Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  “It’s a trap to make me come out of my hiding place,” the padre explained. “Viktor wants to make sure I’m still alive. He wants my skin.”

  “So why go?”

  “Because if I don’t, Boulard swore that he and his men would come to get me and arrest me for nondenunciation of a crime, consorting with criminals, and being party to arms trafficking as the friend and confessor of Viktor from 1919 to 1920. If the police come here, all my brothers will fall with me.”

  They both went quiet, and so did the bees.

  “What about you, Vango? How do you know Superintendent Boulard? What do you have to fear from him?”

  Vango wished he had a life story to tell Zefiro. A heroic life in which everything made sense and even the shadier parts of which could be clarified in a sentence.

  But if he’d been able to speak, Vango’s words would have sunk like flares down a bottomless well.

  Zefiro held out his hand to help the young man stand up again.

  “Good-bye, Vango. I’m leaving. I’ll be back soon.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “You do love me a bit, don’t you?”

  Thomas Cameron was sitting next to Ethel in a red velvet box in the dress circle. The theater was full and buzzing. It was hot. Down below, in the stalls, female members of the audience were fluttering their fans.

  A sweltering summer had taken hold of Paris. The men in the auditorium were pushing up their sleeves and unfastening their waistcoats. The ladies left their shoulders exposed. It felt more like a scene under the weeping willows on the banks of the River Marne than an evening in a majestic theater.

  Ethel was leaning over the edge of their box so as not to miss a single word of the performance.

  In the next box, a group of foreigners was proving rather noisy. And beyond them, in a box carefully chosen so that they could watch the young couple without disturbing them, Lord and Lady Cameron were grabbing the opera glasses.

  “Look, he’s talking to her! She’s accepted the flowers!” cooed Lady Cameron, blushing with excitement.

  Ethel appeared to be the only person interested in what was happening onstage.

  It was the second act of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo had just entered the garden of his family’s enemy: Juliet’s garden. All that was visible in the darkness were handsome Romeo’s eyes. The cicadas were chirruping in cages hung up in the wings. And, for once, Juliet wasn’t being played by an aging thirtysomething actress. She had black hair that cascaded down as far as the jasmine beneath the window.

  “Don’t you love me a bit?” Thomas whispered into Ethel’s ear, gently changing the word order to try his luck again.

  Ethel put a finger to her lips to make him hush. But poor Tom was talking very quietly already, in a voice that wavered.

  He repeated his question one more time, almost inaudibly.

  “Yes, Tom,” she whispered so as to be left in peace.

  She was watching Romeo climbing toward Juliet’s window.

  What else could she say to someone she had always known, who had grown up not far from her in Scotland, on a neighboring property? She loved Tom Cameron the way she loved the landscape of her childhood. She loved him as she did the white sky in the Highlands, the memory of the games she used to play with Paul, the shape of a boat on Loch Ness, or the smell of stuffed pork belly cooked by Mary. No more, no less.

  But she knew that, for several years now, Tom had been expecting much more from her.

  For Ethel, it was exactly as if one of the twisted beech trees behind the castle had knocked at her door one morning to ask for her hand in marriage. What could she say? Yes, she loved those little trees beneath which she used to build her dens. She loved them dearly . . . but would she have wanted to marry them?

  On stage, Juliet could be heard sighing to Romeo:

  What man art thou that, thus bescreen’d in night,

  So stumblest on my counsel?

  Even though Ethel could recite the play by heart, she felt as if she were hearing it for the first time.

  In the neighboring box, the foreigners were talking in Russian. One man was watching the play, hypnotized. The others seemed to be discussing matters more serious than the love affairs of a young Italian girl from Verona.

  Their eyes glued to their opera glasses, the Cameron parents couldn’t have cared less about Juliet either. They were trying to gauge the reaction on Ethel’s face.

  “Got her!” yelped the father. “He’s got her!”

  You’d have thought he was commentating on a clay pigeon shooting session.

