Flykiller

The wealthy, the middle class and the poor, it didn’t matter, thought Kohler. Priest, cardinal and gangster, pimp, prostitute and disgruntled housewife, schoolboy, urchin and banker, these days all of them had become butt collectors. If one didn’t smoke, one sold or traded the tobacco for something else. Seldom was anything but life wasted.

‘Lucky Strikes from downed American aircrew,’ he said, fishing about in Camille Lefebvre’s tin. ‘Baltos and Russians.’ He savoured several, crumbling one after another, was good at this, thought St-Cyr. A connoisseur. ‘Gauloises bleues, with dried herbs, straw and other Quatsch added as usual, the bastards. Cigars … Three of them. No bands, but good. A cigarillo also. A wayside inn, I wonder. A place where both Occupier and Occupied can meet over drinks to discuss things.’

‘Like songs, sex and using vans that belong to the Bank of France?’

‘Chez Crusoe, and if you ask me, mein Kammerad der Kriminalpolizei, I think our groundskeeper’s son must have watched a good deal more than those vans.’

They’d have to talk to Albert, have to get him alone and go to work on him, but gently. ‘Merde, we’re going to be run off our feet, Hermann. Is that what Bousquet wants? To keep us so busy we can’t possibly uncover the truth? And Menetrel … What of the doctor? What, please, was his part in all of this?’

‘That driver of Bousquet’s refused to cough up, Louis. I tried. I used every threat in the book, but our Georges’s mouth has been zipped so tightly, you could put a bullet in his brain and get more.’

‘A cabin,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘A small hotel downriver of it, to which Bousquet’s driver conveniently goes to stay the night.’

‘And a local inn to which some of the girls go after work.’

‘And where one of them meets that same secretaire general to bum a lift home in the small hours – is that how it really was?’

Kohler opened the other tin only to find an almost identical selection, but here there were also two carefully flattened cigar bands: another Choix Supreme perhaps, and a Romeo y Julieta, both bright red and with gold coins on either side of the brand name.

‘Our nurse must have known Albert, Louis.’

‘She had a private practice. Was he one of her patients?’

‘Was she accustomed to caring for the girls at Camille Lefebvre’s school?’

‘Where Celine Dupuis may have taught ballet part-time?’

‘A bird lover, Louis. One who wore diamonds she tried her damnedest to hide.’

‘But hadn’t worn the dress, the shoes or this because she couldn’t have had them.’

The beads of a very wealthy flapper.

‘Which, by rights, should have been stolen from her room,’ breathed Kohler. ‘The Hotel d’Allier, mon vieux. I think we’d better hear what our shorthand typist has to say if alive and still at home.’

The Hotel d’Allier rose up from behind its iron fence, grey and slate-roofed against an even greyer sky. Shutters open, others closed.

In the foyer, a simple bell and desk stood before dark, wooden pigeon-holes with their infrequent messages. Keys absent or left on the run, others long forgotten. Maybe sixty or seventy rooms …

The head-and-shoulders portrait of Petain in uniform, looking sternly down from the papered wall, was crooked.

‘St-Cyr, Surete. Mademoiselle Lucie Trudel, and hurry.’

‘Hurry?’ yelped the ancient concierge, having ducked behind the desk. ‘The police are always in a hurry, no more now than before. Nor have they changed their coats or their politics, only the weight of their truncheons.’ Cloves of garlic spilled from his left hand. ‘My lunch,’ he hissed. ‘There’s no bread.’

‘Kohler, mon fin. Gestapo, Paris-Central.’

‘Concierge Rigaud, it’s a matter of some importance,’ tried Louis.

‘My soup, is that not important? This place. The constant comings and goings and no one signing in or out, eh? What’s it this time? Drugs? Syphilis? Or did she have something worse? Is that why she had to go home? Well, is it?’ he shrilled.

Sacre nom de nom, a tough one! ‘Did she really go home?’ bleated St-Cyr.

‘Three messages now and not collected. Aren’t they evidence enough?’

Rigaud, for all his years and apparent frailty, was fiercely protective of his territory but the snap of Hermann’s fingers broke the air. Swiftly handed over, the slender slips of paper were quickly scanned and pocketed.

‘She was rounded up, wasn’t she?’ rasped the concierge, biting back on his gums, then clucking his tongue for good measure. ‘Grabbed off the street and hustled to the commissariat. Forced to strip for the doctor to have a look and a swab, eh? They’re disgusting, the girls these days. Dropping their underwear whenever they get itchy. No morals. No sense of decency. These old ears of mine don’t want to listen but cry when they hear the goings on!’

Venereal diseases had become so rampant in Paris that the Occupier had insisted the flics routinely round up for medical checks whatever females were available, not just the filles de joie.