Cold Winter in Bordeaux

by Allan Massie

  He pulled up his singlet and scratched his belly.

  ‘But that farm. I couldn’t stay there. Don’t think I didn’t thank you for arranging to get me out of Bordeaux once you explained the danger I was in here, because I did. But I couldn’t stay there. These peasants, they’re no better than animals, filthy animals.’

  What would the farmer and his wife have thought in their turn of this half-Arab boy who prostituted himself to middle-aged men, some of them members of the Occupying Army?

  ‘Besides,’ Karim said, ‘I was worried about my mum. She’s an old sow, I know that, but she can’t do without me.’

  She had certainly told Lannes that she couldn’t do without the money her son brought in, taking over her bed to let the Boches stick it up his arse, as she put it.

  ‘I try to keep her off the drink, or ration her at least. She’s killing herself, otherwise. That’s the other reason I don’t drink myself, I’ve seen what the stuff can do to you.’

  He scratched his belly again. A pink spot flared on the café-aulait skin.

  ‘So. Young Jacques said you had something for me.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ His tongue flickered over his lower lip. ‘He’s all right, Jacques, I like him, could like him a lot, you know. Look, this is difficult. Maybe I will have something to drink. An orangeade, that OK?’

  When Lannes returned with the bottle and glass and another Armagnac for himself, Karim had taken one of his cigarettes from the packet on the table, and was leaning back, smoking and frowning. The cigarette was stuck in the corner of his mouth, gangster style, and there was something pitiful, even ridiculous, in the assumption of toughness by this skinny boy whose soft skin and dark liquid eyes made him look vulnerable.

  He doesn’t even shave yet, Lannes thought.

  ‘How old are you, Karim?’

  ‘Old enough.’

  Certainly old enough to have assumed responsibility, in some fashion anyway, for that drunken wreck of a mother.

  ‘You know what I am,’ Karim said, ‘what I do, sort of. I’m not ashamed, I tell you that. The way things are, the way I am, I don’t reckon I got much choice. Leastways, that’s how I see it and it’s my business, no one else’s. Understand? So I’m not apologising for nothing. I’m not dirt, I want to make that clear. I don’t see myself as dirt and I’m not dirt. Got it?’

  ‘I understand.’

  Lannes lit a cigarette, drew the smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled. Karim stubbed his out, reached towards the packet of Gauloises, hesitated, and looked Lannes in the eye for the first time.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Lannes said, ‘take one.’

  He flicked his lighter to the boy who moved his face forward and looked at Lannes over the flame.

  ‘Thing is, I like sex, see, and I’m good at it, give satisfaction, usually anyway, most times really. But now I’ve a problem and I don’t know, it doesn’t seem right. Well, it’s worse than that, really. It’s a lot worse. Which is why I asked Jacques to tell you I wanted to see you. Understand?’

  ‘Go on.’

  Again Karim scratched his belly. The sound of laughter came, muffled, from the bar.

  ‘There’s this geezer,’ he said, ‘old guy, been with him three, four times. I don’t like him much, something creepy about him, he has eyes of different colours, but that’s not it. I can’t say what it is, not exactly, but … anyway, I raise my price for him and he pays. Well, he came round in search of me. The old woman told him I wasn’t in Bordeaux – she can’t stand him either, says he’s a bad smell, though how she can tell one smell from another beats me. Eddy, he calls himself. You interested?’

  ‘I might be. Go on.’

  ‘Well then, it so happens I come in while he’s there. Bad timing because he was on the point of buggering off, and he comes over all smarmy and says he’s so happy to see me again, but he hasn’t come for sex, not today, which I was pleased about because I don’t like what he likes, which is the other reason I make him pay through his Jewish nose. There’s a friend of his, he says, wants to meet me, is eager and pays well. So I say, fine, because I need the cash and the old woman’s slate at the Alimentation for her rum is sky-high, astronomical. So I go with him, and he leaves me with this chap, thickset, oily hair, smoking a cigarette through a holder, who looks at me like I was dirt, and like I say, I’m not dirt, so I think I don’t have to stay here and do anything with this guy. But then he hits me, smack in the belly, and knocks the wind out of me, and picks me up and hits me on the chops, and holds me by the hair, and says, you’re an Arab and a pretty boy, and I don’t like Arabs and I don’t like pretty boys, and then he throws me down so that I’m lying across the table and he’s grabbed me again by the hair, and then … then … it’s degrading. You can guess what then, I don’t want to speak of it.’

