A Prince Without a Kingdom (40 page)

The Cat was taken aback.

“In that case, I’m the one who’s made the mistake. I’ve got to go.”

“Wait. . . .”

“I must’ve muddled up the packets. I was supposed to give one to Caesar.”

In the middle of the bundle, Vango had paused on a photo.

“Look, it’s New York.”

The postcard was of the heart of Manhattan, as seen from the sky. The tops of the towers rose up out of a sea of clouds. Vango leaned over to get a better view, just as he would have done from the window of the
Graf Zeppelin.

Once again, he was walking at a height over the familiar sights of the city.

And, gently, the card with its serrated edge started moving. Vango couldn’t keep it still in front of him.

“Put it all back in the envelope,” the Cat told him.

“No. Wait!”

She held out her hand.

“Wait,” repeated Vango.

A hand-drawn mark indicated the top of the Empire State Building. Above this mark was scribbled
1937,
in the same handwriting. But one single detail attracted his attention.

“What’s wrong, Vango? Look at me!”

He wouldn’t let go of the card.

“You’re trembling, Vango.”

When he finally turned to face her, the Cat scarcely recognized him.

Paris, December 22, 1942

In the large brown envelope, which had traveled in the Cat’s belt, were two days’ worth of investigation by Inspector Baptiste Mouchet. The results had been sufficiently interesting for him to inform Caesar, the leader of their resistance network, before officially handing his findings to Superintendent Avignon.

Returning from his clandestine meeting at the station, Mouchet had set to work. At the Quai des Orfèvres, his police colleagues had sniggered as they inquired about his vacation. He hadn’t taken any leave for six months now. In order for him to remain beyond suspicion, his work record had to be spotless. So he concentrated on Superintendent Avignon’s orders. He needed to find the list of guests to Max Grund’s New Year’s Eve party. Mouchet was glum about this assignment, which summed up the workload at headquarters: the police force divided its time between drawing room etiquette and crimes of state.

And so, on this particular morning, Mouchet was tasked with establishing the guest list as if he were the personal secretary of a marchioness.

He began by telephoning the restaurant.

La Belle Étoile was the rising star of Parisian restaurants: a small bistro in the Temple district that had become a force to be reckoned with in less than five years. The war hadn’t interrupted its burgeoning success, even if the restaurant made no concessions to the occupying forces.

Mouchet got the brush-off when he called.

“Don’t talk to me about that dinner!” roared the restaurant owner on the phone. “It’s blackmail!”

And he had hung up so angrily that the inspector’s ear was still ringing for several seconds afterward. Mouchet was about to try again when he noticed a line on the New Year’s Eve invitation about the evening taking the form of a musical celebration. The singer’s name was famous. He dialed the operator again.

“Put me through to La Lune Rousse in Montmartre.”

Seconds later, he was connected to a weary-sounding trumpet player in the cabaret. The man, who was still sleeping off the previous night’s show, told him to call a hotel on the rue de Rivoli.

“She should be there.” He yawned. “But if you want her to show any interest,” he added, “I’d advise you to put on a German accent.”

The trumpeter burst out laughing and must have knocked himself out with the receiver, because a dull thud could be heard, followed by snoring.

Calmly, Mouchet telephoned the hotel. His call was transferred to room number twenty-two. It rang several times before a voice finally answered,
“Allô?”

“Mademoiselle Bienvenue?”

“Put the small dog in the bath. I’m coming.”

“I’m sorry?” said Mouchet.

“With bubble bath.”

“Mademoiselle —”

“I was talking to the chambermaid.”

“This is Inspector Mouchet speaking.”

He was surprised at how cooperative Nina Bienvenue was. Despite all the commotion in the bathroom, despite the chambermaid shouting at the dog, despite the noise of the shower and Archibald’s yapping, she didn’t have to be asked twice to dictate the guest list for him. There were only twelve guests. She explained that she always requested the names of the guests, in order to prepare her songs.

“For example, does Offizier Grund appreciate ‘Where Are All My Lovers?’ Are you familiar with that song, Inspector?”

And she started humming into the receiver with her beautiful voice, which made Archibald bark for all he was worth. The chambermaid screeched in concert (she must have been bitten by the dog), but Nina Bienvenue sang on in heartrending tones.

Mouchet noted everything down and thanked her.

He put the list on his desk. Avignon had asked for very specific information, as a result of which the inspector had to research each individual guest. The first five names posed no difficulty: they were high-ranking German officials, including Max Grund and the chief of the Gestapo. The next four guests were French, and Mouchet was familiar with them. They were the Occupier’s best friends in Paris, and they reported to the Vichy government every week. The Paradise Network had been keeping them under surveillance for two years.

The tenth guest on the list was one Augustin Avignon.

Mouchet began to wonder what his boss was doing in the thick of this rabble. Yes, Avignon had seized every opportunity to advance his career, and he referred to members of the resistance as “terrorists,” but he didn’t belong to the same species as the other individuals on the list. Mouchet had even, on occasion, found himself defending Avignon to his friends by explaining that his boss was only doing what most French people did: trying to get by while limiting the damage.

