Kaleidoscope (24 page)

‘And now?' he asked, longing for his pipe and quiet contemplation.

‘Now she waits like all the rest of them to see what you and your friend will do.'

‘And the Nazis.'

‘Yes, yes, and them.'

‘What happened at the villa near Chamonix, mademoiselle?'

He was so intent, she'd have to tell him something. ‘My father telephoned from London to say that the villa was urgently needed by a friend and that I should leave the key with our gardener and caretaker. Josianne-Michèle was at the clinic – about three kilometres away, in the town. I packed our things and did exactly as my father asked. It was me you saw sitting in that waiting-room when the nurse came to ask you what was the matter.'

‘I'd fallen. I'd hit myself. There was blood on the back of my head.'

She held her breath. Puzzled, then baffled by something, he asked, ‘But why that clinic, mademoiselle? Why did I go there and not to a pharmacy or the hospital?'

When she didn't answer, he said, ‘I was looking for you, wasn't I?'

Her lungs filled, her chest rose. She turned away and he saw her shoulders slump in defeat as she looked downhill towards the cottage, hidden in its little valley.

‘Not me, Inspector. Jean-Paul Delphane. You were after that one and you had followed him to the clinic because he had come to find me.'

‘After the death of the financier?'

It was no use. Things could not be hidden from him for long. ‘Yes … yes, after Stavisky's death.'

‘But you were in that villa before it, mademoiselle? Me, I remember seeing you in a stairwell. Your eyes … you were hiding among some things. You were holding your breath.'

‘Just as I am now?'

‘Yes … yes,
exactly
!'

‘Then my back must have been turned to you, Inspector, and you could not possibly have seen my eyes.'

‘There was a mirror on the wall in front of me, mademoiselle, and you were behind me. The staircase rose above you. There were some hangings – it is, and was, all in semi-darkness, a sliver of light, a triangle of it, the frame of the mind rapidly opening as the cinematographer's aperture does in shade, only to close down as I moved away from you and more light entered the stairwell.'

Ah damn, he had seen her. She must walk away from him, walk right back into the present and go down to Josette-Louise. She must cradle that poor child in her arms as she had so often before, and weep over the death of Anne-Marie.

My lover, she said, but only to herself. My heart and my life.

*

Kohler didn't like it. The village was too still. Beyond the rampart gate, that ugly warren of narrow, twisting streets boxed him in. Shuttered windows looked down with suspicion and alarm. Snow clung tenaciously to mossy crevices and ledges. Ivy climbed yellowish-grey walls but there was little of it. A tendril strained to reach a shutter three floors up in brilliant sunlight. The pale ochrous paint of the shutters was peeling.

He knew he was being watched; knew then with absolute certainty the village was united in its silence and afraid.

Winding steps led steeply to another street just visible. No one had bothered to sweep the snow from their doorsteps. There were few footprints, but one set led from house to house and at each door, a new set of prints appeared to follow those of the others. Dédou Fratani, hearse-driver, village cop and general handyman when not flogging stuff on the black market, had been busy but had said nothing of it when he'd picked them up at the station in Cannes.

Since dawn the men of the village had been waiting for Louis and himself. They'd be at the café or up at the church. The Abbé Roussel would urge caution and counsel silence.

The bastards must be only too well aware of the maquis in the hills. The Gestapo Munk would hold them responsible and if not that one, then Jean-Paul Delphane.

Kohler began to hunt for the herbalist's shop only to find himself drawn deeper and deeper into the web of interconnecting streets. They'd view him as at one with Munk; as far as they were concerned, one Gestapo was as bad as another.

Water ran from a tap at a plain stone fountain in a tiny square of no name. Ice rimmed its basin. Footprints led up to it, then went away. The sound of the water was everywhere in the stillness of the square. Directly above him, the sky was still so very blue, though the afternoon was getting on.

Snow clung to eaves where orange-red tiles jutted out.

The water was ice cold. He wet his throat and looked around at closed shutters. An iron-grilled, ground-floor window sought him out. Beyond its bars and glass and lace curtains, an old woman in black and wearing a shawl crossed herself when he noticed her.

