Beekeeper Read Free Page A

a cigarette but suddenly finding his fingers too cold.
    As in Avignon, so, too, in Fontainebleau Forest and with other crimes, the finger of truth had been pointed by them and not appreciated. And, yes, Hermann wore the scars of such honesty. But in Avignon there had been the Cagoule , the action squad of a fanatical far-right political organization of the 1930s, the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire.
    That organization had been dedicated to the overthrow of the Third Republic by any means. Murder, arson … the dynamiting, on the night of 2 October 1941, of six synagogues in Paris in a show of mutual support for the Nazis, but were they now free to do as they pleased with a certain two detectives?
    â€˜In revenge for what happened in Avignon,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Word could so easily have rushed on ahead of us.’
    â€˜Then was Oona stopped in the street as a threat to us to leave things alone or else taste what’s to come?’
    Hermann was thinking of von Schaumburg’s warning. He was letting his thoughts run through the many twisted threads of the tapestry Paris and the country had become under the Occupation. Each thread was so often knotted to another it could and did, when yanked, yank on still other threads and on their guts.
    â€˜All things are possible, Louis. That’s what worries me.’
    The Milice were not the Cagoule , but those same political leanings, those same sympathies were shared. And Boemelburg, as Head of the Gestapo in France, was one of the major thread-pullers and could well have given the Milice a little tug just to warn Hermann and himself to behave.
    And yes, of course, one of the first things the SS and the Gestapo had done after the Defeat was to empty the jails of their most hardened criminals and put those types to work for them.
    â€˜Fighting common crime brings no pleasure these days,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Let’s go and have a talk with our beekeeper. Maybe he can shed a little light on things.’
    Louis always ‘talked’ to the victims, no matter how grisly the murder.
    Under the blue light from Hermann’s torch, the tiny bodies were seen to be scattered everywhere in the snow. All were frozen and curled up. No longer did the cluster of each hive, that winter ball of ten thousand or so bees, shake their wings and jerk their bodies to keep the queen and themselves warm. No longer did each cluster move slowly about the frames feeding on the honey they had stored for the winter and the beekeeper, being wise and kind, had left for their wellbeing. Someone had broken into each of the hives – all thirty of them – and had stolen a good deal of what remained of the winter stores.
    â€˜About twenty kilos to the hive at the start of each winter, in eight or ten frames,’ said Kohler. ‘ Jésus, merde alors ,. Louis, whoever did it had no thought for tomorrow.’
    â€˜Just as in Peyrane, eh?’
    â€˜Not quite. Here they left the cluster. In Peyrane they took it and squashed it along with everything else.’
    The apiary was in one of those surprising little oases of nature that were often found in Paris: a field of a few hectares that was surrounded, St-Cyr knew, by a high stone wall. Cut off, isolated and quiet, it was right on top of one of the city’s smaller reservoirs and not a stone’s throw from the Père Lachaise.
    â€˜At five degrees of frost the poor little buggers didn’t have a chance, Louis. Ten thousand times thirty equals three hundred thousand little murders.’
    Using the wooden-handled pocket-knife the Kaiser had given him and countless others in the spring of 1914, Kohler scraped away the worker bees, stabbed at a large fat one in the centre of the cluster and said, ‘That little darling was their queen. Not a virgin, not this one. Two years old, I’ll bet, since that’s the most productive age to successfully overwinter a hive. They’re