Flykiller

First there was the extreme right of Paris who hated Vichy and wanted power. The Intervention-Referat, at 48 rue de Villejust, recruited and trained teams of assassins from among members of the Parti Populaire Francais of Jacques Doriot whose newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, didn’t just shrill collaboration beyond that of Vichy, but total union with the Reich. True, these killers did the work of the Gestapo when they wished to appear dissociated from it and, true, they did the PPF’s work as well, even when it didn’t necessarily agree with the Gestapo’s position.

Then, too, there was the Bickler Unit of the Alsatian, Karl (Hermann) Bickler, who trained infiltrators and agents for the Gestapo – assassinations, kidnapping and extortion also – but primarily directed against the Resistance.

‘And otherwise?’ he asked himself, for there were still possibilities of a political nature. ‘A jealous wife or lover, but surely not with all three of the victims.’

There was still no sign of Hermann, nor the tisane he had ordered. When looking out of the restaurant at the crowd, he couldn’t help but notice their footwear. Shoes indicated the health of the nation: carpet slippers in winter, but stuffed with bits of newspaper or twists of straw and worn sometimes even in mismatched pairs; open-toed high heels with thin straps, but with woollen socks instead of the silk stockings for which they’d been fashioned, hence the tightness, the rubbing, the painful chilblains one often noticed on the female corpses one had to examine. Wooden-soled shoes with their cleverly articulated hinges and cloth or ersatz leather uppers were everywhere, sabots also, and then, too, shabby leather or rubber boots that were far too big for the wives of those who were locked up in POW camps in the Reich.

‘We’ve become a nation that will wear anything and that no longer cares about appearances,’ he said and then, getting back to the matter at hand, ‘Camille Lefebvre’s father will have to be interviewed. There is also Celine Dupuis’s love of birds and her use of their quills that will have to be looked into. Merde, where is that partner of mine?’

Hermann functioned best with a set of wheels under him. In September 1940, when they’d first met, he’d seen that big, black, beautiful Citroen traction avant, that front-wheel drive, and had said blithely, ‘You’d better give me the keys.’

‘My car! The years of diligent service, the rise to Chief Inspector, and then … then to have it all taken away!’

Hermann was a terrible driver. Heavy on the foot, careless on the straight and narrow, insane on the blind curves. ‘It’s a wonder I haven’t been killed or forgotten how to drive.’ But Hermann, for all his faults, was desperately needed.

‘Bousquet has not come completely clean,’ St-Cyr grumbled when, grinning and loudly exclaiming, ‘I knew I’d find you here!’ the Bavarian at last appeared in a rush. ‘He’s still trying to hide something, Hermann.’

‘Cheer up and shut your eyes – come on, do it – and hold out your hand.’

Louis sucked in a breath as he felt for the thumbnail groove and carefully opened the blade to cradle the pocket knife in his hand. ‘A Laguiole, Hermann. A woman’s knife – there is no awl or corkscrew as with those of the men. It’s an unwritten rule of etiquette that women flash only open blades. The bee under my thumb at the head of the haft supposedly symbolizes Napoleon’s warrant but I doubt it. The village is well to the south of Clermont-Ferrand and a good distance from here. Still, the knives travel, and in the Auvergne it is preferred over the simple Opinel most of our peasants favour. Beautifully made, not cheap now, but razor-sharp because the steel is similar to that of surgical instruments – one per cent carbon, seventeen per cent chrome and point eight per cent molybdenum – but always the love of one’s craft goes into them.’

Opening his eyes, Louis laid the knife on the table, the cinematographer within him taking in each detail: the length, in total, some twenty centimetres, the blade being a little less than half of that: silver-coloured, then brass and rosewood with brass rivets, then brass again in the softly curved end to fit the hand perfectly – any hand.

‘She knew her weapons, Hermann, if she killed them all.’

‘But had she the Marechal in mind?’

‘Or Bousquet, or Alain Andre Richard, Minister of Supplies and Rationing?’

There was a pattern in the steel along the back of the haft and this extended from the bee to the very end. One of art deco hills – volcanoes, perhaps, and each of a wide, low triangle with incised, deeper and much smaller triangular cuts both above and below to give the impression of the forested hills and valleys of the Auvergne.

‘It’s light,’ said Kohler. ‘It can’t weigh any more than two hundred grams.’