‘The very pillars of society, my old one. Bankers, lawyers, industrialists, cardinals and politicians but lots of little old ladies too, and with those you do not mess. Not in France. When the scandal broke on 23 December 1933, the circus began. Stavisky had more than forty registered companies all built on thin air but the magistrate’s warrant from Bayonne did not reach us in Paris until the 28th. Immediately a notice went out to all border crossings, to every Criminal Investigation squad in the country and to all members of the IKPK, the International Police Commission.’
‘Of which Boemelburg was a member. It’s a small world, Louis.’
‘Yes, Walter was notified by me, of course, although Pharand tried to stick his nose in it. Every man who could be spared was put on the case. No holiday, no anything. Stavisky had to be brought in immediately and made not only to pay for his crimes, but to sing like a canary. We had reports of sightings from all over the country. Le Havre, Cannes, Saint-Tropez, the Spanish border, et cetera, et cetera. Then on the 30th word came in, a lucky break. A Parisian woman who had been taking the mountain air at Servoz in the Haute-Savoie. Would she rent her chalet to a friend of her neighbour? Ah yes indeed, but on her return to Paris, she lost one of her suitcases.’
Trust Louis to throw in an example of fate’s taking a hand in things! ‘As luck would have it, someone found the luggage who knew of the neighbour’s friend?’ offered Kohler impatiently.
‘Ah no, not quite. As you well know, among our many duties, the Sûreté are responsible for policing the railways. The woman’s father just happened to be a friend of our Divisional Chief, so of course, it was to him that the father went for help in locating the luggage but not until 5 January was it found.’
‘And then?’
‘By then she had read the news reports of the scandal and had received a letter from the caretaker of her chalet. Apparently the new lodger would reveal himself to no one and lived on nothing but milk and the Paris newspapers.’
‘The cow-juice was for the ulcers, eh?’
‘Stavisky got wind that things were closing in fast and moved to the villa near Chamonix but failed to take on the guise of a skier and that, my friend, is where I first met Inspector Jean-Paul Delphane of the Deuxième Bureau.’
‘The man from Bayonne.’
‘Once head altar boy of the Notre Dame in Paris, Hermann. But a stone’s throw from the Préfecture of Police and the Palais de Justice.’
‘Old friends? Old school chums?’
‘Connections, Hermann. Like Stavisky, Monsieur Jean-Paul was and still is a man with friends in very high places, but unlike him, he was and is of the Establishment. A man who, no doubt, still believes God is on his side and that he is among God’s chosen few. I tried to convince Pharand that the Inspector, he was the one who had silenced the swindler, but I did not know then of my departmental head’s association with him.’
‘Fellow choirboys?’
‘Among other things, the Action Française.’
‘The Royalists of the extreme Right? The Monarchists?’
‘Their terrorist offshoot, the Comité Secret d’Action – the Cagoule, Hermann. The Hooded Ones. Murder, rape, arson and anarchy. They wanted the defeat of the Third Republic and were glad of it!’
‘Shit! Shall we put her on ice, then?’
‘But of course. Exactly as she is. I want to remind her killer of what he has done not just to her, Hermann, but to that daughter who cannot help herself.’
The Cagoule, the Hooded Ones. But how had Delphane gained access to that locked room, how had he vanished into thin air at the moment of the shot?
One bullet from a revolver, blood and brains mingling grey and red, the swindler twitching. ‘A doctor … get a doctor!’ someone had shouted. ‘Hurry! Hurry! There may yet be time to save him.’
The villa had been spacious – sumptuous among brooding spruce, with snowclad mountains towering high above, and darkly stained beams to welcome one in. Richly woven rugs and tapestries – gorgeous things had been everywhere but done by whom – whom, Jean-Louis? demanded the cinematographer of himself but could not answer. Whole blendings of vivid colours. Prussian blues, burnt siennas, golds and crimson reds. Impressionistic, yes; cubist, yes, but earthy too, and wild. The smell of the wool; that of a cigarillo, the tobacco Dutch and very good – yes, yes … The scent, too, of a woman’s perfume, of lily-of-the-valley and lavender … A mirror … a face in a mirror .. and then … then, pine ash smouldering in the hearth beneath charred papers – records, heaps of records. Ah no!
