J. Janes: Salamander

Brusquely he shook hands with Robichaud and made excuses about having to tidy up for dinner. ‘The wife,’ he grunted. ‘She’ll have purchased the last of her silks by now and I must examine them. Have the lists compiled, Herr Kohler. You can bring them over at dawn. Gestapo Mueller wants this solved before it happens again and wishes me to give the matter my fullest attention. Even here in France people have a right to know they are safe under our administration. Heil Hitler.’

Shit!

They watched as he strode the short distance to his car. Robichaud sucked grimly on his cheeks and held his breath in exasperation.

It was Hermann who said, ‘You have our sympathies.’

Lyon’s fire chief nodded. ‘But you have not had to introduce him at far too many banquets, monsieur, and you do not have to answer for your sins or blame yourself for letting this one happen. You see, messieurs, I was in the cinema. It was myself who turned in the alarm and unfortunately he knows of this.’

There was dead silence but only for a moment. St-Cyr took the bottle from him and cautiously filled the fire chief’s cup. ‘Two women?’ he asked, pleasantly enough.

There was a hiss. ‘Of this I am certain! I saw them vanish into a tram-car right over there.’

Right across the square beyond the fountain and obscured by it at the moment of escape, right in front of the Palais des Arts.

It was on the tip of St-Cyr’s tongue to ask, Why did you not blow your whistle and summon a gendarme to chase after them? but he let the matter rest. Obviously Robichaud had had his hands full.

Finishing his cigarette, he carefully put it out, then handed the butt to Hermann for his little tin. These days tobacco was in such short supply it was the least he could do. The crowd seemed intent on their every move. Again he cautiously looked around the square-always there was the possibility that the arsonist would hang about to watch the fun and come back again and again. Sometimes they would offer help or pitch right in unasked. Sometimes they would even turn in the alarm and make suggestions as to how the fire might have started. But not Robichaud, never him. Other things perhaps but not arson.

No one seemed out of the ordinary until St-Cyr spotted a lone girl with a bicycle. She had only just arrived and now stood uncertainly where Herr Weidling’s car had been. She had come up the rue Paul Chenavard. Her carrier basket held a cloth bag that was square and no doubt full of books. About twenty-five or-six but looking a little younger. Still a student? he wondered apprehensively, but thought not. Of medium height, with short, light brown hair and a fringe. The deep, wide-set eyes earnestly searched. The pale oval of her face was not wide or narrow but something in between. There was no lipstick or rouge that he could discern from this distance. A bookseller? he asked. A librarian? A girl in a cocoa-brown beret and long white scarf that was tied under her chin and thrown over the shoulders of a fawn-coloured double-breasted overcoat. A grey plaid skirt and dark grey woollen argyle socks that would come to her knees. Flat-heeled, brown leather walking shoes, not winter boots. Knitted beige gloves gripped the handlebars. Gloves were not so easy to knit, and he wondered if she had made them and thought that perhaps she had. Trained in those arts, then, he said. Yes, she has that capable look about her. Not beautiful, not plain. Does she keep house for someone in addition to her job? Two women …

‘Hermann, wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.’

‘She’s already turning to leave, Louis. She’s seen you looking her way, dummkopf .’

‘Damn!’

Lyon’s fire marshal said nothing but he, too, had noticed the girl. Robichaud seemed a decent enough fellow. Tough and experienced and carrying a cross no fire chief would wish to bear. A man of middle age and grey, a veteran with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour to prove it. A father? wondered St-Cyr. A man who, like most these days, worried about his pension and had gone to work under the Nazis grudgingly, no doubt, but out of necessity and to ensure that pension. We French are realists, he said sadly to himself, especially the Lyonnais.

It was Kohler who, having gathered up the cups and the thermos, returned them to the pumper truck, then led the way back into the ruins. Only the neck of the cognac bottle protruded from his already bulging overcoat pocket.

The girl with the bicycle might have a relative among the victims. Perhaps a husband she didn’t want or a former lover? he asked himself.

Crime … it brought out the worst in one. It made one see motive behind everything, even the most insignificant of things.

Yet the girl continued to haunt him as her presence would Louis. Why had she come for such a brief look? Why had she fled before their eyes?

No shred of film had escaped the fire. Funnelling flames through to its skylight, the projectionist’s booth, never roomy at the best of times, had been turned into an inferno. Bent and twisted film canisters and other rubbish were now heaped in the far corners and against that wall by the pressure from the last hoses. Only the twin projectors, once magnificent pieces of complex engineering, stood sentinel but in ruins on their jackleg pedestals whose tripod feet were securely bolted to the floor.

A lover of the cinema and a cinematographer at heart, St-Cyr ran his eyes ruefully over the control panel. Eighteen Bakelite-handled switches had operated the lights, the screen, the curtains and the sound system. Subdued lighting at the sides, please, behind torch-bearing Venuses that were no more. Spotlights on the manager if some sort of an announcement were to be made-an air-raid warning perhaps. Starlight on the ceiling. Now the full or half-moon and the shooting star. The magic of the cinema.

At once, the whole thing was there before him, that sense of power and control the projectionist must feel, that sense of boredom too, for how many films-even a masterpiece like La Bete humaine- can be seen thirty or forty times?

Picking through the canisters, he uncovered the charred remains of the projectionist’s stool and beneath it, a woman’s shoe that had survived only in its spiked heel and shank. Had someone been in the booth alleviating the boredom? There were no bodies. Presumably the projectionist and his visitor had survived. Perhaps the shoe was from an earlier time and had no bearing on the case.

Searching, he found a warped cigarette case, not expensive. With difficulty, he pried it open but there was no name. A woman’s, he said, pocketing it and the remains of the shoe.

A fountain pen was next. Had the woman come for payment? Had the projectionist been writing her a cheque? Had she forced him to do so?

All manner of possibilities came to mind, the cinematographer discarding most of them as soon as they flashed on the screen of his mind. Once the feature film had started, the projectionist would have rewound the newsreel on the other projector before placing it back in its canister. Since all newsreels these days were German and from the Propaganda Staffel, this had to be done carefully, but had the woman arrived by then? Was she sitting on the stool? No cigarette smoking would have been allowed up here but plenty broke the rule and some had suffered as a consequence. Photographic and motion picture film had a nitrate base that made it highly inflammable. Perhaps she had taken out her cigarettes and he had told her to put them away?

Those two women had come in late. The feature film had already been in progress … Had this woman been one of them? Was it too much to hope for?

A lipstick was uncovered, the thin tube still bearing traces of its fake gold plating. A cheap compact followed, its mirror gone, the thing open-dropped-had it been dropped in panic at the cry of Fire?