Madrigal (21 page)

Her chest rose and fell. St-Cyr indicated that the girl should collect the children. ‘It's their bedtime,' she said sheepishly in
deutsch
. ‘I … I would never hurt them,
mein Herr
. It's … it's only a game we play. They've been so sad. I had to …'

She couldn't say it. Things quietened down. Wearing their towels and frowning, not daring to look at him, the girls trooped by and were soon gone from sight.

Time and again Frau von Mahler had been at the bureau. Slips, half-slips and silk stockings had been yanked aside or half out. Sweaters and blouses …

When he saw the butt of the pistol she had repeatedly taken out and put back, his fist held the crumpled negliges it had been under.

The gun was a Belgian FN semiautomatic. There was a box of cartridges and this had been broken open and spilled, but some time ago, he thought, for there were 9mm Parabellum rounds under many of the things.

Mireille de Sinéty hadn't taken the two rounds Hermann had found in Xavier's pockets from the Kommandant, to give to Dédou Favre before dawn on Monday. She had taken them from here.

The gun was fully loaded. A thirteen-shot Browning
Modéle à Grande Puissance
(High Power). Many of such weapons were being made in Belgium for the Wehrmacht now and most of them, this one included, had deliberately had the safety catch removed. But Frau von Mahler had understood enough to leave the firing chamber empty and that could only mean she knew well how to use the gun.

Ah nom de Dieu
, he silently cursed, what was he to do? Had she been about to kill herself? Had the murder put a temporary stop to it?

With uncertainty, his mind so obviously in a turmoil, the Chief Inspector held the gun, and when he looked at her, thought Frau von Mahler, he too, like all others at first sight, sucked in a breath.

‘Inspector, it's good of you to come but my husband doesn't know about that. I'd be grateful if you would put it back and say nothing of it to him.'

‘Might I ask, please, how you came by it?'

Tough … he must really be so, for he gave no further hint of dismay or alarm at the sight of her. ‘You might, but I, like so many these days, wouldn't tell you unless tortured.'

The black market then, and perhaps a good 10,000 francs.

‘Forty thousand,' she said and turned to lead him into her room. ‘It's better we meet face to face, then you can judge for yourself if the answers I give are lies.'

In the café, Genèvieve Ravier let the fullness of her stunning blue eyes fill with concern as she sought Herr Kohler out to hold him fast with her gaze. ‘The girl could swim a little,' she said of Adrienne de Langlade whose photograph, found behind the mantelpiece in their common room, he had set on the table before them.

‘A little,' echoed Kohler.

The soprano unbuttoned her overcoat and pulled her scarf aside to bare a soft and slender throat. ‘Christiane was positive the girl couldn't. I was not so sure.'

I'll bet, thought Kohler.

‘Inspector, we helped her,' insisted Christiane. ‘She was very shy and ashamed of her fear of the water. A childhood mishap. A near drowning …'
Maudit
! Why had she mentioned
drowning?
‘One of the lakes in the Bois de Boulogne. Yes … yes, it happened there. Madame Simondi would often force the girl to recount the incident.'

‘César's wife was always pumping her for news of Paris, even such old news,' offered Marius Spaggiari.

‘The girl wanted us to hold her under the water for a moment. She trusted us,' said Guy Rochon.

‘And exactly where did this “holding under” happen?' asked Kohler.

Rochon threw the
Basso Continuo
a questioning glance. ‘Why, at the
mas
, Inspector. The cave. The picnic'

‘Inspector,' said Spaggiari, ‘the girl couldn't swim from here to Madame
la patronne
without one of us holding her about the waist.'

‘And exactly
what
happened at that picnic?' he asked.

‘The picnic? Why nothing much,' said Norman Galiteau.

‘She got a little drunk, didn't she?'

Genèvieve nonchalantly shrugged and handed the photograph back to him. ‘After the swim we had our lunch and then … then we cycled home.'

And even girls can lie, especially the pretty ones! ‘The Kommandant issued your
laissez-passers
,' said Kohler, flipping through his notebook. ‘Your reason for the visit … Now where did I put it down? Ah, yes, here it is.'

They waited. He gave them time to digest this, then flipped the page over, letting them think a little more of what von Mahler might or might not have told him.

