End Games in Bordeaux

by Allan Massie

  He cut another Toscano in two, put one half in the top pocket of his jacket, and lit the other.

  ‘When that fellow, the judge, told me you were looking for help – almost a month ago, I suppose – I thought it’s no concern of mine. Besides I’d enough on my plate, and you can imagine that my own position is delicate. Whose isn’t, the way things are?’

  Lannes lit a cigarette and said, ‘You forget, I’ve no idea how they are. I don’t even know how the war is going in Normandy.’

  ‘Oh, as to that, there’s been stiff fighting, but, as far as we can tell, the Allies are advancing, slowly. The Germans are retreating, slowly. But they are still here in Bordeaux and, of course, Paris. Vichy as it was is finished, but the Marshal visited Paris and had a great reception, cheering crowds, much enthusiasm. Yet when the Allies arrive, half of those who cheered the old boy will be ready to shoot him. Scum, a wretched rabble, that’s what most of our countrymen are, scum and bastards. And Laval has fallen out of favour with the Boches – they never trusted him far, now they don’t trust him at all – but he still believes he has a part to play. That’s more or less how things stand, though, as you’ll realise, what stands today doesn’t stand long.’

  And you’re Vichy, Lannes thought, you were at the heart of Vichy, I’m sure of that; so where are you now? I wonder if you too were a Cagoulard, it’s quite likely, it would fit with everything I’ve learned of you. Fabien smiled, and, as if he had read Lannes’ thoughts, said, ‘So it’s coat-turning time. Coats are being turned all over France, by anyone who can read the signs and isn’t too thoroughly compromised. The Resistance is swelling by the day as people hurry to get in on the act. Even your old friend Fernand has, according to my information, set up as a Resistance leader. Good luck to him of course. Another drink?’

  So that’s what was disturbing young Jacques, Lannes thought.

  Fabien put a match to his cigar which had gone out the way Toscani do.

  ‘So if it wasn’t Bracal, who was it?’

  ‘It’s like a country dance,’ Fabien said, ‘with people changing places, changing partners. They get cold feet, you see. Jean-Pierre d’Herblay’s were suddenly as cold as ice, as cold as can be. He’s not much of a man and he has always been afraid of responsibility which is why he amounts to nothing. So he asked for my help – and here we are. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘I sometimes think I’m past being surprised by anything.’

  Fabien looked at his watch.

  ‘I’ve a train in a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘But I’ve asked two people to meet us here. You’ll know them both. I hope they’re not going to be late. They’re connected to the advocate Labiche too.’

  ‘Labiche?’

  ‘Yes, this is all about Labiche. Don’t pretend you don’t know that. Don’t insult me, superintendent, by feigning ignorance. By the way, what became of the rent-boy?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’re at it again. The rent-boy who shot Félix, a killing which we agreed should be ascribed to the Resistance. What became of him?’

  ‘It was his mother who fired the gun that killed Félix, not the boy. And she’s dead. As for him, it’s you that’s playing games now, for I’ve no doubt that you’ve learned of the anonymous letter accusing me of having had sex with the boy which, by the way, I haven’t. I can’t believe Jean-Pierre didn’t mention it, and even that the letter was dictated by Labiche. Why, may I ask, are you so interested in the advocate?’

  ‘Pazienza,’ Fabien said. ‘I must go and pee. A weak bladder is another distressing, even shameful, consequence of my medical condition. You’ll recognise my guests if they arrive in my absence.’

  Lannes watched him limp away, lit a cigarette and felt a wave of relief flow over him. It was like Aurélien’s game of Patience when he turned up the card that unlocked an impasse. He picked up his glass. Georges, the old waiter whom he had known since he and the Chambolley brothers first frequented the Café Régent as students, came over.

  ‘I’ve just come on duty and for a moment I didn’t recognise you with that beard. If I may say so, it doesn’t suit you, Jean.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to shave where I was.’

  ‘I won’t ask you where that was.’ Georges said. ‘There are questions better not put these days. But how is Monsieur Henri? It’s a long time since he’s been in.’

  ‘He doesn’t go out much these days, hasn’t indeed since his brother’s death.’

