They’d been through a lot, the two of them. They weren’t involved in any of the rough stuff, the beating to death of suspected enemies of the State, the Third Reich! Not Gestapo stuff. Ah no. Not yet and never! Hermann was simply his Gestapo partner, his little helper and watcher to see that he behaved himself. Not a good Gestapo, not by any means, but always on the knife-edge.
The faded blue and often expressionless eyes were bloodshot and wary. ‘Talbotte must have known this would happen, Louis.’ A whisper.
St-Cyr nodded. ‘A wise owl shits only at night.’
‘It is night.’
Again there was that shrug. ‘That’s what I meant.’
‘Boemelburg did say Pharand had a small job that would suit us.’
‘Pharand would not have said that if he hadn’t wanted to get back at us for what happened in Vouvray. Besides, Boemelburg would have told him to say it. The mouse always squeaks when stepped on.’
‘It was supposed to keep you busy, Louis, to give you a rest from … well, you know.’
The explosion. The snuffing out of Marianne and Philippe St-Cyr.
‘Talbotte is incapable of a humanitarian thought, Hermann. Boemelburg may well have told him to leave the job to us, but the Prefet of Paris would have had his own reasons for allowing us the pleasure of his turf.’
‘We’re to scrape the surface and see what’s beneath. My chief was definite on this.’
His chief! The Sturmbannfuhrer Walter Boemelburg, Head of Section IV, the Gestapo in France!
‘But of course Walter is invariably definite, but was this one really the girlfriend of the one at the carousel?’
Kohler was a little taken aback. ‘Why shouldn’t she have been?’
‘Why, indeed? Perhaps she was, but then …’ St-Cyr tossed a hand to indicate the room and the clothes that lay not neatly on the bed but thrown there garment by garment when ordered.
The shoes having been first placed neatly just inside the door against the wall, the thin raincoat hung up with its scarf, no gloves … Had she lost them?
Together, they began to take a closer look. Louis again knelt beside the body. He brought his nose close to the girl’s lips. He examined the wire – thin and flexible but not braided. Simply scrap wire, a little rusty too. He ran his gaze swiftly down each of her arms to the hands, noting that, though both were very flat against the carpet, both were also close in to the seat.
There were no rings. There was no jewellery of any kind. She had been forced to strip. Why hadn’t she cried out for help? Had she done so? Had no one responded?
‘The bastard must have had a gun or a knife, Louis.’
‘Perhaps, but then …’
Kohler began with the feet. Again he thought her clean. Bathing wasn’t what the French did too often, especially not these days. Others too, for that matter. Not in a stone-cold room with the Paris skies pissing ice. Besides, the French doused themselves with cheap perfume, only this one hadn’t. He’d have smelled it. Louis would have grimaced.
She’d have stood in that wash-basin sponging herself down and shivering. Goose-pimples all over her seat and those ripe rosebuds sticking out hard, straining for relief as the towel had rubbed her down.
‘She’d have been getting herself ready, Louis. A client.’
St-Cyr could not ignore his total disregard of the positions of the clothing on the bed, or the fact that the towels were dry. Hermann was just not himself. Too beaten up and still on the run. ‘Take another look, idiot! The girl was probably followed. She didn’t know it. She came in here in a hurry. She was late and expecting someone. The shoes, Hermann.’ St-Cyr tossed a hand in the general direction. ‘The coat. No, my friend, she had only just arrived. The concierge has much to answer for and me, I hope he hasn’t cut her throat because she was not peering out of her cage, Hermann. The outer door was open. We are the ones who are supposed to have found the body but quite obviously someone else did.’
Louis had worked his way down to the hips, the hands and the crotch. The semen troubled him.
‘Hermann, what do you make of this?’
‘Premature ejaculation,’ snorted Kohler.
‘Nom de Jesus-Christ, smarten up! Coitus was interrupted at its fullest by some noise in the hall or downstairs.’
‘A flic’s whistle?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘A rafle?’ shot Kohler. A round-up …
‘You must check with Section IV. That’s not my job.’
‘The rooftops?’
‘Perhaps.’
The invective ceased. Though the stitches in his cheek would hurt, Kohler grinned. The lapse of clear thinking on his part had made Louis angry, a welcome sign.
In his heart of hearts Louis was a fisherman, a gardener, a dreamer of Provence and the little cottage to which he’d retire away from the slime. Communing with Nature and smelling the flowers, counting the honey each would produce. A reader of books in wintertime; a student of life’s foibles with the distant air, at times, of a pipe-smoking muse when he could get the tobacco ration.
A widower now, but the possible lover, if he’d but get over this next little while, of an incredibly well-stacked column of woman with stupendous eyes.
Just like this one’s. Ah yes. A coincidence.
The thick brown moustache bulged as the lips were blown out in exasperation. ‘Talbotte, Hermann!’ It was a curse.
‘Boemelburg, Louis. And Pharand. Your boss, my little Frog. The boss of the Surete Nationale.’
‘Let’s take a look around. You do the bureau. I’ll take the armoire.’
‘Fingerprints? Photos? The details? Should we call in the troops?’
‘We’ll leave those for Talbotte. We’ll make him take a hand in this and the other one also. We’ll propose that we work together for the good of the Third Reich!’
Amen. ‘Then the bed and the dressing-table, and the washstand,’ muttered Kohler, suitably chastized. Louis would never work for the Third Reich, not in a thousand years.
‘We’ll leave the washstand to the last,’ said the Frog.
‘But turn back the carpet.’
‘No one will notice that you’ve just palmed a couple of those coins, Hermann.’
Kohler snorted majestically. ‘They are fake. I think I’ve broken a tooth.’
‘You’ll never learn, will you? The question is, did she try to flog them to her killer, eh?’
‘Did the bastard kill her when he discovered the truth? Is that what you mean? Was she trying to buy her way out of this?’ Kohler indicated the room while pulling the sheerness of a midnight neglige out of a drawer.
He began to finger the thing as a connoisseur would.
St-Cyr knew his partner would be suffering the tragic waste of those legs and arms, the lips that could so easily have kissed his own had she been a girl of the streets, which she hadn’t.
‘She’d not have been for you, Hermann,’ he said, flinging open both doors of the armoire to sweep his eyes over the dresses. ‘This one was being kept. Money had her.’
The lace-trimmed underpants were sheer and of silk. Distracted, Kohler said, ‘My thoughts exactly, Louis,’ and judging his moment, stuffed the things into an overcoat pocket.
A satin chemise followed. Good goods.
‘Those for your wife?’ taunted the Frog, not turning from the dresses.
‘Be careful what you say, my friend. Besides, Wasserburg’s too far, and my Gerda wouldn’t know what to do with them on the farm.’
Hermann always had to have the last word. One had to let him. It was best that way. Sometimes.
They went at it in silence. The armoire, although substantial, held only five dresses, a couple of hats and one pair of shoes, but the dresses were of good quality, pre-war, as were the high-heels. The shoes were crimson to match a sleeveless sheath whose neckline was a modest concave, the wool so soft and fine it felt like a woman’s skin when warm.