The coins were Roman and the girl was naked. That there was blood spattered about the room would be an understatement. Hermann was none too quietly rejecting his dinner into the girl’s wash-basin.
The coins had been thrown at the corpse. One had been dipped in blood and placed squarely in the middle of the forehead. The wire, twisted from the right, hadn’t just strangled her. At the last there’d been a sudden, savage twist cutting the jugular and then the windpipe.
She’d drowned in blood and had pressed futile hands against the carpet, arching her body up against the killer.
He’d raped her. The blood had been flung from his hands to speckle the pistachio-coloured walls and mingle with the smears of terror.
‘A pretty mess,’ said St-Cyr. ‘You okay now?’
‘No!’
Kohler shot back to the wash-basin. His ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ could be heard on the floor below and on the one below that. Even on the street perhaps.
Yet no one will have heard a thing, said St-Cyr ruefully to himself. It was always so in situations like this, more so under the German presence, the Occupation.
Paris in the winter of 1942-43 had become a city of the silent. It was Thursday, 10 December, and just before curfew, just before midnight. Not a happy hour. Grief, too, in the all-too-recent loss of wife and little son, no matter how estranged. He’d have to conquer the loss, would have to force himself to concentrate.
The room was a mess but not so much as to indicate the most fearsome of struggles. The girl lay about two metres from the right foot of the bed. She had avoided it like the plague after she’d tossed her clothes there. Had run to the left, had been caught, had struggled, had gripped the wire …
A bookshelf had toppled over. A small table beside it had been smashed. A glass tumbler had rolled about.
Yes … yes, the struggle had been to the left.
St-Cyr gave Hermann another glance. Had the corpse reminded the Bavarian of someone? The drive into Paris had been even more memorable than most of Hermann’s drives. The rain teeming and murder, murder in the dank and frigid air.
The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont first, a carousel looming out of the darkness at a wooded turning on a steep hillside, the thing mothballed with sideboards for the winter. A lantern … A voice, the voice of urgency calling into the rain, ‘The rue Polonceau, Inspectors. Hurry. Hurry! A courtyard. The Hotel of the Silent Life.’
‘But … but …’
No buts. The lantern smoking as it was held aloft so as to see them better.
‘The Prefet has given me the message, Inspectors. You are to go there immediately.’
Four storeys of jaded retirement behind whose flaking, cracked walls and Louis XIV iron balusters hid the downcast retainers of the Third Republic with their deflated pensions and the piety of their medals. Not for them the Defeat of France. Ah no. Simply the frayed cuffs of the suit jacket and shirt, the shine of the knees and the button hanging loosely by its single thread.
But why a girl like this in a place like this? There were hundreds of these little hotels in Paris. The girl was far too young, a pigeon among the buzzards. Had one of them hired her?
It was doubtful.
Again he asked, ‘Are you okay, eh?’
When no answer came, St-Cyr began that most patient and intimate of studies. Left to himself, Kohler fingered the long, stitched gash that lay across the whole of his left cheek. Gingerly he touched the swollen volcano that had risen over his half-shut right eye. He ached like hell. The storm trooper’s chin was still okay, the broad, firm lips hadn’t suffered. He’d lost no teeth, but his hands … Gott im Himmel, the poor mitts were all but broken. His chest was still on fire.
They had made a stop on the run to Paris from Vouvray. The sudden end to another murder investigation and news, news like no one should get. Poor Louis.
Jesus must they go through the same thing again without even a rest? Sleep!
He’d had the sirloin and the potatoes, then the Pear Genoise, a place for generals, a flashing of his Gestapo shield, but had lost it all at the sight of that poor kid lying on her back, her head farthest from the door. Her eyes …
Louis would have noticed them too.
The girl’s earrings were on the washstand. Gold and emeralds – were they really emeralds?
There was a butterfly pin, a chatoyant, enamelled thing in silver. It was leaning against the back of the washstand, next to her handkerchief. There was a strand of pearls, a choker of them too – had she been about to put them on? Had she been deciding what to wear?
How could she have left things like these in a room like this? Where the hell was her purse?
The pearls, the pin and the earrings were swept into a pocket.
Forcing himself to turn away from the mirror, Kohler went over to the girl.
She was not pretty, she was not plain. The pubic hairs were jet-black, glossy, curly and well flanged in their thick triangle, neat against the pure white of her lovely gams. Clouded with semen. Webbed by it, the hairs clinging to one another up the centre of the mat, caught in the glue.
