Rudi leaned over the table, looked to one side and to the other for listening ears not wanted, then thinking better of confiding it to both of them, got up and crooked a finger at this fellow countryman of his who was so delinquent, and whispered, ‘Der Führer has a secret weapon, Hermann. Yes, I have heard this. Everything of such interest passes through, here, but one must be careful to whom one imparts such confidences? The Vergeltungswaffe-Eins, Hermann. Even as we speak, the ground is being prepared for the launching ramps from which they will be sent. Normandy and Picardy have been mentioned.’
‘V-is?’ Revenge weapons.
‘Fliegende Bomben, Hermann.’
Flying bombs.
‘Some kind of rocket. So you see, Stalingrad is but a minor reversal and we are still going to England.’
That little saying hadn’t been heard since the Führer had abandoned such plans in the fall of 1940.
‘Behave,’ said Rudi. ‘Become a good Nazi. Join the Party. Now you must excuse me. My kitchen calls.’
‘And Maxim’s? Did Schlacht …’
‘Pay to get the woman’s son released? Really, my Hermann, how could I possibly know of such an intimate matter?’
The city was now pitch dark and, at 17:22 hours, bitterly cold. Infrequently, pale dots of blue penetrated the darkness from struggling vélo-taxis and vélos. Pedestrians were caught but momentarily in the slim blue slit-eyes of the Citroën’s headlamps. A mother and two little children …
Hermann jammed on the brakes — skidded, and then stopped. The three of them had remained standing right in front of the car …
‘Hermann, we haven’t time.’
‘Her kids are hungry, Louis. She’s prepared to commit suicide.’
‘Merde, how soft can you get?’ But it was happening all over the city. Desperate measures for desperate times, and every car would have to hold the privileged, since no one else was allowed to drive.
‘There’ll be a Wehrmacht soup kitchen at the Gare d’ Austerlitz. I can fix things for her there, then drop you off, and come back to take them home.’
Hermann was rolling down his side window. The woman and her children were approaching … ‘Jésus, merde alors, idiot! We’ve a murder investigation on our hands!’
‘We could simply say the beekeeper’s death was an accident.’
‘Was that what Rudi advised? Well, was it, eh?’
‘Monsieur,’ began the woman. ‘Could you …’
‘Well, was it?’ demanded St-Cyr.
‘Something like that. The heat’s on, Louis. We can’t afford to get burned, not with the Milice after Oona and her papers not so good.’
‘And Giselle? Were they also after her?’
‘Monsieur …’
‘Get in the back. Vite, vite, before this one changes his mind. I’m going to have to see about Giselle, Louis, but that explosion on the tracks between here and Lyon could really have been a warning to us. Please don’t forget it!’
‘And this one, Hermann? Has she a grenade or a revolver hidden beneath that shawl she has wrapped about the children?’
‘A grenade …?’ managed the woman.
‘You worry too much. Mein Gott, your ears are even bigger than Rudi’s!’
‘And you are far too trusting and forget entirely, mon ami, that the Résistance still have my name on some of their hit lists!’
A problem, a little misunderstanding. ‘There’s a rumour of something big,’ said Kohler stiffly. ‘I’ll tell you about it later. I promise.’
‘A rumour?’ managed the woman. ‘Bread here, milk there. Cheese … has one of those salauds really got cheese, or are we simply to eat rumours, messieurs?’
Many of Paris’s forty thousand concierges were grassroots black-market traffickers. Flour from one, cheese from another, but always a city of rumour.
Her tears were very real, and when Hermann stopped the car outside the railway station, they both looked into the back seat at her through the darkness.
‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘Some bastard stole my purse and all of our ration tickets.’
To say nothing of her papers, but such ‘petty’ crimes were happening all too frequently. ‘Look, I’ll fix it. Don’t cry. Chewing gum, Louis. In the compartment. It’s banana flavoured. I was going to give it to you-know-who, but …’
To Oberg, the Head of the SS!
‘Banana …?’ hazarded the woman only to see the big one toss a carefree hand and hear him say, ‘Well, something like that. Here.. here, take it. Look, I know it won’t do much but …’
‘But that is all you can do. I might have known.’
‘No! Now just calm down, madame. You’ll see.’
‘Merde, you’re too easy, Hermann. One of these days I’m going to be picking up pieces of you.’
Like those of Marianne and Philippe — Louis’s second wife and little boy? wondered Kohler. Louis was right, of course. The mood of compliance was bound to change. The Résistance would warm up. Though still disorganized, widely scattered and few in number, they had tried to kill Louis last November, and Gestapo Paris’s Watchers, not liking the finger of truth these two humble servants of justice had pointed, had known all about that bomb on his doorstep but had deliberately left it in place. His wife had been coming home to him after a torrid affair with the Hauptmann Steiner and Louis hadn’t been able to warn her there might be trouble — they’d been out of the city at the time. And, yes, Steiner had been the nephew of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris who had packed him off to Russia to protect the family’s honour. And, yes, Steiner had died there just as would likely happen to the Bzp Obergruppenführer Otto Denke. Ah Christ!
‘A bomb?’ asked the woman with difficulty.
‘Madame, please don’t let it trouble you. Just go with this one. He’ll look after you like he does everyone else.’
The Gare d’Austerlitz was indicated somewhere out there in the cold.
‘Relax, Louis. I won’t be a minute.’
There was a can of pipe tobacco without a lid next to where the chewing gum had lain. The Procurement Office? wondered St-Cyr.
Somewhat mollified, he began to pack his pipe, and when he had it alight, sat waiting and waiting. Thinking, too, and asking, Murder … had the beekeeper’s demise really been intended, and was Hermann honestly suggesting they avoid the issue entirely so as to make life easy for once?
Madame de Bonnevies had gone through her husband’s book of clients and had tried to keep them from finding the name of Frau Uma Schlacht.
Danielle de Bonnevies hadn’t wanted him to look through the microscope at the mite-infested innards of a Russian bee. Her father had been terribly worried about an infestation, but also about the decimation of French bees, though she had claimed not to know the contents of the address he had planned to give.
She had also not wanted him to take any notice of the family’s country house near Soisy-sur-Seine. And ever since the Defeat, the mother had been trying desperately to free her son, the child of another man. Had the son been freed, then? Had the girl known this and feared her stepbrother had come in through the apiary and garden to poison that bottle? It hadn’t been in the study at 5 a.m. on Thursday. Early in the evening de Bonnevies had shaved, had spruced himself up — a woman? he wondered again. Perhaps the childhood friend of his sister, a Madame Héloïse Debré of 7 rue Stendhal? A woman whose husband had repeatedly beaten her until one day he had vanished and she had sworn not to know where to.
Had Father Michel been hiding something? Why else, but to distract this Sûreté, would he have mentioned such a parish disgrace as the gang rape of Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies? And ever since 1919 there had been a cemetery room at Le Chat qui crie and word of a settlement of accounts at any price. A very stubborn beekeeper, then, and one with not only a very troubled conscience, but a long memory.