Kaleidoscope (37 page)

The Old Man snorted, ‘
Ja, ja
, Hermann, and what is it I am to give you in return?
Ausweises
for those two women to return south, eh? Come, come, don't be a
dummkopf
. You know I can't do that.'

‘Neither of them is a threat to the Reich. The one only wants to weave …'

‘Weave?' thundered Boemelburg. ‘If I understand correctly, the woman wove quite a tale and involved the whole village as accomplices.'

‘But only to protect her daughter. Delphane was using them, Sturmbannführer.'

The Chief tossed his shaven head. ‘And Bleicher, the famous Colonel Henri of the Abwehr? What have you offered that one for
Christmas
?'

‘Nothing, Sturmbannführer. The Buemondi woman's list of telephone numbers was accidentally destroyed along with their dossiers and our own in Gestapo Leader Munk's stove.'

Well up in his sixties and bigger than Kohler, France's top cop and Head of SIPO-SD Section IV, the Gestapo in France, knew enough not to ask how this could possibly have happened. ‘And the village?' he hazarded.

‘Left to bury their dead, my Sturmbannführer.'

‘Don't “my” me, Kohler.
Gott im Himmel
, what am I to do with the two of you?'

They waited, keeping silent. Not turning from the windows, the Chief said at last, ‘The girl, is she really pregnant by the herbalist's son or was it this … this professor, this sham artist who defiled her?'

‘Not pregnant, Sturmbannführer Boemelburg. A mistake or a fantasy.'

‘Good! Why did Delphane use the antique arrow to kill the woman? Why not a newer one?'

‘Because it was more fitting but also, Sturmbannführer, because the newer ones were not kept in the grand salon and available to him.'

‘Don't weave too hard, Hermann. Your fingertips might suffer. Surely the Inspector would have used a gun to kill her?'

Kohler steeled himself for it but the Chief had yet to turn from the windows. Still admiring his new toy. ‘Delphane wanted to pin the murder on the weaver, Sturmbannführer. Guns were not allowed.'

‘Guns,' grunted Boemelburg. ‘Guns like the one that killed the financier, eh, Louis, and then did in the perpetrator of that little falsehood.'

‘My gun,' muttered the Frog, knowing he shouldn't speak out of turn. ‘No one in authority would believe it was my revolver that had killed Stavisky, Walter, because they did not want to believe it and the whole thing was to be hushed up. Serial numbers and all.'

‘Yet in every police photograph, Louis, it was your gun we saw.'

St-Cyr nodded. ‘Madame Buemondi's father got Jean-Paul to deal with the financier.'

‘Was he paid for the job, do you think?' asked the Chief.

‘Perhaps, but then … ah then, money need not always change hands.'

‘One of the connected, eh, Louis? The Establishment. Friends in high places who could help him out in the future when a favour was needed. What made him turn against us? Come, come, from you I demand an answer.'

It was clear that Walter was worried but equally clear that he knew more than he was letting on. St-Cyr took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. A Gestapo, Walter was, and a Nazi too; but beneath it all and behind it, a cop and a damned good detective. One could not say otherwise when one had known and worked with him before the war.

Lighting up the furnace, he took several puffs, then waved out the match. ‘Perhaps, Walter, for completeness you might tell us why Abwehr Central and the famous Colonel Henri started to watch the Inspector Jean-Paul Delphane but did not jump him?'

‘Louis …?' began Hermann, startled by the all-too-obvious challenge.

It was a tired Boemelburg who said, ‘Because I always suspected what Jean-Paul had done in Chamonix, Louis, and wanted us to take a closer look at him.'

‘So you tipped off the Abwehr, for whom he was then working, and they went after him.' Paris these days … it never ceased to amaze!

‘And Bleicher suspected the truth but wanted the Gestapo to take care of things – Delphane was too well connected for their shining morals.'

‘But … but why did he go over to the other side?' blurted Kohler. ‘The Resistance?'

