by Ben Stevens
‘Then, quite suddenly – ‘‘You have suffered and you will suffer again, my son, but this time you will do so as a free man.’’
‘Did I imagine those words in my mind, or did I really hear them? Filled with wonder by this and everything that I saw, I made my way towards whatever it was that fate had in store for me.
‘Do I weary you, Pradel, with my somewhat lengthy account? Certainly your concerns are rather more for your present situation than my history, that’s for sure. So I’ll cut a long story short. It was now wartime, France was under the German yoke, and consequently the sentence for a captured escapee was death: escaping was construed as being a desire to join the Free French forces.
‘In any case I was as yet in no hurry to go. I’d never imagined that the five years I’d spent buried in a dark hole could have damaged my mind so greatly, so that I’d have trouble talking to anyone and concentrating on even the simplest of matters for any length of time.
‘Thank God, this mental damage wasn’t permanent. I had a few good friends who fought hard to rehabilitate me, and given the Lord’s help I displayed a certain hardiness and desire to get better myself.
‘Two years passed before I could be thought as being ‘normal’ – a balanced man who no longer talked to himself and who interacted with others in the usual way. I was still on Saint Joseph, which had at its top the grim Reclusion, and now I started planning my escape.
‘A boat: I needed a boat to be built for me. By virtue of my good friends and the money I still had in my charger – this had never left me – one was indeed prepared; but with painful slowness, for as you can imagine construction had to take place in absolute secrecy, with the boat’s different sections being concealed at various points around the island.
‘But at last it was finished, and I would set sail that night from the remotest part of the island: farewell penal, farewell those good friends of mine whom I’d come to love as brothers! They wept as they embraced me goodbye, certain that I would be captured and killed. Not one accepted my offer to come with me. Let the screws capture me, let them kill me. I don’t give a damn.
‘Escape, escape: escape or die! And the guillotine seemed preferable to another spell in the Reclusion were I to be caught.
‘As you know, I wasn’t. That is why I am here now, looking down at you contained in a cage similar to the one that held me for five long years. See, I have even placed a sign reading ‘‘It is forbidden to open this door without administrative order’’ above your door!’
Pierre Pradel nodded slowly, his fat features devoid of expression as he stared up at Henri.
‘So it is Dumas’ recipe, then – your revenge will be as it was in The Count of Monte Christo. You will leave me here to starve,’ he said in a quiet, resigned voice.
With a brusque shake of his head, Henri contradicted this assumption.
‘That’s no recompense for the time and effort it took me to build this cell. No, I will not leave you to starve – and neither will my revenge be as I’d first imagined, with your tongue being cut out just for starters.
‘The good book says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: because of you I spent five years of my life buried in a Reclusion cell, so now the same fate must befall you, for the same period of time.
‘So the interior of this cell is all that you will see for the following sixty months, Pradel. The light above you will remain on and every week someone will bring you seven days’ worth of food. It is possible that you will lose a little weight.
‘In keeping with the rules of solitary confinement, you will not speak to the person who opens the trap in the door to pass you your provisions: if you do so, you will be given a warning to desist. Disobey this, and the light will go out for a week. See, it is pitch-black without it.’
Turning off the bulb, Henri succinctly demonstrated his point.
As he turned it back on, the hatch in the cell door opened and he said, ‘This is your first week’s supply of food, Pradel. Hurry up and take it.’
Feverishly hoping that this was a nightmare from which he would soon awake, the former prosecutor took the four baguettes and the large bag of dried fish and fruit from whomever was on the other side of the door. The hatch was too small even to see the person’s hand.
‘I will try to ensure that you receive some variation in your diet, Pradel, but obviously we have to give you food that will not perish too quickly. Water you can get from the tap, as much as you like. I hope that you live to see your release.’
Making a determined attempt to check his despairing cry, Pradel then forced a sneering tone to his voice as he said, ‘Do you think that you will get away with this, Grandet? I have friends, people who will alert the police, people who will – ’
‘You have no one,’ said Henri in a soft, chiding voice. ‘No one at all. You are as friendless as you have always been. Admit to yourself now that nobody will report you as missing. No one cares. You are as inconsequential to society as a down-and-out, which is pretty much what you are anyway.’
This was true, this was true – death Pradel could have borne bravely, even if torture had preceded it. In some strange way this concept had seemed noble to his mind. It would have proved that he’d been right to have dealt with this man so all those years ago.
But this…
This was a living death.
Five years? Good God, when released he’d be aged –
‘Henri! You can’t do this! Have…’
‘Yes, Pierre?’
‘Have…’
‘Yes?’
‘Have pity!’ Pradel finally blurted, as tears began to course down his flabby cheeks. He knew that, as yet, he would not be able to kill himself. There was no bravery or nobility in suicide.
In fact he could not see how he could kill himself, even if he wanted to. The bars seemed too high to be able to reach so to hang himself, for he stood at little more than five and a half foot. And the tiny sink hardly leant itself to any designs of death by drowning...
