by Fred Vargas
The advance did make progress. Somehow or other, as sleep overtook other people, by three o’clock in the morning the only ones left, sitting round a table covered with glasses and ashtrays were Juliette, Sophia and the inhabitants of the ‘disgrace’. Mathias was next to Juliette, and Marc thought that he had managed this deliberately but discreetly. Oh no, the fool. He was sure that Juliette had excited feelings in his friend, even though she was five years older than the three evangelists-Vandoosler had found out her age and passed it on. She had fair skin, round arms, soft plump cheeks, long blonde hair, a clinging dress and, above all, that infectious laugh. But it had to be admitted she wasn’t trying to seduce anyone. She seemed perfectly content with her single status, running her bistro, as she had said earlier. But Mathias was on the way to being smitten. Not seriously, but a bit, all the same. When you’re down on your luck, it isn’t very clever to fall for the first woman you run into in the neighbourhood, however charming she may be. It only complicates life, and this was not the moment. And it leads to other things. As Marc very well knew. But perhaps he was mistaken. Mathias had the right to be attracted to a woman without it leading to anything in particular.
Juliette, not noticing how still and attentively Mathias was sitting, was telling anecdotes: about the customer who ate his potato crisps with a fork, or the one who came in on Tuesdays for instance and looked at himself in a pocket mirror throughout his meal. At three in the morning, everyone is indulgent towards this kind of story, whether you’re telling them or listening to them. So they allowed Vandoosler senior to tell them about a few criminal cases. He spoke slowly and persuasively. Lucien set aside his worries about rebuffing the advances from the Eastern and Western Fronts. Mathias went to fetch a glass of water and sat down again at random, without choosing a place, not even one from which he could study Juliette. That surprised Marc, who was not generally wrong about even the passing afflictions of his friends. So Mathias was not as easy to read as other people after all. Maybe he was operating in code. Juliette whispered something to Sophia. Sophia shook her head. Juliette appeared to insist. Nobody else heard what they were saying, but Mathias said:
‘If Sophia Siméonidis doesn’t want to sing, don’t press her.’
Juliette looked surprised, and Sophia, on hearing this, changed her mind. A rare moment thus came about, for the benefit of four men sitting in a wine cask at four in the morning, Sophia Siméonidis sang, in private, accompanied on the piano by Juliette, who was quite talented, but who seemed chiefly to be used to playing for the singer. No doubt Sophia was in the habit of giving such secret recitals, after hours, far from the stage, for herself and her friend.
After such a rare moment, one doesn’t know what to do. Tiredness seeped back into the muscles of the trench diggers. They stood up, and pulled on their jackets. The restaurant was closed and everyone walked home together. Only when they reached her house, did Juliette remark that one of the waiters had let her down two days before. He had left without warning. Juliette hesitated, before going on. She was thinking of advertising the job the next day but, as she seemed to have picked up a hint that …
‘That we’re down on our luck?’ Marc completed her sentence.
‘Yes,’ said Juliette, her face clearing, after getting over the worst of the difficulties. ‘So tonight, as I was playing the piano, I thought that after all a job is a job, and it might interest one of you. When you’ve been to university, a job as a waiter isn’t exactly what you dream about, but to tide you over …’
‘How do you know we’ve been to university?’ asked Marc.
‘It’s very simple, when you haven’t been there yourself,’ said Juliette, laughing in the darkness.
Without knowing why, Marc felt put out. Easily identifiable, a marked man, and slightly cross.
‘What about your piano-playing?’ he asked.
‘Ah, the piano’s another matter,’ Juliette replied. ‘My grandfather was a farmer, but fond of music. He knew all there was to know about beetroot, flax, wheat, music, rye and potatoes. For fifteen years he pushed me to study music. It was a sort of obsession with him. When I came to Paris, I worked at cleaning people’s houses, and there was no more music. Only years later did I take it up again, after he died and I inherited a lot of money from him. Grandfather had plenty of acres and plenty of ingrained ideas. He had set a condition before I could inherit: I had to take up the piano again. Of course,’ added Juliette with a laugh, ‘the solicitor said the condition couldn’t be enforced. But I wanted to respect my grandfather’s wishes. I bought this house and the restaurant and a piano. So there you are.’
