The Restaurant of the Gare de Lyon was huge, a prince, a god among all others. But now under the blackout’s hauntingly blue and ethereal light from Paris’s infrequent lamps, its gilded cherubs and buxom nymphs were cloaked in grime. They shed their gilding, clutched their bouquets of daisies and looked offended as if wanting to cry out, Monsieur the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté Nationale, how could you – yes, you! – of all people have let this happen to us?
Gone were the diners in their splendid dinner jackets and tails, the beautiful girls in their magically tantalizing gowns, the femmes du monde, the society women, too, and those of little virtue. The gaiety … the laughter … the sounds of silver cutlery and crystal, the pewter plates upon which the porcelains had been set.
Gone, too, were the bankers, politicians, industrialists, the men of solid cash and much power. These days most of them had found other pastures upon which to graze.
But now … now after more than two and a half years of the Occupation, the restaurant’s crumbling horns of plenty let fall a constant rain of golden fragments and plaster dust which littered the mountains of crates, barrels, sacks and steamer trunks – suitcases, too, of all sizes – that climbed high into the vault of the ceiling to where once Gervex’s magnificent painting, the Battle of the Flowers, had portrayed the city of Nice.
‘It’s like an Aladdin’s Cave that’s all but been forgotten,’ breathed Kohler, aghast at what lay before them.
Distracted, St-Cyr ignored his partner. The restaurant, that triumph of the Mauve Decade and the Belle Époque – le Train Bleu, some had begun to call it – stank of sweat, mould, sour produce and rotten meat that the inevitable delays in transit had left to languish. Soot, too, of course, and urine, for what better ‘terrorist’ action when forced to store things destined for the Reich, than to piss on them in secret – or do worse – in the name of freedom and of Résistance?
‘“Produce … a gift from the people of France to their friends in the Reich,”’ snorted Kohler at a label. ‘Walnuts, Louis. Sacks and sacks of them from Périgord.’
‘A warehouse, Hermann. This was its Salle Dorée!’ Its Golden Room.
‘Easy, mon vieux. Hey, take it easy, eh?’
‘Now just a minute. Look what you Boches have done! My grandmother brought me here on 9 April 1901, just two days after the grand opening. We sat right over there. Yes, over there! Right next to that great big window with all the soot on it.’
A kid of ten. Jean-Louis St-Cyr was now fifty-two years of age, himself fifty-five, and where had the time gone? wondered Kohler. To the Great War – they had both been in it, but on opposite sides – and then to more murders, arsons, rapes and other ‘common’ crimes than he’d care to count. Munich first for himself, then Berlin and finally, after the Defeat of France, Paris and partner to Louis, since all such Frenchmen needed someone to watch over them. This one especially!
‘Oysters baked golden in champagne sauce, Hermann, and laid piping hot in the half-shell on a bed of coarse salt.’
‘Von Schaumburg, Louis. Old Shatter Hand said we were to take a look at this.’
‘Le côte de boeuf à la moëlle …’
Rib of beef … ‘Louis …’
‘Gaufres de Grand-mère Bocuse, Hermann.’
Waffles! Merde, were they to have the whole of the meal? ‘Louis—’
‘Yes, yes, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. How could I have forgotten one of my many, many masters?’
It was Friday, 29 January 1943 at 23:55 hours. Just five minutes to curfew and colder than a bugger outside. In here, too, thought Kohler. At least five degrees of frost, the inky darkness of the blackout, no sleep, no food, no homecoming to Giselle and Oona, his lady loves. No pleasure at all; damp, too, and this after a bastard of an investigation in Avignon whose result, totally unappreciated, had seen them all but shot to pieces and kicked to death.
Von Schaumburg had sent him and Louis a telegram which had found them on the train somewhere between Lyon and Paris and hours late. Hours.
‘We couldn’t have known the Résistance would blow the tracks, Hermann,’ offered St-Cyr apologetically, having intuitively gauged the trend of his partner’s thoughts. ‘We were lucky, that’s all.’
Lucky that the plastic – the cyclonite – hadn’t gone off right under them.
The telegram from von Schaumburg had exhibited the usual Prussian gift for brevity: RESTAURANT GARE DE LYON. TELL NO ONE. It hadn’t even ended with the customary Heil Hitler. A Wehrmacht orderly, one of the Kommandant’s staff, had met them on arrival and had given them a key. No guards had been on the doors, though there should have been.
‘Merde, Hermann, just what the hell had he in mind?’
Paris’s ‘trunk’ murderers were always sending their victims to Lyon in steamer trunks with no return address. Thinking they had yet another corpse on their hands, and not liking the thought, Kohler disconsolately ran the beam of his blue-blinkered torch over the trunks and turned again to hunting through the labels.
St-Cyr let him be. Always these days there was conflict among the Germans, one faction against another. And always Hermann and himself – who were practically the only two honest cops left to fight common crime in an age of officially sanctioned, monstrous crime – had to come between them.
Von Schaumburg was a soldier and the armed forces – the Wehrmacht – still hated the SS and the Gestapo, distrusting entirely the Führer’s faith in those two organizations and jealous of it, too.
Boemelburg, on the other hand, was Hermann’s boss and Head of SIPO Section IV, the Gestapo in France. His telegram had preceded that of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris by nearly twenty-four hours, having arrived just as they had reached the station in Orange to begin their homeward journey:
BODY OF BEEKEEPER FOUND IN APIARY NEAR PÈRELACHAISE CEMETERY REQUIRES IMMEDIATE AND URGENT ATTENTION. HEIL HITLER.
‘Urgent’ meant, of course, trouble, and trouble was something they did not need, but this was, of course, not the Père Lachaise. Not yet!
‘Bees, Louis. Something to do with them, I guess.’ Hermann’s voice was muffled by the crates.
Threading his way through to that same window at which he had sat so long ago, St-Cyr looked down over the inner concourse of the Gare de Lyon. Surreal under its wash of dim blue light, people sat or stood as if caught frozen in time. Locked in now because of the curfew and forced to spend the next five hours waiting to leave. Most were shabby, the suitcases they guarded, old or of cardboard and no longer made of leather. Hungry always, they confined themselves to patience, accustomed now to the lengthy delays, the endless queues for food, food tickets, travel papers … papers, papers of all kinds.
