Flykiller

‘I have, of course, also used Belot’s analysis of the first joint of the middle finger and have found there morte en prison both for Monsieur le Premier and le Marechal. Contradictions … There are always those. In life one tries. Isn’t that all one can do?’

She was genuinely upset. Part Gypsy, part Jewish, part Russian or Hungarian – the possibilities were limitless, the roots deep – she had probably not left the hotel in all the years of the Occupation. ‘Madame, the fingerprints?’ he said gently, having suppressed the impatience he felt.

Must the police always be so stubborn? wondered Madame Ribot. ‘As I have told Monsieur le Premier many times, Inspector, both here and over the telephone, each of those girls came to me. After their little moments in Room 3-17, they would often feel the need, the one believing herself deliciously wicked and triumphantly so, another guilty for having betrayed her husband and wanting to know if he would discover what she’d been up to, the third simply naive enough to have hoped marriage possible. And the fourth, you ask?’ She would pause now, she told herself. ‘A realiste who came to believe her life and that of Lucie Trudel were in grave danger.’

‘You saw her on Tuesday, between five and seven in the afternoon,’ said Ines, finding the words hard. ‘You warned her to be careful.’

‘My dear, I told her death was imminent. Here … There it is. Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, see for yourself. Your hand, a forefinger, s’il vous plait! Press it to the glass, to this area, to just beyond the Mount of the Moon and nearest the break in the Line of Fate. Death by one’s enemies!’

Celine would have had to have bared the scars of her attempted suicide in order for Madame Ribot to have made the prints …

The Inspector was going through those prints that had been set aside. ‘No names,’ he grumbled. ‘How, please, do you identify them’

‘By memory,’ breathed the woman, watching him closely. There must have been thousands and thousands of such prints, thought Ines, and surely no human being could ever have remembered them all?

‘Come, come, Madame, you always make two sets,’ he said. ‘The one, when dry, goes into the file with the name written below each hand; the other you use when writing up or giving your analysis. Then those, too, are kept. A truly professional clairvoyant such as yourself would not do otherwise.’

This was no ordinary Surete. ‘That is correct. An attic room holds the legacy of the years, this office the most recent, but it is not from among any of those cabinets that you will find the ones you seek.’

‘Monsieur Laval wouldn’t have telephoned you so many times today, Madame, unless he was worried, and not simply about himself and his Government. The iron man’s fingerprint sweeps haven’t yielded anything useful because the commissariat de police hasn’t anything on file with which to compare them!’

‘Only the thumbprints each of us must leave in order to obtain our cartes d’identite, and those prints were, alas, not clear.’

‘When did he last telephone?’

‘Not two hours ago.’

‘While we were at the clinic …’ managed Ines.

‘Four murders, Inspector, and in the autumn of 1925, one woman and three of her lovers juxtaposed here on this glass. Noelle Olivier was a Gemini and possessed of an Air Hand, which is usual for such a one; August-Alphonse a Capricorn and …’

‘And Charles-Frederic Hebert?’ he demanded.

‘Noelle brought each of them to me for a reading, yes.’

‘What about Edith Pascal and Albert Grenier?’ bleated Ines, sickened by what was happening and wondering why Herr Kohler hadn’t rejoined them.

It was St-Cyr who snapped, ‘The files on Olivier and Hebert, Madame. All prints. You have no choice and must shout it out to anyone who comes for them that I have taken them.’ Hermann … Where the hell was Hermann?

Madame Ribot did as asked. Two files … only two, Ines told herself, giving a last glance at the light-table, at Celine’s prints and those of Lucie.

Olivier, she said silently. It was Olivier and he’ll have Edith Pascal with him and she’ll have Albert, who has already tried to kill me, not because I’m a threat to the Marechal or ever was, though Mademoiselle Pascal must have convinced him of this, but because I know too much.

The letter boxes of the FTP in Paris … the messages I had to deliver for him but worst of all, who he, himself, is, their Vichy leader.

Auguste-Alphonse Olivier.

*

This is the title of the French version; the one translated into English for the British troops is ‘Lilli Marlene’; the German, the original, ‘Lili Marleen’.

11

Louis wasn’t in Room 3-17 and neither was the sculptress. Frantic now, Kohler rang downstairs to the front desk to beg that son of a bitch of a receptionniste to ignore the Gestapo rough stuff and stop the two from leaving the hotel.