Mannequin (8 page)

‘Come on, let's pick up Oona. I have to see Louis. It's urgent.'

She shook her head. ‘It's finished, Hermann. Your little ménage is over. Me, I am going back to work so as to be fucked by Frenchmen!'

‘Oh no you're not'

‘Am I too good for my fellow countrymen, Herr Haupsturmführer?'

‘Of course not. You're too good to be a whore.'

‘And you—you are saving me from that? You with your great big Bavarian cock?'

‘Come on. A girl is missing, Giselle. We have to find her before they kill her.'

*  *  *

The Club Mirage was on the rue Delambre in Montparnasse. Squeezed among the thirsty tunics of Fritz-haired men in grey-green and navy or air-force blue, St-Cyr tossed back the pastis with a gulp and fiercely thrust the glass across the bar. ‘Another,' he said. Eight hundred Wehrmacht troops on leave hooted, cheered and ogled the chorus line of naked girls and grandmothers who should have known better, while the band, preferring noise above all else, blew their guts out.

It was pandemonium—
Kultur
with a capital K! Under chartreuse floodlights, emerald ostrich plumes and brilliant red pasties moved in a layered haze of tobacco smoke, farts and sweat that had a life of its own.

Leon Rivard, the one with the face like ground meat, tossed him a quizzical eye but knew enough not to ask what the trouble was. ‘This one is on the house,' he shouted. ‘The last one also.'

‘Merci.
'

Downed again. A fire in the belly and the brain. A real tough guy who was pissed off at something. Ah yes. ‘Hey, Gabrielle isn't mad at you, Inspector. She just cut her holiday short to come back to work. Okay?'

‘It's Chief Inspector St-Cyr to you, and she's far too good a singer for a dump like this.'

Rivard grinned. One of two brothers who owned and ran the place, the Corsican fluted, ‘Just as you please, monsieur,' before fist-wiping the zinc and refilling the glass a fourth time.

The girls up on stage were thrusting their bottoms at the troops. The roar grew deafening. St-Cyr added a drop of water for propriety's sake and gloomily watched as the pale yellowish-green of the pastis became milky. ‘Hermann,' he grunted disconsolately, as he fingered his glass in thought. Everything with his partner would have to be out in the open this time. There must be no secrets if they were to find Joanne. He would have to tell him the engraver's son had been forging papers for the Resistance. He would have to trust Hermann not to turn the boy in. There might be a connection to something the Bavarian had uncovered.

The pastis, pre-war and 90 proof, was kept under the bar not only because of its rarity but because most Germans found its strong taste of liquorice revolting. The girls were gone, the stage empty, the hush expectant. Perhaps a minute passed but not an eye was diverted. Even the thirsty who thronged the bar had put down their glasses or rapidly shaken their heads when more was offered.

In the shimmering, sky-blue, sleeveless sheath that was her trademark, with diamonds at her wrists and neck, Gabrielle Arcuri walked on stage. Thousands of tiny seed pearls, in vertical rows on the fabric, rippled, electrifying the place with her gracefulness and fluidity. Tall and willowy, she had an absolutely gorgeous figure. The hair was not blonde but the soft, soft shade of a very fine brandy, the eyes not just blue but an exquisite shade of violet.

She clasped her long, slender hands before her as a schoolgirl might and shyly smiled, then broadly grinned and shrugged as if, having suddenly made up her mind about them, she could now accept them into her heart.
‘Mes cher amis,
I have a song for you of love. Of lovers who have been separated by trouble and now do not know if each still has in them the love for the other that was once there. They meet in a cinema under the cone of light from the projector. Cigarette smoke filters up into this light but the film, it means nothing to them. Nothing, you understand. They are sitting side by side, not even daring to hold hands, not knowing what the other is thinking.'

She sang. She gave herself to it totally and the song brought tears to every last man in the place. She held them in the palms of her outstretched hands which implored them to understand the tragedy of life, of war, of hardship and separation.

A breath was caught, a note was kept until her lungs threatened to burst and all at once there was a collective sigh and then a single shout, the voices of men who knew of the battlefields and wept for home. She brought the house down.

