Mannequin (14 page)

‘Then you should understand that to forget is to survive.'

Not only was there the acid of a swift rejoinder but a nervousness that made him edgy.
To forget is to survive …
Survive
what,
exacdy, he wondered? ‘A few questions, Mademoiselle de Brisson. On Thursday last your father's bank …'

Impatient with him, her voice remained harsh. ‘Look, I know nothing of that business! I've already told the police all I know. Mademoiselle St. Onge, the owner, and I were in the office at the back discussing things when one of my girls came to tell us what had happened.'

‘Yes, of course. Perhaps you would be good enough to conduct me to the office, mademoiselle?'

‘So that everyone in the shop will think I've done something wrong? Is this what you wish? Ah
mon Dieu, mon Dieu,
the nerve! I saw
nothing!
' She stamped a foot.
‘Nothing!
Denise …'

‘Mademoiselle St. Onge?'

Ah damn him for picking that up! ‘Yes, the owner.'

‘Is a friend?'

‘Yes. Yes, a friend, but it's stricdy business between us when she comes to the shop. There are always things to be discussed.'

A nod would suffice. He would ask how Mademoiselle St. Onge had taken the news of the robbery.

Why must he watch her so closely? she wondered. Why must he be so suspicious of her? ‘Mademoiselle St. Onge was extremely distressed, Inspector, both for the sake of the driver and for the car since it was not hers.'

Uncertainty registered in her eyes. She waited for him to ask whose car it had been and when he didn't do so, was troubled and had to ask herself, Why has he come if not for that reason?

St-Cyr set his shabby fedora on the nearest display case and, taking out pipe and tobacco pouch, appeared as though prepared to stay until closing and afterwards if necessary.

‘The fabrics, Inspector. The perfumes. It is requested that there be no use of tobacco in the shop.' She gave him a tight little shrug and forced herself to apologetically grin. ‘Of course we cannot ask our German friends to comply but with ourselves … Ah, I am sorry. Each day I hunger for my cigarettes and tell myself I must wait.'

The urge to ask what she was afraid of was almost overwhelming, but he would have to wait until Hermann was with him. He couldn't jeopardize Joanne's life.

His shrug said, Okay, it's all right about the tobacco. I quite understand. A nearby café will suit just as well. Shall we?

Ah, it said so many things.

‘Tell me, Mademoiselle de Brisson, how is your father taking the loss?'

Starded, she blurted, ‘My father …? Ah, I … I suppose not well. Eighteen million …'

‘You haven't asked him?'

Was such a lack of familial discourse so questionable? ‘My father and I don't discuss things, Inspector. Though I live above the house of my parents, I see little of them. I live my own life.'

He began to move away from her and she didn't like him doing this since it said he was questioning everything she said.
Everything,
ah no. A grey woollen jersey skirt and Hermés block-printed silk scarf attracted him, then the pleated front of a white silk blouse, then the perfumes where he lingered and asked if they manufactured some of their own.

When she said no, he told her he had a friend in the trade who did this. ‘She's really very good,' he said, but didn't tell her the name of this friend or that of her shop and its location. Instead, he left her out in the cold so that she would wonder what this friend of his would say about Chez Denise and would be unsettled. Gossip was always trouble, jealousy rampant, and compliments too hard to come by but why had he done it to her? Why?

Several of the customers and salesgirls were now stealing little looks at them. An oberleutnant, a hauptmann, their women …

Suddenly having made up his mind, the detective turned to confront her. ‘Your girls, mademoiselle. Every one of them must be questioned. Look, I'm sorry but it's necessary. A teller was shot and killed. Someone obviously knew that car would be waiting in the street. Let's begin with the one who brought the news of the robbery to you and Mademoiselle St. Onge.'

She must force herself to give him a hard, shrewd look. She must! ‘Very well, if that's what you wish. Juliette is the one you will want first.'

‘Did none of them see a thing?' he asked, caught off stride.

