‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘Me, I have no reason to do such a thing. My soul is clear as is my conscience.’
He heard her coming back through the darkness but she did not sit down again. Instead, she climbed the stairs and squeezed along the row until she came against his upraised knee. ‘So now, monsieur, you will tell me, please, why you are here.’
Kohler listened to the sharp intake of breath; he felt her trembling fingers as they touched his cheek and then his lips.
She waited. He caught the smell of her perfume – it was light and heady, it was so many things but only Louis could have identified it. ‘Look, I just want to see the slides,’ he said. He felt the hem of her overcoat, a buttonhole, felt the trembling urgency in her fingertips.
‘Carlo didn’t kill her, monsieur, and neither did I.’
‘But now he’s gone off with someone else?’
‘It’s nothing new. He always does that. Like me, they will come back, monsieur. You see, he has made us bare our souls. We are his adoring slaves.’
She left him then, and he heard her pick her way down to the projector. ‘Ready?’ she asked, and when he did not respond, flung on the lamp and filled the screen, deftly focusing the image only at the last.
The mask was chalk-white, unglazed and chillingly stark, the eyes gaping voids of darkness, the expression haunting.
‘It is neither of woman nor of man, monsieur, since the inner self is neither and only demands to be free.’
Kohler pulled down a lower eyelid in doubt and pinched his nose, neither gesture she could possibly have seen. ‘Next,’ he said drily.
Carlo Buemondi rilled the screen, the head so like that of Il Duce it caught the breath. There were even folds in the bald scalp, no sign of a hair, the ears large, the cheekbones wide and of peasant hill-stock, the nose robust and the lips fleshy.
‘Il Dottore,’ she said, a whisper. The Doctor …
The smock was probably pale blue and certainly covered with plaster dust. In slide after slide the professor made paper, then soaked it in water, in wine, in olive oil and paint and, after vaselining a student model from head to toe, made a papier-mâché cast of a hand, a face, a body.
‘That is me,’ she said, another whisper.
The girl was naked and lying stretched flat out on a table awaiting the Vaseline. Breathing straws stuck out of her nostrils. The eyes were hidden beneath black petals of cloth that had already been sealed in place. ‘Here he is going to use the plaster, yes? Since it is much more brittle and gives the better cast when smashed.’
She had a pleasant figure, if a bit skinny. Tiny breasts and almost childlike hips and waist.
The cast was shown. Both the inside and the outside were then covered with lithographic prints of body parts: faces, hands, hair – body-hair – knees, breasts, a breast, a woman’s sex, the labia et cetera, et cetera, and penises – penises everywhere. Erect and otherwise.
‘He uses several colours,’ she said with that same sense of submissive awe. ‘At least seven or eight in the printing.’
‘Then he smashes it all up.’
‘Yes. And glues it back together or leaves it in pieces.’
‘But never in the same form, the natural form?’
‘No, never in the finished piece, since the soul, it is quite formless, isn’t that so? And the body but a vessel for it.’
No artist or connoisseur of the finer things, Kohler was baffled. The drawing, such as it was, appeared inadequate. Oh for sure a woman’s sex was hairy and one could part the lips if curious or peel back a foreskin to examine the head of a penis.
But surely the drawing should at least have approached that of Michelangelo Buonarroti? And as for the quality of the lithographs, he doubted it as well.
‘Not my kind of thing,’ he said uncomfortably.
The collage was a collection of broken casts all wired together and hanging by a frayed noose. Erection after erection stared boldly at him. Through the blinding light, hidden ears and eyes appeared – a finger, a thumb, a woman’s heel, a set of toes – he’d swear to it and got up suddenly to walk past her and up on to the stage.
She saw his shadow leap across the screen and caught her heart. ‘Delphane,’ she said, a whisper. ‘Ah, Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu, it is impossible. The likeness, it is … it is like a curse.’
Kohler traced out the oval of a woman’s eye complete with false lashes. He found a rather nice-looking nose, a lower lip, a hairy scrotum. Son of a bitch, was the bastard a pervert? Cock seemed to be it. Everywhere he looked there was some guy’s genitals. Buemondi’s? he wondered. Mirrors … had he used mirrors? ‘Art?’ he asked. ‘Is this really art?’
The lantern light made his features sharp. Angélique Girard noted the long scar on the left cheek, the sad bags under dissipated eyes, the touches of bruises from some terrible fight that had still to completely fade. The untidy growth of whiskers that made this Gestapo seem older than he was. More ravaged by time. Ah, it was so very sad to see one’s features decay so quickly.
‘You are challenged, monsieur. Is it not so, and is that therefore not what true art must always do?’
‘Perhaps, but then …’ he began, realizing he was using one of Louis’s expressions and was totally out of his depth and wishing the Frog was with him.
‘You are afraid of your own masculinity, monsieur. Though you pride yourself on it, I think you tremble inwardly at thoughts you are afraid to face.’
Quickly she showed him another slide rather than acknowledge his ‘Horseshit!’, said, ‘This is Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi, Monsieur the Inspector from Paris.’
There was no semblance of order. The white shards of the body cast had been put back together at random as by a demented hand. They didn’t even look like a human form of any kind but rather, that of a patch of broken plaster. Most of the pieces were curved either up or down, and all had been overprinted with the husband’s lithographs.
Again the bastard’s cock was there. In her broken ear, in her broken nose or eye. Not always whole, sometimes incomplete and sometimes all but absent. Erection and otherwise.
‘And this is me,’ said the girl without a trace of shyness.
Only a painted mask covered her face. All the rest was bare. She lay flat on the table again, and around her perhaps fifteen students crowded, all ages, all shapes, all naked but for their masks, all gazing down at her childlike body. Both male and female.
‘It threatens you, does it not?’ she asked, standing up beside the projector. ‘It asks you to admit your innermost desires, monsieur, to confess the truth and let your soul be free.’
‘Rape? Is that it, eh?’
‘Yes,’ she said demurely, ‘that and much worse.’
Kohler came down off the stage like a rocket. In one swift flow of motion, he switched off the lantern, collected the slides, grabbed her by the elbow and said, ‘Get moving. I want to talk to the son of a bitch! That was no more you than me. That was one of his daughters.’
She yanked herself away. ‘Which one?’ she asked, lost in the darkness but near enough. ‘Which one, my friend?’ Her voice was shrill and near to tears.
‘Look, I … I don’t know. Josianne-Michèle, I think. The … the one who has the fits from time to time. The one who bit me.’
It was only then that he realized she had used the darkness to make her escape. From the upper floor, she paused to look back down through the pitch darkness at him. ‘Find out which one, Monsieur the Inspector from Paris, and you will find the killer of my lover.’
‘Where is he?’ he cried out.
‘Carlo?’ she shot back. ‘In the mud baths. Wallowing with the others. Fucking them any time he wants.’
There was only one place to hide from Munk’s Gestapo and Kohler took it. The air was full of sulphurous steam, the grotto poorly lighted and subdivided into pools with low walls of pseudo-volcanic rock between. Frescoes and wall paintings of Pompeiian brothels, he supposed, lined the place. Doric columns held up the ersatz temple roof w
ith its fake and hidden lighting, the sun over ancient Rome.
There were perhaps forty or fifty taking the cure, both male and female. The old, the sick, the lame, the wealthy, the nubile, even children as young as ten or twelve.
No one seemed to mind the lack of privacy. It was as if the mud took care of everything and all were united in the common bond of opening the pores, loosening the joints and talking about it, among other things. Besides, in winter it was probably the warmest place in town.
He joined four others. The mud was scalding. The red ochre he’d been dusted with after coming out of the shower-bath did nothing to protect the skin from the heat. Everywhere he looked, whether male or female, partly clothed or not, there was this alarming clash of red and grey.
As he sank below the surface, a moment of panic came with thoughts of smothering, but then some not-so-young thing with stringy mouse-brown hair and chunky hips helped him to his feet and he stood knee-deep in the goo while she proceeded to do his back and shoulders. ‘Now it is your turn,’ she said. ‘Ah, don’t be afraid, my fine monsieur, I am not about to eat you!’
