Carousel (3 page)

The hairy upper lip was licked in doubt.

A confession. ‘Her heart's glowing like a furnace, Louis. She
wants
to become a martyr.'

One of the Broken Mugs, one of the badly disfigured from the last war, but she'd qualified this by saying ‘could have been' … St-Cyr heaved an inward sigh.

‘Such are the ways of simple folk, Hermann. The brave. Now look, madame. The girl – who was she? We know she did not live here but came only at certain times.'

The woman filled her lungs. ‘Gestapo pig!' she shouted. ‘Lackey! Bootlicker! Collaborator! How can you live with yourself, eh? No one else would!'

He ignored the slurs, though struck to the quick. ‘What were those times, madame? Who was it came to visit her? Why was she killed? You will have a thought or two, perhaps something the girl has said, isn't that so? Perhaps something her lover has said in passing – he could not have come and gone without your knowledge.'

She drew herself up in the chair. ‘You have too many questions, monsieur.'

‘They are but the first of many,' he said softly.

‘My head, my memory – I am an old woman, Inspector, but I do know my rights.'

‘You have none,' breathed Kohler. ‘Let's take her with us, Louis. The schmuck might come back to feed her tongue to the cat.'

‘There is the matter of the girl's papers, Hermann.'

‘This one won't know where they're hidden. The girl would have been too smart for that. We'll take a look later on.'

‘The carousel?'

‘We have to, Louis. This chicken's too old for the pot. It might help her to see a little blood.'

‘Then drive by the house. That might also help.'

The street was narrow, the hill steep, the car flat out. At 1.35 a.m. Berlin time, the rue Laurance Savart gave up the gun barrel of its rabbit's burrow.

As the houses flashed past, the concierge, trapped in the back of the car, broke the long-forgotten rosary she'd been telling. The beads went everywhere, and the houses … the houses … two-and three-storeys high perhaps, some too close to the road, some … The rain – they'd skid! Oh Mon Dieu!

Kohler slammed on the brakes! The woman screamed. St-Cyr swore. ‘ HERMANN, THE BRAKES WILL FAIL ONE OF THESE DAYS!'

The car swung tightly across the road. As it rocketed into the doorway of someone's house, it bumped up over the narrow sidewalk.

Lisette Minou shrilled; ‘In the Name of Jesus, monsieur, you should not be allowed to drive a car!'

The headlamps began to fall, the car backing slowly away to bump down off the sidewalk. Kohler drove on a little. The front of Number 3 came into view, held by the stabbing lights. ‘Louis, don't! Leave it, for Christ's sake. Marianne was no good for you. She made a cuckold out of you, damn it!'

A cuckold … Ah now, what was this? The one from the Sûreté …

‘Just leave it, will you, Louis?
Please.
' The front of the house was a shambles – nailed-up boards and vacant windows. There might still be chunks of meat.

‘I must, Hermann. If only for a moment.'

‘You'll get wet.'

‘That does not matter.'

The car door slammed. Lisette Minou filled her lungs. The French one flipped up the collar of his overcoat and pulled down the brim of a misshapen hat. The Gestapo one was lighting a cigarette. Suck lemons, you dog's offal, she wanted to shout. They'd get nothing more from her. Nothing!

Without a word, Kohler passed the fag back to her, then lit another for himself.

The windscreen wipers beat the rain away and the lights shone upon the Frenchman.

‘That one stands like Judas before the Cross,' she said.

‘The Resistance did this, madame. A mistake of course. He's far too loyal to France, but …' Kohler hesitated. ‘His wife and son, a boy of four years, got it instead. The woman was coming home to him. She hadn't wanted to leave the nest of sin but … Ah, what the hell.' He hit the steering-wheel with both hands. ‘War is war.'

‘Did he beat this wife of his?' she asked. When no answer came, she added begrudgingly, ‘Some men do, monsieur. Mine did, but he's gone to his reward on the end of the Kaiser's bayonet and me, I'm glad he got the spit right up the ass!'

Kohler ignored the venom. ‘Louis didn't beat her. He loved her. Now shut that cavern of yours and don't try to keep the car warm with your farts. I'd better go to him.'

