by Allan Massie
‘You were right to tell me,’ Lannes said, ‘and please get in touch with me if you ever see him again. But be careful. Don’t approach him. You see, I rather think you are one of the few people who can identify your friend’s killer.’
Should he add that one of the others who might have done so was now dead himself, after being tortured? No, he’d surely said enough. Meanwhile he promised himself the pleasure of another word with Jean-Christophe who had denied all knowledge of the man Lannes knew as Marcel.
XXII
May 22–29, 1940
Schnyder was still in Paris. He wired to say he might be detained there several days by matters too complicated to explain except in person. He did not say whether Edmond de Grimaud had kept his appointment.
The mood everywhere was edgy. Even Moncerre, the bull terrier, relaxed his grip.
‘Frankly, chief,’ he said, ‘finding out who killed that poor sod doesn’t seem of much importance compared to the war news. Of course we’ll keep at it because that’s our job, but, all the same, nobody just now gives a fuck whether we catch murderers or not.’
Lannes received a summons from the Prefect, who was, ultimately, in charge of the PJ in Bordeaux. He had had few dealings with him in the three years he had been in place, but believed him to be a good man as well as a conscientious official. Moreover he was a man of the moderate Left which seemed to Lannes now the only honourable place to be.
The Prefect managed a smile as Lannes entered his office, but it was a nervous half-hearted one, and began filling his pipe. Then he had difficulty in lighting it. His desk was in disorder, files scattered over it, and some of them spilled on to the floor.
‘I’ve had a complaint from the Mayor’s office,’ he said. ‘That you’ve been harassing one of his staff, a fellow called . . . ’ He searched among the papers for the one that would give him the name he had forgotten.
‘Cortin,’ Lannes said.
‘Apparently he’s engaged in work of national importance.’
Quotation marks were audible round the last words.
‘He’s concealing information about a crime,’ Lannes said.
‘Nevertheless you’re to lay off.’
‘Is that an order, sir?’
‘Let’s say it’s a request with only one possible answer. I don’t like it myself. But that’s how things are today. Besides, and I say this, you understand, with some reluctance, because I respect you and your work as an officer, but if things turn out as I fear they are likely to, then I must advise you to consider your position. Do you understand me?’
‘Only too well. You mean that pursuing this inquiry will do me some damage if the war turns out worse than it is even now, and there’s a change of government, even perhaps of regime.’
‘Precisely. It’s not something I look forward to either,’ the Prefect said, ‘and I have to add that in that eventuality I’m not likely to be here myself. You would then be in a very exposed position.’
Lannes left the Prefecture ashamed. He accepted the logic of what had been said, and resented, even despised, himself for doing so. He had intended to go home for lunch, but telephoned Marguerite to say he was detained at the office. In fact there was nothing but paperwork that seemed more meaningless every day to keep him there, and lying to his wife intensified his feeling of shame and general worthlessness. He would have liked to get drunk, but instead walked across the city in the direction of the docks and, when he entered a brasserie with which he wasn’t familiar, restricted himself to a single beer and ate a badly overcooked steak.
It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun high in an intensely blue sky, and, if you were ignorant of the news, nothing in the streets and squares would have suggested that the war was going badly. The café tables were thronged and waiters were busy bringing ices and citron pressés, tea and cream cakes to women showing off their summer frocks and wearing, many of them, extravagant straw hats to shield their delicate complexions from the sun.
For three days his morose mood prevailed. He spoke little even at home where however he exerted himself to try to maintain a pretence of normality and to support Marguerite whose nervous depression expressed itself in long silences and bouts of weeping. At the office he buried himself in paperwork, and told young René there was nothing else to do, he might as well go and have a couple of beers with his mates.
On the 26th came news that the British were withdrawing to the Channel ports, preparatory to evacuation.
‘The buggers are on the run,’ Moncerre said. ‘They’ve let us down. Well, it’s not the first time the goddam English have betrayed their allies.’
