Flykiller (3 page)

‘The Marseillais has a reputation as a practical joker, Secrétaire. He calls a tender shower of rain a tempest, a lost shirt from the laundry line an armed robbery in which the wife and daughters were strip-searched and their virtue plundered. But he has an even more significant reputation, one for vengeance. Has your suggestion of an attempted assassination been prompted at all by fear of repercussions over what the first
arrondissement
suffered? I ask simply because I must.'

The Vieux Port de Marseille had been a rat's nest of steep and narrow streets, the home of prostitutes, pimps and gangsters! ‘We did what we had to do.'

A month ago, on 3 January, German security forces had raided a
maison de passe
, one of those seedy, walk-in hotels where prostitutes took their clients for a little moment or an hour or two and then left. Suspecting to find
résistants
and Wehrmacht deserters hiding out and fast asleep, there had been an exchange of fire in which several on both sides had been killed or wounded. Hitler, in a rage on hearing of it, and having at that time all but suffered the final loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, had demanded the levelling of the whole of the first
arrondissement
and deportation of 50,000 of its citizens to camps in the east. Bousquet and Lemoine, the regional préfet, had managed to convince Oberg that French police should do the job, and at 3 a.m. on the night of the 13th-14th, 30,000 residents, having been told they had but a few hours to vacate their homes, had moved out. Their papers were all checked, but far fewer
résistants
and deserters than anticipated had been arrested and the homeless citizens, for want of anything better, had been shunted off to camps at Fréjus and Compiègne, where they still resided and would for as long as it took to free the country. Then on 15 January, Wehrmacht engineers had begun to dynamite every building – tenement houses, warehouses, churches, loading docks and port machinery – and had, by the 24th, even sent 173 vessels to the bottom thus unintentionally blocking the harbour for months.

‘The Führer was appeased,' exhaled Bousquet exasperatedly. ‘Twenty thousand were saved and the other thirty thousand kept in France and not deported.'

‘But has this event anything to do with the suspected attempt on the Maréchal's life?'

‘Has the
Grande Rafle
also anything to do with it, eh? Come, come, Jean-Louis, let us get things out in the open.'

‘That, too, then.'

‘I had no choice. Too much would have been lost. We gained. In all such things there are the pluses and minuses. Be glad you don't have to make such decisions.'

‘I am.'

Doucement
, Louis, go easy, thought Kohler, alarmed at the exchange. On 16-17 July of last year Bousquet and the préfet of Paris had convinced Oberg and Heydrich that French police, under French direction, could handle things. Nine thousand Paris police had surrounded five
arrondissements
in the dead of night during what had since come to be known as the Great Roundup. They had then arrested 12,000 terrified men, women and children and had locked them up in the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the cycling arena, for eight days without sufficient water, food or toilet facilities – Jews that had then been deported by rail in cattle trucks; the children kept in France for a little longer and then sent on as well, but not knowing where to or why they had been taken from their parents or whether they would ever see them again.

Louis and he had been away from the city at the time, thank God, but since then Louis had pieced together a record of the tragedy that he intended to pass on to the Résistance for the day of reckoning that would surely come.

‘Just do as you've been told, Jean-Louis,' grunted Bousquet. ‘Don't let your brand of patriotism interfere.'

Only one of those Paris
flics
had resigned and refused to take part. Only one, Kohler told himself, but, to be fair, a good many of them would have been too afraid to object. And orders were orders especially in a police force of 15,000, for that's what Paris had. But if the Resistance had wanted a target, then why not Bousquet himself?

On the outskirts of Vichy the car was stopped at a control by armed Wehrmacht sentries, no longer by members of the Garde Mobile de Resérve, Vichy's small paramilitary force. The latest password was demanded, as one had been since 1 July 1940 at all entrances to the town, and never mind that it was still the curfew, thought Kohler wryly. Assassination had been on the Government's mind right from the beginning!

‘Spring brings the new growth; autumn the harvest,' said their driver – the only words he had spoken on the whole damned trip. Had Pétain written the thing?

With a wave, they were released, and drove into the heart of the town.

