Flykiller

They were standing outside the barracks, standing side by side like a little row of increasingly broad-shouldered, overcoated and fedora-ed set of steps. ‘Bousquet is the middle one. The others I don’t recognize.’

‘The shorter, thinner one will reluctantly tell us who he is; the taller, bigger one will wish to remain nameless.’

French, then, and Gestapo. Occupied and Occupier, with the Prefet of France as the cement between them.

‘Things must be serious,’ confided Kohler.

‘Aren’t they always?’

Hermann had never met Rene Bousquet, but then the partnership didn’t move in exactly the same circles. ‘Monsieur le Secretaire General,’ said St-Cyr, convivially swallowing pride and extending a hand, but with a crushing lump in the throat, for this one had already become a legend.

‘Chief Inspector, and Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter Kohler, it’s good of you to have come on such short notice.’

‘And of you to have waited out here half the night,’ countered Kohler in French.

These two had a reputation. ‘We’ve been warm and you haven’t,’ chuckled Bousquet. ‘But, please, we must still stamp the feet until your suitcases have been cleared through customs. No currency you’ve agreed to pass on for friends in the north, eh?’ he quipped. ‘No letters to post?’

The pre-printed postcards, with their word gaps to fill in and words to cross out or use, were still mandatory.

‘Not even a train novel,’ snorted Kohler. ‘No British detective novels or spy thrillers. Not even any chicory. No time to get them, eh, Louis?’

A huge, illicit trade in Belgian chicory existed on the marche noir, the black market. The number one coffee substitute and better than cash! ‘Just a kilo of dried horse chestnuts,’ offered St-Cyr drolly. ‘For personal use – it’s an old Russian remedy for aching joints, Secretaire. You boil them until soft, then mash them up before spreading the poultice on a towel and wrapping the inflicted joint. My left knee. An old wound from the Great War.’

Horse chestnuts! St-Cyr was known to have a White Russian girlfriend in Paris, a very popular chanteuse, Gabrielle Arcuri, hence the remedy! ‘Then perhaps you’ll have time for the thermal baths.’

‘Are they still open?’

‘A select few.’

Cigarettes were offered and accepted and why not, wondered Kohler, with tobacco in such short supply, and certainly Bousquet didn’t know it wasn’t Louis’s left knee but that of his partner! Only when the flame of a decently fuelled lighter was extended did the Secretaire confide, ‘Monsieur de Fleury, Inspecteur des Finances, felt it might be useful for him to join us, since the latest victim was his mistress.’

The gloved hand was cold and stiffly formal. ‘Inspectors,’ muttered de Fleury uncomfortably, ‘whatever you wish to know from me I will gladly confide but please, you must be discreet. My wife and family … My mother …’

‘Of course,’ said St-Cyr with a dismissive wave of his cigarette. ‘Please don’t give it another thought.’

The third man, the taller one, had still not said a thing or come forward, in any way. Darkness clung to him like a second overcoat. Beneath the pulled-down snap-brim, a watchful gaze took in everything from behind rimless glasses.

Kohler shuddered inwardly. He knew that look only too well, as would Louis. It was one of ruthless assessment chilled by a total lack of conscience, and it said, Don’t even wonder who I am. Just understand that I am here.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Bousquet. ‘Your bags have been cleared. Gentlemen, the car. We can talk en route and I will fill you in as best I can.’

‘Celine Dupuis nee Armand,’ mused Louis, pausing as he always did over the victim’s name. Kohler knew his partner would be thinking of the girl’s family and of her past – he’d be letting his imagination run free, the cinematographer within him probing that name for everything he could dredge, savouring it, too, as a connoisseur would.

‘Married, but a widow as of June 1940 and three days before the Marechal’s radio broadcast to the nation on the 17th,’ said Bousquet, who was sitting in the back of the car next to Louis, with the nameless one on his left.

‘“It is with a heavy heart, I tell you today that it is necessary to stop the fighting,”’ said St-Cyr, quoting the Marechal and remembering the tears he, himself, had shed at the news. ‘And then on the 20th, “We shall learn our lesson from the lost battles.” What lesson, I wonder? Any children?’ he demanded harshly.

‘A daughter, age four and a half, domiciled with the victim’s parents,’ answered Bousquet – this one had had it all memorized, thought Kohler. Prefets weren’t normally good at such things. They were friends of friends in high places and had been chosen so as to keep the existing hierarchy in power, and were either reasonable or abysmal at police work and the same at what they were supposed to do.