Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Grund stood up.

  A second later, the cabin door was flung open.

  It was Agent Zero-Zero. His clothes were ripped, and his right ear was bleeding. He seemed unaware of his sorry appearance and was trying to behave in as relaxed and natural a manner as possible. He was smiling stupidly with one hand in a pocket while twirling the fingers of his free hand, as a sign for the passengers not to worry about him.

  He limped over to his superior and whispered something nobody else could hear. Max Grund pushed him gently toward the door, and they exited together. Eckener apologized to the guests, then followed the agents into the corridor.

  “What is going on?” demanded the commander.

  “We’ve got him. Agent Heiner has found him.”

  “I spotted somebody climbing a ladder in the dark. I called out several times, but he didn’t answer. He was trying to escape through a trapdoor up there.”

  “There’s an exit up there?” asked Max Grund.

  “Yes,” said Eckener somberly. “That’s the route if someone needs to go outside to repair the exterior canvas of the zeppelin.”

  “This exit is not on my plan.”

  “I don’t give a fig about your plan! I command an airship. Not your piece of paper.”

  Eckener turned to face Heiner.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I knocked him out. He’s on a landing near the wine cellar.”

  “Did he put up any resistance?”

  “I grabbed him by the ankles just as he was about to go outside. He said he would rather die. We fought.”

  Poor little one, thought the commander. But out loud he said, “I want to see him.”

  “You will see him when I decide,” Grund barked.

  “In that case, I will have you disembark immediately.”

  “I am the representative of the Reich’s police.”

  “And we are in Italy. The Reich doesn’t extend this far. For the time being.”

  Max Grund was wary of the mad old commander who was only too capable of acting on his words. He paused for a moment, before remarking, “You seem to be very concerned about this man. I trust you’ve had nothing to do with him being here in the balloon, Commander. Go ahead, Heiner. We’ll follow you.”

  A minute later, they reached the platform via a narrow passage. In the gloom, they could clearly see the body lying on the floor, facedown. Eckener was the last to reach the top of the ladder.

  “Do you know him?” Grund grilled the commander.

  Yes, even without any light, Commander Eckener recognized the figure.

  “Do you know this man?” Grund barked again.

  “Yes,” admitted Eckener. “I know him.”

  “Who is he?”

  The commander wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “That is my chef, Otto Manz. You have just knocked out my chef.”

  Max Grund turned the body over.

  It was indeed Number 39, the zeppelin’s head chef.

  Commander Eckener grabbed Franz Heiner by the collar.

  “Get out of my sight! Go and find Dr. Andersen, and four men to carry him!”

  Zero-Zero obeyed without even asking permission from his boss.

  “As for you,” said the commander, turning toward Grund, “from now on, you’ll do everything I tell you. You are in my zeppelin!”

  “The Graf Zeppelin belongs to the Führer of the Third Reich,” Max Grund countered chillingly. “You own nothing. I can crush you like an old dog run over in the road.”

  Eckener was shocked by this violence. From now on, civilized men were all on a stay of execution, like animals on a busy roadside.

  “You . . .”

  The commander didn’t know what to say.

  “You . . .”

  He was stunned. He didn’t recognize this language. He saw Max Grund laughing for the first time, coming up to him and patting him on the cheek.

  “There you go. I do believe you’ve understood.”

  The police officer turned his back and headed toward the passengers’ gondola.

  Slowly, Otto Manz was regaining consciousness.

  Eckener sniffed and leaned over him.

  “You’ll be all right, Otto. We’re going to get you down into the officers’ ward room. But what were you doing up here?”

  “Lady . . .”

  Eckener lent his ear.

  “I wanted to die. To climb up there and throw myself into the sky.”

  “It’s over now, my friend,” the commander reassured him.

  “Lady,” Otto repeated. “She didn’t recognize me.”

  Eckener smiled and rubbed his cheek.

  “So that’s why . . .”

  “Lady . . .”

  “Are you in pain?”

  Otto didn’t reply, so the commander kept going: “You’ve been working too hard. I had an idea for a boy who could have helped you in the kitchen. But I don’t think it’s going to work out after all.”

  There was a small whimper and then Otto said, “She didn’t recognize me.”

  The commander sighed.

  “Women — what can I say, old friend? Women.”

  There followed an unexpected moment of peace. Two men, both wounded in different ways, on the floor, chatting away like a couple of friends camping under the stars and exchanging everyday banter. Sometimes, the simple things in life make us feel better.

  “Ah, women . . .”

  Eckener was lying next to his chef, his hands under his head.

  “I got to know my wife on solid ground,” he said. “I prefer it that way. Up in the air, nothing is quite real. It’s all just stories: our balloon, Africa, Amazonia, the winds that carry the birds over the Black Forest. Do you believe in any of them?”

  Otto was listening with his eyes shut.

  “They’re just fine stories, my friend. We say we’re flying, that we travel the world. We say that. People like it. One day, everything will stop. History will be over. We’ll open our eyes. And the campfire will be a distant memory. Get married down below, Otto. Find a real woman, with earth all the way up to her knees. Find someone who’s right for you.”

