Mayhem (3 page)

The rue Laurence Savart was little different from so many others. Shopkeepers, artisans, bank clerks and brick-layers (if not taken by the Todt Organization to build the defensive works of the Atlantic Wall); tailors, seamstresses, insurance brokers, printers, cooks and doormen. Perhaps that was what he liked most about the place. Its life.

The chestnut tree in Madame Auger's garden had been newly pruned – firewood again! Given another winter like the last one, the woman wouldn't have a stick left.

The Vachons were tidy people; their garden, what he could see of it, had been well put to bed. Leaves had been worked into the soil. Vachon grew such fabulous tomatoes, the jungle of them could only have been fertilized by secret additions of the family's excrement.

The beans had been magnificent too, whereas …

The house at number 3 was very pleasantly situated behind a low brick wall and imitation Louis XIV wrought-iron fence. The gateposts were of brick and the iron gate was substantial.

St-Cyr went to open the gate, then thought better of it. Pausing, he swept his eyes over the garden. All the plants had had to be removed – the rose bushes and the magnolias his mother had loved, her irises and hyacinths …

Like so many others these days he'd raised what crops he could. But work with Kohler had often taken him away and the wife … well, Marianne, she was no lover of the soil.

At a shout, ‘Hey … oo-oo, Monsieur the Detective,' he turned and saw the ball bouncing towards him down the long slope of the narrow street, dark against the dark.

‘A moment, boys,' he shouted, dropping his briefcase to meet the ball and begin to work it up to them. ‘Split … come on, you – you also, my friend. Hup … Hup … Go for it!'

He was past the first of them, deftly working the ball from foot to foot before expertly passing it to a forward. For the next ten minutes he forgot himself, forgot the war, the murder,the wife – all of it.

As he walked back to the house, he threw a tired but grateful salute to his friends.

Unseen by him, one of them whispered to the new boy from Alsace, ‘He's a specialist in murder but has lost his beautiful car.'

‘Does he carry a gun?'

‘Ah no, they have taken that from him too.'

‘Marianne, I'm home.'

St-Cyr flung the briefcase into a chair and went through to the kitchen. ‘Marianne,' he called again.

Five days in the south on a dead end that had seen them camping overnight in Barbizon and on the road at dawn.

‘Marianne …' The house was cold, the draining board, sink and table empty.

He went back through to the sitting-room to stare at the wireless, then at the couch with its little bits of Chantilly lace, then at his favourite armchair by the fire.

Nothing … the books he'd been reading – the volume of Daudet was still spread open on an arm. Everything was just the way he'd left it when Kohler had barged in to take him away.

Parting the curtains, he looked out into the darkness. ‘Marianne …'

She'd been unhappy, upset – so many things. Being the second wife of a cop hadn't been any better for her than it had been for the first wife of that cop.

Too many late nights, too many murders, and now, why now the war and all that it entailed.

Had she taken their son to see her mother? She'd have needed a special
ausweis
for that, a thing not easy to come by. No, not at all. Quimper, like the rest of the coastal areas, was in the Forbidden Zone. The boy was only four years old and very close to her. Though she would have been worried about him, she could have done it. She was a girl of great determination, a woman with a mind of her own and the body to go with it. Ah yes, the body.

St-Cyr pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. This war, he said. This lousy war.

Kohler and his Gestapo associates lived at the Hôtel Boccador which the Gestapo had requisitioned for the duration. Hermann could find him a fast answer but would it make any difference?

Heading back through to the kitchen, he collected the briefcase on the way and took from it the three, fist-sized lumps of coal he'd managed to pick up from a railway siding near Lyon. The loaf of bread Kohler had squeezed out of a baker in Beaune had got a little stale and dirty, but the round of cheese the Bavarian had stolen was just as good as ever.

Looking at the cheese, St-Cyr nodded sadly and said to the walls as if to a priest, ‘Someone's loss is my gain.'

There was virtually no milk in Paris. The boy had had to have his calcium. Kohler had insisted.

Spread on the table were St-Cyr's bread coupons and the green tickets for the week's ration of meat, wine and potatoes et cetera, should he be able to purchase such things.

