Kaleidoscope (10 page)

The cell door was wide open, the clothes were in rags, the body completely naked and crumpled on the floor among the swill. Blood seeped from her nose and battered lips.

He turned her gently over, asked, Murder, isn't this murder? Twenty – eighteen? Was she even eighteen?

The hair was a dark reddish-brown, the eyes were green and where the bastards had shoved the rubber hose up inside her, the lower abdomen was distended.

He closed the eyes and touched her cheek, said, ‘I'm sorry, kid. This kind of thing should never have happened,' and knew in that moment that it was the beginning of the end. The American landings in North Africa had been the turning-point – he knew that now. Now the savagery would come out as never before. Now the hatred and the fear.

When he reached the avenue Beauséjour, he threw up into someone's shrubbery.

Fratani picked him up and they drove down into the city in silence.

‘Mademoiselle Darnot, if I understand you correctly, Stavisky took your father for several hundred thousand francs,' said St-Cyr.

‘Two millions, five hundred thousand,' she said.

‘And yet he allowed the financier to use the villa near Chamonix as a final hiding-place.'

‘Is it so hard to believe? The investments were in railways, automotive engineering works and real estate – all apparently quite legitimate concerns. Right up until the last moment my father believed emphatically that the financier would pull it all off and come out on top as he had before. Many others did, why not him? It's what I've had to ask myself.'

‘And when the scandal broke, you were at the villa.'

‘Yes.'

‘With whom?'

‘That I'd rather not say. Father telephoned from England to ask that I let the villa to a friend, and I did so. That is why you noticed me at the station.'

‘Was it there that I saw you?'

‘Yes. Yes, of course it was, Inspector.'

St-Cyr nodded as if it were so, but there was more to it, though he could not push her too much. Not with grief holding its shroud over her and the Germans waiting to discover her papers were not quite so in order as she had claimed. Still, it would be best to try.

‘And Madame Buemondi? When, exactly, did the two of you get back together?'

‘We have always been together, Inspector. Oh, for sure there were the years of a bad marriage for her, the birth of the twins, all that sort of thing but,' she gave the shrug of the committed, ‘we always found each other in the end. Either she to me, or myself to her.'

‘And Carlo Buemondi?' he asked.

‘Carlo hated me – he still does. To him, I am the cause of his wife's “strange” infatuation and a “gross” insult to his manliness. More than once he's thrown me out of their house – her houses, I should say. They're both Anne-Marie's. Carlo doesn't own anything. He never has, but he's the reason she bought the cottage and gave the village money now and then. We had lovely times there; times of great bliss and utter freedom. The four of us, Inspector. The girls, Anne-Marie and myself.'

He gave a sigh so genuine she knew it was the truth. He said, ‘An enduring relationship, that's what we all hunger for.'

‘You're not married?' she asked, only to see him shake his head and hear him say, ‘No. No, the Resistance killed the wife and little son. A tragic mistake. A bomb the Gestapo left in place hoping I'd step on it.'

‘But … but your partner, he is of the Gestapo?'

‘We were away on a case. I tried to warn her that there might be trouble. Before we left the city, I went out to where she was living but … Ah, never mind. Hermann, he would have found that bomb easily if we'd been there.'

He looked for more of the acorn coffee, picked at a crumb. Was really, perhaps, a very dear man and therefore exceedingly dangerous. ‘Will you come to the villa with me?' she asked.

‘The villa,' he said, his thoughts so obviously far away, she knew his mind was still on Chamonix and that he would not leave the Affair Stavisky alone until he had settled it.

‘The Villa of the Golden Oracle, Inspector. Anne-Marie Buemondi's villa. It's why I came here and bought this house with what was left of the wreckage of my father's estate. The sweepings,' she said. ‘The dust the bankers forgot to pick up after his ashes were in the ground.'

She would walk away from him now. She would go indoors and up to her room to put on something a little more suitable, and she would have to leave him to his own designs for a moment. By choosing the garden for their coffee, he had obviously wanted to separate her from her weaving. The spot he'd chosen had been sheltered, and he
had
enjoyed the sun, had used it to put her at ease. Ah yes, he was clever.

