Bellringer (6 page)

‘
Oui
.’

The once navy-blue overcoat, still with all of its buttons after the years of internment, had a sable collar that would be pleasantly warm but definitely didn’t belong with the original coat, and though the eyes were small and of a dark grey-blue, they were swift and hard behind octagonal gold-rimmed specs that must have belonged to someone else. ‘Your name, madame? The face, the figure, the stature. . . Was it in Honfleur that we encountered each other? La rue du Dauphine, perhaps, or was it Le Havre and along le quai Videcoq?’

The docks, in any case.

The grin was huge, the teeth tobacco- and tea-stained, and broken or absent; the woman as tall and big across the shoulders as Hermann, who was probably congratulating himself on the little problem he had managed to dump on his partner.

‘This Occupation, madame,’ said St-Cyr. ‘This war. People come into contact in the strangest places only to lose contact while others come back unexpectedly.’

I had better drop the voice, she thought. ‘Listen my cow that moos, I’ve never seen you before.’

And gangster slang for police, but one must be cheerful and sing out, ‘Ah, the dialect, that’s it. One hears so many in my line of work, one automatically tries to place them. Les Halles, madame? The rue des Lombardes? The house at number twenty-seven. I’ll have the date in a moment.’

The belly of Paris, the central market, and an unlicenced house. ‘
Couillon, ferme-la
!’

‘Of course, but one good turn deserves another.’

And wouldn’t you know it! ‘
Qu’ est-ce vous désirez, Monsieur l’inspecteur?
The love of the chase, the hunt, the young and beautiful or the more mature?’

‘Our overboots and my partner’s gun, and not without every last one of its cartridges, which I will have already counted.’

He was definitely a shitty bastard. ‘Marguerite, hand over the gun, Hortense, give back the overboots. There’ll be another time.’

Was Hermann pleased? wondered St-Cyr. He didn’t smile, still stood with that hand of his clamped over that of Nora Arnarson of Room 3–38. They were talking. The girl looked as though trapped. . .

‘You’re afraid of them,’ confided Kohler to the girl.

Nora winced. ‘Please let me go, Inspector.’

‘Not until you tell me. That woman down there mentioned stealing little things of no earthly value and you immediately began to tremble. I’d like to know why.’

‘You don’t understand, do you? You can’t. But you’re letting them all see me with you. They’ll think I’ve told you things and ratted on them. They’ll wait. They’ll find a moment when I’m not watching out for just such a thing.’

‘And then?’

‘They’ll shove me.’

Louis had the gun and the boots and was quietly asking the woman down there something. . .

‘Your name, madame,’ said St-Cyr, ‘so as to clear up that little problem and remove the necessity of my asking one of the others.’

The shit! ‘Léa Monnier.’

‘I knew it! Your husband was at Verdun, a corporal and terribly wounded, but one of the lucky.’

Ah, mon Dieu,
what was this, sympathy from a
sûreté
? ‘He never came back. I had to leave his medals at home when the cows rounded me up and gave me a lift in the salad shaker.’

The Black Maria, but one had best shrug and gesture at the helplessness of turning fate aside. ‘So many didn’t survive, did they, but I seem to recall that neither shell nor bullet, bayonet, poisoned gas, or illness got him, yet he left you with a bronze.’

The medal for five children that was pinned high on the left breast of her coat! ‘The youngest turned seventeen in November, so the green beans, having decided that they’d better, had to let her go home, since she wasn’t eighteen.’

The Wehrmacht wore grey-green, thus earning that epithet, but concern had best be shown. ‘Home, and without the benefit of a mother’s guidance? The
salauds
! It makes no sense, does it, when you could have made a fortune with all those boys on leave and wanting company?’

‘Don’t try to pound the bread dough too much, Inspector. Tell me what else you want and I’ll see to it.’

She would never back off, not this one. ‘Peace for now and the right to talk to those among you who might be able, if you were to persuade them, of course, to shed a little light on the investigation. A couple of cigarettes, too, if you can spare them so that all present will see that we have parted on the best of terms.’

The Lucky Strikes were not from a British Red Cross parcel, and were taken not from a packet, but from the silver, diamond-and-emerald-encrusted case Van Cleef & Arpels had crafted in the ’20s to go along with the diamond-and-emerald bracelet that went with the first of those rings.

