Kohler plunked the birdcage down on the bonnet, right up by the windscreen where it wouldn’t be missed, then drove back up the rue Rossini to leave the Citroën next to the town hall and walk back.
No one would steal the birdcage. No one.
It being noon-hour and at its tail end, no auctions were in progress. Instead, the public were allowed to peruse the up-and-coming items. Room upon room of bailiff’s gleanings were on the first floor; those, too, of lesser items being sold off to settle a grândmother’s or dead husband’s estate. Beds, bureaus, cutlery, pots and pans, stacks of dishes – linens. Housewives mingled with shy newlyweds, the bridegrooms all a lot older than their brides. Hell, most of the younger men were dead or in POW camps in the Reich, or on the run from the forced labour and hiding out with the maquis.
The second-floor rooms were reserved for the better quality merchandise. Here there was silence, although the undercurrent of muffled conversation from below formed a constant background. Tiffany, Lalique and Gallé glass filled a room with lamps, vases and figurines. No sign of Herr Schlacht, though.
Limoges and Sevres porcelains were in another room, the belles mondaines and the dealers noting the lot numbers and jotting down, after much deliberation, the sums they would be prepared to bid. One glance was enough. The ebb tide that Paris had become, had left its wide strand littered with the debris of all such items. Things that had been in the family for years had had to be parted with. If one wanted to eat, let alone to eat as one had before the Defeat, then one had to pay black-market prices.
But one had to be so very careful. All items over one hundred thousand francs in value had had to be reported to the authorities in the early fall of 1940 and couldn’t be moved or sold without permission.
A Regency mirror gave him a glimpse of Schlacht. The overcoat collar was still tightly buttoned up under the double chin; the wide-brimmed trilby was still pulled down a little over the brow. He was feasting his eyes on a pure white sculpture, something that would once have been set on a table in a place of honour.
‘Hermann … Hermann, is it really you?’
Merde, it was Gabrielle, Louis’s girlfriend, a chanteuse, a White Russian who had fled the Revolution in 1917 and had arrived in Paris at the age of fourteen and all alone.
Kohler took her by the elbow and hustled her into the adjacent salon, to stand among beautiful pieces of marquetry. ‘Beat it, please,’ he begged. ‘We got back late last night and …’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘And haven’t had a moment since.’
She was a good head taller than Louis, was almost as tall as himself, and when her lips brushed his scarred left cheek, he felt the warmth, the lightness and gracefulness of her. Breathing in the scent of her perfume, of Mirage, he recalled, as he always did when coming upon her like this, their first meeting.
It had been during the investigation of a small murder in Fontainebleau Forest, the murder that had earned him the scar she had just kissed and the one from his right shoulder to his left hip. She’d been a suspect then, had lost a small pouch of diamonds …
‘How are René Yvon-Paul and the countess?’ he asked. The boy lived with his grandmother at Chateau Thériault, near Vouvray, overlooking the Loire.
‘Fine. Both are fine.’ René was ten years old and had been missing the two of them, Jean-Louis especially, thought Gabrielle. René had also saved Hermann Kohler’s life, and Hermann, to his credit, had never forgotten it. But, then, he liked children almost, if not more than Jean-Louis. ‘You look beat, mon vieux. Are you hungry?’ she hazarded and ran a slender hand over a table whose marquetry glowed in shades of amber, some so soft they matched her hair.
She had the loveliest eyes. Violet, just like Giselle’s. Tall, willowy, a gorgeous figure – Louis was an idiot not to have gone to bed with her yet and now … why now, might never get the chance! ‘Look, this isn’t easy, but it’s best we not be seen together.’
‘Not by the one you are following,’ she said and sadly nodded. ‘Is he so important you would deny me the pleasure of your company? Ah! He must be. Don’t look so pained.’
‘Let’s just say he’s connected to the avenue Foch, Gabrielle. I wouldn’t want …’
‘Them to take an interest in me? They already have, as you well know. Bugging my dressing room at the club, keeping track of when and where I go, so …’ She shrugged. ‘What’s the problem?’
