Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Over in the theater bar, the moment when the lights came back on was met with a sigh of relief. Champagne flutes and glasses started clinking again.

  The Camerons resumed their line of questioning.

  “Where was I?” asked Tom.

  “She said . . .” chorused his parents.

  “She said . . .”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He was remembering Ethel’s rebellious fingers escaping his own.

  “She said yes,” Tom lied. “Ethel told me that her answer is yes, but we’ve got to wait a bit before we announce it to her brother. He’s very lonely, her brother. She doesn’t want us to talk about it until then, not even with her.”

  The parents fell into each other’s arms, moaning with joy. It was terrifying to witness. Without realizing it, each of them emptied the contents of their champagne glass behind the other’s back. They let out little squeals of delight. They were all puffed up with pride. They didn’t make a single gesture in their son’s direction.

  This was their victory.

  Ethel had leaped from her box into the circle below before tearing down the stairs. Who could have cut the power with such split-second accuracy? She ran down corridors without knowing where she was headed and arrived at the main entrance, but Boris Petrovitch was already in front of the doors, giving orders to the men there. So she started running backward, bumping into the usherettes.

  There was a door with a security guard at one end of the stretch of red carpet. Ethel made her clothes look respectable again and walked hastily toward that exit. It was the only way to the wings.

  “I should like to see Romeo,” she told the guard in her pretty accent.

  “Not during intermission. You can come after the performance. That’s when the actors receive visitors in their dressing rooms.”

  “I’ve come all the way from the Highlands of Scotland to see Romeo. I’ve brought him flowers.”

  “Yes, I can see you’ve had a bit of a journey!” He sniggered, looking at her wilted bouquet. “Like I said, come back at the end.”

  She heard a noise behind her in one of the circles. Her pursuers were hot on her heels. Ethel’s heart was palpitating.

  Just then, a mysterious voice from the wings said, “Let her in. I can vouch for her.”

  The porter stepped aside. She passed inside. There, with his shoulder pressed against the wall, was a short bald man.

  “I’m sorry I’m not your Romeo, Mademoiselle.”

  She didn’t know it, but this man was none other than the columnist Albert Desmaisons, who had been singing her praises in the press. She hesitated.

  “Hurry up, little lady. You have someone to see. And the intermission is almost over.”

  Ethel gave him her bouquet and a peck on his left cheek.

  “Thank you, Monsieur. Thank you.”

  Listening to the sound of her heels lightly heading off, the columnist stood there marveling. He was seeing stars and didn’t even notice the three unleashed men who, having pushed the guard out of the way, rushed furiously past him, trampling his roses underfoot.

  During the final acts, Boris and his acolytes turned the wings upside down and inside out. But they didn’t find anything. A couple of hours later, once the performance was over, they accompanied Prokofiev back to the embassy on Rue de Grenelle.

  Ethel was on the roof of the theater. Below her, all of Paris was bathed white by the moon.

  Ethel was almost asleep now.

  A fifteen-year-old girl who looked like an angel perched in the flies had whistled to her in the wings.

  “Over here! Come on!”

  The girl had made Ethel climb the rungs of the ladder two at a time, then slide into an invisible passageway. This girl had saved her life.

  Now they were buried in each other’s arms, between two zinc walls, beneath the summer sky.

  “Who are you?” Ethel asked.

  “I was the one who turned off the electricity.”

  “It was you?”

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on the Russian for almost a year.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “The Cat.”

  Paris, seven days later

  Voloy Viktor was sitting on a steel seat that was fixed to the floor. His eyes were closed.

  His hands and feet were attached to the chair by leather straps. A wide metal belt prevented his upper body from moving.

  His face looked calm and confident. It was reasonably handsome and appeared almost indifferent to the light of the lamp that had been angled to shine down vertically onto him.

  A projector was hanging from a wire just above his head. Voloy Viktor was breathing calmly. The projector swung gently at the end of the wire, casting disturbing shadows across his features. The rest of the room in the basement of the Quai des Orfèvres was in darkness.

  In the shadows, behind a glass panel, Boulard was watching the scene. He had returned to Paris five days earlier. Standing on his short legs, he dipped a piece of buttered baguette into a cup of coffee the size of a chamber pot.

  Boulard was waiting for Zefiro. He was fully aware of the danger to which he would be exposing the monk who had already worked so hard to secure Viktor’s capture. And he knew that out on the street in front of the police headquarters, any passerby, any innocent ice-cream seller, might in fact be one of Voloy Viktor’s men, waiting for Zefiro to emerge from his hole so they could spot him and give chase.

  Boulard’s team had offered the monk an armored van to transport him to Paris from the port of Marseille, but Zefiro had refused, letting it be known that he would arrive under his own auspices. No one knew the day or the hour: simply that he had agreed to turn up before the last day of July.

  The month of July would be over in a matter of hours.

  “No news of Z?” Boulard asked his second in command, who couldn’t take his eyes off the man presumed to be Viktor.

  “No,” replied Avignon.

  “If he doesn’t come, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “You said that you trusted this Monsieur Z.”

  The superintendent nodded.

