Death in Bordeaux

by Allan Massie

  He smiled, displaying sharp canine teeth.

  ‘Or a spot of Armagnac? Good.’

  The investigation stalled. Nothing came of the house-to-house inquiries. That didn’t surprise Lannes. Respectable Bordelais, he knew, may delight in keeping an eye on the activities of their neighbours, but prefer not to involve themselves in anything nasty. They expect the police to do their work without any help from them. Nor were inquiries made in the bars by the docks any more fruitful. Gaston was known there, but ‘haven’t seen him for weeks, not since last year, well before Christmas.’ That was the stock response. It seemed likely that Gaston had picked up a sailor – a foreigner, of course, and that the man had taken exception to whatever had been asked of him. Or just indulged in a spot of robbery with violence. No telling. These things happen. The examining magistrate, Judge Rougerie, had his own explanation.

  ‘One of these Spanish refugees. Many of them are degenerates, as well as being Reds It’s an unsavoury case. Keep at it a bit longer, superintendent, but if you don’t get a lead within the next few days, then I think you can set it aside. It’s something best forgotten. They’re an old family, with a distinguished name, respected in Bordeaux for several generations. Their father used to be a guest in my parents’ house. I examined Henri, quite informally, you understand, and his attitude – well, it’s not so different from mine. Nothing, he admits, will bring his brother back, and we don’t want a nasty scandal. That’s the mayor’s opinion too, that only the Communists would benefit from a full disclosure. And we can’t have that.’

  Lannes wasn’t happy, and not only because he had been fond of Gaston. Nobody should die like that and be unavenged. Murder was always vile, but murder that displayed contempt for the victim, that was abhorrent. And yet he got nowhere. He put Moncerre, the most experienced of his inspectors, a man with a nose for whatever was sordid and seamy, on the case. With no result. Gaston had certainly arrived from Bergerac that afternoon, called on Henri, and nobody could be found to admit to seeing him subsequently. So perhaps it wasn’t a pick-up in a public place, but an assignation in a private house or apartment. There was no way of telling. Lannes himself went to Bergerac, found nothing there. Gaston hadn’t apparently kept a diary, unless one had been removed by his murderer, and it seemed the only letters he received, or kept, were from scholars with whom he corresponded on matters concerning his research. He hadn’t been killed where he was found. That at least was certain. He had been dumped there, as Lannes had suspected from the first. The body was already mutilated, which also argued against the theory of a casual pick-up being the murderer. There must have been blood. But where?

  Lannes called again on Henri, ashamed to report no progress.

  ‘Until we learn more about his life.’

  ‘And he kept the dark part secret.’

  Henri sighed, scratched himself under his left armpit. The little black French bulldog, Toto, pushed his head against his master’s knees, demanding attention, offering comfort perhaps.

  ‘No one should die like that,’ Lannes spoke the thought that had been drumming in his head for days, ‘die like that, unavenged.’

  ‘Oh vengeance,’ Henri said. ‘It doesn’t mean much to me. And now that we are at war there will be many still worse deaths, even more horrible ones, and rivers of blood crying out for vengeance. To me that’s meaningless. You’ll do what you can, Jean, I have every confidence in you, but even if you were to find the young man responsible – and I suppose it was a young man – what really would it signify? What good would it do? It’s not only Gaston that’s dead, it’s part of my life that’s been killed.’

  ‘Part of my youth too,’ Lannes said.

  ‘You’ll do what you can,’ Henri said again. He ran his finger along the underside of the little dog’s jaw. ‘The times we live in. What word of Dominique?’

  ‘He’s bored. He says they none of them believe in the war.’

  ‘Who does? But he’s a good boy. You must be proud of him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lannes said. ‘And that makes it worse. Marguerite’s miserable and afraid. He’s her favourite, you know.’

  ‘I used to envy you your children. Now, do you know, I’m happy that my own marriage wasn’t blessed, as they say, with any.’

  It had been a strange marriage. Lannes hadn’t know Pilar well. A Spanish girl, at least fifteen years younger than Henri. An idealist. Caught up in the struggle in Spain. She’d gone, he thought, first to Paris, to work for a republican organization there, then to Spain itself. Missing. Dead? In one of Franco’s prisons?

