Carousel (33 page)

‘Sealed lips, eh?' shouted Kohler angrily.

‘
Eighteen
stitches, Hermann. My left hand. Always the left side.'

‘Louis, this is Oona. Oona, meet Louis.'

St-Cyr brushed momentary eyes over the woman, nodding sagely. ‘We'll discuss it later, madame, but for now, my partner and I have things to settle!'

It was a hiss, that last word. Hermann Kohler laid a revolver on the zinc. The one called St-Cyr swept it up and cocked it.

‘Don't!'

Both of the Rivard brothers had spoken at once. ‘So, okay, my fines. First the dice are to be returned from your floor, and then a few small words of answer to the question I have been asking you for far too long.'

Kohler downed a nearby beer and wiped his lips with the back of a hand. ‘Louis, I think I know what you want. His name's Réjean Turcel or something very close to it. About sixty-three years of age and tough as hell, good with the knife and good on his feet. He was shacked up with Madame Van der Lynn in the house on the quai Jemmapes. He's the new owner of the carousel.'

‘Réjean Turcel?' shrilled the Frog. ‘Réjean Tourmel perhaps, EH?' he shouted fiercely at the Rivard brothers.

They didn't even flutter. All grace and fluid motion of their own, they continued serving up the drinks, taking the cash and running their swift dark Corsican eyes over the crowd.

‘Réjean Tourmel, so what's he done, EH?' answered the one with the face of a mountain.

These Corsicans were all related. ‘Slashed my hand, I think,' mused the Frog, now somewhat subdued and trying to figure things out.

Kohler plucked at the mountain's leather jerkin. ‘Give him another pastis and a little more water. Make it two of them, then leave us alone or we'll torch the place. I'd like another beer.'

‘Steal one then.'

He took out the Walther P-38. ‘Louis, ten francs a bottle, eh? and fifty says the place will empty in less than five minutes.'

‘Too many would be trampled to death, Hermann. It's all right. Me, I think I know what's up.'

Kohler added a touch of water to that filthy yellowish-green muck Louis drank. Insipid, cloying, the taste of liquorice that, after indulging only once, some two and a half years ago, had stayed with him ever since.

Oona watched as the liquor became milky. St-Cyr made room for her and when she hesitated, he noticed she was wearing nothing under the coat.

‘Louis, we had a bit of trouble over on the Île Saint-Louis. A collector of stuffed canaries. She's okay now, I think.'

‘Good!' The pastis vanished. The glass was slid the length of the bar. ‘Another,' said the Sûreté.

The cheering and the applause had subsided again into that breathless hush of expectancy. Again the voice of magic came. ‘My friends, I have a little something for you now that is very dear to my heart. It is a song of a boy in the trenches of that other war. He is standing watch, is he not? He knows the battle will come and that in the morning he and others will die. His thoughts are therefore of home, of a girl he once knew. If only he could have made her understand, if only he hadn't said what he did.'

Louis grimaced and shut his eyes as he gripped the edge of the zinc.

Oona Van der Lynn tried to understand these two men. Quite obviously there was a bond between them that went much deeper than that of mere friendship.

The pistol was put away. The song reached into their hearts. All around them fistfuls of new francs which had to be spent in the occupied country were lowered into waitfulness.

The zinc was wiped. The taller of the two Corsicans let his eyes sift over the crowd, looking always for trouble.

‘Réjean Tourmel, Hermann. Now I know why that coin was left on Christabelle Audit's forehead. I put that one away for seven years. Robbery with violence and extortion. The attempted murder of a police officer and a detective from the Sûreté. This one!'

‘Devil's Island?' asked the Gestapo.

St-Cyr shook his head. ‘Not me, someone else. Ten years, from 1905 until 1915, Hermann. I put him in the Santé.'

Right here in Paris. ‘Along with Victor Morande?'

‘Perhaps. In any case, Lafont and Bonny both knew of Réjean's association with me. Pierre will have been the one to leave the coin. He'll have thought it funny.'

‘Actually, he got Nicole to do it for him.'

Louis clucked his tongue and downed his pastis neat. ‘
Salut
! my old one. Let's go and have a little talk with them.'

