With luck Boemelburg and his boys would have pulled in the girl with the broken shoes and found out who all her friends were.
Perhaps no one would decide to take a shot or two at them. Perhaps the Resistance from Melun would leave them alone until the case was settled and they could clean those bastards out in style, sans Louis of course.
Maybe Ackermann would forget about his duel. Maybe … maybe …
‘It’s all right, Hermann. You watch my back and me, I’ll be sure to watch yours, eh?’
‘Then rest a little easier, my French Frog friend. I went past Gestapo HQ on the fly and swiped us two Schmeissers and seven hundred rounds apiece for good measure.’
There were a dozen stick grenades lying loosely on the floor of the car.
St-Cyr planted his feet among them and hung on as they lost their Gestapo tails.
6
The morning was crisp and clear, the wind in off the Atlantic and up the valley of the Loire to threaten an early blizzard. The sound of church bells was resonant.
Kohler and St-Cyr stood in the midst of Vouvray’s largest cemetery. A crowd had gathered in the distance round the entrance to the church – the curious, the uninvited. Murder always brought them. There’d be whispers, questions – rumours of incest perhaps.
The church’s slate-roofed bell tower and spire rose to a substantial cross which had defied all weathers and all wars since the mid-sixteenth century. The horse-drawn hearses were parked well to the far side; the only cars – that of the countess and that of the local German Kommandant – were to the other.
St-Cyr brought his gaze back to the pair of open graves at their feet. One thing was certain. They buried deeply in these parts.
So, too, was another. ‘The perruches, Hermann. That silicious clay with its flint boulders. They don’t just grow grapes in it.’
Kohler stubbed out his cigarette and thought about flicking the butt into one of the graves. Decently he pocketed it. ‘Why the two graves, Louis?’
‘My thought precisely, Hermann. You’re improving. Why isn’t Brother Jerome being buried at the monastery?’
‘Any ideas?’
‘Several. The countess may well have intervened on the family’s behalf; the abbot might not have wanted to go against her wishes but then … and I stress this … perhaps, in his wisdom, he saw advantage in not claiming Brother Jerome’s body. But then again, Hermann, has a feud developed between the parish priest and the abbot? Ah now, that is a distinct possibility. Perhaps the priest has insisted on a double-barrelled burial and the countess has sided with him. One thing is certain. Authority has been challenged and custom breached.’
‘You going inside?’
St-Cyr tapped out his pipe against a tombstone. ‘Cover the curious and the whole of this place. Have a look for Charles Maurice Theriault just in case he’s had a twinge of conscience and come to pay his last respects. Me, I will step inside as you have suggested, to study the mourners as they view the bodies.’
‘Enjoy yourself. I’m taking a Schmeisser with me.’
‘No one’s going to shoot up a funeral. Not in France. Even the Resistance will show some respect.’
‘Ask Yvette that when you blow her a kiss, or are you planning to lean over the girl and bring her back to life?’
Funerals brought out the worst in Hermann. ‘I’m not sure the caskets will be open, but in the countryside it’s usually the case, no matter what the damage.’
Louis could always be counted on to add that pleasant touch. Kohler grinned hugely. ‘I ought to let you have the last word, my fine Frog friend, but I simply have to say, Don’t do anything in there I wouldn’t do.’
‘For a man who has been challenged to a duel, you’re extremely light-hearted?’
‘Ackermann didn’t come, chum!’
It was on the tip of St-Cyr’s tongue to say, Let’s wait and see, eh, but he left it.
One had to do things like that with Hermann. Having the last word was important to him.
The church was packed. The bells continued – did they ring them twice as long if there were two burials? Everyone but the priest, his two assistants and the altar boys was at their rosaries or sitting stiffly. All in black. Not a suit or a dress of brown. He’d stick out like a sore thumb but … ah, Mon Dieu, it couldn’t be helped. Funerals were so useful. They brought so many together in one place.
The abbot, for instance, and Brother Michael, the monastery’s wine maker and mentor of Brother Jerome.
Only one other monk was present – all three of them sat at the very front, next the aisle, but on the right side.
The third monk was the farthest from the aisle, a younger man with tears in his eyes, by the look. Much weeping. Yes … yes, it was so. Could it be that Brother Michael was gripping him firmly by the hand in hopes of calming him?
Was that third monk Brother Sebastian, the beekeeper Jerome had made unjust accusations against?
The monk was of about forty-five or fifty years of age – very strongly built. The neck and head were those of a wrestler, the shoulders also.
But why the tears if he’d been wrongly accused? Why indeed?
The countess, Gabrielle Arcuri and her son, Rene Yvon-Paul, sat in the second row across the aisle and behind the immediate family of the deceased.
The caskets were open. Lilies … White lilies … Where had they got them at this time of year and in a country at war?
From the south, from Provence perhaps? A greenhouse …
The lilies were of silk and he knew then that the countess had seen to everything but that she hadn’t asked her distant cousin from Germany to help.
Grateful for the advantage standing gave him, St-Cyr was still perturbed that he couldn’t see as well as he’d have liked.
It was going to be a long funeral.
A columned balcony ran along both sides of the church and led to the bell tower and the ringer of the bells. The stained-glass windows were magnificent, so, too, the frescoes in the vaulted ceiling. The community had much to thank the Family Theriault for. The silver service, the candlesticks, the richly embroidered altar cloth and cushions no doubt, the seats of course, the newish roof – perhaps two hundred years old – the robes the priestly folk wore, even the ring the people kissed and the illuminated Bible.
There was only one way to get a brown suit and tweed overcoat out of this.
St-Cyr squeezed along the wall, nodded apologies to four of the pallbearers who’d all been through this sort of thing thousands of times and, in spite of their objections, went up the stairs to the balcony.
It was such a view. Perfect! Magnificent! The smell of incense was all around him. They were burning lavender to which a trace of cinnamon had been added.
Keeping to the outside of the balcony, he moved towards the altar until he came at last to stand in the shadow of one of the columns.
Gabrielle Arcuri and the countess both wore veils. Completely dressed in black, the mirage looked very estranged, very sad and poignant – a war widow, so many things. But Russian? he asked. Did Natasha Kulakov Myshkin look Russian?
Did the countess even know her son’s wife had been the daughter of a very wealthy family who’d found favour at the court of the Romanovs? Would she have believed it if she’d been told?
Somehow he didn’t think the countess would know. Gabrielle Arcuri would have kept that little slice of her past entirely to herself just as the owner of the Lune Russe had said.
So, perhaps a small stint as a streetwalker after all? Just to pay the necessary bills and get established.
She was holding her son’s hand. The boy looked afraid – terrified that something would happen – but then, don’t all boys of that age worry at funerals?
The caskets were near. Though in death and wax, yet the resemblances between Jerome Noel and Rene Yvon-Paul were striking.
Not so Yvette who, beneath the wax, the face powder, rouge and lipstick, had the coarseness of both her mother and father.