There'd been a small garden behind the half-wall of bricks. The cement, Louis XIV urns that had once stood atop the posts were gone. Cucumbers had been grown there in season, in defiance of ration tickets and famine. Cucumbers and pole beans.

Marianne St-Cyr had not been a gardener – she'd hated it – and the cucumbers and beans had been stolen. Or had they died from lack of watering?

All the lower windows had, at best, been crudely boarded up. By order of the SS General Karl Oberg, the Supreme Head of the SS and the Gestapo in France.

The house had been ‘sealed'. Trespassers would be shot, looters … Even possessing one of the stray bricks would command the threat of death. It was a plague upon the house, but had the notice been deliberate on Oberg's part?

Of course it had. A worry.

Louis was reading the word TRAITOR someone had scribbled across it. There was glass everywhere, smashed cakes of the white-painted stucco that had once covered the front of the house.

‘Louis, come away. We've a job to do.'

St-Cyr tried to find his voice. ‘I could have stopped this, Hermann. I wanted to warn her. I knew there would be trouble. The Resistance, they … they had my number.'

‘They probably still do.'

Louis stooped to pluck a shred of cloth from the rubble, the remains of Philippe's shirt.

‘Stop punishing yourself. Come on, let's get to work, eh?'

‘The house will have to be repaired, Hermann. Building materials are so hard to come by.'

‘Look, I'll see what I can do. The boys down at the Todt owe me one. They should be able to pull a few things for us. We'll nail them up together.'

The Organization Todt handled all the construction for the Reich and had, of course, an insatiable appetite. Hence the shortages.

‘Sons should never make their wives live in the houses of their mothers, Hermann. That was part of the trouble. It was always Mother's house, never hers.'

His mother had died more than fifteen years ago! Kohler reached out to him.

‘The trouble,' muttered St-Cyr, still staring emptily at the shred of cloth. The house and the Sûreté, the murders, et cetera, et cetera that had kept him away from his first wife and had left that one so terrorized he'd never come home, she could stand it no longer.

Then Marianne, his second wife, a Breton and quite a looker.

‘Marianne's eyes were sky-blue, Louis, not violet.'

‘Ah yes, not like the girl who called herself Christiane Baudelaire. Not like Gabrielle Arcuri's either, eh?'

‘Come on. I really will see if I can't get the boys down at the Todt to help us out.'

‘You do and my neighbours will hate me, Hermann. No, my friend, I must fix it myself.'

It hadn't been Louis' fault at all, but there was little sense in trying to tell him this. They retreated to the car. Madame Minou, looking like God in hiding, was peering out at them.

‘Hermann, let me tell her how it really was.'

‘Don't be silly. Let her think this is what will happen to that dosshouse of hers if she doesn't co-operate.'

‘She's protecting someone.'

‘My thoughts exactly.'

They both threw a last glance at the house. The trip-wire that had set off the Resistance bomb had been deliberately left in place by Glotz of Gestapo Section IV, the Watchers.

These days one could be an enemy of more than one group, ah yes. ‘Madame, I am not one of these people.'

In desperation the one called St-Cyr tossed his head to indicate the scarface called Kohler.

Lisette Minou exhaled. ‘Beware of what you say, monsieur. The carp are always easiest to take when the pond is shallow.'

The cop on guard at the carousel had fired up the boiler to keep himself dry and warm. Seen in the near distance, the chimney pipe from which the whole apparatus of the roundabout was suspended, funnelled sparks into the darkness of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in flagrant defiance of the blackout regulations.

Kohler drove on up the steep incline to the tableland, a fairground in former days, perhaps. Light was also leaking out through gaps in the sideboards.

‘My friends, if it is all the same to you, I should prefer to stay in the car.'

‘You don't
prefer,
' said the Gestapo, flinging an arm over the back of the front seat. ‘You
have
to come in there with us, madame. We can't have you walking home. It's after curfew.'

She crossed herself, wincing as she did so, making him experience a misguided pang of sympathy.

St-Cyr opened the door for her. ‘It will be warmer inside,' he said.

Her knees were not quite right. The drive perhaps. ‘Is it that you know the dead one here, madame, or is it simply that you fear the worst has happened and must therefore shrink from it?'

