Three half-tracks with 88 millimetre guns brought up the rear of the convoy. Six medium-sized Opel lorries were crammed with troops of the Waffen-SS fresh from the Reich and on their way to wet their trousers in North Africa. MG42s, Schmeissers, Bergmanns, stick grenades and mortars. Kohler had to laugh at that God of Louis’s. ‘These bastards will chew the hell out of that village, mademoiselle. You see, they have to prove themselves in battle.’
There were four armoured cars ahead of the lorries and then; right in front, eighteen motorcycles with side-cars on which had been mounted machine-guns. ‘It isn’t going to be nice,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m sorry you’ll have to witness it.’
She did not know what to make of him. Crying over the loss of his partner and friend; now being sarcastic over the might of his own countrymen.
The snow fell lightly, and it was so beautiful even in the stabbing lights, but then there was the frozen breath of the enemy who ran this way and that alongside the convoy shouting orders and checking things. And the harsh angularity of their helmets matched the bleak brutality of their weapons.
‘Look, if it means anything, Mademoiselle Viviane, I don’t think you were involved with the Resistance and neither was Madame Buemondi. She worked her butter and eggs business and fought off her husband’s attempts to sell the villa. You did your weaving and when someone came along who wanted to leave a few francs with you in exchange for a cheque on a London bank, you obliged.’
Was it all so simple? Could anyone even begin to understand the hell she’d been through?
Shackled tightly to him by wrist and ankle, and guarded by three Alsatians, they could only watch the convoy assemble and dared not move.
‘That business nearly drove me crazy. You see, Herr Kohler, I was terrified the fraud would be uncovered. Every day I asked myself how could I possibly pay those poor, deluded people back? How could I, whose father had suffered so much from fraud, now perpetrate a similar thing on others? There wasn’t any more than a hundred pounds in that account. My father died penniless, remember?’
One of the dogs rose up on its hind legs to get her scent. She cringed. Kohler hissed, ‘Don’t move!’ and the dog took its time. Ah merde! She’d urinated.
He waited, giving her time to calm herself. ‘Madame Buemondi kept the money for later, didn’t she? It was her idea and you went along with it because, being English and determined to stay, you would never know quite what the future might hold. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, she handled the business side of things and, even knowing what she was like, you let her.’
She shut her eyes. She could not look at the dogs! ‘Please don’t condemn me. We needed so many things and I cannot answer for the love and loyalty I have always held for her.’
Kohler wanted to leave it but, Gott im Himmel, sentiment had no place in a detective’s life and they’d need everything at hand if the two of them were to get out of this alive. Besides, talking about it might just keep her from moving. ‘Madame Buemondi had a friend alter the figures in your pass book. Right? Voilà, the one hundred pounds became what? Hell, no one could possibly have checked with the bank!’
‘Five hundred and seventeen thousand, four hundred and twenty-two pounds, six shillings and eight pence. There was only one page that had anything on it. I hadn’t used the account in years and had simply kept the money there in case I should ever have to return to England. Can’t … can’t you do something to make these dogs leave me alone?’
He waited, and finally she continued. ‘That page was removed and the booklet carefully restitched. Several new entries led up to the invasion of 1940, then others traced my route south. But you see, I was an artist, an eccentric and a recluse – isn’t that so? Money didn’t mean anything to me, Inspector. My father was fabulously wealthy – oh, it all fitted and I let it all go on because, you see, I could never leave France!’
The dogs were worrying over her urine. They couldn’t seem to leave her alone. Kohler filled his chest and let the breath out slowly. It was almost time for Munk to begin his Christmas campaign in the hills, and who in Berlin was to know if one villager or another really were maquis? Hell, they’d all been up to their stupid, stupid necks in the black market!
The dogs moved away and sat there watching them.
‘Delphane found out about things,’ he said. ‘By then he was desperate for an out and seized on the two of you. He asked for the money and you tried to get it from her but she saw things differently. She didn’t want to become involved with him at all. She’d have lost everything.’
