Read Online Carousel by J. Robert Janes - Free Book Online Page B

a good question.
    An anxious tremble passed through him. He wasn’t sure about the ears. They’d have to check at the morgue. He hoped the body wouldn’t be disposed of too soon. Surely they’d keep it around for a day or two unless …
    Hermann was earnestly explaining things to his girlfriend who was trying not to cry. Rudi had come out of his kitchen …
    The SS major had taken an interest in things.
    Closing a fist about the earrings, St-Cyr slipped them away, adding the pearls too. As if the moment had been suspended, he saw the other girl lying naked on her back in that room with the coins scattered about her.
    Christiane Baudelaire had been expecting someone. Madame Minou had been listening to the BBC Free French Broadcast from London.
    A Wehrmacht corporal had been killed in the rue Polonceau or was then but a few brief hours from his death.
    The operator of the carousel on the slopes of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont had already been killed and Madame Minou, when forced to witness the corpse, had been worried it might have been her son but had soon got over this.
    The girl had kept a stuffed canary in a bureau drawer in that room. There had been a heavy elastic band around its wings but no need for this.
    The earrings … why had she had them? A girl like that, in a room like that?
    It was a case, a puzzle, a real murder – he knew this now. A crime of passion? Ah no, not in the strictest sense, though hatred must have entered into the savagery of her killing and rape.
    The two would have occurred almost simultaneously. A matter which must have taken some skill.
    An unpleasant thought. Ah yes. Most unpleasant, as was the coin someone had placed on her forehead.
    â€˜Louis, eat your eggs on horseback.’
    Rudi Sturmbacher waited for the verdict. There was a butcher knife in his right hand, a frown …
    Each egg covered a layer of shaved Gruyère whose partially melted nest lay atop a thick slice of pain miel , of honey bread, the whole concoction toasted in a very hot oven so as to congeal and firm the white of the egg but leave the yolk loose and molten as a summer’s sun.
    â€˜In the Name of Jesus, Rudi, me, I have never tasted better.’
    The asparagus had meant it too. ‘From now on you’re one of us,’ roared the mountain, grasping him by the shoulder. ‘Helga, did you hear that? Louis likes them.’
    Sometimes it was so easy to flatter the Nazis.
    The split-pea and ham soup came – it, too, was good. Superbe! Magnifique ! As were the sausages and all the rest, so the flattery had not been misplaced after all.
    And he did not regret it. One must be honest in war, even more so than in peace.
    Food brought out the sage.
    The girl, Giselle, sat quietly between them at the table’s side, taking morsels from Hermann’s fork between sips of ice-cold Chablis. It was really quite a joy to see the slashed-up detective-grandfather with her. But the girl’s magnificent violet eyes were wary, full of moisture, not joy. Guilt drove her to the Chablis; fear to the morsels.
    The rosy blush young girls get in winter when excited was not there.
    St-Cyr lost himself in the sausage with lentils. He’d leave the cabbage and the borsch. He’d eat a little more lightly now, but damn the girl for spoiling what would have been a decent meal. What the devil was the matter with her? Uncertainty over Hermann? That fear of love lost when the security it provided was so necessary these days?
    Had her pimp warned her to seek out Hermann or else?
    The Gestapo’s detective showed no signs of noticing anything. Sparrow to the proffered fork, the girl pecked at another morsel – a bit of sausage dripping applesauce. Was she eating for two? Was that it? These days so many young and not so young girls ate for two.
    The sparrow darted to the Chablis to refresh the lovely milk-white throat. A tiny droplet spilled away from a corner of her glass. Blinking,