Beekeeper (14 page)

The bastard! ‘All right, it is as you have ascertained. Some of our clients – the female ones, too – ridiculed his strange desire. Others tried out the room once or twice, but found it not to their taste. A few have come to use it on a regular basis, yes.'

He'd want the names of those few; he'd want every little titbit he could get!

Feigning boredom came easily to him. He examined a fingernail, said only two words. ‘Four names.'

‘I … I can't tell you. I mustn't.'

‘I think you'd better. While there's still time, that is.'

‘One was killed at Sedan in 1940. A corporal.'

He waited for her to crucify herself. Had he no heart? Did he not think of the slashed face she would earn, the wrists also, her body stripped naked at her age and dumped into the Seine with ropes and stones? ‘One no longer lives in this quartier but comes by métro when he feels the need.'

‘And takes Charlotte once a month, late on Sunday evenings in that little graveyard of yours?'

May God forgive her for telling him. ‘Yes.'

‘That's perfect! Now let me have the whereabouts of the other two.'

‘Both are married. Both have families …'

‘Of course.'

She had him now and rejoiced in it! ‘Both are in prisoner-of-war camps in the Reich!'

‘Which camps?'

‘I … I don't know.'

‘Oflag 17A, madame?' An officers' camp, but … The same as Étienne de Bonnevies …

‘I … I couldn't say, Inspector. Really I couldn't.'

He'd sigh, thought St-Cyr. He'd put his tobacco pouch and matches away. ‘Then all we need is the address and name of the one who comes by metro.'

‘Or those of the wives, the mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers of the other three?' shrilled Madame Thibodeau. ‘Each of them will want to keep silent the identities of those who violated that sister of his!'

‘I'm listening, madame.'

Why had he had to come here like this today? Had her number come up? wondered Madame Thibodeau. ‘Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies was
très belle, très intelligente
, but flirted with the boys and wanted to be like the other girls. Her father had to beat her but not about the face, you understand. He wouldn't let her ask her friend into the house. The friend was “dirty”, he said. “The poor always have lice.”‘

‘And the name of this friend, madame?'

The Inspector had taken out his little black notebook. ‘I will have to sell the house and move to the country.
Les Allemands
don't like issuing such permits. I'm getting on – you can see it for yourself. Would you throw me out on the street?'

The urge to say, You've been hiding the identity of one who aided and may even have incited a crime, to say nothing of those who committed it, but one must be kind. What she had said was absolutely true. ‘My partner and I will go carefully.'

‘It won't be enough.'

‘Then I will still need the name.'

Even as a
flic
he'd been a lousy shit! ‘Madame Héloïse Debré, 7 rue Stendhal, top floor, but … but there's no husband and no one knows where he got to. He used to knock her about terribly but then … why, then, one day he vanished. Just like that, and she swore she did not know where to.'

‘Please don't try to distract me, madame, with suggestions of another domestic killing. Just give me the names of the three families.'

Hermann would be pleased with the progress. The hive of this little murder, if it really was murder, had been truly opened, its cells disgorging honey and uncovering the larvae.

But was there a rival queen?

The Paris auction house wasn't far from the smelter. Just up the rue Montmartre and over past the
mairie of
the ninth arrondissement. It was in a large building on the corner of the rue Chauchat and the rue Rossini. All alone, and by itself, the Renault was parked out front – big, blue and shiny in the wind-driven snow. 110 kilometres per hour, no problem; 120 and still none. A b…e…a…utiful set of wheels for a hot little scrap-metal dealer.

Kohler plunked the birdcage down on the bonnet, right up by the windscreen where it wouldn't be missed, then drove back up the rue Rossini to leave the Citroën next to the town hall and walk back.

No one would steal the birdcage. No one.

It being noon-hour and at its tail end, no auctions were in progress. Instead, the public were allowed to peruse the up-and-coming items. Room upon room of bailiff's gleanings were on the first floor; those, too, of lesser items being sold off to settle a grândmother's or dead husband's estate. Beds, bureaus, cutlery, pots and pans, stacks of dishes – linens. Housewives mingled with shy newlyweds, the bridegrooms all a lot older than their brides. Hell, most of the younger men were dead or in POW camps in the Reich, or on the run from the forced labour and hiding out with the
maquis.