  He had been speaking faster and faster, his words tumbling over each other, and now he stopped and looked at Lannes and there were tears in his eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to spell it out,’ Lannes said, ‘but there’s more, isn’t there?’

  Karim nodded and drank some of his orangeade. Lannes passed him another cigarette, took one for himself and lit them both.

  ‘He said he’d a job for me and I’d no choice. I was his boy now and if I disobeyed him, he’d have me carved. He’d take pleasure in carving me himself so that nobody would say I was a pretty boy ever again. Or he’d kill me. He didn’t care which.’

  ‘And the job?’

  Lannes knew what the answer was going to be, but he had to hear it from the boy. The bloody fool, he thought, the bloody brutal fool, the demented fool.

  ‘And the job?’

  ‘There was a German officer, he said. He would introduce me to him, dangle me – his words – before him. He’s a degenerate, you see, he said, has a taste for brown boys, and you’re going to satisfy it. Well, in ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t mind, you know that. But I didn’t like this, there’s something nasty about it, and I was frightened, I was shit-scared, I don’t mind telling you that, shit-scared. So that’s why I told Jacques I wanted to see you. Can you help me, will you?’

  Lannes leant back in his chair, looking hard at the boy who had averted his head.

  ‘You’ve done right,’ he said. ‘You’ve had it tough and you’re right to ask for my help. Which you’ll get. I can’t say, don’t worry, because that would be foolish, nobody’s free from worry, or from fear, not these days, but you can worry less, a bit less anyway.’

  XV

  It was still dark on a day that might never be light. Fog hung heavy. Léon, hovering in the doorway of the hut, felt the chill penetrating his bones. It was a morning made for goodbyes, and what made it worse was that he knew Alain was eager to be off. Would he give him another thought once they had said ‘au revoir’ and the car, the headlamps of which barely penetrated the gloom, had rolled out of the estate? Doubtless he would, often – they were each other’s best friend, weren’t they? – and yet he would soon be caught up in the action he yearned for, while Léon remained in limbo. And there was the too awful possibility that ‘au revoir’ might really be ‘adieu’, that they would never see each other again.

  Alain came out, wearing his greatcoat, the beret at an angle pulled down over his right ear, and a kitbag slung over his shoulder. The light in his eyes didn’t belong to this grey hour before dawn.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re not to worry. I know there will soon be something for you.’

  ‘Of course there will,’ Léon said, denying his misery.

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Well, then, we’ll see. Meanwhile … ’

  But there was nothing he could find to add to that ‘meanwhile’. To wish Alain ‘luck’? The notion was inadequate, therefore preposterous.

  ‘We’ll meet again,’ Alain said, speaking in English the first line of the song they heard everywhere.

  ‘Don’t know when, don’t know where … ’ Léon obediently responded, a tremble
in his voice.

  ‘Under the Arc de Triomphe, as we agreed, on the day of Liberation,’ Alain said, ‘if not before. You’re not to worry,’ he said again.

  ‘Of course not,’ he lied, and thought of the cyanide pill which his friend would never be without from the moment he boarded the aeroplane that would take him to France.

  Someone rapped out an order. They embraced. Léon, for the first time – the only time ever? – let his lips brush Alain’s.

  Alain stepped back, then forward again, put his hands on Léon’s shoulders, hugged him to himself, and kissed him on each cheek.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting for me. Best be off. Aux armes, citoyens! Vive la France!’

  ‘Vive la France!’

