Kaleidoscope

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Known to be dealing on the black market in Cannes and Marseille. Makes frequent trips to Bayonne where she also has property.

  ‘Suspected of supplying arms, ammunition and false papers to the maquis of the Alpes-Maritimes.

  ‘Suspected of operating an escape line for enemy prisoners of war and of using this conduit to funnel infiltrators into France and Italy.

  ‘Estranged wife of the Fascist, Carlo Buemondi, professor of art and founding member of the National Socialist Party of Cannes and the Society for the Greater Glory of Italy. Mother of twin girls: Josette-Louise, last address: 22 rue Terrage, Paris; and Josianne Michéle, diagnosed as suffering from epilepsy, the result of the mother’s sexual deviations.’

  St-Cyr shuddered at Delphane’s brutal lack of understanding but saw the notations as the Gestapo Munk would have seen them.

  On the surface, then, nothing but death for virtually all those associated with Anne-Marie. Deportation to a concentration camp for Viviane Darnot. Gas or the lethal injection for Josianne-Michèle – the State, the Glorious Third Reich could not tolerate any signs of weakness, especially ‘madness’ brought on by a mother’s ‘sexual deviations’.

  Yet what was the truth? A pawn ticket. A woman so desperate for cash on the day she was killed, she had said to the antique dealer, ‘Cash. I must have the cash or all is lost.’

  A woman who possessed a villa full of valuable pieces. Surely she could have sold something? She had had the contacts. She had bartered with a sharp determination and efficiency.

  A woman, then, with two faces, two masks.

  An espadrille, a small, cheap porcelain figure of the Christ at Galilee, a cross that had been fashioned by the village blacksmith.

  The espadrille had been that of a child of ten or twelve, and all three items had been together on the shelf beside the bed in that cottage. More shards of Roman glass and bits of pottery. Why must shards of glass keep coming up?

  Two daughters, the one estranged from her mother though she was Anne-Marie’s favourite; the other, the one who was ill, the favourite of the father. ‘My little one, my Josianne …’ Carlo Buemondi had said to Hermann only to have one of his current girlfriends call him away to comfort in the mud.

  Himmler’s buyer was furious. Anne-Marie Buemondi would not let her husband sell the villa.

  Viviane Darnot was terrified the Germans would discover she was British and carrying false papers.

  St-Cyr drew out the santon, placing the little carving next to the candle. Though the talk was everywhere now, the men relaxing, the sound of them was as if hushed.

  The beechwood bobbin had been in the mother’s coat pocket, wound with the russet wool of the cape she had given to Angélique Girard.

  The clot of wool had been on that hillside near the santon, near where, in all probability, the shot had been fired.

  According to Carlo Buemondi, the weaver and his wife had practised their archery using images of himself as targets.

  St-Cyr set the pawn ticket between the bobbin and the clot of wool, and in that moment saw again on the cinematographer’s screen, the weaver’s eyes as she had looked at him in Chamonix nine years ago. Shards of mirrored glass then; shards of Roman glass now.

  The force of the bolt would have fractured Madame Buemondi’s spine.

  The boy, Bébert Peretti, had seen something on that hillside but had been forbidden by Delphane from telling them anything, as had everyone else in that village.

  Delphane must have made more than one visit to the area.

  ‘Louis … Louis, aren’t you going to go to bed?’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t, Hermann. I must force myself to think.’

  ‘Then take two of these. I saved a few from that last job.’

  Messerschmitt benzedrine. St-Cyr lifted the tired hand of dismissal. ‘Sleep well, my old one. I will awaken you when it is time.’

  Delphane obviously knew the weaver from before. It was her father’s villa Stavisky had used in those last few days before his death.

  She had moved out at the request of the father, had been there in Chamonix with someone, but would rather not say.

  St-Cyr tapped out his pipe and refilled it without even taking his gaze from the fire. He really ought to destroy the woman’s notebook so as to save lives. Could they take the chance of keeping it a moment longer?

  Tucking it away, he looked at the photograph of Josette-Louise Buemondi. A warm day in the early fall perhaps; Paris, the off-white linen suit well-cut and fitted. The handbag over the shoulder, the wide-brimmed felt hat, the woman’s version of the fedora, pulled down to the left, almost to the level of that eye.

