Maria was smiling, and squeezing a fist with delight. ‘I was hoping. It fits. Back here?’
‘London for me. That makes sense. What did you want?’
‘You can probably guess. I’ve been seeing someone who’s close to you.’
Abel’s mood was changing for the better, and he teased her. ‘Seeing him? Don’t tell me you’re…’
‘Come on, you know better. Not in the English sense. Just around town. And he’s in good shape, so far as I can tell.’
‘Look, Maria, I’ll be seeing him in the north, if you follow me, before too long. I’m sure he doesn’t know yet what I’ve just told you, so let me deal with that.’
Maria said he could trust her to play dumb if she saw Flemyng, and asked him to let her know his dates when he had them. They gossiped with care about Washington and Maria ran through her thoughts about what might happen in Paris in the following week. ‘I’m heading out to Nanterre in an hour or so. With Edward Abbott. Know him?’
‘Only to read. Beautiful pen.’
‘Maybe Grace Quincy, too. I told you she’s around and she wants to come.’
‘I bet. So the gang’s all there,’ Abel said. ‘I wish I was with you. It’s wearying here; so damned wearying.’
They rang off, and Maria walked to the café round the corner where Edward was waiting. He was thin and bony, wearing perfectly round spectacles, and although he seldom dressed to impress – when he wore the jacket of a suit it was often with the wrong trousers – he did wear a tie on most days, because he was a rich mixture of flair and convention. In his writing he took flight; in manner he was gentle, even deferential. She loved his mind, because it reminded her of her brother, who taught history in Dublin, and they always began to catch up – in Warsaw or Paris or Washington – by talking about new books they were reading or favourites they had dusted down. As she kissed him and sat down, he held up a paperback that was falling apart – the autobiography of Alexander Herzen. Russia on the cusp of alarm and decline. ‘It seems appropriate,’ he said, ‘to read about the Tsars tumbling into disaster.’
They fell happily into each other’s company and caught up on their friends. Who was in Prague, where the trail led next, who’d been assigned to the primary campaigns. ‘I’m here for a bit,’ he said. ‘Friends say we’re going to have quite an event on our hands. Let’s go to see them.’ Her green Citroën 2CV was parked lopsidedly in the next street with two wheels on the pavement, and it was unlocked. Pulling her flimsy door shut, she jerked it on to the street and they headed west.
Ten minutes later, creeping through a lunchtime jam, they passed the British embassy. Abbott played the schoolboy and waved at the flag. Inside the building, the scene was serious. Flemyng had arrived at Bridger’s office on the stroke of two and found him on wooden library steps replacing a book on the top shelf. ‘Make yourself at home. We have a tiny problem, I fear.’
Stepping down, he stood beside his globe and dusted off his jacket.
‘It’s unfair on you, Will, because you’re only acting up for a day or so.’ He sighed. ‘But we’ve got to know what Sandy Bolder’s up to. You won’t believe this. He took himself to the European desk in London this morning, first thing – having scuttled over the river from your place, I assume – and made a perfect nuisance of himself. More or less squatted in our corridor. Pompous and mysterious, Patrick Ingleby tells me, whatever that means. He’s now running Europe, incidentally, and it’s going to his head. Anyhow, Bolder has been saying that he’s on the brink of a discovery that will startle us all. Extraordinary. Out of the blue. No procedure, no arrangement made from this end. I know you’d have told me.’ He checked with a glance and Flemyng shook his head.
‘If he’s in London to see his own people – yours, I should say – that has nothing to do with me, in theory at least. But we can’t have him wandering the halls willy-nilly, flaunting that ridiculous hair of his, stirring things up. Shocking. He just doesn’t have the seniority on our side of the shop, and these things do matter, Will. We have rules for a reason.’ He folded his arms.
Flemyng said, ‘It’s awkward for me, Pierce, because I didn’t even know he was going until after he’d gone. The same goes for Freddy.’
