The Great Swindle

by Pierre Lemaitre

  As for Léon, having to keep company with Henri because of their business affairs left his pride wounded. As though his calamitous conjugal relations were not bad enough! He bore Pradelle such a bitter grudge that, if their vast contracts with the government ended in disaster, he would not lift a finger—the financial losses involved would not bankrupt him—indeed, he would take great pleasure in watching his “associate” go under. But this was not simply about money. There was his reputation to consider. And the rumors he had heard here and there were very worrying. Abandoning Aulnay-Pradelle might mean being dragged down with him, and of that there could be no question. All this was talked about in veiled terms, no one really knew the details, but if there was mention of the law, then there must have been offense . . . Crimes! Léon knew a former classmate from his university days who, being obliged to work, had a senior position at the préfecture.

  “My dear fellow,” he had said in a concerned tone, “this whole affair stinks to high heaven . . .”

  What exactly did it involve? Léon could not find out; even his friend at the Préfecture seemed not to know. Or worse, he did not want to talk about it. Léon imagined being summoned to a tribunal. A Jardin-Beaulieu in court! He was shaken at the very thought. Especially since he had done nothing wrong. But try proving that . . .

  “Embarrassing.” Henri calmly repeated the word. “And what exactly is so embarrassing?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly . . . you tell me!”

  Henri screwed up his mouth, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.

  “There is talk of a report . . . ,” Léon went on.

  “Ah!,” Henri said, “so that’s what you meant? No, that’s nothing, it has all been dealt with! A simple misunderstanding.”

  Léon was not to be fobbed off so easily.

  “From what I know . . .”

  “What?” Pradelle shouted. “What exactly do you know, huh? What do you know?”

  Without warning, he had switched from apparent affability to venomous rage. It was something Léon had noticed often in recent weeks; he had agonized over the fact that Pradelle seemed permanently exhausted and could not help but wonder whether Denise had something to do with it. But Henri was clearly worried, because an exhausted lover is a happy lover, whereas Henri was tense, he was more brusque and belligerent than usual. Hence this sudden bilious outburst . . .

  “If the problem has been dealt with, as you say,” Léon ventured, “then why are you so angry?”

  “Because, my dear little Léon, I am sick and tired of having to explain myself when I’m the one doing all the work. Because you and Ferdinand collect your dividends, but who does the organizing, who gives the orders, oversees the projects, handles the accounts . . . ? You? Ha! ha!”

  The laugh was deliberately offensive, but remembering the consequences, Léon carried on as though he had not heard.

  “I would be only too happy to help you. You’re the one who is against the idea. You always say you don’t need anyone.”

  Henri took a deep breath. What could he say? Ferdinand Morieux was a cretin and Léon an incompetent. In fact, aside from his name, his connections, his money, all things that were unrelated to him personally, after all, what was Léon? A cuckold, nothing more. Henri had left his wife’s bed only two hours ago . . . It had been rather tiresome, in fact. He always had to pry her arms off him when he wanted to leave; it was an unending melodrama . . . Henri had had just about enough of this family.

  “This is much too complicated for you, little Léon. Complicated, but not serious, so don’t worry.”

  He was trying to sound reassuring, but his manner was anything but.

  “Even so,” Léon said, “at the Préfecture, I heard that . . .”

  “What did you hear? What are they saying at the Préfecture?”

  “That there have been worrying developments.”

  Léon was determined to find out what was going on, because this was not about his wife’s frivolous affair or the prospect of his shares in Pradelle’s business being worthless. He was terrified of being swept into a maelstrom that was all the more fearsome since politics was involved.

  “These cemeteries are a very delicate matter . . .”

  “Really? Well, well, ‘a very delicate matter’!”

  “Just so,” Léon said, “a sensitive issue, in fact. The slightest blunder and it would cause a terrible scandal. With the new Chambre des Députés . . .”

