Mein Gott, help him! A mistake!
‘Why should that be?’ asked Oberg darkly. The French would never learn.
Heroically defiant, Louis drew himself up. ‘In murder, General, all things are possible.’
There wasn’t a sound. Even the typewriters in distant rooms had ceased their yammering.
Kohler knew he had to break the impasse. ‘We always look for linkages, Herr Generalmajor. Louis didn’t mean to imply that …’
Knochen snorted. ‘We’re not talking of sausages.’
‘Assassination!’ shrilled the banana merchant. ‘This we cannot have! It must be stopped, stopped, stopped!’
So much for trying to stop the death notices. ‘The meat’s all ground up. It’s all the same,’ offered Kohler lamely.
‘Hermann, how could you equate a German corporal with the other two corpses? Please, I think I understand what the Obersturmbannfuhrer Herr Doktor Knochen is implying.’
Sausages …
‘Good, then that is good,’ grunted Oberg, slightly mollified, and the thing came round to the coins again.
‘Who made these?’
‘A professional,’ said St-Cyr, glancing from one to the other of them.
‘The dies were of iron. The faces on all the coins are exceptionally sharp,’ offered Hermann.
Oberg touched the coins. He wanted to scream at these two schmuck cops! ‘The French are notorious for hoarding their gold, Herr Kohler. Greed is in their mother’s milk! It has to be rooted out! Out, damn you! These are from someone’s hoard.’
Hermann thought to please. ‘They’re really quite good. The owner might have been fooled …’
‘Idiot! Don’t be stupid! A collector of such as these would know exactly what to buy and what not to.’
‘But you just said …?’ Oh Mein Gott, what were the two of them really after? ‘We’ve no idea who made them.’
A smile flickered briefly on that chubby face. ‘Come, come, Kohler. Surely you must know who would be a likely candidate? I thought you were supposed to be a good detective? Don’t the two of you know the Paris underworld any better than that? They are good copies, are they not, Herr Obersrurmbannfuhrer?’
Knochen acknowledged that they were.
Oberg was vicious. ‘We can’t have forgers operating in our midst, Kohler. Find the scum who was responsible and bring him to me!’
Never mind the murderer or murderers! Just find the forger. ‘Jawohl, Herr Generalmajor.’
‘Perhaps if I were to talk to the two of them alone,’ began Knochen, leaning close to whisper something into Oberg’s ear while still watching them.
‘Yes, yes, of course. It would be best that way. Good of you to have thought of it, Helmut.’
The pudgy fingers gathered in the coins. Apparently the gold sestertius bearing the head of Mars and the eagle on its obverse side was the rarest and most valuable. And yet the forger had struck all of them with iron dies that could not possibly have been in use at such a time.
The Frenchman would know this, so, too, the Bavarian. They’d both be wondering why an able forger should think it possible to pull the wool over someone’s eyes with these.
Goering … would they think of the Reichsmarschall and Reichsfuhrer Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe?
‘That is all. Now get out of here, the two of you.’
Knochen led the way. Once up the stairs to the second floor they came to the vault, a room whose barred entrance gave subdued light to the contents within.
There were paintings in richly gilded frames, old masters, young masters, stacked and leaning every which way against exquisite pieces of sculpture, antique cabinets, vases, Louis XIV and XV chairs, crates … silver, much silver … an Aladdin’s cave.
Knochen let them look. ‘All confiscated from those who refused to obey the law and failed to report their valuables. Jews, Freemasons, reactionaries – enemies of the State. Vermin, gentlemen. Hoarders. Find out where the girl got the coins and you will, no doubt, unmask the forger and discover the loot.’
‘And if there is no loot?’ hazarded St-Cyr.
Knochen took a moment to study him. ‘Then the suspicions of our friends over on the rue Lauriston are incorrect and the forgeries were not used to hide the real thing.’
The rue Lauriston … The infamous Monsieur Henri and his sidekick, the ex-inspector Bonny. Ah no. No!
‘Old friends of yours,’ said Knochen, watching him closely.
Kohler was certain then that the whole meeting had been for this one moment of revenge for what had happened at Vouvray in that last case.
‘Acquaintances,’ acknowledged Louis with admirable steadiness.
Kohler flicked a troubled glance at Knochen. That little smile was there, the moment of triumph slowly savoured so as to prolong the pleasure.
‘You’re to work with them on this, Inspector.’
‘It’s Chief Inspector.’
‘Louis, don’t!’
The warning was an added bonus. ‘As I was saying, Inspector St-Cyr, your friends over on the rue Lauriston have much to offer. You would be wise to ask for their help.’
‘Has this forger done your people in before?’ asked the Frog, failing to conceal the little triumph he, himself, felt at exposing the Nazis to their gullibility.
The look the academic gave was cruel. ‘But of course he’s taken us in before. Why not? There are always those who are eager to buy, and the forger knows this. Find him! Now get out of here and don’t come back until you have him.’
Giselle was no longer waiting in the car. The bird had flown and no doubt with good reason.
‘Louis, let me come with you.’
‘No, Hermann. Not this time.’
‘Then at least let me give you a lift?’
‘The exercise will do me good. It’s not far in any case.’
Kohler knew that his partner wanted to be alone, that Louis, being Louis, would have to breathe the air of Paris before descending into the slime.
‘Talbotte, Hermann. This is why he has left us to clean up the mess. He is afraid we are tainted and the SS do not want to breathe the same air as we do.’
‘We’ll meet later?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. You to Records, me to the rue Lauriston.’
‘The morgue at five?’
‘Let’s make it four. I want to get back to the house before dark.’
‘But aren’t you staying at Gabi’s flat?’
St-Cyr’s eyes betrayed only emptiness. ‘Not now, Hermann. Never. Not with them taking such a fine interest in us. Me, I could not live with myself knowing harm might come to her.’
Poor Louis. They’d just wiped the street with him and he knew it.
3
There was little traffic on the Etoile as St-Cyr crossed to the Arc de Triomphe. The humiliation of what he was about to experience was almost more than he could bear. In 1936 he had put the infamous Monsieur Henri of the rue Lauriston away for ten years for armed robbery and the ‘accidental’ wounding of two cops, both fathers, who’d come to question things and had somehow got in the way.
In the years before that he’d crossed swords with Pierre Bonny and had seen that one into Fresnes for a term of not less than three years for accepting bribes while under the oath as an officer of the Surete.
Later it had been embezzlement, but by then the ex-inspector Bonny had been eking out a living as a private investigator.
Now, of course, it was from Knochen that the two received their orders and amnesty. Amnesty for hardened criminals, for murderers and thieves!
Bonny was the organizer of that little operation; Monsieur Henri the schemer, the searcher of hidden valuables, and Knochen the supplier of cars, gas, guns and Police ID cards that offered protection with impunity.