Bellringer (39 page)

It was only as he turned the cutter around that Angèle objected, tossing her head and snorting as she pawed at the snow.

‘She’s excited, Louis, is refusing to leave.’

A nearby alcove window had been broken in and a woollen toque had caught on a spine of glass.

‘Nora must have seen that there were two of us in the cutter and concluded that she couldn’t outrun Angèle,’ said Louis.

‘Yet she still had the presence of mind to try to lead us astray. The electricity will be off.’

‘And she’ll still have that ax and her Opinel.’

Luxury was draped in white sheeting and as the beam of the flashlight searched about the seeming vastness of the Hôtel de l’Ermitage’s foyer, it finally came to rest on a staircase of marble whose Art Deco railing curved gracefully upward.

The damp, the cold, the smell were penetrating, this last of mouldy wool mingled with long-spent cigar and other tobacco smoke, dust, and perfume, thought St-Cyr. Built in 1929, the hotel was in four sections, placed in a gentle zigzag. One wing faced onto the golf course, then there was the one he and Hermann were in, and then, end to end, two others facing the forest close in on either side. Nora Arnarson could delay them and then try to leave with Angèle and the cutter, and they both knew this.

‘Four storeys, Hermann. Two more in the attics for the help. One hundred and twenty-two rooms and suites for the guests, plus kitchens, dining room, lounge bar and café, front desk, and offices.’

‘And we’ve only one flashlight, which is likely to give out on us at any moment.’

Hermann didn’t always tend to worry and was simply in need of reassurance. ‘Weber will soon know where we are and come running.’

‘Maybe we should tell her that.’

All of the furnishings from the Vittel-Palace and probably from the Grand had been stored in the Ermitage. Narrow passages, often cluttered and dead-ended, threaded through the mountains they would have to negotiate if she refused to answer.

‘Mademoiselle,’ called Louis, only to have, if possible, the silence plunge even deeper until, through it, came the gusting sounds of the wind outside.

The alcove she had broken into was behind them, a once-pleasant and no doubt much-sought-after recess from which the comings and goings of the clientele in the foyer and at the front desk could have been watched while quietly perusing a newspaper.

Angèle snorted, the sleigh bells jingling their reminder. ‘Stay here, Hermann. Let me flush her to you.’

‘She’ll have already figured that out.’

‘Mademoiselle,’ called out Louis, ‘your best chance is with us. If guilty, we’ll insist on taking you to Paris; if not, and I must emphasize this, we will guarantee that Herr Weber doesn’t use you to cover up his own guilt.’

‘
Louis, we can’t yet prove he’s guilty!
’ hissed Hermann.

‘
But she doesn’t know that
. Mademoiselle, Herr Weber had reason enough to have killed your friend.’

Friend. . . .
The echoes rebounded. ‘Inspectors, please let me go. I didn’t do anything.’

She was on the first landing of the main staircase, was briefly caught by the beam of their light.

Louis switched it off and indicated that they should spread out. ‘You left a knot in Angèle’s forelock,’ he called.

‘Brother Étienne always comes and goes this way,’ she blurted in despair. ‘He wouldn’t have stopped to tell me he knew I had escaped. I wouldn’t have ridden in the cutter. That would only have implicated him. Once in the woods, I’d have followed a stream. There’s a pair of skis waiting for me three kilometres from here, a deserted farm in the hills ten more and to the east of that over a rise, a woodcutter’s shack. I. . . I was to have stayed there until he had arranged to send someone.
Ah, merde,
you won’t arrest him, will you?’

‘An accomplice, Louis.’

Silenced by that, she blinked when the beam of the light again briefly caught her.

‘That knot, mademoiselle,’ said Louis. ‘Even chief inspectors make mistakes. Had I but known. . . ’

‘You would have let me go? Me, a key piece of that investigation of yours and now suspected of murder?’ They had moved and were by the heaped and cluttered front desk and a lot closer to her.

‘Please don’t do anything we would all regret,’ said Hermann. ‘Please just come down.’

‘Let’s discuss it—is that what you mean?’ The
sûreté
had kept the light off. The Kripo must now be at the foot of the stairs.

‘There isn’t much time, mademoiselle,’ said St-Cyr. ‘A few minutes at most.’

They wouldn’t know until it was too late. They couldn’t, Nora warned herself, and taking the stairs two and three at a time, went up through the pitch-darkness, leaving Herr Kohler far behind.

