Beekeeper

by J. Robert Janes

  The ashtrays were clean. Sash cord for tying up the willing and unwilling had been neatly coiled, a gag laid out, a blindfold …

  In a drawer, beneath heaps of lingerie, were boxes of Wehrmacht regulation-issue condoms, jars of petroleum jelly, rolls of surgical tape any hospital in the city would have been glad of, since they had none or very little. ‘Even godemkhés, Louis!’ Dildos. ‘Look, I know our Bonze wasn’t having it off tonight, or watching through some peephole as others went at it, but what I want to know is why the hell did that kid see fit to lay on a raid?’

  Hermann was really worried and had best be calmed. ‘To get at the truth of the missing sketches. To see for herself the room where her mother had been forced to prostitute herself and perhaps even offer up her daughter in hope of freeing her son.’

  ‘Whom Danielle believed had returned, but then discovered after writing the last of her notes, that he couldn’t have.’

  ‘She didn’t want us knowing this, Hermann, until she had done what she felt she had to.’

  ‘Which was to give that lecture and then poison herself. Louis, Oona may be in the cells at the rue des Saussaies with the rest of those who were carted away from here.’

  ‘Or Herr Schlacht has now had time to free her and has taken her with him.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The candles.’

  ‘What about them? Danielle …’

  ‘Though she has denied knowing the whereabouts of the factory, she has patiently discovered everything else.’

  ‘And will now try to put an end to our Bonze and everything he’s been doing.’

  Goods trains shunted in the freight yards, which Kohler knew were just to the east and along the rue des Poissonniers. In the maintenance sheds and yards of the Omnibus Depot across from him and off the north side of the rue Championnet, the racket of misfiring autobuses aux gazogene mingled with that of the others to break the cold, hard darkness, as vélos and their earnest riders hurried to work through the ink of what had, before the Defeat of 1940, been 4:45 a.m. A light snow fell to dampen the rank air from the distillation units which used charcoal to produce the mixture of methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen that, when burned in the cylinders, powered the buses. A lorry parted the stream of bicycle riders; a bus followed, honking furiously.

  Louis was to enter the candle factory by another route. He would negotiate the inevitable passages and, on the way, try to find where the girl had hidden her bike. Just precisely what she planned, they didn’t know yet, but would have to stop her. They couldn’t have her trying to kill Schlacht, couldn’t have her causing trouble here and alerting von Schaumburg and the rest of the OKW to the iniquities of the Palais d’Eiffel any more than she already had, couldn’t have her infuriating Oberg.

  When a lorry turned in at a courtyard whose entrance had been meant for horse-drawn carriages and wagons, its driver violently cursed and finally, at a lumbering crawl, managed to squeeze it through.

  One cylinder wasn’t firing, another missed a beat, so the banging and clattering was intermittent, but it wasn’t wise to switch these things off when the engine was warming up and would soon fire on all cylinders, albeit at three-quarters the power, or less, of a gasoline-fired engine.

  Words erupted with the argot – the slang of the quartier. Wax was to be unloaded; candles taken to the Gare de l’Est for shipment to the Reich. Another lorry soon negotiated the entrance, and now the racket of the two of them filled the courtyard and rose up the slot of it to escape into the night sky some four or five storeys above him.

  Vacated most probably in the early days of the Great Depression, the building had, no doubt, been cheap and available, and with all the room for expansion Schlacht could possibly have wanted. But it had one big drawback, thought Kohler grimly. There would be far too many places for that kid to hide.

  The day shift of fifteen souls began to filter in, their female voices muffled under the constant drone. Kohler thought to join them, but knew he’d stand out as they lined up to punch in at the time clock.

  Hacking coughs, sneezes, constant bitching, two teenaged girls discussing a film, a car …

  Schlacht’s Renault drew slowly into the courtyard behind the lorries. Out tumbled Frau Hillebrand and the others, along with Oona and Giselle. A full house. Not only had he been up all night, he’d been to the lock-up in the cellars of the rue des Saussaies, and also that of Charonne’s Commissariat de Police.

