“I’m leaving Bordeaux.”
He says this in a rush, and finally meets Darlac’s eyes. A gulf of silence opens up between them.
“And going where?”
“Paris. I’ve got a pal up there who’s invested some money in a business for me. A bar for rich fellows, with a few girls for the evenings. Behind the Champs-Elysées.”
An admiring grimace from Darlac.
“And what about your business here?”
“I’ve sold my share in the bistro. I’m going to sell the apartment. I’ve got takers for the furniture and all the shit in here. There are men coming tomorrow to close the deal. I’m taking two girls with me. The others can take care of themselves. I’m clearing out in two weeks.”
Darlac doesn’t know how he manages not to smash the coffee table into Francis’ face. He pretends to read the label on the bottle of wine, then takes a deep breath so he’ll be able to speak calmly.
“Why didn’t you tell me before? We’ve come a long way together, haven’t we?”
“Yeah, but now we’re going our separate ways. Anyway, you’re not exactly the sentimental type . . .”
Darlac feels the room spinning slowly around him.
“This is because of Jeff, isn’t it? You didn’t like me shooting him.”
Francis shakes his head. He looks more assured again and his eyes shine with that murky sparkle that they always have under those heavy eyelids.
“Jeff was a congenital idiot. And uncontrollable sometimes, as you said. Except if you knew how to use him; then you had no complaints. But to kill him the way you did, so coldly like that . . . I didn’t think you were capable of that. And yet you’re a piece of shit, just like me and all the other pieces of shit round here in the police and the gangs, not to mention all those so-called nice, respectable people. They’re all as bad as each other, without a doubt. You choose your sides so you’ll get the least amount of shit. But I thought if you could do that, then you could kill me too as soon as I didn’t fit into your plans. So I’d rather leave. I don’t want to continue. I wouldn’t even dare turn my back on you.”
Darlac pours himself more wine without saying anything. Considers his options. Thinks of some hurtful words and then decides that words are pointless.
“I would never do that. How could I? How could you even think that? You think I’m some sort of mad killer? The kind of bastard who’d shoot you in the back? Have you ever seen me do that to anyone? Shit, if I didn’t know you so well, I’d be insulted! But with you, it hurts . . . But anyway . . . As you say, I’m not the sentimental type; I’ll leave all that shit to women and queers. I don’t really know what a friend looks like, but when I think of that word, I see your face . . . You see? I’m getting soppy. I need to get a grip. But you’re not just any Tom, Dick, or Harry. And I’m not going to shit on the memories we share, everything we’ve been through together . . . Oh well . . . At least I’ll have a place to crash when I go to Paris.”
“The bar will always be open for you. And not just the bar. Wait till you see the girls we’ll have there. Maybe you’ll forgive me then . . .”
Francis gives a knowing smile to Darlac, who responds with a wink and lifts his glass to future fucks.
“Actually, Francis, you don’t have anything to nibble with your wine, do you? We should at least celebrate this properly, even if I don’t like to see you go.”
Francis gets up and disappears into the kitchen. While he hears Francis preparing something, Darlac grabs a large cushion from a chair and puts it next to him, stroking its midnight-blue silk covering. Then he takes the .30 and slides a cartridge into the chamber. He coughs to cover up the sound of the breech clicking into place. He looks around, his eyes roaming this Aladdin’s cave, this ridiculous heap of old valuables that Francis has insisted on accumulating like a rich man, but without the discernment forged by inheritance and a bourgeois education, otherwise known as good taste . . . A monkey hoarding bananas, living in its cage surrounded by his favorite fruit and its rotting peel.
Francis returns carrying a tray, on which Darlac can see a block of pâté, half a loaf of bread and two knives.
“This is all I have. I hope it’ll do.”
They spread the pâté on the bread. Darlac’s mouth waters. He spears a mouthful of pâté with the point of his knife. Francis chats about the charcutier who made the pâté, the baker who baked the bread, then he picks up his glass of wine and his slice of bread and raises them, with the words: “Come on, no hard feelings. To your health! Oh, and what was the news you were going to tell me?”
