In an exclusive extract for Historia readers, we bring you the beginning of award-winning historical crime author Chris Lloyd’s new book, Paris Requiem, the second in his Eddie Giral series of noir novels following a troubled Parisian policeman in the early days of Nazi occupation. The Unwanted Dead, which won the HWA Gold Crown Award in 2021, was the first.
‘I’d’ve been more than happy staying down south.’ Boniface paused and took a delicate sip from his coffee. ‘But the missus wanted to get back to Paris in time for my three girls to go to school.’
The other cops in the Bon Asile nodded sagely at Boniface’s words, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Through the tobacco-brown café window, I saw a German jeep slowly cruise past. Paris was under the Nazis and Boniface was worried about his kids missing the start of the school term. He wasn’t the only one. I watched two small boys follow in the wake of the German soldiers, dawdling to learning like it was any other September.
‘And she missed the shops,’ he added. ‘Not that there’s much in them.’
He had a voice like a Venus fly trap. Syrup-smooth behind sharp teeth, hiding a nectar-filled void. And like a carnivorous plant, form was everything with Boniface, substance a sugar-lined con. Some of the younger cops seated on smoke-stained chairs soaked up his every word. Others, not so much.
Me, not at all.
Not bothering to stifle a sigh, I folded the newspaper and took my cup of coffee to the bar. The Bon Asile, a misnomer at any time, was a dingy temple to coffee and cigarette smoke in the narrow streets of the Île de la Cité behind Thirty-Six, our name for the police station on Quai des Orfèvres.
‘Coffee,’ I told Louis in a low voice, sloshing my nearly full cup on the counter. ‘None of this ersatz rubbish.’
Behind his bar, Louis shrugged expansively. ‘Rationing, Eddie. Can’t get hold of the proper stuff.’
I glanced back at the other cops seated around the table, still enthralled by Boniface’s stories, and turned to Louis. I pointed to the cupboard at the rear of the counter and spoke in a low voice. ‘Real coffee, Louis. Or I’ll tell your wife what you keep in that other cupboard.’
He blanched and made me a new cup. The smell alone left me swooning.
Back at the table, Boniface was still holding court. ‘Dunno why you ever left the south, Giral,’ he said to me when I sat down again. ‘I found the chicks there very welcoming.’
‘They must have been devastated when you left.’ I took a sip of the strong coffee and forgot where I was for the moment.
‘So why did you leave, Boniface?’ one of the other cops who could be bothered asked him. ‘You wouldn’t have caught me coming back.’
‘I was tempted,’ he told them. ‘Boy, was I tempted. Lie low in the sun down south and leave Paris and the Boches to you lot. But as I said, the missus wanted back. The kids, you know, school.’
‘Which missus?’ the first one asked, the ensuing laughter around the table raucous. Boniface was lauded among the more gullible cops for his boasts of having both a wife and a mistress in the city, each with a family spawned by him.
I picked up the paper again. I wanted to choose which lies I paid heed to. His voice washed over me. It was almost soothing when you didn’t listen to what he was saying. He also had a habit of winking knowingly at his slightest utterance. And with his brilliantined hair with its tiny flourish above the right ear, he looked like he wished he was Maurice Chevalier. To me, he was more like a half-hearted Madame Pompadour.
‘Surprised they had you back,’ Barthe, one of the older cops, commented, knocking back his breakfast brandy.
Boniface laughed. ‘Commissioner Dax nearly had my hand off, he was so eager for me to get back in the saddle. Spot of virile blood around here. Dax knows it wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘And because we’re hopelessly undermanned, what with the war and everything,’ I commented, without raising my eyes from the paper.
‘But we’ve always got you, Eddie. You’re part of the furniture.’ I could hear the surprised annoyance in his voice.
I glanced up. The triumphant look on his face wavered as he noticed the other cops looking away, their expressions sheepish.
‘Inspector Giral,’ a voice broke the silence.
I turned to see a young uniformed cop had come into the café. The uniforms usually kept away, leaving this place to the detectives.
‘What is it?’
‘Commissioner Dax wants to see you. Says it’s urgent.’
I got up and towered over the kid. He paled. ‘Where were you ten minutes ago when I needed you?
‘You missed a trick there, Eddie,’ Boniface told me. ‘Should’ve made it back down to the wild south when you had a chance. Put your feet up with the other goat-eaters. No one in Paris to miss you.’
Bending down, I patted him heavily on the cheek. Everyone around the table looked everywhere but at us. His own look was one of growing surprise.
‘You may have noticed the Germans in town,’ I told him, my eyes staring intently into his. ‘Well, they’re not the only thing that’s changed.’
*
‘Take a seat, why don’t you?’ Commissioner Dax told me.
I already had. I leaned back in the chair opposite his desk and shrugged. Outside the window, a September sky failed to warm the morning air, hanging lifelessly over streets grey with uniforms and resignation. Even so, the room was stifling inside, a fly tapping constantly against the window. I knew how it felt.