To approach the table was not easy due to the crowd, but as they neared it, Hermann Kohler automatically went to the right and the one called Jean-Louis St-Cyr went to the left. There was no signal, no word or sign one to the other. They simply moved as extensions of one being.

Oona did her best to follow first Kohler, then St-Cyr, only to find they had left her to approach the table on her own.

They had their hands on their guns. Because they and she were standing, they blocked the view of some and there were objections. One soldier said, ‘Here, you can sit on my lap'; another pulled at the coat and she had to wrench it away from him.

The spotlight was concentrated on the stage. The
chanteuse
sang her heart out.

When Oona reached the table, Hermann Kohler was still some distance to the right; St-Cyr well off to the left.

‘You … you killed my husband,' she said, but knew her words could not possibly have been heard. He was incredibly handsome, this man she'd spoken to. Tall, virile, clean-cut and well groomed. A film star, a banker … polished, so polished but with small, dark, round eyes that were hard and glistening with hatred.

‘Sit down,' he said, indicating a chair that had been taken at another table but whose owner now stood giving applause.

She hesitated. The German owner of the chair would not know it had been taken … Lafont gave a high, falsetto laugh that startled her and made her skin crawl. ‘Take it!' he hissed, and the girl in the canary-yellow dress who sat beside him, the girl with the shaggy mop of curls and the lovely eyes, watched with a tenseness that was both carnal and demented.

The pasty-faced older man, the one with the receding hair and the heavy cheeks, had no interest in this … this Madame Van der Lynn. To him, she was already dead.

The battered girl wept and cowered in her overly large fur coat. Kohler took a chair; St-Cyr, one also.

‘So, my friends,' began the one called Henri Lafont, ‘a little progress report, eh, Louis? Then the latest ground rules.'

St-Cyr cocked his revolver and took aim at the banker. Kohler pressed his pistol into the fleshy stomach of the balding one.

‘No rules, no game,' breathed the Sûreté's detective. ‘Hands off, or you get nothing. I know where the gold is hidden.'

‘Louis …?' began Hermann.

The falsetto laughter was harsh against the songbird's voice. There were angry shouts – threats from the audience.

Lafont pushed St-Cyr's revolver aside, leaning heavily over the table as he did so. ‘Listen, my fine, you hold no cards. That one', he indicated the stage, ‘is mine. Cough up and we'll see if we can find the right syrup for you.'

The one called St-Cyr could barely contain his rage. Hidden beneath the table, the battered girl's hand reached out to hers and Oona took the trembling fingers into her own.

The guns were put away. The Corsican brothers fluttered closely. Two magnums of champagne had been brought. ‘They're on the house, Monsieur Henri,' said the one with the face of ground meat. ‘If anything else is required, just ask,' said his brother.

Lafont smiled at the homage. ‘I hate all of you,' he said of Corsicans, ‘but some I hate more than others.'

‘Then
listen,
' hissed the Sûreté. ‘Paul Carbone is
not
involved.'

Rage leapt into those little eyes, a magnum swung and smashed on the floor!

Leaning over the detective, Lafont held a spine of glass at St-Cyr's face. ‘THEN TALK, COW! TALK!' he shrieked.

The song kept on. The song did not stop. It was about a man who had lost his wife and only child, a little boy, but had found quite by chance someone else who had lost a husband but had a son. They could not meet; they could not even be seen together.

The ring of angry servicemen who had gathered to silence their table cautiously withdrew as Henri Lafont put down the spine of glass and settled back into his chair. ‘So talk, then, talk,' he said.

The other one, the older one who had the look of an accountant on trial for fraud, had watched with hatred and … yes, she had to say it, hope that the glass would be shoved into St-Cyr's face.

The girl in the yellow dress had held her breath with excited anticipation. The battered one's thigh had come closer so that now Oona could feel it pressed firmly against her own for comfort.

When he next spoke, the Sûreté's detective was calm, and she had the idea he knew very well how to keep control in situations like this. ‘What did the contents of Charles Audit's flat turn up?'

‘Nothing but a lot of stuffed birds and animals,' answered the accountant, watching him darkly. ‘We had to burn the crap after we'd ripped it apart.'

St-Cyr ignored his former colleague. He'd stick to Lafont and try to get him angry again. ‘Where are Charles Audit and Réjean holed up?'

