by Allan Massie
‘No, I didn’t know what to say.’
‘Best to say nothing. You know nothing about where he’s gone, what he’s doing.’
In bed, unable to sleep, acutely aware of Marguerite’s absence, he thought, that boy, Sigi’s disciple, what should I have said? But she looks so happy, and, as Marguerite said, she’s denied so much that she should have at her age. Perhaps he is indeed charming and intelligent and certainly he’s a handsome boy, it’s easy to see why she’s fallen for him – and him for her? but, but . . . They’re young, it won’t last, perhaps it won’t last, but if it does . . .
Soon after dawn he gave up trying to sleep. He left a note for Clothilde and went to the Bar du Marché for his coffee which, as usual, he improved with a dash of marc. Beside him at the counter people were talking about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
One market porter said, ‘I don’t care who hears me. I hope Stalin gives the little bastard a bloody nose.’
‘Not much chance of that,’ the man beside him said. ‘The Russians couldn’t even beat the Finns. They’ve no chance against the Boches. Mark my words, little Adolf will be in Moscow before the autumn to take the surrender. And then what?’
‘Might be the end of it all,’ another said.
‘I don’t know about that. If you ask me, it’s going to be bad whatever. We’ll still be stuck in the shit.’
‘You’re all wrong,’ the first speaker said, ‘and I’ll tell you why. The future belongs to Communism. Like I say, I don’t give a damn who hears me. Stalin’s victory is what they call historical necessity. That’s a fact.’
‘Give over,’ his companion said. ‘As for me, I know nothing about your historical necessity, but in my opinion the only thing to do is get on with our work.’
‘The boss wants to see you,’ old Joseph said. ‘He’s in a right stew, God knows why.’
The Alsatian didn’t offer Lannes his hand. Instead, immediately after telling him to sit down, he got up himself and crossed to the window where he stood for a couple of minutes with his back to Lannes.
When at last he turned round, he smoothed his hair and said, ‘I’m embarrassed. You’ve embarrassed me. I thought I could rely on you.’
Lannes waited.
‘You’ve let me down,’ Schnyder said. ‘I trusted you to keep Kordlinger happy.’
‘Difficult job,’ Lannes said.
‘Shouldn’t have been. What you were required to do was simple enough.’
‘Not my opinion.’
‘You weren’t required to have a opinion, merely to find these delinquents and hand them over. Instead . . . ’ ‘Instead what?’ Lannes said.
‘Instead you’ve defied him.’
‘We’re policemen,’ Lannes said. ‘Our job is to investigate crime and arrest criminals. I carried out the investigation as required, and found no crime had been committed. So there were no criminals to arrest.’
Schnyder sat down behind his desk. A nerve in his right cheek twitched.
‘Don’t play at being obtuse,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you don’t understand, don’t understand the reality of the position we’re in. You aren’t that naïve. You know where the power lies, and you know that we can keep our independence only if we respect the wishes of the Occupying forces and do as they require.’
‘Some independence, that,’ Lannes said. ‘Kordlinger demanded that boys or young men, who may be deplorable characters – that’s none of my business – but who have committed no crime, should be handed over to him or the Gestapo. I didn’t like that, but I carried out the investigation as I was ordered to. However, fortunately or unfortunately, I was unable to identify them. So there was nobody to arrest, and in any case, as I say, I have found no evidence of a crime. I’ve reported all this to Bracal by the way, and discussed it with him. That’s how it stands then. I admit I’m not sorry.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No. You can’t think it right yourself that we should deliver young Frenchmen to the Gestapo.’
‘God give me strength,’ Schnyder said. ‘Of course I’d rather not, even if they are what Kordlinger calls degenerates, rent-boys, pansies, scum, but my duty – yes, my duty, Jean – is to protect the PJ, to enable us to continue to function. There are times when sacrifices have to be made in the name of a Higher Good.’
‘Sacrifices of other people?’
‘Yes. I wouldn’t put it like that, but if you insist. The people we’re talking about are of no significance, except in so far as they have got up the nose of the Boches. I’ve had to apologise to Kordlinger. Do you think I liked that? To apologise abjectly.’
