Kaleidoscope

by J. Robert Janes

  Kohler raised a tired hand to signal that he’d seen them, and when she walked on ahead, he thought that maybe they might shoot her. The walls confined. There was a cleared space where blocks of stone had perhaps been quarried by one of the villagers to finish off a house or build one. She crossed this and then, suddenly, came up three simple steps and was standing before him.

  He asked what had happened and she said, ‘I know the ruins, though not as well as my daughter. Jean-Paul might just be able to escape. Herr Munk has offered to let Josette go free if I will see that her father is stopped.’

  ‘Have they killed the boy?’

  She shook her head and saw him nod – understood at once that this one had not wanted Bébert or any of them to have been taken. ‘Carlo’s dead. He tried to snatch a gun from one of the SS. Herr Munk could not have let him live.’

  Kohler nodded grimly. ‘Questions … there’d have always been questions about the villa and who really owned it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s so, isn’t it?’

  ‘Come on. We’d better find them. Those two can follow if they want.’

  He took her by the wrist and she let him do so, was glad of the gesture, but when they saw the arrow, she had to follow him down the steps. They were so steep. Darker, darker, and darker …

  ‘Ssh!’ he said. ‘Listen!’

  The girls were calling to each other. ‘Josianne, why didn’t you tell me you’d found this place?’

  ‘Josette, I wanted to but then I could not control myself. I went all to pieces. A terrible fit. The worst one ever.’

  ‘That’s why you took your things up to the ruins and sat at the Window of the Gods. I just knew there had to be a reason for your sitting there like that so quietly.’

  And from elsewhere, echoing also, ‘I would never have given you epilepsy, Josette. I would have shared Alain with you, just as we shared everything.’

  ‘Yes, yes, my sister, this I know. He loved us both. Hey, I found the beaker, Josianne! The Inspector has it in his pocket.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, Josette. It was to be a present for you but I could not dig it up again … again … She … she …’

  Kohler felt for the weaver’s arm and gently tugged on it, signalling to follow him. The voices came from everywhere. Now, too, the sound of trickling water.

  ‘I’ve never been here,’ she whispered anxiously.

  They crossed the chasm and came to the fissure. ‘Sideways,’ he said. ‘You after me. Don’t stay behind … behind … behind …’ Ah merde, merde, even whispers echoed! A loose rock fell. The sound of it was canyon-loud, and after it, there was the sound of someone running and then only that of the water.

  ‘Louis …?’ he whispered. ‘Louis …? Louis …?’ came the echoes.

  ‘Ah Nom de Dieu, Hermann. He has the revolver again pressed to my head!’

  ‘Don’t move, Kohler!’ shouted Delphane. ‘Josette, stop this at once. Josianne is dead.’

  ‘But I did not push her, did I?’

  Ah no, breathed Kohler inwardly. Son of a bitch, the kid had cracked the ice of time. The weaver held her breath and he could feel her heart pounding against him.

  ‘Of course you pushed her,’ snorted Delphane and this echoed too.

  ‘Then why did you come up to the ruins, Uncle Jean? Josianne had had the bad convulsions. Terrible ones, don’t you remember? Anne-Marie said my sister, she would never get better. You … you came with her.’

  Kohler tapped the weaver’s arm twice. Stay put – she knew that’s what he meant. Then he was gone from her and Josette was saying, ‘Anne-Marie walked on ahead of you, Uncle Jean – father, should I call you father? You knew what she was going to do and you let her!’

  St-Cyr heard the weaver’s cry. It began deep within her and was ripped right from her. ‘No, Josette! No!’

  ‘Mother, it’s true! She pushed Josianne-Michèle from the Window of the Gods and then she hit me and hit me and hit me until …’

  Kohler wrapped a hand about the Lebel and bent it away from Louis, turning it towards Delphane until pressed against that one’s temple. ‘Go on, my fine. Pull the trigger. Don’t make me do it for you.’

  ‘Hermann …’

  ‘Louis, shut up!’

  The bang was very loud. Flecks of blood and brains flew about and Kohler felt them hit his face and hands. The one from Bayonne collapsed. The gun fell and clattered on the stones.

  ‘There are two SS back there somewhere, Louis. It’s a pity this one couldn’t have told them what he knew.’

