Nathalie’s black teddy gave Herr Kohler’s swift scrutiny a glimpse of lace, flesh and garters, of smooth white thighs and black lisle stockings that had no holes above the tops of her jackboots.
‘What’s to happen to us?’ she asked at last, but with that same penetratingly cold voice she used on insufferable men. ‘Are we to be next?’
‘Just who the hell is doing this?’ demanded Carole, abruptly taking a quick drag, then curling back her upper lip to spit, ‘Detectives! Merde, haven’t you salauds from Paris thought it could well be the wives?’
‘A knife?’ Nathalie said softly from her chair. ‘Noelle Olivier’s, is that so, Inspector? Well? Damn it, tell us.’
‘Yes! Louis … Look, my partner has it.’
Had Herr Kohler been startled by Nathalie’s vehemence? wondered Carole. Did he, too, think there could well be a connection to that little legend? Edith Pascal, eh, Inspector? La Megere as we call her — the shrew — when she hounds Albert for newspapers and about other things.
‘And is it true that Albert Grenier found it?’ bleated Aurelienne from where she lay, her back still to him.
‘Yes, again.’
‘Ah Sainte Mere!’ she cried, and, shutting her eyes, bowed her head to press it against her own stage prop which Albert had seen her lewdly sucking and fondling often enough. Albert …
‘Cherie, it can’t have been him!’ insisted Nathalie.
‘Ma foi, quelle stupidite, idiote!’ scathed Carole. ‘Albert loves us all. You know he’d never touch a hair on your head. He’d die for us just as he would for the Marechal. He couldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘Just the rats, eh?’ blurted Aurelienne, defiantly swinging her legs off the bed to sit on its edge. ‘He presses a thumb under the chins of those that haven’t quite been done in and watches as they struggle for breath or all but cuts off their heads by tightening that wire of his!’
‘Or uses the chair leg, so why make such a thing of it?’ shot back Carole.
‘Because I’ve seen him watching me! Oh bien sur we used to say he should at least have a little fun in his life and why not let him watch us, but now I’m afraid of him. I am, Nathalie. I am!’
Hurriedly Herr Kohler pushed things aside on the dressing table to set his drinks down but knocked over the bottle of cologne that was always left open as an air-sweetener. Futilely he made a grab for it only to realize he was too late as it shattered on the concrete floor. ‘Verdammt!’ he swore and desperately searched his pockets for a cigarette until Carole gave him hers.
‘Merci,’ he said. ‘Christ, I needed this! Four girls and Albert knew them all. Did he watch them too?’
‘Getting undressed?’ asked Nathalie.
‘Fucking their lovers?’ went on Carole. ‘Celine was one of us, Inspector. The others were friends.’
‘And she was killed with that knife!’ wept Aurelienne. ‘I knew she was going to be next. I begged her not to go to the Hotel du Parc when Honore de Fleury came in here to give her that nightgown and told her to put it on. Albert knew what she was up to with Petain. I’m certain of it. Certain, do you understand?’
Svelte and looking taller than she was, the one called Nathalie lifted herself from that chair of hers, its back slipping between and behind her legs in one gracefully fluid motion. Putting a bare arm about the clarinet player’s shoulders, she kissed that tear-streaked cheek and, pressing her forehead against it, rocked her head from side to side, saying soothingly, ‘Petite, don’t worry so. Albert couldn’t possibly have killed Celine or any of the others. Mon Dieu, didn’t he leave flowers for you in your room last summer, in mine also, and now sometimes a gingerbread his mother has baked especially for him?’
And gazing up with superb china-blue eyes under bobbed and parted jet-black hair a la Madame Noelle Olivier-yes, damn it! thought Kohler — said, ‘It was nothing, Inspector. Albert overheard Lucie telling Aurelienne and Celine that she was going to have to go to Paris. Gaetan-Baptiste, her banker, was insisting on it and had …’
‘Had what?’
Ah merde! ‘Arranged everything.’
‘An abortion?’
‘She wasn’t going to refuse, Inspector,’ said Nathalie. ‘She couldn’t, she said. But for me, I think she wanted very much to keep the child.’
‘And Albert? How did he react?’
She shrugged. ‘He got angry. He thinks girls lead men astray — at least that’s what his mother has told him often enough. She’s very religious and had wanted a child so badly but had had to wait nearly for ever, so Albert, he doesn’t feel abortion is right either.’
And neither does the Marechal he worships, thought Kohler. ‘Where is this peephole of his?’
‘Actually there are two of them,’ said Carole. Picking her way round the day bed and past the doorless armoire, she found the crack high up in the wall and ran a finger along and right into it. ‘He stands on the wooden crate he uses as a footstool when reaching difficult places to set his snares.’
‘The other one is in the ceiling above Aurelienne, Inspector,’ said Nathalie dryly. ‘There’s a storeroom in which Albert must also set snares. Chez Crusoe would rather their kitchens and our dressing room were inundated every spring during the annual floods, than have all that stuff up there get wet.’
‘Cigarettes and pipe tobacco?’
‘Sugar, flour, chocolate, wine and champagne,’ said Carole, giving him the blankest of looks.
‘Orders are placed here, then, and the vans come and go?’ he asked, not missing a trick.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but please don’t tell anyone we let you in on it.’
‘And you all have rooms at the Hotel d’Allier?’
‘Yes,’ said Nathalie. ‘Inspector, forget about Albert. Think about the wives, as Carole has said. You see, they came here to Chez Crusoe. Not Bousquet’s — she’s in Paris — but Richard’s, de Fleury’s and Deschambeault’s. What they saw they did not like and were only too vocal about it. Everyone in the audience laughed, of course, ourselves especially. Mon Dieu, to be presented with such an opportunity for humour was too much to resist, but … but their husbands had left the club by then.’
‘Marie-Jacqueline, Camille, Lucie and Celine had gone with them to the Chateau aux Oiseaux Splendides,’ said Carole, lighting a cigarette for herself. ‘We joined the party later.’
Louis had shown him his notebook: ‘“Party, 24 October”,’ he muttered, ‘and just before the Allied landings in North Africa and total Occupation …’
‘But there have been other parties since,’ confessed Aurelienne, taking Nathalie’s hand in hers to kiss and grip it tightly. ‘Like Camille, Inspector, each of us has a husband who is a prisoner of war in your country, but unlike Celine’s, ours are still alive. Alive!’
‘Those bitches had the nerve to accuse us in public of being unfaithful,’ snorted Carole. ‘Oh for sure, they despise us for letting a little fun come into our lives now and then, but to threaten to tell our husbands we’ve been unfaithful? To write letters to the Marechal demanding that he get les Allemands to send us to the Reich and into forced labour in a munitions factory? Merde, how could anyone think of doing such a thing to another?’
‘We’re not saints, but we didn’t deserve what they said of us,’ said Nathalie. ‘I’ve two sons I board at a farm on the other side of Charmeil where I know they will get enough to eat. Carole has a daughter she left with her husband’s parents.’
‘I couldn’t stand to live with them any more. It drove me crazy, their constant carping. Now I work and save and hope we’ll have a future when my husband is released.’