Beekeeper (52 page)

No medals, no awards, just memories he shared with that partner of his from the other side. Like brothers, those two, grated Ménétrel. Both honest, both insufferable seekers of the truth who couldn't be bought. And damn Laval for having asked that they be sent from Paris! Damn Bousquet for not having overruled that boss of his and found others who would listen! Damn him, too, for not having had the decency to have kept his word and included him, the Maréchal's
confident
, in the briefing!

‘Where were you on the night of the murder, Doctor?'

The gut was yanked!

‘Was I here, in my office, eh? Did I plan to let that woman into his room and then to watch over the evening's performance? Of course not. Have more sense. When privacy is called for, privacy is always guaranteed.'

‘Then where, exactly, were you?'

‘With my wife and children in the Hotel Majestic which is but a few steps away. I've a suite there, as has the Maréchal for Madame Pétain, but can be here in a matter of minutes.'

The needle was inserted again and again, the gut drawn, the carefully manicured short and finely boned fingers deft and swift. Ménétrel concentrated even as he clipped the gut at last, then sighed.

‘Now we will leave it bare, I think, so as to have it heal faster and better. Unfortunately you will look like a boxer who has just been punished, but that can't be helped.'

And you've found out as much about me as possible, noted St-Cyr, but asked, ‘What rewards did you offer the victim and Monsieur de Fleury?'

The chin tightened. The doctor took a moment to answer.

‘I see that our Inspector of Finances has been indiscreet, but such rewards as I offered are a private matter, Inspector. Find this assassin before he kills his intended target. Bring him to justice and I will see that you are awarded one of these.'

‘The
Francisque
,' sighed St-Cyr. The medal for the faithful that the doctor had had a retired jeweller design. ‘Modelled after the Victor of Verdun's swagger stick, the blades after those of' – Ah! one wanted so much to say Madame Pétain but must humbly substitute – ‘a two-headed battle-axe.'

‘Be the detective inspector I know you to be. Go where you wish, interview whomever you feel necessary, but be discreet. Leave the Maréchal and that wife of his totally out of it. Madame la Maréchale knows nothing of the matter and will only slow you down.'

And interfere? wondered St-Cyr. Ménétrel had been the one, it was said, who had arranged for the arrest of Premier Laval on 13 December 1940 when Pétain had dismissed the
Auvergnat
for assuming too much power. The Garde Mobile had locked up Laval in his château but had been stopped short of the requested assassination by an armed contingent of SS, under the leadership of Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador, who had arrived to whisk the former premier off to the safety of Paris.

Such were the state of things in Vichy then, and probably still.

‘Who knew of this little visit she was to have made?'

The doctor waved an impatient hand. ‘Ask de Fleury. He or Madame Dupuis must have let something slip. I didn't.'

‘Yet you excused the Garde from their duties?'

The needle was put away, the excess gut dropped into an envelope for later sterilization.

‘They were called away. A false alarm.'

‘Not all of them, surely.'

Jésus, merde alors
, must this
salaud
persist? ‘All right, I did tell them things would be secure enough. The visit would be in the evening. It's the depths of winter … How was I to have known an assassin would strike so closely and in our hotel, a hotel that is always guarded?'

‘Then she wasn't challenged as she entered the foyer?'

The bag was closed, the catches secured.

‘The lift attendant was also absent,' confessed Ménétrel, not looking at him. ‘The Maréchal needed to have his self-confidence restored, Inspector. If I have erred, it was only for his sake, and I don't really know how anyone else could have learned of her visit but someone obviously did.'

‘And were there any other such visits recently?'

‘From her, no!'

‘From others, then?'

Ah damn him! ‘Bousquet had to be summoned late one evening last autumn. The woman's husband had got wind of the liaison and was pacing up and down outside the hotel in a fury. Fortunately our secrétaire général has the ability to pacify not only the Boches, but even a distraught cuckold whose wife is upstairs being penetrated by another.'

