Flykiller Read Free Page B

asked companionably.
    â€˜Inspector, you’re splashing my trousers.’
    â€˜Oh, sorry. Did she enjoy sex, seeing as she’d tried to kill herself at the loss of her husband?’
    â€˜ Salaud! How dare you?’
    â€˜Calm down and tell me exactly how faithful a mistress was she?’
    â€˜We were going to get married. I was going to divorce my wife when … when it became possible.’
    Divorce had all but been outlawed by Vichy. ‘Yet you asked her to service another?’
    â€˜I had to! I didn’t know she’d be killed! How could I have?’
    â€˜Just who else knew what you were up to?’
    â€˜ Merde alors , do you not take the hint Monsieur le Secrétaire has given? Dr Ménétrel, the Maréchal’s personal physician and confidant. His personal secretary.’
    â€˜And Ménétrel okayed the session?’
    â€˜Céline was not some cheap putain , damn you!’ Tears fell and were agitatedly wiped away with the fingers. ‘He gave his blessing. He said it was exactly what the Maréchal needed to restore faith in himself during such a difficult time and that … that Céline would be handsomely rewarded as would … as would I myself.’
    â€˜Then you were pimping and that’s an indictable offence, unless you followed Vichy’s latest ordinance on it to the letter. Oh don’t worry, mon fin , we’ll be discreet but if you’ve lied to me and not told us everything, you’d better watch out.’
    â€˜She was a dancer. You must know what such women are like!’
    â€˜And that bit about your marrying her?’
    Would this Gestapo find out everything? ‘It … it wasn’t possible. I couldn’t have done so and she must have been well aware of this yet we spoke of it as if there was no impediment. A little game we played.’
    How nice of him, but one must hold the door open so as to grab a breath of air. It took all types, thought Kohler, and the arrogance of top civil servants, though well known the world over, was legendary in France.
    Had all of what had been felt necessary been said? wondered St-Cyr. The engine throbbed, the road climbed. Frost clung closely, snow was everywhere and darkness lay deep among the trunks and bracken.
    For some time now each of them had withdrawn into private thoughts. Hermann, never one to keep still or silent unless necessary, had taken to staring out his side window but hadn’t bothered to clear the frost from it. Was he thinking of his little Giselle and his Oona, was he worrying, as he often did these days, that when the Allies invaded, as they surely must, his lady-loves would be caught up in things and blamed for sleeping with the enemy, with himself? Was he still trying to figure out a way to get them false papers and to safety in Spain or Portugal?
    René Bousquet would also be on Hermann’s mind, for here, beside his partner, was the man who had met with Reinhard Heydrich and others of the SS at the Ritz in Paris, on 5 May of last year. Here was the one who had convinced Karl Albrecht Oberg, the ‘Butcher of Poland’ and Höherer SS und Polizeiführer of France, not to take over the French police but to let him handle things.
    â€˜The Marseillais has a reputation as a practical joker, Secrétaire. He calls a tender shower of rain a tempest, a lost shirt from the laundry line an armed robbery in which the wife and daughters were strip-searched and their virtue plundered. But he has an even more significant reputation, one for vengeance. Has your suggestion of an attempted assassination been prompted at all by fear of repercussions over what the first arrondissement suffered? I ask simply because I must.’
    The Vieux Port de Marseille had been a rat’s nest of steep and narrow streets, the home of prostitutes, pimps and gangsters! ‘We did what we had to do.’
    A month ago, on 3 January, German security forces had