Tapestry (6 page)

‘Inspector, let’s go into the corridor. They came. Two of them, you understand.’

‘I’m trying to.’

Was there nothing for it but to reveal what had happened? ‘They photographed her late last night.’

‘They couldn’t have, not without help.’

Lachance would just have to admit to having failed to foresee such a possibility. ‘One of the nursing assistants was bribed, Inspector. Two thousand francs. The girl tried to deny it, of course, and has been dismissed. She’ll never get another job in this or any hospital.’

But others would have been bribed and Mailloux set up to take the fall. ‘Okay. Now tell me what photos were taken.’

‘The back and the front.’

‘Then watch her closely. If she kills herself, I’ll have you up for murder.’

‘I wasn’t even on duty when the press got here at three fifteen last night. I wasn’t even getting out of bed so that I could catch the
métro
to work at five a.m. I live in Montrouge.’

And not far from the Porte d’Orléans, but one never offered such information these days. At the very least, one waited to be asked. Mailloux damned well knew he had been set up but it would be best to go easy. ‘Which paper?’

‘Le Matin.’

And but one of the dailies, all of which were collaborationist and, with varying degrees, loved to ridicule segments of the populace and to show the citizenry what animals they harboured and that their police needed not only to be strengthened yet again but placed entirely under the competent control of the Occupier.

The headline said it all: RAPE-BEATING NARROWLY MISSES CONJUGAL MORTUARY SLAB OF ÉCOLE DES OFFICIERS DE LA GENDARMERIE NATIONALE’S MAQUEREAU.

Berlin would be in an uproar, the Führer demanding reprisals and deportations, his shining example of an open city badly tarnished. Boemelburg would be beside himself and expecting the early retirement everyone whispered about, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, Old Shatter Hand himself, utterly unapproachable, Préfet Talbotte bent on revenge and covering his own miserable ass, Louis and this Kripo accused of thoughtlessly letting it all happen or better still, of having taken money from that same press who would be only too willing to admit that they had. And as if that were not enough, Pharand, that arch little Fascist, head of the Sûreté and Louis’s boss, would see to it and urge Talbotte on while scheming all the time.

‘Get her dressed. Whether you agree or not, that woman has to be with her children.’

The bastards hadn’t just taken a simple head-and-shoulders shot. They’d had her stand, had had the smock removed so that full frontal and back views, with the regulation little black triangle in place of course, would hit the page.

And next to them, as if she were in some way connected to him, was the police academy’s victim, identified as her pimp and with his bare ass up and all the rest, if not blacked out.

‘Moving her today is just not possible, Inspector. Whoever did that to her also used an object.’

The academy’s victim had been struck hard on the back of the head, not once but twice, thought St-Cyr. A smooth, blunt instrument, a truncheon perhaps, but a period of time had elapsed between the blows, he was certain.

The pomade was not so much ‘greasy,’ as Hermann had thought, but oily, sweet-smelling and of sandalwood, giving a reminder of Indochina, a significant source, and the final moments of Président Paul Doumer in this very building.

But had the victim been brought here simply to draw attention to the ineptitude of a police force that now had fifteen thousand
flics
in Paris alone and should have done something to prevent such crimes?

‘Hit first an hour or so before he was brought here, Armand?’ he asked of the coroner. ‘Perhaps thrown into the back of a
gazogène
*
lorry to lie there unconscious.’

Jean-Louis loved nothing better than a ‘good’ murder, thought Armand Tremblay, but had best be cautioned. ‘You know it’s too early to say. Once he’s on the table …’

‘Yes, yes, but that back of the head was hit again and later?’

Must he always push for answers? ‘
Oui, oui,
it’s possible the second blow followed the first by an hour at least.’

‘With death at between eight thirty and nine thirty p.m.?’

‘Did I
not
say that was close enough for now?’

‘Of course, but if at that time, then he was perhaps abducted as early as seven thirty.’