  Ah, the new government! In the parliamentary elections the previous November—the first since the armistice—the Bloc National10 coalition had won a crushing majority made up almost entirely of war veterans. So patriotic, so nationalist, this coalition had been dubbed the “Blue Horizon Chamber” after the color of the French army uniform.

  Though Léon might have his “nose glued to the road,” as Henri liked to say, this point struck home.

  It was the landslide majority that had allowed Henri to secure the lion’s share of the government contracts and to get rich at lightning speed—more than a third of la Sallevière had been renovated in the space of four months; some days there were forty workmen on site . . . But the députés were also his biggest threat. A government of heroes tended to be fastidious on any subject that concerned their “dear departed.” There would be much high-sounding rhetoric. The Chambre had been inept in paying demobilized soldiers their pécule or finding work for them, but they would be only too quick now to wallow in sanctimony.

  This is what Henri had been led to understand at the Ministère des Pensions, where his presence had been requested. Not summoned, “requested.”

  “So, tell us, dear boy, is everything going as you might wish?”

  Since he was the son-in-law of M. Péricourt, they handled him with kid gloves. Since his business associates included the son of a général and the son of a député, they used tweezers.

  “This report by préfet . . . what was it? . . .”

  A pretense of struggling to remember, and then, like a burst of laughter:

  “Préfet Plerzec, ah yes, that’s it. It’s nothing, a trifling matter. You get these overzealous civil servants now and then, it was bound to happen. And in fact, the matter has been closed. The préfet all but apologized, if you can imagine that, my boy. It’s ancient history now.”

  Then dropping to a confiding tone. Better yet, a shared secret:

  “Though you might want to be a little more careful because a little pen pusher from the ministry is inspecting. He’s a nitpicker, an obsessive.”

  No way of finding out anything more. “Be a little more careful.”

  Dupré had been blunt in his description of Merlin: a shit stirrer. A man of the old school. Filthy, apparently, quick to take offense. Pradelle found it difficult to imagine what he looked like, but assuredly like no one he had ever met. A third-rate bureaucrat with no career, no future—they were always the worst, always eager to avenge themselves. Ordinarily they have little say in matters; no one listens to them, they are scorned even within their own bureaucracies.

  “That’s true,” he had been told at the ministry, “but that does not change the fact that . . . well, they can sometimes be somewhat of a nuisance . . .”

  The silence that followed stretched out like an elastic about to snap.

  “For the moment, my dear fellow, the best you can do is work quickly and work well. ‘Quickly,’ because the country needs to move on to other things and ‘well’ because the present Chambre is very touchy about anything to do with our Fallen Heroes, you understand.”

  A shot across his bows.

  Henri had simply smiled and affected a knowing air, but he immediately summoned all his foremen, chief among them Dupré, to a meeting in Paris, where he threatened everyone, laid down strict instructions, issued warnings, promised bonuses . . . eventually. But there was no way to check the work being done: his company had to deal with more than fifteen temporary rural graveyards in the preliminary stage and seven, soon to be eight, huge
war graves in the later stages.

  Pradelle studied Léon. Looking down at him, he was suddenly reminded of Soldat Maillard, of looking down on him in the shell crater and seeing him in the very same position some months later, fumbling in the grave of some nameless soldier in order to please Madeleine.

  That time, so distant now, seemed to him to have been marked by blessings from heaven: Général Morieux had sent him Madeleine Péricourt! A blessed miracle. Their meeting had been an incredible chance, the beginning of his success; knowing when to seize an opportunity, that was what mattered.

  Henri crushed Léon beneath the weight of his stare. He looked so like Soldat Maillard sinking into the ground, he was just the type to get himself buried alive.

  For the moment, however, he might still be useful. Henri laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “There’s no problem, Léon. And if there were, well, your father could have a quiet word with the minister . . .”

