Tapestry (17 page)

‘Gaston Morel then pays their bill and follows,’ added the mother tightly. ‘Time and again it’s the prisoner-of-war wives who are conducting themselves in such a shameful and disgustingly unclean manner, Inspector. Madame Morel had every right to be alerted and have the proof of it. Disease is rife, is it not? Disease!’

‘Vivienne, control yourself. Denise had no other choice but to inform the woman that her suspicions had been verified, Kohler. Far too many of these prisoner-of-war wives don’t just need lessons in how to care for themselves and their families and manage the finances while their husbands are absent. They need a damned good lesson in morals and should have their heads shorn and breasts bared in public. Madame Barrault has told you she works the odd night as an usherette, but has she also admitted to having stayed well after closing not on one or two such occasions, but on at least three?’

And so much for a social worker’s sense of confidentiality.

Denise would have to be spared the embarrassment but one had best be positive about it, thought Vivienne. ‘The regular usherettes have informed M. Garnier that the woman is most definitely having sexual relations with the manager of that cinema, Inspector. They have caught the two of them at it in his office and even up on the stage behind closed curtains!’

But when the lights were down and after hours. ‘The cinema?’

Had Herr Kohler not believed her? ‘The Impérial.’

On the boulevard des Italiens and right around the corner from Madame Barrault’s flat.

‘Father Marescot, the priest of the Notre-Dame de Lorette,’ said Vivienne, ‘has sent a letter of complaint to the Scapini commission in Berlin.’

That organization, the Service diplomatique de prisonniers de guerre, first received all such complaints. The names of those judged serious enough by the Vichy government’s Berlin office were then forwarded to the Kommandant of each husband’s prisoner-of-war camp, who then called the poor bastard in to let him know what was going on at home.

‘Father Marescot is worried about Madame Barrault,’ said Denise uncomfortably. ‘In no uncertain terms he has told our
détective privé
that she is just like the others.’

Louis would say it never snows but it rains. ‘I’d best find my partner then, hadn’t I, Judge?’

‘Do finish your cognac, Inspector. You’ve hardly touched it. Take the cigar. It must be cold outside,’ said Vivienne, having retreated into herself already. ‘I hate the cold. It makes me feel as though I were poor and didn’t deserve a fire.’

At 8.40 p.m. the old time, 9.40 the new, the rue Saint-Dominique was pitch-dark. One found direction purely from memory, St-Cyr knew, the silhouettes of the buildings having been lost entirely to the downpour, and when he reached the little square with its delightful Fountain of Mars still unseen, he drew the Citroën in beside it. The
quartier
had, for the last century and more, been definitely an entrenchment of an educated upper middle class. Though virtually nothing could be discerned, the arcaded walks of the surrounding buildings would have arched entrances, the first-storey balconies, their Louis Philippe ironwork railings.

The building at number 131 was heated and that could only mean that at least one of the Occupier had taken up residence.

‘Monsieur, what is it you desire at this hour?’

There were concierges and concierges and this one with the reading glasses and volume of Proust was not only well dressed and well read but a war widow from the 1914–1918 conflict. ‘
Ah, bon
, madame. The Guillaumet residence. Sûreté.’

‘Inspector, what is going on? The other tenants … There have been complaints. Madame Guillaumet has done nothing here to bring offence. There have been no visitors, no such men friends, you understand, none that I have seen and I assure you I would have, but …’

‘But what?’

‘Some of the tenants are demanding that I serve her a notice of eviction, others that it is not right for us to be having detectives coming here at all hours asking questions about her.’

‘What detective? What questions?’

‘The other one from the Sûreté.’

‘What one?’

‘The one with the heavy black-rimmed eyeglasses, the Hitler moustache and the new fedora and overcoat. The one who constantly smokes a pipe, “His little friend.” I didn’t ask to see his ID. I …’

‘Just answered him?’

‘
Oui
. One has to, doesn’t one?’

‘And?’

‘Four times he has been here. The first, a month ago, then two weeks later, then a week more and … and lastly three days ago.’

On Tuesday, then. ‘And did you reveal this to Madame Guillaumet?’