  ‘Ah, that was a sad business. Poor Monsieur Gaston. Always ready with a laugh or a good story. And always champagne when he was in funds and often when he wasn’t. You never found the bastard who murdered him?’

  ‘We never brought him to trial.’

  ‘Like that, was it? Like so much these days. If you want my opinion, Jean, we’ve never recovered from our war. Even our victory was a sham. A sort of delusion. That’s the way I see it anyway. Another brandy? I’ll put it on your companion’s tab. He looks as if he can afford it. Which is more than most people can today. I don’t know what the world’s coming to, I really don’t. You know I used to pity the boys who were killed in the trenches. But now, well, I don’t know, they’ve been spared a lot. Armagnac as usual, is it?’

  Georges shuffled away on his waiter’s flat feet. Fabien returned.

  ‘It’s humiliating,’ he said. ‘You’re in urgent need and only a dribble comes out, and you stand there waiting and know you can never empty your bladder though you need to do so. Sorry to burden you with this, but it gets me down. Ah here they are.’

  Lannes looked up to see Edmond de Grimaud and Father Paul enter the café.

  III

  ‘No, really,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t be upset or embarrassed. I enjoyed it. You were gentle. Some men come at you like a stallion, which isn’t my cup of tea really, even though of course one usually has to drink it.’

  She ran her finger along his lower lip.

  ‘And they treat you like a tart, some of them, often, which isn’t surprising, or no longer surprising. My husband, Robert, was like you, very gentle, because he didn’t really want it either. That was why I fell in love with him, and then out too. Though I’m still fond of him. It’s an odd world. You mustn’t feel bad. I quite enjoyed it, and of course it was my idea, not yours. You’re sweet and for a first time you weren’t bad. Oh dear, that sounds patronising, it wasn’t meant to. You’re not in love with that man Chardy though, are you?’

  Léon smiled. The pink roses in a vase on the little table by the bed smelled delicious.

  ‘Not at all. But I’ve reason to be grateful to him, nothing more.’

  ‘Oh gratitude,’ she said. ‘I know that all too well. But it’s exhausting. What will you do after the war, the Liberation everyone’s waiting for? You won’t stay with him, will you?’

  The Liberation? They all dreamed of the day, didn’t, even now, dare to imagine what it might be like. The Germans, surely, wouldn’t give up Paris without a battle.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh me, I’ll go back home to England, soon as I can. I’ll have to.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were English,’ he said, so surprised by the admission that the strangeness of her last words for the moment escaped him.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, and smiled. ‘It’s made for a difficult war.’

  She stroked his cheek and leaned over to kiss him on the lips.

  ‘You are sweet,’ she said again, ‘and I’m glad we’ve done this, though I don’t suppose we’ll repeat it because I quite understand it’s not what you really want. Or I’m not.’

  Alain, he thought. They’d agreed they would meet under the Arc de Triomphe and Alain had said that of course they would both come through. They would talk and laugh and drink, but that would be all. He would never share a bed with him as he did now with Priscilla. Hadn’t Jérôme once said ‘you’re crying for the moon, my dear’?

  ‘What do you mean, you’ll have t
o? Don’t you want to go home?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what home is now, or where it might be, but as to your first question … ’ She picked up the photograph of the smiling man in the sports car, her racing driver. ‘Some of my friends have done well out of the war and the Occupation. That’s why we’ve been able to drink champagne, you and I, his champagne. But they’re tainted, they’re collaborators, and I suppose I count as a collaborator too, though all I’ve done has been merely finding ways to survive. Still, it’s better I get out, back to England, I won’t be very popular with the French, especially once they’ve decided they’ve almost all been in the Resistance, and have never so much as given the time of day to a German.’

