Tapestry (11 page)

Had her assailant known of her? Louis would have asked and said, Oh for sure, that taxi was stolen from the stand out there, but more importantly, from in here one can see whether such a theft was possible and when best to strike.

Had her assailant been watching for her, Hermann, having stalked her for days or weeks only to at last lift his glass or cup in salute and silently say, All right,
ma fille
, it’s now your turn?

A regular, Hermann, of this establishment and others, the Lido especially, or had he been one of her students?

Must every possibility be examined, and if so, if some of the waiters were pimping, weren’t others betraying those same girls to those who would do them harm? Beyond the heavily draped, plush burgundy curtains that would be tightly closed during the blackout, there were bird’s-eye views of
place
de l’Opéra and the white-railed entrance to the
métro
whose subterranean-leading slot opened on to the boulevard des Capucines like an inclined mine shaft. Any female leaving that entrance and heading for the café would be seen well before she got here; seen, too, if earnestly engaging a taxi for later, or had she been sitting here for an hour or more at one of these tables or at one out under the awning and next to the warmth of that charcoal brazier, she smiling shyly, listening intently and maybe, yes, maybe laying a hand fondly on that of her lover? Had she been upstairs first, eh, to one of those seven hundred rooms since officers and
Bonzen
from home were billeted in many of them? Sure the officers, and all others in uniform, weren’t supposed to take women to their rooms, but who the hell was going to police such a thing in a place like this? Had her lover been one of Von Schaumburg’s men? Had he got up and gone out there to hire that taxi for her and chosen Take Me simply because he had known that’s what she wanted or had already let him have?

A child’s birthday cake, Hermann, Louis would have cautioned. The flour, the sugar …

‘MONSIEUR, I MUST INSIST THAT YOU DO NOT WANDER ABOUT AMONG THE TABLES GETTING IN THE ROAD. PLEASE OBEY THE NOTICE AND WAIT IN LINE TO BE SEATED!’

Lieber Christus im Himmel,
what the hell was this and from a mere waiter? ‘Gestapo,
mon fin
. Kripo, Paris-Central. A few small questions. Nothing difficult unless you want to make it that way. Clear a table.
Ja,
that one will do, and bring me a
café noir avec un pousse-café
.’

A black coffee with a liqueur. Louis would have loved it. His partner playing Gestapo, but only when absolutely necessary. ‘Spit in them and I’ll not just see you arrested but shot.’

Number 25
place
des Vosges was little different from the rest of the thirty-six arcaded pavilions whose steeply pitched roofs with dormers were sometimes bull’s-eye-windowed. Loose slates gave momentarily trapped cascades. Broken, once-painted shutters were open.

‘From a swamp to a palace to a horse market, to this,’ said St-Cyr sadly to himself.
Grand-maman
had said that to him once, that good woman having dragged him here at the age of six to learn a little history.

He’d been particularly bad, had stolen from her handbag. Just a few centimes … Well, five actually. Always, though, the memory would come rushing at him when here, no matter how desperate the circumstance. ‘A sliver, Jean-Louis,’ she had said. ‘A splinter from the lance of his opponent. Who would have thought such a thing possible? A king? Henry II and a bout of jousting? Oh for sure, they didn’t have carousels whose operators demanded cash. They were far too busy, but a little fun all the same, eh? A careless impulse? A tournament whose spine of heartwood found the visor slit of his armour to pierce the eye and brain!’

She had given him a moment to think about a life of crime and then had said, ‘He died in agony, screaming for his mother.’

Beyond the high iron fence that surrounded the park where duels had once been fought, the ruins of last summer’s community vegetable plots made their graveyards among the severely pollarded plane trees. Lonely on his stone steed, Louis XIII ignored the wet snow that struck him and indicated the plots as if mystified to find them here.

The house at Number 25 was crowded but the presence of a police officer had rapidly filtered on ahead. Gingerly he went up the stairs, keeping as close to the wall as possible. From somewhere distant came the impatient pause-by-pause thumping of wood on wood, but soon that ceased. Even the concierge had broken the law and shut her
loge
, failing entirely to respond to his earnest knock. He’d read the ‘flat’ number from the decaying list she had posted in 1935, having crossed out names and added others since.

