Margont pressed his injured side so that the sharpened pain would chase away the effects of the alcohol again. Lefine, understanding what Margont was doing, shook his head, alarmed. Margont did not take his eyes off Relmyer.
‘When I went with you to explore that ruined farm, it had been burnt down. Apart from the fact that he wanted to burn any possible evidence, it was his response to your provocations. He was letting you know that he had received your message loud and clear, that it was in your interest to abandon your search and that, if you continued, you would end up like Franz and Wilhelm! He was trying to scare you.’
‘At first, I was shocked,’ conceded Relmyer. ‘But then I was happy! My plan was working, the man was starting to panic.’
‘The scene you made at the ball was all part of your plan!’ ‘Absolutely. And I also left a tin soldier on poor Wilhelm’s freshly dug grave.’
Relmyer’s assured facade was crumbling. Another facet of his personality started to show through the tatters.
‘What choice did I have? To sit on the terrace of a Kajfeehaus on the Craben, sampling the coffees all day and hoping to see him pass by? No, I had to force him into an error, and to do that I had to lower my guard. Yes, I almost got myself killed, but see how we have progressed, thanks to my plan. Now we know that he serves in the militia and that he’s an officer! I’m going to find out all about the Landwehr and the Viennese Volunteer regiments! And all that in addition to the clues we might find in the registers Ah yes, the registers, let’s talk about those properly! What exactly was that report that threw us into the lion’s mouth. Is it a fake?’
‘Of course it’s a fake! I suspected as much. It was too good to be true. Vienna is crawling with spies and Austrian sympathisers, and we know our man sometimes crosses over to our side of the line. He must have asked one of his acquaintances to find out about me. He learnt that I was spending my days in the Kriegsmin-isterium. It was even easier to discover since I was doing everything possible to make it known. Obviously he must have understood that I was on the trail of the registers. All he had to do was make up that false letter ... I can only dare to hope that he wrote it himself: but all the same he wouldn’t make us a present of his handwriting.’
‘How did he get it into the Kriegsministerium?’
Relmyer lowered his gaze. ‘I didn’t find it there, in fact. A Viennese man sold it to me. He claimed to work for the army and to have stolen a heap of documents just before Vienna fell to the French. He said he wanted to make money selling them to the French. According to him, he was keeping a watch on everyone who went into the Kriegsministerium, trying to find out what they wanted and seeing if that corresponded with what he possessed: maps, reports, files on officers, inventories, the layouts of fortified buildings ... I offered him a tidy sum in exchange for a dozen letters relating to the Austrian army. Only the one I showed you had any bearing on our case. The Viennese man must have been hand in glove with our murderer. Unfortunately the murderer used an intermediary. I know that because while I was launching my expedition, two of my hussars, who were discreetly following the Viennese fellow, grabbed him to interrogate him. He described the individual who had contacted him and paid him to make sure I received the false letters. The description did not tally at all with the man we’re looking for. Alas, it has not been possible to identify him. I turned in the charlatan to the general staff. If he really does possess confidential documents, our marshals will be very interested by what they find at his house.’
Relmyer did not care about the war. His remark was merely an attempt to placate Margont and Lefine, but it failed dismally.
‘It was a dirty trap!’ responded Margont. ‘You knew it: that’s why you pretended that you found the document yourself. It looks as if our adversary did not even bother to finesse this story of the trade in stolen documents. I believe that he suspected that you had guessed that it was just a trap! It’s as though together you had agreed a sort of rendezvous! The two of you, you agreed to play the game! And you, Lukas, you even limited the size of your escort so as not to dissuade him from attacking.’
Relmyer rapidly assessed these words.
‘I don’t know if he knew that I was a willing victim of his trap. But your friend Piquebois had definitely spotted that my first attack was intended to incite him to act. He believed that his assault would prevail anyway/
Lefine concluded, exasperated: ‘And here you are, all in disarray except for our enemy. Lieutenant Relmyer, you have manipulated us since the beginning because you knew that we would oppose your tactic of the earthworm on the fish-hook!’
