Beekeeper

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘V-is?’ Revenge weapons.

  ‘Fliegende Bomben, Hermann.’

  Flying bombs.

  ‘Some kind of rocket. So you see, Stalingrad is but a minor reversal and we are still going to England.’

  That little saying hadn’t been heard since the Führer had abandoned such plans in the fall of 1940.

  ‘Behave,’ said Rudi. ‘Become a good Nazi. Join the Party. Now you must excuse me. My kitchen calls.’

  ‘And Maxim’s? Did Schlacht …’

  ‘Pay to get the woman’s son released? Really, my Hermann, how could I possibly know of such an intimate matter?’

  The city was now pitch dark and, at 17:22 hours, bitterly cold. Infrequently, pale dots of blue penetrated the darkness from struggling vélo-taxis and vélos. Pedestrians were caught but momentarily in the slim blue slit-eyes of the Citroën’s headlamps. A mother and two little children …

  Hermann jammed on the brakes – skidded, and then stopped. The three of them had remained standing right in front of the car …

  ‘Hermann, we haven’t time.’

  ‘Her kids are hungry, Louis. She’s prepared to commit suicide.’

  ‘Merde, how soft can you get?’ But it was happening all over the city. Desperate measures for desperate times, and every car would have to hold the privileged, since no one else was allowed to drive.

  ‘There’ll be a Wehrmacht soup kitchen at the Gare d’ Austerlitz. I can fix things for her there, then drop you off, and come back to take them home.’

  Hermann was rolling down his side window. The woman and her children were approaching … ‘Jésus, merde alors, idiot! We’ve a murder investigation on our hands!’

  ‘We could simply say the beekeeper’s death was an accident.’

  ‘Was that what Rudi advised? Well, was it, eh?’

  ‘Monsieur,’ began the woman. ‘Could you …’

  ‘Well, was it?’ demanded St-Cyr.

  ‘Something like that. The heat’s on, Louis. We can’t afford to get burned, not with the Milice after Oona and her papers not so good.’

  ‘And Giselle? Were they also after her?’

  ‘Monsieur …’

  ‘Get in the back. Vite, vite, before this one changes his mind. I’m going to have to see about Giselle, Louis, but that explosion on the tracks between here and Lyon could really have been a warning to us. Please don’t forget it!’

  ‘And this one, Hermann? Has she a grenade or a revolver hidden beneath that shawl she has wrapped about the children?’

  ‘A grenade …?’ managed the woman.

  ‘You worry too much. Mein Gott, your ears are even bigger than Rudi’s!’

  ‘And you are far too trusting and forget entirely, mon ami, that the Résistance still have my name on some of their hit lists!’

  A problem, a little misunderstanding. ‘There’s a rumour of something big,’ said Kohler stiffly. ‘I’ll tell you about it later. I promise.’

  ‘A rumour?’ managed the woman. ‘Bread here, milk there. Cheese … has one of those salauds really got cheese, or are we simply to eat rumours, messieurs?’

  Many of Paris’s forty thousand concierges were grassroots black-market traffickers. Flour from one, cheese from another, but always a city of rumour.

  Her tears were very real, and when Hermann stopped the car outside the railway station, they both looked into the back seat at her through the darkness.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘Some bastard stole my purse and all of our ration tickets.’

  To say nothing of her papers, but such ‘petty’ crimes were happening all too frequently. ‘Look, I’ll fix it. Don’t cry. Chewing gum, Louis. In the compartment. It’s banana flavoured. I was going to give it to you-know-who, but …’

  To Oberg, the Head of the SS!

  ‘Banana …?’ hazarded the woman only to see the big one toss a carefree hand and hear him say, ‘Well, something like that. Here .. here, take it. Look, I know it won’t do much but …’

  ‘But that is all you can do. I might have known.’

  ‘No! Now just calm down, madame. You’ll see.’

  ‘Merde, you’re too easy, Hermann. One of these days I’m going to be picking up pieces of you.’

