He forces his chest to swell, sucking big gulps of air through his mouth, using his fingertips to massage his painful ribs, passing one rain-slick hand over his face and the back of his neck.
He finds enough breath to start walking back up the street towards place Pey-Berland and his stiff legs obey him, more or less. He passes the walls of the courthouse, his hand brushing the rough stone. The street is empty, with cars parked along one side, the only light reflected from their wet bonnets. Little by little, he manages to walk more quickly, to breathe more easily. He sees the mayor’s office ahead of him, the traffic on the square, and at that very moment the wind carries the smell of tobacco to his nostrils and he turns around to see a man throwing himself at André, yelling “Police! Don’t move!” as a car door opens just in front of him.
The cop behind him tackles him round the waist, pressing his arms to his sides, but André succeeds in reaching the car door and slamming it shut with all his weight on the man who was coming out, and who now screams in pain because his leg is trapped in this suddenly locked jaw. Another man is getting out, on the driver’s side, so André shoves himself backwards and the cop’s head hits the wall with a thud and his arms loosen their grip, allowing André to elbow him blindly in the face. He feels something crack and then hears the cop slump to the ground with a moan. The man in the car is still yelling and his colleague, who is clumsy and overweight, steps onto the sidewalk and stands up tall, holding his arms out wide to block André, a whistle in his mouth. But he uses it only once—in a strident shriek—and then drops it, because without warning he is lying on the ground, being trampled by this silent man who has charged at him, foot first, as if he was going to simply climb over him. As he struggles, fumbling inside his jacket to find his pistol, he probably doesn’t see the fugitive disappear around the corner of the street, nor does he hear his colleagues who have run out of the Concorde, alerted by his whistle, and now arrive on the scene at full pelt.
André hares down the street for about a hundred meters then, exhausted, has to stop, and to hold on to the walls as he staggers on, his lungs crushed. He looks behind him and does not see anyone in pursuit. He imagines the cops consoling each other, licking their wounds. Spotting a bus coming towards a stop, he hops aboard and collapses in the first empty seat. He is drenched with sweat and rain, and his coat smells of wet wool mixed with the acrid stench of sweat. Other passengers stare, and in the rear-view mirror he catches the eye of the driver watching him. He undoes a few buttons of his overcoat, loosens his tie and opens his shirt collar so he can breathe more easily. He tries to work out where he is, and suddenly through the windscreen he sees the line of lanterns at either edge of the pont de Pierre. The windows on the side of the bus are wet with condensation and rain, and even after he wipes one with his sleeve, all he can see of the river is absolute darkness. Then he spots the street lights on avenue Thiers and a few neon lights glowing in cafés.
He gets off at the first stop, in place Stalingrad, and stays there in the wind watching the bus move away with the strange relief of a prisoner who’s escaped a convoy. He would like to go back to his flat, because theoretically Mazeau doesn’t know his address, because no-one knows it, or even his true identity. He thinks about his bed, about a coffee and a few biscuits, and that image makes his stomach growl. But he has to cross back over the bridge, go through the Saint-Michel quarter, and walk even further after that, and he doesn’t have the energy for that, his whole body weighed down with a fatigue he has not felt in a long time and which, right now, he doesn’t know how to overcome.
He decides to walk up the avenue and find a hotel. There are a few in this neighborhood because the gare d’Orléans is close by, so he plunges through that dark gap, below the lanterns that swing in the cold mist and drizzle. He passes cafés full of people, their windows blurred with condensation, and sometimes a door opens, letting out a murmur of merriness and a warm whiff of cigarette smoke or fried food. Then he glimpses a sign lit up by a large bulb announcing the Hôtel Saint-Emilion and pushes the door open, holding onto it to prevent himself falling.
The man behind the reception desk with his grey, close-cropped hair sits up, tensing at the sight of André limping towards him. He even recoils slightly and shoots an anxious look at the front door, as if the night was about to spew other scary monsters into his entrance hall.
“What do you want?”