Relmyer could not justify himself any further. He turned away from them.
‘I am truly sorry. But I would do it all again if I had the chance. I will leave you. I’m going to Mazenau, even though I’m sure that Johann Crich is an invention of our murderer. But you never know. In any case, this business is nearly over one way or the other.’ Saying this, he left. Outside three duels were waiting for him, three possible deaths.
CHAPTER 21
THE two élite hussars were waiting in the sun. NCO Cauchoit had unsheathed his sabre and was amusing himself using it to reflect light into the faces of the passing soldiers. Oh, if only he could annoy one of them into challenging him! But no. They hurried past, pursued by the light, or they let their retinas burn gently, pretending not to notice anything. Cauchoit was having fun when Relmyer came out of the hospital.
‘I’m not waiting any longer, Officer!’
‘Where has your companion gone?’ queried Relmyer in surprise. The NCO glowed, like his blade.
‘I laid that pretentious hussar of the 5th out cold while we were waiting for you. You must have seen his stretcher-bearers as you came out. Let’s fight here! What better place for a duel than a hospital?’
He was almost in ecstasy. Like a lover on the point of climaxing with his sabre.
‘Victory at first blood?’ he proposed.
Relmyer nodded. Yet he had heard that Cauchoit was a sudden death expert. Of the nine ‘first blood’ duels that he was known for, seven had ended abruptly with the death of his opponent (and this figure assumed that the hussar of the 5th Regiment was going to survive). He was nicknamed ‘the widow-maker’ ... Cauchoit had the falsely innocent cruelty of a little boy who finds it funny to throw the cat in the fire.
He took off his pelisse and his dolman and held them out to his friend, the trumpeter, who willingly played the role of coat-stand. Every gifted duellist seemed to have a beatific disciple, a Pagin. Relmyer put his belongings in a wagon stained with dried blood. The sharp sunshine made the white of their shirts dazzling. Cauchoit talked all the time he was warming up, trying to unsettle Relmyer. He mentioned his past successes, hinted that Relmyer was a coward ... For him the duel had already started: his comments were his first strokes.
Relmyer was not listening to him. He found himself in an internal turmoil with which he was all too familiar. His past resurfaced and invaded him, like black water flooding brutally inside him. A man stood opposite and wished him harm. The features of Franz’s executioner imposed themselves on Cauchoit’s face. This confusion of identities, of time, of histories and general contexts generated a hellish chaos in Relmyer’s mind. He was terrified of seeing the man triumph anew and walk away to commit other crimes; the idea obsessed him. He had reached the point where he was no longer paying any attention to what was happening around him, to the extent that he felt he was in a sort of corridor, his only exit blocked by an enemy. Relmyer felt the irrepressible conviction grow in him that he must vanquish this man so that he could escape this tunnel, rejoin the world and resume normal life. It was as if his opponent were the stone in the cellar, which he had to make fall in order to free himself.
Relmyer had to control this whirlwind of emotions and to do this he had his blade, which hid an entire universe. The teaching he had followed, the training sessions, his reflections on the meaning of violence, the ability of mathematics to express the most apparently confusin
g phenomena in the simplest terms: all these interacted to channel the forces jostling within him. Anger, sadness, rancour, rage, anguish, hate, dismay, painful memories and unresolved grief: he managed once again to make all these currents converge towards one aim. To annihilate his opponent. Cauchoit temporarily became the focus of all his suffering.
Cauchoit strutted gracefully, the beautiful embodiment of death.
‘I find there is something of the chicken about you/ he taunted Relmyer. The way you ran away after we were attacked by the grey mice of the Landwehr reminds me of the stampede in the poultry yard when a fox appears. I would wager that your blood has the ruby colour of pigeon blood!’
Relmyer saluted him with his sabre. Cauchoit responded in the same way, then immediately lunged, trying to stab Relmyer in the side, clashed with Relmyer’s weapon and withdrew for fear of a counterattack. A simple test that he judged conclusive. Then he charged at Relmyer. In response to this head-on tactic, Relmyer
produced a complex compound attack. He pretended to parry a lunge to the throat but at the last minute dodged and feinted towards Cauchoit’s chest to threaten his left shoulder. Cauchoit, caught short, beat a retreat.