  Soft on the violent air came the sweet scent of beeswax to indicate that after Sunday’s lay-off, the foreman and his assistants had come in at midnight probably to get the wax melted and everything ready for the day’s production.

  Soon the clanking of ancient machinery was added to the sound of the gazogènes.

  The passage was as dark as pitch and no more than two metres in width, felt St-Cyr, not liking what he’d come upon. It ran the length of the rear of the building and separated it from one of the tenements the Société Anonyme des Logements à Bon Marché had put up years ago out of concrete blocks to house, at low rents, the then increasing waves of immigrants from North Africa. But now this latter building would be all but empty. Blacks, Arabs and other non-whites had been forbidden re-entry to the Occupied Zone after the Defeat and had had to stay in the south, to where they had fled along with so many others. Those who had remained in Paris would be exceedingly careful about where and when they went out, for anyone of colour was suspect and likely to be stopped in the street and, if not vouched for by an employer, then taken for forced labour‥

  Makeshift doorways had consequently been cut into this wall, and inside one of them, he found the girl’s bike. The rucksack was open, the gun gone. When barred windows and locked doors prevented entrance to the factory, he found the fire escape and went up it just as Danielle must have done. A broken window gave access to an even deeper darkness through which the distant sounds of slowly moving machinery came.

  Pausing to feel the gap where the lift doors should have been, he found, instead, an emptiness that sickened. When someone stepped on broken glass, he hissed urgently, ‘Mademoiselle, it is Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté. Please give yourself up.’

  She made no further sound, and after a while he told himself that she had left him. Her half-brother was dead, her father dead, her life in ruins. With nowhere else to run to, she had come here to do what she felt had to be done. But had she caused her father’s death? he asked himself as he blindly searched for the staircase. Had she returned to the house on Thursday to find that bottle on his desk?

  The beekeeper would have turned Étienne in and had been very vocal about it. Had he written a letter of condemnation to the Kommandant of Oflag 17A and told her of it? She’d given no hint of this but must have known Frau Schlacht would come to the study on that evening to collect the bottle. Yet much of what Danielle had done and said since they had first met in the garden seemed to indicate she had been terribly afraid the half-brother had committed the killing. Father Michel had sensed this and had believed firmly for some time that the boy had indeed returned.

  A set of keys. Those from the studio? he wondered, dreading the possibility, for Frau Hillebrand and Honoré de Saussine had each known the whereabouts of the poison, as had Herr Schlacht who had had, by far, the most to lose.

  Pneumonia … At least it wasn’t the ‘cardiac arrest’ the Gestapo were so fond of using, but had the boy been shot? Had the beekeeper, knowing that Juliette would stop at nothing, finally written to the Kommandant of Oflag 17A, denouncing his stepson?

  They would probably never know, and certainly the mother, not having been informed of the boy’s death, had had reasons of her own for adding the poison.

  When he found the staircase, it descended to a landing where there was light, and as he looked up, St-Cyr saw that the building was in two parts, with a forward hoist bay that extended to the roof above, and rearward offices and storerooms. Down below him, where once electrical generators had been assembled, horizontally
mounted, cast-iron wheels, a good two metres in diameter and positioned some three metres above the floor, had candle hoops hanging from them at regular intervals. Each hoop had been vertically strung with an outer and inner cage of wicks, and as each wheel advanced, and each cage came round, an operator pulled down on a lever to lower it into a vat of liquid wax. Dripping, the hoop’s cage was then lifted to cool and set, while successive others were dipped, a candle and cage taking some forty or fifty passes before being completed. Each outer cage held perhaps thirty candles, each inner one, perhaps twenty, and there were sixteen of the hoops suspended from each of five separate wheels.

  More rectangular cages and vats held the larger church candles, the cierges without which the Mass would not seem the same. But short, squat, votive candles were also being made – cast in water-jacketed tables that held perhaps thirty dozen at a time and whose piston arrangement pushed the finished candles out and automatically cut off the wicks which were fed from below and through the pistons. For this operation the wax was being melted in galvanized iron drums that stood atop gantries at one end of the tables. There were lighted gas rings under them, and each drum was equipped with a spigot which, when opened, would let the molten wax run down a trough before spreading out to flood and fill the moulds.