  Yes. Ethel was deeply moved. She was stroking the roses Thomas had given her. But if she had tears in her eyes, it was because, on stage, Juliet had said to Romeo:

  If they do see thee, they will murder thee.

  Ethel was fond of impossible loves.

  Ronald and Beth Cameron had always believed that Ethel would marry their Thomas. It would make an ideal alliance between the families, two estates, two sides of Loch Ness. The death of Ethel and Paul’s parents had been interpreted as a sign of fate by the Camerons. They had shown a great deal of compassion toward the two orphans. And there’s nothing like compassion to make certain people feel they have some kind of ownership over others. . . .

  Not only that, but it wasn’t all for the worse. The Camerons had always been oddly afraid of Ethel’s mother and father. They found them rather wild. They agreed in private that they were aloof, over the top, and even, “Yes, Ronald, let’s be honest about it: pretentious.”

  At their funeral, Lady Cameron had whispered into her husband’s ear something along the lines of “It was always bound to happen,” as if those who had departed this life had been foolhardy enough to live life to the full.

  Their untimely deaths had not, therefore, changed anything about the Camerons’ project to marry off Tom and Ethel. On the contrary. As a twelve-year-old heiress, Ethel was suddenly very rich, which was far from being a nuisance in the eyes of the Camerons.

  In her box now, Tom’s mother was thinking about all the little Camerons this lovely young couple was going to provide her with. When she closed her eyes, she could imagine nine or ten of them. They were all the spitting image of their father. Even the girls.

  As for Sir Ronald, he was busy congratulating himself on his decision to invite Ethel to Paris for the month of July. The Camerons often spent the summer in a different city: Vienna, Madrid, or Boston. This year, they had rented an apartment opposite the Eiffel Tower and were living in an idyllic postcard between the big department stores, the Opera, and the Longchamp Racecourse.

  For Ethel, the invitation fit perfectly. She would be in Paris, chaperoned by the Camerons and so would be able to continue her search for Vango while being able to reassure her brother, Paul, at the same time.

  Paul, for his part, had been very surprised by his sister’s enthusiasm as she was leaving Scotland, given that she had been starting to distance herself from Tom Cameron and openly despised his parents.

  Ethel hadn’t traveled with her hosts. She had explained that she would rather have her own car, but in reality she wanted to make a little trip to Germany in order to question Hugo Eckener.

  In the course of their dinner on Lake Constance, Eckener hadn’t volunteered anything, not a single piece of information as to Vango’s whereabouts, even if Ethel had fleetingly detected that he knew something. She had arrived in Paris two days later.

  Theater, museums, and horse races — this was the style in which Ethel was concluding her third week in Paris. She dragged Thomas to dances at which he didn’t see her all night long. For the Bastille Day celebrations on July 14, she had crossed the whole of Paris without ever being out of earshot of accordion music. There was dancing on every street. At dawn she scooped up Thomas, asleep on a bench.

  She was starting to be noticed and talked about in the newspapers. A society columnist had taken to signing off his daily write-ups that summer with lines such as “And the mysterious
young lady was in the auditorium again” or “It didn’t matter that the orchestra was out of tune; she was there.”

  Lord Cameron, who read the French press, had vaguely advised his son to challenge the journalist to a duel. But son and mother were less keen.

  Ethel hadn’t been informed about her reputation preceding her in the press, and Thomas nearly coming to blows to protect it. She had enough on her plate already.

  Before setting out from the Highlands, she had warned the Cameron family that she would have to absent herself from time to time in order to visit an aunt who lived in the center of Paris, on the Île de la Cité. At first, the Cameron parents had been annoyed by this news, but they positively encouraged Ethel when they discovered that the aunt was very rich, very old, and childless.

  And so Ethel had caught the bus and arrived at the Quai des Orfèvres, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame. Her elderly aunt was named Auguste Boulard. Ethel wanted to ask him about the latest news on Vango.

  But when she got there, the only person she could see was Lieutenant Avignon. Boulard was away.

