And never mind Hermann’s sex life, interesting as that might well be. ‘When spring comes’ meant the Allied invasion. It could be years away and yet …
‘That is,’ she said tartly, ‘if the blackout sadists who prowl the streets in search of such women don’t get to her first!’
‘She’ll try to hide in the darkness of a passage like the Trinite,’ muttered one of the girls.
‘He’ll ram a table leg up her for good measure,’ said the brunette called Gege.
‘But first, he’ll give her a terrible beating,’ said Bijou.
‘He’ll not stop until her throat has been slashed,’ said another, clasping her own as the cat wandered in to lift its tail and rub against her legs before arguing with a pom-pom.
‘I can’t afford to have the house endangered, Inspector,’ went on Georgette Chabot. ‘This house-any such house-must always guard its peace. The girls move around enough as it is and are subject to temptation that needs no further encouragement.’
‘Giselle didn’t encourage us to leave, madame. I swear it,’ blurted Didi.
‘ARE YOU TO PACK YOUR BAGS OR DO YOU WANT ME TO PUT YOU ON THE STREET WITHOUT THEM?’ shrilled the woman.
‘Madame, please! I only meant…’
‘SEE THAT YOU MAKE UP FOR IT! Here the house and the licence are French for French, Inspector. Citizen with citizen, patriot with patriot, and that is all there ever has been or ever will be. When that Le Roy person showed up late this afternoon, I told her to get lost and not come back. I can’t afford to endanger my girls.’
‘You did what?’
‘Are your ears not sufficient?’
Threatening her would only prolong the agony. Oh for sure, two of the German military police often paid prolonged visits and the house was heated, its larder sufficiently supplied at a cost, no doubt, to feed the girls, but … ‘Look, Madame Cliquot, the concierge of that building where Hermann insists on renting a flat, has said the girl never went there today.’
‘That woman would say anything,’ chided Georgette. ‘Frankly, she doesn’t want your partner and his women as tenants and is determined to have the owners cancel their lease. She doesn’t want trouble either, does she, a French girl who offers herself entirely to one of the enemy?’
‘Since when was Hermann ever considered one of those?’
‘Since June of 1940, I think. I do know, also, you understand, that Irene Cliquot is intelligent enough not to want such scores settled in her house.’
‘And Hermann?’
‘Isn’t welcome. The law is the law, isn’t it? Who am I to challenge it?’
At 10.37 p.m. the little blue lights that dimly marked the most important street corners suddenly went out. The last trains of the metro would have begun their runs at ten and maybe the most distant ones still had a ways to go.
One thing was certain. The Occupier had again ordered that the plug be pulled. Kohler stood a moment at the corner of the rue La Boetie and the Champs-Elysees. Louis must have known who Denise Rouget’s father was, but Louis wasn’t here.
‘I have to do it,’ he breathed, the street suddenly damned lonely. ‘Either I’m finished as a detective and ripe for the Russian front, or I’m not. That petite amie of the judge’s may have made our phone call.’
Feeling his way in the rain, he started up the rue La Boetie. Through the hush of the city, sounds came. The throb of a distant motorcycle patrol, the squeal of Gestapo tyres, the clip-clop of high heels with their hinged wooden soles one hell of a lot closer, the heavy scent of too much perfume mingling with that of fresh tobacco smoke.
A lonely car, an Opel Tourer by the sound, turned off the rue de Ponthieu to begin its pass as a figure darted from the shelter to urgently rap on a side windscreen. ‘There’s some bastard lurking around here,’ shrilled the girl as she scrambled in, and didn’t the Occupier drive virtually all the cars, and wasn’t that one just as capable of attacking her?
A cigarette was accepted and a light. The blinkered headlamps went out. The engine continued wasting petrol. Kohler left her to get on with the client’s little moment and went along the street thinking of Giselle and how he had saved her from just such a life. No matter what Louis said, she’d be perfect for that little bar on the Costa del Sol, but the sooner they were out of France and into Spain, the better. ‘False papers,’ he muttered. ‘Cash, too, and plenty of it.’ The lament of the damned.
When he came to what must be the rue d’Artois, he backtracked. Each of these former mansions was cloaked in darkness but at one, the concierge had lit the stub of a candle and that could only mean one thing, of course. The house was warm, too. Though this last didn’t surprise, it did raise a note of caution, but once committed, always committed.
‘Monsieur …’
He would have to say it firmly, couldn’t waver, not with a tenant or tenants from among the Reich’s most privileged. ‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central. The flat Judge Rouget leases. Gestapo HQ have ordered me to take a look around. Lead me to it, then wait down here. Lend me that torch of yours and forget you ever saw me.’
‘Inspector,’ said Laurent Louveau, concierge of this building and with some authority of his own, ‘Monsieur le Juge hasn’t been in for some time.’
‘Don’t get difficult. It’s Elene Artur I’m interested in.’
Louveau tossed his head. ‘Has the girl done something she shouldn’t?’
‘Was she here last night?’
‘Why, please, would she have been if Monsieur le Juge wasn’t?’
Logic was one of the finer points of the French, their brand of it anyway, but there was no sense in arguing. ‘That’s what I’d like to find out, among other things.’
‘Then I must inform you that the girl wasn’t here either.’
‘Good. You’ve no idea how relieved I am. We’ll take the stairs. I don’t trust the lifts.’
Had this one not even noticed? ‘It shall be as you wish, Inspector, since the electricity is off in any case. The flat is on the third floor.’
‘And easy to a side staircase and entrance?’
Sacre nom de nom, what was this? ‘Oui, but … but there’s a little bell above that entrance and I would have heard it, had that door not been locked as it was and is.’
‘Aber naturlich. Ach, sorry. I keep switching languages. That means, of course.’
‘Monsieur the Lieutenant Krantz sometimes also forgets, as does the Mademoiselle Lammers. They make a big joke of it and tell me I’d best learn a proper language, but …’
‘Krantz … Isn’t he one of those who oversee the Bank of France?’
‘Ah, no. He is at the Majestic.’
The offices of General Heinrich von Stulpnagel, the military governor of France. ‘And the Mademoiselle Lammers? Thesima, was it, or Mady?’
‘Ursula. She’s also at the Majestic. A translator, as is the lieutenant.’
And probably working for the Verwaltungsstab, the administrative staff that dutifully subordinated every facet of the French economy to those of the Reich. Fully five hundred million francs a day in reparations and payments had to be coughed up for losing the war and housing one hundred thousand of the Wehrmacht in France, along with lots of others. Converted from its hotel rooms, there were now more than a thousand offices in the Majestic alone, and wasn’t it on the avenue Kleber at the corner of the avenue des Portugais and but a short walk to the avenue Foch and the SS, and hadn’t von Stulpnagel and Oberg served in the same regiment during that other war?
Of course they had, and yes, Von Stulpnagel left all ‘political’ matters, like the retaliatory shooting of hostages, to Oberg, thereby disassociating himself entirely from the extremes of the latter.
No one could have brought the Lido’s telephone caller here last night. They wouldn’t have dared.