Flykiller

Parsimoniously the light from the blue-blinkered torch was rationed. Now on, now off, the husband smoking an American cigarette, the tobacco mild, totally foreign, raising hackles only to have them die as the couple hurried past, not even realizing he was standing in the shadows. Shivering. Not wanting, at the moment, to think about Giselle and Oona and Paris, for people there said exactly the same things, and if one stayed out beyond the curfew, one stayed put until 5 a.m. or else!

Giselle, he knew, often went round the corner to see her friends and former colleagues at the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton. Hadn’t he leased the flat on the rue Suger just so that she could do that and not feel lonely when he was away?

Oona would have gone after her by now. Oona never said a thing about Giselle’s little visits. Close … those two had become really close.

‘But their living with me can’t go on,’ he said aloud and to himself but softly. ‘Louis and I’ve crossed too many. One of these days we’ll all be taking a train east to nowhere unless I can get them out of France and to safety. Louis, too, and Gabrielle.’

As if to mock him and the night and Vichy, and the Occupier, some son of a bitch put his wireless set next to an open window and cranked the volume up.

‘Ici londres … ici londres … des francais parlent des fran-cais …’

‘Jesus merde alors, idiot, have some sense!’

‘Radio-paris ment.’ Radio-Paris lies …

Kohler fired two shots harmlessly into the night sky above him. Kids … it was probably just that couple’s kids!

Immediately the waveband was switched to ‘Lily Marlene’* and he heard the voice of Louis’s chanteuse reaching out to the boys on both sides of this lousy war.

‘Gabi …’ he said, swallowing with difficulty at the thought. Some stopped on their way to listen. Others hesitated. One even began to hum along with her.

A last glance up the street revealed that a van – perhaps an armoured one – had drawn to a stop some distance away.

When he looked back down the boulevard towards the rue du Pont, he thought he could detect another one but they made no sound; he hadn’t even heard them. Like soldiers everywhere in this bitter winter, he’d been sucked right in by that voice.

Madame Ribot occupied a suite on the same floor as Room 3-17, but much closer to the lift, noted St-Cyr, the brass nameplate giving: PALMS READ, FORTUNES TOLD. ALL WHO ENTER LEAVE ENLIGHTENED.

Readings were at twenty francs, the Tarot at forty, and under a loosened strip of sticking plaster whose inked UNAVAILABLE had smudged, TEA LEAVES FIFTY FRANCS INCLUDING THE PRICE OF THE TEA.

The hours were from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., THE TUESDAY, THE THURSDAY, AND THE SATURDAY ONLY. AT ALL OTHER TIMES CONSULTATIONS ARE AS WHEN NECESSARY, THE RATE BEING TWO HUNDRED FRANCS, NOT NEGOTIABLE.

A Louis XV sofa wore its original, ribbed green velvet upholstery; the dented cushions their rescued remnants of tapestry, frayed and with pinfeathers protruding. No two pieces of furniture matched. The sconces were neither art nouveau nor neo-baroque but a mixture of art deco and the fourteenth siecle, he felt. Everything looked as if it had been left by others in payment or as legacies too bulky to be moved in haste from rooms that had had to be vacated, or simply forgotten. Yet, in total, there was the atmosphere, if musty, of something grand and worldly, of ages and lives past, of refinement and fortune, good or bad.

A scratchy gramophone recording gave a lusty chorus from an operetta. The Apollo in Paris, 1912, he thought. Le Soldat de Chocolat, by Oscar Straus. A favourite of Petain’s? he wondered. The green-shaded, Empire desk lamp in the consulting room-cum-study, with its zodiacal charts and those of the palm, was of the thirties, the desk itself utilitarian but of an indeterminate origin, for it could hardly be seen under the clutter.

Like the half-filled, two-litre, hand-blown wine bottle at her left elbow, Madame Ribot was an ample woman whose watery blue eyes matched the tint of the bottle above the deep red of its Chanturgue and her rouged cheeks. The frizzy mop of grey hair was thick and wiry, the neck of the bottle not straight but suffering from arthritis, too, and bent towards the woman, its distractedly replaced cork loose and tilted the opposite way.

Her glass had been drained some time ago.

‘Madame Ribot …’ hesitated the petite bonne a tout faire.

‘Fingerprints,’ muttered the woman irritably. ‘Why does Monsieur le Premier insist on emphasizing their importance when it is the hands that can tell us so much more?’

The shoulders were rounded under the tartan blanket that some Scot must have left behind at some hotel …