  ‘It was on account of Pilar,’ Henri said, ‘that Gaston took up with the refugees. Those who came here first, early in the war, wounded, or perhaps for political reasons I am ignorant of, before the camps were opened for them when the trickle became a flood. Gaston and Pilar were close, you know. They thought alike about the war, about politics. As for me, my attitude was “a plague on the lot of them”. Idealism and folly, they go together. Pilar couldn’t understand me, disliked what she did understand. I tried to dissuade her from engagement. Pointless. She left me because of politics.’

  Lannes looked at her photograph: a strong face, with the black hair pulled back tight, heavy jaws and lips that a novelist might call ‘sensuous’. Picture of a zealot. He wondered what they had ever had in common, what they had talked about. Or had it been one of those silent marriages, such as his own was in danger of becoming?

  ‘I didn’t know that about Gaston,’ he said. ‘That side of him.’

  ‘Does it help, do you think? Might it mean something? That he was serious about politics. To my mind, it was partly a means of retaining self-respect.’

  Did it help? Who could tell?

  Lannes said, ‘I’m under some pressure to set the case aside. You’ve a right to know that. Judge Rougerie’s embarrassed by it. So, according to him, is the mayor. That cunt.’

  ‘You’ll do what’s right. I’m sure of that, Jean. And now it’s time I took Toto for his walk.’

  II

  March 22, 1940

  Lannes turned up the collar of his coat against the chill rain drifting in from the Garonne. It was a blue-grey herring-bone tweed from the English shop, a present from Marguerite on his last anniversary. The label, in English, told him it was “thorn-proof”. He had looked the word up in his big Larousse dictionary, and found there was no precise French equivalent. But he liked what he took to be its meaning, and the sense of the word – “thornproof” – a good thing for a policeman to be, even if the coat itself, as he hadn’t told Marguerite, wasn’t at all suitable for a cop. It made him feel like an actor, a peasant boy aping the aristocracy. It was indeed the kind of coat one of the wine-barons from the Chartrons might wear – a minor baron anyway; the big ones, he assumed, went to London to have their coats and suits made to measure – in Savile Row, wasn’t it? But Marguerite had been delighted with it. ‘You look distinguished, my dear, for the first time in your life,’ she said, and laughed happily. Rare that, these days, her laughter, and all the more welcome. So he couldn’t not wear it. And it did keep out the cold and this rain too, more or less. In any case he had to admit that really he liked it, even its suggestion of swagger.

  His hip was hurting. The piece of German shrapnel lodged there since November 1916 played up in this weather. Nothing to be done about that, others were worse off . . . Still . . . he turned into a bar for an Armagnac. The proprietor, a big fellow with a patch over a missing left eye, nodded, a touch sullen. Well, it was that sort of morning. Lannes was sour himself, and ashamed of being so. Nevertheless . . .

  Actually he had reason, had been grumpy since leaving Rougerie’s office. To be fair the little judge himself had been almost apologetic.

  ‘It’s not, superintendent, a matter of a crime, apparently not, so far, that is, as I understand it.’

  He had paused there to take snuff, a habit Lannes thought affected in him, all the more so because, as the judge had once told him, it was �
�English snuff, the very best, the finest quality, from Fribourg and Treyer in the Haymarket. Try some, will you?’

  Lannes had refused, politely, he hoped. Not that he had anything against snuff. His mother’s father, the tailor, had been addicted to it, spilling it all over his waistcoat as he snuffed and sniffed and sewed, and, as a boy, Lannes had been delighted to take a pinch. ‘Protects against colds and the influenza,’ the old man asserted. And perhaps it did. But the judge was speaking. Lannes had missed something; never mind.

  ‘Not a crime then, and nor is it, I assure you, a matter of a favour for a friend. By no means. I scarcely know the gentleman. He is, however, a person of some standing in the city, yes indeed, of some considerable standing. An old family, not perhaps as distinguished as it was, but yet of some note in the annals of Bordeaux. Moreover he himself is elderly, and that demands our respect. So he has asked to speak of the matter to a policeman of suitably senior rank and of discretion – I repeat, discretion. I’m convinced.’ pinch of snuff – ‘that you fit, as they say, the bill. It may all be of some delicacy. Tact will be demanded of you.’