‘That’s why you often have beetroot on the menu?’ smiled Marc.
‘Yes,’ said Juliette. ‘Beetroots in C major.’
Five minutes later, Mathias had been hired. He smiled, squeezing his hands together.
Later, going up stairs, Mathias asked Marc why he had not told the truth, pretending he couldn’t take up the offer, because he had something else in mind.
‘Because it’s true,’ said Marc.
‘No, it isn’t, you haven’t got anything else lined up. Why didn’t you take it?’
‘Because it’s a case of finders keepers.’
‘What do you mean “finders” … Oh blast! where’s Lucien?’
‘Oh-oh, we’ve left him at the bottom.’
Lucien, who had drunk the equivalent of twenty plastic cups, had not been able to get past the first few stairs, and was asleep on the fifth. The others hoisted him up under an arm apiece.
Vandoosler, who was in perfect shape, had seen Sophia home, and now walked in.
‘What a beautiful sight,’ he remarked. ‘The three evangelists all holding onto each other to attempt the impossible ascension.’
‘Why the hell did we give him the third floor?’ said Mathias, heaving Lucien up.
‘We weren’t to know he drinks like a fish. Anyway, there wasn’t any choice, remember, if we observe chronology. On the ground floor, there is the unknown, primeval chaos, total confusion, i.e. the shared rooms. On the first floor, the first stirrings of conscious life, man in his nakedness stands erect and silent for the first time, that’s you, Mathias. Moving up the ladder of time …’
‘What the hell is he on about?’ asked Vandoosler senior.
‘He’s preaching,’ said Mathias. ‘And why not? There’s no curfew on public speaking.’
‘Moving up the ladder of time, as I was saying, we jump over antiquity and land straight in the glorious second millennium, with the contrasts and the audacity of the Middle Ages, that’s me on the second floor. Next the age of decadence and collapse, contemporary civilisation. This one,’ said Marc, shaking Lucien by the arm. ‘Up on the third floor, bringing the strata of history and the staircase proper to an end, with the shameful Great War. Even further up, we have the godfather who continues to disrupt the present day in his own special way.’
Marc stopped and sighed.
‘You see, Mathias, even if it might be more practical to have Lucien on the first floor, we can’t mess about with chronology and disturb the layers as set out by the staircase. The ladder of time is all we have left. We can’t upset the staircase which is the only thing we have managed to keep in good order. The only thing, Mathias. We can’t destroy it!’
‘Quite right,’ said Mathias gravely. ‘That is not to be countenanced. We have to carry the Great War up to the third floor.’
‘If I might interject at this point,’ said Vandoosler senior in his mild voice. ‘You’re all as pissed as each other, and I would really like you to haul the Great War up to his correct layer of history so that I can reach the dishonourable stages of the present day where I lodge.’
To his great surprise, next morning at eleven-thirty, Lucien watched as Mathias got himself ready, after a fashion, to go to work. The final stages of the evening-and in particular Juliette’s offer to employ Mathias as a waiter-had completely passed him by.
‘Well,’ said Mathi
as, ‘you did embrace Sophia Siméonidis, twice, to thank her for singing. That was a bit familiar of you, Lucien.’
‘No memory of that at all,’ said Lucien. ‘So now you’ve signed up for the Eastern Front, have you? And are you going off with a song in your heart and a flower in your rifle? Don’t you know that everyone thinks it will all be over by Christmas, but in real life it takes longer?’
‘You really were pissed last night,’ said Mathias.
‘Keep the home fires burning. Good luck, soldier!’
XII
MATHIAS DUG IN ON THE EASTERN FRONT. WHEN LUCIEN WASN’T teaching, he and Marc crossed the line and ate their lunch at Le Tonneau to encourage him, and because they liked it there. On the first Thursday, Sophia Siméonidis ate lunch there too, as she had every Thursday for years.
Mathias operated steadily, carrying cups one by one, not trying to balance everything at once. After three days, he had worked out which was the customer who ate crisps with a fork. After a week, Juliette was giving him leftovers from the kitchen, and dinners in the disgrace had improved as a result. After nine days, Sophia invited the other two to share her Thursday lunch. The following Thursday, sixteen days later, she failed to appear.
