Kaleidoscope

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘All that Anne-Marie wanted so much to keep for herself will be lost.’

  ‘And Buemondi’s heirs won’t get a sou,’ breathed Kohler, watching her intently. ‘Heirs that might have had a rightful claim will not be able to raise their voices in objection because they, too, will be silenced, as will this hillside.’

  ‘Viviane, tell him!’ seethed the herbalist, his fists doubled in frustration.

  ‘I can’t, Ludo! Don’t you see, I can’t?’

  Still she hadn’t turned to face them. ‘There’s only one of your daughters up on that hilltop, Mademoiselle Viviane,’ said Kohler firmly. ‘With Madame Buemondi dead, that daughter stood to have a life of financial freedom because, though bastard and lecher he is, Carlo Buemondi would have kept her.’

  ‘Josette was suicidal,’ said Borel, uneasy at the turn of things. ‘Mademoiselle Viviane took her many times to Paris, to Zurich and to Chamonix for treatment.’

  ‘Who paid for it?’

  Ah merde, must this Gestapo betray such a harsh inquisitiveness? ‘Me, I never knew, monsieur, and she never said.’

  ‘Listen, my friend, don’t be an idiot and hold out on me now. Delphane paid up, eh? The village … Gott im Himmel, think of the village.’

  Did this one hope to save it by knowing the truth? Would it even matter?

  Borel tossed a curt nod. ‘That one then. The one from Bayonne. Sometimes he came to see Viviane at the cottage. The twins, they knew him as their uncle.’

  ‘Delphane took letters and money to Josette in Paris, Mademoiselle Viviane,’ said Kohler. ‘He broke the rules and got her the laissez-passers necessary for her to come south from time to time. But she didn’t come here to see Madame Buemondi. She came to see you because by then she had been told or had realized the truth of who her real father and mother were.’

  The weaver bit her lower lip and clenched her fists to stop herself from crying. ‘Anne-Marie had disowned her years ago. Carlo … Carlo made use of her whenever … whenever she went to see him. He was raping her, Inspector. My daughter. A girl who was …’

  ‘Mentally ill,’ said Kohler sadly. ‘You were both on this hillside, Mademoiselle Viviane, when Madame Buemondi came out to see you on her birthday. You shouted the accusations at her – hell, she’d locked up the money you so desperately needed to get Jean-Paul off your back.’

  The weaver clenched her fists all the harder. Blood trickled from the split she had reopened in her lip. Ludo Borel took a step towards her. Kohler grabbed him by the arm.

  The woman choked back a sob and said, ‘Anne-Marie, she … she held out her hand as she had always done to me, Inspector. She … she said that the kaleidoscope was in the mont-de-piété in Bayonne, and that she would redeem it for me just as soon as she could gather enough money. That … that Jean-Paul, he was having the villa watched too closely, and she … she could not go there because he … he would kill h …’

  ‘Monsieur, please!’ pleaded Borel. ‘Madame Buemondi had hurt the Mademoiselle Viviane so many times in the past. When I met them on the hillside, I …’ He saw the Abbé Roussel make the sign of the cross but had no time for him. ‘I took the crossbow from the girl, Inspector, and put an end to what should have ended long ago.’

  ‘Ludo, how could you? Ah Jesus, Jesus …’ The woman fell to her knees and pounded the rocks with her fists. Kohler leapt to drag her up. She fought to destroy herself, to end the one thing her lover had made possible above all else.

  Her knuckles were bleeding badly. ‘Idiot!’ shouted Kohler angrily. ‘Why did you have to do that?’

  She spat in his face and shrieked at him, ‘Because I killed her! Because I was the one who knew about the escapers! It was me who took them to the villa in Le Cannet. Me, Inspector. I moved them from the cottage.’

  Such an outburst did not go unnoticed. Buemondi wet his breeches; Delphane levelled his pistol at her but still had not pulled the trigger …

  Kohler did the only thing possible. He flung the woman at the bastard’s feet and shouted, ‘Go on and kill her then! Be a coward to save your miserable ass.’

  It was Munk who took the Mauser from Delphane and gave him back Louis’s revolver. ‘Now go up on the hill and sort it all out. Take Kohler with you. We will wait one hour and then the executions will begin at ten-minute intervals.’

