Beekeeper (59 page)

‘Chez Crusoe,' trumpeted Albert. ‘It's by the Boutiron Bridge and not far from her hotel. They play records and dance. Sometimes when she comes to Vichy, Yvonne Printemps sings there after hours and there's a piano player, but usually it's … it's only records or the wireless. Never the news from the BBC London. Never! That's … that's against the law.'

‘And the cigarettes, the brandy and cigars Henri-Claude Ferbrave gets?' asked Herr Kohler quietly.

‘They come in a van,' said Albert eagerly. ‘A van that has the Bank of France written on it. I know because I heard him saying so, and then saw it myself. I watched. Cartons and cartons of cigarettes from the Tabac National in Vannes, brandy from the Halle aux Vins in Paris – heaps of white flour, too, and coffee, this coff—'

The bloody Bank of France!

‘It's all right, Albert. Don't worry,' soothed Lulu. ‘The Inspector's a friend. You heard what he said to that one when he had me trapped in the lift. “You hit her and I'll kill you. Maybe I will anyway.”'

‘I … I borrowed our coffee from the van,' confessed Albert, not looking at either of them. ‘The driver and his helper were too busy to notice. It was cold and dark. I hid it but then … then I made the coffee, real coffee, for the boys and … and told them the sack had fallen off a German lorry. They all patted me on the back, my father especially.'

‘A bank,' Louis had said of the woman. A full safe with extra strongboxes just waiting to be opened if one could find the keys!

‘Madame Pétain …' he attempted, only to hear Lulu cluck her tongue and tartly say, ‘Is not a friend of Albert's.'

‘She doesn't like idiots,' whispered Albert, ducking his eyes down at the floor. ‘She and the doctor think I should be sent away.'

‘But she did say something to her
coiffeur
on the day Madame Dupuis fell asleep …' hazarded Herr Kohler, a slow learner perhaps, thought Lulu, but a learner all the same.

‘Asleep – there, you see, Madame Lulu. I was right!'

‘Of course you were. Of course. Inspector, I did not listen in as Dr Ménétrel supposes, nor do I tell anyone what I may or may not have overheard. Monsieur Laurence Davioud is
coiffeur
to many of the wives of important ministers and government officials, those of the foreign ambassadors, too, and even those of inspectors of finances, I believe.'

A treasure … ‘And Ferbrave?'

‘Is a very dangerous man, so Albert and myself, we will appreciate your continued protection.'

‘He knows things,' said Albert darkly. ‘Secret things. I'll bet if he knew what I'd found, he'd want to take it from me, but I'm not going to tell him my special secret, Madame Lulu. I'm not! I'm going to keep it
all
for myself.'

Ah
Sainte Mère
, why must the boy always be picking things up? ‘What, Albert? Show me what you found?' she coaxed. ‘You know I won't tell anyone, not even your mother, if you don't want me to, and as for the inspector, why he's here to help us.'

‘I hid it. I can't tell.'

‘Now, Albert … One good turn deserves another.'

‘I can't hear you. I've got to stoke the fire.'

‘Albert, I must insist. Yvette will only ask me and I want to be able to tell her how helpful you've been.'

‘The other one took my ring. He said it would be dangerous for me if I kept it.'

‘Yes, yes, but this … this assassin they're looking for will know you found something else. Nothing is ever secret for long in this place. Nothing.'

The firebox was stoked, the coals rabbled for clinkers. Sparks flew up, mesmerizing Albert. Madame Dupuis had been asleep. She had!

‘Son, give it to him,' said the elder Grenier, coming into the furnace room. ‘You must, Albert.' His hand went out to caution the others. ‘My son knows how important it is, Inspector. Albert was just waiting for the right moment to turn it over to you or your partner.'

The hiding place, no doubt one of several, thought Kohler, was behind the access plate at the bottom of the chimney. Dusted with soot, some of this sprinkled away as the folded rag was opened.

Brass at its ends, rosewood along its gently curved and palm-fitting haft, the folded-in blade silvery, the pocket knife gleamed.

Herr Kohler was humbled, thought Lulu. ‘I'll see you get another just like it,' he said, so gently for such a big man. ‘Now tell me where you found it.'

‘In the toilet. On … on top of the shit.'

