Paris Requiem, page 1
For my mum and dad, Averil and Mervyn Lloyd.
‘Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.’
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
November 1940
What is it with owls?
As if driving through endless kilometres of darkened forest with just a slit in the headlamps to guide your way wasn’t enough, there was always some strigiform little bastard to remind you you were up to no good. That and the woods crawling with German soldiers who seemed to agree with them.
I froze half out of my car while the echo of the shriek died in the night. The echo in my bowels died with it. Listening intently, I waited while my eyes grew used to the dark. The blackness had rushed in to fill the void the moment I’d turned off the car’s lights. This wasn’t dark. This was an absence of light. I live in Paris under the Nazis, believe me, I know the difference.
I’d only just checked my stomach was back in place when the owl screeched again. A tortured sound shattering the louring silence of the night. I’ve heard Parisian pimps skewered by a rival make less of a song and dance.
As I gently closed the car door, another noise stopped me. A dog barking. Somewhere in the distance. A farmer’s or a soldier’s, I had no idea. I listened out but the beast remained silent. I could wish the owl would follow suit. Other animals joined in, this time with smell, not sound. Wafting on the changing breeze, the aroma of manure tickled my nose. I twisted my head involuntarily to get it out, like trying to kill a sneeze, but it clung on. Pigs. Why anyone would want to live in this wilderness was beyond me. I’d lived too long in the din and grime of Paris to appreciate the dung and grim of the country.
Feeling my way to the rear of the Citroën, I fumbled to open the boot in the dark. Another smell, faint this time, assailed me and I recoiled. Turning away for a moment, I took a deep breath and leaned inside. My hand touched a blanket and I pulled back hurriedly. I’d felt its contents give at my touch and I fought down a retch. More gingerly now, I reached back in, nudging the heavy weight under the blanket to one side to find what I was looking for. Feeling the coarse wood of the handle, I pulled a spade out, careful not to let it bang against the side of the car and ring out in the night.
Leaving the boot open rather than risk making any more noise, I hefted the spade on my shoulder and turned away, letting my peripheral vision try to focus on the edge of the forest. With another dog’s bark in my ears and the cold and pungent air in my nostrils, I felt my path away from the safety of the car and into the darkness.
The owl spoke one more time.
Overture September 1940
1
‘I’d’ve been more than happy staying down south.’ Boniface paused and took a delicate sip from his coffee. ‘But the missus wanted to get back to Paris in time for my three girls to go to school.’
The other cops in the Bon Asile nodded sagely at Boniface’s words, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Through the tobacco-brown café window, I saw a German jeep slowly cruise past. Paris was under the Nazis and Boniface was worried about his kids missing the start of the school term. He wasn’t the only one. I watched two small boys follow in the wake of the German soldiers, dawdling to learning like it was any other September.
‘And she missed the shops,’ he added. ‘Not that there’s much in them.’
He had a voice like a Venus fly trap. Syrup-smooth behind sharp teeth, hiding a nectar-filled void. And like a carnivorous plant, form was everything with Boniface, substance a sugar-lined con. Some of the younger cops seated on smoke-stained chairs soaked up his every word. Others, not so much. Me, not at all.
Not bothering to stifle a sigh, I folded the newspaper and took my cup of coffee to the bar. The Bon Asile, a misnomer at any time, was a dingy temple to coffee and cigarette smoke in the narrow streets of the Île de la Cité behind Thirty-Six, our name for the police station on Quai des Orfèvres.
‘Coffee,’ I told Louis in a low voice, sloshing my nearly full cup on the counter. ‘None of this ersatz rubbish.’
Behind his bar, Louis shrugged expansively. ‘Rationing, Eddie. Can’t get hold of the proper stuff.’
I glanced back at the other cops seated around the table, still enthralled by Boniface’s stories, and turned to Louis. I pointed to the cupboard at the rear of the counter and spoke in a low voice. ‘Real coffee, Louis. Or I’ll tell your wife what you keep in that other cupboard.’