  Otto smiled in the dark.

  “Find someone who’s right for you,” repeated Hugo Eckener. “Someone who stays on after the stories are over and who doesn’t fly off when you breathe on her. Are you listening, my friend? Will you think about what I’ve said?”

  “I’ll think about it, Commander.”

  Otto tried to roll onto his side to talk to the boss.

  “Commander . . .” he said. “I wanted to tell you . . . I heard the way the police officer was talking to you. You mustn’t allow yourself to be treated like that.”

  Eckener looked up. He had sensed the presence of someone, to the side of them. Scanning the gloom, he allowed a little time to go by, but already they could hear the men climbing up.

  “And as for you,” he whispered, “don’t budge. Not a single move until I tell you.”

  He sounded authoritative but gentle.

  “Are you talking to me, Commander?” asked Otto.

  “No, I’m . . . I’m talking . . . I’m talking to myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It has to do with that police officer you overheard. . . . I’m talking to . . . my pride, my sense of personal pride. . . . I’m telling it not to budge. The time will come.”

  In the shadows, Vango knew the message was for him.

  Everland, Scotland, at the same time

  It was raining. Three horses were galloping through the birch trees. A man was riding the first horse and leading the two others by a rope.

  They formed a tightly packed group. At each bend, it looked as if their hooves might get caught up or the leash tangled in the branches.

  But the rider led his team ably through the forest. Silently, the horses obeyed his orders. They enjoyed the sensation of the papery bark rubbing against their flanks. They barely noticed the rain, unlike the young
man, who had soaking-wet hair and needed to blink every now and then to stop the raindrops from blinding him.

  They galloped across a stream, over fallen trees. After the birch wood came a great expanse of red that accentuated the gray sky. The horses picked up the pace through the heather to reach the top of the hill, from where all three of them sped in a single movement when they saw the rooftops streaming with water in the distance: a misty black castle, like an engraving that had been left out in the rain.

  The rider made his charges pause for a moment. They’d set off again soon enough. But he had noticed a white smudge in front of one of the towers. Something had changed since he’d left the castle in the early morning to collect two horses from the other side of Loch Ness.

  A small white smudge on a moor in a season when white didn’t exist.

  The horses were champing at the bit. He relaxed the bridle on his mare, and the team set off again at its triple gallop.

  On spotting the rider approaching between the low stone walls, two grooms hurried down the steps. But he didn’t make for them, directing the horses instead toward the tower and that patch of white.

  Still at a gallop, he released the two other horses and continued alone.

  He rode up to what looked like a white shroud. And, coaxing his mare to get as close as possible, he tugged at the sheet, which slid off to reveal a small, gleaming Railton automobile.

  “Ethel!” he called out, heading for the main steps.

  She was back.

  “Ethel!”

  He jumped off his horse and dodged the small gaggle of house servants rushing toward him. The castle door opened as if by magic. Behind him on the stone floor of the entrance hall, he left a trail of earth and muddy grass.

  “Would Sir like to give me his coat?” the butler inquired in vain.

  “Where is she?” the young rider called out, climbing the stairs.

  “In the Master and Mistress’s bedroom,” replied the man, already bending down to pick up the clumps of earth as if they were precious objects.

  The rider rushed down a final corridor and pushed open the door.

  She was there, with her back to him, buttoning up a large pair of men’s trousers. She was wearing a yellow striped shirt. Her hair was wet.

  “Ethel?”

  She saw him in the mirror, ran over to him, and threw her arms around his neck.

  “Paul.”

  He stood there, arms by his sides, his face giving nothing away.

  “I got here two hours ago,” said Ethel, burying her head in his neck. “I was waiting for you.”

  Paul was almost leaning over backward now; he was distant, his chin held high, as if a child with jam smeared all over her had thrown herself into his arms.

  “I was waiting for you,” she said again.

  “You were waiting for me?”

  “Yes. And it felt so long.”

  “You were waiting for me?” echoed Paul, who thought he must be imagining this.

  She winced with embarrassment, but he couldn’t see.

  Ethel had made it to the castle before the rain, but she knew she wouldn’t escape the downpour of Paul’s anger.

  “You were waiting for me? You say you were waiting for me when you were the one who left without any warning, seventeen days ago?”

  He removed the hands that had been thrown around his neck and pushed them away.

  “I sometimes wonder if you realize what you’re doing, Ethel. Seventeen days!”

  She pretended to be surprised by this number and made a vague show of doing a recount on her fingers.

  “And so for seventeen days, I’ve stared out of the window at the horizon, scanning the woods, being consoled by Scott, Mary, and the staff from the kitchens. Dining alone downstairs without knowing whether you’d ever come back.”

  “I’m back; you know I always come back.”

  He stamped his heel on the parquet floor and turned away from her.

  She took a step toward him. She loved Paul. She blamed herself when he suffered.

  “Paul . . .”

  “Yesterday evening, Thomas Cameron and his father came over. You invited them a month ago, I believe. You’d promised them a trip in the car.”

