by Sarah Smith
Katzmann sat next to them. “I can’t smoke,” he complained, “the fields are too dry. I don’t suppose we have the army contract any more.”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Ah, well, at least you’re part of the problem.” Katzmann fanned his face with his hat. “Did I ever tell you that story? You know my family comes from Alsace. After the war France made us declare ourselves French citizens, opt for France they called it, and my mother wouldn’t do it because we were already French citizens; not until the Dreyfus affair. Then the newspapers started to be full of the Jewish problem, you know, the Jewish problem in France, and she shook her head and said, ‘Well, we have to be part of the problem!’ And she marched us down to City Hall. Congratulations on being part of the problem.”
“I’m losing everyone at Jouvet their jobs.”
“Well, it’s not as if we had jobs before you bought the place.”
Reisden could see, down on the terrace, Gilbert and Perdita. Toby was still trying to investigate the potted plants. Reisden remembered him doing it the day after they’d discovered Blantire’s body. How long ago? Gilbert and Perdita were talking earnestly. Around Perdita’s neck hung a spark of light.
Diamonds. From Gilbert.
“We could survive,” he said. “I have resources I could call on. Money to keep Jouvet going once the army contract fails.”
From Richard.
“Sounds like there’s a price?”
I make my son’s life very difficult. Who would want to be a murderer’s son? And I cease to exist.
***
When he came back to the courtyard, he saw the technicians putting together the guillotine. Ruthie was directing them, wiping sweat off her face.
“I’m proving Count André could not have done anything to this,” Ruthie said. “He was much too far away.”
Pétiot came out of the house to look at it. “Take that down.”
“Put it all up, every bit of it,” Ruthie said fiercely. The sweating technicians hammered together the platform, then set the uprights in their places and secured them. The platform had been roughly washed, but the planks were brown with dried bloodstains.
“The blade too, miss?”
The men lifted the blade out of its box. Blood flaked from its edge. Eli Krauss, watching from the ground, took a step back and put his hands behind him.
Finally it was all complete, tall, narrow, garish, standing in the courtyard at Montfort. Behind the French windows in the dining room, two shadows moved.
“See!” Ruthie said. She made her way up the narrow stairs. “Here was my brother, sitting just here,” she shouted toward the French windows and the shadows of Cyron and Pétiot. She descended the stairs again and paced away from the guillotine. “And here was Count André, on the camera platform: Look, ten, eleven, twelve steps away. How could either of them have done anything?”
From inside the house, curtains slid closed over the windows.
They looked over the mechanism. Threads of blood-stiff material still clogged the main lever. Ruthie picked them out with a knitting needle. Under the brown stains Reisden could see blue, white, and red. The bunting was still packed; they brought it out and hooked all of it onto the platform. It hung down almost to the ground in gaudy swags and strips, concealing everything behind it.
Ruthie put on her glasses and began examining the bunting, inch by inch. They all examined the bunting: the techs, Katzmann, Reisden. At the back of the platform Katzmann found a strip ripped off.
“You see?” Ruthie said. “Anyone must see! The person who stuffed the material into the mechanism must have done it from back here. Count André was out in front. My brother was on the platform. It wasn’t possible for them to do it!”
***
“I will not leave my Toby out here in the sun.” Perdita marched in and took possession of the kitchen. There were no servants at Montfort; no one stopped her. She had brought food: cheese, bread, sausage, wine, baby food for Toby. While Toby crawled around the cool kitchen flagstones after Elphinstone, she and Uncle Gilbert made up plates for people. Being polite— being awfully, very polite— she took a plate in to Monsieur Cyron, negotiating the minefield of things scattered on the floor of his office, wondering if she was feeding a murderer.
“Let my husband find your André,” she said to him as she left the food.
“Go away.”
“I would think,” she said, “I’d think that you would want to help André. He is your son.”
She heard her plate of food smashing on the floor.
“André laughed when she died,” André’s father said. “I will never forget that. Never.”
Ruthie came into the kitchen, hot and crying. “Monsieur Cyron won’t even listen.”
