Century Rain Part 39

and took out a bottle of whiskey, helping himself to a nip. "It looked at me and made a sound I will never forget. It opened its mouth-that was when I saw the tongue and teeth-and it...sang." He said the word with distaste, washing it from his mouth with another slug of whiskey.

"What do you mean, it 'sang?'" Floyd asked. "Or wailed, or shrieked-I really can't describe it adequately. It was not a sound a child was ever meant to make, like a kind of monstrous yodel. Don't ask me how, but I knew what it was doing: it was calling out to others like itself. Summoning them." Custine screwed the top back on the bottle and returned it to the bag. "That was when I fled."

"You knew that would look bad."

"Nothing would have been as bad as staying in that room. I looked around for a weapon, but the child-

thing already had the one item in the room capable of doing any damage. I just wanted to get as far away from there as possible."

"You hailed a taxi?"

"Yes," Custine said. "I took it straight to rue du Dragon, where I left you the note. Then I came here."

"The men from the Big House think you killed Blanchard," Floyd said.

"Of course they do. It's what they want to believe. Have they spoken to you?"

"I had a real nice chat with an Inspector Belliard shortly after you fled the scene."

"Belliard is poison. Protect yourself, Floyd. Have nothing more to do with the case. Have nothing more to do with me."

"Bit late for that."

"It's never too late for common sense."

"Well, maybe this time it is. I spoke to our old friend Maillol. He was sceptical, but deep down I'm

pretty sure he thinks you're innocent."

Custine shook his head resignedly. "One good man can't help any of us."

"I told him I'd clear your name. He said he'd look at any evidence I was able to turn up."

"I'm warning you, as a friend: leave this whole business alone. Do what I intend to do, which is to get

out of Paris at the earliest opportunity."

"There's nowhere for you to run," Floyd said. "I can hop on the flying boat and be in America two days

later. You can't. Wherever you go in France, the men from the Quai will find you eventually. Our only hope is to clear your name."

"Then you have set yourself an impossible task."

"If I give Maillol one of those children, things might look a bit different."

"No one will believe that a child was capable of those murders."

"But if enough witnesses come forward-enough people who've seen one of these demons hanging

around-that might change things." "Floyd," Custine said, with sudden urgency, "please use your head. Those things are out there, even as we speak. They are in the city. They move without attracting suspicion. Furthermore, they seem to be doing their utmost to kill anyone who had the slightest connection with Susan White-which now includes the three of us."

"Then I guess that makes it personal," Floyd said.

"Drop the case, my friend. Drop the case and go with Greta to America."

"Not yet. Like I said, I've already got an interview lined up with the sister."

"You are playing with fire."

"No," Floyd said, "I'm playing with the only lead left in this whole case. And the only thing that's going

to lead me to those children, and get you off the hook."

Custine slumped back against the wall. "I can't argue with you, can I?"

"It's no more than you'd do for me."

"Which only goes to show that we both lack common sense."

"It's overrated anyway," Floyd replied, smiling.

"Be careful," Custine said. "Those children may be demons, but there's no guarantee that the sister isn't

just as dangerous."

At nine the next morning, Floyd watched Verity Auger walk into his office. The slatted light shining through the blinds caught her from one side, electric silver highlights dancing on every curve and curl. She wore a dark pinstriped business suit with low-heeled shoes, and if she had arrived with a hat she must have hung it up outside. Her neatly parted light hair fell in a straight line down to her shoulders and then flounced back up at the ends, as if it had changed its mind at the last moment. Her hair made Floyd think of the flukes of whales in old Dutch lithographs. She had very fine eyebrows, and her face seemed to shift from severe to serene and back again between heartbeats.

She had already helped herself to a seat before it occurred to Floyd that she really did not look very much like her sister.

"I'm sorry about the state of my office," Floyd said, indicating the piles of barely sorted paperwork. "Someone decided it needed rearranging."

"You needn't apologise," Auger said, resting a handbag on her lap. "I'm just grateful that you've agreed to see me at such short notice." She looked him squarely in the eye. "I appreciate that this is all very unusual, Mister Floyd."

