Tapestry (20 page)

Of course they had, and yes, Von Stülpnagel left all ‘political’ matters, like the retaliatory shooting of hostages, to Oberg, thereby disassociating himself entirely from the extremes of the latter.

No one could have brought the Lido’s telephone caller here last night. They wouldn’t have dared.

The Club Mirage was a crash of noise. Packed to the limit with German uniforms, there wasn’t even standing room for one lone Sûreté, the bar impossible to approach.

Up onstage, all-but-naked girls, some nearly fifty, one sneezing at the ostrich plumes they wore, presented a shocking tableau of the boy-king Tutankhamen’s spate of pyramid building. Whips cracked. Those being punished cringed. Cymbals reverberated as a bleary-eyed sun began to set but faltered and the guards in their pleated loincloth-skirts stood sentinel with spears if not otherwise employed.

Merde,
a tableau such as this could go on for hours! Even those at the bar had stopped attempting to quench their thirst.

‘St-Cyr, Sûreté,
meine Herren. Entschuldigen Sie, bitte
. I have to see if my partner’s here. It’s an emergency.’

Excuse me, please?
Ach,
what was this? ‘Piss off,
Franzose
.’

‘But …’ Nefertiti had turned to face the audience and raise her arms. The politically correct albino Nubian began to sponge her naked back while the sun threatened to drop right out of sight behind the screen of a rose-red horizon but decided to hesitate.

‘Verfick dich!’
came a Wehrmacht hiss. Fuck off.

Jumping and waving a desperate arm to signal the bar was useless, but something must have been said, for as Nefertiti’s pseudo-Nubian sponged her ankles and calves, Remi, with the face of a mountain that was all crags, clefts and precipices, motioned.

A pastis, a double, had been set on the zinc, the Corsican adding a touch of water to cloud it green as if by magic. ‘Down that,
mon ami
. And another. You’re going to need it.’

‘Hermann … ? Has something happened to him? To Gabrielle?’

That massive head with its thick, jet-black, wavy gangster’s hair gave an all but imperceptible nod to indicate the dressing rooms as the crowd erupted into cheers through which came calls for the slaves to pluck their feathers and for the guards to drop their spears and loincloths.

Torchlight pierced the darkness of the judge’s flat. Briefly Kohler shone the light over a chinoiserie panel of leaves, vines and exotic birds before letting it fall to the Louis XVI table where Rouget would have left hat, walking stick and gloves. Judges were way higher up than detectives; judges had friends and friends of friends.
Lieber Christus im Himmel,
why did it have to happen to Louis and himself? The building had given no hint of warning. From somewhere distant, though, came the metallic clunking of a hot-water radiator.

There was no dominant smell except for that of the mustiness of old buildings and antique furniture. ‘Please use the candles, Inspector,’ the concierge had earlier said. Candles weren’t common anymore. Even in the South, in the former Free Zone, they hadn’t been seen by most since that first winter of 1940–1941.

Torchlight found her dark-blue leather high heels. They’d been soaked through last night but were now dry and needing a good cleaning and bit of polish. ‘Louis,’ he softly said. ‘I don’t think I can go through with this.’ Questions, Hermann, Louis would have said. You must concentrate on those. The time of entry? That call she made from the Lido last night didn’t come in to the quartier du Faubourg du Roule’s commissariat until 11.13 p.m. There would have been lots of time for her to have joined the judge at his table between sets …

Lots of time for others to have seen her sitting there with him. She had a child—was she married to a POW? She hadn’t been feeling well, had gone home early, the stage doorman said, but when, damn it, when? Early in a place like the Lido could mean anything up to midnight at the least.

Torchlight shone into the
salle de séjour
to settle on a gilded sconce. The cigarette lighter on the glass-topped coffee table was heavy. The matching cigarette box with its tortoiseshell repousé hadn’t had its lid completely replaced. Had her assailant dipped into it?

He knew she was here. Instinct told him this. Detective instinct.

Resting on the mantelpiece behind glass was a framed poster:
Une Nuit à Chang-Rai, 7 Mai 1926
at the Magic City. Had the judge had a taste for showgirls even then?

