Olivier had led him to this point, even to having Hermann removed from the room. In one hand he held the earrings, in the other, the sapphires.
‘You know what it’s like to be made a cuckold, Inspector, but Paris is not Vichy. In a big city one can easily hide. Here things are so close the walls come tumbling down and you stand naked before the very people you once served and who once respected you. Your second wife and little son were killed on their way home to you, I gather, and for that I am deeply sorry, but it was, in so far as I can determine, a tragic mistake.’
Improbable as it seemed, knowing the attitudes of les hauts as he did, St-Cyr had to wonder if Olivier was of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. ‘A Resistance bomb that Gestapo Paris-Central’s Watchers left in place for me took them instead.’
‘War is never easy, is it? Dr Menetrel knows all about that little affair of hers and the films the Watchers made of the couple and enjoyed. Naked and fornicating, that wife of yours crying out in ecstasy to another while you … you have had to bear the shame of it and the laughter.’
Olivier had even tried to provoke him but a calm front would be best. ‘Hermann had the films destroyed. The Hauptmann Steiner was sent, by his uncle, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, to Russia where he was killed in action.’
‘And the chanteuse Gabrielle Arcuri, whose superb voice is regularly broadcast to the Boche and avidly listened to also by the Allies, came to know you.’
Then it was true. He was of the FTP. ‘Hermann is aware she’s involved with the Resistance.’
A cold, flat answer. So, good. Yes, that was good! ‘I just had to hear it from you yourself.’
This upstairs corridor to the bedrooms had always seemed so long, thought Edith. A journey and a half that never ended because Auguste would never let it end. Herr Kohler was right behind her and she knew he had realized love had yet to be consummated but that she would wait for ever if necessary.
‘They always had separate rooms,’ she heard herself saying tartly. Would caution not stop her tongue? she wondered. ‘Auguste rose early, his wife often late. In those days he had the duties of mayor as well as chairman of the bank. Madame Olivier should have understood he had only so much time to spare. Like so many, he went away to war in 1914 and we seldom saw him for four years but still, a wife waits, does she not?’
‘Some do, some don’t,’ she heard Herr Kohler saying. ‘Did she fool around?’
And before the Marechal?’ ‘She had two little children. Perhaps they occupied her totally, perhaps not.’
‘But she liked older men?’
‘Her father felt she needed one and Auguste fitted that mould perfectly. He was thirty-six years of age and very successful, she not quite twenty. Guidance, n’est-ce pas, as if one could ever have guided that filly. Is not the key to a girl’s heart that to the strongbox? I’m sure that father of hers thought this.’
Many are the ways to a girl’s happiness, Hermann, Louis would have said, but the surest is the foresight of the father. Les hauts had a host of such expressions. ‘But Olivier loved her.’
‘Passionately. It’s what every woman prays for but it wasn’t sufficient. Married 13 June 1911, miscarried 27 October of that year when she fell off her horse, gave birth to twins 5 March 1913, and then lost Auguste to the war as so many did. I don’t excuse her; I excuse his not realizing that in his absence she had not had the benefit of that precious guidance and was no longer the young girl he had married.’
‘And her maiden name? It’s just routine.’
Did he know the twins were in Vichy? Did he? wondered Edith. ‘Varollier. An old family in Paris, once very wealthy and with connections to several banks including ours, but all of that was lost in the Depression. Oh for sure one could say, as many later did, that in marrying her Auguste was merely completing a business transaction and that she felt this terribly but it wasn’t so. She was beautiful, was everything a man like him could desire, was tender when needed, vivacious, shapely, voluptueuse, and yet … and yet …’
Ah merde, had Herr Kohler somehow provoked her into speaking her mind or were things so close now she’d had to?
‘The children, mademoiselle,’ he said, having stopped her in the corridor, having taken hold of her by the shoulder and turned her towards him.
What should she say — what could she say? ‘After what happened, he wasn’t even sure they were his. Indeed, he had every reason to think not.’
‘Then Petain wasn’t the first?’
Abruptly her thin shoulders lifted in a questioning shrug but she didn’t turn from him. Wouldn’t!
‘There were others during the war. I’m certain of it.’
Jesus, merde alors, with what were they dealing? ‘And you let him know this when he came back? It couldn’t have been too difficult, could it, since you worked at that bank of his?’
‘He wouldn’t listen! Even when so many later called him a cuckold and laughed at him, he wouldn’t! “Petain and only Petain,” he’d always say and still does.’
‘And the Marechal, does he ever come here?’
‘You can’t know of our Head of State, can you? That one has probably forgotten all about her.’
‘And the house in Paris, in Neuilly? The one her grandmother left her?’
Had the twins told him of it? ‘Auguste sold it and gave the money to Les Soeurs de l’Immaculee Conception. Inspector, the room is just down these few steps. I’m not sure the electric light will work. Auguste … Auguste … hasn’t been in there since she took her life.’
Herr Kohler must be thinking, A hard man to have sold the house on the children, hard to have sent them away like that, but he did not say so. Instead he said, ‘The children’s bedrooms?’
‘Are just across the corridor. The nursery first and then … then the girl’s room and then that of her brother. Always she was close to them, always their very special friend, but even that was not enough to stop her. She was pregnant. Did they tell you that?’
‘They?’
‘Whoever told you of her suicide. Pregnant with Petain’s child!’
‘And your room?’
‘Is next to his on the other side of the staircase. One of the former guest rooms.’
A cold, bitter answer if ever there was one. The overhead light didn’t work. Crowding her, Kohler flicked the switch on and off again. ‘You knew this, didn’t you, because you had removed the bulb from its socket?’
They faced each other in darkness, she standing just inside the room, he still in the corridor. ‘We ran out. We had to have light. These days if you can find them in a shop, and have the necessary tickets, two used light bulbs are demanded as well for each new one, but there aren’t any to be had. They’ve requisitioned them all for the Government. Petain has light; the rest of us have to make do as best we can.’
The Nation’s matches were brittle and often broke and threw flames or sparks or failed to work at all, but in the light of the two he held, Herr Kohler looked not into the room but at her. A giant with a cruel and recent scar down his left cheek from eye to chin, and others from the Great War, the graze of a recent bullet, too, across the brow. ‘The newspapers in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘How did he come by them?’
He’d seen the dates, had seen that they’d not been less than a week old, except for L’Humanite, and had first been read by others. ‘A friend saves them and I … why I try to have a little something for him in exchange.’
Herr Kohler didn’t ask the name of this friend, which could only mean that he sensed it must be Albert Grenier and that he wanted her to know he knew. ‘Let me find you a candle, Inspector.’