“Actually, it was about Jeff. They found his and Mazeau’s bodies. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Why is it good?”
“It’s what you wanted, no?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you called the fucking gendarmes to tell them where the bodies were, you prick, and you left Mazeau’s papers close by. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Jeff’s were there too, even if they are forged.”
The blood drains from Francis’ face. He swallows drily. But he looks Darlac in the eyes, without blinking.
“No, not Jeff’s.”
“You know they’ll identify him soon. Everyone thought he was in Belgium, cos that’s what I told them. So who do you think this puts in the shit? Why did you do that?”
“To settle the score. So that Jeff would get a normal burial. And also because—”
Darlac grabs the cushion and throws himself at Francis, knocking over the chair, which slides along the wooden floor until it bangs into a sideboard, and presses the cushion against his face. But Francis struggles, his choked yells like the grunting of a pig, his hands clinging to Darlac’s forearms so he has trouble freeing himself to get hold of his gun and press the trigger.
“You see, you fucking prick, I’m not shooting you in the back. There’s no need.”
It sounds like a firecracker. Darlac absorbs the recoil in his shoulder and feels something tear or tense up in his shoulder blade. He grimaces with pain, then stands up and contemplates Francis’ corpse, sprawled in his chair, legs outstretched, hands on his belly, wine and pâté all over him. Darlac remains immobile, gun in hand, mind empty, in a daze. Instinctively, he starts looking for the empty cartridge case, and it’s at that moment that the cushion slides then rolls over the dead man’s legs as if down a slope, to the floor. Where the cushion was before, he can now see Francis’ face: the bullet hole in his forehead, his half-open eyes, mouth gaping and full of blood, which overflows in a trickle down his chin. He can’t see the back of his skull, but he knows what’s there, so he turns away from the corpse, spots the cartridge case under a table and picks it up. Then he notices that he is still holding the pistol, and slowly puts it back in his pocket.
He wanders around the room, massaging his shoulder; he leans over various trinkets to examine them more closely; he hefts the glistening two kilograms of an ebony elephant in his hand, and traces with a fingertip the smoothness of its little ivory tusks. Then he sees a silver candelabrum, and uses his Zippo to light the candles. He watches for a moment as the small flames crackle and blacken, thinking about nothing except what he’s doing at that moment, the way you try to protect yourself if you’re crashing down a flight of stairs. After that, swaying slightly, he goes into the kitchen and turns on the gas to all the rings of the stovetop, and then he leaves. Suddenly he thinks about his fingerprints, curses himself mentally for such negligence, and painstakingly wipes every surface he’s touched. You never know, with gas and flames . . .
On his way out, he carefully closes the front door, feeling sickened by the odor that is already spreading through the house. Outside, he fills his lungs with the city’s damp, polluted air and feels better. He looks up at the grey sky, then walks quickly to his car.
29
Caunègre and Castel do not give the men time to b
reathe or take a drink from the water truck’s tap; as soon as they’re back at the station, they organize a weapons maintenance meeting. Disassembly, lubrication, ammo check. They warn them that the slightest error could take off their hand or half their face if there’s an explosion. Load, cock, chamber clean. It should be as free of filth as your girlfriend’s pussy, and it should slide just as easily too, so you’ve got work to do. If it jams when the shot’s about to go off, not only will you look like a dickhead—you should be used to that by now—but there’s a good chance you’ll die like a dickhead too. A few men snigger; others keep their nose down close to the breech and apply themselves, spreading the strong-smelling grease over the steel mechanisms with their cloths, pressing down hard with the tip of an index finger. They’re sitting at tables in the refectory, still completely covered in dust, throats dry, wiping the crusts from their eyes with the backs of their hands, coughing to relieve their soot-choked lungs, spitting out the little saliva they have. They can already smell the ragoût being made by the two clowns in the hot, dark little space that serves as a kitchen, who occasionally improvise strange stews and hashes based on the random supply of food, as a way of changing the sometimes poisonous rations that the army provides. One of them was a bank teller in Le Mans, the other a chemist near Lyon. The first so short-sighted that he has trouble—as he puts it himself—seeing his own dick when he pisses, while the second has such terrible scoliosis that he’s virtually a hunchback and has to remain seated most of the time. Both of them wonder what the hell they’re doing there; they don’t understand—and nor do the officers and N.C.O.s—why the draft board didn’t exclude them. So they are hidden away as best they can be before being sent back to their mothers: kitchen work, cleaning toilets, laundry, minor repairs, because they would be more of a nuisance to the army dead than alive.