She was a member of the Résistance, had been detained during a previous case, but had managed to get away with it. ‘Gabi, please.’
‘Do you like this table? It’s Russian. Eighteenth century. I’m going to buy it.’
She would, too, and then would slap heavy coats of paint on it!
‘For to hide best is to expose those things you value most to view,’ she said, having read his mind. ‘Now take me by the arm like the gentleman – the wishful lover, perhaps – that I know you to be. Escort me into that room, Hermann, so that you may better study this man you want to follow.’
Grâce à Dieu, Schlacht had departed. There were others in the room – four Wehrmacht officers and their Parisiennes.
‘Your Führer has a passion for Leda and the Swan,’ confided Gabrielle, conspiratorially clucking her tongue as she ran her eyes over the voluptuous, classical nude in alabaster. ‘Nineteenth century and by Albert Carrier-Belleuse. It’s exquisite, is it not? Mon Dieu, your man has very good but expensive taste.’
Asleep, the swan was nestled over upraised, cloth-draped knees and thighs, with its head next to a plump, soft breast and Leda’s hand resting on a feathered wing.
‘Both of them are asleep,’ he said. But it was true, the Führer did have a passion for Leda and her Swan, and she did figure heavily in Nazi art. And every time she’d been just as voluptuous, just as slender, just as asleep and waiting to be ravished. ‘She was the Queen of Sparta,’ he said. ‘Zeus came to her in the form of a swan.’
Hermann’s tone of voice indicated how distracted and worried he was. ‘And now?’ asked Gabrielle, turning to search his pale blue eyes. ‘Now will the one you wish to know more about, come back to bid on this?’
‘To send it to his Führer as a little gift?’ he bleated.
She touched his hand in sympathy. ‘I’ll bid against him, if you like.’
‘No you won’t. You’ll find out what he pays for it and if he asks to have it crated and shipped to you know where.’
Outside, on the street, the Renault was gone but in its place were the flattened remains of the birdcage and its canary.
4
It was freezing in the study, and when the one from the Sûreté indicated the tin, Danielle told herself she must listen to his voice as if from beneath the ground and she already in her coffin.
‘One part safrole by volume, mademoiselle. Two of nitrobenzene, and the same again of gasoline. A small amount of the solution is dabbed on to a rag which is then stuffed through the entrance to the hive, so as to place it in the centre of the floor.’
‘Normally the fumigation is repeated every second day, Inspector, until all four decimal-five cubic centimetres of the mixture have been used.’
On waking, the girl had changed into a dark grey, woollen skirt, white blouse with Peter-Pan collar, and a knitted, powder-blue pullover. No pearls, no rings, no jewellery of any kind, not even a wristwatch. She was not nearly so tall as the father, but taller than the mother and thin, now that he could see her without the coat. Thin and small-breasted, underweight and no doubt this was all due to the severe lack of calories, and the energy expended in the hunt for food.
Becoming aware that she had remained just inside the doorway to the study, the girl thought to come forward, hesitated and then thought better of closing the gap between them.
Would the Sûreté understand that most of the honey they had produced had been taken from them? wondered Danielle. Would he realize that the rest had been severely rationed except for that given to clients among the Occupier and their sickening friends?
‘
A lot of the bees are killed and must be removed from the hives, Inspector, but they are usually the ones with the acarine mites. Papa … My father felt the best time for such a fumigation was in the late winter, and after the bees had had a good flight to clean themselves. Bees are very clean, you understand. They will not defecate in the hive unless very ill, and fly away from the hive before doing so. But some people don’t realize this at first and hang their laundry near the hives in the garden, only to … to find it yellowed by the droppings.’
Modestly she had lowered her eyes, and when he gently said, ‘And the fumigation, mademoiselle?’ she looked up suddenly and swallowed with difficulty.
