Gypsy (10 page)

I'll bet she was, thought Kohler ruefully. Five numbers to the combination – would there have been that many for her to have memorized?

It was Louis who said bluntly, ‘Please show us your copy of the receipt.'

Dated the sixteenth, the same day as the Gypsy had ordered the cigarette case, it was clear enough.

‘She came in at about eleven for a fitting. As with our other special clients, this was done in the dressing-room that is just off the office. There it is very private, and if the client chooses, why the door can be closed so as to dress or undress as much as one wishes.'

‘Left alone, was she?' demanded Kohler.

Again Laviolette vehemently shook his head. ‘There was only one tiny alteration for us to do – she had hoped to take everything with her and to wear the pieces that evening, but could not wait while it was done. One of the linkages had to be shortened a half-millimetre.'

A nothing business. ‘And she paid in cash?' he asked.

‘In 500 franc notes.'

It wasn't good, thought St-Cyr, but the receipt might just save her since it offered an alibi of its own, she having made a substantial investment and placed great trust in the firm. And as for carrying around that sort of cash, some did it these days. Her take at the Club Mirage was ten per cent of the gross, kept in an old trunk perhaps to avoid taxes – he was going to have to speak to her about this. It couldn't go on. ‘Monsieur le sous-directeur, think back, please. At any time was Mademoiselle Arcuri or any customer other than the Gypsy left alone in that office while the wall safe was uncovered?'

‘No. No, of course not. We're most careful.'

‘Yet you didn't bank the cash,' snorted Kohler. ‘Why was that, eh?'

‘Such a large sum,' hazarded the Sûreté, grimly gesticulating. ‘One would have thought a little caution perhaps? Oh
bien sûr
, business is booming, but even so …'

‘Noontime had come upon us. The bank was closed for two hours. I myself had to eat.'

‘Yet you had all day Monday to make the deposit,' countered St-Cyr softly.

They had best be told something. ‘With such a sum, and with such pieces, we always want to know absolutely that the sale has gone through.'

‘So the money was in the safe, along with the necklace and other pieces?' said Kohler.

‘That is correct.'

‘Then why, please, did she not pick up the jewellery yesterday?' asked Louis.

Ah damn these two. ‘She … she said she wished to argue with herself a little more. It was, she said, a great deal for her to spend. The authorities … she was worried someone might question such an expense. It would have to be declared, of course. That is the law.'

The careful shopper, thought Kohler, raking the sous-directeur with the look he reserved for duplicity. ‘Anything else, eh? Just what the hell did he really get from that “private” safe of yours?'

‘Nothing else. Apart from those items, that safe was empty.'

Kohler took out the cigarette case to run a thumb over its amber in doubt. ‘He's lying, Louis. They'd have kept the accounts ledgers in that safe, in case of fire.'

St-Cyr took the cigarette case from him, nodding at Laviolette to indicate that he should accompany them to the office at the back of the shop.

‘Inspectors … a little oversight, yes? These days one has to watch what one says.'

‘Of course. Now the truth about that safe of yours,' said the Sûreté, stopping him in the corridor to tap him on the chest with the cigarette case the Gypsy had ordered.

His back to the wall, Laviolette frantically threw a glance into the shop to where anxious clerks were trying to pick up the pieces of their little lives but had stopped to gape at the front entrance.

‘Herr Max, Louis.'

The crowd on the street had not diminished but now a gatecrasher was forcing his way through.

‘The truth, monsieur, and quickly before that one sinks his teeth into you,' hissed St-Cyr.

‘The blanket
laissez-passer
I have which allows me to travel anywhere outside of Paris except for the
zone interdite
.'

The Forbidden Zone next to coastal areas and along the Swiss and Italian frontiers.

‘My first-class railway pass. My spare pocket-watch and …' He licked his upper lip and tried to hastily tidy his moustache. ‘And four packets of
capotes anglaises
, two bottles of Ricard pastis, one of vermouth and … and the keys and deeds to a little house I have in … in the fifth.' Ah
maudit
! would God help him in this moment of crisis?

