‘That is exactly what I’m afraid of! The small cigar, Hermann. This … this one left deliberately at the scene.’
‘As a reminder?’
‘But of course.’
‘Then take my advice, Louis. Let’s say it was a hunting accident. Let’s find the village idiot and nail him with it.’
This from a former Munich detective, to say nothing of Berlin! ‘So, Hermann, ask our friend who told him to meet us at the station.’
‘He’s gone, Louis. Fratani’s buggered off.’
‘Nom de Jésus-Christ! I leave you to do the necessary while I attend to business and you … you …’
‘Easy, Louis. Easy, eh? Why not tell me what’s upset you?’
‘A feeling. The breath of memory, Hermann. An uneasiness I have not experienced since the first week of January 1934.’
St-Cyr tugged at something in the woman’s right hand and when he had it free, let out a gasp, then lifted brimming eyes to the lantern.
Kohler brought the light closer. ‘The mont-de-piété in Bayonne, Hermann. The municipal pawnshop and the same damned one as in 1934!’
He turned aside, and for a cop with a gut of iron, proceeded to vomit and then to urinate in his trousers, both at the same time or in between.
Kohler sat him up and held the brandy to his lips, and when he’d had another pull at it, St-Cyr waved the flask away. ‘Care to tell me about it?’ asked the Bavarian. ‘Just so that I know exactly what to expect.’
Those troubled eyes ducked furtively away to the body. ‘That is just it, Hermann. With him – if it really is him – we will never be sure of what to expect.’
‘Then you watch my back, I’ll watch yours. Let’s stick together like glue, Louis. That’ll fix him.’
‘The Deuxième Bureau, Hermann? State security? Even in a nation crippled by the Occupation, security must come before all else, especially murder.’
Louis really was quite ill. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t work for them any more.’
‘Perhaps, but then … then this one will. Once the dye has taken, the skin cannot be changed.’
‘Then come on, let’s see what’s up the hill. This one will keep for a while.’
The house on the hillside had but one room, a single lantern hanging from the ceiling over the table, a loft for sleeping in warmer weather, and the fetid stirrings of the animals below.
As Kohler shut the heavy door behind them, the sound of the wind dropped a little but the shrieking voice carried on – dementedly shrill in terror, the girl tossing on the only bed, roped to it – while the old woman sat with her back to a roaring fire and the wind … the wind outside laid its file over everything.
Blood gushed down the woman’s pudgy hands as she turned the grinder and vigorously stuffed goose livers into it. Heaps of kidneys, a slab of fatty bacon, some larded ribs of pork and the skinned carcasses of four rabbits glistened on the chequered table-cloth before her.
There was a butcher’s knife, a cleaver – blood smeared everywhere – and a bowl of freshly washed intestines, grey-white and flaccid in their coils. Herbs and spices and black olives. Oil too, and salt. A rope of garlic, two of dried peppers and a mound of peeled onions.
‘She’s making sausage, Louis,’ whispered Kohler.
‘And pâté. Merde, can I not see this myself? The girl, Hermann. What in God’s name is wrong with her?’
‘Epilepsy.’
‘A fit?’
‘What else would you call it?’
The ropes about the ankles and wrists were feverishly strained at, the shrieking again became a shrill, hair-raising cry for penance perhaps or for the torture to end.
Quivering, the spasm passed, and from where they still stood at the door, they could hear the ragged breathing lapse into a fitful caution.
The woman merely continued to grind things, and the fire that raged, threw her rounded shadow on the wall beside them and on the beams in the ceiling too.
‘Madame …?’ began St-Cyr only to see her suddenly stop and reach for the cleaver.
‘Georges?’ she asked. ‘Is that not you?’
‘Blind … Goddamnit, Louis, she can’t see us.’
‘But I can hear you, mes amis. So, please, what is it you want of me? You are not from around here. This I already know.’
‘A moment of your time, madame. Please do not be afraid …’
‘Afraid? Why should I be afraid?’
She was perhaps seventy. It was always so hard to tell with country people. Round of face and shoulder, chin, cheeks and nose, she had the gaze of the blind all right, the high colour of the wind and sun and the ample bosom of the hills.
