Jackdaws

“Exactly,” Flick said, and she pulled the trigger twice. The gun boomed in the confined space. Blood and something else spurted from the woman’s face and splashed on the skirt of her elegant green dress, and she slumped forward soundlessly.

Jelly flinched and Greta turned away. Even Paul went white. Only Ruby remained expressionless.

They were all silent for a moment. Then Flick said, “Let’s get out of here.”

CHAPTER 42

IT WAS SIX o’clock in the evening when Dieter parked outside the house in the rue du Bois. His sky-blue car was covered with dust and dead insects after the long journey. As he got out, the evening sun slipped behind a cloud, and the suburban street was thrown into shadow. He shivered.

He took off his motoring goggles-he had been driving with the top down-and ran his fingers through his hair to flatten it. “Wait for me here, please, Hans,” he said. He wanted to be alone with Stephanie.

Opening the gate and entering the front garden, he noticed that Mademoiselle Lemas’s Simca Cinq was gone. The garage door was open and the garage was empty. Was Stephanie using the car? But where would she have gone? She should be waiting here for him, guarded by two Gestapo men.

He strode up the garden path and pulled the bell rope. The ring of the bell died away, leaving the house strangely silent. He looked through the window into the front parlor, but that room was always empty. He rang again. There was no response. He bent down to look through the letter box, but he could not see much: part of the staircase, a painting of a Swiss mountain scene, and the door to the kitchen, half open. There was no movement.

He glanced at the house next door and saw a face hastily withdraw from a window, and a curtain fall back into place.

He walked around the side of the house and through the courtyard to the rear garden. Two windows were broken and the back door stood open. Fear grew in his heart. What had happened here?

“Stéphanie?” he called. There was no answer.

He stepped into the kitchen.

At first he did not understand what he was looking at. A bundle was tied to a kitchen chair with ordinary household string. It looked like a woman’s body with a disgusting mess on top. After a moment, his police experience told him that the disgusting thing was a human head that had been shot. Then he saw that the dead woman was wearing odd shoes, one black and one brown, and he understood she was Stephanie. He let out a howl of anguish, covered his eyes with his hands, and sank slowly to his knees, sobbing.

After a minute, he dragged his hands from his eyes and forced himself to look again. The detective in him noted the blood on the skirt of her dress and concluded that she had been shot from behind. Perhaps that was merciful; she might not have suffered the terror of knowing she was about to die. There had been two shots, he thought. It was the large exit wounds that had made her lovely face look so dreadful, destroying her eyes and nose, leaving her sensual lips bloodstained but intact. Had it not been for the shoes, he would not have known her. His eyes filled with tears until she became a blur.

The sense of loss was like a wound. He had never known a shock like this sudden knowledge that she was gone. She would not throw him that proud glance again; she would no longer turn heads walking through restaurants; he would never again see her pull silk stockings over her perfect calves. Her style and her wit, her fears and her desires, were all canceled, wiped out, ended. He felt as if he had been shot, and had lost part of himself. He whispered her name: at least he had that.

Then he heard a voice behind him.

He cried out, startled.

It came again: a wordless grunt, but human. He leaped to his feet, turning around and wiping the moisture from his eyes. For the first time he noticed two men on the floor. Both wore uniforms. They were Stephanie’s Gestapo bodyguards. They had failed to protect her, but at least they had given their lives trying.

Or one of them had.

One lay still, but the other was trying to speak. He was a young chap, nineteen or twenty, with black hair and a small mustache. His uniform cap lay on the linoleum floor beside his head.

Dieter stepped across the room and knelt beside him. He noted exit wounds in the chest: the man had been shot from behind. He was lying in a pool of blood. His head jerked and his lips were moving. Dieter put his ear to the man’s mouth.

“Water,” the man whispered.

He was bleeding to death. They always asked for water near the end, Dieter knew-he had seen it in the desert. He found a cup, filled it at the tap, and held it to the man’s lips. He drank it all, the water dribbling down his chin onto his blood-soaked tunic.