Beekeeper (18 page)

Apparently she paid no attention to them, to the dripping of adjacent faucets, the damp cold, dim light, fog and constant smell of Javel. And her voice – she was talking to herself – was not shrill but earnest. ‘You
will
be poisoned, Angèle. I drank water, idiot. You know the poison wasn't in it! Ah, you think I'm crazy? I know where you are. You were in the chapel. I'm in the garden. There were clowns. You were on the trapeze; Angèle. Madame la sous-maîtresse Durand was riding an elephant. You were …'

‘Angèle-Marie,' said Dr Henri-Martin Lemoine gently. ‘It's me. You have a visitor.'

‘I played the drums.
He's a Communist! He's been sent to poison me
! Why am I here?'

‘One of the others spilled their soup on your dress. Remember?' he said.

‘Will he tune my piano?'

‘Perhaps. Now come along.'

‘A lake. I went swimming. You
did
!' she said to herself. ‘
Marie-couche-toi-là
, you were
naked
! You sported yourself!'

Harlot … ‘Inspector, please. Let me get her to her room.'

‘They're going to poison you. You know they are,' she said to herself and then, ‘Try biscuits, not water. Be reasonable. Take air. I can't. It burns. There are spies. They're watching you, Angèle. They've seen you peeing!'

‘Please,' said Lemoine, nodding slightly towards the washhouse entrance. ‘Let me talk to her. We'll only be a moment.'

The woman lifted her head and listened intently. As if struck by something, she stood rigidly, still clinging to the dress on the washboard. Hesitantly her chest rose and fell in fear, but then the frown she now gave changed swiftly to a smile.

Merde
, thought St-Cyr. That bit about the poison not being in water. Does she know why I've come?

The wrinkles were there again across the deeply furrowed brow. The large brown eyes were dark with worry, the lips tight as she watched for his every move and he heard Lemoine saying, ‘Go, for God's sake.'

‘Go?' she asked, and watched – one could feel her doing so, thought St-Cyr, as he walked to the end of the corridor.

Poison … was her concern over being poisoned normal to her condition, or had she been told and had it registered that her brother was dead?

The Schlacht residence at 28 quai d'Orléans might well be pleasant, for the house it was in faced the river. But at 6:17 p.m. it was shrouded in darkness, fog and softly falling snow.

Kohler stood beside the Citroën. He had no love of the Île Saint-Louis, this ancient kernel from which Paris had grown. Oona had nearly been killed at its upstream end, a matter of his having used her as bait, and ever since that affair, he'd been shy of the place.

Regrettably so, Louis would have said but Louis wasn't here. And anyway, that had been back in mid-December and, yes, there'd been gold involved then and now there was more of it. Gold and candles, squashed beehives from Russia and acarine mites. Shit!

Though he listened intently, the city was all but silent. Only the gentle lapping of the river came to him, just as it had when Oona had had that knife at her throat. She had trusted him implicitly then and he had put her at risk.

‘I've got to find her a really decent set of papers; Giselle, too,' he said and swore he'd do so. ‘I've got to get them both out of France before it's too late.'

Spain … he'd always felt that would be best. Louis and he had often discussed it. A small café, a little
bar-tabac
with Giselle behind the zinc and Oona? he asked himself. Oona at home, tending Giselle's babies, eh? Oona waiting. Oona lying in bed night after night never knowing if he loved her, too, or what the hell would really happen to her.

Fed up with himself and the life, he yanked down on the brim of his fedora and took a little walk. Paused to light a cigarette and tried to think.

He'd have to go carefully. Louis and he couldn't have Oberg breathing down their necks again. And yet … and yet, had Frau Schlacht really intended to poison Madame de Bonnevies? Had the woman gone to that study only to find that the beekeeper, thinking the Amaretto quite safe, since he hadn't yet poisoned it, was in the throes of death? Had the intended victim added that poison? Had Juliette de Bonnevies beaten them to it?

A soft whipping sound cut the air to interrupt his thoughts and, curious, he leaned over the stone parapet to gaze down through the inkiness at the lower
quai.
There was a set of iron stairs here, he remembered. There had been chestnut trees, or had they been lindens?