Out of the cold, the damp, the blackout and the silence, and from the deeper darkness of the covered promenade that ringed the Parc des Sources, Hermann's voice came gruffly. ‘Louis, was it right of you to have told them to leave us?'

‘
Merde
, Hermann. We are greeted in the small hours by a Secrétaire who doesn't appreciate our little visit, but brings along the victim's supposed lover, yet fails to brief us completely and tucks in a Gestapo for good measure. Does this not make you concerned?'

They had been dropped off about mid-park and on the rue Président Wilson, some distance from the Hall des Sources and the Hotel du Parc, and not at all the route the victim would have had to take. Acetylene lanterns had been provided but were, as yet, unlit.

‘All right, it smells.'

No collabo and no Pétainiste either, Louis had once been a
poilu
, a soldier in the Great War at Verdun and other such places, and had, like ninety-eight per cent of his fellows and most of the nation, thought fondly of the Victor of Verdun, hailing Pétain's offer of leadership in June 1940 as a godsend to a nation in despair.

Some leader. Very quickly Louis had lost whatever respect he'd had for the Maréchal.

‘Come on,' breathed Kohler. ‘I guess it's this way.'

‘It is, and we walk as the
curistes
– those seeking the cure – walked beneath Émile Robert's marvellous thistledown of wrought iron, which graced the Great Universal Exposition of 1890 in Paris and was moved here in 1900.'

‘I can't see a hell of a lot of it. Too dark, I guess.'

‘Yes! But I'm trying to remember it as I first saw it when a boy of eleven going on twelve, Hermann. In the summer of 1902 Grand-mère thought she had a load of gravel in her guts and made me accompany her. My father urged me to do it, and I could not bear having him suffer her tongue any more. Of just such things are heroes made, but look at me now.
Sacré
! My left shoe has come apart again.'

‘I'll reglue it for you later.'

‘That glue you bought on the
marché noir
won't be worth the lies that budding
horizontale
told you. Just because she was young and pretty and headed for a life on the streets was no reason for you to have trusted her!'

And still bitchy about Bousquet! Glue was all but impossible to find these days; shoes only more so, unless one bought the hinged, wooden-soled ones with their cloth or ersatz leather uppers. Twenty-four million pairs of the things had been sold to date in a nation of forty million, which only showed how lousy they were!

‘Think of La Belle Époque,' muttered Louis, mollified somewhat by his own outbursts and wanting to be calm. ‘Think of high society from 1880 until we all bid adieu to such splendour in 1914. Think of the grand hotels that were built here with their covered terraces and art nouveau ironwork and interiors, their verandas, dining rooms and atriums delicately graced by Kentia palms and other exotics. Of silk or satin gowns, jewels and sensuous perfumes, of princes, duchesses, lords and ladies – marquises, courtesans and counts.

‘Then think of the hordes who followed them, especially in the twenties and thirties, Hermann. Old maids and war widows, shopkeepers, postal clerks and accountants, lawyers too, and judges and young girls of easy virtue. Gamblers also.'

‘Think of a swollen liver, an attack of gout, an enlarged prostate or constant dose of the clap. And then think of guzzling or gargling that
Quatsch
, that crap! An international spa, eh?'

‘But, Inspector, opera singers did it, actors and actresses too, and artists. All such believers came here for the
cocktail thérapeutique
and the baths.'

‘And other things, so don't get pious.
Nom de Dieu
, Louis, will you look at that!'

They had finally reached the Hall des Sources. Under torchlight, great daggers of discoloured ice hung from the rusting, green-painted frieze. Sheets of that same ice coated the tall, arched windows as a frozen signboard above the entrance spelled it out for them:
FERMÉ POUR LA SAISON.

It had been left here in July 1940, and no one in the Government had seen fit to have the sign removed!

‘None of our politicals have a sense of humour, Hermann. This, too, we'd best remember.'

