Kaleidoscope

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘A hunting accident?’ he persisted.

  Why did he look at her the way he did, if not to tug at memory’s door? ‘An accident. Ludo came to see me right away. He … he knew it … it would all be so hard for me to bear.’

  How nakedly she had laid herself open to him. St-Cyr drew in a long breath. ‘The herbalist … Yes, yes, my partner has met him.’

  She asked about his partner and he told her, ‘Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo, mademoiselle.’

  And you hate yourself for having said that to me – is that it? she wondered. You think it cheap of yourself to have made a threat like that to a woman like me. ‘All right, I am English, Inspector. Good God, I never once expected that my accent would become a threat to me. My French, it is pretty good.’

  ‘How long have you lived among us?’

  Still there was that hunter’s look about him and her heart, it could not keep from sinking. ‘Since our school-days, Inspector. Anne-Marie and I grew up together in … in the convent. The Sisters of Charity – some charity. Hah! Me, I shall miss her for the rest of my life.’

  ‘What about her husband?’

  ‘Carlo? That pig? He spent all her money and he abused her terribly. He calls himself an artist but he shits far better.’

  Ah now, what was this? ‘And the twins?’ he asked.

  ‘The twins,’ she said, and he knew at once by her tone of voice that her heart had always included the daughters of her dearest friend.

  She dropped her eyes to the tapestry which he could see only from the front. She touched a bobbin, noted the play of colours that would give those delicate nuances she wanted so much. ‘The twins were always a constant worry, Inspector, and me, I shared that burden with my lover.’

  There, she had said it in foolishness perhaps, or in defiance and pride.

  ‘Josianne-Michèle was at the farm,’ he acknowledged with that nod.

  ‘The one who has the epileptic fits?’ she asked, somewhat taken aback.

  Again he nodded. ‘It is the other one I am interested in, Mademoiselle Darnot. Josianne believes her sister is still in Paris but me, I am not so certain it is as easy as that.’

  ‘A dancer, an actress and … and a mannequin … yes, yes, Josette-Louise is in Paris. Her mother and she were not on speaking terms, Inspector.’

  ‘They were estranged.’

  ‘Yes … yes, all right! I was forbidden to write to the girl but, since Anne-Marie is no longer here to be angry with me, I can tell you that I did. I also sent her money when I could. Not much, for we did not have much, you understand. But a little something every now and then to keep her off the streets.’

  Again there was that curt little nod but was he satisfied? It was so hard to tell. ‘I can let you have the last address, Inspector. It is a few weeks old and she may well have moved since then. The mails … these days they are not so good, isn’t that right?’ She gave a shrug when he didn’t respond and said, ‘In any case the girl can tell you nothing since she never came home to see us.’

  ‘Not the father?’ he asked.

  She didn’t blink – he was certain of this. Cold, was she that cold towards the father? Did the hatred cut so deep?

  ‘Not even her father, Inspector. Not since she went away to school as both her mother and I had done before her.’

  ‘At the age of twelve?’

  ‘Yes, after Josianne-Michèle contracted the encephalitis and began to have the fits, we sent Josette-Louise away. It was only fair that we do so.’

  Fair to deny the one sister the love and help of the other? St-Cyr took a chance – a gamble. ‘Mademoiselle, I am not of the Germans, though I must work under them. If there is anything you should confide in me, do so now before you encounter my partner.’

  ‘My papers are in order, Inspector.’

  ‘But you are English. You, yourself, have admitted this. By rights you should be in the internment camp at l’lsle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse.’

  She did not move. Her gaze never wavered. ‘If you wish to check, you will find that I am Irish, Inspector, and since the Irish, they are not at war with the Reich, my papers really are in very good order.’

  ‘Yet you must tread carefully, mademoiselle. Me, I am not so stupid as to miss such an obvious thing. Your accent is like broken glass to those whose ears are in tune.’

  ‘All right. I have a friend who arranged for me to get a proper set of papers but I really have lived in France nearly all my life.’

  ‘This friend, is he the one who made sure Madame Buemondi would have a proper laissez-passer for the travel to Bayonne and return?’

  ‘Yes … yes, he’s the same one.’

  ‘Good. Now tell me why she had that pawn ticket in her hand.’

