“I’m not disturbing you?” he said.
They looked at each other. The situation was awkward for them both. For her, because ever since he had begun grieving for Édouard’s death, M. Péricourt had suddenly, drastically aged. For him, because pregnancy did not flatter his daughter; Madeleine did not have that glow, that ripeness M. Péricourt had observed in some women, the serene, confident air of accomplishment some shared with brooding hens. Madeleine looked simply fat. Her whole body had ballooned, even her face, and it upset M. Péricourt to see her look so much like her mother, another woman who had not been beautiful, not even when pregnant. He did not believe that his daughter was happy; she seemed only satisfied.
No, he was not disturbing her (Madeleine smiled), I was just daydreaming, she said, but none of this was true: he was disturbing her and she had not been daydreaming. The fact that he was taking such precautions meant that he had something to say to her, and since she already knew, or feared she knew what that was, she forced a smile, patting a seat next to her. Her father sat and, as so often, such was their relationship, nothing needed to be said. In fact, had it concerned only the two of them, they would simply have exchanged pleasantries, each knowing what lay behind these trite remarks, then M. Péricourt would have got to his feet, planted a kiss on his daughter’s forehead and left, satisfied—and rightly so—that he had made himself understood. But today, words were necessary because it did not concern only them. And both of them were frustrated that this private moment was brought about by circumstances beyond their control.
Madeleine would often lay her hand on her father’s, but today, she just sighed softly; they were bound to clash, perhaps even to argue, something she had no wish to do.
“I had a telephone call from Général Morieux,” M. Péricourt began.
“Did you now . . . ?” Madeleine smiled.
M. Péricourt hesitated over how best to approach the matter and settled on what, he felt, best suited him: fatherly firmness and authority.
“Your husband . . .”
“You mean your son-in-law . . .”
“If you prefer . . .”
“I do prefer . . .”
Back when he had longed for a son, M. Péricourt had hoped that the boy would take after him; in a girl, such similarities upset him because women do things very differently from men; they do things in a roundabout manner. This insidious way of saying things, for example, of implying that they were talking, not about the blunders of her husband, but those of his son-in-law. He pursed his lips. He had to be careful, to remember “her condition.”
“Be that as it may, things have not improved . . . ,” he said.
“What things?”
“The manner in which he conducts his business affairs.”
As soon as he uttered this word, M. Péricourt ceased to be a father. Suddenly, the problem seemed resolvable; because he knew everything there was to know about business, there were few problems that he could not resolve given time. He had always considered the head of the family to be like the head of a company. Now, faced with this woman, so grown up, so strange, so little like his daughter, he was stricken with doubt.
He shook his head irritably, and in the grip of this mute anger, he remembered everything he had wanted to say before now, everything she had refused to let him say, what he thought about her marriage, about that man.
Madeleine, sensing that he was about to be cruel, deliberately clasped her hands over her belly and crossed her fingers. M. Péricourt observed this and fell silent.
“I’ve spoken to Henri, Papa,” she said at length, “He has had a number of temporary difficulties. That was his word, ‘temporary,’ nothing serious. He has promised me . . .”
“What he has promised is of little consequence and less value, Madeleine. He tells you whatever suits him, because he wishes to protect you.”
“That is as it should be, he is my husband . . .”
“My point exactly. He is your husband; he should be keeping you safe, not putting you in danger!”
“In danger!” Madeleine shrieked with laughter. “Good heavens, so I’m in danger now, am I?”
She laughed long and loudly. And he was too little of a father not to be annoyed.
“I will not support you, Madeleine,” he snapped.
“But, Papa, no one has asked for your support? Support for what? Against what?”
In their refusal to face facts, they were alike.
Though she gave a very different impression, Madeleine knew things. This business with the war graves had not been as straightforward as it had seemed. Henri was increasingly irritable, distracted, short-tempered, nervous; it was just as well she had no need of his conjugal services; indeed, even his mistresses seemed to be complaining about him of late. Yvonne, only the other day: “I ran into your husband, chérie, and he is positively unapproachable these days. Perhaps he never did have the temperament to be a man of means . . .”
In his work for the government, there had been problems, complications, it was all sotto voce, but she gleaned snatches here and there; the ministry had been telephoning. Henri would adopt his bluff, magisterial tone—no, no, my dear fellow, ha! ha! that was all dealt with ages ago, don’t worry—and hang up with a deep furrow on his brow. A squall, nothing more, Madeleine had been accustomed to such things, she had spent her life watching her father weather such storms, to say nothing of the war; she would not panic because of two telephone calls from the préfecture or the ministry. Her father did not like Henri, that was all. Nothing he did would please M. Péricourt. Male rivalry. Sparring cocks. She hugged her belly more tightly. Message received. Reluctantly, M. Péricourt got to his feet and made for the door, then he turned back; he could not help himself.