  St-Cyr let a breath escape. ‘Merci, my old one. Merci. His contacts in the Resistance are safe.’

  ‘Don’t let it go to your head, Louis. I’m still on the other side, remember? This one’s yours. Now you owe me one.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The war – the ‘Occupation’ – could only get worse and both of them knew it. The next time there could well be maquis in the hills, or Resistants hiding out in a place like this. Ah yes. Hermann the prisoner and his partner the what? asked St-Cyr. The moment of final decision.

  ‘Delphane killed the Buemondi woman, Louis. Don’t argue about it. Sure the boy will say it wasn’t so, but you know how these villagers are. One murder deserves another. Besides, it was a matter of the water rights and anyway, it must have been the dead girl who fired the arrow.’

  ‘Ah yes, Hermann. Without water there can be no life. “Drink and live for ever”, it’s on the beaker.’

  ‘Beaker …? What’s this about a beaker? Louis, the weaver and her daughter will have to come to Paris with us. Boemelburg won’t have it any other way. I’m going to insist on it.’

  Good for Hermann. Having the last word again, as nearly always. Grumpy too, but, then, he had his reasons. But what of a detective’s duty? Must the girl be brought to justice for a crime she did commit? Everything in him said that it was not his job to ask such questions, but only to bring the assailant in. Yet the law of the hills tugged at him fiercely. The villagers would need to see their own brand of justice done.

  ‘With luck, the kid won’t lose the villa, Louis. Maybe she’ll have to lease it to Munk and he’ll have to be satisfied.’

  For the Duration? Ah, one would wish to say such a thing but not to Hermann, and especially not at a time like this.

  ‘The parish records will have been burned, Louis. Madame Buemondi and that husband of hers adopted the girls, and under the law, Josette-Louise is legal heir no matter what anyone says. So, come on, my old one, I need a drink.’

  Still there could be no answer from the French side. Matters were often best left that way but … Ah, what the hell. ‘Me, also, Hermann. Two I think, and then a meal.’

  ‘You’re buying. You’ve got all the cash and Munk’s not getting one franc of it!’

  ‘Then you’d better ask him for the motorcycle. It’s stolen.’

  ‘That thing? Hey, I requisitioned it on sight, but we’re going to need a better set of wheels and I know just the place. A Bentley or a Rolls, and I’m driving.’

  Boemelburg, who was looking out of the windows of his office, was quite taken with the Rolls which was parked in the courtyard behind Gestapo HQ Paris, on the rue des Saussaies. ‘For Christmas, Sturmbannführer,’ said Kohler quietly from his chair before the Chief’s desk. ‘Louis and I thought you might like to have it.’

  The Old Man snorted, ‘Ja, ja, Hermann, and what is it I am to give you in return? Ausweises for those two women to return south, eh? Come, come, don’t be a dummkopf. You know I can’t do that.’

  ‘Neither of them is a threat to the Reich. The one only wants to weave …’

  ‘Weave?’ thundered Boemelburg. ‘If I understand correctly, the woman wove quite a tale and involved the whole village as accomplices.’

  ‘But only to protect her daughter. Delphane was using them, Sturmbannführer.’

  The Chief tossed his shaven head. ‘And Bleicher, the famous Colonel Henri of the Abwehr? What have you offered
that one for Christmas?’

  ‘Nothing, Sturmbannführer. The Buemondi woman’s list of telephone numbers was accidentally destroyed along with their dossiers and our own in Gestapo Leader Munk’s stove.’

  Well up in his sixties and bigger than Kohler, France’s top cop and Head of SIPO-SD Section IV, the Gestapo in France, knew enough not to ask how this could possibly have happened. ‘And the village?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Left to bury their dead, my Sturmbannführer.’

  ‘Don’t “my” me, Kohler. Gott im Himmel, what am I to do with the two of you?’

  They waited, keeping silent. Not turning from the windows, the Chief said at last, ‘The girl, is she really pregnant by the herbalist’s son or was it this … this professor, this sham artist who defiled her?’

  ‘Not pregnant, Sturmbannführer Boemelburg. A mistake or a fantasy.’

  ‘Good! Why did Delphane use the antique arrow to kill the woman? Why not a newer one?’

  ‘Because it was more fitting but also, Sturmbannführer, because the newer ones were not kept in the grand salon and available to him.’

