They went to look at it and all the grand mutilé could find to say was, ‘So it is.’
‘Then if the mistral didn’t carry it in here through closed windows, what did?’
A bird’s nest … who would have thought of such a thing happening? ‘I can’t possibly say, Inspector. One of your soldiers perhaps. They often go for walks along the river. They are always exploring the countryside and picking things up they then tire of.’
‘But you just said you couldn’t possibly say?’
Sainte Mère, what have I done but make matters worse, thought Biron ruefully. ‘You must ask Xavier or Brother Matthieu. Reed warblers … pigeons … I have nothing to do with the dogs. Nothing, do you understand?’
Piece by piece, garment by garment, the body of Mireille de Sinéty had been stripped of its finery in the morgue and each item noted, tagged and described as to its nature and position, once by Jean-Louis and once by himself, thought Ovid Peretti. He let his sad grey eyes pass down over her. The breasts sagged sideways, the skin had begun to blotch and discolour. She’d soon begin to stink. A waste, a tragedy – a danger. Why had he been so stupid as to have agreed to take on this task? Was he bent on self-destruction? he asked himself.
The elder of the two nuns stood grimly on guard at the head of the corpse, refusing to budge.
‘Sister,’ he said, ‘I won’t molest her. I’ll be as kind and gentle as possible.’
‘With forceps?’ shrilled the younger nun. ‘With bone-cutters?’
‘Jean-Louis, get those two out of here at once!’
‘Sister Agnès, it’s illegal for you and Sister Marie-Madeleine to be here,’ said St-Cyr. ‘With the clothing, the jewellery and other things we could make allowances, but with what’s about to happen you will understand Coroner Peretti can’t possibly continue in your presence. Now come away.’
‘The clothes … We must dress her in them after it’s done.’
‘For burial?’
‘Yes! The casket is to be open.’
‘With a neck wound like that?’ stormed Peretti, towering over the corpse.
She gave him a cold look. ‘Such things can be hidden. There are ways and we will use them.’
‘Then leave us, Sister,’ said St-Cyr gently. ‘I’ll join you shortly for a quiet word. A few small questions, nothing difficult, I assure you. The preliminary autopsy will take several hours and I can’t remain here either as I’ve other things I must do. You can come back after the midday meal.’
‘We don’t eat lunch. Not in these troubled times.’
‘Merde alors, foutez-moi la paix!’ shouted Peretti. Bugger off.
He turned the body over and, shaking a thermometer to get its mercury down, eased it into the girl’s rectum. ‘Sister, I told you to leave. I might break the glass.’
The nuns fled, with the Sûreré driving them, and when Jean-Louis returned, his cheeks blown out in exasperation, he, too, swore, then said, ‘The bishop …’
Peretti recorded the body’s temperature. ‘You want to watch your back with him, Jean-Louis. There are whispers.’
‘Whispers?’
Bon, the point had been taken. ‘Power. The bishop yearns for the old days, covets the Palais and thinks our friends from beyond the Rhine can be convinced to give it to him if Il Duce fails and Italy falls to the invader when that one makes up his mind to invade.’
Ah nom de Dieu …‘The Papacy?’
‘He dreams of its return to Avignon and is convinced of the possibility. The Kommandant lets him since it costs nothing, except, perhaps, the life of this one.’
They were alone, thank God. ‘How sure are you of this? The Papacy …?’
There was a shrug. The thermometer was cleaned off and sterilized. ‘There are always whispers, some more prevalent than others. Here in Avignon is God not held in contempt while everything breathes a lie?’
Petrarch had said as much. ‘But the Vatican …? Surely they must have something to say in the matter?’
‘Rivaille keeps up a continuous correspondence which His Holiness answers, of course, for, like the Kommandant, what is there to lose? The Church always dabbles and hedges its bets, so why not with this?’
‘But …’
‘Look, all I’m saying is let’s not fool ourselves. Let’s find out the truth but keep as much of it as we can to ourselves. Oh by the way, she was still a virgin.’
‘A virgin … The Papacy? Does he want to become the Pope?’
