Again she paused to find the words. ‘In one of the mirrors,’ she managed. ‘The … The diamond solitaire César …’
Had just given me, said Kohler to himself.
‘Silly girl … Silly not to have kept my clothes on. I was a fool!’ she shrieked and quivered with indignation until the thought left her and she had to hunt for it. ‘Now I’m a martyr to this mausoleum of his and he wants to fuck Mireille. Mireille! Just as the cardinal wanted her ancestor. Her ancestor.’
Her voice fell back. ‘Laperouse … Is it still on the quai des Grands-Augustins? On the …’
Corner.
‘Numéro cinquante et un?’ she asked coyly. ‘The canard natais was …’
Pure magic.
‘The mousse au chocolat amer was webbed among the hairs of my little forest. César …’
‘We get the picture,’ said Kohler tartly.
‘Mon cul … I was his petite nymphe en rhapsodie, Inspec … tor.’
Entreatingly she extended a hand, beckoning him to join her. ‘The Galeries Lafayette … Do you …’
Know it? Tears were now smearing the mascara and eye shadow. One of Paris’s giant department stores, the Galeries was a ready-to-wear emporium for shopgirls, housewives, chorus girls and maids of all work. Shoddy goods and bare shelves these days, but he hated to tell her.
Hands shaking, she took a deep pull at her glass, then let her tongue linger lovingly on its rim.
A whining tone crept into her voice. ‘Can you still buy the cherries that are dipped in dark chocolate?’ And moments later, ‘The candied ginger aussi?’
Unheard of now, except in certain places.
‘Ragueneau’s … Is it still on the rue Saint-Honoré at numéro 202? The tearoom …’
When he didn’t answer and didn’t come to sit beside her, she grated, ‘I had my own little place on the ave’ Frochot, damn you! Fuck whom I want. Come and go as I please.’
It was just off place Pigalle.
‘The Cabaret Pigalle, the Narcisse and then the Alhambra. Les nus les plus oses du monde, n’est-ce pas? she rasped. ‘And thousands of men – yes, thousands – wanted me.’
The most daring, most risque nudes in the world, and oh for sure that was still true, thought Kohler wryly, what with the boys in grey-green lining up night after night! But they were getting nowhere.
‘Madame …’ he began, only to hear her slackly say, ‘Les Halles,’ while lewdly spreading her legs in an attempt to embarrass him.
Paris’s central market was a cavernous shadow of its former self due mainly to the curfew which allowed no one, including the farmers, into the city after 11 p.m., and refused to let anyone leave before 5 a.m. Requisitioning most of the horses and lorries hadn’t helped, and neither had the drastic reduction in the availability of gasoline.
‘Adrienne de Langlade, madame …’
‘That whore? César … To think that I actually wanted his … child! Me? Who had never had any brats before but …’
She struggled for words, muttered things about Simondi’s not wearing riding coats and leaping from the train while the locomotive was still in full power, then said acidly, ‘He didn’t want to have one with me. He wanted her to have it!’
‘Madame, are you saying your husband was the father of that girl’s unborn child?’
‘Say what you think. Leave me to know the truth.’
Simondi was pounding on the door and crying out her name, but she didn’t even realize this.
‘Which one do you like?’ she asked of the eight or so wrist-watches that were wrapped around her left wrist under the sleeve she had pulled up. ‘I can never decide. Each morning I put them on. Xavier …’
The shouting continued from the corridor. ‘Xavier?’ prompted Kohler and saw her smile lewdly and then softly. ‘Xavier,’ she sighed. ‘He brings me little presents. He’s always very sweet to me.’
‘Madame, we have to talk,’ he said and took the glass from her, took away the bottle … the bottle … ‘Those are mine!’ she shrieked and lunged for them. ‘You can’t take them away. You can’t!’
Blows rained on the door. ‘Marceline!’ cried Simondi.
With bated breath she waited for Kohler to hand her the glass and when he didn’t, tried again to snatch it from him. ‘Please!’ she begged. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like for me without it. Christiane, tell him!’
‘The Palais,’ he said, ignoring the shouting.
