HS02 - Days of Atonement (24 page)

I
CLIMBED ABOARD
the coach, but gave no order to the driver.

I had no idea where Lavedrine might be. I had met him only twice. On both occasions he had strutted onto the scene like an actor who has important lines to speak. Having delivered them, he had turned and walked off the lighted stage, disappearing into the dark wings from whence he had come.

I gave a vague order to Egon Eis to set the carriage wheels rolling in the direction of the town centre. We passed achingly close to my home once again, but my thoughts were so fully occupied in trying to work out where Lavedrine might be hiding that the house was gone in a flash. The Frenchman was not a soldier in any true sense of the word. He held the honorary rank of colonel, but he had told me himself that his role was to monitor criminal behaviour by the emperor’s troops, while collecting data for his criminological studies. If he had an office, it might be anywhere in town. And as for his private lodging, that was anyone’s guess.

As Egon Eis asked me for the second time where I wished to go
exactly
, sir, I came up with a solution so blindingly obvious that it had not occurred to me before: ‘Take me to the Old Hotel,’ I shouted up.

I was thankful not to see the sour expression on my driver’s wrinkled face. Eis was anxious to be home before the curfew, and time was running short. Once the hour struck seven, it would be harder than ever to unearth Lavedrine. Surely, I thought, Mutiez would know where the criminologist could be found.

Called the Hôtel de Ville since the Francophile days of Frederick the Great, the Old Hotel, or ‘Old Town—Hall’, was a three-storey building on the opposite side of the main square from my own office in Lotingen Court House. The Bonapartists had set up their General Quarters there, and the place was always full of French officers, whether they were on duty, or merely passing the time of day. Proving himself to be the sole exception to a universal rule, Mutiez was nowhere to be found.

As I turned to leave, I almost bumped into Captain Laurent, the requisitioning officer for the town.

‘What are you doing here, Herr Stiffeniis?’ he exclaimed with surprise.

‘I am looking for Colonel Lavedrine.’

‘One moment,’ he said, and disappeared into the officers’ mess. ‘No sign of him in there,’ he reported when he returned.

He called to a soldier, sitting at a desk.

‘Check the address of Lavedrine in the Bible. Make a note of it,’ he ordered. He turned to me with a smile. ‘That’s the name we give to the register where the lodgings of our officers are listed.’

Within a few minutes the man came back with a slip of paper in his hand.

‘Chapter and verse, sir,’ he joked as he saluted.

‘I hear that you and he are investigating the massacre,’ Laurent commented, as he handed me Lavedrine’s address. ‘I wish you all success, and hope you catch the killer quickly,
monsieur
. Lotingen reminds me of my home town during the
grande crainte
. Blois-sur-Loire will never be the same. Nor Lotingen, I fear.’

I knew what he was referring to. Towns and villages in rural France had been engulfed by a tide of hysterical fright as the Reign of Terror unfolded in Paris. People spoke of packs of wolves and covens of witches, blood-hungry thieves and murderers roaming the countryside by night, hideous monsters creeping out of the woods under cover of darkness in search of human prey.

‘Many people died as a result of the panic. It was fear that did it. Nothing more. They slaughtered their neighbours indiscriminately, thinking to protect themselves and their loved ones from danger.’

‘We must ensure that nothing of the sort happens here.’

‘If the local population were to turn on our men,’ he said, concern written openly on his sallow face, ‘who knows what would come of it?’

Was that what the massacre of those children was intended to foment? I asked myself. The provocation of violence and lawlessness against the foreign invader? If that should prove to be the case, it would be necessary to turn the spotlight back on my fellow countrymen. A raging, angry crowd would be an immensely powerful weapon in the hands of unscrupulous nationalists. Could that be the link with Kamenetz? A scheme devised by General Katowice and his adepts to throw Prussia into a state of ungovernable chaos? It would make things more difficult for the French, and deflect attention away from the rebels.

‘I wish you a good night, Captain,’ I said, taking my leave, hoping that it really would be an uneventful night for all of us, French and Prussians alike.

Outside, I examined the scrap of paper. Lavedrine had taken up residence
within the city walls, I noted, though somewhat off the beaten track, far from the heart of the town.

