A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

“I need resources. I’ll take up your offer of Thomas Robert’s money,” Reisden said before he could change his mind.

  “I am glad.”

  Reisden wasn’t. He fell back on the grass, looking up into the sky. “I don’t think either of us should be glad. How do we explain why you’re helping me?”

  “Because I think you are right?” Gilbert said. “Because Jouvet is a good company? It is, you know.”

  He turned his head to look at his uncle and smiled wryly.

  But we look like each other, he thought. And Toby will notice.

  Pétiot was coming down the hill toward them, half-sliding on the grass. He stood in front of them, looking from one to the other.

  “There are two men guarding André,” he said. “Two men from you.”

  “Yes. Pétiot, have you met Gilbert Knight?”

  “I can have you deported,” Pétiot said, “and I will.”

  “I expect you can,” Reisden said. He could have added, But you can’t deport Gilbert. Not our American.

  “Alexandre est un bon homme,” Gilbert said in his careful French to Pétiot.

  “Who is he and why is he here?” Pétiot asked Reisden.

  “Monsieur le comte de Montfort et Alexandre, ils sont deux bons hommes.” Both good men.

  Pétiot looked at Gilbert, stroked his beard, seemed about to say something, but then abruptly headed up the slope.

  I will never again be entirely Alexander Reisden of Jouvet, Reisden thought. The story will come out and Toby will know his father is a murderer. He closed his eyes, too tired even to sit up.

  “Alexander,” Gilbert said. “I can certainly simply give you the money and go back to America, if that is what you want.”

  “I’ve told you I’m glad to have you here.” It was ungracious. “I’m sorry. You’re being very useful. What’s going to happen won’t be pleasant, Gilbert. Pétiot means to sic the government on me.”

  “If you need me, I am glad to be here,” Gilbert said.

  I want you here, Reisden thought. But—Toby. “It will depend on what happens with André.”

  “Otherwise of course I will go back to America and not bother you.”

  ***

  They went back to the chateau. In the kitchen, Perdita had bathed Toby and was drying him. Reisden stood at the door, feeling drained, watching Perdita tickle Toby and Toby giggling, loving it. Oh Toby. Gilbert was looking at Toby too.

  It was clear to him, perfectly clear, that taking Gilbert’s money would be betraying his son for his job.

  He went upstairs to see Jules but stopped at the door. Katzmann was with him, sitting and listening; puffing at his cigar but being silent, receptive. Jules had got his neck brace off and was in a padded neck-collar. He could speak, barely, in a whisper. Reisden heard the murmur. He stepped back to avoid eavesdropping, but he heard some of it.

  “It was late,” Jules whispered. “We had to get the shot. I hit my marks. I’d measured everything. I know I stepped on the plank that released the catch. I thought I felt the click—”

  Gaunt, miserable Jules held up the hands that had pulled the rope and stared at them. He had been an ordinary man. Now, for the rest of his life, he would envy the innocent world.

  Someday, if they were lucky, Jules could talk to Reisden about that.

  He waited a few minutes down the hall, watching the intensity of the confession, until Jules straightened up and sat back in his chair. Katzmann puffed at his cigar, stood, and was an ordinary man again, telling jokes, trying to cheer Jules up. Jules was asking if Katzmann thought he’d be deported. “And Ruthie?” Jules managed. Reisden knocked on the doorjamb.

  “Do you want some sausage?”

  “I do,” said the soldier who was guarding Jules.

  Jules made a spooning motion with his hand: something liquid? “Soup,” Reisden guessed. “I’ll bring some up.”

  He cut through the Great Hall toward the kitchen. It was almost dark by now. The light was on in Cyron’s office. Reisden stopped by the door and saw Cyron sitting at his desk, among all the paraphernalia of his theatre, the Serpent Baa, the discarded wig on the bust of Napoleon, the linking rings dangling from his chair. Cyron’s head was in his hands. On the desk lay a puppet, a broken Alsatian soldier, like a broken child.

  Did you kill Sabine, Cyron? Probably not. It didn’t matter at this moment. Cyron might be a murderer; he was a father.