He let his gaze run swiftly over her. The body was good, the breasts round and full and normally uptilted to rosy, sweet nipples, but sagging sideways now, the nipples collapsed. Blood … blood everywhere.
The waist and hips were slim, the legs slender, the height perhaps 158 centimetres, the weight fifty kilograms.
Nice feet, nice toes. Clean, too, and a size four maybe. No bunions yet. No broken toenails either but no war paint, and that was odd, or was it?
The right leg had been thrown out and was now bent in at an awkward angle. The hair on the head was black, cut short, bobbed and curled, the lashes long and curved, the eyes … They were of that unforgettable shade of hyacinths in their prime, a violet like no other.
‘Twenty-one, Hermann. Perhaps twenty-two. No more.’
‘And well set up. So, what gives, eh, Louis?’
The bushy dark-brown eyebrows lifted. The dark brown ox-eyes were moist. ‘If I knew, my old one, I’d say. Me, I want to know why Talbotte should be keeping his hands off this one too.’
Paris and its environs were the Prefet’s beat. The Surete and the Gestapo murder squad – this one in particular – could pick the bones of the rest of France or while away their time tossing dice with the apaches, the small-time hoods in some sleazy, beat-up bar. It was all the same to Talbotte.
The violet eyes had the limpidness of cool spring water into which a man dying of thirst or wounds could drown himself.
Louis was fifty-two years of age, himself fifty-six, a sore point when age was used to settle an argument in lieu of the Gestapo shield.
A chief inspector once again.
The girl’s blood had only just begun to congeal. Rigor had not yet set in. Kohler knew he’d best contribute something. ‘The coins must be fake, Louis.’
‘The coins … Ah yes, perhaps they are, Hermann, but then perhaps there were to have been more of them and she held out to the end.’
‘Couldn’t we cover her for a bit?’
‘Really, Hermann, for a man so accustomed to death you surprise me.’
‘She’s not been dead two hours, Louis. If we hadn’t stopped to eat …’
‘My thoughts exactly. If only we hadn’t stopped.’
‘We couldn’t have known. We’d not been to the carousel.’
‘The carousel, ah yes. One grisly murder for us and now this, the silence of another in the Hotel of Silence. Is it that you are thinking the same as I am?’
‘Hushed before we could get to her.’
Hermann was a big man, broad and stooping in the shoulders, tall and solid, with the hands of a plumber and a countenance that was normally bagged to bulldog jowls, puffy eyelids, shrapnel scars and well-rasped cheeks. The hair a tired sort of frizzy fadedness, not black, not brown, but something in between and greying fast.
They’d been through a lot, the two of them. They weren’t involved in any of the rough stuff, the beating to death of suspected enemies of the State, the Third Reich! Not Gestapo stuff. Ah no. Not yet and never! Hermann was simply his Gestapo partner, his little helper and watcher to see that he behaved himself. Not a good Gestapo, not by any means, but always on the knife-edge.
The faded blue and often expressionless eyes were bloodshot and wary. ‘Talbotte must have known this would happen, Louis.’ A whisper.
St-Cyr nodded. ‘A wise owl shits only at night.’
‘It is night.’
Again there was that shrug. ‘That’s what I meant.’
‘Boemelburg did say Pharand had a small job that would suit us.’
‘Pharand would not have said that if he hadn’t wanted to get back at us for what happened in Vouvray. Besides, Boemelburg would have told him to say it. The mouse always squeaks when stepped on.’
‘It was supposed to keep you busy, Louis, to give you a rest from … well, you know.’
The explosion. The snuffing out of Marianne and Philippe St-Cyr.
‘Talbotte is incapable of a humanitarian thought, Hermann. Boemelburg may well have told him to leave the job to us, but the Prefet of Paris would have had his own reasons for allowing us the pleasure of his turf.’
‘We’re to scrape the surface and see what’s beneath. My chief was definite on this.’
His chief! The Sturmbannfuhrer Walter Boemelburg, Head of Section IV, the Gestapo in France!
‘But of course Walter is invariably definite, but was this one really the girlfriend of the one at the carousel?’
Kohler was a little taken aback. ‘Why shouldn’t she have been?’
‘Why, indeed? Perhaps she was, but then …’ St-Cyr tossed a hand to indicate the room and the clothes that lay not neatly on the bed but thrown there garment by garment when ordered.
The shoes having been first placed neatly just inside the door against the wall, the thin raincoat hung up with its scarf, no gloves … Had she lost them?
Together, they began to take a closer look. Louis again knelt beside the body. He brought his nose close to the girl’s lips. He examined the wire – thin and flexible but not braided. Simply scrap wire, a little rusty too. He ran his gaze swiftly down each of her arms to the hands, noting that, though both were very flat against the carpet, both were also close in to the seat.
