by Brian Moore
‘Where did you get it?’ I asked. Knowing him he could have stolen it.
He handed the puppy over to me. I remember thinking it had the most lovely, loving eyes. I could have kissed it.
‘It’s an Alsatian,’ he said. ‘I had six of those when I was in the milice. They’re police dogs. We can train him.’
‘Train him? What’s happened, the police haven’t stopped looking for you, have they?’
He shook his head. ‘I mean, when I come to visit.’
‘You’re not coming to visit, do you hear? I’m finished with you.’
‘What will you call him?’ he said. ‘He’s a boy dog. What about Putzi? One of the dogs I had in the milice was Putzi, he was a great dog, championship bloodlines, he’d belonged to Commander Knab himself, remember I told you about Knab. He’s the one who said I was a perfect Nordic type.’
‘You’re a perfect shit, that’s what you are. You and your Putzi! Anyway, I’m not taking him.’
She put the puppy down on the floor.
‘OK, I’ll let him off in some alley,’ he said. ‘I don’t want him. I bought him for you. You wouldn’t let him starve, would you?’
‘He’s not mine.’
‘He is, now. Listen, Nicole, I just couldn’t stay away any longer. I know it’s risky for me to come back but I’ve missed you. It’s been awful. I dream about you every night. Come on. Let me stay for a while.’
‘No.’
‘Just for a week, all right?’
‘I know why you came back. And after you’ve fucked me a few times, you’ll be off again. Where did you get that car? Did you steal it?’
‘Friends of mine lent it to me,’ he said. ‘Priests. I’m staying with them. They’re helping me. I’m learning to type. They’re going to find permanent work for me, typing up student theses for the Collège St Christophe in Aix. It’s not much but it will help.’
‘Help who?’
‘I’ll send you some as soon as I make some.’
‘I wasn’t asking for money,’ she said. ‘I’m finished with you. I don’t need you. I’ve got a new job.’
‘Aren’t you still working for the nuns?’
‘I left that. I’m working as a chambermaid at the Hôtel Majestic. Believe it or not, it pays better than the nuns.’
‘A chambermaid? My wife is a chambermaid. A chambermaid. My God, what next?’
‘I’m not your wife. You saw the name on the door. Maranne. It’s my name, not that false one you use. Pou-Pou-Pou – Pouliot!’
‘You call yourself Madame, don’t you?’
‘I have to. But I’m not Madame. I’m nothing.’
‘You’re my wife in the eyes of God. We were married in the church. That’s the only marriage that counts.’
‘Tell that to the mairie. You’re wanted by the police. You’ll never get a marriage certificate.’
‘All right, all right. Abbé Feren is working on that.’
‘Is he? Do you think I’m stupid? I happen to know that if Abbé Feren walked into the mairie today and told them he’d married us without a licence he’d go to jail for it.’
‘Who told you that?’
It was Jacquot, but I didn’t tell him. The puppy came across the kitchen floor, tail frisking, and rubbed its little head against my ankle. The puppy. Bobi. That was his clever trick. He knew I’d keep that lovely little puppy. I had to. He’d said he’d dump it in some alley. He would. And I was right, he’d come back for sex, only sex. I was young then and I was pretty. Two hours later he was pulling down my pants and showing me a hard-on like a steel bar. A week later he was gone. Sex was the big thing with him in those days, although he pretended to be fucking me because it was our duty before God to have a child. Oh yes, he wanted a child, but not for any normal reason. A child would be a way of holding on to me and proving to his friends, the priests, that he was a good family man, persecuted by the Jews, et cetera.
‘You’re not religious,’ I told him once. ‘It’s all an act with you.’
‘Is it? God forgive you for saying that. You don’t know me, you have no idea how much my faith means to me. You don’t know how hard it is for me that I can’t go to mass like anybody else, for fear somebody will recognize me.’
‘What are you talking about? You don’t go to mass now because you can’t stand seeing black people kneeling beside you in church, you can’t stand it when the priest faces you and prays in French instead of turning his back and mumbling in Latin the way it was when you were an altar boy.’