A Wehrmacht mobile soup kitchen was dishing out thick slices of black bread and mess tins of cabbage soup with potatoes and sometimes meat, but only to others of their kind in the ever-present grey-green uniforms. A crowd of children stood silently watching as les haricots verts, the green beans, the ‘Schlocks’ spread margarine on their bread and wolfed down their soup.
Gone were the days of those first few months of the Occupation in 1940 when many of the troops tried to behave themselves and play the benefactor. Now, with the imminent defeat of von Paulus at Stalingrad and the loss of what remained of the Führer’s Sixth Army, they and others were afraid lest the conquered and oppressed begin to turn against them en masse.
Hermann’s two boys had been among the Wehrmacht’s one hundred and fifty thousand dead at Stalingrad, but being Hermann, he didn’t hold this loss against his partner and friend, nor the French or anyone else but the Führer. Instead, he had become a citizen of the world. France had been good for Hermann.
‘Louis … Louis, there’s beeswax in lard pails but half the shipment is missing.’
‘Half?’
‘The dust on the floor. I can count, can’t I? The rings where the pails once sat. Taken two, maybe three days ago at most.’
Kohler crouched to indicate the lack of dust in circular patches. Prising off a lid revealed the contents and for a moment neither of them could say a thing. Frost caused their breath to billow. Louis was transfixed. The dark, golden honey had been squished out to fill the crevasses and grow stiff with the cold. The wax was of a paler, softer amber under the blue of the light. Hexagonal platelets – the cappings that had once covered the cells – were smeared over one another.
‘Squashed honeycomb that hasn’t even been drained let alone spun, Louis. Smashed and mangled bees. Whoever did this didn’t give a damn about keeping the colonies alive and robbed the hives blind.’
A big man with the broad shoulders, big hands, thick wrists, bulldog jowls and puffy eyelids of an ageing storm-trooper, which he’d never been, the Bavarian gazed up at him. They both knew exactly what the robbery meant: the hunt for Banditen, for bandits – résistants – in the hills and some poor farmer’s hives that had just happened to be there.
‘A lot of them, so a lot of farmers, Hermann.’
‘I’m sorry. Do you want me to apologize for all the atrocities of this lousy war or only for being here at this moment?’
Hermann’s tired and faded blue eyes were filled with remorse and worry. He hadn’t liked what they’d found, but more than this, had sensed trouble in their now having to again work for two masters. Von Schaumburg and Gestapo Boemelburg!
‘Forgive me,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s just this … The restaurant, mon vieux. It meant so much to me as a boy. I’d never seen such things. Lace and plunging necklines, scented breasts and lovely soft earlobes with amethysts in silver dangling from them, diamonds too.’
‘I’ll bet your grandmother slapped your ogle-eyed wrists!’
‘She said I needed to be educated and that if I would but do as she had wished for herself, I’d go far. That honey, by the way, is from lavender.’
‘Merde, did you think I needed to be told? The labels, such as they are, say the “wax” is from Peyrane in the Vaucluse, but we both know lard doesn’t come from there in such quantity, so the pails were gathered elsewhere and whoever stole from the hives went in prepared.’
‘So, why would a Parisian beekeeper’s death have anything to do with this?’
‘And why would von Schaumburg want us to have a look and not tell anyone? The gatherer of this little harvest, eh?’ snorted Kohler. ‘Find the bastard’s name and whisper it into the shell of Old Shatter Hand’s ear, but don’t let Boemelburg in on it. Christ!’
‘We shall have to see,’ breathed St-Cyr. Always there were questions and always there were difficulties.
They tasted the honey whose accent was harsh and of the hills, and marvellous. ‘Long after it is swallowed, Hermann, the ambrosia remains.’
‘Ambrosia’s beebread, Dummkopf. Pollen and nectar the worker bees store so that the nurse bees can feed it to the brood larvae. Hey, if you’re still intent on buying that little retirement farm in Provence after what happened to us in Avignon, I’d suggest you damn well pay attention to your partner.’
Hermann had been raised on a farm near Wasserburg, whereas this Sûreté had but spent wondrous summer holidays at those of relatives. The great escape, now dragged into the dust of years by memory.
‘Come on, Louis. We’re wasting time we haven’t got. You take two and I’ll take two as evidence. No one will miss another eighty kilos.’
‘What about our suitcases?’
‘We’ll throw them in the vélo-taxi too.’
A bicycle taxi! ‘It’s too icy. They’ll have stopped running in any case.’
The curfew was upon them and, as von Schaumburg had ordered, they could tell no one of what they were up to.
‘We’ll walk. You take the suitcases,’ said Kohler. ‘I’ll take the pails, then we’ll switch halfway.’
‘To Charonne and Belleville?’
‘Relax, eh? I’ll soon find us a lift.’
‘That is exactly what I’m afraid of, given the scarcity of traffic!’
The gazogene lorry that Hermann stopped perfumed the air with its burning wood-gas and was on its way to La Tour d’Argent, le Grand Véfour, Maxim’s and other high-class restaurants, all of which were doing a roaring business. Half-loaded with ducks, geese, chickens, eggs, cheeses, milk and potatoes – items no longer seen by most since the autumn of 1940 – its driver was speechless.
Louis had simply shrilled, ‘No arguments, monsieur,’ and had flattened the bastard.
‘That’ll teach him to deal on the black market and to hand over half his load to some double-dealing son of a bitch of a Feldwebel at a control,’ snorted Kohler.
Everyone knew that the charge was 50 per cent. Half for the boys in grey-green; half for the dealers, the big boys who organized things. There were never any complaints. Even then fortunes were being made and yet another class of nouveaux riches had been born.
‘We’ll just drive by the flat and let Giselle and Oona look after these, Louis. Then we’ll go and pick up the Citroën before we dump the lorry at one of those restaurants and pay our beekeeper a little visit.’
Never one to take things for himself and his little ‘family’, had Hermann suddenly shifted gears?
‘It’s the war, Louis, and what’s been happening out there. Hey, don’t let it worry you, eh? We’re still friends.’
That, too, is what I’m afraid of, muttered St-Cyr to himself, for the Résistance didn’t take such friendships kindly and this humble Sûreté was most certainly still on some of their hit lists. For working with a Nazi, with Hermann, who was not and could never have been one of those.
No lights showed in the flat that was above St-Cyr on the rue Suger. How could they, with the black-out regulations? Alone, freezing and tired – mon Dieu he was tired, for they’d been away for days without sleep – he sat in the lorry’s cab and waited.
