Oona’s eyes were sky blue, her hair blonde. Tall and willowy, she had a quiet calm, a dignity that was best for Hermann. But like the war, such things would have to sort themselves out and who was this humble Sûreté to judge?
The lorry’s gas-producer hissed as he got out of the cab to stoke its firebox. Firewood and charcoal briquets were being used — charcoal in a land where so few had any heat. Hermann’s concierge was always bitching about their never having any when he could so easily, and rightly, she maintained, insist that coal and wood were well supplied.
But Hermann wouldn’t do that. A bad Gestapo — lousy to his confréres, many of whom hated him — he lived as one of the Occupied. Maybe that, too, was why Oona had grown to love him, and Giselle also. But now things were changing, tightening. Now people were beginning to say, ‘Ma foi c’est long.’ My faith, it’s taking a long time.
For the invasion to come.
‘He’s closing the firebox door,’ whispered Oona, looking down into the street through parted black-out curtains. ‘For just an instant there, I saw a glimpse of its light, Hermann. Ah mon Dieu, to sit and watch a fire in the stove and know those bastards can never again come banging at the door to drag us away.’
The Gestapo, the SS, the Paris flics and Vichy goons, et cetera. Oona had been stopped in the street. The contents of her purse had been dumped out, her papers scrutinized. Kohler held her. He felt her tears on his cheek, cursed the war, cursed the Occupier, and reluctantly said, ‘I have to go. Louis will be freezing.’
And they had another murder to attend to. Never time to live a normal life but then … why, then, she told herself, things were just not normal anyway.
‘Take care,’ she whispered and quickly squeezed his hand.
People didn’t hear Hermann when he didn’t want them to. He left the house as silently as he had come and she knew then that he hadn’t wanted to awaken Giselle, but had wanted to be alone with her.
‘He’s worried,’ she said softly. ‘Intuitively he knows there can only be trouble with this murder.’
Taking a spoon, she dug it into the pail of wax to taste the honey, to hold it in her mouth and cry.
‘Louis, the Milice were after Oona.’
‘When?’ Oona’s papers weren’t good. ‘Well, when?’ demanded St-Cyr. ‘Please don’t spare me.’
‘While we were on the train between Lyon and here.’
That explosion? wondered St-Cyr, alarmed. These days such things could well be the work of others but attributed to the Résistance so as to hide the fact. That way the SS, the Gestapo and their associates could settle nuisances such as honest, hardworking detectives, without being blamed.
These days, too, things were very complicated. The Milice were Vichy’s newest police force — paramilitary but yet to receive their weapons, since Vichy had none to give and no such authority. Primarily their duties were to give the appearance of the government’s actively suppressing the black market. They were also to search out and arrest evaders of the forced labour draft, the hated Service du Travail Obligatoire and two or even three years of indenture in the Reich. But they had still other unspecified duties and powers of arrest and interrogation that suggested a branch of the SS.
‘They couldn’t have heard of what happened in Avignon, not yet,’ muttered Kohler, trying to light a cigarette but suddenly finding his fingers too cold.
As in Avignon, so, too, in Fontainebleau Forest and with other crimes, the finger of truth had been pointed by them and not appreciated. And, yes, Hermann wore the scars of such honesty. But in Avignon there had been the Cagoule, the action squad of a fanatical far-right political organization of the 1930s, the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire.
That organization had been dedicated to the overthrow of the Third Republic by any means. Murder, arson … the dynamiting, on the night of 2 October 1941, of six synagogues in Paris in a show of mutual support for the Nazis, but were they now free to do as they pleased with a certain two detectives?
‘In revenge for what happened in Avignon,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Word could so easily have rushed on ahead of us.’
‘Then was Oona stopped in the street as a threat to us to leave things alone or else taste what’s to come?’
Hermann was thinking of von Schaumburg’s warning. He was letting his thoughts run through the many twisted threads of the tapestry Paris and the country had become under the Occupation. Each thread was so often knotted to another it could and did, when yanked, yank on still other threads and on their guts.
‘All things are possible, Louis. That’s what worries me.’
The Milice were not the Cagoule, but those same political leanings, those same sympathies were shared. And Boemelburg, as Head of the Gestapo in France, was one of the major thread-pullers and could well have given the Milice a little tug just to warn Hermann and himself to behave.
And yes, of course, one of the first things the SS and the Gestapo had done after the Defeat was to empty the jails of their most hardened criminals and put those types to work for them.
‘Fighting common crime brings no pleasure these days,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Let’s go and have a talk with our beekeeper. Maybe he can shed a little light on things.’
Louis always ‘talked’ to the victims, no matter how grisly the murder.
Under the blue light from Hermann’s torch, the tiny bodies were seen to be scattered everywhere in the snow. All were frozen and curled up. No longer did the cluster of each hive, that winter ball of ten thousand or so bees, shake their wings and jerk their bodies to keep the queen and themselves warm. No longer did each cluster move slowly about the frames feeding on the honey they had stored for the winter and the beekeeper, being wise and kind, had left for their wellbeing. Someone had broken into each of the hives — all thirty of them — and had stolen a good deal of what remained of the winter stores.
‘About twenty kilos to the hive at the start of each winter, in eight or ten frames,’ said Kohler. ‘Jésus, merde alors, Louis, whoever did it had no thought for tomorrow.’
‘Just as in Peyrane, eh?’
‘Not quite. Here they left the cluster. In Peyrane they took it and squashed it along with everything else.’
The apiary was in one of those surprising little oases of nature that were often found in Paris: a field of a few hectares that was surrounded, St-Cyr knew, by a high stone wall. Cut off, isolated and quiet, it was right on top of one of the city’s smaller reservoirs and not a stone’s throw from the Père Lachaise.
‘At five degrees of frost the poor little buggers didn’t have a chance, Louis. Ten thousand times thirty equals three hundred thousand little murders.’
Using the wooden-handled pocket-knife the Kaiser had given him and countless others in the spring of 1914, Kohler scraped away the worker bees, stabbed at a large fat one in the centre of the cluster and said, ‘That little darling was their queen. Not a virgin, not this one. Two years old, I’ll bet, since that’s the most productive age to successfully overwinter a hive. They’re Italians, by the way. Banded yellow over the abdomen and with hairs that are fawn-coloured. Gentle, too, and prolific breeders just like their namesakes.’
‘I never knew you were so well versed about bees.’
‘There’s plenty you don’t know! This cluster had lots of honey and pollen to feed on.’
He pointed cells out, pricking some and scraping the wax cappings away. A maze of cells, a warren of them.