Her little smile must be cruel so as to put him in his place and stop him in his tracks. ‘None, Inspector. One of the girls from the shop next door came to tell Juliette who was, herself, busy with a customer.'

He would have to accept this for the moment. He would have to show the face of defeat, that of the humble detective who would now have to go away and think about it so as to put her at ease. ‘What time is it, please?'

Automatically she glanced at her wrist-watch but had to pull the sleeve up.

The watch was worn on the back of the left wrist but had he seen the scars? she wondered. Had he? ‘3 … 3.14, Inspector.'

St-Cyr gave her that little nod he reserved for those whose actions revealed rare insights into their characters. He wouldn't ask about the jewellery yet or if she had told her friend and employer or anyone else of the shipment of cash from Lyon. For now he would have to leave it.

‘You have an eye for display, Mademoiselle de Brisson. The shop is lovely. Everything is displayed to best advantage so that the whole collection produces at once intense feelings of delight in its elegance and refinement.'

How cold of him. ‘We deal in nothing else, Inspector, and nothing less. Chez Denise is that happy marriage of employer who knows what she wants and employee and friend who carries out her every wish.'

Two women …‘I'll show myself out. Please return to your customers. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.'

Just to prove to the customers there was nothing wrong, she forced herself to shake hands with him, and only at the last did her slender fingers betray what a herculean task it had been.

Long after he had left the shop she remained staring at the door, knowing he had seen the scars on her wrist and dreading what they would cause him to believe.

Still in the attic
pied-à-terre,
Kohler forced himself to slow down and think as Louis would have done. Marie-Claire de Brisson was a tidy thing. Everything about the flat suggested great attention to detail—too much so, he thought.

The girl had been adopted at birth. While at the Sorbonne she had become close friends with Denise St. Onge.

She had also taken up photography—was very good, he thought but, in so far as he could determine from a search of her dark-room and filing cabinets, had given it all up in the late spring of 1940. There were no more recent photographs on her walls or in her files. The bottles of developing solution looked unused in years though none had any dust on them. Perhaps she had wisely thought the hobby too dangerous, too open to question by the authorities? She would have needed a permit in any case. Perhaps the very cost of film on the black market had deterred her.

There were two Leicas, a Hasselbad and a Graflex press camera but all had been packed away. There were lenses, lens tissues, even spare packs of film still unopened and ready but bearing the dates of 2 April and 13 May 1940.

Stubbing out his cigarette and forgetting to pocket the butt, Kohler got up to move about the bedroom, searching the photographs on the walls both here and then in the rest of the flat.

There was in all of them nothing but beauty. Not a hint of the tragedies of life. Children in plenty, but only those with happy faces. Old people smiling. Flowers. Birds nesting. Leaves in autumn in the Luxembourg Gardens.

It was a puzzle, for if she photographed only beauty, how could she have photographed those girls? And in any case, knowing what he now did, he had to ask himself, Was she even aware of what was going on across the garden?

There were no fashion photographs, not even a hint of them. The clothes in the armoires were very chic and, though they looked like some of the clothes in the photographs of the victims, he couldn't recall sufficient detail to match them.

Opening the french doors, he let himself out onto the balcony. Stone urns, that in summer would hold geraniums, now were cold and bleak but marked the balustrade with regimented regularity round the three occupied sides of the quadrangle. The daughter would have stood out here at night, looking over the garden and beyond the rooftops to that of the Bank of France. She would have had a cigarette. There would have been the sounds of crickets and cicadas in summer, little intrusion of traffic—hell, the city was so damned quiet at night it was like a tomb and dark if for no other reason than that it was illegal to show a light in any window.

When he found a clutch of frozen cigarette butts in the left of the two urns that abutted her turf, he knew she hadn't just stood out here in summer. Most had lipstick on them and most had been stubbed out in anger or fear.

There was no sign of Louis across the way. He, himself, had sent Madame de Brisson downstairs to her own house thinking the woman would be sure to summon her husband from the bank. This she hadn't done even though she'd been afraid.

