Kaleidoscope

by J. Robert Janes

  Now the chanteuse was on deck singing her heart out like a nightingale while he soaked his beleaguered feet in warm and soapy water.

  Gingerly he explored his nose as he listened to her. Had Louis broken it this time? A logical mistake of course. But why did he have to stamp on the toes as well as knee him in the groin?

  He shut his eyes and marched or waited beside the guns of both sides in this lousy war as she sang ‘Lilli Marlene’. He saw his two boys in better days, picked apples with them – hey, they’d had such a good time then. One of those rare weekends he’d been home. They’d gone fishing – yes, yes. Gerda had packed them a fantastic hamper. Beer, schnapps, cold ham, hard-boiled eggs, pickled beets.

  A tear fell and then another and he said, ‘Jesus, Louis, what the hell are we going to do? It’s a set-up, my old one. Delphane is trying to frame us.’

  He took out the Abwehr’s pay envelope and ripped it open, dropping the handkerchief into the foot-bath, still dropping blood too.

  Bleicher had given him the dead airman’s identity disc. Flight Lieutenant Charles Edward Thomas. A serial number followed. Lost in thought, Kohler ran a worried thumb over the thing, asked, Why had Bleicher given it to them and, knowing of the airman’s body, why had he not jumped on Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi himself?

  Jean-Paul Delphane had been after her. Yes, yes, but he was working for Gestapo Cannes.

  Bleicher’s been watching Delphane. Bleicher suspects him of something. Gestapo Cannes are playing a wait and see.

  The man from Bayonne, ah yes, a man who could threaten a whole village and think nothing of it.

  He felt a hand come to rest on his shoulder and realized that the song was over and he’d failed to hear the thunderous applause of the boys out front. ‘You’re exhausted, Hermann. Why not try to sleep? Louis won’t come here, not if he feels it might endanger me.’

  She was absolutely gorgeous. Tall and willowy. ‘Then I’ve put my foot right in it, haven’t I?’

  ‘Only because he is your friend – no, no, don’t deny it. Louis and you … Hey, you’re something special, isn’t that so?’

  Another tear fell and she knew then that Hermann Kohler was really worried and that the cognac must have got to him a little. ‘Is it a matter of the Resistance?’ she asked, cutting right to the heart of things.

  ‘Why the Resistance?’ he asked, taking hold of her by the hand. She had such long and slender fingers, looked absolutely smashing in that sky-blue silk sheath with its vertical rows of tiny seed pearls.

  ‘Because Jean-Paul Delphane of the Deuxième Bureau came to see me here last night. I am to telephone their office immediately either of you contact me.’

  ‘And?’ he asked, for more than worry had come into those violet eyes of hers.

  She shrugged the fantastic shoulders. ‘The Abwehr … as of late this afternoon they, too, have demanded that I do the same for them.’

  The identity disc was still in his palm and there was no need for her to ask about it. The implications of such things were all too clear. ‘What will you do?’ she asked.

  Her hair was the colour of a very fine brandy. It was swept up and pinned to expose a slender neck that was soft … so very soft. ‘Go back to the village in Provence. Sort it all out where it happened. Pick up the rest of the pieces.’

  He was really upset, a lion in the winter of his life, knowing the jackals were out there waiting to devour him.

  ‘The thing I can’t understand, Gabi, is why Delphane doesn’t want us to get to the twin sister Josette-Louise. That one lives here in Paris. She was estranged from her mother and hasn’t seen her sister in Provence in years.’

  She asked him to tell her what he could and listened as Hermann Kohler found the need within himself to tell her everything. He told her of the cottage, of the village and its herbalist, of the ruins of a Roman or Saracen stronghold high on the hilltop above it all. He said, ‘Those ruins, Gabi, I’ve got a feeling they can only mean trouble for us.’

  ‘The Affair Stavisky?’ she half asked, losing herself in thought, her mind leaping ahead. ‘A kaleidoscope whose platelets have been cut from gemstones.’

  ‘Thirty-five thousand francs to redeem it.’

  ‘A need for cash, then, but a will so firm she would sell nothing from her father’s villa.’

