Tapestry (18 page)

They took him from bedroom to bedroom, all but one of which, it appeared, hadn’t been in use since before the Defeat. ‘We slept with her,’ Louisette said. ‘She read to us just like Oona does.’

‘And the Mademoiselle Giselle,’ said Henri, ‘but she slept on the floor beside us. It was like camping, she said. She’s very beautiful and lots of fun, as … as is Oona, of course.’

‘Certainly,’ said Louisette, taking Oona by the hand to place it fondly against a cheek.

The
salle de séjour
, closed off and never used, not since the husband had gone off to war, appeared just as that one must have wanted it kept: totally undisturbed by the children or the wife, except when dusted. A mastery of Art Deco into which had been fitted several gorgeous pieces of Biedermeier, it had a chaise longue from among the earlier of such pieces: 1825 by the look—Josef Danhauser’s workshop in Vienna? St-Cyr wondered. Of walnut, though, not of the South American hardwoods, which had first been used. The British naval blockades during the Napoleonic Wars had forced a return to native woods. A vitrine and matching cabinet were of birch, with a black lacquered ormulo clock and tasseled candlesticks to perfectly set off the latter. The pear-wood fauteuils were from 1845 perhaps, the maple side table and breakfront bookcase also, everything exuding that clear, clean and uncomplicated line so characteristic of the style, and of Art Deco too, the name coming, of course, not from any furniture maker but from Gottlieb Biedermeier, the much-loved character of a novel whose bourgeois opinions were those of his readers,
bieder
meaning honest, worthy, upright or just plain simple.

It was only later that the style, admired at first by the Prussian and Viennese aristocracy, began to be appreciated by the bourgeoisie and no longer thought of as ridiculing them.

In the dining room the Biedermeier was Russian and of birch wood, the room exquisite but also off-limits and kept closed. Had she been a prisoner of this husband of hers? he had to wonder but couldn’t ask, though Oona intuitively knew what he was thinking.

‘Her desk, Jean-Louis. It’s there that she has faithfully kept every­ postcard they have received from the prison camp.’

‘But only the one letter she was going to send back,’ said Henri.

‘
Maman
hadn’t started it yet,’ confided Louisette. ‘We’re not allowed to keep any of
Papa
’s letters. They must all be returned to him for safekeeping.’

‘Idiot, it’s because
Maman
has to write on the back of them,’ said Henri.

‘Two are received each month and two of the postcards,’ said the sister, ignoring her brother. ‘Unless, of course,
Papa
sends them to his mother and father.’

Because Madame Guillaumet was a career officer’s wife and not that of a common soldier like Madame Barrault, the allowances the Government in Vichy paid, even though only to wives whose incomes were below five thousand francs a year, wouldn’t have been available to her. Having a salary would have helped, since she would then have been eligible for the family allowance and social security, but unfortunately career officers’ wives had never been allowed to take full-time jobs outside the home, and the part-time teaching wouldn’t have counted.

Trapped again? he had to ask. In Paris alone there were more than thirty thousand POW wives whose incomes were below ten thousand francs a year and who were in desperate circumstances.

‘Her desk is in the bedroom, Jean-Louis,’ said Oona, knowing she should tell the children to tuck themselves in but that she couldn’t bring herself to do this without joining them.

Reassuringly Jean-Louis reached out to her. His, ‘Please don’t worry. Hermann and I will see to things,’ was meant to be comforting. The desk was nothing but a plain table. To Jean-Louis’s right, there was the lamp she had switched on after the children and Giselle had finally fallen asleep. There were only sixteen postcards in that little pile, there having been a good four months at the first when no mail at all had come through to anyone. Eight of them had also gone to the grandparents.

To his left was February’s five-kilogram parcel the woman and the children had been making up to send to the camp. No extra ration tickets were ever provided by Vichy for this purpose even though there were so many men locked up. Everything that went into that box, and everyone else’s, had to come from the family’s own supplies.

There were some cubes of Viandox, once the nation’s most popular brand of beef tea, prewar of course and obtained on the black market. Some packets of camomile and of mint tea followed—not much yet, she knew Jean-Louis would be thinking. A pair of heavy woollen socks that had been knitted from the leavings of an unravelled sweater, two drawings …

‘Cartoons,’ Henri said. ‘My latest.’

