Deep down, he felt responsible for what was happening to Vango. He had betrayed the secrecy of confession by revealing Vango’s fears to Bastide.
The young seminarian had told him everything. He was convinced that he was being hunted down: cars following him in the street, his room being searched when he was out, scaffolding collapsing just behind him, as if by chance, and his nighttime struggle in the Carmelite cloisters against a shadow with a knife.
Somebody wanted his skin.
Paranoid confusion, persecution complex. Father Jean knew all about these matters. He had been a military doctor during the Great War. He knew how to gauge the effects of an illness that could lead to madness. At the beginning, people just felt they were being spied on or harassed, but then they started suspecting those close to them, and everyone became a potential threat.
Vango stopped, with tears in his eyes. He was balancing on a steel girder linking two buildings. He had just heard the seminary clock strike three in the morning. His whole life could be played out to the sound of church bells. Others, far away, chimed too, both across Paris and in his memories.
By the time the peal of bells was over, Vango had decided. He was going to make his way to Father Jean’s bedroom and turn himself in.
The priest would take him to the police and be his advocate. Vango would explain his flight. At last they would find out what he was being blamed for. This was the decision that he had reached. He would be able to explain himself because he hadn’t done anything wrong.
A few minutes later, he caught sight of the rooftops of the Carmelite seminary. There was just one more street left to cross. A black Citroën Rosalie was parked by the sidewalk. Red cigarette tips flickered inside it. It must have been hard to breathe in there. There was probably an entire police station, two or three rows deep, crammed into the smoky van. Even the metal bodywork seemed to be coughing.
The scene made Vango smile. And it gave him an idea.
Moments later, Vango found himself on the roof of the building opposite the seminary, on the other side of the street. Against his back, he could feel the warm flue of a chimney, and he could see the wreaths of smoke escaping above him.
He pulled a few badly pointed bricks out of the wall and placed them on top of each terra-cotta chimney pot. Now the smoke was being held prisoner. He positioned himself close to the gutter and waited.
It didn’t take long.
Windows could be seen lighting up and opening, and people were coming outside to catch their breath on the balconies. A few first shouts were heard, then came the stampede down the staircase. Because the smoke couldn’t get out up above, it was spreading through the apartments.
Vango slid in through a skylight, landed in a stairwell now heaving with people, and carefully started combing the smoke-filled apartments. He didn’t want to put anybody in danger. He made sure that everywhere was empty.While he was moving about, he deliberately put his hand in some fireplace soot and rubbed it on his face. It would be impossible to recognize Vango in the middle of these shadowy figures rushing down the stairs, their cheeks blackened with smoke.
On the second floor, he went up to a woman carrying two children. He grabbed hold of the little one, who was crying.
“I’ll help you.”
He hurried down into the street, caught up in a crowd of people in pajamas. The police officers had come out of their car. They were as surprised as everyone else.
Vango crossed the street to join those waiting on the sidewalk. He was just a few paces away from the seminary door. He turned toward a police officer and placed the screaming baby in his arms.
“Are you the police?” asked Vango.
“Yes . . .”
“Right, well, tell your friends that my grandmother is up on the top floor. She’s looking for her cat. She won’t come out without it.”
The police officer was holding the baby as if it were a bomb about to explode. He handed it over to the first person who came along, signaled to his colleagues, and ran toward the building. The bell on the fire engine was getting closer.
“There’s a grandmother on the fifth floor!”
Vango disappeared into the crowd.
Small miracles can accompany great misfortune. He had always thought that. You just need the confidence to believe it.
Vango arrived in front of the seminary door and pushed against it with his shoulder. Bad luck — it was closed. He took a step backward but didn’t even have time to try it again. By a miracle, it opened straight away. Bad luck, it revealed Weber, the seminary caretaker. By a miracle . . . no. Weber froze.
For a moment they stared at each other.
Was it possible that he might not recognize Vango? The latter was counting the seconds and waiting for the miracle to happen. Weber’s face lit up. He opened his mouth wide and had to restrain himself from calling out.
Vango had stopped breathing.
“Nina Bienvenue,” said Weber.
“I beg your pardon?” mumbled Vango.
“It’s Nina Bienvenue.”
“Who?”
“I’m a girl from out of town . . .”
“Come again?”
“Look, my loverboy . . .”
Spoken by a Capuchin monk in his dressing gown, these words were surprising to say the least. His cheeks had turned bright red.
“Take me in your arms, my tender one, my handsome one, take me in your arms, my pet. . . .”
Weber had indeed opened his arms wide. Vango took a step to the side.
“Look,” said the caretaker solemnly. “Nina Bienvenue, the singer from La Lune Rousse!”
Vango turned around. On the opposite sidewalk, barefoot and breathtaking in a nightgown that didn’t cover her knees, with a pink fur collar and a pink flannel knot tied at the hip, not to mention the face to match, was Nina Bienvenue, the cabaret star from La Lune Rousse nightclub in Montmartre. She was twenty-five and had already captured all the hearts in Paris.
She was the final miracle. The ideal diversion. She had found herself as smoked as a kipper in her spacious second-floor apartment.
