Salamander (32 page)

In the bottom of an armoire he found the ledgers. They dated back to that period of time. La Belle Époque had done very nicely over the years. Had Henri Charlebois been afraid to own it completely or merely astute in selling shares to others? Astute. He had to grant him that.

Claudine Bertrand had indeed come to work there ten years ago, when the handwriting changed dramatically to a more martial stiffness that indicated Ange-Marie Rachline had first fought with her new employment.

But had Claudine not had a history prior to this and had not Ange-Marie Rachline and Henri Charlebois known of it?

There was a cold purity to the room he could not understand. Certainly things would come and go, and the brother had an eye for interior decorating as well as for his purchases. And certainly the semi-nude was suggestive of carnal thoughts, but had there really been any? Had the brother really coveted his sister?

The sterility of the twin beds suggested each kept to their own room as was befitting. But was that same coldness not their best defence against discovery of the forbidden?

Only Ange-Marie Rachline could answer him. The sister would never confess it to another now. The brother would never confide it even to the bishop.

Henri Charlebois was too astute, too knowing of his position in life. Both servant and master to the needs of others, to their desires for beautiful things and for all the sins of the flesh.

When he lifted the pillows, he found a pair of plain white cotton underpants with excellent needlework. They were not of today but of the past. They were those of a girl of ten or twelve perhaps but not, he thought, those of the sister.

Though he could not prove it, and perhaps would never be able to, intuitively he understood they had once been Claudine Bertrand's. He heard the sea in his imagination; he felt the wind among the dunes as it blew the grains of sand and made them silently roll. He saw a young girl spying on her brother and two others; saw a pair of underpants lying cast aside and forgotten.

The cotton was not harsh but soft from frequent laundering. Had the sister recently put them here to remind the brother of those days and what he'd done, or had he kept them all that time?

She had put them here, as a last gesture. He knew she had.

Frau Weidling had not, in so far as Kohler could determine, known Henri Charlebois from before, from Lübeck, Heidelberg and Köln.

The woman didn't even seem to know of him in any other context than that of a shopkeeper of antiques, period costumes, shoes, boots, fine fabrics and ebony
godemiches.
Ah yes.

Puzzled, Kohler held his breath. Frau Weidling was being fitted for a shimmering sky-blue silk dress, something old, something from an estate. Charlebois was methodically fixing pins around the hem. The shoes … the ‘boots' she would wear were the same as those he'd seen before.

When the hem was done, and she faced one of the dressing mirrors, Charlebois adjusted the puffed shoulders, took a tuck in each of the long sleeves and then one in the back to tighten things up a little.

She passed a smoothing hand over her bosom, lifting a breast and then proudly tilting up her chin. ‘Yes. Yes,' she murmured softly in German. ‘That is good.'

‘It ought to be. It's eight thousand, seven hundred francs with the alterations.'

Charlebois's German was really very good, thought Kohler and heard him saying, ‘You can take it off now, I think.'

She did so, stepping out of it to stand in a white undershift beneath the corset that was laced up the front in the French style and hung with garters. He took the dress from her without a second glance at that statuesque bit of pulchritude which was bulging out of the top of the corset.

‘Tomorrow,' he said, folding the thing once over on a cutting table. ‘I will personally see that it is delivered to your hotel by noontime.'

She shook out her auburn hair, showed no desire to dress—fingered fabrics like a schoolgirl in a candy shop. There were shelves and shelves of them, all colours, all patterns against the highly polished spiralling support posts of mahogany. Fantastic prints in silk and satin, cotton and linen too, a fortune these days. There was a dressmaker's dummy in the corner nearest her—a cage of wicker over which only a blouse had been stretched so that the skirt of rods appeared as one of birch switches and obscene.

‘The petticoats will not cause a problem?' she asked suddenly.

He didn't object. ‘Frau Weidling, if you wish to try them on with the dress, please do. I've allowed for them. You can trust me.'

