André did not reply, he just nodded and kept looking at Georges, wide-eyed.
“Why am I telling you all this? My wife is the only one who knows. And two or three comrades who are like brothers to me.”
The former Resistance fighter looked at him more closely, pushed back in his seat and smiled.
“You’re not saying anything, but I bet you must have seen some things too. I can tell from your face.”
Prisoner. It came to him suddenly, like that, unthinkingly, an improvised destiny. He had been taken after the evacuation of Dunkirk and had found himself in a Stalag near Bremen. Three escape attempts, all failures. After the war he had worked in a cotton mill near Douai, but he’d been sacked after a strike, and so after that he’d done some, let’s say, more serious stuff, a bit of sabotage, a bit of . . . he hesitated, yeah, you know, a bit of armed robbery, so anyway, he needed a change of scenery and a new name.
Armed robbery. Brigandage. André found the word curious and beautiful. Like an old weapon that could be used again.
He wasn’t sure Georges had believed him. He nodded but his eyes seemed full of surprise and perhaps admiration for this storytelling talent. But he liked the fable, in any case, and that was probably all that mattered. “Brigandage?” he repeated, as if also savoring the word. “I do that too,” he added with a smile. “We’re on the same side.”
So, yes, André. He thinks about the Resistance robber and feels a bit bad about the lie he had to tell him. He thinks about what he is leaving behind him, these successive lives, two, three of them. He read somewhere that American Indians believe they have the equivalent in lives of the three horses12 they possess, and he knows that two have already died under him or have unseated him before running away—where, he doesn’t know, perhaps to eternal prairies where those animals go, calm and happy. The third is walking beside him now. He holds its bridle and whispers to it. He has not yet mounted it; he’s waiting until they know each other better. Soon. And then will come the time for the final attack. He needs to preserve his strength. To gather as much of it as possible despite, sometimes, his tiredness.
He sits at his work table, at the very back of the room, separated from the rest of the shop by a high wooden set of shelves sagging under rolls of cloth and packets of shirts. A little nook that sometimes smells vaguely of saltpetre. There is a calendar hung on the wall, where he notes down deadlines, jobs he has to do. A color photograph of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, which he cut out of a magazine.
She had told him one day, in early ’40: “When the war is over, we’ll go to Venice. We’ll leave the kid with my mother and we’ll go just the two of us. What do you think? I’ve seen pictures, it looks really pretty. And apparently you have to see it before you die.” He must have evaded her question, as he always did in situations like that. Lied about his real intentions and his plans. He has lied a lot throughout his life. Bluffed, as in a game of poker. Like when she asked him where he’d been when he came back late at night or early in the morning, stinking of tobacco and wine, and he lied, again, and she listened to his muddled explanations with a weary sigh. She would never see Venice. They would never have to leave her son with anyone. And now he has no-one to whom he can tell the truth.
He lights the lamp and sighs as he sees the cashbooks, the invoices, the delivery notes, the credit notes handwritten by the boss. He gets started. For four hours, he knows he will be able to make his brain work unrestrainedly on calculations and writing and that he will leave the shop with his mind free and light because it will have thought of nothing but figures and numbers, will have been occupied by mental exercises that he forces himself to do, as he used to, over there, for whole days and nights, to stop his grey cells freezing up and his body being trapped in ice.
The door opens behind him and the sound of the flush and the stench of shit follow in the wake of Raymond, the assistant, who taps him on the shoulder with a “Monsieur André”. Raymond is a short, stocky man with thick eyebrows and a lantern jaw, neckless and ageless, with long arms capable of lifting huge loads under which he sometimes seems about to disappear. He is old Bessière’s creature. His own personal monster. Maybe he tampered with him in his basement, patching him up with bits of other poor devils, like mad Dr. Frankenstein. Bessière treats him with a lukewarm mixture of contempt and compassion. He punishes him whenever he’s in a bad mood, yells at him if turnover is low and makes deductions from his wages that André does not enter into the accounts or the payslips. Raymond goes off to stand behind his counter, always in exactly the same place, eyes staring vaguely from his square, surly, inexpressive face. He hangs the blue ribbon of his tape measure around his neck, and he checks in a drawer that his chalk sticks are there and takes out two pairs of scissors that he tries out vigorously, making the clear hissing sound of steel rubbing steel.