‘Louis … Hey, Louis, sorry I'm late.'

It was Hermann. ‘Your arm? What's happened, please?'

‘It's nothing. A punk called Péguy.'

‘Fortune? Ah
merde,
did you …?'

St-Cyr saw that Oona and Giselle were with him. He touched his lips with the tip of a troubled tongue and plucked nervously at his moustache. ‘Fortune isn't to be trusted, Hermann. Exactly how well did you destroy him in the eyes of his friends?'

‘Completely.'

St-Cyr turned swiftly to the barman and hissed, ‘A table. Quickly!'

There were objections from the troops. Even the chanteuse had to wait while they were seated but laid the soft down of a pacifying voice over the ruckus by asking the displaced to join her on stage.

She put her arms around them. They grinned shyly and stood with her like great dumb drunken blockheads not knowing what to do.

With her fingers trailing in their departing hands, she smiled at each of them, then sang as they left the stage, mollified and coddled in the cocoon of her generous nature.

Giselle le Roy could only remember standing naked before men such as these, hearing their hoots and thrusting catcalls, their hush as her bruised and battered body had been exposed to them by the gangsters of the rue Lauriston.

Hermann had covered her. He and Jean-Louis had come to the rescue, but now it was as if those two didn't even remember what had happened here not long ago and were oblivious to her feelings.

I
am
a whore—
putain, fille de joie,
cunt—she said to herself. It is expected of such women that they should have no feelings. It is part of the profession.

Yet they had just spoken of an engraver's son. Hermann had leaned closely to Jean-Louis and had asked, ‘Could the boy do some work for me?' He had given a nod towards herself and Oona, so they were not unaware of her after all.

In return, Jean-Louis had grimly understood and said, ‘Let's see about it. A good thought.'

False papers.
Laissez-passers,
the
ausweises
of the Nazis. A little trip somewhere. Escape from Paris and the only place she had ever known.

Two tears fell, blurring her vision so that the lights became as the last of a sunset and she saw herself on a tropical island walking alone along a beach beneath tall palms, waiting for the night to come and trying to believe she was safe from the coming storm.

Unlike Giselle, Oona van der Lynn watched her ‘protector'— what else could she, an illegal Dutch immigrant from Rotterdam, call Hermann Kohler? Having lost her two children during the blitzkrieg and had her husband murdered while under interrogation by the French Gestapo, she had had no other choice. But war makes instant friends and lovers just as quickly as it separates them. Hermann was a good man, and perhaps he did love her a little, if one could call it love, for he was home so seldom and Giselle … why Giselle did require attention.

The girl was amazingly beautiful but sat woodenly staring up at the stage, unconscious of the looks she was getting from the crowd, remembering how it had been and wondering what the future held. Ah yes.

To be blonde, blue-eyed, tall, slender and forty years of age was not to covet Hermann Kohler or get jealous of Giselle le Roy, though sometimes those sorts of feelings intruded. One was only human and yes, of course one worried for that same future. At any moment the rifle butts could come even at Hermann's door. Giselle and herself could well be dragged away and ‘deported'.

One must live for the present and accept the situation as it was.

The two detectives had drawn a sketch of the quadrangle of the Palais Royal and its environs and were deep in conversation over it. Hermann was in his element, smoking, tossing glances up at the stage, grinning, drinking beer, thinking that he would like to get a hand between a pair of legs up there, yet all the time his mind was flitting back and forth, recalling little things, projecting on into the future.

Jean-Louis always questioned everything. A thinker, he was not at all interested in the naked girls who kicked their legs above his head. She knew he longed to be alone with his pipe and tobacco, his little furnace, so as to examine the disappearances and murders from as many angles as possible. One so committed, he lived only for each case, especially this one. A cuddly man, Giselle had once said and laughed delightedly at the thought of seducing him, for men over fifty made good lovers sometimes, and the girl had thought it might be ‘very interesting' to compare the two detectives in such a way.

St-Cyr traced out Joanne's route from the Bourse station of the Métro westward along the rue Quatre Septembre towards the bank which was on the other side of the street. Then back again and south down the rue de Richelieu past the Bibliothèque Nationale to the Théâtre du Palais Royal in the north-western corner of the quadrangle.

