by Sarah Smith
Cyron shook his head as if he couldn’t speak. The gun wavered, then pointed dead straight at Reisden. Did she tell you she was leaving André, Reisden wondered; did you tell anyone else? But that wasn’t what he said.
“There are two ways to treat any human being,” he said, “as something and as someone. Things can be bought and sold. Things can be sacrificed. Someone decided Sabine could be sacrificed for her money and your reputation and made her a thing.—And now André will die for your reputation unless you tell whoever is doing this that he is not a thing to you, he is your son, and he cannot be sacrificed. Put your reputation on the table; put who you are; put everything. Be his father. Be his family. Save him, or André will be nothing but cards on the table, money spent to protect you, and he’ll die. The way Sabine died. For you.”
Cyron’s mouth opened. He looked as if he were about to howl. It was theatrical, stagy, the prelude to a big speech, a vast indignation, an accusation, something that would put the attention back on him in the right way. One gunshot would turn him back into a hero. Reisden could see the broken veins in Cyron’s eyes, the blank circle of the gun barrel; thought of William; thought of Toby and André; thought of Gilbert and Perdita, and what he would miss.
“Monsieur!” It was a voice from the doorway. “Ne tuez le pas. Ne tuez le pas! II est mon fils.”
It was Gilbert. Gilbert and Elphinstone. Gilbert came into Cyron’s office and took Reisden’s arm, watching Cyron and the gun all the time with horrified eyes, and pulled Reisden out of the room, into the dark hall, into safety.
Night watch
HE AND GILBERT WENT out onto the terrace. Reisden stood in the darkness, leaning against the still-warm stones of the house. He was shaking with nerves. If he’d had a cigaret he would have taken up smoking again. Elphinstone came up and licked his hand.
“That was interesting.”
“Alexander—”
“I pushed him further than I should have.”
“Yes, you did,” said Gilbert with surprising vehemence.
We sound alike, Reisden thought. We say things in the same way. Or perhaps we have just learned it from each other. Against the sky the guillotine was a vague bulk, blackness against blackness, with the shimmer of starlight along the triangular blade.
“Why did you call me your son?” Reisden asked.
“I— You had been speaking of his son. I was in the hall, taking El-hinstone out. You sounded distraught.—I saw him pointing the gun at you.”
“Cyron wouldn’t help André.” For a moment he simply felt desolated by it. “I couldn’t persuade him. I couldn’t blackmail him. Nothing.”
He felt exposed outside, like a target, and Gilbert by being with him was exposed too. They went back into the house. Gilbert stood between him and Cyron’s office like a shield. They both went into the kitchen. Perdita was standing by sleeping Toby, frightened, her face white as milk.
“I heard you both shouting in the hall,” she said, “and then nothing.”
He took her in his arms. “Cyron has invited us to stay the night, though he doesn’t know it. Take Toby, we’re going upstairs.”
He found a bedroom overlooking the courtyard. It was the room with the angel bed. He locked the door. From the deep window seat he could see the stables and the guillotine.
“What are we looking for?” Perdita fit herself next to him on the window seat. He appreciated the we.
“We’re looking after André.” We’re hiding, he thought. The door was thick old oak. Not easy to shoot through. The lock was sturdy. He tried to tell himself he was not frightened.
Perdita wasn’t wearing her blind watch, which would have told them the time. Toby woke up, found himself in a strange room yet again, poor child, and began to weep. Perdita held him and Reisden held them both, thinking protective thoughts.
“Alexander?” Gilbert said quietly.
Cyron was in the courtyard.
He came all alone out into the courtyard, holding a dark lantern so closed down that they could not see it was Cyron until he stood in front of the guillotine and held the lantern up. Reisden handed Toby off to Perdita and leaned forward on the window seat. Cyron didn’t look at the mechanism. He looked at the posts of the scaffold, gaily decorated with tricolor bunting. He stood in front of the posts and held up the lantern so that, if the posts had been soldiers, he could have seen their faces.
