Flykiller (52 page)

‘Then why didn't her killer take it?'

‘Because, I think, the assailant wanted us to find it. That is certainly why the cigar band was left, but to point us towards Albert Grenier and the past.'

An earring had been loosened … ‘And Edith Pascal?'

‘Would not have left any of it, for she would not have wanted to implicate in any way the man she loved.'

‘A
résistant
.'

A
grâce à Dieu
, the girl had broken at last. ‘You
were
his courier in Paris. Please, mademoiselle, you can trust both Hermann and myself. Monsieur Olivier told me he was district leader of the FTP. Hermann knows of this also.'

‘Then you will know, as I do, that Monsieur Olivier has people at his command. The slogans we saw on those walls, the warning Monsieur Bousquet was given …'

Mademoiselle Dupuis's
carte d'identité.
‘The civil war the boys speak of.'

‘Has started.'

As he listened to the street, listened to the town, Kohler hoped Louis could prise what was needed from the sculptress before it was too late. At the very edges of the pollarded, tree-lined boulevard de l'Hôtel de Ville, the shadows were deeper, the darkness complete in places, thinner where the stumpy, naked branches reached out to the snow-covered road. Two
vélo-taxis
struggled towards him. A few pedestrians were about but none of the town's
autobuses aux gazogène
, for those would have stopped running at 7 p.m. as they had done even before the Defeat. Like towns and villages all over France, Vichy shut down hard and early for most people, even with the presence of the Government.

Far in the distance, a Wehrmacht motorcycle patrol let the world know it was busy. Out of the darkness urgent voices came.

‘
Chéri
, I forgot the blankets.'

‘
Merde
, Heloïse, you know how cold it is in that flat of theirs. Now we'll have to keep our overcoats on and play cards in mittens!'

Parsimoniously the light from the blue-blinkered torch was rationed. Now on, now off, the husband smoking an American cigarette, the tobacco mild, totally foreign, raising hackles only to have them die as the couple hurried past, not even realizing he was standing in the shadows. Shivering. Not wanting, at the moment, to think about Giselle and Oona and Paris, for people there said exactly the same things, and if one stayed out beyond the curfew, one stayed put until 5 a.m. or else!

Giselle, he knew, often went round the corner to see her friends and former colleagues at the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton. Hadn't he leased the flat on the rue Suger just so that she could do that and not feel lonely when he was away?

Oona would have gone after her by now. Oona never said a thing about Giselle's little visits. Close … those two had become really close.

‘But their living with me can't go on,' he said aloud and to himself but softly. ‘Louis and I've crossed too many. One of these days we'll all be taking a train east to nowhere unless I can get them out of France and to safety. Louis, too, and Gabrielle.'

As if to mock him
and
the night and Vichy,
and
the Occupier, some son of a bitch put his wireless set next to an open window and cranked the volume up.

‘
Ici londres … ici londres … des français parlent des fran-çais …
'

‘
Jésus merde alors, idiot
, have some sense!'

‘
Radio-paris ment.
' Radio-Paris lies …

Kohler fired two shots harmlessly into the night sky above him. Kids … it was probably just that couple's kids!

Immediately the waveband was switched to ‘Lily Marlene'
*
and he heard the voice of Louis's chanteuse reaching out to the boys on both sides of this lousy war.

‘Gabi …' he said, swallowing with difficulty at the thought. Some stopped on their way to listen. Others hesitated. One even began to hum along with her.

A last glance up the street revealed that a van – perhaps an armoured one – had drawn to a stop some distance away.

When he looked back down the boulevard towards the rue du Pont, he thought he could detect another one but they made no sound; he hadn't even heard them. Like soldiers everywhere in this bitter winter, he'd been sucked right in by that voice.

Madame Ribot occupied a suite on the same floor as Room 3-17, but much closer to the lift, noted St-Cyr, the brass nameplate giving:
PALMS READ, FORTUNES TOLD. ALL WHO ENTER LEAVE ENLIGHTENED.

Readings were at twenty francs, the Tarot at forty, and under a loosened strip of sticking plaster whose inked
UNAVAILABLE
had smudged,
TEA LEAVES FIFTY FRANCS INCLUDING THE PRICE OF THE TEA
.

