Beekeeper

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘The car’s just around the corner,’ Uma heard him say, and there was a coldness to his voice she well understood.

  ‘Then I will wait here until you bring it round, yes? That way I will not get snow on my shoes.’

  And not see where the car’s parked, thought Kohler grimly, since she’d already figured that out. She’d grill the two, was as swift as a fox and would make damned sure of it!

  With the falling snow there was a little more light, a little less darkness, and this light was suffused and it magnified the hush of the city.

  St-Cyr stood a moment in the centre of the place Mazas. Above the entrance to the morgue, a faint, blue-painted electric bulb glowed forlornly, but clear against the eastern sky, the dome of the Gare de Lyon raised its dark silhouette, reminding him of the restaurant and of the years gone by. The years … but there was no time to dwell on them.

  Had de Bonnevies gone to the restaurant-cum-warehouse at the Gare de Lyon and discovered the squashed honeycomb and mangled bees from Peyrane? Had he then informed the Kommandant von Gross-Paris of what was happening?

  Then why, having found a sympathetic ear, had he taken the suicidal step of planning to give an address that could only have raised the hackles of Old Shatter Hand and the rest of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, to say nothing of der Führer and all others of the Occupier? Their friends as well.

  And who had told von Schaumburg of the Russian beehives in Shed fourteen at the Gare de l’Est.

  Irritated by the constant need for haste, he stubbornly turned his back on the morgue and began to walk downriver towards the quai Henry IV. Suddenly he had to hear the river gurgling softly, had to know that it was still there and that the city … this city he loved so much, would survive the war, this terrible war.

  Hermann must have been delayed – why else would he not have returned to the Salpêtrière? They’d not eaten yet since Chez Rudi’s, hadn’t even had an evening’s decent apéritif or one of the frightful coloured waters that were so common and made with ersatz flavouring and saccharin.

  Frau Schlacht – had the woman proved difficult? he wondered and, suddenly needing the comfort of the river, hurried his steps.

  In 1697 the quai Henry IV had been the south bank of the Île Louviers, a small island. In 1790, the Ville de Paris had acquired ownership. In 1806 there had been a market for firewood on the island, but long before this duels had been fought here at dawn. In 1843 the channel between the island and the Right Bank had been filled in to make the quai. The Canal St Martin began here, too. And, yes, the city had its history, every place its past, its intrigue, its matters of state.

  ‘Monsieur, I will love you for ever tonight.’

  ‘I will spend a moment with you, the half or the hour,’ said another.

  ‘Or all of us could go somewhere warm with you, n’est-ce pas?’ said yet another. ‘And you … you could have the pleasure of the three of us, but for the price of one.’

  Kids … they were just school kids! Fourteen, if that! ‘Go home. You don’t, and I’ll have you arrested!’

  They said nothing. They simply strolled away, arm in arm, and he could see them clearly enough in their thin coats, no kerchiefs or hats tonight. No stockings either, probably, for stockings could not be had by most and beige paint was used instead.

  ‘I was desperate,’ cried out one from the safety of distance. ‘I begged.’

  ‘I needed to be warm,’ shrilled another.

  ‘Grigou!’ Cheapskate! ‘Trou de cul! ’ Asshole! ‘I hope when we next meet you are stretched out in that place on a slab!’

  ‘Gripped by your lover, eh? Another bum-fucker like yourself!’

  ‘Pédé! Salut, my fine monsieur. We’re going to find a flic and tell him you’re one of those. He’ll fix you. He’ll run you in and beat the shit out of you!’

  Merde, the young these days. No parental guidance, no soap either, with which to wash out their mouths! Prostitution was now such a problem, bilingual licences had even been issued to more than six thousand of those who regularly plied the streets but did not work in any of the one hundred and forty legalized brothels. At least this way they were forced into regular medical checkups. But syphilis was still rampant, gonorrhoea a plague, illegitimate births too many, though seldom spoken of until that day of retribution came as surely it would, although sadly for them.

  They’d have their heads shaved, these ‘submissive girls’, so, too, the ‘honest’ women who had found another, or others, among the Occupier while their husbands languished behind barbed wire or lay beneath the clay.

