Beekeeper

by J. Robert Janes

  He’d have to go carefully. Louis and he couldn’t have Oberg breathing down their necks again. And yet … and yet, had Frau Schlacht really intended to poison Madame de Bonnevies? Had the woman gone to that study only to find that the beekeeper, thinking the Amaretto quite safe, since he hadn’t yet poisoned it, was in the throes of death? Had the intended victim added that poison? Had Juliette de Bonnevies beaten them to it?

  A soft whipping sound cut the air to interrupt his thoughts and, curious, he leaned over the stone parapet to gaze down through the inkiness at the lower quai. There was a set of iron stairs here, he remembered. There had been chestnut trees, or had they been lindens?

  Someone was fishing. Before the Defeat, before this lousy war and Occupation, this quai and all the others would have been lined with fishermen, especially on a Sunday afternoon. Now one could only do it under cover of darkness and still that was a terrible risk to take for a few roach or chub.

  He let the fisherman be. He went along until he found the door to Number 28’s courtyard. Rebuilt in the mid-1800s, the house, of five or six storeys, would have superb views of the Notre Dame, the Left Bank, too.

  As if totally ignoring him and the war and what had happened, the bell of the Église de Saint-Louis tolled the half-hour as it had for centuries. Christ! was it cracking the ice of the bloody Volga?

  ‘Fliegende Bomben,’ he muttered disconsolately and asked himself, was the rumour even partly true and if so, must the war go on and on with no end in sight?

  Louis would be certain to tell Gabrielle, who would pass the information to her contacts in the Résistance. ‘And God help us all if she’s dragged in again for questioning. I should never have put that responsibility on his shoulders. Never.’

  Not one for using the elevators – he’d been caught hanging by a thread once too often – he started up the stairs only to be softly reminded. ‘Monsieur, you have not stopped with me.’

  There were concierges and concierges, but to most there was that same look of utter bafflement as to why a visitor – any visitor – should call at such an hour. At any hour!

  Brusquely Madame Jeanette-Noëlle Jouvand turned the ledger towards him, having retreated into her loge.

  She was not old, not young any more, and of medium height and build, was a war-widow as so many of them were. A quite pleasant-looking woman in a neat, prewar woollen suit of dove blue, with silver Widow’s League button, a constant reminder.

  ‘Please,’ she indicated the ledger and held her breath while he wrote: Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central, and glancing at the military wristwatch, the time: 18:35 hours, the Schlacht residence.

  ‘That one has gone out, monsieur.’

  He grinned, and it was a nice grin, thought Madame Jouvand, even though he was a Boche and there was the scar of a terrible slash down the left side of his face from the eye to chin. Other scars, too, but from shrapnel and from a bullet graze across the brow.

  ‘The war,’ he said. ‘Not this one, but the last one.’

  ‘Barbed wire,’ she said and nodded sadly even though he had lied about the slash and the graze – both were far too fresh. ‘Monmari was found clinging steadfastly to it with his face absent. Come back in three hours, monsieur. Madame dines. The Monsieur seldom goes with her since he is not often home and is, perhaps, too busy elsewhere.’

  ‘I’ll just go up and leave my card with her maid.’

  ‘It is as the monsieur pleases, but I will note this in my ledger, should madame wish to question me.’

  Verdammt, she was a cool one! A look down at her from the stairs revealed that same puzzled concern. ‘You do not take the lift?’ she asked and heard him say, ‘They’re like some of the people I have to deal with. I never trust them.’

  A shrug was given and, delighted by her, he knew she was exclaiming to herself that the Germans were crazy, but instead she said, ‘Well, of course, m’sieur, it’s the exercise. Always les Allemands are at it. Rowing on the river, in the most tragic of weathers. Swimming when full of champagne and where none are allowed to swim even if fully clothed and there is ice. But it’s as God has said. He is with them.’

  ‘Gott mit Uns, eh?’ he chuckled gently. It was written on every Wehrmacht belt buckle.

  ‘She will have gone to the salon de beauté first, monsieur, and then to the brasserie.’

  ‘It’s near the passerelle, isn’t it?’

  The iron footbridge that crossed over to the Île de la Cité. The Germans had ordered it thrown up in 1941 to replace the bridge that had been knocked down by a disgruntled barge in 1939.

