Jalibert tried to move, then stopped when Vidal approached with the rifle cocked.
“Your dear precious son even bugged your flat.” Jalibert taunted, and Colette’s umbrella fell to the ground, her thoughts spinning guilt and betrayal into a grotesque aftermath. “He had all the time in the world with you conveniently out of the way, working. And blow me, was he keen.” Another sick laugh infected the silence. “He thought more of us than you. Didn’t you realise that?” Jalibert grunted before Vidal tore the mask from his face and slapped his mouth shut.
He then aimed at Jalibert’s foot and fired. Warm blood sprayed his hand as he grabbed Colette and began to run away from the shriek of pain that hung in the night like a dying shofar.
Nor did the dead sleepers of his parish hinder them. Instead they lay in calm disorder, spared the losses and betrayals of future years, content with the seasons and the call of crows. No more nightmares, just the lull of time curled into a void beyond their understanding.
LXV
Saturday October 11th
Six hours later, as dawn was surreptitiously capturing the sky, the Dominican, Francke Victor Duvivier, safely ensconced in the Presbytery of Ste Trinité, prepared himself for the most meaningful moment in his life.
He’d taken down all the black-and-white enlargements of his mother’s wounds and set a match to each corner. He then blew the ashes into the air.
Time was of the essence, nevertheless, he himself must be perfect. As perfect as when he’d first entered the world, when his mother had held him and put him to the breast, her hot-red nipple filling his mouth. If he’d been born full of sin, her milk had surely cleansed him.
“Ouch!”
The razor tugged at his chest hair, but he endured it, rubbing in blobs of Nivea cream until the pink flesh glistened. Next, his scrotum. Ripe, but unused since the Bataille tart. Onanism was only for when he felt God was otherwise engaged, and now the sac weighed comfortingly in his hand as the crinkly outcrop of middle-age fell away. Powdered, softly white, like early snow on the Pic de la Verne, he smiled.
He’d known all along what to wear. No need for the habitual black, that was for Hubert, buried in his Brigade des Jeunes uniform. Duvivier folded up his robe that hung like a shadow on the door, and squashed it into the bin for Renate Javel to deal with.
The voluminous nappy created from one of his bed sheets bulked out his hips, but four safety pins at the front held it all securely in place.
Practice makes perfect, right, maman?
Then, with the help of a large cognac, he swallowed his mother’s ring, so her gift would always be part of him. Inviolate. He coughed. It had gone down nicely, and even though Doctor Brébisson had once told him that the body excretes immediately after death, it was better than leaving it lying around for the Javels’ grasping fingers.
Duvivier grinned at the transformation in the mirror. He was ready, and eagerness bore him out into the cool morning, down the short drive to the kissing gate and into the graveyard, where his father lay cramped ignominiously against the wall.
A magpie worried at the ground nearby, but today it didn’t concern him.
What harm can it do me now? Live and let live, I say.
He felt his old self returning. A beatific glow glazed his features, and for the first time since his affliction, his left cheek felt normal to the touch. The dough was working even if it was now limiting his expression to a happy rigor mortis.
Loose grass from Javel’s mowing stuck to his bare feet like iron filings to a magnet but again the priest was unconcerned, focussing only on the freshly dug oblong that awaited. At first, the handyman had objected to the extra labour, but for 5,000 new francs had put his old muscle behind the shovel, and now as Duvivier looked into his new home, he noted with pleasure the sharp corners and nicely finished interior.
He looked around checking for the odd itinerant who’d occasionally emerge from the hills hoping for a meal and a wash. Duvivier too, sat on the edge, like a child contemplating the pool. No rosary, no breviary, just his own thoughts conjoining with those of Madeleine Irma Büber, whose beauty was now more real than the soil under his hands.
Come, my son. It is time... It is time... See how she welcomes me... See the light in her eyes...
He lowered himself in and gasped as the floor’s dampness met his bones, but not a moment of regret altered his purpose. He lay with room to spare at either end, savouring the new earth, its deep, timeless secrets, and as the sky cleared between the cedar and the yews, casting the baby pale and without blemish, he drifted towards his last and sweetest Communion...
DOXOLOGY
Robert Vidal checked his watch. 7.09 hrs. Not ideal, in fact there was far too much daylight, but the overnight train from Metz had stopped outside Maçon for the line to be cleared of an asphalt spillage. Colette had slept through it all, fused against his body, her funeral wig tilting on his shoulder whenever nightmares had stirred her. But during two separate visits by the Gendarmes, she’d revived and acted her part well enough for them to leave, even apologise for the inconvenience.
Now, they walked step-in-step, not hand-in-hand as he hoped, towards the hills above Cavalaire. Her face set hard, older somehow in the southern light. She’d persuaded him to leave Jalibert’s cumbersome rifle behind, but she was ready to kill, he knew.
His face, too, was fixed, numbed more by the loss of his house, his bike and the music so carefully stored in the spare room – all ashes now, dusting the Rue Fosse and neighbouring roofs in a fine impermanence.