  “B . . . but . . . ,” Léon spluttered, “that’s impossible! You know very well that my father was elected to parliament as a member of Action Libérale,11 and the minister is Fédération Républicaine!”12

  My God, thought Henri, other than lending me his wife, this idiot has been completely useless to me.

  27

  Four days he had been waiting with mingled apprehension and impatience, but finally his client, M. de Housseray, had come.

  When you have never stolen more than a few francs here and there, going up to hundreds and then thousands in the space of two weeks can be nerve racking. This was the third time that Albert had defrauded his employer and his client in a month; he had hardly slept during that month and had shed eleven pounds. M. Péricourt, having run into Albert in the foyer of the bank two days earlier, had asked whether he was ill and suggested he take a few days off, despite the fact he had only just started working at the bank. Not exactly the sort of thing that endears you to colleagues and superiors. It was bad enough that he had been hired on the personal recommendation of M. Péricourt . . . Besides, there could be no question of his taking time off, Albert was here to work, which meant to dip into the till. And he had no time to waste.

  At the Banque d’Escompte et de Crédit Industriel, Albert had a wide choice when it came to deciding who to fleece. He opted for the oldest and most reliable banking technique: if the face fits.

  M. de Housseray had a face that fitted. With his top hat, his embossed visiting cards and his gold-handled walking stick, he exuded the delightful odor of war profiteer. Albert, worried as always, had naively thought he could make things easier by settling on a man he could revile. This sort of reasoning is typical of the rank amateur. In his defense, he had good reason to be worried. He was defrauding the bank in order to finance a subscription scam; in other words, he was stealing money in order to steal more money—it was enough to confuse any novice swindler.

  First theft, five days after being hired, seven thousand francs.

  A simple dummy entry.

  You take a deposit of forty thousand francs, you credit it to his account. In the takings column, you register only thirty-three thousand francs, and that night you take the streetcar with a briefcase stuffed with bills. The advantage of working with a major bank is that no one would notice before the weekly audit which—since it involved stock portfolios, interest calculations, liquidations, loans, repayments, offsets, current account deposits, etc.—took almost three days. This time lag was crucial. You waited until the end of the first day of the inspection, debit the sum from an account that had just been audited and credit it to the defrauded account, due to be checked the following day. To the auditors, both accounts appear to be accurate. Then you repeat the operation the following week tapping a different account from a different sector: operating expenses, credit lines, investments, interest, shares, etc. It is a classic swindle known as the “Bridge of Sighs,” simple to execute, hard on the nerves, and requiring considerable skill but little malice—perfect for a guy like Albert. The only serious problem is that it triggers an endless escalation, which, as the weeks pass, forces the swindler into an infernal race with the auditors. There are no records of the scheme being run for more than a few months before the perpetrator fled the country or ended up in prison, the latter being by far the more likely outcome.

  Like many opportunistic thieves, Albert had convinced himself that it was only a loan: he would use the first money they received for the war memorials to pay off the bank before they scarpered. This naïive notion made it possible for him to put his plan into action, but it quickly faded when he was faced with other pressing concerns.

  From the very first misappropriation, feelings of guilt rushed in to fill the gap opened up by chronic anxiety and emotion. His paranoia soon turned to pantophobia. Throughout the whole period Albert suffered an almost convulsive uneasiness, quaking at the slightest question, hugging the walls, his palms sweating so much he was constantly wiping his hands, making office work somewhat tricky; he was always on the lookout, always glancing at the door, even the position of his legs beneath the desk exposed a man ready to flee.

  His coworkers found him bizarre; they thought him inoffensive—he seemed ill rather than dangerous. All the ex-soldiers they had hired showed pathological symptoms of some kind, so they were accustomed to such things. Besides, Albert had influential connections, so it was best to smile and carry on.