  So now Lannes was crossing the public garden, leaning heavily on the blackthorn stick which he carried in breach doubtless of some regulation, sub-section this or that, but which made walking less painful for him with his damned hip in this filthy weather.

  The rue d’Aviau was one of the most respectable streets in the city – one of ‘the best addresses’, as they would say – a fortress of the haute-bourgeoisie and people, as his father used to say, ‘with handles to their name’. It was deserted now. The row of blank facades excluded passers-by. Each house was a citadel, shut-off, yielding nothing to the inquisitive, though inviting speculation about the life – or absence of life, he thought – within.

  He mounted the step, rang the bell, and turned away to gaze on the silent street. He waited a long time, two or three minutes, till he heard a chain being loosed and the door was opened by an old woman with swollen arthritic fingers and a drip at the end of her nose. She sniffed loudly, retrieving it. Then without a word – doubtless Rougerie had telephoned to say he was on his way, though at the same time Lannes would not have been surprised to learn that there was no telephone in this house which gave the impression of having been asleep for the last fifty years – she ushered him in, across the dark shadowy hall, and into a high-ceilinged parlour or salon, the walls of which were hung with faded tapestries depicting mythological scenes, and portraits of what Lannes assumed to be ancestors stretching back to the time of Louis XIII.

  An old man was seated in a high-backed armchair, Second Empire style, and winged as if to protect him from a draught which didn’t exist in this stuffy overheated room. He wore a plum-coloured velvet jacket and a floppy bow-tie. A woollen rug was spread over his knees and tucked into the sides of the chair. The window shutters were closed, and in the dim light his complexion was the colour of damp ash. He sat very still as if waiting to join the portraits of his ancestors on the wall, but his eyes were alert and Lannes knew he was being judged. He was conscious of his coat, damp, steaming even, which the old maid or housekeeper hadn’t offered to take from him. But he hesitated to remove it.

  Monsieur le Comte de Grimaud took a thin black cheroot from a box on the little table at his side, and lit it, the match dancing in his quivering hand.

  ‘Lannes. A Napoleonic name.’

  ‘No connection,’ Lannes said, as so often before.

  ‘But you yourself are a Gascon like the Marshal.’

  Lannes shrugged.

  ‘A Gascon yes. Like the Marshal, that’s something else.’

  ‘A brave man,’ the count said, ‘Foolhardy. But one of the glories of the Empire. As for us, we were royalists, missed all that.’ He gestured with his cheroot towards the portraits in a manner that, thirty years previously, would have seemed arrogant. ‘Not that we did anything. Even then, we lacked energy and enterprise. It was as much as my grandfather could do to join the emigration. He was a youth then, of no spirit. So we had no part in the glory of the Empire. Perhaps you don’t think of it like that, as glory, I mean. No matter. I’m eighty-four. Nobody can expect anything of me now. A man of eighty-four is past everything. You must agree, I’m sure. Good for nothing but memories and trivia. Take your coat off, superintendent. You’re sweating. My doctors insist that this room is kept at this intolerable temperature.’

  Lannes, grateful, did as he was bid, saw nowhere to put the coat, let it fall to the floor. Waited.

  ‘My wife, Madame la Comtesse, the fourth countess I have made, is thirty-five. Younger than you? Yes? I was sixty-seven when we married. Foolish of me, foolish of her. But that’s no matter. You may think of it as my last spurt of virile energy. On her part it was what I now recognize as an atrocious adolescent impulse, a morbid desire to be the toy, the plaything, of a licentious old man. She has grown out of it of course. Naturally. But she has always treated me with respect. Even when my hands with their tobacco stains and the blemishes of old age were stroking her thighs, greedily, she never addressed me as other than “vous”. Of course, apart from the difference in age, there was the difference of status. My eldest daughter, who is severe, reproached me for making a misalliance, Disgraceful, she said, for the Comte de Grimaud to marry the daughter of a tobacconist. I paid no heed. That’s where I first saw her, behind the counter of her father’s tabac off the Place Gambetta. She was fifteen, ripe for plucking, and would have been content to be only my mistress. As indeed she was for two years. It was I who insisted on marriage. Odd of me, you think? Perhaps I was afraid of losing her? Perhaps I wanted to spite my children? I’ve forgotten.’