A revolver lying a short distance from the swindler. A Lebel just like his own …
A glass of milk. A last cigarette. The smell of wet leather and saddle soap that had somehow failed to do its job of waterproofing.
‘A suicide, Louis. We will leave it at that,’ Pharand had said.
Now a woman on a hillside, a pawn ticket and memories that simply would not go away.
St-Cyr eased himself out of the hearse. Kohler’s buzzsaw continued, and when the Sûreté was outside and had his feet firmly on the ground, he paused to take a look at his partner but saw himself superimposed on the other due to his reflection in the window.
Aged beyond his years, as Hermann was becoming, though Hermann was the older by three years and therefore could use age if necessary to settle an argument when all else failed.
The scar would fade in time. St-Cyr hesitantly touched his own left cheek and watched with cinematographic fascination how the gesture appeared as if touching the Bavarian’s cheek. One ragged, inflamed scar against another. The back of his own hand. The dark of night in Paris … Paris. An assassin’s knife. That last case. A carousel …
They had come through so much together. Always the tightwire, always the knife-edge. Would either of them survive the war? Would he have to kill Hermann in self-defence some day, or would Hermann have to kill him?
‘We both know this war cannot last for ever, my old one,’ he said, the frost coming on his breath to momentarily fog the glass and cloud the mirror of it. ‘That little derailment outside Lyon – I saw the look on your face, Hermann. The panic, yes. You knew it was but the beginning of the end.’
He turned quickly away at the thought. Hands jammed deeply into his overcoat pockets, he was soon looking down at the body. Nothing had disturbed it during the last of the night and if one could but awaken her, he felt certain she would look not at him but at the sun.
He heard her say, ‘The sea, it is over there, beyond those hills.’
St-Cyr took out the pawn ticket, number P-9377482, but did not ask himself anything, only gazed at it and at the body.
Then he crouched and began that most patient of studies.
The crevice was mossy in its deepest shade but the moss was bone dry as was everything else in these hills. Kohler thought of snakes and hazarded a few cautious probes with a forked stick.
Satisfied, he lay flat on the bare limestone and reached well into the crevice to retrieve the figure.
It was superb, a carving no more than eight centimetres in height – one of a crèche. Dropped perhaps? he asked, or left on purpose, but if so, then why here, why so out of sight?
The exactness was so absolute that he had no question as to the identity. Ludo Borel stared at him from behind the highly polished surface of the holm oak. Oiled and rubbed again and again. ‘The herbalist,’ he said, looking off downhill across the ruin of that sparsely clad hillside to where Louis was still patiently communing with the victim.
Olive trees, grey in the valley, stood among cypresses whose tall, dark green spines appeared almost ornamental.
The wind was still a bitch.
Puzzled as to why the figure should have been dropped or left here, he looked uphill towards the village and saw at once that beyond its broken rampart, beyond the heart of the old town with its jumble of burnt-orange roofs and grey stone walls – perched right up there for all to see, were the brilliant ruins of a citadel. Saracen perhaps? he asked. Jesu
s, the view from up there must really be something.
Left to the rooks and to the wind, the ruins held the village crowded close as though in fear of the centuries.
A precipice more than thirty metres in depth fell to the uppermost part of the village. He picked out the church, then the spill of narrow lanes that led down to the fountain in the square – some square …
He found the village school by its gathering of children and heard, though he could not possibly have done so, their excited chattering.
Which one of them had lost the carving? The boy, Bébert Peretti? Had he left it here on purpose? Hadn’t the hearse-driver said the Borels and the Perettis weren’t on speaking terms? Two centuries of that?
A feeble attempt, then, to plant the seeds of suspicion in our minds? he wondered. Then why plant it so well only a Munich detective and, too long before that, a farmboy like Bébert himself would ever find it?
Kohler pocketed the thing and, in looking for more, came upon a small clot of wool caught on a bit of thornbush. Russet homespun – he held it up to the sun and let the light shine through it as if it were a woman’s hair.
