Madrigal

by J. Robert Janes

  Cigarettes were passed to both of the boys for later. ‘Danke,’ said the other one softly. ‘He’s in there frying our balls, I guess.’

  It was very quiet in the spacious foyer where tapestries hung and gilded Louis XIV armchairs offered respite. But the doors to the salons were all closed, the adjutant not at his desk, the secretary …

  Ilse Gross came through to take one look at him and shake her head. ‘Von Paulus,’ she mouthed the name. ‘Der Führer …’

  Prising off his shoes and dumping coat, fedora and gloves on top of them, Kohler headed for the grand salon. Clearly the rolling drumbeat and trumpet call of Die Wache am Rhein came to him and then words over a wireless that crackled.

  Radio-Berlin were broadcasting von Paulus’s faint-voiced gratitude to the Führer who had just made him a Field Marshal and expected him to carry on to the death.

  Looking ill, a grey, bristle-headed giant struck down, von Schaumburg was huddled under blankets before a roaring fire. Field-grey, regulation-issue woollen long johns were pulled up to the knees; the big bare feet plunked into a tin basin of steaming water that smelled strongly of Friar’s balsam. Both his adjutant, Rittmeister Graf Waldersee, and his aides, Major Prince Ratibor and Oberleutnant von Dühring, were with him.

  But only von Schaumburg had the flu. And why must that God of Louis’s do this to them?

  The radio message came to an end as the Führer’s Headquarters signed off.

  ‘Kohler, ach du lieber Gott, Dummkopf, what has happened? Why aren’t you working?’ Phlegm was hawked up, choked on, and spat into a handkerchief.

  ‘Nothing’s happened, General. It’s just a small delivery my partner and I thought you would …’

  ‘Das Bienen …’ he coughed. ‘Have you brought them. Idiot?’

  The bees … ah shit!

  Startled, Kohler threw the others a puzzled glance only to see the three of them quickly retreat and softly close the doors.

  ‘Well?’ demanded von Schaumburg. ‘My knuckles, they’re swollen. Swollen, Kohler.’

  Arthritis, and Louis hadn’t told him everything that had been in that little book of de Bonnevies’. ‘The bees were all dead, General. As soon as we can find replacements, we’ll send their owner to you.’

  ‘Ten stings a week, one on each knuckle. He was to have come to me yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, General, we know that.’

  ‘Verfluchte Franzosen.’

  Damned French …

  ‘Banditen, Kohler. Terroristen. Did you see what you and that … that partner of yours let those people do?’

  Gott im Himmel, were they now to be blamed for everything? ‘General, I’ve brought your honey and pollen, the royal …’

  ‘ANSWERS. I WANT ANSWERS, DAMN YOU!’

  A coughing fit intruded, the nose erupted. Mulled wine was taken deeply. The Nordic eyes, with their sagging pouches, were filled with rheum.

  The throat was cleared. ‘You see what the filthy French have done to me, Kohler? Now tell me how he died.’

  Here was the man to whom Vichy was now forced to pay not 400 million but 500 million francs per day to the Reich in reparations and costs: £2,500,000 at the official exchange rate of 200 francs to the pound sterling, or at 43.5 francs to the American dollar, all but $11,500,000.

  Pine needles littered the surface of the foot-bath. Rheumatism, too, thought Kohler ruefully. Nearly seventy, and long past retirement, the general waited. The unshaven jowls were grey, the blunt, high forehead and prominent nose damp with perspiration.

  Briefly he gave him an update on the murder but for a moment Old Shatter Hand’s thoughts were transfixed by the flames of other matters. ‘Von Paulus will surrender tomorrow, Kohler, and for this, the Führer will call him a traitor. Cut off, surrounded, outnumbered and out-gunned, should he lay down the lives of those of his men who remain?’

  ‘General, I leave all such matters to those who know best.’

  ‘And the Führer is always right, is that it, eh?’

  ‘General …’

  ‘Yes, yes, you don’t believe it for a moment and have just recently lost both of your sons. War isn’t pleasant. Condolences, Kohler. Condolences.’

  Another deep draught of the mulled wine was taken. A Gevrey-Chambertin, the 1919, and mein Gott, was he draining Coty’s cellars in preparation for the Wehrmacht’s packing up and heading home?