With frozen laundry to his left and a mildewed wall to the right, he came to the room or rooms of the Jourdan father and daughter, the mother having died probably some time ago, Hermann had said.

There was no doorknob, no latch, no lock—nothing but a dirty bit of string to be tied to a nail, no nameplate either, its bronze frame having been unscrewed and sold.

The distant sound of pigeons came, the scrabbling, too, of caged guinea pigs and other livestock. Nudging the door open would be easy, the string having been left to dangle. Knocking with the muzzle of the Lebel would be best.

‘Entrez,’
came the gruff response, exuding, though, both strength and determination, its owner having been forewarned by the bush telegraph. A corridor connected open room to open room, its floor bare but catching the grey light of day from the far end.

Jourdan was sitting at an iron-legged garden table before French windows the constant rain had done nothing to clean. ‘Monsieur … ’ began St-Cyr.

Guiltily the revolver was tucked away. ‘It’s Sergeant, Inspector. The Fifty-Sixth Chasseurs à Pied under Driant.’

‘The Bois des Caures and a key defence at Verdun. The eastern bank of the Meuse and a forest no more than five hundred metres by a thousand.’

‘Into which the Boche poured eighty thousand artillery shells.’

‘Early on the morning of the twenty-first of February 1916, after days of rain, a little sunshine came to dry the ground and prepare it for the assault but did God really want it to dry, I wonder, though I commend you, Sergeant. We all did, all of us who were at Verdun.’

The red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur was not present and should have been, but that of the Croix de guerre was there and the yellow and green of the Médaille militaire with its rosette in the buttonhole.

‘They couldn’t kill all of us Chasseurs, could they?’ taunted Jourdan.

Falkenhayn’s Operation Judgement had met surprisingly stiff resistance when the advance had been launched after that opening barrage.

‘The tempest of fire,’ said Jourdan, watching him closely. ‘Nine out of ten of us were finished in that first barrage, myself among them. Though I’ve the Boche to thank, I’ve hated them ever since for having saved me. Now, to what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from a fellow veteran?’

Jourdan was a
grand mutilé
and had lost the left arm at the elbow and the right leg just below the hip. The crutch that had made its sound of wood on wood had all but lost its rubber stopper and was leaning against the only other chair. He was bundled up against the cold and the damp and with writing materials, the prosthesis he used lying ready beside a neat little stack of at least seven letters waiting to be taken to the post.

‘When the ink isn’t frozen, I write to my friends,’ he said, the accent clearly of the east and Nancy. An open packet of Gauloises bleues and a scattered box of matches indicated impatience.

‘One of those fucking matches threw sparks into my face.’

They were always doing that. ‘At least you have cigarettes.’

‘I budget myself. The half, and then a few hours later, the other half.’

And the agony between. ‘Sergeant, your daughter …’

‘Yes, yes, was dismissed from the
Hôtel-Dieu.
Now what are we to do, eh? Am I to send her out on the streets like all those other bitches are doing? She’s young, she’s beautiful. Certainly she has the urges—what girl of that age wouldn’t—but she’s mine, Inspector. Mine, and comes from a good home. The two of us would rather starve to death than sacrifice her little capital to one of those bastards from the other side of the Rhine. Some crimes can never be forgiven or forgotten, and a woman’s having sex with the enemy is one of them.’

The black hair was thin, revealing patches of shrapnel-scarred skin, the dye job refreshed each day by that daughter, as was that of the full brush of a moustache, which hid its own scars. Others marred the left side of a face that was thin and drawn, the expression given to a wariness that could only make one uneasy.

The olive-dark eyes with their thin brows dropped as that same thought registered. Nothing could be said since pity was the last thing this one would want.

Three tubes of Veronal, one having been squeezed so often it was skeletal, lay next to the pen and ink bottle. Jourdan noticed right away that this Sûreté had seen them and would think the worst.

‘I need it, Inspector, for the stumps and the fragments of metal that are still inside me.’

The tubes had been stolen from the
Hôtel-Dieu
. There wasn’t any question of it, but neither he nor that daughter of his would yet have found a way of replacing them when this supply was gone: a long-acting barbiturate, of the weakly acidic form, it was rapidly absorbed through the skin, but such continued use dramatically lessened its effects while increasing the user’s need. ‘Why did your daughter consider it her duty, Sergeant, to allow the press to photograph that poor unfortunate woman?’

