The flics. Kohler’s grin was huge, and it drew beads of blood from between the sutures on his cheek.
The woman rebelled at the sight of them. ‘Pigs!’ she boiled. ‘You call yourselves cops? Is that it, my fine sweet lemons? If you’d been doing your jobs instead of fighting whores, you’d have saved that one.’
Ah yes. She tossed the frowzy grey mop of hair as she lifted her eyes to indicate the fourth floor and a certain room.
The folds of her neck revealed their creases. The acid came. ‘You have not asked my permission, messieurs. That,’ she simmered, ‘is against the law. The search warrant, please? Come, come – quickly now, mes amis, before I take offence.’
Kohler let her have it. ‘It’s your job to watch and notify the cops of anything suspicious!’ he shouted, richly enjoying the exchange.
The jaundiced eyes narrowed. ‘No prune could have an anus mouth like yours, monsieur. Kindly telephone the Prefet of Police.’
The slut! ‘There is no telephone.’
‘Of course there isn’t! Find one.’
Stung by her, Kohler again nudged the Frog aside and pulled out his shield, which he flung up in front of the woman. ‘Gestapo,’ he whispered. ‘Now open that hairy twat of yours, my fine garlic loaf, and spill the lentils, eh?’
The felt carpet slippers were shabby, the toes turned in. The half-stockings were of that heavy combination of beige cotton, wool and other things. One had lost its elastic.
She saw the Frenchman’s gaze travel up her. Was he weeping for her or calculating the space she’d need in one of those boxcars nobody talked about?
‘I have not seen the man who has done this thing, messieurs. I … Oh, Mon Dieu, may Jesus forgive me. Yes, I was listening to the forbidden. Me, Lisette Minou, whose husband could have been one of the Broken Mugs and proud of it! readily and gladly, messieurs, GLADLY admit it!’
The hairy upper lip was licked in doubt.
A confession. ‘Her heart’s glowing like a furnace, Louis. She wants to become a martyr.’
One of the Broken Mugs, one of the badly disfigured from the last war, but she’d qualified this by saying ‘could have been’ … St-Cyr heaved an inward sigh.
‘Such are the ways of simple folk, Hermann. The brave. Now look, madame. The girl – who was she? We know she did not live here but came only at certain times.’
The woman filled her lungs. ‘Gestapo pig!’ she shouted. ‘Lackey! Bootlicker! Collaborator! How can you live with yourself, eh? No one else would!’
He ignored the slurs, though struck to the quick. ‘What were those times, madame? Who was it came to visit her? Why was she killed? You will have a thought or two, perhaps something the girl has said, isn’t that so? Perhaps something her lover has said in passing – he could not have come and gone without your knowledge.’
She drew herself up in the chair. ‘You have too many questions, monsieur.’
‘They are but the first of many,’ he said softly.
‘My head, my memory – I am an old woman, Inspector, but I do know my rights.’
‘You have none,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Let’s take her with us, Louis. The schmuck might come back to feed her tongue to the cat.’
‘There is the matter of the girl’s papers, Hermann.’
‘This one won’t know where they’re hidden. The girl would have been too smart for that. We’ll take a look later on.’
‘The carousel?’
‘We have to, Louis. This chicken’s too old for the pot. It might help her to see a little blood.’
‘Then drive by the house. That might also help.’
The street was narrow, the hill steep, the car flat out. At 1.35 a.m. Berlin time, the rue Laurance Savart gave up the gun barrel of its rabbit’s burrow.
As the houses flashed past, the concierge, trapped in the back of the car, broke the long-forgotten rosary she’d been telling. The beads went everywhere, and the houses … the houses … two-and three-storeys high perhaps, some too close to the road, some … The rain – they’d skid! Oh Mon Dieu!
Kohler slammed on the brakes! The woman screamed. St-Cyr swore. ‘ HERMANN, THE BRAKES WILL FAIL ONE OF THESE DAYS!’
The car swung tightly across the road. As it rocketed into the doorway of someone’s house, it bumped up over the narrow sidewalk.
Lisette Minou shrilled; ‘In the Name of Jesus, monsieur, you should not be allowed to drive a car!’
The headlamps began to fall, the car backing slowly away to bump down off the sidewalk. Kohler drove on a little. The front of Number 3 came into view, held by the stabbing lights. ‘Louis, don’t! Leave it, for Christ’s sake. Marianne was no good for you. She made a cuckold out of you, damn it!’
A cuckold … Ah now, what was this? The one from the Surete …
‘Just leave it, will you, Louis? Please.’ The front of the house was a shambles – nailed-up boards and vacant windows. There might still be chunks of meat.
‘I must, Hermann. If only for a moment.’
‘You’ll get wet.’
‘That does not matter.’
The car door slammed. Lisette Minou filled her lungs. The French one flipped up the collar of his overcoat and pulled down the brim of a misshapen hat. The Gestapo one was lighting a cigarette. Suck lemons, you dog’s offal, she wanted to shout. They’d get nothing more from her. Nothing!
Without a word, Kohler passed the fag back to her, then lit another for himself.
The windscreen wipers beat the rain away and the lights shone upon the Frenchman.
‘That one stands like Judas before the Cross,’ she said.
‘The Resistance did this, madame. A mistake of course. He’s far too loyal to France, but …’ Kohler hesitated. ‘His wife and son, a boy of four years, got it instead. The woman was coming home to him. She hadn’t wanted to leave the nest of sin but … Ah, what the hell.’ He hit the steering-wheel with both hands. ‘War is war.’
‘Did he beat this wife of his?’ she asked. When no answer came, she added begrudgingly, ‘Some men do, monsieur. Mine did, but he’s gone to his reward on the end of the Kaiser’s bayonet and me, I’m glad he got the spit right up the ass!’
Kohler ignored the venom. ‘Louis didn’t beat her. He loved her. Now shut that cavern of yours and don’t try to keep the car warm with your farts. I’d better go to him.’
There’d been a small garden behind the half-wall of bricks. The cement, Louis XIV urns that had once stood atop the posts were gone. Cucumbers had been grown there in season, in defiance of ration tickets and famine. Cucumbers and pole beans.
Marianne St-Cyr had not been a gardener – she’d hated it – and the cucumbers and beans had been stolen. Or had they died from lack of watering?
All the lower windows had, at best, been crudely boarded up. By order of the SS General Karl Oberg, the Supreme Head of the SS and the Gestapo in France.
The house had been ‘sealed’. Trespassers would be shot, looters … Even possessing one of the stray bricks would command the threat of death. It was a plague upon the house, but had the notice been deliberate on Oberg’s part?
Of course it had. A worry.
Louis was reading the word TRAITOR someone had scribbled across it. There was glass everywhere, smashed cakes of the white-painted stucco that had once covered the front of the house.
‘Louis, come away. We’ve a job to do.’
St-Cyr tried to find his voice. ‘I could have stopped this, Hermann. I wanted to warn her. I knew there would be trouble. The Resistance, they … they had my number.’
‘They probably still do.’
Louis stooped to pluck a shred of cloth from the rubble, the remains of Philippe’s shirt.
‘Stop punishing yourself. Come on, let’s get to work, eh?’
‘The house will have to be repaired, Hermann. Building materials are so hard to come by.’