Flykiller (57 page)

‘Auguste always was a hands-on administrator. When he pushed through the new PTT,. he took an active interest in everything, even to forming a separate company of his own to acquire the old building.'

‘Which, due to the Depression of the 1930s, has, perhaps, remained vacant.'

‘Not at all, but the old cables still run through its cellars.'

‘And he tapped into them?'

‘Yes!'

‘Inspectors, is there anything else we need to know?' asked Laval, filling his glass and testing the wine's bouquet, before raising the glass not to them, but to Madame Ribot, who leaned on the gallery railing so far above them.

‘She predicted I would find my answer in two visitors from Paris,' said Laval grinning appreciatively, ‘and as with so many things, her advice was good. Bernard, enough said. We all know you wouldn't have asked anyone to kill them, but would merely have voiced your intense displeasure at the horrendous breach of security they represented. Please don't forget we've a briefing with his lordship tomorrow morning. Gentlemen, this affair is over. No reports are necessary, and everything you have learned is to be kept in absolute secrecy.'

Even though the gallery audience must have heard it and would be certain to spread the word!

‘And me?' demanded Hébert. ‘What is to become of me?'

‘That,' said Laval, flinging his cigarette away, ‘I leave entirely to your mentor in the fond hope that he won't screw up again.'

At the sound of the Premier's armoured car starting up, Ferbrave returned with Céline Dupuis's rucksack and bag, and a pencilled note:
Station closed until spring.

‘Until the invasion comes and the Occupier is kicked out, Louis.'

Everyone knew the saying, but would it ever come? Olivier and Edith would have left town, gone underground, whatever. With total occupation and a Government of zero influence, the listening post had served its usefulness. For it to have operated from the autumn of 1940, no doubt, seemed enough.

Everything had been done to let the other side know Monsieur Olivier was aware of what they were up to, but had he tried to intervene or had he let it all happen to shield himself and his source? wondered Inès, but couldn't bring herself to ask.

When a burst of gunfire came to them from the street, she knew that Henri-Claude Ferbrave and Dr Ménétrel had not let the killer survive but had told him to run.

The baths at the Hotel Ruhl were heaven. Drained, cleaned and replenished, the warm and mildly effervescent water soothed an aching right shoulder and left knee, but was it salve to Louis's troubled conscience? wondered Kohler.

‘Shot while attempting to escape,' he said. ‘We'll have to leave it at that, Louis. If we object, Ménétrel will only accuse you of warning Olivier to get clear.'

The doctor would do it, too, but still … Pétain would be taking his breakfast behind that screen of his in the Majestic's Chante Clair Restaurant, the Government's ministers, their wives and families, et cetera, sipping their
café au lait ou noir
and picking at their hot buttered croissants …

‘A meeting,' muttered St-Cyr, lying flat out in the bath.

‘Admit it, we've done what we had to. Relax.'

The sculptress had been taken to her boarding house where she would have spent the rest of the night. She'd have caught an early bus, would be sitting in the foyer, waiting for the great one to eat and get his briefing over.

‘Nine-fifty,' murmured Hermann dreamily. ‘My bones feel like rubber, Louis. No pain, no aches, every joint in my body loose and relaxed.'

They'd been left alone in their little stew. It was now 9.30 a.m. Saturday, 6 February. The midday train to Paris didn't leave until 1 p.m., if they were lucky and it was on time.

Would the sculptress book another sleeper, a girl who had no money to spare?

‘Did Olivier really let the killings happen, Hermann? Am I right in this? I have to feel he did. I tell myself that the Resistance, because of circumstance, can't be free of such implications, that there is still unfinished business also, and that Albert Grenier was right about our sculptress, and that Inès Charpentier feels she has been betrayed.'

‘The smell of bitter almonds,' hazarded Kohler. ‘Gessler did vet the thing.'

‘
Plastic …
could it have been from that?'