They scraped out the firebox of the enormous two-ovened kitchen stove. Deep in the grate among the clinkers Ruthie found a scrap of burned leather. “That was the books, but they’re gone.”
“What about Mademoiselle Françoise’s order book?” Perdita asked. It would show Sabine ordering mourning before her father was dead.
“It will show when she bought the dress with the buttons,” Ruthie said.
They sent one of the technicians in the truck to Arras. He came back with the order book.
But the page with Sabine’s order had been torn out. It was gone too.
André is found; "he can trust me"
AT THE END OF the afternoon, the soldiers found the men.
The soldiers had been working their way through the abbey, poking sticks into every hole. They had climbed the towers. They had almost finished, some of them had started on the stables, when one of the soldiers took a second look at the half-ruined, re-roofed side chapel, and saw the iron door.
Reisden had time only to see that the key was gone from above the door before one of the soldiers pulled the door open.
Jules was crouched by a pile of coffins. André exploded through the door, running, knocking aside chairs. The soldier drew his gun. “No!” Reisden ran after André, tackled him, brought him down hard on the broken marble pavement. “Don’t say a word, André,” Reisden muttered, lips by André’s ear, “not a bloody word and do not run, they’ll shoot you.” He manhandled André to his feet, standing close by him. They were surrounded by a ring of guns.
The soldiers handcuffed André and frog-marched him across the courtyard. Jules they half-dragged behind, the center of another knot of guards.
Pétiot came bustling out of the house to meet them. Behind him was Cyron.
“I’m sorry to see this,” Pétiot said. “I really am, Monsieur le Comte.”
André stared over Pétiot’s head at Cyron. André was grey with dust, his long hair was tangled, he was smiling a wide-eyed, twitching smile, no more than a stretching of the lips. His mouth had been cut when he fell. Blood ran down his chin onto his shirt.
“Hello, Papa Cyron. What will happen to me now?”
“Bring him into the house,” Pétiot said, moving between André and Cyron as if André were something infectious. “In—” He hesitated for a moment, obviously at a loss for someplace to put André.
“The old dispensary, in the stables,” André said. “Papa used to put his medicines there. There are bars on the windows and a door that locks.” He smiled, weird, wild, helpful.
Jules, mute, struggled with his captors and got his hands free. He pointed to the guillotine, then to himself. I pulled the rope—I, not André! “Yes, you too,” Pétiot said, shaking his head. “Put him someplace else,” he said to the soldiers. “We don’t want them together.”
***
André thinks about Jules, but mostly André thinks about Papa Cyron, Papa Cyron’s eyes not meeting his, Papa Cyron’s mouth turning down like a judge’s.
“Dispensary,” Reisden says, understanding what André has only half spelled out to himself. “Are there still medicines in it?” There are. Reisden takes a box into the little room and fills the box with bottles. André, guarded, sees the box pass h
im, sees faded skulls and crossbones on the labels. Hamlet, you could have left me one? He knows what is going to happen, he reads it in Papa Cyron’s eyes. He doesn’t know when, what exactly, how long, whether it will be painful. Reisden wants to stop it but he can’t.
It is like when Sabine gave him the poison. Eventually there is nothing else to do.
The soldiers shove him inside the dispensary, a little pantry-like stone room with wooden shelves. The bars on the window are ancient, rusted, but solid; the door is barred, so that André can see out into the stables. The room is filthy with dust; dust motes make the light yellow. André goes over to the window. Outside he can see, on the left, the wall of espaliered grapes and the kitchen garden. On the right is the guillotine.
Beyond the guillotine, parked on the grass, he can see the Necro’s truck, and on the side is Necrosar, dancing and pointing. Only a painted thing. He should have Necrosar to keep him company; Necrosar would say it’s only a play.
But all he has is Reisden. Poor Hamlet.
Reisden brings in two chairs. The soldiers lock the door. Reisden sits on one of the chairs, back-to-front, with his arms on the back, looking up at him. André stands by the window, then goes to the barred door. The soldiers are just outside. He stares at them, and Reisden gets up and does, too, until they move halfway down the long stables.