André stands at the counter. His head is spinning slightly, the floor moving. He forces himself to meet the eyes of the man who is staring contemptuously at him.
“A room. Got any left?”
“Might have. No bags?”
André takes out his wallet, pulls a 10,000-franc bill from it and slaps Bonaparte’s face on the countertop.
“I can pay.”
“I should bloody well hope so!”
The man takes the bill and rubs it between his fingers. Then he sighs.
“O.K.,” he says, picking up the register and handing it to André. “Put your name here. As long as people can pay, I don’t care about the rest.”
André writes down the name of a man who died on Christmas ’44. He sees his wide open eyes again, his twisted mouth. The crumpled rag in his still-closed fist.
“Unusual name.”
“Can’t help that,” says André, trying to smile.
The man slowly shakes his head, looking pensive, and puts the money in his cash drawer. André doesn’t move. He looks at the plaque on the wall behind the man showing the prices for rooms: 4,000 on the street side, 5,000 on the courtyard side. The man follows his gaze and, sighing, hands him a 5,000-franc bill, then grabs a key from the rack on the wall.
“Room twelve. First floor. Shower and toilet at the end of the corridor. I changed the sheets this morning, and the towel. Don’t be surprised if there’s some noise around midnight—I have customers who arrive late.”
The room overlooks the street. That crook with his sergeant major’s face must have taken his little slice: what he thinks is the price of his silence for keeping quiet about the arrival of a traveler without any bags and with a strange foreign name. The wallpaper is piss-yellow, or maybe beige. On the ceiling, a bulb radiates warm light under a fringed reddish lampshade. The bed creaks slightly when André sits on it. The mattress is soft and deep, slouched like some sly beast capable of effortlessly absorbing any body that lies on it and releasing it, partly digested, a few days later. Still on the bed, he takes off his coat and his jacket and rotates his shoulders, massages the back of his neck, stretches his back and finally gets to his feet. He turns on the sink tap and drinks a few big gulps of water, then stands breathless in front of the mirror, inspecting the grayish image of his dark-ringed eyes, his gaunt features.
He gives himself a bit of a wash with the sliver of soap lying on the edge of the sink. He tries to remove that feverish dampness from his skin, and the sick, acrid reek that rises from his body. Naked, he looks at his lanky frame, with its lean muscles and protruding bones. Relieved that he’s still standing.
He gets dressed again and falls asleep straight away on the bedspread, the shutters open on the avenue, letting in the irregular rumble of traffic noise and the dim glimmers of light that prevent the darkness from suffocating him. He dreams of fire. Figures in flames at the other end of impassable corridors, women’s screams behind locked doors that he cannot break down, burned bodies piled up in a garden, among whose charred faces he recognizes Olga’s.
He wakes up terrified in a blue darkness emitted by the window, amid the murmur of rain, and he sits up and stares around at the indistinct shapes in the room, with no idea where he is. Then the sound of a woman giggling through the dividing wall and the creak of floorboards reassure him a little and he falls back asleep, face sunk exhausted in his pillow. But, each time, the furnace lights up again with a roar of flames and Olga screams, her hair on fire, and he can’t reach her, his arms severed b
y the terror of his nightmare.
Early in the morning, head heavy, he leaves the hotel without seeing anyone and crosses the bridge over the muddy river where a few dawn rays are twisting in the water. He walks, seeing nothing, across the city as it wakes to the metallic clatter of buses and lorries. He passes through the stink of their exhaust fumes.
Back near his apartment, on the cours de l’Yser, he starts the same game he played the day before, trying to spot men waiting to ambush him. He walks up and down in front of his street, he goes into a just-opened bar that smells of bleach and the sawdust that the owner is scattering over the tiles.
Coffee and croissant. Suddenly he feels so good that, for a minute, nothing seems very serious or dangerous. He savors this moment when his body no longer feels like a burden he must carry around, before he leaves and crosses the road, looking out for anyone roaming suspiciously through the neighborhood.
