Salamander (2 page)

Ironically, there was a revolver lying under the ice, an old Lebel, Model 1873, a swing-out six-shooter exactly like the gun Louis still carried.

‘Ah, shit!' swore Kohler, exhaling the words exasperatedly. ‘I forgot about his shooter and Louis didn't remind me of it!'

As the Gestapo member of the flying squad, Kohler was to keep their weapons under German control at all times. Well, at least until the shooting started and the time for questions was over.

Swiftly Kohler sought him out again. Louis had gone back through one of the gaps in the rear wall and was now standing in what had once been the foyer. The grey light of day was louvered with shadow. Just his head and shoulders were visible beyond that tangled, horrible pile of humanity he was calmly studying. The brown felt trilby was yanked down over the brow for warmth and as a warning of determination. He'd get whoever had done this. One could read it in him in spite of his calmness.

The head and shoulders vanished and Kohler realized that Louis hadn't wanted to be seen just then.

Merde
again! ‘If we can't trust each other, we're done for,' he said, muttering it to himself. With difficulty he freed the revolver and, looking about to see that he was unobserved, quickly pocketed the thing, determined to drop it in the nearest sewer.

‘There's no sense our getting Gestapo Lyon all worked up. Hell, they'd only rip the town apart and shoot thirty or forty hostages we might need to question.'

Kohler knew that if Louis had found the revolver he, too, would have hidden it away and said nothing of it, but Louis was French and had every reason to do so, whereas his partner was …

When the revolver had disappeared, and Hermann had busied himself elsewhere, St-Cyr heaved a contented sigh. For a moment, he'd thought Hermann undecided. He was glad that they were beginning to think alike on this issue, but of course, Hermann might yet weaken and quite obviously there had been Resistants in the cinema. Railway workers were notoriously Communist, pro-Russian and therefore anti-German.

Distracting himself from such an uncomfortable thought, for things would be far from easy if the presence of the Resistance was as obvious to others, St-Cyr went back to searching the ruins. There were rings of gold and those of silver. If anything, the fire had deepened the colour of the gold wedding bands, while that of the silver had either been dulled by oxidation or swept clean by the flames. One gold wedding band had fallen and rolled ahead of its owner and he wondered about a last act of contrition. An illicit love affair? The wedding ring removed and then … then the fire and the realization that the ring would have to be put back on the finger or else …

He thought of Marianne, of how she must have removed the ring he'd given her on their wedding day. How she must have slipped it into a pocket only to guiltily put it back on when coming home late, satiated from the arms of her German lover. Yes,
lover
!

But Marianne was dead and so was their little son Philippe, killed by
mistake
! A Resistance bomb that had been meant for him. Ah yes, they had had his number—still did for that matter. They thought him a collaborator because he worked under a German, a Bavarian, and for the enemy. What else was he to have done, eh? God had frowned, and God had not thought to tell the Resistance otherwise.

With difficulty, he freed the ring and managed to force it back on the proper finger. He said to himself, Hermann was watching me just then. He has realized I've kept my gun and said nothing of it.

There was one corpse whose hand still clutched the clasp knife the man had used to kill those around him in his struggle to get out. The blade was a good fifteen centimetres long and not exactly what he should have been carrying around. Ah no, most certainly not.

Railwaymen! he said to himself. Ah
nom de Jésus-Christ
, how on earth were they to settle this business? How could they possibly hope to catch this … this maniac, this Salamander who had supposedly set the fire?
Salamander
, the telex from Mueller, Head of the Gestapo in Berlin, had read with all the brevity of a command from on high and all the warning too. ‘
Find him before he kills too many more
,' Boemelburg had said in Paris. The Sturmbannführer Walter Boemelburg, Head of Section IV, the Gestapo in France. Hermann's boss.

Two women, not one man, a Salamander, had been seen. It made no sense to tell them so little yet expect them not only to find out everything in the space of one or two days—would they have that much time?—but also to put a stop to the arsonist or arsonists immediately.

And how, please, had Berlin found out about it in the first place?

