Madrigal (50 page)

‘Then the matter is settled,' said the priest, calling for another carafe of the red to soothe the sore throats of his two guests who had obviously, thought St-Cyr, been up to things with more than one of the local teenagers.

They settled down, each of the sisters no doubt silently cursing their parish priest for having exacted a promise from them by using a confrontation with a Sûreté over the unfortunate death of a former client!

Warming to the interview, for it was so much of Belleville and Charonne, St-Cyr took out his pipe and prepared to stay for as long as it took to get what he could from these two. Both were heavily made-up. Still in their fur-trimmed overcoats, thin scarves and hats, only their gloves had been removed. Both had the same broad faces, wide lips, double chins and carefully tweezed eyebrows. But whereas Josiane had dark brown, cataract-clouded eyes, Georgette's were sea-green and clear, but with a pronounced cast in the left one. Hence the cards and the endless games of solitaire, though even here one of those nuances of character had caused her to taunt the good father and tempt him into distraction, just for the fun of it and to have something to recount to the other girls!

‘Now tell the Inspector a little about Alexandre and your dealings with him,' grunted Father Michel. ‘Go on. You can speak freely. God knows everything and will understand.'

Trust a priest to say such a thing! thought Josiane. ‘God would have shut His eyes, Father. Besides, it's a private matter. The rules of the house, isn't that so?'

‘Private,' echoed her sister.

One by one the greasy, well-thumbed playing cards, each with a full-length portrait of a naked girl in an awkward pose, were placed face up.

‘He liked to take you both, didn't he?' prompted Father Michel, helping himself to more pastis and another Gauloise Bleue from the packet of cigarettes they had brought.

‘Sometimes,' said Josiane a little stiffly, ‘Alexandre would …'

‘Father, details of his sex life with these two really are of little interest. I want to question …'

‘Then they should be, my son. Please don't be so impatient.'

‘Oh
là, là
, Josiane, will you look at that!'

The younger one had lost her game.

‘He … he liked to call us names,' she confessed and began to gather the cards.

‘What sort of names?' prodded the priest, exhaling cigarette smoke and fastidiously picking a shred of tobacco from his sleeve.

‘Father, you know very well what sort of names.'

‘Angele-Marie,' whispered Georgette darkly, again concentrating on the game before her.

Merde alors
, why had he had to ask? cursed Josiane. ‘And Suzette, and Élène or Michèle.
Pouf
! Father, it meant nothing. Just a whim of the moment.'

Retreating behind his little cloud of cigarette smoke, the priest waited.

Finally the dark eyes of the older sister ducked away.

‘Angèle-Marie …?' hazarded St-Cyr. The cards had stopped.

‘Alexandre's sister, Inspector,' sighed Father Michel. ‘I rather thought you might be interested, especially since he went to see her last Thursday. Teased as a child by an older brother who loved bees and knew all about virgin queens; raped repeatedly on a summer's evening in 1912, and so violently at the age of fifteen, by some animal or animals in the Père Lachaise – we never did get the story of it in full; the custodians had forgotten about the poor child and had locked her in for the night – she has long since become a permanent resident of the Salpêtrière.'

Almost the size of a small town, the Paris asylum for women held more than six thousand inmates and had a staff of over a thousand.

‘Alexandre was very worried about her safety, Inspector,' said Father Michel. ‘Given the willingness of our German friends to destroy all such signs of mental or physical weakness, he had, I should think, cause for alarm.'

‘It was only play,' hazarded Josiane, picking at her handbag. ‘Georgette would take her name, I would watch and when … why, when his little moment was over, we would sit and talk for old times' sake.'

Jésus, merde alors
, these village quartiers and their priests! ‘And how old, please, was Georgette when Monsieur de Bonnevies first visited
Le Chat
?'

‘Fifteen,' grunted Father Michel. ‘Alexandre would have been … Now, let me see …'

‘Twenty-seven, Father,' said the older sister.

‘And two years later he went off to war and we saw him only twice in all those years,' confessed Georgette, moisture coming readily to her eyes. ‘These …' She indicated the playing cards. ‘Are the deck I gave him. You can still smell the mustard gas – I swear you can.'