In addition to the Government of France, thirty-two embassies and legations had moved to Vichy in those first few months of the Occupation. Now, of course, there would be far fewer of them – cold and empty villas as of last November, but still there would be the Italians and Japanese, the Hungarians and Rumanians, the Finns too, and neutrals like the Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, thought Kohler. Could
Ausweise
for Giselle and Oona be prised out of the Swiss?

‘Don't even consider it,' mused St-Cyr, having easily read his partner's mind after the two and a half years they'd spent constantly in each other's company. ‘It's far too expensive a country for you. Concentrate on the murder. All things in their proper place and time. Besides, the Swiss are turning them back.'

Freeing the tall iron-and-glass doors brought only grunts and curses and then, at a sudden yank, the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphide and that of warm, wet mould.

Water dripped. Effervescing carbon dioxide hissed as it escaped, but from where? wondered Kohler. Pipes banged in protest as if throttled.

Through the pitch darkness of the hall, the beams of their torches began to pick things out. Pollarded lime trees that were dead – those palms Louis had mentioned were coated with so much ice their blade-like foliage had collapsed about the glazed jardinières of another time.

The hall must be huge and would have held five hundred or a thousand at a time. Breath billowed, and as they looked at each other and then shone their torches around and upwards, they found that the beams of light would penetrate only so far. The air was filled with vapour, grey and layered, especially when not stirred by footsteps.

‘Four sources have their
buvettes
here, Hermann. Their pump kiosks. La Grande Grille, which issues at a temperature of 42.4 degrees Celsius (108.3 degrees Fahrenheit); Chomel, at 43 degrees Celsius; Lucas, at 28.1 degrees Celsius; and Parc, at 22.5 degrees Celsius (72.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Although Grand-mere should have warned me, she said, “Why not try them all,
mon petit
?” I foolishly did and spent the next twenty-four hours locating the toilets, something she probably had had in mind for me to do in any case.'

By just such little exchanges do we keep ourselves sane, thought Kohler, dreading what they'd find. The throat probably hacked open but not before the breasts had been slashed, the womb repeatedly stabbed, the buttocks and …
Jésus, Jésus
, how much more of this could he stand? ‘Chomel, Louis. There it is. Bousquet said we'd find her behind that counter.'

Though seen under the scanning beams of their torches, the Buvette du Chomel was much as St-Cyr first remembered it. A marvellously curved and ample art nouveau, glass-topped table, perhaps five metres by three, whose ringed ridges, atop the glass, had given the image of water flowing outwards from its source in a curved, eight-sided, glass-and-gilded, beehived dome with interlaced crown. Both the table and its source had been suffused with the soft glow of electric lights, as if shining upwards from deep underground.

Wicker-clad bottles, vacuum flasks, jugs and measured glass cups with handles were still much in evidence. Had those in their hundreds who had come to take the waters, and those who had served them from behind the enclosing counter, simply departed in haste?

‘Take a little stroll, Hermann. Look for things Bousquet and whoever first found her will not have seen.'

‘I'm okay. Really I am.'

‘You're not and you know it!' Hermann had seen too much of death – at Verdun on 21 February 1916 when 850 German artillery pieces had suddenly opened up at dawn in a sheet of flame, his battery among them, and the flash of thunder had been heard 150 kilometres away. Death then, and later. Death, too, as a detective in the back alleys and streets of Munich, then Berlin, then Paris. Ah yes, Paris.

Céline Dupuis was but a short distance from one of the gaps in the counter. She was lying on her back, but the hips and legs were turned towards her left and that arm was stretched well above her head, as though, in her final spasm, she had sought to pull herself away from her assailant.

The coat of the nightgown was unfastened, the bloodstained décolletage of antique lace clasped instinctively by a right hand that had then flattened itself and now hid the wound.

The blue eyes, their lashes long and false, were wide open and she was staring up into the light of the lantern Hermann now stubbornly held over her.

A black velvet choker encircled the slender neck; the face was not the classic oval but long and thin, the cheeks pinched even in repose, the painted lips parted, the blonde hair askew and of more than shoulder length.

‘Caught between the dispensing bar and the table, Louis, but did someone pin her arms from behind as the bastard knifed her? That is a knifing. I'm certain of it.'