‘All the same, I would like to,' she said demurely. Did she get a kick out of him helping her dress? wondered Kohler, still hidden from them but not, he felt, from the mirrors. Ah
merde
!

A shift-blouse was found—no neck or arms or buttons, just pretty bows of pink ribbon at the shoulders and lots of lace through which the corset could be seen to give that extra thrill.

The petticoats were of deeply pleated silk taffeta that rustled as she stepped into each of them. Not since he'd been a boy had Kohler seen a woman get dressed in such things, and then only in brief glimpses which had been ruthlessly punished.

‘This one has a sateen dust ruffle.' Charlebois was all business. Nothing interfered, not even the nearness of her.

‘I like the feel of them,' she said, smoothing her hands over hips and thighs to touch the pleats. ‘They are like a young woman's skin, a girl's, is that not right?' He didn't answer. For just a split second he stiffened. ‘So now, the dress again, Herr Charlebois, and then the hat,' she said. ‘I must see it all once more.'

Ah
nom de Dieu
, what the hell were they up to?

‘Then you had best put on the stockings and the shoes,' said the shopkeeper.

‘And the necklace,' she answered.

Kohler saw him kneel to help her with the stockings. Was he going to stick his mitts up under all that stuff to fish about for garters and not get a hard-on?

‘The underwear pants …?' she said. ‘Where are they?'

She got her hands up under everything and pulled her briefs off. He held drawers of silk trimmed with lace, into which she stepped. Perhaps he got them to her knees, perhaps a little farther before she took over. Did she have him in the palm of her hand? Was that it?

Would he kill her? Was he so cold and detached he was planning it even as he helped her, or had they been working together all along, yet she still did not know his true identity? A Salamander …

The stockings were of dark blue mesh and when he smoothed them over her calves, she let him. ‘Hook them,' she said, and he saw Charlebois hesitate.

‘I will get Mademoiselle Découglis, my shopgirl.'

‘Don't be silly. There is no time. Besides, what harm could you possibly do me?'

He didn't like it. As he stuck his hands up there, she held him by the back of the head. Charlebois stiffened. Her fingers began to rub firmly up and down the nape of his neck. ‘You will be at the concert?' she asked.

‘Yes, of course. Mademoiselle Charlebois is in the orchestra.'

‘Your little sister.' Had she tasted the saying of it, had Claudine primed her?

‘Yes. Yes, my sister. She is always nervous before a concert.'

Frau Weidling didn't let go of him. He was on the left leg now, at the back. ‘Isn't she afraid the Salamander will strike again? My Johann says that the theatre is a perfect location and that, once started, such a fire would be very hard to stop.'

Ah
merde
!

Charlebois found the shoes for her but did not lace them all the way up. Straightening, he removed her hand from the back of his neck. ‘There will be no fire. The Salamander—if such a one even exists—would be foolish to try it, Frau Weidling. Your husband will be very thorough. I happen also to know that the men under the Obersturmführer Barbie's command have already placed the theatre under the strictest surveillance. Now, please, the necklace, I think, and then the hat.'

They were like two puppets going through their separate dances. Teasing, flirting in their desperate ways but numb to each other.

The hat matched the stockings and was like a small mushroom trimmed with rows of fluted braid and ribbons of satin taffeta into which three cock pheasant quills had been thrust. The height of fashion forty or fifty years ago, and as sure as that God of Louis's had made little green apples, she'd been fucking around with Claudine in La Belle Époque and wanted to play dress-up herself!

The necklace was of dark blue sapphires and diamonds, and when it was placed around her slender neck, she stood before the mirrors tilting her chin up this way and that, saying, ‘It's perfect. It's just as I imagined it, and just as you said it would be. This little concert first, so that the General Niehoff and the Obersturmbannführer Knab will notice my husband and me together as the lights are dimmed. Then the New Year's Eve concert at the Vienna Opera House with the Führer and the Reichsmarschall Goering who will both have heard of the Hero of Lyon and will see that my Johann becomes not just a professor at the Fire Protection School in Eberswald, but Generaloberst der Feuerschutzpolizei for the Reich.'

