Beekeeper (30 page)

‘She makes four trips a year to Switzerland and must have the keys and account numbers to the fortune he's had her salt away for him and for others of the avenue Foch, namely Oberg, Louis. He fools around, so much so, she's finally had enough of her Oskar and plans to escape.'

‘So she badgers our beekeeper about his weekly visits …'

‘And gets him to tell her of his sister and the stepson he can't tolerate – here, take two drags. You're going to need them. She finds out everything she can about his little life because she's convinced her Oskar's banging the hell out of Mme de Bonnevies. She even gets her maid to confirm this by staking out that fleabag Hotel Titania, then demands de Bonnevies admit it's happening.'

The cigarette was handed back.

‘Frau Schlacht buys the bottle on Tuesday, Louis. Knowing that de Bonnevies always visits his sister on Thursday afternoons, she takes it to the Salpêtrière and slips it to Angèle-Marie.'

‘Whom the brother then caught drinking from it, so the oil of mirabane had yet to be added … But why leave the bottle with her, Hermann? Why not simply take it to de Bonnevies that evening?'

‘You're too innocent. Have you learned nothing from the years with me? She did so because our beekeeper was proving difficult.'

‘He had refused to have anything to do with poisoning her husband,' sighed St-Cyr heavily. ‘He was terrified of reprisals and knew he'd be arrested.'

‘And that has to be why she visited the house on Thursday evening.'

‘To collect the bottle after he'd added the poison.'

‘He'd shaved, had got himself spruced up but …'

‘Was very nervous about his visitor and with good reason!'

‘And Madame de Bonnevies knew at least something of what was going on, Louis, and was afraid you'd discover Frau Schlacht's name in that little book of her husband's.'

Another cigarette was found but ignored, so lost in thought had Louis become. ‘But when Frau Schlacht arrives, our beekeeper was either in the throes of death or dead,' he muttered. ‘Yet when you confronted her in the brasserie, she showed no fear of being questioned.'

‘Because she's as hard as they come and would have done that husband of hers in if she could have,
and
the beekeeper's wife, and then … And this is where it's perfect, Louis. She would have pointed the finger at de Bonnevies and put paid to him, too, and Danielle and Madame and the stepson!'

Death to one of the Occupier only brought more of it. ‘But … Ah
mais alors, alors
, Hermann, there is just one little problem with what you say.'

‘Go on, tell me, damn it!'

‘There was another visitor to the Salpêtrière that afternoon. A man, since Angèle-Marie, for all the “voices” she hears and the worries she has about being poisoned herself, maintained that it was a “he” who had given her a taste of honey on this little dipper.'

‘A man …' croaked Kohler.

‘Someone who knew exactly how she would react to the taste, as she did, but before she'd received the bottle. Someone who didn't want her coming home and wanted to demonstrate to de Bonnevies and her doctors that she wasn't capable.'

Someone from the quartier Charonne, a member of one of the four families … ‘The custodian, Louis?'

‘His day off doesn't coincide with Thursdays but it could have been switched, yet he made no mention of it in the catacombs.'

‘He was too busy with other matters!' snorted Kohler. ‘The son, Louis. Could it have been Étienne?'

‘Did Schlacht pay the first half of the one hundred thousand francs at Maxim's – is this what you're now saying? Well, is it?'

‘You're right, of course,' sighed Kohler. ‘Schlacht wouldn't have paid it. He'd simply have used the offer to nail Juliette's underpants more firmly down around her ankles.'

‘Danielle … Could Danielle have made a deal with him to buy her half-brother's freedom?'

They were desperate. They were trying to think of every possibility. ‘That priest,' said Kohler, finally lighting the cigarette. ‘Father Michel …'

‘Would have known exactly how Angèle-Marie would react to a taste of honey and may well not have wanted her to return to the fold.'

‘Yet he opened the past when he could just as easily have left it closed.'

‘He's hiding something, Hermann.
Merde
, these village intrigues, these domestic quarrels. Severed heads of wife-beaters, blackmail and rape. A legacy of hatred and a determination for vengeance that reaches back more than thirty years.'

‘That bottle, Louis. It must have been left unattended on the beekeeper's desk for a few hours. From when he came home from the Salpêtrière and until he returned from
Le Chat qui cue
and his little cemetery.'