  ‘Oui. The salon and brasserie are very close to each other and to it. First the one and then the other, the place of the Alsatian.’

  ‘And no ration tickets, eh?’

  ‘None. It is also as God wishes, is it not?’

  There was even the innocence of wonder in her deep brown eyes, but concierges seldom offered information and this one had.

  Kohler hated to spoil the fun but returned to face her as a Gestapo would. ‘Ihre Papiere, bitte, Frau …’

  ‘Jouvand. Jeanette-Noëlle, age forty-five.’

  Tonelessly she gave her address and position, et cetera, but it didn’t take him a minute to find what he wanted, and when he drew out the slim, bright red- and green-covered little book from under Paris-Soir, where she had hidden it, she shuddered.

  ‘Relax,’ he said in French. ‘Forget I ever saw it. Look, you’ve a nice coal fire in that furnace of yours. Why not go down to it and do us both a favour?’

  Dear God forgive her, thought Madame Jouvand, for being so stupid as to have accepted that little book in the street when it was passed to her.

  ‘Poésie et vérité,’ said Kohler. Poem and truth.

  Paul Éluard’s poems were Verboten but were being published and distributed by the Résistance.

  ‘I will do so immediately, monsieur.’

  ‘Bon. And now that we’re friends, I can ask you anything I want about Herr Schlacht and that wife of his, and you’ll be sure to answer without telling anyone else you did. Right?’

  Ah merde! ‘Yes. Yes, of course. It shall be as you wish.’

  The grainy photo in the dossier was of Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies in 1912. Staring blankly at the camera, the fifteen-year-old clutched the bundle of her clothes tightly to her chest, had just been showered and admitted, was still wet. The hair, worn no longer then than now, was parted in the middle and had been combed flat to cling behind her ears and drip. There wasn’t a frown, a tear – not one hint of anything.

  ‘Empty … her expression is exactly as it is as she looks at us now,’ said St-Cyr sadly. ‘It’s as if she can never forget.’

  Lemoine turned up a companion photo. ‘The father blamed her,’ he said. ‘A walking stick.’

  She’d been severely beaten. There were welts, bruises and inflamed cuts across her back, buttocks and thighs; rain after rain of blows. Her arms and shoulders had suffered. The calves, the ankles, the heels … ‘Is there no hope for her?’

  ‘There is always hope. Why else would we struggle?’

  From the wash-house, she had led them to the rue de la pâtisserie and then up staircase after staircase and through common wards which seemed to stretch on for ever.

  There were two tall French windows behind the heavy blackout curtains that hung in the centre of each of the outer walls, the corner room having lots of light during the day. The floor was of bare planks, except for a colourful carpet of woven rags. A rescued Louis XIV settee had lost all upholstery but that on the seat and needed repainting and regilding. A worm-eaten narrow table, with a mottled grey marble top, held the grey-stone bust of an unhappy saint; an armoire with mirrored doors, her clothing. A chipped, yellow-and-white-enamelled sink on feet, served both as private bath and basin.

  An unpainted, tin, hospital table-cum-bedside-cabinet held Bible, rosary, lamp, tin carafe of water and one tin cup. There were books with leather bindings but could she even read them for any length
of time and make sense of them? There were several Jumeau, Bru and Kaestner dolls with feathered chapeaux and long, flowing gowns of dark blue, emerald green, deep red and gold velvet. Silk and satin, too, with rings, necklaces, pins, bracelets and cameos. Dolls with rouged cheeks, painted lips and long dark or blonde lashes. Had she given them names?

  ‘My piano,’ she said, at last losing that blankness of expression and indicating the upright. ‘It whispers. It tells me it wants to be tuned, that its strings are hurting. Are you here to paint the room? You did once.’

  A metronome had been silenced long ago by the removal of its arm. There were thin stacks of frayed sheet music – waltzes, he supposed, and sonatas. There were cobwebs, too, and flaking varnish, split cabinet wood, and lifting or missing ivories to match the broken plaster of the walls where large gaps exposed the stones.

  ‘Her brother makes this possible,’ confided Lemoine, discreetly taking the dossier from him. ‘Humour her, Inspector. Sit down and tamper with the keys. She’ll soon pass on to other thoughts.’

  ‘The brother’s dead.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I meant what I said.’