‘He would seal the entrance after placing all of the solution in there at once. “Quick and easy and thorough,” he said. “Danielle, never mind doing it bit by bit. Get it in there and over with! Hurry, petite. Hurry!”
‘The … the carnage was terrible but … but if you ask me, Inspector, he was invariably correct.’
Inadvertently the girl had recounted the first time the father had made her do it. And for how many years had she carried the guilt of those first little murders? he wondered. ‘How old were you then? Five or six?’
‘Seven. We … we had had a scare and papa wanted me to know best how to deal with it. I cried myself to sleep for nights afterward.’ There, he could think what he liked of that!
‘And was the recent infestation the reason so many of the hives had been brought into the apiary?’
Say only what is necessary; look steadily at him, she warned herself and answered flatly, ‘Yes.’
‘And the number of hives?’ she heard him ask and dug her fingernails into her palms to more firmly awaken herself to the threat of him before answering, ‘Usually about twenty here. Sometimes a few less or more. It depended.’
‘On the need to service an orchard or vineyard.’
‘The out-apiaries also. He … papa has – well, he had … Well, we have; I have, fifty-seven to … to look after.’
‘Then twenty-seven of them are still out on rooftops and in gardens?’
‘Papa … Papa and I were still bringing them into the apiary. He … he felt it necessary due to … to the threat he perceived. The disaster he said would happen.’
‘Acarine mites.’
‘Yes! But …’ She clamped her eyes shut and turned away, burst into tears and tried to stop herself. ‘Forgive me,’ she blurted. ‘He … he would not tell me why he felt so certain there would be such a terrible infestation, only that … that we must guard against it for the good of France.’
And has he believed me, this Chief Inspector of the Sûreté? she silently asked herself and heard that one gently saying, ‘Would you like to sit down?’
‘In his chair, at his desk? No. No, I … I will stand over here. Yes, here.’
And next to the microscope under which a Russian bee had been opened.
Her back remained ramrod stiff, her hands gripping the edge of the workbench, but when she realized that he would notice this, the girl relaxed her hold and turned to face him. She hadn’t yet dried her eyes or wiped her nose – did she want him to see her like this so as to engender sympathy? he wondered. Merde, what was she attempting to hide?
Everyone hides things these days, he cautioned himself. And please don’t forget grief takes many forms and she is in great distress.
As in the honey-house, he’d have to be kind, but was she hoping to block him from further viewing what was under that microscope? She’d admitted to the presence of acarine, but not to its source in Russian bees. ‘Mademoiselle, it’s good of you to have come downstairs. You must still be exhausted and are understandably in shock.’
‘I want to help, Inspector. There is only myself who can. She … Maman won’t be of any use. Papa didn’t … didn’t tell her anything about his work or …’
‘Or even about his private life?’
That brothel? That filthy place and those two bitches – was this what he was implying? ‘Yes. Yes, that is how it was with my parents. Mother didn’t do it, Inspector. I made her tell me. I said we had to talk, that the time for insulating herself from me must end.’
‘And her response?’
Instinctively the girl touched her left cheek, disturbing a camouflage of last-minute powder whose pale chalkiness had hidden the welt.
‘Mother slapped me hard. I … I forgave her immediately, of course.’
‘Would you prefer we didn’t talk here?’
‘No. No, here is fine. I … I will just have to get used to it, won’t I?’
The girl waited for him to say yes, but he would simply take out his pipe and tobacco, thought St-Cyr.
‘Inspector, I don’t know who could have poisoned him. That bottle of liqueur was not in the study when I left here early on Thursday morning. My father was already at work at five when I came in to kiss him goodbye. He was happy – earnest, that is, about his work. Our work.’
‘And did you know the contents of the address he was revising?’
‘I knew only that he was working on an important paper, but … but not the subject of it. Papa refused to tell me. “It’s too controversial,” he said. It … it had to be about his bees, of course. They are our dedicated and loyal little friends, isn’t that so? Tireless and always bringing beauty and the gold of their honey, the light from their wax, while at the same time pollinating the very plants without which we could not survive.’