‘Arbeitstrasse,’ I called up as I mounted the coach again.

Egon Eis grunted unhappily and flicked his whip at the horses.

I knew the street. A multitude of craftsmen lived and worked in the area. It was busy enough by day, but as we edged slowly through the narrow streets leading down to the wharves of the River Nogat, the area seemed darker, more deserted than the rest of the town. The only signs of life were armed French soldiers on street corners, and patrols of authorised vigilante watchmen bearing cudgels, carrying lanterns on sticks, making sure that everything had been safely locked up for the night. We were stopped and questioned twice by the French. On the second occasion, they pointed out the house that I was bound for, the corporal-in-command mentioning with a grin that one of his superiors had stayed there for a couple of days, then decided to take himself somewhere else.

This wild goose chase was taking longer than I had bargained for. Church bells began to toll, and the nightwatch crier called out the hour of seven. Had it not been for my impeccable documents, Eis and I would have been destined for the cells.

‘Sergeant Kakou said the persons in the house were
singulières
,’ the corporal said, as he handed back my papers.

‘
Bizarres
,’ his companion added.

Neither man attempted to clarify what their officer might have meant.

The people living in the house were rag-and-bone merchants named Böll. So said a large wooden signboard hanging above a shop that shared its entrance with the house.
ALL YOU NEED, AND MORE,
the legend read. A painted profile of a fat man in a tricorn hat, standing in front of that very house, was handing an object to a woman. She, in turn, held out a gold coin in payment for it.

Herr Böll answered my knock some moments later.

He appeared not to have changed his coat or taken off his hat since the day the sign was painted. Glancing beyond his shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the entrance hall. The simplicity of the house surprised me. I had expected to find Lavedrine in exotic and luxurious apartments which would lend lustre to his status as an officer and scholar of renown.

‘I am looking for Colonel Lavedrine,’ I said, wondering what had induced the Frenchman to choose the place, taking note of the landlord standing before me. He was at least sixty years of age, and even more rotund than the man painted on the sign. His clothes also resembled those in his painted profile: black suit, black shirt, black neckerchief. His
leather shoes were black as well, a silver buckle the only point of light in his outfit.

‘Herr Lavedrine is abroad this evening,’ Herr Böll replied in an unusually high-pitched voice, his eyes protruding like spotted billiard balls of veined yellow ivory.

At his back a tiny woman dressed in white from head to toe, a veil covering her nose and mouth, emerged from behind a black curtain on the right. As she crossed the hallway, her dark eyes peered fearfully into mine. She stopped for an instant, sniffing the air like a wild hare, then, without a word, she lifted the matching curtain on the other side of the hall, and disappeared from view into another room.

‘Where has he gone?’ I asked. ‘It is imperative that I find him.’

Herr Böll did not reply at once. His peculiar eyes rolled up into his head: only the whites were visible. For an instant I feared that he was about to lose his senses. But then his eyes fell back, one after the other, slotting into place like numbers on an abacus. He had been concentrating, I realised, and when he spoke, he was hesitant, perhaps embarrassed.

‘I’ve never been there myself, sir. Colonel Lavedrine seems to . . . well, he seems to go there quite a lot. At the far end of Roederstrasse.
Hunger
. I believe that is the name of the house.’

‘Is Colonel Lavedrine working there this evening?’ I asked.

Herr Böll peered at me as if I were mad.

‘I hardly think so!’ he said.

Roederstrasse is in the most run-down quarter of the town, with the exception of the Jewish ghetto, which it flanked on one side. But before I could enquire any further, Herr Böll bowed politely from the waist and shut the door in my face.

I climbed up into the coach again and gave directions to Eis.

‘Are you sure, sir?’ he shot back. ‘At this time of night?’

‘You said you were a soldier, Eis,’ I snapped. ‘Consider yourself on duty again, obeying orders that you don’t understand, but know to be useful.’

The coachman saluted like an obedient trooper, and turned his coach in the direction of the lower reaches of town. Five minutes later, we rumbled slowly down Roederstrasse. The houses seemed to be shuffling up the hill to avoid slipping into the river. The roofs stretched out, almost touching one another, like fully grown trees that had unwisely been planted too close together when they were saplings. Barely wide enough for the coach to pass, a sewer ran down the middle which was blocked and overflowing. And yet, one aspect was striking. In contrast with the rest of town, the shutters were thrown back, and light blazed unhindered onto the dirt and refuse that cluttered the way.