The hours were from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m.,
THE
T
UESDAY, THE
T
HURSDAY, AND THE
S
ATURDAY ONLY
. A
T ALL OTHER TIMES CONSULTATIONS ARE AS WHEN NECESSARY, THE RATE BEING TWO HUNDRED FRANCS, NOT NEGOTIABLE.

A Louis XV sofa wore its original, ribbed green velvet upholstery; the dented cushions their rescued remnants of tapestry, frayed and with pinfeathers protruding. No two pieces of furniture matched. The sconces were neither art nouveau nor neo-baroque but a mixture of art deco and the fourteenth
siécle
, he felt. Everything looked as if it had been left by others in payment or as legacies too bulky to be moved in haste from rooms that had had to be vacated, or simply forgotten. Yet, in total, there was the atmosphere, if musty, of something grand and worldly, of ages and lives past, of refinement and fortune, good or bad.

A scratchy gramophone recording gave a lusty chorus from an operetta. The Apollo in Paris, 1912, he thought.
Le Soldat de Chocolat
, by Oscar Straus. A favourite of Pétain's? he wondered. The green-shaded, Empire desk lamp in the consulting room-cum-study, with its zodiacal charts and those of the palm, was of the thirties, the desk itself utilitarian but of an indeterminate origin, for it could hardly be seen under the clutter.

Like the half-filled, two-litre, hand-blown wine bottle at her left elbow, Madame Ribot was an ample woman whose watery blue eyes matched the tint of the bottle above the deep red of its Chanturgue and her rouged cheeks. The frizzy mop of grey hair was thick and wiry, the neck of the bottle not straight but suffering from arthritis, too, and bent towards the woman, its distractedly replaced cork loose and tilted the opposite way.

Her glass had been drained some time ago.

‘Madame Ribot …' hesitated the petite
bonne à tout faire.

‘Fingerprints,' muttered the woman irritably. ‘Why does Monsieur le Premier insist on emphasizing their importance when it is the hands that can tell us so much more?'

The shoulders were rounded under the tartan blanket that some Scot must have left behind at some hotel …

‘Love, lust, jealousy and murder, even assassination,' she said, still not looking up. ‘Lisette,
ma chère
, you're such a delightfully dutiful creature, a treasure to a stubborn old woman such as myself, but I am conscious of the presence of these visitors. Now you must ask them to wait a little longer. Please stop the music. I thought it would help, but it has not done so at all. Indeed, it is a frightful racket to a woman who dotes on Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Brahms and Chopin!'

‘Monsieur … Mademoiselle …' blurted the girl to Inès and St-Cyr. ‘Madame, she is working on an urgent matter for Monsieur le Premier.'

‘The fingerprints?' shot St-Cyr, but no answer was given. Inked palm prints – done by rolling the hand with black ink and then gently pressing it flat on tracing paper, after which the hand and paper were held up to work the ink in carefully and the paper then slowly peeled off – had been positioned on a makeshift light-table of frosted white glass. Bent over this table, the woman used a hand-held magnifier, instead of the spectacles that dangled against the tartan folds.

‘Monsieur Laval has again telephoned to ask if an assassination is in the offing. Four times today, no less,' said Madame Ribot, still studying the prints. ‘Progress reports, of course, were given.'

‘And the fingerprints he was concerned about?' asked St-Cyr.

‘The police photographer's efforts have yielded nothing so far. Not from the envelope in which press clippings were slid under the door, not from the Hall des Sources either, nor from the Hotel d'Allier and the rooms of these two.'

She lifted away the handprints she'd been studying and replaced them with two sets. ‘These, Inspector, are Lucie Trudel's, and these, Céline Dupuis's.'

Ghost-like – as if the dead, in terror, were pressing their hands to the underside of a window, with them trapped inside and drowning, thought Inès – the prints cried out to them.

‘Céline was an Aries; Lucie a Virgo,' said Madame Ribot, conscious of the sculptress's pallor and wondering if she could convince the girl to allow prints of her own hands to be taken. ‘Camille Lefèbvre was an Aquarian, Marie-Jacqueline a …'

Firmness would be best. ‘But you weren't examining any of those when we came in here,' said St-Cyr. ‘Please replace the ones you were studying.'