  The sausage would wait. Reisden brought in a chair from the Great Hall, moved the litter aside, and set the chair down. He stood in back of it, crossed his arms on the back, and talked to Cyron.

  Reisden confronts Cyron; opting for France

  “ANDRÉ’S YOUR SON,” SAID Reisden. “He’s what you have, and this is what will happen to him. He’ll be taken to an asylum. He’ll be tried. He’ll be convicted, I imagine. He’ll either be guillotined or locked up for life. And if he’s locked up, one day you’ll hear that he’s drowned in his bath, or committed suicide, and who knows and who cares, because in spite of who he is, André’s not important and you are. He is being framed to keep you a national hero of France.”

  Cyron turned away impatiently.

  “What are you a hero for if not for your son? All you have to do, Cyron, is to tell Pétiot that it is important to you to protect him.”

  “No.”

  Reisden hadn’t sat down. He stood behind the chair—keeping it between him and Cyron, as if Cyron were a lion he had to tame. Even now, Reisden thought, I think of him as though he’s William. “I am a father and so are you. Even if I thought Toby were guilty of murder, I wouldn’t put him through what André will go through. André doesn’t know whether someone will kill him tonight or whether it’ll take months.”

  “I’m not his father,” Cyron said.

  “What’s the puppet for?” Reisden said.

  Cyron looked down at the desk. “It was my father’s. I have no children.” Cyron picked up the puppet. It hung between his hands, a dead thing.

  “You have a child and you need to save him.”

  “Go away, boy.”

  “Do you realize this is being done simply to save you?” Your theatre tunnels, your massive underground fortress, which even I hope the Germans will believe, because otherwise they’ll march down the Arras road with nothing to stop them. “Your reputation as a soldier and a hero. No one wants to ruin it. But I will not let you do that to André.”

  “Ruin my reputation? Mine?”

  Cyron laid the puppet aside and opened the drawer of his desk. He pulled a gun out of it and held it in his hand, his finger against the trigger. It was an old army revolver, standard issue, from the army of 1870.

  “This is my reputation. I shot men with this. I didn’t want to. But I’m a soldier of France.” Cyron held the gun loosely, half pointing toward Reisden. “Don’t you play around with me, don’t you tell me he didn’t do it. I don’t care about my precious reputation except that it does some good, but he killed her and I didn’t, so don’t you threaten me.”

  Reisden brought his hands up slowly and tented them in front of him on the back of the chair, where Cyron could see them. Other than that he didn’t move. The gun was unlikely to be loaded, he told himself. No one keeps a loaded gun in a drawer.

  He watched Cyron’s finger curl and half-tighten around the trigger. Cyron turned the gun away for a moment and kneaded his right hand with his left. The knuckles of both hands were white and gnarled with tension. “Walk out of here, boy,” Cyron said. “Now.”

  And if Reisden did, that would be the end of André, of Jules, of Cyron too, though he didn’t know it. Reisden thought of his family, of Jouvet, of the half-finished conversation with Gilbert. He was beginning to know how one needs families. And here he was, risking everything, talking to a man with a gun.

  “Threatening me won’t help,” he said levelly. “I wrote a letter.” There was no letter; it was a bluff. “I wouldn’t come to accuse you, Cyron, without leaving a letter. I sent it to several friends
, to be opened in the event of my death or André’s. What’s in it is not necessarily true, but if I’m dead it will be believed. Gehazy knew an accusation didn’t have to be true. Only scandalous.”

  Cyron braced his gun hand with the other and pointed it at him. Talk, Reisden told himself, and make it good.

  “What’s in this letter?” Cyron said. “What did you say about me? You said I killed her? He killed her.”

  Reisden looked around the office. Leo had taught him how to think on his feet. Testimonials, photographs, medals. An Alsatian puppet. Wigs and props and a magic serpent.

  And one thing wasn’t there.

  He had known André and Cyron fourteen years; he had seen Cyron’s office, his house, Montfort. He had never seen what he was looking for. He had read about Cyron, all the hagiography; he had never read about the one moment that should have crowned it all. He thought of Katzmann, of Jules and Ruthie, of how he and Perdita would remember becoming French citizens, if he lived to do it.