On the day Sabine had been killed, two men had stood there, two soldiers from Pétiot’s staff, guarding the guillotine. No one had looked at them, of course. They were not actors, they were not important; Reisden could not even remember their faces. One had had a reddish moustache that had looked incongruous with his wig.
Light spilled over the courtyard. Someone had turned on the light in the small dining room. Pétiot bustled out onto the terrace, little Papa Pétiot in his blue uniform, his white hair and beard ruffled. He laid his hand on Cyron’s arm solicitously.
And Cyron drew back, though not much, and in his face there was an unutterable shocked weariness, like a soldier who has seen too much of the war.
They negotiated on the terrace, out of sight. From above, Reisden could hear André’s name but very little else. The voices died away.
I have done what I could, Reisden thought.
Perdita put Toby down to sleep on the bed, but the three of them stayed on watch. In case anything else should happen, perhaps; because they did not want to leave each other.
He began to tell them what had happened, softening it somewhat— And then, realizing what he was doing, he took a deep breath and told it in all its sad complexity.
“A soldier killed Sabine?” Perdita whispered.
“Why could he not apply for citizenship?” Gilbert asked.
“Will he save André?” Perdita asked.
Perdita leaned against him, tired, sighing, her arms around him. “What are you thinking?” he asked. “About Sabine,” she said. “About her baby.”
He thought of the German soldiers singing along the Arras road, of Cyron bullying André to be a soldier, of the German army officers driving Kinderlen-Waechter out of the negotiations in Berlin. Of Mademoiselle Françoise giggling as she was introduced, and Sabine, looking up at André in the Grand’Place with a scowl of baffled love. Like pieces of different puzzles mixed together, different stories, each trying to make itself the only puzzle, the only story. In the darkness a single bird began to sing his son’s name, To-by? Toby, Toby? We all pay, he thought, for what one of us needs.
He leaned against the window casement and—how long later?— found himself slumped against the window thinking thick thoughts.
The birds were singing in chorus. The sky had changed, was less profoundly dark. Perdita was breathing softly against his shoulder. “Gilbert?” he said into the dark. “Are you awake?”
“I’m watching,” Gilbert said. “Lie down, Alexander, you’ll sleep better.”
Are you sure you’ll stay awake, he thought; which was as much as saying, Are you sure I can trust you. “Yes,” he said, “thank you.” He got up stiffly and led the half-asleep Perdita over to the bed, tucked her in with Toby, and lay down beside them but on the outside of the cover, still half on watch, trying not to be. He was depending on Gilbert, not only for the money; it would help if he could trust him. He could see Gilbert’s alert patient profile—Gilbert and Elphinstone—against the window tracery. It was a new thing for him to have someone else on watch even momentarily, someone taking care of his family. For a moment, disoriented, falling asleep, he felt protected, in a way that had never happened to him, or if it had he could not remember; as if his father was in the room, keeping the monsters of the night away.
Reisden makes a proposal
“REISDEN!” IT WAS PÉTIOT, outside the door.
They all started awake but Gilbert, who was awake already. Elphinstone, who had found himself a place at the bottom of the bed, barked madly. Toby cried.
“What is it?” Reisden said.
> “We have found a solution. Come outside.”
Elphinstone scratched at the door. “He is accustomed to going out at this hour,” Gilbert said delicately.
“Come with me.”
Elphinstone made his way down the stairs clumsily, favoring his lame rear leg. Gilbert hovered, ready to grab his collar. “His dignity requires him to go downstairs himself, Alexander, but I find it a trial.” Elphinstone slid but recovered.
Outside, they waited for Elphinstone to splash the Lion Gate.
“A solution,” Gilbert said. “Do you know what he means?”
Reisden shook his head.
“Would it mean you’d be all right?”
Something unknotted in him. “I hope so.”
“You wouldn’t need me, then,” said Gilbert.
“I suppose not.” He had asked Gilbert to go. No reason to be surprised if he went.
“I see how everyone looks at us, Alexander. You are quite right. Toby will be old enough to ask questions soon.”
“And too young to hear the answers,” Reisden agreed. “That’s true.”