And near or at the Lido from which the telephone caller had later rung the commissariat? ‘Jean-Louis, you mustn’t worry so much. Of course we’d both like to save that girl, but by now with so many hours having passed …’

The shrug was not one of uncaring but simply of logic. At fifty-six years of age, dark-shadowed and ruddy, corpulent too, though not nearly so much as before the Defeat, Armand had had to deal with successions of
préfets
and knew how best to preserve integrity through hard reason and fact. The dark brown eyes behind spectacles whose surgically taped repairs had yet to be properly mended, were intent. From time to time he tossed his head, gestured or shrugged the rounded shoulders as if in communication with himself.

Again he muttered, ‘It’s not the usual but all the evidence points to it.’ Long ago the cigarette that had fastened itself to his lower lip had gone out. ‘It’s curious, Jean-Louis,’ he said, not looking up. ‘The position of the body isn’t right, is it? Partly up on the knees, the arms and back stiffly bent—why, please, hasn’t he completely collapsed? The muscles should have been flaccid, yet here we have a victim who—oh for sure, rigor is now well advanced—but he’s too tense even for that. Was he rigid before being dragged down several of those steps?’

Not thrown from the top of them as first thought. ‘Violent exertion?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘Any such struggle would speed the onset of rigor, making the body almost immediately rigid.’

But this was more. ‘The hands,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Were they so tightly clenched, the only way the fingers could be loosened was to stamp on the fists?’

‘Precisely!’

‘As a result of instantaneous cadaveric spasm?’

One didn’t see this often, but … ‘He was strong and in good shape,’ acknowledged Tremblay. ‘He resisted his attackers. At one point he got away from them but …’

‘Was brought down and hit again, that second time.’

‘The bruising of the buttocks and thighs bear this out, also that of the left shoulder. The scrotum was then grabbed and torn, not crushed. He may well have passed out, though; would have been brought round, dragged up, steadied …’

‘Held by two men, while a third smashed him across the face with the flat of a long-handled shovel, the neck instantly breaking.’

‘A sudden, violent disruption of the nervous system, Jean-Louis, but unlike rigor, the fingers stiffen so much they are far more difficult to open even when compared to the tightly clenched fists of a living person who resists with all their might.’

Had the victim grasped something during the struggle? Had this been why it had been necessary to open the hands, the fingers then removed not so much to hide the victim’s identity as to hide the reason for their opening? ‘Strands of hair?’ St-Cyr heard himself ask. ‘A wristwatch perhaps? Some item that could lead to the identity of his killers?’

It wasn’t a happy thought, they both looking down at the grille of the sewer. ‘There might be a catchment at the bottom of the shaft or a weir to hold back the solids,’ mused Jean-Louis who had, it must be admitted, far more experience with such things. ‘We could,’ he added, ‘order up the sewer workers and wait for them to arrive, or go fishing ourselves to save time and further possible loss.’

‘Idiot, it’ll be freezing. Is it that you would have us toss a coin to see who strips off to take the first plunge? In any case, he must be turned over and moved, and that will help to verify the spasm.’

* * *

Kohler longed for a cigarette. More than ever he felt Louis and he were on quicksand. Too much bad feeling towards them, the two of them being put on the run like that last night.

Austere in the old Cité barracks, the Préfecture de Police was to his right, overlooking
place
du Parvis Notre-Dame. To the south and directly ahead of him beyond the
quai
, the Seine was mud-grey in the rain, to the east, the main portal of the Notre-Dame accepted a hurrying, umbrella-bearing flock of sisters. Wounded, the eye of the rose window had been plucked to safety in the autumn of 1939. Now its canvas and timber-framed bandage bagged and sagged with accumulated moisture, causing the gargoyles to cringe.

The Trinité victim, Madame Adrienne Guillaumet, age thirty-two, had been a part-time teacher of German for the Deutsche Institut, and hadn’t the French, its Parisians especially, flocked to learn the language, and wasn’t everything being done to encourage them? But here, too, things were never simple. The Institut had taken over the Hôtel Sagan, the former Polish Chancellory on the rue de Talleyrand and not far from her flat at 131 rue Saint-Dominique, which was in the
quartier
du Gros-Caillou and just to the west of the Invalides, in a very up-market Left Bank neighbourhood.