  He took a chance.

  “You were being blackmailed,” Reisden said. “By Ferenc Gehazy.”

  Cyron puffed out his lips: Bah, for what?

  “Remember that the accusation not necessarily true, only scandalous— You come from Alsace,” Reisden said. “When the Germans captured Alsace, the French conceded the country but not the people. Any Alsatian could move to France and declare himself still a French citizen. They called it opting for France.”

  Cyron frowned.

  “The last date to opt for France was the first of October 1872, two years after the beginning of the war. But in 1872 you and your men were in hiding. During that time you were digging a tunnel into the German munitions store of the Citadel—the tunnel’s still there, I think I’ve seen it. On the first of October 1872, you were just about to dig inside the Citadel wall. You were under the maneuvers field, scraping out dirt by teaspoons.

  “What day did you opt for France?”

  “I don’t remember the day,” Cyron said.

  “All the Katzmann family have their certificates framed in their entrance hall. Jules and Ruthie are political refugees too; they have their certificates of citizenship in the dining room. Where’s yours?”

  “I was always French,” Cyron said.

  “But you did opt for France,” Reisden said.

  “Of course.”

  “At Arras, was it?”

  “Of course at Arras.”

  “There’ll be a record in the town hall, then.”

  “You’re examining me as if I were a criminal.”

  “It must have been very dramatic. Sergeant Cyron, the guerrilla leader, making his declaration of loyalty to France at the risk of his life. I’m surprised it wasn’t in your first play.” He sounded sarcastic. “I’m sorry. I mean that. It would have taken courage.”

  Cyron shook his head angrily.

  “It would have been humiliating as well,” Reisden said. “Katzmann said he felt robbed of his identity. One shouldn’t have to say one was French.”

  Cyron half-nodded. His face had fallen into bleak folds.

  “Which is why you didn’t do it then,” Reisden said. “Did you? Katzmann’s family didn’t declare for France until the Dreyfus affair. They waited more than twenty years.”

  By now the house was quiet. Upstairs, in another world, some-one was running water. From outside, in the fields and the pond, the frogs were making a sound like scraped nerves. Cyron looked straight at him. An old man’s wrinkled potato face, a big nose, no chin, the typical French workingman’s face that can be so ordinary or so extraordinarily spiritual.

  “You never did it,” Reisden said, “did you?”

  Cyron’s eyes darkened. He had guessed right.

  The current German ambassador to Paris was even more of a propaganda master than Izvolsky. He would simply take a box at the Théâtre Cyron and fill it with enthusiastic blond Aryans. Ah, yes, Cyron. One of ours.

  “Why should I apply for what was mine, boy?” Cyron said.

  “But it isn’t yours,” Reisden said. “You’re German. The way my wife is Austrian, who’s American, and I’m Austrian, who am Parisian.— I don’t want to harm you.” That was true, more true than Cyron knew. “But I want you to use your influence to save your son. He didn’t kill Sabine. Someone else did it, or it was an accident. You do not have to solve it by sacrificing André.”

  Cyron was still looking up at him, but his hands moved; his right hand reached into the drawer of his desk and brought out a box of bullets. He began loading them into the gun.

  “I’ll take my chances on the letters,” Cyron said.

  There were no letters. Cyron reached out without looking and found the wig on Napoleon’s bust. He held it over the muzzle of the revolver. It would muffle the sound.

  “Don’t kill me,” Reisden said. “You don’t want to.” He thought he was telling Cyron everything he had learned from twenty-five years of being a murderer: Don’t do it. I know what I am supposed to be doing now, he said silently. I am beginning to know. Don’t kill me now— He realized he was pleading.

  “At least tell me what really happened.” He was playing for time, time to think, perhaps just time. “Did you kill Sabine?” he asked.

  “André killed her.”

  “No. Who killed Gehazy?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think I know?”

  “Did he blackmail you? Did you kill him?”

  Cyron looked down at the gun and back up at Reisden. When you are about to shoot a man, you don’t look at the gun, you look at the man; but you look at the gun beforehand to make certain it’s ready. “No,” Cyron said. “I didn’t kill him. I don’t even know he’s dead.”

