The girl must have spotted them as she’d come along the promenade between the plane trees. ‘Hermann and he are having a little heart-to-heart of their own, mademoiselle, but it’s interesting that you should know of Herr Schlacht.’
‘I … I don’t know him well. Maman has … has only spoken of him once. Just once.’
‘And yet you could identify him so easily?’
‘He … Maman … They …’
‘They secretly met at a hotel in the Eighteenth.’
‘Yes.’
Hastily she dragged off a mitten and wiped her eyes — tried to find composure and took to staring bleakly down at the beehive in front of her. Snow capped its flat roof. ‘Brood chamber below and honey super above,’ she said hollowly of the two-tiered boxes. ‘Six to ten frames of comb in the brood chamber should tide the colony over, but here there are extras in the upper chamber so that the worker bees can place the honey and pollen where they feel it best and the wintering cluster can move slowly about the hive as it wishes. Papa always put a super like this on top of the brood chamber and then a square of heavy tarpaper to shed the rain and snow melt.’
‘He loved his bees, didn’t he?’
‘As a husband ought to love a wife, only in his heart there wasn’t room for one.’
‘Did your mother go willingly to the Hotel Titania on the boulevard Ornano?’
‘You’re simply trying to get me to tell you she had another reason.’
‘And did she?’
Étienne … was he wondering about Étienne? ‘I wouldn’t know, would I, Inspector? We seldom spoke.’
‘Yet surely you knew of her repeated attempts to free your brother?’
‘My half-brother.’
‘Father Michel refused to find three willing workers to be sent to the Reich in exchange for her son. Maxim’s, mademoiselle. Isn’t Maxim’s the reason your mother went to that hotel?’
To prostitute herself. To let Herr Schlacht paw her naked body and rape her, yes rape her in return for his paying the necessary 50,000 francs down. ‘I … I really wouldn’t know, Inspector. Étienne was someone she and I never discussed.’
‘Even though she was so worried about him and had done everything she could to secure his release?’
The girl didn’t answer. Cramming her mittened hands deeper into the pockets of her overcoat, she waited in silence. And what was it Hermann had said Frau Schlacht had told him about the half-sister and half-brother? That the beekeeper had complained to her that Danielle’s one mistake was to blindly trust Étienne and to encourage his every endeavour.
‘You posed for your brother, mademoiselle. You were the best of comrades. He made sketches of you and at least one superb bronze we know of.’
‘Did I pose naked for him — is this what she told you?’
‘She?’
‘Mother, of course. She hated my being close to her son. Étienne and I used to tease each other about it. Jealous … she was so jealous, I’m not surprised she told you I was naked when I posed.’
‘And were you?’
‘What do you think, Inspector? Do I look the type?’
Wryly she tossed her head at his silence and said, ‘When I was three or four I did when bribed with the whole of a peach flan, but not since then.’
Yet that father of yours believed you had done so right up to when the boy went off to war, thought St-Cyr and heard himself ask harshly, ‘Was Étienne de Bonnevies’ release arranged and paid for by Herr Oskar Schlacht?’
‘Did Étienne poison my father — is this what you’re wondering? If so, then the answer is no, Inspector. Étienne couldn’t kill anything. Not in this war we lost and not before it either. “All who are born have a right to life,” he’d always say and leave the job, if absolutely necessary, to me. To me, Inspector. Me, the fumigator par excellence of my father’s hives. You’ll not have forgotten that, I think!’
‘When questioned in your father’s study, mademoiselle, you tried to keep me from the microscope he’d been using and denied having been told why he felt a disaster was so certain.’
‘Acarine mites in Caucasians from Russia. All right, I knew that Herr Schlacht was causing diseased hives to be brought into France. Does that satisfy you now?’
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘How long did papa and I know of it? Since early last summer. We knew it had to be stopped. Things like that can be so easily spread — in one season half the hives can be wiped out in any apiary, sometimes all of them.’
‘So when Frau Schlacht wanted honey for facial masks and bee stings for her arthritis, your father was only too willing to supply them?’
‘She’d been a client right from September of 1940.’
‘And the candle-making has been going on since when?’
‘The … the fall of last year, I think. Earlier perhaps.’
‘The fall of 1941?’
‘Yes … yes, perhaps.’
‘And where is the factory located?’
‘The factory …? I … We … Papa and I tried to find out, but then I … I told him that it was best if we … we left the matter alone.’
‘Why? Because you knew that fifty thousand francs had been paid?’
‘And Étienne had come home yet mother didn’t know of it? I’d have told her if I’d known such a thing, Inspector. Believe me, I’d have gladly ended the little hell I’ve had to endure with her. Going out in search of food — peddling my merchandise and constantly running the controls, so much so my nerves are all but shot? Shot, do you understand? Only to come home to nothing but silence and disapproval from her? You saw the way she slapped me when I asked if she’d put the oil of mirbane into that … that bottle of Amaretto. You and your partner questioned her thoroughly, didn’t you? Well, didn’t you? You saw how she feels about me, the “accident”, the “tragedy” her womb committed, its betrayal — God, why couldn’t she have drowned me at birth? I … Ah nom de Dieu, forgive me. You see the state I’m in.’
But had the outburst been deliberate? wondered St-Cyr, forcing himself to question, as Hermann did, if the girl might well be guilty.
Thinking it best to give pause to his questions, or perhaps wanting to better plan his little campaign, the Inspector indicated that they should walk towards the promenade that would lead them to the terraces and his partner. He wouldn’t leave her alone now, but would keep on asking things, felt Danielle, and she would have to answer with sufficient truth to counter disbelief.
‘That bottle, mademoiselle. You stated that when you left the house at five a.m. on Thursday it wasn’t in the study.’
‘I’d never seen it before.’
‘But you stated first that your mother had poisoned your father and then … then felt one of the Society might have done it?’
‘Mother couldn’t have, and I told you this, that I’d spoken out of despair. As for a member of the Society, come and meet them. Hear what they have to say to me, then decide for yourself!’
It was nearly two o’clock and still there was no sign of Louis. Had he left the Jardin du Luxembourg? wondered Kohler anxiously. Had he realized Schlacht would have to offer a deal that couldn’t be refused because Oberg and the SS had first been consulted?
Louis would feel a need to sort things out and redefine his side of the partnership. He’d want to be by himself. Mein Gott, the Bonze made gold wafers for the SS of the avenue Foch, and sure as hell Oberg wouldn’t want Old Shatter Hand finding out about it! That was why Oona was a hostage. No other reason. Oona …
With difficulty, he hobbled back up the steps to the highest of the terraces, to stand again, leaning on his crutches, forcing himself to let his gaze sift calmly over the Jardin. A Wehrmacht concert band, oblivious to peace and quiet, struck up Deutschland über Alles as if to thumb their noses at the loss of the Sixth Army — 24 generals, 150,000 dead, 100,000 taken prisoner, tanks, guns, everything — and to let the French know the Occupier was here to stay. Few turned to pause and listen, most just kept on as they were and tried to ignore the racket.