Hermann yanked on the bell.
‘Messieurs, madame is asleep and not well,’ came a strict female voice from out of the darkness of the foyer.
‘It’s okay. We’re doctors. We’ve come all the way from Paris just to look after her.’
‘Paris? The detectives. You-’
Nobody could close a door on Hermann if he didn’t want it to be closed. Nobody. Especially if he had help and was agitated.
*
The four-poster was richly carved. Deep in a cocoon of sleep and wearing nothing but a coverlet rich with antique gold brocade, Christiane Bissert and Genèvieve Ravier lay wrapped in each other’s arms exactly where they’d fallen.
‘Absinthe,’ muttered Louis, lifting the bottle from a table.
They didn’t stir. The Primo Soprano’s blonde hair was laced with dried lavender. The Alto’s skin glistened with a fragrant unguent; her jet black curls and long lashes were still damp with perspiration.
‘The tapestry,’ breathed Hermann, not turning away to look at it. ‘A horn player …’
‘A shawm. It’s like an oboe, but with a flared bell.’
Tambourines and tabors joined recorders and citterns in medieval accompaniment among dancing country folk at a wedding. ‘The rites of spring,’ snorted Kohler. ‘So, where is Madame Simondi?’ he asked the housekeeper who hadn’t stopped glaring at them.
‘On … on the other side of the stove room. She is … is with another of them.’
‘Which one?’
‘The Basso Continuo. They … they keep her company from time to time when she demands it or Maître Simondi thinks it is needed.’
‘And who demanded it this time?’
‘The maître.’
‘Bon! Louis, find yourself a chair. There isn’t room.’
Shoes were prised off, overcoat, fedora, scarf and suit jacket dropped on the floor. The Walther P38 was removed to be tucked under one of the pillows as the coverlet was flung back. ‘Sweet dreams, mon vieux. I’ve had it.’
Hermann dragged up the covers and was instantly asleep, warm in his own cocoon.
‘My partner always considers he has the right to take over, madame. He’s had a hard two days and must be excused,’ yawned St-Cyr. ‘Please introduce me to Madame Simondi, then find me a distant room whose door is tight when shut. This one snores but refuses to admit it. They will tell him, I’m sure.’
Beneath a life-sized poster of a dancer of a far different sort, Marceline Simondi lay on a divan among scattered cushions and little treasures, next to a headless classical nude that was wrapped in chains.
There was no sign of Marius Spaggiari.
‘The baths,’ warned the housekeeper. ‘He may have fallen asleep. Please, I must go to him at once. Avail yourself …’ She indicated a deep and shabby fauteuil from the thirties. ‘Use it. She will not even be aware of your presence and will sleep now until noon if not longer.’
‘Cover her.’
‘You do it. I must hurry.’
Gaunt, her wiry, raven hair unpinned and all over the place, the former dancer from the Cabaret Pigalle, the Narcisse and the Alhambra had lost her charms. A false eyelash had come loose. The once alluring mouth was slack. The cheeks were pinched as, deep in the recesses of her mind, another nightmare had begun to build.
She frowned. She twitched. Self-inflicted scratches marred the bony buttocks and thighs.
‘Were you there at the Palais?’ asked St-Cyr, but had to answer, ‘How could you have been, since your present state shows every sign of being your usual?’ Yet Simondi had made a point of suggesting to Hermann that she might well have mistakenly gone to the Palais on the night of the murder.
A long strand of crimson chorus-girl beads had been broken and she lay among them as if, in her struggle to piece the necklace together, she had fallen into a stupor, her body absolutely numb.
The absinthe drip glass was in two parts. Into its thick-stemmed bottom he poured a jigger, not bothering to measure with the dosette.
Into the top, he placed a lump of sugar over the drip hole, then, there being no longer any cracked ice, added water only.
Drop by drop, the deep emerald green of the absinthe became cloudy and he remembered vividly his first sight of this magic and how, as a boy, he had seen grandmaman St-Cyr compress her thin lips in anticipation as she silently steeled herself to be patient. ‘It is, when taken, like ascending to the gods,’ she had said, hardly conscious of him. ‘One is free of all cares and casts aside the weight of these frightful garments a widow must constantly wear.’
Apart from the classical nude, the ogive vaults in the ceiling and the tiles of an early Renaissance floor, the room was totally what one would have expected of a Parisian chorus girl who had depended for much of her life on the flea markets of Saint-Ouen.
‘Ah! I must correct myself,’ he said on examining another of the posters. ‘By sheer force of will, and talent, too, you rose to become the vedette at the Alhambra.’ The top of the bill.
Removing the dripper, he stood with glass in hand looking down at the shell of what had, in the early twenties, been the toast of the rue de Malte and the quartier Folie-Méricourt. Though now in her forties, she looked much older. The legs that would have commanded avid attention, lust, too, were mere sticks. The stomach, whose navel would have drawn the eye for more reasons than a thumb-sized sequin, was wrinkled with excess skin. The breasts whose nipples had once been tassled or bare, were shrunken and withered.
‘À Paris et à votre santé, madame,’ he said, ‘and to the far more recent past. For the first time since arriving in Avignon, this humble servant of justice senses that here, at last, we have come upon an element of unquestionable truth.’
Tossing off his drink, he prepared another and then, having downed that, yet another. But was it wise to have done so, he wondered, as she began to dance from the posters.
The water was hot, and as Genèvieve eased herself into it, the bath sheath she wore drifted outwards like a slowly settling cloud, its fine white gossamer mingling with the steam. She swam a little, using gentle breaststrokes. Her blonde hair was pinned up, exposing the graceful slenderness of her neck. Always when seeing her like this, a reassurance came to Christiane. ‘Your eyes are very clear this morning, chérie. Their blue is perfect.’
‘Don’t worry so much,’ said Genèvieve, her voice soft beneath floor-to-ceiling frescoes of women bathing with their children during the Babylonian Captivity. Of couples, too, and men and boys and girls. ‘Don’t do anything foolish. Trust me, petite.’
They came together in the centre of the bath, where all around their little ocean the marble of six hundred years ago was grey and wet and variegated. They held one another. Lips brushed those that were nervous. Genèvieve’s fingers lingered to trap the tears that were falling and to brush them away. ‘What are we going to do?’ blurted Christiane. ‘The detectives will find out everything. They’ll destroy what we have. They won’t stop. Where will we go; how will we live?’
Hands gripped her by the shoulders and, forcing her under, legs entangled hers until … until, arms thrashing, lungs bursting, she was released and rose suddenly to the surface. ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped.
‘Then understand that what we do must always be done together.’
‘We keep silent,’ blurted Christiane.
‘We know nothing,’ said Genèvieve.
‘The one was drowned, an accident.’
‘The other thought she knew things about her.’
‘But wouldn’t tell us.’
‘We were together on the night she died.’