Bridger shook his head and dived in. ‘And that’s another thing. Where is Freddy? Off the face of the earth as far as anyone here can tell. The ambassador is perturbed, I must say to you. Doesn’t know what to make of it. Says your ship seems to have run aground this week.’
Turning away to the window to show that it was a painful scene, he said, ‘It’s a pity for you that you’re at the helm, so to speak.’
‘I can only apologize, Pierce,’ Flemyng said. ‘Normal service will be resumed, I promise.’
‘Soon, please,’ Bridger said. ‘I speak as our master’s deputy on this matter. And as I said at prayers yesterday it’s a moment for calm, everyone in his place and keeping his nose clean. Nothing untoward.’
Flemyng said, ‘And what exactly was Bolder supposed to be bringing to your colleagues, the chaps on your corridor? Was he peddling names, by any chance?’
‘No. That’s the thing. Nothing anyone can put a finger on. Just making himself sound important.’
‘Sometimes it comes with the territory,’ Flemyng said, looking away.
Bridger was oblivious. ‘I have a visitor soon. Sorry. I must send you on your way.’ He spun the globe with one finger.
*
At Nanterre, the canteen in the student building was filled with a rolling crowd and had the air of a cavernous bar in the early hours, a dance hall with the lights down. There was a group in one corner listening to a guitar, some of them flat out on the floor, and across the room an argument was threatening to turn into a struggle. Somebody ran shouting from the room. At least five people were handing out newspapers and campaign sheets at the door, one of them wearing a Mao cap, the others in black. Maria and Edward could smell some joints smouldering behind the counter, from where the staff were long gone, and there were pungent clouds of rough tobacco everywhere. Someone was cooking in oil. A few on the floor looked as if they’d slept there for days and the place reeked like a school gymnasium on a wet afternoon. They’d rigged up an urn to boil water for coffee, and people were pulling stale bread rolls from a cardboard box. Someone had brought in a cat, which sat on top of the juke box with its tail rigid in the air and its eyes wide. Edward, who’d rolled his tie up in his pocket, was smiling. He sat at a trestle table under the skylight and wrote in a neat and tiny hand. As he did, there was a commotion near the door and somebody began to speak.
He was burly and black-jacketed in leather, with a thatch of fair hair. Maria thought his accent placed him somewhere south of Lyons but he had the air of an urban soldier. The riot squads were getting ready for them in the streets, he said, and they’d fight for their government of old men, but the eyes of the world would be on the coming resistance. Around him a gang of listeners turned into a solid crowd, bound together and quiet. They were a disciplined platoon, about three dozen strong, energized by the smell of battle.
Their university had already been sealed off once by the police after the March events, and they could expect it to happen again. But next time they would have to contend with students across Paris and beyond. He fired them up, and ended with the slogan that someone had painted across the roof above them and which was scrubbed out by the authorities, then painted on again. ‘Be realistic! Demand the impossible!’
They cheered.
As well as the crowd that hemmed him in there were others who lay bored along the walls, or laughed to themselves. Now and again there were shouts, with everyone joining in, and someone sang for a few moments. There was a pile of clothes and shoes in the corner, and people picked up T-shirts and jeans as if they were going on a country ramble and needed gear. There were men in their thirties and kids who looked sixteen. All of them moved in the same throng. Someone else tried the Internationale, not getting far. The crowd began to thin o
ut quickly, a few waving red flags as they walked into the sunshine. There was a fire burning in a waste-paper bin in the courtyard.
Maria and Edward hung around, and soon they were with about fifteen people, half a dozen of them women. They were intense, though Maria got a handshake from several of them who smiled and gave her a hug. Edward began to talk to them, and listened. They spoke of the messages they were getting from London, Washington, Berlin, of the newspaper they were putting together – soon it would be a daily, they said – and their plans for May. A couple of them were German, there was an American from Chicago and a good deal of the conversation was in English as a result.
