Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  Carriage entrances were to the left and right – great, solid, weathered oaken doors with rusty driftpins. All windows at ground level were tightly shuttered, though some of the slats had disappeared. On the floor above, some windows had closed curtains. In others, these had been drawn aside. In one, there were pots of herbs and green onions the frost had killed. In another, a caged rabbit was trying not to think of things as it awaited the stew pot.

  The concierge, grey and toothless, her hair pinned in a tight chignon, was in tears. ‘Inspectors!’ she wailed. ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  A tattered black lace shawl was pulled tightly about the tiny shoulders. More tears fell and then she said accusingly, ‘What is Thérèse to do?’

  ‘Thérèse?’

  ‘Oui. Her assistant. The girl can’t sew without her fingers being guided. Mon Dieu, how could she carry on such work? A girl with a dead mother and a father who has fortunately been absent all her life except for the moment of conception? Mademoiselle Mireille was teaching her. Painstakingly, I must add!’

  Tears were abruptly wiped away but then, of a sudden, the woman turned aside and broke down completely. ‘Forgive me,’ she blurted. ‘The child was like a daughter. Her throat slashed! Ah let me get my hands on his filthy throat. I will wring his neck like a chicken’s!’

  A doubter of all such outbursts, Kohler looked up at the ceiling to where flaking paint and ancient wallpaper threatened to join the plaster as it caved. ‘The key, Louis. Ask her for it.’

  ‘Thérèse is up there waiting for her to return, monsieur!. Always I’ve seen the way he has secretly watched the tower room from the ramparts. Always he has stood clothed in darkness while he planned to steal her little capital.’

  Ah nom de Dieu. ‘Who, madame?’ asked Louis.

  She raked them with a savage look. ‘He took it, didn’t he?’

  Her virginity. ‘No. No, she remained pure to the last.’

  ‘Ah grâce à Dieu.’ The bosom was hastily crossed, the fingertips kissed and then the black beads of an ancient rosary were sought and also kissed.

  ‘Who?’ repeated St-Cyr.

  They had both crowded into her loge. ‘I …’ She threw them a tortured look. ‘I … I don’t know. I spoke out of grief. You … you can see how distressed I am.’

  Kohler sighed and then said, ‘Withholding information is a criminal offence. We’ll have to see that she’s charged, Louis. Otherwise she’ll only set a bad example.’

  ‘Dédou Favre. The one who is wanted by the authorities so much that Monsieur le Préfet has the house watched constantly.’

  ‘Her lover, Louis. The boy the bishop was trying to get her to give up. The Kommandant spoke of him. De Passe told me he had agreed to look the other way while Rivaille worked on her.’

  A ‘terrorist’. One of the maquis. ‘And you think he killed her, madame?’ asked Louis pleasantly.

  ‘She said he would misunderstand and that for him, it would be enough.’

  ‘Misunderstand what?’ asked St-Cyr.

  ‘The attentions of others. Those of the madrigal singers of Monsieur Simondi, and of that one aussi. What they want, they take. A girl’s virtue is nothing to such as them, and she was totally aware of this. “Dédou will be insanely jealous,” she said. “He will think that in joining the group I’ve succumbed, that even I can be led astray in order to advance my career.”’

  And in Avignon such jealousy was cause enough for murder. History was replete with the evidence.

  ‘Inspector, that was one of the reasons she wouldn’t leave this house to take up the lodgings Bishop Rivaille had arranged for her. She also said, “Here I keep my independence. Here I can stand on the side of what is right as I reach out to clasp the true hand of God.” Every day, on waking, she would make that little vow to herself as she gazed up at the Palais. A saint.’

  The German lit a cigarette for her and left her two others for later. ‘Thérese?’ he asked. His voice was gentle for one so formidable and with the mark of a terrible scar down the left cheek – how had he got it? she wondered.

  ‘Barbed wire,’ lied Kohler. ‘The Great War. My partner and I were enemies then, but we’re friends now.’

  The other scars from that war were much older, except for the graze across his brow which was still very fresh. ‘Thérèse hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, nor will she listen to me, messieurs. Please do what you can for her. Mademoiselle de Sinéty would wish this of us all.’