  ***

  Maurice was in the library of the house in the rue d’Aviau where he had spent so much of his childhood. He was trying to read Proust, but it was impossible. His attention strayed in the middle of a sentence. Vichy was finished, the Marshal had been taken away from the Hôtel du Parc. His own work with the Chantiers de Jeunesse likewise. Dominique had vanished on mysterious business for François or whatever he was calling himself this week. So his father had brought him back to Bordeaux, and he didn’t know why. Old Marthe, the maid/housekeeper who had been his grandfather’s mistress, had greeted him with a sniff which was almost a mark of affection. His uncle Jean-Christophe was sitting in what had been his father’s chair drinking port, stupefying himself. Upstairs his aunt, Madame Thibault de Polmont, had taken to her bed declaring she was dying, though Marthe said all that was wrong with her was a bad cold and a foul temper. ‘She’s missing her German friends, the old fool,’ Marthe said. Dominique had told him to be sure to call on his mother and tell her all was well with him. ‘Make sure you call when Clothilde’s at home,’ he said.

  ***

  It was beastly hot in the wagon which still smelled of cattle and their dung. Alain ached all over his body, though the fiery pain in his genitals had eased a bit. He’d held out as long as he could, screaming and then longing for death to deliver him from the pain. But he’d talked. Of course he’d talked. As the Boche officer said, ‘Everyone does in the end. It’s so stupid to make me do this to you.’ Relief had flooded over him, then came tears, then shame, shame of betrayal, shame that he was less of a man than he had thought himself. Everyone talks – the words rang in his head like the same note being struck again and again and again till the end of time.

  There were more than thirty of them, all sweaty and stinking and some of them spewing in this cattle truck which stank of shit. And no water. They couldn’t look each other in the eye. A thin boy, who might have been no more than fifteen, began to pray, Hail Marys, over and over again. It got on your nerves. On and on he went till the man next to him, a burly bald-headed fellow in a cheap and filthy blue suit, got to his feet and kicked the boy sharply in the ribs. ‘The bloody Virgin’s not going to answer you, Holy Mother of God she ain’t. So fucking well shut up.’ The boy rolled over and lay on his face, his shoulders heaving.

  Alain said, ‘There was no call for that. The kid’s terrified. It’s his own mother he’s crying for. There’s no need to behave like the bloody Boches.’

  The train juddered to a halt. Someone peered through a crack between the slats.

  ‘Middle of fucking nowhere,’ he said.

  ‘Could be worse,’ someone replied. ‘We might have arrived wherever the hell they’re taking us.’

  ‘Hell – that’s the right word for sure … ’

  Even the priests no longer preach about hell-fire, Alain thought. So the Nazis have made hell reality here on earth.

  ***

  The tea was the colour of mahogany. Mrs Spinks spooned in three sugars, stirred, and handed Jérôme the mug.

  ‘Nothing like a good cup of tea,’ she said

  ‘You shouldn’t be giving me your sugar ration,’ he said.

  She smoothed her hands over her apron. A gold wedding-ring bit into an arthritic finger.

  ‘Plenty more where that came from, Froggie, if you know where to get it. And my brother-in-law does, the old devil. You’ll be off home soon I expect now that Jerry’s on the run. That Foorer of theirs won’t be half so cocky these days, will he? No more screaming about Deutschland über alles. I mind when one of them Blackshirts came here trying to sign up young Fred, my old man sent him off with a flea in the ear. No silly bugger with a Charlie Chaplin mouser’s going to win a war, he said. Pity he isn’t here to see he was right. I miss the old bastard, I really do. Young Fred will have told you his dad caught it when they bombed the docks in the first raids of the Blitz. I told him to stay put that day, having what they call a premonition, but would he listen? Not him, never. Now drink your tea and tell me about Gay Paree to cheer me up. And don’t fret yourself about young Fred, he’ll sail in some day, merry as can be, saying, “Told you I’d be fine, Ma, it’s only the good die young.” ’

  ***

  Michel, naked to the waist, lay on the grass, the sun hot on his back. Somewhere, not so distant now in the East, the battle was being fought, tanks massed against tanks, infantrymen like him crouching in fox-holes, their hands over their ears to block out as much as they could of the rocket fire. ‘Stalin organs,’ they called them, Baron Jean had told him; and told him too that at last it wouldn’t be long till they were in action. ‘They’re even calling up grandfathers and kids of fourteen and fifteen,’ he laughed. ‘Michel, my friend, we’ve signed up for Armageddon. If our girls could see us now!’

  ***

  ‘Tell me,’ François said, ‘your father is a policeman, yes? A superintendent in the PJ. Is he a man of the Right or the Left?’