‘The drains to our outdoor toilets become frozen in winter, Inspector,' interjected the elder Grenier. ‘Since we have so many visitors these days, the Government decided to install two portable toilets next to the permanent ones in the park. Among my son's tasks is the job of checking these twice each day, just to see there is paper if needed.'

Paper was in such short supply it was a wonder it wasn't repeatedly stolen, unless, of course, Albert kept his eye on those two portables more than twice a day … ‘And the knife was lying there as if dropped?'

‘Albert washed and oiled it.'

‘I polished it. I shined it up. It's brand-new and hasn't …' His voice trailed off. ‘Ever been used, I guess.'

‘Had the person who dropped it been sick?' asked Kohler.

Albert gave an eager nod, then frowned and said, ‘It … it must have slipped and fallen. Yes … yes, that's what it did!'

‘Open or closed? The blade, that is.'

‘Open. Straight up, and in like a dagger!'

‘Blood … was there blood?'

‘Frozen. It had been washed,' grumbled Albert, gritting his teeth. ‘There wasn't any blood. Why should there have been?'

‘When … when did you find it?'

‘In … in the morning, after the … the vomiting.'

‘A cigar? Did you find one?'

‘No.'

‘The key …?' prompted Lulu, meaning the one to the Hall where the murder had taken place.
Merde
, the tension was terrible, but had Albert lied to protect the killer?

‘Those portable toilets are never locked, Inspector, only the permanent ones,' said the elder Grenier.

The kid, the boy, the man, deserved a medal, but would Louis still be at the morgue?

‘A tisane of lime flowers with apple skins, or the carrot greens with liquorice. If I can't drink it, I can always smoke it,' said St-Cyr.

A wise one reeking of Sûreté and Paris and pissed off at having to wait his turn! The forlornly clutched pipe was empty, the tobacco pouch also, as further evidence. ‘A moment, m'sieur. I will see if there is anything beyond ashes. Sometimes the urn contains a few leaves.'

Verdammt
, Louis, how many times have you told me never to try to joke with a waiter? Hermann would have gone on and on about the ‘lessons' in French etiquette he constantly received from his partner, but Hermann wasn't here as anticipated and perversity had won out!

Vichy's railway station stank of cold, damp soot, unwashed bodies, disinfectant and urine. Dirt was everywhere: in the saucer that was used for powdered saccharin, on the floor that hadn't been swept in months, in the shabbiness of the crowd that mingled or came and went but that held few happy faces. Papers being checked – plain-clothed Gestapo on the hunt; GFPs too, the Wehrmacht's secret police, looking for deserters; its uniformed military police also, the
Kettenhunde
, the ‘chained dogs' who wore their badge of office on a chain around their necks. Tough, brutal, no-nonsense men to whom even the Vichy goons and
flics
gave a wide berth.

The sculptress had taken the same train as Hermann and himself, but try as he now did, St-Cyr could find no memory of her having been in any of the waiting queues, either at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on Wednesday, the day after Céline Dupuis's murder, or at the Demarcation Line.

‘Inés Charpentier,' he said. Oh for sure, her name had been in the register. She'd taken a sleeper – normally one would think nothing of it except that, as an artist and poor, how could she have afforded such a luxury when even detectives didn't dare to do such a thing?

Then, too, since the Defeat, the trains had been policed, not by the Sûreté, but by the German railway police. And everyone, including most especially the Resistance, was well aware of the respect and admiration given to wealth and position by the common and ordinary of the Occupier.

Even at the Demarcation Line they seldom bothered to disturb those in the
wagons-lits
, the
Schlafwagens.

‘A man and a woman, but one of the latter,' he said, ‘who knows well how to come and go and now has a reason for staying here.' Had someone paid her fare, someone in the Résistance?

It was an uncomfortable thought and, as always these days, things could be so complicated. Many of the railway workers, especially in Lyons, had been communists until the party had been banned, and when the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941, the
cheminots
formed what was to become, in 1942, the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, but by then the assassinations they had initiated were being carried out in earnest. Prominent collaborators, Wehrmacht corporals and higher-ups. In December 1941, Général Keitel signed the
Nacht und Nebel Erlass
, the Night and Fog decree. In retaliation for the killings, all those arrested whose innocence could not be quickly determined were to be deported to the Reich under cover of darkness.