‘How do we know this will happen?’ Edward asked.
‘No one believes in revolution until it comes,’ someone said.
‘It’s coming,’ a blond boy said. ‘Believe me. It can’t be stopped. This place is ours – we’re in control – and it’s going to happen next week. The movement is taking shape. Come to the café tomorrow. She knows where it is’ – smiling at Maria.
Abbott saw that Maria was distracted. ‘OK?’ he asked.
Maria apologised. ‘I thought Grace Quincy might come, that’s all.’
*
When he had checked that the black iron gates were bolted, and rattled them by habit to make sure, Georges Lebosquet began his evening ritual. He set off along the cemetery’s principal boulevard, picking up a few pieces of rubbish as he walked, and looked to each side as he progressed. As a deputy keeper at Père Lachaise his duties were straightforward and unchanging, and he got his satisfaction from ensuring the calm of the place when the living went away and let the dead look after themselves.
At the end of each day, when the last visitor had disappeared – sometimes a little later, when the gravediggers had finished their business following an afternoon burial – he walked for half an hour or more to look over some of his territory. His route varied, so that over the course of a month or so he visited every corner of the burial ground. He noted down evidence of any mausoleum that needed attention, or a railing or gate that had rusted away, and his observations were entered next morning in the logbook in the keeper’s stone lodge near the main gate. The families responsible for the upkeep of their own tombs would be contacted and asked to attend to them, or, in the case of a prominent resident – Chopin, Proust, Piaf – the staff would take charge.
Sometimes M. Lebosquet worried that he was trying to make water run uphill, because in his twenty-seven years at Père Lachaise he had watched material decay take hold and advance. There were many memorials whose angels and cherubs had lost arms and wings, and tombs with gates that swung free when they should have been locked fast. Heaps had built up of jagged stone fragments long separated from their monuments, waiting for someone to cart them away. So many repairs were needed that the list in the logbook was never cleared. The gravel and cobbled paths were well swept, because funeral processions still came through on most days and pride still had a place, but much else embarrassed him, particularly the state of the columbarium. How many urns did it contain? No one knew, but he and his fellow keepers thought that the cemetery held the remains, in one form or another, of more than a million souls.
As he turned up a slope, near the bust of Balzac, he saw the owls waiting for the evening in a favourite chestnut tree that was heavy with blossom, and there was a convocation of young starlings on the high tomb ahead of him. Despite the army of cats that patrolled the graves, the sparrows of Paris were everywhere, enjoying the freedom of a hundred acres and all the high perches in the monuments and the trees. The April light was bright. He savoured the fragrance of spring, but he liked his walks most of all in the early autumn, when the evenings began to draw in, because then he could enjoy the cemetery as the light disappeared. The animals crept out, and the birds sang a chorus for the end of the day.
M. Lebosquet had just turned sixty, and, although he was in decent health, he carried too much extra weight and often felt a little tired by the end of his walk, having been in the cemetery since eight o’clock when he and the two other deputies breakfasted together before they began the day’s rounds. On the southern perimeter he started on the path home. Within an hour he would be at the table with his wife.
He turned left at a group of graves that he knew well, because he passed them every day. A fox was barking in the trees behind him and he noticed that someone had left a rucksack propped up neatly against an obelisk. As he bent down to pick it up – he’d lock it away before he left, having made a note of its contents – he was aware, all at once when he straightened up, that something was wrong.
He was puzzled. There was a change in the scene that he couldn’t immediately identify, but he knew it was there. He looked around. The grave in front of him was undamaged, and he noticed that it had been tidied up in recent days. The memorials on either side looked as they always did.
Then, from the corner of his eye, M. Lebosquet caught sight of what had caused him to stop.
He swung leftwards and stood motionless for a moment, like the statues behind him.
He dropped the rucksack at his feet and ran, as if for his life.
