‘Or Herr Schlacht has now had time to free her and has taken her with him.’
‘Where to?’
‘The candles.’
‘What about them? Danielle …’
‘Though she has denied knowing the whereabouts of the factory, she has patiently discovered everything else.’
‘And will now try to put an end to our Bonze and everything he’s been doing.’
Goods trains shunted in the freight yards, which Kohler knew were just to the east and along the rue des Poissonniers. In the maintenance sheds and yards of the Omnibus Depot across from him and off the north side of the rue Championnet, the racket of misfiring autobuses aux gazogene mingled with that of the others to break the cold, hard darkness, as vélos and their earnest riders hurried to work through the ink of what had, before the Defeat of 1940, been 4:45 a.m. A light snow fell to dampen the rank air from the distillation units which used charcoal to produce the mixture of methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen that, when burned in the cylinders, powered the buses. A lorry parted the stream of bicycle riders; a bus followed, honking furiously.
Louis was to enter the candle factory by another route. He would negotiate the inevitable passages and, on the way, try to find where the girl had hidden her bike. Just precisely what she planned, they didn’t know yet, but would have to stop her. They couldn’t have her trying to kill Schlacht, couldn’t have her causing trouble here and alerting von Schaumburg and the rest of the OKW to the iniquities of the Palais d’Eiffel any more than she already had, couldn’t have her infuriating Oberg.
When a lorry turned in at a courtyard whose entrance had been meant for horse-drawn carriages and wagons, its driver violently cursed and finally, at a lumbering crawl, managed to squeeze it through.
One cylinder wasn’t firing, another missed a beat, so the banging and clattering was intermittent, but it wasn’t wise to switch these things off when the engine was warming up and would soon fire on all cylinders, albeit at three-quarters the power, or less, of a gasoline-fired engine.
Words erupted with the argot — the slang of the quartier. Wax was to be unloaded; candles taken to the Gare de l’Est for shipment to the Reich. Another lorry soon negotiated the entrance, and now the racket of the two of them filled the courtyard and rose up the slot of it to escape into the night sky some four or five storeys above him.
Vacated most probably in the early days of the Great Depression, the building had, no doubt, been cheap and available, and with all the room for expansion Schlacht could possibly have wanted. But it had one big drawback, thought Kohler grimly. There would be far too many places for that kid to hide.
The day shift of fifteen souls began to filter in, their female voices muffled under the constant drone. Kohler thought to join them, but knew he’d stand out as they lined up to punch in at the time clock.
Hacking coughs, sneezes, constant bitching, two teenaged girls discussing a film, a car …
Schlacht’s Renault drew slowly into the courtyard behind the lorries. Out tumbled Frau Hillebrand and the others, along with Oona and Giselle. A full house. Not only had he been up all night, he’d been to the lock-up in the cellars of the rue des Saussaies, and also that of Charonne’s Commissariat de Police.
Soft on the violent air came the sweet scent of beeswax to indicate that after Sunday’s lay-off, the foreman and his assistants had come in at midnight probably to get the wax melted and everything ready for the day’s production.
Soon the clanking of ancient machinery was added to the sound of the gazogènes.
The passage was as dark as pitch and no more than two metres in width, felt St-Cyr, not liking what he’d come upon. It ran the length of the rear of the building and separated it from one of the tenements the Société Anonyme des Logements à Bon Marché had put up years ago out of concrete blocks to house, at low rents, the then increasing waves of immigrants from North Africa. But now this latter building would be all but empty. Blacks, Arabs and other non-whites had been forbidden re-entry to the Occupied Zone after the Defeat and had had to stay in the south, to where they had fled along with so many others. Those who had remained in Paris would be exceedingly careful about where and when they went out, for anyone of colour was suspect and likely to be stopped in the street and, if not vouched for by an employer, then taken for forced labour‥
Makeshift doorways had consequently been cut into this wall, and inside one of them, he found the girl’s bike. The rucksack was open, the gun gone. When barred windows and locked doors prevented entrance to the factory, he found the fire escape and went up it just as Danielle must have done. A broken window gave access to an even deeper darkness through which the distant sounds of slowly moving machinery came.
Pausing to feel the gap where the lift doors should have been, he found, instead, an emptiness that sickened. When someone stepped on broken glass, he hissed urgently, ‘Mademoiselle, it is Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté. Please give yourself up.’
She made no further sound, and after a while he told himself that she had left him. Her half-brother was dead, her father dead, her life in ruins. With nowhere else to run to, she had come here to do what she felt had to be done. But had she caused her father’s death? he asked himself as he blindly searched for the staircase. Had she returned to the house on Thursday to find that bottle on his desk?
The beekeeper would have turned Étienne in and had been very vocal about it. Had he written a letter of condemnation to the Kommandant of Oflag 17A and told her of it? She’d given no hint of this but must have known Frau Schlacht would come to the study on that evening to collect the bottle. Yet much of what Danielle had done and said since they had first met in the garden seemed to indicate she had been terribly afraid the half-brother had committed the killing. Father Michel had sensed this and had believed firmly for some time that the boy had indeed returned.
A set of keys. Those from the studio? he wondered, dreading the possibility, for Frau Hillebrand and Honoré de Saussine had each known the whereabouts of the poison, as had Herr Schlacht who had had, by far, the most to lose.
Pneumonia … At least it wasn’t the ‘cardiac arrest’ the Gestapo were so fond of using, but had the boy been shot? Had the beekeeper, knowing that Juliette would stop at nothing, finally written to the Kommandant of Oflag 17A, denouncing his stepson?
They would probably never know, and certainly the mother, not having been informed of the boy’s death, had had reasons of her own for adding the poison.
When he found the staircase, it descended to a landing where there was light, and as he looked up, St-Cyr saw that the building was in two parts, with a forward hoist bay that extended to the roof above, and rearward offices and storerooms. Down below him, where once electrical generators had been assembled, horizontally mounted, cast-iron wheels, a good two metres in diameter and positioned some three metres above the floor, had candle hoops hanging from them at regular intervals. Each hoop had been vertically strung with an outer and inner cage of wicks, and as each wheel advanced, and each cage came round, an operator pulled down on a lever to lower it into a vat of liquid wax. Dripping, the hoop’s cage was then lifted to cool and set, while successive others were dipped, a candle and cage taking some forty or fifty passes before being completed. Each outer cage held perhaps thirty candles, each inner one, perhaps twenty, and there were sixteen of the hoops suspended from each of five separate wheels.
More rectangular cages and vats held the larger church candles, the cierges without which the Mass would not seem the same. But short, squat, votive candles were also being made — cast in water-jacketed tables that held perhaps thirty dozen at a time and whose piston arrangement pushed the finished candles out and automatically cut off the wicks which were fed from below and through the pistons. For this operation the wax was being melted in galvanized iron drums that stood atop gantries at one end of the tables. There were lighted gas rings under them, and each drum was equipped with a spigot which, when opened, would let the molten wax run down a trough before spreading out to flood and fill the moulds.