  ‘Stubborn … she must have been one hell of a stubborn woman.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’

  He tried to grin and, realizing that he still held her hand, finally released it. ‘Louis is a fool, Gabi. I’d have told Pharand and Boemelburg I’d had enough. I’d have taken you away and married you.’

  ‘Compliments are always nice to receive.’ She bent to kiss him on the cheek, a brush so soft and warm he could not fail to notice her perfume even though his nose was such a wreck.

  But when he said nothing, she thought Louis had not told him about the makers of Mirage, that Louis still must keep his little secrets from his friend and partner.

  ‘Louis does his thing, Gabi, and I let him,’ said Kohler, having figured it all out.

  She kissed him on the cheek again and brushed a hand fondly over his hair. ‘You saved my son, Hermann Kohler, but even so, I cannot reveal where Louis is.’

  ‘But he’s safe?’

  ‘Yes, yes, for now, I think, though it is only intuition which tells me where he must have gone.’

  The shop called Enchantment on the Place Vendôme. The underwear store. And the perfume of Mirage … ja, ja … the juice for the loins.

  ‘Wait while I do this set, then I will drive you around until we find him,’ she said, resigned to having lost the battle, for she’d seen he’d understood only too well.

  Kohler did what she so desperately wanted. He shook his head and put his feet up, said, ‘Leave the door open, Gabi, and sing this old soldier to sleep. I’ve had it.’

  Dawn forced a gun-metal hue between the bars of pitiful harshness in the sky over St-Cyr’s beloved Belleville. Wearily he slogged round the corner and into the rue Laurence-Savart. Already the boys were heading off to school. Playfully they pushed at each other, snatched the toque of one, tried to trip another or merely trudged along with schoolbags strapped to the back as welcome protection against the snowballs, ah yes.

  When one of them saw him, they all stopped. Stood rooted like frozen elves muffled in their heavy coats, long scarves, toques and mittens. And the old grey canyon of the street, filled with its iron-blue fog of frost, held them against the paving stones.

  St-Cyr tried to give a cheery wave though still haunted by the unfortunate death of the dancer at Les Naturistes.

  In a rush, the breath blowing, Dédé Lebelle said, ‘It’s him. He’s back already.’

  The detective looked like a guilty mole, hunched before the shattered gate of its little house. ‘He’s lost the briefcase,’ whispered Hervé Desrochers whose father operated a vélo-taxi in the Place de l’Opéra and had already left for work one hour ago.

  ‘First the car,’ whispered Guy Vachon. ‘That great big beautiful black Citroën. Then they have taken away the revolver only to give it back after the shooting has begun.’

  ‘Then the demotion with loss of pay,’ swore Antoine Courbet who lived directly across the street from the detective and therefore knew much more about him than anyone else. ‘Then the wife drops her underpants and planks herself out beneath a German general.’

  ‘He was a lieutenant, idiot!’ swore someone. ‘They did it standing up. All Germans do it that way! It’s part of their training.’

  Courbet tossed the indifferent hand of his father. ‘Oh for sure, my apple-cart, what does it matter whether the woman is up or down, eh? Or the man a general or a private? The shaft of one Boche is the same as that of another, and that one down there, he has turned the blind eye and the cowardly cheek of the cuckold!’

  ‘Then she came back to him,’ said Dédé, shaking his head, ‘and boom! That was the end of her.’

  ‘And the little son,’ said s
omeone else. ‘The Resistance. Did they make a mistake or did they not?’

  ‘He’s got a mistress,’ seethed Antoine whose mother had once looked after the detective’s house but had lost her job in the bang. ‘He couldn’t wait to get rid of the wife. He let the Resistance do the job for him.’

  ‘The Nazis shot his car to pieces on that last job,’ offered Guy Vachon hesitantly. ‘At the garage where my father now works for the Boches, they got the job of fixing it. Fixing a car like that these days? Pah! It’s unfortunate.’

  ‘Me, I never want to become a detective,’ sighed Hervé. ‘Breakfast could be your last meal.’

  ‘Shall we wave?’ suggested Dédé, half in hopes the others would agree. He looked so sad, the detective.

  ‘My father would kill me,’ swore Antoine. ‘Until the windows of our house are replaced, that one is to be ostracized.’

  ‘He can’t ask the Germans to do it for him,’ said someone. ‘We’d hate him more than we already do if he did.’