The telephone rings, an early customer opens the door. The day begins.
André forgets himself in numbers, gets drunk on additions, empties his mind into columns of figures. Sometimes he looks up at the photograph of Venice and stares for a few seconds at a woman in a red dress walking past the basilica.
About quarter past one, he shakes hands with Raymond, waves to the old man who replies with a sigh and goes outside and spits in the gutter, his working day over. Every day that he comes here, he scrupulously follows this shopkeeper’s routine, never deviating from it. The way you might climb a rock-face, following a marked path, without neglecting any pitons, without allowing your mind to drift. No sudden jolts, no slackening. Because below you, the ravine is bottomless.
After that, he has time. On cours Victor-Hugo he is almost blinded by the sun as it shoots a few rays of light between the clouds. The air is milder. It’s supposed to rain all week, as it often does here in winter. So he looks up at the patches of pale blue sky, he lets himself be dazzled by the violent bursts of sunlight that fall on the wet street.
He enters the café Montaigne and sits on a bench, in a corner, not far from the counter. From there, he can see who enters or who arrives on the sidewalk, through the big windows. Pupils from the nearby secondary school are sitting a little way off, leaning against the windows and laughing, winding each other up, ties loosened, shirt collars unbuttoned. He hears them talking about Algeria, Guy Mollet, Soustelle, calling for Mendès . . . There are five of them. They drink coffee, leaning forward to talk over breadcrumbs, the remains of their sandwiches. Then they lower their voices, one of them whispers, and in turn they stare at his dark eyes. Their faces grow more serious as their eyes meet his.
André decides to look away so as not to be taken for a snitch. At the other end of the café, four old men are playing cards. They laugh loudly, their chips clicking softly when they throw them on the green baize. Right by the door, there is that very old lady dressed all in black, tiny, a little dog with a long face and bulging eyes sitting on her lap, a glass of beer on the table in front of her. He sees them every time he comes in here. Same seat, same position. The old lady and the dog look out through the window, their eyes seeming to follow the same passers-by, as if they were waiting for someone who was already very late. André wonders who. Someone who is not coming. Or who never came back. But who is not dead, oh no, because she was never informed of anything officially. She did not see his name on any list. She doesn’t know. Perhaps prefers not to know. And it’s true that you sometimes read in the papers about unexpected reunions. So why not?
Later, the old lady will stand up and her dog will jump to the floor, with a shake of its cylindrical body, and it will chew its leather leash and they will leave, disappearing slowly towards the cours Pasteur. Tomorrow. Surely tomorrow . . .
He has just been served a sandwich and a glass of red when the door opens and a man greets him with a movement of his chin and approaches, removing his hat. They shake hands. The man waves at the waiter then sits down with a sigh, unbuttoning his coat and then his waistcoat. He
is quite tall, with a bladelike face and dark eyes. Hair greying at the temples. He looks around casually then changes his seat so he’s positioned perpendicular to André, and immediately shoots a glance at the street. Inspecteur Mazeau.
“Shit, I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it. We had a double homicide in Mériadeck. A whore who slit the throats of her pimp and a john. There was blood everywhere, she did a good job. One of them was almost decapitated . . . Problem is, she can’t explain to us what weapon she used. We haven’t found anything. No knife, no razor, no cleaver, nothing. Just that bitch, pissed out of her head, with two corpses, in a room that looked like an abattoir. It was the hotel manager who found her like that, about ten o’clock, as she hadn’t checked out. We don’t think he’s hiding anything, he’s a vice squad informer. He runs his hotel and we close our eyes to the drugs he deals occasionally in return for him being a good snitch. Although with that kind of weirdo, you never know when they’re going to betray you. The girl could hardly have shanked them with her nail file, so we’re wondering. Apart from standing there shivering in her blood-soaked nightdress, she’s incapable of doing or saying anything. We don’t think she could have acted alone, but we don’t know anything for sure, and hardened prossies like that don’t talk to cops.”
