Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  The doe was delighted. She was dancing about on the spot.

  “Shoo, shoo!”

  This time, she jumped on top of a large table, took a sharp turn along a leather banquette, and threw herself at the superintendent.

  When Ethel walked into the small hunting room, she could tell that something was up.

  The superintendent was standing in his socks on the chest of drawers, holding on to a chandelier. The doe was staring at him, batting her long amorous eyelashes.

  “Could I ask you for my umbrella, please, Mademoiselle?”

  Ethel clicked her fingers and the doe, looking moody, sloped off toward the door.

  “I’m sorry. You’ve met Lily,” said Ethel, holding out the umbrella and shoes.

  Boulard stayed on top of the chest of drawers long enough to tie up his shoelaces, while checking that Ethel closed the door firmly behind Lily.

  “Does she . . . does she live with you?”

  “No. She comes from the woods, but she sneaks into the house whenever a door or window is left open.”

  The superintendent was astounded. In Paris, not even the pigeons got close to his windows.

  “I bottle-fed Lily for the first year of her life,” Ethel explained in her faint accent. “She’s become very . . . clingy.”

  It always took Ethel a while to get used to speaking French again.

  Boulard had to admit he’d never bottle-fed a pigeon. Which might explain why they never ventured into his apartment.

  Once the superintendent had set foot on the parquet floor again and was reunited with his umbrella, it was only a matter of seconds before he was back in the character of Auguste Boulard, the impressive police superintendent from Paris, who had solved some of the century’s greatest crimes.

  “I don’t imagine you’re paying me a visit just because of your love for animals,” said Ethel.

  “Indeed not, Mademoiselle. Indeed not.”

  It had only taken two days — the two days following the events at Notre Dame — for Boulard to realize that he wouldn’t find out anything about Vango Romano in Paris. He had never been confronted with a situation like this before: a boy who had lived for four years in a seminary, alongside dozens of others who all viewed him favorably, and even admired him; a boy who had fit well into a close-knit community but about whom people could say nothing at all. Nothing.

  Boulard sometimes investigated street crimes, and now and then, a witness might not be able to state his own name, answering, “They call me Mosquito around here — I don’t know my name.” But Vango wasn’t a street urchin: he had been a boarder in a Carmelite seminary for four years.

  From the other students, Boulard had tried to track down any piece of information that could have rooted Vango Romano somewhere on this earth: his place of birth, the surname of a family member, his parents’ address. The superintendent had inquired about the boy’s hobbies, where he spent his holidays, what visitors he had, what mail he received . . .

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  “You’re making fun of me, Canon!”

  Boulard had ended up in the office of Canon Bastide, whose responses to the same questions involved his eyes bulging as he tied knots in his cassock.

  “Nothing,” the canon replied over and over again, fueling Boulard’s outrage.

  “You’re making fun of me! You can’t seriously be telling me that you don’t know his date of birth!”

  This time, Bastide’s face lit up.

  “Oh, yes . . . his date of birth, I should be able to help you out there.”

  Lieutenant Avignon, who was standing behind Boulard, looked interested and got out his notebook.

  “Around 1915,” said Bastide. “Or perhaps 1916.”

  Boulard gritted his teeth.

  “Or 1914,” ventured Canon Bastide somewhat abashedly.

  Augustin Avignon had noted down the three years in his notebook.

  “That’s about as accurate as the year in which Abraham was born,” thundered the superintendent.

  “As a matter of fact,” admitted the canon, “I believe that Vango tried to pass himself off as a little bit older than he really was, in order to make it to the priesthood sooner. He was just a kid. He requested a special dispensation from Rome. I don’t know how he got one. He spoke Italian, had connections.”

  Had connections! The whole problem was that Vango didn’t appear to be connected to anyone.

  The canon did, however, say a word or two about the paranoia from which Vango suffered.

  “Paranoia?”

  “Yes,” confirmed the canon. “He was a vulnerable boy. Unfortunately, the accusation is only too clear. It’s written on the victim’s desk.”

  Boulard had enough schoolboy Latin to understand what Fugere Vango meant, but he didn’t trust the evidence. He could tell that Bastide didn’t like Vango. He changed the subject.

  “Do you have the file for that special dispensation?”

  “Nothing,” muttered the canon, for the fiftieth time.

  Boulard collapsed into an armchair. He glanced behind him at Avignon.

  “Well, do you have anything else to ask this good father?”

  “Nothing,” the lieutenant replied.

  “Right!” groaned Boulard, checking his pocket watch.

  The superintendent stood up and headed for the door. His thoughts had now turned to a bistro behind Saint-Sulpice. A bistro that served up veal cheeks to die for.

  Boulard was hungry.

  Just as he was about to turn the handle, he heard the canon remark, “When all’s said and done, there’s only one person who could help you. He knew everything, I think. He vouched for the boy from the outset.”

  Avignon got out his notebook again.

  “He was the person,” revealed Bastide, “who introduced Vango to me. He got him in here.”

  “And he is?”

  “He was Father Jean. And Vango killed him on Friday night.”

  “The day you find a witness who’s alive, Father, do let me know.”