  The morgue was dimly lit. ‘St-Cyr, Sûreté, to view the corpse of Alexandre de Bonnevies of the Impasse de champ de parc de Charonne.’

  ‘They said you’d come.’

  It would be best to simply raise the eyebrows.

  ‘Monsieur le préfet, and the sous-préfet of the quartier Charonne,’ acknowledged the attendant.

  ‘Did they ask for Dr Tremblay, or tell you to wait and let me do the asking?’

  ‘Dr Arnaud has already performed the autopsy. The heart, the lungs, the liver, spleen and all the rest, including the stomach and its contents.’

  ‘Arnaud is a fool and careless, and is aware that I am fully cognizant of his failings. I want Tremblay. They know it and you will now get him here immediately!’

  ‘Tremblay. It shall be as you wish. I can only try.’

  ‘But first, mon ami, you will roll out the corpse and put it in a quiet place. I want no noise, no ears but those of the dead and my own, so please don’t get any smart-assed ideas, and forget all about what the préfet told you to do.’

  This one ‘talked’ to the dead. ‘Préfet Talbotte will be disappointed.’

  ‘Let him be. If he’s happy, there will only be trouble for others. Myself, yourself, who knows? So it is always best not to hear. Then … why then you can claim you know nothing and I will be certain you do and not come after you.’

  The sheet drawn fully back, St-Cyr let his gaze move slowly over the victim. If anything, the skin’s pale blackberry hue had increased. There was still rigor, still the smell of bitter almonds.

  De Bonnevies had been wounded three times in the Great War – shrapnel or machine-gun fire had torn a deep gouge across the left thigh. The bullet from a Mauser rifle, a sniper, perhaps, had hit him just below the right shoulder. It would have lifted him off his feet and thrown him back.

  Barbed wire and metal splinters had ripped their way across and into his chest, the wire probably whipping about as a result of exploding shells and de Bonnevies lucky not to have lost half his face and sight. Otherwise the corpse was what one would have expected of a fifty-eight-year-old who was tall, of medium build.

  Drawing the sheet back up to the chest, he said apologetically, ‘It can’t be pleasant for you to lie here like this, but there are things we have to discuss and it is best I get to know you as well as I can.’

  According to the wife, death had occurred between 8:30 and 10 p.m. Thursday, 28 January. It was now nearly 8 p.m. Saturday.

  ‘You were a man who loved his little sister, monsieur. You had made a tragic request of her in the summer of 1912, for which you have suffered ever since and now … why now, for all we yet know, this same request, and your desire to settle accounts at any price, may well have led to your death.

  ‘Madame de Bonnevies would certainly not have appreciated the news of Angèle-Marie’s anticipated visits and your plans to have her again living in the house. But did you tell her of them?’

  He would pause to walk back and forth a little, gesturing now and then, thought St-Cyr. ‘Knowing what we do so far of your relationship with your wife, monsieur, I have to doubt you confided in her. But if aware of the planned visits, and in despair, could she really have tried to poison you in the way that you so obviously thought? Would she have known enough about your beekeeping?

  ‘Bien sûr, it’s possible, but I have to say no. And if not to her, then to whom? You see, you had sha
ved. You had unlocked the outer gate and that of the garden. You must have been expecting a visitor, a woman. Frau Uma Schlacht, I believe.’

  Bending over the corpse, he examined the cheeks closely, the throat also, ignoring its crudely stitched incision and the stench.

  There were two small nicks on the left side of the neck, just under the jaw. ‘A straight razor was used, and you were a man who would not have used a dull one. Were you nervous?’ he asked.

  Water was dripping somewhere and he turned suddenly at its intrusion. The attendant, in a bloodstained smock, was standing in a far corner, beyond the rows of pallets. ‘Beat it,’ said the Sûreté. There was no need to shout. ‘Sounds echo here,’ he said apologetically to the corpse, and then again, ‘Were you nervous?’

  There was a scrape on the right side of the chin. ‘A lack of lather?’ he asked. ‘No hot water?’

  De Bonnevies had got dressed as if to go out to a meeting of the Society. ‘You were nervous, weren’t you,’ said St-Cyr, ‘and now I am quite sure of it.’

