Kohler shoved the soup plate forward until it lay like a sick moon just before the fanned-out, biliously chartreuse ration tickets the Préfet had left for them. Louis hadn’t shown up here. He hadn’t been with Kerjean either. Ah damn, where the hell was he? In trouble … was that it?
Reaching down to the floor, he caught up the Lebel Model 1873 six-shooter the Sûreté carried when needed. Guns were this Gestapo’s responsibility when not in use, a stupid rule of Boemelburg’s that ought to have been done away with long ago.
Breaking the gun open, he squinted down the barrel at the candle flame. Clean as a whistle and ready to go as always. A careful man. Louis could knock the head off a pigeon at thirty paces but was a lover of nature, a tree-planter on occasion even when investigating a murder! He seldom used a gun, preferring his precious bracelets and leaving the guillotine to do its work. ‘The basket always catches them,’ he’d say.
He had come here with Marianne on his second honeymoon. She had been a very pretty thing. Blonde, blue-eyed and quite innocent at first, no doubt. But in the buff, she had had an absolutely gorgeous figure, not only awakening to the joys of sex but eager for them, so eager. The poor Frog. The Hauptmann Steiner had made damned good use of her for far too long and Gestapo Paris’s The Watchers had photographed the couple at play on several occasions, none of which had been cluttered up by bedcovers or clothing. Half the boys at the rue des Saussaies had seen the films. They were still holding regular showings when they thought it funny and Louis, who had yet to see the films and never would, wasn’t around.
But now the cuckold was missing and the pretty wife was dead. And oh for sure, someone else had come along and Gabrielle Arcuri, the chanteuse, was superb both in voice and looks, et cetera, et cetera, but that romance had yet to be consummated. Kohler was certain of this. ‘He’s too shy. He’s still feeling the loss, still loyal to the wife in spite of everything and unwilling to commit himself a third time.’
Idly he wondered what Louis’s first wife had been like. She had run off with a truck driver, or had it been a door-to-door salesman? He never said much about her, out of deference to the second wife. Truth was, the Sûreté was seldom home. Truth was that even when awakening to a naked woman in his bed, a gift from his partner and friend, he had remained steadfastly faithful. Politely muttering excuses, he had always been kind to these nocturnal visitors and afterwards would say, ‘Hermann, you must always remember that girl was someone’s daughter. I would not wish to offend the mother, not to mention the father, of course, or the husband or the lover.’
Closing the revolver’s cylinder, he slid his right arm through the straps and buckled up. Then he checked the Walther P38 on the other side of his chest, popping the clip, banging it back in and shucking cartridges rapidly before reloading and making certain there was one up the spout.
Satisfied, he put the safety on and slid the pistol away.
‘Madame Quevillon,’ he sang out — at least it sounded as if he did. His voice crashed from the walls and fled among the fully dressed tables that waited in the all but darkness as schoolgirls wait to dance a first dance when no one asks them and the boys haven’t come.
‘Monsieur?’
Still mesmerized by the artillery probably, that formidable giant in black sackcloth and boots stood watch from just inside a far doorway. Arms were folded defiantly across her chest. The headgear towered above her.
‘Madame, the cotriade is among the finest I’ve tasted but until I find my partner, I’m …’ He shrugged and threw her a lame look. ‘I’m afraid I simply have no stomach for it.’
‘Perhaps he is already with the others.’
With the dead? ‘At the party?’ he bleated.
‘Or at the shop of Madame le Trocquer. The shop will, of course, be closed and that girl, that Paulette will be at the …’
‘The party?’
‘You might call it that, Inspector. For myself, I would call it the work of the Devil. Such drunkenness and goings on are shameful. Debauchery, licentiousness …’ She crossed herself. ‘… and now murder. It is only to be expected. That girl …’ The lips compressed themselves tightly. ‘Paulette le Trocquer is trouble. Some are saying she knows where the Captain’s money is hidden, others that she helped the thief to steal it and now waits for him to return. Hah, there’s fat chance of that! You’ll see. She’ll go to the party now that her father’s dead and never mind the required days of mourning. Those she will spend on her back, the silly thing. Please stop her. Her mother needs her.’
Ah merde, the giant had reduced herself to tears in front of the enemy, something she would never have done otherwise. ‘Hey, it’s going to be all right, madame. The U-boat crews may be rough — hell, they don’t have easy lives or long ones, but they’re not criminals. They wouldn’t harm a pretty girl.’
‘Even if she had stolen their money or knew who had taken it and where it was?’
Verdammt, she had sucked him right in with those tears! ‘If you’ve got any thoughts on the matter, you’d best let me have them,’ he said warily.
She would tell him now. It would be for the best, a free conscience and a pure heart. ‘The Cöte Sauvage, Inspector, and the caves no one sees from atop the cliffs. I am worried someone will take that girl to a place no one else knows of. Then they will force her to tell them what they want to know and then they will kill her.’
The rain came suddenly to the standing stones. The darkness was everywhere as the wind shrieked across the moor. Dazed and aching badly, St-Cyr clawed himself to his feet to lean against the stone and try to still the agony in the back of his head.
‘This way,’ he gasped and lurched from the stone to stumble and fall into the grass and lie there letting the rain wash over him. ‘Hermann … Hermann, where are you?’
A memory came of their first meeting, 13 September 1940, each warily regarding the other with open hostility and doubt. Then Hermann had grinned and extended that big hand of his. ‘Ah what the hell, eh, Monsieur Jean-Louis? Let’s work together and show them all it’s possible. I like your car.’
Hermann had been living at the Hotel Boccador then with others of the Gestapo. Girls in, girls out, the traffic jams in the rooms and corridors had been heavy.
When the gale struck him, he was pushed along to teeter madly, to slip and let out a piercing cry. Then the clay pits took him. Down and down he went, banging into the rocks, shooting over muddy, rain-washed slopes until, with a sound he did not hear, he was swallowed up. Clay to the left, clay to the right. It sucked at his arms and pinned his legs. It threatened to drown him.
For a while he tasted the chalky milk of it that poured down the cliff face behind him as he squeezed its unctuous-ness between clenched and useless fists.
Only by easing a foot around did he find rock solid enough to stand on and by sheer force of will pry himself upright. ‘H … ermann!’ he cried out into the beating rain. ‘H … ermann!’ It was no use. ‘Where am I?’ he asked. ‘My head …’
The clay was so greasy. It took all his strength to pull himself out of the hollow. He began to climb rocks that crumbled at the least touch or simply rushed away in torrents of gravelly mud that struck him in the face. ‘I must,’ he said.
Hermann had immediately taken possession of his car, that big black beautiful Citroën four-door sedan all the boys on the rue Laurence-Savart in Belleville had admired so much. Now he drove it nearly always and his little Sûreté Frog sat as a passenger — a passenger in his own vehicle!