André comes back to the window and motions Reisden to stand by him.
“They came here last night,” he says in a low voice. “Began hunting us at dawn. I shouldn’t have frightened Roselle— I thought Papa Cyron would come by himself. He sent Pétiot.”
“You’ll be taken to Arras, probably tonight,” Reisden says. “Tomorrow morning you’ll be questioned. You’ll be sent to jail or to a guarded asylum. That’s all that will happen for now. Katzmann will be with you, and if not Katzmann, someone else from us. Always.”
Reisden is being kind to him or thinks he’s an idiot. André touches his mouth. It stings and his hand comes away bloody. “I want a bath. If I were cleaner Papa Cyron might think he could trust me.”
“We’re all here. Everything will be all right.”
“We smashed the lock on the tunnel. Papa Cyron knows what we know. You and I.”
At the corner of Reisden’s jaw a muscle jumps, and then his face goes completely wooden, blank, almost stolid. André knows how Reisden uses his face, André’s put it on stage. Reisden isn’t showing what he’s thinking but he’s not able to show anything else.
“He could trust me,” André says; it’s Papa Cyron he’s saying it to, Reisden is only a convenient ear. “It’s true I’m—a little odd—but I wouldn’t tell the Germans.” It’s André’s house, after all, his countryside the secret is protecting. “If I ever wanted to say the tunnel doesn’t exist—” he puts his face in the corner, against the cold stone “—I’d say it like this.” He whispers to the wall, but what he whispers is something else.
Papa Cyron is going to murder me.
Papa Cyron needs the tunnel. Which doesn’t exist. And poor odd André knows it.
And so does Hamlet, who has a wife and a son and wants to believe in a normal life.
Murderers are ordinary, André realizes. He has got it wrong in his theatre; the Necro vampires, the eviscerators, the ax murderers are comedy. This is real life, and there is no difference between the heroes and the villains and the victims. Reisden’s a murderer, of all people, Reisden who does paperwork in the train and doesn’t exist in the morning before coffee and has a little boy he loves.
That’s the only way André wants to think of murder now, that it’s an accident that happens to ordinary people. So it might be some-thing that happens to him and Papa Cyron. It’s nobody’s fault. If it hadn’t been for the tunnel, it might not have happened to them.
“Tell him to trust me. I won’t tell.” André sits down on the chair. He is so frightened that he needs to rock back and forth; he puts his hands between his knees and squeezes them, but his mind is perfectly clear.
“We will protect you.”
André turns around and looks at Reisden. Reisden is trying to make both of them believe that everything will come out all right. Reisden is frightened of the dark with the guns in it, of the boy who pulled the trigger; he doesn’t want anyone to pull the trigger again. But he won’t say that Papa Cyron will trust André.
“Papa Cyron will put me in the asylum,” André says patiently. “But he’ll think, it isn’t safe, the boy’s insane. You can’t watch me all the time,” André says impatiently. A month, a year, two years!
How long?
And all that time Papa Cyron will have to wait, and André will have to wait. And then . . . André thinks that Papa Cyron will bring him some bottle of wine, some delicacy. Something he particularly likes. André will take it, the way he took the candy from Sabine.
Papa Cyron won’t want to do it. André has seen that in Papa Cyron’s grimace. But if it has to happen, he will do it himself. André doesn’t want to die, but if it comes from Papa Cyron-- They are tied together, Papa Cyron and he.
“We have a journalist friend. She’s going to take up your case. We’ll try you in the newspapers, André, and we’ll prove you innocent.”
“I said I would kill her,” André says. “And she’s dead. How much can you do, Hamlet?”
He looks out the window. It is a beautiful late afternoon. On the wall, the grapes are shaped by the shadows and the sun. On film they would look round enough to take in the hand. “I like making films,” André says, “and I won’t be able to make any more in the asylum. And I don’t want to spend a long time frightened.”