Quickly Danielle wiped her nose and eyes with a hand and tried to smile, and when she heard him ask, ‘Was he to have given the address that evening?’ vehemently shook her head.
‘Tomorrow at two p.m. The Jardin du Luxembourg. A … a room in the Palais is still not possible so, again, as since the Defeat, the Society must meet in one of the greenhouses, but it … it is really quite pleasant and perhaps far more in keeping with the subject. I, myself, though forced always to sit at the back, have never objected to our holding the meetings there. The bees love it, and one can watch them going about their tiny lives as if in total peace.’
Her voice had strengthened but was she now on firm ground? he wondered. She was also, in a way, striking a blow for equality and the injustice many women and young girls felt at the hands of men who often knew far less than they.
‘Aren’t you going to light your pipe?’ she asked.
‘Ah! I’ve forgotten. I often do. Would you like a cigarette?’
Would it help? ‘No. I don’t. I haven’t ever. I’ve had no desire to use them.’
And now need no such crutches? Merde, what was there about her? The need to constantly be on her guard, the need to hide the fact she must know the mites were from Russia? ‘While away, you stayed, I believe, at the family’s country house.’
‘Only at night. My route took me too many kilometres from it otherwise. I arrived after dark on Thursday, crept into bed and was up and away before dawn on Friday. Today also. It’s … it’s just an old place. Not much to look at and sadly in need of repair.’
And nothing for you to worry about – was this the impression she wanted to impart? ‘You use it only once in a while.’
‘Yes.’ And damn maman for telling him of it. ‘I must vary my route and so must stay overnight in other places. Sometimes where we have out-apiaries. That way I can check on the hives also.’
And let me give you those locations? Let us talk no more of the country house – was that it, then? ‘Could someone have come here on Thursday evening to see your father?’
‘And bring him such a gift?’
The frown she gave was deep. ‘Well?’ he heard himself ask.
‘Perhaps one of the Society might have arranged to visit him, but he didn’t tell me this, and I … why I did not ask. I was in too much of a hurry to be on my way. I did not think. I just assumed everything would be the same when I returned – fine, do you understand?’
Flinging herself around again, she stood with head bowed and her back to him. Tears spattered the workbench, hittin
g the hands she pressed flat against it. Splashing between her fingers. Hands that, washed in ice-cold water and without soap, still held dirt and looked chapped and worn.
The Inspector took hold of her by the shoulders. ‘There … there were those in the Society who did not want him to give that address,’ she said bitterly. ‘They … they were afraid les Allemands would close down the Society and arrest everyone. Cowards, papa called them. Cowards!’
Her hair was very fine and light and when he released her left shoulder, his right hand remained in comfort, deliberately touching it and she knew – yes, knew now – that he would stop at nothing to get his answers, that he had, indeed, the eyes and insidious curiosity of a priest! Of Father Michel, yes!
‘But he was determined to give the address?’ she heard him ask and felt herself instinctively nod then blurt, ‘It was his duty to do so. His duty, he said!’
The girl was thin, and she shook hard when he wrapped comforting arms about her. ‘Please go upstairs, mademoiselle. Go back to bed. There will be time enough for questions.’
But will there? she silently asked, still clinging to him but opening her eyes now to see, through the mist of her tears, the desk, the wall with its collection of bees under glass, the paintings, the whole of it, of life itself and what it had become. The French windows to the garden also.
‘Inspector …’
It was Madame de Bonnevies and the look she gave condemned both himself and her daughter for sharing grief’s moment in such an intimate way.
The girl released her hold but remained defiantly standing beside him so that her right arm touched his and now … now that hand found its timid way into his own and he felt her close her fingers about his and tightly. She was still trembling.
‘Mother, what is it? What’s happened?’
Had the girl been expecting an absolute disaster? wondered St-Cyr and thought it probable.
The mother’s voice grated.
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