  Elsewhere, machines braided cotton threads into wicks of various sizes, while others inserted wicks into candles that had been cast without them. Of the fifteen or so females who operated the machines, sorted, polished and packed candles, only two were white and not of North African descent. The foreman, his assistants and two others, all of whom were busy unloading lard pails of wax and honey, were Caucasian.

  Behind the windows of an office on the far side of the working floor, Schlacht was clearly in a rage. Frau Hillebrand stood next to him, irritably smoking a cigarette, while Juliette de Bonnevies sat beside Father Michel and Honoré de Saussine was with Oona and Giselle.

  There was no sign of Hermann.

  The Senegalese was tall and thin, and when he came upon her suddenly in the room where the wax was being separated from the honey in a press, Kohler touched a finger to his lips.

  Startled, confused, she didn’t know what to do. Should she cry out a warning; should she remain silent? she wondered.

  He threw an anxious glance over his shoulder towards the door through which he’d come, this giant who was even taller than herself. Everything about him smelled of fear and yet … and yet …

  Her dark eyes settled on him. ‘You’re from the police, but are afraid,’ she said.

  An observant woman. The jet-black hair was all but hidden under a tightly knotted kerchief. ‘Visitors,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Miliciens from the quartier du Mail et de Bonne-Nouvelle. Old friends your boss has called in for a little more help.’ And nom de Jésus Christ, why had it to be this way?

  They had arrived in a hurry in two cars and had parked these across the entrance to the courtyard, thus sealing it. ‘They’ll soon be after a girl,’ he said sadly, only to hear the woman anxiously ask, ‘Which one?’

  ‘Not one of yours.’

  ‘What’s she done?’

  ‘It’s not what she’s done but what she intends to do.’

  Once separated from the honey, the wax was cleaned by placing it in flour sacks which were submerged in boiling water – the woman used a stout stick to prod these. ‘As the wax melts,’ she said, ‘it passes through the sacks and leaves behind the …’

  ‘Ach, I know all about it. The unwanted bits of bee carapaces, et cetera. The wax rises to the surface of the water and you skim it off. No problem, madame, except that there are lots of extra sacks on that washing line of yours and some of them are missing from the end next to that door I came through.’

  ‘Missing …?’

  ‘Four, I think.’ Soaked through with residual wax, and then dried, as they now must be, any of them would make an ideal wick, but all the kid really had to do to set fire to the place was to turn up the gas rings under the drums that fed the votive candles. Wax should never be boiled or allowed to get too hot, because if it reached its flash point, it would rapidly expand to vapour and ignite with a deafening bang.

  ‘Pass the word, will you? Tell the others you’d best go on strike and leave the building while you can.’

  Louis … he’d better find Louis. ‘Go on, damn it. Hurry!’

  Seen from above, there were seven miliciens and as they poured from the office, St-Cyr watched Juliette de Bonnevies press herself against the windows to cry out, ‘Danielle …,’ though he could not hear her. Each of the miliciens carried a lead-weighted, black-leather truncheon which they now used to herd the shrieking workers into a corner, refusing to let them leave. They knocked things over in their haste. The iron wheels continued to turn; the pistons to spit out the votive candles. The two white girls were joined by another who called out, ‘The burners, messieurs. I must shut them off!’

  They let her go and, from high above the working floor, he watched as she went to the gantried drums. She wore a kerchief, a block-printed smock, and wax-covered, charred asbestos gauntlets, showed no fear or uncertainty, knew exactly what she would have to do.

  Some of the miliciens, still not realizing who it was, began to search for her and went up the stairs. She gave them time, called out firmly, ‘ Un moment,’ when yelled at to join the others, then, having turned up the burners and flung off the gauntlets, pulled the Lebel from under her waistband.

  Firing only once, Danielle put a hole in one of the drums and let a stream of molten wax pour out over the floor.

  ‘Mademoiselle!’ called out St-Cyr. ‘Mademoiselle, you mustn’t do this! We know your brother couldn’t have come home.’

  Against the thud and clank of meshing gears, the sound of his voice echoed.

  ‘I must!’ she cried. ‘Herr Schlacht had my brother killed!’