FIFTEEN
The driver of the ambulance said to his companion that it was unusual for a body to be driven through the gates of Père Lachaise into the outside world, instead of the other way round. They laughed together as they switched on their red lights and took the roundabout at speed.
The ambulance was on its way to the Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière and not the city morgue as they had expected when they arrived at the cemetery. From the start, there had been no question of resuscitation, but they were aware from the moment that they were led in procession from the keepers’ lodge to the grave that the circumstances were unusual. Two senior police officers were already on the scene when they got there, after a struggle with traffic that held them up for twenty minutes, and they had spent more than an hour and a half on the scene. They were now heading south-westwards to the Pont de Bercy and they assumed that there would be a welcoming party at the hospital on the other side of the river. They had made sure that the back of the ambulance was neat and tidy, with the white-covered stretcher properly bolted down and its passenger strapped firmly in place.
Soon afterwards, while the first examination was beginning at the hospital, the guard at the British embassy gate rang the office of head of chancery. He knew that Bridger was working late.
‘Sorry to disturb, sir. George at the front door. A call has come through the switchboard and I think it needs your attention. Police, sir.’
Bridger was working on a speech for an awards ceremony the next day where he was deputizing for the ambassador, and had been timing his remarks in a private rehearsal, but George’s tone was such that he expressed no irritation. Within a few minutes, having spoken on the line to one of the inspectors at Père Lachaise, who was as surprised as he was that they were having the conversation, he summoned Wemyss,
‘A flap, I’m afraid. I need Flemyng, and, failing that, Freddy Craven, wherever he is.’
There was no reply from Flemyng’s apartment, and Wemyss reported that he couldn’t raise Craven, who had evidently not returned to Paris. ‘Bolder?’ he suggested.
Bridger showed his fiery side. ‘Forget him. He’s in London on a jaunt of his own. We’ll have words when he’s back. I knew it! The station is in a mess this week, Wemyss. We have a long night ahead.’
‘Janet, sir?’ said Wemyss.
‘Precisely. She will know how to proceed.’
Wemyss was despatched to the apartment a few streets away where Janet Phillimore had lived for five years, since she arrived at the same time as Craven’s predecessor. Unlike the men in her office, she was ready for action. Asking Wemyss to make himself comfortable, she prepared quickly and efficiently to return to the embassy, wearing the pearls that were her badge and without which the station would seem to be losing face. Wemyss knew her reputation for loyalty and iron discipline over many years and,
as a junior on only his second posting, he was content to let her give orders. In less than ten minutes they were ready to leave, and she led the way. At the embassy gate she told him that she would visit Craven’s office, then meet him in Bridger’s room. ‘I’d say that I shall be with you in five minutes and no more,’ she told him.
She was, and having been briefed in a few sentences by Wemyss about the nature of their problem, although he hadn’t mentioned a dead body, she brought them a solution.
Bridger, whose attachment to hierarchy involved a degree of old-fashioned gallantry, expressed his gratitude for her attendance. ‘I’m afraid, Janet, that in the absence of all the men you are required to steady the ship once again and steer us through the storm.’
‘I’m delighted to be able to help,’ she said. ‘Mr Flemyng is in the city, as far as I am aware, but I know that he intended to meet a friend this evening. So I expect he is dining – with whom, I don’t know. We can hardly expect to visit all his favourite places in search of him’ – Bridger smiled as if it was a dig at Flemyng – ‘and he will not be available at his apartment, I should think, until after ten. Mr Bolder is in London, but I am afraid that he did not ask me to make the arrangements, so I am not aware of where he is staying. We could try his club. I have the number here.’
Bridger shook his head, saying nothing.
‘As for Mr Craven, fortunately I can tell you where he is. There is some awkwardness here, because he did ask me to keep a confidence. Under the circumstances, however, I feel justified in breaking it. He is visiting Mr Flemyng’s family home.’
Bridger sat up straight. ‘Why on earth has he gone there?’
Paris Spring Page 14
