The Guardian of Lies

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Léon.’

  He concentrated on the piece of paper she was handing him. ‘Please sit down,’ he said.

  They sat either side of the desk and studied the bold printed words on the page.

  YOU WANT ME TO KILL YOU?

  LIKE GOLIATH. ALONE. IN THE DARK.

  GO BACK TO PARIS. NOW.

  He sat very still, then tipped his chair on to its back legs. A bad habit of his when rattled.

  ‘Well, first, this is not the work of a professional, so I think we can rule out our MGB Intelligence friend from last night.’

  She gave him a sideways look. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No. Not certain. But it smells of amateur work to me. A professional criminal would not have picked up a pen to scrawl such a note. The ink and the handwriting style are far too traceable. A professional would use a typewriter or preferably words and letters cut from newspapers.’

  He nudged it further away from him, barely having touched more than a corner of the offending article.

  ‘I’ll bet you one of my nice new eggs that the paper is dripping with fingerprints.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stared down at her own fingertips.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll take your fingerprints while you’re here and eliminate them.’

  She nodded. ‘So who do you suspect?’

  ‘An angry local. Scared witless by the arrival of nuclear weapons on your father’s land.’

  ‘Just as dangerous though.’

  ‘I doubt it. A toothless threat, I suspect.’

  She looked tired. There was a greyness around her mouth and her eyes had sunk deeper into her head, but he saw the effect of his words. Her shoulders came down from under her ears and the half-smile she gave him reached her eyes.

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ she said, ‘Monsieur le Capitaine.’

  ‘To be sure of being safe, you could always do as the note instructs, you know. Return to Paris.’ He said it casually, as if it wouldn’t tear a hole in him.

  ‘No. But thanks for the suggestion.’

  ‘Did you speak to André about last night?’

  ‘Yes, I did. It seems he knows Gilles Bertin better than I thought. They worked together in Paris. Before.’ She didn’t say before what. There was no need.

  ‘You’re telling me that André worked with a Soviet Intelligence agent? And you’re not worried? Seriously?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, Léon. But it was a required part of his job.’

  ‘His job.’ Léon shrugged, but it didn’t come across as carelessly as he intended. ‘Always his job. Eloïse, I know what he does because a couple of years ago he tried to recruit me into his nefarious world of espionage.’

  Her dark eyes grew darker. ‘Did you accept?’

  ‘No. I declined.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My life as a police officer is plenty dangerous enough, thank you. Only this morning I had an argument with fat old Henri Laurent on his tractor.’

  He wiped imaginary sweat off his brow with exaggerated relief and saw he’d made her smile. He picked up one of her eggs from the straw-filled basket and cradled it in his hand, so delicate, yet so strong. As pale as her Parisian skin. Its shell was as smooth as the lie he was about to tell her.

  ‘I’ve been going through the statements,’ he tapped one of the paper piles on his desk, ‘given by all the people who attended Goliath’s burial ceremony. Not one of them saw anything suspicious.’

  ‘Surely someone must have seen something.’

  ‘No.’ He moved on quickly. ‘The fire was started at the rear of the stables while everyone was watching the ceremony, their back to the stables.’

  ‘So any of them could have done it.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘A person who sets fire to horses should be shot.’

  Léon was not going to argue with that. ‘I am looking into their political affiliations. It might narrow the field down. Checking if any have a history of anti-American or anti-nuclear activities.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘We have lists.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to be thankful or scared.’

  ‘Try impressed.’

  That made her smile. She nodded. ‘I hope I’m not on your list.’

  ‘No, but your brother is.’

  ‘André?’ She frowned. ‘He’s not anti-American.’

  ‘No, not André.’

  ‘Isaac?’

  He watched her mouth form her younger brother’s name, as if she were biting on a tooth that hurt. He pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer and spread it in front of her.

