Tapestry (19 page)

The stage doorman at the Lido had said that all its girls had been accounted for but he wouldn’t have said anything of one who had had to leave early, especially not when he’d have known of the judge’s interest in her.

St-Cyr was certain the photos on the Trinité victim’s desk revealed far more of the husband than of herself and the children. Captain Jean-Matthieu Guillaumet had spent time in the colonies. The first tour of duty had been in French Polynesia. After that, he had had a lengthy stay in Indochina, then in the Sudan and, more recently before the 1939 call-up had summoned him home, French West Africa. Like his
papa
before him, he’d been a graduate of the École Militaire and a career officer.

The wife had, apparently, been left to fend for herself.
Bien sûr,
the husband would have come home on leave—six months perhaps, though three or four were more usual. There were no contraceptives amongst her most personal things—she’d been a good Catholic. There was, as yet, not one hint of her having strayed in all those years. No silk stockings but, like so many women had to these days, had they been sold on the black market? Among the rest, there were no seductive undergarments. One garter belt was neatly to the side of four pairs of plain white cotton briefs. There was not even one pair of the latter for each day of the week. Two slips, one of satin, had seen their wear, an extra brassiere also, but nothing fancy. All of these things were prewar and most of them had been mended, but had she worn the last of her finery? He couldn’t ask the children. Perhaps
Madame la Concierge
would have noticed?

Attempts at writing the next letter to the husband had been done on thin notepaper first and then scratched out.
I must tell you
.
I have to tell you
.
I tell you I have no other choice
.

On the back of that slip of paper:
If only you would ask your parents to accept me as I am and not continue to prejudge
.

And on yet another piece of notepaper:
If only they could bring themselves to help us a little. They’ve plenty. They don’t need what the government allows of your wages. We do!

Each page had been tightly crumpled before being thrown into the wastepaper basket in despair and left ready for the fireplace.

It was on another piece of paper that he found:
Why can they not forgive my one indiscretion? I was young. You were away for months on end and didn’t seem to want me anymore. You could have taken me with you—at least for a little. It wouldn’t have cost that much, but when you did come home, and we did go out, I knew from the looks your fellow officers gave me that you had been with others
.

All these efforts had had to be scrapped—for one thing the censors would have played havoc with them, for another, there simply wouldn’t have been enough space.

Oh for sure, I went to Deauville for a little holiday when you were in Indochina. It was only for a few days, as I have told you many times and, yes, I didn’t ask your father’s permission since you were unavailable to me, but why must he and your mother continue to hold it against me and believe the worst? I did nothing wrong. I kept to myself. I walked along the beach in my bare feet or sat in the sun, or watched others as they played tennis or danced in the evenings while I sat alone at my table
.

Trying to get a grip on her life—he knew that’s what she’d have been doing, just as Marianne must have done during the constant absences of this detective husband of hers.

Then Madame Guillaumet had had a son, and then a daughter, the cement of them making things all the harder, and then the Defeat had come.

He’d have to ask the concierge and went downstairs. Madame Ouellette had switched to Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris
.

‘She wore her street clothes, Inspector, but as always, tried to look her best, particularly as she had to spend two hours or more in front of her class. One of her students brought the message from the Ritz where he’s employed as a doorkeeper. I don’t know his name, only that when he came here early last Friday, he was wearing his uniform, so there can be no mistake in that regard.’

And weren’t all such doorkeepers suspected of being procurers? Francine could see him thinking this as a detective should.

‘If my partner shows up, madame, please tell him I’ve gone to find Giselle. First to their flat, then to the House of Madame Chabot and then to the Club Mirage, unless he catches up with me beforehand. Let’s hope he does.’

And then to the Ritz? she wanted so much to ask but knew she mustn’t, that they would go there soon enough. Adrienne had had to sell the use of her body but should never have been condemned. Many had had to do it during that other war, though many had also resisted, herself among them, but each day the loneliness had become harder to bear. Then in 1918, on 4 October, a Friday, and right near the end, the notice had come and she had found that the waiting, it had all been in vain and she was a widow.

And afterwards? she asked, still finding it hard to resist not being bitter. Afterwards so few men had remained, God had left no one for her. Two casualties: the husband and the wife.

