Salamander (31 page)

One should ask for the magistrate's order, one should demand to see it! ‘You've no right, Inspector. Monsieur Henri is absent from the premises. Mademoiselle Charlebois—'

‘Has not come back from her walk in the park, monsieur, and will not unless she wishes arrest. Now, please, I know absolutely the duty of every concierge is to protect the sanctity of the tenants, but if there are complications—another tragic fire perhaps …'

‘The fires …? But … but what has Mademoiselle Charlebois to do with them?'

St-Cyr told him. Tears leapt into the old man's eyes. He used the back of a forefinger to self-consciously tidy a superb handle-bar moustache. ‘She was worried about her brother, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. Mademoiselle Charlebois is a kind and gentle soul. It … Ah no, no, it's impossible what you say. Oh for sure they might quarrel—what brother and sister don't, and he's much older, she's never married. But for her to have set such fires and caused so many deaths …? No. No, monsieur, it is just not possible. A mouse … she wouldn't let me kill a mouse but made me release it in the park.'

‘Where is her brother?'

‘Monsieur Henri …? At his shop. Always that one works. Always he comes and goes. There are so many people dying these days, so many of the old estates being broken up. She's the anchor, the lamp behind the black-out curtain, the one who keeps house for him.'

‘And teaches school.'

‘Yes, yes, of course.' The concierge, a throwback to the days of yesteryear, hesitated. One could see him struggling with things from the past—little incidents—and things from the present. ‘How long will you be, Inspector?' he asked, defeated at last by some remembered incident.

‘Not long. Now tell me what made you change your mind? Come, come, monsieur, time is something we do not have.'

The chin was gripped and favoured in doubt. Loyalty … the years of service flicked past on the screen of memory. ‘Mademoiselle Charlebois came to ask about her brother, monsieur. The car was not here, you see, and she … she wondered where he had gone so late in the day. His supper … she had yet to get it ready, had not had time. She was frantic and could not understand why he would leave without telling her.'

‘When … when was this?' breathed the Sûreté.

‘Why … why the day she lost her keys. She thought she might have left them in the car. She had searched everywhere and thought her brother might have taken them by mistake.'

On Tuesday night, 15 December.

‘The car had to go in for repairs and did not return until the following Thursday. Me, I have heard Monsieur Henri drive in in the small hours, but when she came to search the car in her night-gown and slippers, Mademoiselle Charlebois could not find the keys and was most distressed.'

Thursday the twenty-fourth, the day after the cinema fire, the day Hermann and himself had arrived. ‘She did not ask her brother?'

The concierge shook his head. ‘Monsieur Henri did not go up to the flat. He would not have wished to disturb her at such an early hour.'

Had it even been Henri Charlebois? ‘There was a robbery at the Dijon shop, on the night of Tuesday the twenty-second,' said St-Cyr gruffly. ‘Monsieur Henri left here on the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-third, and did not return until Christmas Day in the afternoon.'

‘But the car …? I know it returned here on Thursday, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. Everything is recorded. Everyone hears cars these days because there are so few of them, isn't that so?'

‘Then perhaps you would let me examine your register,' breathed St-Cyr.

The car had been clocked in at 3.37 a.m. No Salamander would have been so careless unless desperate or absolutely sure of himself.

‘The flat,' said St-Cyr.

Concern leapt into the concierge's eyes. ‘You will touch nothing?'

‘Only what is necessary.'

‘Then come this way. Please remove the shoes. No one will steal them.'

‘All the same, I will take them with me and put them on the mat Monsieur Charlebois keeps just inside his door. Please do not attempt to telephone him, monsieur. It would be best for you if he did not know I was here.'

*
the pavement or cobblestone of good health

9

A
T THREE THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON, A LONE
Daimler was parked outside the shop of Henri Masson, and the street that ran past it, ran straight from place Bellecour to place Carnot, the Hotel Terminus and the Hotel Bristol.

Frost had built up inside the windscreen of the Daimler and on the side windows. Lots of it, so the wait had been long and the driver frozen.

