Salamander Read Online Free Page B

lipstick or rouge that he could discern from this distance. A bookseller? he asked. A librarian? A girl in a cocoa-brown beret and long white scarf that was tied under her chin and thrown over the shoulders of a fawn-coloured double-breasted overcoat. A grey plaid skirt and dark grey woollen argyle socks that would come to her knees. Flat-heeled, brown leather walking shoes, not winter boots. Knitted beige gloves gripped the handlebars. Gloves were not so easy to knit, and he wondered if she had made them and thought that perhaps she had. Trained in those arts, then, he said. Yes, she has that capable look about her. Not beautiful, not plain. Does she keep house for someone in addition to her job? Two women …
    â€˜Hermann, wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.’
    â€˜She’s already turning to leave, Louis. She’s seen you looking her way, dummkopf .’
    â€˜Damn!’
    Lyon’s fire marshal said nothing but he, too, had noticed the girl. Robichaud seemed a decent enough fellow. Tough and experienced and carrying a cross no fire chief would wish to bear. A man of middle age and grey, a veteran with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour to prove it. A father? wondered St-Cyr. A man who, like most these days, worried about his pension and had gone to work under the Nazis grudgingly, no doubt, but out of necessity and to ensure that pension. We French are realists, he said sadly to himself, especially the Lyonnais.
    It was Kohler who, having gathered up the cups and the thermos, returned them to the pumper truck, then led the way back into the ruins. Only the neck of the cognac bottle protruded from his already bulging overcoat pocket.
    The girl with the bicycle might have a relative among the victims. Perhaps a husband she didn’t want or a former lover? he asked himself.
    Crime … it brought out the worst in one. It made one see motive behind everything, even the most insignificant of things.
    Yet the girl continued to haunt him as her presence would Louis. Why had she come for such a brief look? Why had she fled before their eyes?
    No shred of film had escaped the fire. Funnelling flames through to its skylight, the projectionist’s booth, never roomy at the best of times, had been turned into an inferno. Bent and twisted film canisters and other rubbish were now heaped in the far corners and against that wall by the pressure from the last hoses. Only the twin projectors, once magnificent pieces of complex engineering, stood sentinel but in ruins on their jackleg pedestals whose tripod feet were securely bolted to the floor.
    A lover of the cinema and a cinematographer at heart, St-Cyr ran his eyes ruefully over the control panel. Eighteen Bakelite-handled switches had operated the lights, the screen, the curtains and the sound system. Subdued lighting at the sides, please, behind torch-bearing Venuses that were no more. Spotlights on the manager if some sort of an announcement were to be made—an air-raid warning perhaps. Starlight on the ceiling. Now the full or half-moon and the shooting star. The magic of the cinema.
    At once, the whole thing was there before him, that sense of power and control the projectionist must feel, that sense of boredom too, for how many films—even a masterpiece like La Bête humaine— can be seen thirty or forty times?
    Picking through the canisters, he uncovered the charred remains of the projectionist’s stool and beneath it, a woman’s shoe that had survived only in its spiked heel and shank. Had someone been in the booth alleviating the boredom? There were no bodies. Presumably the projectionist and his visitor had survived. Perhaps the shoe was from an earlier time and had no bearing on the case.
    Searching, he found a warped cigarette case, not expensive. With difficulty, he pried it open but there was no name. A woman’s, he said, pocketing it and the remains of the shoe.
    A fountain pen was next. Had the woman come for