J. Janes - Tapestry

‘Inspector,’ said Laurent Louveau, concierge of this building and with some authority of his own, ‘ Monsieur le Juge hasn’t been in for some time.’

‘Don’t get difficult. It’s Elene Artur I’m interested in.’

Louveau tossed his head. ‘Has the girl done something she shouldn’t?’

‘Was she here last night?’

‘Why, please, would she have been if Monsieur le Juge wasn’t?’

Logic was one of the finer points of the French, their brand of it anyway, but there was no sense in arguing. ‘That’s what I’d like to find out, among other things.’

‘Then I must inform you that the girl wasn’t here either.’

‘Good. You’ve no idea how relieved I am. We’ll take the stairs. I don’t trust the lifts.’

Had this one not even noticed? ‘It shall be as you wish, Inspector, since the electricity is off in any case. The flat is on the third floor.’

‘And easy to a side staircase and entrance?’

Sacre nom de nom, what was this? ‘ Oui , but … but there’s a little bell above that entrance and I would have heard it, had that door not been locked as it was and is.’

‘ Aber naturlich. Ach, sorry. I keep switching languages. That means, of course.’

‘Monsieur the Lieutenant Krantz sometimes also forgets, as does the Mademoiselle Lammers. They make a big joke of it and tell me I’d best learn a proper language, but …’

‘Krantz … Isn’t he one of those who oversee the Bank of France?’

‘Ah, no. He is at the Majestic.’

The offices of General Heinrich von Stulpnagel, the military governor of France. ‘And the Mademoiselle Lammers? Thesima, was it, or Mady?’

‘Ursula. She’s also at the Majestic. A translator, as is the lieutenant.’

And probably working for the Verwaltungsstab, the administrative staff that dutifully subordinated every facet of the French economy to those of the Reich. Fully five hundred million francs a day in reparations and payments had to be coughed up for losing the war and housing one hundred thousand of the Wehrmacht in France, along with lots of others. Converted from its hotel rooms, there were now more than a thousand offices in the Majestic alone, and wasn’t it on the avenue Kleber at the corner of the avenue des Portugais and but a short walk to the avenue Foch and the SS, and hadn’t von Stulpnagel and Oberg served in the same regiment during that other war?

Of course they had, and yes, Von Stulpnagel left all ‘political’ matters, like the retaliatory shooting of hostages, to Oberg, thereby disassociating himself entirely from the extremes of the latter.

No one could have brought the Lido’s telephone caller here last night. They wouldn’t have dared.

The Club Mirage was a crash of noise. Packed to the limit with German uniforms, there wasn’t even standing room for one lone Surete, the bar impossible to approach.

Up onstage, all-but-naked girls, some nearly fifty, one sneezing at the ostrich plumes they wore, presented a shocking tableau of the boy-king Tutankhamen’s spate of pyramid building. Whips cracked. Those being punished cringed. Cymbals reverberated as a bleary-eyed sun began to set but faltered and the guards in their pleated loincloth-skirts stood sentinel with spears if not otherwise employed.

Merde, a tableau such as this could go on for hours! Even those at the bar had stopped attempting to quench their thirst.

‘St-Cyr, Surete, meine Herren. Entschuldigen Sie, bitte . I have to see if my partner’s here. It’s an emergency.’

Excuse me, please? Ach, what was this? ‘Piss off, Franzose .’

‘But …’ Nefertiti had turned to face the audience and raise her arms. The politically correct albino Nubian began to sponge her naked back while the sun threatened to drop right out of sight behind the screen of a rose-red horizon but decided to hesitate.

‘Verfick dich!’ came a Wehrmacht hiss. Fuck off.

Jumping and waving a desperate arm to signal the bar was useless, but something must have been said, for as Nefertiti’s pseudo-Nubian sponged her ankles and calves, Remi, with the face of a mountain that was all crags, clefts and precipices, motioned.

A pastis, a double, had been set on the zinc, the Corsican adding a touch of water to cloud it green as if by magic. ‘Down that, mon ami . And another. You’re going to need it.’

‘Hermann … ? Has something happened to him? To Gabrielle?’

That massive head with its thick, jet-black, wavy gangster’s hair gave an all but imperceptible nod to indicate the dressing rooms as the crowd erupted into cheers through which came calls for the slaves to pluck their feathers and for the guards to drop their spears and loincloths.

Torchlight pierced the darkness of the judge’s flat. Briefly Kohler shone the light over a chinoiserie panel of leaves, vines and exotic birds before letting it fall to the Louis XVI table where Rouget would have left hat, walking stick and gloves. Judges were way higher up than detectives; judges had friends and friends of friends. Lieber Christus im Himmel, why did it have to happen to Louis and himself? The building had given no hint of warning. From somewhere distant, though, came the metallic clunking of a hot-water radiator.

There was no dominant smell except for that of the mustiness of old buildings and antique furniture. ‘Please use the candles, Inspector,’ the concierge had earlier said. Candles weren’t common anymore. Even in the South, in the former Free Zone, they hadn’t been seen by most since that first winter of 1940-1941.

Torchlight found her dark-blue leather high heels. They’d been soaked through last night but were now dry and needing a good cleaning and bit of polish. ‘Louis,’ he softly said. ‘I don’t think I can go through with this.’ Questions, Hermann, Louis would have said. You must concentrate on those. The time of entry? That call she made from the Lido last night didn’t come in to the quartier du Faubourg du Roule’s commissariat until 11.13 p.m. There would have been lots of time for her to have joined the judge at his table between sets …

Lots of time for others to have seen her sitting there with him. She had a child-was she married to a POW? She hadn’t been feeling well, had gone home early, the stage doorman said, but when, damn it, when? Early in a place like the Lido could mean anything up to midnight at the least.

Torchlight shone into the salle de sejour to settle on a gilded sconce. The cigarette lighter on the glass-topped coffee table was heavy. The matching cigarette box with its tortoiseshell repouse hadn’t had its lid completely replaced. Had her assailant dipped into it?

He knew she was here. Instinct told him this. Detective instinct.

Resting on the mantelpiece behind glass was a framed poster: Une Nuit a Chang-Rai, 7 Mai 1926 at the Magic City. Had the judge had a taste for showgirls even then?

Deep blue irises encircled soft pink roses that surrounded a scantily clad eighteen-year-old pseudo- indochinoise dancer. Slender, upraised arms crisscrossed above the coolie hat she wore. The look was squint-eye, the black lashes long and straight, the short hair curled in about her neck, and wasn’t the thing a parody Elene Artur must have definitely not appreciated, the judge a hypocrite? The dark-blue heels were every bit the same as those he’d just found.

‘Elene Artur,’ he said again, and weren’t names important? Hadn’t all the dead of that other war had names that had counted for something?

A vitrine held enamelled boxes, spills of jewellery, strands of pearls and beads, Faberge eggs, Sevres porcelain figurines, a Venus shy;, a marchioness … Had Hercule the Smasher used them to tempt his girlfriends into doing what he wanted or to pay them off by letting them choose some little memento as they left, one that said in no uncertain terms, Ferme-la, cherie ? The kitchen was hung with copper pots and pans, Judge Rouget, President du Tribunal special du Departement de la Seine, immune to the scrap-metal drives that demanded everyone else cough up such items. The copper-sheathed zinc bathtub hadn’t been used to hold her corpse but the bidet had cigar ashes floating in it. A Choix Supreme? he demanded. Had Vivienne Rouget chosen to offer this Kripo one of those not because the Vichy gossip could be used if needed to shield that daughter of hers, but because she had damned well known or suspected this might happen?