‘Just cut the travelogue, eh?, and show me where they dumped the bodies of the Royalists that were imprisoned and then murdered in 1791.’
The Glacière Massacre of that October. ‘The Latrines Tower is just through here. On each floor of the Palais, latrines gave relief and refuge to servant, dignitary, guard and pontiff alike. Rainwater and kitchen slops joined the waste, and the refuse fell to a large pit that had been sunk into the rocks far below. A drain then carried this waste to the Sorgue which soon joined the Rhône.’
The torchlight didn’t shine down the shaft nearly far enough. Biron went on about how, during a siege, invaders had entered the drain, waded across the cesspool and then had climbed into the Palais to surprise the guards.
‘What happened to the bodies of the Royalists?’
‘Quicklime was dumped on top of them. When the stench became too great, they were removed through an opening.’
‘Is that opening still there?’
‘An iron grille keeps all but the smallest of animals from entering.’
‘Then you’d better show it to me, hadn’t you, especially as some son of a bitch must have tidied up and dumped her things down there.’
Ah merde, did this one miss nothing? ‘We will need a hammer and cold chisel.’
‘Then get them. Bring help if necessary.’
Though an hour had passed, the body of Mireille de Sinéty had still not been cut into. ‘I thought you were going to question the sisters?’ asked Peretti, not looking up from her hair.
‘I lied,’ murmured St-Cyr. ‘Avignon has already tainted me.’
Nothing more was said. Peretti was in his late fifties. The face was angular and often sad, for he’d seen death many times, both in such places and on the field of battle. But the hands that could break bones if necessary could also be gentle. Something was teased from her hair and carefully mounted on to a microscope slide. Without pausing, he pulled the instrument from its case and set to work.
St-Cyr turned back to the trinkets which had been carefully arranged on a nearby pallet. The girl had carried no papers, but to walk the streets without them was to invite arrest, interrogation and possible deportation to one of the camps. Had her killer relieved her of them? he wondered, cursing the Renaissance’s lack of pockets. Had she parked them on a ledge or tucked them into a crack?
You were a Libra and of the House of Balance, he said silently. Among the zodiacal signs is the oft-repeated hand-held weighing scale, but did you then seek rooms in the Balance Quartier for good luck perhaps, or for some deeper reason?
Superstition had played such a part in the daily life of the Renaissance. Her gimmel ring set lapis lazuli side by side with a saffron-yellow topaz which matched exactly the colour of her gown. Yet the pattern on the gown, in a faint and delicate shade of brown, was of oak leaves and branches that were entwined with grapevines. Had this, too, had meaning for her and for others to puzzle over? And wasn’t the background pattern in the frescoes of Clement VI’s bedchamber of spiralling vines and oak branches and the deeper blue of lapis lazuli?
On the soft leather of her girdle he found, among so many other things, the sign of the Archer in gold. A tiny medallion. The Centaur’s arrow was pointed away from a silver House of Balance and towards a Goat that had been cast in lead.
The House of Balance weighed a tiny lapis lazuli cabochon against that of a saffron-yellow topaz, the two stones of equal weight.
She would tease and she would dare but had such things led to her death?
The little silver bells were very old, and he wondered how she had come by them, by all of this, for the trinkets and jewels dated from the Renaissance, whereas the clothing had been cut and sewn by herself.
‘Lapis is the stone of fertility,’ grunted Peretti impatiently. ‘What I’ve found in her hair isn’t much, I admit, but perhaps it’ll be enough.’
Down through the ocular of the microscope, and at thirty times magnification, the image of a tiny clot of coarse black wool rushed at the eye. ‘A cassock …’ breathed St-Cyr.
‘Or cloak, overcoat or sweater.’
‘The bishop …’
Back came the Commissaire de Police’s warning. Break glass and you’ll be cut. Tamper with the Host and the Blood of Christ and watch out.
‘Be careful,’ sighed Peretti. ‘I meant what I said.’
‘We will.’
‘How sure are you of that partner of yours?’
‘Hermann? We are like two perpetually crossed fingers. God’s honest cops trying to stop themselves from drowning in a torrent of officially sanctioned crime.’