But from now on, in the police force, this sort of arrangement was becoming impossible. You had to choose. Six months earlier, thousands of police officers had organized a terrifying roundup. For Mouchet, the arrest of thirteen thousand Jews, from one Thursday morning to the following afternoon, had been an earthquake. And it was because of Caesar’s rigid orders that he had agreed to stay at the Quai des Orfèvres after this nightmare, as a double agent.

Mouchet stared at the two last names on the list. The first was the Baron de Valloire. The second was a friend of the baron’s, a foreign banker whose name Nina Bienvenue didn’t know.

Mouchet began by researching Valloire. He couldn’t find anything about the subject in his files. He simply opened an old Paris telephone directory for 1938 and found a Valloire
(Virgile Amédee de),
on the rue d’Anjou. Out of curiosity, he picked up the telephone directory for the following year. Valloire had disappeared.

He spent his lunch hour visiting the rue d’Anjou. The building gave onto a handsome paved courtyard. The concierge explained that the Baron de Valloire still owned the building but no longer lived there himself. She had never seen him. He rented the premises to the sales department of a cheese maker.

That afternoon, back at the Quai des Orfèvres, Mouchet cast another eye around the archives room. By pursuing his investigation in this way, he was no longer merely working for the satisfaction of Avignon. He was convinced that this meeting of Nazi officers and collaborators might interest Caesar. In the archives, under the letter
V,
he could find nothing for the name of Valloire, apart from three lines about an incident involving the theft of a goat in the commune of Valloire, in the department of the Savoie.

He was about to abandon his research when he noticed a short man in a gray shirt rummaging around in the boxes. It was André Rémi, a former inspector who had been demoted to his current job because he had effectively become deaf in 1940 during the Phoney War.

“What’s in those boxes?” Mouchet called out loudly.

“Are you looking for something?” asked Rémi, turning around.

Mouchet wrote “Valloire” on his hand.

“Valloire? No, don’t know that name. But take a look at the Boulard boxes before we throw them out.”

“Boulard boxes?”

“No, I said: the Boulard boxes.”

Rémi pointed to the pyramid of boxes he was stacking.

“Superintendent Boulard’s paperwork amounts to our only legitimate archives. And it’s being cleared out on Avignon’s orders. Did you know Boulard, my boy?”

“No, I’m sorry to say. I arrived here from Marseille at the beginning of the year.”

Rémi was becoming misty eyed.

“So, just like me, you know what a great man he was.”

“No, unfortunately . . .”

“Please. The pleasure is all mine.”

And he shook Mouchet warmly by the hand.

Mouchet found the name of de Valloire on a thick spiral-bound notebook. His last name was followed by a number. And this number led to a file. The file turned out to be a locked box, which he carried to his office. The box must once have contained some decent red wine, but it was now full of papers. Mouchet opened it and discovered these three strange words on the first document he came across:

Just below, among the forty-seven names Voloy Viktor sometimes went by, could be seen: Baron Virgile de Valloire.

The Viktor file had been definitively closed by Augustin Avignon in February 1942, on the same day that he had been appointed superintendent, but Mouchet was familiar with the arms dealer’s name.

Boulard had continued doggedly with his investigation until the bitter end. He had kept track of Viktor from town to town, continent to continent, even during the war. In the box was a photo of one of Viktor’s houses in Italy, and a postcard from New York with an arrow over his base for the year of 1937. There were lists of his contacts in each country, his associates, his friends . . . As for the foreign banker who would accompany Viktor on the evening of the thirty-first of December, Mouchet could make a reasonably informed guess as to who that might be.

The inspector put the most important photos and papers in an envelope. Then he encoded the guest list provided by the singer.

La Blanche Abbey

At the bottom of the garden at La Blanche Abbey, the Cat stared at the spot Vango’s finger was pointing to on the postcard. The skyscraper was brand-new, with four spires covered in gold. It was taller than the Empire State Building and all the other towers.

“I spent months up there with Zefiro, spying on Viktor,” said Vango.

The Cat couldn’t understand what had come over her friend.

“I lived and slept in that tower, before it was completed,” he went on. “One day, I even glimpsed the man who commissioned it to be built.”

The Cat raised her eyebrows questioningly. She had never seen Vango in this state.

“Explain,” she said.

“Finish what you’re doing first.”

She was decoding Mouchet’s list.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” protested the Cat. “This is a personal message for Caesar.”

“Don’t worry. I swear that it’s for me too. You’ll take it to him afterward.”

When she had finished, she held out the piece of paper.

Vango took it and ran his eyes over it, before putting it back on the table.

The letter merely stated the information that Mouchet had pieced together: the party organized by Max Grund at La Belle Étoile restaurant on the thirty-first of December at nine o’clock. And at the end, in eleventh and twelfth places, were the two guests of honor: Voloy Viktor and a financier friend.

Mouchet’s examination of Boulard’s boxes had led to the conclusion that the financier in question was probably the man who had become Viktor’s associate toward the summer of 1937, for industrial projects in Nazi Germany: the businessman known by everyone as the Irishman, and who signed by the name of Johnny Valence O’Cafarell.

Johnny Valence O’Cafarell.

Boulard had gone to investigate him in New York during the summer of 1939. It was the first time the superintendent had taken advantage of a novel idea that was now three years old: paid vacation. During his two weeks on the other side of the Atlantic, he had found out a lot more than the New York cops ever had. The Irish associate was every bit as much to be feared as Viktor.