Madrigal (41 page)

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.