  ‘He calls himself an old Radical,’ Dominique said.

  ‘An old Radical? That means nothing now. It’s a description that belongs to the Third Republic. Whatever Vichy’s faults, and it’s been a mess, a proper mess, even if we may all someday come to experience a tender nostalgia for the time of the Marshal because it has been the time of our adventurous youth, there’s this to be said for the regime: it got rid of all that, of the absurd and corrupt republic of mates. In the new world of the after-war, things will be very different. I’m afraid your poor father’s out of date. But you have done well, Dominique. I’m pleased with you. Attach yourself to me, be loyal, and there’s a bright future ahead of you. And abandon this notion of becoming a priest. I’ve been an altar-boy myself, but the fact is that the Church has had its day. The problem now is how do we prevent the other Church, the Church of Moscow, from taking over. And I have to tell you that de Gaulle has no answer to that question. In my opinion, the cocos will run rings round him.’

  IV

  ‘Your wife will recognise you now, you look respectable again,’ the barber said. ‘I didn’t recognise you myself when you came in, superintendent. With that beard you looked like one of these Resistance thugs come to demand money in return for their protection at the Liberation.’

  ‘Is that what they do?’

  ‘It’s what they try to do.’

  The barber picked up a towel to wipe his razor.

  ‘When do you think the Boches will march out?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve no more idea than you have.’

  ‘It can’t be too soon. Not that what follows will be a picnic, not at all, in my opinion. There’s too much water has flowed under the Pont de Pierre, and it’s been stained with blood. My intention is to shut up shop, pull the shutters down, for as long as it takes for some sort of normality to be restored.’

  ‘That might take some time.’

  It might indeed, he thought. He had been surprised to see Edmond de Grimaud looking as spruce and debonair as ever. He played over the encounter in his mind.

  ‘You all know each other,’ Fabien said. ‘So there’s no call for introductions. Good. I don’t have long. I’ve a train to catch. But explanations, that’s another matter. De Grimaud here,’ he turned to Lannes, ‘has been a loyal and efficient minister. But that’s o
ver.’

  Edmond smiled.

  ‘As usual,’ he said, ‘our friend here comes straight to the point.

  You’re in my debt, superintendent, you’ll admit that. Now I’m calling it in.’

  ‘I’ve been in the Milice’s prison for three weeks,’ Lannes said. ‘I’m out of touch with events. So I’ve no idea what you want of me. If it’s only assurance that I’m not going to pursue any investigation that might compromise you – such as that shooting outside the Hotel Splendide in 1940 – that’s fine. I’d say we’re quits. In any case I’m still officially suspended. So I don’t know what purpose this meeting serves. As for you, Father, I certainly have information which compromises you, but it’s none of my business and I’m not interested in your bedroom activities. Is that what you want to hear? What does puzzle me is why you’re here. You’re Labiche’s man, aren’t you?’

  The priest, who had been chewing his fingernails, shook his head, but made no other reply.

  Lannes turned to Fabien.

  ‘Perhaps you can explain why these gentlemen are here.’

  ‘You’re being obtuse, superintendent. I’d thought better of you. I told you this meeting was all about our friend the advocate. We have a common interest in him. You say Father Paul here is Labiche’s man. Correct, but what does that mean? As for Monsieur de Grimaud, he blocked Labiche when he was trying to destroy you, didn’t he? That’s not been forgotten, I assure you.’

  De Grimaud smiled and fitted a cigarette into a long amber holder.

  ‘Labiche collects information,’ he said. ‘Information is power, now more than ever. Father Paul here admits, Fabien says, that he has been one of his informants, certainly. But ask yourself why? As for me, I won’t pretend to you that my own record is unblemished. Years ago we talked about the Spanish girl, Pilar, who was briefly my mistress and the wife of your friend Henri Chambolley. Then she returned to Spain, was arrested and shot by the Reds, her own side. She was betrayed of course, and had herself been playing a double game. But who betrayed her? Who found the means to lay information against her? Believe me, my friend, I would like to know the answer to that question. I rather liked her, you know. And Father Paul here, I dare say he has his own reasons to fear the advocate.’