Sometimes waiting for Hermann could take hours. There were only two beds in the flat, one for Giselle, the other for Oona. Hermann would try not to awaken either of them. They’d both be bundled in several heavy sweaters, pyjamas, slacks and socks upon socks. Woollen hats, too, and scarves. Mittens probably, and all that under heaps of blankets, but their ears were ever keen, as were most these days. And he knew Oona would be certain to get out of bed to greet his partner silently.
She was forty years of age, all but twice that of his little Giselle. Was Dutch, an illegal alien from Rotterdam who had lost her two children to the Messerschmitts on the trek into France during the blitzkrieg, and had subsequently lost her husband to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. A Jew she had been hiding. Another case, a carousel murder.
Hermann and she got on well. She never complained and he knew Hermann depended on her to watch over Giselle. And, yes, the Bavarian was in love with both of them, and, yes, they were each, in their own ways, in love with Hermann. ‘War does things like that,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It forms instant friendships only to plunder them as instantly.’
Giselle was half-Greek, half-Midi French and with straight jet-black hair, lovely violet eyes and a mind of her own. A former prostitute Hermann had ‘rescued’ from the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton and just around the corner.
Oona’s eyes were sky blue, her hair blonde. Tall and willowy, she had a quiet calm, a dignity that was best for Hermann. But like the war, such things would have to sort themselves out and who was this humble Sûreté to judge?
The lorry’s gas-producer hissed as he got out of the cab to stoke its firebox. Firewood and charcoal briquets were being used – charcoal in a land where so few had any heat. Hermann’s concierge was always bitching about their never having any when he could so easily, and rightly, she maintained, insist that coal and wood were well supplied.
But Hermann wouldn’t do that. A bad Gestapo – lousy to his confréres, many of whom hated him – he lived as one of the Occupied. Maybe that, too, was why Oona had grown to love him, and Giselle also. But now things were changing, tightening. Now people were beginning to say, ‘Ma foi c’est long.’ My faith, it’s taking a long time.
For the invasion to come.
‘He’s closing the firebox door,’ whispered Oona, looking down into the street through parted black-out curtains. ‘For just an instant there, I saw a glimpse of its light, Hermann. Ah mon Dieu, to sit and watch a fire in the stove and know those bastards can never again come banging at the door to drag us away.’
The Gestapo, the SS, the Paris flics and Vichy goons, et cetera. Oona had been stopped in the street. The contents of her purse had been dumped out, her papers scrutinized. Kohler held her. He felt her tears on his cheek, cursed the war, cursed the Occupier, and reluctantly said, ‘I have to go. Louis will be freezing.’
And they had another murder to attend to. Never time to live a normal life but then … why, then, she told herself, things were just not normal anyway.
‘Take care,’ she whispered and quickly squeezed his hand.
People didn’t hear Hermann when he didn’t want them to. He left the house as silently as he had come and she knew then that he hadn’t wanted to awaken Giselle, but had wanted to be alone with her.
‘He’s worried,’ she said softly. ‘Intuitively he knows there can only be trouble with this murder.’
Taking a spoon, she dug it into the pail of wax to taste the honey, to hold it in her mouth and cry.
‘Louis, the Milice were after Oona.’
‘When?’ Oona’s papers weren’t good. ‘Well, when?’ demanded St-Cyr. ‘Please don’t spare me.’
‘While we were on the train between Lyon and here.’
That explosion? wondered St-Cyr, alarmed. These days such things could well be the work of others but attributed to the Résistance so as to hide the fact. That way the SS, the Gestapo and their associates could settle nuisances such as honest, hardworking detectives, without being blamed.
These days, too, things were very complicated. The Milice were Vichy’s newest police force – paramilitary but yet to receive their weapons, since Vichy had none to give and no such authority. Primarily their duties were to give the appearance of the government’s actively suppressing the black market. They were also to search out and arrest evaders of the forced labour draft, the hated Service du Travail Obligatoire and two or even three years of indenture in the Reich. But they had still other unspecified duties and powers of arrest and interrogation that suggested a branch of the SS.
‘They couldn’t have heard of what happened in Avignon, not yet,’ muttered Kohler, trying to light a cigarette but suddenly finding his fingers too cold.
As in Avignon, so, too, in Fontainebleau Forest and with other crimes, the finger of truth had been pointed by them and not appreciated. And, yes, Hermann wore the scars of such honesty. But in Avignon there had been the Cagoule, the action squad of a fanatical far-right political organization of the 1930s, the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire.
That organization had been dedicated to the overthrow of the Third Republic by any means. Murder, arson … the dynamiting, on the night of 2 October 1941, of six synagogues in Paris in a show of mutual support for the Nazis, but were they now free to do as they pleased with a certain two detectives?
‘In revenge for what happened in Avignon,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Word could so easily have rushed on ahead of us.’
‘Then was Oona stopped in the street as a threat to us to leave things alone or else taste what’s to come?’
Hermann was thinking of von Schaumburg’s warning. He was letting his thoughts run through the many twisted threads of the tapestry Paris and the country had become under the Occupation. Each thread was so often knotted to another it could and did, when yanked, yank on still other threads and on their guts.
‘All things are possible, Louis. That’s what worries me.’
The Milice were not the Cagoule, but those same political leanings, those same sympathies were shared. And Boemelburg, as Head of the Gestapo in France, was one of the major thread-pullers and could well have given the Milice a little tug just to warn Hermann and himself to behave.
And yes, of course, one of the first things the SS and the Gestapo had done after the Defeat was to empty the jails of their most hardened criminals and put those types to work for them.
‘Fighting common crime brings no pleasure these days,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Let’s go and have a talk with our beekeeper. Maybe he can shed a little light on things.’
Louis always ‘talked’ to the victims, no matter how grisly the murder.
Under the blue light from Hermann’s torch, the tiny bodies were seen to be scattered everywhere in the snow. All were frozen and curled up. No longer did the cluster of each hive, that winter ball of ten thousand or so bees, shake their wings and jerk their bodies to keep the queen and themselves warm. No longer did each cluster move slowly about the frames feeding on the honey they had stored for the winter and the beekeeper, being wise and kind, had left for their wellbeing. Someone had broken into each of the hives – all thirty of them – and had stolen a good deal of what remained of the winter stores.