Daniel has lovingly polished his rifle, checked the cartridges one by one before reinserting them into the magazine, cleaned the lens of his scope with one of the embroidered handkerchiefs that Roselyne slipped into his suitcase at the last minute and that he brought with him so he could smell the scent of lavender that still clings to them. He quickly checks his M.A.S.-49, lingering over the wooden butt which is so scored and worn away that it almost looks like someone’s been chewing it, then raises his hand to indicate to Lieutenant Caunègre that he has finished. The lieutenant comes over to him and hefts the Garand, examining the scope, then looking around the room.
“Fucking brilliant weapon, that. You can do anything you want with it. You could put a bullet up a mouse’s asshole if you wanted to.”
Daniel nods, watching as the lieutenant checks the gun’s balance, and thinks: But we’re not firing at mice. He sees again the woman collapsed in the ruins of the house. In the scope, he had been able to make out the pattern on her dress; he could have counted the pearls on her necklace. He could see the blood glisten as it ran from her smashed-up face.
“I hear from Sergent Castel that you’re pretty handy with a gun. You got the platoon out of the shit the other day by taking out a fell hidden two hundred meters away. Good work! I bet the paras don’t have many shots as good as you.”
Daniel looks up into the eyes of the man who is speaking to him, leaning over him, his face earth-colored and shiny with sweat, eyes wide with exhaustion, but his mind is still outside the blown-up house. The woman abruptly vanished from his field of view and he had to search the shadows of the house to locate her collapsed body as it tipped over onto the ground, one of her arms still on her dead daughter as if to protect her.
“Thank you, lieutenant.”
Caunègre puts the rifle down on the table and gives Daniel a mechanical smile. He looks like a politician on an election campaign.
“Dismissed,” he says. “You can go and have a drink.”
He continues his inspection, stopping a littler further off to look at an M.A.S. that has been taken to pieces.
Daniel picks up the Garand and shoulders it. He looks around the room, then sees the two Parisians at the other end, sitting next to each other as they clean their sub-machine guns. He gets them in his crosshairs, alters the focus and leans his elbows on the table. He centers the scope on Olivier, his head in close-up, like a film shot, looking down, concentrating on what he’s doing, conscientious, perhaps a little anxious. He sees the sweat on his skin, his long lashes blinking quickly. The tip of his tongue sticking out between his lips. The face turns towards him and the eyes widen.
“What the hell are you doing?” Caunègre demands.
Daniel lowers the rifle, puts it down. The Parisian is still staring at him, from the other end of the table.
“There was something on the scope. I was just checking it, lieutenant.”
“I said you could go. So clear off.”
Daniel puts the rifle in its slipcover and leaves. The setting sun sprays gold over the black mass of an advancing storm cloud. Gusts of cooler air float around him. The caporal in charge of delivering the post whistles and waves a letter at him. Daniel recognizes Irène’s handwriting on the envelope. He tears it open.
She tells him what he already knows by heart: her life at university, the communist students, the war and how everyone talks about it, how no-one knows what De Gaulle is playing at. She received a long letter from Alain, now in Dakar, who told her about the heat, the smells, the dark bars and cold beer, fighting with Englishmen, and the boatswain, who’s a good man and maybe a former crook. Daniel recalls a film with Gérard Philipe that took place in searing heat, and this bar in some godforsaken hole where men sweated and gave each other dirty looks in the thick air stirred up by a huge ceiling fan. Alain the globetrotter. He tries to imagine it: those bars, those faces, hotels where no-one can sleep because of the heat and the stinkbugs and the screaming of whores pushed around by drunkards, the alcohol, the girls’ arms and their tired eyes. He makes his film, motionless in the yellow air, with the lightning flashing and the thunder rumbling far off in that charcoal-grey cloud that is rising above him. A dark, slow film. Red and amber.