Wisps of silky grey hair were matted to the brow with blood or stuck out from beneath the simple kerchief.
‘Madame, the girl …?’ began St-Cyr with genuine concern.
‘That one? Have you really come from the asylum in Chamonix as promised?’
‘No … Ah, no, madame. We have come from Paris about the … the …’
‘The taxes?’
‘Ah no, madame. Not the taxes.’
‘The schooling for my grandson – my only grandson? Look, messieurs, the husband he is dead, isn’t that so? I am the widow, yes? The boy he is needed around the farm. Reading can do him no good if he cannot eat.’
‘Then he was not at school on Wednesday?’ hazarded Kohler.
The cleaver was lowered in defeat perhaps. ‘No … no, he did not go to school then, monsieur. Wednesdays are not days for the schooling. Is it that you did not know of this perhaps?’
Kohler flung Louis a questioning look, only to see the Frog shrug and hear him say, ‘I would have told you sooner or later, eh? Go and have a look at the girl. Leave this one to me.’ Merde! Les Provençaux could be so difficult! Suspicion always, particularly towards outsiders, but she had spoken in French, albeit with the harsh accent, so that was something.
‘The woman, madame. The body?’ he ventured, watching her closely.
She stiffened. ‘What body? There is no body. I am not going to my Maker just yet, monsieur, not when I have such a …’ Ah no, why had she let it slip?
‘Such a duty, madame?’ offered the Sûreté’s detective.
‘Yes … yes, a duty to that one.’
The girl.
Kohler found the patient’s watchful gaze electric. Every particle of the girl was set to strike out at him if she could. Spittle foamed from between her clenched teeth, the lips were drawn cruelly back, the breath coming in short spasms, hatred everywhere.
He reached out to soothe the dampened brow. She jerked her head back and savagely bit him!
‘Ah … you slut!’ he shrieked. ‘Let go of me! Louis … Louis … The bitch …!’
St-Cyr pried the jaws apart and the girl spat in his face!
‘Verdammt!’ bellowed Kohler, sucking on the bloodied ham of his right thumb. ‘I was trying to be kind, Louis.’
‘You need a mirror, my friend. That scar … the thing that rawhide whip bestowed upon your left cheek, eh? The stitch-marks are still red.’
‘Shit! Her teeth are sharp. I’ll get epilepsy, Louis. Human bites … one can’t be too careful. They’re always the worst!’
The Gestapo’s detective had meant it too. Always the Germans were so afraid of catching some French disease. St-Cyr shook his head to chide his partner, and taking up a wash-cloth from a nearby chair, squeezed water over the thumb.
As the girl watched closely, her breasts pushed at the rough cotton nightgown and her slender throat constricted. She was about twenty-four years of age and thin, had the high cheekbones of the aristocracy, the fierce dark eyes of the Midi and the hair to match. Was really quite beautiful were her state of health and condition not so utterly deplorable.
Kohler wrapped his thumb in the rag. Immediately the girl yanked her eyes from Louis to focus fiercely on it. Again the breasts shoved at the nightgown. Again there was that watchful look of hatred whose intensity both shocked and troubled.
Blood was smeared on her neck and collar-bones, and where the old woman had tried to jam a stick between those white, white teeth, there was more of it on the chin and on the pillow-slip and sheets.
Together, St-Cyr plucking at Hermann’s coat-sleeve, they withdrew. The old woman was again stuffing goose livers into the grinder. ‘Nothing stops for long in these hills, Hermann,’ said St-Cyr ruefully. ‘It can’t, for to do so is to die.’
‘Then ask her if the one in the bed is related to the one with the bolt in her chest.’
‘You’re learning. Ah Mon Dieu, my old one, the lessons I have been so patiently imparting to you are at last beginning to sink in.’
‘Gott im Himmel, you dummkopf, did you think these people were any different from the ones back home in Bavaria? Just give me five with that old girl, Louis, and she’ll have her hand in that grinder or else!’
Hermann did have a way with him when upset, but now was not the time for it.
‘Go and warm yourself by her fire. See if you can’t figure out how it is that in such a place like this, there are not one or two thin sticks on the hearth as there should be, but sufficient logs for the whole winter!’