  Like those of Marianne and Philippe – Louis’s second wife and little boy? wondered Kohler. Louis was right, of course. The mood of compliance was bound to change. The Résistance would warm up. Though still disorganized, widely scattered and few in number, they had tried to kill Louis last November, and Gestapo Paris’s Watchers, not liking the finger of truth these two humble servants of justice had pointed, had known all about that bomb on his doorstep but had deliberately left it in place. His wife had been coming home to him after a torrid affair with the Hauptmann Steiner and Louis hadn’t been able to warn her there might be trouble – they’d been out of the city at the time. And, yes, Steiner had been the nephew of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris who had packed him off to Russia to protect the family’s honour. And, yes, Steiner had died there just as would likely happen to the Bzp Obergruppenführer Otto Denke. Ah Christ!

  ‘A bomb?’ asked the woman with difficulty.

  ‘Madame, please don’t let it trouble you. Just go with this one. He’ll look after you like he does everyone else.’

  The Gare d’Austerlitz was indicated somewhere out there in the cold.

  ‘Relax, Louis. I won’t be a minute.’

  There was a can of pipe tobacco without a lid next to where the chewing gum had lain. The Procurement Office? wondered St-Cyr.

  Somewhat mollified, he began to pack his pipe, and when he had it alight, sat waiting and waiting. Thinking, too, and asking, Murder … had the beekeeper’s demise really been intended, and was Hermann honestly suggesting they avoid the issue entirely so as to make life easy for once?

  Madame de Bonnevies had gone through her husband’s book of clients and had tried to keep them from finding the name of Frau Uma Schlacht.

  Danielle de Bonnevies hadn’t wanted him to look through the microscope at the mite-infested innards of a Russian bee. Her father had been terribly worried about an infestation, but also about the decimation of French bees, though she had claimed not to know the contents of the address he had planned to give.

  She had also not wanted him to take any notice of the family’s country house near Soisy-sur-Seine. And ever since the Defeat, the mother had been trying desperately to free her son, the child of another man. Had the son been freed, then? Had the girl known this and feared her stepbrother had come in through the apiary and garden to poison that bottle? It hadn’t been in the study at 5 a.m. on Thursday. Early in the evening de Bonnevies had shaved, had spruced himself up – a woman? he wondered again. Perhaps the childhood friend of his sister, a Madame Héloïse Debré of 7 rue Stendhal? A woman whose husband had repeatedly beaten her until one day he had vanished and she had sworn not to know where to.

  Had Father Michel been hiding something? Why else, but to distract this Sûreté, would he have mentioned such a parish disgrace as the gang rape of Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies? And ever since 1919 there had been a cemetery room at Le Chat qui crie and word of a settlement of accounts at any price. A very stubborn beekeeper, then, and one with not only a very troubled conscience, but a long memory.

  When Kohler got behind the wheel all Louis said was ‘Four names, mon vieux. One of whom was killed at Sedan during the invasion of 1940. Another who no longer lives in the quartier but visits a certain lupanar late on Sunday evenings and takes Charlotte whose age is eighteen in that very room.’

  ‘What room?’ blurted Kohler, baffled by the thought trend but intrigued.

  ‘Please don’t interrupt me. Two others, Hermann, who are married and with families but are locked up in POW camps in the Reich just as, supposedly, is Madame de Bonnevies’ precious son.’

  ‘Oflag 17A.’

  ‘It’s just a thought.’

  ‘Louis, Rudi says Schlacht’s fucking Madame de Bonnevies.’


  ‘Did he really say that?’

  ‘Not really, but enough.’

  ‘In return for which?’

  ‘Schlacht must have put the fifty thousand francs down at Maxim’s for her to get her son back. Why else was that little badge of his in her drawer? Why else the expensive lingerie and the menu?’

  ‘The son, then, and that’s what the daughter tried to hide from me, but really, Hermann, Herr Schlacht could have any …’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His secretary.’

  ‘Then you will have to prove to me that he really is consorting with madame.’

  ‘Why me? Why not you?’

  ‘Are you ordering me to keep a watch on her when I have already too much to do?’

  ‘Louis, this is serious. Boemelburg has warned us to lay off.’

  ‘Even though the Kommandant von Gross-Paris is insisting we do no such thing?’

  They’d be shouting at each other in a moment. ‘Oberg won’t stand for our interfering again. Let it lie, Louis. Say it was an accident.’

  ‘An accident.’