  ‘I’d like you to read through this list of names of attendees at the burial ceremony and tell me which ones you know. Or, more to the point, which ones you don’t know.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be asking my father this?’

  ‘I have already done so.’

  She cocked her head at him. Exactly like when she was twelve. ‘Covering all angles?’

  ‘Looking for holes,’ he said.

  He handed her a pen. She started skimming through them, ticking the ones she knew with rapid little flicks of the nib. At one point she glanced up at him and found him watching her, but it was when she paused a second time, her forehead wrinkled in an effort of recall, that he smelled a scrap of something meaty. He was about to ask which name had niggled at her, but the door burst open without the customary knock and the moment was lost.

  ‘Can’t you see, Travert, that I am busy?’

  ‘Captain, all bloody hell is about to break loose.’

  Travert was his sergeant, a man with a penchant for languidness. Not one to panic, not unless he had to, and right now, his cheeks were an odd florid colour. Léon rose to his feet.

  ‘Excuse me a moment, Eloïse.’

  But before he could exit the office, Travert started to spill the emergency news.

  ‘They’re coming. In coaches,’ he blurted out. ‘Coming here. To demonstrate in Serriac against the air base. Hundreds of the Commie trade union bastards being shipped here, maybe thousands. They’re on their way right now, charging up from the coast and Marseille. They’ve reached Saint-Martin-de-Crau already and—’

  ‘Enough! Silence, Travert.’

  Léon rushed to the door and yelled down the hallway, ‘Get me Monsieur le Maire on the phone. Now!’ He swung back inside the room. ‘Travert, see Mademoiselle Caussade out.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The town of Serriac was choking. Crowded. Cracking at the seams. Shouts and anti-nuclear placards and raised fists disrupted the sleepy air that was accustomed to nothing more than the barking of dogs and the jangled notes of toothless old Fabron’s accordion.

  ‘Americans out!’

  ‘Hiroshima never again!’

  ‘No to nuclear weapons.’

  ‘Yanks go home!’

  ‘No USA air base here!’

  I felt the hatred growing, as uncontrollable and as destructive as the fire in my father’s stables. I feared for my town. I saw a woman with a baby strapped to her chest and she was brandishing a placard that stated in blood-red paint: I WANT A FUTURE FOR MY CHILD . I feared for her child.

  I perched myself on the fountain near the church and watched Léon positioning his men, quick and decisive. On corners. In pairs. He was young to be in such a senior position of command, but the war had snatched so many of Serriac’s men that it opened up opportunities for those who were left. I noticed the way his men treated him with respect, even those who were older than he was. He studied the huge crowd of protesters with quick eyes, picking out troublemakers. They moved the way a shoal of fish moves, tight together, jostling shoulders. Safety in numbers. Their rage so intense that all it needed was a match to set it on fire. I could see that Léon was determined there would be no match.

  A van full of officers came racing in from Arles with police reinforcements to block off side streets and help keep the peace. They formed a human barrier between the d
emonstrators and the locals who resented this unwelcome intrusion. Insults were hurled. Tempers rose. Few residents of Serriac could stomach the air base because they knew it made them a target for a Soviet nuclear attack, so I couldn’t blame them even though I knew they were wrong. But at the same time they didn’t want this invading army marching through their town.

  ‘Eloïse Caussade,’ a woman’s stern voice shouted out as she marched past me, swept along by the tidal force of the crowd, ‘you and your father should be ashamed of yourselves for selling your land – French land – to the capitalist overlords from America. You are traitors to your country.’

  It only took me a second to find the owner of the familiar voice and I felt my cheeks burn the way they had always done when she used to reprimand me when I was young. It was Madeleine Caron, the headmistress from the school I used to attend, tall and unforgiving. But before I could respond she was gone. Is that how the town thought of me? Of Papa? It saddened me and the urge to explain was strong, but how could I explain when I didn’t understand myself?