Lannes thought, so what? You’ll eat any shit if you’re told to.
Vichy will eat any shit if it’s told to. He had hoped for better from the Alsatian, not much better, but a bit better.
‘And it wasn’t enough,’ Schnyder said. ‘Because of you I humiliated myself, I grovelled, and it wasn’t enough. Kordlinger went straight to the Prefect to express his displeasure. The Prefect had me on the carpet, upbraided me for failing to ensure that my subordinates did their duty as instructed by the Occupying Power. He railed on for half an hour. The upshot, Jean, is that you’re suspended. I’m sorry. I’ll do what I can of course to get you reinstated, we’ve got on well and you’ve been helpful since my arrival. Actually you can thank me you’re only suspended, not dismissed.’
‘I can thank you?’ Lannes said. ‘Really?’
‘I’ve seen to it that you are still on full pay till the matter is resolved. I’ve done the best I can for you, believe me.’
It was probably true. That was the ridiculous thing.
It was strange, abruptly, to be in the sunshine with nothing to do. Moncerre was right; he had been a fool to twist Kordlinger’s tail. Yet he didn’t regret it. He ought to go home, tell Marguerite he had been suspended, ask how her mother was. He couldn’t bring himself to do so.
The sky was a deep blue, free of any cloud. The sun beat down. Thousands of miles to the east the Panzers would be rolling over the vast plains that stretched to the Ural Mountains. And Alain and his friends? Had they made contact with the Gaullists? He hoped they had gone to the beach and were soaking up the sunshine. He turned away from home, stopped off in the Place Gambetta for a beer on the terrace of the Café Régent. There were women all around, some of them pretty. He thought of Yvette stretched out on her bed and saying ‘needing?’ Why not? What harm could it do? But he lacked the energy. A sentence formed in his head: ‘Superintendent Lannes, having been suspended from duty, found he lacked the energy to betray his wife with a tart.’ But it wasn’t only that. It was also that in defying Kordlinger he had regained his self-respect, even his honour. Honour? Wasn’t it a sense of honour that animated Alain and his friends, the belief that to acquiesce in Vichy and the Occupation was dishonourable? Alain might even use the word. He wasn’t so sure of Léon and really knew nothing of what prompted Jérôme. But Alain had been brought up on d’Artagnan. He wished he could speak to him now. Alain would understand his defiance of Kordlinger, and approve of it. So, he was sure, would young René. In a crumbling world what remained to a man but his sense of honour? Tarnished, certainly, but not entirely lost.
The beer was beautifully cold. He flicked a hand to the old waiter he had known for years who understood and brought him another demi.
‘On days like this you can almost forget how things are.’
‘Almost, Georges.’
Lannes gestured across the square where a group of German soldiers was gathered by the fountain.
‘I did say “almost”, superintendent. We must make the best of things and take such pleasures as present themselves. Enjoy your beer.’
Such pleasures as present themselves? Yes, except such as young Yvette with her bedroom eyes, which honour forbids you. She had been kind to old Aristide in his loneliness and fear – though it wasn’t those he had feared who killed him. Had his commitment to the Communist cause been an attempt to r
egain his honour, the honour he had lost when he betrayed his young daughter?
Damn the word. There was some character in fiction – in a novel or play, he couldn’t remember – who had dismissed it as just that, a mere word.
Meanwhile there was an Italian proverb, Neapolitan, he thought: dolce far’ niente – sweet to do nothing.
For the moment, yes. But nothing? Only nothing? Was that what they were condemned to now, in their humiliated France? He sat there for a long time and didn’t order another beer. It seemed to him that his suspension from duty was a blessing; it gave him the freedom to reflect. He had taken a first step, but the first step counts only if others follow. There was the man Vincent of TR to whom he had made some sort of a commitment. Blessing or not, the suspension would make it difficult, even impossible, to act on that. So he must get it lifted. Perhaps Bracal could help.The hot sun was making him sleepy. He closed his eyes.
