The man was offended. He turned to his friends at the other table and called to them. "Hey-did I kill him or not?"
They knew immediately what he was talking about, and agreed loudly, with the barman joining in, that Jean-Honore Bourget had indeed killed him, and no one in the village would say otherwise.
Gideon, sensing that protocol called for it, invited them over and earned smiles and nods by ordering them another carafe of wine. Jean-Honore wondered politely if he might have a Pernod instead, and this was brought in a slender glass with an ice cube floating in it. He poured some water into it from a squat bottle with an "Anisette Berger" label on it, took a contented sip of the resulting milky-green liquid, and settled happily back to tell them all how he killed SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Helmut Kassel.
It was like watching a father deliver a familiar bedtime story to his children. When he couldn’t remember a detail, they supplied it for him, so they wound up telling a lot of it themselves, and when they contradicted him on a minor point, he said: "No, truly?" and went equably along with them. There was a lot of laughter.
But on the major points there were no contradictions, and no laughter either. In retribution for the murders of the six men named on the plaque, Jean-Honore and three other Maquis had done away with the SS man. One of the other three was the local barber, the second was a woman schoolteacher, and the third was the leader: Guillaume du Rocher. Only Jean-Honore was still alive.
Kassel, who had seen himself as a ladies’ man, had been lured to an afternoon assignation with the schoolteacher in the Hunadaie forest not far from town. There, they had killed him.
"How?" Gideon asked.
"With a claw hammer, mostly," the old man answered pleasantly. "Edmond wanted to use his razor, but Guillaume said it would be best to have no clean knife wounds." He nodded with approval. "He was right, too."
Working quickly, they had stripped him of his uniform, even his underwear, and dressed him in old farm clothes that smelled of pigs and manure. They carried him a few hundred feet to the road that runs between Ploujean and Plancoet. There Guillaume, whom the Nazis permitted to have a car because of his status and apparent docility, ran over him, making sure that his face was crushed against the asphalt. The body was left in the road to be found by the authorities-some drunken peasant who’d stepped in the way of a transport truck or a speeding staff car-and that was the end of that.
"But wasn’t there any retribution? Didn’t the Nazis-"
Jean-Honore grinned. "Not very smart, the Boches."
"Well, you see," one of the others explained, "the last thing the SS wanted was to let it out that somebody with a rank like that might have been assassinated. They didn’t want us to know, and they certainly didn’t want Berlin to know. And as for the regular army, the regular administration, they just wanted the SS out of here, the sooner the better; they hated them more than we did."
"As much, maybe," Jean-Honore said. "Not more."
"As much," the man agreed. "So in the end they settled for the story that he just disappeared on one of his little trips to somewhere or other; one of his private, unannounced‘investigations’ to the Argoat, or the Morbihan, or maybe Normandy. Nobody knew where."
"Anywhere but this district," Jean-Honore said. "Bureaucrats are the same everywhere." He finished his Pernod with a sigh, turned down the offer of another, wiped the ends of his moustache between thumb and forefinger, and looked with sparkling little eyes at his satisfied audience.
"What did you do with Kassel’s uniform?" Gideon asked.
"What kind of a question is that?" the barman said.
"No, why shouldn’t he ask?" Jean-Honore said. He shot a melodramatically cryptic glance to Gideon. "He has to know many things." Gideon nodded, soberly and mysteriously.
"The uniform…" mused Jean-Honore, searching his mind.
"You burned it," said one of the others.
" Burned it?" Gideon said.
"Oh, yes, that’s right…" said Jean-Honore. "Well, the parts that would burn without making a stink; the cloth parts. The rest Guillaume took away with him to bury somewhere. In his wine cellar, maybe," he said and laughed. "My God, it hurt to bury those boots. You should have seen what we were wearing for shoes."
So that explained that, and much to Gideon’s satisfaction. The SS regalia simply had no connection with the bones in the cellar. Two separate murders, two separate burials. No relationship beyond the fact that one had been executed by the other, and the other killed to avenge him. So much for the SS insignia that had so pleased Joly.
But the main questions still remained. How had Alain’s skeleton (a third of it, anyway) gotten into Guillaume’s cellar in the first place? Where was the rest of it? And now most disturbing of alclass="underline" What possible connection might Guillaume have had with it? For it was next to impossible that Alain had been dismembered and buried in his cellar without his knowing about it. He sighed. The more he found out, the more confusing it got.
Jean-Honore decided that perhaps another Pernod might be very nice after all. Gideon bought it, thanked the old man, and shook hands all around, finding himself bobbing up and down as each one popped out of his chair in turn. As he left he heard the barman’s querulous voice: "Well, what does he care what happened to the bastard’s uniform?"
Gideon glanced over his shoulder as he pulled the door closed behind him. There was Jean-Honore hunching forward over his Pernod, eyes glittering, explaining the situation to his attentive cronies.
" Say…" he whispered knowingly, his forefinger alongside his nose, " Eee…"
John was right. Joly was beginning to appreciate them, or at least he was getting used to their popping up with astute insights to muddle his investigation into Claude’s death. When Gideon got to Rochebonne after a ten-minute walk along the tree-lined road from Ploujean, he found the inspector on a cigarette break from whatever he’d been doing, strolling amicably with John in the courtyard and enjoying the rare spring sunshine. Gideon fell in step with them.
"Alain du Rocher, eh?" was Joly’s greeting. Not exactly a full-hearted endorsement of Gideon’s deduction, but not a contemptuous rebuff either. Just the mildly amused, not unfriendly skepticism with which he tended to receive ideas other than his own. Gideon was getting used to Joly, too.
"You were right, Doc. Lucien doesn’t buy it." So the two of them had graduated to first names too, which was good. John’s pronunciation- Loosh’n -brought no more than a momentary strain to the papery skin under Joly’s eyes. Something like Mathilde’s look when he’d referred to "Roach Bone" in her presence.
"It’s very hard to see how it can be Alain," the inspector said. "I called our local prefect of police as soon as Mr. Lau-ahum, John-told me what you thought. As a matter of fact, it turns out that Alain du Rocher’s height, weight, and age do conform to what you learned from those bones."
"Well, then-"
"But so do many other people’s. Bretons are in general shorter and more slender than other Frenchmen, as I’m sure you’re aware. And unfortunately for your theory, there’s simply no doubt whatever about Alain’s execution by the Nazis."
"Yes, I know. That’s the one thing that doesn’t add up; how he got into the cellar."
"Gideon, he was picked up by the SS at 5 a.m., October 16, 1942, and taken to the mairie. Between 10 a.m. and noon the other five Maquis were brought in. There were many witnesses, including the prefect himself as a child. None of them ever came out again. No," Joly said comfortably, walking erectly along, hands behind his back, face turned up slightly towards the pale sun, "everything suggests that the bones in the cellar are Kassel’s. Surely you see that."
"No, Kassel was run over by a car and left out in the road near the Hunadaie forest."
It was a sign of just how accustomed Joly was becoming to them that he received this without even a hitch in his step and listened with tolerant resignation while Gideon told him the rest of what he’d learned in Ploujean. It was, in fact, Gideon who stopped in mid-stride.