"There's nothing 'usual' where a homicide's concerned," he said. "And I don't imagine any of this has been easy on you."

"I won't pretend it's been easy," she said. "On the other hand, I won't pretend that Susan and I were the closest of sisters, either."

"Family trouble?"

"Nothing so dramatic. We were just never very close when we were growing up. We were half-sisters, for a start. Susan's father died before I was born. She was four years older than me, which might not sound much, but it's a world of difference when you're children. Susan may as well have been a grown-up for all that we had in common."

"And later, when you were both older?"

"I suppose the age difference became less important, but by then Susan was spending less and less time at home. She was always running off with boys, bored out of her mind with our little town."

"Tanglewood, Dakota," Floyd said, nodding.

Her eyes widened in what was either mild surprise or mild disbelief. "You know it?"

"I know of it, but only because of what I learned from the papers in your sister's tin. Funny thing is, I looked it up in a gazetteer and it doesn't seem to exist."

"You mean it wasn't in the gazetteer. I a.s.sure you it exists, Mister Floyd. I would have a great deal of trouble explaining my childhood if it didn't. Do you have an ashtray?"

Floyd pa.s.sed her one. "It must be a real one-horse town."

Auger shook her head as she lit a cigarette. "It has wild ambitions of becoming a one-horse town."

"Like that, is it? In which case, I understand why your sister felt she had to leave. A place like that can

begin to feel like a prison."

"Where are you from, if you don't mind my asking? I don't even know your first name."

"I'm from Galveston, Texas." Floyd said. "My father was a merchant marine. I was a trawlerman by the

time I was sixteen."

"And you ended up in Paris?" Auger blew out a line of smoke. "I hope you weren't the navigator."

"I was the navigator, wireless operator and a lot of other things until the day I decided I liked making

music more than catching fish. I'd just turned nineteen and I'd heard that Paris was the place to be if you wanted to make it as a musician. Especially if you were American. Bechet was here, Baker, Gershwin. So I caught a boat to Ma.r.s.eille and decided to try to make my name. I landed in nineteen thirty-nine, a year before the tanks rolled into the Ardennes."

"And?"

"I'm still trying to make my name." Floyd puffed out his cheeks and smiled. "I gave up on my serious jazz ambitions after about six months. I still play as a hobby, and now and then I make more money out

of it than I do from the detective business. But I'm afraid that's more of a sad reflection on the business than my luck as a musician."

"How did you get into this line of work? It's something of a jump from trawlerman to private detective."

"It didn't happen overnight," Floyd replied, "but I had an advantage before I even landed. My mother

was French, and I had the paperwork to prove it. The French army was undermanned and unprepared for the German army lining up on the border. When they finally woke up and realised they were being invaded, they weren't too fussy about who they let into the country."

"And did you man those guns?"

"I told them I'd think about it."

"And?"

"I thought about it and decided there were things I'd rather be doing than waiting around for German

Seventy-Sevens to pound the h.e.l.l out of me."

Auger abandoned her cigarette, barely smoked, stubbing it out in the ashtray. "Didn't the authorities come after you?"

"There were no authorities. The government had already cut and run, leaving a city run by mobsters. For a while back there, it really looked as if the German invasion was going to succeed. It was only luck that those armoured divisions got bogged down in the Ardennes-bad weather working for us, for once. That and the fact that we realised they were in trouble in time to put some bombers over them."

"A close thing, in other words. It almost makes you wonder what would have happened if that advance hadn't stalled."

"Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad," Floyd said. "At least there'd have been some kind of order under the Germans. Still, it was the right outcome as far as I was concerned. There was a lot of dirty work to go around. A man who could speak American and French and pa.s.s as either was very valuable in those days."

Auger nodded. "I can imagine."

Floyd waved a hand, compressing years of his life into a single dismissive gesture. "I got a job as a bodyguard and chauffeur for a local gangster. That taught me more ropes than I ever knew existed. When the local gangster opposition wiped out my boss, I made a couple of sideways moves and found myself running a small, struggling detective agency."

"Shouldn't there be another chapter-the one where you end up running a huge, successful detective agency, with branches all around the world?"