5
‘M Charles Audit! Yes, yes, monsieur. I knew him well. A brave man. Killed like all the rest.’
The old soldier looked away in sadness at the thought. St-Cyr heaved a detective’s sigh. The room in the Hotel of the Silent Life was far too stuffy for health and badly in need of cleaning. There were ribbons on the lapels of the blue blazer. The thin red of the Legion of Honour, the yellow and green of the Military Medal. The medals themselves were on prominent display in a locked vitrine, along with the splintered remains of the shell that had killed his comrades and some bits of china and silver still too precious to sell.
‘This war, it is nothing, monsieur. Nothing! No spine, do you understand?’
The voice had leapt with accusation. It would be best to offer a cigarette and wait while those vibrating fingers took their nourishment.
Major Fernand Corbet gave a dignified sniff of thanks, then, as if the record was broken, for all invariably said the same these days, he spat, ‘They ran, monsieur, when they should have stayed and held their ground as we did.’
Corbet lived in 4-9, next to 4-7. A little man with cigarette ash and dandruff on his jacket, tie and beret, he’d been about to go out for his afternoon aperitif. ‘A simple glass of the vin ordinaire, the white you understand. These days the red’s too acid for the digestion.’
St-Cyr drew up the only other chair. ‘M’sieur -’
‘Major. Please, I must insist. These days one has to do something.’
‘Major, the girl who used the room next door to you?’
‘A student. No spine. She should be making bombs or seducing Boches so that real men could cut their throats, not fucking some fat windbag of commerce!’
‘Yes, yes, Major, but she’s dead.’
‘Dead? What is this, eh? A murder in the hotel? Nom de Jesus-Christ, I’ll get that bitch this time! Calls herself a concierge! Can’t keep order in this place. Order, do you understand?’
He was quaking with rage. ‘Yes … yes, of course I understand, Major. Later … we’ll both speak to her later.’
‘You’re from the police, aren’t you?’
‘The Surete.’
‘Who let you into my room, eh? That bitch …’
Corbet had a coughing fit. It was several moments before he had fully recovered.
‘That girl …’ he began. ‘Yes, yes. Always at it, the two of them. Naked … naked on that floor in there.’
Though it was useless to ask, St-Cyr had to try. ‘Did you see anything, hear anything? It happened Thursday night, at between nine and nine-thirty.’
Thursday … Thursday … They’d been waiting for the shells. Paul Tremblay, the one with the hollow eyes and the look of death, had said, ‘It’s my turn. Today I’m going to get it.’
‘Pardon?’ asked the cop.
The Major tossed a tired hand. ‘I heard nothing of that affair, monsieur, nor did I see anything untoward.’
He sucked on his cigarette as one accustomed to the trenches. ‘Dead,’ he said, tossing his head in acknowledgement. ‘All of them, Colonel. I am the only one left. Why did God spare me and yet take them?’
To his dying day he’d ask the question all survivors of such things must ask.
St-Cyr patted him on the shoulder. The elevation in rank to colonel from a mere sergeant in the Signals Corp had said it all. ‘Take care, my old one. I’ll drop in again.’
Out in the hall it was the thigh wound that gave the first twitch of sympathy to strip away the years, then the one in the shoulder that had knocked him off his feet and made him ask that same question himself.
Always it was like this, old wounds, old battles, old memories he’d sooner forget.
His left side had always been the vulnerable one, ever since he’d broken that leg as a boy while scaling his Aunt Jessie’s barn near Beaune. It had been one of those rare incidents when his mother had lost her temper and had slapped him across the face, the left side, always the left, ah yes, for disobedience.
Never mind that his leg had been hurting like hell!
‘The girl next door … Yes, yes, I remember her well, monsieur. Always in a hurry, that one, and not wishing to come in even for a moment. I have even left the door ajar so as to watch for her and call out, but’, the man gave a shrug, ‘she has ignored me. Not out of unkindness, I assure you, Inspector. Out of haste, always haste. She did not wish me to know she met another in there.’
Alphonse Dupuis had been a captain, a sapper who’d lost his right leg but who otherwise appeared quite debonair in spite of his reduced state of being. A man of some fifty-eight years perhaps. Not too thin. Still with a little paunch.
He readily accepted a cigarette but flicked his own lighter, the one he kept for special occasions when he wanted to impress. ‘Don’t believe a word of what Corbet has told you, Inspector. That one’s so touched he still doesn’t think it possible there were men below the rank of major.’
The little joke went well, the one from the Surete had understanding in his eyes, instant rapport. So, good! Yes. Now the interview could begin.
‘She was quite pretty?’ he hazarded. ‘Dead, I understand, from garrotting with the wire? Violated as she lay beneath her assailant, eh? My poor little bird.’
‘Did you ever talk to her?’
‘Me? Ah no. She was, as I’ve only just said, far too embarrassed. She’d have seen the truth of her life in my eyes – they’re like a father’s, is that not so, Inspector? It would have been too much for her.’
The paunch rose to press against the buttons of the green silk vest Dupuis had had for years. His hair was thin, the head nearly bald over the crown, the eyes of a deep and intense brown but constantly on the move.
‘What about the one who visited her?’
Had the Surete seen the truth? Did he know that the dreams of the little one had hurt almost as much as the nightmares? ‘That one has a moustache much wider and fuller than your own, Inspector. Brown and greying. The well-pressed suit, the corpulent, well-fed bastard’s son of a shopkeeper’s whore.’
‘His age?’
‘Madame Minou will have already told you. Me, I haven’t time for trifles, Inspector. I’m busy writing my memoirs. The publishers, the bloodsuckers, they’re always pressing me for deadlines yet still refusing to pay their advances.’
‘About fifty-six or fifty-eight?’ Nom de Dieu, don’t get bitchy on me!
‘Yes, yes, all right! Of almost your age, but with more vitality for a man with two legs, more zip to his step.’
‘I’m only fifty-two.’
‘You look eighty but never mind. I suppose it’s all that sitting you people do.’
‘Just tell me about him, eh?’
A ten-franc note was parsimoniously fingered in a black leather pocketbook that would have shamed a priest.
The note was placed on the desk. A cloud of exasperated smoke enveloped the Surete’s gumshoe. Good! ‘Another, Inspector. There is much that I can tell you.’
‘Withholding information is a criminal offence.’
‘Arrest me then. Jail would be preferable to this hole.’
Twenty more fell and then a further twenty to bring it up to fifty.
‘He was from the provinces, from the south-west. A bourgeois up to Paris to see his mistress. He brought her things, little favours. Chocolates, several jars of pate at different times – I’m certain of it. Once two bottles of liqueur, once four bottles, usually only one.’
‘How can you be so certain?’
‘Because she left them outside my door when she went away.’
St-Cyr laid another fifty on the desk. ‘Antoine Audit and Sons of Perigord?’ he asked. ‘A pate de foie gras aux truffes?’
Dupuis grunted. ‘It was exceptional. I looked for more.’
‘She spoiled you, monsieur. Any ideas what went on in that room?’