Someone was fishing. Before the Defeat, before this lousy war and Occupation, this
quai
and all the others would have been lined with fishermen, especially on a Sunday afternoon. Now one could only do it under cover of darkness and still that was a terrible risk to take for a few roach or chub.

He let the fisherman be. He went along until he found the door to Number 28's courtyard. Rebuilt in the mid-1800s, the house, of five or six storeys, would have superb views of the Notre Dame, the Left Bank, too.

As if totally ignoring him and the war and what had happened, the bell of the Église de Saint-Louis tolled the half-hour as it had for centuries. Christ! was it cracking the ice of the bloody Volga?

‘
Fliegende Bomben
,' he muttered disconsolately and asked himself, was the rumour even partly true and if so, must the war go on and on with no end in sight?

Louis would be certain to tell Gabrielle, who would pass the information to her contacts in the
Résistance.
‘And God help us all if she's dragged in again for questioning. I should never have put that responsibility on his shoulders. Never.'

Not one for using the elevators – he'd been caught hanging by a thread once too often – he started up the stairs only to be softly reminded. ‘Monsieur, you have not stopped with me.'

There were concierges and concierges, but to most there was that same look of utter bafflement as to why a visitor – any visitor – should call at such an hour. At any hour!

Brusquely Madame Jeanette-Noëlle Jouvand turned the ledger towards him, having retreated into her
loge.

She was not old, not young any more, and of medium height and build, was a war-widow as so many of them were. A quite pleasant-looking woman in a neat, prewar woollen suit of dove blue, with silver Widow's League button, a constant reminder.

‘Please,' she indicated the ledger and held her breath while he wrote: Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central, and glancing at the military wristwatch, the time: 18:35 hours, the Schlacht residence.

‘That one has gone out, monsieur.'

He grinned, and it was a nice grin, thought Madame Jouvand, even though he was a Boche and there was the scar of a terrible slash down the left side of his face from the eye to chin. Other scars, too, but from shrapnel and from a bullet graze across the brow.

‘The war,' he said. ‘Not this one, but the last one.'

‘Barbed wire,' she said and nodded sadly even though he had lied about the slash and the graze – both were far too fresh. ‘
Monmari
was found clinging steadfastly to it with his face absent. Come back in three hours, monsieur. Madame dines. The Monsieur seldom goes with her since he is not often home and is, perhaps, too busy elsewhere.'

‘I'll just go up and leave my card with her maid.'

‘It is as the monsieur pleases, but I will note this in my ledger, should madame wish to question me.'

Verdammt
, she was a cool one! A look down at her from the stairs revealed that same puzzled concern. ‘You do not take the lift?' she asked and heard him say, ‘They're like some of the people I have to deal with. I never trust them.'

A shrug was given and, delighted by her, he knew she was exclaiming to herself that the Germans were crazy, but instead she said, ‘Well, of course, m'sieur, it's the exercise. Always
les Allemands
are at it. Rowing on the river, in the most tragic of weathers. Swimming when full of champagne and where none are allowed to swim even if fully clothed and there is ice. But it's as God has said. He is with them.'

‘
Gott mit Uns
, eh?' he chuckled gently. It was written on every Wehrmacht belt buckle.

‘She will have gone to the
salon de beauté
first, monsieur, and then to the brasserie.'

‘It's near the
passerelle
, isn't it?'

The iron footbridge that crossed over to the Île de la Cité. The Germans had ordered it thrown up in 1941 to replace the bridge that had been knocked down by a disgruntled barge in 1939.

‘
Oui.
The
salon
and brasserie are very close to each other and to it. First the one and then the other, the place of the Alsatian.'

‘And no ration tickets, eh?'

‘None. It is also as God wishes, is it not?'

There was even the innocence of wonder in her deep brown eyes, but concierges seldom offered information and this one had.

Kohler hated to spoil the fun but returned to face her as a Gestapo would. ‘
Ihre Papiere, bitte
, Frau …'

‘Jouvand. Jeanette-Noëlle, age forty-five.'

Tonelessly she gave her address and position, et cetera, but it didn't take him a minute to find what he wanted, and when he drew out the slim, bright red- and green-covered little book from under
Paris-Soir
, where she had hidden it, she shuddered.