He blanched and made me a new cup. The smell alone left me swooning.
Back at the table, Boniface was still holding court. ‘Dunno why you ever left the south, Giral,’ he said to me when I sat down again. ‘I found the chicks there very welcoming.’
‘They must have been devastated when you left.’ I took a sip of the strong coffee and forgot where I was for the moment.
‘So why did you leave, Boniface?’ one of the other cops who could be bothered asked him. ‘You wouldn’t have caught me coming back.’
‘I was tempted,’ he told them. ‘Boy, was I tempted. Lie low in the sun down south and leave Paris and the Boches to you lot. But as I said, the missus wanted back. The kids, you know, school.’
‘Which missus?’ the first one asked, the ensuing laughter around the table raucous. Boniface was lauded among the more gullible cops for his boasts of having both a wife and a mistress in the city, each with a family spawned by him.
I picked up the paper again. I wanted to choose which lies I paid heed to. His voice washed over me. It was almost soothing when you didn’t listen to what he was saying. He also had a habit of winking knowingly at his slightest utterance. And with his brilliantined hair with its tiny flourish above the right ear, he looked like he wished he was Maurice Chevalier. To me, he was more like a half-hearted Madame Pompadour.
‘Surprised they had you back,’ Barthe, one of the older cops, commented, knocking back his breakfast brandy.
Boniface laughed. ‘Commissioner Dax nearly had my hand off, he was so eager for me to get back in the saddle. Spot of virile blood around here. Dax knows it wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘And because we’re hopelessly undermanned, what with the war and everything,’ I commented, without raising my eyes from the paper.
‘But we’ve always got you, Eddie. You’re part of the furniture.’ I could hear the surprised annoyance in his voice.
I glanced up. The triumphant look on his face wavered as he noticed the other cops looking away, their expressions sheepish.
‘Inspector Giral,’ a voice broke the silence.
I turned to see a young uniformed cop had come into the café. The uniforms usually kept away, leaving this place to the detectives.
‘What is it?’
‘Commissioner Dax wants to see you. Says it’s urgent.’
I got up and towered over the kid. He paled. ‘Where were you ten minutes ago when I needed you?’
‘You missed a trick there, Eddie,’ Boniface told me. ‘Should’ve made it back down to the wild south when you had a chance. Put your feet up with the other goat-eaters. No one in Paris to miss you.’
Bending down, I patted him heavily on the cheek. Everyone around the table looked everywhere but at us. His own look was one of growing surprise.
‘You may have noticed the Germans in town,’ I told him, my eyes staring intently into his. ‘Well, they’re not the only thing that’s changed.’
* * *
‘Take a seat, why don’t you?’ Commissioner Dax told me.
I already had. I leaned back in the chair opposite his desk and shrugged. Outside the window, a September sky failed to warm the morning air, hanging lifelessly over streets grey with uniforms and resignation. Even so, the room was stifling inside, a fly tapping constantly against the window. I knew how it felt.
Dax pulled two glasses and a bottle of whisky from a cupboard and poured us both a small tot. I looked at my watch. Barthe wasn’t the only one to indulge in a working aperitif these days. He sat down heavily in his chair, the air from the cushion farting gently between us. He was still as gaunt as ever, his harsh horn-rimmed glasses nestling unsteadily on the narrow bridge of his nose, but his dietary choices were making up for lost time with his ever-increasing paunch. I wondered where he got the food from to grow it. And the whisky. He seemed to read my mind.
‘Major Hochstetter,’ he explained, brandishing the bottle.
Hochstetter was the German military intelligence officer assigned the job of making life difficult for me. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks now. Still didn’t mean I wasn’t hurt at not being on the free whisky list.
He clinked his glass against mine, which was still sitting on the desk between us, and took a drink. He looked tired. We all did. Hunger does that. So does having the Nazis coming to stay.
‘Drink,’ he urged me. ‘We’re all in this together.’
I picked up my glass. ‘Except some of us are more in this together than others.’
It tasted good, I had to give Hochstetter that. He knew his whisky. The rare luxury of it almost hurt as it lit a path through my mouth and down my throat.
It was Dax’s turn to shrug. ‘Please yourself, Eddie. Hasn’t stopped you drinking it.’
‘What is it you wanted?’ I asked.
‘The Jazz Chaud. Body of a man found in suspicious circumstances.’
I looked pointedly at the whisky. ‘So no rush, then?’
‘Just trying to keep you sweet, Eddie. Remember that? Anyway, the stiff won’t be going anywhere.’ I watched him drain his glass and pour himself another two f ingers. ‘The place has been shut down by the Germans, but the caretaker found the body this morning when she went to check up on it. Looked like he’d been trying to rob the safe.’
‘Rob the safe? With the place closed for business. Not the smartest suit in the club, then. What else do we know?’
‘That’s all, Eddie. Uniforms are there now, waiting for you to show up.’
I stood up. ‘I’ll apologise to them for being late, then, shall I?’
Dax wasn’t taking Occupation well. Even just a couple of months ago, he’d have called me in to his office, told me about the suspicious death and shooed me on my way. ‘Take Boniface with you. He’s rusty after three months sunning himself down south.’ He waved me away.
In reply, I poured myself another two fingers of the whisky and drained the glass before leaving his office.
Picking up Boniface from the detectives’ room, we took his car from outside Thirty-Six and drove south across the river. I figured if Boniface was behind the wheel, he couldn’t do much talking. I was wrong. He kept up a constant chatter, like rubber tyres on wet cobbles.
The Jazz Chaud was a jazz club in Montparnasse. We drove down wide boulevards into narrow streets to get there. The city was steadily refilling. All the people who’d fled in the weeks leading up to the invasion, terrified at the thought of what the Germans had in store for us, were now slowly coming back home. There was nothing like the bustle before the Nazis had decided to come and see us, but the city was yawning and stretching its arms, looking around itself in a daze and wondering what to do that day. The panic of the summer had proved false, the Germans treating us with a strange and polite formality. For now.
‘It’s as though we’re all waiting like sacrificial lambs.’
I turned to see Boniface staring intently at me. ‘What did you say?’ I asked him.
He’d parked and was gesturing at the life around us. ‘Us. In the city. One final fling before we queue blindly for our turn at the altar.’
He turned away and got out of the car. I could do nothing but stare after him for a few moments, the memory of his pomade still sweet in my nostrils, before following him.
The Jazz Chaud occupied the whole of a narrow building, a three-storey affair nestling amid a row of uneven buildings thrown up at random like damaged tombstones. I shivered despite the growing warmth of the day. This was a street the sun never troubled. Neither did the Germans, which was a relief. At least for the time being.
A uniformed cop on the door to the club looked green at the gills. He carried an aroma of vomit. For once, Boniface’s hair odour was preferable. For the first time, I really wondered what awaited us inside.
In the entrance, I found Boniface bending over a middle-aged woman who was crying into a threadbare shawl, only occasionally coming up for air in racking gasps. She was clutching a tortoiseshell cat firmly to her breast. Mewing loudly, the creature was struggling to break free. Boniface touched the woman’s face, his voice soft, soothing her, inviting her to say what she knew. I nodded at him and went on through the second set of doors into the club itself.