  Killed … Killed …

  ‘No he didn’t! If anyone, it was your father.’

  ‘Papa …? But … but how could this be, please?’

  ‘By writing to the Kommandant of Oflag 17A.’

  ‘Ah no. Maman, is this true?’

  Someone must have switched off the machines, for the wheels and gears soon ground to silence.

  Allowed to leave the office, the mother walked out on to the floor, was pale and badly shaken. ‘Is Étienne dead, chérie?’ she quavered.

  ‘Maman, I thought he was alive and had come home to us. I thought he was staying at the studio but …’

  ‘But couldn’t have?’ asked Juliette.

  ‘He wasn’t there, maman, and only later did I find what had happened to him. I … STAY WHERE YOU ARE! DON’T MOVE!’ she shrieked at miliciens who had been tempted to close in on her. ‘THIS PLACE IS FINISHED, MESSIEURS. I DO IT FOR THE BEES OF RUSSIA AND FRANCE!’

  ‘Danielle, you mustn’t! You’re not a murderer. Some may be killed, others badly burned.’

  ‘Maman, did papa write such a letter?’

  Letter … Letter …

  ‘He … he threatened to, yes. He … he even showed it to me. To me!’

  ‘And did you know Herr Schlacht had been to the studio?’

  The studio … The studio …

  ‘Chérie, listen, please. I could not have stopped him. He …’

  ‘You knew he wanted to rape me, maman! Me!’

  Some of the wax from the hole was flooding down the side of the drum. It was only moments away from curling under to the burner. The burner …

  ‘The other drum, Louis. The kid was going to come up here and, after torching these, throw them down, but must have felt they wouldn’t work.’

  There were flour sacks in Hermann’s hands. ‘Do I shoot the daughter?’ asked St-Cyr.

  ‘You’re the diplomat. Try that first and buy me a little time. Oona and Giselle are still in that office with our Bonze.’

  ‘Madame de Bonnevies,’ called out St-Cyr. ‘If my partner and I can negotiate a reprieve for your daughter, would that not be best? The
two of you to Spain, perhaps, with sufficient funds to make a new start.’

  Juliette looked questioningly at Schlacht as he came out of the office with Frau Hillebrand; she looked at Danielle. ‘Spain, chérie, and a chance to leave it all behind. Is it possible?’

  ‘THE INSPECTOR IS LYING!’ shrilled Danielle. The fountain of wax was still pouring on the floor; she still had the revolver and would use it if necessary …

  ‘We’ll die together, is this what you want?’ asked Juliette. ‘I felt certain Étienne wasn’t coming home, Danielle. I had only to look at those sketches that Herr Schlacht had taken from the studio to remind and taunt me, and I knew that something terrible must have happened and would also happen to you. I did not know what to do. Should I add the poison and hope Frau Schlacht’s husband would drink it, should I not do so? And all the while I was so worried about Étienne.’

  ‘Pneumonia.’

  ‘Don’t cry. Turn off the burners. You’ve done what you really had to do. You’ve made me see how much my silence has hurt you.’

  ‘HERR SCHLACHT,’ called out Louis. ‘WILL YOU AGREE TO GET THEM AUSWEISE AND LET THEM ACCOMPANY MADAME VAN DER LYNN TO SPAIN?’

  TO SPAIN … TO SPAIN …

  Kohler had reached the working floor and would now, thought Schlacht, begin to make his way up behind the two of them. He hadn’t yet drawn his gun, so must be planning to grab the revolver and switch off the burners. But the drums were separated by a good three metres, and while the one began to boil and clouds of heavy white vapour poured from it, the other continued to piss its stream.

  ‘Oskar, agree! You have to,’ hissed Käthe. ‘If you don’t, and this place goes up, it really will be the end of the Palais d’Eiffel.’

  ‘Those two to Spain. The Van der Lynn woman stays in Paris,’ called out Schlacht. Father Michel crossed himself; Honoré de Saussine began to slip away, but was held back by Frau Hillebrand.

  ‘Dieu merci,’ said Louis as the girl handed the revolver to her mother and crouched to switch off the gas ring under the leaking drum, then turned off the other one.