“I’ll prove Sabine guilty,” Reisden says.
That won’t work. André has been watching her through the camera lens for weeks. He’s seen her in the Ball of the Dead scene, blonde, terrified, attacked by monsters: innocent as a picture. “No one would believe it.”
André looks out at the good strong light. He has wanted to photograph that last scene with Cyron; when he thought the tunnel was real, he thought he would make Cyron a hero. “Ask him to finish my film,” André says. “I want him to say I did this for France. Tell him when he plays that to think of me. And I want you to say I forgive him. Say it for me.”
“Don’t you play a death scene on me, Montfort.”
“And whatever you want to do for me, I want you to do it for Jules instead.”
“I won’t give up,” says Reisden.
“If I say I killed her, Jules will be all right,” André persists.
Reisden stands up and grabs him by the shoulders. “You’re not alone in this!” he says. “If you roll over and let yourself get killed, don’t think Jules will thank you for it, or Cyron’s life will be better— He hasn’t done anything to you yet. Don’t let him do it. Don’t do it to him. Just don’t.”
It is almost funny. Reisden won’t let Papa Cyron kill him. Reisden wants to save both of them.
“Don’t give up. I’ll talk with Cyron.”
“What can you tell him?” André asks, curious.
“Pétiot wants to avoid scandal; he simply wants the whole thing over. If you’re accused it won’t be over. We have a journalist friend looking into Sabine’s background. Milly Xico, you know her? And I’ll put Jouvet’s resources behind you.”
“Papa Cyron will have bigger newspapers. Bigger friends.”
“We’ll be able to fight him,” says Reisden. He looks grim.
“Tell him he can trust me,” André says.
Reisden and Gilbert talk about money
THE COPPERY SKY GREYED; the long twilight drew in. The soldiers set up their tents around the stables. From the east, lightning made the clouds glow and thunder muttered across the fields, but not even a breeze moved the air at Montfort. Reisden sat in the kitchen with Perdita and Gilbert, feeding Toby. Eli Krauss and Ruthie were on watch by André. Katzmann was upstairs with Jules.
“The books are gone,” Perdita said. “Sabine’s order for mourning is gone.�
�
Reisden took a chance and used the telephone cabinet in the Great Hall to call Milly.
“Almost none of Sabine’s school friends are in Paris,” Milly said over the telephone line. The connection was bad; she sounded as if she were shouting through a windy pipe. He could hear Nicky barking in the background. “They’ve all gone to the country. But I reached one. She’s been got to! She said Sabine was the sweetest, kindest, most considerate girl she ever knew. She was shocked, shocked that the poor girl’s died. I saw two of her schoolteachers. The same. Sweet. Kind. Considerate. Bah!”
“Will you keep trying?” he asked.
Milly would. Milly gave up for nobody.
“But you should have been her dog,” Milly said. “I’ll lose my column over this.—Never mind, I’ll live off my sweetie and write my book.”
After he hung up, he stood in the Great Hall, thinking: not thinking, simply waiting, for inspiration, to be clever, anything. Halfway up the wall, the entrance of André’s parents’ room gaped like a wound.
Pétiot was standing by the kitchen door. He moved away when Reisden approached. He had been looking at Gilbert.
In the kitchen, Gilbert had rolled up his sleeves and was washing up. Perdita was sitting on the floor, playing ball with Toby. Elphinstone was following the ball with his eyes. “Gilbert?” Reisden gestured: Come outside.
The soldiers watched them from the stables. He led Gilbert past the guillotine, through the Lazarus Gate and the graveyard in front of the great ruined abbey doors. They sat on the grass slope beyond the abbey, watching the low sun and the ribbons of water through the fields. He looked back; Pétiot was watching them from the crown of the hill.
“I thought Cyron might have killed Sabine,” Reisden told Gilbert quietly. “It’s simpler than that. Cyron’s reputation needs to be protected. So Sabine’s murder has to be solved quickly. André’s the designated murderer, probably with Jules. I won’t have it.”
Gilbert nodded.