‘But were the gates unlocked then?' sighed St-Cyr and said firmly, ‘Not likely. Keys would most probably have been needed. Keys, Hermann.'

De Bonnevies had seen his sister drink from the bottle and had thought it okay. Later, he'd had a quick shot, only to discover otherwise.

‘Several would have known where he kept the nitrobenzene, Louis. Danielle …'

‘Yes, yes. How many times must I say I can't see that girl poisoning her father?'

‘The wife did it, then.'

‘Or Héloïse Debré? Or Father Michel – we can't discount him yet!'

‘Someone who knew it was there, Louis, and had had enough of our beekeeper who was far from being the saint that daughter of his thought, and far worse than the lousy son of a bitch his wife considered him to be.'

A torturer, a blackmailer, a hider of serious crimes that had been committed by others. A man so seeking vengeance he would prolong the agony of those responsible for years just for the sweet pleasure of it.

Yet a dedicated scientist who had truly loved his bees and had had the wellbeing of the nation's bees and those of others at heart and suicidally so.

‘But he didn't care for Amaretto, Hermann, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that he would drink from that bottle.'

‘But would our
Bonze
have done so, Louis? Our
Bonze?
'

*
This portion of the rue Dareau is now rue Rémy-Dumoncel.

7

Beyond the boxwood there were rose arbours, and in among these the puppet theatre that had been rebuilt in 1931 but whose origin dated back to 1881. Beyond it, there was the Palais where the nobility of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré had been imprisoned twelve to a room, during the Reign of Terror in 1792, and a high hoarding had been wrapped completely around the Jardin du Luxembourg to keep them in until called to the guillotine.

And now? asked St-Cyr silently, as Hermann leaned on the makeshift crutches the smelter workers had kindly crafted. Now the Palais is home to the Luftwaffe and a swastika flies from it while we, the people, are the prisoners, but without the wall of boards.

There was snow everywhere, and often with distance-loving spaces between, there were strolling couples, old, young, the Occupier, too, with his
Parisiennes.
Choirboys – perhaps sixty of them – were furiously at war with snowballs among the lindens and under the stern-eyed gazes of their respective choirmaster priests. Each ‘soldier' wore his ‘colours' in a trailing choir gown. ‘The Saint-Sulpice, Hermann, and Saint Germain-des-Prés. It's an annual affair, if God provides.'

The snow! ‘They're too silent, Louis. Have they all got sore throats?'

Not a one of them made a sound. All swore or yelled with glee but under their breaths. ‘People respect the rights of others here to peace and quiet,' said St-Cyr drolly, trying to calm him down. ‘It's a rule that even lovers must conduct their most amorous activities in absolute silence!'

Beyond the war of snowballs, beyond the tennis courts, balustraded terraces, with wide promenades, stepped down to the large, octagonal pond where in summer and days gone by, Louis and his little boy had sailed their toy boats. Statues, most of them of the queens of France, looked silently on, and as the steps on the other side rose from terrace to terrace, they eventually led into a wide promenade that was flanked by stately plane trees.

In the distance, beneath the grey of the skies, sunlight touched the dome of the Panthéon. Breath billowed. Neither of them said a thing. Both simply wanted the moment to last, thought St-Cyr, but all too soon it was gone.

‘Herr Schlacht will be waiting for us at the bandstand, Hermann. It's over there, on the way to the
Fontaine des Médicis
and before Valois's Leda and the Swan.'

‘Louis, let me talk to him alone. He'll want that.'

‘Can I trust you, Hermann?'

‘Not to make a secret deal?' Always there was this doubt between them; less now as the years together had sped, but still, it was there. ‘I'll do what I can because I have to. Oona's suffered far too much already.'

‘Then go. I'll walk about for a bit, and then follow.'

Hermann reached the upper terrace and stood looking off towards the Panthéon. Framed by the lines of plane trees and closer urns where sprays of golden chrysanthemums from the hothouses were coated with ice, he looked old and defeated. A giant with one foot so bundled in rags, he gave the premonition of captured soldiers marching through the snows and into Siberia.

