Gabrielle Arcuri, a chanteuse with a Russian past and an evident interest in Jean-Louis St-Cyr, had worn the perfume Mirage.
Giselle le Roy, the young prostitute from the rue Danton and the house of Madame Chabot, was Hermann Kohler’s latest girlfriend.
With just such strings were detectives pulled and made to dance.
The butterfly pin was of silver, its enamelled surface smooth, the street ahead narrow.
Kohler sat alone in the car. Giselle would have liked this little thing, but the girl was nowhere to be found and he had the uneasy feeling he’d never see her alive again.
She’d not been in the Red Room at Madame Chabot’s, not in the Easter Parade or in the Forest Glade with its battleship-grey bathtub that had been made over into a grotto pond with silk water lilies that seldom stayed in one place or held their shapes for very long.
She’d not been in there with someone else, not on her hands and knees or on her lovely back. Not in the schoolroom either, with the other young girls who played at being teenagers for older men who liked to think of things like that.
Giselle le Roy, age twenty-two, half Greek, half Midi French, a perfect hourglass when standing or bent over fake Empire tables in the Red Room, she throwing him that little look of hers. Stockings of black mesh or Prussian blue right up to her working parts; all the rest of her clothes gone. Damn it, where the hell was she?
Not in the Bal Saint-Severin, the dancehall she liked to dream in, which was just around the corner from the house on the rue Danton and not too far to walk.
She hadn’t been in the Odeon either, soaking up a tired bit of unwanted culture to get in out of the rain, nor in any of her three most-favoured movie theatres watching ancient reruns in hopes there’d be a banquet scene to drool over. Hell, the whole of Paris did that now and then. It was the only way they got a decent feed.
Kohler’s fingers shook. She hadn’t been happy to see him back in Paris. Come to think of it, she’d been damned worried and distracted.
Had she bolted from the car in fright? Had that been it?
The butterfly took wing and he cursed himself for being in love with man’s worst enemy, a young and very vibrant hooker.
Gerda wouldn’t like it, but then Gerda was back on the farm and this was Paris. Besides, he hadn’t seen the wife in nearly two and a half years, not since his transfer here. Well, once a quick visit to settle her fears about the boys, but that had been so long ago, he couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like any more. Besides, she’d only laugh at him and double her fists!
The butterfly lay in the crumbly mud on the floor beneath his shoes, the mud of Vouvray. Louis would be needing him. He would have given the Frog the butterfly along with the other things but the insect had become tangled in the lining of his pocket. Threads still clung to its tiny claws – did butterflies have claws?
The Faberge wings played their greeny-blue iridescence on the mind when he turned it this way and that. The eyes sparkled as tiny, well-cut sapphires should. Giselle would have been quite taken with it, it would have gone with the colour of her eyes, her hair, her smile.
Thumbing the jet-black body, he heaved the sigh of a wounded detective who was getting just a little too old for this sort of thing. Records had turned up nothing. Only acid had greeted his request. The photos of the corpses hadn’t yet been sent over. They’d virtually nothing to go on.
The same with the operator of the carousel, but there he had the feeling that once they’d tied a name to that one, they’d find his file missing.
When gangsters ruled, they always cleaned the nest.
Christiane Baudelaire had been murdered between 9.00 and 9.30 last night, Thursday; the mackerel at about the same time the night before. And very early today, or late last night, a Wehrmacht corporal had been killed in the rue Polonceau. And now thirty hostages had been taken.
A priest had reported that last murder. Somehow they’d have to get stays of execution and deportation. They couldn’t have potential witnesses vanishing before they should. Besides, thirty was far too many for a lousy corporal who probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It implied that Boemelburg had been told precisely how many to choose, and that could only mean Oberg had known the exact number of coins in that room and had said ‘Or else.’
The gear shift was sticky, the Benzedrine still hammering in his veins. He’d best be careful. Taken with alcohol, that stuff didn’t go down so well. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and he wasn’t getting any younger. Crime didn’t pay. He should have been a farmer like his father and grandfather before him.
‘Up to my ears in shit, no matter what!’ he snorted, goosing the Citroen. He’d find the Church of Saint Bernard in Montmartre, he’d hear what the good father who reported the corporal’s body had to say.
But had he forgotten something to do with that dead girl? Had Giselle’s disappearance made him forgetful?
All Germans were tourists. To treat them any differently was to admit they existed for purposes other than tourism and that they wouldn’t eventually go away.
Father Eugene Delacroix rubbed his hands in anticipation of payment. ‘The chapel of our patron saint lies on the hallowed ground’ – he ducked his head to indicate the very place – ‘of the much smaller edifice that was first erected here, monsieur, in the twelfth century.’
Kohler took the bandy-legged little bastard in. Seventy-two, if a day, with narrowed, watchful eyes, a grey brush cut and a grizzled beard that showed the severe shortage of razor blades in bloodied nicks and bits of sticking-plaster.
‘Listen, you ragged little bag of bones, your history’s a little too old for me.’
Delacroix ignored the warning. ‘In 1852, monsieur, the Baron Lepic laid the first stone even as the nuns of the Josephine mixed the Holy mortar.’
A heavy door slammed. The priest went on anyway. ‘The Monsignor Christophe, the Bishop of Soissons himself, has consecrated this house of God not three years later, monsieur. Three!’ as if it had been Rome itself and built in such a shortness of time.
‘Father, I’m here on business.’
The distant steps had grown nearer but now paused. ‘What sort of business?’ shot the priest, raising his voice to sound a warning.
‘Murder,’ breathed the detective.
Kohler moved swiftly. He hit the vestry door and shrieked, ‘GESTAPO, FREEZE!’
The novice flattened himself against the far wall and went as white as a sheet.
‘Kohler of the Gestapo, my fine young sackcloth. A few questions or would you prefer the ashes?’
The old priest came to stand in the doorway. ‘It’s all right, David. You may go now. Do the silver. See if we haven’t enough wafers – perhaps you could break them in half. Yes, yes, that would be best. The shortages,’ he clucked his ancient tongue. ‘Leave the wine alone. I’ll take care of it.’
‘Just a minute. No one leaves until I’m done.’
The vestry door closed. The young priest couldn’t seem to pull himself off the wall. The older one scratched the three-day growth, opening a wound and flaking off a bit of sticking-plaster that wanted to go somewhere else. ‘David, sit down. It’s all right. God will protect you.’
Kohler knew he ought to ask, why he needed God to protect him. ‘Which of you reported the body of that corporal?’
The novice swallowed hard, glancing to the elder priest for reassurance. Receiving none, he said, ‘I did. It was me,’ and, shutting his eyes in a grimace, thrust out his arms for the handcuffs.
Well now, how about that? ‘Start talking. We’ll see about the bracelets later.’
‘One of our parishioners called David in, Inspector. Me, I was indisposed at the time.’