‘An audition … Xavier, he … Please!’ she shrieked, and when refused, wept and tore her dress open. ‘You want me, don’t you?’ she wheedled, begging him to have sex with her. ‘Xavier, he … he said he would help me. He always does.’
When allowed to drink, she drained the glass and for a moment her dark eyes misted. Lost, she looked down at her withered breasts and slowly, deliberately, brushed droplets from them and wondered what was happening to her. ‘I tried …’
He waited. Simondi cried out her name. ‘I tried to be nice to Mireille. I really did,’ she wept, ‘but César, he was determined to have her and to … to get rid of me.’
‘You killed her, didn’t you?’ he sadly breathed and his voice, his words echoed in her head and the pain of them was excruciating.
The pounding had stopped. Her eyes were still open.
‘Inspector, she’s right out of it now,’ said Christiane, buttoning the woman’s dress. ‘She’ll sit like this for hours, sipping a little from time to time, but you’ll get nothing further from her today.’
‘And you?’ asked Kohler. ‘What about you?’ The girl had sounded relieved.
‘I wasn’t there. I was at the Villa Marenzio with the others as we all have told you and your partner.’
‘Tesoro, da quando sei qui?’ asked Simondi earnestly. Sweetie, how long have you been here?
‘Since early last night, César. You …’ hazarded Christiane.
He touched her arm in comfort. ‘Sì, sì, I remember now. I asked you and Genèvieve and Marius to spend a little time with Marceline. She’s all right, isn’t she?’
They were gathered in the corridor outside the bedroom.
‘She’s fine, César. Fine,’ said the Alto, her dark eyes full of concern for her singing master.
Lightly he kissed her on the cheek and held her a moment. ‘Bene. Try not to dwell on things. Keep the mind and voice clear, eh? We’ve the concert on the thirtieth and then the tour. Genèvieve and you had best spend an hour or two in practice. Verdolet, I think, and Constanzo Festa. Ispettores, this is terrible. Ah Dio mio, to think that you, Herr Kohler, thought my gardener and others were to assassinate you. Merda! How could such a thing have been possible?’
‘Maître, my partner and I will find our own way out through your Grand Tinel,’ said St-Cyr, ignoring the question. ‘There’s a portrait of the first Mireille I would very much like to examine more closely.’
‘That painting can tell you nothing, Inspector. Nothing!’
‘Perhaps, but then … ah mais alors, perhaps not.’
‘Bastardi, I’m warning you. Get out of my house this instant!’
‘Warn if you like, but unless you wish to prove your innocence after a lengthy incarceration while awaiting trial, I suggest you leave us to do as I wish.’
‘I won’t forget this.’
‘That is of no concern.’
They were in the car now and Hermann was rapidly thumbing cartridges into a spare clip for his Walther P38 while attempting to break open a packet for the old Lebel six shooter this Sûreté would be allowed and nothing else.
‘Verdammt, Louis, did you have to set Simondi off like that and then hang around like an art student in the Louvre? That girl was totally convinced cagoulards would knife me. De Passe must have threatened her with them if she didn’t cooperate and distract me.’
‘The bishop shows every indication of belonging to the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire.’
‘De Passe is head of the Cagoule, mon enfant. That’s why h
e came running so hard to the villa to call out his boys, but … ah Gott im Himtnel, Boemelburg, Louis. The Chief must have sent us to Avignon hoping those bastards would take care of us once and for all!’
‘Calm down. You’ve been popping too much Benzedrine.’
‘I haven’t had the time, damn it! Nom de Jésus-Christ! Idiot, will you listen to me.’
Kohler told him of the partouse on the Îie de la Barthelasse last October. Louis found a cigarette and, breaking it in half, lit up and passed him his half. As was their custom at such moments, they began to go quickly through things.
‘Our singing master first tries to implicate his wife in the de Sinéty murder, Hermann, as does Albert Renaud – oh bien sûr, there’s plenty of reason. But when there might be doubt in our believing this, Simondi then confides that Genèvieve Ravier was to have been dismissed.’
‘Desperate, was he?’
‘The implication being that Christiane Bissert and Genèvieve would have lost everything had Adrienne de Langlade and Mireille replaced the Primo Soprano and Xavier.’
