A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  Late on a Saturday night in August vacation: There would be no one in the building. “Come downstairs with me,” he said.

  They went together into the laboratory. He turned on the lights and looked at the double row of lab benches and enameled-steel cabinets. The techs had claimed their territories with knickknacks on cabinets and shelves. Méraud’s plants on the window ledge, Felicienne Calivart’s cartoons on the supplies cabinet, Beauchène’s soccer schedules on the bulletin board. He pushed open the door of a testing cubicle. On the table were scattered pieces of a Goddard form board. That would be Ségur testing a baby’s intelligence and never picking up after himself.

  This is my country, he thought. I am Reisden of Jouvet and I made this. He saw the baby’s chart, left in Ségur’s out-basket. We find answers. We are good.

  And I’m going to give Jouvet up, he thought, for André’s sake; for one patient.

  No. I’m not giving it up. Only losing it. But in the meantime I’m going to fight for it.

  And that was the key to his marriage too, he thought. Not giving up, trying at least; losing it maybe; losing it certainly if the war came. But not willingly or easily.

  In the venerable, unchanged office that had been Dr. Jouvet’s, he cranked the telephone. This may be all I can give you, Toby, he thought, how to fight for who you are. He jotted down phone numbers. Ruthie. Katzmann. Dotty. Milly Xico.

  “What are you going to do?” Perdita asked.

  “Fight Cyron for André. Lose, unless we get to him first. I’ll try to get him away. But if I can’t, I want him arrested in front of witnesses; I want someone watching him all the time.”

  “Give me the list,” she said. “I’ll call. You don’t want to spend time telling people you’re alive. But I’m coming, Alexander, and we’re bringing Toby if we have to. And Alexander? I’m putting Gilbert on the list. We’re bringing Gilbert.”

  Gilbert watches the soldiers

  RICHARD WAS NOT DEAD. Gilbert got Perdita’s telephone call only minutes before a motorized truck drew up in front of his apartment. It was still quite dark. A Frenchman helped Gilbert climb up into the back of the truck, and lifted up Elphinstone. “We’re all very crowded, I’m afraid,” Richard said. Richard’s voice. Richard. Richard. In the lantern light, he was so thin.

  “Oh dear boy.”

  The body of the truck was full of people, all sitting on gray packing quilts. Mr. Krauss, the cinema photographer, in his flat cap. A sweet-faced woman with a gray streak in her hair. A Jewish man, smoking a cigar, which made the space very fuggy and was certainly not good for anyone’s health. Three or four men in shirtsleeves. Dearest little Toby, asleep on another blanket between Reisden and Perdita, his rump in the air.

  “Thank you for being our American,” Richard—Alexander—said with a tired smile. “The plan is to go to Montfort, where there’s a manhunt on for André. He’s accused of killing his wife but I don’t think he did.”

  “I was on the camera platform all the time,” the cameraman said. “He was with me.”

  “Doesn’t help, Krauss; one of us could have done it. We’re all going to Montfort to be with him when he’s caught,” Alexander continued.

  “Probably just shoot him like a mad dog,” Krauss said.

  “Not if we’re there. So we’ll be there. Krauss, you’ve looked at all the film you shot?””

  “Yeah. Jules stepped right where he was supposed to but the lunette didn’t open. You can see her trying to move back, then the blade comes down and,” Krauss swallowed.

  “Katzmann?” Alexander and the man with the cigar talked in French. Alexander translated. “Philippe Katzmann is André’s doctor and is going to stick with him, to do a thorough mental workup.”

  “Is Count André in danger?” Gilbert asked, because that was what Alexander sounded like.

  They stopped at Amiens for coffee, at the railroad cafe. There was no tea; Gilbert had coffee too. In the strengthening sunlight he looked at his nephew’s face. He had thought never to see it again.

  Alexander shook the paper out and swore. “Kinderlen-Waechter’s resigned.” A group of young soldiers were reading the papers eagerly, joking, boasting, slapping their chests. A train huffed into the station and they gathered their equipment, going somewhere to the east.

