Carousel, p.18
Carousel, page 18
The priest paused, but pausing would do no good. ‘I argued with the Corporal but they loaded everything on to their trucks, even the furniture. He gave Marie two bolts of cloth with which to make new dresses – just flung them off the back of one of the trucks. He had so much of it. All his, all those things. The accumulations of two generations, father and son. They’re bastards. Bastards!’
The cigarette did little to calm the old priest’s nerves. Indeed, tobacco seemed only to make him more agitated and angry. The acid of the years came forward.
‘The sisters Gagnon,’ he spat. ‘They are lying. Lying, Inspector! The Captain Dupuis is innocent of such a hideous crime. I’ve warned them repeatedly. I’ve told them both they must stop picking on a man with one leg, a veteran! But at the ages of eighty-seven and eighty-three, God could tell them and they’d still turn the deaf ear!’
Delacroix took a quick drag. ‘Merde! must I go down on my knees to those two old bitches, eh? Dupuis is nothing!’ He tossed the hand of insignificance and spat tobacco from his lower lip. ‘Oh, for sure he looks at the girls – which of you doesn’t, eh? and the younger, the prettier – you can’t tell me you haven’t ravaged a few in that mind of yours, eh? But the Captain is incapable of killing anyone.’
St-Cyr took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. ‘He was a soldier, was he not?’
‘Verdun. Yes … yes, he could have killed. Does that make you feel better?’
The pipe was forgotten. ‘Why not say the Captain was incapable for other reasons?’
He’d show the Sûreté! He’d not let up now, not when things were going so well! ‘Dupuis often frequented the houses – Mme Lauzon’s, Mme Belle’s …’
‘Yes, yes, but was it always the youngest he chose?’
The Sûreté’s eyes sought him out. The pipe, tobacco pouch and matches had yet to be put to use. ‘He … he had strange tastes, Inspector. They had to be suitable, you understand, but those two old women are wrong. They’re simply being vindictive. It wasn’t Dupuis. It was Charles Audit if it was anyone from around here.’
The pipe was packed but the effort took time. At last the match was struck. ‘M Charles Audit?’
Delacroix drew deeply on his cigarette to let the impasse grow. The further they got from discussing Father David the better, but should he air the parish linen, should he not listen to God?
‘I’ve no proof, except that I saw Monsieur Charles early on that evening coming out of the courtyard of the Villa Audit. I’d gone to have my supper but, of course, the cafés were all closed, the streets so empty it was not difficult to notice a man in great haste who was afraid he might be caught.’
‘Are you certain it was Charles Audit?’
‘Positive. I’ve known the brothers for years. He was some distance ahead of me, carrying two suitcases which he left behind those barrels in the courtyard out there.’
Two suitcases … St-Cyr hesitated. Why had the priest not called out to Charles Audit? Why hadn’t he offered to help carry the suitcases? ‘And you didn’t tell the police?’
Delacroix again tossed a hand. ‘I had no reason to. At the time I didn’t suspect him of the girl’s murder. Besides, the police had better things to do and so did I. Two suitcases are not much, even though Monsieur Charles did not own the Villa Audit and should not have been taking things from it.’
The Germans had been at the gates of the city, Paris all but deserted but what had happened to now make him suspect Charles Audit? ‘Tell me about this other girl.’
Father Eugène looked away. Was there sadness at the memory of her, or relief that they’d passed beyond Father David and the murder of Corporal Schraum?
‘Her name was Mila Zavitz. She was a Polish refugee, a very pleasant and presentable girl from Cracow. M Paul junior took her into his shop over the objections of his wife, to which, I must confess, I agreed. The girl was quite attractive, not what you’d think at all. The wife had reasons enough to worry.’
‘When would that have been?’
Such eagerness for the sordid. ‘In the late spring of 1938. Mila was only seventeen. She and her family lived over in Belleville, in a cellar off the rue Armand Carel, near the parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The father was a shoemaker. Mila spoke delightful French. She was a very well-educated girl. The parents could speak so little of our language, but she …’
Father Eugène drew on his cigarette and held the smoke in for the longest time. ‘She played the piano – classical things. I let her … I could not have kept her from the instrument in our parish hall even though she was a Jew.’
