Tapestry by J. Robert Janes

he said aloud and to himself alone, ‘but first, the seller of it, Mademoiselle Noëlle Jourdan of 25 place des Vosges.’
    The Café de la Paix occupied much of the ground floor of the Hôtel Grand, that sumptuous palace of seven hundred rooms that had been opened on the fifth of May 1862 by the Empress Eugénie. A home away from home, the café was busy even though at three forty-seven in the afternoon most should have been working. Wasn’t there a war on?
    Of course there was, Kohler silently snorted as another waiter brusquely squeezed past him with a heavily laden tray, and everywhere there was the aroma of real coffee mingled with those of expensive perfume and pungent with tobacco smoke. Nice … Ach du lieber Gott , it must be, but if the Führer only knew. Certainly not all here were with their girlfriends; certainly too, though, among the ranks present there wasn’t one below that of a Leutnant, but didn’t the Führer desperately need men at the Russian front?
    Uniform or not, Blitzmädel or not, the Occupier behaved as if he or she had the world by the balls. Here also there was none of that Nur Attrapen , that Only-for-Show nonsense on bar bottles of coloured water as seen in the everyday citizen’s watering holes, none of those demands for ration tickets or the chalked-up pas d’alcools signs that spelled out the no-alcohol days. Though many of the Parisiennes glanced up at him from their tables, their men friends seemed not to notice and were too busily on the make or simply couldn’t be bothered even though they damned well must know he was a cop and why he was here clutching a copy of Le Matin .
    Louis would have said, Look closer still. See how a waiter nods in answer to a male whisper, then gives a curt nod towards a table where someone else’s petite amie flashes downcast eyes—pimping, are they, some of these waiters? Hasn’t a carefully passed one hundred-­franc note just been tucked away? Girls and middle-aged women, some with their wedding rings hidden, who hang on every word their companions utter even though some of them can’t understand too many and are doing their best to catch up three nights a week—was it three that Madame Adrienne Guillaumet left her children alone in the flat and went to the École Centrale to teach Deutsch to females such as these and to older men? Older, since there aren’t too many young Frenchman around are there?
    Had her assailant known of her? Louis would have asked and said, Oh for sure, that taxi was stolen from the stand out there, but more importantly, from in here one can see whether such a theft was possible and when best to strike.
    Had her assailant been watching for her, Hermann, having stalked her for days or weeks only to at last lift his glass or cup in salute and silently say, All right, ma fille , it’s now your turn?
    A regular, Hermann, of this establishment and others, the Lido especially, or had he been one of her students?
    Must every possibility be examined, and if so, if some of the waiters were pimping, weren’t others betraying those same girls to those who would do them harm? Beyond the heavily draped, plush burgundy curtains that would be tightly closed during the blackout, there were bird’s-eye views of place de l’Opéra and the white-railed entrance to the métro whose subterranean-leading slot opened on to the boulevard des Capucines like an inclined mine shaft. Any female leaving that entrance and heading for the café would be seen well before she got here; seen, too, if earnestly engaging a taxi for later, or had she been sitting here for an hour or more at one of these tables or at one out under the awning and next to the warmth of that charcoal brazier, she smiling shyly, listening intently and maybe, yes, maybe laying a hand fondly on that of her lover? Had she been upstairs first, eh, to one of those seven hundred rooms since officers and Bonzen from home were billeted in many of them? Sure the officers, and all