The second-floor rooms were reserved for the better quality merchandise. Here there was silence, although the undercurrent of muffled conversation from below formed a constant background. Tiffany, Lalique and Gallé glass filled a room with lamps, vases and figurines. No sign of Herr Schlacht, though.

Limoges and Sevres porcelains were in another room, the
belles mondaines
and the dealers noting the lot numbers and jotting down, after much deliberation, the sums they would be prepared to bid. One glance was enough. The ebb tide that Paris had become, had left its wide strand littered with the debris of all such items. Things that had been in the family for years had had to be parted with. If one wanted to eat, let alone to eat as one had before the Defeat, then one had to pay black-market prices.

But one had to be so very careful. All items over one hundred thousand francs in value had had to be reported to the authorities in the early fall of 1940 and couldn't be moved or sold without permission.

A Regency mirror gave him a glimpse of Schlacht. The overcoat collar was still tightly buttoned up under the double chin; the wide-brimmed trilby was still pulled down a little over the brow. He was feasting his eyes on a pure white sculpture, something that would once have been set on a table in a place of honour.

‘Hermann … Hermann, is it really you?'

Merde
, it was Gabrielle, Louis's girlfriend, a chanteuse, a White Russian who had fled the Revolution in 1917 and had arrived in Paris at the age of fourteen and all alone.

Kohler took her by the elbow and hustled her into the adjacent salon, to stand among beautiful pieces of marquetry. ‘Beat it, please,' he begged. ‘We got back late last night and …' He shrugged and grinned. ‘And haven't had a moment since.'

She was a good head taller than Louis, was almost as tall as himself, and when her lips brushed his scarred left cheek, he felt the warmth, the lightness and gracefulness of her. Breathing in the scent of her perfume, of Mirage, he recalled, as he always did when coming upon her like this, their first meeting.

It had been during the investigation of a small murder in Fontainebleau Forest, the murder that had earned him the scar she had just kissed and the one from his right shoulder to his left hip. She'd been a suspect then, had lost a small pouch of diamonds …

‘How are René Yvon-Paul and the countess?' he asked. The boy lived with his grandmother at Chateau Thériault, near Vouvray, overlooking the Loire.

‘Fine. Both are fine.' René was ten years old and had been missing the two of them, Jean-Louis especially, thought Gabrielle. René had also saved Hermann Kohler's life, and Hermann, to his credit, had never forgotten it. But, then, he liked children almost, if not more than Jean-Louis. ‘You look beat,
mon vieux.
Are you hungry?' she hazarded and ran a slender hand over a table whose marquetry glowed in shades of amber, some so soft they matched her hair.

She had the loveliest eyes. Violet, just like Giselle's. Tall, willowy, a gorgeous figure – Louis was an idiot not to have gone to bed with her yet and now … why now, might never get the chance! ‘Look, this isn't easy, but it's best we not be seen together.'

‘Not by the one you are following,' she said and sadly nodded. ‘Is he so important you would deny me the pleasure of your company? Ah! He must be. Don't look so pained.'

‘Let's just say he's connected to the avenue Foch, Gabrielle. I wouldn't want …'

‘Them to take an interest in me? They already have, as you well know. Bugging my dressing room at the club, keeping track of when and where I go, so …' She shrugged. ‘What's the problem?'

She was a member of the
Résistance
, had been detained during a previous case, but had managed to get away with it. ‘Gabi, please.'

‘Do you like this table? It's Russian. Eighteenth century. I'm going to buy it.'

She would, too, and then would slap heavy coats of paint on it!

‘For to hide best is to expose those things you value most to view,' she said, having read his mind. ‘Now take me by the arm like the gentleman – the wishful lover, perhaps – that I know you to be. Escort me into that room, Hermann, so that you may better study this man you want to follow.'

