Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  Boulard was pacing from one end of his office to the other, waving his arms and banging into files and pieces of furniture.

  “The real issue is Vango Romano’s true identity. That’s the mystery that interests me. And that mystery is the only reason I’m not giving up on this whole wretched inquiry. When it comes to murder, there are enough murders in this city every day to keep thirty-six Superintendent Boulards busy! Do you understand, my little lady? Thirty-six Superintendent Boulards! But I’ve never met a single Vango Romano before.”

  “I’m not your little lady,” said Ethel, on the verge of tears.

  “I’m sorry, I . . .”

  Boulard collapsed into his chair and in so doing flattened his hat.

  “I’m a bit overworked,” he went on. “I didn’t mean to. . . .”

  The superintendent was looking at her. There were tears forming in the corners of her eyes. Ethel really was crying.

  “If there were thirty-six Superintendent Boulards, I would throw myself straight out of the window,” she said, sobbing.

  The two of them fell silent.

  Boulard opened a drawer and took out a large white cotton handkerchief, which was perfectly clean. He always had these at the ready, ironed on Sunday afternoons by his mother, for those who dropped by his office.

  There had been so many tears in forty years in this room. Boulard’s job depended on the grief of others.

  Sometimes he felt as if he spent his life swimming lengths in a great lake of tears. And the worst thing was that without the dramas, the people in mourning, the destinies felled, Boulard’s life would be dry, and he would find himself all alone trying to swim backstroke on the parquet.

  Ethel took the handkerchief.

  Just then, they heard something that sounded like an explosion. Boulard’s door sprang open as a result of an almighty kick.

  Lieutenant Avignon came flying into the office.

  When he saw Ethel, he tried to pull himself together. He turned to Boulard.

  “Superintendent . . . Superintendent, he’s downstairs. . . .”

  “Who is?”

  “The . . . the . . . the rat catcher. . . .”

  Ethel sat bolt upright.

  Boulard was trying to decode what was being said. He screwed up his eyes.

  “The rat catcher?”

  “The one . . . the one you’ve been expecting. . . .”

  Avignon stared at the superintendent. Was the penny ever going to drop?

  “Yes, the one you’ve been expecting . . . the man you asked us to . . .”

  “My God!” exclaimed Boulard, leaping to his feet. “I’m coming.”

  He rushed over to the door. Ethel was stunned. So she wasn’t the only person on whom that rat catcher had made such a big impression.

  “This is an emergency. I do apologize, Mademoiselle. Good-bye.”

  He told Avignon to follow him. And disappeared.

  Once outside, Ethel walked along the river as far as the Pont Neuf, stopping in the middle of the bridge under a street lamp. She climbed over the handrail and got onto the small ledge that jutted out over the eddying Seine.

  She crouched down.

  Ethel could feel how low her spirits were as she watched the water flowing beneath her. In the distance, near to the Pont des Arts, people were swimming.

  “Tell me about it,” said the Cat, who’d been waiting for her.

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  In the basement of the Quai des Orfèvres, the rat catcher had been taken to a small room where the daylight entered via a tiny basement window.

  Boulard walked in, closing the door behind him.

  They stared at each other.

  “Thank you for coming, Padre Zefiro.”

  “I’m not doing this for you.”

  “I know.”

  “Where is he?”

  “At the end of the corridor; follow me.”

  “Wait. I want everything to be absolutely clear. Only one man here, apart from you, knows who I am?”

  “Augustin Avignon. He has my complete trust.”

  “That’s already one man too many.”

  Boulard glanced at the suitcase with DRAT THAT RAT! stamped on it.

  “You’re not going to get rid of my Avignon?” he ventured.

  “No. But I don’t want a single other witness. Nobody. To everybody else, I must remain the rat catcher.”

  “Of course.”

  “Is it dark where we’re going?”

  “Yes.”

  “Voloy Viktor mustn’t know that I’m alive.”

  “The suspect is blinded by a projector. We’re taking no risks. This is my responsibility.”

  “No. It’s mine. I have the lives of dozens of men in my hands. If I’m seen, my monastery will be condemned.”

  “You won’t be seen.”

  “I will simply tell you if it’s Viktor. Then I will make the sign of the cross, and I will leave the way I came.”

  “Through what?”

  “Through the door, Superintendent. Do rat catchers often fly out windows?”

  “You’re quite right, yes, of course, sorry.”

  “I want everything to be normal and in order as regards this business. You should even have the payment for my pest-control services delivered to the company address, Drat That Rat!, Maison Aurouze, Rue des Halles. You never know. The people we’re fighting against know everything, they watch over everything, and they’ll examine all documents with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “Agreed.”

  Zefiro grabbed Boulard by the jacket and said very earnestly, “Listen to me, Superintendent. Father Zefiro never came here, all right? He never came here because he’s dead and buried with an ocean view, under the green oak trees of the Abbey of La Blanche. There are even bones in my grave bought from the Museum of Mankind to prove it. I don’t leave anything to chance.”

  “Understood,” said Boulard, who was beginning to realize the full gravity of the situation.

  He had never imagined that being dead could be so complicated.