  ‘In 1935, de Bonnevies visited my family’s estates in Mecklenburg on the Plauer See. He remembered our beekeeper fondly – they’d spent an afternoon discussing a mutual interest in bee-breeding and making mead.’

  ‘Acarine mites in Caucasian bees, General …’

  ‘From Russia, Kohler. Russia!’

  It had to be asked. ‘Brought in with squashed honeycomb, some of which might then be used for supplementing the winter stores of Parisian bees?’

  Kohler had been to the Restaurant of the Gare de Lyon, so gut, ja gut! but that honeycomb hadn’t been from Russia. ‘To the Gare de l’Est, you idiot. Rerouted through the Reich to find its way to Paris thereby denying the needs of the Fatherland. I want the practice stopped.’

  Oh-oh. ‘A name, General?’

  ‘That I can’t give you and you know this. All I can tell you is de Bonnevies was aware of it and deeply concerned for the health of not just his own bees, but those of his colleagues and all others.’

  ‘And was that why he was poisoned, General?’

  ‘Questions … must you ask me questions when you find me like this? He had a sister in the Salpêtrière, the women’s asylum. He may have gone to see her on Thursday. He always did.’

  Frau Gross came in with one of the Wehrmacht’s doctors. Two nurses followed. There was talk of putting the general in hospital, of at least getting him back to bed.

  ‘Candles, Kohler. I think it had something to do with candles.’

  ‘The wax.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s it. The shortages.’

  And the marché noir, the black market? wondered Kohler, but let the matter sit. Louis might have something by now. Louis …

  The candle was no more than ten centimetres in length and one in diameter. Made from tightly rolled foundation sheet, the wick, a simple piece of string, would work well enough, thought St-Cyr. First soaked in salt water and then dried, it brought back boyhood memories of homemade fireworks and other forbidden explosive devices. The pewter candleholder would have entranced a boy of ten and filled his head with dreams of brigands and seaside inns.

  Madame de Bonnevies was tensely watching him. ‘Do you light one of these every day?’ he asked and saw a faint, sad smile briefly touch her lips.

  ‘When I can, yes. It perfumes the air. Étienne loved the smell of it. He …’

  ‘Madame, your son can’t have occupied this room in several years. Not, I think, since beyond the age of …’

  How could he do this to her? ‘Sixteen,’ she gasped.

  ‘And did your husband know you were using his foundation sheets for such a purpose?’

  ‘No! There, are you satisfied?’

  ‘And this practice?’ He indicated the candle. ‘Has been going on for how long?’

  The police were always brutal, the Sûreté only more despicable. ‘Since the Defeat, since my son was taken. A mother has to do something, hasn’t she? Well?’

  She wouldn’t cry, she told herself. She would face his scrutiny bravely. But he turned away and, setting the candleholder down on Étienne’s desk next to the windows, found Sûreté matches and lit it.

  ‘One name,’ he said, and she, like him, watched the flame splutter to life. ‘There are well over forty in this book of your husband’s, madame. My partner and I have little time. I think you know the one we need.’

  ‘I don’t. I haven’t seen that book in …’

  ‘Then why, please, did you take it?’

  ‘Did I look through it – is that what you’re implying?’

  ‘You know it is.’

  ‘Then I must tell you I sa
w nothing untoward.’ There, she had him now.’ Defeated, he picked up one of the tiny Plasticine sculptures of ducks, pigs, geese and horses, too, in the farmyard Étienne had made at the age of four and which she had saved all these years.

  ‘Beautifully done,’ he said.

  ‘Please don’t touch them. You’ve no right.’

  ‘Is it that you want me to obtain a magistrate’s order? It will take much time, but if you have nothing to hide, why imply that you have?’

  Salaud! she cried inwardly and swiftly turned away.

  ‘Sixteen, madame. Why did your son feel he’ had to leave this house at such a tender age?’

  Tender … ‘It has nothing to do with my husband’s murder! Nothing, do you understand? He … he simply couldn’t stand seeing what was happening to me.’