  Kohler thought of his two sons encircled with the whole of the Sixth Army by the Russians at Stalingrad. Savagery could only be met with savagery. What mercy could the boys possibly expect?

  He thought of Gerda and the farm he’d hardly seen since the spring of 1939, of picking wild flowers by a reedy pond and bathing naked with the boys while she laughed yet worried they’d get pneumonia.

  He thought of Louis up there among the ruins and of the dogs they’d be certain to unleash. ‘Give me something,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me to go in there barehanded.’

  Have some compassion where none could be expected? Borel warned himself not to intervene, that by the very act of doing so, he would place himself among the first to be executed.

  Even so, when the Gestapo Munk turned aside to speak to the SS major and his lieutenants, he nudged the Bavarian’s arm. ‘Take this,’ he whispered urgently. ‘It is of the opium poppy and the hot red peppers. I made it up for Mademoiselle Viviane’s escapers but she would not allow me the opportunity to give it to them. She was afraid, monsieur, that if it was found in their possession, I would suffer for something I had had nothing to do with.’

  The glass-stoppered bottle was cold and Kohler warmed it with a hand as he slid it away in a pocket. ‘Thanks,’ he said as the truth of what the herbalist had just said hit him. ‘Have courage.’

  ‘Please, monsieur. If you value life, value silence. My eldest son, he is among them.’

  ‘The maquis?’

  ‘Monsieur, that word must never pass my lips. My son is a good boy. When he found the escapers lost and wandering about our hills with one of their number badly wounded, he did what had to be done.’

  ‘He brought them to the cottage under cover of darkness,’ sighed Kohler grimly. ‘Then he left them there for Jean-Paul Delphane, the one they’d said would take them on through to Spain and freedom.’

  ‘Marcus. His code name was Marcus. No one could have known the German security forces had begun to question the Inspector’s moves, monsieur. Nor could anyone have known for sure that he would then turn on them to save himself.’

  ‘Try to get them to keep the dogs here and I’ll see what I can do. Look after the weaver. She’s going to need all your efforts for the little time that’s left.’

  St-Cyr bit off a breath. It was uncanny how well the girl knew the ruins. She did not hide so much as lead him into positions from which, unseen, she could observe him. And the sunlight from the east was always behind her, dazzling and painful, red-orange and full of fire.

  A clump of snow fell suddenly from a rock. He wet his lips in doubt and fear. For some time now he’d felt there was a pattern to the places she led him. Time seemed suspended though time they did not have. Down a darkened ramp, blocked by rubble at its ends, in shadow still, there was an open doorway to one side, and it was colder there than when in the sun. ‘Mademoiselle …’ he began again, knowing she would answer only when it suited her, knowing, too, that Jean-Paul, he would understand this and try to use it.

  Suffused with soft light from a portal high in its eastern wall, the stable was littered with goat droppings and he knew at once, the girl and Bébert Peretti had often met here to share their humble lives.

  Fresh straw had been put down in one corner. There was a simple wooden bench for the milking, the blackened remains of a fire, a tin can for boiling water and a shared cup.

  At first he didn’t notice the lifted stones in the floor right at the corner, nor the small heap of rubble that was to one side of them.

  Throwing an anxious glance over a shoulder, St-Cyr crouched, then got down on his hands and knees as he saw the trowel she had used. Ah Nom de
Dieu, among the shards of Roman glass there was a small, pale green beaker. A magnificent thing with Greek letters and designs around the rim. She had brushed it off.

  ‘“Drink and live for ever,”’ he said, swallowing tightly as he saw those two girls in happier times, heard their excited cries, their shouts and earnest whispers as they dug for treasures like this. ‘Fourth or fifth century AD,’ he said sadly. ‘A town, a fortress destroyed – when, when?’ he asked. ‘Now a village is to have its turn and these ruins, they are to receive another pounding. Mademoiselle Josianne-Michèle,’ he called out. ‘You alone can save the village, and me, I think you are wise enough to have perceived this.’

  ‘“Drink and live for ever,”’ she said, but from where he could not discover. ‘I didn’t kill her. It was an accident.’

  She was already moving away from him. ‘Your voice …’ he said, startled. ‘Mademoiselle Josette-Louise, listen to me!’

  ‘She said I was diseased, Inspector! That I had this terrible, terrible affliction and that I wasn’t ever going to get better!’