  Hervé shook his head in wonder at the way the world turned. ‘He looks like Christ in winter without the benefit of His breakfast of wafers and wine.’

  The boys did not wave. St-Cyr stood there by the gate, the hand of friendship raised again and doubtfully yet again.

  Yanking open the shattered gate someone had wired in place, he ignored the Verboten signs of the Germans and the scribbled Traitor of someone else.

  The front of the house was a wreck. If something wasn’t done soon, the place would be completely finished.

  Boards were strewn about. There were bits of splintered wood. To have even touched one would have brought prison – that’s what the Verboten meant. But he knew that things could so easily have been taken in any case were it not for the unspoken code of the street. They had condemned him to doubt and until the matter of his loyalties and the destruction of his house et cetera, et cetera were resolved, they would not touch a thing.

  Whoever had wired the gate shut must have done it at night.

  He lit a fire in the kitchen stove. Soon hot water was available. The shave then, ah yes, and the brushing of the teeth …

  It was Marianne’s spare toothbrush and it took him several moments to overcome the guilt and remorse a detective’s life had caused, but nothing could be wasted these days. Besides, he had left his only toothbrush at the cottage in Provence. It had gone completely out of his head. Such an important thing. Ah merde!

  When Gabrielle Arcuri found him on her way home from work, he was sitting at the table smoking a pipe of Luftwaffe tobacco and musing over bits and pieces. There was no sign of the girl Josette-Louise and she knew then that Louis really had kept her safely hidden. It pleased her immensely to find her mind so in tune with his.

  The santon of the herbalist was there, a beechwood bobbin wound with russet wool in many shades, a clot of the same. The silver kaleidoscope was beautifully engraved. There was a gold locket and chain containing photographs of two curly-headed girls. ‘And three tiny scabs of lichen, Gabrielle,’ he said, nudging them into better view.

  ‘Where are the lantern slides of the father’s artwork, Louis, and the box in which that thing was kept?’

  The kaleidoscope … Hermann must have told her everything. ‘Both in a locker at the Gare de l’Est awaiting retrieval on the return journey.’

  ‘Will you be free by Christmas?’

  ‘Ask the Nazis. I think they have simply forgotten it this year. Perhaps it was not in Hitler’s budget.’

  ‘You’re not pleased to see me.’

  ‘Of course I’m not. It’s far too dangerous.’

  ‘Hermann said it was now okay for me to come here. I’m to tell you he’s gone to see Boemelburg. He’ll demand a letter guaranteeing safe passage for you both and the girl, Josette-Louise.’

  ‘Good. At least it will get us back to Provence. Once there, we will have to look after ourselves again.’

  ‘God, I’m so tired of singing “Lilli Marlene”, Louis.’

  When he didn’t say a thing, she dumped her handbag on a chair and pulled off the sable coat. Was dressed quite simply in a plain skirt, blouse and sweater.

  ‘I don’t like it when you’re angry with me,’ she said.

  He removed his pipe. ‘I’m not. I’m angry at a world which no longer allows a detective the patient contemplation of the case before him.’

  She sat awhile, letting him look at his little bits and pieces. She picked up the Cross of Lorraine and, as in a game of chess, slid the identity disc into its place.

  ‘The body in that house,’ he said. ‘Who found it?’

  She moved the enamelled Cross back into view beside the disc. ‘The Abwehr, Louis.’

  Though he nodded, it was as if he’d already known. He laid the photograph of Josette-Louise Buemondi above the open locket. He said, ‘I stood over that girl late last night as she slept. Chantal and Muriel, they were very good about my bringing a fugitive to them. She’s so like her sister, Gabi, and yet … and yet there is the world of difference.’

  ‘The Stavisky Affair?’ she said softly. One could not prod the mind too hard at times like this.

  ‘Ah yes, Stavisky, Gabrielle. The financier took the weaver’s father for a fortune.’

  ‘But Anne-Marie Buemondi’s father made one and got out before the crisis.’

  ‘Did M. Cordeau advise the weaver’s father of what investments to make?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. It was so good to be thinking with him.

  St-Cyr drew on the pipe. ‘Two women in love, Gabrielle. Lifelong friends, the one straying often perhaps, but always coming back to the other to be forgiven.’

