Madrigal (40 page)

‘“
Produce … a gift from the people of France to their friends in the Reich
,”' snorted Kohler at a label. ‘Walnuts, Louis. Sacks and sacks of them from Périgord.'

‘A warehouse, Hermann. This was its
Salle Dorée
!' Its Golden Room.

‘Easy,
mon vieux.
Hey, take it easy, eh?'

‘Now just a minute. Look what you Boches have done! My grandmother brought me here on 9 April 1901, just two days after the grand opening. We sat right over there. Yes, over there! Right next to that great big window with all the soot on it.'

A kid of ten. Jean-Louis St-Cyr was now fifty-two years of age, himself fifty-five, and where had the time gone? wondered Kohler. To the Great War – they had both been in it, but on opposite sides – and then to more murders, arsons, rapes and other ‘common' crimes than he'd care to count. Munich first for himself, then Berlin and finally, after the Defeat of France, Paris and partner to Louis, since all such Frenchmen needed someone to watch over them. This one especially!

‘Oysters baked golden in champagne sauce, Hermann, and laid piping hot in the half-shell on a bed of coarse salt.'

‘Von Schaumburg, Louis. Old Shatter Hand said we were to take a look at this.'

‘Le côte de boeuf à la moëlle …'

Rib of beef … ‘Louis …'

‘Gaufres de Grand-mère Bocuse,
Hermann.'

Waffles!
Merde
, were they to have the whole of the meal? ‘Louis—'

‘Yes, yes, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. How could I have forgotten one of my many, many masters?'

It was Friday, 29 January 1943 at 23:55 hours. Just five minutes to curfew and colder than a bugger outside. In here, too, thought Kohler. At least five degrees of frost, the inky darkness of the blackout, no sleep, no food, no homecoming to Giselle and Oona, his lady loves. No pleasure at all; damp, too, and this after a bastard of an investigation in Avignon whose result, totally unappreciated, had seen them all but shot to pieces and kicked to death.

Von Schaumburg had sent him and Louis a telegram which had found them on the train somewhere between Lyon and Paris and hours late. Hours.

‘We couldn't have known the
Résistance
would blow the tracks, Hermann,' offered St-Cyr apologetically, having intuitively gauged the trend of his partner's thoughts. ‘We were lucky, that's all.'

Lucky that the
plastic
– the cyclonite – hadn't gone off right under them.

The telegram from von Schaumburg had exhibited the usual Prussian gift for brevity: RESTAURANT GARE DE LYON. TELL NO ONE. It hadn't even ended with the customary Heil Hitler. A Wehrmacht orderly, one of the Kommandant's staff, had met them on arrival and had given them a key. No guards had been on the doors, though there should have been.

‘
Merde
, Hermann, just what the hell had he in mind?'

Paris's ‘trunk' murderers were always sending their victims to Lyon in steamer trunks with no return address. Thinking they had yet another corpse on their hands, and not liking the thought, Kohler disconsolately ran the beam of his blue-blinkered torch over the trunks and turned again to hunting through the labels.

St-Cyr let him be. Always these days there was conflict among the Germans, one faction against another. And always Hermann and himself – who were practically the only two honest cops left to fight common crime in an age of officially sanctioned, monstrous crime – had to come between them.

Von Schaumburg was a soldier and the armed forces – the Wehrmacht – still hated the SS and the Gestapo, distrusting entirely the Führer's faith in those two organizations and jealous of it, too.

Boemelburg, on the other hand, was Hermann's boss and Head of SIPO Section IV, the Gestapo in France. His telegram had preceded that of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris by nearly twenty-four hours, having arrived just as they had reached the station in Orange to begin their homeward journey:

BODY OF BEEKEEPER FOUND IN APIARY NEAR PÈRELACHAISE CEMETERY REQUIRES IMMEDIATE AND URGENT ATTENTION. HEIL HITLER.

‘Urgent' meant, of course, trouble, and trouble was something they did not need, but this was, of course, not the Père Lachaise. Not yet!

‘Bees, Louis. Something to do with them, I guess.' Hermann's voice was muffled by the crates.