Everyone was only too aware of what the Bodies, the Germans, and those who would collaborate with them were stealing. ‘Then leave me with her, Jean-Louis. Go and warn him to be very careful. I’ll lock everything up. No one will touch a thing.’
‘Just let me go over it once more. I must see if something, other than her papers, is missing. I must find what the bishop was looking for when he gave her Extreme Unction.’
And sent two of his nuns to police the corpse and have a look themselves or to thieve an item or two! thought Peretti. ‘He’s one of the Black Penitents, as is de Passe.’
‘Hence his wearing a simple black cassock when giving her the last rites?’
Peretti indicated the microscope slide. ‘Unless he was trying to tell you any one of them could have killed her, including himself.’
Several brotherhoods, including les Pénitents Noirs, dated back to the Baylonian Captivity when there were no fewer than sixty churches and thirty-five monasteries and Rabelais had described Avignon as the bell-ringing city, while Petrarch had called the Palais ‘the habitation of demons’.
‘Some of them practise flagellation,’ snorted Peretti. ‘Our bishop happens to be one of them and regularly scourges himself, or so it is rumoured.’
‘With a martinet?’
A small but many-thonged whip that some parents used to discipline delinquent children …‘Two of his fellow “brothers” hold him while he thrashes himself, Jean-Louis, but to purge himself of what sins, I know not.’
‘The Black Penitents also were and are men dedicated to good works,’ countered St-Cyr.
‘But for whom, Jean-Louis. For whom?’
The bishop, the préfet and others of the establishment were implied. ‘There’s a tiny silver martinet among her jewels.’
‘Then perhaps you have your answer.’
Dawn broke, and from the battlements of the Trouillas Tower some fifty-two metres above ground and next to the Latrines Tower, the view was of those ancient times. Eerie, steeped in mystery and deceit, damned cold and utterly heartless.
Kohler tugged the collar of his greatcoat up and crammed bare hands into its pockets. He was dying for a fag but the wind put paid to any such notion.
‘Inspector …’
The word, though shouted, was ripped away and pelted southward.
‘In a moment, Préfet. I have to get the lie of the land.’
Bâtard! cursed de Passe silently. ‘You find things at the base of the Latrines Tower. You do not immediately inform me in the proper manner. Instead, you demand my presence here in this wind? What is it you want? I haven’t all day.’
‘Nor have I.’
The gun-metal grey of a thickly layered ice-fog was being swept down the Rhone Valley and from distant hollows among the hills. Faint touches of pastel pink were beginning to intrude but offered no promise. The bitterly hard air took the breath away.
Would it have been like this in Russia? wondered Kohler. Would the boys have watched the fog lift or hug the ground to remain as they waited for the battle to begin again?
Everyone said the mistral had its origins in Russia. ‘My sons were within a year of her in age,’ he shouted.
‘Could we not go inside?’
Ah damn you, eh? ‘This wind makes people edgy, doesn’t it?’
‘What is it you want of me?’
‘A word, that’s all.�
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The coal-black eyebrows arched under the grey snap-brim fedora. The cleanly shaven chin and wind-burned cheeks stiffened as the grey eyes swiftly narrowed. ‘Get to it, Inspector.’
‘Answers. That kid lived right down there in a slum next to the ramparts and by that four-legged bridge that looks as if it still might like to cross the river but can’t quite make up its mind.’
‘You’ve found her papers.’
De Passe was of medium height and build and immaculately dressed in a grey overcoat whose thin and perfect collar wasn’t turned up to ward off the wind. The blue silk of a Royalist’s tie showed from between the arms of a grey cashmere scarf. Arrogant and of the bourgeoisie, he was not quite of the bourgeoisie aisée, the really well off, but would have aspirations, especially these days when anything was possible for the chosen few.
A civil servant, an administrator, he would consider himself far above such a lowly station as a cop.
‘Start by telling me why that girl was here and then, Préfet, what the hell she might have known that someone didn’t want her saying.’