‘
Ah, bon, merci
. My partner will be certain to return the favour with interest as soon as possible.’

Hermann’s Walther P38 had all eight Parabellum cartridges in its box magazine and one up the spout.

‘We don’t steal things, Inspector.’

How watchful she was. ‘Only the Americans do that?’

‘They’ve plenty now, yet they still torment us.’

‘And you’ve ways and means of finding out who the thief is?’

‘A magpie, that’s all we know for sure. Things are stolen for their colour or the temptation of it, the thrill,
n’est-ce pas, le grand frisson
.’

L’orgasme,
the great shudder. ‘And not for their use or need? A kleptomaniac?’

‘Call the slut what you will, but it’s still stealing. If you find her, remind her that Madame Chevreul keeps asking, and that soon Cérès will give us the answer even if you don’t.’

Hermann was still standing up there with Nora Arnarson, who was confiding something to him. Just what that was, one couldn’t tell, but it must have been given with a certain desperation, for they faced each other and the girl had at last managed to free her hand.

‘Léa Monnier isn’t the ringleader of the British, Herr Kohler. She’s just head flunky.’

As he came down the stairs and into the foyer, the others having left, Hermann was in high spirits. ‘Limehouse, Louis. The docks along the Thames in London couldn’t hold our Léa, and she came over here in 1914 as a truck driver in that other war but found love drove her. Married a Claude Monnier in the autumn of 1917 while he was on extended leave. Learned the language, had five kids, collected his medals and his pension—Verdun as usual.’

Such naiveté always needed clarification. ‘While working her way up to becoming madame of the
clandestin
at 27 rue des Lombardes,
mon vieux,
to support Monnier in the style to which he had become accustomed. Sénégalais porters, coal sellers from the Auvergne, farmers from the Vendée, Orléans, Nantes, and other places. All as customers bearing ducklings, fresh-picked asparagus, young spring leeks, Charolais beef, sausage from Lyon and oysters from Concarneau. Good country people with a little time on their hands after the onion soup.’

Les Halles after that war to end all wars, and with overblown memories of what it must have been like before this Occupation!

There was a sigh.

‘But she had kept her passport,’ said Kohler. ‘How many of those British women did you know?’

‘None, but working with you has been good for me. Ah, your Walther P38, Inspector. Please see that better care is taken of it.’

‘Still got that Lebel six-shooter I made sure the Geheime Staatspolizei were good enough to let you carry?’

‘The Modèle d’ordonnance 1873?’

‘The one with the eleven-millimitre low-pressure, black-powder cartridges no one wants when things get tight because they’ve been stored for such a long time and might be damp.’

‘It’s where it ought to be. Silent until needed.’

‘Maybe you’d better let me have it and I’ll get the Kommandant to lock up the firepower.’

‘Don’t be crazy, not with Madame Monnier and her hatpins. Now, please be so good as to carry your own overboots. You might need them.’

The first victim wasn’t easy to get at, for the elevator, in the farthest wing from the entrance of the Vittel-Palace, had been decommissioned like all the others in September of 1939, its cage left in the cellars at the bottom of the shaft.

‘Someone opened the gate on the third floor, Louis. The corridor lights were blinking on and off—another electrical problem for which the electrician from town was later brought in. Caroline Lacy had had a rough night and was out along the corridor trying to get her breath and light one of her cigarettes. Mary-Lynn Allan, from Sweet Briar, Virginia, was coming toward her and Caroline thought the girl might need a little help, but then there was a scream.’

‘Why help? I thought Caroline Lacy was the one who needed it?’

‘Mary-Lynn was unsteady on her feet. Drunk perhaps, on home brew.’

‘And Nora Arnarson, who divulged this information, where was she?’

‘On the stairs. She swears it.’

‘And also drunk?’

‘A little.’

‘Date?’

‘Saturday to Sunday, the thirteenth and fourteenth.’

‘Time?’

‘About 0100 hours on the Sunday and the reason for that urgent call to summon us.’

‘And why was Nora on the stairs, Hermann, since she obviously hadn’t gone to help Caroline Lacy?’

‘She and Mary-Lynn had been to a séance in the Hôtel Grand.’