Boemelburg turned back to the windows and the rain. Was it pissing like this in Berlin, he wondered, or snowing? The car was superb and he'd enjoy being driven around in it from time to time but for how long?

‘Even the Far Right are beginning to have second thoughts about us, Louis, but who can answer for a man like Jean-Paul? Perhaps he felt the end was near and thought that by switching sides he'd save himself.'

‘The war in Russia,' muttered Hermann, ‘and the one in North Africa.'

‘Who knows?' said Boemelburg. ‘The Right have always done what they felt was right for themselves.'

‘Walter, why not admit that you lost heavily in the Stavisky Affair and have been feeling badly ever since? Me, I am certain you must have …'

‘Some shares. A little venture – ah, it was nothing, Louis. Nothing. Merely the heating-and-ventilating firm I used to work for here in the old days. One can't always be a cop. Someday one has to retire. Stavisky refloated the firm and I thought … Well, Paris, I'd had such good times here. I …'

St-Cyr tugged at Kohler's sleeve. ‘Enjoy the Rolls, Walter, and the holiday, eh? Hermann and me, we must take a few days off to rest up.'

‘Then read that telex on my desk and
enjoy
your own holiday.'

Ah no … The thing was from Mueller, Gestapo HQ Berlin. It was all about someone code-named Salamander.

‘Find him, Louis, before he kills too many more. Hermann, you go with him. Lyon first, I think. Arson, Louis. A cinema-house and all the popcorn the two of you can eat!'

‘And the weaver and her daughter?' bleated the Sûreté's little Frog.

‘Besançon and the internment camp there for British citizens, Louis. It's the best I can offer.'

‘But what about Christmas? What about …?' Kohler saw the telex beneath the other one. He could not bring himself to pull it out. Apprehension rushed in on him. The boys? he asked. Gerda … his little Gerda?

‘She's asking you for a divorce, Hermann,' said St-Cyr, wishing he could cushion the blow to the ego. ‘Apparently your wife has found someone else.'

‘A Frenchman, Hermann,' snorted the Chief. ‘A labourer on her father's farm.'

‘Then I'm applying for compassionate leave, Sturmbannführer. Please, you can't cut me off like this. I'll …'

Have nothing to go home to. All three of them knew this was what Hermann had been about to say.

‘Lyon,' muttered St-Cyr. ‘We'll pass through Vouvray, Walter. A short digression to restore the soul.'

‘Then see that you don't take too long about it. This one's slippery. Get to the cinema-house before the ashes are cold. Find the hand that did it.'

Turn the page to continue reading from the St-Cyr and Kohler Series

1

T
HE STENCH WAS TERRIBLE, OF PISS-SOAKED
wool, wet ashes and death, that sweet, foul, clinging odour of burnt flesh, excrement and human hair.

Jean-Louis St-Cyr let his gaze drift over the corpses that lay in two great mounds at what had once been the curtained doorways to the foyer. Some, too, were scattered about the charred, soaked seats that now lay in ruins under ice.

Some had tried repeatedly to force the exit doors—there were corpses there, too, lots of them—trampled again and one could see how that seething mass of terrified humanity had run to those doors and then had tried to escape through the foyer.

‘Louis, how the hell are we supposed to go about sorting this thing out?' demanded Kohler angrily. Hermann was looking desperate and ill behind a blue polka-dot bandanna that had been soaked in cheap toilet water and disinfectant. Contrary to popular belief, many Bavarians were known to have weak stomachs, this one especially.

Concerned about him, St-Cyr nudged his partner's arm. ‘Try not to think too much about the loss of so many,
mon vieux.
Try to go carefully, eh? Remember, we don't have to pull them apart. Not us. Others.'

Louis was always saying things like that! A chief inspector of the Sûreté Nationale and a detective of long standing, he was the other half of their flying squad, such as it was and always seeming to be on the run. ‘
Verdammt!
It's nearly Christmas, Louis! Giselle and Oona … they were expecting me to be at home in Paris for the holiday.'