  Boulard slammed the door. The wall quivered, making the crucifix perform a half turn.

  Now that he was standing opposite Ethel, the superintendent adopted a different tack.

  “Yes, of course we’re making progress with the investigation. We’re not far from getting to the bottom of this business. The noose is tightening. It’s in the bag. The secret won’t go with him to the grave. . . .”

  Boulard was playing for time with this string of clichés, while working out the best way to interrogate Ethel.

  He never prepared his line of questioning.

  His mentor, Jacques Aristophane, chief commissioner of the Paris Police when Boulard had started out in 1891, had always told him that to arrive with questions meant already providing the answer.

  Aristophane used to explain his method with quick-fire examples, sometimes referring to nursery rhyme characters. “You see, Boulard my boy, if you ask the milkman whether he saw Mother Michelle’s cat last night, you’re already letting him know that Mother Michelle has a cat, that there’s a problem with that cat, and that the problem happened last night. But, Boulard my boy, if you just say ‘Hello,’ you have a chance of hearing something.”

  Boulard, who was very young at the time, would listen religiously to his mentor and from then on viewed his childhood nursery rhymes in an entirely new light.

  “Because, you see, the milkman will tell you, ‘Now, look here, today’s got off to a bad start. Someone has spilled all my milk. It’s bound to be the neighbor’s son, because he’s always playing with his ball in the courtyard.’ Well, he’d never have told you that, Boulard my boy. He’d have answered you with, ‘No, I didn’t see any cat.’ And that would have been an end to the matter. He’d never have made any link with the overturned milk, because he was so primed to blame the neighbor.”

  Jacques Aristophane had taught Auguste Boulard everything he knew.

  The chief
commissioner died from a pistol shot in 1902 while attempting to intervene in a gangster street fight at the end of Rue Planchat, by the gates to Paris. The young Boulard, leaning over him, had harvested his dying words: “The shot has gone under my rib, Boulard, my boy, so it must have been the shortest one who fired.”

  Even his final sigh was a police investigation.

  As Boulard recalled those early days, he was also mindful of the fact that young Ethel was smart and wouldn’t easily volunteer any information.

  “So, as I was saying, we’re very close to solving it. . . .”

  He stopped to look at her and added:

  “In any case . . . the guilty party, Vango Romano, is under lock and key.”

  It came to him just like that, the way you flick a ball over the tennis net. It was worth a try.

  The results weren’t long in coming. Ethel clenched her fists and hid them under her short hunting jacket, as if she were cold. Boulard noticed this, but a normal observer would only have seen the girl’s apparent indifference. Just in time, she caught the ball: “You’re very efficient. Bravo, Superintendent! But I’m not sure why you’ve come all the way here to tell me that.”

  “Because I’ve been told that only you can give me the information I need.”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  “No, I mean who told you that?”

  “Vango.”

  This time he had her. The Aristophane method was working.

  Ethel sat down in an armchair beside the fire. They fell silent for a while. Ethel knew there was no point in denying it. If Vango had given her name, she couldn’t contradict him.

  Deep down, she was also enjoying imagining the shape that her name formed on Vango’s lips.

  Ethel.

  Ask Ethel.

  That’s what he must have said.

  Boulard, who was pretending to be very offhand about it all, was miming playing the double bass with his umbrella.

  “Can I see him?” Ethel finally ventured.

  “Who?”

  “Him.”

  Boulard shrugged, making an apologetic face as if to say, It all depends on what you’re about to tell me.

  Ethel’s foot gently nudged a log, about to escape the flames, back into the fireplace.

  “I knew him a little for a few days. We were very young.”

  Now it was the superintendent’s turn to sit down. She amused him. At barely seventeen years old, she sounded like a respectable old lady referring to a love affair in her youth.

  “I was traveling with my brother, Paul. Vango was there. We became friends.”

  “Was it a long time ago?”

  “Oh . . .”

  She flung her hand over one shoulder as if talking about a bygone era, about a period in time that the old superintendent could never have known.

  “Your parents allow you to travel like that?”

  Ethel smiled.

  “Our parents leave us a little too much to our own devices, Superintendent. Our parents aren’t very . . .”

  “Clingy?” guessed Boulard.

  “Yes. It’s a real word, isn’t it? Clingy?”

  Boulard shrugged again.

  “Our parents,” she repeated, “aren’t what you might call ‘clingy’ at all.”

  Her eyes were moist, but she tried to smile and continue talking.

  “So, as I was saying, I was traveling with my brother, and Vango was there — that’s all.”

  “What do you know? What did Vango tell you about himself?”

  “Very little. He told me very little.”

  At least she had avoided the dreaded refrain of “nothing,” which everybody used when talking about Vango.

  “Well?” asked Boulard.

  “I know he grew up on an island. Or a few islands.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure. He used to say ‘on my islands.’ Because he spoke such good Russian, I imagined them as islands in frozen seas or on the Amour River.”

  Or was it Amur? She knew it sounded like the River of Love, anyway.

  “I . . . I mean —”

  “He spoke Russian?” Boulard interrupted her, frowning.

