partner's cigarettes.

‘I gave it up,' he said. ‘One has to. The tobacco ration alone can put more on the table than the francs that china vase
*
of ours issues. Butter at three twenty to the kilo on the
march
é
noir
, sugar at two thousand, coffee the same. Even the potatoes here have risen to over two hundred the five kilos. A new suit of haircloth is six thousand or half a year's hard-earned for many of our men. We refuse to deal on it, don't we, Edith? What others, including our bishop, will sanctify, we prefer not to.'

A louis d'or was spun on to the table, the eyes of the banker flicking swiftly over them to come to rest on it. ‘In 1857 that was worth twenty francs and the same in 1869 when Napoleon III minted the second of them. I can trace back my family in Vichy to well before that.'

‘Auguste, please …' attempted Mademoiselle Pascal, nervously fidgeting.

‘No, Edith, let them hear it. What can that all but
lanterne rouge
of his class at the military academy trace himself to, eh? The farm of the peasant heritage he's so proud of that he never worked a day in the fields? The Victor of Verdun, the
médecin de l' Armée
? Oh
bien sûr
, I was there and worshipped him like so many others. That,' he indicated the coin, ‘was worth one thousand francs in 1940 after the Defeat and now … why now it's close to eight thousand and the price of a new bicycle if one can find one. In Lyons the St Paul prison, and even the St Joseph's for women, are packed to overflowing. The Fortress of Montluc has been requisitioned by Obersturmführer Barbie, and it, too, is jammed. Five and six to a cell with only two bunks so they sleep in shifts but that's not allowed by the warders, is it?

‘You're police officers. You should know all this. The Santé in Paris was built to hold a thousand and now houses between five and six thousand. One in every five men has been deprived of his liberty and all contact with his loved ones, and Secrétaire Général Bousquet and the others wonder why their lives are being threatened?
Sacré nom de nom
, do they need Laval's clairvoyant to show them the truth?'

‘Auguste … Auguste, you're shouting. The … the inspectors, they want to ask you about Noëlle's … Messieurs, my employer apologizes. Isolation has made him incautious.'

And yet … and yet he knows we'll not arrest him for it, said St-Cyr to himself. Has he still contacts in Paris who can tell him how it is there for us?

‘
Travail, Famille, et Patrie
, Inspectors. While one-third of our farmers languish in POW camps in the Reich, our remaining peasants sell nearly half of their butter, eggs and pork to the BOFs, the butter, eggs and cheese racketeers. One-quarter of all potatoes not sent to the Reich also go to them, and one-half of all chicken. And yet … and yet, our Head of State and the Government he has created wish us to
venerate
the noble peasant while making those same peasants far richer and more arrogant than they've ever been?'

He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Seventy-five per cent of all oats grown in the country go to the Reich, eighty per cent of all pressed oils and now … now they're no longer counting the cattle that arrive in Paris for transhipment to the Reich, only the rail trucks when full. I shouldn't be surprised if Parisians aren't wondering, as they did in the Franco-Prussian War, if they will not soon be reduced to eating rats!'

‘Auguste, I'm going to my room.'

‘Go if you wish, Edith. These two will listen. That one, though he's no collabo, has his name on
L'Humanité's
list, and that one … Well, if you'll forgive me, Inspector Kohler, I have to ask, did your rebelliousness not once consign you to a
Himmelfahrtskommando
?'

To being one of the trip-to-heaven boys, one of a bomb-disposal unit!

‘Though I can no longer stop averting my gaze, still I've seen it in your eyes, Herr Kohler. Not just fear of what's going on here in France but of what's to come for those you love. Now toss out the jewellery and I will tell you what I can.

‘Edith,' he said. ‘Edith, the bilberry tisane for our guests. They say it's good for the sight, Inspectors. One has to try everything these days, so one steps carefully at night when one leaves a lighted room or else one falls on one's ass. Ten minutes it takes me now just to adjust the eyes. Ten minutes!'

Night blindness was a terrible problem, especially in the bigger cities. During the day vision would be normal, but at dusk it would become hard to gauge distances and define objects. One would step outside into the blackout as if totally blind, and would have to wait patiently for the eyes to adjust. A lack of vitamin A and fats in the diet, the doctors said; others, the blackout itself.