‘The victim?’ asked Kohler, tossing his head to indicate the general direction of the body. ‘The victim’s been paying them to look after the girl.’
Ah Nom de Dieu, sometimes the Bavarians were so slow-witted! ‘Precisely, my old one. Precisely. You really are learning.’
‘Then ask her where son Georges and the grandson Bébert are.’
‘I already have – silently, eh? They are with the Abbé Roussel and our hearse-driver, deep in conference, no doubt, and forgetting their illegal vin ordinaire. Look, why not go up the hill a little farther, Hermann? Make of it what you will and me, I shall join you presently.’
‘You’d better. I’ve got a stone in my shoe and a nail in my thumb – i.e. my patience is sorely tried!’
Hermann always had to have the last word and, at times like this, it was best to let him have it.
When the door had closed, St-Cyr went back to the girl. Taking up another bit of rag, he wrung it out before placing it on her brow. ‘Now, now, mademoiselle, I am not going to hurt you, eh? From me you have nothing to fear.’
The eyes began to close. The lids fitfully struggled to remain open, once, twice – three times … Ah, Mon Dieu, such force of will, such terror of the defencelessness of sleep.
In exhaustion, the patient slept the sleep of the damned. St-Cyr stood there a moment more. Unbidden, the image of himself as a cinematographer came and he let the cameras roll, wished only that he could pull back the covers. A ballet dancer? he asked. A mannequin – she had every aspect of either, every suggestion. Not a hint of perfume, only the sour odour of the very ill.
A fine gold chain, the equivalent of three or four interwoven hairs, had slipped from beneath the pillow during the fit.
Cautiously he teased it away and when he had the small, heart-shaped locket in hand, he turned to see the old woman holding her breath. Ah now, what was this, eh?
The photograph within the locket was of two curly-headed girls of perhaps ten or twelve in happier times. Twins, ah yes. Identical.
Merde, what had they got themselves into this time? Some heart-rending family feud? Why … why in God’s name had the mother kept the one daughter here like this, and the other … where? Where was the other one?
And why had the mother – if indeed she was the mother – been killed in any way, let alone in such a fashion? And why … Dear God, why did she have to have a pawn ticket from Bayonne in her fist? It could have been from anywhere else, couldn’t it?
As carefully as he could, he slid the locket back but found the girl’s cheek soon came in contact with his hand. She wouldn’t let him leave – he realized this readily enough, knew only by the contented, childlike sigh she gave that deep in sleep, the touch of him had instantly made her happy.
It was the old woman who said, ‘Now come away, monsieur, and I will tell you what I can because I must.’
‘Are you really blind?’ he asked.
‘Is it so hard for you to tell?’
‘Madame, you humble me.’
‘Then understand, monsieur, that I have been blind for over sixty years but that this has never prevented me from seeing what I have to. Your friend will get nothing out of the abbé. Nothing! That one has the lips of wax.’
The dead …? Ah Mon Dieu, not another murder so soon? ‘Will it be safe for Hermann up in the village, madame?’
‘On a night such as this? Perhaps if … if the other one has gone.’
‘What other one?’
‘The one who came to see the body first. The one who came from Bayonne.’
*
Kohler knew it wasn’t safe. His was the only light in the village. Once past the rampart gate, an ugly warren of narrow lanes and shuttered or iron-grilled windows swallowed him. Winding flights of stone steps led up and off to unseen streets – did they name them? Were they even worth naming?
The wind was like Christ after a sinner. It drove its fist into every bone, found every crevice – roared along the narrow lanes, rattling the shutters and tearing away the little bits of flaking mortar the ages had left.
A tile flew off someone’s roof and, falling the two or three storeys, hit the cobbles to fly into pieces. Another followed and then another. A boulder too – one of the slabs that had been used to secure the tiles.
His back to a wall in panic, he heard the boulder rumble and bounce away. A door was flung open. A light shone out and with it came a guttural burst of Provençal he could not translate but understood well enough.
A ladder followed the enraged owner of the lantern. The wind sucked at it and at the light, at the waxed handlebar moustache. ‘Alphonse … Alphonse, hurry! Hurry!’
