Hector Bolduc and that secretary of his were going to need a visit, that mistress of his too. ‘Me to check out how that coin could ever have found its way here.’
Sliding the photos into that top-secret envelope, Ludin said, ‘For now, you can keep these since I have others.’
Serge de Lenz-Sergei Lebeznikov-was enjoying a cigar and leaning against the Citroen when they came out of number eighty-four.
‘A word, mes amis,’ he called out companionably with a wave of the cigar. ‘Since your women are set to be transported, Kohler, I think you can use a little help and Rudy is quite willing to let bygones be bygones.’
One glance at either of those photos of Anna-Marie and Lebeznikov would immediately know who he and that son of his had taken to dinner. ‘Ludin would give me this envelope, Hermann.’
‘To absolve himself of all responsibility, just like he did with it and Oona. If we lose those photos to this rabble or any other-and that could well be what he has in mind-we’ll be blamed. Let me just get the Purdey, and we’ll hear what this bunch have to say since there are two other cars along the street, and they can’t possibly yet know where she and that passeur and his firebox feeder are.’
Choosing ESCALIER M, whose door could never be closed since it didn’t have one, thought Anna-Marie, Etienne led the way along a linoleum-floored corridor off which were doors and the steeply rising staircase.
The air in the room had been drenched with cologne but held traces of cabbage, sweat, the smoke of countless Gauloises bleues and other things. Overhead a single, naked electric bulb gave light to the woman whose lisle stockings had been rolled up to below the pudgy, work-worn knees across which the hem of a flowered housedress was draped. Strong, big, round in the contours and still of the streets, her bosom sagged, the dyed blonde hair a mass of curls and pins over heavily made-up eyes of the deepest blue. The complexion, once that creamy white of the Bretonnes, was now but pasty and blotched.
Under the woman’s forearms and not quite hidden by the faded shy; lace antimacassars, stuffing leaked from the chair, the canary shy; silent in a spotless cage.
‘Ah bon, mon garcon, it’s about time,’ she said, the accent so of Brittany, Anna-Marie felt herself smiling.
Swift to judge, the false lashes narrowed. ‘Who are you?’ asked the woman. ‘Come, come, my beauty with the roll collar who hides the left hand in a pocket of those Norwegian trousers? From where do you come, Oslo or Narvik? Why are you here, what do you plan to do in Paris, is it legal or not, and why, please, having left us in such a hurry do you then return with the utmost caution? Were you expecting our friends to come here, having followed you, and if so, why?’
The puffy fingers wore garish rings.
‘Madame …’ began Etienne, looking as though silently laughing at her predicament.
‘Pauf! Let the girl speak since speak she must.’
The room, the tiny world within the one Madame de Kerellec ruled, held a black iron cookstove, sink, drainboard, counter, pantry shelves with little but things old, a table, two chairs other than the one she was in, a bed that had yet to be made and a chamber pot that definitely needed emptying.
‘It’s early yet,’ the woman said. ‘Why hide your left hand? Is it disfigured, diseased or injured in some other way?’
‘I’ve arthritis, madame. It was caused by my having to live in a garret where there isn’t any heat and the ice, it forms in winter on the inside of the window and walls.’
‘Arthritis … I have it too. The shoulder … This one. The shame of it all is that God, who could have done, did not make us perfect, but then He must have known what He was doing, don’t you think?’
She would have to ignore the invitation to religious conflict, felt Anna-Marie. ‘Your figurines are lovely.’ Of fawns, dwarfs and fairies, all were in frosted bottle-blue glass but beautifully made, and they climbed, flew, danced and lived on shelves above that bed.
Etienne’s newest friend notices everything, thought Apoline, but had Arie, who had lost the love of his life, secretly fallen for this one? ‘Marcel Perrot, the glassblower, made those for me. He was a Picasso with glass and felt I would need the company once the cancer took him, so I named each of them after people we both knew, some good, some bad. Now yours, please, and show me that hand.’
Beside the bed, in a neat pile, were the lurid-jacketed originals of the cheap train-novel* series of Fantomas, all thirty-two of the arch villain’s brutal and sadistic crimes.*
‘I like to read,’ said Apoline tartly. ‘Every night I look forward to a new one, then I have it and I start all over again, now answer what I asked, or is it that the contents of my loge have so entangled that tongue of yours, you can’t use it?’
There could be no hesitation since her papers said one thing and Etienne might still not know of it for he only had been given her real name. ‘Forgive me, madame, but I love to read those, too, and pick them up whenever I can. Annette-Melanie Veroche is my name. I’m from Rethel and am a student at the Sorbonne.’
Etienne had been impressed, but what lovely lies, if lies they were. ‘Students, like artists, always suffer.’
There were a few crumbs on the saucer Madame had been using. ‘May I?’ asked Anna-Marie, and receiving a shrug, took a step over to the cage that hung behind and just to one side of the woman’s chair.
‘Napoleon has been bad,’ said Apoline. ‘He’s being punished for having ignored me this morning. I’m going to call him Adolf-I really am, you little monster!’
When it sang, she was driven to tears, the mascara running, the glossy white Bakelite earrings catching the light. Wiping her eyes with one of the antimacassars, she said, ‘Now what have you for me this time, Etienne, since I must confess I was greatly relieved to see that you and Arie were again staying here where you belong, even though the rent, it has been fully paid up month after month and you have always left things for me to sell for you and for myself and others, of course.’
‘Eggs, cheese, coffee-chicory, chocolate, cigarettes, Ardennes hams and some of those wine-flavoured cheroots you like from Belgium. Annette-Melanie is in a hurry to get to the Sorbonne, madame, but may come back to see us and even stay a night or two.’
‘Is it that I should report such a thing to the Commissariat de Police as the law demands and the Victor of Verdun requires?’
Grinning, kissing her on each cheek, he dropped a wad of francs into her lap and said, ‘Forget about the Marechal Petain. Here’s 40,000 to help your conscience and cover the rent in future.’
Concierge’s often being intermediaries in the marche noir, she was a good choice, felt Anna-Marie. Not a cross or crucifix were present, nor any of those garishly pious religious prints. Just one photo of the novice the woman had once been as a teenager.
‘The sisters felt I would never be clean,’ said Apoline, ‘the fathers, that I was a sinner who needed to be taught a lesson. Naked, they beat me, and naked, I responded because I had to, which only got the Mother Superior and the other sisters all the more upset and jealous. Now go. Come back and come and see me again. We’ll have a little anisette and you can show me that hand of yours because no one here will say a thing of you, but should Arie or this one take a notion to fool around with you without your permission, just leave them to me.’
Out in the courtyard, she said, ‘I have to check on my place but will try to come back later after they’ve decided what to do with Frans.’
‘Un mouchard, ein Spitzel, eh, Kohler?’ said an unsmiling Lebeznikov, flinging the half-smoked cigar away. ‘Two Diamantenbonzen from the Reich pay you a rush visit and still you and St-Cyr turn up your noses at our help? Rudy, tell them.’