‘And there’s the bishop planting photos of Adrienne for me to find, so as to throw suspicion on to the boy and his mentor, Brother Matthieu.’
‘The fétichiste de cheveux our shepherd boy felt he might well need to blackmail.’
‘Xaviers swift like a fox, Louis. That little confident of Madame Simondi’s realized he’d be among the fingered and didn’t tell the others he had the reward money for turning Dédou in.’
‘Ah yes, but a murder, Hermann, that is linked to another which, in turn, is linked to a death six hundred years ago. The brocade, it keeps haunting me.’
‘What brocade?’
‘The painting Simondi didn’t want us to look at.’
‘The Papal Court and a bunch of randy old cardinals who had already stripped a girl naked and nearly drowned her!’
‘The front of our Mireille de Sinéty’s cote-hardie, Hermann, and that of the first Mireille. Did those two look-alikes who were so good with the needle hide something there as well as on their belts? Another rebus?’
A last drag was taken and the butt carelessly extinguished underfoot. ‘You tell me. You’re the one who had to stall when we should have got the hell out of there and fast!’
Kohler thrust the Lebel at him. ‘Use it. Don’t hesitate. That’s an order.’
Hermann always said such things. ‘If one looks closely at that painting, a pattern begins to emerge in slight relief among the gold brocade, but looking closely isn’t enough. One really has to think as they did in the Renaissance. They loved the play of light and shadows. Such things had tremendous meaning for them. Stand to the side of that painting as I did, and as light from the end of Simondi’s Grand Tinel passes obliquely across the tightly laced bosom, it reinforces that which the artist depicted and one sees that shadows make daggers across her heart. The broad ribbing of the bars of an accabussade becomes clearer, Hermann, though still in soft relief and incomplete of form.’
‘And?’ asked Kohler quietly. Louis sometimes got like this.
‘From across the centuries she cries out to us to see that her heart was broken, that the one who loved her had failed to come to her rescue.’
‘I thought the husband, the de Sinéty family and her own had been forced into ruin?’
‘But would she have been aware of this? A prisoner in the Palais? She hoped and prayed her husband would come, but secretly dreaded he wouldn’t and wove that premonition into the brocade.’
‘Only to then find herself before the court.’
‘Just as our Mireille was before her judges, and in the same Palais, Hermann, the same Grand Tinel.’
‘Dédou hadn’t shown up but she couldn’t have known he’d been arrested. Instead, she must have felt he would weaken and stay away.’
‘And having copied exactly the clothing of this earlier Mireille, had woven that premonition into the brocade she herself would wear.’
‘An accabussade,’ breathed Kohler sadly as he slid the gear lever into first. ‘Hey, mon vieux, I think I can find us one, or at least take us to where it was used and not so long ago.’
They stood alone, the two of them, on either side of the little car, near the flood-damaged northern end of the Îie de la Barthelasse. Hermann had pulled up his coat collar and yanked down the brim of his fedora. His breath billowed in the frozen air through which, and all around them it seemed, came the sound of the river.
‘A gristmill, Louis. Built to receive grain that had been brought downriver by barge during the height of the Babylonian Captivity.’
He sounded sickened by thoughts of what they might find. The mill was, of course, not nearly so old.
There were boulders of several sizes, uprooted trees, pavements of pebbles, washouts, heaps of sand. But among all this debris, the building stood serenely, its two storeys of soft grey-buff stone and steeply pitched, four-cornered roof with attic dormers catching the winter’s light. At the innermost, eastern corner there was a round tower whose spiral staircase would access all floors. Well behind them was the farm, with peach, pear and apricot orchards and fields for artichokes, garlic and melons. There had been severe flood damage there as well, but still …‘Our singing master and his associates have an eye for value, Hermann. A real money-earner and a perfect hunting and fishing lodge.’
‘Don’t get sentimental. I’ve heard it all before from you.’ Louis was always going on about his retirement. Merde! What retirement?
Three rooks took flight and for a moment they watched them. ‘Is it a sign, I wonder?’ mused St-Cyr. ‘Are their shadows passing over the mill to give warning to us?’
‘Verdammt, idiot, things are too quiet and you know it! Christ, we could be right back in the fourteenth century.’
