Flykiller

Timidly she put an exploratory hand through the gate to touch the cold wall of the shaft. Again she pressed a button. Now the lift started up, only to stop. Now she pushed the button hard, and again the lift started up, only to descend and quickly come to another abrupt stop.

She hesitated, waited – pushed another of the buttons.

Down and down the lift went until at last its cage door was opened and then closed.

‘Albert …’ she said, her voice not loud or shrill, but flat and toneless as she backed away until she could no longer move.

He did not answer. He drew in a breath as he studied her. Was he puzzled? Had he been pushing the buttons too? Surely he must want to know where St-Cyr had gone?

Another breath was taken, then he gave a little sigh and the smell of him came to her.

Kohler was moving fast. He had to draw the Garde off, had to help Louis out, couldn’t let them have the trumped-up, pseudo-medical file on Julienne Deschambeault either, would have to hide it and the other one some place, but where?

He had propelled the two from the lift-well partway up the main staircase and into the rest of the Garde, had run from these as they’d come thundering down into the cellars. He had gone to ground himself, but every time he entered a corridor, the lights would be thrown on and they would catch a sight of him.

Merde, if only he could find Olivier, if only Madame Ribot could have told him where that one was hiding. The old PTT? he wondered again, as he and Louis had … An ear constantly to the telephone lines not just from this hotel, but from the Hotel du Parc, the Majestic and all the others. Olivier and that bank of his had financed the building and the move to a bigger, modern exchange, but was there a corridor to it, a tunnel of some kind? Old cables … had those been what he’d seen running along the ceiling of this corridor?

A treasure, Madame Ribot had said. A treasure.

‘The baths,’ he muttered, coming upon an arched, oaken door with mounted placard, as yet another light switch was found and thrown on well behind him.

The door’s lock was flimsy. Jesus, merde alors, would it hold long enough for him to hide the files?

There was a notice on its back: Etablissement Thermal – Service Medical … The names of Vichy’s ‘medical’ consultants, Raoul Normand among them …

The towel room? he wondered.

TARIFS DES BAINS, DOUCHES ET AUTRES SERVICES … BAIN DE CESAR … Caesar’s bath, 2 francs … GRANDE DOUCHE CHAUDE … the hot shower, 1 franc 50, PETITE DOUCHE LOCALE, 1 franc 25…. BUVETTES … a season’s pass to all of them, the Hall des Sources, the Chomel, the Parc and Celestins, et cetera. Ten francs.

Where … where the hell could he hide the files and not be caught with them?

Gossamer-clad maidens combed their hair or bathed in the buff as coy little half-submerged virgins beckoned to a young lad from among a mural of dark green lily pads. Blue and gold tilework paved the floor. Mustn’t slip, he warned himself. Must keep going in spite of that knee of mine.

From the half-shell of a giant scallop, a life-sized marble statue of a naked girl stood on tiptoes with slender arms upraised and entwined as a bearded, ancient Neptune summoned her by blowing on a conch.

Water fell over marble bas-reliefs of romping, life-sized nymphs. Sumptuous things, gorgeous things, pure and innocent in their nakedness and completely at ease with one another among tall reeds at the bank of a river, the Nile … Was it the Nile?

The sculptor Girardon, Louis would have said, as he had when they’d visited Versailles in the autumn of 1940, Occupier and Occupied getting to know one another. The original had been cast in lead, in 1670 or thereabouts.

‘Kohler, that’s enough!’ cried Henri-Claude Ferbrave. ‘Be reasonable. All we want are the files. We’ve burned the rest.’

The rest … The rest, came the echoes. What rest? he wondered, frantically tossing his head as he looked for a way out and muttered, ‘The handprints they took from Madame Ribot.’ Four, five … no, seven of the bastards were heading for him. Hard, no-nonsense sons of bitches, tough … mein Gott they were tough. Charles-Frederic Hebert was the last of them and the only one without a weapon.

The baths, separated by reclining mermaids, were surrounded on three sides by the bas-reliefs, and it was among these that the mildly effervescent water fell over pleasing thighs and breasts and gorgeous backsides to stream on to the head of a laughing nymph who playfully splashed another but seemed to mock this Kripo.

His Gestapo shoes, broken at the seams, were soaked through, his feet warm. His left sock protruded. There was a hole in its toe.

Verdammt! He was standing on the walkway between the bas-reliefs and the baths. Coursing around and over his shoes, the water gave up the smell of its sulphur, and he heard, as if in the distance, the trickling music of it and finally the gentleness of its fizzing.