Bellringer (7 page)

This investigation was getting deeper and deeper. ‘Which bank?’

‘The Morgan.’

‘With headquarters in New York but a branch office in Paris, Hermann, the cheque negotiable after this war since Madame Chevreul could not possibly get there to cash it even though that bank is still open.
Ah, merde
. . . ’

The candle had snuffed itself. ‘Two of the guards are bringing an extension cord,’ said Kohler. ‘They’ll lower a light to you.’

‘Why don’t they open the ground-floor gates?’

‘
Ach,
I didn’t think to tell them. The crowd, I guess.’

‘Then be so good as to clear all corridors and find our trapper. Pick up where I left off by asking if any of that
datura
has gone missing before.’

‘Missing. . . ?’ Did Louis
want
to warn everyone of it? ‘Was she drugged?’

Good for Hermann. ‘At this point, it’s simply an alternative to the effects of alcohol. She’d have lost focus, been very unsteady on her feet. . . ’

‘Hallucinogenic?’

They’d all be listening now, felt St-Cyr. ‘It’s just a thought.’

‘But don’t jump to conclusions, eh? And Madame Chevreul of the Hôtel Grand?’

‘Leave her for now. Let others tell her of our interest. Chevreul was the nineteenth-century Frenchman who popularized the use of a pendulum to induce hypnosis. She may have borrowed the name, which would imply study of the process, or simply have married someone related or totally unrelated.’

The listeners would think about that too. ‘In addition to getting in touch with her father, Louis, Mary-Lynn Allan wanted to know where he was buried since he was one of the hundreds of thousands who were never found. Blown to bits probably, or simply left in the cesspool of a shell crater to eventually be covered.’

A sigh would do no good. ‘Hermann, please do as I’ve asked. Since you’ve already been talking to Nora Arnarson, continue your conversation with her, then find out whatever else you can here.’

‘But leave the Hôtel Grand for later. A pendulum and two bodies.’

‘The theft of little things of no consequence.’

They’d all know of that anyways. ‘A trapper, Louis, a bell ringer, and a flunky.’

‘And a chess piece, Hermann.’

‘Oh, that. The wood’s from a Kentucky Coffeetree. The father carved it when he was a teenager. The mother sent it over with the snapshots in a Red Cross parcel. That’s why the ex-Kommandant who asked for us but left without leaving any information readily agreed to the late-night visitation and attended it himself as a firm believer.’

Ah, sacré nom de nom!

Room 3–38 was far from happy, thought Kohler. The blue-eyed blonde whose cot was under the St. Olaf College pennant tried to light a cigarette but was so nervous, match and fag fell to her lap, scorching the grey tweed of a slender skirt.

‘Shit!’ she cried in English. ‘
Don’t,
Marni. I’m warning you.’

That one, whose cot was next to the innermost wall and under the Marquette U. pennant, and who had helped herself without the chef’s permission to a cup of the rabbit broth, had been about to quench the fire.

‘Should I have let you torch your beaver?’ she yelled. ‘The
préfet de police’s
goatee, eh?’

The police chief’s beard and prostitute talk, the insult not really meant but. . .

‘That’s it!’ cried the blonde. ‘I’m not living here a moment longer. I can’t
stand
the stench of that!’

The rabbits, to which the trapper, Nora Arnarson, having flung a desperate look of censure at the green-eyed redhead with the mass of curls who’d helped herself to the broth, was now slicing peeled sow-thistle roots to be added to the pot.

She dumped the lot in and began to slice the hell out of an onion, though how she had come by such a rarity was anyone’s guess unless on the black market.

‘I don’t know how you can kill things like that, Nora,’ started up the blonde again. ‘I really don’t. They’re God’s creatures.’

‘As was the pig from which the SPAM you eat must have come,’ came the retort from Nora.

‘
At least I was spared the agony of having to watch the poor thing being skinned and butchered!
’

Shrill. . . ‘
Jésus, merde alors,
ladies. . .
mesdames et mesdemoiselles,
a moment. My English, it’s not enough. I’m not here to accuse any of you, why would I? My partner and I just need a little help.’

‘If you’re to stop another of us from being murdered—is that it, eh? Why don’t you just say it?’

That had been Jill Faber, who slept end-to-end next to Becky Torrence, the blonde, and was sitting under the U. of Wisconsin pennant.

‘Are we all to be poisoned?’ wept Becky. ‘Those damned seeds, Inspector. If Nora’s right, each one contains at least a tenth of a milligram of the datura poison atropine. Ten to thirty seeds will make you very sick and hallucinating in hell; a hundred can kill you.’

‘And for all I know, they could already have been added to our supper,’ said the chef, to which the redhead with the broth added, ‘Nora, darling, you don’t really mean that.’

‘We all knew both of them, Inspector,’ countered Nora, dribbling diced onion into the pot. ‘I wasn’t the only one who was near Mary-Lynn the night she died.’

Swiftly they made eye contact, but with it had they instantly come to a consensus on how best to deal with him? wondered Kohler.

‘Darling, you weren’t as drunk as she was,’ said Jill, who was in her late thirties and maybe ten years older than Becky, the youngest of them. Jill had dark grey eyes that could set off the whole of her if she would but let them and if things had been better.

‘I was drunker,’ said Nora. ‘
Mon Dieu,
I could hardly get up those stairs and kept telling her to wait for me.’

‘She was in a hurry, was she?’ asked Kohler.

The others were now intently watching the trapper-cum-chef.

‘She said she was going to be sick, Inspector, and needed the
vase de nuit
.’

The night vase, the chamber pot. ‘The one in Room 3–54?’

He’d think the worst of her if he ever found out the truth, thought Nora, but something had best be said. ‘And the room right next to that elevator shaft we both had to pass.’

‘People come and go at all times of the night, Inspector,’ quickly offered Jill, who flicked a glance past him to the redhead called Marni.

‘It’s the shit you Germans give us to eat,’ said Marni. ‘It gives us the trots.’

‘Black bread that’s more sour than green apples; sour cabbage, too, and potato soup that always seems to have lost its potatoes,’ said Jill.

‘But with the chance of a knuckle from a long-dead horse,’ offered Marni.

‘
Stop it! Stop it! Please!
’ cried Becky.

The cigarette had fallen to the floor this time to roll under her cot.

‘Stay where you are. I’ll get it,’ said Nora.

She brushed it off and held it out, fondly touched the blonde’s cheek and said, ‘Why not let me rub your back? You know it’ll help because it always does, then I’ll make you some chamomile. I’m sorry about the rabbits. I should have realized and waited until you’d gone out.’

They weren’t just nervous, felt Kohler. They were worried about where each of them fitted into these killings, were tense as hell, and desperately tired of one another’s company and of the room.

‘It’s the winter, Inspector. It’s been getting to us,’ offered Jill with an apologetic shrug. She had straight black hair, a nice wide grin, certainly dimpled cheeks, and did look like she could be a lot of fun, but they’d had one death a week ago just along the corridor and yesterday another, taken from this very room.

‘First,’ he said, pointing at Nora, ‘tell me if any datura has gone missing before?’

She had better not look at the others, thought Nora, had better just gaze levelly at him and shake her head.

‘OK, now you,’ he said to Jill. ‘Tell me about the girl who fell.’

Herr Kohler was a little frightening after the celibacy of the past five months, thought Jill. She knew her nervousness stemmed from that as well as from everything else, but had he noticed it already? Was that why the others could see what she was thinking? If so, he would be bound to exploit it and then where would she be? ‘Sweet Briar’s essentially a girl’s college. You could say, I suppose, that Mary-Lynn had led a sheltered life, but then came Paris. Before it was closed and taken over when you people declared war on us in December of ’41, she worked as an interpreter and sales clerk at Brentano’s on the avenue de l’Opéra.’

The American bookstore.

‘Her German was almost as good as her French and because of it, she thought she was safe,’ said Marni, the redhead from Marquette U.

‘She hoped to attend the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, in Paris,’ wept Becky, ‘but. . . but you people came to put a stop to everything. Just everything!’

‘Jill, for God’s sake, tell him,’ said Marni. ‘If you don’t, I will.’

‘Perhaps you’d best then, darling, since you knew far more than any of us, even Nora.’

‘Jill, how could you do that to me?’

‘I just did. Now, tell him.’

The redhead lowered her gaze and fingered her cup. ‘Six months before our boys landed in North Africa in November last and you people rushed to take over the
zone non occupée,
the
zone libre,
for God’s sake, Mary-Lynn fought off all her prejudices and fell for a German, a Sturmbannführer, a Major Karl Something-or-Other.’