  Frau Schlacht, coming to the house, would most certainly have caused this, but had she really done so and why?

  It was an uncomfortable thought, but had he missed anything here?

  Pausing, he threaded his way among the Occupation’s fresh take of corpses and demanded the beekeeper’s clothing from the disgruntled attendant. A vacant pallet was sought, the Chief Inspector taking time out from his conversations with the dead to examine each item thoroughly.

  ‘I told you to leave me alone with him. I meant it,’ he said, not raising his voice.

  Sand had been used on the shirt collar during its laundering. Vichy advised its Occupation-weary citizens to do such a thing instead of lamenting the lack of laundry soap. The finer the better, and voilà, the sweat stains could be erased with a little patient scrubbing. A market had even developed for the stuff. ‘Clean, washed sand, Monsieur de Bonnevies but, I’m afraid, a shirt that was quickly laundered and not rinsed sufficiently.’

  Gently tapping the shirt collar over a slip of notepaper, he collected the sand. Had the daughter picked it up on one of her foraging trips? he wondered. ‘It’s not from around here,’ he said. ‘The local sand has tiny filings of iron which are rusty, if they’ve been in the river long enough and there was oxygen available. Grey or black otherwise, and with organic matter even after washing.’

  This sand was clean, very fine, and of white quartz with only a few grains of naturally occurring black magnetite and ruby-red garnet.

  And the girl had had freshly laundered undergarments in her suitcase of trade goods and these had been washed with the aid of the same sand.

  ‘Danielle has the perfect alibi,’ he muttered, still not looking up. ‘Not only was she not in the city, she simply couldn’t have poisoned you, and I’m convinced of this, so please don’t trouble yourself unduly.’

  And the son of that bitch my wife? the victim seemed to demand. What of Étienne, eh? Oflag 17A, mais certainement, but she was trying her utmost to secure his release.

  The son of another man, a former lover of Madame de Bonnevies who was still alive? wondered St-Cyr. They’d have to find out and get the man’s name.

  ‘Did you tell anyone about what the taste of honey would do to that sister of yours?’ he asked. ‘Someone knew only too well what would happen and made certain it did. They wanted the doctors to see her true state and to stop all this nonsense of your having her home.’

  Then that person must have been my wife, Inspector, the corpse seemed to answer, and continued: There was a crowd of at least two thousand visitors, people coming and going all the time. Juliette would have known the approximate time of my visit and could have been there earlier.

  A small jar of honey, a wooden dipper, a gift and gone. Damage done and message certain.

  ‘But … but your sister said it was a man who had given her the honey, monsieur,’ said St-Cyr, ‘and I have to ask could the same person have left the Amaretto?’

  He seemed to smile, this victim of theirs, to take academic delight in the dilemma, and say, Inspector, pardonnez-moi, but have you forgotten the list you took from my pocket?

  ‘Ah bon! Merci. But at the time I found it, I asked myself why should anyone you were to visit on the following day have felt a need to poison you, and I ask it again?’

  There was no answer.

  Searching his pockets, the Chief Inspector at last found what he was looking for. Unfolding a scrap of paper, he stood a moment in silence as he studied it beside the corpse. Then he said quietly, and without turning or looking up, ‘We’ve a visitor again. Merde, the nerve! I knew his father well. M. Victor Deschamps, but so often a son fails to please or live up to the aspirations of a parent. Piss off, mon ami, before I personally wipe the floor with you!’

  Had he eyes in the back of his head? wondered Deschamps.

  ‘I have!’ shouted the Sûreté.

  There were four names on the list de Bonnevies had planned to visit on Friday. No further details were given but, laying the list on the shroud, he found the victim’s little ledger and soon had paired addresses with all of them.

  After the General von Schaumburg, the beekeeper had intended to visit the long-standing keeper of one of his out-apiaries. Madame Roulleau was the concierge of the building at 14 rue d’Argenteuil, in the first arrondissement and not far from place Vendôme and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré where Madame de Bonnevies’s father had once had a shop, and where the beekeeper’s father had been head clerk. A person, then, who quite possibly might have known the victim from years and years ago.