She had picked up the final letter and had, at 1.15 or 1.20 p.m., entered the garden and gone into the shop of Meunier the engraver.

Then finally she had walked out of the garden and around to the rue de Valois to knock at the door of that house.

‘For three days she's kept a prisoner, Hermann. Three days of … ah, I can't bring myself to think of it. Then suddenly they leave and the house is emptied.'

‘The photos are then scattered either by one of the kidnappers or by someone else,' said Kohler grimly.

‘But the photos only tell us so much. The rapes aren't shown, but were they photographed?'

‘For someone else to view?' breathed Kohler, watching him closely. ‘Someone who wasn't present?'

St-Cyr nodded curdy and passed a smoothing hand over the rough sketch map he had drawn. Oona van der Lynn was very still, and when he looked across the table at her, he saw her flinch, saw moisture rush into her lovely eyes.

Giselle le Roy was tense and pensive—ashen, so much so that the paleness of her fresh young cheeks contrasted sharply with her jet-black hair.

‘A sadist, Hermann? A psychopath—one with money enough to hire those who would do his every bidding?'

‘A man and a woman …' said Kohler, lost in thought.

‘Madame Lemaire's maid, Nanette, heard the crying not just of Joanne, but of others,' said St-Cyr.

Kohler told him of Renée Marteau's body and that the former mannequin had been kept for at least forty-three days. ‘Between 3 July 1941 and 15 August. The throat was slit, Louis, the hair hacked off, the breasts …'

‘Say it, please.'

Ah
merde
…‘Removed.'

‘Months—
years,
Hermann. How long has it been going on in that house? Fourteen girls all with the same colour of hair and eyes, the same height, weight, size of bust …'

‘Louis, take it easy. Try not to get so close. A man probably took the photos but a woman may have greeted each girl at the door.'

‘One whose purpose was to lead them on,' blurted Giselle le Roy, all broken up about it. ‘How could
any
woman do such a thing?'

‘She was essential,' said Oona, instinctively reaching out to comfort Giselle. ‘If she hadn't been at that door to welcome them in, some of those girls would have turned away and saved themselves.'

‘Joanne was very nervous. She knew she was being followed …' muttered St-Cyr.

‘But did she see the robbery?' asked Oona earnesdy. ‘Could she have identified one of the men or perhaps the woman who watched the street for them?'

‘Ah, I wish I knew,' said Jean-Louis.

‘And was
that
not the woman who followed her?' asked Giselle.

The girl shrugged when St-Cyr looked at her—she could appear so innocent at times, so fragile.

‘If so, then it couldn't have been the one who answered the door,' she said more decisively.

‘Then there were two entirely unconnected women,' concluded Oona positively. ‘One who watched the street for the bank robbers, and one who opened the door when Joanne rang the bell or knocked.'

Two women It was a thought.

‘They couldn't have been the same because Joanne would have recognized her, Louis,' said Kohler. ‘The one she knew was following her must have been the one who watched the street.'

‘Did both women follow her, but only that one was seen by Joanne?' asked St-Cyr grimly.

‘Verdammt,
Louis. The one who opened the door would have made damned certain Joanne had come alone!'

‘And to do so, she would have had to follow Joanne right from the Bourse Métro to the Théâtre du Palais Royal,' said St-Cyr, ‘then leave her so as to get to the house on time.'

‘But wouldn't she have seen the other woman, then,' asked Oona, ‘and thought the girl hadn't come alone?'

‘Perhaps but … ah
mais alors, alors …
' muttered St-Cyr. It was all speculation.

‘Girls with specifics,' said Giselle, giving Kohler the tremulous look of a young woman who was still not certain her lover really cared enough about her to obtain false travel papers for them.

‘Specific physical features,' said Jean-Louis, gravely brushing both hands over the table, ‘that match the girl who was once engaged to the son of the house's owner.' He fingered a richly gilded announcement. ‘Le Château des belles fleurs bleues near Provins. A Mademoiselle Angèlique Desthieux, a mannequin.'

‘Ah no,' gasped Giselle, clutching the base of her throat and feeling quite sick.