St-Cyr didn't smile and that was as expected. Early last December he had lost his wife and little son to a Résistance bomb that had been meant for him but had been purposely left in place by Gestapo Paris-Central's Watchers. She'd been coming home from a particularly torrid affair with the Hauptmann Steiner, nephew of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, and yet St-Cyr was still missing her, still blaming himself for what had happened!

‘Did you see the victim after she'd been found, Doctor?'

Such coldness of tone was commendable. ‘I did. I was the one who pronounced her dead. That
imbécile
of a groundsman who found her was incoherent.'

‘Then describe how she was. Leave nothing out.'

‘Were things tidied? Is this what you're, wondering?'

‘I would not ask otherwise.'

The clearing of a throat next door indicated Pétain was waiting for his daily massage and the heat treatments Ménétrel would administer. ‘A moment, Maréchal,' sang out the doctor. ‘Let me just tie my shoelaces.'

‘Breakfast, Bernard. I want to go down. The hotel is up.'

‘Begin the exercises, please. The arms …'

‘Yes, yes,' came the reedy answer, heard as clearly as if there'd been no connecting door.

‘Sometimes at night he drums his fingers on the wall above his bed,' confided Ménétrel. ‘The older he gets, the less he sleeps. Now where were we? Oh yes … She was lying on her back, the left arm extended well above the head, the legs parted slackly. One knee – the left – was bent a little.'

‘And you're certain the legs weren't turned either to one side or the other?'

‘How
did
you find her?'

‘For now, Doctor, please just answer.'

‘The legs were as I've described. One hand, the right, was flattened over the wound. She'd been knifed, I felt, but didn't move her hand to make certain of this. There was no sign of the weapon.'

Ménétrel took a moment, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

‘Anything else?'

‘Her earrings. I had the feeling her killer must have taken one but had then panicked and left the other.'

‘Which one?'

‘The left. I'm certain of it.'

‘
Blancs exceptionnels
, Doctor. Who gave them to her?'

How pleasant of this Sûreté. ‘I only wish I knew.'

It seemed strange, stepping back into the Hall des Sources knowing what he now did, thought Kohler, carrying the victim's overcoat, scarf, gloves and beret, but not her handbag. The place was still pitch dark in its recesses even with the lanterns glowing – hell, the dawn wouldn't break until well past seven the old time and it wasn't quite seven yet.

She couldn't have cried out when confronted by the bastard on that balcony, hadn't struggled, nor had the curtains or windows been damaged.

A gun, then? he asked himself again. Had she recognized her assailant's voice? Had he been afraid of this? Had there really been two of them? The one here and waiting in an unlocked Hall – a woman with a knife and wearing no overcoat or woollen cardigan – the other bringing the victim to her at pistol point?

But the wrong victim.

‘Then they hadn't wanted to kill Pétain in his bedroom for fear of awakening Captain Bonhomme, or someone else,' he sighed, longing for a cigarette and for time to think it all through with Louis.

She'd got away from the one who'd brought her here. He would have called out to the killer, would have told her what had happened and that they had no choice but to silence Céline …

‘Madame Dupuis. I've got to think of her only that way,' he said.

‘Inspector …' came a voice.

It was the ‘iron man', the police photographer and fingerprint artist – nothing ever upset these guys. Tough …
Mein Gott
, they could photograph anything and then patiently dust all round for prints. Old men who'd had their brains blown out,
horizontales
who'd been carved up, kids, housewives, it didn't matter.

‘Marcel Barbault, Inspector.'

Merde alors
, the son of a bitch looked like a defrocked priest! The body was round, the face round, the precisely clipped and black-dyed Hitlerian moustache perfect, the cheeks smooth, the throat no doubt dry and regretting the sour red it had consumed last night.

‘Ah
bon
,' said Kohler, offering fresh nourishment and a light, for it took all types to make this world. ‘Give us shots of her and the
buvette
from all angles, Marcel, then one or two of the Buvette de la Grande Grille and another two of the Buvette Lucas, just for local atmosphere.'

Barbault grinned. ‘The corpse?' he asked, eyebrows arching beneath a fastidiously blocked black homburg, the overcoat collar of carefully brushed velour.