  Lannes made no reply, waited, just as in boyhood, duck-shooting with his grandfather on the old man’s little farm in Les Landes, he had learned patience crouching in the reeds by the edge of the pond till the birds came in a rush as darkness crept over the empty fields.

  ‘There’s brandy there, behind the books on the lower shelf. It’s forbidden me, like so much else, but give yourself a glass. Give me one too. Forbidden pleasures are ever the sweetest, and all my life I’ve never denied myself them.’

  Again he gestured with his cheroot and, putting it in his mouth, said, ‘Push against that panel.’

  It swivelled to reveal bottle and glasses. As Lannes restored the bottle to its hiding-place, he saw that a line of books bore the count’s name: a history of the Cathars, one entitled Nuits Marocaines and another, Mémoires d’une Jeunesse Morte; several novels.

  ‘As you see, I once aspired to be a man of letters. But I lay no claim to these novels. They were my first wife’s work. She was very cultured, very literary. When she died my ambitions in that direction withered. Perhaps I wrote only to impress her.’

  Lannes poured the brandy. It was much better than what he had drunk in the bar.

  ‘Another life,’ the count said. ‘Poor woman. I made her unhappy. She was poisoned by a snake. In Morocco. It introduced itself into her bed one night when I was absent, pursuing another interest. Almost half a century ago. There are few left who remember her, and none who read her books, though they were praised her in her day. I saw to that of course, for I loved her passionately, till she began to bore me. Are you married, superintendent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Happily? Forgive me, I am being impertinent, but a happy marriage is a rare thing. Rare and doubtless wonderful. However I am wasting your time which is, I suppose, the Republic’s, and therefore to be valued.’

  He sipped his brandy, taking no more than a sparrow might, or one of the canaries that flitted to and fro in the cage that stood on a pedestal behind his chair. Then he replaced his glass, applied another match to his cheroot, and, reaching into the inner breast pocket of his jacket, withdrew some papers bound together by a green ribbon.

  ‘I have read that it’s our national vice, or one of our national vices, writing anonymous letters. You will, I’m sure know how common it is and have seen many. However these a
re the first I have ever received.’

  ‘What is their theme? There’s always a theme,’ Lannes said. ‘Often demented.’

  ‘What would you expect? That my wife is unfaithful. That she has affairs. That she is a whore. The language is coarse, the tone vulgar and violent. And the information neither surprises nor pains me. How should it? At my age? What else should I look for?’

  He held out the package.

  ‘In that case,’ Lannes said, weighing it in his hand, ‘I am not clear as to what you want of me.’

  The old man smiled. Maliciously? Perhaps.

  ‘It’s usually slow work,’ Lannes said, ‘Identifying the writer of such letters. Slow work, disruptive and disagreeable for the family. I take it all are addressed to you? That your wife herself hasn’t received any?’

  ‘How should I know? Would you expect her to tell me? We are not on such terms. I believe there are bourgeois couples who claim to have no secrets from each other. Their lives must be very dull. The most recent of these letters declares that her current paramour is my grandson Maurice, a boy of twenty. I do not know if this is the case.’

  ‘Would it disturb you if it was?’

  ‘He’s quite an attractive boy. Miriam is an attractive woman.’

  ‘Miriam?’

  ‘Yes, Miriam. My wife is Jewish. Ah, that does interest you?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ Lannes said. ‘But with things as they are politically, the information may help me identify the writer. I take it, that’s what you want?’

  ‘I should like to know, yes.’

  ‘Understandably. But it’s not perhaps a criminal matter. Not yet. One is under no legal obligation to sign a letter. If the content is slanderous, that’s another matter.’