Century Rain Part 38

"Are you going to let her have it?"

"I want her to have it. But I also want to tail her when she leaves the office. For that I'm going to need a

little bit of help."

"I see."

"Will you do it? If not for me, then for Custine?"

"Don't push your luck, Floyd."

"I mean it. Maillol said he could get Custine off the hook if I could come up with something tangible."

"Like what?"

"Another suspect. I know it's a long shot, but the girl's my only lead. If I don't follow her, Custine's

finished."

Floyd and Greta pushed through the doors into Le Perroquet Pourpre and followed the line of framed jazz photographs that led downstairs into the bas.e.m.e.nt. At eight on a Friday evening a few regulars had already arrived, but otherwise the place was quiet, with most of the tables still unoccupied. A young kid in a striped s.h.i.+rt was playing "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" solo on the house piano, trying to match Duke's moves but not quite getting there. Michel nodded coolly at Floyd and Greta, served them drinks without saying a word and went back to polis.h.i.+ng the zinc-topped bar. Every now and then he'd raise an eye to the door at the top of the stairs leading down into the room, as if expecting someone else.

Floyd and Greta sipped their drinks without speaking. Five minutes pa.s.sed, then ten.

"You know why we're here," Floyd said, eventually.

Michel stopped polis.h.i.+ng and made a big show of putting aside his towel. "You take the easy route getting here?"

"No one followed us," Floyd a.s.sured him.

"You sure of that?"

"As sure as I can be."

"That's not much of a guarantee."

"It's the best I can give you. You know where he is, don't you?"

Michel took their empty gla.s.ses. "Follow me."

He raised the folding section of counter at the end of the bar and led them into a back room full of casks and empty wine bottles. Another door led into a meandering brick corridor lined with wooden beer crates. Halfway down this corridor, Michel stopped at an unmarked white door and fished out a set of keys. He opened the door and stepped into another storage room, also piled high with crates. They appeared to fill the room to the back wall, but when Floyd looked closely he saw that the crates had been arranged to conceal another door.

"Through there," Michel said. "Keep it quick, and keep it quiet. No offence, Floyd, but I'm taking a serious risk here."

"And it's appreciated," Floyd a.s.sured him.

The concealed door admitted them to a tiny room not much larger than a broom cupboard. The walls were covered with flaking plaster, which was coming off in scabs to reveal damp, cracked brickwork. A single electric light bulb provided illumination. A mattress on the floor was the only item of furniture.

Half-lying on this mattress, his back propped against the wall with only a few thin pillows for comfort,

was Custine. A bag of provisions sat by his side. He wore the same clothes he'd had on that morning, but now they were crumpled, sweat-stained and dishevelled, as if he'd had them on for a week.

Custine placed aside a sc.r.a.p of newspaper he'd been reading. "Don't mistake this for ingrat.i.tude," he

said, "but how did you find me?"

"Lucky guess," Floyd replied.

"Or rather, a process of deduction," Greta said. "How many friends do we have left in this city?"

"Not many," Custine admitted.

"So it wasn't that difficult to draw up a short list. Michel was pretty near the top."

"It's good of him to keep me here," Custine said, "but I can't stay for long. It's too dangerous for him,

and too dangerous for me. I take it you weren't-"

"Followed? No," Floyd said.

"I'm in a lot of trouble."

"Then it's up to us to do what we can to get you out of it," Greta said.

"But first we have to know what happened," Floyd added. "All of it, Andre, from the moment I dropped

you off at rue des Peupliers this morning."

"Did you get my note?"

"Of course."

"Then you know about the typewriter."

"The enciphering machine? Yes. What I don't quite understand is-"

"We used them at the Quai," Custine said, "for secure communications between different establishments

when we were trying to crack major organised-crime operations. The kind of people who tap our telephone lines. When Blanchard showed us the typewriter case-at least, what he thought was a typewriter case-I knew I'd seen one like it before. It was just a question of remembering when and where."

"I'm glad you did," Floyd said. "It cleared up a few things."

"She was a spy."

"I agree."

"And she wasn't acting alone, either, not if someone else is still sending those coded transmissions. She

almost certainly has a.s.sociates in the area."

"As a matter of fact," Floyd said, "one of them's due to walk into the office at nine tomorrow morning."