‘Oh, sorry. She's behind the bar. I'll leave you to it, then, shall I?'

‘A clean killing?'

‘Tidy, I think.'

‘You going to stick around in case there's anything else you want?'

‘Of course. Prints on that dripping tap above her feet when you get to them.'

Barbault moved the lanterns so that they wouldn't cast his shadow on the corpse. Popping flashbulbs, he went to work.
Merde
, how could he be so calm? He didn't whistle like some, didn't sing or mutter things to himself like others. ‘A good fuck,' he said, his voice gruff and echoing. ‘A nice cunt for the old sausage to ram, eh, Inspector? They say he never wears a rubber, that he simply tells them to wash it out!'

‘I'm going to get a breath of air.'

‘Don't catch your death.'

Jésus, merde alors!

The skies were clear but dark. Always before dawn it got like this, and which cities and towns at home would be in ruins? Jurgen and Hans had been killed at Stalingrad – just kids, really, his sons, and why hadn't they gone to Argentina like he'd begged them to? Gerda, the ex-wife, was at home on her father's farm near Wasserburg but was now married to an indentured French farm labourer …

Giselle and Oona were at the flat on the rue Suger in Paris, just around the corner from the house of Madame Chabot and Giselle's old friends in the profession. Thank God Oona was there to keep an eye on her.

‘I really do have to get them out of France before it's too late. Louis, too, and Gabrielle, his new love, though that definitely hasn't been consummated.' A chanteuse, a war-widow with a ten-year-old son, a beautiful lay who was keeping it only for Louis.

The Résistance would shoot that patriot simply because he worked with one of the Occupier and in their need for vengeance they'd make lots of similar mistakes.

‘Vichy can't last,' he muttered as, remembering the matter to hand, he hurried back inside the Hall. ‘Marcel, make sure you get close-ups of those cigar ashes on her front and on the counter, those also at the Buvettes de la Grande Grille and Lucas. I'll show them to you when you're ready.'

‘Cigars …?' gasped a female voice. ‘Ah
Sainte Mère
, I have brought some for the Maréchal, Inspector.'

‘Just who the hell are you and what do you think you're doing in here?'

Here … Here
… came the echoes on the damp, cold air.

‘Inès Charpentier … Sculptress and patcher-up of injured detectives. Is it really true that there is a sadist who rapes and then murders only virgins? I ask simply because … because I may have to work late and return to my boarding house after dark and alone.'

Had there been a catch in her throat? ‘Your information's a little off. She wasn't raped and wasn't a virgin.'

‘Oh. The … the men who are clearing the snow have it wrong then. Are these really cigar ashes, Inspector? You see, the Maréchal detests cigarette smoke but apparently enjoys an occasional cigar, and my director, he … he has sent him a little gift of some Havanas, from Cuba by submarine, I think.'

Had the kid been crying? She was standing behind the bar, with her left hand wrapped tightly around that dripping tap and the other one flat on the counter, smudging the ashes. She couldn't stop herself from staring at the corpse, was sickened, no doubt, and likely to throw up.

‘Come on,' said Kohler gently. ‘You need what I need.'

‘And the ashes?' asked Barbault, not turning from his work.

‘Find the rest of them yourself and then have her moved to the morgue.'

The broom kept going. The man, the boy under torchlight, didn't look up but down at the snow he was clearing from the covered walk. The jacket of his
bleus de travail
was open, the coveralls well padded by two bulky pullovers, two flannel shirts and at least one pair of long johns.

A tricolour – a blue-, red- and white-banded scarf – trailed from its tight knotting about the all but absent throat. The face was wide and flat, the dark brown eyes closely spaced under a knitted woollen cap and inwardly grooved by fleshy folds of skin beneath frowning black, bushy brows.

‘Albert,' said the father gently. ‘The Chief Inspector St-Cyr has come all the way from Paris to speak to you. Surely you could spare him a moment?'

‘I went round as I always do,' retorted the son. ‘All the doors were locked except for that one!'

The broom flew up to fiercely point at the distant Hall des Sources, indistinct in the darkness.