The weathered shutters were all closed. There’d been no answer at the mas, no tenant farmer-cum-custodian in residence; a worry, to be sure.
‘Did they get here before us, Louis? Are they waiting?’
The Hooded Ones.
Beyond the broken forest of poplar, linden and willow, Simondi had laid out a spacious garden through whose grey and vine-tangled broken arbours they had to make their way.
‘A regular trysting place, if ever there was one,’ snorted Hermann, having read and seen right through his partner’s thoughts.
The tower rose straight up beside him from stone steps that led to the door.
‘It won’t be locked, dummkopf.’
‘Then let the Sûreté go first, eh? Stay out here and have another cigarette. You still have one, don’t you?’
‘You took the last of them. Hey, I’d better come with you, just in case.’
Dished and worn, the stone stairs went up and around to small square windows below the heavily timbered roof, but now there was no longer the sound of the river, now, deep from below them, came a constant sucking noise.
‘The sluicegates withstood the flood and were fortunately closed before it,’ offered the Sûreté.
‘End of travelogue, eh?’ Hermann had his pistol in hand.
‘I’m only trying to ease your mind.’
‘Then tell me what that other noise is, mein brillanter französischer Oberdetektiv.’
They hesitated. They listened hard. Against the sucking noise something was seesawing gently back and forth. A door, a shutter …‘Ah, merde alors, Louis!’
‘Don’t throw up! Tell yourself you’re not going to. Not this time.’
‘I’m going to. Sorry.’
‘Go outside! See what you can find but leave this to me!’
Louis was moving now. He wasn’t hesitating. At the top of the stairs a door gave into the attic, and all too soon he had disappeared from view.
Kohler could hear him muttering, ‘Aïoli, the sauce, the mayonnaise of Provence. Marinated green beans with sliced sweet red peppers, pickled artichoke hearts à la grecque, a chèvre de crottin the mice have all but devoured, some black olives, a handful of truffles, good ones, t
oo, and a bottle of grappa … The postcards.’
He became very quiet, and Kohler knew his partner must be looking out over the water through the attic portal and down past the hoist beam to where the grain sacks had once been lifted into the loft.
Busying himself, he went below, and when he found the millrace, he found the accabussade.
9
The doorway at the base of the mill had all but been choked by cobbles and sand. Beneath its stone arch someone before Hermann had crawled in and had broken through the flood-splintered door but had then carefully replaced the boards.
Immediately inside the cellar there was a drop of about a metre, a crawl space since the flood. Blackened tin lanterns hung from hooks in the worm-eaten timbers. Some of these lanterns were so perforated, they reminded one of vegetable graters, thought St-Cyr. Others were more baroque with many fleurs-de-lis openings.
Gutted of its water wheel years ago, the stone sluice had all but been silted up by the flood. There was barely room to manoeuvre, Hermann’s terse, ‘It’s over there,’ revealing he was imagining the screams Adrienne de Langlade must have given, her cries for mercy and gasps for air. An accident … would Simondi and the others now try to claim this?
Jammed into the corner and all but buried by sand and silt, the rusty flat iron bars and rectangular, open weave of a man-sized oval cage barely protruded. Dried reeds, moss, algae, bits of twigs and leaves were everywhere, as was the stench of rotting fish.
Kohler took down one of the lanterns and, cleaning it of silt, lit the candle. Immediately a much-dappled light fell over the cage to join shafts of daylight that leaked in from around the foundation. Louis crawled into the corner and, after deliberately fingering the bars, quickly thrust an arm in through the weave to recover something.
‘Dried lavender,’ he said. ‘A small bouquet left as a memorial to what our Mireille had discovered.’
‘She took one hell of a chance coming out here!’
‘Technically this is not an accabussade, Hermann. Those were made of wood.’
Verdammt! Another lecture. ‘Then what the hell is it, Hen Professor?’
‘The cage in which those who had offended the Papal Court and had remained unrepentant were left until the sun, the wind, the rooks and starvation or thirst had finally finished them. During the Babylonian Captivity this cage would have been suspended from the end of a long pole or tripod that had been mounted atop the Bell Tower of the Palais.’
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