There were no rings. There was no jewellery of any kind. She had been forced to strip. Why hadn’t she cried out for help? Had she done so? Had no one responded?
‘The bastard must have had a gun or a knife, Louis.’
‘Perhaps, but then …’
Kohler began with the feet. Again he thought her clean. Bathing wasn’t what the French did too often, especially not these days. Others too, for that matter. Not in a stone-cold room with the Paris skies pissing ice. Besides, the French doused themselves with cheap perfume, only this one hadn’t. He’d have smelled it. Louis would have grimaced.
She’d have stood in that wash-basin sponging herself down and shivering. Goose-pimples all over her seat and those ripe rosebuds sticking out hard, straining for relief as the towel had rubbed her down.
‘She’d have been getting herself ready, Louis. A client.’
St-Cyr could not ignore his total disregard of the positions of the clothing on the bed, or the fact that the towels were dry. Hermann was just not himself. Too beaten up and still on the run. ‘Take another look, idiot! The girl was probably followed. She didn’t know it. She came in here in a hurry. She was late and expecting someone. The shoes, Hermann.’ St-Cyr tossed a hand in the general direction. ‘The coat. No, my friend, she had only just arrived. The concierge has much to answer for and me, I hope he hasn’t cut her throat because she was not peering out of her cage, Hermann. The outer door was open. We are the ones who are supposed to have found the body but quite obviously someone else did.’
Louis had worked his way down to the hips, the hands and the crotch. The semen troubled him.
‘Hermann, what do you make of this?’
‘Premature ejaculation,’ snorted Kohler.
‘Nom de Jesus-Christ, smarten up! Coitus was interrupted at its fullest by some noise in the hall or downstairs.’
‘A flic’s whistle?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘A rafle?’ shot Kohler. A round-up …
‘You must check with Section IV. That’s not my job.’
‘The rooftops?’
‘Perhaps.’
The invective ceased. Though the stitches in his cheek would hurt, Kohler grinned. The lapse of clear thinking on his part had made Louis angry, a welcome sign.
In his heart of hearts Louis was a fisherman, a gardener, a dreamer of Provence and the little cottage to which he’d retire away from the slime. Communing with Nature and smelling the flowers, counting the honey each would produce. A reader of books in wintertime; a student of life’s foibles with the distant air, at times, of a pipe-smoking muse when he could get the tobacco ration.
A widower now, but the possible lover, if he’d but get over this next little while, of an incredibly well-stacked column of woman with stupendous eyes.
Just like this one’s. Ah yes. A coincidence.
The thick brown moustache bulged as the lips were blown out in exasperation. ‘Talbotte, Hermann!’ It was a curse.
‘Boemelburg, Louis. And Pharand. Your boss, my little Frog. The boss of the Surete Nationale.’
‘Let’s take a look around. You do the bureau. I’ll take the armoire.’
‘Fingerprints? Photos? The details? Should we call in the troops?’
‘We’ll leave those for Talbotte. We’ll make him take a hand in this and the other one also. We’ll propose that we work together for the good of the Third Reich!’
Amen. ‘Then the bed and the dressing-table, and the washstand,’ muttered Kohler, suitably chastized. Louis would never work for the Third Reich, not in a thousand years.
‘We’ll leave the washstand to the last,’ said the Frog.
‘But turn back the carpet.’
‘No one will notice that you’ve just palmed a couple of those coins, Hermann.’
Kohler snorted majestically. ‘They are fake. I think I’ve broken a tooth.’
‘You’ll never learn, will you? The question is, did she try to flog them to her killer, eh?’
‘Did the bastard kill her when he discovered the truth? Is that what you mean? Was she trying to buy her way out of this?’ Kohler indicated the room while pulling the sheerness of a midnight neglige out of a drawer.
He began to finger the thing as a connoisseur would.
St-Cyr knew his partner would be suffering the tragic waste of those legs and arms, the lips that could so easily have kissed his own had she been a girl of the streets, which she hadn’t.
‘She’d not have been for you, Hermann,’ he said, flinging open both doors of the armoire to sweep his eyes over the dresses. ‘This one was being kept. Money had her.’
The lace-trimmed underpants were sheer and of silk. Distracted, Kohler said, ‘My thoughts exactly, Louis,’ and judging his moment, stuffed the things into an overcoat pocket.
A satin chemise followed. Good goods.
‘Those for your wife?’ taunted the Frog, not turning from the dresses.