Cyclonite did smell almondy but Nobel 808 reeked of bitter almonds so much one inevitably got a hell of a headache when using it. ‘A timer … A pocket watch and battery. It would have to have been a watch, Louis. Those time-pencils the British are dropping to the Resistance freeze up in the cold.'

‘And are delayed by hours. Their acid does not work as quickly when the bulb is squeezed and broken to release it on to the wire that holds the spring back, until that is freed and the pin strikes the detonator.'

‘A watch, then,' said Kohler. ‘And blocks of 808 embedded in a sculptress's beeswax. Accessed while left in the elder Grenier's care and updated last night at her boarding house, the kid not knowing a thing about it. Surely Olivier wouldn't do that to one of his own?'

Who knew too much and was the only person who could, in all innocence, carry a valise into a meeting to show the Maréchal the portrait mask she had completed?

‘They'll all be at that briefing, Hermann. Laval, Bousquet, Richard, Deschambeault, the others, too, and Ménétrel. People will say she had good reason, that Pétain had given the order to have her father shot.'

‘Hurry, Louis. We've got to hurry!'

Trousers wouldn't pull on easily over wet legs. Shirts refused to be buttoned; shoes were complicated, wet and troublesome, especially if their laces were broken and had been knotted too many times.

The goddamned car wouldn't start! Ten degrees of frost was in the air, the sun still struggling to rise as they ran, came to the rue du Casino, cut into the Parc des Sources through the snow, found the covered iron promenade and tried … tried to reach the Hôtel du Parc before it happened … it happened.

They skidded into the Majestic and among the tables, knocking diners aside, raising their voices to drown complaints. ‘
Out! Get out! Explosives! A bomb!
'

Coffee cups shattered, plates shattered. A few people screamed, the screen went over; the kid, startled, looked up from that mask of hers, of Pétain, the blush of health on its cheeks, china-blue eyes … surgical glass eyes. Ferbrave intruding … trying to stop them.

‘The valise. Here, take it!' cried Kohler, shoving it into the bastard's hands. ‘Run! For God's sake run!'

‘Messieurs …' began the sculptress, only to be told, ‘You left your valise unattended in the cellars of the Hôtel du Parc yesterday, mademoiselle. You couldn't have known the Resistance got at it. Even Gestapo Gessler didn't find the bomb!'

The windows shattered. Glass rained inwards, pieces and pieces of coloured glass, the stench of cordite and plaster, of stone dust too.

Kohler caught and dragged her down as Louis fell. Blood spattered the tablecloth and the Maréchal's brow. ‘
Merde!
' exclaimed Pétain. ‘It's exactly as it was at Verdun!' And hadn't Madame Ribot predicted just such a thing?

The shrieks, the accusations, denials, threats and counterthreats were now over.

Subdued, still very much in terror of being arrested, Inès stood on the platform a little to one side of the detectives. The train, though agonizingly late, had finally arrived but it could not and would not be allowed to leave until Laval had spoken to them. A fag end glued to his lower lip, the Premier hurried towards them.

‘Ah
bon
,' he said, ‘and in the nick of time, eh?' Meaning their arrival at the Chante Clair.

‘Premier …' began Louis, only to be silenced by an upraised hand.

‘Mademoiselle,' he said to Inès, ‘you make a mask of the Maréchal, and it blows up nearly killing all of us. Herr Gessler continues to have serious doubts about you, but is forced to admit that he and Herr Jännicke examined that valise of yours, while I …'

‘Premier, she could not have known of the bomb,' insisted Louis.

‘She was cheated, had mistakenly bought a phial of bitter almond instead of one of cloves. For … for the toothache, you understand.'

‘But Albert had a look, Premier,' said Kohler.

‘He spilled almost all of it,' muttered Inès hesitantly.

‘Olivier also had ample opportunity to get at that case,' said Louis.

‘My valise …' wept Inès. She had let Monsieur Olivier open it, had shown him the portrait mask but … but dare not say anything of this. ‘Céline … Céline and others knew I always carried my first-aid kit in it.'