Relmyer immediately unleashed a frenetic succession of assaults: attacks, composite attacks, false attacks, attacks to the left side, whipped strokes, feints, jabs, false parries, beats, ripostes, parries, unexpected sequences ... He aimed for one side, then the other, the waist, the head, the throat, the side again, the thigh, the right wrist, the left hand ... Relmyer seemed to be able to do whatever he wanted. During his duel with Piquebois, he had studied his tactics. He had, as it were, ingested them and now reproduced them in his own way. Cauchoit, disconcerted, uselessly parried a false attack to the abdomen and received a circular blow full on the temple, which landed him in the dust.
He got up immediately, put his hand to his head and looked at his bloody palm.
‘It’s nothing! What a relief! I thought for a moment I was bleeding.’
Fury made his cut inaccurate. Relmyer dodged and plunged his sabre into Cauchoit’s thigh, pitching him for a second time to the ground.
‘You can see it better now, Monsieur?’
The trumpeter Sibot looked at his friend writhing in pain but the sight made no sense to him. He persisted in thinking that even though he could see Cauchoit on the ground, in reality it was Relmyer who had been defeated. He took several seconds to take in the true situation. And then hesitation gave way to raw violence. Sibot thrust the point of his sword in the direction of Relmyer’s face, bounding forward like a cat. Had he hit his target, the first blood would have been Relmyer’s, flowing from his burst eye, and at the same time from his brain. But Relmyer had been sharpening his reflexes for a long time and he was able to parry the blow even when his adversary’s blade had already almost completely obscured his vision. He counterattacked immediately, thrusting his sabre into the musician’s shoulder. The bone cracked, blood spurted, the man collapsed and Relmyer found himself
motionless, bespattered and dazed, alarmed by his uncontrollable capacity to trigger violence all around him.
Stretcher-bearers hastily gathered up the two élite troopers. Margont noticed the agitated throng pass in front of him and disappear into the little room where he himself had been sewn up. The floor was roughly flagged. After a few operations and one or two amputations, the accumulated blood was sluiced away with large bucketfuls of water.
Margont and Lefine were silent a moment, amazed at what had happened.
‘When Relmyer is not chasing after death, it’s death that comes to him,’ concluded Lefine, finally.
Shortly afterwards the figure of Antoine Piquebois appeared framed in the entrance. Four hussars of the 8th Regiment accompanied him. They were friends from his old regiment with only one desire: to convince him to become a hussar again. To them, their friend’s invalidity was because he was not thinking straight, not for any physical reason. They surrounded Margont and Lefine.
‘Don’t tell me that you all want to fight a duel with Relmyer!’ said Margont, irritated.
‘Not at all. We’re not at his level, alas,’ Piquebois reassured him. ‘Dear friend, I’ve heard all about your chase and your wound ... You know how I love horses. No beast understands man better! Between man and horse a harmony can be established that ...’ Words failed him. There was a gap in his discourse right there where he would have liked to express the heart of it. A tic played at his lips.
‘All right, if no one understood what I was trying to say, let him learn to ride a horse. But there is one particular case - just one! -where an event transcends our love of horses.’
‘One particular case, just one!’ echoed the hussars.
‘It’s when the first horse is killed under you in combat! In Cod’s name, that’s a baptism! It’s like the first girl one beds!’
Piquebois and his companions produced goblets they had been hiding behind their backs. A warrant officer held one out to Margont.
Piquebois, joyously excited, shouted: ‘In honour of the first horse killed under my friend Captain Margont!’
Everyone emptied their goblets, the warrant officer clinking for two people since Margont refused his glass.
‘You’re all stupid!’ exclaimed Margont. ‘I was almost killed, I ... Oh, get out! Go on!’
Piquebois and his companions went on their way, laughing. They were young and there was a war on: life was sweet. That was the way they saw the world ... In spite of the shooting pains travelling through his battered body, Margont turned to Lefine.