  “The French want Cambon and Caillaux to come home too,” Alexander said, his eyes dark. “The negotiations are failing. That lot are going off to the frontier.—You really told Perdita you’d stay if there is a war? If there is a war, take Toby and Perdita back to America.”

  Alexander did not want him to stay in Europe, of course. Gilbert knew that.

  They watched the young men boarding. They are so young, Gilbert thought, and so bright, so cheerful, so happy on this hot morning, as if they are going to see their girlfriends.

  “You must take the money,” Gilbert said to Alexander. “Tom’s money. If there is going to be trouble of any kind,” he didn’t want to say words like war, “then it is better to have resources. One feels rather—ignored—when one is well off; it is only the money that people see. But when I have gone back,” he was very careful to spell that out, because that was what Richard, what Alexander wanted, “I would feel so relieved if I knew you had resources to spare.”

  The low morning sun made Alexander’s face suddenly bleak. “Gilbert, I am glad of your presence. Don’t think I want you to go. None of what’s coming will be fun. I want friends,” he said, with a little pause before friends. “But I don’t want the money.”

  Alexander had never talked about needing friends before, and it did not seem a comfortable admission for him now. Gilbert realized, in one of those sharp-edged revelations he had with Alexander and no one else, that Tom’s money might not be good for Alexander. Wealth is isolating.

  “I shall be with you,” Gilbert said. “I shall not go, not while you need me.”

  The last soldiers were boarding. “If the war comes,” Alexander said, “some of them will come back with nightmares they can’t talk about. And here I am, making a stink in Pétiot’s nostrils and losing the army contract so I can’t help them.—Let’s get on with it. Let’s get to Montfort.”

  Reisden accuses Cyron

  WHEN CYRON REACHED MONTFORT, he found Lucien Pétiot already there, standing in the courtyard, directing the soldiers as they hunted André.

  It was the first time Cyron had been back to the castle since Sabine’s funeral. She was still so here, as if she were around the corner. He almost saw her, a flash of blonde, heard her soft little nasal voice. In a moment she would come truly into the center of his vision. But it was only a window closing, a bird crying. When he turned his head, she wasn’t there.

  Weeds were poking up between the paving-stones of the terrace. Where the grass had been plowed up by cars or carts, blood-red poppies waved, the weeds of Flanders, taking root in the churned-up earth.

  Methodically, from one tower to another, groups of Pétiot’s soldiers were searching the buildings. It was so quiet. The sun hammered the courtyard. The men made barely a sound.

  “Go home, Maurice,” his friend said quietly. “I’ll let you know.”

  Cyron squinted; the soldiers were armed with revolvers.

  In a corner of the courtyard lay two enormous boxes, fresh yellow pine like the coffin of a beheaded giant. The guillotine had been brought here from Arras. “What do we want that here for?” Cyron said sharply. In the sun the pine smelled sharp and resinous. Cyron was suddenly back in 1870, going up toward the line. He had passed a wagonload of coffins, smelling like that in the heat.

  Around the guillotine the ground was red with flowers. Under a tarpaulin, the electrical ventilation fan was waiting to go back to the mines. He could see her blonde hair shining with Krauss’s lights behind it. He had imagined once that she would bring André into line— she could have done it if any-one could, sweet and stubborn Sabine. He had been half in love with her himself. More than half in love, perhaps. When he’d thought of
André’s marriage to her, he had pictured himself and Sabine at the breakfast table, with André somewhere else.

  And André had killed her.

  Cyron went inside. Upstairs, he looked into his own room, then, hardening his heart, he opened Sabine’s door. For a moment he thought he smelled flowers, her perfume, and then the dusty heat of an unused room overpowered it. Powder dusted her dresser and her box of jewelry had been rifled, spilled open. An amber necklace lay on the floor, and an enamel bracelet for a little wrist.

  He wiped his nose and closed her door. He went back to his own room, but from his window he could see the army boys searching the stables. He went into André’s room instead, looking for some clue to how everything could have gone so wrong.