  There were photographs of the boy with his mother in happier times, some of the sister, too. In one snapshot, the two youngsters, at the ages of perhaps twelve and eight, were shyly holding hands at the water’s edge; in another the boy was moulding river clay into a pregnant female form. In yet another, he and his mother were fondly embracing.

  ‘One always looks for answers, madame. You must forgive the detective in me.’

  Had he seen something? she wondered and looking up, knew at once that he was now watching her closely in the mirrored door of the armoire and had positioned himself so as to do so.

  ‘Is there anything else you want?’ she asked harshly.

  ‘The watercolours, madame. Your son is also an accomplished painter. Very sensitive, very accurate. Lupins, achillea, dogwood in flower, roses, but …’

  ‘But, what?’ she spat.

  He shrugged and parted the black-out drapes to peer down into the garden and then to pull them aside. ‘But in your husband’s study, madame, there are those of Pierre-Joseph Redouté and others. Un bouquet de pensées, Rosa x odorata, lilium superbum …’

  ‘And?’she shrilled defiantly.

  ‘But none of your son’s work. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?’

  Pinching out the flame, St-Cyr heard her suck in a wounded breath and stammer, ‘I … I never do that. Not … not until the candle’s burned out.’

  ‘Then let us hope your prayers will be answered.’

  Wax and candles and a sister in the Salpêtrière. Acarine mites from Russia … Old Shatter Hand hadn’t given them a hell of a lot to go on, thought Kohler, finishing a cigarette while standing next to a newspaper kiosk inside the Gare de l’Est.

  People were everywhere; uniforms, too, the smell of boot grease, sweat and urine mingling with those of cheap cologne, unwashed bodies, stale tobacco smoke, farts and all the rest. Jesus, merde alors, why did the French have to make their railway stations so huge?

  High above him, the glass-and-iron dome of the roof was lathered with regulation laundry blueing, each pane criss-crossed with brown sticking-paper, but now daylight fought to get in to discolour everything in this perpetual gloom. More than thirty platforms fed lines to and from Eastern France, the Reich and Switzerland. It was from here that trainload upon trainload of goods left the country. Fully 80 per cent of the country’s wheat, nearly all of its potatoes, eggs, cheese, wine, copper, lead, zinc and steel. There were goods-sheds upon sheds in the yards to the north of the station, warehouses upon warehouses. So how the hell did honeycomb from Russia bypass the Reich to find its way into this, and where was it being kept?

  Tucking the cigarette butt away in his mégot tin for another day – a real butt collector like everyone else – Kohler took a moment longer to look around.

  People came and went or milled about in their thousands, or joined seemingly endless queues at the controls which solidly blocked the traffic up. Some had burlap sacks of onions – firewood even – on tired, worried shoulders. Others lugged suitcases – the better dressed, their briefcases. A crate of carrots, one of cabbages – artichokes in a hamper that was stuffed to the limit. Sacks empty, on occasion, and oh, bien sûr, it was a city and a nation on the scrounge and most here had been out foraging the countryside or were on their way to it. And those returning with the spoils had to face the lottery of the controls.

  Paris had become a city of police and nowhere did one see this better than in places like this. The flics in their dark blue capes and képis patrolled endlessly looking for trouble or just being damned officious to show that they still had some power. The Feldgendarmen, the military police, in field-grey greatcoats and with badges of office that looked like miniature breastplates dangling from the neck, were here in force. The Kettenhunde, they were called behind their backs: the chained dogs. They, too, carried black leatherclad, lead-weighted truncheons.

  Gestapo … there were lots of those and invariably they carried thin briefcases and looked like down-at-the-heel undertakers who’d had a bad year. But the Wehrmacht had its plain-clothed secret police, too: the GFPs, the Geheime Feldpolizei, on the hunt primarily for deserters.

  And wasn’t this matter of the mites a question for the railway police? he asked himself and said, Go carefully. Remember that these days there has to be a system for every commodity.

  The Reichsbahn supervised the railways, so he’d have to go to them. But in France they didn’t wear the becoming light blue-grey they did at home. Here they wore coal black with silver piping on their tunics. Swastikas and eagles also, of course.