This was the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté whom Monsieur Laval had requested from Paris. ‘Very well, as you wish.'

A suitcase, set to one side on the day of the Defeat, its brass studs and corners scoured by years of travel, bore once-colourful, now tattered and long-faded labels: The Peter's-Bad Hotel um Hirsch, at Baden-Baden … The Splendide, at Evian-les-Bains … The Nassauer Hof, at Wiesbaden … The Hotel les Bains, at Spa, in Belgium … The Grand, at the Montecatini Terme in Tuscany …

Not for a moment would this one have entertained the thought of taking less expensive lodgings and surreptitiously acquiring the stickers. She had gone from one to the other during each season for years and had stayed at nothing but the finest hotels.

‘Two prints, the left hands first, Inspector. Monsieur le Maréchal would most certainly not have allowed me to take one had Noëlle Olivier not begged him to join her for a reading on my return in the early autumn of 1924. I saw suicide even then, but could not bring myself to warn her and have chastised myself ever since.'

‘And the other print?'

‘Is Monsieur le Premier's, whose excellent wine, so generously given, and whose wood and coal keep these old bones warm because he is genuinely concerned with my well-being.' There, that ought to stop him from questioning her about having them! ‘A Taurus,' she said of Pétain, ‘and a Cancer; the one ruled by Venus, the other by the Moon. The one an Earth Hand, the other, a Water Hand, but there are many complexities with both and I cannot convince myself that the analysis is wrong. Regrettably I must disagree with what Herr Kohler and yourself have told the Premier, Inspector, for I feel assassination is a very distinct possibility. Though I seldom use Belot, I have consulted his sixteenth-century work on palmistry and its relationship to the signs of the zodiac. Between the line of Life and that of Fate, and just near the latter's juncture with the Line of Head, there is a region where, if the fine lines criss-cross many times and the Line of Life is broken, one can, after consulting the zodiac, deduce assassination. The analysis is not much used, if at all today, and has been widely discredited, but it does reinforce the others I've made, and when one seeks answers for such a man as the Premier, at a time of such crisis, one leaves no stone unturned.'

Hermann should have heard her but where was he? Why hadn't he rejoined them? Trouble …? Had there been trouble?

‘I have, of course, also used Belot's analysis of the first joint of the middle finger and have found there
morte en prison
both for Monsieur le Premier and le Maréchal. Contradictions … There are always those. In life one tries. Isn't that all one can do?'

She was genuinely upset. Part Gypsy, part Jewish, part Russian or Hungarian – the possibilities were limitless, the roots deep – she had probably not left the hotel in all the years of the Occupation. ‘Madame, the fingerprints?' he said gently, having suppressed the impatience he felt.

Must the police always be so stubborn? wondered Madame Ribot. ‘As I have told Monsieur le Premier many times, Inspector, both here and over the telephone, each of those girls came to me. After their little moments in Room 3-17, they would often feel the need, the one believing herself deliciously wicked and triumphantly so, another guilty for having betrayed her husband and wanting to know if he would discover what she'd been up to, the third simply naive enough to have hoped marriage possible. And the fourth, you ask?' She would pause now, she told herself. ‘A
réaliste
who came to believe her life and that of Lucie Trudel were in grave danger.'

‘You saw her on Tuesday, between five and seven in the afternoon,' said Inès, finding the words hard. ‘You warned her to be careful.'

‘My dear, I told her death was imminent. Here … There it is.
Mon Dieu
, mademoiselle, see for yourself. Your hand, a forefinger,
s'il vous plaît
! Press it to the glass, to this area, to just beyond the Mount of the Moon and nearest the break in the Line of Fate. Death by one's enemies!'

Céline would have had to have bared the scars of her attempted suicide in order for Madame Ribot to have made the prints …

The Inspector was going through those prints that had been set aside. ‘No names,' he grumbled. ‘How, please, do you identify them'

‘By memory,' breathed the woman, watching him closely. There must have been thousands and thousands of such prints, thought Inès, and surely no human being could ever have remembered them all?

‘Come, come, Madame, you always make two sets,' he said. ‘The one, when dry, goes into the file with the name written below each hand; the other you use when writing up or giving your analysis. Then those, too, are kept. A truly professional clairvoyant such as yourself would not do otherwise.'