‘She liked older men, Inspector. She felt more at ease with them,’ said one of the others—which one, Kohler wasn’t sure.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Nora, she wanted a father figure,’ said Marni.

Springtime in Paris, thought Kohler, but one of the SS, which meant, of course, the avenue Foch and Karl Albrecht Oberg, the Höherer-SS und Polizeiführer of France, an acquaintance Louis and he wished they’d never had to meet. ‘Couldn’t the Sturmbannführer have lifted a finger to stop her from being sent here?’

‘He refused,’ said Jill flatly. ‘There were plenty of
très chic Parisiennes
to take her place.’

‘Begged him to do something, did she?’ asked Herr Kohler.

Again that rush of warmth came and though she wanted it to continue, Jill fought it down, yet he had the nicest of smiles. Soft and warm, kind and considerate—boyish, too.

‘Well?’ she heard him ask, and had to smile softly in return and say, ‘That and other things like offering to marry him.’

A sigh would be best and then another smile, thought Kohler. ‘But he was already married and had kept that little secret from her?’

Ah mon Dieu,
that look of his! ‘And now you know why she despised herself.’

The timing had been perfect, but had Jill caught him off guard? wondered Marni.

‘That why the séance attempts to contact her father?’ he asked.

Even with that terrible scar from the left eye to the chin, he was adorable, thought Marni. Shrapnel? she asked herself. A fencing sword? but that couldn’t be possible with one such as this. He was far too down-to-earth and would be accustomed to bullets. ‘The attempts, Inspector. There were more than one of them. Five actually.’

The others hadn’t moved. ‘At fifty American dollars a crack?’

He was making her flash a grin, thought Marni, knowing the others would be thinking the very same thing, especially Jill—that to be alone with Herr Kohler, to feel those hands of his, would be to live that dream. ‘At two hundred and fifty, one-fifty, one hundred, and then fifty. Madame Chevreul offered to continue on an installment plan. Mary-Lynn blamed herself for the séance failures and had become convinced her dad must have known all about her affair with the Sturmbannführer.’

‘Even the most intimate of details,’ interjected Jill, watching for the effect of her words.

‘And definitely not approved of,’ said Marni, tensely watching him now, the tip of her tongue touching the crowns of her teeth.

‘The dead looking down on the living—that it?’ asked Herr Kohler.

‘Love, yes, as I used to know it,’ said Jill.

Louis should have heard her! ‘And she was feeling sick the night she died?’

It couldn’t be avoided, thought Jill, and certainly Herr Kohler would know all about such things anyway. ‘I had found her being sick one morning about a month ago.’

‘OK, so every young lady needs a bit of company now and then and the Sturmbannführer couldn’t have done it by mail. Did he pay her an extended visit?’

It would be best to be harsh. ‘We don’t know who the father was,’ said Jill, ‘only that it definitely couldn’t have been him. She wouldn’t tell us.’

‘She was afraid to,’ said Nora. ‘You knew she was, Jill, and so did I. Sure, she was looking for a father figure. That’s why she was friendly with Colonel Kessler, the former Kommandant. She had never known her own dad, Inspector, and had always regretted this.’

‘Brother Étienne said he would find something for her,’ added Jill quickly.

‘And did he?’

‘We were never told,’ said Jill.

‘Holy bitter, Indian brandy, juniper or yew leaves. . . ’

And Marni again, thought Kohler.

‘But also aloes and canella bark,’ she went on. ‘Rhubarb and nitrous ether; an emmenagogue in the hope the uterus will contract and get rid of the problem.’

Becky was looking positively ill, but what the hell had they agreed to hide? wondered Kohler.

‘
Ignis sancti Antonii
perhaps,’ offered Jill, again intently gazing at him.

St. Anthony’s Fire and an ecbolic if ever there was one. The deadly ergot fungus from rye flour or bread made from the same.

‘Apiol, Inspector,’ said Nora. ‘
Petrosilium crispum
or common parsley. Large doses of the leaves and stems, or the oil if distilled out, the apiol stimulating blood flow to the uterus, but apiol and the rest of the oil can cause polyneuritis and gastrointestinal haemorrhages if one’s luck has run out. Brother Étienne told her not to worry, that “The Grace of God invariably was on the side of the grazer,” and that if it didn’t work, he’d increase the dose.’

They had put the run on him to see if they could take the heat off themselves, thought Kohler. It was either that or to cover up for one of them. ‘Parsley?’ he asked.