Bellringer

by J. Robert Janes

  Hortense, the cook, was immediately to his left, having stealthily taken a few steps to get into position, the maid, Marguerite, to the right and still over by the Ouija board, that one watchful to the point of being intensely so, the tip of her tongue caught between the whitest of teeth, her breath short and fast, her pulse racing as if just after having stolen something.

  ‘Couillon,’ said Léa softly, ‘you have no right to be in here. We didn’t kill either of those bitches.’

  ‘Streetfighter, mob leader, and defender of the realm, is that it?’ he asked.

  Her grin was huge. ‘I broke a few heads, if that’s what you mean, and crushed the balls of others.’

  ‘They must have enjoyed having you all to themselves in the Old Bailey.’

  ‘And now, what now?’ she said, letting him see the pearl-headed hatpin in her palm.

  Ach, du lieber Gott, the damned thing was at least twelve centimetres long. The maid sucked in a breath at the thought, her gaze flicking anxiously from Léa to him, to Hortense and the table that lay between him and the cook, ah yes.

  The crystal ball was hefted, the girl fighting down the urge to step forward and cry out in alarm, a hesitant hand being extended only to resignedly drop.

  Hefting the ball, he set it not on its little brass stand but on the damask tablecloth that was embroidered in a circle round with the symbols of the zodiac. ‘Month by month,’ he said. ‘A Libra, a Scorpio—which are you?’ he asked of Léa, the ball rolling a little until at last it had come to a tentative stop.

  ‘Please don’t,’ managed Marguerite.

  ‘Then start talking.’

  ‘Not here, and not without Madame,’ swore Léa softly, and she meant it too.

  ‘Things have gone missing, haven’t they? Little things. Jennifer Hamilton pays visit after visit and becomes a suspect only to cease coming and then show up again but with Caroline Lacy.’

  ‘Madame interviewed the couple time and again,’ said Léa.

  ‘And was finally satisfied that neither was the thief, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Caroline was to have become a sitter while Jennifer was to wait for her outside the Pavillon de Cérès—is that right?’

  It was. ‘All alone?’ he asked.

  Herr Kohler had moved and in so doing had carelessly jostled the table and rumpled the cloth. ‘I. . . I did ask Madame if I could wait with her,’ said Marguerite, ‘but was told that would not be allowed.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The ball was again beginning to roll, but he hadn’t noticed this yet, had taken out his cigarettes and was placing two of them on the cloth facing Léa. ‘My partner borrowed those,’ he said. ‘Now I’m returning them, but without interest.’

  ‘My ball. . . ’ managed Marguerite. ‘Please don’t let it fall.’

  ‘Like Mary-Lynn, eh?’ he asked, and, reaching out, snatched up the ball as it left the table. ‘Now, you start talking like I said.’

  ‘Marguerite, I’m warning you,’ whispered Léa, her octagonal glasses catching the light.

  ‘Jennifer. . . ’ began the girl.

  ‘You were lovers,’ he said with a finality that hurt and, setting the ball down, paused to light himself a cigarette and to drop the spent match on a cloth that had taken her months and months to embroider.

  Still she didn’t leap forward. She mustn’t. Ashes soon fell.

  ‘Why did you break up? Come on, mademoiselle. If lovers, why the sudden split?’

  ‘Madame—’

  ‘Thought Jennifer might have been stealing things?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And after you, Jennifer then takes up with Caroline. That must have been hard, or was it merely a necessity since Jennifer was then able to come here again?’

  ‘Those American bitches with their Ivy League crap,’ grunted Léa.

  ‘Alpha Beta Theta bullshit!’ shouted someone out in the corridor.

  ‘Pi Beta Phi!’ said another.

  ‘Sororities?’ he asked.

  Léa let him have it with a laugh. ‘If that’s what they’re called, we’ve got the biggest of them!’

  The ball began again to roll, Marguerite Lefèvre to hesitate with fingernails to her lips and eyes rapidly moistening, yet still she didn’t step forward—couldn’t, wouldn’t, Léa having given her a scathing look.

  ‘Please,’ she wept. ‘Herr Kohler, I beg you.’

  ‘Smoky quartz, wasn’t that what you started Jennifer on?’

  ‘Yes! Then the rose and. . . and then the clear.’