  ‘Mademoiselle … Jean-Paul Delphane, he is …’

  No one would believe her! ‘It was an accident, Inspector! How can you think anything else?’

  Merde, where was she? Up above him or to one side? ‘Mademoiselle Josette-Louise, what are you doing here? Only a moment ago I was talking to your sister.’

  ‘She’s a liar! Epilepsy is not contagious. It was an accident, Inspector. An accident!’

  ‘Which Monsieur Borel saw only too clearly,’ he said, sadly muttering it to himself as the past overwhelmed the present, suspending it in that ether called time. Two girls of twelve, the one with epilepsy and subject to terrible fits she could not control or understand; the other trying to cope with the sister she had once known. These ruins; those happy times before.

  Abruptly he left the stable, carrying the beaker clenched in a fist. When he came to the portal at the end of a long and confining passage, she was not there to face him with the sun behind her. Puzzled, he looked down at the wide stone sill upon which Josianne-Michèle must have sat, and saw the shard of glass and the perfume vial he had left elsewhere for her at dawn. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he hazarded, not turning from the mountains and the sun in the east lest she fire that thing at him. ‘Mademoiselle Josette-Louise, you and your sister had fought over something. Did she threaten to give you the incurable disease you said she had? Did she then make you so angry that, in a fit of rage, you pushed her?’

  ‘I … I grabbed her, Inspector. I did not mean her to fall. I was only going to tease her but … but she screamed and Ludo … Ludo saw it all from below. Mother … mother made him bury her and say nothing of it. She took away his water rights but told him he could have them back once she was satisfied he’d obeyed.’

  St-Cyr raised his arms. She could not avoid seeing the beaker. Ah Nom de Jésus-Christ, where was Jean-Paul? ‘You were sent to school; Josianne-Michèle supposedly for treatment, and so it all began, the lie of your double existence.’

  St-Cyr waited. The light was so unbelievably clear over the mountains, incredible beauty and … and this. ‘Only Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi was not your natural mother. That one resented the increasing burden of what was happening to you, Josette-Louise. Two sisters, an actress, a dancer and a mannequin in Paris; yes, yes, you tried, succeeding immensely well only as the sister you had loved and accidentally killed.’

  He had believed her about the accident, but would it matter? ‘It was the Madame’s birthday and Viviane my real mother, was very upset with her.’

  ‘Anne-Marie knew the weaver was going to kill her,’ said St-Cyr. ‘That is why she had a bobbin wrapped with russet wool in her pocket. She wanted the truth known if what she feared came to pass.’

  The beaker would break as he fell. It was so very beautiful and Josianne, she had kept it hidden from her all these years and only now had let her find it. ‘Anne-Marie did not want to help my real father, Inspector, my uncle, the Inspector Jean-Paul Delphane. She wanted the money for herself.’

  ‘And by then you had come to hate her.’

  His back was straight. He had braced his booted feet so as to better receive the arrow’s shock. The beaker would fly to pieces. Those things, they were so delicate. Like paper sometimes, thin, so thin and flashing bluey-green and gold or yellow when the sunlight touched them. ‘Yes, yes, I hated her, Inspector. She was greedy and selfish and domineering, and she had betrayed my mother for the last time.’

  Dear Jesus help him. ‘Both of you were on that hillside to meet her, Mademoiselle Josette-Louise. The weaver and yourself. Bébert saw it all happen, and now the village is being held hostage.’

  ‘The village, yes, and … and Carlo, the maker of masks and body casts.’

  ‘And your mother, the weaver whom I think you love more than anyone.’

  When he turned, the girl stood cautiously up, but he could not tell which of them held the crossbow. Josianne-Michèle or Josette-Louise? The one would not kill him, and the other would have to.

  Kohler tried to ease his aching arms. The bastard was right behind him with that gun of Louis’s. They were making their way down a central avenue among the ruins. Columns stood on either side. There were stone basins that had once held olive oil perhaps. More than a fortress or citadel, the place must have had its market. But he had no time for idle speculation. They came out into a small amphitheatre and saw at once an empty bowl with dregs of café blanc now frozen, and the footprints of Louis and the girl …

  The wind whispered among the ruins. Overhead the sky was very blue. Delphane cocked the Lebel. ‘What’d you do to the weaver, eh?’ shouted Kohler, angrily tossing the words over a shoulder. ‘Rape her? Is that how she got the twins? Did she scream and throw her head about? Did you have to hold her down or tie her wrists and ankles to the bedposts?’