  I saw a hand in the crowd rise as a tall man reached up above the heads around him, and my heart tightened. His fist was wrapped around a chunk of rock. It swung back and then with explosive force shot forward. A shop window shattered.

  One of Léon’s police officers dived into the crowd, seized the culprit and hauled him out into the back of a police van parked across one of the side streets. But another hand went up, another rock. Violence erupting. The quiet world of Serriac was fraying at the edges.

  The protesters were surging down towards the town hall, where I could already see Mayor Durand standing on the steps, waiting for his moment in the sun. The largest audience he could wish for was heading his way and I hoped he had the right words on his silver tongue. I jumped down off the edge of the fountain and ran to the police van that I’d seen blocking the side street.

  It stood unguarded.

  Its rear door was held closed by a metal strut that hinged across it and it was the work of a second to flip it up, releasing the door. I swung it open in search of the hooligan who had thrown the first rock. He was seated on a metal bench in the gloomy interior but leaped for the door, all long limbs and blazing eyes. He stopped dead on the step when he saw me.

  ‘Isaac,’ I shouted at him, ‘you bloody fool.’

  *

  We sat at the back of the empty church and kept our voices low. The Church of Saint-Joseph was too grand for Serriac. Its rose-coloured marble floors too splendid, its marble columns too lofty, its vaulted ceiling too gloriously intricate to grace a plain-spoken rural town that had trouble raising enough money even to keep its library open more than two days a week.

  I loved to sit in this church, though I rarely did so. Every time it made my heart swell because it smelled of my childhood. I remembered sitting on one of these pews with my mother. She wore a lavender frock and white gloves. A loving smile directed at me. Her belly swollen. The building had been gifted to the town in medieval times by a wealthy Parisian baron, Henri-Jacques de Montfer. It was to offer thanks to God for a Serriac fisherman saving the life of the baron’s sister when she almost drowned in the Rhône.

  A brother and sister. The bond was strong.

  ‘Your face,’ Isaac murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t bother about it. I don’t.’

  It was a lie of course, but I didn’t want my little brother’s pity. Not that he was exactly little anymore. Only nineteen, but taller than my father or André and whippet-thin. A handsome face with a shaggy mop of wheat-coloured hair that had the coarse texture of Cosette’s mane. Of all of us, he was the one most like my mother and possessed the identical round blue eyes which, like hers, opened straight into his soul. I saw into it now, burning with belief.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Isaac? Arriving with rocks. Looking for trouble.’

  ‘Trouble is already here, Eloïse.’

  ‘We don’t need more.’

  ‘Trouble is staring us in the face in the shape of American nuclear bombs located in what they call a direct line of communications across France.’

  His hands were jabbing at the air. He was seeing in his head the eleven sites chosen across the country where the American military bases were being constructed, picturing the nuclear arsenal piling up in storage silos on our doorstep. I knew. I’d seen them inside my own head.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Isaac, see sense. The Soviet Union has installed Communist governments in all the countries of Eastern Europe and if it thinks it can get away with it, it will invade and crush Western Europe, as it tried to do when it blockaded West Berlin in 1948. The American nuclear threat is all that keeps them from our door.’ I waved a hand towards the huge arched door behind us. ‘Tell that to your friends out there. And remember this: the Soviets have just detonated their own atomic bomb, which means we are in an arms race that—’

  ‘No, no.’ My brother shook a fierce finger at me. ‘It was not a true H-bomb, not like America’s explosion at Enewetak in the Pacific last year. That one was a monster. A thousand times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. The Soviet bomb didn’t have a staged fusion device.’

  I stared at him. My little brother used to be always skiving off to sail his dinghy on the lagoon instead of doing his maths homework, yet here he was talking about staged fusion devices.

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’ I asked. ‘About the fusion device.’

  ‘So you still think that because I didn’t go to university like you and André, I have shit for brains.’

  ‘No! Of course not.’

