“What do you want?”
“You’re not going to close me down, are you? This is a reputable establishment.”
The commissaire smiles: shows his teeth.
“No, we’re not going to close you down. You’re serving the public, my good man. You’re keeping the people occupied in wholesome activities; why would we wish to prevent you continuing to do so?”
He turns away in search of his hat, which he left on the coat rack earlier. He glances up at the empty room, at the disorder of tables and chairs.
“This is going to be good publicity for you, I bet you anything. The vultures will all turn up to see the crime scene. They’ll drink to the health of the deceased. It’ll be sweet. If I were you, I’d open straight away, as soon as you’ve mopped up the worst of the dead guy’s mess. They’re going to want to see a few traces, you know. They’ll all circle it, glass in hand, like redskins around a whipping post.”
He leaves without listening to what the man says as he busies his hands with rinsing glasses, and outside he stares at the thirty or so bystanders who watch as the vans drive off. He hates their ugly mugs, avid for details, disappointed not to have seen anything, not even the dead man’s feet, barely even a glimpse of the killer’s lowered face surrounded by uniformed cops. They console themselves by watching Inspecteur Lefranc and another man in plain clothes smoking by their car and exchanging notes from their notebooks. One of the onlookers even brazenly listens in to their conversation.
“Look at them,” says Darlac. “Bunch of bloody sheep.”
The two cops glance indifferently at the bystanders then go back to their confab.
Darlac takes a few steps towards the crowd and removes his hat with a flourish.
“If any of you want to go in and clean up, the boss is hiring.”
People look away. Two or three women leave. The two detectives laugh. Darlac wonders if they’re laughing at him or at those scavengers grouped on the sidewalk across the street. He gets in the car and drives off at full throttle, looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing their stupefied faces turned towards him, and he doesn’t slow down until he has rounded the corner of the street. For him, this city, with its trivial occupations, its deathly peace, is merely a hostile backdrop peopled by little action figures whom he would like to knock down or crash into just to feel the soft, muffled thud of their bodies hitting his car’s hood and being thrown into the air, like a furious kid sweeping all his toy soldiers off the table with the back of his hand.
*
This is where he feels good, Albert Darlac, after all this shit, these pathetic cases, these degenerates murdering each other, all the blood, the lies, the legal procedures that have to be followed, as if these parasites actually mattered, I’d stick them up against a wall and we’d charge every fucking family for the bullets . . . He thinks this as he watches the wine flow into his glass and his heart pounds with rage and hatred, but he knows that in a moment everything inside him will grow calm, curtain drawn, shutters secured.
He picks up a candle and examines his wine in its flickering gleam. He rolls the ruby liquid around in the glass. He sniffs, ogles it again, then drinks. Next he swishes the nectar round his mouth so his mucous membranes can soak it up. Swallows slowly. Sighs. Grunts with pleasure as he reads the label on the bottle again. Emile’s Saint-Emilion is really something. He feels the aromas flowering at the back of his palate. Premier Grand Cru, 1947. Surprising. He smiles. A rare event. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s a sardonic grimace, a bitter or contemptuous sneer. Even when he’s at home, as on this Saturday evening, sitting at the table, waiting for madame to serve him. Even with his daughter Elise, he finds it difficult to smile. He has eyes only for her, soft, fascinated, worried. And hand gestures, caressing, light, that recently she has been ignoring more and more often, now that she’s a teenager.
She sits across from him, at the other side of the table, face leaning down over her plate, eyes hidden behind long brown lashes. With the tines of her fork she traces parallel lines on the tablecloth then erases them by going across them as she tries to draw a grid.
“You look thoughtful,” Darlac says, putting down his glass.
The girl looks up at him as though she has just noticed his presence. She shrugs one shoulder, twirling the silver fork in her fingers. She glances towards the kitchen, from where they can hear her mother taking something out of the oven.
“No, it’s just that . . .”
“It’s nearly ready! Start the pâté without me, I’ll be there in a minute!”
The voice tries to sound cheerful and bright amid the clanking and banging of utensils. The model mother, the busy housewife.