Mud drained from his lips, he tasting it as he grinned. ‘Your back, I think,’ he said and she smiled mockingly perhaps – with all that mud on her face it was hard to tell.
One of the others did his back while he did the woman’s. The Gestapo came then and perhaps they were as startled as himself, for the place looked like nothing on earth short of the wilds of New Guinea.
They searched for him as the chatting fell off but did not think to check the lock-ups for his clothes and things, or ask if he was there.
When they were gone, Kohler moved from pool to pool until he found Buemondi in a far corner. The head was just above the mud between the knees of four naked young girls. Bald but lathered, big with robust ears and folds of skin across the brow, wide eyes that blinked, the same nose as in the lantern slides, a bull-like throat. Yeah, it was him all right.
The hippopotamus rose up among the nymphs, the barrel gut and hanging fruit drained mud in sheets. The girls descended on him and each began to smear more mud over the hairy back and belly.
Then they all submerged themselves until only their heads protruded. Red ochre round the eyes, lips and nostrils, grey nearly everywhere else, though the girls had tried to keep their hair out of it.
‘Carlo Buemondi?’ he said, stepping off the walk and into the pool.
‘Yes, that is me. What can I do for you?’
‘Nothing at the moment. I just wanted to tell you that for a man who’s supposed to be in mourning, you’re taking things pretty well.’
Buemondi held up handfuls of mud, squeezing it through clenched fists. ‘Ash, is it ashes you want?’ he said. ‘Volcanic ash from Vesuvius.’
‘Carlo, shall we go?’ asked one of the nymphs.
‘No, no, darling. It’s all right. It’s nothing. Monsieur, my wife and I have not seen each other in ages. Though I regret the news of her death, I can offer little sympathy.’
‘But much rejoicing,’ said one of the other girls, coyly tracing a finger over the professor’s cheek.
‘Laura, I will teach you a lesson some day. Perhaps it is best if the monsieur and I were to talk alone while the four of you play.’
Kohler sat down on the edge of the pool. Buemondi handed him one of the girls’ towels, saying, ‘The face, monsieur. The countenance. That way we will recognise each other in the street.’
The bastard even talked like an Italian! Fruit was brought – figs, oranges and persimmons; bowls of water to wash the hands, the girls co-operating as if trained to the job.
Buemondi chose an orange but did not peel it, simply biting into the thing and sucking at the juice. ‘She was an odd one, monsieur. Splendid in bed when needed but … what can I say? Not really enjoying it. All lies,’ he said, dribbling juice and mud. ‘Lies and schemes.’ He chose fig.
‘She loved other women,’ said one of the girls shyly. ‘Angélique Girard, I think.’
Their mentor impatiently shooed her away and the girl immersed herself in wallowing with the others, her posterior bobbing up like a cork.
‘Look, I really do not know what happened, monsieur. Anne-Marie went into the hills, yes, and someone shot her with my crossbow but it was not me. Me, I could never do such a thing as that. Not to a woman I loved.’
‘But it was someone.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘Your daughter?’
‘Josette-Louise?’ asked Buemondi.
The one in Paris. ‘No, no, the other one,’ said Kohler. ‘Josianne-Michèle perhaps.’
Startled and afraid, the girls looked at each other. One of them suddenly stood up. Mud coursed down over her splendid breasts. Her hands helped it.
‘Monsieur, neither of my daughters would ever have killed their mother. In spite of Anne-Marie’s love affairs with other women, the children were always very loyal to her. Even my little one, my Josianne, she would … she would …’
‘Carlo, come. Come and join us. Please don’t upset yourself.’
‘Josianne-Michèle was mine, monsieur. Josette-Louise was Anne-Marie’s. Always there was this favouritism but even so, neither would have done what you think. It is just not possible.’
‘Where were you on the day your wife was killed?’
‘Here, in Cannes, in my studio. These four will vouch for it. My Four Graces, monsieur. The body casts.’
‘I’m sure they’d vouch for anything,’ said Kohler drily. ‘What about Angélique Girard?’
Buemondi blinked to clear his reddened eyes. ‘That one also, monsieur. Believe me, I had no reason to kill my wife.’
