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‘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.'

Kohler felt Oona stiffen. ‘Herr Kohler …' she began. He shifted her out of the way.

The game of cards had speeded up. Offenheimer had insisted he and his partner had won the hand. The two old aunts were objecting. One of them went so far as to slap the back of the little boy's hand.

Stunned into tears, the Captain got all choked up.

Then someone must have interrupted things, only no one had come into the room. The one in black pushed back her chair and said something sharply to the visitor. Offenheimer blanched. Anger made him quiver and clench a fist. So much for politeness.

The maiden aunt got up and went quickly over to the table to yank the cloth away.
Gott im Himmel
, it was a white porcelain nude, a lovely thing, a gorgeous bit of behind with high breasts and splendid young hips.