  “Will he be here tomorrow?”

  “No, Mademoiselle.”

  Avignon had recognized Ethel. He offered her a seat in Boulard’s office, but she immediately stood up again. She walked around the room, browsing the files and papers and checking the photos on the walls.

  “Where is he?”

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “And where did he go?”

  “As I said, I’m not . . .”

  Avignon, who was feeling intimidated, put his hand down to close a file she had just been leafing through.

  “Please, Mademoiselle . . .”

  “Monsieur?”

  By accident, his little finger had landed on Ethel’s. She didn’t move. He started to blush dreadfully. She removed her hand once he’d nearly fainted from embarrassment.

  “Well, from what I can tell, Monsieur Boulard is always on holiday. I believe I saw him this winter in a striped swimming costume on Lake Constance.”

  “It’s for w-work,” Avignon stammered, his eyes bulging at the prospect of his boss in a bathing suit.

  “And where did you say he is now?”

  “As I’ve explained, I’m not at liberty to tell you.”

  “Oh, no, you definitely did tell me.”

  Avignon was startled. What had he said?

  “Only joking,” Ethel murmured, removing the thumbtacks that held a picture in place on a corkboard. “Did you copy that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not bad.”

  It was based on Ethel’s portrait of the assassin, which she had handed over fifteen months earlier in the upstairs dining room at the Smoking Wild Boar.

  “Will I be able to see the superintendent soon?”

  “In two weeks.”

  Ethel dropped the portrait.

  “Two weeks! But what if it’s urgent?”

  “The same answer. Come back in two or three weeks, Mademoiselle.”

  Boulard had set off in search of the only witness capable of identifying Voloy Viktor with any certainty. This was his top priority as far as he was concerned. He had gone alone and hadn’t wanted to reveal his destination to anybody. Not even his faithful Avignon.

  Ethel scooped up the picture of the killer’s face off the floor. It was in three pieces. She glanced questioningly at Avignon.

  “Yes,” the lieutenant explained, “I draw the mustache and the hair on separate pieces of paper. These are the first things a wanted man can change about himself. He’ll cut his hair or his mustache.”

  Feeling rather proud, he took out a box containing different hairstyles and sideburns that could be put together in any combination on the portraits.

  “So you see, it’s really very easy. I always do it this way.”

  Ethel put the pieces of paper down on the desk and played with them for a few seconds, adding and then removing the Russian’s little mustache.

  “You’re terribly clever, Lieutenant.”

  He blushed again. Ethel headed for the door.

  “Do you have a message for the superintendent?” asked Avignon, following her out.

  “No. I’ll be back. Thank you.”

  She shook his hand firmly.

  When Avignon returned to his office, he smiled on discovering that she had added two chunky braids and a thin beard to the assassin’s portrait.

  The lieutenant remained in a dreamy frame of mind for quite some time. That girl seemed to have stepped out of a novel. Even her perfume had a make-believe quality.

  Once she’d sat down in the bus, which was heading along the Quai des Grands-Augustins, Ethel took out of her bag a small and very slim brown file that she’d found on one of the shelves in Boulard’s office. A file on which two words were visible: THE CAT.

  And below that were two more words, underlined in red ink: “Investigation abandoned.”

  It was the only file that had looked interesting to her. And it just happened to be the file of a girl with a close interest in Vango. Ethel opened it. It was empty.

  In the theater, it was now Act Three. Ethel was listening to Juliet’s father swearing that his daughter would be forced to marry the man he had chosen for her. Juliet was resisting. Her heart belonged to Romeo.

  Slippery as an eel, Ethel was avoiding Tom’s hand. She was watching Juliet standing up to her father.

  Cameron senior kept sending satisfied signs to his son. Thomas Cameron was trying to put on a brave face, but he was clinging to his seat so as not to throw himself into the orchestra pit. She didn’t love him. How would he survive? How could he ever tell his parents?