Schnyder at last returned from Paris on the 28th. His face was grey, there were bags under his eyes and his suit was crumpled.
‘I’ve come straight from the train,’ he said, ‘it was packed, like sardines in a tin, and I got no sleep. They’re nervous as kittens up there. Everything’s going wrong, they’re preparing for the worst, and yet, you know, people are still drinking cocktails and champagne in the bars on the Champs Elysées. It’s unreal. At the Quai des Orfèvres half of them are busy destroying dossiers.’
The Quai des Orfèvres was the headquarters of the PJ in Paris.
‘Did you manage to see Edmond de Grimaud?’
‘More than once. That was what detained me, apart from arranging for my almost ex-wife to go to her parents in Dijon.’
‘And?’
Schnyder sighed, sat down heavily, felt for his cigar case, and holding an unlit cigar between his fingers, said, ‘Well he still insists that the shot must have been intended for him and that you got in the way. He asked why anyone should wish to shoot a conscientious officer like yourself. More than once by the way he told me how impressed he was by your “integrity” – his word.’
‘He’s a liar,’ Lannes said.
‘No doubt, no doubt. “In my position,” he said, “it’s natural I have enemies – the Reds, the Jews” and so on ad nauseam. Do you think he exaggerates his importance?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Lannes said.
‘However, he arranged a meeting for me at the Deuxième Bureau. Well, like most of us in the PJ, I distrust the spooks, but naturally I went along. Naturally too the officer I saw went by the name of Dupont – it would be less insulting to give no name at all. But he obligingly gave me a look at a dossier on Madame Pilar Chambolley, according to which she had been identified as an agent of the Comintern. “We don’t know,” Monsieur so-called Dupont said, “what has become of her. She crossed into Spain for the last time we know of in the summer of last year and there has been no trace of her since. She may be dead shot by the Anarchists with whom she associated in order to betray them. She may be in one of Franco’s prisons. She may have been spirited away by her masters in the Soviet Union. We only know France is well rid of her.” How does that sound?’
‘If she worked for the Comintern,’ Lannes said, ‘then everything she told her husband Henri, and Gaston, was a lie. I find that hard to believe.’
‘But possible?’
‘What isn’t possible these days? And of course if she was a Comintern agent, her whole life would be a lie, I grant that. I just find it hard to believe.’
Schnyder drew on his cigar, his brow furrowed. The fingers of his left hand beat a little tattoo on the desk. He got up and began to walk about the room. He stopped behind Lannes and put his hands on the superintendent’s shoulders, pressing down hard. Then he relaxed his grip and crossed over to the window.
‘The spooks are all liars,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, according to friend Dupont, she was a known associate of two men, Andre Labarthe, an engineer in the Air Ministry and Communist sympathiser, and Louis Dolivet, reputedly the most important Comintern agent in France. She frequented a club, the Cercle des Nations, in the rue Casimir-Perrier, which had been established by Dolivet. Part of their business was smuggling planes and guns to the Reds in Spain, the guns passing through Bordeaux in a manner facilitated by a customs offic
ial and trade union activist called Cusin. Do you know of him?’
‘Cusin? Yes, he was a figure here in Bordeaux for some years, a labour organizer in the docks, said to be honest. But he’s no longer about.’
Schnyder sat down again.
‘Does this put a different complexion on the case? Assuming for a moment I wasn’t being lied to – big assumption – does it merely complicate matters further? For, if Madame Pilar was indeed a Soviet agent, who is interested in preventing this from being disclosed, and who could have a reason to murder Chambolley? Would these indeed be the same people?’
Lannes made no reply.
Schnyder said, ‘I don’t mind telling you my head’s spinning.’
Lannes said, ‘In any case, since I’ve now been instructed by the Prefect to take things no further, it’s not going to be possible to find an answer to these questions. He said it was for my own good that he gave the order. I’d still like to know of course.’