  The padre opened his suitcase and spread a pungent powder along the walls.

  “What are you doing?” asked Boulard.

  “I am getting rid of your rats, Superintendent. You clearly don’t understand anything!”

  “Yes, of course, sorry.”

  Zefiro gathered up his belongings.

  “Let’s go. Make sure the corridor is empty. Then check the booth we’ll be in. Come back and get me.”

  Zefiro was on his own for a moment. He took a deep breath. He was remembering those meetings with Voloy Viktor. Zefiro had managed to deceive him for six months. But each time, when he found himself in the small confessional box, in a chapel in the Dolomites or in Brittany, waiting for his dreadful penitent, he half expected to feel an arrow going through his heart, shot from behind the grille. His life hung in the balance from one second to the next.

  He had believed he wouldn’t have to relive that experience, that the only darts that posed any threat to him now were those of his bees on Arkudah.

  “Come this way; the coast is clear,” said Boulard, pushing open the door.

  Zefiro picked up his suitcase and followed the superintendent. When he passed behind the window, he immediately saw the man attached to his seat. A chilling shudder ran down his spine.

  He had been expecting someone as bait, a man trying to pass himself off as Viktor in order to reel in Zefiro.

  In the darkness, Auguste Boulard couldn’t make out the padre’s reactions.

  “Is it him?” whispered Boulard.

  There on his seat, Viktor still had that uncanny smirk.

  “It’s him,” Zefiro answered.

  They remained there, without moving, for seven or eight seconds. Zefiro would always regret those few seconds. If he had turned around right away, if he had left, it would all have been so different.

  But before the monk and the superintendent had time to move at all, Voloy Viktor tens
ed his entire body, thrust his neck backward, and, with a head butt of almost inhuman violence, struck the projector lamp shade that was brushing against his hair. The beam of light shot away from him in a vertical line, like a swing, and swept the darkness at random. It spun around and in a second sway of the pendulum the bulb lit up Zefiro’s face with the precision of flash photography.

  The image of that face blinded by the light was etched on Voloy Viktor’s eyes.

  He sat frozen to the spot. A trickle of blood ran down the beginning of his hairline.

  Viktor’s lips moved. And if the projector had been on him, it would have been possible to read on his lips the lyrics of a song that Nina Bienvenue sang in Montmartre and that everybody was singing that year:

  Welcome to Paris . . .

  Glad to know you’re alive . . .

  It was a song about a soldier returning to his loved one after the war, but in Viktor’s mouth, it was a death sentence for Zefiro.

  Father Zefiro let out a cry, grabbed Boulard by the collar, and dragged him into the corridor.

  He pinned him to the brick wall and spluttered, “You swore to me — you swore you wouldn’t make me take any risks. . . .”

  Boulard had turned deathly white.

  “I don’t understand what happened. I mean that. Avignon checked everything.”

  Zefiro let go of him.

  “Leave,” panted Boulard. “Don’t worry. We’ve got him. And we won’t let him go. Nobody will be able to communicate with him. Nobody will know that you’re alive.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “He’ll rot in a cell for the rest of his days —”

  A shrill ringing noise started up.

  “What’s that?” demanded Zefiro.

  “The alarm signal. I — I simply don’t understand any of this. Somebody unauthorized must have entered police headquarters. They’ll block all the doors.”

  Beside himself with fury, Zefiro kicked his Drat That Rat! suitcase before telling Boulard, “I’m warning you not to let Viktor get away. Or you’ll spend the rest of your life paying for it.”

  And he ran off. He was no longer the dignified tradesman expecting to exit via the main entrance; he was Zefiro the clandestine.

  He would have to leave the premises like a rat.

  As they strolled past the bird market, Ethel and the Cat stopped. Ethel had just seen the small black van advertising DRAT THAT RAT!, ESTABLISHED 1872 She went over and peered inside through the closed window. Nobody there.

  She’d have liked to see the man from the waiting room again.

  “What are you doing?” asked the Cat.

  “I wanted to say hello to a friend.”

  The small van was blocking people’s access. With nobody to shout at, the market deliverymen had left a string of insults scrawled on the windshield. This was an old Paris tradition that dated back to the invention of the wheel.

  Ethel snatched a piece of paper, drew a line through what was written on it, and, smiling again, she wrote down the same question three times: Who are you?

  Then she signed it: Ethel.

  The Cat watched her tuck the piece of paper back under the windscreen wiper.

  She had finally met someone more unpredictable than she was. Ethel never stopped surprising her. Compared with this intense Scottish character, the Cat felt entirely reasonable. And that did her a world of good. The Cat felt she was the more sensible one in this team. And she was thriving on it.

  She’d even told Ethel that she had a boyfriend named André. She hadn’t said any more so as not to let on that he didn’t actually know about the Cat’s existence or that his real name was Andrei and that he received his orders from one Boris Petrovitch.

  The two young women had decided to pool their efforts in order to find the person responsible for making their paths cross: Vango.

  Lieutenant Avignon discovered his boss on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  Boulard was fuming as he crossed the courtyard.

  “Who set off that alarm?”