Dax pulled two glasses and a bottle of whisky from a cupboard and poured us both a small tot. I looked at my watch. Barthe wasn’t the only one to indulge in a working aperitif these days. He sat down heavily in his chair, the air from the cushion farting gently between us. He was still as gaunt as ever, his harsh horn-rimmed glasses nestling unsteadily on the narrow bridge of his nose, but his dietary choices were making up for lost time with his ever-increasing paunch. I wondered where he got the food from to grow it. And the whisky. He seemed to read my mind.
‘Major Hochstetter,’ he explained, brandishing the bottle.
Hochstetter was the German military intelligence officer assigned the job of making life difficult for me. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks now. Still didn’t mean I wasn’t hurt at not being on the free whisky list.
He clinked his glass against mine, which was still sitting on the desk between us, and took a drink. He looked tired. We all did. Hunger does that. So does having the Nazis coming to stay.
‘Drink,’ he urged me. ‘We’re all in this together.’
I picked up my glass. ‘Except some of us are more in this together than others.’
It tasted good, I had to give Hochstetter that. He knew his whisky. The rare luxury of it almost hurt as it lit a path through my mouth and down my throat.
It was Dax’s turn to shrug. ‘Please yourself, Eddie. Hasn’t stopped you drinking it.’
‘What is it you wanted?’ I asked.
‘The Jazz Chaud. Body of a man found in suspicious circumstances.’
I looked pointedly at the whisky. ‘So no rush, then?’
‘Just trying to keep you sweet, Eddie. Remember that? Anyway, the stiff won’t be going anywhere.’ I watched him drain his glass and pour himself another two fingers. ‘The place has been shut down by the Germans, but the caretaker found the body this morning when she went to check up on it. Looked like he’d been trying to rob the safe.’
‘Rob the safe? With the place closed for business. Not the smartest suit in the club, then. What else do we know?’
‘That’s all, Eddie. Uniforms are there now, waiting for you to show up.’
I stood up. ‘I’ll apologise to them for being late, then, shall I?’
Dax wasn’t taking Occupation well. Even just a couple of months ago, he’d have called me in to his office, told me about the suspicious death and shooed me on my way. ‘Take Boniface with you. He’s rusty after three months sunning himself down south.’ He waved me away.
In reply, I poured myself another two fingers of the whisky and drained the glass before leaving his office.
.jpg)
Picking up Boniface from the detectives’ room, we took his car from outside Thirty-Six and drove south across the river. I figured if Boniface was behind the wheel, he couldn’t do much talking. I was wrong. He kept up a constant chatter, like rubber tyres on wet cobbles.
The Jazz Chaud was a jazz club in Montparnasse. We drove down wide boulevards into narrow streets to get there. The city was steadily refilling. All the people who’d fled in the weeks leading up to the invasion, terrified at the thought of what the Germans had in store for us, were now slowly coming back home. There was nothing like the bustle before the Nazis had decided to come and see us, but the city was yawning and stretching its arms, looking around itself in a daze and wondering what to do that day. The panic of the summer had proved false, the Germans treating us with a strange and polite formality. For now.
‘It’s as though we’re all waiting like sacrificial lambs.’
I turned to see Boniface staring intently at me. ‘What did you say?’ I asked him.
He’d parked and was gesturing at the life around us. ‘Us. In the city. One final fling before we queue blindly for our turn at the altar.’
He turned away and got out of the car. I could do nothing but stare after him for a few moments, the memory of his pomade still sweet in my nostrils, before following him.
The Jazz Chaud occupied the whole of a narrow building, a three-storey affair nestling amid a row of uneven buildings thrown up at random like damaged tombstones. I shivered despite the growing warmth of the day. This was a street the sun never troubled. Neither did the Germans, which was a relief.
At least for the time being.
A uniformed cop on the door to the club looked green at the gills. He carried an aroma of vomit. For once, Boniface’s hair odour was preferable. For the first time, I really wondered what awaited us inside.
Paris Requiem by Chris Lloyd is published on 23 February, 2023.
It’s the second in his Eddie Giral series of noir crime novels set in Paris in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion. The first, The Unwanted Dead, won the 2021 HWA Gold Crown Award.
Read Chris’s interview with Historia.
You may also enjoy the feature he wrote about the background to his series, The French Resistance: shadier than you think.
For more about occupied Paris, see An appearance of serenity: the French fashion industry in WWII by Catherine Hokin.
Historia is grateful to Chris’s publisher, Orion, for permission to reprint this exclusive extract from Paris Requiem.
Images:
- Cafe in Paris, 1940s, by Willem van de Poll: ©Nationaal Archief, (Dutch National Archives) via Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)
- Policeman arresting a Jewish man in Paris, 1941: German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
- Wachtparade (guards’ parade) in the Champs-Elysees, 1940, coloured: German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- French police arresting Jews and recording their personal details, 1941: German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
- Django Reinhardt, the French jazz musician, at the Aquarium jazz club in New York by William P. Gottlieb: United States Library of Congress via Wikimedia (public domain)
