Her father who had made so much money on the schemes. ‘Yes. It … it is what I feel your partner had already come to know.’
‘And now poor Louis is dead and that bastard is going to have his way.’
‘His kind always do, Inspector. It is a right they assume at birth even though it is a wet nurse who suckles them.’
The dogs were now worrying his ankles. One of them was …‘Then why’d he turn over a new leaf? Why’d a Fascist and leading member of the Cagoule change the colour of his ways?’
‘Ask him. Perhaps he’ll tell you if he does not kill us first. Certainly he will not allow me to betray him, Inspector, and you … why you are powerless to prevent it.’
‘But he cannot kill us. He’d only expose himself. He must have others do that, mademoiselle. He must make certain of it! Everything must appear as if he is innocent and loyal to the Reich. Ah Jesus, Jesus, you bastards leave my trousers alone!’ Kohler moved a foot and received a nip and then a heavy chorus of throaty barking.
When the dogs had quietened, she wanted so much to say, Jean-Paul has already thought of this. That even as they stood prisoner, he spoke urgently to the Gestapo Munk and the SS major and his lieutenants. She wanted to say, I’m sorry for you but could not bring herself to do so.
‘Then it will happen in the citadel of dreams among the shards of pottery and bits of Roman glass, Inspector. It will happen where the wars of the imagination were often fought and nearly always won. It will happen where my heart was broken.’
The dogs …? wondered Kohler. Would the SS unleash them? Mascots, for Christ’s sake! Loved until ordered otherwise. And well fed by the look.
The broken walls and narrow passageways of the ruins came to him and he saw them bleached by moonlight, then plunged into darkness. Cold, so cold and all alone.
Snow and moonlight played the devil’s taunt with the narrow streets and passageways of the darkened village. No one was about. There was no sound but that of his own boots. And through it all came that sense of knowing all doors and voices would be shut to him.
St-Cyr reached the tiny square. Water still spilled from the tap. Snow filtered down, and where the sharp shaft of the sky above appeared, the crystals glistened as they fell and swirled and struggled so as to bury the ground.
‘Messieurs,’ he shouted in panic now. ‘I must have answers!’
Only silence and the cold of their canyons came to him. All would be listening – tensely, so tensely, the finger to the lips, the black-out curtains tightly drawn. All lights extinguished in every room and house but a single candle.
Old lips with wrinkles sharply joining to meet them among the hairs of unwanted moustaches. Black shawls, black everything. So be it. He tossed the hand of indifference, said quietly, ‘Mon Dieu, you people are stubborn. United in spirit, you range against that common enmity of your centuries not understanding I come as a friend.’
St-Cyr gave them what they wanted. Trudging onward and uphill always, he passed the Cafe de Bonne Chance, their little gathering place – oh how they valued it but were not blind to its humble simplicity. It had served them well. He passed the church and knew its door, though never locked, would now be shut to him.
He went on up the hill and just before he came to that final, steep ascent, turned to look back over the land. He drew in a deep breath and gave a long sigh of, ‘Ah, it’s magnificent!’
Light shimmered on the sea that was always bluer than any other. It bathed the olive groves and vineyards, the orchards too, and came on up over stony pastures to solitary pine or clump of cypresses. Roman and Saracen, Vandal or Visigoth, Nazi or German. Munk would level the village – he knew this now, felt it and said, ‘God, do not mock me like this. The Gestapo Munk stands only to gain no matter the outcome of our little investigation.’
As was His custom, God did not answer but gave only the paleness of the moon and the gently falling snow.
Abruptly St-Cyr turned and climbed to the heights, passing through that broken portal and into ruins the centuries had left. An owl flew off, heavy-winged and dark beneath the moon and silence.
‘Josianne-Michele,’ he sang out, his voice so loud it seemed odd and frightening to hear it echo back and forth. It was as if time had left only his voice to bounce about long after death.
He lowered it. ‘Josianne-Michele …? Ah! it is me, Jean-Louis St-Cyr, the detective. Please, I am unarmed. The man from Bayonne, mademoiselle. The one from the Deuxieme Bureau, isn’t that so? He has my revolver. My revolver, Josianne-Michele, and me, I have foolishly let him take it from me again.’
Again … again … again … Did Saracen or Roman yell among fresh ruins a last farewell, and would it have echoed so many times and so hauntingly?
‘Ah yes, mademoiselle. The crux of the matter, eh? A simple revolver then; a simple murder now. Then, too, that of a dancer in Les Naturistes in Paris – a single shot in an otherwise empty room. Protection through silence for her killer.’
As some tourist, forgotten by tour guide and autobus and left to his own designs in a foreign land, the detective strolled about the ruins, muttering things to himself. And she could not decide about him and eased her aching arms. He might know who had killed that dancer; he might not even understand why it had happened. He might now know about Chamonix – ah! it was very possible. He had discovered the masks. Oh for sure, he had looked at them. What had he thought? she wondered.
He was now in the arena surrounded by the broken columns that stood as soldiers would to stop the lions from escaping so that the naked virgin of childhood, she could try to save herself. One could hear the shouts and cries all around him; one could see among the crowd those who stood to shout their praises and encouragement, and those who threw the thumb down to mock her.
‘But Chamonix,’ he said. ‘Chamonix, Josianne-Michele Delphane? That and the death of the financier are the kernel of this whole affair.’
He was in silhouette sharply defined and he wanted her to walk out there to him. That, she could not do. ‘My name is not Delphane!’ she shrilled, trembling with sudden anger. ‘How can you say such a thing?’
She was up in the seats of this little forum she thought a theatre or perhaps even a colosseum. St-Cyr thanked that boyhood intuition that was still with him after all these years. Think as a child, and a child you will find.
Again he tossed an indifferent hand. ‘All right, mademoiselle, then is it Buemondi who fathered you and your sister? Come, come, I need to know the answer and must hear it from yourself.’
She rested her arms on her knees and saw him along the sight of the crossbow and above the shaft of the arrow. She could kill him easily.
‘Carlo made the mask of me and the body casts, Monsieur the Detective from Paris. Carlo has allowed me to see myself as I really am. Wanton, monsieur. Lustful and with no shame for the urges of my body. Ah yes, Inspector, I have slept with my father many times and enjoyed it immensely!’
Ah Nom de Dieu! ‘And your sister?’ he shouted but knew the girl had vanished.
Picking his way through the blocks of stone, St-Cyr came out on to a broad avenue and looked uncertainly along it towards the walls that surrounded the citadel. Instinctively his shoulders flinched and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
She was behind him and he knew that if he turned, she’d fire that thing at him. ‘And your sister?’ he asked again, lowering his voice to a calmness he did not feel.
The girl’s voice grated. ‘My sister loathes the very sight of me, Inspector. She’s always hated me because Alain Borel is mine! Alain could not divide one heart among two lovers. Oh for sure, Josette-Louise, she envies me. She even let Carlo make the mask of her and lay naked under his hands while the body casts, they were made. She exposed herself to him many times and tried to let him have the use of her body, but it was no good. I was not present. Me, I refused absolutely to be a witness to it. And the face you see in her mask, Inspector, is the lie of her outgoing self, for she has failed miserably at everything she ever tried to do except be the virgin she is.’