‘About twenty kilos to the hive at the start of each winter, in eight or ten frames,’ said Kohler. ‘Jésus, merde alors,. Louis, whoever did it had no thought for tomorrow.’
‘Just as in Peyrane, eh?’
‘Not quite. Here they left the cluster. In Peyrane they took it and squashed it along with everything else.’
The apiary was in one of those surprising little oases of nature that were often found in Paris: a field of a few hectares that was surrounded, St-Cyr knew, by a high stone wall. Cut off, isolated and quiet, it was right on top of one of the city’s smaller reservoirs and not a stone’s throw from the Père Lachaise.
‘At five degrees of frost the poor little buggers didn’t have a chance, Louis. Ten thousand times thirty equals three hundred thousand little murders.’
Using the wooden-handled pocket-knife the Kaiser had given him and countless others in the spring of 1914, Kohler scraped away the worker bees, stabbed at a large fat one in the centre of the cluster and said, ‘That little darling was their queen. Not a virgin, not this one. Two years old, I’ll bet, since that’s the most productive age to successfully overwinter a hive. They’re Italians, by the way. Banded yellow over the abdomen and with hairs that are fawn-coloured. Gentle, too, and prolific breeders just like their namesakes.’
‘I never knew you were so well versed about bees.’
‘There’s plenty you don’t know! This cluster had lots of honey and pollen to feed on.’
He pointed cells out, pricking some and scraping the wax cappings away. A maze of cells, a warren of them.
Indicating a poorly defined thumbprint, he said, ‘Whoever robbed the hives wore gloves and was afraid of bees. They could so easily have scraped the cluster away and taken everything.’
Instead, they had left perhaps a good three kilos of honey in each hive.
Kohler switched off his torch and for a moment the star-filled sky came down to them, the air cold and clear. No hint of smoke or car exhaust in a city of nearly two and a half million. Paris had the most fantastically clear sunrises and sunsets these days, the most beautiful views over its pewter and copper-green roofs.
In ’39 there had been 350,000 private automobiles and traffic jams like no others; in July of 1940 there had been, and now were, no more than 4,500 cars and most of those were driven by the Occupier. Sixty thousand cubic metres of gasoline had been required per month before the Defeat; now all that was allowed was 650 cubic metres. Thirteen hundred of the city’s buses had disappeared from the streets and virtually all of the lorries.
Now the city ran on bicycles or on two feet, and when it shut down like this at midnight, it didn’t open up again until 5 a.m. Berlin Time, 4 a.m. the old time in winter and hell for those who had to get up and go to work.
‘So when were the hives robbed and by whom, Chief?’
Hermann was below him in rank. Sometimes he would use this accolade to prod his partner; sometimes, when others were present, to let them know he was subordinate to a Frenchman.
‘Footprints,’ sighed St-Cyr.
‘I was wondering if you’d noticed them. The préfet’s boys and those of the commissariat on the rue des Orteaux, which isn’t far, is it, but did they have to trample everything and visit every hive?’
‘A woman, I think.’
‘Madame de Bonnevies?’
‘Or another, but the matter can be left for now. Why not go and have a talk with the grieving widow? Let me take care of the rest.’
The corpse. ‘Are you sure?’
Having seen too much of it, Hermann hated the sight of death. ‘Positive. Fortunately the study is separated from the rest of the house and this kept the fumes from it, but it’s interesting, is it not, that the woman didn’t spend much time in there after she discovered what had happened? We could so easily have had two corpses on our hands. Use the front entrance; leave me to go in by the back. I want time alone and undisturbed with him, Hermann. I need to think and want Madame out of the way and distracted.’
‘And the daughter?’
‘It would be best if she were to come upon us by surprise, but then these days anything is possible, and a daughter who is absent without a laissez-passer and a sauf-conduit will have to be questioned about what she missed.’
About the missing permit and safe-conduct pass or the murder? wondered Kohler but let him have the last word, for Louis was in his element.
‘Madame …’ hazarded Kohler on entering the salon.
The woman didn’t look up or turn from the stone-cold hearth. ‘Oui. What is it, Inspector?’
‘A few small questions. Nothing difficult.’
His voice was gentle but this grated on her nerves, though she told herself he was only trying to be kind. She heard him sit in one of the other armchairs, knew he would have noticed there wasn’t a speck of dust in the room and that she must have an obsession about cleanliness. Would he smell the eau de Javel, she wondered, or just the lavender water she used when wiping down afterwards?
The Javel, she said to herself. He has the sound and manner of it.
‘Your husband, madame. I gather he spent all his time with his bees.’
And didn’t go out to work like normal husbands with responsibilities? ‘Ours was old money, Inspector. My money.’
Under Napoleonic Law a husband had control of his wife’s money and property and could do as he pleased, even to gambling the lot away.
Kohler found his cigarettes and offered one, only to see her vehemently shake her head and hear her saying, ‘I haven’t since the Defeat. Women aren’t allowed a tobacco ration, isn’t that so? He … my husband refused to share even his cigarette butts and delighted in my anguish as he lit up.’
‘I take it, then, that you weren’t getting on?’
‘Not getting on? We hardly spoke.’
‘Then is there anything you can tell me that might help us?’
She pulled the bulky white dressing gown more tightly about herself and thrust her hands deeply into its pockets, still hadn’t looked at him. A woman with very dark brown, almost black hair, cut short, kept straight, and worn with a bit of a fringe whose carelessness suggested an irritable, hasty brush with a hand.
‘He wouldn’t have taken that stuff by mistake, Inspector, not of his own accord.’
In tears, she faced him now, was angry and afraid and didn’t really know what to make of things, thought Kohler. Was still in shock, was very much the Parisienne, but not of the quartier Charonne. Definitely of the Sorbonne and probably of the quartier Palais-Royal or some other up-market district. Of medium height and slender—weren’t so many women slender these days? – she had a sharply defined face with high and prominent cheekbones, skin that was very fair, a jutting defiant chin, dark brown eyes, good brows, lips, a nice nose, nice ears, throat and all the rest probably.
The hair was thick, and as he looked her over and she fought to return his scrutiny, her right hand nervously tried to brush the fringe from her brow.
‘Your daughter, madame …’
‘Danielle, yes. Something … something must have happened to her. The Gestapo, the Service d’Ordre …’
The Vichy goons, the Milice.