The carriage stopped outside a building that was taller than the others.

‘Here we are, sir,’ Eis announced, pointing to a painted tile on the wall.

HUNGER

The door knocker was gracefully moulded in the shape of a mermaid. No sooner had it dropped than the door swung open, and I found myself staring into a pair of bright green eyes.

Hungry eyes, I remember thinking.

‘Um, ja!
’ the girl exclaimed, as if a tasty dish had just been set on the table.

From the glistening sheen on her round cheeks and the rapid rise and fall of the panting breasts beneath her low-cut blouse, I realised that I had disturbed this beautiful creature at her work. My immediate impression—that her work was something less than honest—was tempered by confusion. With shimmering blonde hair which fell loosely to her naked shoulders, she was a most attractive waif, her figure pressed as slender as an hourglass by a whalebone corset. She smiled broadly in welcome, waiting for me to speak, it seemed, and my confusion grew. As we stood on the step, the rich perfume of sweat and something sweeter came washing out of the house and over me like a tidal wave.

‘Colonel Lavedrine?’ I asked, uncertainly.

The girl turned her head and said something in a breathless, throaty tone to a person inside the room whom I was unable to see. I did not understand a word, but thought I caught the name of Serge Lavedrine somewhere in the middle.

‘I must speak with him,’ I insisted.

Again, she turned away and spoke. Scandinavian, I thought, though it was beyond my capabilities to recognise the precise language or dialect.

‘At once,’ I pressed, breaking in on what seemed to me to be an unnecessarily long and probably useless exchange of opinions.

‘Serge is busy,’ a voice called back from the interior. ‘Hilda, ask him if he wants fresh spice on his
Putipù
.’

The girl before me burst out laughing, her breasts heaving and pumping with delight at the joke, then she went away to do as she had been told. A minute later, she was back, flashing a doll-like smile as she slipped her hand beneath my arm and pulled me over the threshold.

I thought for an instant that I had stepped into a bakery. The smell of ovens was strong, the air hot and heavy. My nose twitched with the scent of yeast, but there was also a strong smell of spiced wine in the air. The room was large. At the far end, a fire blazed in the grate. Hanging from the ceiling was a huge chandelier. There were more candles scattered around the
place than I could count. And more than one table. Many chairs with spindle backs. And on every wooden surface, a naked man or woman. More women than men, I corrected myself. I counted six, all busily engaged with paintbrushes, which they refreshed from a large cooking-pot in the centre of the room. Honey, I guessed from the colour, smell and consistency. As the door closed at my back, the tongues returned to work. I had broken in upon an orgy.

‘Room at the end,’ the girl lisped, letting go of my arm, and pointing away down a long corridor.

I went the way the whore’s finger pointed.

Before the fourth door, I knocked hesitantly.

‘Entrez, alors!’
came the lively, nasal reply.

Opening the door, I saw the transformation of Lavedrine’s face, as debauched good humour gave way to surprise.

‘For the love of God, Stiffeniis! I was expecting hot spice, and what do I get? Your pale, starched face. Come in from the cold. Make yourself at home. My friend here will hate you for it, but there you are!’

I stepped uncertainly into the room.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Don’t be shy, they don’t eat people in Naples as a rule.’

I obeyed, and found myself face to face with a person.

I can find no adequate word to describe the Frenchman’s table companion. Nor was I disposed to stare. Naked from the waist up, I would not have dared to imagine what was hidden beneath the table. Slender, with hardly any breasts at all. Olive-skinned, except for the radiant slash of painted lips and glistening nipples, like sliced cherries, the colour of carmine. Above penetrating black eyes, eyebrows arched like the wings of a hawk across a broad and graceful forehead. Those languishing orbs fixed themselves on me, and silently took me in, shining out of two deep, dusky caverns. A finely chiselled nose. Full, pouting lips. A dark-skinned Mediterranean beauty. But the mystery began below the mouth. The line of the jaw was square, the chin pronounced, the shadowy flesh too dark.