In a rage, one of them nearly tore the car door off as the Citroen pulled up. ‘KOHLER, WHY HAVE YOU AND THAT … THAT FRENCHMAN NOT STOPPED THIS? BANDITEN, I TELL YOU, KOHLER. TERRORISTEN!’
Ach, mein Gott, it was the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. ‘Just leave it to me, General. Go back to your dinner.’
‘Back? When those dear ladies need to be calmed and that entrance replaced and the door upstairs to the flat?’
Only a Prussian could have overlooked the tragedy of what had really happened. ‘I’ll just go and speak to them, General. Maybe they can be more specific.’
‘Specific, is it? Did I not say Banditen?’
A fortune in lingerie and lace had been trampled or stolen. Broken glass was everywhere. Aphrodite’s alabaster breasts no longer beckoned, nor did Diana’s, she having lost her bow and arrow, and as for the flimsily clad, limbless, headless mannequins, the wrecking bar had done its worst.
Dense, a cloud of unleashed perfume filled the air. Crystal phials lay among the ruin, scattered cosmetics, too, and bath salts, soaps, powders, garter belts, silk stockings and lace-trimmed step-ins. Ducking past the cluttered office, he came at last to the stairs only to stop at the sight of Giselle’s pom-pom slippers. She had tried to fight the attackers off and had been thrown down the stairs. Blood was flecked here, there, everywhere, Oona’s white ribbon-the one she always used to tie back her hair before bed-was dangling from the railing.
Diminutive-never anything but vivacious and always perfectly turned out and looking years younger than she really was-Chantal Grenier, that beautiful blonde-haired dove from yesteryear, clutched a torn nightdress to her bare bosom while stern-eyed Muriel Barteaux, far taller, bigger, stronger, tougher and still wearing the usual broad-lapelled iron-grey pinstripe and dark-blue tie, tried to comfort her lifelong companion and business partner.
The voice was of gravel. ‘Chantal … Chantal, mon ange, it’s Hermann. He and Jean-Louis will bring them back.’
‘Louis isn’t …’ began Kohler.
‘Raped, Monsieur Hermann,’ shrilled Chantal. ‘Defiled, I tell you! The throat of the one slashed while the other has tried to stop them. They’ll be violated, my Muriel! Mutilated, the one forced to watch as the other is … Ah Sainte Mere, Sainte Mere, they will scream but it will be of no use. None, I tell you!’
‘Chantal … Chantal …’
‘Easy, little one. Easy,’ urged Kohler, wrapping his arms about the two of them. ‘Louis isn’t with me but as soon as he is, we’ll find them and take care of things. Make her down a stiff cognac, Muriel, and then sip another. Find her something to nibble on. A biscuit, a crust-anything so long as it settles her.’
He looked as if in tears himself, thought Muriel, and though it was very dangerous to say such a thing, she could with Hermann and had better. ‘They threatened to expose us. They said that since the Nazis would love to burn us at the stake, they would, and that as soon as they had finished what they had to do, they were going to torch the shop and make sure we never left it.’
‘Frenchmen, Monsieur Hermann, in two big cars. Two, I tell you, and ten of them. Ten! Resistants. La Croix de Lorraine!’
‘Nonsense,’ said Muriel, her expression enough to shatter the thought. ‘I already pay those people far too much to leave us alone.’
‘PPF, then, a hit squad of them?’ asked Kohler.
Ah, mon Dieu, what was this? ‘One did shout to the others …’
‘Let me, my Muriel. “The corner of the boul’ Victor Hugo and rue de Rouvray.”’
And in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the villa Gestapo Boemelburg used for those whose countries of origin, passports, politics, finances and such were suspect but who required far gentler treatment than usual. It would be blackmail for sure from that Hamburg Kriminalrat, but Louis would be the first to ask, Now what are you going to do about it? Submit or tell him absolutely nothing?
Muriel was using a sleeve to gently wipe Chantal’s eyes. ‘Look, I’ll see that this is paid for in cash and otherwise. Louis will too.’
Would it break his heart all the more if she were to tell him? wondered Muriel.
Intuitively Chantal understood and, wrapping her arms more firmly about her, lifted herself up to whisper, ‘You must, ma chere.’
‘One of the others shouted that they should drive by Rudy’s place to show him what he was missing, Hermann, that Jean-Louis had this morning not only been unkind to their tires and headlamps, but insulting.’
That Rudy being Rudy de Merode, not Rudi of Chez Rudi’s.
Alone, felt St-Cyr, and as if left out for him on her dressing table at the Club Mirage on the rue Delambre in Montparnasse was the crystal phial of scent that would immediately invoke its memories. ‘Exquisite,’ he said, as when first encountered early last December, Muriel Barteaux having designed it especially for Gabi and named it after the club. ‘Mirage,’ he went on, ‘those three initials on this cigarette case being N. K. M.: Natalya Kulakov-Myshkin and a Russian who had escaped from the revolution in 1917, losing her family en route and having arrived alone in Paris at the age of fourteen, a survivor, a chanteuse.’
Seemingly, he still hadn’t realized that her last number had come to its end, the club packed as always with the Occupier, they all shouting for her to return. ‘Jean-Louis …’
Replacing the stopper, he didn’t look up to see her sheathed as she was in shimmering sky-blue silk, felt Gabrielle. Perhaps he was remembering the brown whipcord jodhpurs she had worn at the mill on the Loire, or was it the open hacking jacket?
No lipstick or makeup as now, thought St-Cyr, her hair tied back with a bit of brown velvet and not blonde at all, as first thought, but the shade of a very fine brandy, her eyes of a violet matched only by those of Hermann’s Giselle.
‘Every time I hear you sing, Gabrielle, I’m exactly like all of those out there, and Muriel too, filled and lifted entirely out of myself and present difficulties. You know, of course, that there are those who will never forgive you for having sung for the Occupier. Isn’t it time you thought of stopping, or is it that you feel the Fuhrer, with all his wisdom, will turn this conflict around and defeat the Russians, and the Allies who are now mercilessly bombing his cities?’
‘Those boys out there and along the front need me as do soldiers everywhere, no matter which side they’re on. Even Charles Maurice would have wanted me to continue.’
A lie, of course, for Captain Theriault, the dead husband, had prevented her from singing and had insisted, as most Frenchmen would, and had the right, that she stay home with their son, an absence Muriel had lamented, only to then find Gabi after the defeat and at the Mirage.
Though it would do no good to say it, and she was very much of the Resistance herself, he had better. ‘The Banditen will never forgive you. Why skate so close to the edge when you don’t have to?’
‘Is it that you think my Rene Yvon-Paul needs me?’
Rene was now eleven and lived with his grandmother, the countess, at the Chateau Theriault near Vouvray.
‘Me, I sing because for me, I have to, Jean-Louis. But why, please, when you must know this dressing room of mine could well have ears, is it that you should say such things so loudly?’
‘Because we never whisper and they need to hear it from yourself.’
The Gestapo’s Listeners-their Watchers too, the ones who had deliberately left that Resistance bomb on his doorstep early last December, tragically killing his second wife and little son instead. ‘I think I need a cigarette.’