Threading his way through to that same window at which he had sat so long ago, St-Cyr looked down over the inner concourse of the Gare de Lyon. Surreal under its wash of dim blue light, people sat or stood as if caught frozen in time. Locked in now because of the curfew and forced to spend the next five hours waiting to leave. Most were shabby, the suitcases they guarded, old or of cardboard and no longer made of leather. Hungry always, they confined themselves to patience, accustomed now to the lengthy delays, the endless queues for food, food tickets, travel papers … papers, papers of all kinds.

A Wehrmacht mobile soup kitchen was dishing out thick slices of black bread and mess tins of cabbage soup with potatoes and sometimes meat, but only to others of their kind in the ever-present grey-green uniforms. A crowd of children stood silently watching as
les haricots verts
, the green beans, the ‘
Schlocks
' spread margarine on their bread and wolfed down their soup.

Gone were the days of those first few months of the Occupation in 1940 when many of the troops tried to behave themselves and play the benefactor. Now, with the imminent defeat of von Paulus at Stalingrad and the loss of what remained of the Führer's Sixth Army, they and others were afraid lest the conquered and oppressed begin to turn against them en masse.

Hermann's two boys had been among the Wehrmacht's one hundred and fifty thousand dead at Stalingrad, but being Hermann, he didn't hold this loss against his partner and friend, nor the French or anyone else but the Führer. Instead, he had become a citizen of the world. France had been good for Hermann.

‘Louis … Louis, there's beeswax in lard pails but half the shipment is missing.'

‘Half?'

‘The dust on the floor. I can count, can't I? The rings where the pails once sat. Taken two, maybe three days ago at most.'

Kohler crouched to indicate the lack of dust in circular patches. Prising off a lid revealed the contents and for a moment neither of them could say a thing. Frost caused their breath to billow. Louis was transfixed. The dark, golden honey had been squished out to fill the crevasses and grow stiff with the cold. The wax was of a paler, softer amber under the blue of the light. Hexagonal platelets – the cappings that had once covered the cells – were smeared over one another.

‘Squashed honeycomb that hasn't even been drained let alone spun, Louis. Smashed and mangled bees. Whoever did this didn't give a damn about keeping the colonies alive and robbed the hives blind.'

A big man with the broad shoulders, big hands, thick wrists, bulldog jowls and puffy eyelids of an ageing storm-trooper, which he'd never been, the Bavarian gazed up at him. They both knew exactly what the robbery meant: the hunt for
Banditen
, for bandits –
résistants
– in the hills and some poor farmer's hives that had just happened to be there.

‘A lot of them, so a lot of farmers, Hermann.'

‘I'm sorry. Do you want me to apologize for all the atrocities of this lousy war or only for being here at this moment?'

Hermann's tired and faded blue eyes were filled with remorse and worry. He hadn't liked what they'd found, but more than this, had sensed trouble in their now having to again work for two masters. Von Schaumburg
and
Gestapo Boemelburg!

‘Forgive me,' said St-Cyr. ‘It's just this … The restaurant,
mon vieux.
It meant so much to me as a boy. I'd never seen such things. Lace and plunging necklines, scented breasts and lovely soft earlobes with amethysts in silver dangling from them, diamonds too.'

‘I'll bet your grandmother slapped your ogle-eyed wrists!'

‘She said I needed to be educated and that if I would but do as she had wished for herself, I'd go far. That honey, by the way, is from lavender.'

‘
Merde
, did you think I needed to be told? The labels, such as they are, say the “wax” is from Peyrane in the Vaucluse, but we both know lard doesn't come from there in such quantity, so the pails were gathered elsewhere and whoever stole from the hives went in prepared.'

‘So, why would a Parisian beekeeper's death have anything to do with this?'

‘And why would von Schaumburg want us to have a look and not tell anyone? The gatherer of this little harvest, eh?' snorted Kohler. ‘Find the bastard's name and whisper it into the shell of Old Shatter Hand's ear, but
don't
let Boemelburg in on it. Christ!'

‘We shall have to see,' breathed St-Cyr. Always there were questions and always there were difficulties.

They tasted the honey whose accent was harsh and of the hills, and marvellous. ‘Long after it is swallowed, Hermann, the ambrosia remains.'

‘Ambrosia's beebread,
Dummkopf.
Pollen and nectar the worker bees store so that the nurse bees can feed it to the brood larvae. Hey, if you're still intent on buying that little retirement farm in Provence after what happened to us in Avignon, I'd suggest you damn well pay attention to your partner.'