You are of the Gestapo, monsieur, he heard her saying to herself. You are as the bell that tolls before death comes.

Several archways of stone provided walkways from house to house above the street. Steps led down into cellars, while the street itself went uphill under the arches. Jesus it was narrow – dished so as to carry the run-off, and cobbled. Globular terracotta urns held grape and trumpet vines that twisted up the railing of a rickety set of nearby stairs.

There were gas lanterns the black-out didn't allow – no time to even give them a wash of blue paint. The Occupation of the south had been too rapid. Now the villagers simply didn't bother to light their lamps. Ah yes.

Figs and cacti grew in other urns, olive trees from some, herbs in still others and winter lettuces the cold snap had finished.

When he found the shop, it was beneath an archway, half hidden at a corner where the steps led down and up, and the street was no wider than any of the others.

The door was not locked. At once that pungent, dusty smell of ground, powdered herbs and spices met his nostrils. There were liquorice and ginseng roots, dried sponges, glass-stoppered apothecary jars, all with Latin labels.
Hieracium pilosella
L COMPOSITAE
(Mouse-ear Hawk-weed),
Hyoscyamus niger
L SOLONACEAE
(Henbane, a sedative and antispasmodic but also quite poisonous),
Iris germanica
var.
florentina
Dykes
IRIDACEAE
(Orris, the Florentineiris, causes vomiting and may be violently purgative if taken from fresh root-stock). The violet smell was powerful.

There were sacks and bins of dried herbs and flower petals for pot-pourri, a small desk-cum-work table with brass weigh-scale, one chair and beams in the ceiling that must have been three or four hundred years old.

A pictorial chart gave the names of perhaps sixty local herbs and other useful plants. Another gave human organs with their various complaints and treatments. For colds, teas of hyssop and white horehound; bayberry and ginger; or liquorice, elder, meadow sweet, violet and garlic.

There was no sign of Ludo Borel but on the dispensing table there was one bottle of pale grey-green dust.
Papaver somniferum
L PAPAVERACEAE,
the opium poppy, the ground leaves and white flowers probably. Not as narcotic as the milky sap but used in teas and poultices all the same.

Again he had to ask that question that had been bothering him ever since they'd come on the case. Was Borel treating Josianne-Michèle? Now he had to ask, Had she really gone into the mountains?

Behind the shop was one long room devoted to storage and the drying of the herbs. Bunch after bunch of fennel, sage, thyme and rosemary, among others, hung from the rafters. There were burlap sacks and wicker panniers of rosehips, others of pungent juniper berries, a much-worn chopping block and small machete – a wicked thing in the right fist. Honed sharp and centuries old.

Even an idiot could see that the Borels had been in business for generations.

There was a grinding mill with nests of screens to sieve out particles of the appropriate size and return the rest to the mill. There was a distillation unit – oil of eucalyptus, essence of lavender. Roasted barley and acorns were ready to be ground into ersatz coffee; metre-long bunches of soapwort for making soap.

Kohler wished his partner was with him. It was eerie, it was uncomfortable. All warehouses had this feel when no one was around.

Tiny pre-war bottles were stored in pre-war boxes and there were hundreds of them. Borel had bought with an eye to the future.

Going quickly back through to the shop, he paused to scan the shelves of tiny bottles, read: oil of anise; oil of savin; oil of the white opium poppy …

Borel didn't fool around. He had something for everything. Lungwort, henbane and mandrake.

There were even plant dyes and lots of them. Madder and cosmos, walnut and indigo. Goldenrod too.

Out on the street there was still no sign of anyone. As he climbed to the church, he found the village closing in on him. It seemed to say, You are an outsider; you are not wanted here. Beware!

The church was empty and cold. When he reached the last of the houses, the land still climbed. A rough rampart of maquis scrub and angular blocks of stone rose to the ruins of the citadel, stark and vacant yet sharp in the long slant of the sun.

Gott im Himmel
, what was he to do? The kid had been sick at her stomach, a mild case of food poisoning probably. But had that vomiting served only to cut him off from Louis and drag him up here? He knew he ought to go back; knew he had to go on.