He exhales. He looks like he’s just been running, or at least walking fast.
André stares at his forehead, which is glistening slightly. A few drops of sweat at his temples. The waiter arrives, and the man orders a ham sandwich and a beer.
“I’m starving, after all that crap. I haven’t had time to eat anything since breakfast.”
The old lady leaves with her dog. She shuffles slowly away. The teenagers burst out laughing. They are sprawled on their table, shaking with hilarity, or thrown back in their chairs, guffawing. The belote players lay down their cards grandly. André sees all these scraps of lives like little islands in an ocean of chaos.
“You’re not very chatty today.”
The waiter returns with the cop’s order. He attacks his sandwich, chewing noisily, swallowing with difficulty, washes it all down with a mouthful of beer and exhales, shaking his head.
“Ah, that’s better!”
“So?”
Mazeau shoves in another mouthful while watching him with narrowed eyes. Maybe he’s smiling, or maybe his face is just deformed by the contents of his big gob.
“So, I have news,” he says, mouth still full.
André nibbles a bit of bread from his sandwich. His throat is tight. He can no longer see or hear anything around him. He waits for the other man, preoccupied with eating, to come to the point. Cops are like that. They like to show who’s in control of the situation by playing on the nerves of the people they deal with. Enjoying their power.
“One of Darlac’s relatives. Some sort of distant cousin. Emile Couchot. Married in ’47 to Odette Bancel. They have a wine bar on place Nansouty. That Odette, she’s like the sister of his wife Annette. She used to whore for the Krauts too. Danced at Tichadel, just like Darlac’s wife. They lived together during the Occupation. Apparently they put on a lesbo show for a hand-picked audience, including the Krauts, who liked that sort of sophisticated stuff, as we know. In ’44, when they sensed the wind changing, the two sisters gave up their Nazi orgies and tried to find a way to cover their asses. So they went over to the people who seemed to be in the safest position at the time, cos their analysis of the situation was not exactly exhaustive, namely cops and gangsters. Annette shacked up with Darlac, and the other one, Odette, put her hand down the pants of Couchot, who was making a small fortune with his cousin Darlac selling objects stolen from deported Jews and taking commissions on the sales of confiscated goods. He wasn’t the only one and he wasn’t as greedy as the lawyers in Bordeaux, who were really filling their pockets, but he got enough to buy his bar and a lakeside cottage for him and his missus. He looks like he’s gone straight, but it wouldn’t surprise us if he was still doing a bit of business on the side. Anyway, Darlac goes to see him occasionally. And Darlac is not the kind of man who goes to see people just to pass the time of day. And as for family, he couldn’t give a crap . . .”
André says nothing. He is digesting the information that Mazeau has given him, mentally sketching a family tree around Darlac. There is something not quite right here.
“How old is Darlac’s daughter? Fifteen, sixteen?”
Mazeau smiles, a sly look in his eyes.
“What do you conclude from that?”
“That she was born in ’42 or ’43. Before her mother met Darlac. That means she’s not his daughter. That he accepted her afterwards. That maybe she’s the result of her mother bedding a Jerry. And that you must know the truth, you cops.”
Mazeau shrugs. He glances over André’s shoulder.
“In any case, how would it help you to know that?”
“So I can understand. Know what kind of man he is, how he reacts, so I can know what I should do to really hurt him.”
André looks in the cop’s eyes, and Mazeau nods knowingly, with a fixed grin. He looks as if he has understood these words.
“Of course,” he ventures.
André bites into his sandwich without taking his eyes off the cop, who lowers his, looks away, sips his beer. They don’t say anything more, and the hum of the café around them prevents the silence becoming heavy. Then André leans towards him and points a finger at his chest.