‘A control … Was she stopped and taken into custody, Inspector, or did they just “requisition” her bicycle again and force her to walk home?’
Hastily she wiped her eyes with the back of her left hand and snapped, ‘Well?’
The daughter, like so many these days, had gone out into the countryside to search for food, but that had been on Thursday, well before dawn, well before the murder. ‘Look, we don’t know yet what, if anything, has happened to her. We’ll find out. Don’t worry, please. She’s probably okay.’
The Inspector had been writing notes in his little black book. A big man, broad shouldered and comfortable with himself even though there was a savage scar down his left cheek; others, too …
When he didn’t look up at her but let her continue to look at him, she told herself he could know nothing and she was not to worry.
It was small comfort. And what about Danielle? she demanded of herself while waiting for his questions. Danielle who had never been the first-born, always the second and had therefore become so defiantly independent and competent. But … but these days, even those qualities could go against a person if arrested.
‘The timing, madame?’ he said, and she realized he was using the notebook to avoid looking at her so as to gain her confidence.
‘Last night … Well, Thursday night, at … at about ten o’clock the new time. Berlin Time. My husband … he hadn’t left that study of his, that “laboratory” as he loved to call it. When I went to knock on the door, he … he didn’t answer.’
‘And the door?’
‘Was locked as usual. Mon Dieu, he could have been up to anything in there and I’d not have known, but always with him it was his bees.’
‘You went in by the garden?’
‘I went outside, yes, and around to that field.’
‘You took the footpath that leads down from the cul-de-sac, the impasse, here to the gate that’s off the rue des Pyrénées?’
‘Yes. From there a lane leads to it.’
‘The apiary your husband leases from the city?’
‘Yes! And … and then I came in through the garden.’
‘The gate to that field’s kept locked but you’ve got a key?’
‘No I don’t have. It … it wasn’t locked, nor was the one to the garden.’
‘Could anyone else have come in that way?’
‘The thief, the destroyer of the hives?’
‘You noticed in passing that they’d been robbed?’
‘Not then, no, but …’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t really know when that happened. Yesterday – on Friday, probably, and after … after one of the neighbours had discovered he’d been murdered and would no longer have need of the hives.’
Kohler scribbled: Hives not robbed night of murder but next day (?) Neighbours a problem. ‘Anyone else?’ he asked, not looking up.
‘Whoever delivered that little gift he drank from, the seller of it perhaps? Yes!’
‘Do you mean your husband left those two gates unlocked because he was expecting someone?’
‘I … I don’t know. How could I have?’
‘Okay, okay, calm down. So you found a brick in the garden and broke a pane of glass in one of the doors.’
‘I had to. He … he did not answer me.’
‘And you found him lying on the floor, dead?’
‘Merde alors, must I shout the obvious to you? The fumes alone were enough!’ she shrilled and gripped her head in anguish, shut her eyes and wept – let him see her like this. Ashamed, terrified, completely exposed and totally unable to control herself.
Kohler lit a cigarette and forced it between her trembling lips. ‘Merci,’ she gasped and inhaled deeply. Calmed a little, she tossed her head back, but gave him a hard look to warn him off, thinking he was getting too close. Still fighting for control, she turned her back on him.
‘I choked. I ran back outside and tried to think. He … he hadn’t been dead for long, Inspector, because we’d spoken through that damned door of his at about seven thirty, or was it eight thirty? I … I can’t remember. I’m so confused. Eight thirty … yes, it was eight thirty. He hadn’t wanted to eat what little I had prepared. Soup … endless days of soup. A few cooked carrots. A little endive … No wine. We’d run out and you can’t buy any, can you? Not here. Not in Charonne anyway, and one must shop at those places where one is known, isn’t that so?’
Everyone was bitching about the shopkeepers, many of whom abused their positions and lorded it over their customers, selling a little to their favourites and nothing to the rest.
Kohler told her to sit down.
‘And freeze?’ she snapped. ‘Forgive me. I’m … I’m just not myself,’ but thought he would only wonder if this really was herself. Shattered and unable to think, and so afraid.
Instinctively the woman’s fingers sought the gilt-bronze sculpture of a naked young man which stood, perhaps some thirty centimetres high, on a glass and bronze table in front of the fireplace. There was a vase of long-stemmed red silk roses beside it and, as he watched, she fingered the sculpture’s shoulders, arms and thighs, couldn’t seem to stop herself and trembled at the touch.
Complete in every detail, handsome and virile, the sculpture was one of a pair but its mate, a girl of fifteen or sixteen, stood not on the table but up above it and dead centre on the white mantelpiece of fluted wood, and before its mirror. The girl’s right foot was down a step from the other foot on her pedestal, her torso turned towards the viewer, her head away and to the right.
Tiny acanthus leaves made a delicate tracery of chained ovals on the flat frame of the mirror that was as wide as the mantel. Two life-sized white marble faces, those of a boy and a girl, flanked the statue, looking out into the room.
‘My son … our son, did these,’ she said as if afraid of sounding foolish. ‘Étienne … Étienne is in one of your prisoner-of-war camps.’
Along with one and a half million other Frenchmen, but they aren’t my camps, thought Kohler and said, ‘Look, I’m sorry to hear that. You obviously need him with you.’
‘I’ve always “needed” him, Inspector. Always.’
But not the daughter? Then why put her sculpture up there front and centre and with her gorgeous backside reflected in the mirror? The father? he asked himself. Had de Bonnevies insisted on her placing it there?
The chairs, the sofa and chaise all matched the mantelpiece with white and fluted wooden frames and the clean, sharp lines of the late 1920s. Moderne, then, or post-moderne, and all covered in a cocoa-brown fabric that was almost silvery in the lamplight. Italian silk velvet, he told himself, and very expensive even then. Had the furniture been a wedding gift from her father, he wondered and thought it probable.
The carpet was not an Aubusson or a Savonnerie or any of those to which, as a child and then a university student, she might have been accustomed. But the soft, warm and very light beige of its wool went well with the armchairs and the rest of the furniture. In the mirror he could see the oil paintings she had hung, and knew they were good and must have been in her family for years.
‘Inspector, my husband had his enemies – the petty jealousies of other beekeepers. He was president of the Société Centrale d’Apiculture, and for the third year in a row, and so had trampled on a good many toes. But … but who the hell would do that to him? Who?’