This was Kohler of the Kripo, a conscientious doubter of Germanic invincibility who was disloyal to his peers, reviled and often hated by many at Gestapo Paris-Central, yet kept on by Sturmbannführer Boemelburg because he and that infernal partner of his gave some semblance of law and order to the ordinary citizen. They were Boemelburg’s flying squad, dealing with the difficult, thus opiating public outcry. They still couldn’t seem to learn that policemen were never dismissed for doing too little.
‘She had a lover. A boy who fled to the hills to join the Banditen.’ The ‘terrorists’, the Résistance, the maquis. ‘This matter was known to the bishop who, Herr Kohler, prevailed upon me to let him try to convince the girl to give up such a foolishness and agree to help us take the boy into custody before he did anything untoward.’
Anything that might damage the status quo, namely that of those in power. But good of him to have agreed to let the bishop have a try, though there must have been a little something offered in exchange for such a consideration.
‘And you think she was here to meet that boy?’
‘It’s possible. She would dress as if to cover herself for the lie of an audition, should the authorities stop her in the streets.’
‘But she wore her overcoat and beret, Préfet, a scarf and boots, too, and carried a handbag?’
Further discoveries had been made in the Latrines Pit, thought de Passe, and Kohler had seen fit to tease his ears with the information so that he would now fret over what else had been found. ‘I’m only suggesting a possibility. You and Jean-Louis are in charge of the investigation.’
‘Why’d they choose to meet here?’
‘Her place of residence was being watched. Quite obviously she must have realized this and found a way to arrange a meeting no one would suspect or question.’
But someone had. ‘Patriotic, was she?’
‘Misguided, Inspector, as so many of our young seem to be.’
‘Then there was some urgency to what she had to impart?’
‘Inspector, could we not go inside? There’s a window in this tower from which the view is almost as good.’
‘But then I couldn’t see the hills behind us. Those ones. That big one to the northeast. Right out there, Préfet. Yes, there.’
Mont Ventoux and the plateau de Vauduse, home to some of the maquis.
‘What else did you find in the Latrines Pit?’
‘Anxious, are you?’
‘Why should I be?’
‘Because maybe I found something you didn’t expect. Maybe whoever tidied up and dumped those things of hers should first have taken a damned good look through her handbag.’
‘What, damn you? Tell me. I have a right to know.’
‘Nothing, then. Absolutely nothing.’
‘Maudit salaud! Cochon, how dare you defy me?’
Livid, de Passe turned abruptly away and headed for the exit rather than embarrass himself further. Left to the rooks which would haunt the battlements after a siege, Kohler thought again of his two sons. He thought of Giselle and Oona in Paris, the two loves of his life. And he thought of Louis who had lost his wife and little son to a Resistance bomb not so long ago, a mistake if ever there was one – that bomb had been meant for Louis who was not and could never be a collaborator – and he thought of Avignon and of men like de Passe.
‘Ah merde,’ he croaked, ‘have I gone too far this time?’ The lady’s wrist-watch he had found in her handbag was from Carder’s and, though it was tastefully modest and had but a plain brown leather strap, the watch would have cost from 30,000 to 50,000 francs in 1938, the year it must have been purchased.
Ovid Peretti gently stroked the girl’s breasts using a swab of cotton wool. He did her hips and arms, the inner thighs. He wasn’t going to miss a thing and that was good. Because I have, thought St-Cyr, cursing himself. There had been three rings on the fine gold chain that had hung about her neck – he was positive of this and had reread his notes – and now, unfortunately, there were only two of them.
Search as he had, no sign of the third ring had been uncovered. ‘The sisters,’ he said. ‘One of them made off with a trinket.’
The cotton swab was added to others in a labelled glass vial. ‘Le bijou par excellence, eh?’ snorted Peretti. ‘Are you still certain the youngest of the sisters was vomiting only because of this place, or are you now wondering if God’s servant, in all of her innocence, also did it to distract you?’
‘That was no act. The younger sister was suffering deeply from grief as well as a queasy stomach, but the older one must have used these against me. The ring had a ruby cabochon of at least four carats.’