And one whose murder on the eve of the Defeat would have counted for little?
Saddened by the thought, St-Cyr drew on his pipe. He’d leave Charles Audit for the moment, would keep his voice very calm, for the death of this other girl was hurting the conscience of the old priest in more ways than one. Delacroix had been forced to face up to his anti-Semitism. ‘Did Mademoiselle Jeanne come to tell you of the body she had discovered?’
Delacroix blinked at this but did not turn from gazing sadly out at the street. ‘Yes. I asked Father David to look after her and I went to see if it was true. Mademoiselle Jeanne has always been afraid of men, Inspector. Ever since I have known her it’s been the same. When one is a priest, one bears the agonizing of other souls, even their darkest secrets and, yes, desires.’
‘And the girl? How did you find her?’
‘Dead, as Mademoiselle Jeanne will have told you. Ravaged, strangled.’
Was Father Eugène not lying a little? ‘How certain are you that she was in fact “ravaged”?’
Ah damn! The Sûreté’s detective saw more than he let on. ‘Her clothes … the attitude of the body …’
‘Yes, yes, but was there anything else?’ He’d push the priest now. ‘Semen? The ejaculation?’
St-Cyr waited. A cloud of pipesmoke would be useful perhaps. Delacroix was struggling with his own soul for he knew only too well what the ‘ejaculation’ looked like. All priests do.
‘It … it was on her pubic hairs, on her stomach. Some … some of it had collected in her belly button.’
Then the killer had withdrawn himself at some sudden noise – footsteps perhaps, in fright perhaps, or had it simply been because of guilt, because of a realization of what he’d done?
Mila Zavitz, age twenty, a Polish refugee, a Jew.
‘What makes you now want to accuse Charles Audit of this girl’s murder, Father, and that other killing, that of Christabelle Audit, his granddaughter? Please, I know you are linking the two deaths to him. Just give me your reasons.’
Delacroix crossed himself and muttered a prayer of absolution. ‘Monsieur Charles spent fifteen years on Devil’s Island for the attempted murder of his brother, Inspector, nearly six more years in the jungles of Brazil and Colombia. He was a man who had been betrayed by a brother seven years younger than himself.’
‘M Antoine Audit.’
‘When Charles returned to Paris in 1926 he was a changed man, no longer the bourgeois shopkeeeper. Though I saw him rarely, there was much hatred in him. Oh for sure, he lived for his carousel and his granddaughter, but he hated also and myself, may God forgive me if I am wrong, believe he waited only for the moment to repay his brother.’
‘Revenge is at the heart of darkness; vengeance is its sweet success.’
‘He came back for his suitcases only to find Mila in the courtyard. Since he’d stolen the things from the villa, he had to kill her.’
‘Why?’ The priest was edgy.
‘Because she knew him, Inspector. Mila often went to the parc des Buttes-Chaumont on her afternoon off and on Sundays. She would have seen him at the carousel. She spoke of him and of his granddaughter. I remember her once saying, “Those two, they are so close. It’s as if the one loves the other and she reminds him of her grandmother.”’
‘Michèle-Louise Prévost.’
‘Yes, yes, that one.’
‘Could M Antoine have withdrawn the charge of attempted murder he brought against his brother?’
‘He could have. A misfired pistol – myself I have prayed for this at the time. But he chose not to. Instead, at the age of thirty, M Charles went to the tropics, to hell itself, and Madame Charles left the house and went to Périgord with M Antoine.’
‘She was expecting a child.’
‘Yes … yes, a girl – Christabelle’s mother. That one died in childbirth at the age of fifteen.’
‘Did Michèle-Louise raise Christabelle?’
Father Eugène shook his head. ‘Not after the age of six. That’s when Charles came home and bought the carousel. From then on he raised Christabelle himself with the aid of a housekeeper. They didn’t come here to this quartier, not to my knowledge, and I hear most things that happen sooner or later. Michèle-Louise could not have been much of a mother. She was not a good woman, Inspector. She was too loose, too busy with her “art-work” and her friends.’