One should not cry. One must be brave. ‘He went after Josette-Louise and found her in Paris. He … he said that he would use her against me if .. if I did not get him the money. That he needed it to … to finance things.’
‘What things?’
As if he didn’t know! ‘The escape of himself and four others. They … they had come this way and had used the cottage, Inspector. You see, Jean-Paul knew all about that place. He knows everything there is to know about Anne-Marie and myself. He …’
‘He fathered your children who were then adopted by your lover and Carlo Buemondi.’
‘Is it so bad? I had nothing. An artist earns so little. Oh for sure, in the early days I could use my father’s villa near Chamonix now and then if I pleaded with him and said it was an emergency, but he never gave me an allowance. You see, Inspector, my father despised me for what I had become. And when he lost everything to Stavisky, he blamed me and I was left with only my dearest friend and her love for me. For me!’
Ah Nom de Dieu, it had been a crime of passion! Borel had had nothing to do with the killing. Merde! ‘What did Jean-Paul tell you after all those years, mademoiselle? That her father had hired him to silence the financier?’
Her father who had made so much money on the schemes. ‘Yes. It … it is what I feel your partner had already come to know.’
‘And now poor Louis is dead and that bastard is going to have his way.’
‘His kind always do, Inspector. It is a right they assume at birth even though it is a wet nurse who suckles them.’
The dogs were now worrying his ankles. One of them was …‘Then why’d he turn over a new leaf? Why’d a Fascist and leading member of the Cagoule change the colour of his ways?’
‘Ask him. Perhaps he’ll tell you if he does not kill us first. Certainly he will not allow me to betray him, Inspector, and you … why you are powerless to prevent it.’
‘But he cannot kill us. He’d only expose himself. He must have others do that, mademoiselle. He must make certain of it! Everything must appear as if he is innocent and loyal to the Reich. Ah Jesus, Jesus, you bastards leave my trousers alone!’ Kohler moved a foot and received a nip and then a heavy chorus of throaty barking.
When the dogs had quietened, she wanted so much to say, Jean-Paul has already thought of this. That even as they stood prisoner, he spoke urgently to the Gestapo Munk and the SS major and his lieutenants. She wanted to say, I’m sorry for you but could not bring herself to do so.
‘Then it will happen in the citadel of dreams among the shards of pottery and bits of Roman glass, Inspector. It will happen where the wars of the imagination were often fought and nearly always won. It will happen where my heart was broken.’
The dogs …? wondered Kohler. Would the SS unleash them? Mascots, for Christ’s sake! Loved until ordered otherwise. And well fed by the look.
The broken walls and narrow passageways of the ruins came to him and he saw them bleached by moonlight, then plunged into darkness. Cold, so cold and all alone.
Snow and moonlight played the devil’s taunt with the narrow streets and passageways of the darkened village. No one was about. There was no sound but that of his own boots. And through it all came that sense of knowing all doors and voices would be shut to him.
St-Cyr reached the tiny square. Water still spilled from the tap. Snow filtered down, and where the sharp shaft of the sky above appeared, the crystals glistened as th
ey fell and swirled and struggled so as to bury the ground.
‘Messieurs,’ he shouted in panic now. ‘I must have answers!’
Only silence and the cold of their canyons came to him. All would be listening – tensely, so tensely, the finger to the lips, the black-out curtains tightly drawn. All lights extinguished in every room and house but a single candle.
Old lips with wrinkles sharply joining to meet them among the hairs of unwanted moustaches. Black shawls, black everything. So be it. He tossed the hand of indifference, said quietly, ‘Mon Dieu, you people are stubborn. United in spirit, you range against that common enmity of your centuries not understanding I come as a friend.’
St-Cyr gave them what they wanted. Trudging onward and uphill always, he passed the Café de Bonne Chance, their little gathering place – oh how they valued it but were not blind to its humble simplicity. It had served them well. He passed the church and knew its door, though never locked, would now be shut to him.
He went on up the hill and just before he came to that final, steep ascent, turned to look back over the land. He drew in a deep breath and gave a long sigh of, ‘Ah, it’s magnificent!’