Kohler stood a moment in the rapidly fading light. Henri Charlebois's name, and that of the shop, had been among the list of concert patrons, automatically guaranteeing the antique dealer a handful of complimentary seats.

Bundled against the cold and fighting the ice underfoot, people hurried along the narrow street, oblivious to the shop windows, to fine china, crystal, furniture and paintings most could never have afforded even in pre-war days. Jewellery too, and walking-sticks of all things—watches, silks and bits of sculpture.

A few
vélos
, tragic in the freezing cold and likely to split apart, struggled to master the ice but could only do so with speed.

He crossed the road, pausing in the middle as a girl shouted, ‘Monsieur, a moment, please!' The grey mouse in the back of the
vélo
didn't like the look of him. Plump and stuffed into uniform at the age of forty, the silly bitch had at last realized her true station in life and was proud of it.

He resisted the temptation to grab the
vélo
and wreak havoc. He wanted to tell her, Watch out, fräulein. One of these days some disgruntled bastard will drop a grenade into your lap and give you something to think about.

Instead, he strode purposefully into the shop, into an Aladdin's cave of glitter and warmth, the hush of talk over
objets d'art
, with but momentary glances his way from the clerks. A generaloberst with a monocle browsed, a generalmajor, a hauptmann—a few Frenchmen and their wives, a few very fine-looking Frenchwomen. All talking, all foraging, some pausing to pass fingers over a nice bit of porcelain or a bronze Pegasus or a truncated bit of Roman statuary with testicles just waiting to be fondled to soft, teasing laughter. ‘
Don't
squeeze them,' he warned one pretty thing. ‘It hurts like hell and is still hurting.'

There were three floors, with a broad, spiralling staircase rising right in the middle to a huge chandelier of Baccarat crystal just waiting for a bomb to fall. No sign of Frau Weidling yet or of Henri Charlebois. Old friends? he wondered. Old lovers?

There were clocks, clocks and more of them. There were paintings big and small, tapestries long and short—weavings of silk and embroideries …

‘Monsieur, is there something I can do for you?' sniffed someone.

The little squirt gave him the once-over from shoes to fedora. ‘Gestapo,' breathed Kohler. ‘To see the boss and the woman who is with him.'

The clerk started up the stairs. Kohler grabbed him and said, ‘Don't. It's a surprise.'

‘Then … then they are with the fabrics and the estate lingerie, monsieur. The shoes and dresses. It is on the third floor, at … at the back. There are three rooms. The Monsieur, he … he has said they … they were not to be disturbed.'

‘Good.'

Martine Charlebois had got to the flat first. There were droplets of water near the mat just inside the door. Gingerly St-Cyr set his shoes down and drew the Lebel. Should he call out her name? She must have heard the concierge unlocking the door for him, must have heard them talking in the hall. Ah
merde
, where was she?

Not in the salon, not in the dining-room or kitchen, not in the brother's bedroom or her own … Had she killed herself? Had there been enough time? Yes, there had, idiot!

He hit the door to the bathroom and burst inside to find it empty. The lavatory? he shouted at himself, racing for it.

She'd been and gone and he did not know if she had taken the phosphorus. Two jars … two of them in a woven rush hand-bag, perhaps wrapped in a towel for safety.

And with bottles of gasoline? he asked and shuddered at the thought, smelling the garlic odour and seeing on the cinematographer's screen of his mind in black and white, with no fooling about in colour, the phosphorus bursting instantly into flame and giving off dense clouds of white smoke. The girl naked and on her knees in front of that priest who then had knelt facing the flames of retribution. The girl so desperate, she would defy all logic to come back here …

Like a cold, hard wind he went furiously through the flat. It was all so tidy it made him angry. Assistant professors of lycées had virtually no time, yet to have kept a house like this without help, she must have worked herself to the bone.

Even the superb Louis XV desk, with its regimented stacks of exercise books, was tidy.

It was a Hitlerian tidiness he could not understand. Sweating, he dragged off his overcoat, letting it fall where it would with a clunk, reminding himself to empty its pockets.