  ‘Don’t weave too hard, Hermann. Your fingertips might suffer. Surely the Inspector would have used a gun to kill her?’

  Kohler steeled himself for it but the Chief had yet to turn from the windows. Still admiring his new toy. ‘Delphane wanted to pin the murder on the weaver, Sturmbannführer. Guns were not allowed.’

  ‘Guns,’ grunted Boemelburg. ‘Guns like the one that killed the financier, eh, Louis, and then did in the perpetrator of that little falsehood.’

  ‘My gun,’ muttered the Frog, knowing he shouldn’t speak out of turn. ‘No one in authority would believe it was my revolver that had killed Stavisky, Walter, because they did not want to believe it and the whole thing was to be hushed up. Serial numbers and all.’

  ‘Yet in every police photograph, Louis, it was your gun we saw.’

  St-Cyr nodded. ‘Madame Buemondi’s father got Jean-Paul to deal with the financier.’

  ‘Was he paid for the job, do you think?’ asked the Chief.

  ‘Perhaps, but then … ah then, money need not always change hands.’

  ‘One of the connected, eh, Louis? The Establishment. Friends in high places who could help him out in the future when a favour was needed. What made him turn against us? Come, come, from you I demand an answer.’

  It was clear that Walter was worried but equally clear that he knew more than he was letting on. St-Cyr took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. A Gestapo, Walter was, and a Nazi too; but beneath it all and behind it, a cop and a damned good detective. One could not say otherwise when one had known and worked with him before the war.

  Lighting up the furnace, he took several puffs, then waved out the match. ‘Perhaps, Walter, for completeness you might tell us why Abwehr Central and the famous Colonel Henri started to watch the Inspector Jean-Paul Delphane but did not jump him?’

  ‘Louis …?’ began Hermann, startled by the all-too-obvious challenge.

  It was a tired Boemelburg who said, ‘Because I always suspected what Jean-Paul had done in Chamonix, Louis, and wanted us to take a closer look at him.’

  ‘So you tipped off the Abwehr, for whom he was then working, and they went after him.’ Paris these days … it never ceased to amaze!

  ‘And Bleicher suspected the truth but wanted the Gestapo to take care of things – Delphane was too well connected for their shining morals.’

  ‘But … but why did he go over to the other side?’ blurted Kohler. ‘The Resistance?’

  Boemelburg turned back to the windows and the rain. Was it pissing like this in Berlin, he wondered, or snowing? The car was superb and he’d enjoy being driven around in it from time to time but for how long?

  ‘Even the Far Right are beginning to have second thoughts about us, Louis, but who can answer for a man like Jean-Paul? Perhaps he felt the end was near and thought that by switching sides he’d save himself.’

  ‘The war in Russia,’ muttered Hermann, ‘and the one in North Africa.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Boemelburg. ‘The Right have always done what they felt was right for themselves.’

  ‘Walter, why not admit that you lost heavily in the Stavisky Affair and have been feeling badly ever since? Me, I am certain you must have …’

  ‘Some shares. A little venture – ah, it was nothing, Louis. Nothing. Merely the heating-and-ventilating firm I used to work for here in the old days. One can’t always be a cop. Someday one has to retire. Stavisky refloated the firm and I thought … Well, Paris, I’d had such good times here. I …’

  St-Cyr tugged at Kohler’s sleeve. ‘Enjoy the Rolls, Walter, and the holiday, eh? Hermann and me, we must take a few days off to rest up.’

  ‘Then read that telex on my desk and enjoy your own holiday.’

  Ah no … The thing was from Mueller, Gestapo HQ Berlin. It was all about someone code-named Salamander.

  ‘Find him, Louis, before he kills too many more. Hermann, you go with him. Lyon first, I think. Arson, Louis. A cinema-house and all the popcorn the two of you can eat!’

  ‘And the weaver and her daughter?’ bleated the Sûreté’s little Frog.

  ‘Besançon and the internment camp there for British citizens, Louis. It’s the best I can offer.’

  ‘But what about Christmas? What about …?’ Kohler saw the telex beneath the other one. He could not bring himself to pull it out. Apprehension rushed in on him. The boys? he asked. Gerda … his little Gerda?