When he woke it was as if his mind had cleared. He went into the bar and telephoned the house in the rue d’Aviau. When old Marthe answered he said, ‘I need to speak to Sigi. Is he in Bordeaux? . . . Good. I know you refuse to have dealings with him for the reason you’ve told me, but this is urgent. Tell him I must see him. This evening, seven o’clock in the Café des Arts, cours du Marne, where we met before. He’ll understand . . . ’
As soon as he turned his key in the door of their apartment he knew Marguerite was home. If anyone had asked him how he knew, he might have replied, ‘Twenty-five years of marriage.’ He had never thought of it before, but now it came to him that no matter how strained relations between them might be, these twenty-five years couldn’t be wiped away. They had contributed to making each of them what they were. If Marguerite lived only for their children and their home and refused to take an interest in his work or the world beyond her immediate circle, wasn’t this because he had himself chosen to shut her out of so great a part of his life?
‘Why are you home so early?’ she said.
‘How’s your mother? Better, I trust?’
‘It was nothing really, as usual,’ she said. ‘Just in need of attention and reassurance. How did you leave Dominique?’
‘Well and happy, I think. As for being home now, I have to tell you I’ve been suspended from duty.’
He hadn’t been sure he would tell her. Then it seemed impossible not to.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘Do you want to hear it?’
For a moment it seemed as if she was about to turn away. Then she sat down. He stood looking out of the window, at nothing really.
‘You know we’re required to collaborate with the Germans,’ he began.
He told her everything from his meeting with the spook Félix, about Léon, not concealing that he was one of Alain’s companions, the wretched Schussmann’s suicide, the Café Jules and the boy Karim, Fernand’s role, Kordlinger’s demand and his defiance of it. Everything, even details which he knew would disgust her.
‘So?’ he said. ‘Have I been a fool?’
She laid aside the knitting to which she had attended throughout his recital.
‘Why do you ask me that?’
‘Because I have to, just as I decided I had to tell you the whole story. So: have I been a fool?’
‘You know you have. You must also know I wouldn’t have wished for you to behave otherwise.The boys you speak of – well, what you say they are disgusts me, you know that, insofar as I understand it, and I’m sorry to think that one of them is Alain’s friend as you say he is, but they have mothers and if some policeman was to hand over any of our children to that German, what would I think? I’d want to tear his eyes out.’
‘Thank you.’
For the first time in days she smiled to him.
‘There’s a postcard from Alain,’ she said. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be able to write to us, that there was still a postal service with North Africa.’
She got up to fetch it. A photograph of the Marshal.
‘All well and happy,’ Alain had written. ‘Don’t worry. Lots of Love. A.’
‘It makes me feel better,’ she said.
A photograph of the Marshal, Lannes thought; it was as if d’Artagnan had sent a card with the image of the Cardinal.
XLIX
Of course he was late. His arrogance, characteristic in Lannes’ experience of the natural killer, wouldn’t permit him to be the one to arrive first. Doubtless it wasn’t only arrogance; there was wariness too. He would want to make sure Lannes was alone before he presented himself. When he arrived, looking like a fashionable man about town in a newly pressed biscuit-coloured linen suit with silk shirt and silk tie, he was all smiles.
‘What’s this you are drinking?’ he said, ‘a petit vin blanc, superintendent? How modest.’
‘Have what you please,’ Lannes said. ‘I wasn’t sure old Marthe would give you my message.’
Sigi continued to smile, but the smile did not reach his eyes.
‘Poor old woman,’ he said, ‘she suffers from delusions, you know. And have you solved the case of that poor professor who got his head bashed in?’
‘The case is closed,’ Lannes said.
‘So you have decided my poor friend Sombra is innocent? Your inspector was rather rough with him.’
‘No rougher than he deserved. You haven’t spoken to Edmond recently?’
‘Why should you think that?’
‘Because you still refer to Sombra as your friend.’
‘And why not?’