  Lemoine heaved a contemplative sigh. ‘I felt you must have a good reason for coming. She’ll have heard us, by the way, and is very conscious of everything that goes on around her. How did it happen?’

  ‘Poison,’ she said to herself. ‘You will also be poisoned, Angèle-Marie. I won’t. I drank the roasted barley-and-acorn coffee they have to serve us in this place. I was a squirrel.’

  ‘Later … I’ll tell you later,’ confided St-Cyr.

  Clothing lay drying over a small wooden rack, but the room was damp and cold. She hung the dress with the other things and, finding a nightgown in the armoire, modestly turned her back to them and got ready for bed. Fought with the voices she heard; refused to respond to them; said earnestly, ‘I won’t! I mustn’t! Not now.’ And then, ‘He’s dead. I’m free and can no longer hate him. He hated you. He really did!’

  ‘Angèle-Marie, you know that’s simply not true,’ said Lemoine. ‘Your brother loved you. He’ll be sadly missed.’

  ‘His honey is sweet,’ she said and smiled and arched her eyebrows questioningly before again speaking to herself. ‘You tasted it, you little fool. I had to! I begged you not to, Angèle-Marie. He said I had to. He did. He really did! Poison … it was poison. Honey …’

  ‘Touch the damned keys, Inspector! Play something. Anything!’ whispered Lemoine urgently.

  The piano was not the euphonium that he had played in the police band and still practised when time allowed, which was never, thought St-Cyr, but he did know the keys and with effort, picked out Au Clair de la Lune.

  Entranced, Angèle-Marie sat down on the settee, then got up quickly to pull an all-but-threadbare Louis XIV armchair over to the piano. ‘Please,’ she said, and nodded at the keyboard. ‘Already it sounds better. As if it wants to be healed.’

  ‘Find out for me if she had any other visitors last Thursday,’ he sang out, the deep baritone of his voice delighting her.

  ‘She’ll not be fooled, Inspector. I warned you.’

  ‘Agreed. But please call downstairs to the desk. There is an intercom in each of the wards. Choose the closest.’

  ‘There is no need. She had a violent attack early on that afternoon. It took us ages to calm her down.’

  ‘An attack?’

  ‘The keys,’ pleaded Lemoine.

  ‘The keys,’ whispered Angèle-Marie.

  ‘Please double-check for me,’ sang out the Sûreté.

  Il Pleut Bergère – It’s Raining Shepherdess – followed and then, though the piano was desperately in need of tuning, St-Cyr thought he’d try Sur le Pont d’Avignon only to be reminded of Hermann and the agony of their last investigation and to strike up Les Beaux Messieurs.

  ‘He did bring me honey,’ she said earnestly and then, sharply, ‘He wasn’t supposed to, Angèle-Marie. I told you not to taste it. I did!’

  ‘Honey …?’ asked St-Cyr. Lemoine had left the room.

  She indicated he was to search for something and watched intently while he did. Five minutes passed, perhaps a few more. Baffled, he stood before her and the smile she gave was one of absolute delight.

  ‘The curtains,’ she whispered and nodded excitedly towards them. ‘Flowers. Stones. Undervest and drawers. Hands, Angèle-Marie. I warned you. Cheese!’

  Lying on the floor, and well hidden behind the black-out curtains, was a wooden honey-dipper. ‘Bees,’ she said. ‘You heard the bees, Angèle-Marie. They were in the walls. No they weren’t! Yes they were. Those were mice, idiot! Mice don’t live in solid stones. BEES, ANGÈLE-MARIE! BEES …’

  Ah Nom de Jèsus-Christ, what was happening to her?

  Lemoine tore back into the room. ‘Inspector, what the hell did you say to her?’

  The woman was on her knees by the bed holding her hands tightly over her ears and crying. The sound of bees was clearly all around her. From every wall, the floor and ceiling, too. Tearing her hair, she began to moan, to rock back and forth and then to shriek, ‘DON’T DO IT TO ME! PLEASE DON’T! I’M A GOOD GIRL. I’M NOT A QUEEN … A queen,’ she sobbed.

  Holding her tightly, Lemoine indicated the dipper and demanded to know how she had come by it.

  ‘The brother, apparently.’

  ‘Inspector, that’s impossible. He wouldn’t have, and in any case, I was certain we had taken that wretched thing from her in the concourse last Thursday. Angèle-Marie, I’m sorry but your visitor must leave immediately. Get out, Inspector. Out, damn you!’

