Kaleidoscope (23 page)

St-Cyr drew on the pipe. ‘Two women in love, Gabrielle. Lifelong friends, the one straying often perhaps, but always coming back to the other to be forgiven.'

‘Until … until, ah suddenly, Louis, someone comes along to tell the weaver the truth about Anne-Marie's father getting out before the crisis fell, but not giving others a warning.'

‘The toy is pawned, a heart is broken. It is the final straw. They've fired the crossbow often enough, the two of them. In jest, of course, but now in business.'

‘The mother leaves Cannes to visit the village on her birthday and to see Josianne-Michèle.'

‘Yes, yes, but something happens on that hillside, Gabrielle. The mother is challenged. The pawn ticket is extended – offered perhaps as evidence that it will be retrieved in good faith, or was it used as a threat?'

‘But what kind of a threat?' she asked, ‘unless to expose this one?' She slid the identity disc directly in front of him but he only shook his head.

St-Cyr picked up the kaleidoscope and pointed it at the light. ‘Bits of colour but such colours, Gabrielle. They rain in on each other; they pass outwards making patterns I cannot read.'

He handed her the instrument. He said, ‘Stavisky, Gabrielle. Something happened at that villa near Chamonix the day the financier supposedly shot himself, or it happened at a clinic and Jean-Paul Delphane, he is using it against me.'

He told her of the dancer at Les Naturistes. He said, ‘I tried to force myself to open that laundry basket in which I myself had only just hidden, but I could not do it. I was terrified he would kill me.'

‘And what is worse,' she said, lowering the instrument to reach out and touch his hand, ‘is that he knew it.'

‘Yes. It's like a puzzle in which time will suddenly collapse and have no meaning for me. Things will happen in the past and in the present and very fast. The kaleidoscope will turn and everything will suddenly fall into place but will it be too late?'

Gabrielle held the toy up to the light again and slowly turned its outer box. Patterns continuously folded in upon each other or opened out. Translucent and transparent, the colours of the gemstones glowed but … but was there not something else? ‘Louis … Louis, would you do something for me?'

He set the pipe aside. ‘Yes, of course. Anything. You have only to ask.'

‘Then open it.'

‘
What?
'

She made unscrewing motions with her fingers, was lost to the excitement of discovery and could hardly contain herself until it was done.

When he took a pair of tweezers from his pocket, she asked for a magnifying glass and he went to get one.

Then they sorted through the tiny heap of platelets whose facets flashed.

‘A D, Louis,' she said.

‘An M and … and an X.' Ah damn.

When laid out in a row, single chips of emerald, topaz, ruby, tourmaline and diamond gave the engraved letters of D, M, X, T. G.

‘A five-letter grouping,' he said, aghast at what they'd found. ‘A wireless code, Gabrielle. The maquis of those mountains. Josianne-Michèle's lover, the eldest son of Ludo Borel … The one thing her sister didn't have.'

It was all so clear he felt sick about it. ‘Jean-Paul, he … he has known exactly what we'd find and now I must tell Hermann of it.'

‘Can't you keep it to yourself?'

He shook his head. ‘That's exactly what Jean-Paul will expect me to do.'

‘Then why, please, did he not want you to find the sister of Josianne-Michèle?'

‘Perhaps Josette-Louise knew of this?' He indicated the letters.

‘But that cannot be. Not if she was estranged from her mother as you have said.'

‘But not from the weaver, Gabrielle. Viviane Darnot sent the girl money against the wishes of the mother. She kept in touch.'

‘But how could she have done such a thing without help? The Demarcation Line between the north and the south, it still exists. It is not so easy to get such letters across even now. The censors, Louis. The Gestapo. Postcards are still the only possible mail.'

‘Delphane?' he asked but rushed on. Suddenly he was lost to her. He got up to search the cupboard for something and when he had it, opened the tin and shook a little out into his hand, drew in the smell of sage.

‘The espadrille, Gabi. The shards of Roman glass that must have come from Hermann's ruins.
Ah Nom de Dieu
, why have I not seen it before?'

More he would not say but rapidly gathered everything up stuffing it into pockets wherever he could find them.

‘Christmas,' he said. ‘Tell René Yvon-Paul we will hunt for the osprey and when we find it, we will know that is where to fish.'