‘She’ll use that ax, Louis, or cut her wrists.’

‘But is guilty of what, Hermann?’

‘Admit it. That monk’s with the Résistance. Weber’s going to have a field day making mincemeat out of all of us.’

The first floor was crowded with furniture—beds taken apart and leaning with their mattresses against the corridor walls, rooms filled to overflowing. No order, just a jumble, and done in haste since the Grand had become vastly overcrowded and the Vittel-Palace urgently needed.

Nora listened. Nora tried to hear them, but they moved silently as a team. First one would go ahead, and then the other. Only then would the flashlight come on briefly and she would know for sure that it was but a matter of seconds until they found her.

They wouldn’t understand that she and Mary-Lynn hadn’t just argued about Cérès talking to the father Mary-Lynn had never known. They couldn’t know that Mary-Lynn had yelled, “You’re afraid of what Einar is going to say to you if Cérès
does
get through to him as she did with my dad. You
didn’t
let Einar have you, Nora. You told him to stop making love to you and buzz off. You stupidly shouted that if he really, really
did
love you he would have to wait!”

Einar had been blazing mad, had sworn at her, a thing he had never ever done before, and had run off to join up, and later she had agreed to come to France.

When the beam of the light found her, she blinked but didn’t lower the knife, could feel the blade already cutting into her throat.

‘Don’t, mademoiselle. Please don’t,’ said Louis gently.

She was in one of the rooms, jammed between two bureaus, with knees up tightly and back against a wall. The Opinel was at the jugular and once cut, thought Kohler, how the hell were they to stop the bleeding?

‘I did try to grab Mary-Lynn earlier on the stairs but tripped and fell and she got well ahead of me. I heard her scream. I cried out to her in confusion and despair for I didn’t know what had happened, only sensed it, for when someone falls like that, they. . . Caroline did see me when I finally got to that gate to look down the elevator shaft but. . . but it could only have been a glimpse because the lights then went off again.’

She wasn’t going to listen, felt Kohler. She had that ax leaning right beside her but must have told herself she couldn’t use it on anyone, not even to escape.

‘I’ll be shot, won’t I?’

Louis had lowered the light and was now shining it toward the other side of the room and back a little.

‘Not if we can help it,’ said St-Cyr. Hermann wasn’t going to get any closer unless she could somehow be distracted. ‘The wallpaper,
mon vieux
.’

‘The Senegalese, Louis.’

The light was now shining fully on that far wall. ‘With the dampness, it’s come loose and they’ve been peeling it off,’ said Nora, finding the will to faintly smile at the thought. ‘Madame Chevreul needed to decorate that tentlike cabinet of hers and Léa. . . Léa made them find her something no one would know of until seen. I’m not the only one who has broken into this place, but they’ve been into it lots and lots. They must have.’

‘Weber will only use it against them, Hermann,’ said Louis sadly.

The flashlight blinked as flashlights will. ‘He’s on to me, isn’t he?’ she asked. ‘When I met Jennifer on her way down to the laundry this evening, she said Marguerite had told her he had received a telex from Berlin about me and that he’d been very excited by it and wanted to see me. I. . . I worked for our Intelligence Department, inspectors. They’d been canvassing the universities and said I might be useful.’

A spy, thought Kohler. As if they didn’t have enough trouble already. The knife was still determinedly at her throat. She’d die if either of them moved.

‘Ever since I was little, my mom has always spoken to me in her own language. I did tell them that my accent would be far too off, that even the local patois I’d have to deal with wouldn’t cover that up, but they didn’t think I’d have a problem if I worked on it, not back then in ’41 when they needed people quickly and Vichy still had the carpet out.’

‘Mademoiselle, what. . . ’ began Louis.

‘Did I do? Look, I didn’t kill anyone. I was sent here to help us get an independent estimate of the size and grade of the deposits of aluminum the Compagnie des Bauxites de France are mining.’

‘The valley of the Argens, Hermann. The Département de la Var, near and at Brignoles to the east and northeast of Marseille.’

‘Where I handed my reports and field samples in, either to my boss or to our contact person.’

‘And the valley of the Hérault, in the Bas Landguedoc,’ said St-Cyr, ‘to the northwest of Montpellier.’

Louis was obviously dismayed at what they were up against, but the girl seemed relieved to be finally telling someone.

‘I even went to Les Baux to see where it had all begun. I fell in love with your country, Chief Inspector, and was, I felt, doing something that would not only be useful to the war effort but to France as well.’

Les Baux-de-Provence, a place of troubadours and knights, was about twenty kilometres to the north of Arles and a ruined hilltop town and ancient fortress where bauxite had first been discovered in 1821 and given that name.

There was blood on her neck and she could feel it.

‘Aluminum equals fighter aircraft and bombers, inspectors. France has by far the world’s largest source of high-grade ore. The Germans haven’t nearly enough of their own and must get it from here and from Hungary.’

‘An earthy-red, chalky ochrous rock, Hermann.’

‘But not ochre, which has far more iron,’ she said. ‘Though formed in essentially the same way in tropical climates of the past, bauxite is a residual deposit caused by the chemical and physical breakdown of rocks that are high in alumina.’

St-Cyr hadn’t taken his eyes off her for a split second and Nora knew she couldn’t keep the acid from her voice. ‘You French, Inspector, are letting them take seventy to eighty percent not only of the mined bauxite but of the refined metal.’

Whose smelters were in the Savoy, in the valleys of the Arve, the Isère, and the Arc, where plenty of electrical power was being generated. ‘You certainly got around.’

‘The Germans tried to control the price paid for the ore and metal. Vichy wanted more, of course, but what did the Compagnie des Bauxites do but worry they wouldn’t sell a thing and accept seventy-five francs a ton, which was far less than even the Reich’s Vereinigte Aluminium-Werke had offered. In 1941 Germany took 230,000 tons of ore. At four to one of metal that alone equalled nearly 60,000 of the refined, but Vichy also allowed the sale of 34,500 of that. In 1942, up until I was arrested and brought here, it was worse. The only problems the Germans were having were the distance to the Reich, the extreme shortages of railway stock—since they had stupidly shot themselves in the foot and had taken far too many locomotives and railway cars—and the lack of labour, since they had locked up far too many of the miners as prisoners of war.

‘Now, please let me die in peace. I didn’t kill anyone and I didn’t steal anything and I’ve no reason now to lie to you or to anyone.’

‘But you do know who the thief is.’

‘The klepto? Not really. I suspected Jen and then Caroline but never accused either nor told anyone else.’

Her fingers were sticky, the blade not quite where it ought to have been, thought St-Cyr, but was she beginning to realize this?

‘That crystal-ball gazer?’ asked Hermann. Somehow he had reduced the distance to her by half.

She would give Herr Kohler a faint smile for such an attempt, thought Nora, and would tell them both. ‘To me, Jen’s still head over heels with Marguerite, who may or may not give a damn about her anymore. I simply don’t know her well enough nor why they split up. Jen’s never said a thing about it, not to me and not to anyone else that I know of, nor has Marguerite.’

‘But Jennifer then took up with Caroline, Hermann.’

‘Leaving the other one homicidally jealous, Louis?’

‘Perhaps, but then. . . ’

‘Caroline really did want to find out what had happened to Madame de Vernon’s husband, inspectors. Jen. . . Jen was always encouraging her to.’

‘How much traffic goes back and forth from hotel to hotel?’ asked Louis.

‘Lots. Every day, and lots of overnights, too. If Marguerite’s been stealing things, tell her I hope that Indian Head penny brings her the luck my dad wanted me to have.’

The flashlight went off and then came on, the wrist being caught, the knife hand pulled back, Hermann having grabbed the girl in a bear hug.

Finally she stopped struggling and just let him hold her. ‘
Ah, bon,
’ said St-Cyr, ‘now we’d best get to work. We’ve company.’

‘
ACHTUNG, ACHTUNG!
’ came the call from Weber, given over a loud-hailer. ‘
RAUS, ALLES! KOMMEN SIE! SCHNELL! SCHNELL!
’

‘
NICHT SCHIESSEN, KAMMERAD!
’ yelled Hermann. ‘
NICHT SCHIESSEN!
’ Don’t shoot.

‘COME DOWN. IT’S ALL UP WITH YOU, KOHLER.’

‘Stall him, Hermann. Keep him occupied.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘There’s something I have to do. Mademoiselle, come with me and don’t try anything other than what I tell you.’

‘Louis, I’m not hearing this, not from you. You can’t leave me and try to make a break for it in that cutter. He’ll have left at least two men holding that nag by the harness.’