The leaders of the CSAR had been arrested. They’d been brought to trial in July of ’38 but the war had soon intervened.
‘End of story,’ said Kohler, picking up the thread of Louis’s thoughts, ‘but sadly not so, eh?’
‘No, not.’
On the night of 2/3 October 1941, perhaps as Bishop Rivaille was looking forward to a morning’s shooting courtesy of the Kommandant’s ignoring the ordinance against hunting and possessing guns of any kind, cagoulards in Paris had dynamited seven synagogues in a show of solidarity with Nazi policies against the Jews.
‘And now?’ asked Louis, lost to it and still staring at the street. ‘Now Ovid Peretti has twice made a point of warning me to watch our backs, and the bishop dreams of returning the Papacy to Avignon.’
‘It all has to mean she was killed because she damn well knew too much,’ swore Kohler.
‘But what, Hermann? That is the question.’
They began to look through the order books, comparing the one she had kept privately with that from which de Passe had torn so many pages. ‘All references to Simondi’s post-dated cheques have been removed,’ said Louis. ‘Some of these have even put payment off by as much as six months and yet all are for the most insignificant of sums.’
‘Overextended, is he?’ snorted Kohler. ‘He owns several cinemas and theatres but loves music more than money, or so von Mahler took pains to claim.’
‘But is Simondi alone in owning them or merely the front man?’
In several places where the pages had been removed, the complete copy revealed she had used alchemical glyphs for the signs of the zodiac as a shorthand for the names of her customers and had paired these with measurements and other notations for each costume. Where more than one customer had been born under the same sign, she had used a vertical line, placed on one side of the glyph or on the other, to distinguish them. ‘But again, Hermann, why would the préfet remove such pages unless he had been warned by Bishop Rivaille that she had left the riddle of it all on her belt?’
A rebus … the talismans, enseignes and cabochons, the signs of the zodiac themselves …‘Salvatore Biron is adamant there wasn’t an audition, Louis, but there was one. He was delayed and claims to have come upon the body seconds after the killing, only to hear a sigh that clearly couldn’t have been hers.’
‘But was it the killer’s or that of someone else — a witness perhaps?’
‘And why didn’t he run into whoever had tidied up?’
‘A lock of her hair was cut off and that would have taken time …’
‘And now we have similar locks from her dressing table and from a strawberry blonde, and this last is glued to a photo.’
‘Mireille de Sinéty wears ancient keys that can’t have been of any use to her, Hermann. She takes rooms in the ancestral home, gathers artefacts from the same, clasps a pomander that is as old as the Palais and modelled after its Bell Tower.’
‘Has a namesake from those times.’
‘Has recipes and letters that can be attributed to this other Mireille. Merde, mon vieux, why can I not recall more of the very early Renaissance? Did my professors at the lycée freeze their minds into accepting rigid dates — Early, Middle and Late, and never mind that such dates are normally far from perfect, and that the Renaissance began much earlier here and in Italy?’
‘But we have her record book, Louis, and we now know how she used the glyphs. Hey, that’s progress. Cheer up.’
‘We still don’t know which glyph represents which name.’
‘Was Dédou the Archer?’ asked Kohler.
‘Was the bishop the Goat, the Scorpion or the Cancer?’
‘Xavier must have tidied up, Louis. I’m certain of it.’
One of the bishop’s hounds had been with the boy and must have come into the Palais with him, said St-Cyr to himself. She had known the dog and had removed its little bell so as to prevent its sound from giving away her position, but had broken a fingernail in the process …
‘Rivaille wanted her to move into the Villa Marenzio with the other singers,’ said Kohler.
‘Then let us hear what they have to say. Let us listen to the madrigal of them.’
‘You’re forgetting the sardines. You can’t do that. Three tins, one of which she took with her.’
‘Along with a wealth of old coins, one of which held a maze, mon ami. A maze!’
4
The Villa Marenzio could not help but engender admiration, thought St-Cyr. Seventeenth-century diamond leading and stained-glass armorial shields faced the rue Banasterie with a quiet calm that belied the centuries.
Kept in excellent condition — worked on even now when materials were so hard to come by — the villa was to the northeast of the Palais. A delightful bas-relief of pomegranates, grapes, eagles and grinning, hollow-eyed masks surrounded the family crest above the carriage entrance, while matching life-sized statues of the Virgin flanked it. A superb pentagonal stone staircase was directly across a large inner courtyard where ancient plane trees were partially sheltered from the mistral. At the north of the courtyard, sunlight glowed from the soft, buff-grey of the walls.
‘Hermann. It’s magnificent.’
‘But a bugger to heat.’
‘Merde alors, must you always look on the bad side of such things?’
‘Wenn der Führer wusste, eh, mein lieber Oberdetektiv? That’s woodsmoke and coal smoke coming from the chimneys.’
If only the Führer knew … People had taken to saying this in Paris when such privilege was witnessed. Twenty-five kilos a month was the coal ration — enough to heat one small room for a few brief hours, if one could get it. ‘Unless I’m mistaken, mon vieux, that is Mademoiselle Bissert who has been watching for us from one of the second-floor windows.’
Though distant, and seen but fleetingly, for she soon ducked away, the girl looked like a moth trapped behind leaded glass, and must have been anxiously awaiting their arrival for hours.
There were two storeys. An open balcony and its ground floor arcade looked out on to formal gardens in the centre of which, drained for the winter and bleached by the half-light of partial shade, stood a fountain. But such a one. In summer, in the midday heat especially, and under moonlight too, stone carp would piss their streams on to the heads of cavorting naked nymphs as cicadas sang.
‘An addition an eighteenth-century owner must have felt necessary,’ commented the Sûreté drolly. ‘Our Monsieur Simondi has an eye for value, Hermann; our bishop, one for accommodations.’
The concierge, his wife and fourteen-year-old daughter had braved the wind and cold to dutifully stand outside their loge, which was near the staircase and next to what had, until the advent of the motor car, been both stables and storage sheds.
None of them was tall, but the daughter had awkwardly shot up past her parents, leaving her ankle socks to lose their elastics above well-worn, laceless black boots. The man’s beret was crumpled into a tight fist. The wife’s dark brown eyes were impassive; those of the daughter, modestly averted.
With a guarded tongue, this grizzled patriarch in brown cords, boots and a flannel shirt, his skin the colour of tannin, said in manageable langue d’oc, ‘Maître Simondi wishes us to bid you welcome, messieurs, and to assist your enquiries. Please, he has put us completely at your disposal. I am Octave Leporatti and this is my wife, Mila, and daughter. The house, it is big, but most of it was made into flats some time ago and now only the north wing is reserved for the students.’
At the far end of the courtyard, where Christiane Bissert had watched for them, the brick-red tiles so common to the south climbed to the line of the roof beyond which rose a two-storeyed square tower. The wind plucked at the concierge’s close-cropped grey hair and brought water to his watchful eyes — he’d seen the girl too. And forget about that crap of their being at our disposal, thought Kohler. This one’s family, and that of his wife, had hailed from Sicily two hundred years ago, but always the code of silence had governed life. Omertà.