‘Extend to him my sincere condolences, madame, and tell him, please, that Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr has paid his respects. From now on I wear my muffler and gloves, eh, to keep the influenza at bay.’
All of which made the woman toss her head before closing the door in his face.
‘Horse hamburg steeped in bouillon is supposed to be good, madame!’ he called out for the sheer pleasure of it. ‘I always knew the Prefecture was a draughty place. Beware the currents of air, madame. Keep him away from the rat-holes!’
Like those of the rue Lauriston and the avenue Foch! Currents of air that would blow over a dead girl’s naked body or brush a carousel into motion.
The Prefet’s house was one of two that overlooked the boulevard du Palais on the Ile de la Cite. Behind it rose the massive stone edifice of a former barracks, the Prefecture. He ought to see about the carousel licence. He ought to force them into doing something.
Talbotte had sent his chief coroner to the carousel. That was something. But now the draught was too much. Word must have got round that St-Cyr and Kohler were dead.
Shunning the quays, he tried to find a bit of solace in the Flower Market nestled between the Prefecture, the Tribunal of Commerce, and the Hotel-Dieu. The stalls were empty. Few people were about and those that were appeared nervous.
He touched the canary in his pocket. He remembered the coin in the centre of that girl’s forehead … a warning, ah yes. Maudit!.
Beyond the mist of condensation there were a few tired poinsettias in an otherwise empty shop. Distraught, St-Cyr stared at the plants. Where once there would have been a riot of blooms, a jungle, there were now only these and a single rubber plant that should have stayed at home.
Henri Lafont was capable of the utmost cruelty yet loved with the passion of an innocent child, all types of flowers. He had them in his office – there’d been hothouse begonias on a corner of that desk. White ones. A mass of red roses over by the windows. A lemon tree.
Every day the flowers were changed no matter the season. Orchids were a favourite. Orchids and women like Nicole de Rainvelle.
He pushed open the shop door.
‘M’sieur?’ asked the startled reed in glasses who was warming his hands by furiously rubbing them with cat’s fur.
‘Ah yes. I’d like a cactus. The pricklier the better.’
Alphonse Bilodeau didn’t like the look in this one’s eyes. Taxes – were they after him again for the taxes?
‘A cactus?’
‘Yes. Cleistocactus strausii perhaps.’
‘Something with spines. These days that’s about all we have.’
Bilodeau motioned him to follow. Behind the shop, which was less than three metres wide and four in length, a thin partition separated the living quarters, some three metres by one and complete with larder, hotplate, cold-water tap, sink, clothes rack, chamber pot, et cetera, et cetera.
‘My apartment,’ said the florist apologetically. ‘These days …’
‘The Thirties too, and the Twenties,’ said the detective, taking it all in. How in the name of God had he managed to sleep and cook under that thing without hurting himself?
The pot was huge, the main column of the cactus bent where the ceiling had given it no more room. A secondary column leaned directly over the unmade bed. Another scratched the wall; a third caressed the photograph in glass of a dancer who’d forgotten her clothes and had shyly turned her back to the camera.
‘Cereus Peruvianus,’ enthused St-Cyr with admiration. ‘It’s perfect, my friend. Perfect!’
‘You can’t mean that. You’re just saying it. You flics are all the same! None of you buy a thing but you all come here …’
‘Please, I did not hear that, monsieur. If I buy, I pay.’
‘You can’t want my Titan.’
He’d even named it. ‘Oh but I do.’
‘It’ll take four men to move it,’ seethed cat’s fur. ‘Men are in short supply these days and costly.’
A real tiger. St-Cyr drew out the black leather billfold his mother had given him thirty years ago. ‘I have little time to negotiate. Here is three hundred francs. Deliver it to Number 93 the rue Lauriston, and see that you do or I will come back to haunt you.’
Number 93 the rue Lauriston … ‘I will need the velo-taxi, monsieur.’
‘Keep it warm. Enclose a card. Say it’s from Louis. Use two velos if necessary but don’t break it. Me, I want this thing just as it is.’
He pulled out a further hundred-franc bill. ‘Does stroking cat’s fur really help to make the hands warm?’
The man tucked the finances away. ‘The plants used to, but now …’
St-Cyr thought to ask him if it had been his cat but left it unsaid. There was no sense in pushing his luck. ‘Use a couple of blankets to keep the cactus warm in transit. If anyone bitches, tell them you’re doing a little job for the Surete as it used to be.’
Bilodeau watched the cactus-buyer walk away. There was a briskness, a looking-up to see his God perhaps. A smile, a wave to the heavens. All the world was crazy these days. Cat’s fur! Of course it helped to keep one warm. How the hell else could half the population of Paris exist and half the cats have died if not to be eaten?
Locking the shop, he prepared to go and negotiate the help, but the cactus-buyer came rushing back.
‘Talbotte – you know him?’
The Prefet, the sourest bastard in France! ‘Of course, m’sieur.’
There was one poinsettia that had lost all but two of its leaves. ‘Send this to him. Gift-wrapped! Say, I hope you’re feeling better.’
‘A coffee without milk or sugar, please.’
A polite one at last, a man of great sensitivity.
St-Cyr threw his hat on to a chair, then dumped his overcoat on top of it. Pipe, tobacco and matches were arranged. The view was suitable, the water of that grey-brown shade it always seemed to acquire in winter. Silt from Troyes, from Chatillon-sur-Seine, from upstream anyway, and more murders, rapes, muggings – crimes of passion than he’d care to remember.
There were no barges and the river, with but a few old men breaking the law along the quays to fish, looked desolate and empty.
He wondered if he’d ever see it from freedom’s eyes again. In the autumn of 1940 the Germans had taken the barges and the larger of the tour boats for the invasion of England that had never materialized.
Russia would be their nemesis as it had been Napoleon’s. Winter was everyone’s curse in these wretched latitudes; ice and snow, the punishment rain had forgotten.
The tobacco was good – pre-war and Belgian, a gift from Hermann, for whom he could not, even with all his inner rage against what had happened to France, find in his heart of hearts anything but a wary affection. But would Hermann be forced into choosing loyalties again, as he himself had been forced?
It was a particular punishment God had laid on detectives these days.
The coffee wasn’t ersatz, and the taste brought tears to his eyes. Ah Mon Dieu, what were they missing?
He knew the waiter would be watching for some sign and that he’d have seen the cup hesitate and been held out as if a chalice of holy wine or water.
Nothing more was needed, no further demonstration of appreciation.
The spires of the Church of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais were just visible, submerged and set against the ramparts of the rooftops. The Hotel de Ville flew the German flag of course, but if one did not look that way it was almost as it once had been, except for the absence of the barges.
The table was reasonably private. The canary would cause some notice but the desire for a quiet think was too much.
Little birds were among the hardest to mount. This one had been done by an expert who knew both taxidermy and his birds. The feathers were all in place. There’d been a few bald spots – all birds had them. These spots had been carefully hidden as they would have been in life.