‘And you’re certain the Captain Dupuis could not have killed Christabelle any more than he could have killed Mila Zavitz?’
‘Lonely men are always suspect, Inspector, but fear is a terrible thing. The few droplets of blood Mademoiselle Jeanne saw on the Captain’s shirt could just as easily have come from these, the cuts and nicks of shaving. There weren’t many of them – I examined the shirt myself at the local préfecture. The sisters have had it in for the Captain ever since he got the better of them in one of the shops. A last two bottles of sherry, I believe, or was it Madeira?’ He gave a shrug. ‘Of just such little insults are mountains made and the avalanche of nightmares begun again.’
‘Was there no blood on the girl?’
‘A little. In … in the area of her … her sexual parts and on the legs, the thighs.’
‘So M Charles could have killed her to protect himself for having robbed the house that had once been his own?’
‘Yes. The law had been broken.’
How close to the truth was the priest treading? ‘Did you see the contents of those two suitcases, Father? Did you open them?’ he asked harshly.
‘No, I did not open them. They were locked, but I can tell you that they were heavy.’
‘And when you saw Mila’s body, they were no longer there?’
‘That is correct. He’d pushed the trash barrels back. He was quite strong. The years on Devil’s Island had changed him, as I’ve said.’
St-Cyr nodded. There was so much more they needed to know, but one could ask only so much at any one time. ‘Why is it that you feel M Charles Audit could also have killed the granddaughter he loved so much?’
The priest tossed his head and shrugged. ‘It doesn’t make any sense but me, I feel he did.’
‘Could it have been Madame Minou’s son, Roland?’
Delacroix fingered the crucifix he carried in a pocket. He’d come to the end of the cigarette, must remember to save the butt. Always these days there was something to remember, and the wine … he’d have to have just a little of it. ‘Roland Minou … Yes, yes, I suppose if you could find him, that one might well have done it too, but he’d have had to have a good reason.’
‘Cheating?’
Father Eugène’s gaze narrowed. ‘Yes. Yes, cheating. If he’d thought he’d paid good money for something that wasn’t what he’d been told it was. He’s a mean-minded little gangster, a young man without a conscience. That silly woman dotes on him but he’s played her for a sucker once too often. Still, you might have something there, Inspector. Yes, you certainly might!’
The old priest grinned with relish at the thought. Belligerently the back teeth were ground. ‘If he ever shows his face around here, send him down to see me, eh? I’ll teach him not to rob the parish poor-box. I’ll teach him not to steal my wine and silver.’
I’ll teach him. Yes, yes I will, as God is my witness.
God and the Devil.
6
The dream was different, the dream was very real. Another nightmare! Incongruously the carousel had been transported to what must be Devil’s Island. The galloping stallions slavered. The ducks cried out for water. The heat sucked the moisture from their wild dark eyes, deadening them to wicked slits as the thing came round … round, the animals all going up and down, faster, faster, the music jarring, jarring … A girl in a cage of bright-red iron and gold wire, a laughing girl who took the money in, the money. Naked … naked, so young and beautiful and lying on her back. An arm unfolding, the slender legs parting, she taking her breasts in her hands to wet their nipples with her fingers. Nipples … nipples … A panda – why a panda? The thing chasing the girl … The thing rising and falling … Slow … too slow … The girl … the girl …
St-Cyr awoke in a panic. Ah, Mon Dieu, must he have constant nightmares about this case? They were in a terrible fix. The rue Lauriston … the avenue Foch … the Abwehr … Gabrielle Arcuri and Giselle le Roy … Hermann … ah yes.
Christabelle Audit’s mother had died at the age of fifteen while giving birth to the child. Antoine Audit and Michèle-Louise Prévost had raised the girl until the age of six. Then Charles Audit had returned to take her from them. He’d bought the carousel for her – bribery, had it been bribery?
Ah merde! The Île du Diable. Two square kilometres of barren rock and scrub and more than a thousand convicts. Nothing but the hardest of them and the immenseness of trackless jungle lying across but a few kilometres of ocean.