‘A cardinal perhaps. I really don’t know, but you’re in Avignon, remember? Six hundred years ago or today, it’s exactly the same. Whereas the Occupier uses guns, the citizens still prefer poison, the garrotting wire or the knife.’
‘It was a sickle. I’m all but certain of it.’
‘Bend, gather, pull and then reap, eh? We shall see.’
Still upstairs in the Palais, Kohler was lost in thought. A chamber separated the Grand Tinel from the Kitchens Tower and in it the girl could have waited out of sight until the judges had been seated. But had she taken off her overcoat, her winter boots, hat and mittens? ‘She couldn’t have walked through the streets dressed in costume, not even after dark,’ he said to the concierge. There’d have been the chance of a spot check or control – a rafle, maybe.’ A raid, a house-to-house search or roundup. ‘She’d have had a handbag.’
Her identity papers …‘There was nothing here, Inspector. Nothing in the Palais to suggest …’
‘Nothing but a bird’s nest.’
Kohler shone his torch around the barren floor and up over walls that had once held frescoes whose patchy remains revealed the faint grid lines in reddish ochre that had allowed the artist to easily transfer his drawings. Together, he and Biron went into the Kitchens Tower. It, too, was barren.
‘The chimney is huge, Inspector. A pyramid in the octagonal shape.’
Nothing remained of the bake ovens and yet one could sense the constant comings and goings. Well over four hundred retainers, cooks, scullions, guards and porters – thirty chaplains alone and all of their servants – would have occupied the Palais, in addition to the guests and the family of the pontiff. The spongers.
‘There are pantries and storerooms in this tower,’ said Biron. ‘Other kitchens below us, all of whose flues go up and into the central chimney, which is unique for these parts and for such times.’
Again Kohler used his torch. The mistral played fitfully with the flame of the lantern. The downdraught carried a trail of smoke towards the open entrance where tall wooden doors would once have stood.
‘The Revolution destroyed them,’ said Biron of the doors. ‘The pots, pans and stone or clay crocks – everything was smashed, burned or stolen. One can but regret the loss, the pages of history which are gone from us for ever, the …’
‘Just cut the travelogue, eh?, and show me where they dumped the bodies of the Royalists that were imprisoned and then murdered in 1791.’
The Glacière Massacre of that October. ‘The Latrines Tower is just through here. On each floor of the Palais, latrines gave relief and refuge to servant, dignitary, guard and pontiff alike. Rainwater and kitchen slops joined the waste, and the refuse fell to a large pit that had been sunk into the rocks far below. A drain then carried this waste to the Sorgue which soon joined the Rhône.’
The torchlight didn’t shine down the shaft nearly far enough. Biron went on about how, during a siege, invaders had entered the drain, waded across the cesspool and then had climbed into the Palais to surprise the guards.
‘What happened to the bodies of the Royalists?’
‘Quicklime was dumped on top of them. When the stench became too great, they were removed through an opening.’
‘Is that opening still there?’
‘An iron grille keeps all but the smallest of animals from entering.’
‘Then you’d better show it to me, hadn’t you, especially as some son of a bitch must have tidied up and dumped her things down there.’
Ah merde
, did this one miss nothing? ‘We will need a hammer and cold chisel.’
‘Then get them. Bring help if necessary.’
Though an hour had passed, the body of Mireille de Sinéty had still not been cut into. ‘I thought you were going to question the sisters?’ asked Peretti, not looking up from her hair.
‘I lied,’ murmured St-Cyr. ‘Avignon has already tainted me.’
Nothing more was said. Peretti was in his late fifties. The face was angular and often sad, for he’d seen death many times, both in such places and on the field of battle. But the hands that could break bones if necessary could also be gentle. Something was teased from her hair and carefully mounted on to a microscope slide. Without pausing, he pulled the instrument from its case and set to work.
St-Cyr turned back to the trinkets which had been carefully arranged on a nearby pallet. The girl had carried no papers, but to walk the streets without them was to invite arrest, interrogation and possible deportation to one of the camps. Had her killer relieved her of them? he wondered, cursing the Renaissance’s lack of pockets. Had she parked them on a ledge or tucked them into a crack?