As if on cue, the bell of the Bibliothèque Nationale sounded once, to shimmer on the frigid air. But then all motion stopped; no one moved, for that one bell was taken up by the Notre Dame, and after that by the Sacré-Coeur and others – one by one, and throughout the city.

No wonder the choirboys had fought in silence – they'd known this would happen and now … now stood or crouched, as if statues themselves.

‘Stalingrad …' sighed St-Cyr, a rush of joy and tears of gladness filling him even as he gazed across that frozen expanse towards Hermann, who made a statue, too. ‘Von Paulus has surrendered.'

It was Sunday, 31 January 1943.

Behind the bandstand there was a cleared space, a no-man's-land not easily visible from elsewhere in the Jardin. Along one side of this space rows of stacked iron chairs leaned away towards tall trees like a regiment whose legs were spread as if urinating.

Having pulled one of the chairs free, Schlacht sat with forearms crossed and resting on the head of a burled walking stick. The beige, herringbone overcoat was tightly buttoned under the double chin; the grey eyes looked out emptily from beneath the pulled-down brim of a freshly blocked trilby. The gloves were new and of pigskin and all but unheard of these days; Schlacht the well-to-do Berlin
Kleinbürger
wanting yet to rise above the middle class.

The voice, when it came, was thick and still of the scrap-metal yards. ‘Well, Kohler, you've me to thank for your being alive.'

‘And to blame for this.'

The foot. Kohler still hadn't come down from the bandstand. ‘If I understood Godonov's daughter correctly, the burns are small and not serious.'

‘The Russians – even the White ones – will say anything these days.'

‘And that partner of yours?'

‘Louis? He's probably communing with the beehives the
Société Centrale
are overwintering under the fruit trees.'

The Society did keep hives here and regularly held beekeeping demonstrations and gave lectures. ‘These papers, Kohler. This Oona Van der Lynn of yours …'

‘She's not mine. No woman is.'

‘No matter.
Diese papiere sind nicht gültig
, Kohler.'

Not valid, not good …

‘Where is she? What have they done with her?'

‘
Bitte. Kommen sie hier.
Sit awhile. Rest yourself. She's fine and will not be harmed.'

‘Unless …'

‘Let's talk first. Then we'll see.'

Tucking Oona's papers away, Schlacht offered a cigarette from a packet with a black cat on a red background. ‘Craven A's,' breathed Kohler. ‘Taken from downed American aircrew that were stopped while on their way to Berlin.'

‘The war's not good, is it?'

‘Not good, but then I don't exactly live at the expense of the Occupied like some.'

Schlacht nipped off the end of a small cigar. ‘Now listen, be realistic. De Bonnevies got in the road. If that wife of his hadn't poisoned him, someone else would have.'

‘And you're sure Madame de Bonnevies did it?'

The cigar was lit. ‘What I'm certain of is that my Uma didn't, and that,
mein lieber Detektiv
, is the only reason I'm here talking to you. Leave her out of things.'

‘She wanted you dead.'

The cigar was examined fondly like the little friend it was. ‘She misunderstood things, Kohler, that's all, and has reconsidered, but wants her maid returned.'

‘That girl's free to do as she pleases and has found a better job.'

‘With Gabrielle Arcuri.'

‘Who has generals and the OKW at her beck and call, the boys in the front lines, too, and all the others.'

Kohler had yet to sit down. ‘Then we'll leave Mariette Durand where she is and hope her new boss stays out of trouble, but I must warn you rumours still persist about that woman's loyalties.'

‘I'll be certain to let Gabi know.'

‘And the war, Kohler? Have you heard how things are at home?'

Schlacht had been sitting on copies of the
Berliner Tageblatt
and the
Zeitung
, and took these from under himself. ‘
Bombenlose Nacht
, Kohler. Apparently it's what my fellow Berliners now say to each other when parting company.'

Bombless night, instead of
auf Weidersehen.

‘Even apple cider, our favourite non-alcoholic drink, is no longer available. Rhubarb juice has been substituted! And now … now those little
Witze
, those political jokes my fellow Berliners love to circulate, include several about the Bolsheviks. When Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich announces on Radio Berlin that Bolshevism is dead, people are heard to whisper, “Long live Bolshevism”!'