Rivaille looked up at and beyond her to his God as she fired. ‘It was the only way, Kurt! The only way!’ she cried, and walking among the fallen, fired once more into each of them.
Leaderless, the Hooded Ones had vanished.
*
It was freezing in Orange, some twenty-five kilometres to the north, when they got to the station, the night so pitch black, the hour so small, it was uncomfortable. Von Mahler’s driver simply lifted their bags out of the boot and dropped them on the pavement.
Then he was gone and they were left alone. Hustled out of Avignon without a moment to lose, they stood listening to the tourer’s rapidly dwindling sound.
No one else was around. No one.
‘Verdammt, Louis. How the hell did you know that woman would do a thing like that?’ muttered Kohler, still shaking.
It was tempting to call up a further enseigne but Hermann was just not himself. ‘A pistol without a safety? And fully loaded? She had to have had some training to have known at least enough to leave the firing chamber empty until needed.’
Frau von Mahler had risked her life to save those of two police officers. It would be claimed not by them, but by her husband, that she had suffered from a severe psychotic trauma. The courts would be lenient – bien sûr – and she would probably be confined to a private clinic in Paris for a while to satisfy the Vichy authorities and the Occupier.
‘The singers will be sent into forced labour,’ said Kohler emptily, for always at the end of a case, especially a difficult one – and when were they never difficult? – there was this tremendous sense of loss.
‘Even so, Christiane and Genèvieve will be separated. Will they find each other, Hermann, after this war is over?’
Louis worried about such things and was of too forgiving a nature. He’d wanted stiff prison sentences but had had to defer to the Kommandant’s express wishes, seeing as cagoulards could well be skulking in the streets and magistrates, especially those in the provinces, were tardy at best. ‘Madame Simondi will find her way back to Paris, once she dries out. It would have been too hard to pin anything on her. Forget her, mon vieux. Remember that you can’t always win all battles.’
Hermann invariably said things like that, and one nearly always let him. ‘Marie-Madeleine will move into Mireille’s flat to take up where her friend left off.’
‘Yes … yes, she’ll do that, Louis. A nice kid. Thérèse and she’ll get along okay. They’ll pay Madame de Sinéty a little visit and break the news as gently as they can.’
‘And us?’ asked the Sûreté, still looking off into the cold black emptiness.
Kohler searched his pockets desperately for a forgotten cigarette to share. ‘We’ll just have to stay out of Provence. Mein Gott, it’ll be a relief! No more talk of your finding a little farm down here and retiring to raise melons and strawberries without me around to tell you how to do it!’
They were still arguing when the sous-chef de gare found them and, passing her blinkered torchlight over them, said haltingly, ‘Messieurs, there is a telegram for whichever of you will agree to pay the fifty-seven francs that are due.’
Louis snatched the flimsy tissue from her, Kohler the light.
‘“Beekeeper”, Louis.’
‘Merde alors, let me read it will you? “Body of Beekeeper found in apiary near Père Lachaise Cemetery requires your immediate and urgent attention. Heil Hitler.”’
‘Boemelburg’s still mad at us for not letting the Cagoule put us down, but is willing to momentarily kiss and make up. But isn’t it a little cold to be worrying about bees?’
‘Perhaps, but then … ah mats alors, alors, Hermann, in Paris anything is possible, especially when under the Occupier.’
As if he didn’t already know it!
Kohler thought to add a word but was too tired. And anyway, Louis deserved to have the last one. ‘Come on, mon vieux. Hey, I’ll even let you ride second-class if you want.’
‘Merci. And while you’re up there in front with others of the Occupier, please think about his use of “urgent”, Hermann. That suggests trouble.’
Turn the page to continue reading from the St-Cyr and Kohler Series
1
The Restaurant of the Gare de Lyon was huge, a prince, a god among all others. But now under the blackout’s hauntingly blue and ethereal light from Paris’s infrequent lamps, its gilded cherubs and buxom nymphs were cloaked in grime. They shed their gilding, clutched their bouquets of daisies and looked offended as if wanting to cry out, Monsieur the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté Nationale, how could you – yes, you! – of all people have let this happen to us?
Gone were the diners in their splendid dinner jackets and tails, the beautiful girls in their magically tantalizing gowns, the femmes du monde, the society women, too, and those of little virtue. The gaiety … the laughter … the sounds of silver cutlery and crystal, the pewter plates upon which the porcelains had been set.
Gone, too, were the bankers, politicians, industrialists, the men of solid cash and much power. These days most of them had found other pastures upon which to graze.
But now … now after more than two and a half years of the Occupation, the restaurant’s crumbling horns of plenty let fall a constant rain of golden fragments and plaster dust which littered the mountains of crates, barrels, sacks and steamer trunks – suitcases, too, of all sizes – that climbed high into the vault of the ceiling to where once Gervex’s magnificent painting, the Battle of the Flowers, had portrayed the city of Nice.
‘It’s like an Aladdin’s Cave that’s all but been forgotten,’ breathed Kohler, aghast at what lay before them.
Distracted, St-Cyr ignored his partner. The restaurant, that triumph of the Mauve Decade and the Belle Époque – le Train Bleu, some had begun to call it – stank of sweat, mould, sour produce and rotten meat that the inevitable delays in transit had left to languish. Soot, too, of course, and urine, for what better ‘terrorist’ action when forced to store things destined for the Reich, than to piss on them in secret – or do worse – in the name of freedom and of Résistance?
‘“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 wh
ose 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 B
elleville?’
‘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.
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