  ‘Misadventure. Rudi says there are flying bombs and that they’re to be pointed at England from launching ramps that are already being built in the north. He wouldn’t have told me that had he thought it wouldn’t convince me to be a good Nazi for once.’

  ‘And has it convinced you? Is the one-thousand-year Reich really here to stay, Hermann?’

  ‘I don’t know. Verdammt! I wish I did.’

  ‘Then in the interim, mon ami de guerre, let me visit the sister while you …’

  Hermann knew he’d have to say it. ‘Visit Frau Schlacht.’

  ‘Who may have paid our beekeeper a little visit on the night of his death – is this what worries you, Hermann?’

  ‘Not really, but now that you’ve brought the possibility to my attention, I’ll be sure to ask her.’

  ‘Bon! For all we know at present, she could just as easily have given him that bottle as anyone else!’

  ‘Idiot, it’s the wife she’d have wanted to get rid of, not de Bonnevies, particularly if Schlacht is running around with madame!’

  ‘And that, mon enfant, is precisely what I meant.’

  Ah merde, the Amaretto, thought Kohler. Had it not been meant for the beekeeper at all, but for madame?

  Out of the darkness and the falling snow, the silhouette of the Salpêtrière grew, and the line of its many roofs stretched from the rue Jenner almost to the Gare d’Austerlitz, along the south side of the boulevard d’Hôpital.

  Pausing to search for a visible light – some sign of life within – St-Cyr found only one tiny pinprick of blue above the main entrance. Every window and door would be secured behind heavy black-out curtains. Oh bien sûr, the staff would open those curtains during the day – they were really very conscientious, so much so, the hospital ranked among the finest. But still there would be that mesh of stiff steel wire, still the bolts, the necessary locks, guards, warders, nurses, doctors, cooks, et cetera.

  ‘Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies,’ he softly said and wondered what he’d find. She’d be forty-six years old now.

  The patients would be at their evening meal. Soup … would it be soup? And how many of them did they really have – six thousand … eight thousand? Was the cost what troubled the Occupier as much as an unwillingness to recognize that mental illness was not something society should wipe out with injections of potassium cyanide or air?

  There was wing after wing to the hospital – those for the criminally insane, others for the suffering of amnesia, depression, hypochondria and senile dementia. On visiting days, the triangular foyer would be crowded with relatives and loved ones – two thousand, perhaps three thousand of these, with vendors, too. Ersatz chewing gum – yes, yes, banana-flavoured, cherry also, and apple; flower sellers as well; paper collages and cut-outs, picture books done in cloth or otherwise. From the administrative centre, avenues opened up and these were named after the permanent shops they led to. And which one would he follow? Which would she walk every day of her life? The rue de tabac, where now no tobacco would be available? The rue de la pâtisserie where painted plaster and papier-mâché mock-ups would give the lie of plenty as they did all over the city? Éclairs, petits fours and babas au rhum? Would they allow such lies or simply have empty shelves?

  The street of the market was one of the most popular, since the hospital was to be as much like a small town as possible.

  Of the two bronzes at the entrance, only one remained: that of Dr Philippe Pinel who, in the 1790s, was one of the great pioneers in the humane treatment of the mentally ill. The other, that of the world-famous neurologist Dr Jean Martin Charcot, had been removed by the Occupier last year. Cast out for having influenced Freud, among others of his students. A man who had pioneered the use of hypnotism in the treatment of hysteria, Charcot had lived from 1825 until 1893; Freud had, of course, been Jewish.

  Shaking his head in despair at the long memories of the Occupier and what had happened to France, he went in to the administrative desk, pulled out his badge and ID and said, as always in such places, a stern, grim, ‘St-Cyr. Sûreté. It’s urgent, so please don’t argue. Just get me whoever is in charge of the wing in which Mademoiselle Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies resides. Her dossier also.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘As are most things these days until a little persuasion is applied.’

  Namely the Gestapo. ‘Wait here. I’ll ring for him.’

  ‘Bon.’

  The smell of eau de Javel was pungent. Water dripped constantly from leaking faucets. The white, enamelled cast-iron washtubs were chipped, the light so dim it was as if a fog had seeped into the corridor.

  All that remained of Louis XIII’s gunpowder factory were this wet, grey marble floor and these two limestone walls with their black iron bolts and the heavy ceiling timbers. Later, sconces of wrought iron had been added to give torch- and candlelight, but that had been in 1656 when the Salpêtrière, then so named, had been an asylum for vagrants.

  ‘Inspector, please be careful. She is … How should I put it? Almost normal. Deceptively so,’ said the doctor.

  The woman wore grey – an undershift – and the dress she frantically scrubbed was grey, too, as were the galvanized iron ripples on the washboard she used. Her hair was blonde, but pale and cut short so that it stood well out from her and above the shoulders. Thick and teased by constant, rhythmic brushing.

  Apparently she paid no attention to them, to the dripping of adjacent faucets, the damp cold, dim light, fog and constant smell of Javel. And her voice – she was talking to herself – was not shrill but earnest. ‘You will be poisoned, Angèle. I drank water, idiot. You know the poison wasn’t in it! Ah, you think I’m crazy? I know where you are. You were in the chapel. I’m in the garden. There were clowns. You were on the trapeze; Angèle. Madame la sous-maîtresse Durand was riding an elephant. You were …’

  ‘Angèle-Marie,’ said Dr Henri-Martin Lemoine gently. ‘It’s me. You have a visitor.’

  ‘I played the drums. He’s a Communist! He’s been sent to poison me! Why am I here?’

  ‘One of the others spilled their soup on your dress. Remember?’ he said.

  ‘Will he tune my piano?’

  ‘Perhaps. Now come along.’

  ‘A lake. I went swimming. You did!’ she said to herself. ‘Marie-couche-toi-là, you were naked! You sported yourself!’

  Harlot … ‘Inspector, please. Let me get her to her room.’

  ‘They’re going to poison you. You know they are,’ she said to herself and then, ‘Try biscuits, not water. Be reasonable. Take air. I can’t. It burns. There are spies. They’re watching you, Angèle. They’ve seen you peeing!’

  ‘Please,’ said Lemoine, nodding slightly towards the washhouse entrance. ‘Let me talk to her. We’ll only be a moment.’

  The woman lifted her head and listened intently. As if struck by something, she stood rigi
dly, still clinging to the dress on the washboard. Hesitantly her chest rose and fell in fear, but then the frown she now gave changed swiftly to a smile.

  Merde, thought St-Cyr. That bit about the poison not being in water. Does she know why I’ve come?

  The wrinkles were there again across the deeply furrowed brow. The large brown eyes were dark with worry, the lips tight as she watched for his every move and he heard Lemoine saying, ‘Go, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Go?’ she asked, and watched – one could feel her doing so, thought St-Cyr, as he walked to the end of the corridor.

  Poison … was her concern over being poisoned normal to her condition, or had she been told and had it registered that her brother was dead?

  The Schlacht residence at 28 quai d’Orléans might well be pleasant, for the house it was in faced the river. But at 6:17 p.m. it was shrouded in darkness, fog and softly falling snow.

  Kohler stood beside the Citroën. He had no love of the Île Saint-Louis, this ancient kernel from which Paris had grown. Oona had nearly been killed at its upstream end, a matter of his having used her as bait, and ever since that affair, he’d been shy of the place.

  Regrettably so, Louis would have said but Louis wasn’t here. And anyway, that had been back in mid-December and, yes, there’d been gold involved then and now there was more of it. Gold and candles, squashed beehives from Russia and acarine mites. Shit!

  Though he listened intently, the city was all but silent. Only the gentle lapping of the river came to him, just as it had when Oona had had that knife at her throat. She had trusted him implicitly then and he had put her at risk.

  ‘I’ve got to find her a really decent set of papers; Giselle, too,’ he said and swore he’d do so. ‘I’ve got to get them both out of France before it’s too late.’

  Spain … he’d always felt that would be best. Louis and he had often discussed it. A small café, a little bar-tabac with Giselle behind the zinc and Oona? he asked himself. Oona at home, tending Giselle’s babies, eh? Oona waiting. Oona lying in bed night after night never knowing if he loved her, too, or what the hell would really happen to her.

  Fed up with himself and the life, he yanked down on the brim of his fedora and took a little walk. Paused to light a cigarette and tried to think.