You were a Libra and of the House of Balance, he said silently. Among the zodiacal signs is the oft-repeated hand-held weighing scale, but did you then seek rooms in the Balance Quartier for good luck perhaps, or for some deeper reason?
Superstition had played such a part in the daily life of the Renaissance. Her gimmel ring set lapis lazuli side by side with a saffron-yellow topaz which matched exactly the colour of her gown. Yet the pattern on the gown, in a faint and delicate shade of brown, was of oak leaves and branches that were entwined with grapevines. Had this, too, had meaning for her and for others to puzzle over? And wasn’t the background pattern in the frescoes of Clement VI’s bedchamber of spiralling vines and oak branches and the deeper blue of lapis lazuli?
On the soft leather of her girdle he found, among so many other things, the sign of the Archer in gold. A tiny medallion. The Centaur’s arrow was pointed away from a silver House of Balance and towards a Goat that had been cast in lead.
The House of Balance weighed a tiny lapis lazuli cabochon against that of a saffron-yellow topaz, the two stones of equal weight.
She would tease and she would dare but had such things led to her death?
The little silver bells were very old, and he wondered how she had come by them, by all of this, for the trinkets and jewels dated from the Renaissance, whereas the clothing had been cut and sewn by herself.
‘Lapis is the stone of fertility,’ grunted Peretti impatiently. ‘What I’ve found in her hair isn’t much, I admit, but perhaps it’ll be enough.’
Down through the ocular of the microscope, and at thirty times magnification, the image of a tiny clot of coarse black wool rushed at the eye. ‘A cassock …’ breathed St-Cyr.
‘Or cloak, overcoat or sweater.’
‘The bishop …’
Back came the Commissaire de Police’s warning. Break glass and you’ll be cut. Tamper with the Host and the Blood of Christ and watch out.
‘Be careful,’ sighed Peretti. ‘I meant what I said.’
‘We will.’
‘How sure are you of that partner of yours?’
‘Hermann? We are like two perpetually crossed fingers. God’s honest cops trying to stop themselves from drowning in a torrent of officially sanctioned crime.’
Everyone was only too aware of what the Bodies, the Germans, and those who would collaborate with them were stealing. ‘Then leave me with her, Jean-Louis. Go and warn him to be very careful. I’ll lock everything up. No one will touch a thing.’
‘Just let me go over it once more. I must see if something, other than her papers, is missing. I must find what the bishop was looking for when he gave her Extreme Unction.’
And sent two of his nuns to police the corpse and have a look themselves or to thieve an item or two! thought Peretti. ‘He’s one of the Black Penitents, as is de Passe.’
‘Hence his wearing a simple black cassock when giving her the last rites?’
Peretti indicated the microscope slide. ‘Unless he was trying to tell you any one of them could have killed her, including himself.’
Several brotherhoods, including les Pénitents Noirs, dated back to the Baylonian Captivity when there were no fewer than sixty churches and thirty-five monasteries and Rabelais had described Avignon as the bell-ringing city, while Petrarch had called the Palais ‘the habitation of demons’.
‘Some of them practise flagellation,’ snorted Peretti. ‘Our bishop happens to be one of them and regularly scourges himself, or so it is rumoured.’
‘With a martinet?’
A small but many-thonged whip that some parents used to discipline delinquent children …‘Two of his fellow “brothers” hold him while he thrashes himself, Jean-Louis, but to purge himself of what sins, I know not.’
‘The Black Penitents also were and are men dedicated to good works,’ countered St-Cyr.
‘But for whom, Jean-Louis. For whom?’
The bishop, the préfet and others of the establishment were implied. ‘There’s a tiny silver martinet among her jewels.’
‘Then perhaps you have your answer.’
Dawn broke, and from the battlements of the Trouillas Tower some fifty-two metres above ground and next to the Latrines Tower, the view was of those ancient times. Eerie, steeped in mystery and deceit, damned cold and utterly heartless.