‘And one of mine,’ his sister added. ‘It has been marked with my kisses.’

Though her words would sound hollow, Oona knew she had best say, ‘The package won’t be sent until the end of the month, so there’s lots of time yet.’

‘Time for
Maman
to come home to us,’ said Louisette.

‘We add a bit each day, Inspector. Sometimes once every two days. It depends,’ said her brother.

Though heavily censored—blacked out first by the German censors at the camp and then by Vichy’s at the frontier—each postcard held only seven lines, often reduced to four-and-a-half or less; each letter, written on the regulation return that would fold itself yet again into an envelope, held only twenty-seven lines, reduced usually by the censors to twenty or less.

‘One can’t say much, can one?’ said Oona. ‘Repeatedly he writes as though she will do everything he says and expects; she, in turn, as though she has.’

But had she? Hadn’t she arranged to be taken to the Hôtel Ritz where at least two hundred francs would have been received for a simple pass, four hundred for the half-hour, six for the hour? A steady income? She was handsome—a framed photo taken before the Defeat revealed her to have been a little on the comfortable side but she would have lost all that, would have had the figure trimmed down hard by all that walking if nothing else. The hair was of shoulder length and parted in the middle, swept back to expose droplet earrings of great delicacy that framed a look that was steadfast, serious, and wanting what? he had to ask. To be understood, to be treated as an individual of some worth? Had she been trapped even then?

All over the city and the country it was happening. ‘She’s lucky her assailant didn’t kill her,’ he said. ‘
Mon Dieu,
forgive me, children. I only meant …’

They looked at him with moistening eyes, rightly feeling betrayed by the harshness of his judgement but had the life of a detective not forced him into a prison of his own?

‘Come on, you two, let’s go into our room,’ said Oona. “Let’s snuggle up and leave the chief inspector to think a little more about what he says.’

‘Oona, I’m not like Hermann. Certainly he constantly reminds me to mend my ways. It’s only that the policeman in me sometimes forgets. Once a cop, always a cop.’

‘And the gun in that handbag?’

‘Is another matter but not entirely.’

* * *

The Ford’s heater was throaty, Didier Valois, owner-operator of the
maréchal
’s Baton, less than cooperative. Kohler sighed as he hauled out the bankroll and, in the feeble light from the judge’s cigar, counted them off. ‘Five hundred … No, let’s make it a thousand.’

‘Two. Things are expensive these days and
Monsieur le Juge
will have my balls put on display before the blade falls if he ever finds out that I’ve spoken to you.’

An interesting comment Louis would have appreciated. ‘Two thousand it is, but with the offer of a bonus.’

And didn’t the Boche have all the money and think they could buy everything? ‘Sometimes the judge has me pick him up just to make sure he gets home.’

It was a start but one had best go carefully. ‘Under the empire of alcohol is he at such times?’

‘He’s not an alcoholic, only sometimes takes a little too much. It … it depends.’

On whom he’d been with, but that had best not be asked just yet. ‘The Folies-Bergère?’

‘Inspector, I’m not the only one he hires. There are others,’

‘Of course there are.’

Pressure was needed, otherwise this Kripo was going to dig a grave that would hold them both. ‘The Cercle de l’Union Interalliée­.’

That private club of clubs and better even than the Cercle Européen since everyone who was anyone had to be a member of both but only some of the latter were allowed into the former. Men like Gaston Morel, no matter how useful they might be or how hard they tried, would never be welcomed into the Interalliée. It was just that simple. Located on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré at number 33, opened in 1917 and counting that arch supplier of cannon fodder, the Maréchal Foch, as a member, now deceased, the
hôtel particulier
was sumptuous in all regards and had a history that went back a further two hundred years to Louis Chevalier, président of the Parliament of Paris, and his sister, Madame le Vieux, but Louis would have said, Go easy, Hermann. Don’t be rash.

The Interalliée, the union of the Inter-Allied, had been started as a place for, amongst others, American aviators to stay when in Paris on leave, and when that other war had ended, this use had continued but been expanded to include others, especially now with the club’s military reputation and the Defeat.

Herr Kohler was thinking the matter over and that was good, thought Valois. The judge had stated most clearly on a number of occasions the names not only of the club’s most illustrious members—pillars of society—but more especially those of the new ones, among them the generals Karl Albrecht Oberg and Ernst von Schaumburg.