Verdammt!

‘There are droplet ear-rings in my safe. I think you should consider them,' said the shopkeeper.

Christ!

‘And the bracelet. Yes, it will not be too much.'

Every high-ranking Nazi in
France-Sud
must be attending the Lyon concert. A small fire just to keep them all happy, a handsome couple, a hero.

She was like a schoolgirl before her first ball; dressed like that, she was exactly like one of Madame Rachline's girls. Was Charlebois merely the servant, the decorator of this little Christmas tree? Or had he another golden pear for her to hold in her hands when she was naked so that he could secretly photograph her and anonymously drop the print into Gestapo Lyon's lap?

‘Johann says that Herr Robichaud has been placed in custody,' she confided, turning sideways to examine herself.

‘That's a mistake I would wish them not to to make, Frau Weidling. Over the years, Herr Robichaud has worked very closely with the theatre committee.'

‘Of which you are a member?' she asked coyly. She could have knocked him over with a fan.

‘As was my grandfather before me,' came the answer stiffly. ‘Julien knows the theatre intimately and could be of immense help. He and I and the other members of the committee have been over the building hundreds of times. If … if it is not impertinent of me, Frau Weidling, might I suggest you urge your husband to have him released?'

‘Does the theatre mean so much to you?'

‘It was my grandfather's pride and joy.'

‘Then I shall ask Johann to request that the Obersturmführer Barbie release him, and I shall do so in return for this.' Delighted with the dress, she swirled around and grinned happily. ‘But I will pay you in cash, have no fear.'

Had they been feeling each other out? Had she everything to do with the fires or absolutely nothing?

And what of Charlebois? What really was his game, if anything?

It was dark now, and the wash of dim blue light inside the crowded tram-car made it hard to concentrate, though St-Cyr knew he must. Bathed in this horrible light, the passengers appeared sickly and from another, quite alien world. Suspicious of him, accusative—Why cannot you solve this thing, monsieur? they seemed to ask with silent lips and furtive looks. Beaten, yes. Afraid, yes. A Salamander, monsieur. A Salamander …

Henri Charlebois, Claudine and Ange-Marie had experienced something so profound among the sands at Concarneau, it had come back to haunt them but would Madame Rachline tell him?

The car rumbled on toward another stop as though blind, for all the windows had been painted blue to shut in the light. Concentrating hard, he tried to stay awake. Concarneau, he said and heard the wind in from the sea.

Again he dozed off. Again he was awakened—ah
maudit
! The chasing around in that school, the warmth of the Charlebois apartment … When a seat became available, he threw himself into it and slept. Dreamed of flames and of their warmth, of Gabrielle and a few days of holiday, then of the fires and only then of Hermann, whom he saw from high up in the second balcony of the Théâtre des Célestins. Hermann was dwarfed by the magnificent vault of the ceiling and the glow from the stage curtains. Alone among the rows of empty plush-red seats the Gestapo's Bavarian nuisance was slumped dead centre in a front-row seat. Snoring up into the gods, melodiously and uncaring, his long legs stretched out so as to ease himself in the crotch. That left testicle … ah
merde
, was it bothering him again? During the last war Hermann had caught a cold in that most unfortunate of places and had ever since been proud of it as one would an appendix scar or a torn ligament!

The snoring continued. The house lights were dimmed. From high in the flies, Frau Kaethe Weidling watched with Martine Charlebois and her brother … her brother … and the ghost of Claudine Bertrand. Ange-Marie Rachline was there also, and Leiter Weidling—yes, yes, even Robichaud and his Élaine, and someone else, someone wearing the finery of La Belle Époque perhaps. Someone into whose face those of all the others dissolved until the mask was empty, the Salamander had disappeared again, and the house lights had been extinguished.