Son of a bitch, he had the answer! Not the murderer or murderess yet, ah no, it was too early for that. But the answer all the same.

The kaleidoscope had made its first complete turning. A pattern had unfolded.

7

Far below the intense blue of the sky, fresh snow blanketed the ground. It sharpened the contrast of orange-tiled roofs in their jumble against the bleached grey-white of the ruined fortress perched on the summit.

St-Cyr stood alone on that hillside. Frost was in the air. Smoke trailed thinly from the village. Goats foraged amid snow-dusted clumps of mimosa and juniper. Grey-green, the scattered ilex and olive gave to the landscape some semblance of the once luxurious forest that had stood here in ancient times. Solitary pines cast long shadows as if that same forest had now all but been forgotten.

Dédou Fratani had brought them in the hearse. Now the girl, Josette-Louise and Hermann waited in the cottage below.

He tried to put himself into the shoes of that girl's mother. A birthday – she'd been exactly fifty-two years old. Some sixty metres from her, the assailant had held the crossbow. They'd exchanged a few words. The woman had extended the pawn ticket.
Viviane
, I've always loved you.
Viviane
, forgive me, please.
Viviane
, you don't understand. I was helping the Resistance.

Or had it been:
Mother
, why couldn't you have helped me?
Mother
, you knew I was down and out.
Mother
, I tried to sell my body in the streets of Paris but could not find the courage.

Viviane
sent you money, Josette.
Viviane
saved you from that, though she disobeyed me.

No, no, he cautioned. It's not Josette-Louise up there on that snow-covered rock where Hermann found the
santon
. It's Josianne-Michèle.

He heard the wheels of the morning's express to Lyon as if they were still beneath them. He saw the girl, Josette-Louise, asleep before him on the opposite seat. He felt himself slipping inside her head to explore the caverns and tunnelled passageways of her mind.

My father never loved me, he said. Josianne-Michèle has always been his favourite. Mother has rejected me and now … now after all the years of my absence, I must come home to face her burial and my sister with my failure.

Josette-Louise Buemondi had not drifted off to sleep easily. Instead, she had fought it long and hard. Exhaustion had ringed the dark eyes. Alone with Hermann and himself, she had stared out of the compartment windows and said so little.

She had dreaded coming home but had also feared their scrutiny and had fought sleep until only it had offered welcome respite.

Josette-Louise Buemondi. The same pale lustre to the skin, that same slender neck and gauntness, that same little brown mole high on the right cheek-bone, the same slight laziness in the right eye.

Hermann had put his coat over her and had lifted her feet up on to the seat. She had sighed – had been so deeply unconscious of them, her fleeting smile had given but a glimpse of happier times.

‘Louis … Louis, the girl's vomiting.'

‘Wha …? Ah, Hermann. What is it?'

‘The kid's sick. It must have been that lousy ham we had in Lyon. Ersatz like all the rest of it.'

‘Or fear. Is it not dread, Hermann, at meeting the sister of her childhood?'

Kohler broke off a bit of thyme and began to chew it. He, too, looked uphill to the ruins beyond the village. ‘Two sisters, two partings of the ways, the one to hell and the other to heaven, Louis. Fear knows no equal to the loneliness of a small village when all the doors are closed and eyes watch everything you do. I'd best get the herbalist. He'll be able to give her something to settle that stomach.'

‘Ah yes, the herbalist. Is it that Josette-Louise believes that one will help her and therefore has brought the vomiting upon herself?'

‘You're too suspicious. Give the kid a break eh? She's had a rough time of it, Louis.'

Was Hermann getting soft in his old age? ‘Suspicion is midwife to detection. It is the umbilical cord of answers.'

‘And Delphane? What about our friend?'

‘He is absent as are the villagers from this hillside. Fear is at once their enemy, Hermann, and their only friend.'

Muttering, ‘You're too deep for me,' Kohler raised a tired hand in half-salute and pushed on up the hill. He knew that Louis would watch him until the ramparts had cut him off from view. He knew all about the threat of the maquis in those hills, of what it could only mean for both of them.

An end to their partnership; a return to hatred because only then can wars be won and enemies conquered.

He reached the spot where the crossbow had been fired and paused before turning to look back at his partner and friend.

Then he raised his arms and bent them as if aiming that same bow at Louis.

