Flykiller (64 page)

‘And for all I know, they could already have been added to our supper,’ said the chef, to which the redhead with the broth added, ‘Nora, darling, you don’t really mean that.’

‘We all knew both of them, Inspector,’ countered Nora, dribbling diced onion into the pot. ‘I wasn’t the only one who was near Mary-Lynn the night she died.’

Swiftly they made eye contact, but with it had they instantly come to a consensus on how best to deal with him? wondered Kohler.

‘Darling, you weren’t as drunk as she was,’ said Jill, who was in her late thirties and maybe ten years older than Becky, the youngest of them. Jill had dark grey eyes that could set off the whole of her if she would but let them and if things had been better.

‘I was drunker,’ said Nora. ‘
Mon Dieu,
I could hardly get up those stairs and kept telling her to wait for me.’

‘She was in a hurry, was she?’ asked Kohler.

The others were now intently watching the trapper-cum-chef.

‘She said she was going to be sick, Inspector, and needed the
vase de nuit
.’

The night vase, the chamber pot. ‘The one in Room 3–54?’

He’d think the worst of her if he ever found out the truth, thought Nora, but something had best be said. ‘And the room right next to that elevator shaft we both had to pass.’

‘People come and go at all times of the night, Inspector,’ quickly offered Jill, who flicked a glance past him to the redhead called Marni.

‘It’s the shit you Germans give us to eat,’ said Marni. ‘It gives us the trots.’

‘Black bread that’s more sour than green apples; sour cabbage, too, and potato soup that always seems to have lost its potatoes,’ said Jill.

‘But with the chance of a knuckle from a long-dead horse,’ offered Marni.

‘
Stop it! Stop it! Please!
’ cried Becky.

The cigarette had fallen to the floor this time to roll under her cot.

‘Stay where you are. I’ll get it,’ said Nora.

She brushed it off and held it out, fondly touched the blonde’s cheek and said, ‘Why not let me rub your back? You know it’ll help because it always does, then I’ll make you some chamomile. I’m sorry about the rabbits. I should have realized and waited until you’d gone out.’

They weren’t just nervous, felt Kohler. They were worried about where each of them fitted into these killings, were tense as hell, and desperately tired of one another’s company and of the room.

‘It’s the winter, Inspector. It’s been getting to us,’ offered Jill with an apologetic shrug. She had straight black hair, a nice wide grin, certainly dimpled cheeks, and did look like she could be a lot of fun, but they’d had one death a week ago just along the corridor and yesterday another, taken from this very room.

‘First,’ he said, pointing at Nora, ‘tell me if any datura has gone missing before?’

She had better not look at the others, thought Nora, had better just gaze levelly at him and shake her head.

‘OK, now you,’ he said to Jill. ‘Tell me about the girl who fell.’

Herr Kohler was a little frightening after the celibacy of the past five months, thought Jill. She knew her nervousness stemmed from that as well as from everything else, but had he noticed it already? Was that why the others could see what she was thinking? If so, he would be bound to exploit it and then where would she be? ‘Sweet Briar’s essentially a girl’s college. You could say, I suppose, that Mary-Lynn had led a sheltered life, but then came Paris. Before it was closed and taken over when you people declared war on us in December of ’41, she worked as an interpreter and sales clerk at Brentano’s on the avenue de l’Opéra.’

The American bookstore.

‘Her German was almost as good as her French and because of it, she thought she was safe,’ said Marni, the redhead from Marquette U.

‘She hoped to attend the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, in Paris,’ wept Becky, ‘but. . . but you people came to put a stop to everything. Just everything!’

‘Jill, for God’s sake, tell him,’ said Marni. ‘If you don’t, I will.’

‘Perhaps you’d best then, darling, since you knew far more than any of us, even Nora.’

‘Jill, how could you do that to me?’

‘I just did. Now, tell him.’

The redhead lowered her gaze and fingered her cup. ‘Six months before our boys landed in North Africa in November last and you people rushed to take over the
zone non occupée,
the
zone libre,
for God’s sake, Mary-Lynn fought off all her prejudices and fell for a German, a Sturmbannführer, a Major Karl Something-or-Other.’

‘She liked older men, Inspector. She felt more at ease with them,’ said one of the others—which one, Kohler wasn’t sure.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Nora, she wanted a father figure,’ said Marni.