  ‘Won’t the sisters take her in?’ asked St-Cyr, only to see the woman’s expression tighten and to hear her rasp, ‘The sisters? You mustn’t ask them to do that. Not until you’ve brought the one who did this terrible thing to justice.’

  ‘But … but you’ve just told us Dédou Favre must have killed her in a jealous rage.’

  She gave him a piercing look. ‘One can still be wrong, is that not so, Inspector? And if I am wrong, why then it would have to have been someone else.’

  Pure logic. ‘But the sisters?’ snorted Kohler in disbelief.

  ‘Have among them, messieurs, the disease of those who are capable, especially if they believe it is God’s work.’

  ‘Did Sister Marie-Madeleine come here often?’ asked St-Cyr.

  Had this one from the Sûreté seen it too, the bond between Mireille and her friend? ‘Often enough and not always with one of the other sisters, though it is their rule to go two by two when escaping the tight embrace of their walls.’

  Thérèse Godard was about fifteen years old – thin, frail, not healthy-looking at all. ‘Tuberculosis …?’ breathed Kohler – the door had been left open.

  ‘The flu …’ cautioned Louis, perturbed that God should do such a thing to them at a time like this.

  She was shivering, was sitting at a cutting table, staring emptily at an upturned pair of dove-grey woollen gloves whose fingers, especially in these days of so little fuel, had been cut away at the first joint.

  Gently Kohler spoke her name. She tossed her head. ‘Mireille …?’ she managed, only to see the two of them and to turn swiftly away.

  The auburn hair, once curled, was unkempt. ‘I’ll take her downstairs to madame, Louis. See what you can make of this clutter.’

  ‘It is not clutter!’ blurted the girl angrily. ‘Everything is in its place just as we kept it. They came. They searched. They did that to her privacy but I … I have put things back exactly as we kept them.’

  Ah merde …‘De Passe, Louis?’

  ‘The police,’ she managed.

  Kohler dug into a pocket and dragged out the wrist-watch he had found in the victim’s purse. ‘Was this hers?’

  The girl buried her face in her employer’s gloves and wept.

  ‘Sorry … Look, I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘Xavier gave that to her. She needed a watch and he … he said he could get her one.’

  The shepherd boy.

  The rooms – there were two of them – opened into each other through double doors that had been permanently flung wide. In a far corner, a spiral staircase led up to the tower.

  Rescued, pieced together, were the stone fragments of letters which had once been a part of the coat of arms. ‘De Sinéty …’ exhaled St-Cyr. The time, the diligence needed to gather and fit the artefacts together said much about the victim. A scattered collection of pieces, obviously uncovered from courtyard and cellar excavations, yielded a bent and much corroded ducat, the remains of an ancient pair of shears, those also of fourteenth-century clothing pins and clasps, and those of what must have been the original keys to the house.

  Two silver thimbles, one crushed flat, the other crumpled, had been cleaned but were still black.

  The pattern on them matched that of the thimbles in the motif on the sides of the pomander.

  There was cloth in plenty, either folded neatly on the workroom shelves or in bolts and remnants, and he had to ask, How had she come by it? and had to answer, ‘The Church, the bishop and the nuns –
wealth that has been stored for centuries.’ And then, fingering satin, silk and velvet, ‘The drapes, bed linens and clothing from abandoned villas. Wrist-watches, too, no doubt.’

  Those of the wealthy who could get out before the Free Zone had been occupied had had to leave virtually everything behind. Now most of these places had been taken over by the Occupier and his friends, if in convenient locations and ‘suitable’; if not, they had remained empty. A ready source of fabrics especially for a group of singers to collect when on tour.

  The cutting table yielded patterns, fabric shears, scissors, thread, thimbles, needles and detailed sketches of the costumes she was making. There were hundreds of notations with arrows to each seam and tuck. A collection of volumes on Renaissance painting offered ready comparisons.

  An order book would hold the dates, customers, projects and fees charged. Alain de Passe would have looked through it but in search of what? he asked himself.