  A troubled young woman, caught in the street perhaps but not avoiding her photographer, ah no. Simply facing the camera. Thin. Once quite beautiful, yes, and dressed up for what? To meet someone or to take the train to see her mother in the south?

  For this last, she would have needed an ausweis, not easily obtained. The forger in Marseille? he asked. Had she betrayed her mother to Delphane? he wondered. Had Jean-Paul convinced her to co-operate?

  She seemed so … ah, what could he say? Tragic? Resigned? Unhappy – yes, yes. Not in love, not on her best feet either, in spite of the clothes. No, ah no. Circumstance had not been kind to this one.

  Shutting his eyes, he ran his fingers slowly over the photograph just as Madame Peretti would have done had the girl been before her in that farmhouse on the hillside. He willed himself to step into her shoes and asked, Had she no friends? A pretty girl like this? Young … so young and yet, and yet …

  The right eye must be slightly lower than the left as in the sister. Hence the stylish tilt of the hat which had the effect of distracting the viewer from the bad eye.

  But surely that same eye would have hampered her ability to fire a crossbow?

  What was it Josianne-Michèle had said about her sister? That Josette-Louise had become everything Josianne had ever wished.

  The santon of Ludo Borel drew him then and he said, as if to Josianne-Michèle, Everything, mademoiselle, but a lover. That boy in the hills, eh? The one thing your sister in Paris did not have.

  The clerk who was forced to open up the pawnshop in Bayonne was a shrill-minded little shrew with pencil moustache and teeth like a rabbit in rigor mortis. He hated cops, loathed intrusion, loved order and basked in his supreme sense of power.

  Livid, he raked the heavy iron key round in the lock, gripping the door handle in fury only to find himself picked up and slammed against the outer wall.

  ‘Stay put!’ hissed the Sûreté every bit as livid. ‘Don’t do so and me, I will personally break every bone in your body with absolute joy!’

  For good measure, St-Cyr slammed him up against the wall again, knocking the pancake beret to the road and the gold-rimmed specs askew.

  Kohler was impressed. For once their roles were reversed. Pocketing the keys, Louis told him to wait outside. ‘A moment, my old one. That is all I ask. I must experience it as it was, alone.’

  The rabbit leapt. ‘The regulations require that I be present! It is the Lord’s Day! Monsieur le Directeur, he has said …’ He choked. The Bavarian was grinning at him.

  When the uninviting black iron door had closed behind Louis, Kohler grinned again and said, ‘He just wants to get the feel of it again. The Chief Inspector St-Cyr was in on the Stavisky Affair and is not entirely certain that business is over.’

  Oh-oh. Nine years had not been enough to erase the memory of the scandal. Everyone who had lost still bitched volubly and grumbled about having been taken to the cleaners. ‘I am not from here, monsieur. I know nothing of that business. I was assigned this post after the crisis and have many times applied for the transfer.’

  The Gestapo nodded. ‘Maybe we could help. Would Paris suit?’

  These days one had to beg even though such an offer could only be suspect. ‘The Basques, monsieur. They do not like the outsiders. My wife and son, we do not speak their devil’s tongue, s
o it is very difficult and sometimes it gets on the nerves, the isolation of a foreign posting.’

  So much for the far corners of the empire. Fog had rolled in from the Atlantic up the Adour to smother its confluence with the Nive and shroud the ancient bridges of the old town. Their landing had been a bitch. The drive in from the aerodrome outside Biarritz something else again.

  Kohler dragged out the Luftwaffe’s fags and offered one. ‘Tell me about the Inspector from the Deuxième Bureau, eh? We know he’s been to see you. Why’d he leave that little item in there for us to find?’

  Rabbit-teeth jerked round to stare at the door above which had been chiselled the words: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. ‘He … he has said we must report the names of any who come to collect the kaleidoscope, monsieur.’

  ‘The “kaleidoscope”?’