  The sun threw the long shadow of the Bavarian across the snow. ‘Viviane and Anne-Marie had decided they wanted a child neither could give the other. Anne-Marie chose me.’

  ‘An old friend of the family, eh?’ snorted Kohler. ‘Wasn’t her father the one who made a bundle before the Stavisky Affair erupted?’

  A bundle … a bundle … The Bavarian’s words were echoing. Good! A small smile would not hurt when he turned, and then the bullet in the chest – yes, yes, that would be best. Kohler ‘killed’ by the partner and friend he had come to put a stop to, Jean-Louis St-Cyr the traitor. ‘She screamed so hard we had to jam a stick between her teeth. Indeed, for myself, I thought the whole thing a piece of foolishness.’

  ‘But you enjoyed it,’ sighed Kohler, easing his arms a little. ‘Your kind always would.’

  ‘Yes, yes, keep me talking, my fine detective from Wasserburg! That is precisely what I want.’

  Ah merde, the bastard wanted Louis to come out here! ‘What’d Madame Buemondi do? Sit on her lover’s head while you went at the weaver, eh? Did you have to do it several times until the fix was in? Did she enjoy watching you torture that poor woman? Did she try to kiss her as it was happening?’

  ‘Antagonize me, my friend. Come, come, a little more of the acid, please. Yes, I went at her several times and yes, Anne-Marie probably watched and listened! Viviane cannot stand the touch of a man but to please her lover, she would endure even that.’

  ‘Even murder the financier?’ hazarded Kohler, dropping his voice.

  Delphane raised the Lebel. He would aim it at the centre of the Bavarian’s back instead, and would let Louis see the coup de grâce. ‘The financier Stavisky. First, my friend from the other side, you must understand that Anne-Marie’s father had written in his will that all his wealth was not to go to her, but to her children.’

  ‘And she had none,’ snorted Kohler. ‘Ah Nom de Dieu, so much for her wanting kids by Viviane! She married the first jackass that came along, and Buemondi couldn’t believe his luck but was never able to consummate the marriage and had to lie about it.’

  Kohler had shifted his weight
to the left foot – he would throw himself to the right but by then it would be too late. ‘Anne-Marie’s father and others could not allow the financier to talk. Too much was at stake.’

  ‘So the weaver let you into the villa and gave you a key to that room.’

  It could do no harm to tell him. ‘Ah yes, of course. Viviane got me into the villa just ahead of Louis and the others, but forgot to give me the key to the room the financier had locked himself into.’

  ‘The room she kept her daughter locked in when not at the clinic,’ sighed Kohler. ‘The girl saw her mother leave the clinic again and followed her back to the villa. Josette knows you murdered Stavisky.’

  ‘With Louis’s gun, yes,’ said Delphane. There was no other sound but that of his voice. Now everything was so still and Kohler’s shadow no longer moved.

  ‘How’d you convince the weaver to let you into that villa, eh? Her father had lost a fortune. By rights, she should have wanted him alive.’

  A dry chuckle was followed by a derisive snort. ‘Viviane believed me when I told her Stavisky was going to get off scot-free.’

  Slowly Kohler turned to face him and lowered his hands. ‘No, my fine, you threatened to tell the world that Josette-Louise had killed her sister.’

  Delphane’s dark, bushy eyebrows arched. ‘And now, my friend? What now, eh?’

  The bastard was going to shoot him. ‘Munk, my friend. Munk is down there waiting for you to bring him the leader of the “maquis”.’

  The one from Bayonne shrugged. ‘Oh for sure, for me it does not matter, monsieur. Viviane will be shot, so, too, the herbalist and the hearse-driver, the abbé and the boy. All others. The black market, eh? Escapers did pass through here. But these hill people, they are nothing in the struggle ahead, and we will win it. Someday the trash you Germans have brought to France will be gone for ever.’

  Louis … where the hell was Louis? ‘Bravo! One dead girl of seventeen in the cellars of the Hotel Montfleury. Hey, my fine, did you enjoy stuffing that hose up inside her, eh? One dead dancer and the drowning in mud of Angélique Girard. The laugh is that Munk let you kill that kid in the cellars, and wanted only to see how far you’d go to protect yourself!’