Or a shepherd’s cloak, but if so, why of such a colour?
The girl? he asked and thought he had the answer since the Abbé Roussel had said, ‘She often walks in the fields and is at peace with God when not demented by her frenzy.’
The girl could have placed the carving here for some quite other reason.
Or someone could have put it here for her to find, he said, seeing in his imagination, as Louis would, the girl both coming secretly downhill to leave the figure or walking back uphill to find it.
Since the Perettis never spoke to the Borels and she was in the care of the former, if care is what it could be called, she might not have wanted them to know about it. Ah yes.
He walked away – did a wide sweep of the area, passing first up higher still, then coming downhill until he was well below the hearse and could see it standing out like God or the Devil, black and ridiculous against the bluest of skies, the orange of the tiles, and the glare from the ruins.
The gazogène that powered the hearse was, of necessity, on its roof. The cylinder for collecting the wood-gas was a cut-down water-tank salvaged from somewhere; the firebox, a small cast-iron stove whose chimney had been welded shut all but for its connection to the tank.
Copper tubing carried the inadequately compressed wood-gas to the engine, yielding perhaps at best sixty per cent of normal power.
If they hadn’t had the small pieces of wood to burn, the petit bois of green oak, they’d have removed the engine and hitched up the donkey or the horse. The roped-on wicker panniers for the wood only made it all the more ridiculous and pathetic. But why the smell? he asked. Bad sausage, eh? Bad something – Louis had known it too, but had said little about it. Indeed, the Frog was deep and quiet in these hills. It was as if he drove himself to commune with the dead, knowing the hills he had thought he might love so much held nothing for him but that same reward.
Kohler longed for a fag. He tried some rosemary, chewed on a bit of savoury, some wild marjoram and when he reached the olive trees, he saw the cottage as he tasted the forbidden fruit – fruit so black and bitter, he sucked on his cheeks but did not dare to spit.
The place was silent even in the ever-present wind. A pond, perhaps five metres in length and three in width at the most, was pale green and bordered by ferns and things that lived and died according to season. As if by some miracle of God, it was here that the water welled up to trickle past a weir and move the lily pads that had all but gone to sleep among the weeds that choked its floor.
Flagstones led round to the cottage. There were two short bits of wall, door-height, on either side of the small courtyard and all but covered with vines. Terracotta amphorae of Greek or Roman vintage stood near the unpainted door whose planks had been stained by the ages. A small casement window that opened outwards at the middle was half hidden by the nearest and shortest bit of wall. The roof was not of tiles but of slate, and the mortar between the stones had been newly pointed within the past ten or twenty years perhaps.
Another small window faced northward but was up high – in the loft perhaps, if there was one.
A stone wash-basin, rectangular and with three flower-pots at one corner, stood out in the small courtyard, a fishpond now perhaps.
There were clumps of greenery everywhere, whole draperies of it. Pines and cypresses nearby, and the olive trees.
It was verdant in a land of dryness. Louis would be ecstatic, but smoke issued from its chimney and the man from Bayonne had said he’d be waiting for them here.
Kohler paused to dip a hand and wash his face – one ought to freshen up before meeting the Establishment. Still, he drew the Walther P38 and, though feeling slightly off at having done so, went all the way and cocked it.
The aroma of sage-flavoured sausage and warm bread came to him, mingling with the pungency of the woodsmoke.
‘A moment, my old one,’ said Louis in a hush. ‘Please, I must see it as she must have done. Ah Mon Dieu, Hermann, it’s exquisite. Mistral could have written here; Balzac too. Fennel and chicory, shepherd’s purse, white nettle and wild celery.’
‘Cherries and olives and lemon trees.’
‘Yes, yes, figs too, and apricots.’ Louis took in a deep breath and held it.
‘And your friend,’ said Kohler only to see Louis give that quick little shake of the head.
‘The girl, I think. Delphane will have left us to discover what he, himself, was unable to find.’