‘Booze and a woman, and wouldn't you know it, eh?' snorted Kohler, blocking the way, thus hiding them from Herr Max who was making noises about the crowd. ‘Is that all?' asked the Kripo.

‘
Oui. Positive
.'

‘No it isn't,' said the Sûreté. ‘We want the name of the woman and the address of that little nest for which he has taken the keys.'

‘My wife … My daughters …'

Laviolette was sweating.

‘Hey, they won't even hear of it if you behave and keep all this between the three of us. Silence, eh?' said Kohler.

‘
Numéro trente-cinq
, rue Poliveau.'

‘The quartier Saint-Marcel,' said Louis.

‘Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire, veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper – zebras, hyenas, jackals, wolves, wild boar and foxes at … at the Jardin des Plantes.'

How the hell had they met? wondered Kohler, pulling down a lower left eyelid in disbelief. ‘Age?' he demanded. It took all types, and when Laviolette said, ‘Thirty-two', patted him on the shoulder, all sixty-two years of it, and said, ‘Don't get bitten. Women in their thirties are even more dangerous than those in their early twenties.'

‘Now go and entertain our visitor from Berlin while we lock ourselves in your private office to have a look for ourselves,' said St-Cyr. ‘Let this be a warning to you.' The Jardin des Plantes … ah
merde
.

They were moving swiftly. ‘The back door, Louis. The cellars.'

‘Get the car. Meet me in the rue Volney! Fire some shots in the air if you have to, but get it, Hermann, and hurry!'

There was just a chance the Gypsy might have holed up in that house. If so, he was a gambler and was prepared to take risks but had thought the sous-directeur would not have said a thing.

The safe was open, and from the door to the private dressing-room, there was more than a clear enough view of the dial but not of the numbers. Gabrielle could easily have stood here, waiting for Laviolette to bring her the pieces but …

Pulling open the dressing-table drawers, St-Cyr soon had what he wanted, and closing the door to the wall safe, set the vanity mirror with its little stand on top of one of the filing cabinets. Tilting it until he had the dial in view, he retreated to the dressing-room. It was no good. She would have had to stand much nearer the desk but from there, with the use of the mirror, she could have watched the dial and, after several visits, have had the combination or close to it, but had she done so?

They might never know.

And why, please, he asked, would Laviolette not have noticed the subterfuge and put a stop to it?

No, then. She must have done it some other way or not at all. But if she had, then that, too, implied she had known of the Gypsy and had made a thorough survey of the target for him.

The quartier Saint-Marcel had been going downhill for years. Built mainly in the first half of the 1800s, its houses of two and three storeys still held that sense of a small provincial town or village. The slanting roofs were often cut off and at odd angles with the sky but also with a towering wall of dirty yellow brick which represented ‘redevelopment' into a monotony of identical flats.

‘It's unprotected,' said Louis of the district. ‘Ripe, sadly, for tearing down. That thing', he indicated the apartment building, ‘was built in the 1920s.'

Still a stronghold of
le petit commerce
and of retired shopkeepers, sales clerks and maids of all work, its shops were small, its ateliers struggling, the narrow courtyards far too long and far too handy.

Neither of them liked the look of the place. The doorway to number 35 hadn't been used in years. The black paint was peeling, the monogrammed ironwork over the curved bottle green light above was First Empire but badly rusted.

They had left the car around the corner but even so, two plain-clothed detectives, no matter how casually they kept their hands in the pockets of their overcoats, could not fail to attract attention.

A lace curtain fell in a first-storey window across the street. Stares were given from behind the window of the
café-bar
below.

‘Louis, you watch the street, I'll take the courtyard.'

‘That door has been sealed with iron spikes as long as my hand. He's not Hercules is he, our Gypsy?'

The courtyard was close, the stucco walls mildewed, the house separated from others by yet another courtyard behind it.

Lines of grey washing were frozen stiff. There were clouds of breath not just from the neighbours but from the ateliers of a mender of cooking pots and a scavenger of roofing slates and floor tiles.

Steps pitted by frost and worn into hollows by long use led up to a side entrance. Unattractively the number 35B in cardboard was pinned to a door that had been left off the latch.