‘Madame Chevreul?’

‘How the hell did you know that?’

‘The Ouija board I found under Nora’s bed and the words of Madame Monnier, but for now it would take too long to discuss it. Find us a flashlight. This candle stub of mine won’t last.’

‘
Ach,
I’ll have to go out to the gate. No one here is allowed one.’

‘And when the lights go out, it’s pitch-dark.
Ah, merde,
Hermann, what have we got ourselves into?’

‘A problem, especially since the Kommandant who asked for us but has now been replaced must have given the two permission to be out late that night, as well as letting them keep such personal items as watches, rings, and bracelets.’

With the cellars at close to freezing, only now were there touches of yellowish-green to copper-red discolouration, but the veins in the neck and on the backs of the hands, where marbling was present, were a dark purplish blue.

St-Cyr looked up the shaft of the elevator’s well. Mary-Lynn Allan had fallen the four floors from that third storey, had instinctively grabbed at cables that were shamefully frayed, considering it had been a deluxe hotel when built in 1899 and partially renovated in 1931. The palms of both hands had been badly torn, the left cheek as well.

She had then turned over and had plunged to land facedown with arms flung out atop the elevator between its two cables, the rest of her bent over the iron bars to which those same cables were bolted.

Blood had drained. Within about twelve hours, postmortem hypostases had coalesced and made the face, ears, and neck livid in their lowermost parts. The eyes bulged, the mouth, teeth, forehead, and nose were broken, as were the arms, legs, ribs, and shoulders. Having emptied herself instantly, the rats had got at her.

‘
Ah, mon Dieu,
Mademoiselle Allan, Hermann had best not see you. Death has haunted him since his days in the Great War from which a prisoner-of-war camp saved him but allowed time to dwell on the matter. Outwardly he puts on a veritable show, but inwardly. . . It’s not just that the big shots of the Gestapo and SS will use this against him, a detective of theirs who no longer has the stomach for it, but though he would never admit it, he’s far too old for the Russian Front and has already lost his two young sons to that. Boys. . . They were only boys. Yet, still, it’s really just Hermann himself. We’ve been through so much, have constantly been in each other’s company and yet have survived while displeasing virtually everyone else. Those who stood to gain and those who hoped to, even those remotely connected who simply wished the status quo to continue.’

The thighs were bare, the foetus absent, the placenta wrapped around the remains of the umbilical cord.

As gently as he could, he covered her. ‘Two months, three, mademoiselle? Had you told anyone, the father perhaps? Was he a guard, one of the doctors. . . the electrician who comes from town? The dentist, or one of the camp’s officers?

‘And why, please, was that gate deliberately opened when it should have remained closed and locked?’

The candle stub flickered in a down-draught that drew the little flame to one side, threatening darkness. Several photos lay about—snapshots from home she’d been carrying, and also a beautifully carved
cavalier,
a knight from a chess set, the wood light-red to reddish-brown.

‘And hard, and moderately heavy, and very straight grained.’ It had fortunately tumbled to the far left front corner of the elevator’s roof, where it had remained clear of everything else.

‘Mary-Lynn Allan was twenty-seven years old, Louis. Two brothers in the service, the girl the youngest. Father Ed. . . ’

‘Killed during that other war?’

‘
Ah, mon Dieu,
how the hell did you. . . ’

‘The snapshots. An officer.’

‘Killed during the Meuse-Argonne advance of. . . ’

‘Hermann, I’m aware of the date. Twenty-six September, 1918. Fog got them. Buried tank tracks and other shot-up armour threw their compass bearings off, they failing to realize this until it was too late.’

The poor bastards had been green and almost straight off the boat from home, but Louis, like most of the French, would still be thinking
les Américains sont toujours merveilleux
. ‘They’d not had any food for at least four days and little if any sleep,
mon vieux
. You know how it was. End of story. First Army, Thirty-Fifth Division under Major-General Traub.’

‘The east bank of the Aire River well to the northwest of here and of Verdun, Hermann.’

‘She couldn’t have known him, would only have been about two years old but wondering all her life.’

The photos had been of the deceased father, the
cavalier
having belonged to him. ‘That why the séance with Madame Chevreul?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘For which she handed over a cheque for the princely sum of fifty dollars American.’