  A recent page had been torn out. A fragment remained, and from this, there were two letters in pencil. Ai… Aix? he asked himself. The tour the group were to make? Had Simondi demanded different costumes for every tour? Had the girl written down his needs? Then why tear the page out?

  Unfortunately several other pages had been removed and these went right back to the beginning, nearly four years ago. But why hadn’t de Passe simply taken the book and destroyed it? Thérèse Godard would have told them of it, yes, of course, but had it been left as a warning to watch out and tread lightly?

  ‘Ah merde, Avignon,’ muttered St-Cyr, not liking things at all.

  A narrow cabinet held spools of thread, including that of gold and silver. There were buttons, ribbons, bodice laces, boxes of pins, rolls of basting tape, et cetera.

  When he went up into the tower, he saw at once that the pomander was a replica of the Palais’s Bell Tower, that it must, indeed, date from the mid-fourteenth century, and he had to ask, How had she come by such a valuable thing?

  Her lute was a treasure, too, not nearly so old as to have come from those times, but old and beautifully kept. A relative? he wondered. A legacy?

  There were letters that had been written in Latin, in the French of the North, and in the langue d’oc of those days. Treasures, too, and many of them bore the signatures of the de Sinéty family and of another Mireille. Her namesake.

  On the table she had used as a desk, there were recipes for beauty oils and creams, and these had been noted down from references no longer in evidence but attributed to this other Mireille.

  Stanzas, verses and lines were from poems and madrigals.

  My love for my mistress is so gentle,

  I serve her so timidly, am so humble,

  I do not even tell her of my longing,

  Bernard de Ventadour had been among the leading troubadors of the third quarter of the twelfth century. The passage, more of which appeared, was from The Timid Wooing. ‘His style of poetry,’ she had noted, ‘is very firmly elemental and of les provençaux.’

  De Ventadour had been a baker’s son who had risen to sing at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. After the age of the troubadors had come that of the motet, and then the madrigal.

  A leather-bound volume, the Musica Transalpina, of 1588 and borrowed from whom, he wondered, held a collection of madrigals, written in Italian but with their English translations, too, and many of these pieces had been composed by Luca Marenzio. Unbidden, the face of Christiane Bissert as she had entered the cafe this morning came to him. The Villa Marenzio. I await your questions, she had written, with a heart that is open.

  ‘Louis, de Passe went through her things all by himself. There was no one else with him.’

  ‘Then let us find what he missed.’

  Two tins of sardines were from Marseille and they matched, exactly, the one Louis had taken from the victim.

  Kohler reached well into the hidey-hole he had found under the floorboards beneath a wooden box that was full of fabric remnants. A corked, dark green wine bottle was next. ‘Extra Vierge,’ he breathed.

  There were freshly harvested black olives as big as small plums. Dried figs and apricots had been threaded on to braided lengths of straw for ease of carrying to and from market or hanging up in the kitchen, but few would have done so these days for fear of a visit from Vichy’s hated Service d’ordre, soon to become the Milice, who, among other tasks, hunted for hoarders and the lesser black-marketeers, the little men, the lampistes. Never the big ones. Never! It was only the little ones who couldn’t buy their way out of trouble.

  A beating and arrest were guaranteed; theft, too, of the offending items and anything else that might appear appealing.

  The braiding of the straw and style of tying matched that of the recently acquired ropes of garlic and sun-dried tomatoes that hung freely in sight above the tiny basin she had used as a sink.

  A cake of homemade olive-oil soap smelled of honey, too, and lavender, not of ground horse chestnuts, sand and slaked lime as did the infamous ‘National’ soap, which was always served up in grey, pasty two-centimetre-sized cubes and rationed. Nor would this soap have burned her skin and scratched it as the National’s did Giselle’s and Oona’s. Not used until recently, the soap had to have come with the olives and the oil. None of these items was ever seen in Paris by ordinary people. And as sure as that God of Louis’s had made olives to ripen like that near les Baux, the shepherd boy had some answering to do.