She gave him a terrified glance. Blinded momentarily by the blazing lights, they left the night and the rain behind. The brightly painted menagerie, poised in collective silence, stood suspended in motion, caught frozen on the roundabout, waiting for the gears to mesh and the music to begin.

In this day of missing lightbulbs not a one was absent. There were mirrors of bevelled glass, barley-sugar brasses, spiralling brass poles through each of the animals, an eagle in hot pursuit, a rabbit on the run, a leaping pig, a duck, a goat, stallions with wild eyes, the great, thundering herd foaming at the mouth.

Five rows of animals, each seen against a background of others and the glitter of carvings in gold and mirrored glass, of nymphs, yes, and golden cherubs blowing golden horns among billowing white clouds. All the animals racing, racing, crowding each other. Not a one of them moving, all caught in motion. Not a sound but that of the falling rain and the hiss of escaping steam.

The
flic
on duty was calmly eating a snack not a metre from the corpse. He was sitting on the very edge of the carousel, dangling his boots just above the earthen floor.

Blood had long since ceased to drip from the slashed throat of the victim. What there was of it – a lot – had congealed on the wooden feathers and at the splayed feet of the chicken to which the victim, riding backwards, had been tightly tied.

The expression of death was unpleasant. Frozen, too, like the expressions of the animals who now seemed to rebel and brake at the sight of what had happened and yet were still forced by their momentum to race towards the corpse.

The victim was young, with jet-black hair that despite the struggle which must have occurred was still glued into place by pomade. Everything about him said gigolo or pimp, yet Madame Minou forced herself to search out the gruesome face. Again and again she muttered, ‘It is not him. It is not him. May God be praised.'

St-Cyr took the
flic's
tin cup and poured her a stiff tot of the Armagnac he'd brought from the car.

‘That's the monkey's cup,' offered the flic, tossing his head but not neglecting the crusty sandwich with its mound of sausage – real sausage – and cheese. Real cheese. A point to consider.

‘I have not yet had the opportunity to wash it out,' he added. ‘There's no water here.'

‘There is outside,' said Kohler, noting the richness of the feast and implying that the man had not only overstepped his mandate but would suffer for it.

Clément Cueillard judged he could afford to grin. He favoured the scruffy moustache that was raked out at its mottled, greying ends. He touched the chin that was narrow and round, the cheeks that formed their crinkled bowl and extended upwards to the pinched forehead and the mangled dark-brown hair which protruded carelessly from beneath the shiny visor of his dark blue kepi.

The woman tossed off the brandy, monkey spit or no.

‘Talbotte is slipping,' said Kohler of the cop.

‘It's the war,' offered St-Cyr. ‘It has brought out the worst in us, Hermann.'

‘Do you want me to run this thing for you when I'm finished?' quipped the flic.

The man was in his late forties. A father no doubt. A recipient of someone's largesse in these hungry times.

‘That you can eat so well in front of us, my friend, is the shame of our nation.'

‘Louis, let's leave him. Let's get to work.'

‘Is the sausage to your liking, my friend?' asked the one from the Sûreté. The mouse.

‘The cheese is Swiss; the sausage from Alsace.'

‘And the beer?' shot Kohler.

‘Alsace also,' oozed the flic, continuing to eat. ‘You bastards left me out in the cold. What did you expect me to do?'

‘Not bring your larder with you.'

‘It wasn't mine. It was his.' Cueillard jerked a thumb towards the corpse. ‘Since he's done with eating, my fine detectives, I can indulge myself. There's more in the centre if you want some. By the boiler. Behind the organ.'

‘You weren't to touch a thing,' warned St-Cyr.

‘The stomach doesn't touch. Its juices dissolve.'

‘A scientist, eh?' snorted Kohler. ‘A smart-ass.'

‘You may start the machine,' said Louis. ‘Give us the privilege of your expertise. Set your snack on the ground. No one will step on it.'

‘Music, maestro?'

A real card. Talbotte must have given him all the rope he needed. ‘Of course, why not the music? It will help us think.'

‘Stand back then.'

Threading his way among the menagerie, Cueillard disappeared through a gap in the panelled mirrors that surrounded and hid the boiler and its workings. ‘All set?' he cried from in there.