  ‘What pawn ticket? Me, I know of no …’

  ‘Mademoiselle, please! Time, it is of the essence! Jean-Paul Delphane is also on the case.’

  Jean-Paul Delphane … Ah no. This one, he had remembered Chamonix.

  Tall French windows overlooked the city and the sea beyond the spacious grounds of the Hotel Montfleury. Kohler sought the yacht basin only to see that most of the boats had been beached due to the Occupation. He felt time ticking by and knew he’d have to say something.

  The Gestapo Gerhardt Munk, a hard, quick, bitter little man of thirty-six, irritably fingered the pencil that lay lost among the papers on the ornate desk behind which no one sat.

  ‘Well?’ asked Delphane. ‘We’re waiting, Herr Kohler. We can’t wait long.’

  ‘It’s Hauptsturmführer Kohler, or Inspector to you.’

  ‘The notebook!’ hissed Munk. ‘These … these …’ He snatched it up and thrust it under the Bavarian’s nose. ‘Telephone numbers!’ he shrilled. ‘Communists! Agents provocateurs!’

  ‘Come off it, don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘This is no laughing matter!’ seethed Delphane. ‘We have the necessary proof. The woman was carrying that notebook when found.’

  Kohler returned the leaden gaze, was shocked again at the near-image of himself. Only in the hair and the eyes was there difference. A shrug would irritate – he did so and noted the stiffening of the ramrod back, the swift determination to return the slight with good measure. ‘Removing evidence from the scene of a murder is against the law, monsieur. Both here in France and at home in the Reich.’

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ snorted Munk, watching them both.

  ‘Then why call Louis and me in, eh, seeing as you’ve got it all figured out?’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Delphane tossed a pacifying hand. ‘So, my friend, it is more than a list of telephone numbers.’

  ‘But you don’t know how much more and you’d like us to find out,’ sighed Kohler, reaching for the cigarette box only to have Munk place a hand firmly on top of his own.

  ‘Not so fast, Herr Kohler. There is a small matter the Inspector, here, wishes to settle.’

  Delphane did not like being put on the spot by anyone, let alone a divisional head of the Gestapo. Hesitating, he took up a folder, then found the hornrimmed glasses his sixty years had made necessary.

  When he glanced at Munk only to receive the curt nod of suicide or else, his eyes were like ripe olives in oil. Ah yes.

  The Deuxième Bureau’s agent began to read, the voice gruff with the humiliation he himself had only just received. ‘Kohler, Gestapo Central, Paris. Has recently moved out of free room and board among his associates at the Hotel Boccador to take up lodgings at Number 44 rue Saint-André-des-Arts in the Latin Quarter with the young prostitute Giselle le Roy.’

  ‘The flat’s right across the street from the lycée. I was hoping she’d take the hint and go back to school.’

  ‘At twenty-two years of age?’ scoffed Munk. ‘Come, come, Herr Kohler, the address is not far from that of the bordel of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton.’

  Once a whore, always one, was that it? ‘I was afraid the kid would get homesick. She’s half Greek, half Midi French and doesn’t know
the city all that well.’

  Delphane ignored the lie. ‘But … but she has Madame Oona Van der Lynn to take care of her? Forty years of age. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed and …’

  Munk let Delphane say it. ‘And a Dutch alien, Herr Kohler. An illegal immigrant.’

  The bastards.

  ‘Are you fucking them both?’ asked Munk, breathing in so tightly his nostrils pinched. ‘If so, we can supply you with condoms. We found eighteen cases stashed among the wine bottles in the cellars of the American consulate.’

  The man from the Deuxième Bureau waited; Munk sucked in a little breath and allowed the merest vestige of a grin.

  ‘So, okay,’ sighed Kohler, ‘you’ve made your point. Now what seems to be the trouble besides that notebook?’

  Again at a curt nod, Delphane was delegated to speak. ‘No, my friend, I have not made my point. The Sturmbannführer Boemelburg has offered the Deuxième Bureau the full co-operation of the Gestapo in this matter and I want it. I insist!’

  ‘It’s too early to tell you anything. If you want another look at the body, she’ll be over at the morgue just as soon as our driver can get her there.’

  ‘That driver of yours must be watched,’ said Munk fastidiously.

