Flykiller (55 page)

‘Albert …' she said, her voice not loud or shrill, but flat and toneless as she backed away until she could no longer move.

He did not answer. He drew in a breath as he studied her. Was he puzzled? Had he been pushing the buttons too? Surely he must want to know where St-Cyr had gone?

Another breath was taken, then he gave a little sigh and the smell of him came to her.

Kohler was moving fast. He had to draw the Garde off, had to help Louis out, couldn't let them have the trumped-up, pseudo-medical file on Julienne Deschambeault either, would have to hide it and the other one some place, but where?

He had propelled the two from the lift-well partway up the main staircase and into the rest of the Garde, had run from these as they'd come thundering down into the cellars. He had gone to ground himself, but every time he entered a corridor, the lights would be thrown on and they would catch a sight of him.

Merde
, if only he could find Olivier, if only Madame Ribot could have told him where that one was hiding. The old PTT? he wondered again, as he and Louis had … An ear constantly to the telephone lines not just from this hotel, but from the Hôtel du Parc, the Majestic and all the others. Olivier and that bank of his had financed the building and the move to a bigger, modern exchange, but was there a corridor to it, a tunnel of some kind? Old cables … had those been what he'd seen running along the ceiling of this corridor?

A treasure, Madame Ribot had said. A treasure.

‘The baths,' he muttered, coming upon an arched, oaken door with mounted placard, as yet another light switch was found and thrown on well behind him.

The door's lock was flimsy.
Jésus, merde alors
, would it hold long enough for him to hide the files?

There was a notice on its back: É
tablissement Thermal
–
Service Medical …
The names of Vichy's ‘medical' consultants, Raoul Normand among them …

The towel room? he wondered.

TARIFS DES BAINS
,
DOUCHES ET AUTRES SERVICES
…
BAIN DE CÉSAR
… Caesar's bath, 2 francs …
GRANDE DOUCHE CHAUDE
… the hot shower, 1 franc 50,
PETITE DOUCHE LOCALE
, 1 franc 25….
BUVETTES
… a season's pass to all of them, the Hall des Sources, the Chomel, the Parc and Célestins, et cetera. Ten francs.

Where … where the hell could he hide the files and not be caught with them?

Gossamer-clad maidens combed their hair or bathed in the buff as coy little half-submerged virgins beckoned to a young lad from among a mural of dark green lily pads. Blue and gold tilework paved the floor. Mustn't slip, he warned himself. Must keep going in spite of that knee of mine.

From the half-shell of a giant scallop, a life-sized marble statue of a naked girl stood on tiptoes with slender arms upraised and entwined as a bearded, ancient Neptune summoned her by blowing on a conch.

Water fell over marble bas-reliefs of romping, life-sized nymphs. Sumptuous things, gorgeous things, pure and innocent in their nakedness and completely at ease with one another among tall reeds at the bank of a river, the Nile … Was it the Nile?

The sculptor Girardon, Louis would have said, as he had when they'd visited Versailles in the autumn of 1940, Occupier and Occupied getting to know one another. The original had been cast in lead, in 1670 or thereabouts.

‘Kohler, that's enough!' cried Henri-Claude Ferbrave. ‘Be reasonable. All we want are the files. We've burned the rest.'

The rest … The rest
, came the echoes. What rest? he wondered, frantically tossing his head as he looked for a way out and muttered, ‘The handprints they took from Madame Ribot.' Four, five … no, seven of the bastards were heading for him. Hard, no-nonsense sons of bitches, tough …
mein Gott
they were tough. Charles-Frédéric Hébert was the last of them and the only one without a weapon.

The baths, separated by reclining mermaids, were surrounded on three sides by the bas-reliefs, and it was among these that the mildly effervescent water fell over pleasing thighs and breasts and gorgeous backsides to stream on to the head of a laughing nymph who playfully splashed another but seemed to mock this Kripo.

His Gestapo shoes, broken at the seams, were soaked through, his feet warm. His left sock protruded. There was a hole in its toe.

Verdammt!
He was standing on the walkway between the bas-reliefs and the baths. Coursing around and over his shoes, the water gave up the smell of its sulphur, and he heard, as if in the distance, the trickling music of it and finally the gentleness of its fizzing.

