Flykiller

Deschambeault had left his cigar band on her bedside table next to the bottle of the Chomel. ‘An El Rey del Mundo, mademoiselle,’ he said, carefully flattening it. ‘A Choix Supreme perhaps? Taste is everything to those who can afford to cultivate it. Taste in cigars and in mistresses. Salut. The band is glued to the cigar. Once plain, and used to prevent the fingertips from becoming strained with nicotine, the bands soon acquired great diversity of design. Gold coins to wrap themselves around Albert Grenier’s finger. Does Albert know you were stopped on your way here? If so, then he’s in even more danger than I had first thought.’

But had the cigar band from the Hall des Sources been left for them to find, or simply removed as this one had been by an automatic response of long custom and only when heat from the lighted cigar had softened the adhesive?

The laissez-passer she had been given by the sous-directeur had indeed been countersigned by Fernand de Brinon whose signature appeared beneath that of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and its stamp. ‘Deschambeault’s wife is a neurotic, is she?’ he asked, desperately wanting answers. ‘Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux must have known her from the clinic of …’ He flipped through his little black book. ‘Dr Raoul Normand. Celine Dupuis left a message for you: “Lucie, please come back soon. We have to talk. It’s urgent.”

‘Talk about what, mademoiselle? About jealous wives wanting revenge or about vans from the Bank of France being used to haul cigars and other luxuries from Paris so that your lover and those of the others could enjoy the high life while the rest of us knuckle under? Or was it this?’ He indicated the laissez-passer. ‘They’re so very hard to come by unless you know the right people. You see, it’s rumoured Monsieur de Brinon, our delegate in Paris, sells them. Secretaire-General Bousquet is patently aware of this and afraid I am too. A little under-the-table business that’s probably not so little. Certainly such things,’ he said and shrugged, ‘are never recorded and thus the income is never taxed.

‘You ran with the pack. You all did, for various reasons no doubt. And now … now have paid for it while we must find your killer or killers but protect those we would most like to see taught a damned good lesson!

‘L’Humanite,’ he went on. ‘It’s only natural that I should dread what could well happen to me. Questioned first, and not kindly! Then up against the post, Mademoiselle Trudel, or with the necktie.

‘Hermann … Hermann, why the hell are you being so quiet?’ he asked.

Sans toi, she seemed to say. Sans toi. And when the voice of Lucienne Boyer filtered down the corridors and stairs, a wild moment of panic rushed through him and he heard himself blurting, ‘Hermann … Hermann, are you all right?’ Had they killed him? Were the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans really behind this thing, this so-called plot to bousiller les gars? The FTP had formed a secret murder squad in the winter of 1941-42 and it was still very active, still

selecting its targets and not at random!

Softly closing and locking the door to her room, he started out, knowing only as that sincere and lovely voice permeated every part of his being that others also listened and waited. Bousquet, on making his deal with Oberg and Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris, had said the French had better become accustomed to ‘a police force that intervenes ruthlessly’. Parisians and all others would be in for ‘a shock at the sight of it’.

Of an all-too-willing collaboration, of often violent arrest for little or no reason, of brutality, cruelty and theft being carried out by ordinary gendarmes, les flics of cities like Paris and Lyons, but even in some little villages by their trusted gardes champetres.

The French Gestapo also, and now, too, the Milice who were to enforce the Service de Travail Obligatoire, the compulsory labour service that would send thousands to the Reich. And yes, too, the Bidder Unit, and the Intervention-Referat.

People had good reason to be very angry. A lot of people.

Putting the Lebel on full cock, he started up the stairs, listening always to that voice, thinking of it, of dancing cheek to cheek with his first wife. They’d been so in love, but the long absences, she never knowing if and when he’d return, had intruded just as they had with the second wife, with Marianne. And now there was Gabrielle who would sing that song as well or even better, but to 800 of the Wehrmacht’s servicemen on leave at the Club Mirage on the rue Delambre, and to those in the front lines and barracks, for her voice was carried by German wireless to men on both sides of this lousy war.

Gabrielle Arcuri who was of the Resistance, her group so tiny she, too, could well be in danger from the mistakes and reprisals of other resistants.