Then he let them have it. A lie if ever there was one, but to all good lies must come a solid element of truth. ‘The Feldwebel in charge of the control on the bridge recorded that one of your group failed to show up. That one had been left behind. She was …' He paused. ‘Too ill to return.'

There was nothing in Herr Kohler's pale blue eyes but emptiness. ‘She was badly sunburned, Inspector,' said Spaggiari levelly. ‘We did what we could but had to leave her with Madame de Sinéty.'

‘Goat's milk and butter …' blurted Galiteau, his gold-rimmed glasses framing a nervousness that couldn't be hidden.

It had to be asked. ‘Where was Xavier?'

‘Xavier?' blurted Christiane. ‘Why he—'

‘He had had to remain in Avignon, Inspector,' said Spaggiari. ‘A small matter Brother Matthieu was upset about.'

‘A penance,' swallowed Galiteau. ‘Xavier had to scrub out the dog run.'

‘Okay, so the boy was with you – that's what Feldwebel Jacob Dorst wrote down.'

‘Xavier … Inspector, if you're so certain he was with us, why don't you ask him?' said Spaggiari.

‘I already have.'

‘That boy lies … You can't trust him,' said Christiane earnestly.

The ersatz lime-green apéritif hadn't been touched but when he laid the photographs of that picnic on the table before her, she reached for it only to suddenly withdraw her hand.

‘You lot got her drunk,' said Kohler. ‘Was it on absinthe?'

None of them answered. All were panicking and wondering how the hell he'd come by the photos. ‘In these you can see that her knees are stained by lavender and soil, as are the palms of her hands and her seat,' he said and pointed this out to them.

The day had been very hot. Round and round they had spun her, each of them looking up into the sun, recalled Christiane. They had all laughed. Adrienne had done so, too, and had stumbled when they had let go of her. She really
had
fallen several times, and then … then had passed out.

Herr Kohler set something in front of her, and when Christiane looked down at it, she saw that it was the postcard that had been made from the negative Norman had sold to the
Petit Enfant
. Clamping her eyes shut at the thought of what must now happen to them, she felt the detective take her by the hand. He pressed her fingers against the hair … the hair … It had been so soft – hot in the midday sun. Guy had laughed. Genèvieve had urged them all to help. They had turned the girl over but how had the Inspector come by the photographs? Norman had kept them. Norman …

‘Who raped her?' asked Kohler gently. ‘Please don't lie to me, Mademoiselle Bissert. That girl was at least four months pregnant when she drowned in October of last year, a good two or three weeks before November's flooding freed up her body.'

The singer and the song … A life so suddenly gone. ‘Xavier. We … we didn't know what he was doing to her. I swear it!'

‘Until it was too late,' said the tenor.

‘Too late,' echoed the baritone.

‘We had gone up to the
mas
,' said Spaggiari.

‘The
mas
,' said someone.

‘The sun,' said someone else.

‘Hot … it was so hot,' said Christiane in despair.

‘Absinthe isn't very kind, Inspector,' said Genèvieve. ‘It can make some crazy, others numb to what is happening to them.'

Rose madder, saffron yellow, thought St-Cyr. Dark forest green and cocoa brown, the white of crocheted stockings and the undersheath a well-bred girl of nineteen would have worn six hundred years ago. The fine, soft suede of her belt, the girdle that had been worn low off the hip and had held so many things. Tiny silver bells, a dirk, a purse, a pair of scissors, a sewing kit. The
enseignes
, cabochons and talismans … the rebus, the riddle she had presented.

‘Venetian velvet, Flemish linen. Silk that is so soft and supple it's cool to the touch but once radiated the warmth of her body, Inspector,' said Frau von Mahler earnestly, her dark blue eyes never leaving him. ‘Go on, take up a handful of the remnants she gave me.
Bitte, mein lieber französischer Oberdetektiv
. Breathe in the scent of her, of me! A soothing lotion, a balm she made for my skin, from an ancient recipe.'