Gathering the cards, she held them out, the cut-glass rings on her pudgy fingers, with their red-lacquered nails, flashing in the thin light.

‘He loved them,' she said. ‘He used to say they reminded him constantly of me.'

‘Of me, too, Georgette.'

‘Yes, of you, too,
chérie.
'

At a nod from the priest, another carafe of the red was brought – the third, or was it the fourth? wondered St-Cyr. People had come and gone. Left alone in their little cocoon, the four of them had lost all sense of time.

‘The hives,' prompted Father Michel.

‘Ah,
oui
,' said Josiane. ‘“A field lying fallow is a portion of France dying.”'

It was one of the Maréchal Pétain's many sayings, just as was
Travail, Famille et Patrie
, but not the
Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité
of prewar days.

‘I take it the field was leased from the city for the apiary,' sighed St-Cyr, ‘but the neighbours felt it would be best to grow vegetables there.'

‘And Alexandre would have no part of such a thing, Inspector. You see, to remain content and productive, bees need peace and quiet,' acknowledged the priest.

‘There was lots of room,' countered Josiane. ‘He could have freed up half the land. We … we told him this.'

‘We did,' insisted Georgette. ‘And now the hives are in ruins and what the neighbours wished will soon be possible.'

‘Who stole the honey?' asked St-Cyr.

Both of the sisters shrugged. Josiane glanced at the priest and then dropped her gaze to her wine.

‘The neighbours,' sighed Father Michel. ‘Which of them, and how many, will, I'm afraid, be all but impossible to ascertain and take much time.'

‘A
fait accompli
, is that it, Father?'

‘“Life is not neutral,” Inspector,' grunted Father Michel, giving him another of the Maréchal's sayings. ‘“It consists of taking sides boldly.” AJexandre was very much a
Pétainiste
, but not when it came to giving up his precious apiary.'

‘He could be so very stubborn,' offered Georgette. ‘
Mon Dieu
, if I didn't submit
exactly
the way he wanted, he would get angry. I was to stretch out my arms above my head so as to grasp the little black iron bars of the fence around the tombstone while … while knocking the flowers over as I smothered my cries in them. They … they tickled my nose. That stone … it was so shaky sometimes, so heavy I was afraid it would fall and … and crush my head!'

‘I had always to urge him on, Inspector,' confessed Josiane.

‘Until he would cry out his sister's name as he released his little burden?' bleated the Sûreté.

‘Ah
oui.
Then he would stroke Georgette and tell her to be calm, that she hadn't really lost her virtue, that this was of the heart, not the hymen, and I would stroke him until … until all three of us were calm.'

‘Tears … were there tears?' he heard himself asking.

‘Always,' confided Josiane with a touch. ‘Always and without fail.'

‘Father, you could have warned me. Did he rape his sister?'

They had left the café and were heading up the rue Saint-Blaise towards the church.

‘No, he did not. He was at the Jardin du Luxembourg assisting one of the Society's beekeepers. Alexandre simply blamed himself. You see, that morning he had asked his sister to pick some flowers in the cemetery but to be careful not to let the custodians see her doing so. He wanted a sampling of their pollen to compare, under the microscope, with that found in his hives.'

‘Then why play a game of rape with those two?'

‘Why not? It was harmless, a punishment – self-humiliation. And there was Georgette's sister to witness it.'

‘But she had always to urge him on?'

‘That's of little consequence. Oh
bien sûr
, he confessed this strange desire to me many times – God won't punish me for telling you; but I felt it best you should hear it from those two.'

‘You told me he went there, you thought, perhaps to humiliate Madame de Bonnevies.'

‘He
did!
But by the time of their marriage he had discovered he couldn't stop himself. Those two understood him far better than Juliette could ever have done.'

‘They said nothing of his wife.'

‘Because they had nothing to say about her.'

‘And did he tease his daughter the way he teased his sister?'

They were shouting at each other. ‘Absolutely not. Danielle was everything to him – everything that is, except his bees, but he included her among them, so it really didn't matter.'

