Carousel, page 23
His wallet, keys and Sûreté bracelets were placed on the desk, his pipe, tobacco pouch, et cetera. ‘Shall I send the clothes out to be cleaned, Mademoiselle Grenier?’ asked the girl who doubled, as did all the salesgirls, as lingerie mannequins.
‘Discreetly,’ said the detective, Muriel giving her a nod that would have splintered a bank robber’s knuckles.
A slightly wheedling tone entered Chantal’s voice as the pencilled eyebrows took on what might have been construed as a frown if frowns had not long ago been known to be damaging. ‘I will make us some tea, Muriel. Let us send out for sandwiches and a little something to sweeten his tooth. Louis will want to talk to the both of us this time. He will need the knowledge you alone possess.’
Those clear brown eyes that missed nothing and were so sensitive, had already noticed among the trash of his pockets a half-filled crystal vial of perfume and a lipstick. Ah yes.
Muriel snorted. ‘When he’s ready, dearest, and not before then!’
The bath was heaven. St-Cyr lowered himself into the suds and when, at a discreet knock, one of the mannequins asked if he would like his tobacco pouch and pipe, he said dreamily, ‘Yes … yes, you may bring them in.’
Muriel had lit the pipe for him. The girl wore nothing but Chantilly lace, an apology of sorts. She was not plump except in those parts where a little plumpness suited. ‘There is a cognac, too, Monsieur the Chief Inspector, a double.’
She touched the tip of a forefinger to remove a spilled droplet. ‘Please enjoy the bath for as long as you wish.’
Chantal and Muriel occupied the flat directly above the shop, as they had all these years. They owned the building, had lived through the times of war and those of the Depression, the inflation and the repeated devaluations of the franc. They had weathered a lot of storms together, those two, and they had done it exceptionally well.
He knew the shop would be full of high-ranking Germans and their French girlfriends and that neither Muriel nor Chantal would approve, but business was business and the Decree of 1940 had spelled out the rules. Business was, of course, booming, though many things were now becoming quite difficult to acquire. Silk especially unless, of course, one bought it on the black market or from German corporals who might fiddle on the side.
If, of course, Schraum had really been involved in such things to any great extent – Hermann would find that out. Hermann … where was he?
St-Cyr waved the pipe smoke away, reminding himself that Schraum must have been involved with coal and firewood and that these would have been how Victor Morande had first made contact with him.
Then why in the Name of Jesus did Lafont and Bonny have to question the housekeeper of that villa? Why had they had to kill her?
‘They don’t trust us any more than we trust them. They must have wanted to silence her, or perhaps things simply went too far.’
‘Pardon, Monsieur the Chief Inspector?’
This one wore black right from her silk-stockinged legs to her garters, briefs and brassière. She had a generous smile and raven hair to match the undergarments that were not, of course, under anything!
‘Muriel has thought you might like another cognac, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. Please forgive us for disturbing your thoughts.’
Another apology? ‘Please thank her for me. She’s being very kind.’
Perhaps an hour passed, perhaps a little more. Yet another mannequin, an auburn-haired girl this time, ducked her head discreetly round the door to inquire if a salmon pâté would suit?
She laid a pair of flecked beige tweed trousers over the back of a chair, then a new shirt, new woollen socks, a new tie and gold cufflinks.
She was wearing nothing. Another apology from Muriel! ‘Ah, Mon Dieu, you are like a gift from heaven, mademoiselle.’
The girl let him feast his warm brown eyes on her body as Muriel had requested. ‘You are to be forgiven, Monsieur the Chief Inspector. New shoes are on their way and should arrive after you have had your tea. The overcoat and hat will also be replaced as they are considered to be beyond repair and unworthy of a man of your calibre.’
A new man but one who was getting sleepier by the moment!
Muriel Barteaux laid the experience of her perfumer’s eye on the vial that was nothing exceptional in the world of Laliquesque and showed a naked girl scenting her body in frosted glass among some leaves. ‘It is not new, Jean-Louis,’ she said, and he thought he detected a speck in her eye.
The cigarette smouldered in its ashtray – the tenth or was it the twentieth? He had opened his heart to them, had told them everything connected with the case, well, almost everything. A few details here and there had been left out to protect Chantal’s great sensitivity. Only by winning their absolute confidence could he ask what he needed to know.