The sausage was good, and with the cheese, the wine and soup, a repast fit for a king. St-Cyr broke off another chunk of bread. ‘Mademoiselle, you honour us in these hard times, eh, Hermann? All the food we want, while you sit like a starved cat watching us devour ten thousand ration tickets’ worth.’
‘Louis …’ began Kohler, stunned by the lack of tact in one who so often used it.
‘The “fork breakfast”, Hermann. One such as those who must labour all morning in the fields are given.’
‘It is … it is what I have thought you …’ The girl turned quickly away to hide her tears.
Kohler made a fist at his partner. ‘Louis, quit being a bastard,’ he said angrily. ‘The kid was only trying to make up for having bitten my thumb.’
‘Ah, forgive me, my old one. I thought she stole the food from Madame Peretti on the hill. But you are so pale and thin, mademoiselle, why will you not join us?’
‘Me, I have already eaten, monsieur! At dawn. The bowl of milk and the piece of bread, since there is no coffee.’
There were chicory and barley to roast – acorns too – but St-Cyr let it pass. Everyone was sick of the ersatz life, even here in these hills.
He cut off a fat chunk of the well-smoked sausage and, nudging her arm, offered the morsel. ‘Go on, take it. Madame can always make more, eh? Isn’t that what you thought when you stole these few things for us?’
Once she had tasted, she waited for more but was agonized by guilt perhaps and torn by fear – was it fear of reprisals? he wondered apprehensively.
Soon she was eating more than they and enjoying it. Ravenously!
With a sigh, she finally sat back. Not a crumb was left, though she searched for more. ‘Now perhaps, mademoiselle, you will tell us what has been going on here, eh? Your mother comes …’
‘My mother!’ she cried out, flinging a hand to cover her face and bursting into tears.
Both of them had to comfort her. St-Cyr found only hatred for himself but said, ‘Please, I know it is a terrible shock for you but we absolutely must know everything you can tell us.’
She shook her head. ‘I saw nothing. Nothing, messieurs! I was ill – all day the temperature, then the warnings I always get, then the spasms – twice, yes, yes, twice they came in the night, and then again.’
‘Who did your mother come to meet? That old woman on the hill? Come, come, Mademoiselle Buemondi, one would have to be
an idiot not to notice the sausage mill and the goose livers for the pâtés.’
‘She … she …’
‘Was working a fiddle,’ sighed Kohler, loving it. ‘She was lugging food to Cannes and Bayonne, was that it?’ he laughed. ‘The black market, eh?’
‘Yes, yes, she was … was dealing in little things. One has to, isn’t that correct, Inspector?’
The rage was instant, the hatred all too clear in those dark, misty eyes. ‘She was doing it to buy the medicines for me, monsieur. Me! Her daughter who is ill.’
Kohler felt like a bastard. Louis said with all humbleness, ‘The phenobarbital, Hermann. A sedative and hypnotic’
‘The Dilantin, monsieur, the anticonvulsant, and the Diamox, the diuretic. Where, please, since you work for the Germans, are we who are so ill supposed to get our medicines if not on the black market?’
St-Cyr met her gaze, noting again how intense it was and how thin the face. ‘Even on the black market you would have no guarantee of what you were getting or of the strength,’ he said. A cold fish – he could see her thinking this. Her right eye appeared as if only slightly lower than the left. This hardened the expression and made it more remote perhaps than she wanted.
A small brown mole on the upper edge of the right cheekbone was just below the eye on the periphery of its hollow circle. The brows were wide and dark and extremely handsome, the nose exquisite – perfect in such a face, the lips … that slight pout of what? – iron discipline? he asked and said, Quite the finest lips. Given a little more meat on her bones, she would be absolutely beautiful, if in a haunting way. Yet now … now she was like a defiant angel, a paragon of virtue searching his dark soul and defying him to uncover her, but why?
‘So, is it your wish to imprison me, Inspector, for someone else’s crime?’ she asked.
Collaborator! she silently screamed. Resigned to such accusations these days, St-Cyr sadly shook his head. ‘No. No, of course not. But your mother’s contact in Cannes or Bayonne? Is it that she had a falling out with him and was killed because of this?’
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