Darlac grabs the dish and cuts some thick slices. Chicken liver and foie gras. A present from the butcher at the Grands-Hommes market whom he helped out of a sticky situation last year: a gambling debt rather insistently demanded by some loser, a dilettante pimp who was trying to be threatening. As he was a former rugby player, a craggy giant who was promising to turn his butcher’s shop into an abattoir, the honorable barbecue artisan, who sold roasts to old biddies from the Chartrons, was afraid for his safety.
But that scrum half didn’t know whom he was attacking. He could never have guessed that Darlac and the man who deboned meat for old ladies had been in business together in ’43: a few valuable pieces of furniture, a few gewgaws and paintings stolen from apartments after the round-ups; and a plot of land just after Mérignac, on the road to the airport, three hectares of cattle pasture that would end up as building land one day, confiscated with a stroke of a pen by a prefecture underling and certified by a notary.
That brute of an athlete was surprised one night in the arms of his hooker, stinking of cologne, his pockets full of cash, by a dozen cops. And a little packet of opium folded inside a sheet of newspaper to seal the deal, slipped in there secretly amid all the confusion by a detective sent by Darlac. The man looked so genuinely shocked by this that the cops almost began to wonder, to doubt his guilt. But then they concluded that this asshole was just a very good actor, like a lot of the deadbeats they interrogated. Move over, Jean Gabin and Gérard Philipe. Every day at the station it’s like the flicks but in real life, like being at the bloody theater, crying and laughing over half-assed scripts. Any old detective knows as much as Louis Jouvet in Entrée des Artistes and can take apart all the fake confidences, the true deceits, can unmask the bloodthirsty ingénues, hunt down the lies, fill the holes in memory, prompt the actors—forcefully if necessary—whenever they dry up.
And then he got uppity, the giant: he yelled that he knew some very important people, thanks to his rugby career. Men at the mayor’s office, bigwigs, he knew them all, you bunch of assholes; he told them this while the girl was dragged outside by the hair because she was screaming too loud. He refused to admit that it belonged to him, that opium. He never touched the stuff. They were trying to frame him, but it wouldn’t work. He yelled, he denied, fiercely, then he lost his temper and went for the throat of a detective, trying to strangle him with his massive hands, presumably in an attempt to squeeze the truth up and out of his mouth. Instantly set upon with rifle butts, fists and boots, he finally let go of the cop, who had been starting to turn blue. There followed a violent scrum, eight against one. Even after he was handcuffed and dragged to his feet, he kept worsening his case with each movement he made, kicking out and elbowing them in spite of his cracked ribs, with each word he spat out, red with blood, from his dislocated jaw, and then he hurled abuse at the pigs, adding charge after charge to his night’s misdemeanors along with the bruises and the broken noses. Verbal abuse and assault and battery against officers of the law, attempted murder of a police detective, added to possession of narcotics and procurement. The cops took turns reading him his rights and smacking him over the head to calm him down.
The commissaire remembers the account his special envoy had given him, having pinched a bit of opiu
m from a secret stash in the Vice Squad office. He smiles as he spreads pâté on a slice of bread.
“I just can’t stand it anymore,” Elise mutters, without looking at him.
Darlac, who had been about to bite into his bread, puts it down and leans forward.
“What’s the matter?”
She looks up at him with her beautiful green eyes, her gaze soft as silk, and Darlac shivers.
“Those detectives following me around everywhere—”
“Which ones? What have they done?”
“Nothing. I—”
“What do you mean, nothing? Explain yourself!”
The words come out louder than he intended. He flaps his hand around, as if to catch them or soften them.
“Tell me, if there’s something wrong.”
“They’re always there, following me around. On foot, in cars . . . When I go out in the morning, they’re there. When I come out of school, they’re there.”
“You think they’re not discreet enough?”
“No, I just mean . . . Well, I know them, so I feel like they’re all I can see. And then, the other day, Madeleine—you know, my friend?—she noticed something and asked me if we were being followed, and she showed me the tall one, what’s his name . . . ?”
“Morlaas?”
“Yes. And I didn’t dare tell her, even though she was scared and I didn’t know how to reassure her. And then, after a while, we didn’t see him anymore, and it was alright. It scares me too. I always have the feeling that that man is going to come back and strangle me.”