As he put through the call, he experienced again the humiliation and sadness the defeat of France had brought. ‘Hermann, it's me. My wife's gone.'

As expected, Kohler gave him the name of a whore on the rue Mouffetard but said he'd see what he could do. ‘Want me to tell them to bring her back?'

‘No. No, just ask them to let her know I was worried.'

The call done, he climbed wearily to the bedrooms. A fallen négligé brought back its memories, a pair of briefs reminded him that older men and younger women don't always mix.

Philippe had taken his favourite toy, a water pistol that had been made in Hamburg before the war. The gift of a German soldier in the street, or so his wife had said.

A German soldier.

*

‘Steiner, the Hauptmann Erich, age thirty-two, attached to the Ministry of Supply. Wife: Hilda, age twenty-eight; children: Johann, age four, Stephanie, age three, Hans, age two, and young Erich, age one month, two days. The wife and kids are at home in Regensburg.'

‘Anything else?' demanded Kohler, pinching the last possible smoke from the butt before carefully grinding it out in the ashtray and saving the remaining tobacco.

‘Good-looking. A real ladies' man. Been here since last August, arrived in all that heat – that's when he first met her out walking in the Bois de Boulogne. She had the kid with her. Steiner used the boy as an intro – My son, your son, Frau …? Pictures from home and all that shit. She didn't fall for it, not at first, not that one. It took him a month's hard labour.'

‘Why wasn't I notified?' grumbled Kohler, more offended by the omission than by the infidelity of his partner's wife. These days no one really knew everything the others knew, not even about oneself.

‘You didn't ask,' commented Glotz, of Countersubversion Special Unit X, the Watchers in charge of keeping tabs on the Sûreté Murder Squad, among other things.

‘So, okay. What's the address?' asked Kohler, feigning apology and a tiredness that was genuine. Crises, there were always crises these days.

Glotz reached for his coffee. ‘Hermann, I'd leave it for now, if I were you.' Overweight and overstuffed, he blew on the mug before taking a sip.

Kohler spread his meaty hands on the counter. He hated shits like Glotz but acknowledged they were necessary. ‘My partner needs his wife. If he doesn't get laid it puts him off his feed. Besides, my friend, I think the poor bugger really loves her. The Frogs …' He sadly shook his head. ‘Come on, be a buddy. Don't be so tight about it.'

‘You planning to kick down the door?'

‘Perhaps.'

The grin was wolfish. Glotz enoyed baiting Kohler. ‘A flat in one of those modern apartment buildings over by the Bois de Boulogne.'

The fashionable West End. ‘The address,' breathed Kohler. It was nearly 3 a.m.

Glotz didn't like the look. ‘Number 33, avenue Henri-Martin.'

Double the address number of St-Cyr's house and double that of the clock!

The date of the murder also, and of St-Cyr's birthday. Jesus Christ!

Kohler was impressed by the coincidence but didn't believe in omens. ‘The apartment number?' he asked quietly.

‘Thirteen. It's on the third floor at the back. There's a roof terrace. He likes to sunbathe.'

‘In this weather?'

Glotz grinned and shook his head. ‘In the heat and in the nude. The woman as well. Last October 11th to be precise.'

‘Thanks. I'll be in touch.'

‘Don't do anything I wouldn't do. He's a nephew of von Schaumburg.'

‘He's
what
?'

‘I just thought you ought to know.'

Von Schaumburg's nephew.

‘Leave it for a bit, Hermann. He'll soon tire of the woman and she'll have to go home to your buddy.'

‘He's not my buddy. He's my partner. That used to mean something to a man like me but you wouldn't know about it.'

‘Perhaps not. I'm really a lawyer.'

‘I've always hated lawyers. They're always so dishonest.'

‘I'd be careful what you say.'

‘Is that a threat?'

Glotz reached for his coffee. ‘Of course not, Hermann. It's only a warning that the walls have ears.'

‘Then let the bastards listen!'

‘Louis, it's me. Look, something's come up. Try to get a bit of sleep and I'll see you in the morning.'

‘Is she safe?'

‘Yes, she's safe.'

