J. Janes - Beekeeper

The Restaurant of the Gare de Lyon was huge, a prince, a god among all others. But now under the blackout’s hauntingly blue and ethereal light from Paris’s infrequent lamps, its gilded cherubs and buxom nymphs were cloaked in grime. They shed their gilding, clutched their bouquets of daisies and looked offended as if wanting to cry out, Monsieur the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté Nationale, how could you — yes, you! — of all people have let this happen to us?

Gone were the diners in their splendid dinner jackets and tails, the beautiful girls in their magically tantalizing gowns, the femmes du monde , the society women, too, and those of little virtue. The gaiety … the laughter … the sounds of silver cutlery and crystal, the pewter plates upon which the porcelains had been set.

Gone, too, were the bankers, politicians, industrialists, the men of solid cash and much power. These days most of them had found other pastures upon which to graze.

But now … now after more than two and a half years of the Occupation, the restaurant’s crumbling horns of plenty let fall a constant rain of golden fragments and plaster dust which littered the mountains of crates, barrels, sacks and steamer trunks — suitcases, too, of all sizes — that climbed high into the vault of the ceiling to where once Gervex’s magnificent painting, the Battle of the Flowers, had portrayed the city of Nice.

‘It’s like an Aladdin’s Cave that’s all but been forgotten,’ breathed Kohler, aghast at what lay before them.

Distracted, St-Cyr ignored his partner. The restaurant, that triumph of the Mauve Decade and the Belle Époque — le Train Bleu , some had begun to call it — stank of sweat, mould, sour produce and rotten meat that the inevitable delays in transit had left to languish. Soot, too, of course, and urine, for what better ‘terrorist’ action when forced to store things destined for the Reich, than to piss on them in secret — or do worse — in the name of freedom and of Résistance ?

‘“ Produce … a gift from the people of France to their friends in the Reich ,”’ snorted Kohler at a label. ‘Walnuts, Louis. Sacks and sacks of them from Périgord.’

‘A warehouse, Hermann. This was its Salle Dorée !’ Its Golden Room.

‘Easy, mon vieux. Hey, take it easy, eh?’

‘Now just a minute. Look what you Boches have done! My grandmother brought me here on 9 April 1901, just two days after the grand opening. We sat right over there. Yes, over there! Right next to that great big window with all the soot on it.’

A kid of ten. Jean-Louis St-Cyr was now fifty-two years of age, himself fifty-five, and where had the time gone? wondered Kohler. To the Great War — they had both been in it, but on opposite sides — and then to more murders, arsons, rapes and other ‘common’ crimes than he’d care to count. Munich first for himself, then Berlin and finally, after the Defeat of France, Paris and partner to Louis, since all such Frenchmen needed someone to watch over them. This one especially!

‘Oysters baked golden in champagne sauce, Hermann, and laid piping hot in the half-shell on a bed of coarse salt.’

‘Von Schaumburg, Louis. Old Shatter Hand said we were to take a look at this.’

‘Le côte de boeuf à la moëlle …’

Rib of beef … ‘Louis …’

‘Gaufres de Grand-mère Bocuse, Hermann.’

Waffles! Merde , were they to have the whole of the meal? ‘Louis-’

‘Yes, yes, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. How could I have forgotten one of my many, many masters?’

It was Friday, 29 January 1943 at 23:55 hours. Just five minutes to curfew and colder than a bugger outside. In here, too, thought Kohler. At least five degrees of frost, the inky darkness of the blackout, no sleep, no food, no homecoming to Giselle and Oona, his lady loves. No pleasure at all; damp, too, and this after a bastard of an investigation in Avignon whose result, totally unappreciated, had seen them all but shot to pieces and kicked to death.

Von Schaumburg had sent him and Louis a telegram which had found them on the train somewhere between Lyon and Paris and hours late. Hours.

‘We couldn’t have known the Résistance would blow the tracks, Hermann,’ offered St-Cyr apologetically, having intuitively gauged the trend of his partner’s thoughts. ‘We were lucky, that’s all.’

Lucky that the plastic — the cyclonite — hadn’t gone off right under them.

The telegram from von Schaumburg had exhibited the usual Prussian gift for brevity: RESTAURANT GARE DE LYON. TELL NO ONE. It hadn’t even ended with the customary Heil Hitler. A Wehrmacht orderly, one of the Kommandant’s staff, had met them on arrival and had given them a key. No guards had been on the doors, though there should have been.

‘ Merde , Hermann, just what the hell had he in mind?’

Paris’s ‘trunk’ murderers were always sending their victims to Lyon in steamer trunks with no return address. Thinking they had yet another corpse on their hands, and not liking the thought, Kohler disconsolately ran the beam of his blue-blinkered torch over the trunks and turned again to hunting through the labels.

St-Cyr let him be. Always these days there was conflict among the Germans, one faction against another. And always Hermann and himself — who were practically the only two honest cops left to fight common crime in an age of officially sanctioned, monstrous crime — had to come between them.

Von Schaumburg was a soldier and the armed forces — the Wehrmacht — still hated the SS and the Gestapo, distrusting entirely the Führer’s faith in those two organizations and jealous of it, too.

Boemelburg, on the other hand, was Hermann’s boss and Head of SIPO Section IV, the Gestapo in France. His telegram had preceded that of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris by nearly twenty-four hours, having arrived just as they had reached the station in Orange to begin their homeward journey:

BODY OF BEEKEEPER FOUND IN APIARY NEAR PÈRELACHAISE CEMETERY REQUIRES IMMEDIATE AND URGENT ATTENTION. HEIL HITLER.

‘Urgent’ meant, of course, trouble, and trouble was something they did not need, but this was, of course, not the Père Lachaise. Not yet!

‘Bees, Louis. Something to do with them, I guess.’ Hermann’s voice was muffled by the crates.

Threading his way through to that same window at which he had sat so long ago, St-Cyr looked down over the inner concourse of the Gare de Lyon. Surreal under its wash of dim blue light, people sat or stood as if caught frozen in time. Locked in now because of the curfew and forced to spend the next five hours waiting to leave. Most were shabby, the suitcases they guarded, old or of cardboard and no longer made of leather. Hungry always, they confined themselves to patience, accustomed now to the lengthy delays, the endless queues for food, food tickets, travel papers … papers, papers of all kinds.

A Wehrmacht mobile soup kitchen was dishing out thick slices of black bread and mess tins of cabbage soup with potatoes and sometimes meat, but only to others of their kind in the ever-present grey-green uniforms. A crowd of children stood silently watching as les haricots verts , the green beans, the ‘ Schlocks ’ spread margarine on their bread and wolfed down their soup.

Gone were the days of those first few months of the Occupation in 1940 when many of the troops tried to behave themselves and play the benefactor. Now, with the imminent defeat of von Paulus at Stalingrad and the loss of what remained of the Führer’s Sixth Army, they and others were afraid lest the conquered and oppressed begin to turn against them en masse.