Nobody saw her on the next day either. Juliette anxiously enquired of St Matthew if she might have a word with the ex-commissaire, after closing the restaurant. Mathias was rather put out that she called him St Matthew, but since the old man had used these ridiculous names the first time he had introduced his three fellow residents, she couldn’t think of them in any other way. So after closing Le Tonneau, Juliette accompanied Mathias to the disgrace. He had explained to her the chronological division of the lodgings, so that she would not be shocked that the oldest resident lived at the top of the house.
Out of breath from climbing the four flights of stairs so quickly, Juliette sat down opposite Vandoosler senior, who listened attentively. She seemed to like the evangelists, but to value even more the advice of the former commissaire. Mathias, leaning against a roofbeam, thought that in reality she was rather attracted by the features of the elderly ex-policeman, and this somewhat annoyed him. The more attentive the old man became, the more handsome he looked.
Lucien, back from Reims where he had been giving a well-paid lecture on ‘The Stalemate on the Western Front’, asked for a summary of the facts. Sophia had not reappeared. Juliette had been to see Pierre Relivaux, who had said not to worry, she would be back. He seemed concerned, but quite confident. Which gave one to think that Sophia had explained where she was going before leaving. But Juliette couldn’t understand why Sophia had not told her. It bothered her. Lucien shrugged. He didn’t want to upset Juliette, but after all Sophia was under no obligation to tell her everything she was doing. Juliette however insisted. Never before had Sophia missed a Thursday lunch without telling her beforehand. She always had a special dish, veal casserole with mushrooms. Lucien pulled a face. As if the veal and mushrooms would matter, if there was some sudden emergency. For Juliette, of course, the veal with mushrooms did matter. And yet Juliette was an intelligent woman. But that was the way of things, wasn’t it? Obsessed with one’s own little preoccupations such as veal with mushrooms, one ends up saying silly things. She was hoping that the old commissaire could get more out of Pierre. Although she had understood that Vandoosler was not exactly above reproach.
‘Still,’ she said, ‘once a policeman always a policeman.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Marc. ‘A flic who has been thrown out of the force might turn anti-flic, or monster.’
‘Doesn’t Sophia get fed up eating veal every Thursday?’ asked Vandoosler.
‘No, not at all,’ replied Juliette. ‘And she even has her own way of eating it. She lines up her little mushrooms, like notes on a stave, and eats her way through them bar by bar.’
‘An orderly woman, then,’ said Vandoosler. ‘Not the sort to vanish without explanation.’
‘If the husband isn’t worried,’ said Lucien, ‘he must have good reasons, and he’s not obliged to tell us about his private life, just because his wife has walked out and failed to eat her veal and mushrooms. Let it go. A woman has the right to go away for a bit if she wants to. I don’t see why we should be chasing after her.’
‘All the same,’ said Marc. ‘Juliette is thinking about something she’s not telling us. It’s not just the veal that’s bothering you, is it, Juliette?’
‘No, it’s not,’ she replied.
She appeared a pretty woman, as the glancing light from the attic windows fell on her. Having hurried up the stairs, she had taken no thought for her appearance. As she leaned forward, with clasped hands, her dress fell loosely open, and Marc noticed that Mathias had positioned himself in front of her, transfixed. It was worth it, he had to admit, for the glimpses of pale skin, rounded curves and bare shoulders.
‘But if Sophia comes back tomorrow,’ Juliette went on, ‘I’d feel awful to have been gossiping about her with neighbours who hardly know her.’
‘We may hardly know her, but we are her neighbours,’ Lucien pointed out.
‘And then there’s the tree, ‘Vandoosler reminded them gently. ‘The tree makes it more important to say something.’
‘Tree? What tree?’ asked Juliette.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Vandoosler. ‘Perhaps you could first just tell us what you know?’
It was hard to resist the old flic when he spoke in this tone of voice, and Juliette was no exception.