‘I think it is one of Cartel’s, or perhaps it is one of M Coty’s earlier works. A perfume of …’ She unscrewed the silver cap and removed the tiny glass stopper.
‘Lemon grass,’ breathed the Sûreté with excitement. ‘Rosemary and coumarin.’
‘Yes, yes. Don’t trouble me,’ she scolded.
The nose was flattish, the cheeks still strong – indeed all of Muriel’s features exuded strength. But in perfumes and their concocting she had perhaps her only sign of weakness, apart from her friend and lifelong companion. The voice was one of gravel and incongruous in a perfumer. ‘There is musk and civet in this and it has the anger, Jean-Louis, of a woman who knows her own mind and body. What we used to call a “fast” woman.’
‘Sex … sex with many men,’ whispered Chantal with great modesty.
‘The civet is subtle, the musk has been used mainly to accent its sharpness. There is some Balsam of Peru, some sandalwood – she wanted those elements of mystery – the wildness of thyme as well. A woman of much abandon, Jean-Louis. One who teases, or did so, since she can no longer be so young and foolish.’
‘The cloves of Bourbon and a touch of sweet fennel?’ he said, watching her every expression with all too evident admiration.
So loyal! Ah, Mon Dieu, it was at once tragic and elevating to see Monsieur Louis and Muriel exchange views like this. A sensitive man, an unmarried man now, a widower. Childless too. Another tragedy but for the best. Ah yes.
‘The lime is for the acid with which she would turn each of her love affairs into bile.’
‘Are you certain?’ he asked. One could have heard a pin drop.
Muriel took a last breath of the scent. ‘It was called Revenge, Jean-Louis, and it was made by a German in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Gerald Kahn. He died in an automobile accident in Cannes in 1926.’
‘He didn’t. Tell me he didn’t.’
Muriel reached for her cigarette. ‘Your woman was with him.’
‘Michèle-Louise Prévost?’
‘We followed the shooting in 1905 with much interest. Everyone did. It was idle chatter to while away the parties. Even a cuckold of a Parisian shoe salesman was of interest in those days. Chantal will have the newspaper clippings in one of her scrapbooks.’
That one ducked her lovely eyes away and into the past. ‘She had been having a running affair with this Kahn for several years, Jean-Louis. Now on, now off. He was much younger. They’d been staying at a villa near Saint-Raphaël. M Antoine Audit did not take a very nice photograph.’
‘Revenge?’
‘Michèle-Louise had a daughter by Monsieur Charles, his brother. Your Christabelle was the daughter of that girl, but they did not name her father, Jean-Louis. It’s all so sad, Muriel. The past should never be scraped in such a way! Me, I shall shed tears. Tears! Muriel. A father whose name was not given.’
Chantal was stricken. Muriel made her blow her nose. ‘Be strong, little one. Be brave. Jean-Louis does not mean to torment us.’
The brown eyes beseeched her companion of so many years. ‘He will know we have bought silks from the Corporal Schraum, Muriel. Jean-Louis is no fool.’
‘Now, now, he’s been bribed enough, if one could ever bribe such a man. You need have no fears of the Gestapo.’
It made one feel guilty, and he took several cigarettes just to prove it and was glad Hermann hadn’t heard things. He’d have to be stern with the two of them. ‘How did the Corporal Schraum get the silks? Straight from M Antoine’s mills in Lyon, or via some friend of a friend in the Bureau Otto’s warehouses?’
‘The warehouses, of course,’ said Muriel sternly. ‘M Antoine would not have dealt directly with such a one no matter if he was German or not. I paid the Corporal in perfume and in francs. Fifty-fifty.’
‘Mirage?’ he asked of the perfume, remembering the Étoile of this afternoon and the handkerchief of Nicole de Rainvelle, remembering the rue Lauriston and the scent the woman had been wearing.
The scent of Gabrielle Arcuri.
‘Mirage of course.’
A second pot of tea was necessary, another plate of cakes and more cognac. At just which point he began to doze off was anyone’s guess but when he slipped away from them, Muriel put his feet up on the chaise.
‘He’ll keep. I hope he doesn’t snore. Snoring’s bad for business.’
‘I will give him just a touch to make the subconscious guide his dreams, my Muriel. A little of the Revenge yes, on the pillow by the nostrils that are so bold and Roman, and a suggestion of Mirage. If he does not fall in love with the present, then the past will claim him.’
‘Or the truffles and the walnut liqueur. Do you think he has guessed that M Antoine bought our lingerie for that poor unfortunate girl?’
‘For Christabelle? Ah yes, he has guessed it. My poor Louis, my poor hero of the crime passionnel and otherwise. My knight, Muriel, in his new suit of armour. And very handsome too, don’t you think?’
‘For a man, yes, and for a detective particularly, but we will share the expense and charge it to the shop.’
‘And to the future, lest he come here looking for the gold coins we have not declared.’
‘Those are napoleons and louis d’or, Chantal, not sestertii and aurei of the Roman emperors.’
‘Gold is gold and to the Nazis it is all the same.’
‘No, no, you are wrong, little one. Some of it is worth far more than others.’
‘She was a pretty thing, this Michèle-Louise Prévost. Perhaps it is,’ Chantal ducked her eyes away in hesitation, ‘perhaps it is that you have once noticed this, my Muriel?’
They kissed, they brushed cheeks and held each other for a moment. Then they parted, Muriel to go in search of silk to replace that whose source had suddenly dried up; Chantal to attend to the shop.
Blue pot-lights intermittently led the way across the Seine to the Île Saint-Louis. Through the darkness and the fog the lights appeared ethereal.
Kohler folded his arms over the steering-wheel. ‘He went this way, Oona. I know that bastard did.’
‘A black Mercedes in a black night. You should have let me take my chances at the house.’
‘Not on your life. You stick to me like glue and you’ll be okay, right?’
She didn’t answer. They’d spent part of the afternoon in the flea markets of Saint-Ouen dodging the footsteps of this Captain Offenheimer. He’d bought a green ceramic tortoise, a duck in the same, two crocheted tea cosies and a tarnished tin of marzipan that had looked suspicious.
The car crept along the quay. Herr Kohler began to search the houses, the grand mansions of the seventeenth century with their steep mansard roofs that could not possibly have been seen because of the darkness and the fog.
When the car stopped, she heard him say, ‘This is it. There’s his car.’
And some others.
The ‘house’ was next to the Hôtel de Lauzun on the quai d’Anjou and when he’d rubbed a sleeve across the bronze name-plate, she read the names of poets and writers, that of Baudelaire.
‘Well, what d’you know about that, Oona? Baudelaire, a fellow I’d never heard of until this case.’
A small sign on a discreet door to one side of the main entrance said: Enter without knocking.
They stepped into a parlour of plush wine damask, Turkish carpets, brasses, dusky, tassled lamps and small crystal chandeliers with lozenges of ruby and amber glass.
Another sign said Please wait. The house is fully occupied at the moment.
Kohler rang the bell several times. At last a bustling matron in her early sixties, all weight, wind and business, came through in a rush. ‘Monsieur, such impatience! Ah, Mon Dieu! you cannot bring that one in here! Out … out, I say. Get her out of here at once!’
The fleshy hands made brushing motions. He pulled his Gestapo shield. Her face-powder began to crumble, her eyes to moisten. ‘But … but why?’ she asked. A raid …
‘Your name?’ he demanded.
‘Joyeux, Henriette, Madame. I am the sous-maîtresse, the sub-mistress of this house, monsieur. The House of the Silver-Haired.’
Kohler gave her a wolf’s grin as he breathed, ‘The Silver-Haired.’ He’d quicken his voice now. He’d catch her on the run. ‘You’ve a Kapitän Offenheimer here, madame. A regular. Eyeglasses, navy-blue uniform, a real sea captain of about forty-four, eh? He’ll have come bearing little gifts for your girls. A turtle, a duck …’
The woman’s eyes darted away. The plump bosom hesitated. ‘What’s he done?’ she asked sharply, turning on him now. ‘We have had no trouble with that one. An angel, monsieur. An angel, I assure you. This is a very respectable house, very clean.’
Her gaze swept furtively over Oona who was trying not to be too evident.