‘Relax,' he said in French. ‘Forget I ever saw it. Look, you've a nice coal fire in that furnace of yours. Why not go down to it and do us both a favour?'

Dear God forgive her, thought Madame Jouvand, for being so stupid as to have accepted that little book in the street when it was passed to her.

‘
Poésie et vérité
,' said Kohler. Poem and truth.

Paul Éluard's poems were
Verboten
but were being published and distributed by the
Résistance.

‘I will do so immediately, monsieur.'

‘
Bon.
And now that we're friends, I can ask you anything I want about Herr Schlacht and that wife of his, and you'll be sure to answer without telling anyone else you did. Right?'

Ah
merde
! ‘Yes. Yes, of course. It shall be as you wish.'

The grainy photo in the dossier was of Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies in 1912. Staring blankly at the camera, the fifteen-year-old clutched the bundle of her clothes tightly to her chest, had just been showered and admitted, was still wet. The hair, worn no longer then than now, was parted in the middle and had been combed flat to cling behind her ears and drip. There wasn't a frown, a tear – not one hint of anything.

‘Empty … her expression is exactly as it is as she looks at us now,' said St-Cyr sadly. ‘It's as if she can never forget.'

Lemoine turned up a companion photo. ‘The father blamed her,' he said. ‘A walking stick.'

She'd been severely beaten. There were welts, bruises and inflamed cuts across her back, buttocks and thighs; rain after rain of blows. Her arms and shoulders had suffered. The calves, the ankles, the heels … ‘Is there no hope for her?'

‘There is always hope. Why else would we struggle?'

From the wash-house, she had led them to the rue de la pâtisserie and then up staircase after staircase and through common wards which seemed to stretch on for ever.

There were two tall French windows behind the heavy blackout curtains that hung in the centre of each of the outer walls, the corner room having lots of light during the day. The floor was of bare planks, except for a colourful carpet of woven rags. A rescued Louis XIV settee had lost all upholstery but that on the seat and needed repainting and regilding. A worm-eaten narrow table, with a mottled grey marble top, held the grey-stone bust of an unhappy saint; an armoire with mirrored doors, her clothing. A chipped, yellow-and-white-enamelled sink on feet, served both as private bath and basin.

An unpainted, tin, hospital table-cum-bedside-cabinet held Bible, rosary, lamp, tin carafe of water and one tin cup. There were books with leather bindings but could she even read them for any length of time and make sense of them? There were several Jumeau, Bru and Kaestner dolls with feathered chapeaux and long, flowing gowns of dark blue, emerald green, deep red and gold velvet. Silk and satin, too, with rings, necklaces, pins, bracelets and cameos. Dolls with rouged cheeks, painted lips and long dark or blonde lashes. Had she given them names?

‘My piano,' she said, at last losing that blankness of expression and indicating the upright. ‘It whispers. It tells me it wants to be tuned, that its strings are hurting. Are you here to paint the room? You did once.'

A metronome had been silenced long ago by the removal of its arm. There were thin stacks of frayed sheet music – waltzes, he supposed, and sonatas. There were cobwebs, too, and flaking varnish, split cabinet wood, and lifting or missing ivories to match the broken plaster of the walls where large gaps exposed the stones.

‘Her brother makes this possible,' confided Lemoine, discreetly taking the dossier from him. ‘Humour her, Inspector. Sit down and tamper with the keys. She'll soon pass on to other thoughts.'

‘The brother's dead.'

‘Pardon?'

‘I meant what I said.'

Lemoine heaved a contemplative sigh. ‘I felt you must have a good reason for coming. She'll have heard us, by the way, and is very conscious of everything that goes on around her. How did it happen?'

‘Poison,' she said to herself. ‘You will also be poisoned, Angèle-Marie. I won't. I drank the roasted barley-and-acorn coffee they have to serve us in this place. I was a squirrel.'

‘Later … I'll tell you later,' confided St-Cyr.

Clothing lay drying over a small wooden rack, but the room was damp and cold. She hung the dress with the other things and, finding a nightgown in the armoire, modestly turned her back to them and got ready for bed. Fought with the voices she heard; refused to respond to them; said earnestly, ‘I
won't
! I
mustn't
! Not now.' And then, ‘He's dead. I'm free and can no longer hate him. He hated you. He really did!'