Back inside the cinema, Kohler came upon what must have been a priest. Only the top of a richly jewelled cross protruded from tightly clasped hands that had been roasted. The corpse was jammed between two rows of seats and on its knees facing the foyer. A chain, of many links and stones, was wrapped around the right hand, and why must that God of Louis's make him do things like this? Gingerly he broke the encasing ice away and teased the cross free. It came quite easily, the flesh clinging a little, but unravelling the chain was more sickening. His fingers trembled. His breath was held. He knew he was on to something.

Rubies and sky-blue sapphires and diamonds … tiny fleurs-de-lis in gold … 150,000 marks? 175,000? Renaissance? Was it that old?

No ordinary priest. The Bishop of Lyon's secretary? he wondered. A cardinal perhaps or some ambassador from the Vatican? But why wear a thing like this to a film? Surely he must have known robbery was a distinct possibility?

Had he come fearing the worst, the fire, and then knelt to pray it would not happen even as it did?

All around him were the remains of dinner pails, boots, goggles and heavy leather-and-asbestos gauntlets, indicating that some of the men had only just come off shift from the marshalling yards in Perrache, right in the centre of the city not far from here and on the end of the tongue of land that lay between the Saône and the Rhône.

Gestapo HQ Lyon was in the Hotel Terminus facing the Gare de Perrache, an uncomfortable thought. Questions … there were bound to be questions. The Resistance thing if nothing else.
Verdammt
!

Two women and a priest, but no ordinary cleric. A large handbag woven out of rushes. A bag for the market, though nowadays market pickings were slim unless one dealt on the black market and had things to sell or trade.

A telex from Mueller, an order from Boemelburg. Shit!

Kohler sought the seats where the two women must have sat but, of course, they were now under a pile of humanity. Surely the priest could not have been looking their way. Not at the last. But had he known of them? Could it be possible?

Pocketing the cross, he moved away, found a broken wine bottle and another dinner pail, wondered again at the avidness of the railwaymen. Clearly they'd all agreed to gather to see a favourite film, but since the film had first come out in 1938, presumably most had seen it already.

Then why the gathering? he asked himself. Such meetings could only mean trouble.

He began to search further. Nearly everywhere there was the rubbish of railwaymen or members of their families. The gun he had found weighed on his conscience and he experienced a spasm of cold panic. He saw again that girl in the cellars of the Hotel Montfleury in Cannes, saw the blood trickling from her battered lips and nose to join the swill of vomit and excrement on the floor. Dead … dead at such a tender age. She'd known nothing, hadn't even been involved. Well, not really.

‘Hermann …'

He leapt. ‘Louis, good
Gott im Himmel
, what the hell do you mean by startling me like that?'

Ah
mon Dieu
, Hermann was really not himself! ‘Nothing,
mon vieux.
Nothing, eh? Forgive me. The fire marshal wants a word.'

‘Then talk to him. I'm busy.'

‘Don't be so gruff. His German counterpart is present and speaks no French. Kommandeur Weidling requests your presence as interpreter.'

Kohler pulled down a lower eyelid and made a face behind the bandanna. ‘Doesn't he trust you to do it accurately?'

‘Please don't give me horseshit, Hermann. Both men are nervous and not without good reason. They are afraid this will happen again and soon.'

‘Then there really is a pattern and there have been other fires?'

‘Ah yes, a pattern.'

‘The Salamander?'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Did you find anything?'

A shrug would be best. ‘Just little things. Nothing much. We'll look again, eh? After the conference.'

‘Piss off! The Feuerschutzpolizei back home can't know anything about this, Louis. What the hell's he doing here?'

Again there was that massive shrug. ‘Ask Gestapo Mueller; ask Herr Weidling but proceed gently. We can use all the help we can get.'

‘A visitor from home who just happens to be a fire chief and on the scene of a major fire? The son of a bitch shouldn't even be here, Louis, not with all those incendiaries the fucking RAF are dropping at home!'

Hermann always had to have the last word. It was best to let him so as to avoid argument, but … Ah, what the hell. ‘Then let us have a look at our surroundings first, so as to have everything in perspective. Please, I think it is important.'