Deep blue irises encircled soft pink roses that surrounded a scantily clad eighteen-year-old pseudo-
indochinoise
dancer. Slender, upraised arms crisscrossed above the coolie hat she wore. The look was squint-eye, the black lashes long and straight, the short hair curled in about her neck, and wasn’t the thing a parody Élène Artur must have definitely not appreciated, the judge a hypocrite? The dark-blue heels were every bit the same as those he’d just found.

‘Élène Artur,’ he said again, and weren’t names important? Hadn’t all the dead of that other war had names that had counted for something?

A vitrine held enamelled boxes, spills of jewellery, strands of pearls and beads, Fabergé eggs, Sèvres porcelain figurines, a Vénus­, a marchioness … Had Hercule the Smasher used them to tempt his girlfriends into doing what he wanted or to pay them off by letting them choose some little memento as they left, one that said in no uncertain terms,
Ferme-la, chérie
? The kitchen was hung with copper pots and pans, Judge Rouget,
Président du Tribunal spécial du Département de la Seine,
immune to the scrap-metal drives that demanded everyone else cough up such items. The copper-sheathed zinc bathtub hadn’t been used to hold her corpse but the bidet had cigar ashes floating in it. A Choix Supreme? he demanded. Had Vivienne Rouget chosen to offer this Kripo one of those
not
because the Vichy gossip could be used if needed to shield that daughter of hers, but because she had damned well known or suspected this might happen?

Clothing clung to the open doors of an armoire whose mirrors threw back light from the candle in his hand. A necklace of sapphire beads had been broken. A dark-blue velvet off-the-shoulder sheath lay crumpled on the floor with a blue lace-trimmed silk slip and brassiere, silk stockings, too, that were scattered and had been yanked off—two men, had two of the bastards done it? The garter belt was entangled with the stockings and her step-ins.

Everywhere things had been broken, everywhere things torn or thrown, he waiting for the shakes to come, knowing, too, that that damned Messerschmitt Benzedrine he and sometimes Louis took to stay awake, wouldn’t help matters, but Louis who would, just wasn’t here …

The hush that enveloped the Club Mirage was every bit as deep as that first time St-Cyr had seen Gabrielle walk out onstage, a mirage of her own. Always she would have to sing ‘Lilli Marlene,’ and always that voice of hers would be carried over the airwaves by Radio-Paris and Radio-Berlin to be picked up by the Allies who avidly listened in, and wouldn’t being such a celebrity damn her in the end when finally France was freed? Hadn’t she best be got out of the country? A
résistante
!

Her dressing room was at the end of the corridor and right next to the stage door and stairs that led down into the cellars or up to the Rivard living quarters and storerooms and from those, down other sets of stairs to independent exits or up to the roof and from there to others.

Certainly Gestapo Paris’s Listeners had bugged that dressing room and just as certainly Gabrielle had left those bugs in place. Apparently, though, she had taken to keeping a bicycle handy. Unlocked, this shabby, third-hand instrument leaned against a wall, facing the exit and ready at a moment’s notice. Age and wear gave it a little less chance of being stolen, and wasn’t a bike by far the best means of travel these days? Didn’t it allow one to avoid the checkpoints and roundups that increasingly plagued the métro? Didn’t it also give advance warning of street controls since one could often see well ahead and reroute if possible or walk the bike up into a courtyard as if one belonged?

The dressing room was starkly Spartan, the more so from when he had met her during the investigation of a small murder, a ‘nothing’ murder Hermann had called it, only to then find otherwise. ‘Standartenführer … ? Forgive me, please. I didn’t know Gabi … the Mademoiselle Arcuri had someone waiting for her.’ Remi Rivard
had
tried to warn him. Remi …

‘St-Cyr, Sûreté—am I correct?’

Schwaben … Was the accent from there? ‘
Jawohl,
Colonel. I’m looking for my partner.’

‘Then you’ll be disappointed.’

Were the SS hunting for Hermann? ‘Gabrielle might have heard from him.’

St-Cyr hadn’t moved from the doorway and looked as if to bolt. ‘She’ll not have heard unless within the last ten minutes.
Ach, bitte
. Close the door. Though I love the sound of her voice, the shouting and applause I find disturbing. Would you care for one of those?’ The cigarettes were indicated. ‘I’m sure Madame Thériault won’t mind.’

Her married name had been used as a definite hint to that ‘nothing’ murder. As then, there had been Russian cigarettes, but had the case been purposely left open on her dressing table in defiance of this SS since the Russians were now getting the better of the Reich?