  ‘Yes, yes. A child’s toy but very beautiful. In silver with much eloquent scrollwork and such colours when held to the sun. We gave Madame Buemondi 35,000 francs. It is a lot, but an item of such curiosity and craftsmanship deserved at least that much. I had to consult with the Director several times, you understand. Madame needed the cash, she said, and since she comes from a very old family, we gave it. But … but why are you here, monsieur? Has something happened to her?’

  Again Kohler found himself saying abstractedly, ‘No … No, nothing. It’s just a small matter of her father’s estate.’

  ‘The taxes …? Ah, no! Yes, yes, of course. The taxes. The father was very wealthy. That one had many investments in the companies of the scoundrel Stavisky but managed to extricate himself well before the scandal erupted.’

  ‘Made a bundle, did he?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the bundle.’

  ‘Then why did Madame have to pawn her little toy?’

  ‘This … this I do not know, monsieur. The wealthy often come to us. Along with the poor and the destitute, they, too, require the funds from time to time. The stocks and bonds, the fine paintings one has overbought at auction … Monsieur, could we not …’

  ‘Go in?’ Kohler shook his head. ‘The Chief Inspector has to be left alone to soak up whatever vibrations this place of yours can give that memory of his. Find us a café and I’ll let you buy me a coffee and a marc’

  ‘It is not a day for alcohol and there is no coffee.’

  The shops were barren or making hollow pretence. A plaster ham in a place where the hams had been famous. Chocolate looking suspiciously like painted mud. No bayonets in a shop of no knives – too dangerous probably in a town that had been named after the bayonet.

  Rope-soled espadrilles for Christmas? wondered Kohler, thinking of the espadrille Louis had found in that cottage. Moth-eaten berets, oyster shells where no oysters were to be had because it was against the law to fish and the town was in the Forbidden Zone, that deep swath of terrain along the coast the Wehrmacht had sealed off from the rest of the country. Controls, controls …

  ‘Louis won’t touch a thing. Relax, eh? And we’ll see what we can do about Paris while you try to remember everything you can about Jean-Paul Delphane.’

  ‘He looked at the box. He looked through the tube and said to leave it.’

  ‘Did he mention the Stavisky Affair?’

  ‘No, but … but Monsieur le Directeur, he has said that one must have murdered the financier or been very close to the one who did. A man from the Deuxième Bureau, Inspector? A man from the police?’

  Dead, Stavisky could tell no tales; alive, he could have identified all those who had benefited from the swindles.

  ‘How much of a bundle did Madame Buemondi’s father make?’

  ‘Monsieur Cordeau doubled his substantial fortune, Inspector. Perhaps several hundred millions of francs, who knows? There are still those who say he was smart to have pulled out when he did; others, that he knew only too well what was going on and got out before the scandal broke. Still others say it was he who paid to have the bullet placed in Monsieur Stavisky’s brain.’

  Nice … that was really nice. Louis should have heard it. ‘Did Madame Buemondi ever pawn anything else?’

  The man shook his head. ‘She was very quiet, you understand. Like the terrified little mouse. She sat among the others on one of our benches and when I called out her number, she jumped but did not argue. Just snatched the money and stuffed it into her purse. I had to call her back to make her take the ticket she had left on the counter.’

  ‘A kaleidoscope.’

  ‘Yes, as I have said.’

  ‘Was there anyone with her?’

  ‘Not in the pawnshop, but when I went to call her back, I saw her meet a young girl.’

  ‘One of her daughters?’

  The man gave him a curious look. ‘No, not a daughter, monsieur. A Basques-Française.’

  ‘The daughter of a shepherd? Of a man who knows the mountains?’

  ‘A mountain guide, yes.’

  Verdammt! Now what were they to do? Delphane had been right. The cash had been to pay off the guide for taking the escapers into Spain. Kohler knew it, felt it in his bones, said to hell with the medicines she might have been buying. It was as good as over for that village and for the weaver and the daughters. Louis, too, and himself.

  When they reached the pawnshop, they found the door locked from the inside. A note had been written on the back of one of the tags and tied to the handle. Hermann, please do not disturb me.