‘We had him in custody. Someone applied pressure to have him released. It wasn’t Edmond. So who was it? It’s a question that should interest you, Sigi.’
Sigi caught the waiter’s attention.
‘Bring us a bottle of champagne,’ he said, ‘the best you have.’
‘He’s been turned,’ Lannes said. ‘You can’t rely on him now. There are people in Vichy, even in Vichy, who don’t like Edmond. I don’t suppose they much care for you either.’
‘Are you threatening me, superintendent?’
‘Threatening you? I’m in no position to threaten anyone. Call it rather a warning. There’s nothing simple or straightforward in Vichy. You should know that.’
The waiter popped the champagne.
‘Your health, superintendent.’
He leaned back in his chair, holding his glass aloft and watching the bubbles dance.
‘Should I be grateful?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. That poor Sombra, he’s nothing really, a nothing man. And as for what you say about Vichy, it’s true of course, but of no importance. I was surprised, I don’t mind telling you, to receive your message, and even curious. After all, our previous dealings have not always been agreeable. But if it was only to warn me against Sombra, it’s of no significance. Do you remember, superintendent, when we met here in this café a year ago – or perhaps when we had that other conversation in the public garden? I told you that there are two kinds of people in the world, Masters and Slaves, and two kinds of morality, that of the Masters – the Herren, as Nietzsche puts it, and that of the Sklaven – the Slaves. Poor Sombra is a Slave, I’m afraid. But what about you, superintendent? I invited you, as I recall, to be one of the Herren. It’s not too late. You must see now that the game is going our way. France must play its part in the battle against Bolshevism, which will see us rewarded with a leading role in the New Order of Europe.’
‘Russia stretches a long way,’ Lannes said, ‘and there are more Russians than Germans. Russia can lose many battles and still win a war.’
‘Germany beat them in the last war and the Third Reich is stronger than the Kaiser’s. Moreover, this time France will be fighting alongside Germany, not against her. I assure you, my dear superintendent, it’s not too late for you to attach yourself to the winning side.’
‘We shall see,’ Lannes said.
It wasn’t to listen to this nonsense that he had invited Sigi to meet him, but now that he was there, he found it difficult to bro
ach the subject of Clothilde and the boy Michel who hero-worshipped this scoundrel. He knew what he wanted to demand of him, and knew he would have to abase himself.
‘You tried to kill me,’ he said. ‘There’s no point denying it . . . I accept that you were acting under orders.’
‘Certainly, superintendent, there was nothing personal, I assure you.’
‘Quite so, and since then your uncle or half-brother – for he is both, isn’t he? – Edmond and I have reached an understanding.
For the time being, anyway. We have done each other a service. You probably know of this. Now there is the boy Michel, your – what should I call him? – your disciple? – I don’t know. Whatever he is, he thinks you are wonderful, you’re a hero to him. His grandfather, Professor Lazaire, confirms this. It fills him with anxiety. And now Michel and my daughter.’
‘Who is charming, I’m told.’
‘Whom I love dearly. There, I’ve confessed a weakness. You tried, as I said, to kill me. Now I ask you to break your hold on the boy. You can only harm him.’
There, he thought, I’ve said it. I’ve made my plea to this killer with his talk of Herrenmoralitie, and he’ll reject it.
‘Clothilde tells me he talks of fighting agaist Bolshevism. Spare him that nonsense. Let him be a boy and only a boy.’
‘You don’t understand, superintendent. The world is a battlefield.
I’ve had to fight all my life to maintain a foothold. Life is struggle. Nobody can escape that reality. Michel recognises this and welcomes it.’
I’ve failed, Lannes thought. It was stupid even to try to penetrate his crazy egoism. Clothilde will be hurt and I have revealed my own vulnerability. Whoever forms a tie, gives his heart to another, exposes himself.
Sigi picked up his glass and smiled.
‘You never replied to my notes, superintendent.’
‘What notes?’
‘Don’t you want to know who your real father was?’
‘Oh that? More nonsense. My father was the man who brought me up, and as for you – you killed your own father, didn’t you?’