The coast of French Guiana would have beckoned with the lure of a naked harlot who carried syphilis and cried out as a leper, ‘You can’t! You mustn’t! There is no escape from here. Absolutely none!’
He wet his lips. ‘The villa,’ he said. ‘It all began at the villa so long ago. A touch of lemon grass, a whisper of rosemary, a suggestion of coumarin.’
Had the panda really been about to rape that girl, or had his subconscious been trying to tell him something?
Swallowing with difficulty, St-Cyr lay back as the whisper of her perfume mingled with the heady scent of Cream of the Walnut in his mind.
Christabelle Audit had shaved her underarms and had dyed her hair, but why? To please her grandfather, or to please his brother, or to hide herself from one or both of them, or neither, but someone else?
She’d lived at Number 10 rue Bènard, apartment six.
Fumbling for his cigarettes, he took one and lit it, let the darkness of the bedroom he’d once shared with Marianne close about him.
To go from shoes to utter desolation to a carousel and a granddaughter one loved so much one put her in a little red-and-gold cage to take the tickets as the thing went round, was something. A cage within a cage, the canary singing its lungs out in competition or chorus with the calliope.
M Charles Audit and his granddaughter. Around those two elements the carousel had revolved, the years from 1926 until the day of the Defeat seeing the girl grow into womanhood.
Then the carousel is sold – quickly, decisively. Charles Audit goes where? To Number 10 rue Bènard, apartment six, in Montparnasse?
Perhaps, but then …
A year later the granddaughter has good false papers in the name of Christiane Baudelaire, a name she must have chosen herself but one so close to what a criminal might choose, it has to make one wonder. Change it only a little, eh? That way if someone calls out to you or questions you, the name is almost as natural as your own and causes no difficulty. Ah yes. A criminal.
She meets M Antoine – was it really her grandfather’s brother? A man of some fifty-six to sixty years of age from Périgord, a bourgeois who brings her gifts of pâté and liqueur from one of his businesses. Presents which she leaves outside the door to Captain Alphonse Dupuis’ room as if, though in need of money and food, she still cannot bear to bring herself to touch them.
For nearly a year she meets with this M Antoine once or twice a week in that room, always at about the same time, between 8 and 9 p.m. The Captain Dupuis is driven crazy with thoughts of her naked body and what the two of them must be doing in there.
She has been taking pieces of her grandmother’s jewellery from the Villa Audit on the rue Polonceau and selling them in the flea markets, or trying to.
Then she is killed – forced to strip naked before her killer. Why?
She knew him. She expected help to come from M Antoine, who’d left a note for her but she hadn’t picked it up. Did Dupuis take it, read it and put it back? The envelope had been unsealed.
And why should M Antoine know what to do? Had he training in such things?
She’d taken off her clothing garment by garment in the hope that help would soon come.
Then she’d been killed – garrotted, savagely raped, a virgin all this time – and left to lie on the floor with thirty forged Roman gold coins scattered about her body and no answers. Only a warning that this detective from the Sûreté had instantly taken to have been left for himself. Ah yes.
Did the killer throw the coins or did someone else? Lafont perhaps? Nicole de Rainvelle or Pierre Bonny? They’d visited the scene of the crime, they’d photographed the body. Any one of them could have placed that coin on her forehead.
Talbotte had washed his hands of the affair. Boemelburg, Oberg and Knochen had insisted on Hermann and himself. Lafont and Bonny had offered help, he himself suffering the humiliation of having to go before them or else.
All of them believed there were real gold coins to be had, loot in plenty.
Find the forger, find the loot. Never mind the killings.
And two and a half years before these killings, another young girl, another strangulation, rape and withdrawal during ejaculation. Mila Zavitz.
Two heavy suitcases. M Charles Audit.
He’d been sent to Devil’s Island in 1905 at the age of thirty. This meant that he was now sixty-seven years old, still spry perhaps, tough perhaps, and well able at sixty-five to carry two heavy suitcases if he’d wanted to.