Her eyes are filled with tears. She gently pats them away with her napkin.
Darlac is furious. He tries to imagine his men standing ten meters behind his daughter, about as discreet as clowns at a circus. Discretion was his absolute condition. So much for that . . . “Ach! French police!” the Krauts used to snigger whenever anything went wrong, and sometimes they had been right, those bastards, even if the französisch Polizei had served them with loyalty and zeal and a certain degree of efficiency. Just ask those Resistance members surprised to find themselves nicked by French cops . . . or ask the ones encouraged to talk in the basement of the prefecture by the persuasive methods of Poinsot and his master butchers. Some of them would have given up their parents just to make it stop, but they were never asked for that much, just a name, an address. It was like extracting a playing card from a tower patiently assembled by trembling fingers. He always defended that honor, Commissaire Darlac. The honor of a job well done. The French made a pretty good fist of disposing of their own communists and Jews and terrorists, most of the time. The Germans were there as cover. Tough shit for them if they didn’t manage to win their war.
But right now their job is to protect and entrap, and those dickheads are apparently incapable of it, even if that nutcase surely wouldn’t be stupid enough to attack again anyway. That man got Penot with a knife, in his hallway, and bled him dry. No-one saw or heard anything. Not a trace, not a single fingerprint. Like a ghost. It would have been easy to shoot Penot, anyone could have done it: just walk up to him, revolver in hand, as he’s about to get in his car and blast the contents of his skull over the dashboard. Nice guaranteed visual effect, and it would give food for thought to all those hangers-on, those cowards and nobodies who crowd around the big shots. Or get him while he’s slurping up a stew in his favorite bar, because monsieur was a regular there, and everyone knew it. There again, there’d be warm brains on his plate and grape juice coulis splattered everywhere. And the first one to move would be served more of the same. The police photographers would have a ball. They’d take three rolls just to capture the beauty of the image. That’s how it ends in Marseille, and sometimes even here. The bar closes for a few days, and it’s a little quiet after it reopens, but the customers come again, sometimes from a long way away, to visit the cursed place and taste its specialities.
But this man . . . he must be a very patient man. He watches, he prepares. He follows, he’s there, and nobody sees him. Monsieur Everyman. A gray man in this gray city. Camouflaged. And unlike the hordes of perverted loonies and lazy murderers and impulsive cretins who fill up the newspaper columns, this one seems to have a brain and to know how to use it. Darlac feels flattered by the challenge. It lifts him up above the dumb beasts that surround him: cops, gangsters, whores, swindlers, pimps, each more gullible than the next; a bunch of filthy, hopeless little piglets fighting over the shitty paddling pool where they shuffle blindly. The commissaire can sense that this is a criminal worthy of his enmity, a different species, acting alone without a doubt, in pursuit of a goal, gripped by an obsession perhaps. Pitiless, contemptuous of money and material goods. Some sort of mad monk? Shining his bullets up like silverware before lodging one in your gut. A refined man, maybe an intellectual ripened by years in jail, embittered by his treatment at the hands of the screws. A man unafraid of death, perhaps someone with nothing left to lose? Not the kind of man who will let himself be taken alive.
So the commissaire muses, his thoughts drifting into fiction, as if in pursuit of Fantomas. Or Judex14. He doesn’t really see the difference, but he senses that, between him and this man, it’s personal: “Tell your father I’m back and I’ll be back again.” He hears Elise’s voice again in his head, shaken by sobs, repeating those words that the man had breathed into her face. But where he had returned from is a mystery. As is when he will return again.
Darlac’s hand moves across the table and touches his daughter’s, which is cold and limp, before she withdraws it with a suddenness that she tries to control but that he feels.
“I’ll tell them to be more discreet. They’re oafs. But you know what that guy said to you. We can’t take any risks.”
The girl nods. Dries her eyes.
Madame returns at that moment, humming. The beauty of Cadiz has eyes of velvet, but her song is ended by the silence that hangs heavily over the table.
“Elise? What’s the matter?”
Darlac clicks his tongue to shut her up, without even looking at her, so she sits down, her face turning hard and expressionless with humiliation and anger. She is no longer looking at anything; her eyes roam over the cutlery, the plates, the slices of bread in the breadbasket, as if checking that all is where it should be.