  ‘No! No! But you want him to go, Angèle? He was going to poison you. Drink … I must not drink the liquid. You did! You did!’

  ‘What liquid?’ snapped the Sûreté. The woman sucked in a breath and glared at him through her tears.

  ‘A bottle of Amaretto. After we’d got her calmed down and thought she was well enough to see her brother, some fool must have momentarily set it near her during visiting hours.’

  ‘And did she drink from this bottle as she claims? Well, did she?’

  ‘The brother caught her doing so and, in a rage, took it away with him.’

  Nothing could have been wrong with it then, said St-Cyr to his other self when alone and out in the corridor. Only later could the poison have been added, but de Bonnevies, believing the liqueur was perfectly safe, had thought no more about it and must have tossed off a stiff shot – Dutch courage perhaps – only to then, in panic, blame his wife for having tampered with it. But for this to be so, he reasoned with his other self, the bottle must have been left alone in the study and Madame de Bonnevies must have had a chance to get at it. Honey … someone among the crowd of visitors on that afternoon had earlier given Angèle-Marie a taste of honey.

  De Bonnevies had gone to the brothel. That evening he had left the outer gate to the apiary unlocked and that to the garden also. He had an address he was to give to the Society, had settled on the names of the four who had violated his sister.

  ‘A woman …,’ he said, he and his other self churning things over. ‘The visit that evening would be difficult, hence the stiff shot from the bottle.’

  The French windows to the study and garden had been locked – madame had had to break the glass to get in, or had she simply lied? To hide what, then? he asked his other self and, after holding a breath, finally answered, ‘The identity of the visitor she knew only too well would come calling.

  ‘Frau Uma Schlacht.’

  5

  The flat at 28 quai d’Orléans had once been the property of a retired antiques dealer, felt Kohler. In the grand salon the floral trim of the panelling exuded that warm, soft glow of gilding that had been applied a good one hundred years ago. Portraits were of counts and countesses who had lived well before the Revolution. But in amongst this feast of ormolu, oil paint and Baccarat, of gilded, silk-covered Louis XIV and XV armchairs, were the bits and pieces of their new owners.

  ‘Madame
collects,’ quavered the bonne à tout faire timidly.

  The girl, a brunette of medium height in a neatly pressed uniform, was all of sixteen and still terrified of him. Mariette Durand, he reminded himself, so caught up in things he couldn’t yet quite comprehend them. ‘Porcelains from the 1920s,’ he went on. ‘Mein Gott, cheap figurines of bathing beauties.’

  Some naked, most not, they were everywhere, even on the mantelpiece against a gorgeous ormolu clock whose figurine depicted Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. They were between mounted Imari vases. Green, red, or navy-blue bathing suits on some of them, and all poised as if for a plunge, or simply lounging about on bits of coral, on red lobsters, or sunning themselves flat on the sand. Figurines from ten to fifteen centimetres in length. No chips, no cracks that he could see.

  ‘Madame swims,’ offered the girl, as if an explanation for such a strange passion was needed. ‘Every day she goes to the Lutétia pool.’

  One of the sweat-relieving havens of the Occupier. ‘Even when it’s open to others and not nur für Deutsche?’

  And only for Germans.‘Oui.She … she says it is good for the figure.’

  ‘And she’s conscious of that?’

  ‘Very.’

  One had best prise off the shoes – it was that kind of carpet. An exquisite white porcelain, Sevres damsel with harp sans clothes but with open cloak in a stiff breeze, caused him to pause. One arm was uplifted, that breast higher than the other; one foot placed back, the girl proudly dancing into the wind, while at the feet of this little goddess of perfection lay a Russian table whose marquetry would have made Louis’s Gabrielle green with envy. Yet here, too, there was a clutter of the flea-market gleanings of Frau Schlacht.

  ‘They … they help her to think of home,’ offered the girl.

  ‘And Herr Schlacht – are they here to help him think of her?’

  The girl sucked in a breath and fought for the correct words. ‘She … she hopes so. During the early twenties she was a bathing beauty. Her father ran a concession at Wannsee, one of the pleasure lakes and suburbs to the north of Berlin. Bier, Wurst und Schnitzel, with ices and soda drinks. That is where Herr Schlacht first met her.’