  ‘Just because I work on the waterfront in Marseille and spend my days loading and unloading bloody great ships, doesn’t make me a dumb knucklehead, you know.’

  ‘I know that, Isaac.’

  His voice grew louder and I threw a quick glance around the church. Nothing moved in the shadowy confession box or the gilded pulpit with its carved-eagle lectern. But still I checked out the Our Lady chapel with the blue-draped Madonna stained-glass window and the grand altar space with its candles burning steadily. Even the gilt box in the wall that displayed the service hymn number. We were alone.

  ‘Wearing a docker’s vest and dungarees,’ Isaac could not let it go, ‘doesn’t mean I can’t read or listen. Yes, I wield a docker’s hook. That doesn’t mean I don’t know what questions to ask. Education of the masses lies at the heart of Stalin’s Communism.’

  There we had it.

  My brother Isaac was a fully signed-up member of the French Communist Party, yet here he was in the house of God with me. The irony did not escape me. I slid an arm along his shoulder and pulled him closer. He might have been thin but I could feel the dense muscles of him, the sinews and tendons, the strength of him. But the strength of his convictions was what made me nervous.

  ‘How is life in Marseille treating you?’ I asked with an affectionate squeeze.

  But he was too fired up. ‘You don’t realise, Eloïse, in your Paris bubble, that the country is seething with rage and frustration at Laniel’s right-wing policies that are bringing industry to its knees and failing the workers of France. He cannot continue with the government’s austerity programme. Cutting jobs. Refusing pay demands. We are about to go on strike because he is crippling the country.’

  ‘Who is we? Your dockers’ union?’

  ‘All of the Socialist and Communist trade union groups are about to stop work and walk out. A general strike. No rail network. No gas or electricity. No postal system. Even miners and hospitals on strike.’ His face glowed the way I’ve seen an evangelical preacher’s glow. ‘We will paralyse France and force Laniel out of office. Replace him and his greedy pigs who keep their snouts in the trough with—’

  ‘Isaac.’

  ‘. . . a left-wing coalition. With the PCF – the Parti Communiste Français under Maurice Thorez – holding it together. They will immediately kick the fascist Americans out of our country. This time for good. No air b
ases. No nuclear bombs to—’

  ‘Isaac!’

  He came back to me from his soap box.

  ‘Would your protesters out there kill Goliath to make their point?’

  He laughed. The sound of it was shocking after his angry tirade. ‘Of course not. These men and women have been born and bred in the gutters of Marseille. They’d run like rabbits if they came face to face with a bull.’ He rubbed my shoulder. ‘Poor old Goliath, the cantankerous bastard.’ He rubbed his own shoulder, which bore a telltale scar. ‘They would attack air bases and face rifles. But not bulls.’

  ‘A man would need a horse to get anywhere near Goliath. Even with axes there would need to be at least two or three men on horseback.’

  ‘Pauvre Papa.’

  ‘And stables? Would they burn stables with horses inside?’

  ‘Probably. Oh, Eloïse, I wish you would come and fight on our side. We need people like you.’

  I took my brother’s hand in mine. ‘Isaac, I miss you.’

  ‘Not nearly as much as I missed you when you ran off to Paris to follow André, leaving me here with a father who couldn’t stand the sight of me.’

  ‘No, Isaac, Papa loves you.’

  ‘He cannot bear to be in the same room with me.’

  ‘You’re wrong. It is because every time he looks at you, he misses Maman’s beautiful face, you are so like her. You remind him how much he lost when she died, but underneath it all, he still loves you.’

  ‘And André?’

  I chafed the back of his hand with my fingers. ‘André is André. A law unto himself. But Isaac, I didn’t run away to follow in his footsteps, I went to university at the Sorbonne because it is the best in the country. I didn’t go to Paris just because André was there.’

  Liar. Liar.

  ‘Anyway, you were never at home,’ I added. ‘You were only fifteen but always off at your political meetings and rallies. You had no interest in the farm.’