The École Militaire was immediately to the south of the Gros-Caillou, the Champ de Mars and Tour Eiffel to the southwest. Money there, too,
bien sûr
, but the
quartier
École Militaire was home to retired career officers from that other war and this one too, some of them, and most were nothing more than pompous pains in the ass who would be all too ready to damn an absent fellow officer’s wife if she strayed.

She had taught her evening class at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, over on the rue Vaucanson in the Third. At just after 9.30 p.m., or close to it, she must have stood in the rain on the rue Conté to hail a
vélo-taxi
’s little blue light. The college of engineering and manufacturing was popular. Some of those taxis would have been waiting until evening classes were out, but why hadn’t she just run the short distance south to the
métro
entrance on
place
Général-Morin? That would have got her home safely.

Though he didn’t want to think it, not with her, not with those kids of hers and a husband locked up in the Reich, it would have to be asked: Had she been on her way to meet someone? She had left the children at home, hadn’t had the cash perhaps to have hired anyone to come in or hadn’t wanted the neighbours to know, yet had had the cash for a taxi.

The
passage
de la Trinité hadn’t been far, the time perhaps 9.45 or 9.50 p.m. He shuddered at what she had had to go through, couldn’t help but recall other such cases.

When Matron Aurore Aumont of the
H
ôtel
-Dieu
found the detective, he was staring bleakly down at the square as many must have done in the old days when dragged there to be anointed with oil before being set afire in the face of God. He looked, she was certain, like a
gentilhomme de fortune
who had just seen the ashes of his life.

She had been going to tell this
gestapiste
that there was no soap and little disinfectant, that there had been a 50 percent increase in tuberculosis, wards full of those who had foolishly smoked uncured tobacco, obtained illegally of course, and that appendicitis, ulcers of the stomach and ruptures of the bowel were due entirely to the eating of rutabagas—cattle food! the potatoes having all gone to the Reich. But she couldn’t bring herself to say any of it to this fritz-haired giant with the terrible scar and others far smaller but still far too many to count.

‘Monsieur, you wished to see me?’

‘Has Madame Guillaumet said anything?’

‘Not to us. There may be memory loss simply from hunger, you understand. Like so many these days, it’s the little things first that one forgets, and not just with the rape cases, which are never easy, as I can see you are only too aware.’

As if it mattered deeply to him, he said that he and his French partner handled only common crime. ‘We’re floaters,’ he said, and that they had been brought in especially to deal with this tidal wave of blackout crime and could use all the help she could give. ‘The girl who let the press in?’

‘Noëlle Jourdan.’

‘How could they have gotten to her?’

‘The press, they have their ways. I wouldn’t know, of course.’

‘But might have an idea?’

Was this one on an amphetamine—Benzedrine perhaps? she wondered. He had a nice grin, not unkind and though the accent, it was harsh to sensitive ears, he
did
speak French and was not like so many others of the Occupier who didn’t even bother to learn a few words. ‘Inspector, is it that you would shut us down at such a time? Those who must have helped them get to Mademoiselle Jourdan have been set the example of her dismissal in disgrace. Now, of course, they tremble that they’ll be next. Is that not enough?’

A wise woman. ‘Tell me about the girl. Her age, address, training—give me as much as possible in the limited time you have to spare.’

‘Nineteen. The mother’s dead. The girl lives alone with her father at 25
place
des Vosges. Noëlle was very competent. It struck me hard to have to dismiss such a promising candidate. One invests the time,
n’est-ce pas
? One cares deeply, rejoices at each step of progress and then …’ She shrugged. ‘The young, they abandon you.’

‘Two thousand francs wasn’t much.’

Enough to buy perhaps three days of food, but he’d seen that too, this one. ‘Inspector, I simply don’t know who paid her, only that when confronted, the girl cried out that she had done her duty. To whom, I ask?’

Her duty … ‘Was she forced into agreeing, do you think?’

‘Did they get to her because they knew they could, is this what you are saying? If it is, the answer must be that I couldn’t possibly know.’

There was absolutely nothing else he could do. To offer money to make sure the woman didn’t kill herself would only insult the matron who, by one of the pins she wore, had been made a widow by the 1914–1918 hostilities as so many had been: 1,390,000 Frenchmen, with another 740,000 left permanently disabled. ‘Take care of her then, madame.’