Sandman by J. Robert Janes Page B

the boys in blue to come up, shall I?’
    â€˜Yes, yes, but none of their lewd remarks. The photographs first, then the fingerprints. The others can wait in the corridor until everything else has been done. We’ve got to find the heiress, Hermann. Everything depends on her now.’
    A kid at large in a city where virtually everyone had to walk or ride their bicycles or take the métro or the autobus au gazogène to get from place to place and it was still far too easy to hide even with all the watching that was going on. ‘We’ll try the convent school first, and then the ancien Cimetière de Neuilly. She has to be somewhere.’
    But where? ‘The salon de thé in the children’s restaurant but at between three-thirty and four,’ said Louis, a hope, a prayer if all else failed.
    Kohler hated to tell him. ‘You’re forgetting she hasn’t any money.’
    â€˜And you’re forgetting her little friend could well have brought along a change purse of her own. This the Mother Superior may be able to confirm.’
    â€˜Or Sister Céline, the one the kid said hated her students. “We are the cabbages she feeds to her pigs after first giving them the names of each of us. We are her droppings.”’
    â€˜ Optare, optari .’
    The voices of twenty-two uniformed girls in dark-blue tunics and white middies, and ranging from nine to twelve years of age, rose in unison. ‘To desire, to be desired.’
    â€˜ Optavisse, optatus esse ,’ announced Sister Céline from behind the Iectem, tall and straight and determined to drill the students even though most were in tears and ashen at the brutal loss of one or perhaps even two of their classmates.
    â€˜To have desired, to have been desired.’
    â€˜ Optaturus esse, optatum iri .’
    â€˜To be going to desire, to be going to be desired.’
    â€˜ Optat! ’ said the sister sharply, causing them all to lower their eyes and voices in modesty.
    â€˜He desires, he is desiring.’
    â€˜ Optabit! ’
    â€˜He … he … he will desire, Sister. He … he will be desiring.’
    There were more tears, more burying of the faces in the arms and gnashing of teeth. Ah Gott im Himmel , stormed Kohler inwardly, how could she do it to them? Were they all little sluts to her?
    â€˜Easy, mon vieux ,’ cautioned St-Cyr, and softly closing the door of the classroom, left them both with a lasting image of Sister Céline, one that was haunted by tragedy, gaunt and raw and full of anger, the woman not unhandsome but street-wise, they thought, and ever watchful. A woman in her mid-thirties whose every look and gesture reeked of punishment to be meted out for sins imagined and otherwise.
    The firm round chin and not unsensuous lips had only added to the fierceness of a straight and defiant nose, high and prominent cheekbones and wide-set deep brown eyes under brows that in another would have been an asset.
    Kohler could imagine her blowing cigarette smoke through both nostrils as she had read the signs while still going on with her class and had sized the two of them up as if they were sailors in place Pigalle: five francs in exchange for ten minutes, or a couple of cigarettes, such was the scarcity of tobacco.
    Not a sound was heard from beyond the door that had opened to put them so close to the sister she could not have avoided looking sideways at them in stark assessment.
    â€˜Inspectors, please ,’ whispered the little nun who had met them at the gate and had let them into God’s sanctuary, she too upset and unsettled to object when they had asked to be conducted here without permission.
    â€˜Now you may take us to the Mother Superior,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Please leave this matter for me to explain. There will be no problem and you need say nothing of it, since I doubt very much if Sister Céline will mention it.’
    â€˜ Then you do not know her,