“I don’t like your husband.”
There, he had said it. In the end, it had not proved terribly difficult.
“I know, Papa,” Madeleine smiled. “It doesn’t matter. He’s my husband.”
She patted her belly.
“And this is your grandson. I’m sure of it.”
M. Péricourt opened his mouth to speak, but decided it was better to leave the room.
A grandson . . .
He had been avoiding this thought from the first, because it had not come at the right time, he could not bring himself to make a connection between the death of his son and the birth of a grandson. He almost hoped it was a girl so that he would not have to think about it. There would perhaps be a second child, but by then time would have passed, the memorial would be built. He clung to the notion that erecting the monument would signal the end of his grief and his remorse. For weeks now he had not slept properly. With the passage of time, Édouard’s death had taken on a colossal importance, it had even begun to affect his professional activities. Only recently, during a board meeting of one of his companies, “la Française des Colonies,” his eye had been caught by a shaft of sunlight cutting obliquely across the hall and illuminating the top of the conference table. A ray of sunlight is a commonplace thing, yet its effect on him was almost hypnotic. Everyone has moments when they become dissociated from reality, but the expression on M. Péricourt’s face was not blank, it was a look of fascination. Everyone saw it. They carried on with the meeting, but without the chairman’s powerful gaze, his keen, radiographic attention, the discussion slowed, jolting and juddering like a car running out of fuel, before eventually trailing off into silence. In fact, M. Péricourt was not gazing at this beam of sunlight, but at the motes of dust, a nebula of dancing particles, and it took him back—how many years? Ten, fifteen? How tiresome it was to have no memory for such things! Édouard had just painted a picture, he would have been sixteen, no, younger, fifteen, a painting that was simply a mass of tiny points of color, no brushstrokes, only dots, it had a name, this technique. It was on the tip of his tongue, but the word would not come. It was a painting of young girls in a meadow, he seemed to remember. He had found the technique so absurd that he had scarcely notice the su
bject of the picture. How foolish he had been. His little Édouard had stood, waiting diffidently while his father held up this picture he had come upon by chance, this preposterous, trivial object . . .
What had he said all those years ago? Disgusted with himself, M. Péricourt sat in the hushed boardroom shaking his head. He stood up and left without a word, without so much as a glance, and went home.
Now, as he left Madeleine, he was again shaking his head. But the thought was not the same, indeed it was almost the reverse, he felt angry: coming to his daughter’s aid amounted to helping her husband. In the end, these things make you ill. Morieux might have become a doddering old fool (perhaps he had always been one), but the rumors he had passed on about Pradelle’s business affairs were disturbing.
The name of Péricourt would be mentioned. There was talk of a report. Scandalous, it was whispered. Where the devil was it, this report? Who had read it? And who had written it?
I’m taking this too much to heart, he thought. After all, it’s not as though it concerns my companies, the man does not even bear my name. As for my daughter, she is protected by her marriage contract. Besides, I don’t give a curse about what happens to Aulnay-Pradelle (even when he mentally pronounced the name, he uttered the four syllables with unalloyed contempt); there is a whole world between him and us. If Madeleine should have a child (this time or another, with women it was impossible to know how these things will turn out), surely Péricourt was capable of providing for their future?
This last idea, objective and rational, convinced him. His son-in-law could sink or swim, he, Péricourt, would be standing on the bank with lifelines to save his daughter and his grandchildren.
And if that meant pushing Pradelle under, so be it.
M. Péricourt had killed many men in the course of his long career, but never had the notion seemed as consoling as it did now.
He smiled, recognizing that very particular shudder he felt when, from among many possible candidates, he had chosen the most effective solution.
29
Joseph Merlin had never slept well. Unlike some insomniacs who spend their whole lives not knowing the cause of this misfortune, he knew precisely: his life had been a constant hail of disappointments to which he had never grown accustomed. Every night he brooded over the disagreements in which he had not prevailed, replaying them to change the outcome to his advantage; he remembered every professional slight, fretted over problems and setbacks: there were more than enough to keep him awake. There was something profoundly egocentric about the man; the epicenter of Joseph Merlin’s universe was Joseph Merlin. Having no one and nothing in his life—not even a cat—everything was about him, his existence had curled in on itself like a dry leaf around an empty space. For example, in the course of these long, sleepless nights, he had never once thought about the war. For four years, he had thought of it only as a tiresome inconvenience, an assortment of tribulations, chief among them food rationing, that served only to aggravate his crabby temperament. His colleagues at the ministry, especially those who had someone they loved fighting on the front lines, had been shocked to see this embittered man worrying only about the price of public transport and the shortage of chicken.
