Beekeeper Read Free

with Hermann. ‘War does things like that,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It forms instant friendships only to plunder them as instantly.’
    Giselle was half-Greek, half-Midi French and with straight jet-black hair, lovely violet eyes and a mind of her own. A former prostitute Hermann had ‘rescued’ from the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton and just around the corner.
    Oona’s eyes were sky blue, her hair blonde. Tall and willowy, she had a quiet calm, a dignity that was best for Hermann. But like the war, such things would have to sort themselves out and who was this humble Sûreté to judge?
    The lorry’s gas-producer hissed as he got out of the cab to stoke its firebox. Firewood and charcoal briquets were being used – charcoal in a land where so few had any heat. Hermann’s concierge was always bitching about their never having any when he could so easily, and rightly, she maintained, insist that coal and wood were well supplied.
    But Hermann wouldn’t do that. A bad Gestapo – lousy to his confréres, many of whom hated him – he lived as one of the Occupied. Maybe that, too, was why Oona had grown to love him, and Giselle also. But now things were changing, tightening. Now people were beginning to say, ‘ Ma foi c’est long. ’ My faith, it’s taking a long time.
    For the invasion to come.
    â€˜He’s closing the firebox door,’ whispered Oona, looking down into the street through parted black-out curtains. ‘For just an instant there, I saw a glimpse of its light, Hermann. Ah mon Dieu , to sit and watch a fire in the stove and know those bastards can never again come banging at the door to drag us away.’
    The Gestapo, the SS, the Paris flics and Vichy goons, et cetera. Oona had been stopped in the street. The contents of her purse had been dumped out, her papers scrutinized. Kohler held her. He felt her tears on his cheek, cursed the war, cursed the Occupier, and reluctantly said, ‘I have to go. Louis will be freezing.’
    And they had another murder to attend to. Never time to live a normal life but then … why, then, she told herself, things were just not normal anyway.
    â€˜Take care,’ she whispered and quickly squeezed his hand.
    People didn’t hear Hermann when he didn’t want them to. He left the house as silently as he had come and she knew then that he hadn’t wanted to awaken Giselle, but had wanted to be alone with her.
    â€˜He’s worried,’ she said softly. ‘Intuitively he knows there can only be trouble with this murder.’
    Taking a spoon, she dug it into the pail of wax to taste the honey, to hold it in her mouth and cry.
    â€˜Louis, the Milice were after Oona.’
    â€˜When?’ Oona’s papers weren’t good. ‘Well, when?’ demanded St-Cyr. ‘Please don’t spare me.’
    â€˜While we were on the train between Lyon and here.’
    That explosion? wondered St-Cyr, alarmed. These days such things could well be the work of others but attributed to the Résistance so as to hide the fact. That way the SS, the Gestapo and their associates could settle nuisances such as honest, hardworking detectives, without being blamed.
    These days, too, things were very complicated. The Milice were Vichy’s newest police force – paramilitary but yet to receive their weapons, since Vichy had none to give and no such authority. Primarily their duties were to give the appearance of the government’s actively suppressing the black market. They were also to search out and arrest evaders of the forced labour draft, the hated Service du Travail Obligatoire and two or even three years of indenture in the Reich. But they had still other unspecified duties and powers of arrest and interrogation that suggested a branch of the SS.
    â€˜They couldn’t have heard of what happened in Avignon, not yet,’ muttered Kohler, trying to light