‘Well, that’s true enough,’ he said. ‘These left-wing priests have ruined the beauty of the mass, they’re ruining our religion. Not that you care, Nicole. You’ll never understand what these things mean to me. You’ve never had an ounce of faith.’
‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘You’re a liar. You’re the biggest liar I know. All that talk about how you’ve become another person since you met Monsignor Le Moyne, I’ll tell you what that is, it’s shit. Monsignor Le Moyne is just the latest dupe for your line of bullshit. “Father, forgive me, hear my confession. Only you can save me. Only you can bring me back to God.” You know as well as I do that you’re a con man with priests. Remember Abbé Feren?’
And it’s true. The very first time I met him he was with this priest, Abbé Feren, an old fool who was a chaplain to the milice. Talk about drama! Bursting in on me that night in my place in Marseille as I was eating supper, this old priest holding him by the one arm and Jacquot holding him by the other, and him bleeding away, the blood dripping down on the floor, this tall blond guy, I thought he was some German deserter. He didn’t look French. They put him down on my couch, he looked as if he was going to pass out, and Jacquot said, ‘Nicole, this is Pierre Brossard, he was my chief in the milice, so the FFI are after him. One of them recognized him on the Canebíre just now and took a shot at him. This is Abbé Feren. We went to him first and he’s going to help us but we can’t stay at his place.’
‘Good evening, Mademoiselle,’ says this old priest. ‘You’re Jacquot’s sister, aren’t you?’
‘I am, Father.’
‘The Abbé knows a doctor who’ll come here and take the bullet out,’ Jacquot said. ‘Nicole, we need your help. Pierre could sleep on your couch.’
It was Jacquot who’d got me that apartment in the first place, he got it for me in 1943, when the Rosenthal family was shipped off to Germany and the milice requisitioned their place: 171 Rue Paradis, Marseille, that was the address, it was the only nice apartment I’ve ever had and Jacquot, God rest his soul, always said, ‘I’m your big brother and there’s only the two of us and my job is to look after you.’ And he did. So if he asked me a favour there was no refusing him. I had to take this fellow in.
The doctor came later that night and took the bullet out and then Abbé Feren and Jacquot left me alone with Pierre and when I’d made up the living-room couch as a bed, and given him some soup, he thanked me, he wept, he could always turn the tears on, and later, when I looked in to see if he was all right, he’d got out of bed and was kneeling beside it, saying his prayers. And I knew what the miliciens were like and this wasn’t like any milicien I’d ever known. Including Jacquot. Making the sign of the cross. Saying prayers. And he was good-looking in that blond Nazi way. The truth was, I fell for his looks, I fell for his whole act. I nursed him for three weeks and he was smart, he didn’t try to fuck his friend’s little sister, he was all respect and gratitude and then he told me he’d fallen in love with me and in those days just after the war when everything had gone wrong and my own brother was sentenced to death in absentia and I was working like a nigger in the Fabrice Mounier, I wanted a man, I wanted a child, I wanted to be happy, to be ordinary, to be like everybody else.
Fat chance. How could I be like everybody else when I was mixed up with Pierre. Did he ever love me? If you asked me to tell you what Pierre’s like in one word I’d say ‘liar’. Everything was lies. Even the story about the FFI shooting him was a lie. I was on
the toilet one day, a couple of years after that, we were living in Hyères then, and Jacquot had come to see him and they didn’t know I was at home. And I heard Jacquot say, ‘I don’t know. I’m fed up. We still have the guns. We could have another go at it.’
‘It’s too risky,’ Pierre said. ‘Look what happened last time.’
‘That was your fault,’ Jacquot said. ‘You panicked.’
‘I never panicked. And I told you. It’s not like when we were in Paris. Marseille is different. It’s lousy with flics.’
‘It wasn’t lousy with flics, that day,’ Jacquot said. ‘There was only one flic and it was an accident that he saw us. If you hadn’t run, he wouldn’t have fired.’