“For God’s sake” they would say indignantly, “don’t you realize, there’s a war on?”
“A war? Which war?” Merlin would say, “There have always been wars. Why should I take any more interest in this war than in the last one? Or the next?”
He was considered a defeatist, almost a traitor. On the front lines, he would quickly have found himself facing a firing squad; on the home front, such an attitude was less dangerous, though his indifference led to further snubs: people called him “the Boche,” and the name stuck.
At the end of the war, when he was transferred to the war grave inspectorate, “the Boche” became “the Vulture,” “the Carrion Bird,” “the Raptor,” according to the circumstances. Again, he suffered sleepless nights.
The inspection of Chazières-Malmont was his first visit to one of the military cemeteries managed by Pradelle & Cie.
When they read his report, his superiors found the situation alarming. No one was clamoring to take responsibility, and so the document quickly rose to dizzy heights until eventually it landed on the desk of the director general, who, like his colleagues in other ministries, was an expert in hushing up such dossiers.
Meanwhile, Merlin spent every night in bed, honing the words he would say to his superiors when he was summoned to appear, all of which amounted to a simple, brutal fact, one that would have serious consequences: thousands of French soldiers were being buried in coffins that were too small. Regardless of a soldier’s height—whether five foot two or more than five foot nine (from the military records available, Merlin had compiled a detailed list of the heights of the soldiers concerned), he was buried in a coffin measuring four foot three. To make the bodies fit, it was necessary to break the necks, saw off the feet, break the ankles; in short, the bodies of these fallen soldiers were being treated like lumber to be hacked and sawed. The report went into macabre detail about the process, explaining that “having no knowledge of anatomy nor any appropriate tools, laborers are reduced to breaking bones with the blades of their shovels, sometimes with the heels of their boots against flat stones, sometimes with pickaxes; despite such measures, it is often impossible to fit the remains of taller soldiers into such small caskets, forcing workers to pack in as much as possible with any surplus being tossed into a coffin serving as a trash can which, once full, is sealed and marked ‘Unidentified Soldier,’ consequently making it impossible to assure families that the bodies of the loved ones they have come to mourn are intact, something further exacerbated by the scant time allotted for exhumations by the company that secured the contract, leading workers to place only those parts of a corpse that are immediately apparent into coffins with no attempt made to comb the grave for bones, documents, or objects that might help confirm or determine the identity of the deceased as required by regulations, with the inevitable consequence that it is not uncommon to encounter scattered bones that cannot confidently be identified as belonging to any particular corpse; hence, in addition to its serious, its systematic failure to provide instructions concerning the respectful exhumation of bodies, and its use of coffins that fail to meet the stipulated requirements, the aforementioned company . . .” As is apparent, Merlin could compose sentences running to more than two hundred words; in this, he was considered an artist by his colleagues at the ministry.
The report was a bombshell.
It was deeply worrying for Pradelle & Cie, but also for the Péricourt family, who were very much in the public eye, and for the government, which had felt it sufficient to inspect work only after the event, by which time it was too late. If word got out, there would be a scandal. It was decided that, henceforth, all information relating the affair was to be sent directly and without delay to the office of the director general. And, in order to silence Merlin, a message had been sent through the appropriate channels informing him that his report was being studied attentively, that it was much appreciated, and that he would be advised of any further action in the fullness of time. Merlin, with almost forty years’ experience in the civil service, immediately knew that his report had been buried, something that did not particularly surprise him. There were doubtless murky areas in the process by which contacts had been awarded. It was a sensitive subject; anything that might embarrass the government was bound to be brushed aside. Merlin knew that it was not in his interests to be difficult; if he were, he would once again find himself moved around like a pawn. No, thank you. A man of duty, he had done his duty. In his own estimation, he was beyond reproach.
Besides, he was nearing retirement; there was nothing to be done but wait to draw his pension. All that was expected of him was to carry out perfunctory inspections, sign his name, rubber-stamp the registers, and wait until rationing ended and chickens were once more available in markets and on r
estaurant menus.
Realizing this, he went home and slept soundly for the first time in his life, as though his brain, like sediment in fine wine, required an exceptionally long time to settle.
His sleep was troubled by sad dreams in which rotting soldiers sat up in their graves and wept; they tried to cry for help, but no sound came; their only comfort came from lanky Senegalese laborers, naked as the day they were born, chilled to the marrow, throwing shovelfuls of earth over them as one might throw a coat over a drowned man dragged from the water.
The Great Swindle Page 30