  ‘Until … until, ah suddenly, Louis, someone comes along to tell the weaver the truth about Anne-Marie’s father getting out before the crisis fell, but not giving others a warning.’

  ‘The toy is pawned, a heart is broken. It is the final straw. They’ve fired the crossbow often enough, the two of them. In jest, of course, but now in business.’

  ‘The mother leaves Cannes to visit the village on her birthday and to see Josianne-Michèle.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but something happens on that hillside, Gabrielle. The mother is challenged. The pawn ticket is extended – offered perhaps as evidence that it will be retrieved in good faith, or was it used as a threat?’

  ‘But what kind of a threat?’ she asked, ‘unless to expose this one?’ She slid the identity disc directly in front of him but he only shook his head.

  St-Cyr picked up the kaleidoscope and pointed it at the light. ‘Bits of colour but such colours, Gabrielle. They rain in on each other; they pass outwards making patterns I cannot read.’

  He handed her the instrument. He said, ‘Stavisky, Gabrielle. Something happened at that villa near Chamonix the day the financier supposedly shot himself, or it happened at a clinic and Jean-Paul Delphane, he is using it against me.’

  He told her of the dancer at Les Naturistes. He said, ‘I tried to force myself to open that laundry basket in which I myself had only just hidden, but I could not do it. I was terrified he would kill me.’

  ‘And what is worse,’ she said, lowering the instrument to reach out and touch his hand, ‘is that he knew it.’

  ‘Yes. It’s like a puzzle in which time will suddenly collapse and have no meaning for me. Things will happen in the past and in the present and very fast. The kaleidoscope will turn and everything will suddenly fall into place but will it be too late?’

  Gabrielle held the toy up to the light again and slowly turned its outer box. Patterns continuously folded in upon each other or opened out. Translucent and transparent, the colours of the gemstones glowed but … but was there not something else? ‘Louis … Louis, would you do something for me?’

  He set the pipe aside. ‘Yes, of course. Anything. You have only to ask.’

  ‘Then open it.’

  ‘What?’

  She made unscrewing motions with her fingers, was lost to the excitement of discovery a
nd could hardly contain herself until it was done.

  When he took a pair of tweezers from his pocket, she asked for a magnifying glass and he went to get one.

  Then they sorted through the tiny heap of platelets whose facets flashed.

  ‘A D, Louis,’ she said.

  ‘An M and … and an X.’ Ah damn.

  When laid out in a row, single chips of emerald, topaz, ruby, tourmaline and diamond gave the engraved letters of D, M, X, T. G.

  ‘A five-letter grouping,’ he said, aghast at what they’d found. ‘A wireless code, Gabrielle. The maquis of those mountains. Josianne-Michèle’s lover, the eldest son of Ludo Borel … The one thing her sister didn’t have.’

  It was all so clear he felt sick about it. ‘Jean-Paul, he … he has known exactly what we’d find and now I must tell Hermann of it.’

  ‘Can’t you keep it to yourself?’

  He shook his head. ‘That’s exactly what Jean-Paul will expect me to do.’

  ‘Then why, please, did he not want you to find the sister of Josianne-Michèle?’

  ‘Perhaps Josette-Louise knew of this?’ He indicated the letters.

  ‘But that cannot be. Not if she was estranged from her mother as you have said.’

  ‘But not from the weaver, Gabrielle. Viviane Darnot sent the girl money against the wishes of the mother. She kept in touch.’

  ‘But how could she have done such a thing without help? The Demarcation Line between the north and the south, it still exists. It is not so easy to get such letters across even now. The censors, Louis. The Gestapo. Postcards are still the only possible mail.’

  ‘Delphane?’ he asked but rushed on. Suddenly he was lost to her. He got up to search the cupboard for something and when he had it, opened the tin and shook a little out into his hand, drew in the smell of sage.

  ‘The espadrille, Gabi. The shards of Roman glass that must have come from Hermann’s ruins. Ah Nom de Dieu, why have I not seen it before?’

  More he would not say but rapidly gathered everything up stuffing it into pockets wherever he could find them.

  ‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘Tell René Yvon-Paul we will hunt for the osprey and when we find it, we will know that is where to fish.’