At six that evening came the news that Belgium had surrendered to the Germans. Prime Minister Reynaud told the French people in a radio broadcast that history had never seen such a betrayal. ‘It’s only the first,’ Lannes thought.
For almost a week now he had hesitated uncertain of how best to act on the information the boy Léon had given him. Each time he thought of following it up, he pictured Javier Cortazar lying dead with his nails torn out. But it nagged at him and the Prefect’s warning-off order provoked his obstinacy. If d’Artagnan could defy and outwit the all-powerful Cardinals, he thought, what kind of Gascon am I to give up? The thought made him smile; it was so ridiculous. Nevertheless, ridiculous or not, action might serve as an antidote to the war news. So he picked up his blackthorn stick and limped off towards the rue d’Aviau.
It was still warm in the street, but when old Marthe admitted him to the house, the hall was dark and chilly. Some of the furniture had gone, also paintings from the walls.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s over here. Everything will have to go in time, the debts are enormous. If it’s the count you want, I doubt if you’ll get any sense from him.’
Jean-Christophe sat, as on Lannes’ last visit, in his father’s chair with the canaries hopping and chirruping in their cage behind him. He had a bottle of brandy and a glass by his side, and his eyes were glazed.
‘He’s been drinking for days, and he won’t eat,’ the old woman said, ‘and, what’s more, he didn’t go to bed last night, but sat there in a stupor. Here’s that policeman to see you,’ she said, shaking Jean-Christophe by the shoulder.
Then she settled herself on a stool by the door, and said to Lannes, ‘Carry on, don’t mind me. You may find you’ve some need of me however.’
Lannes pulled up a chair and sat silent for some minutes looking at the wreck of a man opposite him. Jean-Christophe’s gaze focused on him a moment, blearily, then moved away.
‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’ Lannes said. ‘Afraid of what you know and what the consequences may be. Isn’t that so?’
A tear trickled down the count’s fat cheek.
‘I know nothing, nothing at all. Don’t hit me,’ he whimpered. ‘Don’t beat me. I can’t stand being beaten.’
His hand stretched out, tremblingly, for the brandy glass, but Lannes was too quick for him, removing both glass and bottle.
‘You’re a liar,’ he said, ‘but nobody’s going to beat you, certainly not me.’
He topped up the glass and held it out, just beyond Jean Christophe’s reach.
‘Tell me the truth, and I’ll give you a drink. Who is Marcel? Where can I find him?’
‘I don’t know who you mean. I’ve told you before. Don’t beat me, I can’t stand being beaten.’
‘Nobody’s going to beat you,’ Lannes said again. ‘Come on now. You were seen with Marcel, La Chope des Capucins, Cours du Marne. So there’s no use pretending you don’t know who he is. Tell me where I can find him and I’ll give you your drink. Or would you rather I made this a formal examination, in my office, after you’ve spent a night in the cells and had time to consider your position – without a drink. You’re in trouble. I’ve enough evidence to hold you as an accessory to murder. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
The fat man was now blubbering freely, but when he at last found himself able to speak, it was the same refrain: ‘I know nothing, I tell you I know nothing, don’t beat me, I can’t stand being beaten, I’ve done nothing to be beaten for.’
Lannes hesitated. It was a disgusting spectacle and his own part in it revolted him. He passed the glass to the wretched man and watched him take a big gulp, shudder, and sit there holding it between his hands.
Then the moaning started again.
‘You’ve no right to treat me like this, no right. I’ve a bad heart. I can’t stand being beaten.’
The old woman said, ‘He’s afraid of you but he’s more afraid of another.’
‘Who?’
‘Come downstairs and I’ll tell you what you need to know.’
Lannes followed her. As he closed the door he heard the count whining, ‘I can’t stand being beaten. Don’t hit me, I can’t stand it, I’ve a bad heart, don’t beat me, please, please.’