St-Cyr knew she was watching from an upstairs window and when he looked up, the parted curtain fell.
Ah Mon Dieu
, what was it with her? So afraid, one could smell the fear on her. Terrified the Nazis would discover she was English and lock her up, thus ending the work that was so precious to her; terrified of something else.

Picking his way among the storage jars, he re-entered the house, knew then that she would be hurrying and there was something – something she definitely did not want him to find.

The room in which she stores her wool? he asked. Quickly he went along a cluttered corridor – more shards of pottery and bits of Roman glass on a side-table beneath a sumptuous hanging – and when he found a door that was closed, he opened it and sucked in a breath.

To the ceiling and on every available space of wall there were wooden storage cubicles for wool, skeins and skeins of the most gorgeous colours. Draped over a long table to one side, there were tapestries and rugs, a multicoloured heap of wool, and then … then, on plain trestles with straight-backed chairs behind, two ill-defined rows of small hand-looms.

He took out the clot of russet homespun Hermann had found on the hillside above the body. He had perhaps three minutes at the most and began to search earnestly for its source but asked, What have we here? Places for six or eight students, some perhaps older than she; others younger. A pittance for their lessons, barely enough to pay the expenses; and an intrusion into those precious hours that could never be enough.

When he found the skein, the last of a batch, he knew he had the source. And taking out the pocket-knife his father had given him as a boy of six, he cut off a piece and quickly coiled it.

He still had his back to her, when he sensed she was watching from the doorway. He did not turn and she thought then that it was all over for her. That just as the true artist saw with an inner eye, so, too, must the true detective.

St-Cyr brought the skein up to his nose but she was not fooled by this.

‘You've found my little secret,' she said, and he noted the sadness in her voice. ‘To survive as an artist, Inspector, one has always to teach and as so often, most students are totally unsuited and not the slightest bit inclined to strive for greatness.'

‘Yet you could not teach at the School of Fine Arts?'

‘Carlo prevented that, as he tried to prevent everything else.'

‘And Madame Buemondi, she could not provide enough for you to exist without the teaching?'

It was no use. He was bound to find out, and did she care any more? Did she really? ‘I would never have taken charity from her or from anyone, Inspector. Things have been very hard since the Defeat. There
are
expenses that still must be met. Things
do
cost a great deal more.'

And you were on that hillside, weren't you? he wanted so much to ask but held it back, though in all honesty he could find no reason for his reticence.

Viviane Darnot was a good seven years younger than her companion had been, but there was no youthfulness in the dark grey-blue eyes that met his own.

‘We'd best go,' she said, ‘or we will miss the autobus.'

‘There are two bicycles, are there not?'

Lady's, but would they not be safer than the bus? – she knew that was what he was thinking and was grateful for this sign of concern. ‘Let us compromise, then. The back streets until the climb becomes too much. We've a good three kilometres to cover.'

‘Could Carlo Buemondi have killed his wife?'

Startled – betrayed that he should ask such a question when least expected – she glanced away to the student looms and then looked bravely at him. ‘Someone did, Inspector, and may God bring down His Holy Wrath upon whoever it was!'

When he followed her to the cellars to fetch the bicycles, she felt he did not stare at her as men usually do. There was no fear within her of the sexual thing, none of the distaste she usually felt in such situations, and she found herself respecting this quality in him even when in the closeness and the near-darkness of the cellars.

He was a man who understood and who did not question that two women or two men could live quite naturally together as a couple. He did not prejudge and she wanted to thank him for this but could not bring herself to do so.

St-Cyr took the dark green Majestic from her and carried it up the stairs as she followed him with the red one. But all the time he did so, he saw her eyes as they'd been in that chance moment – had it been chance? – in Chamonix as now. Flashing revelations of their owner. Dark raven hair and pure white skin, the pale oval of the face touched by the blush of apprehension.

