‘I had always to urge him on, Inspector,’ confessed Josiane.
‘Until he would cry out his sister’s name as he released his little burden?’ bleated the Sûreté.
‘Ah oui. Then he would stroke Georgette and tell her to be calm, that she hadn’t really lost her virtue, that this was of the heart, not the hymen, and I would stroke him until … until all three of us were calm.’
‘Tears … were there tears?’ he heard himself asking.
‘Always,’ confided Josiane with a touch. ‘Always and without fail.’
‘Father, you could have warned me. Did he rape his sister?’
They had left the café and were heading up the rue Saint-Blaise towards the church.
‘No, he did not. He was at the Jardin du Luxembourg assisting one of the Society’s beekeepers. Alexandre simply blamed himself. You see, that morning he had asked his sister to pick some flowers in the cemetery but to be careful not to let the custodians see her doing so. He wanted a sampling of their pollen to compare, under the microscope, with that found in his hives.’
‘Then why play a game of rape with those two?’
‘Why not? It was harmless, a punishment — self-humiliation. And there was Georgette’s sister to witness it.’
‘But she had always to urge him on?’
‘That’s of little consequence. Oh bien sûr, he confessed this strange desire to me many times — God won’t punish me for telling you; but I felt it best you should hear it from those two.’
‘You told me he went there, you thought, perhaps to humiliate Madame de Bonnevies.’
‘He did! But by the time of their marriage he had discovered he couldn’t stop himself. Those two understood him far better than Juliette could ever have done.’
‘They said nothing of his wife.’
‘Because they had nothing to say about her.’
‘And did he tease his daughter the way he teased his sister?’
They were shouting at each other. ‘Absolutely not. Danielle was everything to him — everything that is, except his bees, but he included her among them, so it really didn’t matter.’
‘Included her among them …? As a virgin queen? Well?’
‘Don’t be an ass, Inspector. He knew very well she wasn’t a bee.’ ‘Even so, Father, I’m going to have to talk to those two again.’
‘Of course. It’s understood. Now that the introductions are over, feel free to contact them whenever necessary. They’ll answer you truthfully, or they’ll answer to me.’
Parting at the church, Father Michel watched as the Sûreté, somewhat disgruntled, it had to be admitted, plodded up the steps into the driving snow. Had he been right, he wondered, to short-circuit things and open that door into a very private and tragic matter now seldom mentioned?
‘I had to do it,’ swore Father Michel. ‘Otherwise that one and his partner would have looked elsewhere and this they must not do.’
More snow began to fall, and with the wind, it made life miserable, thought Kohler, wishing he’d driven over instead of leaving the Citroën in the place de la Bourse. But he’d wanted to come upon Herr Schlacht on the quiet.
Most people didn’t look up as they hurried along. Bundled up in anything they could lay hand to these days, all pretence of fashion had long since vanished from the minds of everyday citizens. Even the boys in grey-green had given up on their seemingly endless window-shopping. And as for the filles de joie who had migrated from the vast emptiness Les Halles, the central market, had become, the girls were listless and frozen stiff.
Bicycle-taxis vied with one another and with the bicycles. Pedestrians took their lives into their hands at the white-studded crosswalks. At the corner of the rue Réaumur and the rue Montmartre, sandbags were being unloaded from two Wehrmacht lorries. Here, too, as elsewhere in the city, the air-raid shelters were being converted into bunkers and machine-gun nests.
Instinctively, Kohler flicked a glance down the rue Montmartre towards the central market to gauge the field of fire, was right back at the front in 1914 and ’15. Bang on. These boys knew what they were doing and that could only mean the OKW — Old Shatter Hand and von Stülpnagel, the Military Governor — still feared an uprising once the defeat at Stalingrad was officially announced, as it would have to be.
Louis and he had seen such pillboxes before heading south to Avignon. Unsettled by the thought, he went on up the rue Montmartre searching for the smelter.
A big Renault was parked outside the café À La Chope du Croissant. No sign of its owner, nor would Herr Schlacht have wasted time in that cafe.
A nearby signboard, in flaking off-white paint, read: Imprimerie. Printers.
Pushing open the tall, wooden doors, he found himself in a rubbish-littered, ice-encased courtyard. Soot all over the place. Soot in these days of so little coal. Soot and iron bars on the windows. Were all the doors locked? he wondered. In one broken window the wind teased a peeling paper notice in German and in French: Jüdisches Geschäft. Jewish business. All were gone now. Gone since July of last year. But the smelter would have coexisted with the printers for as long as the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, when so many had fled to Paris.
The courtyard was narrow and at its far end it must take a bend to the right. Tattered handbills rattled around inside the printing shop, the presses as silent as a frozen tap that had burst its lead pipe.
Merde, where was the place? The smell of burning charcoal was in the air, soda, too, and bone ash.
As he neared the bend, the soft roar of pot-furnaces came to him. A little farther on, he came to a window and, reaching between the bars, cleaned off a bit of the glass to peer inside.
Flames danced, coals glowed. Crucibles were held by two-metre-long iron tongs. Everyone wore goggles, most asbestos suits, gauntlets and toe-capped boots …
The smell of nitric acid reached him and of hydrochloric, too. Aqua regia, Louis would have said. A mixture of the two, Hermann. One part nitric acid, three to four of hydrochloric; the name from the Latin for Royal Water. Gold can be dissolved by it and then later extracted.
End of lecture. Louis was always coming up with things like that, but Louis wasn’t here. And why did he feel he needed backup? Why the constant tingling in his spine?
Among the half-dozen or so grey-clad zombies with their hoods and goggles that made them look like naval gunners in the heat of battle, Herr Schlacht watched a pour. White-hot, the gold was being cast into wafers the size of calling cards. An assistant, to one side, was polishing those that had already cooled.
Schlacht, though hidden behind goggles and under a wide-brimmed felt trilby and tweed overcoat, had the stance, the look of a Berliner. Solid — maybe weighing as much as no kilos. A real Bürgermeister type. The face was round, fleshy and double-chinned, the forehead wide and blunt, the nose not unlike Louis’s but no boxer, no such refinements — simply a pugilist come up from the streets. The lips were a little thin, but maybe that was because the stub of a cigar was clamped fiercely between his teeth.
Two Alsatians, guardians of the smelter, slept on the cooling firebricks of a nearby hearth.
The pour came to an end, the goggles were pushed up until they covered the forehead. Ja, das ist gut — Kohler could almost hear Schlacht saying it. Gold and candles … What the hell else was this little entrepreneur into?
Again the tingling in his spine came to him, again he thought to step back from the window and did so this time.