  He watched the rear lights of the car till the fog swallowed them up. Alain had tried, for his sake, to disguise his excitement, his exhilaration even, but when he had put his hands on Léon’s shoulders, it had felt like an electric charge. He turned back into the Nissen hut and lay down on his bed, his face pressed into the pillow. He remembered how he had left Bordeaux without a word to his mother. Had she sat in her chair weeping when she learnt of his departure and feared for him? And how seldom he had given her a thought since! This too was something of which he had to be ashamed. Not of course that he was ashamed of what he felt for Alain, which he had acknowledged only to Jérôme and the nature of which he believed Alain didn’t suspect.

  Two nights previously they had listened to Jérôme’s first broadcast to the Youth of France. He had spoken well, even movingly, they had agreed on that, though Léon thought the script he had been given to read was poor stuff.

  He kept that opinion to himself, like so much else.

  Alain said, ‘You see, they’ve found the right role for Jérôme. They’ll do the same for you. You’re not to worry about that. They assess us pretty carefully, you know, and not without insight.’

  But what if their assessment of him was negative?

  Then Alain surprised him.

  ‘We’re not d’Artagnan and Athos, really. I know that it’s not like the Musketeers, not really. My father brought me up on Dumas and still reads him whenever he feels low, which is quite often, poor man. But there’s no colour in our world today and no romantic exploits either. I’m well aware of that, and I realise I may be killed any day after I am parachuted into France. We may neither of us survive this war. There’s no glory in it either and if we are killed it will most probably be like a rat caught in a trap. I don’t even know if I’ll die bravely or if, at the moment of death, it will be a matter for consolation or pride that one has done the right thing. But there it is: we’d be ashamed of ourselves if we had made any other choice. So if I don’t survive and you do, I would like you when you’re back in Bordeaux to tell my father – and my mother – that I did what I thought I must do and was happy. Don’t say that I died for France, because that would make my father look sceptical – he detests the big words and high-flown rhetoric – and my mother would dissolve in floods. And I’ll do the same for you of course, tell your mother and your Aunt Miriam, and old Henri too – if things should turn out the other way. I think that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t be morbid.’ Léon forced himself to smile. ‘It’s natural what you say when you’re about to go into action, but I’m convinced we’ll both come through. We’ll meet in Paris, as we’ve agreed, at the Liberation, on the Champs-Élysées or under the Arc de Triomphe. I’ve never been to Paris, you know, and I’ve no intention of dying without seeing Paris.’

  ‘All right then,’ Alain said, ‘that’s a deal. And in any case I too am determined to see Paris before I die.’

  That evening was the only time Alain had ever spoken of death as a real possibility, though the idea of it was never far from Léon’s mind.

  There came a cheer and a babble of conversation from the far end of the hut where people were gathered round the wireless.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Wonderful news!’

  ‘It’s the turning point of the war!’

  ‘What news? What’s happened?’

  ‘American forces have landed in North Africa, near Algiers.’

  ‘You call that wonderful? It’s outrageous, an invasion of French territory, an act of aggression.’

  The speaker was their sergeant, in peacetime a Parisian lawyer who, despite his membership of Action Française, had joined de Gaulle in 1940, one of the comparatively few French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk who had declined the chance to be repatriated and chosen to remain in England. He now pulled at his moustache and said, ‘I hope Vichy throws them back into the sea.’

  It was with difficulty that Léon prevented himself from laughing out loud. Whoever said the French were a rational people? But he couldn’t help smiling and the sergeant turned on him, angrily.

  ‘Are you mocking me, little Jew?’

  ‘Certainly not, my sergeant, but we are engaged to fight against Vichy, aren’t we?’

  ‘You don’t understand, young man. You don’t begin to understand, Vichy is France too.’

  So do you cry ‘Vive de Gaulle’ or ‘Vive le Maréchal’? Léon wondered, and then it occurred to him that it might be possible, quite sincerely, to do both. Moreover, if the American landing succeeded, there might be some in Vichy who cheered it, and were ready to adjust their political position accordingly.

  XVI

  ‘So what do you make of it?’ Bracal said.