And had that person come in through the apiary? wondered Kohler.
For a moment they looked at each other and finally, realizing what she was fingering, the woman let her hand fall away from the sculpture of her son. ‘That is Danielle,’ she said acidly of the other bronze. ‘My son is very talented but his sister did not pose like that for him. Not without her bathing suit. I’m certain of it.’
But not quite, was that it, thought Kohler, and wrote it all down for Louis and himself to digest. ‘Your daughter, madame. How old is she?’
‘Eighteen. Étienne is twenty-two. Why can’t you people let him come home? He was badly wounded, and is still in need of a long convalescence. He can do you no harm, not now, not even then, in ’39 and ’40. A stretcher-bearer, an artist … He who had never wanted to hurt anyone, especially not his dear maman, his bienaimée.’ His beloved. ‘They shot at him, even though he wore a Red Cross armband.’
‘Madame, your husband.’
She waited, letting him know she wanted to shriek, That bastard, yes?.
‘Thirty hives. Were there more?’
Out-apiaries – that was what the Inspector was thinking. ‘Several. One here, one there. Maybe two or three. It depended on the locations. A flat with a roof-top that was sheltered and not much frequented; the garden of a private house or villa. The city has plenty of such places.’
Have fun chasing them, she seemed to imply. ‘And the honey, madame. Did he sell it and the pollen and the propolis – the bee glue? The gelée royale also, his extra queens and the wax?’
The detective had forced her to look at him in a new light, that of one who was well versed on the little slaves Alexandre had adored. ‘He had his “clients”, yes. There’s a book, a list with all the addresses and details. Your partner will have found it unless … unless, of course, whoever poisoned my husband took it away with him, or the sous-préfet and préfet, since both came here briefly to view the body yesterday at noon, and to discuss the matter.
‘Now if you will excuse me, Inspector, it’s very late and I’m very tired. My bedroom is at the back, overlooking the garden and that field, but while I’m in my bed, avail yourself of the rest of the house. Search all you like. I’ve nothing to hide and I don’t think he had either. We didn’t sleep together, not any more, and not in a long, long time. Ours was always a marriage of convenience. I’ll not deny it, and you would soon have discovered this in any case, so please don’t bother to ask the neighbours. Life is hard enough.’
Alone in the study, St-Cyr drew on his pipe as he sought out each detail, but this killing had not – he was now certain – been as it had first appeared.
The smell of bitter almonds, of nitrobenzene, though minor, was still present, for the corpse exuded it. Some, too, had been spilled on the worktable and tiled floor, and some had been absorbed by a fistful of rags. These things had had to be cleaned up and removed by Hermann and himself, both wearing rubber gloves and before they had gone out into the apiary to find that the hives had been robbed. Hermann had put a match to the stains and had burned the rags in the stove – no other course of action had been possible. The damned stuff was just too dangerous.
He, himself, had capped the bottle of ersatz Amaretto and never mind the fingerprint artists fooling around with it while open. He had picked up and had capped the tin container of nitrobenzene that the beekeeper, in his panic, had taken down from a shelf and had hastily opened.
Flung wide, the doors to the garden still let in the cold night air as an added precaution, while the heavy black-out curtains kept in the light. Fortunately, the Occupier hadn’t chosen to switch off the electricity to this quartier or the whole city in reprisal for some act of ‘terrorism’ or because the Citroën and Renault works, et cetera, were in desperate need of the power to make things for the German war machine.
‘Nitrobenzene is nothing to fool with, is it, monsieur?’ he said to the dark blue-suited, scarved and cashmere-sweatered victim who lay on the floor near the desk, curled into the fetal position by a final spasm, and in rigor. ‘The poison is rapidly absorbed through the skin and lungs, and that is, I fear, what really killed you. Death by misadventure, albeit with intent.’
The right side of the head, and a portion of the white woollen scarf, were awash in now frozen vomit. Everything, at first glance, had pointed to the bottle of Amaretto that sat on the desk among his papers. Oil of mirbane was soluble in alcohol, not in water, so there was, perhaps, no problem there. But drinking it was to experience its fiercely burning taste and to die long after ingestion.
De Bonnevies had probably first smelled the liqueur, and finding its bouquet acceptable, for Amaretto’s flavour came normally from apricots and their stones which have the odour and taste of bitter almonds, had apparently taken a sip or a mouthful and then had instantly spat it out and set the bottle down.
‘In panic, you thought the worst, monsieur – your wife, perhaps?’ he said, gesturing companionably with his pipe. ‘You rushed over to the shelves and took down the tin which you had kept in here for safety’s sake, and not in the honey-house in the garden. You had to see if it had been the source of the poison. You had to, mon ami. Let us make no mistake about this.’
Giving the matter a moment’s thought, St-Cyr then said, ‘The container had been put back in haste, n’est-ce pas? The cap was loose, wasn’t it? Accidentally you spilled some. You grabbed the rags to wipe it up. You were extremely agitated. Angry, I should think. Your fingers shook. Did the realization of what you felt had happened cause your shaking hands to accidentally knock that tin over? Had you argued with your wife, monsieur? Had she threatened you?’
The fingerless gloves which de Bonnevies had used while working in the cold at his desk, had absorbed some of the spilled nitrobenzene. He had dragged them off and, yes, they, too, had been burnt in the stove by Hermann.
‘You tried to wipe the residue from your hands with the rags, monsieur. There was also some on the workbench. In your haste, your panic, did you then knock the tin over again and is this what caused it to fall to the floor?’
Suddenly feeling very dizzy, had he cried out to madame? Had he seen in the container lying on its side on the floor, the truth of what he felt she had done to him?
‘Did you then look at the door which you had kept locked so as to shut her out? A door that opens into a narrow corridor and a set of stairs down which that woman would have had to walk each time she wanted to talk to you?’
The rest was clear enough. Breathing in more and more of the fumes and unable to get the pale, lemon-coloured oil from his hands, de Bonnevies had started for the garden. ‘Suddenly you felt very drunk, monsieur. You had a splitting headache. You began to throw up – first over there by the table you used when selecting queens for your colonies, then by the one on which is the apparatus you use for artificially inseminating them. You had left the tin lying on its side on the floor. You had to get out. Out!