‘The pity that you showed myself and so many others; men whom you knew way down in that black heart of yours were innocent, victims of a plot cooked up by the pigs?’ asked Henri after a pause.
‘Please...’
‘It’s no use,’ Henri replied, suddenly sounding weary. He turned to walk away as a sudden, wildly encouraging thought struck Pradel.
‘Ha, fool!’ he cried. ‘You forget one thing! Where have I been everyday for so many years, hey? Who has grown so used to my presence – and my money – that they will surely alert the police to the fact that I am missing? Who will give the police a detailed description of you? I am at least remembered as having been a great figure in French justice, and those flics of whom you speak so disparagingly will mount a search operation that is second to none.’
Henri again gripped the handrail, and as Pradel finished speaking he smiled.
‘Such is your dreadful memory for faces, Pierre, that for many years you’ve been staring straight at a man whom you had sent to penal for bicycle theft.’
And at Henri’s side there now appeared a man whose weasel-face burnt not only with triumph, but also with his disbelief that everything had gone so exactly to plan.
‘Dubois!’ blurted Pradel.
‘You fat pig,’ was all the café owner’s husband felt able to say. He was almost entirely overcome with emotion.
‘I am leaving for Venezuela soon, Pradel,’ Henri stated. ‘I will return to France when and if I judge that it is safe to do so, for I go now to deliver a package of explosives to the police headquarters in Paris. By tonight who can say how many pigs will be dead?’
Conscious that time and indeed hope were fast running out, Pradel fixed his trembling gaze on Jean-Luc Dubois.
‘Jean... Jean...’ he mewed pitifully, entirely out of keeping in comparison to how he’d always addressed the thin man before. ‘This man is mad, surely you can see that? This house was bought in your name, wasn’t it? When it is known that
I am missing, the police – knowing that I frequent your wife’s café – will certainly go through your history and discover the link between us. They’ll be onto you and this little plan quicker than you can say knife. Think about that, Jean-Luc Dubois, just think about that!’
For a moment Pradel looked as satisfied as if he’d just given the final, extraordinary piece of evidence to a packed courtroom. And appearing suitably concerned, Jean-Luc appealed with his stupid, docile eyes for Henri’s assistance.
‘You know, you know,’ repeated Henri quietly, a little wearily. ‘We’ve talked about this before.’
‘No one knows you, Pierre Pradel,’ Jean-Luc said at length, in little more than a whisper. ‘No one will report you missing. All I have to make sure is that no one’s following me when I come to feed you, just in case. That’s all.’
‘My landlord will notice!’ Pradel cried.
This time Henri intervened. ‘You said to me once that you’d bought your room outright many years back. I took care to find this out, of course. Come now, I’ve not got the time for games. You have a five year solitary sentence to begin, and I hopefully have many flics to kill.’
‘YOUR WIFE!’ screamed Pradel to Jean-Luc. ‘What are you going to say to her each week, hey man? I mean, when you come here to feed me? She’ll notice something’s up, and what do you think she’ll think of this?’
Reluctantly, Henri motioned to someone away from him and his friend to join them. Pradel gave a hideous, canine whine as the fat figure of Madame Dubois bounded into view, her piggy eyes blazing with hate. It was now obvious as to who’d just given him his week’s worth of rations.
‘You took my man away from me for eight long years! Ten it was meant to be, for sure, but eight was just as bad! And now, Pradel, you shall taste the terror, the utter misery, of the unjustly imprisoned. When my man told me who you were, all those years ago when you first entered the café, I pleaded with him to do something. It seemed unbelievable that you didn’t recognise him. But do not imagine that he is as weak-willed as all that: he refused point blank to do take any revenge, and nothing I could say could persuade him otherwise. Oh – I had my ideas! Poisoning your brandy, for example.
‘It took Henri to talk Jean-Luc round, and here we are. Do not imagine that I hate you any less then these two men, even though it was they who suffered at your hands. If it was down to me you’d be eaten alive by rats!’
‘Madame Dubois, I was only doing my job, can’t you see that – ’
‘Silence!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’ll be taking it in turns with my hubby to drive here and give you your week’s food, and one peep out of you and I’ll turn that light off, you hear? It’ll be a thousand times worse in the dark.’
With this, the three turned as one and began walking away.
As he stared wide-eyed at their retreating shadows on the stone wall behind the walkway, Pradel suddenly shouted, ‘Wait, wait; this is a joke, this has to be a joke. In the name of Christ, you cannot – ’
‘Shut up, Pradel. I’m warning you. One more peep…’
Already Henri Grandet’s voice sounded far away, the last voice Pierre Pradel would be hearing for half a decade.
‘Henri!’ he shrieked.
The light went out.
The Burning House
The large wooden house situated close to the edge of the thick forest was burning fiercely, the fire red and yellow, magnificent against the night’s dark-purple sky. Cinders erupted into the air like fireworks but fell back to Earth well short of the assembled crowd, who stood watching the flames with grim satisfaction. No attempt was being made at putting out the fire, and as the house stood on its own no other properties were in danger.