  ‘She’s asking you for a divorce, Hermann,’ said St-Cyr, wishing he could cushion the blow to the ego. ‘Apparently your wife has found someone else.’

  ‘A Frenchman, Hermann,’ snorted the Chief. ‘A labourer on her father’s farm.’

  ‘Then I’m applying for compassionate leave, Sturmbannführer. Please, you can’t cut me off like this. I’ll …’

  Have nothing to go home to. All three of them knew this was what Hermann had been about to say.

  ‘Lyon,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘We’ll pass through Vouvray, Walter. A short digression to restore the soul.’

  ‘Then see that you don’t take too long about it. This one’s slippery. Get to the cinema-house before the ashes are cold. Find the hand that did it.’

  Turn the page to continue reading from the St-Cyr and Kohler Series

  1

  THE STENCH WAS TERRIBLE, OF PISS-SOAKED wool, wet ashes and death, that sweet, foul, clinging odour of burnt flesh, excrement and human hair.

  Jean-Louis St-Cyr let his gaze drift over the corpses that lay in two great mounds at what had once been the curtained doorways to the foyer. Some, too, were scattered about the charred, soaked seats that now lay in ruins under ice.

  Some had tried repeatedly to force the exit doors—there were corpses there, too, lots of them—trampled again and one could see how that seething mass of terrified humanity had run to those doors and then had tried to escape through the foyer.

  ‘Louis, how the hell are we supposed to go about sorting this thing out?’ demanded Kohler angrily. Hermann was looking desperate and ill behind a blue polka-dot bandanna that had been soaked in cheap toilet water and disinfectant. Contrary to popular belief, many Bavarians were known to have weak stomachs, this one especially.

  Concerned about him, St-Cyr nudged his partner’s arm. ‘Try not to think too much about the loss of so many, mon vieux. Try to go carefully, eh? Remember, we don’t have to pull them apart. Not us. Others.’

  Louis was always saying things like that! A chief inspector of the Sûreté Nationale and a detective of long standing, he was the other half of their flying squad, such as it was and always seeming to be on the run. ‘Verdammt! It’s nearly Christmas, Louis! Giselle and Oona … they were expecting me to be at home in Paris for the holiday.’

  Ah merde, no concern for his partner, and how, really, were they to begin? wondered St-Cyr, wishing he was elsewhere and looking desperately around at the carnage, telling himself that Herman
n was better off if a little angry. It helped the stomach.

  One couple clung in a last, desperate act of love. Ice encased everything, and the fire that had come before had removed all but scraps of clothing. Even the woman’s garter belt was gone, the elastic adding its tiny contribution to the conflagration, the wires now embedded in her thighs.

  Others had cringed under the seats, covering their heads and trying to protect their faces. Still others had been trampled by their fellow human beings. Now those who had done the trampling lay atop the piles of tangled bodies, their stark, empty-eyed expressions caught and kept by death and the encasing ice.

  A cinema … The Palace of Pleasure of the Beautiful Celluloid. Whoever had set the fire—and it had been set—had made certain of the carnage. Both fire doors had been padlocked, though not, he thought, by the arsonist. The cinema had been packed—two days before Christmas 1942, a Wednesday evening performance, the fire set at about 9.15 Berlin time. The City of Lyon, the German Occupation of France but not a cinema reserved for the Wehrmacht, not one of the soldatenkinos. Railway workers and their families. Humble people, little people. Loyal fans, the film a favourite of all railway workers, La Bête humaine, The Human Beast.

  In the scramble to escape, 183 patrons had died, an unofficial estimate. ‘Ah, mon Dieu, Hermann, to come straight from the railway station to a thing like this!’

  Icicles were everywhere—hanging from the balcony and a brass railing that had come loose under the crush. Even from the cornice of the projectionist’s booth, even from the backs and bottoms of the seats. Charred timbers showed where portions of the roof had gone. The sky above was empty and grey. Icicles hung up there—great long things that, with the fifteen degrees of frost, appeared dirty grey and savage.

  There was glass underfoot from the skylights above, and plaster in chunks with laddered bits of once-painted wood whose charred alligator pattern might have been used to trace the progress of the fire had one not been told exactly where it had started.

  ‘Right at the head of each aisle, Louis. Simultaneously or very close to it. Gasoline, though God knows where they got it.’