Weber was seeing stars. He knew every song.
It helps to know that Raimundo Weber was a Capuchin monk from Perpignan who had been allowed to retire to the capital and who played the foxtrot at night on the chapel organ. He was less than five feet tall, but each hand spanned two octaves.
He threw back his shoulders, undid his dressing gown, and twirled it around him like a bullfighter. He was wearing checked pajamas. He took one step toward the singer, then another, then another, as if inviting her to dance the tango in the street. He ended up giving a bow that, given his lack of height, brought him level with the cobbles. Then, with another bullfighting swish of his dressing gown, he covered the bare shoulders of the beauty.
“Allow me, Mademoiselle. From an admirer.”
Nina Bienvenue smiled.
Vango was already in the courtyard. He crept down a long corridor and entered another courtyard. Hearing voices draw near, he threw himself into a dark corner, then climbed lizard-like up a pipe attached to the wall. He was back on the roof. He could breathe again.
He had always felt better closer to the sky. He was instinctively drawn to heights. Take yesterday’s bad luck, for example, which had threatened to shatter his life — hadn’t it occurred just as he was lying on the ground for the first time?
He had spent his childhood on cliff tops, directly above the sea, among the birds. He had learned to tame the vertical.
Vango took a few steps along a narrow ledge. Father Jean’s bedroom was just there, in the small wing, at the back of the cobbled courtyard.
Father Jean, his only hope.
Two men were standing on the steps, guarding the door.
These guards weren’t in Vango’s way, because he wasn’t the kind of person who entered boringly via the doors, but their presence alarmed him. He hoped they hadn’t caused Father Jean any bother on his account. Above all, he hoped that nob
ody thought Father Jean was involved in his escape or in whatever misdeed he stood accused of. Misdeed. What misdeed?
When he had slipped into the Smoking Wild Boar, as a last-minute hire to peel potatoes, Vango was trying to find out about his crime. He had discovered the superintendent’s hideout and had listened in on him, but he hadn’t learned anything. The only revelation had come from another voice, as gentle as the summer rain, which had stirred up emotions inside him, making him capsize under the weight of tears.
Ethel.
He had heard Ethel’s voice for the first time in five years.
So she had come.
In the restaurant, he hadn’t even been able to turn around to take a look at her. But he could tell that she hadn’t changed. Vango had met Ethel in 1929, when she was twelve and he was fourteen. That meeting had changed a lot of things in his life. From that day on, the world had seemed more wonderful to him, and a bit more complicated too.
A candle was shining in Father Jean’s window. He must be at home. Vango climbed over the gutter, lowered himself so that he was hanging over the void, dropped to the window ledge on the top floor, and then performed the same set of acrobatics to descend another floor. Just below him, on the steps, the guards were lighting a cigarette. Vango glued his face to the windowpane. A single candle, almost burned to the quick, illuminated the room. He could see Father Jean asleep in bed.
He must have dropped off during his evening meditation. Vango smiled. That was just like him. Father Jean was still fully clothed and holding his rosary.
The window was open. Vango simply had to push it. He entered the room.
He was almost safe. With Father Jean by his side, nothing more could happen to him.
Vango was worried about frightening the priest.
“It’s me, Father. Vango,” he called out very softly.
Because the window had been left half open, the temperature in the bedroom was glacial. Vango didn’t dare get too close to the bed. He decided to wait for the priest to wake up.
Looking for a chair, he noticed that one section of the room was cordoned off with tape a meter off the floor.
Vango slid underneath the tape and got as far as the small desk where he had spent many hours at the side of his old friend.
“A desk is a boat,” Father Jean had told him one day as he sat down at it. “This is how you should work. Lean over your book and hoist the sails.”
Out in the corridor, a door slammed. Vango waited for some time before taking another step.
The desktop was in disarray. Fountain pens lay in a sea of ink half soaked up by the wood. A large notebook was open. Strangest of all, a line of white chalk had been drawn around each object as if to mark its place.
Vango shivered and leaned over the notebook. On the page he saw a dark stain and two words, in Latin, scribbled feverishly in the hand of Father Jean:
It only took a second.
He understood everything. The stain was a bloodstain. The room had been left in the state in which it had been discovered. The man lying on the bed was dead.
Now Vango understood his crime.
Father Jean was dead.
And the two words written on the notebook were accusing him:
In everyone’s eyes, he was Father Jean’s murderer.
He was being hunted down for this crime, which must have been committed the previous night, just before the ordination.
Vango collapsed on his knees in front of his friend’s bed. He took the dead man’s frozen hand and pressed it against his forehead.
The worst. The worst had just happened. A spiky ball of nails was spinning around in the pit of his stomach. He could feel his heart and his skin being turned inside out, the way the hunters of his childhood skinned rabbits in Sicily.
But by the time he stood up, a moment later, he was convinced that the two words written by Father Jean weren’t an accusation.
They were an alarm cry, an order telling Vango what to do.
Flee.
Salina, Aeolian Islands, Sicily, sixteen years earlier, October 1918
They pushed open the door, and the storm entered too.