Ah
merde
, no concern for his partner, and how, really, were they to begin? wondered St-Cyr, wishing he was elsewhere and looking desperately around at the carnage, telling himself that Hermann was better off if a little angry. It helped the stomach.

One couple clung in a last, desperate act of love. Ice encased everything, and the fire that had come before had removed all but scraps of clothing. Even the woman's garter belt was gone, the elastic adding its tiny contribution to the conflagration, the wires now embedded in her thighs.

Others had cringed under the seats, covering their heads and trying to protect their faces. Still others had been trampled by their fellow human beings. Now those who had done the trampling lay atop the piles of tangled bodies, their stark, empty-eyed expressions caught and kept by death and the encasing ice.

A cinema … The Palace of Pleasure of the Beautiful Celluloid. Whoever had set the fire—and it had been set—had made certain of the carnage. Both fire doors had been padlocked, though not, he thought, by the arsonist. The cinema had been packed—two days before Christmas 1942, a Wednesday evening performance, the fire set at about 9.15 Berlin time. The City of Lyon, the German Occupation of France but not a cinema reserved for the Wehrmacht, not one of the
soldatenkinos.
Railway workers and their families. Humble people, little people. Loyal fans, the film a favourite of all railway workers,
La Bête humaine
, The Human Beast.

In the scramble to escape, 183 patrons had died, an unofficial estimate. ‘Ah,
mon Dieu
, Hermann, to come straight from the railway station to a thing like this!'

Icicles were everywhere—hanging from the balcony and a brass railing that had come loose under the crush. Even from the cornice of the projectionist's booth, even from the backs and bottoms of the seats. Charred timbers showed where portions of the roof had gone. The sky above was empty and grey. Icicles hung up there—great long things that, with the fifteen degrees of frost, appeared dirty grey and savage.

There was glass underfoot from the skylights above, and plaster in chunks with laddered bits of once-painted wood whose charred alligator pattern might have been used to trace the progress of the fire had one not been told exactly where it had started.

‘Right at the head of each aisle, Louis. Simultaneously or very close to it. Gasoline, though God knows where they got it.'

‘Molotov cocktails?' asked the Frenchman.

Kohler shook his head and nudged the bandanna farther up on a nose that had been broken several times in the course of duty and elsewhere. ‘More subtle than that. Two women were seen entering together. One carried a woven rush bag large enough for the shopping.'

‘And those two women?'

The Bavarian's gaze didn't waver. ‘Seen leaving in a hurry, Louis, just as the fire struck. They were the first to get out.'

‘Two women.'

‘Yes. They came in late, and the usherette found them seats at the very back, the right aisle, left side, nearest the aisle.'

‘It's not possible. No woman would do this, Hermann, and certainly not two of them.'

‘Then talk to the usherette. See if you can get any sense out of her. The poor kid's still so deep in shock, she couldn't even tell me her name. I told her to go home and think about it. All the others had buggered off. She alone had stayed.'

Hermann was really upset. The faded blue eyes that could so often hold nothing but saw everything, were moist and wary. Frost tinged the strongly boned brow round the edges of its bandage—a bullet graze there from a last investigation and blood … blood everywhere, some still seeping through. Too worried to even change the dressing. Yes, yes, that last case and what it had revealed to him about the growing resistance to the Occupation. Provence and a hill village. Murder then and murder now, and no time to even take a piss. Just blitzkrieg, blitzkrieg, because that was the way the Germans wanted everything solved. No time even for Christmas and a little holiday.

‘We'll leave the usherette for now, Hermann. The relatives will want the dead released for burial. It's the least we can do.'

Then you take this aisle, I'll take the right one. Meet me in front of what's left of the stage.'

‘Look for little things. House keys, cigarette lighters, bits of jewellery, brass buttons, anything that might let us get a feel for what really happened here. Then we will know better how to proceed.'