  A small round of chèvre de crottin had been dusted with herbs. Three slices of honey-drenched, fried bread were golden in colour and lying under a cover on a plate – the tranches dorèes the peasant would take at his mid-afternoon goûter, his little ‘tea break’ among the groves or vineyards and fortified by at least four litres of red wine. Had the shepherd boy been bribing the victim or just trying to encourage her favour?

  A last item was harder to retrieve and it caused consternation for it couldn’t have come from a similar source.

  ‘Hédiard,’ he muttered. ‘Kumquats. Merde alors, she’s full of surprises!’

  The pale green glass jar, with its gold lettered and embossed label, spoke of luxuries not seen by most since before the war and then only from the street side of a shop window.

  There was dust on the lid; the seal was intact, a puzzle these days.

  From behind the false backing of the small cupboard that served as her kitchen counter and drainboard, he took a jar of English marmalade, one of candied ginger, a tin of litchi nuts and another of crystallized, unrefined sugar from Barbados. Again, all the items had come from Hédiard’s. Again there was dust on all of the lids and this was thickest on the jar of marmalade. From there through to the kumquats it varied, indicating the items hadn’t come in all at once but had been given to her in payment perhaps, and at intervals. But why had she partaken of none of them?

  Everyone knew or had heard of Hédiard. One of Paris’s venerable institutions, and much revered not just for its delicatessen but for its upstairs tearoom, the shop had occupied premises at 21 place de la Madeleine since 1851. And oh bien sûr, had they closed it in protest at the Defeat of June 1940, they would have lost the business to a friend or friends of the Occupier. That had been one of the many ordinances of the time, and had been obeyed or else.

  Among other things, she had been working on an order for six replacement surplices for the Cathedral’s choir, a donation of her already overstressed time, no doubt, since there was no mention of the order in her ledger.

  But then, of course, Alain de Passe, that warner of Don’t mess with the Host and the Blood of Christ, had torn out page after page.

  When he found a false panel beneath the top of her main worktable, his fingers trembled and he had to calm them. Infrequent sleep and meals hadn’t helped the nerves, nor had the pace of things. Always it was blitzkrieg for them, and always of late those little dove-grey pills of Benzedrine the fighter pilots took to stay awake and alive had been necessary.

  The ledger she had hidden was complete. Great
ly humbled by the thoroughness of this petite lingère, he began to peruse it.’ Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Toulon and Aries … The tour after the concert on the thirtieth.’

  Beneath each of these place names she had noted the costume changes the singing master had demanded. Detail after detail followed in columns and sketches so orderly he had to recall the Kommandant’s admiration of her practicality. She had even used a code – in glyphs – to denote the singers’ names and those of others, and nowhere here did the actual names appear. A kind of shorthand, he supposed, but another rebus for them to sort out.

  Beneath the glyphs and the details there were notations of payment: for the costumes at Aix, a mere 205 francs; for those at Marseille, 103; for Aries only 63 francs.

  The singing master must have had her modify existing costumes, but even so it was far too little, far too parsimonious.

  At the bottom of the page she had written: Maître Simondi’s cheque for 876 francs has been postdated to 25 April- three months, no less! – and given on the Aries branch of the Banque des Pays du Sud this time.

  Two things were immediately clear: the singing master was a demanding, cheap son of a bitch – an astute businessman, the Kommandant had said. And Mireille de Sinéty had felt it necessary to keep hidden a far more detailed copy of her ledger.

  They’d been watching her, and she had damned well known it.

  Xavier had brought her gifts from his father’s farm, and things he had stolen when the group had broken into abandoned villas. Someone else – he didn’t think it could have been the shepherd boy – had paid her in, or given her, the tins of sardines. And yet again, someone had done so with the items from Hédiard’s, but at intervals.

  Up in the tower, Louis was lost in thought, puzzling over something on the girl’s dressing table and sucking on a pipe he had forgotten to light.

  Fingering a cheap, ersatz pewter crucifix and a rosary of black Bakelite beads, the Sûreté said, ‘This medallion, Hermann. The image of the Holy Mother has been so poorly stamped, the second impression blurs the first.’