‘You tripped and fell. You hit your head and threw up violently. Your vision was blurred, your skin began to itch. Drunk … you felt very drunk and as you got up, you stumbled, only to realize then that you had just put your hand down into the spill and that container had rolled across the floor towards you.’
A bloodied froth of vomit and mucous had erupted from the mouth and nostrils. The rictus was far from pleasant and exposed tobacco-stained and gold-filled teeth. The lips and mucous membranes, the fingernails also, were the deep shade overripe blackberries give to their juice when crushed. The skin was but a paler shade of the same.
At fifty-eight years of age, de Bonnevies had once been distinguished-looking – tall, but otherwise of medium build, and with a face that was broad and strong. The hair was iron-grey, coarse and rapidly receding, the eyes grey and with heavy, horn-rimmed glasses that had been knocked askew.
The nose was long and broad, fierce and determined, a full Roman even in death; the eyebrows those of an academic, a professor perhaps: thick, bushy, well arched and demanding. The cheeks were cleanly shaven … Had he been about to go out? These days shaving was not a priority due to the scarcity of soap, razor blades and hot water but de Bonnevies had shaved early on Thursday evening.
The lips were thin, their expression probably often tight with impatience. The white shirt had been freshly laundered in cold water without soap, of course, and with fine sand for the collar stains – there were still sufficient grains to indicate the shirt hadn’t been well rinsed but had been washed in a hurry. The tie was a dark royal blue and had many golden-threaded bees woven into it. A meeting of the Society? he wondered.
The gold signet ring bore the image of a honey hive with a tiny cloud of departing workers – a swarm perhaps.
Madame de Bonnevies was deeply asleep. Exhausted, no doubt, thought Kohler has he stood in darkness at the foot of the woman’s bed. She had closed and had locked the door, but had left the key in the lock. And as any housebreaker worth his salt knows, he snorted inwardly, that’s as good as giving him the key.
Her breath came easily – a clear conscience, he wondered, or relief at last that it had finally been done?
As with the rest of the house, the room smelled strongly of Javel and he had to wonder about this too. Lavender water had been liberally sprinkled and used when wiping down the furniture, but it couldn’t begin to suppress the other. He had found bottles of Javel in the armoire by the bathtub, more of it in the toilet down the hall and still more in the kitchen. All from late 1940 or even up to mid-1941 probably, but as with so many things people had taken for granted, now it was no longer easy to come by unless she had a ready source.
There were lace and silk in the mirrored armoire, the soft wool of a dress, another of crêpe de Chine, a suit, a pair of slacks, a chemise, full and half-slips … Silk stockings were in a bureau drawer. Five, maybe six pairs and virtually unobtainable except in certain places. And oh bien sûr women kept those with runs in them – nothing was thrown out these days and one of the pairs had laddered runs in it. He could imagine her despair.
The brassiere he fingered was light and airy. There were two garter belts, and these had the same lace. But so, too, were there serviceable, everyday undergarments of cotton, linen and satin. All prewar. Nothing ersatz for her in that department, and damned hard to get in any case.
She sighed and murmured in her sleep, and turned on to her other side. He wanted to switch on the torch to see the faces in the photographs on the bureau and those that hung on the walls and were on her writing table.
Had she, unlike the husband, only those of the son; he only those of the daughter? The girl, Danielle, had had plenty of both herself and her brother in her room, and of happier times. A country house, a weekend retreat before the war. The boy lithe and handsome and laughing, with an arm draped fondly across his mother’s shoulders, both in their swimsuits.
When he ran his fingers over what he knew to be a foundation sheet of wax for the combs in the hives – the bees built on these – Kohler felt each hexagonal indentation, the design covering the whole of the sheet. She’d been making a candle, but had left this off.
Gently he eased open the drawer of her writing table and began to explore its contents. He looked towards the bed; he put his back to her and, wrapping a hand over the end of the torch, let only a sliver of light escape.
There was a photograph of her son in uniform and taken before the Defeat. Clipped to it was a menu from Maxim’s, no less, and at the bottom of this someone had scribbled 100,000 francs. The going rate. Half down, half on arrival.
Searching for a cheque stub, a bank passbook – something to indicate monies had been paid out – he found none, simply a small oval badge in silver with the letters F.M. – Förderndes Mitglied – the runic double ‘S’ and the swastika.
Sickened by its implications, Kohler silently closed the drawer and returned to the foot of her bed. Again he listened to her breathing until satisfied she hadn’t awakened.
Quietly he left the room, locking the door behind him while leaving the key in the lock on her side.
‘Louis …’
Hermann had returned to the study. ‘A moment, mon vieux.’
Louis was bent over the beekeeper’s microscope. He had taken off the battered brown fedora that had seen such rough handling in Avignon. The shabby overcoat with its threadbare collar had been flung open – had he been tucking things into his jacket and waistcoat pockets, wondered Kohler and answered, Probably.
A fisherman at heart, though that pastime was forbidden and subject to forced labour or imprisonment, Louis was not tall or short, but something in between and still a trifle portly in spite of the extreme shortages. A muse, a reader of books in winter when he could get the time, which was seldom, he had the brown oxeyes of the French, the wide forehead of the police academy’s boxing champ and flic he’d once been. The hair was thick and dark brown, and carelessly brushed to the right. The eyebrows were bushy, the nose that, too, of a boxer. The lips were broad and determined, the moustache thicker and wider than the little corporal’s and grown long before that ranting maniac had ever come to power.
‘Talbotte was here, yesterday at noon,’ said Kohler.
The préfet of Paris, on Friday. ‘I could have told you as much. I recognized his footprints in the snow. Flat and expensive leather shoes, not those of a real cop nor the soles of wood most of us have to wear these days. Now, please, I’ve the corpse of a bee before me and it’s not one of our beekeeper’s.’
A half-open matchbox held several said corpses. The broad and somewhat rounded shoulders of the Sûreté hunched closer to the instrument. A meaty, no-nonsense thumb was jerked up and behind to indicate a framed collection under glass on the wall nearest the desk. ‘The varieties and their clans, Hermann. The offspring of their unfettered inbreeding.’
Each bee in the collection of nearly two hundred had been stabbed with a tiny silver pin. ‘Apis mellifera carnica …’ began Kohler, trying not to think of the corpse on the floor. ‘Apis mellifera caucasia …’
‘The Carniolan and Caucasian bees,’ said St-Cyr, not looking up from the microscope, ‘and beside them, the dark German bee, Apis mellifera mellifera, and the golden-banded Apis mellifera ligustica, the Italian bee.’