  The third name on the list was that of a Captain Henri-Alphonse Vallée, the visit to deliver a small bottle of pollen and a little honey, ‘for the energy of an old and much-valued comrade in arms, and for wise counsel on all difficult matters.’

  The address was 2 place des Vosges and not too far from the morgue, if time allowed. A vélo-taxi … would one be possible? he wondered.

  The fourth name was that of a Jean-Claude Leroux. No reason was given for the visit, simply the address: 53 rue Froidevaux. It was in the Fourteenth and overlooking the Cimetiére du Montparnasse.

  ‘From one cemetery to another,’ he muttered. ‘Is this the one who visits Le chat qui crie on Sunday nights once a month and takes only Charlotte who is eighteen?’

  The corpse did not reply but seemed to silently return his gaze.

  Not waiting for Herr Kohler to open the gate for her in the convenient absence of the concierge, Uma did so herself and stepped into the lift at 28 quai d’Orléans. She’d fix this one from the Kripo; she’d deal with the girl and, afterwards, with that bitch who managed the building. She’d show the two of them that they couldn’t talk about an employer behind her back and think to get away with it. The girl would be on the train first thing tomorrow – straight to Dachau; the woman to one of the camps in the east.

  Reluctantly Kohler followed her into the elevator. One had always to make these little sacrifices. But Gott im Himmel, what the hell was he to do? She’d accuse her maid of being one of the terrorists and it would be game over. Oona’s and Giselle’s names and the address of the flat he rented would come up – the kid would have to spit them out; that of the Club Mirage also, and Gabrielle. Water … would the boys down in the cellars of the rue des Saussaies use the torture of the bathtub on the kid? Of course they would. They’d strip her naked just for the fun of it.

  He’s afraid, this Schweinebulle, snorted Uma inwardly. In a moment he will be on his knees begging me to forget all about his disturbing a quiet meal after first having questioned my maid and that other one.

  ‘Oskar is clean, mein Herr. I really can tell you nothing.’

  The woman had reached the door to her flat. Unlocking it, she entered and shouted angrily, ‘Mariette …’

  ‘Oui, Madame,’ sang out the kid, from somewhere.

  ‘Komm’ hier!’

  ‘Oui, Madame.’

  The kid still hadn’t appear
ed, but the woman went on in a rage, ‘Tell the Detektiv Kohler you were with me at the pool on Thursday afternoon. Stop him thinking otherwise, then repeat for me exactly what you said to him when he was here earlier.’

  ‘Oui, Madame, mats qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?’ But what’s happened? ‘I know of no detective, Madame,’ she said in German.

  Sacré nom de nom! swore Kohler silently. The kid had icing sugar smeared on her chin and lips. Frau Schlacht had seen it …

  ‘Hure, how many this time?’ shrilled the woman. ‘Bitte, you little Schlampe!’

  Brutally pushing the girl aside, she headed for the bedroom and when she had the box of Turkish delights in hand, raced her eyes over it. ‘Three!’ she shouted, stung by their absence.

  ‘Madame …’

  Violently the box was thrown at Mariette, the kid slapped hard and hard again.

  Bleeding from the lips, she fell backwards on to the rug, winced, cringed as a hard-toed shoe drove itself into her stomach.

  ‘Enough! Verdammt! They’re only candies, Frau Schlacht!’

  ‘And she has stolen three of them! Arrest her. Do it, or I will call in others who will!’

  The woman was livid. One had best not grin. ‘Now look,’ he said, ‘I’ve accepted your word that she was with you all afternoon on Thursday and probably throughout the evening. Isn’t that right, mademoiselle?’ he asked in French.

  Badly shaken, the girl hurriedly nodded then bowed her head and shut her eyes. Tears were squeezed.

  ‘There, you see, meine gute Frau,’ said Kohler. ‘The perfect alibi. Why not give her another chance?’ And grâce à Dieu for a kid who had the brains and guts to think ahead and take the rap herself to protect the concierge and hide the fact he’d been here earlier.

  ‘A week’s wages. No, two, and no half-days off for a month!’ snapped the woman.

  ‘Gut! That’s perfect. Now everyone’s happy.’

  The girl was told to leave them and dutifully curtsied before doing so. Frau Schlacht led the way into the grand salon but didn’t suggest they sit.