There were four of them. Four men carrying a lifeless-looking woman wrapped in the red sail of a boat. Everybody stood up. Tonino the innkeeper cleared a table in front of the bread oven and called to his daughters. They put the body down on the wooden tabletop.
“Is she still alive?” asked Tonino.
His oldest daughter unwrapped the red cloth, ripped open the soaking-wet dress, and put her ear to the woman’s heart. The customers at the inn, the owner, the fisherman who had brought the body in — the whole room held its breath.
Carla listened for a long time.
“Well? Carlotta!” Tonino shouted impatiently.
“Shhhh,” came her reply.
She couldn’t be sure. The wind was whistling outside. A bougainvillea branch was knocking against the shutters. Nothing is quieter than a heartbeat. And when it’s up against a storm, it’s like the tinkling of a tiny bell against a brass band.
Carla finally drew herself up to her full height and smiled.
“She’s alive.”
Her little sister was already bringing over sheets to dry the body off. She took two large stones that were warming up near the fire, wrapped them in a piece of fabric, and slid them like hot-water bottles against the woman’s damp skin. The girls waved their arms to shoo away the men, who were entranced by the pair of naked shoulders.
“Ciao, signori! Ciao!”
They held up a sheet as a partition so they could undress her. Tonino declared that the drinks were on the house. There were twenty people at his inn here at the small port of Malfa.
Bad weather’s good for business, the innkeeper had thought earlier in the day as the sky turned black. And sure enough, that morning the inn at Malfa was full.
Not that there were many inhabitants left on the island. In just a few decades, the population had been decimated. People had set off in boatloads to seek their fortunes in America or Australia. They left ghost villages in their wake.
“Where did she come from?” he asked.
“We found her on the stone path above Scario Beach.”
So spoke Pippo Troisi. He wasn’t a fisherman. He grew capers and had a vineyard, but he was a plump man who was hired to help make the boats heavier on days when the wind was up.
Pippo had been the first to see the woman and he felt personally responsible. This was a very proud moment in his life. From time to time he would glance proprietarily at the shadow-play being acted out behind the sheet.
“But where does she come from?” Tonino asked again.
“Nobody knows her,” Pippo replied.
This news resulted in a lengthy silence. Everybody knows everybody on an island. And although a few foreign sailors turned up occasionally in the ports, no one had ever brought back an unknown and extremely beautiful woman from a cliff-top path.
“She was soaked to the bone,” added Pippo. “She must have been out there in the rain for a long time.”
“But where does she come from?” the innkeeper repeated, staring into his glass.
The wind was now playing notes down the chimney as if it were a flute.
“She comes from the sea,” answered a voice from behind the sheet.
It was Carla. She stuck her head out to say, “This woman is as salty as a barrel of your capers, Pippo Troisi!”
They all stared at one another in silence. The sea had given them everything. They lived by it, and sometimes they died by it. The Tyrrhenian Sea delivered surprises to them: a washed-up whale calf, pieces of wreckage, and even seven crates of bananas that had fallen off a boat the previous summer. But it had never flung out a woman like a flying fish, halfway up the cliff on Scario Beach.
“She’s opening her eyes!”
They rushed over. But Carla and her sister kept everyone at a respectful distance, and they didn’t dare come any closer.
The woman was now covered in a thick layer of shawls and blankets. The girls had done a good job. She was more decent than a nun. Even her hair was covered with a piece of cloth. All you could see was her face, and her neck leaning against a cushion.
She wasn’t nearly as young as they’d initially thought. But it was as if the cold had applied makeup to her face: pale complexion, dark lips, eye shadow. As she warmed up, her cheeks became powdered with pink. She kept her eyes open for a long time before uttering a single word:
“Vango.”
They found the little boy an hour later, between two rocks on the beach. He was two or three years old. His name was Vango. He was wearing blue silk pajamas. His curls fell over his eyes. He didn’t seem to be afraid. In his hand he held an embroidered handkerchief scrunched into a ball. He stared at everybody around him.
Vango.
The woman had described the exact place where he was hidden. They had brought in the doctor to translate her instructions. He leaned over and listened to her as she whispered a few words.
“She speaks French,” he said, sounding very serious, as if diagnosing tonsillitis.
There was a ripple of satisfaction. Everybody knew that the doctor, who liked to recount his past travels, could talk forever about France.
“What’s she saying?”
Dr. Basilio seemed a bit embarrassed. The truth was, he had never been farther than Naples. His knowledge of the French language was rather hazy, even if he always walked around with an old copy of L’Aurore newspaper and liked to sigh, “Ah! Paris, Paris!” while staring at fashion photos.
He was trying to piece together everything he knew in a bid to understand her.
“She speaks other languages as well. It’s all mixed up like the Tower of Babel.”
This time, he wasn’t lying. In her state of extreme fatigue, the woman kept switching languages.
“That’s Greek,” said the doctor.
“But what does it mean?”
“It means that she speaks Greek.”
His logic was met with general admiration.
Eventually they found out that she spoke Italian too. Feeling relieved, the doctor led the interrogation. He repeated in Sicilian everything she mumbled in near perfect Italian, which everybody understood anyway.
Vango Page 3