She would shake her head, Francine Ouellette decided. She would tell this one exactly how it had been for he looked far more trustworthy. ‘Each time I’ve told him I have seen nothing to condemn Madame Guillaumet in the eyes of God or anyone else. Her life is her own, is that not so? Who am I to question what she does away from here? I checked on the children when she went to her teaching job, but always refused to take payment, since at present she has none to spare, but …’ She would shrug now. ‘What else is one to do?’

But make allowances.

‘Inspector, has Adrienne died? What, please, is to become of Henri and Louisette? The father’s parents won’t take them in. His was a marriage of which they didn’t approve and now they’ve been making her life very difficult, since the son’s wages go to them, not to her.’

‘She’s holding on. I saw her only a few hours ago.’

‘But did she speak? Did she describe the one who did that to her?’

‘Not yet. Look, has my partner, Herr Kohler, been in?’

‘Not today or tonight. The girl named Giselle has gone out, though, and has not yet returned. The other one—Madame Oona Van der Lynn—is alarmed, you understand, and rightly so, what with these … these criminals still at large and the curfew nearly upon us and always threatening to be moved ahead without notice. The girl will become lost, Madame Van der Lynn has said, if she tries to find her way back here in the dark. She doesn’t know this
quartier
or any other than the one in which they live.’

The quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Though they seldom if ever did, and he had never heard them do so, it had to be asked. ‘Did they argue down here in the foyer?’

‘And in the lift. The one named Giselle …’

‘Mademoiselle le Roy.’

‘
Oui, oui.
That one has said she could no longer stand being cooped up and that she was going to find Herr Kohler and tell him what he’d done. It’s a tragedy, is it not, Inspector? Madame Guillaumet at death’s door and Madame Van der Lynn finding not just two children of the same ages as her own would have been but
exactement
a boy and then a girl? I have heard them comforting her. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, or has God forsaken us all?’

The Line 3 métro entrance at
place
Malesherbes had been permanently closed just like every other alternate station to save on the power. Bicycle taxi, licence 43.75 RP18, the maréchal’s bloody Baton, couldn’t have been spending the night picking up fares here.
Ach,
where was he to be found? wondered Kohler. Pedestrians blindly felt their way through the rain, narrowly colliding with him. Other taxis squeaked past, heading up the boulevard Malesherbes to the Wagram entrance at
place
du Brésil and not that far: eight hundred metres, maybe a thousand but on a night like this and without a torch?

He’d have to do it, would have to leave the Ford where he’d left it back on the rue Henri Rochefort, mustn’t terrify anyone. Denise Rouget had said she’d not been certain the Trinité victim had been fooling around, though there’d been ‘some evidence,’ and that could only mean she’d had the woman followed.

So how was it, please, that a social worker had not only known where to look for a firm of private detectives but had hired one that was right next to the Lido? Vivienne Rouget had been far too uptight, even to letting him know in advance that she had heard the Vichy gossip about Louis and himself and would use it if necessary.

When Didier Valois pulled in to the stand outside the Wagram entrance, several clamoured to hire him, but only one person succeeded. ‘Inspector …’

‘Take me back to my car. I must have lost my way.’

The door to the Guillaumet flat was answered, hope registering and then dismay. They’d been expecting Giselle and, like children the world over whose hopes have been dashed, their expressions fell as they thought the worst.

‘Jean-Louis …’

‘Oona, I’m not here about Giselle.’ The eyes were red and swollen, the fair cheeks pale and strained. There was none of that calmness one had come to expect of her, none of that willingness to accept things, hard though they were. Hermann’s unthinking act of getting her to look after the Trinité victim’s children hadn’t been good. ‘We’ll find her, I promise. These must be Henri and Louisette?’

A slim, warm hand was taken and formally shaken, man to man, the boy tall for his age, the dark brown hair still curly but newly trimmed—Giselle would have done that. The eyes were brown but not so large or deep as the sister’s, harder, more instantly accusative—those of the father? he had to ask. Each child was different, exactly themselves of course, and yet … and yet he knew with a certainty he couldn’t understand that the girl must be more like the mother. Their faces were pinched and drawn, they, too, fighting back the tears even as Oona, tall, willowy, blonde, blue-eyed and everything Hermann would need in a woman had he but the sense to see it, fought for control to softly say, ‘It’s as I have thought. Giselle has stayed the night at the house of friends. She must have.’