  ‘And where is Louis?’ asked Delphane. ‘Why is he not here with you?’

  Kohler shrugged. He wasn’t used to being told he’d have to work under a Frenchman. It hurt. It was humiliating and that was exactly what Munk had had in mind.

  Delphane was terse. ‘Don’t get your ass in a knot, my friend. If you wish me to do so, I will tell Gestapo Paris to keep the child from returning to her profession.’

  ‘She’s not a child.’

  ‘Then we will leave her to her own desires and get on with things.’

  A buzzer was pushed. An orderly brought in a roll of maps and they moved over to a table that had been cleared.

  ‘The maquis,’ swore Delphane. ‘Bayonne to Marseille to Cannes, the mountains and the Italian frontier.’

  ‘Where they no doubt have joined up with the Italian partisans who’ve been fighting Il Duce’s Fascists since the late twenties? Come off it,’ snorted Kohler. ‘That woman had nothing to do with the Resistance.’

  ‘Nothing? But … but what is this?’ demanded Delphane. ‘Has Louis not told you of the Cross of Lorraine the woman was wearing under the lapel of her overcoat?’

  ‘Ah merde! You bastards …’

  ‘Bastards we may be, Herr Kohler, but you will find the truth for us or else.’

  Again Munk had let the Deuxième Bureau say it.

  Kohler stood nervously outside the hotel finishing the cigarette he had taken from the orderly. One thing was certain. Gestapo Cannes would offer no help in solving the murder. Stores would not free up a set of wheels. Food tickets were out of the question. Even ammunition for Louis’s Lebel and his own Walther P38 was ‘unobtainable’.

  Yet the place was like a wasps’ nest that had been stirred. Telephones, telexes – grey mice everywhere and full of themselves. Blonde, blue-eyed bitches from home.

  And in the cellars – cellars that already were choked with loot – the beatings, the screams, the sight of Delphane and Munk hurrying down stone steps and along to a cell. A terrified shriek, a girl’s. The kid’s sister? he demanded, not liking the thought.

  Memory came and gave him every detail. The corridor stacked on either side with oil paintings and tall mirrors in richly gilded antique frames. Himself in every one of the mirrors. His face that of a man on the run and ravaged by doubt and anxiety.

  The girl had shrieked, ‘My mother!’ so clearly his heart had stopped. Then had come the blows, the vomit, the sound of water and of her choking and gasping for air, and of, ‘Bring her round. Immediately! We must know the reason for it.’

  He had slid the iron window open a crack and had seen the body on the floor awash in vomit and excrement with Delphane standing over her. A shoe had lifted. The kick, when it had hit the ribs, had been savage.

  Then the kid had rolled over with a sigh and in that instant Delphane had looked towards the door, the image of him seared on the mind for all time. Intense, yes; stung, yes, but in secret fear himself and terrified he’d be discovered doing such a thing.

  They had hauled the girl up and had sat her in a chair. They had hit her several times to bring her round, then Inspector Jean-Paul Delphane had taken hold of her by the front and had ripped the shirt and shift away.

  He had touched her battered, shivering cheek and had run the tip of his fingers down the curve of her broken jaw.

  Kohler threw the butt down and ground it out. He was glad Louis hadn’t been there, glad his partner hadn’t seen what Delphane had done next.

  Fratani was waiting by the hearse, staring emptily not towards the sea but towards the hills of home. Rheum in his dark eyes and so much tremor in the voice, he could not speak at first.

  ‘You’re not coming with us?’ he asked, when finally he’d taken the necessary papers.

  A shake of the head would do but a touch of kindness would not be remiss. ‘She’ll sleep okay now but see that they put her on ice.’

  ‘The leader of the Gestapo, he … he took the longest time with her. Me, I had to draw the curtains wide for him so that the sun, it would pour over her.’

  ‘And Delphane, the man from Bayonne?’

  ‘He … he has told me that all our lives, they are in jeopardy if we do not obey.’

  Like a knife, the mistral blew just as incessantly and as coldly as before. Sweeping down among the shuttered villas of the wealthy, it had long since bent the token olive trees towards the south. Yet the sky was so absolutely clear of cloud, one could see for at least a good forty kilometres and, were one up on the very heights above the city, the snow-capped Alpes-Maritimes and the Italian frontier.