  In Paris, a German seminarian had claimed to be very close to Vango because he spoke German just like he did. And Canon Bastide said that he knew Italian. Were they all talking about the same boy?

  “Yes, he spoke Russian. He spoke with . . .”

  Ethel’s expression became agitated for a moment. She appeared to be troubled by something.

  “With?” quizzed Boulard, who wasn’t going to let the matter drop.

  “With a Russian who was traveling with us.”

  Ethel was silent for a moment.

  The Russian.

  His face had just flashed into her mind. She had been searching for the owner of that face for several days now, and it belonged to the man who had taken out his weapon on the square in front of Notre Dame. The man with the waxen face, the man she’d already seen somewhere before, and she had suddenly remembered where: their paths had crossed in 1929, during that long voyage with Vango. But she didn’t want to mention any of this.

  Boulard stood up sharply.

  “Why on earth did he speak Russian? I mean, is he Russian?”

  “No,” she said, “I think one of his parents must have been British or American.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he spoke my language perfectly.”

  Boulard couldn’t make head or tail of any of this. He rubbed his ear, which was something he always did on a bad day. During the last week, he had developed a sketchy sense of Vango, as a rather bland and mild character, but now, all of a sudden, it felt like he was hunting down a globe-trotting chameleon who was sticking out his multicolored tongue at him.

  “By heck, I’ll get him in the end!”

  Ethel’s eyes widened. Too late, the superintendent realized what he’d just said.

  The girl’s eyes were as green and shiny as polished bronze.

  “You haven’t got him yet!” she gasped. “You just wanted to make me talk.”

  Boulard bit his lip.

  “I must tell you, Mademoiselle . . .”

  She stood up.

  “No. You’re not going to tell me anything. You are welcome here, Superintendent. Do at least stay until tomorrow.”

  She kept on talking, with no letup.

  “Mary will show you to your bedroom. Lunch has been laid out for you in there. Along with some clothes, because you appear to be rather short of them. Do take a walk this afternoon. I can show you the view from the hill. We shall dine late tonight. My brother, Paul, will be joining us, but he won’t be back until nine o’clock. It will be a fun evening: the three of us have plenty to tell one another.”

  She sounded sad and severe now as her voice betrayed a hint of emotion: “But as for the subjects we’ve touched on, Vango and everything else, I don’t want to hear another word. Do you understand? Not a single word or I’ll throw you out, even if it’s in the middle of the night, and even if Lily and all the other wild animals are out there roaming the Highlands. Until later, Superintendent. And not another word.”

  Ethel nodded and walked away with her head held high.

  Boulard’s day was certainly memorable.

  He settled into a bedroom the size of a concourse in the railway station of a large provincial city. For Mary, the housekeeper, it was love at first sight, and in the kitchen she was constantly referring to their guest as “the handsome Frenchman.” Nobody else recognized this description of the short superintendent.

  Boulard went for a stroll over the hills, dressed in a pair of Scottish laird’s trousers whose hems had been hastily taken up by Mary while he was having a bath.

  That evening, the dinner was as much fun as predicted. Paul simply couldn’t understand what this man was doing at his table, but he welcomed him like an old friend. At midnight, Mary led the superintendent back to his bedroom by candlelight.

&n
bsp; “Tell me, dear child,” said Boulard before attempting to leave Mary in the corridor by closing his door, “the parents of these young people, where are they at the moment? Are they far?”

  “Oh, no! They’re never far, Mr. Poolard. That would be out of the question! The four of them love each other too much. . . .”

  She drew him over to the landing window and pointed out some flickering lights less than a hundred meters away.

  “Just there, look, the little graveyard is under the tree.”

  The superintendent nearly keeled over.

  “Ah, right, yes . . . you’ve put my mind at rest. And how long have they been there?”

  “Ten years. Ten years in four days’ time.”

  The next morning, Ethel offered to drive Boulard to Inverness station. Mary had crammed a bag full of souvenirs for the handsome Frenchman. He made his excuses for not taking the stag’s head she wanted to give him.

  She must think he lived at Versailles. He was trying to picture his mother’s face when, on opening the front door of their three-room apartment in Rue Jacob, she discovered those antlers.

  “Good God, Auguste!”

  He already had to hide his collection of toy soldiers under his mattress because, according to Madame Boulard, they were a dust trap.

  “The superintendent is rather overladen,” Ethel explained to Mary. “We’ll send it to him.”

  The two of them slid into the twelve-cylinder Railton. The racing car wasn’t built for two people, but Ethel was very slim. And Boulard pulled his stomach in.

  The young woman and the superintendent made a funny sight, squeezed in like two yolks in one egg, with a suitcase into the bargain.

  The automobile drove away from the castle. It took a left bend, and then its engine roared as it vanished on the horizon.

  Mary went back inside, forlorn and still holding the stag’s head.

  The superintendent felt out of his depth, glued to this young woman at eighty miles an hour on a bad road.

  “She made it to a hundred and sixty an hour on the circuit at Brooklands!” shouted Ethel.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m saying you don’t need to give me a demonstration!”