  “We’re not going to be able to keep Viktor much longer,” said Boulard. “If Z doesn’t come to identify him, the game’s up. He’ll be free tomorrow. There’s already a huge amount of pressure to release him.”

  “There was another call from the minister’s office.”

  “I know. They’re all scared of Voloy Viktor.”

  “The minister’s special adviser wanted to inform us that Gaston Balivert, a beaver-skin trader, had been arrested by mistake at a French border,” Avignon added, “and the Canadian authorities are demanding that their man be released.”

  Boulard was so angry he nearly choked on his baguette.

  “He’s not Balivert! His name is Viktor! And Canada hasn’t requested anything at all. I have the proof that his passport is a fake. The real Gaston Balivert died twelve years ago when he slipped in his bathroom. I am convinced that the man in front of us is Voloy Viktor. And the minister knows that as well as I do. But seeing as Viktor pays half the rulers of the world in emeralds and rubies from Anvers, they’re all worried they won’t be going on vacation next year. . . .”

  Behind three thick layers of glass, Voloy Viktor couldn’t hear any of this conversation. But he still had a smirk on his face and was staring directly at Boulard, who was shifting about uneasily in the gloom.

  In the main waiting room of the police headquarters, Ethel was sitting with her hands on her knees.

  There were a lot of people, and it was all fairly chaotic. As a result of Voloy Viktor’s being kept in the building, there were all sorts of checks and controls in place. Tempers were being lost. And meetings were running late.

  Ethel looked around her.

  Among the shambles she could see: a mother with her three children, a lawyer sucking on a peach pit, a ticket puncher from the Métro, a redheaded man wearing earplugs so as not to be disturbed whi
le he read, a builder’s mate holding a pink summons and asking everybody to read it back to him, tourists who had lost their suitcases, a well-heeled couple who had been burgled, widows of men who had been murdered, elderly gentlemen who looked as if they had been waiting since the previous century and might in fact be stuffed, and a nice-looking man in a suit with, at his feet, a suitcase marked: DRAT THAT RAT! — PEST CONTROL AND RAT CATCHING.

  Ethel glanced at the clock. Once again, she had told her hosts that she was off to see her elderly aunt in the Île de la Cité.

  The Camerons had changed their tune since that unforgettable night at the theater. They hadn’t mentioned Ethel’s sudden disappearance during the intermission of Romeo and Juliet. When she had explained to them that she’d felt slightly ill and had stepped outside to drink some homemade lemonade at the end of the street, the Cameron parents had winked at their son and said, “It’s an emotional time!”

  And Tom Cameron, looking very pale next to Ethel, had wished that the ground would swallow him up.

  Ethel had reported to reception. She knew that Boulard was back. This had been confirmed by the police officer behind the counter.

  The same man had just called out a name. And each time this happened, the red-haired man opposite her conscientiously removed his earplugs, stood up, put his book facedown so as to keep both his seat and his place, and headed over to the officer.

  “Which name did you call?”

  “Madame Poirette!”

  “Ah. Not me, then. Thank you.”

  And back he went to sit down again, poking the wax earplugs into his ears with his thumbs.

  The man with the pest-control suitcase was sitting right next to Ethel, and the pair of them smiled at this charade as if they were at a puppet show.

  The man didn’t really look like a rat catcher.

  Another police officer entered and paced around the waiting room, looking for somebody. He stopped in front of Ethel’s neighbor.

  “Are you the gentleman from Drat That Rat!?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “We’ll come and get you in ten minutes. The superintendent isn’t in a good mood. He says it’s really not the day for it, plus nobody let him know. But I’m very glad you’re here.”

  Then he lowered his head and whispered, “The place is crawling with them down there. All the rats of the Seine come to cool off here every summer. I promised the superintendent you wouldn’t disturb him. I’ll be taking care of you.”

  “Yes. It’ll only take a few moments. I’ve got a stunning new product.”

  Ethel took the opportunity to tackle the police officer directly: “Do you know if Monsieur Boulard is seeing people today? I’ve asked someone to let him know I’m waiting. I haven’t heard anything back.”

  “He’s not in his office for the time being. We’ll keep you posted.”

  Ethel had already been waiting for at least an hour. The police officer moved off.

  “I’d be better off catching rats,” she remarked to the pest-control expert.

  “Yes, it looks as if I’ll be let in ahead of you. I do apologize.”

  The man was charming. He had a natural poise. Only his peasant’s hands were testimony to a life that hadn’t been spent in high society: he must have seen the world a bit before moving into pest control.

  One of the children belonging to the mother sitting in the corner near the window started playing with an old man’s walking stick, mimicking a Charlie Chaplin film that had just come out.

  “Don’t be silly!”

  Chaplin’s mother grabbed him by the ear. He gave the walking stick back to its owner and returned to his mother’s skirts, like a good little boy.

  Ethel’s neighbor had also watched this scene. They were disappointed when the show came to an untimely end.

  Ethel nudged the man’s suitcase with her foot.

  “You’re not really in the rat trade, are you?”

