J. Janes - Carousel

Louis explained things but it was as if Pacquet had already been briefed and had forgotten her. ‘Identity?’ his voice leapt.

‘Not yet, Chief Coroner. The papers were stolen. Records will know him.’

‘You hope.’

It was a prayer freely given.

Pacquet examined the gaping wound that had cut through to the spinal cord. ‘His neck’s been broken. The head was pulled back like this,’ he demonstrated, ‘by cupping the bastard beneath the chin and pressing the knee against the centre of the back. Tied for good measure and then the throat opened. A straightforward gangland killing, Louis. Vengeance! The pinstriped suit, the broad lapels of the typical mackerel – one has only to look at him to know his nature. The candy-striped tie. One ring finger is missing – you would not have noticed that.’

The little finger of the left hand had been hacked off. The ring had been too tight. A bad job.

The finger was lying on the floor, stuck to the congealed blood.

‘As a matter of fact, I did notice it.’

‘Please don’t swear under your breath. The Surete’s most infamous murder squad should be more forthcoming with their lungs.’

The victim’s arms had been pulled down on either side of the chicken’s tail, then tied and roped to the ankles so that he straddled the thing in a most incongruous position. The rope had then been passed up and over the back a few times before being securely knotted to the brass pole upon which the chicken was mounted.

‘He’d not have fallen off,’ came the dry comment. ‘The killer must have searched for this among the workings, after he’d dragged the body over to the chicken.’

The rope was flicked with a forefinger.

‘We’re working on it,’ said St-Cyr.

Sufficient play had been allowed for the chicken and the corpse to rise and fall as the carousel went round. A nice touch.

Kohler let the two of them fuss. The ticket booth attracted him.

The cage was just big enough for a girl to stand in. A small seat, hinged to the back, would give momentary ease when lifted up and fixed into place. Rolls of tickets hung handily above, on either side of the brass bars of the wicket.

Looking out of the cage, he saw the boardings that had been put up to mothball the carousel: lions and tigers leaping through fiery hoops to whips, or standing on hind legs; an elephant, a monkey … The monkey’s cup,’ the flic Clement Cueillard had said.

‘Come to think of it, where the hell has the monkey got to?’

It was a thought.

The cash box was empty, but that would have been done as a matter of course at the close of each day. Robbery couldn’t have been the motive, not the few sous this thing would take in.

The ticket booth was fixed to the carousel next to its outer edge, and went round and round with it. At the end of each ride the attendant would step out of her booth to unhook the chain and let the riders off, taking back the tickets and tearing each in half. Then she’d get behind the wicket to take the money in and hand out fresh tickets to the new batch of riders.

The system had its faults. When the boards were down there’d have been ample opportunity for the kids to jump on and off, snitching rides at will. The little nippers would have driven the attendant and the operator crazy. The success of the venture had depended on the riders being honest!

‘Perhaps that’s why the apache was hired to run the thing?’ Or had he been hired at all?

Kohler ran his hands over the black lacquer of the tiny counter. The attendant’s knees would have touched the iron door. The girl would have chafed her stockings against it and worried about them. If she’d had any left. These days the girls used a wash of beige, drew lines up the backs of their gams and went barelegged. Her shoes would have scuffed the floor. She’d have been like a little bird in a cage.

A bird that had called herself Christiane Baudelaire? Was that it?

When he ran his eyes up into the vaulted dome of the booth he found a gold-painted hook, and reaching up, let a finger wrap itself around the thing. A cage within a cage. Christiane Baudelaire.

Louis was waiting for a ticket. Pacquet had seen enough.

‘Dead a good thirty hours, Hermann, so exactly as we’d thought.’

Nine, nine-thirty, Wednesday night.

‘A vengeance killing. Pacquet’s leaving us to sort out the details. He only came here at the request of your boss.’

The Sturmbannfuhrer Walter Boemelburg.

‘What’s Walter really got to do with it, Louis?’

‘That I wish I knew, my old one. Ah merde , but I do.’

‘The girl had one of those coins placed squarely in the middle of her forehead, Louis.’

The Frog’s eyes were moist. ‘It is the custom always to pour gasoline on the fire, Hermann. He who holds the can determines the size of the blaze.’

‘The avenue Foch?’

‘Perhaps.’

The General Oberg, the Butcher of Poland, and his deputy, the Obersturmbannfuhrer Helmut Knochen. The SS at Number 72 the avenue Foch!

‘Louis, whoever ran this thing had plenty of coal and firewood.’

‘Yes … yes, I am aware of that, Hermann. While virtually the whole of Paris freezes, some have all the luck.’

‘The girl’s client?’ asked Kohler, not liking the drift.

Louis only nodded sadly, then shrugged as he walked away. The chips were down and the poor Frog knew it.

*The rabbit hutch (the brothel) of the White Birds

The shutters were drawn, the street was empty. At 5.30 a.m. Berlin time the curfew had broken, but the dawn was still some hours away.

St-Cyr stood alone on the sidewalk at the entrance of the courtyard that led to the Hotel of the Silent Life.

There was only a small wooden placard to mark the location of the hotel. They’d not been able to afford bronze when what had once been the villa of a bourgeois merchant had lost its innocence and become a pension.

Armed with Hermann’s Gestapo flashlight, he’d been searching for the girl’s papers but had come out here to experience the city’s awakening.

Those that had stayed late had begun to seep homeward or to their places of work. Here in the quartier Goutte-d’Or, on the rue Polonceau it was no different. All over Paris there would be this same indefinable hush. It was as if guilt drove the honest to scurry or to coast one’s bicycle when passing others in the dark, instinct having given warning and the gently ticking breath of the sprocket answer.

The wind in a girl’s skirt in summer; the clasp of her overcoat as now.

The opening of a door directly across the street broke his thoughts. He knew a bicycle was being pushed out on to the road.

‘Marianne, take care.’ A whisper.

‘I will, Georges. Until tomorrow, my love, I die with waiting and hunger.’

‘Until tomorrow.’

Marianne … Could she not have had some other name? Must God do this to him?

St-Cyr held his breath. The door softly closed and the girl rode silently away, letting her bicycle gather its effortless momentum.

Quickly he crossed the street but did not shine the light over the place. It was a shop of some sort – a sign-painter, a tailor, a shoe-repair – Montmartre, like Belleville, was the earth of such things.

The window glass was cold, the surface a mirrored lake through which the bottom of what Paris had become would be certain to appear.

He chanced the light but briefly. It was a bakery and patisserie in which the sugared almonds were not real but made of pressed paper that had been allowed to dry in the summer sun then had been painted or dipped in glue and covered with a sprinkling of coarse salt.

The eclairs were as plastic and everyone would know this and no longer bother to ask if they were real.