  The visitors in the waiting room had been herded into a secured room for further checks. Nobody had the right to leave now. Even the trash collectors who’d been taking out the garbage from the cafeteria found themselves stuck. A rotting smell was spreading across the cobblestones and seeping into the offices. It was some stench.

  “I asked who set off the alarm!”

  “It wath me,” said Avignon.

  “You? Avignon?”

  “There wath someone in your offith,” the lieutenant went on, holding his nose. “Badeboiselle Darbon spotted them.”

  “Who?”

  “Badeboiselle Darbon.”

  “Stop pinching your nostrils, you stupid oaf!”

  “Mademoiselle Darmon.”

  “Did they make off with anything?”

  Ten days earlier, a file of no interest relating to the Vango Romano case had inexplicably disappeared. It was the file for the witness known as the Cat.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What, they didn’t even make off with Darmon?”

  “Not even,” said Avignon, who didn’t dare smile.

  “That’s a shame. Tell Mademoiselle Darmon I’m expecting her in my office.”

  Mademoiselle Darmon was three months away from retiring. She had been secretary to the superintendent for forty-four years, and in all that time, he had gotten on perfectly well without her. Truth be told, he’d never known what to do with her. And so she had spent forty-four years doing crosswords and reading slushy romances and advice columns, and that’s exactly what she would continue doing for a few weeks more.

  Darmon walked into the office with her four-tiered chignon and her never-ending heels.

  She sat down opposite the superintendent.

  “What was he like?” he barked.

  “Very good-looking,” she replied, batting her eyelashes. “And very young.”

  “What else?”

  “Very well brought up.”

  “He didn’t do anything to you?”

  “No,” she said, sounding rather regretful.

  “How did he leave?”

  “Through there.”

  She pointed at a window. It was a small horizontal window that gave onto a tiny courtyard, which in turn served as a light well for the glass roof below. Boulard’s office window was the only one set into the four walls of the courtyard. The walls offered no footholds whatsoever.

  “Did he have a rope?” asked the superintendent.

  “No. He jumped onto the wall opposite and climbed it.”

  Avignon and Boulard glanced at the wall in question, which was as smooth as a bar of soap, three or four meters from the window and fifteen from the ground.

  Avignon closed the window, disgusted by the smell of rubbish that was spreading everywhere.

  “Right, right, right, right . . .” Boulard muttered softly.

  He exchanged looks with Avignon. Mademoiselle Darmon had a very active imagination. One day, she had informed them all that the actor Clark Gable had come over to her little garden in Bagnolet for cocktails and a game of croquet.

  Boulard paced the office. None of his files had been moved. Everything appeared to be in order. He inquired of his second in command in a falsely sweet voice, “So Monsieur Avignon makes the whole building jump because Mademoiselle has a gallant encounter in my office with a young Apollo who has special powers when it comes to sticking to walls. Is that it?”

  “I thought that . . .”

  “Get out!” he thundered. “Get out of here right now!”

  Avignon and Darmon were about to leave the room when Boulard muttered, “Mademoiselle, do keep me in the loop if your cat burglar writes you letters during your retirement in Bagnolet. . . .”

  Mademoiselle Darmon stopped.

  “Oh, yes, I almost forgot. I have something for you.”

  She reached into her blouse and reluctantly took out a piece of paper folded in eighths.

 
; “He left this for you.”

  Boulard pounced on the scrap of paper and unfolded it.

  The letter was signed Vango Romano.

  Vango’s clothes were hardly crumpled at all.

  He had just escaped via the roof of the Palais de Justice and dropped down again from the top of the Sainte-Chapelle.

  A young magistrate had seen him passing vertically by his window; another even got an apologetic wave from Vango for disturbing him. Ashamed of their hallucinations, neither of them breathed a word about what they had seen.

  Vango emerged from the bird market a second after Ethel had turned the corner at the end of the street.

  In an ideal world, we might have dreamed of a benevolent hand intervening so that one of them tarried a little longer while the other hurried up, and that they would have found themselves at precisely the same moment in front of the black van with DRAT THAT RAT! stamped across it. In an ideal world, there would have been music playing in the distance and a ray of sunshine would have lit up the scene.

  But, even in an ideal world, would it have been worth changing the course of these two lives, treating them like pawns to be pushed one square ahead or one behind, just for us to enjoy a reunion scene played out in slow motion?

  So Vango got into the van alone.

  Events hadn’t gone according to plan. Vango had lied to Zefiro. Since their departure from the Aeolian Islands, he had had a secret scheme. He wanted to speak with Boulard, at last, to tell him everything he knew and get him to follow up other leads than his own trail. In Zefiro’s presence, he had nothing to fear. Superintendent Boulard would listen to him.

  They had turned him away at the entrance. He had pretended to accept this. He had entered the premises via the walls and the roof instead.

  But Boulard and Zefiro weren’t in the office.

  He had ended up having to write a letter in great haste, which he gave to a secretary who batted her eyelashes at him before shrieking for help.

  Vango started up the van.

  If things went wrong, his instructions were not to wait for Zefiro. They would meet up later at the station.

  A piece of paper was spread on the windshield. Vango got out to remove it. Sitting at the steering wheel, with the engine roaring, he scanned it.