He enters the dark corridor as if he were entering fire: barely breathing, muscles so tensed they’re painful. They might already be here, hidden in any corner, ready to leap out with a yell, ramming the barrels of their guns under his chin. He practically runs to the staircase, recognizing the same odors that he smells every morning, hearing the radio from Madame Mendez’s flat, seeing the old, cracked, peeling greenish paint on the walls, and slipping upstairs like a thief in this sad, grey, reassuring quietness.
With relief, he opens the door to his apartment and stands in the middle of the room for a moment with the sensation that he has been away for so long that it pleases him to find every object in its usual place, the shapes unchanged, the smells of floor polish and clean laundry that strike him with a mixed feeling of newness and quickly rediscovered familiarity. Then he takes off his clothes, drops them on the chair and walks to the kitchen, where he starts warming some water in a large saucepan.
He soaps himself, shivering, and rubs his skin until it turns red, as always. The soap makes his eyes sting, but he likes its taste on his lips, its smell that finally overcomes the rank stench that guilt and fear coated him in the day before. Feet in a tub, he rinses himself, pouring some of the hot water over his body, and feels himself come back to life. He tells himself he will never leave this lair again, the only wretched place where he feels any kind of peace. For an instant he dreams of a recluse’s life, living in a cave on a mountainside where the only things that matter are the sunrise and the sunset and the echoes of the past in a silence of furtive creatures and the wind in the trees. He thinks all this while rubbing his head dry, and when he removes his towel he jumps, almost tripping over the edge of the tub, because Mazeau is standing in the entrance to the kitchen, pistol in hand.
Instinctively, André hides his crotch and the cop smiles nastily at this modesty, then gestures with his gun.
“Drop the towel, you’re not a fucking girl. I prefer you like that—powerless.”
André rolls the towel into a ball and holds it tight to his stomach. He can’t do a thing. He can see no object, no kitchen utensil lying around that he might throw in his visitor’s face. And anyway, what then? A bullet travels faster than a knife. Mazeau is no longer smiling. He pushes his hat brim back and leans against the door frame.
“Weren’t we supposed to meet last night?”
Naked under his gaze like this, André feels the way he used to feel watched by kapos or S.S. guards. He wonders if he would have the strength or the courage to kill this man. He thinks very precisely about how he might disarm him as soon as he relaxes, once he feels so in control of the situation that he would lower his guard and not see the blow coming.
“I was scared,” he says. “Too many cops.”
“You messed up three detectives.”
“I was scared. They were coming out all over the place. I didn’t realize.”
André makes himself look at the ground, pretend to be contrite. He lets his shoulders slump a bit. He can sense Mazeau on his guard. He knows how suspicious cops are of everyone and everything, knows he won’t be able to fool him that easily. The cop stands up straighter, more solidly on his legs, and André guesses that he’s tightened his grip on the butt of his gun.
“Didn’t realize what?”
“That it would have been better to let them arrest me. It’s all over for me now, I know that.”
“Yes, you dipshit, it certainly is all over for you. You killed three people, including that kid. So come with me quietly and I’ll take you to the station.”
“I’ll tell them everything. I’ll say you were the one who gave me the address. You trapped me. You knew that girl was hiding there.”
“I didn’t know shit. You wanted some scum with connections to Darlac, and I gave them to you. The girl was another of his schemes. He must have picked her up I don’t know where and he was hiding her there while he worked out what to do with her.”
“I’ll tell them everything and I’ll take you down with me. Only difference is, I don’t care. I’ve been living on borrowed time, ever since I got out. I’m already dead. You’ve got a wife, you’ve got kids.”
Mazeau snorts with laughter. The pistol trembles in his hand. That is all André sees. Wonders if . . . Gives up the thought.