Again it was the accountant who answered. ‘We don't know. They've gone to ground. When they surface, we'll get them.'

‘How much did Schraum's uncle have to advance on the thirty coins?'

Louis was playing it tough, but then he had always done so. ‘Five thousand marks. One hundred thousand new francs, but the girl would accept only old francs,' said Bonny.

‘Which, of course, was illegal and subject to imprisonment, a fine and deportation to forced labour in the Reich,' replied the Sûreté. ‘One hundred thousand new francs is 31250 old ones. That just goes to show you what devaluation will do, Hermann. But it's still a tidy sum for two old residents of the Île du Dîable.'

Lafont grinned. The woman in yellow glanced repeatedly from one to the other of them, touching the crowns of her perfect teeth with the tip of her tongue.

‘Their retirement pensions,' offered Kohler.

‘Or money with which to travel light,' said his partner.

Lafont could not tolerate being ignored. ‘Réjean hates your guts, St-Cyr. Rot in hell. Bring us the coins and you can rot in heaven.'

‘Where's Antoine Audit?'

‘Staying out of harm's way.'

‘Collecting truffles?'

‘Perhaps. It is the season for them.'

St-Cyr leaned forward. ‘Then listen carefully, my fine. We have four killings. One which is separated from the others by two and a half years, eh? It is in this first killing that the answers lie.'

‘What killing? There was no other killing. You are crazy.'

Lafont glanced uncertainly at Bonny, who refused to take his gaze from St-Cyr.

‘What's it all about, eh, Monsieur Henri?' asked the Sûreté. ‘Coins for Goering or else the rue Lauriston suffers a reversal from which it can never recover? What did Victor Morande have to say before you cut his throat?'

The little eyes were livid, the sound of the laugh so out of place in a man like this that the battered girl cringed and wept.

‘Not even a charge of murder will stick on us today, Jean-Louis, so don't get your ass in a knot. We didn't kill him.'

This had come from the accountant.

‘Carbone did,' seethed Lafont, working himself quickly into another rage. ‘
That bastard Réjean is with him in this. I'll tear his heart out. I'll –
'

St-Cyr let him have it. ‘They've got you just where they want you, eh? Réjean has never worked with anyone before. Charles Audit is his friend, idiot! The code of the Island is at work and nothing you or I can do will break it.'

‘Morande ratted on Réjean while he was in the Santé,' snorted Pierre Bonny. ‘If you want the mackerel's killer, Louis, find Réjean Tourmel and you've got him.'

‘The new owner of the carousel hires the ex-convict who fingered him in stir to run his pleasure machine?' snorted Kohler right back at him. ‘Come on, my fine. You can do better than that.'

Hermann would never understand the logic of the French let alone that of the Corsicans, but for now it would be best not to enlighten him. ‘Those who search for gold, Hermann, search not for the truth unless they find it in the dross.'

‘Fuck your philosophizing, Louis,' seethed the accountant. ‘We've come to renew our insurance policies and to take out others.'

The song had come to its end. ‘I never liked you, Pierre. As a chief inspector and divisional head you were always too highhanded. I don't need you to tell me how to solve this little puzzle any more than I need your threats.'

‘Then look!' hissed Lafont.

The girl, Giselle le Roy, burst into tears and shouted that she would not do it. Lafont told her that she would. Nicole de Rainvelle wet her hesitant lips, watching the girl and watching the others until Giselle finally stood up.

‘The table,' ordered Lafont, a whisper through the hush as the audience awaited another song from the stage.

Reluctantly the girl stepped on to her chair and then up on to the table. The fur coat was unbuttoned. ‘Hermann … Hermann,' she began.

Kohler reached out to her but Nicole de Rainvelle tugged at the coat and it slipped away to a rush of sucked-in breath, a chorus of gasps.

The spotlight left the stage to settle on them. The hush became a murmur, one of puzzlement and growing discontent, one of horror now but of lust, too, in broken laughter and whistles that were silenced swiftly by others.

A switch was to be made and Kohler knew it only too well. Oona Van der Lynn for Giselle de Roy. ‘Kid, I can't do it,' he said, reaching up to help her down. ‘You know nothing; she knows far too much.'