The motorbike had blown a hole to the sky oxygenating the early feeble flames to an inferno that had merely mocked the water hoses. They’d both heard it, helpless from their hiding place in the Petits Jardins. He’d wondered about his father. Maybe the fool had gone back to the house, maybe not. He’d probably never know.
Neither spoke as the church of Ste Trinité and its bell tower’s grotesque ironwork came into view. Vidal still weighted by his damp clothes forced his tired body forwards to keep pace with the woman alongside who was trying to increase her advantage.
“Come on, Colette. Let me touch you.” He tried, but she moved faster, keeping him at an even greater arm’s length.
The road was deserted. Too early for the chasseurs still sleeping off the wild boar blood that had reddened their gums and pinked their teeth the night before. But by noon, the covered trucks would again be crawling the trails of Les Pradels, ex-army green against green, and soon the killing rifle shots would sing out above the church bells.
“I’ll try here,” she said, reaching the Presbytery, as he shed his jacket and hooked it over his shoulder with one finger. “I bet the cowardly bastard’s come home.”
The Huntress stood on tiptoe by the window – her well-turned legs bearing dark diagonals under each calf muscle, blue heels still swollen. Yet she was all he had – this woman with no hair, no eyelashes, dressed in black for her son who’d given Moussac his passport to Eternity. Yet he would try to love her again, because otherwise there was no-one. Not even God. And he knew that given time, he would.
She reached the front door and pushed it open on to a thick white carpet. No alarm. No lock. Something was up.
“Colette, come back,” he said, fear already sharpening his tongue. He gripped her shoulders to stop her going any further. “Let me go first.” But she pushed him away and he watched, helpless as she went in.
Emptiness, emptiness. All is emptiness...
“Look, I’ll find Duvivier for you. You go and wait outside, please.” But she ignored him, looking from left to right then up the drift of stairs. Her business now. The one thing the Provençal had got right.
“Please!”
She turned too late, and suddenly her mouth fell open in a silent scream.
Three figures stood behind him, booted feet apart. Motionless silhouettes save for three balaclava’d pairs of eyes. Liquid hate distilled, pure and terrible. The one who held him like a goat, also held a knif
e. Its bright curved blade settled against his throat.
“At least Dominique Mathieu has done the decent thing, unlike his father,” the butcher said. Colette gasped in horror. “So you’re the last, Robert Vidal. Such a pity you gave too much of your yeitzer hara to Satan, like all the others. Michel Plagnol, who’d suffocated his old grandmother, made a good meal for the Cressy’s dogs after he’d been most helpful. Éric Cacheux, whose own brave mother had even named him after one of us, strung him up. Francke Duvivier, Philippe Toussirot, Georges Déchaux… all the mad bitches of Libourne, save the switchboard operator who won’t last long even under police guard.”
“Mademoiselle Zeresche?”
A nod. “Not her real name of course. Like all cowards.”
The priest searched her face, but she gave him nothing.
“Mercifully, Zyklon B still has its uses... Oh I forgot. We have our friend Yves Jalibert with us, too; you’ll be pleased to hear, but he won’t be saying much from now on.”
Vidal made no attempt to move. They frisked him for the Browning before the knife point pierced beneath his jaw and warm blood trickled down his neck.
“And still the Milk-White Hind suckles too many fools like you who cling to her teats. You’d think after harbouring murderers who’d slipped through the Nüremberg net, she would now desist. But Satan is insatiable. He prefers white meat however it is prepared. And now he can have all of you. Mens et Corpus. Just like your idol Eichmann. How about that for a feast?”
Robert Vidal’s beautiful animal eyes pleaded with her, deep, dark and never more deadly, to no avail. She watched her lover’s hands hang limp and brown like old leaves, until suddenly in time to the glide of steel, they splayed and jerked on a final unheard cry.
Colette.
***
In the aftermath, the gloating silence, she swayed for a moment, then steadied herself. “There’s something I’ve got to do,” she whispered, “before I forget. I need to take his shadow. Please.”
Hesitation.
One of them aimed Vidal’s semi-automatic at his shortened silhouette on the ground behind, and when it was done, allowed the man to fall, soulless at her feet.
But because they owed her one, because when Leila Fraenkel had asked, she’d given, the Israelis let her go. So, winged like the swallow, Colette Bataille flew under the cedar, past Duvivier still smiling up at the sky, out into the autumn sunlight.
FINIS
Sparkling Books
Young adult fiction
Cheryl Bentley, Petronella & The Trogot
Brian Conaghan, The Boy Who Made it Rain
Luke Hollands, Peregrine Harker and the Black Death
Vitali Vitaliev, Granny Yaga
Crime, mystery and thriller fiction
Nikki Dudley, Ellipsis
Sally Spedding, Cold Remains
Other fiction
Amanda Sington-Williams, The Eloquence of Desire
Non-fiction
Daniele Cuffaro, American Myths in Post-9/11 Music
David Kauders, The Greatest Crash: How contradictory policies are sinking the global economy
Revivals
Carlo Goldoni, Il vero amico / The True Friend
Gustave Le Bon, Psychology of Crowds
Malediction Page 35