  The room was large and all but bare. Dark wooden panels lined the walls not unlike those of a courtroom. Austerity and piety seemed everywhere. A long counter ran across the back, separating the rest of the room from the storehouse of pawned wealth in rows of shelves asleep behind padlocked wire caging.

  St-Cyr stood alone among the shabby wooden benches where the poor and the not-so-poor or the wealthy sat alike with sinking hearts as each had his or her number called out. ‘Numéro –, will you take thirty francs for your wedding ring? Numéro –, will you take forty-five on the camera and ten on the shoes?’

  Often the sum given was far less than the rumoured one-quarter of the object’s value – only fools dared to arrive in the morning. Always bitchy, never kind, the clerks behaved slightly better after a good lunch, and the wealthy often did a little preliminary research so as to bribe the waiter or the chef for just such a reason.

  Photographers and artists were among the first to come as hard times approached; farmers often among the last. He remembered a ballet dancer who had had to pawn her shoes in order to pay her rent but then could not dance that very evening and was distraught. Fifty francs he’d given her and she had held him as one would a long-lost father.

  He remembered an old man who, on parting with his pet finch, had wept openly and promised vehemently to return at the first opportunity but had immediately gone into a café and drunk the pittance away.

  Everyone in the room knew the amount received by everyone else. Some could not bear the humiliation and broke down completely, only further disgracing themselves. Others were cavalier. Most tried to argue but the value offered was always firm and attested to by the arrogance of the clerks who hated with a vengeance any and all who approached that counter.

  Yet from just such as this had Stavisky been able to launch his swindles.

  St-Cyr drew in the musty odour of things long forgotten. He willed the memories to come. Chamonix … he urged. Chamonix. It was so far from here.

  Viviane Darnot had known Jean-Paul Delphane was in Cannes looking into the murder of her former lover and companion. Her father had been taken to the cleaners by Stavisky but why, then, must she lie about things, unless still protecting someone?

  Josianne-Michèle? he asked. But why protect her now, knowing that the girl’s mother was dead?

  He saw the mother’s eyes in death, the braided diadem with the fringe all but covering the forehead. The dark, wooden shaft of that arrow – why had the killer not used a newer bolt? If the two women had practised their archery as much as Carlo Buemondi maintained, then surely they must have had
newer ones?

  The weaver came to him then. He saw her in the half-light of some stairwell, the cellars perhaps? Hiding … Yes, yes … Had she come back to the villa near Chamonix to find out what was happening?

  Again he reminded himself that her father had lost a fortune. Two and a half million francs – old francs then. Worth at least twelve and a half million now.

  Two girls in a convent school, the older one taking the younger under her wing and into her bed.

  The sound of a pistol shot – fragments of mirror flying outwards. Dark grey-blue eyes in every one of them. Slices of her face, turning … turning …

  Quickly he went over to the counter and ducked through the gap. From row to row he searched among the battered valises, the pitiful lampshades and stacks of dishes. ‘Numéro P-9377482,’ he said aloud, ‘will you take 35,000 francs?’ Ah Mon Dieu, so much?

  The black leather box was really quite small – perhaps no more than twenty-five centimetres by fifteen in width and the same in height.

  Unlocking the wire, he moved the rusty screen aside, then stood there looking down at that thing she had pawned. Though the dust must settle constantly, there was no trace of it on the leather, and he could not help but wonder why Jean-Paul had left it here for them to find.

  ‘A trap,’ he said. ‘It’s a trap.’

  There was a tiny key and he could hear the argument that must have raged between Madame Buemondi and the clerk as to its leaving. Only at the last would she have given in and relinquished it.

  Jewels? he wondered. Some sort of scientific instrument? ‘Ah, Nom de Dieu,’ he breathed. ‘A pocket telescope!’

  In black velvet, the silver shone. Even in the poor light, the bright-cut engraving sparkled. Lions and tigers, elephants, giraffes and palm trees, the sickle of the moon above an oasis, the stars all out, the three wise men in their robes, their camels hobbled for the night. The crest of some wealthy family, the hallmark of its maker.

  Carrying the box into the Assistant Director’s tiny office, he switched on the lamp, then stood looking down at that thing again.