The Club Mirage was a crash of noise. Packed to the limit with German uniforms, there wasn’t even standing room for one lone Surete, the bar impossible to approach.
Up onstage, all-but-naked girls, some nearly fifty, one sneezing at the ostrich plumes they wore, presented a shocking tableau of the boy-king Tutankhamen’s spate of pyramid building. Whips cracked. Those being punished cringed. Cymbals reverberated as a bleary-eyed sun began to set but faltered and the guards in their pleated loincloth-skirts stood sentinel with spears if not otherwise employed.
Merde, a tableau such as this could go on for hours! Even those at the bar had stopped attempting to quench their thirst.
‘St-Cyr, Surete, meine Herren. Entschuldigen Sie, bitte. I have to see if my partner’s here. It’s an emergency.’
Excuse me, please? Ach, what was this? ‘Piss off, Franzose.’
‘But …’ Nefertiti had turned to face the audience and raise her arms. The politically correct albino Nubian began to sponge her naked back while the sun threatened to drop right out of sight behind the screen of a rose-red horizon but decided to hesitate.
‘Verfick dich!’ came a Wehrmacht hiss. Fuck off.
Jumping and waving a desperate arm to signal the bar was useless, but something must have been said, for as Nefertiti’s pseudo-Nubian sponged her ankles and calves, Remi, with the face of a mountain that was all crags, clefts and precipices, motioned.
A pastis, a double, had been set on the zinc, the Corsican adding a touch of water to cloud it green as if by magic. ‘Down that, mon ami. And another. You’re going to need it.’
‘Hermann … ? Has something happened to him? To Gabrielle?’
That massive head with its thick, jet-black, wavy gangster’s hair gave an all but imperceptible nod to indicate the dressing rooms as the crowd erupted into cheers through which came calls for the slaves to pluck their feathers and for the guards to drop their spears and loincloths.
Torchlight pierced the darkness of the judge’s flat. Briefly Kohler shone the light over a chinoiserie panel of leaves, vines and exotic birds before letting it fall to the Louis XVI table where Rouget would have left hat, walking stick and gloves. Judges were way higher up than detectives; judges had friends and friends of friends. Lieber Christus im Himmel, why did it have to happen to Louis and himself? The building had given no hint of warning. From somewhere distant, though, came the metallic clunking of a hot-water radiator.
There was no dominant smell except for that of the mustiness of old buildings and antique furniture. ‘Please use the candles, Inspector,’ the concierge had earlier said. Candles weren’t common anymore. Even in the South, in the former Free Zone, they hadn’t been seen by most since that first winter of 1940-1941.
Torchlight found her dark-blue leather high heels. They’d been soaked through last night but were now dry and needing a good cleaning and bit of polish. ‘Louis,’ he softly said. ‘I don’t think I can go through with this.’ Questions, Hermann, Louis would have said. You must concentrate on those. The time of entry? That call she made from the Lido last night didn’t come in to the quartier du Faubourg du Roule’s commissariat until 11.13 p.m. There would have been lots of time for her to have joined the judge at his table between sets …
Lots of time for others to have seen her sitting there with him. She had a child-was she married to a POW? She hadn’t been feeling well, had gone home early, the stage doorman said, but when, damn it, when? Early in a place like the Lido could mean anything up to midnight at the least.
Torchlight shone into the salle de sejour to settle on a gilded sconce. The cigarette lighter on the glass-topped coffee table was heavy. The matching cigarette box with its tortoiseshell repouse hadn’t had its lid completely replaced. Had her assailant dipped into it?
He knew she was here. Instinct told him this. Detective instinct.
Resting on the mantelpiece behind glass was a framed poster: Une Nuit a Chang-Rai, 7 Mai 1926 at the Magic City. Had the judge had a taste for showgirls even then?
Deep blue irises encircled soft pink roses that surrounded a scantily clad eighteen-year-old pseudo-indochinoise dancer. Slender, upraised arms crisscrossed above the coolie hat she wore. The look was squint-eye, the black lashes long and straight, the short hair curled in about her neck, and wasn’t the thing a parody Elene Artur must have definitely not appreciated, the judge a hypocrite? The dark-blue heels were every bit the same as those he’d just found.
‘Elene Artur,’ he said again, and weren’t names important? Hadn’t all the dead of that other war had names that had counted for something?
A vitrine held enamelled boxes, spills of jewellery, strands of pearls and beads, Faberge eggs, Sevres porcelain figurines, a Venus shy;, a marchioness … Had Hercule the Smasher used them to tempt his girlfriends into doing what he wanted or to pay them off by letting them choose some little memento as they left, one that said in no uncertain terms, Ferme-la, cherie? The kitchen was hung with copper pots and pans, Judge Rouget, President du Tribunal special du Departement de la Seine, immune to the scrap-metal drives that demanded everyone else cough up such items. The copper-sheathed zinc bathtub hadn’t been used to hold her corpse but the bidet had cigar ashes floating in it. A Choix Supreme? he demanded. Had Vivienne Rouget chosen to offer this Kripo one of those not because the Vichy gossip could be used if needed to shield that daughter of hers, but because she had damned well known or suspected this might happen?
Clothing clung to the open doors of an armoire whose mirrors threw back light from the candle in his hand. A necklace of sapphire beads had been broken. A dark-blue velvet off-the-shoulder sheath lay crumpled on the floor with a blue lace-trimmed silk slip and brassiere, silk stockings, too, that were scattered and had been yanked off-two men, had two of the bastards done it? The garter belt was entangled with the stockings and her step-ins.
Everywhere things had been broken, everywhere things torn or thrown, he waiting for the shakes to come, knowing, too, that that damned Messerschmitt Benzedrine he and sometimes Louis took to stay awake, wouldn’t help matters, but Louis who would, just wasn’t here …
The hush that enveloped the Club Mirage was every bit as deep as that first time St-Cyr had seen Gabrielle walk out onstage, a mirage of her own. Always she would have to sing ‘Lilli Marlene,’ and always that voice of hers would be carried over the airwaves by Radio-Paris and Radio-Berlin to be picked up by the Allies who avidly listened in, and wouldn’t being such a celebrity damn her in the end when finally France was freed? Hadn’t she best be got out of the country? A resistante!
Her dressing room was at the end of the corridor and right next to the stage door and stairs that led down into the cellars or up to the Rivard living quarters and storerooms and from those, down other sets of stairs to independent exits or up to the roof and from there to others.
Certainly Gestapo Paris’s Listeners had bugged that dressing room and just as certainly Gabrielle had left those bugs in place. Apparently, though, she had taken to keeping a bicycle handy. Unlocked, this shabby, third-hand instrument leaned against a wall, facing the exit and ready at a moment’s notice. Age and wear gave it a little less chance of being stolen, and wasn’t a bike by far the best means of travel these days? Didn’t it allow one to avoid the checkpoints and roundups that increasingly plagued the metro? Didn’t it also give advance warning of street controls since one could often see well ahead and reroute if possible or walk the bike up into a courtyard as if one belonged?