The Third Woman. Mark Burnell

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СКАЧАТЬ Day Three

      The Marais, quarter-past-five in the morning, the streetlamps reflected in puddles not quite frozen. Rue des Rosiers was almost empty; one or two on the way home, one or two on the way to work, hands in pockets, chins tucked into scarves.

      It had been after midnight when she abandoned the Métro. Since then, she’d stopped only once, when the rain had returned just before three. She’d found an all-night café not far from where she was now; candlelight and neon over concrete walls, leather booths in dark corners, Ute Lemper playing softly over the sound system.

      Stephanie stretched a cup of black coffee over an hour before anyone approached her. A tall, angular woman with deathly pale skin and dark red shoulder-length hair, wearing a purple silk shirt beneath a black leather overcoat. She smiled through a slash of magenta lipstick and sat down opposite Stephanie.

      ‘Hello. I’m Véronique.’

      Véronique from Lyon. She’d been awkwardly beautiful once – perhaps not too long ago – but thinness had aged her. And so had unhappiness. Stephanie warmed to her because she understood the chilly solitude of being alone in a city of millions.

      They talked for a while before Véronique reached for Stephanie’s hand. ‘I live close. Do you want to come? We could have a drink?’

      Petra considered the offer clinically: Véronique was an ideal way to vanish from the street. No security cameras, no registration, no witnesses. Inside her home, Petra would have options; some brutal, some less so. But it was after four; there was no longer any pressing need for a Véronique.

      Stephanie let her down gently with a version of the truth. ‘It’s too late for me. If only we’d met earlier.’

      She turned left into rue Vieille du Temple. The shop was a little way down, the red and gold sign over the property picked out by three small lamps: Adler. And beneath that: boulangerie – patisserie.

      Stephanie knocked on the door. Behind the glass a full-length blind had been lowered, fermé painted across it. A minute passed. Nothing. She tried again – still nothing – and was preparing for a third rap when she heard the approach of footsteps and a stream of invective.

      The same height as Stephanie, he wore a creased pistachio shirt rolled up at the sleeves and a black waistcoat, unfastened. A crooked nose, a mash of scar around the left eye, thick black hair everywhere, except on his head. The last time, he’d had a ponytail. Not any more, the close crop a better cut to partner his encroaching baldness. There was a lot of gold; identity bracelets, a watch, chains with charms, a thick ring through the left ear-lobe. As Cyril Bradfield had once said to her, ‘He looks like the hardest man you’ve ever seen. And dresses like a tart.’

      ‘Hello, Claude.’

      Claude Adler was too startled to reply.

      ‘I knew you’d be up,’ Stephanie said. ‘Four-thirty, every day. Right?’

      ‘Petra …’

      ‘I would’ve called, of course …’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘But I couldn’t.’

      ‘This is … well … unexpected?’

      ‘For both of us. We need to talk.’

      It was delightfully warm inside. Adler locked the door behind them and they walked through the shop, the shelves and wicker baskets still empty. The cramped bakery was at the back. Stephanie smelt it before she saw it; baguettes, sesame seed bagels, apple strudel, all freshly prepared, all of it reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything since Brussels.

      Adler took her upstairs to the apartment over the shop where he and his wife had lived for almost twenty years. He lit a gas ring for a pan of water and scooped ground coffee into a cafetière. There was a soft pack of Gauloises on the window-ledge. He tapped one out of the tear, offered it to her, then slipped it between his lips when she declined.

      ‘Is Sylvie here?’

      ‘Still asleep.’ He bent down to the ring of blue flame, nudging the cigarette tip into it, shreds of loose tobacco flaring bright orange. ‘She’ll be happy to see you when she gets up.’

      ‘I doubt it. That’s the reason I’m here, Claude. I’ve got bad news.’

      Adler took his time standing. ‘Have you seen the TV? It seems to be the day for bad news.’

      ‘It is. Jacob and Miriam are dead.’

      He froze. ‘Both?’

      Stephanie nodded.

      At their age, one was to be expected. Followed soon after, perhaps, by the other. But both together?

      ‘When?’

      ‘Last night.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘Violently.’

      He began to shake his head gently. ‘It can’t be true.’

      ‘It is true.’

      ‘How do you know?’

      ‘I saw the police. The ambulances …’

      ‘You were there?’

      ‘Afterwards, yes.’

      ‘Did you see them?’

      Stephanie shook her head.

      ‘Then perhaps …’

      ‘Trust me, Claude. They’re dead.’

      He wanted to protest but couldn’t because he believed her. Even though she hadn’t seen the bodies. Even though he didn’t know her well enough to know what she did. Not exactly, anyway.

      ‘Who did it?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      He thought about that for a while. ‘So why are you here?’

      ‘Because I’m supposed to be dead too.’

      Adler refilled their cups; hot milk first, then coffee like crude oil, introduced over the back of a spoon, a ritual repeated many times daily. Like lighting a cigarette. Which he now did for the fourth time since her arrival, the crushed stubs gathering on a pale yellow saucer.

      Now that he’d absorbed the initial shock, Adler was reminiscing. Secondhand history, as related to him by Furst: the pipeline pumping Jewish refugees to safety; the false document factory he’d established in Montmartre; 14 June 1940, the day the Nazis occupied Paris; smuggling Miriam to Lisbon via Spain in the autumn of 1941; forging documents for the Resistance and then SOE. And finally, betrayal, interrogation, Auschwitz.

      Adler scratched a jaw of stubble, some black, some silver. ‘He always said he was lucky to live. Listening to him tell it, I was never so sure.’ He stirred sugar into his СКАЧАТЬ