  Lannes had no immediate reply to offer because, quite truthfully, he really didn’t know what he thought. There had been rumours that the Americans were preparing a landing in North Africa, but he had discounted them as he discounted so many of the ‘on dits’which people had bandied about since 1939.

  Bracal smiled.

  ‘I’m not surprised that you decline to commit yourself, Jean, even in a private conversation. What I am sure of is that it will make your work – our work – even more difficult, not to say dangerous.’

  This was doubtless the case, but what struck Lannes was that this was the first time Bracal had addressed him by his Christian name. He couldn’t respond in kind, even if etiquette permitted him to do so, because he didn’t know the judge’s one. Indeed he knew very little about him, not even whether he was married and a father.

  ‘It may be the turning point,’ Bracal said. ‘Or it may not. What I’m sure of is that things will get worse before they get better. The word is that Laval has gone to Germany to meet Hitler – gone of his own accord or been summoned, I don’t know. When I say that’s the word, I mean it’s information a friend in Vichy has passed on to me. It’s not public knowledge.’

  Lannes thought, why are you sharing it with me?

  He said, ‘And the Marshal?’

  ‘Well, as I’m sure you realise, since Laval returned as Prime Minister in place of Darlan in the spring, the old man isn’t much more than a figurehead. Apparently he says that Laval knows how to talk to the Boches, and Darlan doesn’t. He might be right there; Laval’s a politician to his fingertips and the Admiral is really a bureaucrat. My friends say he is never happier than when drafting a memorandum which most of the time nobody reads. They don’t like Laval but they respect him even if they also deride him as an Auvergnat peasant.’

  And who were these friends, Lannes wondered, and what was their position in Vichy? Did they blow with the wind? Was Bracal alert to any change in its direction? He lit a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t understand politics,’ he said, ‘I’m only a cop.’

  ‘Oh, quite.’

  ‘But if you ask me, the Marshal should fly to Algiers. The Americans still recognise him as Head of State, don’t they?’

  Bracal’s fingers tapped out a tune on the desk, his habit, Lannes had noticed, when he wanted time to think or was uncertain what to say. The sound of a horn blared from the square.

  ‘That’s the Gestapo,’ Bracal said. ‘I’ve come to recognise their note. This news will have made them edgy, tho
ugh they’ll never admit to that. You’re right, Jean. The Marshal should indeed do as you suggest. It’s the only way to save his honour and perhaps his life. But he won’t. He has his own idea of honour, you see. It’s one of his lines, you know: I made the gift of my person to the French People and I will never desert them. You’re a reader, aren’t you? There’s a character in Dickens who keeps saying that – that she will never desert her husband. She’s absurd of course, and not only because her husband is an idiot. Do you know how many sensible people deserted in 1940? Save your skin if you can and all that. It made sense, didn’t it, sense of a sort anyway.

  ‘My son was taken prisoner,’ Lannes said, ‘and I’ve never read Dickens. My English novelists are Walter Scott and Stevenson. So you think the Marshal will stay?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘You have a regard for him?’

  ‘I was at Verdun.’

  ‘Of course. A long time ago.’

  ‘There are days it seems like yesterday, and days it seems another life. For the Marshal too, doubtless.’

  ‘Perhaps. But there’s another thing. Admiral Darlan is himself in Algiers. Pure chance. His son is ill in hospital there. But he is still the Marshal’s Dauphin, and the word is, he’s determined to resist the Americans to demonstrate his loyalty to the Axis. It’s a question of course whether the Army there obeys him. But all this is a distraction from what you have come to report to me. Are you any closer to finding the killer of that wretched woman?’

  ‘There are days,’ Lannes said, ‘when I feel further away than ever.’

  ‘Do you find it strange that we concern ourselves with such questions at such a time?’

  ‘Strange perhaps, but what else can we do? It’s our métier, just as clerks go to their offices and the wine barons still make wine.’

  He outlined all that he had learnt of the case and the course of his investigations, and finished by saying, ‘Nevertheless, it’s a case I want to solve. The dead woman was not admirable, I grant you, a procuress and, I believe, a blackmailer, but … ’