Vapour rose up from the baths and for an instant he thought, Please just let me lie in one of the them, but …

Louis … he said silently. Louis, I tried.

The lift had descended to the cellars, its gate opening and closing, but no words had been spoken, or not that he had heard, thought St-Cyr. And as for Hermann, the Garde seemed to have vanished with him.

There were none of them in the foyer when he chanced a look over the third-floor gallery railing; none, apparently, on the staircases, rushing to overtake him; yet surely by now they must know he was no longer in the lift with the sculptress? Surely they'd want her out of the hotel and safely tucked away in her boarding house, if for no other reason than to finish things here in private? Surely Ménétrel would have insisted on that?

A cover-up, a frame-up, too, and if not the wives, as Dr Normand's file on Julienne Deschambeault had indicated and Charles-Frédéric Hébert had stated, then Blanche and Paul Varollier or Albert. And if not Albert, then Edith Pascal, and if not Edith, then Auguste-Alphonse Olivier, recluse, ex-banker, old. enemy and cuckold. But had Olivier really tried to stop the murder of Céline Dupuis? Had he been right in this? She would have constituted a distinct threat to the FTP had she been taken and questioned by the Gestapo.

Hermann had found no evidence of anyone having tried to intervene. There had been no signs of Céline's having tried to get away until she had reached the Hall des Sources. Why hadn't she tried to escape beforehand, why hadn't she run?

Merde
, this investigation, he swore. No time to think things through; Hermann needing him now. Hermann …

Albert was to have delivered a hamper to Chez Crusoe early on Tuesday evening. Some caviar, a little pâté … a bottle of the Bollinger Cuvée Spéciale, one also of the Rémy-Martin Louis XIII, but that hamper hadn't turned up and neither had Céline Dupuis's rucksack and handbag, only her ID, which had been left in her room for Bousquet to find.

Hébert's pocket knife – the Laguiole he had had since a boy – had been in that hamper, or so he'd stated, a reminder to the Maréchal of better days and other conquests: that of Noëlle Olivier.

Albert had left that knife in the sacristy of the chateau's chapel, thinking Hermann wouldn't notice the difference. He had then tried to kill the sculptress with Madame Olivier's knife, having perceived her a threat to his hero, but what threat, please? he asked himself. Herr Gessler and Herr Jännicke had vetted the girl's valise and, having satisfied themselves, had then asked her to make certain nothing had been taken.

Albert had emptied a phial, causing the case to reek of bitter almonds. The girl had been certain he had known who had killed her friend, but she couldn't be a threat to Pétain, could she? Certainly she'd been a courier, had received and delivered messages for Olivier and was, yes, like Céline had been, a distinct threat to the FTP should the Gestapo get their hands on her. A threat Olivier had naturally made no mention of, even though Edith Pascal had called him a fool for having divulged he was their leader, a man who had known beforehand everything that would happen.

Had that hamper and Albert been intercepted en route to Chez Crusoe? Had Lucie Trudel been stopped on her way back to the Hotel d'Allier after Albert had helped her to get a bottle of the Chomel for her father?

Had Olivier, knowing full well what must happen to those girls, not intervened but waited instead, and then used the killings, particularly the two most recent, to let Bousquet and the others know their every action was being watched and that they would be called to account?

If so, then the civil war they feared had, as the sculptress had said, already begun. Cruelty would be matched by cruelty, the innocent caught between the two sides. Henri-Claude Ferbrave and the Garde, the Milice and all the others on the one hand; the Resistance on the other.

Still St-Cyr heard nothing. Timidly a door opened and a head darted out only to be withdrawn at the sight of him. Again he looked over the railing, this time letting his gaze sweep round the galleries until it came to rest on the fountain below. If the water were turned on, the dust blown away, the chandeliers lit and there were couples about, arm in arm to laughter, music and whispered tête-à-têtes, it would be so like the Vichy he had experienced as a boy.
Grand-mère
and he hadn't stayed in anything so opulent. ‘A
pension
will serve us just as well, Jean-Louis,' she had said, ‘but we will take our meals in nothing but the finest restaurants, if they have such establishments in this place.'

