Flykiller

‘Not us,’ whispered Nathalie, her expression unchanged, and still sitting facing the back of that Thonet chair of hers. Its bentwood waist was slender and curved beautifully upwards just like her own, her thighs tightly gripping it, her chin on the hand that was folded delicately over the top rail as if she was caressing the back of a lover’s neck. A chair that she often used as a stage prop and had insisted she must have when she’d arrived in Vichy in the late autumn of 1940. Madame Nathalie Benoist, Inspector. Nathalie who holds us all together and writes our songs and routines and makes us work. She has such lovely shoulders hasn’t she? And yet … and yet her expression can be so hard and uncompromising.

Nathalie’s black teddy gave Herr Kohler’s swift scrutiny a glimpse of lace, flesh and garters, of smooth white thighs and black lisle stockings that had no holes above the tops of her jackboots.

‘What’s to happen to us?’ she asked at last, but with that same penetratingly cold voice she used on insufferable men. ‘Are we to be next?’

‘Just who the hell is doing this?’ demanded Carole, abruptly taking a quick drag, then curling back her upper lip to spit, ‘Detectives! Merde, haven’t you salauds from Paris thought it could well be the wives?’

‘A knife?’ Nathalie said softly from her chair. ‘Noelle Olivier’s, is that so, Inspector? Well? Damn it, tell us.’

‘Yes! Louis … Look, my partner has it.’

Had Herr Kohler been startled by Nathalie’s vehemence? wondered Carole. Did he, too, think there could well be a connection to that little legend? Edith Pascal, eh, Inspector? La Megere as we call her – the shrew – when she hounds Albert for newspapers and about other things.

‘And is it true that Albert Grenier found it?’ bleated Aurelienne from where she lay, her back still to him.

‘Yes, again.’

‘Ah Sainte Mere!’ she cried, and, shutting her eyes, bowed her head to press it against her own stage prop which Albert had seen her lewdly sucking and fondling often enough. Albert …

‘Cherie, it can’t have been him!’ insisted Nathalie.

‘Ma foi, quelle stupidite, idiote!’ scathed Carole. ‘Albert loves us all. You know he’d never touch a hair on your head. He’d die for us just as he would for the Marechal. He couldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘Just the rats, eh?’ blurted Aurelienne, defiantly swinging her legs off the bed to sit on its edge. ‘He presses a thumb under the chins of those that haven’t quite been done in and watches as they struggle for breath or all but cuts off their heads by tightening that wire of his!’

‘Or uses the chair leg, so why make such a thing of it?’ shot back Carole.

‘Because I’ve seen him watching me! Oh bien sur we used to say he should at least have a little fun in his life and why not let him watch us, but now I’m afraid of him. I am, Nathalie. I am!’

Hurriedly Herr Kohler pushed things aside on the dressing table to set his drinks down but knocked over the bottle of cologne that was always left open as an air-sweetener. Futilely he made a grab for it only to realize he was too late as it shattered on the concrete floor. ‘Verdammt!’ he swore and desperately searched his pockets for a cigarette until Carole gave him hers.

‘Merci,’ he said. ‘Christ, I needed this! Four girls and Albert knew them all. Did he watch them too?’

‘Getting undressed?’ asked Nathalie.

‘Fucking their lovers?’ went on Carole. ‘Celine was one of us, Inspector. The others were friends.’

‘And she was killed with that knife!’ wept Aurelienne. ‘I knew she was going to be next. I begged her not to go to the Hotel du Parc when Honore de Fleury came in here to give her that nightgown and told her to put it on. Albert knew what she was up to with Petain. I’m certain of it. Certain, do you understand?’

Svelte and looking taller than she was, the one called Nathalie lifted herself from that chair of hers, its back slipping between and behind her legs in one gracefully fluid motion. Putting a bare arm about the clarinet player’s shoulders, she kissed that tear-streaked cheek and, pressing her forehead against it, rocked her head from side to side, saying soothingly, ‘Petite, don’t worry so. Albert couldn’t possibly have killed Celine or any of the others. Mon Dieu, didn’t he leave flowers for you in your room last summer, in mine also, and now sometimes a gingerbread his mother has baked especially for him?’

And gazing up with superb china-blue eyes under bobbed and parted jet-black hair a la Madame Noelle Olivier-yes, damn it! thought Kohler – said, ‘It was nothing, Inspector. Albert overheard Lucie telling Aurelienne and Celine that she was going to have to go to Paris. Gaetan-Baptiste, her banker, was insisting on it and had …’

‘Had what?’

Ah merde! ‘Arranged everything.’

‘An abortion?’

‘She wasn’t going to refuse, Inspector,’ said Nathalie. ‘She couldn’t, she said. But for me, I think she wanted very much to keep the child.’

‘And Albert? How did he react?’