  On stage, Juliet’s father was booming:

  But fettle your fine joints ’gainst Thursday next,

  To go with Paris to Saint Peter’s Church,

  Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.

  In the box next to Ethel and Tom’s, silence had been restored. The blond man was still watching the performance attentively.

  His name was Sergey Prokofiev. And during the summer of 1935, he was working on a ballet score inspired by Romeo and Juliet. He had heard about this production in Paris and had been granted permission to come and see it.

  But he was under escort and would be heading back to the Soviet Union the next day.

  The curtain fell. The houselights came up. It was intermission.

  Three quarters of the auditorium leaped to its feet, as if this were the moment everyone had been waiting for. Plenty of spectators only go to the theater for the intermission.

  “Are you coming for a drink, Ethel?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll stay here.”

  Thomas stood up, trembling at the prospect of what he had to reveal to his father.

  Ethel glanced over at the blond man. He hadn’t moved. He was staring at the curtain as if he could still see shadows moving on it. Someone leaned over and whispered in his ear. Ethel could only see the back of this second man. When he turned around, she felt her heart pounding very fast.

  It was the marksman from Notre Dame.

  He had shaved off his mustache, but his portrait, which she’d seen only a few days earlier in the office at the Quai des Orfèvres, was so clear in Ethel’s mind that there could be no doubt about it.

  Boris Petrovitch Antonov might not have seen Ethel.

  He was there to accompany Comrade Prokofiev, the composer. There were also two representatives from the embassy as well as Comrade Vladimir Potemkin, the ambassador himself, plus four security guards. It was a major responsibility.

  And so he might not have seen Ethel, but for the fact that the composer’s eyes met those of the young woman at precisely the moment Boris was staring at the composer. It was like a ricochet effect. Ethel’s look of astonishment piqued the composer’s curiosity. And seeing that curiosity in Prokofiev’s eyes made Boris turn his head to discover Ethel, a few meters away
, sitting in an almost deserted theater, with Tom’s bunch of flowers still in her hands.

  They stared at each other.

  For a moment, Ethel thought he was going to run away. She was ready to give chase and was already cursing the fact that her choice of dress would make her hobble. It was a black dress in which Ethel had disguised herself in her bedroom, during those years of mourning when she was just a little girl, with the dress trailing behind her to form a long, tragic train.

  Ethel was already unbuttoning a short tight coat that came to her hips and restricted her movements. She wasn’t going to let this man get away a second time. Suddenly she froze.

  Their roles had just switched.

  No, the man wasn’t going to get away. Boris Petrovitch Antonov was staring at her intensely. He had gauged Ethel’s determination. He knew she would always be behind him, getting in the way of his work. And so he had just decided to eliminate her.

  “Will you excuse me for a moment, Comrade Prokofiev?” he inquired with a polite smile.

  Addressing the composer in what was now a completely empty auditorium, he exited the box.

  “Well?”

  Two floors lower down, in the theater foyer, surrounded by the throng of spectators, Thomas was looking very pale in front of his parents. Lord Ronald Cameron had a bottle of champagne in one hand and was filling the glasses.

  “What are we drinking to, Junior?”

  Tom hated it when his father called him Junior.

  Lady Cameron was blushing and in a state of suspense at the news her son was about to announce.

  “Well?” she urged him again.

  “Well, I spoke to her. . . .”

  “And?” his father went on, his face contorted with excitement.

  “And she said . . .”

  Suddenly, the lights went out. All around them, people shrieked in fright.

  A second earlier, Boris had appeared in Ethel’s box. She was standing in front of him. He was holding a knife between his fingers, the blade hidden in his jacket sleeve.

  “You really do get everywhere, Mademoiselle. But not for much longer.”

  He lunged in her direction, and right at that moment, the lights went out. Refusing to deviate from his plan, he plunged the knife with the precision of a street fighter. When the lights came back on ten seconds later, Boris Antonov let out a roar of anger that was drowned out by the racket going on elsewhere. He had sliced through the red velvet of the chair. Ethel had vanished.