“You know perfectly well why my men are following you. They’re protecting you from that lunatic. Can’t you understand that? You want him to attack you again? You want him to . . .”
Annette Darlac suddenly leans forward to reach the pâté. Her wax mask comes between her daughter and her husband and both watch as she sits back down again, taking no notice of them, too busy serving herself with brusque movements, too stiff-backed when she sits on her chair to conceal the tension within her. The clinking of the silver cutlery takes the place of conversation. All three of them eat grudgingly, each picking at their food with the point of a knife, each deep in their own thoughts. The girl shoots fearful glances at her father, who looks at a painting on the wall behind her, a pastoral scene from the eighteenth century by a Burgundian master, according to an expert when he had the items he’d accumulated during the war valued. “A pupil of Boucher.—If you say so.—Worth around three or four million. It’s a magnificent work.” Darlac decided to keep the daub, as he called it. He hates that shepherd and shepherdess, flirting with each other surrounded by chubby sheep, a dog asleep at their feet. He hates the simpering look on the girl’s face, the way the boy looks like a queer, but at that price it goes nicely over the sideboard, just as the porcelain dinner service, which was part of the same haul, goes nicely on his table.
Madame stands up without a word and walks to the kitchen. Darlac looks at his daughter. She meets his gaze briefly then turns away.
The arrival of the lamb provides a diversion: he examines and sniffs it while a hand protected by a dishcloth folded in four puts the hot oven dish in front of him. He grabs a
large knife and slices into the pink meat. A pan of sautéed Sarladaise potatoes is brought to the table. He feels fine then, Albert Darlac, carving slices from the lamb while greedily eyeing the gills of wild mushrooms mixed with the potatoes. He serves everyone quickly; the muttered thank yous sound stiff and insincere but he doesn’t care. His plate is heaped, juicy, aromatic, his glass filled with ruby nectar. Nothing else matters but this moment of plenitude, and the first mouthful lifts him away from the grasp of any contingencies: let the world die, it is in instants like this that he feels fully alive.
So they eat in a silence sparsely interspersed with questions murmured by the mother to her daughter and the softly spoken replies. Her school, her navy-blue skirt, the latest new son Constance, a friend who had an appendectomy the week before. And about school: is Sister Anne-Marie, the Latin teacher, as strict as ever? The conversation is intermittent, semi-clandestine, under the feigned indifference of Darlac’s gaze, alert for any looks, hesitations, unusual intonations, anything that might betray a secret shared by the two women, or even a simple decision taken behind his back. He has second and third helpings of the meat, spreads another slice of bread with pâté, but he does not have any cheese and decides to leave a little wine at the bottom of the bottle for tomorrow. He is getting organized. After the gâteau à l’orange that madame has made—as she always does on Friday nights—he leans back in his chair as they clear the table, while he waits for his coffee to arrive. His face relaxes a little bit, as the bitter crease that drags his mouth downward goes slack.
Just the kind of evening he likes. He’s in his armchair, leafing through the newspaper; his daughter has gone to her room, and madame is humming as she washes the dishes. She’s always humming. It goes back to her music-hall days, when she used to sing at the Alhambra while high-kicking onstage. She sings to herself the latest hits heard on the radio. At the moment, she is endlessly repeating “Je t’appartiens” by that Gilbert Bécaud, who makes women daydream in front of their sinks with his breathless crooner’s voice; either that or Edith Piaf, who whines loudly about her life as a poor girl. He hates that noisy dwarf. Madame also adores the bawling of Luis Mariano or Marcel Merkès and Paulette Merval. The annoying couple, with their soppy yelping. She even rewards herself with matinées at the Grand-Théâtre on Sunday afternoons with her friend Suzy so she can listen to all those loudmouths in sequins. And that’s without even mentioning the records she listens to during the day on the phonograph that her sister gave her last year. He refuses to listen to that thing. All he likes is Maurice Chevalier and Ray Ventura, the only singers to put him in a good mood. He pukes over all those imbeciles singing about love, all that romantic billing and cooing.
After the War Page 15
