Madrigal (53 page)

The second-floor rooms were reserved for the better quality merchandise. Here there was silence, although the undercurrent of muffled conversation from below formed a constant background. Tiffany, Lalique and Gallé glass filled a room with lamps, vases and figurines. No sign of Herr Schlacht, though.

Limoges and Sevres porcelains were in another room, the
belles mondaines
and the dealers noting the lot numbers and jotting down, after much deliberation, the sums they would be prepared to bid. One glance was enough. The ebb tide that Paris had become, had left its wide strand littered with the debris of all such items. Things that had been in the family for years had had to be parted with. If one wanted to eat, let alone to eat as one had before the Defeat, then one had to pay black-market prices.

But one had to be so very careful. All items over one hundred thousand francs in value had had to be reported to the authorities in the early fall of 1940 and couldn't be moved or sold without permission.

A Regency mirror gave him a glimpse of Schlacht. The overcoat collar was still tightly buttoned up under the double chin; the wide-brimmed trilby was still pulled down a little over the brow. He was feasting his eyes on a pure white sculpture, something that would once have been set on a table in a place of honour.

‘Hermann … Hermann, is it really you?'

Merde
, it was Gabrielle, Louis's girlfriend, a chanteuse, a White Russian who had fled the Revolution in 1917 and had arrived in Paris at the age of fourteen and all alone.

Kohler took her by the elbow and hustled her into the adjacent salon, to stand among beautiful pieces of marquetry. ‘Beat it, please,' he begged. ‘We got back late last night and …' He shrugged and grinned. ‘And haven't had a moment since.'

She was a good head taller than Louis, was almost as tall as himself, and when her lips brushed his scarred left cheek, he felt the warmth, the lightness and gracefulness of her. Breathing in the scent of her perfume, of Mirage, he recalled, as he always did when coming upon her like this, their first meeting.

It had been during the investigation of a small murder in Fontainebleau Forest, the murder that had earned him the scar she had just kissed and the one from his right shoulder to his left hip. She'd been a suspect then, had lost a small pouch of diamonds …

‘How are René Yvon-Paul and the countess?' he asked. The boy lived with his grandmother at Chateau Thériault, near Vouvray, overlooking the Loire.

‘Fine. Both are fine.' René was ten years old and had been missing the two of them, Jean-Louis especially, thought Gabrielle. René had also saved Hermann Kohler's life, and Hermann, to his credit, had never forgotten it. But, then, he liked children almost, if not more than Jean-Louis. ‘You look beat,
mon vieux.
Are you hungry?' she hazarded and ran a slender hand over a table whose marquetry glowed in shades of amber, some so soft they matched her hair.

She had the loveliest eyes. Violet, just like Giselle's. Tall, willowy, a gorgeous figure – Louis was an idiot not to have gone to bed with her yet and now … why now, might never get the chance! ‘Look, this isn't easy, but it's best we not be seen together.'

‘Not by the one you are following,' she said and sadly nodded. ‘Is he so important you would deny me the pleasure of your company? Ah! He must be. Don't look so pained.'

‘Let's just say he's connected to the avenue Foch, Gabrielle. I wouldn't want …'

‘Them to take an interest in me? They already have, as you well know. Bugging my dressing room at the club, keeping track of when and where I go, so …' She shrugged. ‘What's the problem?'

She was a member of the
Résistance
, had been detained during a previous case, but had managed to get away with it. ‘Gabi, please.'

‘Do you like this table? It's Russian. Eighteenth century. I'm going to buy it.'

She would, too, and then would slap heavy coats of paint on it!

‘For to hide best is to expose those things you value most to view,' she said, having read his mind. ‘Now take me by the arm like the gentleman – the wishful lover, perhaps – that I know you to be. Escort me into that room, Hermann, so that you may better study this man you want to follow.'

Grâce à Dieu
, Schlacht had departed. There were others in the room – four Wehrmacht officers and their
Parisiennes.

‘Your Führer has a passion for Leda and the Swan,' confided Gabrielle, conspiratorially clucking her tongue as she ran her eyes over the voluptuous, classical nude in alabaster. ‘Nineteenth century and by Albert Carrier-Belleuse. It's exquisite, is it not?
Mon Dieu
, your man has very good but expensive taste.'

Asleep, the swan was nestled over upraised, cloth-draped knees and thighs, with its head next to a plump, soft breast and Leda's hand resting on a feathered wing.

‘Both of them are asleep,' he said. But it was true, the Führer
did
have a passion for Leda and her Swan, and she did figure heavily in Nazi art. And every time she'd been just as voluptuous, just as slender, just as asleep and waiting to be ravished. ‘She was the Queen of Sparta,' he said. ‘Zeus came to her in the form of a swan.'

Hermann's tone of voice indicated how distracted and worried he was. ‘And now?' asked Gabrielle, turning to search his pale blue eyes. ‘Now will the one you wish to know more about, come back to bid on this?'

‘To send it to his Führer as a little gift?' he bleated.

She touched his hand in sympathy. ‘I'll bid against him, if you like.'

‘No you won't. You'll find out what he pays for it and if he asks to have it crated and shipped to you know where.'

Outside, on the street, the Renault was gone but in its place were the flattened remains of the birdcage and its canary.

Buy
Beekeeper
Now!

Acknowledgements

All the novels in the St-Cyr-Kohler series incorporate a few words and brief passages of French or German, while
Madrigal
includes some Italian as well. Dr Dennis Essar of Brock University very kindly helped with the French, as did the artist Pierrette Laroche, while Ms Bodil Little, at Brock, helped with the German, and Carrado Federici with the Italian. Should there be any errors, they are my own and for these I apologize, but hope there are none.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1999 by J. Robert Janes

Cover Design by Linda McCarthy

978-1-4532-5186-7

This edition published in 2012 by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA