Beekeeper (43 page)

The ‘desk' was vacant. The
patron
had been told to bugger off. There were no snores, only Louis's breathing and that of his own. ‘Switch on the torch,' he sighed. ‘Come on
mein lieber Oberdetektiv
, this place has been emptied in expectation of our little visit.'

‘So have my batteries.' But had Herr Schlacht prepared a welcome for them?

Time was lost, all sense of its passing gone. On his hands and knees St-Cyr crept forward to another door which, he knew by now, must open at a touch but one could never touch without searching first.

Dust … a feather in a place where there were so few … a coin, a pfennig dropped as
Reichskassenscheine
or francs were hauled from a pocket and one mark or twenty francs given for a little moment, or cigarettes, for these had fast become the preferred currency. A packet of twenty for the night, maybe with an extra ten if there were two girls and the soldier boy was living the dream he'd had while lying up in a barracks, waiting to go on leave.

There was no wire, no taut bit of string but still … the door could have been booby-trapped from within. They'd had that happen before. A safe cracker, the Gypsy, the Ritz and not so very long ago. Was it a week or ten days? One lost track of time. Before Avignon … yes, yes. Before its
Cagoule
had taken such an exception to them.

Sacré nom de nom
, were friends of friends simply out to silence Hermann and himself, and never mind Oona and Giselle, never mind the murder of some beekeeper who had, one must agree, done everything to ensure sufficient would want him dead.

Not just his wife.

The room held no one but himself. The
vase de nuit
had been used but accidentally overturned in the rush to get out. A raid, then, he said. A raid …

A door banged; it banged again and the sound of this carried through the pitch darkness of the attic where garrets, close under the roof, held filthy mattresses, rags and scatterings of female clothing. A torn dress … a brassiere, a shoe … Was it Oona's? wondered Kohler, moving silently and swiftly from room to room for that door hadn't been banging until now.

Stepping out on to the roof, he hooked the door open to silence it. ‘Oona …?' he called softly. ‘Oona, it's me.'

There, was no answer. A flat stretch of tarred roofing had been swept clear by the wind which had piled the snow up against the base of a brick wall that rose a storey and a half.

Crossing the roof, Kohler looked up through the darkness at the iron ladder that was bolted to the wall and would lead whoever it was to the chimneypots of the adjacent building. ‘Don't do this to me,' he sighed. Louis … should he get Louis? Someone had put through an alarm and the Paris
flics
, the Sûreté's vice squad
and
Gestapo's bully boys with guns had come running.

Résistants
? he wondered. Had the person told them that? No doubt Schlacht had clearance and had paid off the local sous-préfet and all others, but who among the rank and file was going to worry about such little details at two or three in the morning when the alarm must have come in?

His foot hurt like hell and he really didn't want to climb the rungs. His hands were freezing, but he had to tell himself Oona would have gone up this in her bare feet if necessary. Oona could be up there.

Had she been missed in the raid? Had she heard something or sensed there was someone else in the attic and not known it was him? She must have. But it hadn't been Oona. Jammed between the chimneypots at the top of the ladder was a thick Manila folder that had been put there while clambering on to the roof, and then left in haste.

The folder held sketches and snapshots of Danielle de Bonnevies at the age of fourteen and fifteen, and in most of these the girl wore nothing but her birthday suit. But there were others in Room 4-18, some tucked in around the mirrored doors of an armoire, some pinned to the walls, or, if a large sketch, framed and hung, and all must have come from the studio. While most recently there, she had realized that several were missing and must have wondered where they were and who had taken them.

‘Frau Hillebrand and Schlacht,' said Kohler, nursing his right foot and trying to rebandage his wounded toes. ‘Our
Bonze
didn't just want to raid the hive for the mother, Louis. He was intent on the kid.'

‘And the mother must have known of it, Hermann.'

‘And done something about it, eh? Like lacing a bottle that was intended for him.'

‘Perhaps, but then … Ah
mon Dieu
, this murder, Hermann. Positively no time to sort things out except while on the run. The run,
mon vieux.
Turning in an alarm is not so easy after the curfew has begun. Mademoiselle Danielle would have needed to either tell the
flics
in person and risk certain arrest, or have had access to a telephone.'

