Madrigal

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘He liked to take you both, didn’t he?’ prompted Father Michel, helping himself to more pastis and another Gauloise Bleue from the packet of cigarettes they had brought.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Josiane a little stiffly, ‘Alexandre would …’

  ‘Father, details of his sex life with these two really are of little interest. I want to question …’

  ‘Then they should be, my son. Please don’t be so impatient.’

  ‘Oh là, là, Josiane, will you look at that!’

  The younger one had lost her game.

  ‘He … he liked to call us names,’ she confessed and began to gather the cards.

  ‘What sort of names?’ prodded the priest, exhaling cigarette smoke and fastidiously picking a shred of tobacco from his sleeve.

  ‘Father, you know very well what sort of names.’

  ‘Angele-Marie,’ whispered Georgette darkly, again concentrating on the game before her.

  Merde alors, why had he had to ask? cursed Josiane. ‘And Suzette, and Élène or Michèle. Pouf! Father, it meant nothing. Just a whim of the moment.’

  Retreating behind his little cloud of cigarette smoke, the priest waited.

  Finally the dark eyes of the older sister ducked away.

  ‘Angèle-Marie …?’ hazarded St-Cyr. The cards had stopped.

  ‘Alexandre’s sister, Inspector,’ sighed Father Michel. ‘I rather thought you might be interested, especially since he went to see her last Thursday. Teased as a child by an older brother who loved bees and knew all about virgin queens; raped repeatedly on a summer’s evening in 1912, and so violently at the age of fifteen, by some animal or animals in the Père Lachaise – we never did get the story of it in full; the custodians had forgotten about the poor child and had locked her in for the night – she has long since become a permanent resident of the Salpêtrière.’

  Almost the size of a small town, the Paris asylum for women held more than six thousand inmates and had a staff of over a thousand.

  ‘Alexandre was very worried about her safety, Inspector,’ said Father Michel. ‘Given the willingness of our German friends to destroy all such signs of mental or physical weakness, he had, I should think, cause for alarm.’

  ‘It was only play,’ hazarded Josiane, picking at her handbag. ‘Georgette would take her name, I would watch and when … why, when his little moment was over, we would sit and talk for old times’ sake.’

  Jésus, merde alors, these village quartiers and their priests! ‘And how old, please, was Georgette when Monsieur de Bonnevies first visited Le Chat?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ grunted Father Michel. ‘Alexandre would have been … Now, let me see …’

  ‘Twenty-seven, Father,’ said the older sister.

  ‘And two years later he went off to war and we saw him only twice in all those years,’ confessed Georgette, moisture coming readily to her eyes. ‘These …’ She indicated the playing cards. ‘Are the deck I gave him. You can still smell the mustard gas – I swear you can.’

  Gathering the cards, she held them out, the cut-glass rings on her pudgy fingers, with their red-lacquered nails, flashing in the thin light.

  ‘He loved them,’ she said. ‘He used to say they reminded him constantly of me.’

  ‘Of me, too, Georgette.’

  ‘Yes, of you, too, chérie.’

  At a nod from the priest, another carafe of the red was brought – the third, or was it the fourth? wondered St-Cyr. People had come and gone. Left alone in their little cocoon, the four of them had lost all sense of time.

  ‘The hives,’ prompted Father Michel.

  ‘Ah, oui,’ said Josiane. ‘“A field lying fallow is a portion of France dying.”’

  It was one of the Maréchal Pétain’s many sayings, just as was Travail, Famille et Patrie, but not the Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité of prewar days.

  ‘I take it the field was leased from the city for the apiary,’ sighed St-Cyr, ‘but the neighbours felt it would be best to grow vegetables there.’

  ‘And Alexandre would have no part of such a thing, Inspector. You see, to remain content and productive, bees need peace and quiet,’ acknowledged the priest.

  ‘There was lots of room,’ countered Josiane. ‘He could have freed up half the land. We … we told him this.’

  ‘We did,’ insisted Georgette. ‘And now the hives are in ruins and what the neighbours wished will soon be possible.’

  ‘Who stole the honey?’ asked St-Cyr.