Shabby and diffident, an old trilby tilted back to expose the broad, bland brow, Monsieur Ox-Eyes and Bushy Moustache looked up at him.

Frost hung in the air they breathed. Louis extended his right hand and shook it a little as though holding the pawn ticket out and pleading with him to understand that justice must always be done no matter the consequences or opposition.

‘She didn't do it, Louis. That kid from Paris hasn't got it in her.'

The air burst with a puff of vapour as the words chased up to him, but Kohler knew them anyway, had already said them to himself and aloud, ‘Perhaps, but then … then …'
Mais alors … alors …

Lonely on that snow-covered hillside, Hermann was etched in relief, sharpened by the sunlight that, as with the pines, cast a long shadow from him. The air, though crisp, was pungent with the mingled perfume of sage and thyme. New leaves protruded from beneath the clumps of snow. ‘A pattern set is a pattern fixed in memory,' said St-Cyr, but to himself.

When he turned to walk down to the cottage, the weaver stopped and she, too, stood out on that hillside for God to mock. She wore the russet cloak with hood thrown back. She looked up at him and then beyond to Hermann's fast-dwindling figure.

He said, ‘Mademoiselle Darnot, where is the other sister, please? Our cable specifically asked that you both be here.' In mirror after mirror he saw those same dark grey-blue eyes ache with anguish and fear. Flashing at him through the semi-darkness of some stairwell; gazing up at him through the sterile brightness of some clinic.

‘Did you have to bring her?' demanded the weaver harshly. ‘Are you now satisfied?'

‘Mademoiselle, I asked you a question. Please, it is your duty to answer truthfully even though such answers may be used against you.'

‘Josianne-Michèle has gone into the mountains, Inspector. I could not stop her.'

‘And Jean-Paul Delphane, Mademoiselle Viviane? Where, please, is he?'

She shook her head and did not come closer. Perhaps five metres still separated them. ‘I … I don't know, Inspector.'

Again he saw that look in her eyes. Ah, it was of such tragedy, such anguish, she lay broken at his feet.

‘You know, don't you,' she said at last.

That boyhood intuition had served him well. ‘Yes … yes, I know,' he said.

Hands in the pockets of her cloak, the weaver tightly shrugged. ‘Josianne-Michèle needed help, Inspector – qualified doctors and psychiatrists. Against Anne-Marie's wishes I took the girl to Chamonix, yes, and we were there when … when the financier killed himself in my father's villa.'

‘Josianne-Michèle?'

‘Yes, yes, of course. The girls were sixteen at the time. Anne-Marie was at her wits' end. Carlo would do nothing. I thought … That is, I … I interfered, if you want the truth. I came down here and together, Josianne and I went to Chamonix to see an old friend of my father's.'

‘You told no one? Not her mother or her father?'

‘Neither of them knew.'

‘But Carlo Buemondi has told my partner that he demanded the girl be brought back here?'

‘Yes, yes, Carlo said the treatments weren't working and he wanted his little pigeon back. The man's a bastard, Inspector. You saw how she bit your friend. Carlo raped her repeatedly.'

‘His own daughter? His little Josianne …?'

‘Yes. I couldn't let it happen any longer but … but Anne-Marie made me bring her back.'

‘Knowing what he was doing to the girl? Please, mademoiselle, the time for family secrets is past.'

He'd find out anyway; he had that look about him. ‘Josianne-Michèle had tried to kill herself, Inspector. Not once or twice, but several times. It's true the treatments weren't working.'

‘Is it also true that your lover and friend, Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi, asked you to take her daughter to Chamonix?'

‘Yes, yes, it's true.'
Ah merde!
He'd discover the truth and all would be lost. ‘We'd been there for nearly four months and … and nothing seemed to be working. Josianne-Michèle herself begged me to bring her home even though she knew exactly what awaited her.'

‘Was she in love with the herbalist's eldest son even then?'

There was a nod, the woman brushing a booted foot over the snow to clear a small patch. ‘If love can have its roots in loneliness then, yes. Everyone up there in that village, Inspector, was only too well aware of what Carlo had been doing to the girl. You see, they had the aftereffects to contend with, isn't that correct? Madame Peretti, that blind woman who sees everything, has the memory of that child's screams on her conscience.'