‘The Casino de Paris?’ hazarded Herr Kohler, but had he asked it so as to distract from the other?

‘The Apollo,’ said Valois levelly. ‘Sometimes the judge likes a little change.’

I’ll bet he does, snorted Kohler silently. Both were on the rue de Clichy in Pigalle where lots of those delinquent prisoner-of-war wives trolled the music halls, bars and pavements before lining up outside the nearest
maison de passe
with their clients. ‘The Naturiste, the Chez Ève and the Romance?’ he asked.

Sister clubs on
place
Pigalle. ‘The Bal Tabarin also.’

Number 36 rue Victor Massé and in the area, an old style cancan that always showed lots of leg and frilly-clad crotches. A man of many tastes. ‘And after a good feed at the Lapin Agile or some other such trough, the Boeuf sur le Toit, eh, at its new home in a wing of the Hôtel Georges?’

An SS and Gestapo trough! ‘Inspector,
Monsieur le Juge
has many contacts he must consult on the business of the courts. Who am I to …’

‘Entertains them, does he?’

‘Is it not necessary?’

‘Régine Trudel’s La Source de Joie?’

Why had he asked if he knew all the answers? ‘There, also.’

The Fountainhead of Joy on the avenue Frochot in Pigalle and definitely better than those who trolled the streets. ‘
Ah, bon, mon ami,
out with the rest. That wife of his is scared to death of his contracting a heavy dose of the clap. That daughter of his knows all about it too, and may well have a hidden life of her own for all I know at the moment, so give.’

Perhaps if nothing else, this would stop Herr Kohler. ‘La Maison de Plaisir du Maître.’

The House of the Master’s Pleasure, the SS brothel on the avenue­ de Wagram. ‘Your judge has an interesting after-dinner life, doesn’t he?’

‘I … I wouldn’t know. I simply do as I’m told.’

‘So tell me where you picked him up last night and don’t lie to me.’

‘Inspector, as I’ve already told you, he gets rides from other taxi drivers, from friends, too, among those he entertains. He must.’

‘Has a blanket pass to be out after curfew, does he?’

An
Ausweis
. ‘Of course.’

Cigar smoke filled the car. Herr Kohler fiddled with the windscreen wiper switch and checked to see that the blades were not frozen fast. He didn’t say, I’m waiting. He merely implied it. ‘The Lido.
Monsieur le Juge,
he … he likes to watch the girls there.’

‘While they bathe topless in the swimming pool and sometimes, if the law’s not looking, completely bare the rest for the tips they’re bound to receive?’

‘That is correct.’

‘And now for the hard part, since there’s room for two in that contraption of yours.’

‘He didn’t take anyone from there. The girl hadn’t been feeling well. The headaches—perhaps the onslaught of the flu.’

Oh-oh. ‘What girl?’

Did this one always insist on digging his own grave deeper than necessary? ‘The one he often takes to the flat he keeps on the rue La Boétie.’

Scheisse,
a
petite amie
! ‘Her name?’

‘He’ll kill me if I tell you. Madame Rouget might find out. She’s a …’

‘Very jealous woman? Surely the judge has told you that?’

‘Élène Artur. She’s … she’s an
indochinoise,
you understand, but her skin is almost white and I think her father must have been French, the mother the half if not a little more.’

And so much for racism. The generals and the boys who flocked to the Lido would have been fascinated, but had she made that telephone call and, if so, why? ‘Keeps her at the flat, does he?’

‘There are also others he uses it for. The judge doesn’t stay the rest of the night, you understand. Only the hour or two unless he …’

‘Falls asleep?’

‘
Oui
. She …’

‘Élène.’

‘
Oui
. Élène comes down to the cellar, to the furnace room to get me, and … and together we put him into the taxi.’

‘Pretty, is she?’

‘
Tr
è
s belle
.’

‘Come on, there’s no perhaps about it, is there? Twenty-two, is she? Twenty-four?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Leaves by the side entrance, does she, in the morning after she’s rested up?’

‘Leaves it at five, when the curfew ends. She has a child her mother looks after.’

A child. ‘Whose?’

‘This I don’t know since she doesn’t wear a wedding ring and I’ve not asked.’