Springtime in Paris, thought Kohler, but one of the SS, which meant, of course, the avenue Foch and Karl Albrecht Oberg, the Höherer-SS und Polizeiführer of France, an acquaintance Louis and he wished they’d never had to meet. ‘Couldn’t the Sturmbannführer have lifted a finger to stop her from being sent here?’

‘He refused,’ said Jill flatly. ‘There were plenty of
très chic Parisiennes
to take her place.’

‘Begged him to do something, did she?’ asked Herr Kohler.

Again that rush of warmth came and though she wanted it to continue, Jill fought it down, yet he had the nicest of smiles. Soft and warm, kind and considerate—boyish, too.

‘Well?’ she heard him ask, and had to smile softly in return and say, ‘That and other things like offering to marry him.’

A sigh would be best and then another smile, thought Kohler. ‘But he was already married and had kept that little secret from her?’

Ah mon Dieu,
that look of his! ‘And now you know why she despised herself.’

The timing had been perfect, but had Jill caught him off guard? wondered Marni.

‘That why the séance attempts to contact her father?’ he asked.

Even with that terrible scar from the left eye to the chin, he was adorable, thought Marni. Shrapnel? she asked herself. A fencing sword? but that couldn’t be possible with one such as this. He was far too down-to-earth and would be accustomed to bullets. ‘The attempts, Inspector. There were more than one of them. Five actually.’

The others hadn’t moved. ‘At fifty American dollars a crack?’

He was making her flash a grin, thought Marni, knowing the others would be thinking the very same thing, especially Jill—that to be alone with Herr Kohler, to feel those hands of his, would be to live that dream. ‘At two hundred and fifty, one-fifty, one hundred, and then fifty. Madame Chevreul offered to continue on an installment plan. Mary-Lynn blamed herself for the séance failures and had become convinced her dad must have known all about her affair with the Sturmbannführer.’

‘Even the most intimate of details,’ interjected Jill, watching for the effect of her words.

‘And definitely not approved of,’ said Marni, tensely watching him now, the tip of her tongue touching the crowns of her teeth.

‘The dead looking down on the living—that it?’ asked Herr Kohler.

‘Love, yes, as I used to know it,’ said Jill.

Louis should have heard her! ‘And she was feeling sick the night she died?’

It couldn’t be avoided, thought Jill, and certainly Herr Kohler would know all about such things anyway. ‘I had found her being sick one morning about a month ago.’

‘OK, so every young lady needs a bit of company now and then and the Sturmbannführer couldn’t have done it by mail. Did he pay her an extended visit?’

It would be best to be harsh. ‘We don’t know who the father was,’ said Jill, ‘only that it definitely couldn’t have been him. She wouldn’t tell us.’

‘She was afraid to,’ said Nora. ‘You knew she was, Jill, and so did I. Sure, she was looking for a father figure. That’s why she was friendly with Colonel Kessler, the former Kommandant. She had never known her own dad, Inspector, and had always regretted this.’

‘Brother Étienne said he would find something for her,’ added Jill quickly.

‘And did he?’

‘We were never told,’ said Jill.

‘Holy bitter, Indian brandy, juniper or yew leaves. . . ’

And Marni again, thought Kohler.

‘But also aloes and canella bark,’ she went on. ‘Rhubarb and nitrous ether; an emmenagogue in the hope the uterus will contract and get rid of the problem.’

Becky was looking positively ill, but what the hell had they agreed to hide? wondered Kohler.

‘
Ignis sancti Antonii
perhaps,’ offered Jill, again intently gazing at him.

St. Anthony’s Fire and an ecbolic if ever there was one. The deadly ergot fungus from rye flour or bread made from the same.

‘Apiol, Inspector,’ said Nora. ‘
Petrosilium crispum
or common parsley. Large doses of the leaves and stems, or the oil if distilled out, the apiol stimulating blood flow to the uterus, but apiol and the rest of the oil can cause polyneuritis and gastrointestinal haemorrhages if one’s luck has run out. Brother Étienne told her not to worry, that “The Grace of God invariably was on the side of the grazer,” and that if it didn’t work, he’d increase the dose.’

They had put the run on him to see if they could take the heat off themselves, thought Kohler. It was either that or to cover up for one of them. ‘Parsley?’ he asked.

‘
Oui
.’

Just what the hell was this trapper of theirs hiding? ‘And did he bring her enough last Saturday?’