‘Pigeon’s blood and free from flaws?’
‘Why did they take it?’
Had Jean-Louis now realized that, at the very least, the younger sister must also have known what they had been told to retrieve?
‘Was it the bishop’s?’ hazarded St-Cyr.
‘And on loan? You’re asking the wrong person, mon ami.’
‘Then what about this?’
At least six hundred years old, the pendant box that was attached to her girdle next to the sewing kit was ovoid in shape, and not more than six centimetres long by about three in width, and one-and-a-half in thickness. Foiled crystals, in silver gilt, threw back a golden light when the box was opened to reveal a thorn.
‘Christ wore a crown of thorns,’ murmured Peretti, ‘but this one bathed herself before going to her death. After the bath, an oil of some kind was used.’
‘One that she had made herself?’
‘Perhaps.’
In the pendant box, in translucent enamel, Christ was depicted on the Cross, and being lifted gently down from it. The tiny figures wore vivid colours of blue, green, red and saffron yellow. The clothing of the Virgin Mary and of Mary Magdalene and the Disciples was medieval and of a style probably worn fifty to one hundred years earlier than the Babylonian Captivity.
‘Louis the Ninth led the Seventh Crusade,’ muttered St-Cyr, his mind lost to the relic. ‘In 1250 he was defeated at El Mansura and held for ransom, after which he remained in the Holy Land until 1254. He died of the plague in Tunis in 1270, soon after landing at the head of another crusade. History has it that he purchased the Crown of Thorns from the Emperor of Constantinople.’
‘Even canonized kings can be conned,’ said Peretti dryly.
‘Ah yes, but did the bishop lend it to her? The fastener was loose as though an attempt had been made to take it back.’
And hidden away among the folds of a black habit. ‘Then you’d better ask him in the presence of those two sisters.’
‘I’ll attempt to, but first I must catch up with my partner.’
‘Then before you go, please take a look at this. It was caught in that broken fingernail.’
The image of a single hair rushed up the ocular to meet the eye – short, stiff and tan-coloured,
and most probably from a dog.
‘I’ll need to make microscopic comparisons, and of sections too,’ said Peretti, ‘and for this I must have samples. But I leave the matter in your good hands lest the bishop question my sudden interest in his hounds.’
‘Be careful.’
‘You too.’
3
Mullioned windows, punished by hoarfrost, overlooked the place de Horloge in the centre of town. St-Cyr didn’t remove his overcoat, scarf and fedora. One seldom did these days due to the lack of heat and threat of theft. ‘A tisane of rose hips, madame,’ he called out.
‘At this hour?’ she shot back from behind the brass scrollwork of her cage. It was not yet eleven in the morning.
‘At any hour,’ he said.
Ah! A Parisian as well as a Sûreté – the blind could have sensed it; for herself, it was written all over him, but to his credit, he didn’t attempt to hide it. ‘The girl …’ began Madame Emphoux, indicating the headlines of the Occupation’s thin and tightly controlled Provençal. ‘ “Découverte du cadavre d’une jeune fille au Palais,”’ she read the headline aloud as if for the first time. ‘Is it true, Inspector?’
She would have heard plenty by now but he met the gaze she gave, one of brutal assessment, given from under fiercely knitted brows, as if she had heard nothing. ‘True,’ he said warily.
‘Violated?’ asked the woman, leaning closely so that unclipped nasal hairs and florid cheeks unbrushed by rouge or powder were more than evident beyond the scrollwork. There was butter on the double chin. Butter! He was certain of it. The hair was frizzy, a mop of tired auburn curls that hung over the blunt forehead. The cardigan, of wine-purple wool, had frayed holes at the elbows and was too small for her. Tightly buttoned, it gave glimpses of a turquoise blouse and a flannel shirt. ‘Violated?’ she prodded.
‘That I cannot say,’ came the still wary response, the Sûreté not budging unless … unless, perhaps, the offer of something useful was made. ‘They come here,’ she confided, her voice still low but her hard brown eyes flicking over the clientele who, disinterested or otherwise, appeared to keep entirely to themselves.
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