He should have gone with him. Climbed up that gangway behind Alain and the boatswain, hidden in a lifeboat, waited until the ship was in open sea before showing himself. Sure, they’d have put him down in the engines, amid the grease and the noise, in 120-degree heat, but when he went back up to the bridge, the wind and the sea spray would have cooled him down, cleaned him off, and later they would have offered him something else to do, anything, and he would have agreed so he could feel the massive swell of the ocean beneath his feet and see the edge of a continent heaving into view, the lights of a port, its swarming chaos. He would be in Hamburg or Tangiers right now, sitting in a taxi after asking the driver to take him to the parts of town that never sleep, and in his gut he would feel hunger and the exciting apprehension of the unknown. He lets these ready-made images flood his mind, the clichés amassed by those who don’t know the truth, and who sometimes don’t dare to find out.
Instead of which he is sitting on a bench, holding a letter written a week ago, his rifle leaning against him, and he trembles and then vomits between his feet at the idea of what he might have done and what he did, of what he might have been and what he’s become. He spits bile in the dust that is turning his face into a hardened, earthcolored mask, sticking to his eyelids as he wakes up in the morning and making his lungs wheeze.
He starts reading again, using the back of his hand to wipe away the tears brought on by vomiting.
I didn’t want to tell you this because I didn’t want to worry you or reopen old wounds, but in the end I think you have to know. Some cops came to our house two weeks ago to see Mom. They were aggressive, tried to intimidate her. One of them turned all the rooms upside down. He wasn’t searching for anything, he just wanted to scare her. They said they were searching for your father. They said he wasn’t dead, that he’s come back to Bordeaux and he’s killed people. Mom was shocked, and so was Dad.
I’ve never seen them like that before. We talked about it until late at night and we don’t know what to make of it. What do those creeps want? They even mentioned you being in Algeria. They said they would make your life more difficult there if my parents refused to talk. But the problem is they don’t know anything! And your father was never really friends with them, as you know. They’ve told you about him before—he was a strange guy. So watch out for those army bastards. Don’t give them any excuse to make your life any harder than it already is . . .
I was sad to hear about the death of your friend Giovanni. They must be so rare, men like him, where you are.
Anyway . . . I wanted you to know. Our parents don’t know that I’ve told you about this. They don’t want you to worry, but there’s no-one else I can talk to about these things. I miss you. We all do. We’re counting the months until you get out of there, but for you every hour must seem like an eternity. Maybe the war will end more quickly, with De Gaulle. No-one knows, as I already said. Some people are afraid it’ll turn into a dictatorship. Others, old comrades, claim it’s all a ruse and he’s already negotiating secretly with the F.L.N..
Take care of yourself. Come back soon. Your sister and your little comrade, Irène.
He rereads the letter. He doesn’t understand. The images in his mind knock him off balance. His hand in that man’s on a sidewalk, one morning. He tries to remember his face. Shoulders, a vague outline, eyes turned towards him. His mother’s voice. It all blurs together. Yes, his mommy: her smile, her hair. Her dark eyes. He tries to recall the day when. On the roof, suddenly. Don’t move. He remembers that voice, whispering, urgent. Terrified. Don’t say anything. Wait for us. He waits. He pees himself because he can’t get his shorts unbuttoned; he’s too scared of slipping down the tiles. He climbs up to the chimney and leans against it. Maybe he cries. Maybe he’s scared. He can’t remember. But he waits for them. Yes, he remembers that. He hears a few cars passing in the street below, hears people talking, windows opening, a caged bird singing. Mommy? Maybe he called for her, very softly. Little birds come to see him. They are freezing like him, feathers plumped. They flutter about near him and he talks to them in a quiet voice.
After the War Page 41