‘How do you know?’ Pierre said. ‘Look, what we’re doing now is easy. Sure, it’s boring, day after day sitting with an iron in your hand. But it’s a lot less risky than what we did in Paris. I’m not going back to that.’
‘So you’re not interested?’ Jacquot said.
‘No.’
I didn’t ask Pierre. He’d lie. I asked Jacquot. ‘I heard you this afternoon. You told me it was the FFI who tried to shoot Pierre that time. Were the pair of you lying to me?’
‘Just trying to protect you.’
‘And what’s this about an iron? What’s that mean? I thought you and Pierre were doing factory work at Renault.’
Jacquot laughed. ‘Is that what he told you? How could we? We’ve no papers.’
‘So what is this?’
‘It’s a job. They’re fake banknotes. They look too new. Our job is to iron them and fold them until they can pass for real.’
‘And how long have you been doing this?’
‘Ever since we came to Hyères. Look, what else can we do? The Yids and the commies are out for our hides. The courts are full of commie judges. The flics will get a medal if they bring us in. That’s why Pierre moved here. There isn’t any legal job we can do. Do you know how boring it is to sit there day after day ironing banknotes that you can’t even spend because if you stole one of those false notes the guys we work for would break our legs. Anyway, I’m fed up. I’m going back to Paris.’
Poor Jacquot. He did. And two years later. Cancer.
She heard him call from the kitchen.
‘Nicole?’
She didn’t answer.
He knocked on the bedroom door.
‘Nicole, are you there?’
Bobi covered his head with his paws and began to whimper. She got up, went to Bobi and comforted him. ‘Stop that knocking,’ she said. ‘You’re frightening Bobi.’
‘I’ll do more than frighten him,’ he said. ‘Unless you open up.’
And he would too. She unlocked the door.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘It’s only for a few days. I’ll be out of here by Monday. In the meantime, if you want peace and quiet, just do as I say. I don’t want to leave this flat. I want my meals cooked here and cooked properly. Buy some good wine. Do as you’re told. And if you do, I promise you Bobi will be a happy doggy. Won’t you, Bobi?’
He went over to Bobi and put his hand out to pat him. But Bobi knew. Bobi couldn’t see him but he knew. That dog was uncanny. He snapped at that hand, Bobi who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who never in sixteen years had snapped at anybody.
‘Leave Bobi alone,’ she said. ‘Do you hear me, leave him alone!’
‘It’s up to you whether I leave him alone or not.’
No human being was capable of the love Bobi had for her. And she knew it.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Come on, Bobi. Let’s go shopping.’
14
From the very first time he saw Nicole he had lusted after her. He remembered lying on the couch in the living room of her little flat on Rue Paradis, seeing her pass by, half-naked, going to the shower or into her room, unable to touch her because of Jacquot. She was just a kid, jailbait, and living with her like that, he thought about it all the time. It was not being able to touch her that made him so hot for her, but it was also a time when he was changing, when God had come back into his life. In the forties he had drifted away from his boyhood faith, from mass and confession and the memory of kneeling down nightly with his parents to say the family rosary. He had lived a rough life in the years he fought for the Maréchal and for France. There were no saints in the milice. But then, in those first post-war years, the years of the hold-ups, the black market, the counterfeit notes, he had met Abbé Feren and begun to think again about heaven and hell. In those days, living in Nicole’s little flat, he had begun to pray again. Nightly. He had been condemned to death in absentia. The thought of death, of capture, led him back to God. And to this Abbé who understood what it was like to have been in the milice, and be abandoned when the communists won the war. ‘My son, of course you have committed sins in the past,’ Abbé Feren said. ‘But God’s mercy is infinite. He forgives our sins and asks only that we sin no more.’ He wanted to believe the Abbé. In those years everyone wanted to be forgiven. The clergy, the politicians in the National Assembly, people in shops and factories and on the farms, every sensible person said that what happened in the war years was best forgotten, that the war trials were revenge, not justice, that the Resistance had been run by the communists and now they planned to hand the country over to Stalin. And, of course, who did the communists hate more than an ex-milicien? He was a victim of the times, wasn’t that the truth? He wanted to get married, to hide away from the past, to live a quiet life. Abbé Feren knew about the temptations of the flesh. He knew that it wasn’t possible to get a marriage certificate. But the Abbé was a saint. He told him he would marry him in the only way that counts, in church in the sight of God. And after Abbé Feren had married him to Nicole in the sight of God, there was a time, and he remembered it well, when he would lie in bed on a Sunday morning, waiting for her to come back from mass, and when she would come into the bedroom in her Sunday best, her missal in her hand, he would make her take off all her clothes and lie there on the bed, and he’d lie there beside her with his cock sticking up, looking at her naked body, telling himself that he could have her any way he wanted and all the time and be without sin in doing it. Never before had he fucked a girl without knowing he’d have to tell it in confession. But now that he had returned to God, now that he tried to live in a state of grace, now that Abbé Feren had heard his confession and given him absolution, it was a good thing he was no longer tempted by that sin. The Abbé, and later Monsignor Le Moyne, always thought of him as a devout Catholic who obeyed the commandments. And he was. He had a young wife with a lovely milk-white arse and there was no sin in doing it.