  André had a camp bedstead in one corner of the room, but the rest was all about the film. Notes on costumes. Budgets and schedules. Rehearsal times, costume preparation, scene paintings, props. The scenario, annotated with the shots André wanted.

  In one corner of the study, on a table, André had set up the old puppet theatre Cyron had given him. Cyron grasped the frame of one of the puppets, an Alsatian soldier. He stood up with it. He made it salute and march, and then for a moment he rocked its frame and began to make it dance. Those first days Cyron had known André, the only thing that had amused the boy had been listening to stories and seeing the puppets dance. He dropped the frame and kicked the puppet underneath the table.

  Beside the puppet theatre was a pile of scrapbooks. Cyron opened one, expecting to see André’s record of his theatre.

  But everything in the scrapbooks was about him, Cyron.

  There were reviews, interviews with him in theatrical journals, introductions he had written for plays. Interspersed with them were notes in André’s hand, memos of a discussion they had had about Le Cid, something he had said about pacing. Cyron flipped through the pages, dismayed, horrified. Cyron had been a soldier first, then a sensation, above all a message. None of it had been an end in itself. But André had thought he was an actor.

  He wanted scrapbooks full of André’s military career. He wanted them kept by André’s wife. By Sabine. He sat down helpless in the chair by the puppet theatre, the wrong life spread over his knees in dusty brittle pieces of paper.

  “I was no actor, boy. I stood for something. I belonged to France.”

  Outside André’s windows, a motor-truck was coming through the Jerusalem Gate. Cyron could just see the side panel of the truck. A life-size André capered on the painted boards, pointing out the gilded, blood-dripping name of the theatre: the Grand Necropolitan.

  “What now?” he said, heartsick. “What?”

  He stumped downstairs.

  By the time he got outside, the courtyard was full of people. A couple of men in caps, a short man smoking a cigar, Fauchard’s sister. Reisden’s wife, and then at the corner of the truck he saw Reisden.

  Reisden. He might have known Reisden would be alive too. He looked thin, half-starved, and he turned and stared at Cyron almost feverishly, with the intensity of a man at the front. Cyron wouldn’t go to meet him; Reisden squared his shoulders and came forward.

  “‘He’s not mad, he won’t hurt her,’ ” Cyron mimicked Reisden, giving him the Austrian drawl he’d had once. “See what you did. He killed her.”

  “He didn’t kill her,” Reisden said.

  Lucien Pétiot was at their elbows. “You’re alive.”

  “We’ve come to help you search,” Reisden said.

  “Nobody needs your help,” Cyron said.

  The crowd that had come with Reisden had moved onto the terrace to get out of the heat. By the front door stood an old man holding Reisden’s baby in his arms. It was the same white-haired man who had come when Reisden was sick, and the two of them together, the old man and the child, looked like Reisden in old age holding Reisden as a baby. Binny is dead, Cyron thought, and the baby she would have had, and André is dead to me, and yet Reisden parades his son who looks like him and this man who looks like him, to me, as if I had no heart.

  “Leave us alone.”

  “You’ve more chance of capturing André with our help.” Reisden looked toward the hillside. Thirty soldiers at least, a long irregular blue line like a shadow on the grass. “Guns, Cyron; what are the guns for?”

  Go away.

  “I want to ask you a question.” Reisden looked at Pétiot. “Alone.”

  “Wait in Arras if you like,” Pétiot said.

  “Alone,” Reisden said, “now.”

  “You should have treated André like the child he was,” Cyron said bitterly. “You should have supported me when I tried to make him a man. Now he’s killed her.”

  “Supported you in what, Cyron?” Reisden said quietly. “Making him a murderer, when he’s not? Neither André nor Jules had anything to do with killing Sabine, which you should know as well as I.”

  “Why should I know?” Cyron guessed, looking at the hot dark eyes. “You think I know someone else killed my Binny, and I’m letting them go?”

  He saw a flicker of uncertainty cross Reisden’s face.