Families could not even find out where their sons or daughters had been taken or if they had even been arrested. Brothers lost brothers; sisters the same. One simply vanished without a trace.

Hostages were also taken and shot. At first only a few, then ten for each German killed, then more, people being rounded up and held as
Sühnepersone
– as expiators – for those who'd been killed.

And yes, a civil war between Vichy's newest police force, the Milice, and the Resistance was definitely possible. And yes, Hermann and he himself would be caught up in it, his Giselle and Oona too; Gabrielle also.

But these killings, he reminded himself, these failed assassination attempts, if indeed that is what they'd been, might not have been the work of the Resistance at all.

First there was the extreme right of Paris who hated Vichy and wanted power. The Intervention-Referat, at 48 rue de Villejust, recruited and trained teams of assassins from among members of the Parti Populaire Français of Jacques Doriot whose newspaper,
Le Cri du Peuple
, didn't just shrill collaboration beyond that of Vichy, but total union with the Reich. True, these killers did the work of the Gestapo when they wished to appear dissociated from it and, true, they did the PPF's work as well, even when it didn't necessarily agree with the Gestapo's position.

Then, too, there was the Bickler Unit of the Alsatian, Karl (Hermann) Bickler, who trained infiltrators and agents for the Gestapo – assassinations, kidnapping and extortion also – but primarily directed against the Résistance.

‘And otherwise?' he asked himself, for there were still possibilities of a political nature. ‘A jealous wife or lover, but surely not with all three of the victims.'

There was still no sign of Hermann, nor the tisane he had ordered. When looking out of the restaurant at the crowd, he couldn't help but notice their footwear. Shoes indicated the health of the nation: carpet slippers in winter, but stuffed with bits of newspaper or twists of straw and worn sometimes even in mismatched pairs; open-toed high heels with thin straps, but with woollen socks instead of the silk stockings for which they'd been fashioned, hence the tightness, the rubbing, the painful chilblains one often noticed on the female corpses one had to examine. Wooden-soled shoes with their cleverly articulated hinges and cloth or ersatz leather uppers were everywhere, sabots also, and then, too, shabby leather or rubber boots that were far too big for the wives of those who were locked up in POW camps in the Reich.

‘We've become a nation that will wear anything and that no longer cares about appearances,' he said and then, getting back to the matter at hand, ‘Camille Lefébvre's father will have to be interviewed. There is also Céline Dupuis's love of birds and her use of their quills that will have to be looked into.
Merde
, where is that partner of mine?'

Hermann functioned best with a set of wheels under him. In September 1940, when they'd first met, he'd seen that big, black, beautiful Citroën
traction avant
, that front-wheel drive, and had said blithely, ‘You'd better give me the keys.'

‘My car! The years of diligent service, the rise to Chief Inspector, and then … then to have it all taken away!'

Hermann was a terrible driver. Heavy on the foot, careless on the straight and narrow, insane on the blind curves. ‘It's a wonder I haven't been killed or forgotten how to drive.' But Hermann, for all his faults, was desperately needed.

‘Bousquet has not come completely clean,' St-Cyr grumbled when, grinning and loudly exclaiming, ‘I knew I'd find you here!' the Bavarian at last appeared in a rush. ‘He's still trying to hide something, Hermann.'

‘Cheer up and shut your eyes – come on, do it – and hold out your hand.'

Louis sucked in a breath as he felt for the thumbnail groove and carefully opened the blade to cradle the pocket knife in his hand. ‘A Laguiole, Hermann. A woman's knife – there is no awl or corkscrew as with those of the men. It's an unwritten rule of etiquette that women flash only open blades. The bee under my thumb at the head of the haft supposedly symbolizes Napoleon's warrant but I doubt it. The village is well to the south of Clermont-Ferrand and a good distance from here. Still, the knives travel, and in the Auvergne it is preferred over the simple Opinel most of our peasants favour. Beautifully made, not cheap now, but razor-sharp because the steel is similar to that of surgical instruments – one per cent carbon, seventeen per cent chrome and point eight per cent molybdenum – but always the love of one's craft goes into them.'