Flykiller

‘Spring brings the new growth; autumn the harvest,’ said their driver – the only words he had spoken on the whole damned trip. Had Petain written the thing?

With a wave, they were released, and drove into the heart of the town.

Out of the cold, the damp, the blackout and the silence, and from the deeper darkness of the covered promenade that ringed the Parc des Sources, Hermann’s voice came gruffly. ‘Louis, was it right of you to have told them to leave us?’

‘Merde, Hermann. We are greeted in the small hours by a Secretaire who doesn’t appreciate our little visit, but brings along the victim’s supposed lover, yet fails to brief us completely and tucks in a Gestapo for good measure. Does this not make you concerned?’

They had been dropped off about mid-park and on the rue President Wilson, some distance from the Hall des Sources and the Hotel du Parc, and not at all the route the victim would have had to take. Acetylene lanterns had been provided but were, as yet, unlit.

‘All right, it smells.’

No collabo and no Petainiste either, Louis had once been a poilu, a soldier in the Great War at Verdun and other such places, and had, like ninety-eight per cent of his fellows and most of the nation, thought fondly of the Victor of Verdun, hailing Petain’s offer of leadership in June 1940 as a godsend to a nation in despair.

Some leader. Very quickly Louis had lost whatever respect he’d had for the Marechal.

‘Come on,’ breathed Kohler. ‘I guess it’s this way.’

‘It is, and we walk as the curistes – those seeking the cure – walked beneath Emile Robert’s marvellous thistledown of wrought iron, which graced the Great Universal Exposition of 1890 in Paris and was moved here in 1900.’

‘I can’t see a hell of a lot of it. Too dark, I guess.’

‘Yes! But I’m trying to remember it as I first saw it when a boy of eleven going on twelve, Hermann. In the summer of 1902 Grand-mere thought she had a load of gravel in her guts and made me accompany her. My father urged me to do it, and I could not bear having him suffer her tongue any more. Of just such things are heroes made, but look at me now. Sacre! My left shoe has come apart again.’

‘I’ll reglue it for you later.’

‘That glue you bought on the marche noir won’t be worth the lies that budding horizontale told you. Just because she was young and pretty and headed for a life on the streets was no reason for you to have trusted her!’

And still bitchy about Bousquet! Glue was all but impossible to find these days; shoes only more so, unless one bought the hinged, wooden-soled ones with their cloth or ersatz leather uppers. Twenty-four million pairs of the things had been sold to date in a nation of forty million, which only showed how lousy they were!

‘Think of La Belle Epoque,’ muttered Louis, mollified somewhat by his own outbursts and wanting to be calm. ‘Think of high society from 1880 until we all bid adieu to such splendour in 1914. Think of the grand hotels that were built here with their covered terraces and art nouveau ironwork and interiors, their verandas, dining rooms and atriums delicately graced by Kentia palms and other exotics. Of silk or satin gowns, jewels and sensuous perfumes, of princes, duchesses, lords and ladies – marquises, courtesans and counts.

‘Then think of the hordes who followed them, especially in the twenties and thirties, Hermann. Old maids and war widows, shopkeepers, postal clerks and accountants, lawyers too, and judges and young girls of easy virtue. Gamblers also.’

‘Think of a swollen liver, an attack of gout, an enlarged prostate or constant dose of the clap. And then think of guzzling or gargling that Quatsch, that crap! An international spa, eh?’

‘But, Inspector, opera singers did it, actors and actresses too, and artists. All such believers came here for the cocktail therapeutique and the baths.’

‘And other things, so don’t get pious. Nom de Dieu, Louis, will you look at that!’

They had finally reached the Hall des Sources. Under torchlight, great daggers of discoloured ice hung from the rusting, green-painted frieze. Sheets of that same ice coated the tall, arched windows as a frozen signboard above the entrance spelled it out for them: FERME POUR LA SAISON.

It had been left here in July 1940, and no one in the Government had seen fit to have the sign removed!

‘None of our politicals have a sense of humour, Hermann. This, too, we’d best remember.’

In addition to the Government of France, thirty-two embassies and legations had moved to Vichy in those first few months of the Occupation. Now, of course, there would be far fewer of them – cold and empty villas as of last November, but still there would be the Italians and Japanese, the Hungarians and Rumanians, the Finns too, and neutrals like the Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, thought Kohler. Could Ausweise for Giselle and Oona be prised out of the Swiss?