This Vichy. This tourist trap, she had finally come to call it. Aurore Iréne Molinet, he reminded himself. She'd favoured Balzac, Victor Hugo and Dumas for the sheer pleasure they had brought her as a girl who'd been forbidden to read them.

‘Stay close. I will awaken your eyes,' she had confided, rejoicing in the sight of so many obviously unmarried couples whose men had been old enough to have known better than to consort with girls, who certainly had known better and were often far less than half their ages.

She had introduced him to tobacco and had known full well he had taken three of her Turkish cigarettes, yet had said nothing of the theft.

She had introduced him to gambling and the Grand Casino, where the Chambre des Députés, under Laval's conniving and cajoling, had met in July 1940 to vote themselves out of office by a margin of 569 to 8o, thus putting an end to the Third Republic and initiating what some had called the ‘Casino Government'. She had introduced him to crime as well, for she had loved nothing better than a juicy scandal, and had avidly read the news reports of such to him, commenting at length on what had lain between the lines and the sheets. She would have had much to say about the current scandal and the murder of those girls.

And, yes, he said as he started cautiously down a far staircase, she would have agreed with Pétain's return to the soil, especially as one-third of all of France's agricultural workers were in POW camps in the Reich. But she would not have agreed with Marcel Déat, that France was and should be ‘Germany's vegetable garden'. ‘The Boche are savage, Jean-Louis,' she had said, referring to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. ‘I am going to send you to a farm near Saarbrücken to stay with distant relatives so that you will not only learn their language but how they think.'

Aurore Iréne Molinet … Had she known then that the Boche would be back?

He hadn't thought of her since their last investigation. Once he had innocently asked her here in Vichy if her side of the family had descended from the poet and chronicler Jean Molinet, who'd been in the service of the dukes of Burgundy in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

She had answered as only she would, ‘I. have no patience with poets,' and that had been it. A woman – a lady – of great contrasts. One who had introduced him to absinthe and, if truth were told, had no use for the convention that had seen her strapped into a whalebone corset under widow's black.

But was it at moments like this that the legacy of one's past became clear, or was her ghost simply trying to tell him he must have missed something?

Louis wasn't with him. Louis hadn't backed him up.
Verdammt!
swore Kohler silently, what the hell had happened to him? Killed? he asked himself and answered, I heard no shots. Shots would have echoed down here in the cellars.

Two of the Garde were stationed at each of the far corners of the baths. Bergmanns there and no chance of a way out. Sour, still in a lot of pain and just itching to pull the trigger, the one with the broken arm now cradled it and a long-barrelled Luger with drum clip – thirty-two shots.
Merde!

Burning sheets of paper – the files he'd taken from Dr Normand's safe – were being held up, page by page, to be released only at the last by Charles-Frédéric Hébert, their charred remains drifting slowly down until extinguished by the water that coursed around hobnailed boots. And why must that God of Louis's allow things like this to happen to honest, hard-working detectives?

Henri-Claude Ferbrave, that little gangster from the roof of the Jockey Club and the foyer of the Hotel du Parc, now had a Schmeisser tucked under his right arm. As he lit each page, he handed it to Hébert. Disarmed, Kohler knew he could only wait it out and hope. But when the sculptress and Albert Grenier were hustled in to stand with him on the walkway between the bas-reliefs and the baths, the girl, still clutching her valise and bag, shrilled, ‘The lift, monsieur. The Inspector had climbed out and was standing on it when Albert and I punched the buttons and caused it to go up and down.'

The lift … Ah Christ, had Louis fallen? Was he caught in the cables, torn, mangled, bleeding?

‘Not there,' said one of the two who had brought the girl and Albert. ‘We looked, Henri-Claude. He must have reached the third floor.'

Afraid of Ferbrave, Albert clung to the sculptress, which only made her cringe all the more. His woollen hat was pulled down, the scarf loose, the jacket of the
bleus de travail
open.

The burlap sack he held, he now released, letting it fall into the water at his feet.

‘Ah
bon
, it's done,' sighed Hébert as the last of the pages was torched, ‘Now there is no proof.'