Custine's eye widened. "The sister?"

"She showed up, just like Blanchard said she would."

"Be very, very careful how you play this," Custine warned.

"I've got the matter in hand. Now I'd like to hear your side of the story. What the h.e.l.l happened today?"

Custine rearranged himself on the mattress. "I began my investigations on the second floor, with the

tenant you didn't manage to speak to yesterday. He still wasn't in, so I proceeded to Mademoiselle White's room and once again set about trying to record those radio transmissions."

"Did you get anything?" "Yes-and this time I had the benefit of a Morse book. But as I transcribed the message it became clear that it was meaningless-just a random sequence of letters. I stared at them and stared at them until something about them began to seem oddly familiar. That was when I remembered the Enigma machine in the Quai. It hit me then: it was utterly pointless trying to extract any information from the message. Even if we managed to get our hands on an intact Enigma machine of the same kind that Susan White was using, we would still have no idea of the particular settings that would need to be applied to decipher the message."

Floyd scratched his head. "How long would it take us to work through all the possibilities?"

Custine shook his head dismissively. "Years, Floyd. The encryption's not meant to be easily broken.

That's the whole point."

"So this whole wireless business was a wild-goose chase?"

"On the contrary. It told us rather a lot about Susan White, even if it didn't tell us what was in those messages. We also know that someone made a point of smas.h.i.+ng her Enigma machine. Whoever did that knew exactly how important it was."

"So she was killed by an enemy agent," Floyd speculated.

"I think we can a.s.sume so," Custine replied. "And whoever did that must have destroyed the rotor settings for the machine as well. Nothing in the tin she entrusted to Blanchard resembles a list of such settings. They may have been written down elsewhere. She may even have committed them to memory."

"Talking of Blanchard," Floyd prompted.

"When the futility of intercepting those signals dawned on me, I put the wireless back as I'd found it the day before, complete with broken connections. I packed away my tools and set off down to Blanchard's rooms, where I intended to bring up the delicate matter we discussed yesterday."

"And did you?"

"I never got a chance," Custine said. "When I knocked on the door to his rooms, I found it ajar. I pushed it open and called out to him. No one answered, but I heard...sounds."

"What sort of sounds?"

"Scuffling, grunting. Furniture being shoved around. Naturally, I entered. That was when I saw the child: a little girl, perhaps the one we saw outside the apartment yesterday, perhaps another one."

"What was the child doing?" asked Floyd, a sick feeling beginning to churn in his stomach.

"It was killing Monsieur Blanchard." Custine said this with a perfect, detached calm, as if he had gone over the events in his head too many times to be shocked by them any more. "Blanchard was on the floor, with his head pressed against the leg of a chair. The child was squatting over him, holding one hand over his mouth while it grasped a clawed fire iron in the other. It was smas.h.i.+ng the fire iron against his skull."

"How could a child overpower a man like that?" Floyd asked. "He was elderly, but he wasn't particularly frail."

"All I can report is what I saw," Custine said. "The child seemed to have enormous animal strength. It had stick-thin arms and legs, but was still hammering that fire iron down on him as if it had the strength of a blacksmith."

"You keep calling the child 'it,'" Floyd observed.

"It looked at me," Custine said. "That was when I knew it wasn't any kind of child."

Greta looked at Floyd, concern filling her eyes. Floyd reached out and touched her arm rea.s.suringly.

"Go on," he said to Custine.

"It was dressed like a little girl, but when it looked at me, I knew it was something else-something

more like a demon than a child. Its face reminded me of a piece of shrivelled fruit. When it opened its mouth, I saw a dry, black tongue and a few rotten stubs of teeth. I smelled it." "He's frightening me," Greta said, shuddering with revulsion under Floyd's hand. "Is this supposed to be one of those children you say keep turning up?"

"Whatever they are, they aren't children," Custine repeated. "They're things that resemble children unless you look closely. That's all."

"This isn't possible," Greta insisted.

"We've both seen them," Floyd said. "So did some of the tenants in Blanchard's building."

"But...children?"

"Somehow they fit into this," Floyd said. "One of them probably killed Susan White."

"What happened next?" Greta asked, fascination gradually overcoming apprehension.

"The child looked at me," Custine said. He reached into the little bag of provisions next to his mattress