Hermann had been raised on a farm near Wasserburg, whereas this Sûreté had but spent wondrous summer holidays at those of relatives. The great escape, now dragged into the dust of years by memory.

‘Come on, Louis. We're wasting time we haven't got. You take two and I'll take two as evidence. No one will miss another eighty kilos.'

‘What about our suitcases?'

‘We'll throw them in the
vélo-taxi
too.'

A bicycle taxi! ‘It's too icy. They'll have stopped running in any case.'

The curfew was upon them and, as von Schaumburg had ordered, they could tell no one of what they were up to.

‘We'll walk. You take the suitcases,' said Kohler. ‘I'll take the pails, then we'll switch halfway.'

‘To Charonne and Belleville?'

‘Relax, eh? I'll soon find us a lift.'

‘That is
exactly
what I'm afraid of, given the scarcity of traffic!'

The
gazogene
lorry that Hermann stopped perfumed the air with its burning wood-gas and was on its way to La Tour d'Argent, le Grand Véfour, Maxim's and other high-class restaurants, all of which were doing a roaring business. Half-loaded with ducks, geese, chickens, eggs, cheeses, milk and potatoes – items no longer seen by most since the autumn of 1940 – its driver was speechless.

Louis had simply shrilled, ‘No arguments, monsieur,' and had flattened the bastard.

‘That'll teach him to deal on the black market and to hand over half his load to some double-dealing son of a bitch of a Feldwebel at a control,' snorted Kohler.

Everyone knew that the charge was 50 per cent. Half for the boys in grey-green; half for the dealers, the big boys who organized things. There were never any complaints. Even then fortunes were being made and yet another class of
nouveaux riches
had been born.

‘We'll just drive by the flat and let Giselle and Oona look after these, Louis. Then we'll go and pick up the Citroën before we dump the lorry at one of those restaurants and pay our beekeeper a little visit.'

Never one to take things for himself and his little ‘family', had Hermann suddenly shifted gears?

‘It's the war, Louis, and what's been happening out there. Hey, don't let it worry you, eh? We're still friends.'

That, too, is what I'm afraid of, muttered St-Cyr to himself, for the
Résistance
didn't take such friendships kindly and this humble Sûreté was most certainly still on some of their hit lists. For working with a Nazi, with Hermann, who was not and could never have been one of those.

No lights showed in the flat that was above St-Cyr on the rue Suger. How could they, with the black-out regulations? Alone, freezing and tired –
mon Dieu
he was tired, for they'd been away for days without sleep – he sat in the lorry's cab and waited.

Sometimes waiting for Hermann could take hours. There were only two beds in the flat, one for Giselle, the other for Oona. Hermann would try not to awaken either of them. They'd both be bundled in several heavy sweaters, pyjamas, slacks and socks upon socks. Woollen hats, too, and scarves. Mittens probably, and all that under heaps of blankets, but their ears were ever keen, as were most these days. And he knew Oona would be certain to get out of bed to greet his partner silently.

She was forty years of age, all but twice that of his little Giselle. Was Dutch, an illegal alien from Rotterdam who had lost her two children to the Messerschmitts on the trek into France during the blitzkrieg, and had subsequently lost her husband to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. A Jew she had been hiding. Another case, a carousel murder.

Hermann and she got on well. She never complained and he knew Hermann depended on her to watch over Giselle. And, yes, the Bavarian was in love with both of them, and, yes, they were each, in their own ways, in love with Hermann. ‘War does things like that,' he muttered to himself. ‘It forms instant friendships only to plunder them as instantly.'

Giselle was half-Greek, half-Midi French and with straight jet-black hair, lovely violet eyes and a mind of her own. A former prostitute Hermann had ‘rescued' from the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton and just around the corner.

Oona's eyes were sky blue, her hair blonde. Tall and willowy, she had a quiet calm, a dignity that was best for Hermann. But like the war, such things would have to sort themselves out and who was this humble Sûreté to judge?

The lorry's gas-producer hissed as he got out of the cab to stoke its firebox. Firewood and charcoal briquets were being used – charcoal in a land where so few had any heat. Hermann's concierge was always bitching about their never having any when he could so easily, and rightly, she maintained, insist that coal and wood were well supplied.