  ‘And in between sessions, the simply being together.’

  Again he caught the ball, snatching it up in midair, but this time he placed it securely in her trembling hands and she. . . why, she could only let him see her tears and hear her gratefully whispering, ‘Merci.’

  He stepped away from her, began to close the gap between himself and Léa, said, ‘I think I’ve seen enough for now,’ but turned at the last, as Léa and the others began to make way for him, Herr Kohler to catch sight of her frantically examining the cloth and brushing the ashes away to fastidiously tidy it before passing a final smoothing hand lovingly over it, only to then pause as he continued to look at her, she now steadily at him.

  Then he was gone and Léa was saying, ‘You little fool. Wait until Madame hears of this.’

  8

  They were moving now as detectives should; they weren’t wasting time but all along the corridors of the Grand, crowds lined the walls and the shrillness, the shrieks, the jeers, and banging of pots and pans was deafening.

  ‘Léa Monnier, Hermann. Cérès knew of that Star of David,’ managed a visibly harried Louis, for several had tried to hit him.

  More couldn’t be said until, at a shout from a clearly ruffled Brother Étienne who had ducked out of a doorway, the uproar died as suddenly as the nod from Léa had started it up.

  Now the pots and pans were lowered and the rabble, dressed in separates often of the most incongruous kind, some sucking on their fags, others wishing they had one, fell to a watchful silence and then. . . then, as these two detectives hurried past, a whispered hiss, ‘None of us did it!’

  ‘We’re clean,’ said one whose breath alone claimed otherwise; another, ‘Caroline Lacy was the thief. Becky Torrence was seen going into the Chalet des nes after her.’

  ‘Nora Arnarson, inspectors. Ask Nora why she tried to grab but shoved Mary-Lynn.’

  ‘Her friend. . . Some friend.’

  ‘Ask Angèle,’ whispered another. ‘Ask that nag of Brother Étienne’s what Nora likes to share with her.’

  ‘Oh yes, to share when there is so little.’

  ‘Louis, what the hell are they talking about?’ asked Kohler.

  ‘Something so simple I should have seen it.’

  Out on the terrace, the light of day had left and the shops were closed.

  ‘That sprig from a beech tree, Hermann, and three curls of the inner bark. Though mention of these implies Cérès knows what we found with Caroline Lacy, who else in the camp but Nora would think to nibble on them?’

  ‘Not Caroline?’

  ‘Not Jennifer either, nor Madame de Vernon or even Becky.’

  ‘Caroline wasn’t just going to tell the Kommandant who had pushed Mary-Lynn, Louis.’

  ‘Nora saw her being followed by Becky and must have thought Caroline would tell Colonel Jundt about that girl’s fiancé, but that Becky wasn’t strong enough to have dealt with her.’

  ‘And that’s why Becky came back the next morning to find out what had happened.’

  ‘Nora having told me that at first she had thought it out of character for Jennifer to have taken up with Caroline, and then opportunistic.’

  ‘Jennifer having been in love with our kleptomaniac, Louis, with Marguerite Lefèvre, Madame Chevreul’s maid, something Nora may well have known.’

  Had Hermann really pinned the thief down? ‘The evidence?’

  Kohler told him, Louis muttering, ‘C�
��est possible, mon vieux, but. . . ’

  ‘Gott im Himmel, why must you continually doubt the obvious? I caught her red-handed!’

  ‘And she made a visible impression on you.’

  ‘Deliberately?’

  ‘Hermann, how many times must I tell you not to be putty in the hands of the female sex? You share yourself with two women in Paris, can’t bring yourself to decide between them and they know this yet live together in harmony and have become fast friends.’

  ‘They’ve left me, and you know it. Giselle to become a mannequin, Oona to. . . ’

  ‘Yes, yes, but they’ll be back as soon as you are.’

  ‘And Marguerite Lefèvre?’

  ‘Could well have sized you up and seen right through you.’

  ‘No crystal ball needed?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Then she was trying to shield Jennifer.’

  ‘Her former lover, Hermann? If still former, Madame having been kind enough to have warned me that Cérès has claimed Jennifer is in great danger.’

  ‘Since Madame had stopped her from seeing Marguerite until Caroline came along. Two days, Louis. That’s all Jundt and Weber are giving us, and one of them’s gone. If we don’t come up with answers today they’ll call in Berlin-Central and we both know what that means.’