“Who’d believe you? I mean, who the hell are you? Everyone thinks you’re dead—even you think that. You changed your identity, practically changed your face, and fifteen years later you come back to get revenge? Can you remember what kind of man you were, till ’43? A gambler, a womaniser, a wheeler-dealer? You didn’t bite the hand that fed you, back then, did you? Who would even listen to you whining about the concentration camps and everything you’ve been through and your pathetic vengeance? You think your old pal Darlac’s going to let you strip him naked without saying anything? He’ll get out the old police files, he’ll embroider his memories, and you’ll be nothing but some sad little loser come to settle a few scores. Anyway, no-one gives a toss about deportees anymore, haven’t you noticed? All they care about is the Resistance and its heroes! And I was on the right side. So what do you think? People just want to forget all that shit, especially now their sons are being sent to Algeria to have their guts sliced open by the ratons. They’ve got bigger fish to fry than listening to the adulterous husband of some dead Jewish bird go on about his miserable life. Just think for a minute: you’re fucked. You killed three people and you’ll be lucky if you escape the guillotine.”
He stops talking and rummages in his pocket, coming up with a wallet that he throws at André’s feet.
“There you go, look at that, André Vaillant. Now I know what to call you. Come on. Get dressed and let’s get out of here.”
André does not move.
“We’re not going anywhere. Or I’m not, anyway. Go ahead and shoot, if you want. You haven’t understood anything.”
Mazeau cocks his pistol and lowers his aim.
“I’m going to shoot you in the leg. I’ll say you attacked me. Legitimate self-defence. I’ll be lauded for my self-control, cos you’ll only be injured. I’ll take you to rue Castéja15 and everyone will congratulate me. My colleagues, the chief super, I’ll be promoted. And you’ll have to limp to the Fort de Ha16. You’ve been there before, haven’t you? I don’t care if the law condemns you. I don’t believe in all that crap. As far as I’m concerned, justice is a bullet in the head for any scum we catch, and that’s all. And as you’re already dead and as you don’t care either, we’re almost in agreement. So, you follow me, you end up dying, and I do pretty well out of it.”
André nods. He takes one step forward and the cop aims the gun at him, arm stretched out tense, the knuckles of his fist turning white as he grips the butt tightly.
“I need to go to the wardrobe. Can I?”
Mazeau takes a few steps backwards.
“Slowly. Go very slowly.”
André moves forward. He can feel the rough floorboards under his bare feet. He concentrate
s on that to fill his body again with sensations and strength. Mazeau is still pointing the gun at him, hand steady. He’s two meters away from him, raincoat and jacket undone so his shoulders can move freely.
The outside door bangs and they hear the shouts of children in the corridor. Laughter, a stampede of feet on the staircase. Mazeau turns around, startled, and André sees the look on his face and uses his towel to knock away the cop’s gun hand and throws himself at him and then the two of them go flying over the top of the armchair.
Mazeau hits the floor head first. For a few seconds he’s stunned, groggy, eyes staring up at the ceiling. André grabs him by his shirt collar, sitting astride his chest, and with an effort lifts him up and smashes his head against the wooden floor to knock him out. He doesn’t know if the cop has let go of his pistol; all he’s thinking about is trying to make his gestures more efficient, but the man is heavy, hard to drag, so André kneels on his chest and the man struggles, trying to roll over sideways to knock him off, trying to knee him in the ribs. Mazeau’s face is purple, the veins throbbing wickedly in his temples and his forehead because he can’t breathe, and suddenly it becomes slippery in André’s hands, slick with sweat, the bones hard-edged and angular, and he bangs it against the floorboards, thinking that tiles would be more effective, less flexible, but all the same he dreads hearing the soft crack of his skull and seeing a pool of blood spreading over the wood, because he has witnessed that before once in the camp, when a kapo killed a prisoner because he hadn’t moved out of the way for him as he was leaving the building, and André remembers the sound of death behind that scrawny face and the instant clouding over of his eyes, and the shudders that ran through his whole body as it slumped against the bloodstained concrete post. And suddenly, at the very edge of his field of vision, to his left, he glimpses the pistol rising up and he smacks it with the back of his hand but the gun rises again like a snake so he grabs the cop by his ears and yanks and shoves to smash his head against the floor until he feels the body go soft underneath him and stop moving.
After the War Page 18