  Where … where the hell to start? Soldier-boys were everywhere, arriving and departing, laughing, shouting, crying, too, as they kissed their girls goodbye. There were boys from the Kreigsmarine and also from the Luftwaffe, for Paris was Mecca to all and probably the closest one could get to how things had been before the war – no bombing; well, hardly any. Rest and recupe’ and this really was the Führer’s little showcase of how the Occupied should behave.

  Good luck then, mein Führer, he snorted inwardly at the thought of what wasn’t so easily seen, that vast undercurrent of dissent and deceit that would one day erupt into outright hatred.

  When he found the appropriate office, a burly Bahnschutzpolizei corporal from Schwaben was standing guard over a bench filled with kids. Some were young, others older, but all had dutifully crossed their knees. Books were open on each of their laps – one, two, three, four, five in all. Scruffy shoes needed mending, mismatched kneesocks drooped, and all were obviously from the same family, for a mismatched sock found its mate well down the line …

  Would a sweet voice help? ‘Guten Morgen, Herr Offizier. A moment, bitte. I seem to be lost.’

  Suspicious blue eyes raked him savagely. ‘Lost? Don’t give me that crap! Gott im Himmel, mein Schweinebulle, since when was a cop ever lost?’

  Was he really that easy to spot? wondered Kohler, somewhat taken aback. ‘Okay, I’m looking for something.’ Affably he grinned and offered a cigarette as a token of peace.

  The packet was taken in expectation of more to come. The kids didn’t look up. A page was turned and then another and on down the line.

  It would be best to get it out and over with. ‘A railway truck in from Russia recently. Honey or beeswax.’ He gave a futile shrug. ‘My boss wants to know.’

  ‘Your boss,’ sighed the corporal.

  ‘Sturmbannführer Boemelburg.’

  ‘That’s better.’

  Reluctantly Kohler dragged out a wad of bills. Cursing the constant need to pay for information that should rightly be shared, he peeled off five hundred Reichskassenscheine, the Occupation marks and equivalent to ten thousand francs at the official rate.

  ‘It’s important,’ grunted the corporal. ‘Your boss must really want to know.’

  Another five hundred were found. A page was turned, another and another and on down the line.

  ‘Try Shed fourteen, line twenty. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Danke.’ Kohler started to leave but curiosity got the better of him. ‘So, why are the kids being held?’

  ‘Why do you think, mein lieber Detektiv?’

  Knees were uncrossed and recrossed and this con
tinued on down the line. A thin skirt was primly tugged into place beneath its book. Trousers were tugged … Another skirt …

  ‘Your sergeant has arrested their mother,’ sighed Kohler.

  ‘Detained her.’

  ‘For how long now?’

  A lifelessness entered the corporal’s gaze. ‘Long enough.’

  ‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central, mein Herr. I’m sorry but I’d better check into it.’

  ‘He won’t like it.’

  ‘Nor will I.’

  The door was locked. The kids had all stopped reading. People came and went constantly. None looked up. None were curious.

  When a woman who couldn’t possibly be old enough to be the mother of those kids came out to urgent banging and cries of ‘Gestapo! Raus! Raus!’ she was carrying two big and obviously freshly emptied old suitcases. There were tears in her wounded brown eyes, those of rage and those of humiliation and despair. Her overcoat was unbuttoned, the little pillbox hat with its bit of veiling askew. Blouse and sweater were also unbuttoned.

  ‘Get out of my Way,’ she said fiercely to Kohler.

  So few of the Occupier spoke French, he knew his use of it would startle her. ‘A moment, madame. Hey, let me settle this properly, eh? Just wait here. I won’t be long.’

  Louis wasn’t going to like it. They had enough trouble as it was but what the hell. Chance was everything these days. One could go through a control and nothing would happen or there’d be an absolute disaster, but this one’s misfortune could have its silver lining.

  Stepping into the office, he closed the door and locked it behind him. Out in the station they’d be waiting, the kids not turning a page, the woman trying to button her things and finding her fingers were shaking too much.

  The beret and earmuffs were dark brown, the belted brown suede, three-quarter-length jacket and grey woollen gloves old. As St-Cyr watched her from inside the honey-house, Danielle de Bonnevies hesitated. The girl had entered the garden from the Impasse de champ de parc de Charonne, and now stood just inside the tall wooden carriage doors through which she had come.