  Unlike the Grand, the Vittel-Palace was as silent as a tomb. All doors were closed, the smells still everywhere: ersatz perfume and pomanders but especially those of burning rutabaga steaks, boiling cabbage, and frying SPAM, or the smoke from innumerable stoves, some with the taint of refuse, others with that of the caramelized sweetness of toasting black bread, then too, the pungency of overheated electrical wires and the reminder, of course, that the damned place was nothing more than one hell of a fire trap.

  A knock at Room 3–54 brought nothing, the room uninhabited, that of Room 3–38, the crowded waiting looks of apprehension. Clearly the two rooms had gotten together to discuss things.

  Becky Torrence sat on her cot with Marni Huntington to one side and Jill Faber to the other. Dorothy Stevens, the tall, thin brunette from Ohio State with the uncooperative hair, was standing by the stove, where she had been eagerly licking a cone of what looked to be some sort of ice cream.

  Candice Peters, the all-but-forty-year-old with the frizzy brown hair from North Carolina State, was sitting on Nora’s cot. Droplets from the newspaper-covered cone she held fell to her slippered feet.

  Barbara Caldwell, the auburn-haired thirty-two- to thirty-six-year-old from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, was standing beside Marni’s cot on which sat Lisa Banbridge, the twenty-two-year-old brunette from Duke with the lovely hazel eyes and ponytail.

  There was no sign of Nora, none either of Jennifer or of Madame de Vernon.

  ‘The washing, Louis. Diese Pariser.’

  The condoms. Three of these hung limply from the curtain cord that had shut Caroline Lacy and Irène de Vernon off from the others.

  ‘It was just fun,’ confessed Jill with a shrug. ‘All we wanted was to be by ourselves for a little like it used to be when Mary-Lynn was with us.’

  ‘Une veillée, inspectors,’ offered Lisa. ‘For centuries such evening gatherings of women have been a tradition in France, a chance to talk things over, to recall the past while doing a little sewing or mending. Jill was telling us about Madison, Wisconsin, and the farmers’ markets she used to go to every Saturday morning as a student. The apples. . . ’

  ‘The McIntosh,’ said Marni, that chocolate thing of hers all but gone.

  ‘The Red Delicious—tart yet sweet,’ said Dorothy with longing.

  ‘The cheese,’ said Candice. ‘Muenster, Gruyère, caraway, brick, and Havarti, but best of all, the farmer’s. Little cubes on toothpicks were always given away, inspectors, slices of apple too, sometimes a whole one if a girl smiled and flashed her eyes the right way. It would be snatched up and quickly handed over to be tucked out of sight in a pocket or ravenously bitten, the farmer’s wife giving her husband the elbow.’

  ‘Maple syrup,’ sighed Becky, unable to stop herself from smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Mary-Lynn loved maple syrup.’

  ‘Popcorn,’ said Jill, giving her a tight hug. ‘She liked that, too.’

  ‘Pumpkins at Halloween,’ said Candice. ‘We used to fry the seeds in a little salt and butter and then eat them while they were hot. They were so delicious.’

  ‘Honey,’ said Marni, as if reliving the memories of a ten-year-old. ‘Clover, basswood, wildflower, buckwheat, and black locust, inspectors, the sweetest of all and softest of golden yellows. The beekeepers would let you have a sample. If you wanted to try any of them they’d dip one of the twigs they’d whittled into whatever jar you chose even if they knew you weren’t going to buy a thing.’

  ‘You could have your whole breakfast or lunch that way just by going from stall to stall,’ said Becky, having regained her composure. ‘There would be the smells of freshly baked bread and buns from the bakers’ stalls—those of chestnuts, too, sometimes—and fudge or pull taffy from the candymaker’s. Certainly those of burning hickory and grilling sausages, and of the winter, spring, summer, or autumn. Maybe a little sharpness in the air or even falling snow but that wonderful, wonderful tingling feeling of just being outdoors and absolutely free to do whatever one wanted. No guards, no war, no internment.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Louis impatiently. ‘Where is Madame de Vernon?’

  They looked at one another. It was Lisa who said, ‘Jill was telling us about the Red Gym—the Armoury Gymnasium that is on Langdon Street down by Lake Mendota and had been built in 1893. She used to have a beau in the Badgers Rowing Club and had taken to getting up at five to row with one of the girls’ crews just for a chance of seeing him. From its redbrick walls and heavy, oaken door you can look uphill to see the sun glistening on the beautiful big white dome of the State Capitol. It’s built of blocks of Bethel granite.’

  ‘From Vermont,’ confessed Jill.

  ‘And Madame, knowing of Barre, Vermont, and her former husband, was convinced you were taunting her, as indeed you were with those.’

  The Kondoms. It would be best to shrug and to tell them, thought Jill. ‘Bango, she flew into another of her boiling rages. Oh, sorry. Bango means “right away.”’

  ‘And left us to ourselves,’ managed Becky. ‘I didn’t kill anyone, inspectors. I swear I didn’t. Gosh, all I ever wanted was to help Antoine.’

  ‘Her fiancé,’ said Marni, tightly gripping the girl’s right hand. If an arrest was to be made, it would have to be of all of them.

  ‘And Nora and Jennifer?’ asked Hermann.

  ‘Nora’s gone to get some more clean snow so that she can make us another of these glorious snow ice-cream cones her dad taught her how to make, though he liked the raspberry best, Nora the blueberry. Jen’s doing her laundry.’

  ‘We always have to make sacrifices,’ said Dorothy of Jennifer’s absence. ‘Everyone in this hotel tends to eat early because we’re hungry by four and positively ravenous by five.’

  Which would mean, of course, that when Caroline Lacy was killed, all but a few had been in their rooms doing that after having, like Madame Chevreul and Léa Monnier, just watched Brother Étienne arrive.

  Blue eyes, green, dark olive-brown, hazel, and dark grey impassively looked at St-Cyr and Kohler as if, when they eventually left the room, there would be a collective sigh of relief and they’d go right back to what they’d been doing, discussing the simple things that everyone had taken for granted before this war.

  It was Jill who said ‘The laundry’s behind the kitchens and about as far from here as you can get. Sometimes at this hour there’s still a little hot water but it’ll be lukewarm at best. It always is.’

  The room was cavernous but of electric lighting there was only that from two widely spaced forty-watt bulbs. Leaking bronze taps, above the rows of zinc-lined drain tables yielded the periodic patience of ice-cold droplets that would, in the early ho
urs of a still-distant morning, freeze.

  Oak-framed, truss-backed washboards hung above the tables. Only one of them was being used—a lone occupant—and from it came the irritable clash of buttons on rippled brass as invective was muttered. The smell of ivy leaves, stewed and drained in desperation to give a liquid hopeful of soap, was clear enough. Sand could be used, and there was evidence of it.

  At regular intervals, cast-iron, rubber-roller clothes wringers were clamped to the tables, but of the washing machines and bench ironers of the interwar period there wasn’t a sign. All would have been removed and placed in storage. The Hôtel de l’Ermitage? wondered St-Cyr.

  ‘Curtis, Louis,’ said Hermann, giving the manufacturer’s name of the clothes wringers. ‘It’s like taking a step back in time.’

  Those twenty-six and -seven years since the wounded of the First American Army had been in residence. ‘Soldiers everywhere have no need of the complicated, Hermann. In any case, the simple copper wash-boiler, a mere tub, didn’t come into general use in France until the late ’20s and early ’30s. Washing machines and other such labour-saving devices were but objects of curiosity in catalogues.’

  Hand cranks turned the rollers and these were all but as long and heavy as tire irons, thought Kohler. Jennifer simply wasn’t present, only the small heap of wet underclothes that she had left on a distant drain table along with a bottle of what must be Brother Étienne’s lavender wash water.

  The nearby wringer roller’s hand crank had also absented itself, a worry to be sure.

  ‘Madame de Vernon,’ said Louis to her back, ‘what have you done with that girl?’

  She wouldn’t turn, thought Irène. She would concentrate on the scrubbing. ‘Me, Chief Inspector? Nothing, but why not ask that garce yourself? I arrived and she fled.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘Madame, you hated that girl. She was terrified of you.’

  ‘Terrified? For raping the innocence of my Caroline? Bien sûr, I wasn’t happy with what she was doing to that child of mine but as to her being terrified of me, that I couldn’t say.’