‘Well,’ Juliette began, ‘she came over from Greece with her boyfriend. He was called Stelios. According to Sophia, he was a loyal, protective sort of man, but as far as I could see he was a fanatic, an attractive but temperamental guy, who wouldn’t let anyone near her. He watched over Sophia, guarded her, kept her close. Until, that is, she met Pierre and walked out on her guardian angel. Evidently this caused the most awful drama, and Stelios tried to kill himself, or something like that. Yes, that’s it, he tried to drown himself, but it didn’t work. Then he ranted and raved and made threats, but finally he went off and she didn’t hear from him again. That’s all. Nothing really remarkable. Except the way Sophia talks about him. She never seems to feel safe. She thinks one day Stelios is going to come back, and that will mean big trouble. She says he’s “very Greek”, brought up on Greek tragedies and that’s something that never goes away. Sophia says we forget that in the olden days the Greeks were really a big deal. And then, oh, about three months ago, or a bit more, she showed me a postcard she’d had, from Lyon. It just had a star drawn on it, not even very well drawn. I couldn’t see what was wrong with it, but it upset her. I thought it meant a snowflake or Christmas, but she was convinced it meant Stelios, and that it wasn’t good news. It seems that Stelios was for ever drawing stars, because the Greeks had been good at astronomy and all that. But nothing happened, so she forgot about it. That’s all. But now I’m wondering, well, whether she’s had another card. Maybe she was right to feel afraid. Things we can’t understand. The Greeks, after all, they were something special.’
‘How long has she been married to Pierre?’ asked Marc.
Oh, a long time, fifteen or twenty years. Frankly the idea of someone wanting revenge twenty years on seems pretty far-fetched to me. Life’s too short, to nurse a grudge so long, you know what I mean? If everyone who’d ever been jilted plotted their revenge for years, we’d all be at each other’s throats, wouldn’t we?’
‘Well, you can go on thinking about someone for years, you know,’ said Vandoosler.
‘Killing someone right away, OK,’ Juliette was going on, without hearing him, ‘I know these things happen. A sudden rage. But getting murderous twenty years later, no, I can’t see it. But Sophia does seem to believe in some sort of delayed reaction. Perhaps Greeks are like that, I don’t know. But if I’m telling you all this, it’s because Sophia took it very seriously. I think she’s rather sorry she let her Greek go, and since Pierre’s turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, ma
ybe this is her way of remembering Stelios. She said she was afraid, but actually I think she rather likes thinking about Stelios, the long-time lover.’
‘Pierre’s a disappointment?’ asked Mathias.
‘Yes,’ said Juliette. ‘Pierre takes no notice of anything any more, that is, he doesn’t take any notice of her. He just says yes and no, that’s all. He converses, as Sophia puts it, he reads the paper for hours on end, and doesn’t look up when she goes past. Apparently that’s how he is from first thing in the morning. I told her it was pretty normal, but she thinks it’s sad.’
Oh well,’ said Lucien, ‘if she’s decided to run off with her Greek, what’s that to us?’
‘Well, for a start, there’s the veal and mushrooms,’ insisted Juliette obstinately. ‘But anyway, I’d just like to know what’s happening. I’d feel better about it if I know.’
‘It’s not so much the lunch that bothers me,’ said Marc. ‘It’s the tree. I don’t know if we should just do nothing, when we have a wife who disappears without warning, a husband who doesn’t give a damn, and a tree popping up in the garden. What do you think, commissaire?’
Armand Vandoosler raised his finely wrought profile. He was looking like a policeman now. He had a concentrated expression which seemed to draw his eyes in under his eyebrows; his nose appeared somehow more commanding. Marc recognised the look. The godfather had such an expressive face that you could tell the kind of thoughts he was having. When he looked serious, it was the twins and their mother, lost somewhere in the world; when it was medium-serious, it was police business; when it was sharp, it was some woman he was trying to seduce. At least that was the simple reading. Sometimes they all got mixed up together and then it was more complicated.
‘I’m concerned, yes,’ said Vandoosler. ‘But I can’t do much on my own. From what I saw of him the other night, Pierre Relivaux isn’t going to bare his soul to the first disgraced policeman he meets. Certainly not. He’s the kind of man who will only respond to officialdom. Still, we do need to know.’