Light shimmered on the sea that was always bluer than any other. It bathed the olive groves and vineyards, the orchards too, and came on up over stony pastures to solitary pine or clump of cypresses. Roman and Saracen, Vandal or Visigoth, Nazi or German. Munk would level the village – he knew this now, felt it and said, ‘God, do not mock me like this. The Gestapo Munk stands only to gain no matter the outcome of our little investigation.’
As was His custom, God did not answer but gave only the paleness of the moon and the gently falling snow.
Abruptly St-Cyr turned and climbed to the heights, passing through that broken portal and into ruins the centuries had left. An owl flew off, heavy-winged and dark beneath the moon and silence.
‘Josianne-Michèle,’ he sang out, his voice so loud it seemed odd and frightening to hear it echo back and forth. It was as if time had left only his voice to bounce about long after death.
He lowered it. ‘Josianne-Michèle …? Ah! it is me, Jean-Louis St-Cyr, the detective. Please, I am unarmed. The man from Bayonne, mademoiselle. The one from the Deuxième Bureau, isn’t that so? He has my revolver. My revolver, Josianne-Michèle, and me, I have foolishly let him take it from me again.’
Again … again … again … Did Saracen or Roman yell among fresh ruins a last farewell, and would it have echoed so many times and so hauntingly?
‘Ah yes, mademoiselle. The crux of the matter, eh? A simple revolver then; a simple murder now. Then, too, that of a dancer in Les Naturistes in Paris – a single shot in an otherwise empty room. Protection through silence for her killer.’
As some tourist, forgotten by tour guide and autobus and left to his own designs in a foreign land, the detective strolled about the ruins, muttering things to himself. And she could not decide about him and eased her aching arms. He might know who had killed that dancer; he might not even understand why it had happened. He might now know about Chamonix – ah! it was very possible. He had discovered the masks. Oh for sure, he had looked at them. What had he thought? she wondered.
He was now in the arena surrounded by the broken columns that stood as soldiers would to stop the lions from escaping so that the naked virgin of childhood, she could try to save herself. One could hear the shouts and cries all around him; one could see among the crowd those who stood to shout their praises and encouragement, and those who threw the thumb down to mock her.
‘But Chamonix,’ he said. ‘Chamonix, Josianne-Michèle Delphane? That and the death of the financier are the kernel of this whole affair.’
He was in silhouette sharply defined and he wanted her to walk out there to him. That, she could not do. ‘My name is not Delphane!’ she shrilled, trembling with sudden anger. ‘How can you say such a thing?’
She was up in the seats of this little forum she thought a theatre or perhaps even a colosseum. St-Cyr thanked that boyhood intuition that was still with him after all these years. Think as a child, and a child you will find.
Again he tossed an indifferent hand. ‘All right, mademoiselle, then is it Buemondi who fathered you and your sister? Come, come, I need to know the answer and must hear it from yourself.’
She rested her arms on her knees and saw him along the sight of the crossbow and above the shaft of the arrow. She could kill him easily.
‘Carlo made the mask of me and the body casts, Monsieur the Detective from Paris. Carlo has allowed me to see myself as I really am. Wanton, monsieur. Lustful and with no shame for the urges of my body. Ah yes, Inspector, I have slept with my father many times and enjoyed it immensely!’
Ah Nom de Dieu! ‘And your sister?’ he shouted but knew the girl had vanished.
Picking his way through the blocks of stone, St-Cyr came out on to a broad avenue and looked uncertainly along it towards the walls that surrounded the citadel. Instinctively his shoulders flinched and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
She was behind him and he knew that if he turned, she’d fire that thing at him. ‘And your sister?’ he asked again, lowering his voice to a calmness he did not feel.