Cautiously, St-Cyr took the Lebel from his overcoat pocket and, pulling back the hammer, gave the door a quiet nudge. Hermann was right behind him and had drawn his Walther P38. ‘Louis …?' he softly said and in that one word there was consternation and terror – ah! so many things.

They had both smelled it. They hesitated when they ought really to have run. The shutters were all closed, the cast-iron stove was cold, the air ripe with the stench of bitter almonds. ‘
The kitchen
!' managed Hermann, removing his hand from the stove; they were moving quickly now, delicately.

The aluminium stew-pot on the hotplate was still boiling, the fumes were thick and white and acrid … ‘Ah
nom de Jésus-Christ
, be careful!' hissed St-Cyr.

Both of them looked questioningly at the ceiling above. Both looked to the pot where the remains of several broken-up sticks of dynamite in water bubbled thickly beneath an oily, pale yellow scum, the nitro.

Two eye-dropper bottles had already been skimmed. A small glass funnel lay on its side. There was a ladle, a long-handled wooden spoon. Absolutely no friction could be tolerated, no sudden shocks, no sparks, no matches or cigarettes. Both bottle and funnel would have been tilted during the filling so that the nitroglycerine would trickle smoothly down the inside of the glass. A master of self-control, a fearless idiot but desperate.

They left the kitchen and took the steep, narrow staircase on and up – they didn't want to. He's armed and dangerous, they would have said if they could have found the words. Their heads were buzzing so hard from the fumes and the dizziness, it was all they could do not to bolt and run, to gag and clear the street.

The Empire bed was huge and sturdy and heaped with rumpled covers. No one hid in the massive Breton armoire that held the woman's clothing. No one was in the spare room, a nursery perhaps in bygone days or a tiny sitting-room, but now jammed with suitcases and the bits and pieces from the mistress's former flat.

The bathtub on its four cast-iron legs had been painted green too many years ago. The geraniums were wilted, the towels cold.

Kohler nodded towards a shuttered door. Louis saw him do so in the gilded mirror above the tub.

Shots would be exchanged out on that roof – there was no hope of preventing them. Hermann ducked out on to the little porch where in summer the veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper would have sunned herself or cooled herself after a bath, her lover too. He slipped and fell, went down hard, the Walther P38 banging off two rounds as he rolled aside and threw himself behind a low railing that was lined with stone planters.

Nothing … there was no answering fire. ‘I thought …' he blurted.

‘You thought incorrectly, so did I.'

They heard the Citroën start up – hell, there were so few cars in Paris that wasn't hard to do – and when it left the street where they had parked it, they knew he had taken it.

‘The keys,' swore Kohler. ‘I put them under the driver's seat when I got our guns.'

‘
Idiot! Now what
?'

‘We find us a telephone and call the bomb-disposal boys, but first we turn off that hotplate before the soup boils dry.'

Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire lay under the covers, bound hand and foot and gagged. A not unpleasant-looking young woman, she was furious at what had happened to her and embarrassed that anyone should see her wearing four heavy flannelette nightgowns, two sweaters, three pairs of thick woollen kneesocks and gloves, her auburn hair put up in
papillotes
for the night, her eyes weeping from the fumes.

‘
Bâtards
!' she shrilled when released. ‘
Who the hell are you, and who the hell was he
?'

The hands of caution were raised and she was told the street would have to do for the moment, and quickly.

Hermann almost kicked over one of the little bottles. It had been left for them on the doorstep. Sickened, he watched as the woman paled and sucked in a breath. Tears streamed from her. A lower lip quivered. ‘No one told me this would happen,' she blurted. ‘He's
crazy
! He said that if I knew what was good for me, I should lie very still.'

The quartier Saint-Marcel had been cleared of every living soul but those of the Wehrmacht's bomb-disposal unit. The Café of the Deceiving Cat, on the avenue des Gobelins, was teeming with disenchanted residents and merchants all shouting about Sûreté incompetence and loss of income. The Gestapo never got publicly blamed.
Never
!