An instrument the Hotel Titania lacked as did most of the quartier Clignancourt.

‘But what the hell had she really in mind?' asked Kohler. Room 4-18 was a cut above the others. Plush wine-red drapes covered French windows that must lead to the little balcony Juliette de Bonnevies had said had a view of the Sacré-Coeur. There were carpets on the floor, pillows on the iron-framed double bed, silk sheets, too, soft woollen blankets and an antique, white lace spread. Two straight-backed chaises, an armchair, a footstool … Champagne flutes placed in readiness – there was even some ice left in the bucket, no bottle of Krüg, though, for those who had raided the hotel would have helped themselves with pleasure.

The ashtrays were clean. Sash cord for tying up the willing and unwilling had been neatly coiled, a gag laid out, a blindfold …

In a drawer, beneath heaps of lingerie, were boxes of Wehrmacht regulation-issue condoms, jars of petroleum jelly, rolls of surgical tape any hospital in the city would have been glad of, since they had none or very little. ‘Even
godemkhés
, Louis!' Dildos. ‘Look, I know our
Bonze
wasn't having it off tonight, or watching through some peephole as others went at it, but what I want to know is why the hell did that kid see fit to lay on a raid?'

Hermann was really worried and had best be calmed. ‘To get at the truth of the missing sketches. To see for herself the room where her mother had been forced to prostitute herself and perhaps even offer up her daughter in hope of freeing her son.'

‘Whom Danielle believed had returned, but then discovered after writing the last of her notes, that he couldn't have.'

‘She didn't want us knowing this, Hermann, until she had done what she felt she had to.'

‘Which was to give that lecture and then poison herself. Louis, Oona may be in the cells at the rue des Saussaies with the rest of those who were carted away from here.'

‘Or Herr Schlacht has now had time to free her and has taken her with him.'

‘Where to?'

‘The candles.'

‘What about them? Danielle …'

‘Though she has denied knowing the whereabouts of the factory, she has patiently discovered everything else.'

‘And will now try to put an end to our
Bonze
and everything he's been doing.'

Goods trains shunted in the freight yards, which Kohler knew were just to the east and along the rue des Poissonniers. In the maintenance sheds and yards of the Omnibus Depot across from him and off the north side of the rue Championnet, the racket of misfiring
autobuses aux gazogene
mingled with that of the others to break the cold, hard darkness, as
vélos
and their earnest riders hurried to work through the ink of what had, before the Defeat of 1940, been 4:45 a.m. A light snow fell to dampen the rank air from the distillation units which used charcoal to produce the mixture of methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen that, when burned in the cylinders, powered the buses. A lorry parted the stream of bicycle riders; a bus followed, honking furiously.

Louis was to enter the candle factory by another route. He would negotiate the inevitable
passages
and, on the way, try to find where the girl had hidden her bike. Just precisely what she planned, they didn't know yet, but would have to stop her. They couldn't have her trying to kill Schlacht, couldn't have her causing trouble here and alerting von Schaumburg and the rest of the OKW to the iniquities of the Palais d'Eiffel any more than she already had, couldn't have her infuriating Oberg.

When a lorry turned in at a courtyard whose entrance had been meant for horse-drawn carriages and wagons, its driver violently cursed and finally, at a lumbering crawl, managed to squeeze it through.

One cylinder wasn't firing, another missed a beat, so the banging and clattering was intermittent, but it wasn't wise to switch these things off when the engine was warming up and would soon fire on all cylinders, albeit at three-quarters the power, or less, of a gasoline-fired engine.

Words erupted with the
argot
– the slang of the quartier. Wax was to be unloaded; candles taken to the Gare de l'Est for shipment to the Reich. Another lorry soon negotiated the entrance, and now the racket of the two of them filled the courtyard and rose up the slot of it to escape into the night sky some four or five storeys above him.

Vacated most probably in the early days of the Great Depression, the building had, no doubt, been cheap and available, and with all the room for expansion Schlacht could possibly have wanted. But it had one big drawback, thought Kohler grimly. There would be far too many places for that kid to hide.