  Another embarrassed face from Ethel. Yes, that dimly rang a bell.

  “They were dropped off at the end of the driveway,” said Paul. “I didn’t know what to say when I saw them arriving.”

  “The Camerons? I’d said ‘perhaps,’” muttered Ethel.

  “Everything is ‘perhaps’ with you, Ethel. You might as well be named Perhaps.”

  “Sorry, Paul.”

  “I lent them horses to ride back home. I don’t understand why you weren’t here.”

  “I don’t care what the Camerons think,” she said.

  “Well, I felt embarrassed. The truth was, I didn’t know if you were dancing in the cellars of Edinburgh, London, or somewhere else, or lying half dead in a ditch behind the hill.”

  “This time, I wasn’t dancing.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Her wet hair was going curly around her eyes.

  “I was in Paris.”

  “I know.”

  “How?” blurted Ethel.

  “Because a Frenchman called for you last night. And there was a telegram from him this morning.”

  He was watching her closely now.

  “Do you know his name?” Ethel asked sharply.

  Paul didn’t answer.

  “Where’s the telegram?”

  “In my pocket.”

  “And you opened it?”

  Silence.

  “I’d decided that I would open it this evening if you hadn’t returned.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Slowly, he held it out.

  Her trembling hand took the telegram, and she went over to the window. She turned her back to Paul, but he could see from the way her shoulders were moving that she was breathing heavily.

  Vango, Vango, Vango.

  She kept saying his name over and over again to herself in the hope that it would be printed in blue at the bottom of the folded piece of paper between her fingers. Did he remember her?

  She opened the telegram and scanned it, and Paul saw her shoulders fall in one movement.

  “Is he handsome, at least?” he asked.

  She turned around and gave a disarming, disillusioned smile. At last, he let her hold his hands.

  “He’s an old gentleman with a face like a Scottish terrier,” she replied. “He’s named Superintendent Boulard. He says he’ll be here tomorrow.”

  Paul looked at her. Nothing surprised him anymore. He stared at the bed and then the whole bedroom.

  The windows were streaming with rain.

  They let a moment or two go by.

  Ethel’s dirty clothes were hanging off a leather armchair. Three or four ancestral portraits, with peepholes in their eyes, were secretly spying on them.

  “It never changes in here.”

  “No,” said Paul. “Mary puts out fresh flowers every day.”

  “She even changes the sheets.”

  “She says, ‘I’ve tidied the Master and Mistress’s bedroom.’ I don’t know what she finds to tidy!”

  They both laughed at the same time.

  “Yes,” said Ethel.

  “Even though the Master and Mistress haven’t been here for ten years. Nobody comes into this bedroom.”

  Then he stared at Ethel and added, “Apart from you, who’s always trying on Father’s clothes.”

  Together, they stared at the mirror.

  And then they lost any desire to laugh. They could see themselves at four and twelve years old, coming into their parents’ bedroom at daybreak, climbing aboard that big bed like highway bandits. With one eye open a crack, their father would call out to an imaginary coachman to pick up the pace, and then he’d grab his sword to defend his wife, who was hiding under a pillow. The little bandits would roll onto the carpet.

 
When Mary, the housekeeper, came in to open the curtains, she would witness this crazy family writhing about on the bed and on the floor, looking exhausted, the little girl often planting herself underneath the chest of drawers, wearing her father’s enormous boots.

  “They’re mad. My God, they’re mad,” Mary would often say.

  But in her bed at night, she prayed for them to stay like that forever.

  Ethel and Paul closed their parents’ bedroom door softly behind them. Dinner was ready downstairs. There was a fire in each room. The two of them sat down, side by side, not far from the fireplace, at the head of a vast table that ended somewhere in the mists of Scotland.

  There were three people to serve them and two butlers at the doors.

  The candlelight from the chandeliers blended with the light from the fire.

  “I know who it was you wanted to see in Paris,” said Paul.

  She looked down.

  In the food on his plate, her brother had drawn a V with a knife.

  Above the Mediterranean, the same evening

  At about ten o’clock, on board the zeppelin, somebody put an armful of rope next to Vango in the darkness. The stowaway was getting ready to jump when he heard Captain Eckener, out of breath, whispering: “They’re looking for you. When I give the signal, you’ll go out onto the roof of the zeppelin. Lower yourself to the ground with the rope. We’ll fly very low. Good luck, Jonah.”

  What signal? What ground? Vango was about to ask. But just then a voice nearby on the ladder called out, “Commander? Are you looking for something?”

  A beam of light was trained on the commander’s face. It was an electric lightbulb fixed to a square battery as big as a tin of biscuits. Yet again, the voice belonged to Max Grund.

  “You take your evening strolls in very out-of-the-way places. . . .”

  Since the incident with Otto the chef, the two men from the Gestapo had called off their search. They planned to start again the following morning by requisitioning ten crew members. Within a few hours, they’d be sure to find their stowaway.

  “Can I help you?” asked Grund.

  Hugo Eckener was using his hand to shield himself from the light.

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do for me.”

  “Perhaps you have a problem?”