The forest enclosed two-thirds of the village called Tisakurt, growing either side and meeting a few hundred yards behind the building that was now on fire. Seated on a fallen log just outside of the forest were a man and a woman. The woman was thin and dressed in jeans and a white shirt, watching the flames with absorption.
A short distance away was the inn where she was currently residing. Caroline Dawes was visiting Hungary in her capacity as a freelance journalist, preparing a report on the country and its people, democracy having finally been established two years before in 1989.
Dawes had no real interest in the man who was sat beside her, his face averted away from her own as he silently watched the burning house. He’d come from the direction of the forest five or so minutes after she’d taken a seat on the log.
When the man finally spoke his voice was hoarse, his English heavily accented –
‘Many have prayed for that house to burn for years.’
Immediately sensing an interesting and hence possibly sellable story – and hoping that the man’s explanation would provide the answer to the crowd’s obvious mood of grim satisfaction – Dawes replied, ‘Why?’
The man sighed before replying, the sound strangely lonely, like wind blowing through the branches of an autumn-stripped tree. His face remained inclined away from the reporter as he said, ‘A couple by the name of Kronberg brought that house nearly one hundred years before and turned it into an inn.
‘The husband, Lazio, was a harsh man who often whipped his eldest son Nicholas for failing at school. Unable to take anymore, Nicholas finally ran away. Their only other son died fighting in the Great War, and their daughter fled to Budapest in the hope of a better life. Unfortunately she found only prostitution, drink – and ultimately death.
‘At the end of the Great War the couple sat down and talked. They were in trouble, for they had hardly any money and their future appeared as bleak as their present. Unlike most of their ageing neighbours they no longer had any children to care for them as they grew decrepit, for their cruelty had driven them all away. After hours of debate they could think of only one possible solution to their problem – murder for profit.
‘They planned everything with meticulous care, Lazio digging a long trench in the wood behind the house and filling it with quicklime. The trench was well hidden, but if anyone asked what he was doing he’d only to reply that he was planning to build an outhouse.
‘But people were too wrapped up in their own misfortunes to concern themselves with another’s business, and so he dug his trench of death in peace. His wife, Susi, brought some strychnine crystals, telling the uncaring shop owner that they were being troubled by wolves.
‘From then on, eleven of the guests who sought lodgings at the Kronberg’s inn never left again. If the guest appeared well-to-do then the Kronberg’s would give them a fine meal, and at the end of this meal a special wine would be produced, the guest gladly drinking to the health of their generous hosts. The wine didn’t do their own health any good, however, as it had been heavily laced with strychnine.’
Dawes’ body shook slightly with both the chill of the night away from the fire and the man’s story. The gathered crowd continued to watch in silence as the flames devoured the house.
‘But why did they give such a meal and spend time with the guest before killing them?’ she asked softly, no longer thinking about the stiff drink and the hot shower she’d previously been looking forward to upon her return to the inn.
She saw by an almost imperceptible movement of his thin shoulders that the man had shrugged.
‘Who can tell?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Certainly not me. Perhaps it was their way of atoning for what they were going to do, strange though this may sound. But anyway – they didn’t intend to murder forever, and after a few years they were sufficiently well-off to agree to seal the quick-lime pit forever after one last killing. ‘Their last ‘guest’ was a man in his early thirties, who said that he’d only recently returned from several years spent in New York conducting business, and who bore the self-satisfied air of someone who’d done well for themselves. And so his fate was sealed, as indeed the trench would be after his death.
‘He talked with such good humour and was so friendly that the Kronberg’s were reluctant
to kill him, but his lips curled back as he tasted the ‘special’ wine he was given at the end of the meal. When he was dead the Kronberg’s searched the bags he’d left in the guest bedroom, and with shaking hands found that they were full of money. They were rich beyond even their wildest dreams.
‘But then they found something else: a photo of themselves. And only now did they realise that the genial man who’d insisted that he be called ‘Lucky’ was actually their eldest son Nicholas, who’d run away years before. They found papers in the dead man’s jacket confirming this name, and noticed a scar on his forehead that the boy had received from one of his father’s many beatings.
‘This was all too much for the elderly couple: overcome with remorse they sat with their dead guest at the dinner table, wrote a note confessing what they’d done, and drank the lethal wine themselves.’
The reason behind the crowd’s mood was now obvious to Dawes, who shivered violently and rubbed her arms. She shared the gathered locals’ satisfaction as one side of the house collapsed with a great cracking noise, the burning roof consequently slipping down. As the man momentarily turned his face towards her a sudden wind blew his curly black hair back from his forehead and he smiled sadly, the blazing fire illuminating his pinched and sallow face.
Looking back at the house he said, ‘During the years that followed the house was frequently bought and frequently sold, never staying with an owner for very long for always they complained of a vision of thirteen people seated around a dining table, all with the same horrible grin fixed upon their decaying faces. The house fell into ruin during the 60s, and now it is burning to the ground. The town, and perhaps those who were murdered, are finally free of the Kronberg’s legacy.’