‘Why am I surrounded by idiots?’
‘It’s because you attract them, damn it!’
‘Listen to me: Jean-Quenin thinks I will be able to leave hospital the day after tomorrow, so I’ll leave this evening. That will be good enough; he is always too cautious. Go and see our major and tell him from me to make sure Antoine doesn’t leave our regiment; he can tell him that he’s putting him on guard or that there’s going to be an inspection of the company, or anything at all that will keep him there ... Because otherwise the malady of our friend Antoine, the “hussar manque”, will recur and we will have two Relmyers for the price of one. Can you also find me a new horse and keep me informed about the prisoners? If one of them finally decides to talk ...’
Lefine sniggered. ‘Isn’t it enough for you, all that’s already happened?’
‘No!’ persisted Margont. ‘It would take a great deal more than that to make me give up.’
‘For heaven’s sake! At the rate things are going, you’ll soon have your “great deal more”!’
But Margont was no longer listening. Luise had just arrived in the company of a hussar that Relmyer had sent to inform her what had happened. She was in tears and the man had to point out Margont before she spotted him. She crossed the room, lifting her pale blue dress slightly, but the bloodstains had still accumulated at the bottom and were gradually creeping up the azure material. She stopped in front of him.
‘Is it serious?’
‘No, it’s nothing.’
‘Why did you let yourself get wounded?’
She leant over him. Margont thought she was going to kiss him, but she slapped him hard.
‘Idiot!’
She immediately left as the wounded soldiers guffawed. Lefine shrugged his shoulders philosophically.
‘There are some days when everything goes badly and others when things go even worse ...’
CHAPTER 22
BY 11 June Margont had recovered. Lefine was regularly absent pursuing his research, and Relmyer was still spending all his time ferreting through the archives of the Kriegsministerium. They were all to meet up in a cafe on the Graben to take stock.
Margont, the first to arrive, already had three empty cups in front of him when Lefine joined him, accompanied by Relmyer, whom he had gone to uproot from his world of papers. Pagin was not far behind, of course; he followed Relmyer like a shadow. Relmyer was his mentor, the ideal older brothe
r he had never had.
They all ordered coffee while they waited for Luise, who was also to join them. The ambience was noisy and smoky. The Kajfeehaus was always full. Soldiers gathered there in spite of the high prices. Prostitutes sat on their laps and hung round their necks wearing daringly low-cut dresses, which they lifted to show off their legs. They roared with laughter when the men fought over them. Some drunken infantrymen came in, loudly calling for wine, and went angrily off again when they discovered there was none left. The owner and his sons hardly knew which way to turn.
‘Before we begin, I’d like to give you something,’ Relmyer announced.
Give them something? Lefine looked expectant. He still remembered the cascade of gold that had fallen from Relmyer’s hand onto the desk of the clerk at the Ministry of War. Relmyer lined up three tin soldiers on the table. The figurines, horsemen painted in three colours, seemed to challenge the coffee cups.
To me they are much, much more than toys. They represent our “soldiers’ oath”. After the inquiry into Franz’s death was abandoned, Luise, some friends from Lesdorf and I swore never to renounce the hunt for Franz’s assassin. I organised the ceremony -a secret meeting in the dead of night, in one of our bedrooms. To seal our pact I had the idea of using tin soldiers. Seven of us swore the oath.’
‘Where are the five others?’ asked Lefine.
Relmyer’s voice became halting and bitter.
‘I lost track of two of them. One of the others serves as an NCO in the Austrian army. The two remaining ones are here in Vienna. I went to find them. They told me they considered that the saga no longer concerns them. One of them even said that our “soldiers’ oath” was the fantasy of a handful of angry boys. He added, “Today we are adults.” Well? What do you think? Am I just a child who hasn’t managed to grow up?’
His explanation lent new meaning to the figurines.
‘That’s why I chose the tin soldiers to signal my presence - so that our man would notice me. They are testimony to my determination never to give up.’
Wolf Hunt Page 16