Kohler tugged the collar of his greatcoat up and crammed bare hands into its pockets. He was dying for a fag but the wind put paid to any such notion.
‘Inspector …’
The word, though shouted, was ripped away and pelted southward.
‘In a moment, Préfet. I have to get the lie of the land.’
Bâtard! cursed de Passe silently. ‘You find things at the base of the Latrines Tower. You do not immediately inform me in the proper manner. Instead, you demand my presence here in this wind? What is it you want? I haven’t all day.’
‘Nor have I.’
The gun-metal grey of a thickly layered ice-fog was being swept down the Rhone Valley and from distant hollows among the hills. Faint touches of pastel pink were beginning to intrude but offered no promise. The bitterly hard air took the breath away.
Would it have been like this in Russia? wondered Kohler. Would the boys have watched the fog lift or hug the ground to remain as they waited for the battle to begin again?
Everyone said the mistral had its origins in Russia. ‘My sons were within a year of her in age,’ he shouted.
‘Could we not go inside?’
Ah damn you, eh? ‘This wind makes people edgy, doesn’t it?’
‘What is it you want of me?’
‘A word, that’s all.’
The coal-black eyebrows arched under the grey snap-brim fedora. The cleanly shaven chin and wind-burned cheeks stiffened as the grey eyes swiftly narrowed. ‘Get to it, Inspector.’
‘Answers. That kid lived right down there in a slum next to the ramparts and by that four-legged bridge that looks as if it still might like to cross the river but can’t quite make up its mind.’
‘You’ve found her papers.’
De Passe was of medium height and build and immaculately dressed in a grey overcoat whose thin and perfect collar wasn’t turned up to ward off the wind. The blue silk of a Royalist’s tie showed from between the arms of a grey cashmere scarf. Arrogant and of the bourgeoisie, he was not quite of the bourgeoisie aisée, the really well off, but would have aspirations, especially these days when anything was possible for the chosen few.
A civil servant, an administrator, he would consider himself far above such a lowly station as a cop.
‘Start by telling me why that girl was here and then, Préfet, what the hell she might have known that someone didn’t want her saying.’
This was Kohler of the Kripo, a conscientious doubter of Germanic invincibility who was disloyal to his peers, reviled and of
ten hated by many at Gestapo Paris-Central, yet kept on by Sturmbannführer Boemelburg because he and that infernal partner of his gave some semblance of law and order to the ordinary citizen. They were Boemelburg’s flying squad, dealing with the difficult, thus opiating public outcry. They still couldn’t seem to learn that policemen were never dismissed for doing too little.
‘She had a lover. A boy who fled to the hills to join the Banditen.’ The ‘terrorists’, the Résistance, the maquis. ‘This matter was known to the bishop who, Herr Kohler, prevailed upon me to let him try to convince the girl to give up such a foolishness and agree to help us take the boy into custody before he did anything untoward.’
Anything that might damage the status quo, namely that of those in power. But good of him to have agreed to let the bishop have a try, though there must have been a little something offered in exchange for such a consideration.
‘And you think she was here to meet that boy?’
‘It’s possible. She would dress as if to cover herself for the lie of an audition, should the authorities stop her in the streets.’
‘But she wore her overcoat and beret, Préfet, a scarf and boots, too, and carried a handbag?’
Further discoveries had been made in the Latrines Pit, thought de Passe, and Kohler had seen fit to tease his ears with the information so that he would now fret over what else had been found. ‘I’m only suggesting a possibility. You and Jean-Louis are in charge of the investigation.’
‘Why’d they choose to meet here?’
‘Her place of residence was being watched. Quite obviously she must have realized this and found a way to arrange a meeting no one would suspect or question.’
But someone had. ‘Patriotic, was she?’
‘Misguided, Inspector, as so many of our young seem to be.’
‘Then there was some urgency to what she had to impart?’
‘Inspector, could we not go inside? There’s a window in this tower from which the view is almost as good.’
‘But then I couldn’t see the hills behind us. Those ones. That big one to the northeast. Right out there, Préfet. Yes, there.’
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