The old woman led him to the back of the hall and down a steep stair to her kitchen in the basement. It was a long cavernous room with a stone-arched ceiling and stone flags on the floor. A couple of hams hung from hooks attached to a beam that ran across the room, their skins darkened by smoke from a black range in which there was a glow of embers. She directed him to a high-backed winged wickerwork chair by the range, while she disappeared into a cupboard or pantry, from which she returned with a bottle of marc and two stubby tumblers. She poured a couple of inches into one of them which she passed to Lannes, and a smaller drop into the other. Then she settled herself opposite him in the chair that flanked the other wise of the range.
‘That it should come to this,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived in this house for sixty years and it’s always been a place of wickedness. As you sow, so shall you reap.’
Lannes waited, now without impatience. She would come to what she wanted to tell him, in her own time and in her own way.
‘The old count was wicked, but he was a man. That poor creature upstairs, he’s never been that. He wrote the letters his father gave you, but perhaps you know that already.’
‘Why? What was his motive?’
‘I know nothing of motives, but I tell you this. He wrote what he didn’t have the courage to say. He’s always been a coward, and then he’s eaten up with jealousy and the knowledge that he isn’t a man. Isn’t that reason enough?’
She paused, and chewed her lower lip. A wall-clock ticked loudly in the silence of the vast kitchen. Lannes relaxed and sipped his marc. He recognized the moment, he had experienced it so often, that moment when someone who has never spoken his thoughts arrives at the breaking of the dam, when the need to communicate becomes irresistible. You could never be certain what would bring a person to it. Sometimes it was fear, sometimes grief, sometimes anger, most often an immense weariness.
‘Sixty years,’ she said again, ‘and much wickedness.’
‘Were you the count’s mistress?’
‘Of course I was. Not a month after I came to the house and he took me from behind. Oh, he was a man. His first wife, poor creature, was asleep in their bed and he had me on the couch. So it continued. Wives came and went but he always returned to me. Until the last one. She was like me, you know. Of the people. I didn’t hate her, though she thinks I did. To tell the truth I was relieved. It had got wearing at the age I was. But not him, he came back to me, insisting, always. Even in the last years he would have his hand up my skirt if I let him.’
‘You loved him?’
‘Whatever that means. It’s not a word I ever think about. He was my life, that’s all. Naturally he used to tell me I was the only one he had truly loved, but that was just blethers. He couldn’t love anyone, and sometimes he hated me because
I understood him.’
She knocked back her marc and cackled.
‘Oh yes, he was a man. And now it’s all finished. He was disappointed in you, I have to say. He thought you would discover it was that poor sot upstairs who wrote these letters.’
‘He wasn’t interested in them, though, was he?’ Lannes said. ‘He had some other reason for directing my attention to this house. What was it? Tell me about this Marcel. You heard me ask Jean Christophe about him. When I asked you before, you denied all knowledge of him. But that was a lie, wasn’t it. You know who I mean, and if I tell you that Jean-Christophe has been seen with him and I’m sure Edmond also knows who he is, what do you say?’
She sniffed loudly, picked up the bottle with fingers twisted by arthritis, poured herself a glass, drank it, and passed the bottle to Lannes.
‘It’s natural to know your own family, even those who are born the wrong side of the blanket. I wouldn’t speak of him before because he used to run barefoot about this kitchen when I had the nursing of him, but now it’s different, since he killed his father. I didn’t know that before, you see. It was that sot upstairs who let it slip, that the man you call Marcel was in the house the morning the count was killed.
‘Marcel is the count’s son.’
‘As I say, and worse than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s much wickedness here, I told you that. Thérèse wasn’t always the half-wit she is now, spending half her days on her knees in prayer. She was ever a bit simple, that’s true, but a cheerful girl and as pretty as could be. She was a woman at sixteen, in body but not in mind, and he couldn’t keep his hands off of her. Then one day it was more than hands, and nine months later . . . So, you see, Sigi, which is what we called him, is the count’s son and also his grandson. No wonder the poor girl took to religion.’