This Sûreté couldn’t help but notice the other items the ‘Arcuri’ woman had left out: a glass of the Château Thériault’s
demi-sec
, the vineyards near Vouvray, a wedge of
chèvre crottin
with a dusting of herbs and dill, some slices of a baguette, these last forbidden by law and therefore subject to both a fine and prison sentence or forced labour.

Everything registered clearly in St-Cyr’s expression, including concern over why she had been so foolish as to not have anticipated a visitor from the SS.

‘Standartenführer …
’ blurted this
Schweinebulle
who placed honesty and truth above all else, as did Kohler, the two of them having incurred the wrath of so many of Paris’s SS and Gestapo, especially for what had happened at that same château.

‘
Bitte, mein lieber französischer Oberdetektiv
, Hjalmar Langbehn
à votre service
.’

The heels were smoothly brought together but hardly a sound from the jackboots was heard, a slim hand extended and taken since it had to be. ‘Colonel, what brings you here?’

A certain
Blitzmädel
’s handbag, was that what was worrying St-Cyr? ‘A little supper—oh, not those.’

The glass of wine he had wished for, St-Cyr knew, when Gabi had shared the repast with him at the Château Thériault’s mill on the Loire.

‘Those have, I gather, been left for yourself in welcome on your return from Alsace, but …’

He would leave a little pause, thought Langbehn. It always seemed to unsettle those who did not wish to reveal more than possible, and St-Cyr was definitely one of them. ‘Mademoiselle Arcuri has kindly agreed to be my guest at Chez Francis.’

The Alsatian restaurant on
place
de l’Alma had long been a legend in its own right, but before the Defeat several of its waiters and sous-chefs had been spies and fifth columnists for the Reich. Now, of course, they owned and ran the restaurant.

A cardboard suitcase—nothing so fine as from Vuitton or Hermès—lay tucked behind the colonel’s chair, but had he noticed it? Did Gabi now keep it packed and ready to take into hiding at a moment’s notice—had things become that desperate for her even within the past ten days?

One might never know. Such suitcases had come with the disappearance of leather to the Reich, but they had one great advantage: so common and identical were they, few among the Occupier could differentiate and they could, if confronted by a control, be casually slid in amongst others at a railway station and left behind.

‘These blackout crimes,’ said Langbehn. ‘Brief me on your progress—I trust such has been made?’

Had Oberg ordered this one to look into the matter? Fortunately Sonja Remer’s handbag was still hidden under the overcoat. ‘I’ll just go out to the courtyard to see if my partner might have finally arrived. Hermann often chooses to come in that way but has trouble closing the doors.’

‘
Gut,
then both of you can brief me. I understand that Judge Rouget’s daughter was at the Drouant last night with Gaston and Madame Morel when he and the stepsister of the latter were attacked.’

‘Give me but a moment. I’ll be right back.’

Outside and standing in the rain, St-Cyr knew that the colonel might well look around the dressing room and find things he shouldn’t. There’d been an Eisernes Kreuz First-Class at the neck of that uniform, and from that other war, Wehrmacht wound and flak badges too, and the 1939 clasp and bar with Nazi eagle and swastika in silver gilt, the double braiding and skull and crossbones on the cap, an SS-Dienstauszeichnungen also, the long-service award with SS runes and ribbon signifying twelve years of absolute loyalty.

But now … now the Standartenführer wasn’t simply a soldier but an administrator, one of the Totenkopverbände who ran the concentration camps, and hadn’t Hermann and he had to visit the camp at Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace not three, or was it four days ago?

A granite quarry whose cruelty had been matched by the harshness of winter in the mountains of the Vosges.

The rain was icy when he lifted his face to it. There was, of course, absolutely no sign of Hermann who knew all about this courtyard and stage door but would have blithely roared in through the front entrance to chat up the coat-check girls before taking in a bit of the show and making his way through to the bar.

But where was he when most needed? Had he found Giselle?

The bed was Empire and of mahogany that gleamed but Élène Artur wasn’t in it. She had spun away to the far side, had been caught by an ankle, had kicked, scrambled up, run to the dressing table and seized something—a letter opener. Had she defied her assailants with it? She had knocked over a perfume bottle, the toilet water, rouge, talcum powder, face cream and other things. A hand mirror had then been thrown. Where … where the hell had she got to? Had she managed to get away?