‘The villa?’ asked Kohler, seeing the tadpoles glance quickly at one another and hold their breaths.
‘Not even for the villa, monsieur, though Anne-Marie refused absolutely to let me sell it and I begged her many times for the divorce she would not grant.’
The girls began to play with each other, to roll about and grapple but it was all to no avail. Kohler wasn’t buying any of it. ‘I smell a rat, my friend,’ he said. ‘Me, I think you did it.’
‘Then think again. Jean-Paul Delphane would not be bothered were it a simple matter of marital discord.’
‘Settled with a crossbow?’ asked Kohler, pulling down a lower eyelid to peer at the hippo. ‘Hey listen, my fine professori, loading a crossbow takes a good bit of muscle; firing it into sharp sunlight to hit a mark from sixty metres, one damned lot of practice.’
Buemondi didn’t waver. He would give the fine detective from Bavaria a moment. Ah sì, sì. Then he would tell him. ‘The weaver, monsieur. Viviane Darnot, my wife’s ex-lover and former companion of many years. She was in the hills on that day, yes? She travels there quite often in search of herbs and earths with which to dye the wool. Ludo Borel, the village herbalist, often helps her. Viviane discovered that Angélique and my wife were using the cottage she and Anne-Marie had used themselves as a lovers’ nest. It is as simple as that. The villa also. And she could shoot with that bow of mine, monsieur. Shoot only too well. She and my wife used to practise killing me. The big photograph on the target, the sketches – yes, yes, myself have I seen such a thing many times.’
‘Then why is the man from Bayonne involved?’
‘Why indeed, if not to discover something else?’
‘Did they know each other from the past?’
‘Delphane and Viviane, or Viviane and my wife?’
‘All three of them, I think.’
Buemondi grimaced, then flicked mud from his hand. ‘Look, let’s not mess. You and I both know what those people in the Deuxième Bureau are like. Trouble under every carpet and behind every door. Me, I don’t want to become involved.’
‘Just say it,’ said Kohler quietly.
The hippo clucked his tongue ruefully then jerked his head up as he nodded. ‘Yes … yes, I think the three of them must have known each other from before but I have nothing with which to back this up.’<
br />
‘You lying bastard. You were married to the woman nine years ago. You know damned well what I’m referring to. The murder of Stavisky in Chamonix.’
‘The financier? Then scrape the mud away and find out what is beneath.’
Kohler got up and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t drown,’ he said. ‘I’d hate to have to watch them pounding that crap out of you.’
The masseuse was waiting for him when he came out of the showers. He tried to ease her fears about her mother, the coiffeuse on the rue du Canada, and the sister but found it difficult to hide the truth.
Paulette Rogette was tough, sturdy and with the hands and arms of a potter, above all a realist. ‘My sister Suzanne is dead, is that it?’ she asked. ‘Mother telephoned here twice, Inspector, then again and again and again but they will not tell her anything, so now I ask it of you. Did the Gestapo of the Hotel Montfleury pry anything out of my sister before they killed her?’
Kohler took the towel and wrapped it around himself. ‘She can’t have given them much or they’d have shut this place down and taken you away.’
‘Why can’t you look at me when you say this?’ she shrilled.
Kohler did so, and when she struck him, hissing, ‘Bâtard!’ he let her try to get it out of her system.
‘They’ll pay for it,’ he said.
‘That will not bring her back!’
The woman was in tears. He could not comfort her; she would not have allowed him to touch her.
Without another word he walked away Chez Paulette’s was on the rue Buttura not far from the Sporting Club and the Notre Dame de Bon Voyage. There were the bicycles of the oppressed, the vélos jockeying for position. Girls wanting to sell themselves in front of shops that contained either little or things that were far too costly for most. Girls and older men because there were so few of the young ones left. Everyone pumping their legs to beat the Jesus for a sou while the Army of the South took its leisure in the growing night and the boys in blue with their leaded capes and sticks strolled about looking for him.
When he found the showroom, it was completely by chance. Kohler stood a moment admiring the De Sotos, the Chrysler Imperials and Packards, the Rolls Royces and Bentleys of the departed.
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