‘Included her among them …? As a virgin queen? Well?'

‘Don't be an ass, Inspector. He knew very well she wasn't a bee.' ‘Even so, Father, I'm going to have to talk to those two again.'

‘Of course. It's understood. Now that the introductions are over, feel free to contact them whenever necessary. They'll answer you truthfully, or they'll answer to me.'

Parting at the church, Father Michel watched as the Sûreté, somewhat disgruntled, it had to be admitted, plodded up the steps into the driving snow. Had he been right, he wondered, to short-circuit things and open that door into a very private and tragic matter now seldom mentioned?

‘I had to do it,' swore Father Michel. ‘Otherwise that one and his partner would have looked elsewhere and this they must not do.'

More snow began to fall, and with the wind, it made life miserable, thought Kohler, wishing he'd driven over instead of leaving the Citroën in the place de la Bourse. But he'd wanted to come upon Herr Schlacht on the quiet.

Most people didn't look up as they hurried along. Bundled up in anything they could lay hand to these days, all pretence of fashion had long since vanished from the minds of everyday citizens. Even the boys in grey-green had given up on their seemingly endless window-shopping. And as for the
filles de joie
who had migrated from the vast emptiness Les Halles, the central market, had become, the girls were listless and frozen stiff.

Bicycle-taxis vied with one another and with the bicycles. Pedestrians took their lives into their hands at the white-studded crosswalks. At the corner of the rue Réaumur and the rue Montmartre, sandbags were being unloaded from two Wehrmacht lorries. Here, too, as elsewhere in the city, the air-raid shelters were being converted into bunkers and machine-gun nests.

Instinctively, Kohler flicked a glance down the rue Montmartre towards the central market to gauge the field of fire, was right back at the front in 1914 and '15. Bang on. These boys knew what they were doing and that could only mean the OKW – Old Shatter Hand and von Stülpnagel, the Military Governor – still feared an uprising once the defeat at Stalingrad was officially announced, as it would have to be.

Louis and he had seen such pillboxes before heading south to Avignon. Unsettled by the thought, he went on up the rue Montmartre searching for the smelter.

A big Renault was parked outside the café À La Chope du Croissant. No sign of its owner, nor would Herr Schlacht have wasted time in that cafe.

A nearby signboard, in flaking off-white paint, read:
Imprimerie.
Printers.

Pushing open the tall, wooden doors, he found himself in a rubbish-littered, ice-encased courtyard. Soot all over the place. Soot in these days of so little coal. Soot and iron bars on the windows. Were all the doors locked? he wondered. In one broken window the wind teased a peeling paper notice in German and in French:
Jüdisches Geschäft.
Jewish business. All were gone now. Gone since July of last year. But the smelter would have coexisted with the printers for as long as the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, when so many had fled to Paris.

The courtyard was narrow and at its far end it must take a bend to the right. Tattered handbills rattled around inside the printing shop, the presses as silent as a frozen tap that had burst its lead pipe.

Merde
, where was the place? The smell of burning charcoal was in the air, soda, too, and bone ash.

As he neared the bend, the soft roar of pot-furnaces came to him. A little farther on, he came to a window and, reaching between the bars, cleaned off a bit of the glass to peer inside.

Flames danced, coals glowed. Crucibles were held by two-metre-long iron tongs. Everyone wore goggles, most asbestos suits, gauntlets and toe-capped boots …

The smell of nitric acid reached him and of hydrochloric, too.
Aqua regia
, Louis would have said. A mixture of the two, Hermann. One part nitric acid, three to four of hydrochloric; the name from the Latin for Royal Water. Gold can be dissolved by it and then later extracted.

End of lecture. Louis was always coming up with things like that, but Louis wasn't here. And why
did
he feel he needed backup? Why the constant tingling in his spine?

Among the half-dozen or so grey-clad zombies with their hoods and goggles that made them look like naval gunners in the heat of battle, Herr Schlacht watched a pour. White-hot, the gold was being cast into wafers the size of calling cards. An assistant, to one side, was polishing those that had already cooled.