“Tanglewood must be very small indeed. Did I tell you I couldn’t find it in the gazetteer?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Anyway,” Floyd said, “I can’t begin to imagine what business a girl from a small town in Dakota would have in a Paris Métro tunnel. Or her sister, for that matter.” He met her eyes in the mirror. “The thing is, Susan White also had a thing about Cardinal Lemoine. She was observed entering the station with a heavy suitcase and leaving with a light one.”
“If there’s a significance to that, I’m afraid it quite escapes me.”
“According to the late Mister Blanchard, and judging by what I saw when he let me into her room, your sister had a mania for collecting things. Her room was a holding area for huge numbers of books, magazines and newspapers, maps and telephone directories. It looked as if she collected just about anything she could get her hands on.” Floyd waited a beat. “Pretty odd behaviour for a tourist.”
“She liked souvenirs.”
“By the ton?”
Auger leaned forward. He smelled her perfume: it made him think of roses and spring. “What exactly are you saying, Mister Floyd? Let’s get it out into the open, shall we?”
He turned the car on to boulevard Pasteur, slowing down behind a bus carrying an advertisement for Kronenbourg beer. “Your sister’s actions simply don’t add up.”
“I already told you she had mental problems.”
“But Blanchard got to know her pretty well, and he never suspected that there was anything wrong with her head.”
“Paranoiacs can be very manipulative.”
“What if she wasn’t paranoid at all? What if all that was just a story you tried to sell me to throw me off the scent?”
“You’re saying that my sister’s actions might have had some rational explanation?”
“Miss Auger.” They were off first-name terms now. No more Verity, no more Wendell. “I just watched you crawl out of a Métro tunnel. Right now I’m about ready to believe anything, up to and including the possibility that the two of you were not sisters at all, but fellow spies.”
“So now we’re getting to it,” she said, rolling her eyes in disbelief.
“Let’s look at the facts, shall we?” Floyd continued, unperturbed. “Susan White obviously wasn’t acting alone. She must have had an accomplice whom she met with in Cardinal Lemoine. The accomplice made the suitcase switch, or emptied the one White was carrying and took the contents away. My guess is that the accomplice then made their way into that self-same tunnel you just came out of. There’s obviously something in there that means a great deal to you.”
“Go on,” she said, her tone mocking. “Let’s hear the rest of your preposterous little theory.”
“It isn’t a whole theory yet, just the start of one.”
“I still want to hear what you think you’ve got.”
“My partner found something odd in Susan White’s room. The wireless set had been altered, probably by Susan herself. It looks as if she was using it to receive instructions, or perhaps to tap into communications between rival spies.”
“Ah. So now we’ve got two groups of spies? It gets better, it really does.”
“Custine never did crack the code. Turns out his attempts were futile anyway: Susan was using an Enigma machine.”
“I’m quite sure that means something to you, but—”
“It’s a sophisticated enciphering machine. Which makes me think she was a spy. So what does that make you?”
“You’re being totally absurd.”
“Except I’m not the one who just crawled out of a Métro tunnel.”
For a long while, Auger said nothing at all. Floyd took boulevard Garibaldi as far as place Cambronne and then steered on to Emile Zola, heading towards Auger’s hotel.
“Look,” she said, “I can’t expect you to understand any of this, but everything I told you about my sister was the truth. However, it’s also true that she had some kind of fixation with Cardinal Lemoine station. I told you she believed forces were moving against her, didn’t I?”
“Maybe you did,” he allowed.
“I can’t explain the wireless, or that machine you mentioned… except to say that if you listen to the radio these days, there are a lot of odd transmissions. And who knows where she found that machine? I take it this is something you can buy, if you want one badly enough?”
“Get to your point, Miss Auger.”
“My point,” she continued, “is that it’s more than likely that my sister picked up one of these odd radio channels and absorbed it into her private conspiracy. As for the tunnel… well, I can’t deny that she thought there was something down there. She mentioned it more than once in her postcards. She also mentioned that she had hidden something valuable in there. Whether she had or not, I couldn’t say, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to leave Paris without finding out for myself.”
“And this didn’t strike you as being just the slightest bit dangerous?”
“Of course I knew it was dangerous. And of course I couldn’t very well tell the man in the station what I was doing.”
Floyd’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “So that’s all it was? Just tidying up some of your sister’s unfinished business?”
“Yes,” she said emphatically.
“It still doesn’t explain why there have been two deaths. Got a neat explanation for that as well, have you?”
“As you already said yourself, Blanchard probably felt guilty about what had happened to Susan. Perhaps her death was an accident after all. Those low railings look unsafe to me.”
Floyd slowed the car to a crawl as they neared the hotel, looking for a suitable parking spot. The bad weather had brought everyone out in their cars, with only a few brave souls chancing the sidewalks.
“You know what?” he said. “I’m half-tempted to believe you. I’d like nothing more than to close this case with a clear conscience. Maybe you are exactly who you say you are, and all the suspicious circumstances I keep seeing are just red herrings left behind by your sister.”
“Now you’re beginning to talk sense,” Auger said.
“There’s a woman in my life who wants to leave France,” Floyd said. “She wants me to pack my bags and leave with her. A large part of me wants to go with her.”
“Maybe you should listen to that large part.”
“I’m listening,” Floyd said, “and right now the only thing that’s keeping me here is the thought that I might be turning my back on something big. That and the fact that my partner is in a lot of trouble with the police, and will be until this case is closed.”
“Don’t get sucked into Susan’s games,” Auger said. Making an obvious effort to sound uninterested, she asked, “So who is this woman, anyway?”
“You’ve met her.” Floyd had spotted a parking space. He crunched the Mathis into reverse and prepared to ease the massive car into an available space, thinking of the car as a coal barge and the space as a vacant berth. “She’s the woman who followed you from my office.”
“The cleaning girl?”
“The cleaning girl, yeah. Except she isn’t a cleaning girl. Her name’s Greta and she’s a jazz musician. Good at her job, too.”
“She’s pretty. You should go with her.”
“Easy as that, is it?”
“There’s nothing to keep you in Paris, Wendell.”
He looked at her. “We’re back on Wendell now, are we?”
“I’ve seen the state of your office—business isn’t exactly booming. I’m sorry about your partner, but I assure you, there really isn’t a case to be investigated here.”
The Mathis’s rear fender kissed the front fender of a dented Citroën behind them. Floyd slipped the car into first gear and was inching it forward when Auger suddenly lunged hard across the back seat, away from the side nearest the hotel. “Drive,” she said.