‘But I didn’t. Bien sûr, there were things Caroline would tell me-lots of them-but there were also those she wouldn’t and didn’t.’
And that was one of them. ‘What did you lose to the resident kleptomaniac whose speed of filching things reminded you of Houdini?’
She mustn’t waver, felt Jennifer, must face up to him even if his partner had remembered that comment of hers and had passed it on. ‘Am I that person-isn’t this what you really want to ask?’
‘Just tell me.’
The urge to rattle off two dozen items was almost more than she could bear. Lisa would be quick to add things, Barb, too, but she’d best use anger. ‘One of these.’
Snatching at the blue Bakelite butterfly pin in her hair, she dragged it free and snapped off its spring-loaded alligator clip before handing the butterfly to him. ‘It was broken, but I had kept it because I only had this one left. Sure they were teenage, little-girl things, but I wore one when dealing to give that impression of innocence and naiveté. Women will do such things-you should know this as a man. Even though times were very difficult for the sellers, the paintings and antiques I was buying didn’t come easily.’
She shrugged, forced a weak smile, and said, ‘They still asked far too much, but a touch of innocence was useful, and of course I emphasized the new home they’d be getting. What I did wasn’t illegal, Inspector, and what I finally paid was simply less than had been asked.’
The sellers had been Jews and others on the run. ‘That why you stuck around until it was too late for you to leave France?’
‘Partly, but I also couldn’t manage the shipping. The Occupier and the French kept throwing up the roadblocks.’
Reichsmarschall Göring being the biggest of them. ‘How much is the stuff you’ve got in that flat of yours worth?’
‘In Boston and New York, or in Paris and Berlin?’
She seemed to thrive when talking business. ‘Both.’
‘Lots, then. There’s an early Corot landscape that I bought for myself in the autumn of 1940, paying 28,000 francs. In June of 1941, I could have sold it for 1,210,000, today. . ’ She shrugged. ‘And it’s only one of several pieces I have, or had.’
The official exchange rate was 50 francs to the dollar, or 200 to the pound sterling, the black bourse rate being the more usual and at 110 to 120, and 350 to 400, a worry to be sure and maybe the reason entirely for the anxiety attacks, but one had to ask, wasn’t it being a little too free with the info? ‘Did our kleptomaniac take anything else of yours?’
‘Inspector, please don’t blame me for buying from the desperate. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, and at least they knew, or thought, that the pieces were going to a place of safety and to owners such as themselves who would value them. The Paris market is everything in the art world-surely you must know this. I was just a little fish in a big and very turbulent pond.’
Excuses. . they all had their excuses. Time and again Louis and he had come up against these ‘buyers,’ Göring especially. ‘Just answer what I asked.’
Were Herr Kohler and his partner really on the side of the persecuted as everyone was saying, even Untersturmführer Weber? ‘The key to my flat. It. . it was on a string I would wear around my neck. When taking a shower downstairs, I had hung it on a hook, but when I got out, why, it. . it had been taken.’
‘Why a shower downstairs?’
‘Because one was free, and for which I paid two cigarettes.’
‘Was anything else of yours stolen?’
‘A lipstick. The tube was empty-I’d even used a matchstick to get at the last of it-but one keeps such things as reminders of what we once had. One has to here.’
That was fair enough, but she was still too wary. ‘You and the others asked the Senegalese to look into your futures.’
So he had found that out too. ‘Just after the Christmas party. We all thought it would be a lark and were still in a partying mood.’
‘You asked about your flat?’
‘Bamba. . That was his name. He said Thérèse, my maid, would come soon and she did, that very afternoon.’
‘Was that all?’
Had he talked to Bamba? ‘I was to leave offerings of food-crumbs, really-and. . and was to come back for another reading. My fortune wasn’t good, but I haven’t been back yet.’
‘Was anything taken from that little basket of his?’
‘By me, or by Caroline?’
He waited. He didn’t and wouldn’t say another thing, thought Jennifer, until she had answered him, but she mustn’t let apprehension get ahead of her. ‘Or by neither of us, Inspector? Caroline did keep nudging me to watch Becky. That one wasn’t just tense. It was as if something exciting were building up inside her, but we. . we didn’t see her take anything. Was something missing?’
‘Don’t worry about it. Tell me about Mary-Lynn and Colonel Kessler.’
‘Why not ask what you really want? Mary-Lynn had been left in the lurch by her “fiancé.”’
‘An SS, a Sturmbannführer.’
‘Oui, Karl Hoffmann. She wanted to get even-lots of girls feel like that. Colonel Kessler was friendly but not a lover, not if you ask me. It was more the friendship of one who wanted to practice his English and who enjoyed her knowledge of books and appreciated her support at the séances. Mary-Lynn wanted to find out where her dad’s remains were. It. . it had become an obsession with her.’
‘One that Madame Chevreul played upon?’
‘Really, Inspector, I’m not the doubter Nora is. Caroline wanted to become a sitter and I. . why, I wanted whatever Caroline wanted.’
‘Did she steal that L’Heure Bleue box and bottle from Madame Chevreul?’
‘And claim that Madame had given it to her?’
‘Just answer.’
‘Then no. Madame Chevreul pressed it into Caroline’s hands to cement the goodwill between them.’
‘And seal the payment of five hundred greenbacks?’
Would his questions never stop? ‘That, too, since you ask. Madame Chevreul knew only too well that Madame de Vernon had been getting after Caroline for wanting to become a sitter. The presentation box was something Caroline would love to have for the thoughts it would bring, and of course having it would strengthen her resolve.’
‘Picked up from Madame’s dressing table, was it?’
Why had he to ask that? ‘It. . it was near the photos of the friends Madame had left behind when she came to France. A Rebecca Thompson and a Judith Merrill. Léa Monnier used to work as kitchen help for Mrs. Merrill. That’s. . that’s how Madame Chevreul first met her.’
‘Léa Easton.’
‘Yes, but Madame Chevreul wasn’t married then. Her maiden name was Beacham. You. . Ah, merde, merde! You don’t know, do you?’
Herr Kohler took her by the arm and, leading her out of the room, walked her along the corridor toward that elevator shaft with everyone looking at them. Just everyone. ‘No place is more private,’ he said. ‘Now, you start telling me what I don’t know and should.’
The gate to the elevator had been locked again, and using another chain, and he saw this as they stopped, would know that Mrs. Parker had insisted on it, but wouldn’t know how sick she, herself, still felt at the thought of it having been left open. ‘They were suffragettes. Judith Merrill took Léa Easton to their meetings and convinced her to join. Léa was only sixteen at the time but soon found herself leading a screaming mob of umbrella-wielding, vote-demanding women. She would have, wouldn’t she? She’s a natural.’
He said nothing, this Gestapo detective. He just looked at her, she with her back now to that gate. ‘Léa wasn’t the only one who spent time in prison, Inspector, in London’s Old Bailey, where they were force-fed in the summer of 1914. Judith Merrill, being the oldest, was accused of being the ringleader. A bomb had been set off in Oxted Station on 4 April, 1913, four houses torched on the third in the suburb of Hampstead Garden, then later, I think, the Yarmouth Pier pavilion. It had just been built at a cost of 20,000 pounds, but the police and Scotland Yard didn’t catch up with Léa and the others until 1914.’