  From the beginning, Albert had told Édouard that seven thousand francs would not be enough. There was the catalog to print, envelopes and stamps to buy, staff to pay for addressing the envelopes; they also needed a typewriter so they could respond to those asking for additional information; they would have to open a post office box—seven thousand francs was a derisory sum, Albert had said, I’m telling you as an accountant. Édouard had waved him off, maybe, we’ll see. Albert recalculated. Twenty thousand francs minimum, he was sure. Édouard had been philosophical—let’s go for twenty thousand then . . . You can tell he’s not the one doing the stealing, Albert thought.

  Having never admitted to his friend that he had been to dinner at his father’s house, that he had sat opposite his sister, or that Madeleine had married that bastard Pradelle, the cause of all their problems, it was impossible for him to explain that he had accepted a job as a clerk in a bank whose founder and principal shareholder was M. Péricourt. Though he was no longer a sandwich man, Albert still felt caught in a vise between Péricourt père, the benefactor he was planning to defraud and Péricourt fils, with whom he would share the spoils of this embezzlement. To Édouard, he pretended it had been an extraordinary stroke of luck, running into an old colleague by chance, a vacancy at a bank, an interview that had gone better than expected . . . Édouard, for his part, accepted this suspicious, well-timed miracle without question. He had been born rich.

  In fact, Albert would happily have kept this job at the bank. On his first day, when he was shown to his desk, saw the carefully filled inkwells, the sharpened pencils, the neat columns of figures, the polished wooden hat stand with a hook of his own on which to hang his hat and coat, the pristine black oversleeves, it made him long for a peaceful existence. With a position as a bank clerk, he could have a comfortable life. Exactly the life he had imagined behind the lines. If he stayed on in this job, he might even try his luck with the Péricourts’ pretty housemaid . . . Yes, a nice little life. Instead of which, this evening, feverish and queasy, Albert caught the métro with a briefcase containing five thousand francs in large denominations. The weather was still chilly; he was the only passenger sweating.

  Albert had good reason to get home quickly: the one-armed ex-soldier with the handcart was supposed to collect the catalogs from the printers.

  As soon as he stepped into the courtyard, he saw the bundles tied with string . . . They had arrived. This was disconcerting. The time had finally come. So far, everything had been preparation; now the real work would begin.

  Feeling dizzy, Albert closed his eyes, opened them again, set
down his briefcase, ran a hand over one of the packages, untied the string.

  The “Patriotic Memory” catalog.

  Anyone would have sworn it was real.

  And it was real, printed by Rondot Frères, rue des Abbesses, as serious a printer as you could wish for. Ten thousand copies. Printing cost of eight thousand two hundred francs. He was about to pick up the top copy of the catalog and thumb through it, but his hand froze in midair at the sound of a horse-like whinny. Édouard’s laugh, heard from the foot of the stairs. A high-pitched laugh trilling with vibrato, one of those laughs that hang in the air long after they fade. It sounded like a wild laugh, like that of a woman going mad. Albert grabbed his briefcase and rushed upstairs. Pushing open the door, he was greeted by a thunderous screech, a sort of rrââhhhrr expressing Édouard’s impatience and relief that he was finally home.

  The cry was no stranger than the atmosphere itself. Édouard, this evening, was wearing a mask in the shape of a bird’s head with a long downward-curving beak, parted to reveal two unexpected rows of dazzling white teeth. This leering, carnivorous bird, painted in tones of red, had a savage, hostile look. The mask covered Édouard’s forehead, leaving two holes for his swift, smiling eyes.

  Albert, who had been feeling a somewhat confused delight at the prospect of showing off his wads of bills, had been upstaged by Édouard and Louise. The floor of the apartment was completely covered with pages from the catalog. Édouard was lying in a lascivious pose, his bare feet propped on one of the bundles while Louise, kneeling beside him, was painstakingly painting his toenails a vivid carmine. Engrossed in her task, she barely looked up to acknowledge Albert. Édouard began to laugh again, his booming, joyous rrââhhhrr, and gestured to the floor with a flourish, like a conjurer after a particularly impressive trick.