‘Unfortunate? The slut was selling herself and got what she deserved! The wife of an officer, a prisoner of war? Her throat should have been cut and her
chatte
sliced to ribbons! I told my Noëlle that she had done absolutely the right thing by letting them make an example of the woman and that the hospital should never have accepted such a patient.’

Mon Dieu,
such vehemence. ‘Old wounds make you incautious, monsieur.’

‘It’s Sergeant
,
and I’ll say what I please, but obviously couldn’t have done it, though I would most certainly have liked to.’

The smile Jourdan gave deliberately invited censure. ‘Where is your daughter, Sergeant?’

‘Out looking for food and work that won’t tarnish her good name.’

The house had begun to crawl back to life. When something fell in one of the garrets above, Jourdan tossed his head up in alarm to desperately search the plaster skies and fix his gaze apprehensively on the supposed source.

He strained to listen. He didn’t move and hardly breathed. ‘It’s all right,
mon ami,
’ said St-Cyr, as if still in the trenches of that other war, ‘that one missed us.’

‘Night is far worse, isn’t it? When they come at night, I scream and have to hide my head.’

‘NAME?’
demanded Kohler.

Given in
Deutsch
, the shriek filled the Café de la Paix, making a sweet young thing at a nearby table leap to her feet and drop her cup. Coffee showered over her lover boy
. ‘Name?’
he asked more reasonably. He’d been getting nothing but the runaround from the waiters.

‘Inspecteur …’

‘VERDAMMTER FRANZOSE, BEFEHL IST BEFEHL!’

Damned Frenchman, an order is an order, but
Gott sei Dank,
Louis wasn’t here.

‘Henri-Claude Martel, maître d’,’ managed Martel.

All eyes were now on them. The lieutenant with the coffee in his lap was furious but afraid to say a thing, so good,
ja gut
! Martel waited as he should. Tall, ramrod stiff, stern and unyielding behind his specs, this lantern-jawed billiard ball on stilts was well up in his sixties and wasn’t going to be easy. ‘This café,’ said Kohler, indicating the crowd. ‘I’m surprised the terrorists haven’t tossed a grenade into it.’

Taken aback, Martel blurted, ‘They … they wouldn’t dare. It’s just not possible.’

‘Oh, and why is that?’

‘They simply wouldn’t. The café is too close to the Kommandantur.’

‘And an obvious target.’

‘Monsieur …’

The things one learned by taking a shot in the dark. ‘It’s Herr Hauptmann Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter Kohler. Please don’t forget it.’

Give him a moment now, Louis would have said. Let the gravel you’ve fed him work its way down to the crop. After all, it’s the time of the ostriches in France, isn’t that so? Now tell him what you’ve just discovered but don’t emphasize the management’s threatening the local troublemakers should they have a change of heart. ‘Your bosses have quietly paid off the Résistance
,
my fine one, and have an absolute guarantee that no such thing will happen to discourage business and create costly repairs. No, don’t argue. You think I’m not aware of what’s been going on under the carpet? Just give me what I need or I’ll have the Kommandant von Gross-Paris shut this place down so hard you’ll all be heading east for a little holiday.’

Again Herr Kohler paused. He hadn’t touched either the
café noir
or
pousse-café
he’d been given. Patting his pockets, he relieved the lieutenant of one of his cigarettes and took time out to light it.

Indicating
Le Matin
’s photo splash, he said, ‘I’m certain this woman came here yesterday. You know it; all of your staff do. She sat at one of the tables with a companion, and now you are going to tell me who that companion was.’

‘Another woman. One with a young daughter. Not wealthy. Certainly not as well dressed as … as that one was.’

That one being the Trinité victim, but the things one learned with a little pressure. ‘And?’

‘They asked for a glass of milk for the child but as we had run out, the one with the briefcase suggested an
eau gazeuse citron vert
and that was brought instead.’

A lime fizz and ersatz unless the limes had been flown in from somewhere, but let’s not forget the Trinité victim had a briefcase. ‘Do you mean to tell me you let them sit here, having ordered nothing else?’

‘I did, yes.’