  ‘Why not tell me what happened the day the woman was killed?’ asked Kohler, wishing he had cigarettes to offer and hating himself for having stolen the last of them from Fratani some time ago.

  The hearse-driver drew himself up as a garde champêtre and village elder should. ‘Because to do so is to have all the men of our village shot, Inspector.’

  ‘Then wait for me down the hill a bit, eh? I won’t be a minute.’

  The little blue notebook was still on Munk’s desk. Frantic that he’d be discovered, Kohler tore his eyes away from that damning temptation to find the dossier Boemelburg had so kindly sent down from Paris, and to find Louis’s right underneath it. Ah merde, what was he to do?

  He lifted them, and only then did he pause, for beneath the two was the dossier of Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi.

  It took about three seconds for him to decide. Popping buttons on his shirt front, he stuffed the dossiers away, lifted the notebook and only paused when he saw the photograph. Paris in the fall. The Marly Horses behind, the girl in an off-white linen dress with modestly plunging open collar, wrist-watch, leather shoulder bag and wide-brimmed felt hat tilted to the left and pulled down so that the edge of the brim and the eye were all but in line.

  She’d a coat folded over the hands that were clasped in front of her. The belt was wide and of linen too, so matching the dress. No jewellery at the neck, button earrings – enamelled perhaps – the hair dark and thick like the sister’s, the eyes the same, the face the same, even to the tiny mole that was on the upper cheek-bone just below the right eye. Josette-Louise Buemondi. That kid in the cellar? he cried out inwardly, knowing he’d have to look, that he couldn’t leave it. Not now; not after seeing the photo.

  The cell door was wide open, the clothes were in rags, the body completely naked and crumpled on the floor among the swill. Blood seeped from her nose and battered lips.

  He turned her gently over, asked, Murder, isn’t this murder? Twenty – eighteen? Was she even eighteen?

  The hair was a dark reddish-brown, the eyes were green and where the bastards had shoved the rubber hose up inside her, the lower abdomen was distended.

  He clo
sed the eyes and touched her cheek, said, ‘I’m sorry, kid. This kind of thing should never have happened,’ and knew in that moment that it was the beginning of the end. The American landings in North Africa had been the turning-point – he knew that now. Now the savagery would come out as never before. Now the hatred and the fear.

  When he reached the avenue Beauséjour, he threw up into someone’s shrubbery.

  Fratani picked him up and they drove down into the city in silence.

  ‘Mademoiselle Darnot, if I understand you correctly, Stavisky took your father for several hundred thousand francs,’ said St-Cyr.

  ‘Two millions, five hundred thousand,’ she said.

  ‘And yet he allowed the financier to use the villa near Chamonix as a final hiding-place.’

  ‘Is it so hard to believe? The investments were in railways, automotive engineering works and real estate – all apparently quite legitimate concerns. Right up until the last moment my father believed emphatically that the financier would pull it all off and come out on top as he had before. Many others did, why not him? It’s what I’ve had to ask myself.’

  ‘And when the scandal broke, you were at the villa.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘That I’d rather not say. Father telephoned from England to ask that I let the villa to a friend, and I did so. That is why you noticed me at the station.’

  ‘Was it there that I saw you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course it was, Inspector.’

  St-Cyr nodded as if it were so, but there was more to it, though he could not push her too much. Not with grief holding its shroud over her and the Germans waiting to discover her papers were not quite so in order as she had claimed. Still, it would be best to try.

  ‘And Madame Buemondi? When, exactly, did the two of you get back together?’

  ‘We have always been together, Inspector. Oh, for sure there were the years of a bad marriage for her, the birth of the twins, all that sort of thing but,’ she gave the shrug of the committed, ‘we always found each other in the end. Either she to me, or myself to her.’

  ‘And Carlo Buemondi?’ he asked.

  ‘Carlo hated me – he still does. To him, I am the cause of his wife’s “strange” infatuation and a “gross” insult to his manliness. More than once he’s thrown me out of their house – her houses, I should say. They’re both Anne-Marie’s. Carlo doesn’t own anything. He never has, but he’s the reason she bought the cottage and gave the village money now and then. We had lovely times there; times of great bliss and utter freedom. The four of us, Inspector. The girls, Anne-Marie and myself.’