‘But by the time the bomb was planted in blocks of beeswax to replace your own, mademoiselle,' said Louis, ‘it would not have mattered, since Albert had, by spilling that phial, done the necessary to divert us all from the smell of the Nobel 808.'

Had he been told to do so? wondered Inès. Had he?

‘
Peut-être
,' muttered Laval. Should he have this girl arrested? One whose life was still ahead of her? ‘Go then. Take her with you. Ah! I almost forgot.'

Digging into his overcoat pocket, he pulled out the telegram he had received from Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris, and handed it over.

‘“
Karneval
,” Hermann. “
Kolmar.
Contact Kommandant Rasche. Hangings, Stalag III
Elsass.
Heil Hitler.”'

Alsace and what was now the Reich. Louis would have to cross the frontier. He'd have no authority there, would …

‘A POW camp, Louis. A little warning of Boemelburg's for us to keep quiet about things here or else.'

But what kind of
Carnival
? wondered St-Cyr, looking up to that God of his. What kind of a warning? Paris … they'd both wanted desperately to get back to Paris.

Rasche … Hadn't he heard that name before? wondered Kohler, not liking the thought but conscious of Louis. ‘Maybe this Kommandant won't keep us too long,
mon vieux
,' he said, the memories flooding over him like ice-cold spa water, for not only did he damned well know who Rasche was, he'd spent nearly two years in such camps, had learned to speak and write French while there, hadn't known how useful it would become.

The Premier handed the chief inspector a packet of Gitanes and, tipping his hat, grunted,
A bon chat, bon rat, mes amis.
Tit for tat. One good turn deserves another.
Au revoir
, mademoiselle. A safe journey.'

Through the soot-streaked windows of their compartment, Inès watched as Monsieur le Premier shouldered his way along the platform, to finally disappear from view. St-Cyr had lighted a cigarette – one only – and sensing, she surmised, that it was a moment he and his partner must share, had passed it to Herr Kohler.

Two men from opposite sides of this war, thrown together by chance and common crime, Inès told herself, and taking a pencil and paper from her handbag, sketched the two of them as they were. No smiles, each so different, yet both grave with concern for the other and this new task, their respective loved ones also, and for what would happen to them and to France when spring finally came.

Tue-mouches
– Flykiller – was the
nom codé
, the code name, of the
résistant
Jean Schellnenberger, who was captured, interrogated and then shot in Dijon in 1942.

Acknowledgements

All of the novels in the St-Cyr–Kohler series incorporate a few words and brief passages of French or German. Dr Dennis Essar of Brock University very kindly assisted with the French, as did the artist Pierrette Laroche, while Professor Don MacRae, of Germanic and Slavic Studies at Brock, helped with the German.

A very special thanks must also be extended to Joel and Laurence Sherman, of Nat Sherman Tobacconists, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, for their very kind and patient answers to my queries about cigars and for permission to use some of the Sherman brand names in a historical sense.

Should there be any errors, however, they are my own. For these I apologize but hope there are none.

Turn the page to continue reading from the St-Cyr and Kohler Series

To Vittel’s Parc Thermal there was but irony. Landscaped vistas of field, forest, and distant hillslope stretched to and beyond band shell, pavilion, and storybook chalet through the gathering ground fog of evening, offering nothing but a constant reminder of freedom denied. Shrouded in barbed wire, the two luxury hotels near its entrance—one of five storeys, the other of four—rose in a multitude of makeshift rusty stovepipes protruding this way and that from every window and trailing woodsmoke into the frost-hazed air.

It was 1522 hours Berlin Time, 20 February, 1943, a Saturday, and things were far from good, St-Cyr felt. The Kommandant who had summoned them from Paris with such urgency hadn’t bothered to stick around or leave a note or word of advice, his replacement being most notable for his own absence. True, they had been expected six days ago—another derailment by the Résistance, who were still learning their lessons and fortunately hadn’t put the whole train off the rails—but they were starting out here with virtually no information.