Of course, later, he fell from the true path. In the sixties, when he had to leave Hyères and start a life of living in monasteries and presbyteries, no matter how much he prayed, there was always temptation, loose girls on street corners, showing their thighs. He was only human. He had money. Money from the priests, money from his typing, and, later on, the Commissaire’s payments. So he could afford it. But each time he did it, each time he fell from grace, he did not go to Monsignor Le Moyne, his confessor, but anonymously, to some curé who didn’t know him. Those were special confessions in which he confessed just that one sin.
‘Come on, Bobi. This way.’
He heard the front door shut. Blind old beast, it should have been put down years ago. And Nicole. Poor bitch, what use is she to anyone now? Old and ugly, no kids, no relatives, except for me, if you can call me a relative, her brother’s dead long ago, what kind of life is it for her, living in this little shithole of an apartment, taking the bus to La Napoule six days a week to clean up other people’s dirt. She’s not even religious. Her religion is that dog. 6,000 francs I gave her. How long would it take her to earn that much? She’ll spend it on the dog. Well, that’s all right. It’s Yid money. Give it to the dog. It’s all part of what’s happening now, I know it, the roulette wheel’s turned against me. It’s bad-luck time.
He got up, went to the kitchen dresser and o
pened the bottom drawer. A half-used litre of gros rouge and a bottle of cheap porto. He took a glass and tried the porto. Too sweet, but better than nothing. I told her to buy good wine. She’ll do as she’s told. Remember, no one in the whole world knows I’m here, not even the Commissaire. I told him Aix. It’s risky, though. He might phone there to check up on me. I’ll ring him Sunday. I’ll say I’m still in Aix.
He finished the porto then went into her bedroom and lay down on her bed. He felt his pulse. Eighty-six. Calm down. I need a rest. I need a good night’s sleep. This bed’s big enough for both of us. I’ll eat a big dinner, drink some wine, go to sleep. Not to dream. No dreams.
But he dreamed.
Legrand was excited. ‘Execution squad! Execution squad! Lecussan told Knab we’ll shoot fifteen. OK? Who will I take?’
‘Come with me.’ He got up from his desk, from the papers, the damn papers that took up so much of his time. This was more like it. As chief of the second section it’s my pick, my authority. Now I’ll see the fear in their eyes.
In the big room there were forty-six of them, most of them Resistance, plus some Jews rounded up in the past month. Which was which? He went in with Legrand behind him. He stood very straight, his beret at a proper angle, his trousers, shirt, boots, immaculate. Prisoners who were walking around in the big room stopped at the sight of him. The others lying on the stinking straw on which they slept rolled over and got to their feet, afraid that they’d be kicked if they did not. He shouted an order. At once, six miliciens came running upstairs and into the big room. They pointed sub-machine guns at the prisoners. The prisoners stood, stock still. They did not look at the men with guns. They looked at him. It was the moment of joy, the moment of power. I am God. I am God!
