‘Louis, what the hell’s happened to you?’ The morgue was freezing.
‘Me? I have just lost my lunch. The Abwehr, Hermann. The canary … It’s just possible our Monsieur Antoine is an Abwehr agent.’
‘Jesus, you’d better read this then. It was left on the doorstep of the head juju man up at the Church of St Bernard, Father Eugene Delacroix.’
Louis read the thing, the pallor deepening as the blood drained completely away. ‘Is Christian Masuy also involved?’ It was a cry, the bleat of a goat in trouble.
Masuy was also the Belgian, Georges Delfanne, who had invented for the Gestapo and their French counterpart the infamous torture of the bathtub.
‘Paul Carbone is enough, Louis. He and Lafont have been at each other’s throats for years, or hadn’t you heard, seeing as you were the one who told me of their feud?’
Carbone, a notorious Corsican gangster, worked out of Number 48 rue de Villejust, the Intervention-Referat that was mentioned in the priest’s note.
‘But … Carbone and Lafont both work independently for the avenue Foch, Hermann, not the Abwehr any more?’
‘This thing goes round and round, Louis.’
‘Why the Abwehr’s interest in the canary, Hermann, unless the girl had been about to sell out to them?’
There were gangsters upon gangsters interlayered with the many layers of the Gestapo, the SS and the Abwehr too. What treasures one didn’t get, another took, and quickly. Each was jealous of the others; Henri Lafont did hate Paul Carbone with a passion, and the Carbone gang was the leading edge of the Intervention-Referat.
‘Lef’s have a look at the bodies, Louis. Something might have turned up.’
There were two empty pallets beside the three occupied by the girl, the mackerel and the Wehrmacht corporal.
‘Are those for us?’ asked St-Cyr. ‘Have we stepped into a vendetta, Hermann?’
‘I wouldn’t want to bet against it, Louis. The shit’s always deepest in the centre of the sewage lagoon.’
‘Then take a look at this. Lafont’s latest pigeon insisted I bring it along for company.’
St-Cyr handed him the crumpled photograph. ‘Search the faces of the crowd, Hermann. See if the mackerel isn’t among them, or the other one. Me, I’m open to all possibilities but must take an immediate look at the girl’s ears.’
The photo was grainy and the girl anxious. Both hands were in the pockets of her overcoat. The collar was up. She wore a kerchief and a frown. A nice kid, a kid out to flog the loot she’d stolen from her grandmother’s jewellery box? Was that it?
That and forged Roman gold coins.
Kohler fingered the butterfly which had become entangled in a death’s grip with the dragonfly.
At peace, the mackerel didn’t look pleasant. They’d had to break the rigor just to lie him on the stretcher. The face was still frozen in its hideous grin. He’d bad teeth and snot in his nose. Snot and dried blood.
The girl was standing in front of a stall on which were arrayed the leavings of several lives – books, lamps, dishes. He thought of that room and the little things he’d seen there. The vase of artificial flowers, the porcelain figurines.
In profile, she looked as if she’d had more taste – wealthy perhaps, but down on her luck. Of breeding anyway, the brows, the forehead and the eyes told him that. The way she stood and looked over her shoulder.
A girl who had dyed her hair even in the warmer climates.
There were several faces in the crowd – men, women, even a child, a baby in a German corporal’s arms. A baby …
Kohler bent over the jerk. Powder-burns tinged the skin around the bullet hole. The eyes were closed, the grin still there as if he’d only just said, ‘So, what else is new?’
Kohler soaked up the photograph, concentrating on the child and on the corporal’s face.
It was him all right. Grinning then as he was grinning now. A blocky, square-jawed Pomeranian. Aged thirty-two to thirty-five and still a corporal. A randy bastard of medium height and stocky build. Two small scars on the right cheek – a fight probably. Brown hair and a dick that would have made a schoolgirl scream.
‘Louis … Louis, I think I’ve been had.’
‘Hermann, what is it? Can’t you see I need to be left alone?’
With a corpse! ‘Is this one the father of the child I saw this morning drawing on its mother’s breast?’
The Frog left the girl to move swiftly between the pallets.
‘The young priest, Louis. I … I thought he was the father.’
‘Most priests are.’
Hermann shook his head. ‘The father of that.’ The child.
‘Perhaps you’d better explain things, Hermann.’
The insects were tangled but when separated, the dragonfly found its rightful owner.
There were three blood spots on the corporal’s left hand where the brooch had dug in its feet at the moment of death. One wing was slightly bent, as were the feelers, but with these an attempt had been made to straighten them.
‘The corporal could simply have been minding the child, Hermann, while the mother made a purchase?’
‘Then what’s the mackerel doing over there?’
It was true. The mackerel was watching the girl from the vantage of another stall. He was screened by a man in his sixties and a woman in her forties.
Had the old priest been completely fooled by the young one, or had Delacroix known of it all along and lied with such dexterity?
‘Concentrate on the mackerel, Hermann. Did they bring his little finger?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘You know I don’t like this sort of thing.’
‘But you’ll do it anyway. Here, give me the photograph for safe keeping. The insects also.’
St-Cyr moved back to the girl. The ears weren’t pierced so she could not possibly have worn the earrings. Perhaps she had not worn the pearls either? he thought, wanting desperately to be alone with her.
An attendant in a blood-smeared labcoat and filthy cap cracked a grin. ‘You two chicken-pluckers back?’ he crowed. ‘Ah, my fines, she’s a nice bit of stuffing, eh? A virgin until the moment of death. Who would have guessed?’
A virgin … ‘That’s impossible,’ stormed Kohler. He’d show the -
‘Hermann, wait! Perhaps it’s not so impossible. The autopsy, please. Quickly, quickly, my friend, if you value your life.’
‘In this place? You’ve got to be kidding. I only work here because I have to.’
‘You’re Feloux. I knew your father. He worked at the old place over on the Ile de la Cite.’
‘The autopsies have gone to the Prefet. My lips are sealed and no amount of money will open them.’
‘But you’ve just said she was a virgin.’
‘That much I saw for myself when they first brought her in. Torn like a rapist’s souvenir.’
‘So much for privacy. When the dead are carted here they become common property.’
The mackerel had been one of the durs, one of the hard ones, but had chosen not to wear the three dots in a row on the backs of the middle three fingers of the left hand.
Instead, he had the five points of the dice tattooed on the web of skin between the thumb and the forefinger of the right hand.
‘“All alone between four walls”, Hermann. This one has spent time in solitary.’
‘Then Records might have a file on him, and if not them, the Sante or some other can.’
‘Why would Madame Minou think it was her son who’d been murdered?’
‘Aren’t most mothers like that?’
The attendant watched in silence as the two cows chewed their cud. A dope- or tobacco-sniffer, the dur; the girl a virgin before she’d been taken; and a corporal who’d received the bullet but who continued to smile as if from satisfaction.
The girl was in good company; comfort even after death.
‘Louis, it’s suicide for us.’
‘Hermann, it must be done. I need time with that girl. The mackerel is nothing; the corporal little else, but she can tell us what we need to know.’