J. Janes - Mannequin

Apart from this, it was a good film, but he hadn’t the time for it and when he ousted the man next to her, Giselle didn’t even look up or pay attention to the disturbance but only stared at the screen.

A tear trickled down a soft cheek, another followed it. ‘Giselle …’

‘They … they have arrested him. He … he is now going to kill himself rather than face prison.’

Quickly she crossed herself and kissed her mittened fingertips, was all broken up about the ending just because the fantasy of hope had turned out to be the harsh reality of life.

Handcuffed, the thief cut his own throat with a penknife. End of Pepe. Would that all such thieves and punks would do the same.

‘There … there will be no escape when this war is over,’ she said, a torn whisper as she dried her eyes.

The film was late due to a ‘power failure’. It was nearly 11.00 p.m. when the Metro would close. Everyone else didn’t bother to stand for the anthem of the Occupier but beat it. They were soon left alone in the dark. ‘Look, I’ll do what I can, cherie. You know I will. Hey, I was only just thinking about it.’

She had short, straight, jet-black hair with a fringe, strong, decisive brows, good hips, lips, legs and all the rest. Magnificent violet eyes, a lovely milk-white throat.

She was only twenty-two years of age, half Greek, half Midi French, could pass for someone else. Was not stupid and would use her brains.

‘The resistants, the ‘patriots,’ will kill me,’ she said. ‘They will strip me naked, Herr Kohler, then they’ll beat me as those from the rue Lauriston did not so long ago, isn’t that correct? And then they will stone me to death.’

The rue Lauriston … She was refering to a previous case. ‘Hey, what’s with the Herr Kohler bit? It’s Hermann you’re talking to.’

Entirely not her fault, she had been badly roughed up in that other episode by gangsters of the French Gestapo and still bore the bruises and the memories of it.

‘Come on, let’s pick up Oona. I have to see Louis. It’s urgent.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s finished, Hermann. Your little menage is over. Me, I am going back to work so as to be fucked by Frenchmen!’

‘Oh no you’re not’

‘Am I too good for my fellow countrymen, Herr Haupsturmfuhrer?’

‘Of course not. You’re too good to be a whore.’

‘And you-you are saving me from that? You with your great big Bavarian cock?’

‘Come on. A girl is missing, Giselle. We have to find her before they kill her.’

The Club Mirage was on the rue Delambre in Montparnasse. Squeezed among the thirsty tunics of Fritz-haired men in grey-green and navy or air-force blue, St-Cyr tossed back the pastis with a gulp and fiercely thrust the glass across the bar. ‘Another,’ he said. Eight hundred Wehrmacht troops on leave hooted, cheered and ogled the chorus line of naked girls and grandmothers who should have known better, while the band, preferring noise above all else, blew their guts out.

It was pandemonium- Kultur with a capital K! Under chartreuse floodlights, emerald ostrich plumes and brilliant red pasties moved in a layered haze of tobacco smoke, farts and sweat that had a life of its own.

Leon Rivard, the one with the face like ground meat, tossed him a quizzical eye but knew enough not to ask what the trouble was. ‘This one is on the house,’ he shouted. ‘The last one also.’

‘Merci. ’

Downed again. A fire in the belly and the brain. A real tough guy who was pissed off at something. Ah yes. ‘Hey, Gabrielle isn’t mad at you, Inspector. She just cut her holiday short to come back to work. Okay?’

‘It’s Chief Inspector St-Cyr to you, and she’s far too good a singer for a dump like this.’

Rivard grinned. One of two brothers who owned and ran the place, the Corsican fluted, ‘Just as you please, monsieur,’ before fist-wiping the zinc and refilling the glass a fourth time.

The girls up on stage were thrusting their bottoms at the troops. The roar grew deafening. St-Cyr added a drop of water for propriety’s sake and gloomily watched as the pale yellowish-green of the pastis became milky. ‘Hermann,’ he grunted disconsolately, as he fingered his glass in thought. Everything with his partner would have to be out in the open this time. There must be no secrets if they were to find Joanne. He would have to tell him the engraver’s son had been forging papers for the Resistance. He would have to trust Hermann not to turn the boy in. There might be a connection to something the Bavarian had uncovered.

The pastis, pre-war and 90 proof, was kept under the bar not only because of its rarity but because most Germans found its strong taste of liquorice revolting. The girls were gone, the stage empty, the hush expectant. Perhaps a minute passed but not an eye was diverted. Even the thirsty who thronged the bar had put down their glasses or rapidly shaken their heads when more was offered.

In the shimmering, sky-blue, sleeveless sheath that was her trademark, with diamonds at her wrists and neck, Gabrielle Arcuri walked on stage. Thousands of tiny seed pearls, in vertical rows on the fabric, rippled, electrifying the place with her gracefulness and fluidity. Tall and willowy, she had an absolutely gorgeous figure. The hair was not blonde but the soft, soft shade of a very fine brandy, the eyes not just blue but an exquisite shade of violet.

She clasped her long, slender hands before her as a schoolgirl might and shyly smiled, then broadly grinned and shrugged as if, having suddenly made up her mind about them, she could now accept them into her heart. ‘Mes cher amis, I have a song for you of love. Of lovers who have been separated by trouble and now do not know if each still has in them the love for the other that was once there. They meet in a cinema under the cone of light from the projector. Cigarette smoke filters up into this light but the film, it means nothing to them. Nothing, you understand. They are sitting side by side, not even daring to hold hands, not knowing what the other is thinking.’

She sang. She gave herself to it totally and the song brought tears to every last man in the place. She held them in the palms of her outstretched hands which implored them to understand the tragedy of life, of war, of hardship and separation.

A breath was caught, a note was kept until her lungs threatened to burst and all at once there was a collective sigh and then a single shout, the voices of men who knew of the battlefields and wept for home. She brought the house down.

‘Louis … Hey, Louis, sorry I’m late.’

It was Hermann. ‘Your arm? What’s happened, please?’

‘It’s nothing. A punk called Peguy.’

‘Fortune? Ah merde, did you …?’

St-Cyr saw that Oona and Giselle were with him. He touched his lips with the tip of a troubled tongue and plucked nervously at his moustache. ‘Fortune isn’t to be trusted, Hermann. Exactly how well did you destroy him in the eyes of his friends?’

‘Completely.’

St-Cyr turned swiftly to the barman and hissed, ‘A table. Quickly!’

There were objections from the troops. Even the chanteuse had to wait while they were seated but laid the soft down of a pacifying voice over the ruckus by asking the displaced to join her on stage.

She put her arms around them. They grinned shyly and stood with her like great dumb drunken blockheads not knowing what to do.

With her fingers trailing in their departing hands, she smiled at each of them, then sang as they left the stage, mollified and coddled in the cocoon of her generous nature.

Giselle le Roy could only remember standing naked before men such as these, hearing their hoots and thrusting catcalls, their hush as her bruised and battered body had been exposed to them by the gangsters of the rue Lauriston.