It took about an hour to reach their destination. From the shelter of the wooded hills above Le Cannet, the Villa of the Golden Oracle overlooked the Esterel, the city and the sea. Three handsome plane trees gave the buff-coloured, eighteenth-century manor-house great dignity. Ivy climbed the walls; cypresses stood out among the clipped box and yew. There were herbaceous borders behind which there would be flowers everywhere in season. Mimosa, oleander and roses. Arbours too, and trellises, a quiet pool, the ancient sculptured head of the oracle from whose mouth the water would pour.

‘Perhaps four or five hectares in all,' sighed St-Cyr.

‘Six, and surrounded by this same wall of buff-yellow stone. It was worth a fortune but not today, not with the money the Nazis have printed for us.'

The french windows of the ground floor opened on to a flagstone terrace, and from there the steps led down to the gardens which spilled away to the gates.

‘It's magnificent,' he said, ‘and such a contrast to all we've experienced in getting here.'

The shabby lines for food that so often no longer existed when one got there, the dirt, the crowded autobus whose
gazogène
could barely get them up the hills. The smell of unwashed bodies drenched in cheap peifume – Dear God, why did they have to wear it? The dogged looks, that damnable uncaring, the downtrodden nature of everyone. The hawking and spitting, the tubercular coughing now that winter had come.

‘They are beaten, mademoiselle, and they are desperately afraid because they no longer have any control over their lives.'

‘They hated me, did you know that? When the Defeat came, I very quickly discovered my French friends would have nothing more to do with me. It wasn't the accepted thing to be on friendly terms with anyone who was English. I was dirt and they let me know it. I was to blame for what had happened at Dunkirk. My hangings were burned. My commissions ceased absolutely.'

‘So you hid yourself away until they came to realize that Britain was fighting to free them.'

‘And now I do not know which of those friends are truly so, Inspector, and which are not.'

St-Cyr tossed his head in acknowledgement of the national disgrace. ‘Come. Come, we'd best not stand too long at the gates. Let us leave the bicycles against the wall.'

‘Let us take them up to the villa and put them in the solarium out of sight.'

It was only when they got there that they found the cloak of russet homespun and he knew then that she had led him to it and he had to stand in awe of her.

The Salon Marchal des plus Beaux Antiquités was on the rue d'États-Unis not far from the rue d'Antibes. It was right in the most exclusive shopping district, right where few French these days could afford to buy and therefore the clientele was nil or numb and selectively German otherwise.

Kohler gave the glitter of carved mahogany and old paintings a glance. He noted a silver jewel-case with a spillage of pretty baubles – pearls like that poor kid had worn in the last investigation, diamonds as in the one before …

Straight-arming the door, he sent it crashing open. Startled, the dealer, a vain little bastard in grey serge with pop-eyes behind gold-rimmed specs, looked up. Caught in that moment, crouched beyond a marble nymph among stacks of gilded frames whose canvases had been cut away and rolled up for delivery elsewhere long ago.

‘Fernand Marchal?' he shouted.

The shop fell to silence and the dust began to settle. ‘Kohler, Gestapo Central, my hot little friend. Start talking.'

Ah merde
! The glasses were pulled away, Marchal dragging at a silk handkerchief while one old boy in a black lamb's-wool overcoat and Homburg stole a hand across a counter to the pocket-watch he had been trying to flog to the dealer's assistant.

An off-duty Wehrmacht lieutenant and his latest pigeon ceased perusing a magnificent ormolu cabinet neither of them could ever have afforded in normal times.

‘Get out,' said Kohler. ‘All of you except this one.
You
,' he said to the assistant, ‘put the lock on, then wait for me in the back. If you don't, I'll sell your balls to the chef over at the Carlton.'

‘M … monsieur,' began the dealer.

‘It's Inspector,' breathed Kohler. ‘We've things to discuss.'

Marchal eased the last of the gilded frames back into place and, wincing painfully, for the knees, they were no longer youthful, stood unsteadily.

Kohler reached up to lay a hand on the nymph's gorgeous ass and then to lean that hand dangerously against the statue … Ah no – 470,000 new francs, 90,000 old ones if lucky. Florentine and worth a fortune. Priceless!