Uh-oh, Herr Kohler did have a way about him, and the others would already have noticed it, thought Nora, especially Jill who, like everyone else in the room, had known of the parsley.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Late in the afternoon. He’d been delayed. A flat tire.’

‘His
petrolette,
Inspector,’ said Jill. ‘Our former Kommandant allowed him a small weekly ration of gasoline.’

‘So that he could make it from where to here and back?’

‘Domjulien. It’s about eight or ten kilometres if the road is OK.’ said Jill. ‘If not, he uses the cutter, a small, one-horse sleigh.’

‘The former Kommandant OK’d that too,’ offered Becky, having at last found her voice again. ‘The one who had to leave right after Mary-Lynn fell.’

‘The one who left us with that little Hitler who now runs the camp,’ said Nora.

The blonde had dried her eyes, the cigarette and the back rub having helped to steady her nerves.

‘And now another murder,’ she managed under his scrutiny. ‘What’s happening to us, Inspector? We’re the forgotten of this war, but has God also deserted us?’

‘Becky, you were out in the corridor,’ said Marni. ‘You had gone after Caroline.’

‘Me? Not likely. I’d have let her wheeze.’

‘But you didn’t let her,’ said Nora gently. ‘The corridor light was blinking on and off. She couldn’t see a blessed thing at first because it was pitch-dark. You know that as well as the rest of us. She was trying to get at one of her cigarettes when that damned light came back on. You had grabbed her by the wrist to steady her hand.’

‘Darkness. . . ’ began Herr Kohler.

‘Night blindness,’ said Jill. ‘Caroline had been having a terrible attack of asthma.’

‘She was in tears, Jill,’ said Becky, ‘was very upset and madly searching for those damned cigarettes Madame had hidden on her and you then found. You did, Jill. Please don’t deny it. I got out of bed and turned the room light on and tried to calm her.’

‘Of course I found them, but then you went out into the corridor after her.’

‘Jill, you don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Becky with a wince. ‘We were nowhere near Mary-Lynn and Nora. Sure, we heard the scream and then. . . ’

‘Then what?’ asked Herr Kohler, reaching for her cigarette to take a few drags himself.

He was looking at her now, but what did he really see? wondered Becky. The weakest link? ‘I. . . I grabbed Caroline. She had started to run toward the elevator shaft when we. . . we heard Mary-Lynn hit the bottom. The
bottom
!’

She went all to pieces. Nora moved; Jill did too. Both sat at her side and tried to comfort her. The cot sagged.

‘You held her, Becky,’ said Nora gently. ‘When I managed to get up the stairs, I saw the two of you. You saved Caroline. She would have died as well. I’m certain of it. She’d have chanced a look and, in her state and still trying to get her sight back, would have tried to get a breath and fallen.’

Yet hadn’t.

‘I lit one of her cigarettes,’ managed Becky. ‘I did get her to take a couple of drags. That’s all she really needed. Right away there was a change for the better. She even gave me a weak smile, only to again burst into tears.’

‘By then the rest of the floor were out in the corridor, Inspector,’ said Jill, ‘and others, too. Mrs. Parker soon came up and somehow got everyone calmed down, then closed the gate but couldn’t put the lock back on where it should have been.’

‘Caroline was upset, that it?’ he asked Becky.

‘We all were.’

‘But before that, before Mary-Lynn Allan fell?’

‘Yes. Then too.’

‘And was anyone else on the staircase when you went up it at 0100 hours or thereabouts?’ he asked Nora.

Herr Kohler wasn’t one to fool with. ‘Inspector, I was so dizzy, I really wouldn’t have known. I was drunk and seeing things. Worms crawling all over me, bats tearing at my hair. I. . . I can’t remember a thing.’

Yet had remembered enough. ‘And during all of this, where was Madame de Vernon, your other roommate?’

Thank God, he had finally asked, thought Marni, but one ought to be careful, otherwise he would think she’d been pleased with the question. ‘In bed, where else?’

‘Yet Mademoiselle Caroline was having a severe attack?’

The poor man now looked so helpless, it would be best to tell him, but first her hands would be placed on her thighs and moved to her knees as if wanting him. ‘Madame de Vernon claimed it was all in the girl’s mind and that Caroline need never have the attacks if she would stop being so emotional and just stay calm and tell herself not to gasp for air.’

The redhead named Marni had lovely green eyes but the offer of the rest, though enjoyable no doubt, had best be ignored for now. ‘Well-liked, was she, this Madame de Vernon?’