Kohler darted across the lane and, using the wall as cover from the wind, fought his way up to the ladder, thus terrifying its owner until held in a grip of iron.
‘Kohler. Gestapo Central. Here, allow me to help. Tell the boy to hold my light.’
Another guttural string of verbiage ensued. The light was taken and awkwardly the ladder was leaned against the wall just under the eaves. ‘The rocks,’ gasped the man as another of the tiles pulled away. ‘We must put them back.’
‘You can’t go up there in this!’
‘I have no other choice, monsieur.’
‘Then let me. I’m twice your size.’ Son of a bitch, why had he said it? Kohler began to climb.
‘A moment, a moment,’ shouted the man. ‘The rock, monsieur. You cannot forget the rock. Put it up a good thirty centimetres from the edge of the roof.’
The thing weighed a tonne. The ladder lurched, slipped, then questionably held.
Up at roof level, he had to throw his left shoulder into the wind just to get a grip on the frozen tiles. As he heaved the stone up and slid it along, another of the tiles disappeared. ‘Higher!’ shouted the man. ‘A good sixty centimetres.’
The bastard was right behind him on the ladder!
Another boulder was awkwardly passed up and then another. Again he heard, ‘A moment, please.’
The ladder flexed, then did so again and again as two more boulders were carried up – how had he done it?
At last the tiles seemed fitfully content and Kohler was able to climb down. Blood ran freely from the ham of his thumb and he cursed himself for being such a fool. ‘The abbé, monsieur,’ he managed. ‘I’m looking for him and for Dédou Fratani.’
The lantern revealed an instant of suspicion and swift alarm, then careful reassessment. ‘The Café de Bonne Chance, monsieur. Please … please allow me to show you. Here, we will both carry the lanterns, yes? So that each of us will have one.’
‘Your name?’ asked Kohler.
‘Ludo Borel. I am the herbalist, at your service.’
‘Got anything for a human bite?’
‘A bite?’ Ah no, had this one really been bitten?
‘But … but of course, monsieur, although we can do what is necessary at the café, I think.’ Nom de Dieu, what had possessed him to say a thing like that? Ten sugar cubes dissolved in a litre of wine was good for washing such wounds, afterwards the sprinkling of crushed sugar and the bandage, but sugar was almost impossible to get these days unless one dealt on the black market and there was sugar at the café. Also it was well after curfew and this one had said he was from the Gestapo.
‘Forget it,’ said Kohler. ‘I’m on holiday.’
Head down, St-Cyr hurried on. The road was tortuous and when, at last, he reached the outskirts of the village, the deeper darkness of its newer houses lay against the lesser of the night sky.
He had to pause, had to catch a breath. Too many late nights, the years of too much tobacco and running around – would the war not help with the tobacco fatigue? Ah merde, Hermann, use your head. Don’t be tricked by these people. They have their ways. The one from Bayonne, he will know of this and try to use it against you.
The one from Bayonne … Was it possible? A pawn ticket – some treasured item, a painting perhaps … What, what had that woman pawned and why had she had that ticket in her hand?
Anxiously feeling for it, he dug deeply into his overcoat pocket and when he had the thing, heaved an inward sigh. Had she held it out to her murderer? Had she threatened him with it?
‘St-Cyr …’ – he heard that voice as if it was not far ahead, heard the challenge of it; then again, from later, the Directeur-Général of the Deuxième Bureau’s – ‘You are very wrong, Louis. That one, he could not possibly have done it.’
But someone had, back then on 9 January 1934, and someone had done so now almost nine years later.
Bayonne … must history always repeat itself? he asked and answered, It never does, not in exactly the same way.
Always these mountain villages had their careless spills of newer houses. Expansion in good times, contraction in bad – first the olive groves, then the vines, the cork oaks and the silkworms, the garance, too, from which a red dye was made for soldiers’ uniforms. But then the silkworm disease, ah yes, the winter that froze the olive trees; the artificial dye to replace the natural and, yes, the phylloxera to kill off the vines and the industrialization which swept the population of France into cities and towns. And always the wars, as if the rest were not enough.
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