One by one the girls came down to the viewing room at the House of Madame Chabot. Some wore slippers and a flimsy chemise or see-through negligees, one a dishevelled schoolgirl’s tunic. They didn’t cry as friends should over Giselle’s not being found. Their expressions were hard and watchful, the odours of them mingling with the ever-present fug of Gauloises, the acid of
vin ordinaire
and the perfume each had chosen as her own little signature but Hermann
hadn’t
come by. ‘I want answers, damn you,’ rebelled St-Cyr. ‘Giselle is not at the flat, as Madame Chabot has claimed!’

That one, that fifty-eight-year-old with the made-up eyes, blonde wig, round rouged-and-powdered cheeks, vermillion lips and double chin who still insisted on
claiming
she was thirty-eight, gave but the swiftness of a green-eyed gaze that would have startled a cobra.

‘She has said she would spend the night there, Inspector. Who am I to …’

‘It’s Chief Inspector!’

Ah, bon
, he was now shouting. ‘That’s a
zéro
to me, you understand. The police are the police, but the girl came to the house asking of Herr Kohler and expecting—yes, expecting, I must emphasize—to pass the time of day with friends? What friends?’

‘Now, listen. Giselle le Roy was one of your girls. My partner …’

‘Decided to make a
petite amie
of her and rob the house of one of its top earners? Rented a flat around the corner to constantly remind me of my loss and to tempt others into giving up the profession and moving in with another of
les Allemands
? Pah,
quelle folie
! When spring comes, the Résistance will strip her naked and cut off that jet-black hair your partner loves to rub his fingers and other things through.’

And never mind Hermann’s sex life, interesting as that might well be. ‘When spring comes’ meant the Allied invasion. It could be years away and yet …

‘That is,’ she said tartly, ‘if the blackout sadists who prowl the streets in search of such women don’t get to her first!’

‘She’ll try to hide in the darkness of a
passage
like the Trinité,’ muttered one of the girls.

‘He’ll ram a table leg up her for good measure,’ said the brunette called Gégé.

‘But first, he’ll give her a terrible beating,’ said Bijou.

‘He’ll not stop until her throat has been slashed,’ said another, clasping her own as the cat wandered in to lift its tail and rub against her legs before arguing with a pom-pom.

‘I can’t afford to have the house endangered, Inspector,’ went on Georgette Chabot. ‘This house—any such house—must always guard its peace. The girls move around enough as it is and are subject to temptation that needs no further encouragement.’

‘Giselle didn’t encourage us to leave, madame. I swear it,’ blurted Didi.

‘ARE YOU TO PACK YOUR BAGS OR DO YOU WANT ME TO PUT YOU ON THE STREET WITHOUT THEM?’ shrilled the woman.

‘Madame, please! I only meant…’

‘SEE THAT YOU MAKE UP FOR IT! Here the house and the licence are French for French, Inspector. Citizen with citizen, patriot with patriot, and that is all there ever has been or ever will be. When that Le Roy person showed up late this afternoon, I told her to get lost and not come back. I can’t afford to endanger my girls.’

‘You did what?’

‘Are your ears not sufficient?’

Threatening her would only prolong the agony. Oh for sure, two of the German military police often paid prolonged visits and the house was heated, its larder sufficiently supplied at a cost, no doubt, to feed the girls, but … ‘Look, Madame Cliquot, the concierge of that building where Hermann insists on renting a flat, has said the girl never went there today.’

‘That woman would say anything,’ chided Georgette. ‘Frankly, she doesn’t want your partner and his women as tenants and is determined to have the owners cancel their lease. She doesn’t want trouble either, does she, a French girl who offers herself entirely to one of the enemy?’

‘Since when was Hermann ever considered one of those?’

‘Since June of 1940, I think. I do know, also, you understand, that Irène Cliquot is intelligent enough not to want such scores settled in her house.’

‘And Hermann?’

‘Isn’t welcome. The law is the law, isn’t it? Who am I to challenge it?’

At 10.37 p.m. the little blue lights that dimly marked the most important street corners suddenly went out. The last trains of the métro would have begun their runs at ten and maybe the most distant ones still had a ways to go.