Returning to the flat, he began to search in earnest for the secret compartment the daughter must use to store her negatives, prints and film. It wasn't in the dark-room, or in any of the other rooms but lying atop the cistern in the water closet.

It was not film or photographs of naked girls whose breasts would be removed but a series of ‘Letters to Myself' all neatly bound in leather.

Wednesday 23 December 1942

I hear his footsteps on the stairs and know my father is coming up to see me again. The sound is like a hammer in my tortured brain. It makes the chasms open and I see myself as a girl often caught between the pinning walls of his arms. I feel his hands on my naked body. I smell the sweat of him, the pomade, the garlic too—whatever we have had for supper that night. Which night? Ah, jesus, Dear Sweet jesus, I cannot remember, for each time the agony is the same, and each time I weep and pray and vow I will never tell a soul.

From the rue Quatre Septembre to the rue de la Paix and down it to the place Vendôme was not far. Never one to miss the beauty of the city he loved more than any other, St-Cyr tried to slow his steps but, ah, it was no use. Mademoiselle Marie-Claire de Brisson filled his cinematographer's mind in living colour. Against the lovely long view that ended in that tall bronze column with its statue of Napoleon as Caesar on high, he saw the girl naked in the bath, slashing her wrists with a razor.

Three times, on the left wrist—so, a very determined attempt and one she still tried hard to hide. Blood flowing out to stain the scented bathwater while, with eyes fixed on the wounds, she watched her life drain away until …

She had been found, but by whom? Her mother, her father, her friend and employer Denise St. Onge or by someone else, a lover perhaps?

The scars, though not recent, hadn't been that old. Though he couldn't be sure of this, he thought perhaps no more than six months or a year at most.

A broken love affair? Girls sometimes killed themselves for the silliest of reasons. ‘But not this one,' he said and paused.

The traffic flowed around him—pedestrians whose shoulders jostled. Now a well-dressed, middle-aged woman in a hurry, now an old man with a brown, paper-wrapped parcel under one arm. Antiquarian books, the sale rejected, the disappointment and what it meant all too clear. No food.

There were a few
gazogéne
lorries, two of which were parked outside very expensive restaurants, lots of the inevitable
vélo-taxis
filled with German soldiers and officers on leave, staff cars, Gestapo cars … ah, one had only to look at these last to tell them apart from all others.

Had it been the only time Marie-Claire de Brisson had attempted suicide?

She'd been clever and hadn't run across the street to her father. She'd known the Sûreté would be watching for just such a thing.

But had she tried to kill herself because of what had gone on in the house of Monsieur Vergès? That was the question.

Hermann might have an answer, but Hermann wasn't with him.

The shop Enchantment was on the east side of the octagon, facing across place Vendôme towards the Ritz Hotel where a gigantic swastika hung above two helmeted sentries with bayonets fixed. Requisitioned by the German High Command, the Ritz was a place for generals and other high-ranking officers. Pedestrians were everywhere and, though that
joie de vivre
could not quite be snuffed out, most kept their heads down and hurried about their business, for then there would be far fewer questions. Ah yes. Always one must look as if one knew exactly where one was going and was about that business and no other.

The Germans like order and efficiency. It hadn't taken the Resistance long to learn this simple lesson.

The shop was very classy, very chic and upbeat and very expensive and busy as always. A place of lingerie, perfumes, lace and silk, bath oils, creams and soaps, et cetera, and the most beautiful mannequins in the business, all shop-girls too, for Muriel Barteaux chose them not only for the shapes of their bodies and their posture above all else, most certainly, but also for the quickness of their minds.

‘Chantal, it's good to see you looking so lovely.'

That little bird from yesterday gracefully turned from a customer, a lieutenant with whom she had been discussing the weather—she never served the customers herself, one must not do such a thing—to delicately touch in hesitation the silk chiffon scarf she wore then press a hand to the base of a throat that bore few wrinkles— one did not speak of such things. ‘Jean-Louis …? Is it really you,
mon cher detéctive?
'

The eyes were clear and large and of a lovely, warm shade of brown—very sensitive as now.