‘Which room?’ breathed Kohler. ‘The glass of the invisible eye, madame. This one comes with me, so don’t argue unless you want me to close you down.’
‘But … but you cannot do that! We have the Germans, the generals, the …’
He summed her up with a look. ‘The Wehrmacht doesn’t recognize you even exist. Of the one hundred and forty brothels in Paris, eighty of which are reserved for the Reich, there’s not a mention of this one.’
The stitches were very black and where the flesh had puckered, it was puffy and red. The one eye was terrible. ‘We are known by the word of mouth, monsieur.’
‘So, what else did the horse drop when it passed by?’
‘Men from all over Europe come to us. We fulfil their needs.’
‘I’ll bet you do. Now come on, let’s have a look.’
‘Please, you … you must remain quiet at all times. He mustn’t be disturbed.’
Offenheimer and three old dames were playing bridge. Kohler glued himself to the eyepiece. The room unfolded, starch and linen, lace doilies and damask, heavy … heavy … The Berlin of the 1910s perhaps, the parlour of the Captain’s granny.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he hissed. ‘They’re all wearing clothes? Those old dames have dolled themselves up for formal company?’
She could not see him through the darkness, she could only feel the nearness of him. ‘It is what he desires, monsieur,’ she whispered. The closet, it was so small. The woman this Gestapo had brought had squeezed herself back into a corner. ‘You must watch and be patient. Life will unfold. It takes a little time.’
The ‘ladies’, all well into their seventies, wore staid, matronly dresses, one a light iron-grey, with a cameo at the throat – her severe hair had a slightly blueish cast. Perhaps it was the lighting. The plumper one, her partner and shorter by far, wore black, a widow? he wondered, only to remember a maiden aunt of his own who’d always worn that colour. Lost opportunities. Love passed by.
Offenheimer’s partner was a fine, stiff-backed woman, taller than the rest and wearing a soft blue chiffon in which there were parallel lines of white. She’d a choker of pearls at her high-collared throat, earrings of the same, and though age had taken its toll, there was yet a certain beauty.
The talk was formal but also animated. There were little asides, little lectures which the Abwehr’s captain always accepted with shyness, he the grandson and the nephew, they the grandmother and maiden aunts, well, at least one of them.
As for sex, there was none. They’d had their coffee – he’d given them the gifts he’d found in the fleas as a boy of ten would do. The tin of marzipan had been opened, the tea cosies lay neatly in a forgotten pile on a forgotten table near a forgotten sofa that should have been put to better use had the ‘girls’ been a lot younger.
Kohler studied the table on which the things lay. There was something under cover, a lamp perhaps. A beautifully crocheted white woollen shawl all but hid it and he could see his own aunt’s swollen knuckles as she’d patiently made some similar thing and he, too, was taken back to his boyhood on the farm.
Oona Van der Lynn nudged him and reluctantly he let her have an eyeful. Lost in thought, he felt her backside pressed firmly against his middle, a good fit but strangely, though he was finding her increasingly attractive, he’d lost all desire, had been robbed of it.
They had wrinkles. They all had them. It was a fact of life and yet … his stomach turned at the thought.
‘How often does he do this?’ he asked of the sous-maîtresse against whose generous bosom his arm was solidly squeezed.
‘Twice a week. Always twice, but never on the same nights. He telephones ahead but sometimes is forced to cancel at the last moment.’
‘What about last Tuesday?’
‘He was here. Yes … yes, a good session.’
‘And Thursday?’ he asked, holding his breath.
‘Thursday is always busiest. Many of our clients have to go home to Berlin for the weekends. He knows this but insists. We –’ The Gestapo was deliberately squeezing her against the wall. ‘Yes, he was here on Thursday night.’
‘At what time?’
‘At just after eleven. Monsieur the Captain has come in great agitation, you understand. Me, I have had to tell him the ladies were occupied but he has insisted on the calming. He has said he had to see them.’
‘I’ll bet he did. Was there any blood on him?’
‘Blood?’ He felt her bosom rise and hold itself in dismay. ‘Blood? Ah, no, no, monsieur, there was no blood on him. Only a lost button which I have sewn back on to the jacket of his uniform.’