The House of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton.

‘Or at the flat on the rue Suger which is just around the corner,’ said Henri gravely. ‘Are you really a chief inspector?’

‘I’m even armed. This is my gun, this one, that of my partner.’

‘And that?’ asked Oona tensely of the glossy black, regulation-issue handbag under his arm.

‘A little something for Hermann to return to Rudi Sturmbacher as soon as possible.’

They didn’t ask further and that was a good sign. Louisette hesitantly took his fedora, Henri more assuredly the overcoat and overshoes, Oona the handbag, she mastering the shock of its weight and knowing only too well what it must contain.

‘The kitchen,’ she said, ‘or would you prefer our room?’

‘Our
petit salon,
’ said Henri.

‘Our very own,’ said Louisette, whose hair brushed her shoulders every time she tossed her head. ‘
Maman
has helped us with it, you understand,
Monsieur l’Inspecteur principal.
There it is warm and there we are allowed to keep the things we love and to have adventures.’

‘Then that’s where we’d best go,’ St-Cyr heard himself saying.
Merde,
was he, too, about to burst into tears?

‘
Maman
would not have done what they are saying in the papers or on the stairs and in the halls at school,’ said the boy.

‘She didn’t need to be punished,’ Louisette added with, she felt, the necessary amount of severity. ‘She is a good woman,
Monsieur l’Inspecteur principal,
not a bad one. A tramp!’

‘A slut,’ muttered Henri. ‘A
paillasse
!’

‘Henri, Louisette,
mes chers
, make the inspector some tea, please. The camomile … do you think that would suit him best?’

‘Et pour toi?’
asked the boy, using the familiar.

‘Moi aussi, merci.’

‘But first our
salon
,’ said Louisette. ‘Our very own place of magic.’

The room was all of that and more. A clutter of flea-­market gleanings, paintings and drawings by the resident artists, a puppet theatre
d’après
Guignol, brass urns, candlesticks, mushroom-­shaded lamps, carpets, divans and pillows, a library, too, and wireless set.

They watched him closely, the two of them. They saw him tear his gaze from the dial and he heard them sigh with satisfaction and whisper to each other, ‘Just like Herr Kohler, he has looked to see if we have been breaking the law and listening to the BBC Free French broadcasts from London or the Voice of America’s swing music of Messieurs Goodman, Dorsey and others.’

They had their tea. They apologized for not having tobacco and acknowledged that they knew he preferred his pipe, ‘his little friend,’ to cigarettes.

Each in their turn said that they were sorry to learn of the loss of his wife and little son. ‘And of Herr Kohler’s two boys at Stalingrad,’ Henri said.

‘
Mes amis,
a moment, please. If Hermann and I are to find the one who hurt your mother, I must get to know her better. First, the rest of the flat, and then the desk she keeps—the place where she writes to your father. Photos of her, all such things.’

‘Messages?’ asked Henri.

‘Certainly.’

‘There are none,’ whispered Louisette darkly. ‘She took it with her.’

‘It was from one of her students, I think,’ said Henri. ‘Madame Ouellette, our concierge, gave it to
Maman
last Friday before the lady from the Maison du Prisonnier came to see us.’

‘The Mademoiselle Rouget,’ said Louisette distastefully. ‘The one called Denise.’

‘It was sealed, you understand, and
Maman
told us not to say anything of it to that one, and only that it was something she had to do for … for us all.’

‘Jean-Louis, you must understand that Adrienne—Madame Guillaumet—had had trouble paying the rent. Her in-laws …’

‘They receive the three-quarters, in total, of
Papa
’s military pay, Inspector,’ said Henri, ‘but from that deduct nothing for our rent.’

‘And give her absolutely nothing for the children or herself, or for the parcels they send to him each month. Her sole source of income has been the two francs a day the government in Vichy provides towards the cost of the parcels and …’

‘Her pay from teaching,’ said Louisette, watching him closely. ‘One thousand a month. It is not much, so messages have to be received from time to time, is that not so?’

‘Show me the flat. Come on, you two. Help me to build a profile of her.’