Hermann’s two boys had been among the Wehrmacht’s one hundred and fifty thousand dead at Stalingrad, but being Hermann, he didn’t hold this loss against his partner and friend, nor the French or anyone else but the Führer. Instead, he had become a citizen of the world. France had been good for Hermann.
‘Louis … Louis, there’s beeswax in lard pails but half the shipment is missing.’
‘Half?’
‘The dust on the floor. I can count, can’t I? The rings where the pails once sat. Taken two, maybe three days ago at most.’
Kohler crouched to indicate the lack of dust in circular patches. Prising off a lid revealed the contents and for a moment neither of them could say a thing. Frost caused their breath to billow. Louis was transfixed. The dark, golden honey had been squished out to fill the crevasses and grow stiff with the cold. The wax was of a paler, softer amber under the blue of the light. Hexagonal platelets — the cappings that had once covered the cells — were smeared over one another.
‘Squashed honeycomb that hasn’t even been drained let alone spun, Louis. Smashed and mangled bees. Whoever did this didn’t give a damn about keeping the colonies alive and robbed the hives blind.’
A big man with the broad shoulders, big hands, thick wrists, bulldog jowls and puffy eyelids of an ageing storm-trooper, which he’d never been, the Bavarian gazed up at him. They both knew exactly what the robbery meant: the hunt for Banditen, for bandits — résistants — in the hills and some poor farmer’s hives that had just happened to be there.
‘A lot of them, so a lot of farmers, Hermann.’
‘I’m sorry. Do you want me to apologize for all the atrocities of this lousy war or only for being here at this moment?’
Hermann’s tired and faded blue eyes were filled with remorse and worry. He hadn’t liked what they’d found, but more than this, had sensed trouble in their now having to again work for two masters. Von Schaumburg and Gestapo Boemelburg!
‘Forgive me,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s just this … The restaurant, mon vieux. It meant so much to me as a boy. I’d never seen such things. Lace and plunging necklines, scented breasts and lovely soft earlobes with amethysts in silver dangling from them, diamonds too.’
‘I’ll bet your grandmother slapped your ogle-eyed wrists!’
‘She said I needed to be educated and that if I would but do as she had wished for herself, I’d go far. That honey, by the way, is from lavender.’
‘Merde, did you think I needed to be told? The labels, such as they are, say the “wax” is from Peyrane in the Vaucluse, but we both know lard doesn’t come from there in such quantity, so the pails were gathered elsewhere and whoever stole from the hives went in prepared.’
‘So, why would a Parisian beekeeper’s death have anything to do with this?’
‘And why would von Schaumburg want us to have a look and not tell anyone? The gatherer of this little harvest, eh?’ snorted Kohler. ‘Find the bastard’s name and whisper it into the shell of Old Shatter Hand’s ear, but don’t let Boemelburg in on it. Christ!’
‘We shall have to see,’ breathed St-Cyr. Always there were questions and always there were difficulties.
They tasted the honey whose accent was harsh and of the hills, and marvellous. ‘Long after it is swallowed, Hermann, the ambrosia remains.’
‘Ambrosia’s beebread, Dummkopf. Pollen and nectar the worker bees store so that the nurse bees can feed it to the brood larvae. Hey, if you’re still intent on buying that little retirement farm in Provence after what happened to us in Avignon, I’d suggest you damn well pay attention to your partner.’
Hermann had been raised on a farm near Wasserburg, whereas this Sûreté had but spent wondrous summer holidays at those of relatives. The great escape, now dragged into the dust of years by memory.
‘Come on, Louis. We’re wasting time we haven’t got. You take two and I’ll take two as evidence. No one will miss another eighty kilos.’
‘What about our suitcases?’
‘We’ll throw them in the vélo-taxi too.’
A bicycle taxi! ‘It’s too icy. They’ll have stopped running in any case.’
The curfew was upon them and, as von Schaumburg had ordered, they could tell no one of what they were up to.
‘We’ll walk. You take the suitcases,’ said Kohler. ‘I’ll take the pails, then we’ll switch halfway.’
‘To Charonne and Belleville?’
‘Relax, eh? I’ll soon find us a lift.’
‘That is exactly what I’m afraid of, given the scarcity of traffic!’
The gazogene lorry that Hermann stopped perfumed the air with its burning wood-gas and was on its way to La Tour d’Argent, le Grand Véfour, Maxim’s and other high-class restaurants, all of which were doing a roaring business. Half-loaded with ducks, geese, chickens, eggs, cheeses, milk and potatoes — items no longer seen by most since the autumn of 1940 — its driver was speechless.
Louis had simply shrilled, ‘No arguments, monsieur,’ and had flattened the bastard.
‘That’ll teach him to deal on the black market and to hand over half his load to some double-dealing son of a bitch of a Feldwebel at a control,’ snorted Kohler.
Everyone knew that the charge was 50 per cent. Half for the boys in grey-green; half for the dealers, the big boys who organized things. There were never any complaints. Even then fortunes were being made and yet another class of nouveaux riches had been born.
‘We’ll just drive by the flat and let Giselle and Oona look after these, Louis. Then we’ll go and pick up the Citroën before we dump the lorry at one of those restaurants and pay our beekeeper a little visit.’
Never one to take things for himself and his little ‘family’, had Hermann suddenly shifted gears?
‘It’s the war, Louis, and what’s been happening out there. Hey, don’t let it worry you, eh? We’re still friends.’
That, too, is what I’m afraid of, muttered St-Cyr to himself, for the Résistance didn’t take such friendships kindly and this humble Sûreté was most certainly still on some of their hit lists. For working with a Nazi, with Hermann, who was not and could never have been one of those.
No lights showed in the flat that was above St-Cyr on the rue Suger. How could they, with the black-out regulations? Alone, freezing and tired — mon Dieu he was tired, for they’d been away for days without sleep — he sat in the lorry’s cab and waited.
Sometimes waiting for Hermann could take hours. There were only two beds in the flat, one for Giselle, the other for Oona. Hermann would try not to awaken either of them. They’d both be bundled in several heavy sweaters, pyjamas, slacks and socks upon socks. Woollen hats, too, and scarves. Mittens probably, and all that under heaps of blankets, but their ears were ever keen, as were most these days. And he knew Oona would be certain to get out of bed to greet his partner silently.
She was forty years of age, all but twice that of his little Giselle. Was Dutch, an illegal alien from Rotterdam who had lost her two children to the Messerschmitts on the trek into France during the blitzkrieg, and had subsequently lost her husband to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. A Jew she had been hiding. Another case, a carousel murder.
Hermann and she got on well. She never complained and he knew Hermann depended on her to watch over Giselle. And, yes, the Bavarian was in love with both of them, and, yes, they were each, in their own ways, in love with Hermann. ‘War does things like that,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It forms instant friendships only to plunder them as instantly.’
Giselle was half-Greek, half-Midi French and with straight jet-black hair, lovely violet eyes and a mind of her own. A former prostitute Hermann had ‘rescued’ from the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton and just around the corner.