  “You said Gehazy was working for the Austrians,” Reisden said. “He wasn’t. If he had been, he wouldn’t have blackmailed me. For five years the Austrians have been trying to get Jouvet patients’ records from me; they wouldn’t compromise me. Gehazy was working for someone else. Who was blackmailing you through him?”

  Cyron’s eyes flickered with a momentary uncertainty.

  “Let’s say the Germans. The Germans want the secret of Montfort, this famous whatever-it-is, which you would know. He came to you. He said he knew you were German. You agreed to give him the secret, which Pétiot wanted passed to the Germans. But the secret couldn’t come from you,” Reisden said, “because a hero can’t be a traitor.”

  “This is all in your letters?”

  Reisden was saying anything, like Scheherazade, telling stories to hold death at bay. “You asked him to appear to blackmail another person,” Reisden said. “Jules. But Jules did two unexpected things: He went to me first, and then he came to you. Jules is an honest man. He can’t lie without friends to help him. He was careful that whatever he said about Montfort wouldn’t be the truth. So he was no good to you.

  “So Jules was removed in favor of me. A more believable spy who couldn’t afford to be blackmailed. I was supposed to find something in the cellars. I didn’t co-operate either. I wasn’t going to pass information; Pétiot knew that before I did.”

  Cyron was listening. Keep talking.

  “Gehazy knew I wouldn’t talk. And then Gehazy disappeared.”

  Cyron shook his head. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I don’t say you did. I say he was a problem for you and he disappeared. You didn’t have to do anything. Pétiot protects your reputation; the army protects your reputation; they want you making speeches and appearing on cigaret cards, not shooting blackmailers.” The two words hung in the air. Shooting blackmailers. You don’t have to do anything to me, Reisden thought at him. Something will happen to me without your shooting me.

  “André is a problem for you now,” Reisden went on, keeping his voice quiet and level. “Just as Gehazy might have been. This afternoon there were thirty nervous conscripts with guns out in your fields, hunting him like a rabbit. You think nothing will happen to André. It will.”

  “He killed Sabine,” Cyron
said.

  “If he is suspected of it and dies, it’s convenient for you. But he didn’t.”

  “Who are you accusing? Lucien Pétiot? You think Pétiot wants to kill André so I can appear on cigaret cards?”

  War is the worst kind of melodrama. There are no motives. This one knows too much, that one makes me nervous, he has too many strong friends. I don’t like his sort. I need room to breathe. Murder without motives. I think André is going to die, Reisden thought, because you built a plaster tunnel, a stage set for spies, instead of a fortress; because you were a hero and not hero enough.

  “I think Gehazy died because he threatened your reputation,” Reis-den said. “I think Jules was attacked because he was in the way of protecting your reputation.”

  “What about Françoise Auclart?” Cyron asked unexpectedly. “What did she do?”

  She got in Sabine's way.

  “She died by accident,” Cyron said. “They all— It had nothing to do with me.”

  So you did wonder about her, Reisden thought. “She was the niece of one of your men,” he said. Cyron nodded. You wondered about her, Reisden thought. You think André killed Sabine. But what did Françoise Auclart do to André?

  “You couldn’t ask about her, could you?” Reisden said. “Not when everything else was happening so conveniently. How many things have happened conveniently for you, Cyron?”

  Cyron looked up at him sharply.

  “You have a good reputation, and you use it for France, and it’s protected. Can you control that protection? Can you give it to André? Cyron, what’s going to happen to André? Blantire died. Françoise Auclart died. Jules and Ruthie almost died.—Cyron,” he said, “what about Sabine?”

  Cyron opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, and then stood up, pushing himself up with his hands on his desk, the gun hand and the other. Standing, he raised the gun and pointed it at Reisden.

  “Sabine was a danger to you,” Reisden said very quietly.

  Cyron’s lips moved. What do you mean, he might have said. Tell me. But if he had asked anything, he would no longer have been protected.

  “She had got involved with a group that met in the boves. Your man Auclart was part of it; so was Françoise. Sabine’s child may have been Blantire’s. She would have been a scandal for you.”