The day shift of fifteen souls began to filter in, their female voices muffled under the constant drone. Kohler thought to join them, but knew he'd stand out as they lined up to punch in at the time clock.

Hacking coughs, sneezes, constant bitching, two teenaged girls discussing a film, a car …

Schlacht's Renault drew slowly into the courtyard behind the lorries. Out tumbled Frau Hillebrand and the others, along with Oona and Giselle. A full house. Not only had he been up all night, he'd been to the lock-up in the cellars of the rue des Saussaies, and also that of Charonne's Commissariat de Police.

Soft on the violent air came the sweet scent of beeswax to indicate that after Sunday's lay-off, the foreman and his assistants had come in at midnight probably to get the wax melted and everything ready for the day's production.

Soon the clanking of ancient machinery was added to the sound of the
gazogènes.

The
passage
was as dark as pitch and no more than two metres in width, felt St-Cyr, not liking what he'd come upon. It ran the length of the rear of the building and separated it from one of the tenements the Société Anonyme des Logements à Bon Marché had put up years ago out of concrete blocks to house, at low rents, the then increasing waves of immigrants from North Africa. But now this latter building would be all but empty. Blacks, Arabs and other non-whites had been forbidden re-entry to the Occupied Zone after the Defeat and had had to stay in the south, to where they had fled along with so many others. Those who had remained in Paris would be exceedingly careful about where and when they went out, for anyone of colour was suspect and likely to be stopped in the street and, if not vouched for by an employer, then taken for forced labour‥

Makeshift doorways had consequently been cut into this wall, and inside one of them, he found the girl's bike. The rucksack was open, the gun gone. When barred windows and locked doors prevented entrance to the factory, he found the fire escape and went up it just as Danielle must have done. A broken window gave access to an even deeper darkness through which the distant sounds of slowly moving machinery came.

Pausing to feel the gap where the lift doors should have been, he found, instead, an emptiness that sickened. When someone stepped on broken glass, he hissed urgently, ‘Mademoiselle, it is Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté. Please give yourself up.'

She made no further sound, and after a while he told himself that she had left him. Her half-brother was dead, her father dead, her life in ruins. With nowhere else to run to, she had come here to do what she felt had to be done. But had she caused her father's death? he asked himself as he blindly searched for the staircase. Had she returned to the house on Thursday to find that bottle on his desk?

The beekeeper would have turned Étienne in and had been very vocal about it. Had he written a letter of condemnation to the Kommandant of Oflag 17A and told her of it? She'd given no hint of this but must have known Frau Schlacht would come to the study on that evening to collect the bottle. Yet much of what Danielle had done and said since they had first met in the garden seemed to indicate she had been terribly afraid the half-brother
had
committed the killing. Father Michel had sensed this and had believed firmly for some time that the boy had indeed returned.

A set of keys. Those from the studio? he wondered, dreading the possibility, for Frau Hillebrand and Honoré de Saussine had each known the whereabouts of the poison, as had Herr Schlacht who had had, by far, the most to lose.

Pneumonia … At least it wasn't the ‘cardiac arrest' the Gestapo were so fond of using, but had the boy been shot? Had the beekeeper, knowing that Juliette would stop at nothing, finally written to the Kommandant of Oflag 17A, denouncing his stepson?

They would probably never know, and certainly the mother, not having been informed of the boy's death, had had reasons of her own for adding the poison.

When he found the staircase, it descended to a landing where there was light, and as he looked up, St-Cyr saw that the building was in two parts, with a forward hoist bay that extended to the roof above, and rearward offices and storerooms. Down below him, where once electrical generators had been assembled, horizontally mounted, cast-iron wheels, a good two metres in diameter and positioned some three metres above the floor, had candle hoops hanging from them at regular intervals. Each hoop had been vertically strung with an outer and inner cage of wicks, and as each wheel advanced, and each cage came round, an operator pulled down on a lever to lower it into a vat of liquid wax. Dripping, the hoop's cage was then lifted to cool and set, while successive others were dipped, a candle and cage taking some forty or fifty passes before being completed. Each outer cage held perhaps thirty candles, each inner one, perhaps twenty, and there were sixteen of the hoops suspended from each of five separate wheels.