Kohler's grunt was answer enough. Picking their way past the ticket booth, they stood a moment at the entrance, gazing out across place Terreaux. Bartholdi's four magnificent horses were caught frozen in their imaginary flight to the sea. Shrouded in ice, the Goddess of Springs and Rivers looked unfeelingly down from her chariot at the corpse of a man who had run to her in flames for help.

French police and German soldiers kept the crowd at bay behind a rope barrier. The debris of firefighting was everywhere. Pumper trucks, whose snaking hoses were now collapsed and clinging to the icy pavement, were being attended to by exhausted firemen whose disillusionment at having failed to save so many was all too evident.

The square, one of the finest in Lyon and right in the centre of the city, would normally be busy in the afternoon, even under the Occupation. Now the curious and the grieving huddled around its periphery and, in places, beneath shop awnings that had been folded out of the way.

Collectively the mood of the crowd was one of outrage and fear. They'd be blaming the authorities. They'd be whispering How could you let a thing like this happen? Why were the fire doors padlocked? It was that bastard who owned the place. He did it for the insurance. No, no, it was a sadist, a maniac. It's going to happen again. Oh yes it is!

A murmur intruded, a disturbing puzzle for it was not coming from the crowd. Now and then the sporadic chipping of firemen's axes broke through the hush and the murmur as the hoses were freed for coiling.

Unsettled that he could not readily find the source of the murmur, St-Cyr scanned the length of the square. The Hôtel de Ville, the city's seventeenth-century town hall, faced on to it at the far end, with a domed clocktower rising above and behind the entrance. The Palais des Arts—the Palais Saint-Pierre—took up the whole of the opposite side of the square. Eighteenth century. All solid, well-built buildings. Staid but baroque too, and emitting that singularity of purpose so evident in the Lyonnais character. Good business and sound banking: silk and explosives, leather tanning and many other industries. A city of about 700,000, with blocks and blocks of nearly identical, shoulder-to-shoulder buildings from three to five windows wide and from four to six storeys high, as were some of these. The stone grey or buff-grey, the stucco buff-grey to pale pink. The roofs of dark grey slate or weathered orange tile, the chimneys far more solid than those of Paris and of brownish-yellow brick with chimneypots that were rarely if ever canted because the people here would have seen to them.

Mansard roofs with small attic windows and tiny one-or two-room garrets for servants, shopgirls, clerks and students were to the left and right. Below them were ornamental iron railings before tall french windows behind which most of the lace or damask curtains were now parted. Drop-shutters were pulled up and out of the way or, in a few places, lowered to half-mast like weary eyelids, and in one case, closed completely as if to shut out what had happened.

‘The location is perfect, Hermann. Maximum exposure if fear of repeat fires is what was wanted.'

‘Publicity. Someone who knows the city well,' grunted Kohler. ‘A pattern, Louis.'

‘An uncomfortable thought and an arsonist totally without conscience. But for every fire there is a reason, no matter how warped.'

‘Or sick.'

Again the murmuring intruded but now there was that unmistakable feeling of never knowing if they were being watched by the arsonist.

‘Louis, our visitor is feeding the pigeons. There, over there. Behind the fountain.'

The stiff woollen greatcoat was Prussian blue, the rubber boots, whose tops were folded down, were well used and black, of pre-war vintage. Little more could be seen of him beyond the stallions with their flailing hooves and wild-eyed muzzles, but the murmur increased and became more excited. The black leather gloves had been removed and stuffed into a pocket. The left hand held a torn loaf of white bread—white, no less and seldom seen on the streets these days!—while the fingers of the right hand ripped off bits and tossed them to the pigeons, his little friends.

‘Does he keep doves at home?' hazarded Kohler, baffled that, in the face of such a catastrophe and hunger among the civilian population, anyone could be crass enough to unthinkingly undertake such a sentimental task.

‘Maybe he's homesick,' offered the Sûreté.

‘Maybe he wants to show you French exactly how unimportant you are!'

Such inflammatory statements from Hermann were best ignored but why should they be? ‘Is it that he has seen it all so many times before, Inspector, or is it that he needs to find release from the horror in such a simple task?'