  Both of the sisters shrugged. Josiane glanced at the priest and then dropped her gaze to her wine.

  ‘The neighbours,’ sighed Father Michel. ‘Which of them, and how many, will, I’m afraid, be all but impossible to ascertain and take much time.’

  ‘A fait accompli, is that it, Father?’

  ‘“Life is not neutral,” Inspector,’ grunted Father Michel, giving him another of the Maréchal’s sayings. ‘“It consists of taking sides boldly.” AJexandre was very much a Pétainiste, but not when it came to giving up his precious apiary.’

  ‘He could be so very stubborn,’ offered Georgette. ‘Mon Dieu, if I didn’t submit exactly the way he wanted, he would get angry. I was to stretch out my arms above my head so as to grasp the little black iron bars of the fence around the tombstone while … while knocking the flowers over as I smothered my cries in them. They … they tickled my nose. That stone … it was so shaky sometimes, so heavy I was afraid it would fall and … and crush my head!’

  ‘I had always to urge him on, Inspector,’ confessed Josiane.

  ‘Until he would cry out his sister’s name as he released his little burden?’ bleated the Sûreté.

  ‘Ah oui. Then he would stroke Georgette and tell her to be calm, that she hadn’t really lost her virtue, that this was of the heart, not the hymen, and I would stroke him until … until all three of us were calm.’

  ‘Tears … were there tears?’ he heard himself asking.

  ‘Always,’ confided Josiane with a touch. ‘Always and without fail.’

  ‘Father, you could have warned me. Did he rape his sister?’

  They had left the café and were heading up the rue Saint-Blaise towards the church.

  ‘No, he did not. He was at the Jardin du Luxembourg assisting one of the Society’s beekeepers. Alexandre simply blamed himself. You see, that morning he had asked his sister to pick some flowers in the cemetery but to be careful not to let the custodians see her doing so. He wanted a sampling of their pollen to compare, under the microscope, with that found in his hives.’

  ‘Then why play a game of rape with those two?’

  ‘Why not? It was harmless, a punishment – self-humiliation. And there was Georgette’s sister to witness it.’

  ‘But she had always to urge him on?’

  ‘That’s of little consequence. Oh bien sûr, he confessed this strange desire to me many times – God won’t punish me for telling you; but I felt it best you should hear it from those two.’

  ‘You told me he went there, you thought, perhaps to humiliate Madame de Bonnevies.’

  ‘He did! But by the time of their marriage he had discovered he couldn’t stop himself. Those two understood him far better than Juliette could ever have done.’

  ‘They said nothing of his wife.’

  ‘Because they had nothing to say about her.’

  ‘And did he tease his daughter the way he teased his sister?’

  They were shouting at each other. ‘Absolutely not. Danielle was everything to him – everything that is, except his bees, but he included her among them, so it really didn’t matter.’

  ‘Included her among them …? As a virgin queen? Well?’

  ‘Don’t be an ass, Inspector. He knew very well she wasn’t a bee.’ ‘Even so, Father, I’m going to have to talk to those two again.’

  ‘Of course. It’s understood. Now that the introductions are over, feel free to contact them whenever necessary. They’ll answer you truthfully, or they’ll answer to m
e.’

  Parting at the church, Father Michel watched as the Sûreté, somewhat disgruntled, it had to be admitted, plodded up the steps into the driving snow. Had he been right, he wondered, to short-circuit things and open that door into a very private and tragic matter now seldom mentioned?

  ‘I had to do it,’ swore Father Michel. ‘Otherwise that one and his partner would have looked elsewhere and this they must not do.’

  More snow began to fall, and with the wind, it made life miserable, thought Kohler, wishing he’d driven over instead of leaving the Citroën in the place de la Bourse. But he’d wanted to come upon Herr Schlacht on the quiet.

  Most people didn’t look up as they hurried along. Bundled up in anything they could lay hand to these days, all pretence of fashion had long since vanished from the minds of everyday citizens. Even the boys in grey-green had given up on their seemingly endless window-shopping. And as for the filles de joie who had migrated from the vast emptiness Les Halles, the central market, had become, the girls were listless and frozen stiff.