He tossed his fedora onto one of the Louis XVI armchairs whose gilt and pistachio-green trim was flaking. The scarf, he reminded himself, removing it. Ah
merde
, the place was like a mausoleum and a museum in which life had passed and the history of its artefacts had been jumbled. Royalty might once have slept in her bed, a superb
lit à la duchesse
with sumptuous drapery in gold and pale green brocade. Certainly it had come from well before the Revolution.

There was a magnificent, gilt-framed eighteenth-century Venetian mirror that reflected almost the whole of the room. And though he saw himself, shabby and diffident and lost among such refinement, he saw her too, naked and kneeling on the sumptuous Savonnerie carpet, saw her reflected in the mirror. Had Father Adrian made her watch herself as he had had sex with her?

The brass of an antique cage held a finch that sang, startling him for it must have been singing all along.

The canary was quiet. Soft and as golden yellow as a canary he remembered from another case, it lay on its side with the little door open.

She had had only enough time to kill the one. It being winter, she would not have released them, but would she have thought of this? Would she, in all her haste?

Trembling, he could not keep his hand still enough to get it inside the cage and had to calm himself. The canary felt cold but, then, little birds that die lose their body heat very rapidly.

No drawer had been untouched by himself, no door to either of the two magnificent armoires, and he knew then that he had been so frantic to find the phosphorus, his mind hadn't bothered to record if any of them had been partially closed.

There were condoms in a lowermost drawer of her dressing table—a loose handful, thrown down perhaps. In the waste-basket there was a pessary that, when held to the light, revealed the sabotage of a pin. Not once but several times.

Sadly he recalled another case, long distant from this lousy war. A girl in tears. A pessary with similar holes and a brother who had done the damage to a sister who had loved another.

A pair of forgotten ballet shoes in pink satin hung from the back of her door. Only a pair of shoes. Only their reminder of the dance, of hope and prayers and things one would like to be.

There were scent bottles on her dressing table and among them one containing
Étranger.
Gorgeous bits of glass and gold and silver. The photograph of a young man. ‘Max.' Nothing else. Not, From Max, with all my love, my
liebchen
, or anything else. A German boy.

Though he must not feel sympathy for her, a sudden sadness would not leave him.

There was no sign of the sapphire bracelet he'd seen in the salon the other night. He was certain it had been a gift from the brother; certain, too, that it had been rejected by her. Pins and ear-rings and brooches—one superb pink topaz necklace with a rope of silver and a diamond-encrusted clasp from which finely braided tassels of silver hung. An emerald ring, an opal, a cameo—all of it was from the
belle époque
, that age of refinement before the guns of war had come.

The sister had known only too well that life is to be lived on borrowed time with borrowed things. Even the contents of her jewel case would come and go as circumstance dictated.

Gaps in the leather-bound books on her shelves revealed a missing Baudelaire and a volume of Proust. Had Claudine Bertrand given her that vial of perfume in exchange for the loan of the books? Probably.

She played the cello and this, a fine old instrument from some estate sale, leaned against a chair in a far corner beside a music stand. Handel's
Water Music
, Mozart's
The Magic Flute—
she wasn't among the first cellists but among the seconds. Notations, in a tight, neat hand, were marked on the scores. ‘Andante, Martine; fortissimo,
chérie.
Don't be so nervous here. It's all right. You'll do it.'

Flipping through one of the exercise books on her desk, he compared the handwriting. She'd done them both and had probably written the anonymous letters the préfet had given him. Yes, yes, she had.

Henri Charlebois's bedroom was every bit as immaculate. Two very fine Empire-style beds, with beautiful mahogany head- and footboards and inlaid ebony posts, had been pushed together. A single antique spread of pure white damask covered them. There were pillows enough for two. A superb Renaissance tapestry hung on the wall above the bed. A cathedral, a wedding … Beside it, and to the right, there was a large painting of a young woman who modestly covered her eyes with the crook of an upthrown arm while the viewer ravaged her splendid breasts and wished the flimsy skirt of transparent gauze would slip from the soft swell of her hips.

It was of the
belle époque
and joyously marvellous, but a skylight in the painting, behind and to the left of the woman, let in the only light and this set her off starkly, as if to say, This is what you will get, monsieur, when you pay the price a young virgin commands.