One thing was certain. The Occupier had again ordered that the plug be pulled. Kohler stood a moment at the corner of the rue La Boétie and the Champs-Élysées. Louis must have known who Denise Rouget’s father was, but Louis wasn’t here.

‘I have to do it,’ he breathed, the street suddenly damned lonely. ‘Either I’m finished as a detective and ripe for the Russian front, or I’m not. That
petite amie
of the judge’s may have made our phone call.’

Feeling his way in the rain, he started up the rue La Boétie. Through the hush of the city, sounds came. The throb of a distant motorcycle patrol, the squeal of Gestapo tyres, the
clip-clop
of high heels with their hinged wooden soles one hell of a lot closer, the heavy scent of too much perfume mingling with that of fresh tobacco smoke.

A lonely car, an Opel Tourer by the sound, turned off the rue de Ponthieu to begin its pass as a figure darted from the shelter to urgently rap on a side windscreen. ‘There’s some bastard lurking around here,’ shrilled the girl as she scrambled in, and didn’t the Occupier drive virtually all the cars, and wasn’t that one just as capable of attacking her?

A cigarette was accepted and a light. The blinkered headlamps went out. The engine continued wasting petrol. Kohler left her to get on with the client’s little moment and went along the street thinking of Giselle and how he had saved her from just such a life. No matter what Louis said, she’d be perfect for that little bar on the Costa del Sol, but the sooner they were out of France and into Spain, the better. ‘False papers,’ he muttered. ‘Cash, too, and plenty of it.’ The lament of the damned.

When he came to what must be the rue d’Artois, he backtracked. Each of these former mansions was cloaked in darkness but at one, the concierge had lit the stub of a candle and that could only mean one thing, of course. The house was warm, too. Though this last didn’t surprise, it did raise a note of caution, but once committed, always committed.

‘Monsieur …’

He would have to say it firmly, couldn’t waver, not with a tenant or tenants from among the Reich’s most privileged. ‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central. The flat Judge Rouget leases. Gestapo HQ have ordered me to take a look around. Lead me to it, then wait down here. Lend me that torch of yours and forget you ever saw me.’

‘Inspector,’ said Laurent Louveau, concierge of this building and with some authority of his own, ‘
Monsieur le Juge
hasn’t been in for some time.’

‘Don’t get difficult. It’s Élène Artur I’m interested in.’

Louveau tossed his head. ‘Has the girl done something she shouldn’t?’

‘Was she here last night?’

‘Why, please, would she have been if
Monsieur le Juge
wasn’t?’

Logic was one of the finer points of the French, their brand of it anyway, but there was no sense in arguing. ‘That’s what I’d like to find out, among other things.’

‘Then I must inform you that the girl wasn’t here either.’

‘Good. You’ve no idea how relieved I am. We’ll take the stairs. I don’t trust the lifts.’

Had this one not even noticed? ‘It shall be as you wish, Inspector, since the electricity is off in any case. The flat is on the third floor.’

‘And easy to a side staircase and entrance?’

Sacré nom de nom,
what was this? ‘
Oui
, but … but there’s a little bell above that entrance and I would have heard it, had that door not been locked as it was and is.’

‘
Aber natürlich. Ach,
sorry. I keep switching languages. That means, of course.’

‘Monsieur the Lieutenant Krantz sometimes also forgets, as does the Mademoiselle Lammers. They make a big joke of it and tell me I’d best learn a proper language, but …’

‘Krantz … Isn’t he one of those who oversee the Bank of France?’

‘Ah, no. He is at the Majestic.’

The offices of General Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France. ‘And the Mademoiselle Lammers? Thesima, was it, or Mädy?’

‘Ursula. She’s also at the Majestic. A translator, as is the lieutenant.’

And probably working for the Verwaltungsstab, the administrative staff that dutifully subordinated every facet of the French economy to those of the Reich. Fully five hundred million francs a day in reparations and payments had to be coughed up for losing the war and housing one hundred thousand of the Wehrmacht in France, along with lots of others. Converted from its hotel rooms, there were now more than a thousand offices in the Majestic alone, and wasn’t it on the avenue Kléber at the corner of the avenue des Portugais and but a short walk to the avenue Foch and the SS, and hadn’t von Stülpnagel and Oberg served in the same regiment during that other war?