“I know that,” Gilbert said. “I want you to know that I have enjoyed myself very much. That doesn’t affect what we should do, does it?”
“Enjoyed yourself?” Reisden said.
“I like Jouvet. A company,” Gilbert said, “I think is like owning a dog. They are a great bother, but . . . he expands my life. On a cold day, you know, throwing sticks for him on Commonwealth Avenue, in the snow; one could never do that by oneself.”
“Ah,” said Reisden, amused.
Hearing dog and stick, Elphinstone raised his head and shook his tags. Gilbert reached down to pet him and groped on the grass for a branch to throw. Reisden found one.
“I have even thought of traveling,” Gilbert said, imbuing traveling with the emotion of a man who spreads his handkerchief on a park bench before sitting down. “Even— Italy.”
“Don’t go back to Boston yet,” Reisden said, wondering a bit why he was saying it. “Gilbert, there’s the whole world.”
“Trains,” Gilbert said, shaking his head. “Hotels.”
“You faced Cyron,” Reisden reminded him. “That took courage. Italy can’t be worse.”
“Alexander, do you ever think of Father?”
“Oh yes.”
“He was a great drag on the spirit. But he—” Gilbert hesitated. “Do you suppose, in a way, he might make one courageous? Simply from having to resist him?”
An expansion of life, Reisden thought. William. Like Toby. “That would be a good way to think of him,” he agreed.
“Why did you name your boy Toby?” Gilbert asked, half-echoing Reisden’s thoughts. “I found that—very touching. That you should take such care to name him after Tom.”
“What?” Reisden turned and stared at him.
“Toby,” Gilbert faltered. “Thomas Robert. I thought—”
“No, it was—” Toby’s official first name was John--Jean, Johannes, after Perdita’s beloved Brahms. Perdita’s family chose names out of Shakespeare, so they had wanted one for him. Finally they’d taken Sebastian from Twelfth Night. Jean-Sebastien Louis Victor von Reisden, an awkward mouthful. But, as babies will, he had found his own name, Sir Toby Belch—
Toby. Thomas Robert Reisden, he thought. I named him after my father. And I thought I was running from the Knights.
Gilbert threw the stick overhead for his dog. Elphinstone rushed off at his peg-legged gallop down the hill, sliding, scrambling tail-over-ears. I ran from the Knights, Reisden thought, ran to them, like a dog with a stick, who wants it thrown far away, who wants to lose it and chase it, find it and have it thrown again, but always to have it somewhere in his thoughts; the stick is the thing. We shall never be able to get away from each other, Gilbert and I.
“I don’t know what we’ll do about the resemblance,” Reisden said. “Or the scandal. But, Gilbert, we shall always need an American. A large wild American, waving dollar bills, when we need to get out of the sort of problems I assume we’ll get into.”
When there’s war.
Gilbert smiled at the idea of being large and wild. “You shall have the money. That is yours anyway.”
“No,” Reisden said. “It’s not mine. I don’t want that. You would give it to Richard, and I don’t want Richard. But I have a proposition, Gilbert. If you like Jouvet. I want you to use that money to buy into Jouvet, as a partner with me.”
A tragic accident
EVERYONE GATHERED ON THE terrace: Ruthie and the technicians and Eli Krauss, soldiers who had spent the night, Cyron all by himself; Gilbert and Perdita, Reisden and Toby, in a group by themselves; and, not under guard, Jules and a stunned André.
“I have an announcement to make.” Papa Pétiot smiled at them. “We have all been deeply saddened by the Countess of Montfort’s tragic and untimely death. But it is my sad pleasure to report that we have found the explanation. It was an accident.”
Exclamations and murmurs. Pétiot gestured in the direction of the guillotine. “A regrettable accident!” said Pétiot.
“You mean nobody murdered her?” said someone, and was shushed.
“The design of the guillotine isn’t to blame.” Pétiot pulled up the bunting that draped the platform until the fabric was an austere scallop, barely hiding the mechanism. “This was De Vere’s original design.”