“And what’s in it for you? Why are you telling me all this? Who are you with? Who are you betraying?”
Mazeau looks saddened and shakes his head. He gazes at André like a beaten dog.
“I don’t understand why you’re so mistrustful. Shit, you’re always like this. It’s like you don’t believe anything anyone tells you anymore. If I give you information, it’s cos we’ve known each other a long time, cos I know who you are, where you’re from. And also cos you had the cojones to kill Penot. And cos I didn’t think you’d do it. So I’m giving you Couchot. Another one of Darlac’s relatives. All these shits slipped through the net after the Liberation, and it doesn’t bother me at all if a guy like you bumps a few off. Anyway, I owe you that much.”
“You don’t owe me anything. Just cos we were friends doesn’t . . .”
“Were?”
“Yeah, well, I mean . . . I don’t really know where I stand anymore, or where we stand. I . . .”
“Forget it. We all fucked up. We all lost our honor in that shit heap. But you know perfectly well that if I could have . . .”
The policeman finishes his beer, staring down at the table.
André looks out through the bay windows. His face shows nothing. He lets the other man swallow his remorse with his beer: it will pass very quickly, with the first belch. Inspecteur principal Eugène Mazeau was always a penitent bastard. Gnawed at by doubt and by the old moral lessons learned by heart in church schools, but capable of ridding himself of questions of conscience the way you might chase away an overly curious wasp, and then instantly ready for new subterfuges and betrayals. Whether through chance or some dogged scruple, he became part of a group of republican cops in ’43 who put together a Resistance network within the Bordeaux police force. Like a coin that has spun on its side for a long time, he finally fell—and landed right side up. Since then, he has been living in the shade of the patriotic laurels on the head of Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde, the man who runs the city, the man who sees everything, even the slender profits eked from activities condemned by the law and conventional morality but to which the great Gaullist fraternity decorously closes its eyes.
Mazeau had not acted either—he had done nothing, said nothing. But it wasn’t up to him. Too young, at the time. And besides, Darlac had promised. Darlac knew what was being prepared. He had sworn in front of Olga, in front of the kid, one evening, that he would warn them as soon as he knew when the round-up was supposed to t
ake place. He had held the kid in his lap. He’d kissed his hair. André remembers all this as if it had happened yesterday. The way he smiled at her, eyes shining with the thought that the three of them would escape the quiet massacre being carried out in Poland that everyone was beginning to whisper about as a little hell capable of spreading across the whole of Europe.
Mazeau sits up, as if emerging from a dream or a stupor. He tries to get the waiter’s attention.
“You want a coffee?”
A coffee. André nods. The cop should leave now. He can feel that impalpable mantle of silence and solitude descending on him. No more talking. No more listening. He just wants to go there now and prowl around that address, around that Couchot and his wine bar. See what might be possible. But Mazeau has started speaking again.
“Darlac is convinced that this is all some settling of scores between clans. He thinks this has-been, half-dead gangster—Bertrand Maurac, aka Crabos—is coming down on that shit Destang, who’s an old acquaintance of Darlac, and that he sent one of his men to mess up Penot. He reckons that Crabos decided to eliminate Destang and his gang before he snuffs it so he can pay them all back for what happened during the Occupation. Penot was an auxiliary in the S.A.P.13—he sneaked in during the Liberation. Anyway . . . you know all that. So, to calm everyone down, Darlac and his henchmen took the Crabos to the station the other day and sent him down to Spain, where he’ll meet up with a few of his friends who are managing his money. No-one wants a war here. Laborde—you know, the commissaire divisionnaire?—he promised the mayor he’d keep the peace. It’s like the pact they made when they took the city after the war. This isn’t Marseille. Everyone knows each other here, but we don’t knock about together. We never needed gangsters to control the city. Those sons of bitches, the ones here in Bordeaux, they’re not very bright, but they’re not really dangerous either. As soon as they start swaggering around, all you have to do is bare your teeth at ’em and they fall into line straight away.”
After the War Page 13