As a young cop in the twenties, I’d moonlighted in a similar club in Montmartre, knocking the heads of rowdies together on a Saturday night for money, but I hadn’t set foot in a jazz club since. And I didn’t know this place. In those days, I hadn’t ventured this far south in the city for fun. I saw enough of it for work. In an instant, I recognised the underlying tang of alcohol and perfume from that time, the acrid smell of bleach and the sad sight of the stage silenced for the day. But all the aromas were weak, diluted. The club had closed before the Occupiers had got here and they’d banned it from reopening in one of their random acts of administrative zeal. The stage had been silent for months. Like every other fitting in the club, there was a fine coating of dust on it, covering the chairs and piano, the music stands and microphones. For the briefest of moments, I wondered what had become of all the musicians, both here and the ones I used to know, especially the African-Americans who’d stayed in Paris after the last war, not wanting to go back to the problems they’d face in America. I wondered if the Nazis had closed them down too.
A second uniformed cop was standing around inside, shuffling from one foot to the other and looking longingly at the empty bar. Older than his colleague at the door, he looked to be a hard man, of an age to have seen a lifetime of sights the last time we went toe-to-toe with the neighbours.
‘What have we got?’ I asked him.
‘Bad, Inspector.’ His voice was strangely light, discordant with his corpulent build and gimlet eyes. He nodded to a door. ‘Through there.’
‘The owner around?’
‘Can’t get hold of him. No one else here.’
I nodded and made for the door he’d indicated. When Dax had told me of the death at the club, I’d assumed an accident. A hapless safe-cracker who’d fallen from a window trying to get in. The two cops’ attitudes told me I’d been wrong. Crossing the floor, my thoughts raced, trying to anticipate what I was about to find.
I couldn’t have.
In an office, next to an open safe, a man was sitting on an ornate but faded captain’s chair. He’d been tied to it, his wrists fastened with twine to the crafted wooden spindles supporting the leather-clad arms. Before approaching him, I instinctively checked the safe. It was empty, either because the place had been empty or because someone else had made off with whatever had been in it.
I turned my attention back to the man. The reports had been right about one thing. He was certainly dead. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see Boniface coming into the room, a look of horror on his face.
‘Mother of God, I wasn’t expecting that,’ he said, his voice momentarily hoarse.
Looking back at the figure in the chair, I took in the eyes open in terror, the blood around the twine on his wrists where he’d struggled to get free, his legs stretched in front of him as he’d tried to push his head away from his attacker.
Someone had sewn his lips shut.
Crude thick stitches in the same rough twine, his mouth puckered in a shocked kiss. A small beard of dried blood clung to his chin, a contrast to the colour drained from his lips.
‘Neither was I,’ I told Boniface. ‘This is Julot le Bavard. He’s supposed to be in prison.’
2
The skylight hadn’t been forced.
I’d left Boniface downstairs talking to the caretaker – she seemed calmed by his scented charm, so I figured he’d learn more from her than I would – and I’d climbed the stairs to check on the roof. Julot was old school, he had habits he couldn’t kick, tells that always gave him away. That was one of the reasons why he was in prison. Or should have been.
I looked in all the upstairs rooms. One of his habits was getting into the buildings he was burgling across the rooftops and through an upstairs window or – his favourite – a skylight. I checked them all, but none of them had been forced.
‘So why change your MO?’ I asked him in his essential absence. ‘And why burgle somewhere that’s closed?’
Julot wasn’t the brightest of villains, but even he would know an empty club means an empty safe. Unless there was something else he knew. Which still wouldn’t explain the change of MO. Shooting one last glance at the pristine twin skylights under the slope of the roof, I went back downstairs to find Boniface telling the caretaker she could go home now.
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ he assured her. In that voice. It worked. After the wailing of half an hour ago, she floated off like she’d just shed thirty years and spent the morning with her lover.
When she’d gone, I stood with Boniface in the alcohol-scented glow of the main room, not wanting to go back into the office just yet.
‘Pretty much what we knew,’ he told me, commenting on what the caretaker had told him. ‘The club’s been shut down by the Germans, so there wouldn’t have been any money in the safe. She comes in every Monday morning to check up, but that’s all. There’s no one to clean the place because the owner can’t afford to pay them anymore.’
‘Did she say who the owner was?’ I wondered if it was a face from my past.