‘And the boy?'

‘With a nursemaid. Look, it's okay. I've checked it all out. Now go to sleep.'

For a long time there was only silence from the other end of the line – a waste of several centimetres of Gestapo listening tape.

‘It's that lieutenant, isn't it? Steiner.'

‘Yes … Yes, his name is Steiner. Louis, I would have told you if I'd known. I would have tried to put a stop to it.'

‘Thanks. I'll see you in the morning. Oh, anything on that you know what?'

‘No, there's nothing to report on that.'

Still in his street clothes, St-Cyr lay in the dark on their bed, wrapped in three blankets and smoking the last of his tobacco ration. The purse had been of silk, very French, very
femme fatale
– from one of the fashion boutiques. The perfume had been someone's very special concoction. Nothing mass produced. Not that scent. Ah no.

But from a silk purse, without knowing of its contents, and a single whiff of expensive perfume, can a humble French detective sketch not only the figure of the woman but also the rest? Her character, her likes and dislikes. The reasons why, perhaps, she had waited in the car on that lonely forest road while her maid had gone to fetch the purse and had killed the bearer of it?

Steiner was a power to be reckoned with. Only in thinking of the murder was there escape from the hard reality of what had happened.

The photographs were grainy. In an attempt to please, Barbizon's photographer had made them a set of 25x20 blow-ups but these were streaked as if by specks of sand. Old photographic paper? wondered St-Cyr. Damp in any case, at some point in its career. Things were so hard to get these days. One bought on the black market or worked some other fiddle but one never really knew what one was getting.

In spite of the graininess – indeed, because of it – the boy's features were etched more sharply. He looked beatific, saintly. Some mother's son. The face was long and narrow, the mop of dark brown hair curly and careless or carefree. The cheekbones were hard and finely moulded, the mouth somewhat small, as was the chin. The nose was long and typically French, hawkish and of the upper class.

The deep brown eyes had clouded over but their expression was still one of surprise.

A small, brown mole marred the angelic left earlobe. Was twenty years not too young an estimate? In spite of the apparent youthfulness, there was hesitation.

St-Cyr couldn't put his finger on the reason, but now felt the boy might possibly be a little older. Some men are always young – young at fifty even. At fifty-two their wives …

I'm not young-looking, he said. I'm shabby, tired and a whole lot of other things, and I mustn't let her leaving interfere with my work.

Quickly he went through the photographs, pausing now only at the shot of him and Kohler grinning into the lens. The Bavarian's arm was draped over his shoulder. The body was at their feet and the thing looked a little too much like they'd been out hunting and had bagged the poor bugger before breakfast.

Kohler should have been in vaudeville. One thick-soled shoe rested on a boulder. The conqueror and the conquered, working side by side. The Gestapo and the French Sûreté.

Setting the prints aside, he went through the negatives, flashing each up before the grimy window.

When he came to the last of them, St-Cyr resisted feeling ill and went back through them again.

There was no negative of him and Kohler. Either the photographer hadn't listened, or Kohler had pocketed it.

Failing these two possibilities, there was a third: that someone else in the Gestapo had taken it; and then a fourth: that the Kommandant of Barbizon had had a look or had asked one of his staff to do so, in which case the negative had been pilfered so as to have a visual record of the two men who were on the case – a possibility, yes. Very much so.

And finally there was a fifth possibility: that somehow the Resistance had got to that pouch or to that photographer.

He dropped the last of the negatives on to the pile. Couldn't something have been easy? Just one little thing?

The office was on the fifth floor of the Sûreté, overlooking the courtyard that led on to the rue Saussaies in the heart of the city. The Citroën wasn't in the courtyard, so either Hermann hadn't been in yet, or he'd been in and had gone out.

Chances were Hermann had the negative.

St-Cyr wondered what sort of squeeze his partner had put on the photographer. Had the Bavarian wanted to share the blame and give the photographer the chummy evidence of this? Had that been the reason for the photograph of the two of them?

Or had it simply been because of the purse and its handkerchief, because of his asking to have the spoor photographed – a kind of mutual blackmail, You don't tell the boss, and I won't show this to you-know-who?