‘You’re learning,’ quipped his partner. De Bonnevies, like many French beekeepers, had kept Italians primarily because they were gentle and productive, while the Germans, as with their human counterparts, thought Kohler wryly, had strong tendencies towards aggression.
‘So, what’s the verdict, Chief?’
‘Acarine mites in Caucasian bees. Our beekeeper had collected some of the diseased corpses and was proving his diagnosis.’
‘Only to be poisoned by a remedy for them. Fumigation with …’
‘Yes, yes. Here our beekeeper has cut off the head and forelegs, then has used a needle to expose the tracheae which bear the characteristically brownish stains caused by the mite.’
‘You’ve been reading his reference books.’
‘It’s not a simple murder, Hermann,’ sighed St-Cyr, as if warming to the thought of a long and complicated investigation.
‘That of the bee or of the human?’
‘Both! Now listen, forget about the colour of the fingernails and the rigor – forget all such things. Take a look around you, eh? The well-ordered, well-loved shelves of a dedicated scientist. Two microscopes, Hermann, and good ones. The watercolours of flowers, the oils – the catalogue he kept of pollen in bottles, of honey, too, and its many varieties.’
The sketches, painstakingly executed, of dissected workers, drones and queens. All sacrificed, thought Kohler, to the greater good of others. ‘So, why hasn’t Talbotte got his boys working on the case?’ he asked.
Charonne, like all of Paris and the Île de France, was the préfet’s beat; theirs the rest of the country. ‘And préfets tend to stick together,’ said St-Cyr, leaving the microscope to pick up the trend of thought.
Both knew that word of what had happened in Avignon must have been passed on ahead of them. Those in power so seldom liked being challenged and did tend to stick together.
‘Perhaps Talbotte doesn’t want to dirty his hands with this, Hermann, for fear ours won’t be dirtied enough.’
‘And von Schaumburg has asked for us,’ said Kohler, not liking it.
Caught between the Occupier’s opposing factions, they had simply had to tough it out. But these days events were piling up and everyone was uneasy.
And suspicious too.
‘Death occurred sometime between eight thirty and ten p.m. on Thursday,’ said Kohler. He’d save the worst until the last. ‘The couple weren’t getting on, Louis, and didn’t sleep together, but …’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t see her as having tried to poison him. I really can’t.’
Hermann always had a soft spot for the pretty ones. ‘But she may well have laced that bottle,’ chided St-Cyr gently and led him patiently through how the killing had come about. ‘She’d have felt he wouldn’t have taken more than a sip, Hermann. His every reaction would have been known to her. The instant suspicion, the anger, the race to check the tin – a woman can’t have lived with a man for more than twenty-two years and not have known about such things.’
‘The son …’
‘What about the son? Well, come on, damn it, tell me.’
‘F.M.’
Out in the garden, not a sound came up from the city at nearly 5 a.m. Far beyond the Bois de Boulogne, far over England and freedom, a shooting star streaked long and hard and cleanly until snuffed out.
Up from the ground came the terrible dampness and the cold.
‘F.M., Hermann. What, please, have the Honorary Members of the SS to do with this little murder which was not murder at all, simply the attempted variety, if what we have seen of it so far is true.’
‘It could so easily have been a black-market mistake, idiot. How else these days is one to find the smell or taste of bitter almonds?’
Everyone knew there were hazards with black-market products. No questions were ever asked. To complain was to get nothing further and to have one’s name passed on to other traffickers. ‘Well, what about the F.M., Hermann? Please don’t spare me.’
In 1932 there had only been about 13,000 Honorary Members, recalled St-Cyr. Collectively they had contributed a modest 17,000 marks to the SS’s ‘cultural, charitable and social pursuits’. But in 1934 membership had grown to over 342,000, with an increase in funds of nearly 600,000 marks. Since then he had lost track, but the sky must be the limit.
‘Jeder an seiner Stelle, Louis,’ said Kohler. ‘Es ist eine Ehre, förderndes Mitglied zu zein.’
Each in his appointed place, translated St-Cyr. It is an honour to be an honorary member. By caving in and joining the F.M., not the SS or the Party, one made a little contribution every year, thereby avoiding the strong-arm boys and the constant squeeze. Guaranteed a little peace, the Honorary Members and another, similar group, the Friends of the Reichsführer-SS, got on with their business interests – shoes, beer, tanks, cigars or whatever. All were involved.
‘Siemens-Schuckert, Hermann. I.G. Farben. The Krupps, the Norddentsche Lloyd and Hamburg-America Shipping Lines, the Dresdner and Deutsche banks – all of the really big companies sent board members to join the Friends, and often the F.M., and in doing so, dragged in the little fish.’
‘Himmler still has a good thing going with them, Louis. That little badge I saw only proves it. Silver no less, not zinc’ As were many of the medals these days.
‘And the name?’ asked the Sûreté, looking up to that God of his with tears no doubt, thought Kohler.
‘We haven’t got a name yet, but we’ve got a menu.’
Everyone who was anyone listened to rumours these days and knew that among the waiters at Maxim’s there were some who would offer to help those wealthy enough to want to free their loved ones from POW camps in the Reich.
‘Fifty thousand down, as the menu says, Louis. The rest when the “meal” is delivered.’
Madame de Bonnevies had been trying to buy her son’s freedom. ‘But why does she have the badge, Hermann? Why keep it with a photo of her son and with the menu?’
‘Why, indeed, when her. husband had control of all of her money, eh, and let her have only enough for the house?’
‘You found expensive underwear. If she’s having an affair with a Nazi …’
‘We’ll have to go carefully.’
These days things were always so complicated. ‘Our beekeeper had planned his rounds for Friday and had made a list of those he intended to visit,’ said St-Cyr.
‘You’ve found his little book,’ sighed Kohler.
‘His is an eclectic list.’
‘And?’
Hermann could nearly always sense when there was more. ‘Old Shatter Hand is a valued customer. Three jars of honey.’
Shit! ‘And?’
‘The honey, the royal jelly and pollen were to have been delivered first thing yesterday morning to his villa.’
‘Then I’d best deliver them, hadn’t I?’
It was a plea, a cry to God for help. ‘Yes, I think you’d better.’