  “Where is he, if you’re going to help us find him? You owe me that. I married Binny off to him, and he killed her.” He wanted to wail, to scream into the sky, white as a blind man’s eyes, until Fate took pity on him and brought her back. “Do you know what you’ve done, boy?”

  “Cyron,” Reisden said. “You can’t have André. I won’t let you do it. You cannot have André shot and give your big curtain speech about justice prevailing, the way you do in your plays. You bloody well aren’t the hero here.”

  “Don’t you care about her?” Cyron asked. “Don’t you care who killed her? Your friend, your patient—”

  “André didn’t kill her,” Reisden said.

  “Then who? Who do you think?” Cyron said.

  Reisden looked into his eyes, trying to stare him down or something. Cyron stared back. “Who?” said Cyron. “Who?”—and he understood. Cyron gestured to Pétiot. “Lucien. This boy, this excuse for nothing, wants to blame Sabine’s—Sabine’s—” He could not say murder, not even death. “On me.”

  He left them and stumped up the stairs to the terrace. He brushed past the people Reisden had brought. The last one was the old man with Reisden’s baby; him Cyron shoved aside. Isn’t it funny? The fools flourish.

  He made his way blindly up the stairs to the privacy of the second floor.

  They search for André

  “ARE YOU INSANE?” PÉTIOT asked Reisden.

  “Am I?”

  Cyron said he didn’t kill Sabine. Reisden wanted to believe him. That didn’t mean it was true.

  Pétiot was glaring at him with concentrated anger. “Look at me. Where is André?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You knew André was alive—how long ago? I thought you and I were on the same side. You should have told me he was alive. Immediately.”

  “I went to see my wife, immediately.”

  Pétiot gestured. “What do you mean by bringing all these people?”

  “Fauchard’s sister, people from the Necro; they want to protect André.”

  “They’ll only distress themselves.”

  “Because you’re going to have him shot by your bloody soldiers with their bloody guns?”

  “I’m cleaning up the mess you made. I have to protect Maurice.”

  “Do you think Cyron needs protecting?”

  “From the newspapers! We’re in the middle of a national crisis.” Pétiot lowered his voice. “And Maurice is a national symbol. In the middle of his personal sorrow, he’s speaking in front of manufacturers, talking about the necessity of cutting ties with German companies, producing supplies for the army. But all it takes is one heckler. ‘Have the police caught your son, the murderer?’” Pétiot mimicked grimly. “‘What happens if we don’t want to support war production— the guillotine?’ I want André caught.”

  Six weeks to conquer France. Reisden took a breath a
nd burned his bridges. “André didn’t do it. Krauss, the cameraman, alibis him for the whole time.”

  “I honestly don’t care.”

  “No, Pétiot. People have died. I will not let you hunt André and Jules.”

  Pétiot simply looked at him. “Do you know how many people have died in Morocco this week? I thought I could work with you. I’m sorry.”

  ***

  They followed the searchers. Ruthie and Katzmann, Eli Krauss, and the technicians walked behind the line of soldiers, calling out André! Jules! Ruthie pinned her hat on her head and clambered up on the ramparts, cupping her hands into a megaphone. “Jules! Count André!” Reisden walked down the hill to the New Buildings, which were locked, then back up the slope to the Lion Gate. He wanted to make sure André saw he was here. If André was here.

  The young soldiers kept on, methodically quartering the landscape of Montfort. They were sweating through their tunics. Reisden recognized some of them from the battle scene.

  He got into the house and looked round the first floor, which was shadowy and dusty and deserted, but had been thoroughly searched.

  Reisden sent two techs back to Arras to look in the boves, another to the Auclart farm, another to walk to Vimy, the next town east, to see if they’d taken the train toward Belgium.

  He went outside and sat in the shadow of the stables. Ruthie and Katzmann came over and sat with him.

  “I don’t understand why anyone should think Count André could have done anything to the guillotine! Jules and you and I checked it. Nothing was wrong with it!”

  “France needs someone to blame.”

  “Not Count André!”