The girl’s voice grated. ‘My sister loathes the very sight of me, Inspector. She’s always hated me because Alain Borel is mine! Alain could not divide one heart among two lovers. Oh for sure, Josette-Louise, she envies me. She even let Carlo make the mask of her and lay naked under his hands while the body casts, they were made. She exposed herself to him many times and tried to let him have the use of her body, but it was no good. I was not present. Me, I refused absolutely to be a witness to it. And the face you see in her mask, Inspector, is the lie of her outgoing self, for she has failed miserably at everything she ever tried to do except be the virgin she is.’
‘A dancer,’ he said – it was not a question.
‘Yes!’ she answered. ‘Actress, designer’s mannequin and artist’s model – even at prostituting herself, she could not succeed.’
‘Then why didn’t you go to Paris?’ he asked, fearing the iron-tipped bolt of that thing in her hands; feeling he had asked too much.
There was no answer.
Just before dawn the boy, Bébert Peretti, came up to the ruins with bread and a bowl of café blanc made with real coffee and milk.
‘It is to be a treat for her, monsieur,’ he said gravely. ‘It is because grand-mère wishes to tell her the agony will soon be over. The soldiers, they have the guns and they ring both the village and the fortress.’
St-Cyr threw up his eyes to the heavens above. He could not help but cry out from the soul, God, why have you not allowed us to prevent it?
Only silence gave answer. Eventually he filled his lungs, catching the breath of sage, thyme and mimosa.
‘Bébert, today is to be your day and me, I know exactly how much you and your grandmother love the Mademoiselle Josianne-Michèle. She is the sweetheart of your dreams, and by your silence, you are trying not only to protect the village but her also. This I understand and admire because I’ve been a boy myself. But now you must go down through the village that is your home. Walk right through it, eh? Speaking to no one. Tell the Gestapo Munk that the leader of the maquis is in the citadel among the ruins and agrees to negotiate only with the Inspector Jean-Paul Delphane. Please, you may give the Inspector this. That one, he will understand.’
St-Cyr placed the kaleidoscope in the boy’s hand and closed his fingers over it with a gentle clasp and the terse shake of comrades. ‘Now go, and may God go with you.’
‘And the other one, monsieur? The Inspector from the Gestapo?’
‘Ah, yes, Hermann. Hermann, he must not try to join us. Tell him that we part as friends, knowing each respects the other for what we are. Men first, and detectives second.’
‘But he must not come.’
‘Hey, listen, my friend. That one is stubborn beyond belief, but this time absolutely, he must bend to my wis
hes. I do not wish to see him crucified.’
The boy raised the hand of farewell and the detective from the Sûreté watched as he threaded his way through the ruins and went down to the village.
Then he left the café blanc and the bread on a slab of stone and beside them both, placed a single piece of Roman glass and the scent bottle the two girls had found so long ago.
It was enough. It would have to be enough.
10
They were gathered on the road just below the ramparts of their village, about 200 souls in all. And the Abbé Roussel, gaunt, an old rook in flight, hastened down the narrow passageways to be with them.
Most were on their knees; some stood like cattle, dumb before the hammer that would kill them. Three were dead. Their bodies lay in the streets above on trampled snow where the bullets had caught them or one of the dogs. A woman had lost her baby; blood and brains were on hands that shook so hard, she could barely clasp them in prayer.
It was the morning of 23 December 1942. The dogs were being put back on the leash for a final pass through the village. Anyone found hiding would be shot on sight.
Kohler, freed of the handcuffs that had held him all night, clasped and then favoured first one bony wrist and then the other. Ludo Borel and the weaver stood with him, the woman constantly searching the heights and desperate.
Carlo Buemondi, lost and ludicrous in his black uniform, had finally realised what it all must mean for him.
Apart also, and alone, Jean-Paul Delphane drew on a cigarette in the frosty air, hiding whatever thoughts he might have.
The sun was sharp and it made oranger still the flame-coloured roofs of the village.
‘Buemondi is about to die in the battle for that hilltop,’ said Kohler quietly. ‘Oh for sure he’ll die the hero’s death and valour will be nailed to his tombstone, but he’ll die all the same.’
‘The Gestapo Munk will take over the Villa of the Golden Oracle and either sell or live in it,’ said the weaver emptily.
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