  Bicycle-taxis vied with one another and with the bicycles. Pedestrians took their lives into their hands at the white-studded crosswalks. At the corner of the rue Réaumur and the rue Montmartre, sandbags were being unloaded from two Wehrmacht lorries. Here, too, as elsewhere in the city, the air-raid shelters were being converted into bunkers and machine-gun nests.

  Instinctively, Kohler flicked a glance down the rue Montmartre towards the central market to gauge the field of fire, was right back at the front in 1914 and ’15. Bang on. These boys knew what they were doing and that could only mean the OKW – Old Shatter Hand and von Stülpnagel, the Military Governor – still feared an uprising once the defeat at Stalingrad was officially announced, as it would have to be.

  Louis and he had seen such pillboxes before heading south to Avignon. Unsettled by the thought, he went on up the rue Montmartre searching for the smelter.

  A big Renault was parked outside the café À La Chope du Croissant. No sign of its owner, nor would Herr Schlacht have wasted time in that cafe.

  A nearby signboard, in flaking off-white paint, read: Imprimerie. Printers.

  Pushing open the tall, wooden doors, he found himself in a rubbish-littered, ice-encased courtyard. Soot all over the place. Soot in these days of so little coal. Soot and iron bars on the windows. Were all the doors locked? he wondered. In one broken window the wind teased a peeling paper notice in German and in French: Jüdisches Geschäft. Jewish business. All were gone now. Gone since July of last year. But the smelter would have coexisted with the printers for as long as the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, when so many had fled to Paris.

  The courtyard was narrow and at its far end it must take a bend to the right. Tattered handbills rattled around inside the printing shop, the presses as silent as a frozen tap that had burst its lead pipe.

  Merde, where was the place? The smell of burning charcoal was in the air, soda, too, and bone ash.

  As he neared the bend, the soft roar of pot-furnaces came to him. A little farther on, he came to a window and, reaching between the bars, cleaned off a bit of the glass to peer inside.

  Flames danced, coals glowed. Crucibles were held by two-metre-long iron tongs. Everyone wore goggles, most asbestos suits, gauntlets and toe-capped boots …

  The smell of nitric acid reached him and of hydrochloric, too. Aqua regia, Louis would have said. A mixture of the two, Hermann. One part nitric acid, three to four of hydrochloric; the name from the Latin for Royal Water. Gold can be dissolved by it and then later extracted.

  End of lecture. Louis was always coming up with things like that, but Louis wasn’t here. And why did he feel he needed backup? Why the constant tingling in his spine?

  Among the half-dozen or so grey-clad zombies with their hoods and goggles that made them look like naval gunners in the heat of battle, Herr Schlacht watched a pour. White-hot, the gold was being cast into wafers the size of calling cards. An assistant, to one side, was polishing those that had already cooled.

  Schlacht, though hidden behind goggles and under a wide-brimmed felt trilby and tweed overcoat, had the stance, the look of a Berliner. Solid – maybe weighing as much as no kilos. A real Bürgermeister type. The face was round, fleshy and double-chinned, the forehead wide and blunt, the nose not unlike Louis’s but no boxer, no such refinements – simply a pugilist come up from the streets. The lips were a little thin, but maybe that was because the stub of a cigar was clamped fiercely between his teeth.

  Two Alsatians, guardians of the smelter, slept on the cooling firebricks of a nearby hearth.

  The pour came to an end, the goggles were pushed up until they covered the forehead. Ja, das ist gut – Kohler could almost hear Schlacht saying it. Gold and candles … What the hell else was this little entrepreneur into?

  Again the tingling in his spine came to him, again he thought to step back from the window and did so this time.

  Frozen in its little cage beside the door opposite to the smelter, a dead canary watched him through hollow-eyed sockets. The hanging wire cage had been dented several times and often straightened to no effect. Mein Gott, why had someone left the poor creature out here to sing its heart away until no more?

  There was a notice on the door. Avertissement: Peine de mort contre les saboteurs. Sentence of death against saboteurs.

  For the acts of terrorism on 15 November, 3. and 16 December 1942 …

  Father, brother, mother, sister, cousins, too – all had been taken, since that was the rule these days. But whereas the résistant would have been shot right away, the other men would be held as hostages, as Sühnepersonen – atoners – until needed in retribution for some other act by some other poor idiot whom they wouldn’t even know. And goodbye to the rest of the family. They’d all have been deported.

  Oberg had added these little twists to the ordinance. The Brigadeführer und Generalmajor Karl Albrecht Oberg, Höherer SS und Polizeiführer.

  Judging by the custom-made wafers, Herr Schlacht could well have friends in. high places and that could well be von Schaumburg’s greatest worry.

  Stepping into the canary’s abandoned building, Kohler prepared to wait and find out what he could. Louis would preach caution. Oberg was simply not a nice fellow and they’d already had too many run-ins with him.

  Behind closed doors, through slightly parted curtains, the neighbours watched and held their collective breath, thought St-Cyr. Once on the Impasse de champ de parc de Charonne, the feeling was only more intense. Father Michel had orchestrated the whole interview, but why, really, had he seen fit to take him back to 1912 and the sister?

  A parted curtain fell into place, another and another. Were the women of these houses afraid of what Hermann and he might discover and what their parish priest could well have initiated? Certainly a field for vegetables was one thing, the smashing of the hives and theft of the honey directly related to it, but did their guilt run deeper? And why, really, had Josiane always, it seemed, to play the part of a witness?

  All of these former villages, once suburbs, had had their gangs of toughs. As a boy, he had had to defy that natural fear of all such boys when venturing into the territory of others. And in the summer of 1912, as today, de Bonnevies, no matter his penchant for taking a drink in the neighbourhood café or visiting the local house, would still have been classed as an original. Had the sister been picked on because of it? Had she not been alone in the Père Lachaise at all but with a friend – a witness who had hidden in terror, only to later confess to her mother the names of those who had raped the girl?

  Father Michel might always have suspected this and now could not fail to see a connection between the murder and the rape, or had he deliberately begun by almost accusing Juliette de Bonnevies and then used the past to distract the investigation so as to hide something else?

  ‘I don’t quite trust him,’ said St-Cyr to himself. ‘I can’t afford to, not yet.’

  Knowing that he
had best talk to Josiane and her sister before the priest got to them again, he retraced his steps. Father Michel had made no mention of the Caucasian bees de Bonnevies had been examining, none whatsoever of the address to which the beekeeper had been making last-minute revisions. Either he hadn’t known of these, or had simply chosen not to discuss them.

  At the rue de Bagnolet, St-Cyr crossed over and, once beyond the parish church and heading down the rue Saint-Blaise past the café to a side street, was right back in his days on the patrol.

  Like all such houses, Le Chat qui crie had no need to announce its presence to the rue Florian or to this Sûreté. But like them all, there was intermittent traffic, the steps either hesitant or dogged, and then, of course, the absolute ease of entry. Swift and secure, and no one the wiser, perhaps.

  The Charonne métro station was just behind the house and perfect for those who liked to travel from another quartier for their little moments, but had it been closed to save on the electricity? Rapidly he counted off every second station, concluding that it must still be open.

  Between the glass and the lace curtain of the door to the house, a small card stated simply: Entrer.

  ‘Monsieur, what can the house do for you?’

  Sûreté had registered in the sixty-year-old madam’s eyes. Instant suspicion, total defiance. Outrage, even. So bon! Oui, oui! He’d heard it all before, and many times. ‘Josiane and Georgette, madame, and hurry.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘A few small questions, nothing difficult unless, of course, you feel I had best call in a little help.’

  Bâtard! she silently cursed, tossing her head in a huff and saying tartly, ‘You may sit with the girls or wait here.’

  ‘Here will suit perfectly.’

  He was already thumbing through her accounts ledger. There were no names of the clients there for him to peruse, only those of the girls, but once her back was turned, he would put the lock on the door and then what? she demanded.

  St-Cyr … wasn’t it St-Cyr those two had said?

  She let a breath escape and murmured to herself. ‘The ave’ Ménilmontant. The house at number six.’ And now? she wondered. Why now it must be more than thirty years since that house had been raided. Would he have remembered her from among those who’d been swept into the panier à salade – the salad basket – the Black Maria?