Shredded strips of fabric, all of them taken from those the girl had used in her costume, filled the large white porcelain bowl the woman held. They'd been sprinkled liberally with honey water. The Greeks had favoured its use, and the ancient Egyptians before them, probably. Honey, coriander, nutmeg and cloves, gum benzoin, vanilla pods, storax and dried lemon rind – all had been mixed and ground in a mortar, after which, in the early Renaissance, a litre or so of fine cognac or brandy had been added. Two or three days, the mixture had been allowed to steep. Then rosewater and orange blossom water had been joined with ground musk and ambergris and the whole concoction placed in a matrass, a glass flask with a long neck, and heated gently for three days and nights before cooling and bottling.

‘Frau von Mahler,' said St-Cyr, still holding the fistful of remnants he had brought to his nose.

‘
Please
! Let us speak
en français
. Let me show you how well she was teaching me. So many things. All gone now.
Gone
, do you understand?'

He waited for her to set the bowl aside but she refused to relinquish it to Marie-Madeleine and remained sitting with it in her lap. A woman of perhaps twenty-seven. It was so hard to tell. Once tall and flaxen-haired, now thin and stooped and …

‘Forgive me,' she said. ‘You see, I … I've very few friends and she became my dearest one. Ah! it's strange, I know. A foreigner, a
Boche
, one of the Occupier, but you see, Inspector, Mireille was above all that. She knew I needed help and that my children shouldn't suffer from the loneliness their mother had imposed upon them because of … because of this.'

The reddened scars that were threaded, stippled and bulged with newly grown and still-growing whitish tissue on her neck and her face, the skin grafts that had been painfully undergone and still would have to be. The terrible loss of so much of her lovely hair.

‘My chest. My thighs. These arms of mine,' she said. ‘When you're engulfed in flames, Inspector, you can never forget your screams. I think I must have rolled about in the street but have no memory of it. Someone – I still don't know who – threw a blanket over me and smothered my little fire. But by then, of course, I'd torn off my clothes, and perhaps that one act saved me from being even more severely burned but, again, this I can't recall doing.'

Avignon's
petite pomme frite
. Had she learned of Xavier's having called her that, and the others too, he wondered. How hateful of them, if so.

‘Mireille knew things, Inspector. Things someone couldn't have her saying.'

‘Bishop Rivaille?' he asked, only to see her draw in a breath.

She plucked at the remnants. ‘Rivaille … He proclaims we're at the dawn of a new Renaissance and says the past must be purged, the slate wiped clean. But I wonder which slate he means. That of the Babylonian Captivity, or that of last Monday night at ten fifty.'

There were no tears. These had all been shed, or perhaps it was that she could no longer physically cry. Grief was registered in once fair cheeks.

‘Did he tell you that the first Mireille fell to her death of her own accord from the Bell Tower of the Palais where she had been taken as seamstress to his Holiness? Did he tell you how they had taken her from the Palais to the Pont Saint Bénézet, there to publicly strip her naked and lock her into an
accabussadd
The Pontiff, the cardinals, magistrates, captains and Papal Guard?'

The Chief Inspector St-Cyr waited for more of the truth. ‘Most of the city turned out for the spectacle,' she said. ‘You see, the girl was being punished for harlotry, it was falsely claimed, and once back in the Palais, having been nearly drowned, she then clothed herself again in all her finery. And in despair of what they had done to her good name and to that of her family and her husband, threw herself to her death, or was pushed.'

Marie-Madeleine hastily crossed herself and, not taking her gaze from him, said softly, ‘She had refused absolutely to consort with the cardinal who had wanted her, and for this, was put on trial first and then … then punished.'

‘The pomander,' said St-Cyr and, taking it out, held it in a fist. ‘Gripped just as she must have done and then again by our Mireille last Monday night.'

‘It's filled with ambergris that is very old,' said Frau von Mahler. ‘The
notaire public
, Albert Renaud, loaned it to her. He has extensive collections, and among the artefacts are many that once belonged to this other Mireille and to the de Sinéty family.'

‘The third judge,' said St-Cyr. ‘Brother Matthieu suggested the possibility; Bishop Rivaille confirmed it.'

The Inspector looked at Marie-Madeleine when he said this. Suddenly the girl blurted, ‘The postcards, the hair. The shop of the Petit Enfant …'

‘And another girl, madame. Another murder.'