“I asked for more bunting,” Cyron interrupted hoarsely, with the air of a man delivering bad lines. “I didn’t want the crowds to see the trick. We hung the bunting from the platform, long swags, streamers. And the script called for a breeze to move the flags”—his voice trembled—“so we’d show it was one shot without any tricks.”
André nodded.
Pétiot pulled the tarpaulin off the wind machine.
“The filmmakers brought this ventilator fan from the Wagny mines,” he said. “To create the breeze. But it was hot in the square. For the last forty-five minutes before the accident, the fan was running.”
He pointed at one of the soldiers. The fan had a hand crank as well as a motor. The soldier cranked the handle; the big vanes began to turn. The streamers stirred and fluttered.
“Of course this is not as powerful as it was in the Grand’Place. And then the breeze came up too. Maurice?”
Cyron, like a man mesmerized, reached out and took one of the streamers, pulled it gently underneath the platform as if the wind had blown it.
“And you, Reisden, you tested the machine. Test it now.”
He was being brought into this explanation. He climbed the stairs and stepped on the release plank. The lunette dropped open. “Again,” Pétiot said. This time the lunette dropped only halfway.
“Look,” Pétiot said. “Come here and look. The material’s working its way into the mechanism, into the hinge.”
They all looked. One of the streamers had caught in the lever.
“A tragic accident,” said Pétiot.
“I told you!” said Ruthie.
The crowd gathered around André and Jules, congratulating them. Ruthie stood between them, hugging them both. The technicians grinned. Pétiot took Reisden aside. “What do you think of our story?”
“Graphic, simple, and believable.” It gave everyone the truth they wanted.
“So you’ve won,” Pétiot said.
“Have I?”
“You’ve made an American alliance.” Pétiot nodded at Gilbert, talking to Perdita. “I hear you’re partners with him. You’re to be congratulated.”
“News travels quickly,” Reisden said.
“You did tell me,” Pétiot said. “‘His lawyers thought I was an unofficial relative.’ Are you his son?”
“Am I?” Reisden said.
“I should say so,” said Pétiot. “You have the contract, if you still want it.”
Reisden thought of soldiers laughing as they boarded the train east; soldiers marching down a road. “Yes.”
Pétiot brought something out of his pock
et. It was the broken lock from Cyron’s false tunnel. The edge of the keyhole was bright with scratches. “I don’t suppose you recognize this?”
“I can’t say I do,” Reisden said.
“You accused Maurice of so many things last night,” Pétiot said, “all of them wrong, of course. You never accused him of failing at anything. I found that impressive.”
“Failing at what?” said Reisden.
Pétiot looked over at André, standing on the terrace with Eli Krauss and Ruthie, pointing up at the guillotine. “Will that one really keep his mouth shut?”
“Oddly enough, he will.”
“Make sure of it.— Encourage him to stay in Paris. Not that I wished the boves on him, but I really did think we’d seen the last of that boy.” Pétiot made a wry face.
André was talking with Jules and Ruthie now. What will happen to those three, Reisden thought; what will happen to André? Ruthie was looking up at André with a shy longing that, sometime in these last days, had crossed the line between service and adoration. Jules was looking from his sister to André, and André, as usual, was oblivious. Not quite oblivious. Through the crowds, Cyron had blustered his way forward to greet his son, and André simply looked at him, like a specimen, like raw material for the Necro. This was the middle of a story, not the end.
“Maurice was bothered when you said it was for the money,” Pétiot said. “Not that we don’t need it. We’re still digging. We don’t give up.— But no, it wasn’t for the money.” Pétiot was putting on his gloves. “There was an incident in the Countess’s life. A school friend, a necklace Sabine wanted. ‘You’ll die soon. Leave it to me.’ The girl did die. Maurice should have consulted me.” Pétiot adjusted his gloves, pulling fastidiously at each finger to straighten the seams. “That was what Gehazy knew. He came to Maurice and Maurice came to me. I am not sorry about Gehazy, no, not at all. But the girl . . . It was a shame. It was really deplorable.’