Grâce à Dieu
, Schlacht had departed. There were others in the room – four Wehrmacht officers and their
Parisiennes.

‘Your Führer has a passion for Leda and the Swan,' confided Gabrielle, conspiratorially clucking her tongue as she ran her eyes over the voluptuous, classical nude in alabaster. ‘Nineteenth century and by Albert Carrier-Belleuse. It's exquisite, is it not?
Mon Dieu
, your man has very good but expensive taste.'

Asleep, the swan was nestled over upraised, cloth-draped knees and thighs, with its head next to a plump, soft breast and Leda's hand resting on a feathered wing.

‘Both of them are asleep,' he said. But it was true, the Führer
did
have a passion for Leda and her Swan, and she did figure heavily in Nazi art. And every time she'd been just as voluptuous, just as slender, just as asleep and waiting to be ravished. ‘She was the Queen of Sparta,' he said. ‘Zeus came to her in the form of a swan.'

Hermann's tone of voice indicated how distracted and worried he was. ‘And now?' asked Gabrielle, turning to search his pale blue eyes. ‘Now will the one you wish to know more about, come back to bid on this?'

‘To send it to his Führer as a little gift?' he bleated.

She touched his hand in sympathy. ‘I'll bid against him, if you like.'

‘No you won't. You'll find out what he pays for it and if he asks to have it crated and shipped to you know where.'

Outside, on the street, the Renault was gone but in its place were the flattened remains of the birdcage and its canary.

4

It was freezing in the study, and when the one from the Sûreté indicated the tin, Danielle told herself she must listen to his voice as if from beneath the ground and she already in her coffin.

‘One part safrole by volume, mademoiselle. Two of nitrobenzene, and the same again of gasoline. A small amount of the solution is dabbed on to a rag which is then stuffed through the entrance to the hive, so as to place it in the centre of the floor.'

‘Normally the fumigation is repeated every second day, Inspector, until all four decimal-five cubic centimetres of the mixture have been used.'

On waking, the girl had changed into a dark grey, woollen skirt, white blouse with Peter-Pan collar, and a knitted, powder-blue pullover. No pearls, no rings, no jewellery of any kind, not even a wristwatch. She was not nearly so tall as the father, but taller than the mother and thin, now that he could see her without the coat. Thin and small-breasted, underweight and no doubt this was all due to the severe lack of calories, and the energy expended in the hunt for food.

Becoming aware that she had remained just inside the doorway to the study, the girl thought to come forward, hesitated and then thought better of closing the gap between them.

Would the Sûreté understand that most of the honey they had produced had been taken from them? wondered Danielle. Would he realize that the rest had been severely rationed except for that given to clients among the Occupier and their sickening friends?

‘A lot of the bees are killed and must be removed from the hives, Inspector, but they are usually the ones with the acarine mites.
Papa
… My father felt the best time for such a fumigation was in the late winter, and after the bees had had a good flight to clean themselves. Bees are very clean, you understand. They will not defecate in the hive unless very ill, and fly away from the hive before doing so. But some people don't realize this at first and hang their laundry near the hives in the garden, only to … to find it yellowed by the droppings.'

Modestly she had lowered her eyes, and when he gently said, ‘And the fumigation, mademoiselle?' she looked up suddenly and swallowed with difficulty.

‘He would seal the entrance after placing all of the solution in there at once. “Quick and easy and thorough,” he said. “Danielle, never mind doing it bit by bit. Get it in there and over with! Hurry,
petite.
Hurry!”

‘The … the carnage was terrible but … but if you ask me, Inspector, he was invariably correct.'

Inadvertently the girl had recounted the first time the father had made her do it. And for how many years had she carried the guilt of those first little murders? he wondered. ‘How old were you then? Five or six?'

‘Seven. We … we had had a scare and
papa
wanted me to know best how to deal with it. I cried myself to sleep for nights afterward.' There, he could think what he liked of that!

‘And was the recent infestation the reason so many of the hives had been brought into the apiary?'

Say only what is necessary; look steadily at him, she warned herself and answered flatly, ‘Yes.'