The streets of the fortress were lined with its broken walls. Everywhere the whitish stones stood out as if the limestone boulders had been burnt to lime and the years had removed whatever blackness the fire had caused. Some walls were higher than others. Rooms lay upon rooms, some like caves, others open to the sky. Portals gaped; rubble lay strewn beneath the snow. Here and there, clumps of maquis and juniper struggled to gain a foothold, green against the vibrant white. Goats had been and gone; donkeys too. In one stable a smoke-blackened ceiling gave evidence of fires past, though no fresh ashes lay beneath and there was still no sign of anyone.

What might once have been the dining hall was now open to the sky and ringed by broken walls and here a room, there a room or passage. And everywhere that same strong, sage-like smell of the hills but also that of wet moss and mould, a graveyard smell.

When he came to a portal at the end of a short passageway, he saw snow-capped mountains in the distance – Italy over there; then the nearer hills with their frugal clumps of scattered pines and solitary cypresses, and finally the drop. Ah Jesus, Jesus, it was steep. About sixty or eighty metres, not the thirty he'd thought from below the village. Rust stained the rocks like vomit and though there was no wind, its chill was there.

The village lay well off to the right and all but out of sight, huddled with its back to the fortress, house piled upon house, rocks lining many of the eaves. Trees and scrub and boulders between it and the cliff, perhaps 300 metres of them. The portal hidden then … all but hidden from the village.

He dropped a stone but heard nothing – had given up listening for it entirely, only to feel its hollow clatter in every bone.

There was a sill across the base of the portal, an arch above it. The thing was just wide enough for two persons to sit, or for one to put his legs up should he have no fear of heights.

Suddenly queasy at the thought, Kohler turned away and began to retrace his steps. There were too many places for an assailant to hide. From any one of several corners a shot could be fired and one would not know whence it had come.

‘Louis,' he muttered. ‘Louis, I don't like it.'

When he reached the gap where once there had been a gate, the sea was brilliant in the distance. Cannes spread along the shore, then the hills climbed to the cottage tucked away in its little valley; then the hillside where the murder had happened, the
mas
of the blind woman, and finally uphill to the village. Olive groves were on the lower slopes; orchards too and fields, but on the road below, the boy Bébert Peretti was holding the Abbé Roussel's hand. Behind them, in a straggle, were the men of the village. Old … many of them looked too old to be climbing such a hill.

The priest wore black; the rest, a motley collection of unpatched blue denim, brown corduroy or leather, and berets that summed up at once their total indifference to such things and the absolute frugality with which they approached each work-week. Only on Sundays, or for weddings, funerals and fêtes would they wear their stovepipe suits of black.

Dédou Fratani was a few paces behind the priest. There was no sign of the herbalist. From a distance of 400 metres they watched him approach and when they turned to evaporate back into their village, he knew Borel would be waiting for him at his shop. Word had somehow travelled up to them from the cottage that Josette-Louise was ill. He'd had no need to go up to the ruins and yet he could not have stopped himself.

He threw a fitful look back at the citadel. Saracen or Roman, what did it matter? Once trapped among those ruins, once the hunting had started, who would care?

Louis … Louis, has Delphane chosen his spot so well?

The cinematographer recorded everything with the camera of his mind. He'd witnessed the first hesitant meeting of two souls, that final rush into each other's arms. The tears, the half-smiles, the lingering, trembling touch of Josette-Louise Buemondi's fingertips on the weaver's cheeks.

Viviane Darnot kept returning to comfort the girl. The shawl Josianne-Michèle had loathed to touch, her sister Josette drew tightly around herself, stroking it fondly as though in wonder.

‘You're so beautiful,' she said, ‘so talented.' And then again apologetically as if they'd only just met, ‘Forgive me, please. I could not stop them from bringing me, Viviane.'

‘It's nothing. Forget it,
chérie
. Just try to rest. She's so pale, Inspector. Can't you see how worried she is? That ham you ate … Ludo … Where the hell is he? Why hasn't the German brought him to see her?'

‘The Bavarian, mademoiselle. Hermann, he will get here in his own good time. Nothing stops him once he's made up his mind.'