  He started laughing and declared, as if confiding in her, “No, of course not, dear child. It’s all a camouflage. . . . The truth of the matter is I’m a hermit monk on the trail of arms dealers!”

  They laughed together. She was staring at him closely.

  “I can tell you’re not what you appear to be,” whispered Ethel. “Who are you?”

  The man seemed bothered by this.

  “Who are you?” Ethel teased him again. “Who are you?”

  He fell quiet.

  Zefiro was paying attention to everything. He was trying not to let his curiosity get the better of him. It was all very disorienting. He was emerging from fifteen years on a lost rock in the middle of the Mediterranean.

  But he had already said too much to this girl. He had to stay one step ahead. Invisible lives depended on him.

  The best would have been to enter 36, Quai des Orfèvres accompanied by Vango. As a duo, the rat catcher and his assistant would have been less easy to spot. Viktor’s spies were looking for a lone man.

  But no matter how hard Zefiro had tried to explain at the entrance that he couldn’t do without his assistant, the security officer had been adamant: the sidekick had to stay outside.

  In the end, Zefiro had told Vango to wait nearby, close to the bird market, in their van with DRAT THAT RAT! emblazoned in gold letters against a black background.

  He was glad he’d brought the boy with him. He hadn’t put up much of a fight when Vango had insisted, because this way they could warn the monastery if something went wrong. And if the padre was captured by Viktor, the monastery would instantly have to be dissolved.

  “Who knows if they’ll be able to make me talk?” Zefiro had confided in Vango on the boat coming over. “I’ve got no idea what my levels of resistance are like. I might end up revealing Arkudah’s existence.”

  Which was why, in the waiting room at the Quai des Orfèvres, Zefiro couldn’t afford to let his guard drop for a second.

  He was keeping a particularly close eye on the reader with the earplugs. He didn’t trust him. For all he knew, it might be the ideal way for this man to sit in the waiting room and focus on everything that was going on.

  As for the girl to his right, he refused to believe that she could be with the enemy. Even a monk who’d been faithful to his vows for thirty years and who had resisted the charms of fifty nuns at the Abbey of La Blanche in Noirmoutier, couldn’t help but find this young woman irresistible.

  He felt her elbow nudging him.

  “I think this time it’s for you,” she said.

  But it was for her.

  “You see, my child. You’re going first after all.”

  From a distance, before she went through the door, she repeated her question: “Who are you?” mouthing the words without a sound escaping her lips. She smiled.

  Zefiro had heard her first name being mispronounced in a French accent by the officer as “Heh-tel.” It sounded like “Hey, tell!,” which seemed to be just what Ethel was trying to make him do: blow his cover.

  “I’ve got very little time,” Boulard warned Ethel as soon as she sat down opposite him. “I’m expecting someone. I might be called away at any moment.”

  He appeared to be nervous.

  “I’ve known you be more gentlemanly, Superintendent. Our housekeeper, Mary, asks to be remembered to you.”

  Boulard had no answer to that.

  He was trying to find where to put his legs under the table.

  Mary, the housekeeper he had met at Everland, kept writing him letters in English. He would read them at night with a magnifying glass and a dictionary before hiding them in the curtain lining so his mother wouldn’t find them when tidying up his bedroom. Modesty prevented him from writing back.

  Madame Boulard would stop the concierge, Madame Dussac, as she was bringing up the mail. They spent hours talking in the stairwell. When these letters arrived, with their British stamps and their scent of faded rose, Marie-Antoinette Boulard used to explain to the concierge that her son was corresponding with Scotland
Yard, the flagship of the British police.

  This was what Boulard himself had told her, to justify the frequency with which the letters kept coming.

  And so his mother and the concierge would stare devotedly at the envelope, picturing the proud figure of Sherlock Holmes leaning over his table as he stamped his seal, in a cloud of pipe smoke.

  “He’s an important man, your son,” Madame Dussac concluded.

  And even when there was a little heart drawn on the back of the envelope, they put it down to the legendary sentimentalism of the English.

  “Have you got any news for me?” Boulard asked Ethel.

  “Yes, Mary is doing well, she’s —”

  “I’m talking about Vango Romano,” interrupted the superintendent, blushing.

  “What about you?” Ethel fired back. “Have you got any news?”

  “Not really. I’m convinced he’s far away by now.”

  Boulard couldn’t have been further from the truth. Vango had never been closer. He had just leaped onto the roof, a few meters above them.

  “Don’t tell me that a yearlong investigation hasn’t turned up any results,” said Ethel.

  Boulard rubbed a cheek.

  “I have to confess, I’m dealing with some very big cases at the moment.”

  “And what about a nineteen-year-old kid who kills an elderly priest on the eve of being ordained himself and who then gets shot at in front of thousands of people in the center of Paris — doesn’t that count as a big case?”

  “No, Mademoiselle, not at all,” the superintendent exploded as he stood up. “That is not the heart of the matter! I care about that murder as much as my old hat. I’m sitting on that murder as I’m sitting on three quarters of all the crimes in Paris. The real issue here is to find out where that boy comes from, when no one has the first clue about him despite the fact that he seems to know everybody.”