After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  Under an open fanlight that lets in the damp air, he uses a bar of soap to wash his bloody hands and scrapes out the brown paste that is encrusted under his fingernails, then rolls up his sleeves to hide his sin beneath his jacket. He splashes his face with cold water and drinks big mouthfuls from the tap, and wipes himself with a wet, filthy hand towel. In the mirror he sees a haggard face with dark rings around the eyes. He pinches his cheeks, trying to bring the color back again, but the little pink marks quickly fade.

  Sitting down at the table, he pours himself a glass of red and swallows it in big gulps. The swill stirs up stomach acids, making him grimace. The waiter brings him a terrine of pâté, a plate of lentils topped with two huge sausages and a basket of bread. He stares at this assemblage of food and wonders what he’s doing there with all these loudmouths who will down a bottle of red and then get back on the road, steering their twenty-ton trucks towards Bordeaux or Spain. He doesn’t know what he should do, holding his knife and fork in the air without any memory of having picked them up; he doesn’t know what to think either; is not even sure he’s able to think about anything right now. He can feel two men to his left staring at him, so he decides to dig into the pâté. He starts eating and his mouth waters and suddenly he feels hungry.

  He eats it all, in the end. Cleans his plate. The oven-baked apple is delicious, with the sugar caramelised on top. The restaurant has gradually emptied and now there are no more than a dozen men, talking more quietly, laughing and toasting each other and having one more for the road. He watches them on the sly, noting their clumsy gestures, their red faces, their glistening foreheads. He feels like a cop again, spying on these men who don’t even see him, and once again feels the contempt that always raises him above the common herd as he watches them, and suddenly he feels better and his mind starts to gauge and assess and plan the coming days.

  Outside, perked up by his lunch, he savors the coldness of the air and the deep grey of the clouds that mass in the west, pushed by a bitter wind. So he doesn’t think anymore about Jean Delbos, fucking Jean, come back to Bordeaux to make him pay, and as he starts his car he feels almost happy to finally know his target, or his prey—he hesitates over the words as he turns on to the road behind a lumbering truck—target or prey? Both, probably. It’ll be easier like that.

  Approaching Bordeaux, he thinks about that woman, as beautiful as Martine Carol, whom they abandoned in front of the fireplace with her arm torn off, and he tries to remember the soft feel of her hair when he lifted up the back of her neck earlier to wedge a cushion under her head and a desire for kisses tickles his lips.

  29French film actress, considered the Gallic version of Marilyn Monroe.

  17

  When André paid him in cash for three months rent in advance, the landlord, whose name is Ferrand, simply nodded and slipped the money into one trouser pocket, while taking the keys to the room from his other pocket. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “And feel free to call me if you need anything.” He lives practically opposite, barely twenty meters away, alone with his mentally ill daughter, Arlette, who can be heard laughing and crying and groaning in the mornings, when the windows are open. Screaming too, sometimes, as if terrified or tortured. The pigeons and all the other birds that hang around on the rooftops fly away. When that happens, the house-keeper quickly closes the window and the scream is suddenly muffled, its faded sound echoing in the street, a ghost dissolved into air.

  A bedroom three meters by four, and a sort of living room that’s not much bigger. But clean. Walls, ceilings, floorboards. It has all been renovated, repainted, sanded, polished. A small kitchen has been put together in a little back room: gas stove, cupboard, stone sink. The sole luxury: a little water heater. As soon as the landlord closed the door, André washed in hot water, shivering all the same in his little nook, under that fanlight jammed shut, with the filthy glass through which only the bleakest, dimmest light penetrates, even in the middle of the day.

  It’s on rue Surson, a hundred meters from the Quai de Bacalan. Near the river though, the view is only of the railings around the port and the brown concrete of the warehouses. Whole blocks of houses in the area belong to major wine merchants. Acres of storehouses and bottle-filling factories. Trucks shuttle the product to the docks, from where the stuff leaves to be poured down rich people’s throats all over the world.

  Often, in the mornings, the entire neighborhood stinks of cheap wine. Today is one of those mornings. André goes out under a clear sky amid a racket of sparrows swooping from the rooftops and rolling in the gutters. A little bit of spring, already in a panic. His fingertips caress the butt of the pistol. He never goes anywhere without it now. There are eight cartridges in the clip. Enough to give him the chance to flee, to believe that it is still possible to emerge from this.

  He walks quickly through the cool air, passing a fence intended to hide the ruins of two or three houses destroyed in the bombing raid of May 17th, 1943. The neighborhood is full of these sudden gaps lighting up a narrow street as if some wild urban planner had wanted to create a square. But what you can see after all these years is the plumbing clinging to what remains of a bathroom, walls with faded paint jobs, drab tiling, a whole private interior world exposed to the four winds, a dreary patchwork the only decoration. A flayed part of the city’s back, the skin turned back, left hanging in the impossibility of a scar. He rushes on, hands in the pockets of his reefer jacket, then enters a bar on the cours du Médoc where he has already been twice before since moving to this area. There are four or five workmen leaning on the counter, satchels over their shoulders, drinking coffee and chatting with the owner. They reply mechanically to André’s hello but speak only sporadically afterwards, maybe because they slept badly or because they’re already tired. He picks up the newspaper and flicks through it as he often does, and when he sees the photograph and reads the headline, it seems that everything else fades into darkness and silence around him.

  POLICE HAVE “PROBABLY IDENTIFIED”

  THE PLACE NANSOUTY ARSONIST

  Our readers will remember the criminal fire that burned down a wine bar in place Nansouty on the night of February 24th-25th, causing the deaths of three people. Bordeaux police, after a meticulous investigation, have identified a suspect, whom they are actively seeking: his name is André Vaillant, but he was born in Bordeaux, on November 16, 1916, under the name of Jean Delbos. Until a few weeks ago, when he disappeared, he was working as an accountant at a fabric wholesaler on rue Bouquière. Considered missing after being deported, the suspect must have returned to Bordeaux a few months ago. The motives for his acts are currently being investigated. Anyone who may be able to provide information on this individual (see photograph) is invited to contact local law enforcement authorities.

  André examines the blurred face, smiling, squinting in the sun, and recognizes it instantly without being able to recall precisely where or when this photo was taken. But he knows it was in another life, in a world that has now disappeared. Even though the trees that are visible behind him have probably grown, even though the same soft breeze still rises with the onset of ebb tide in the Arcachon bay. He knows that, if he went back there, he would find that same diaphanous morning light above the horizon, as if the day was welling up from the gleaming silt at low tide or from the flat sea of high tide.

  He wishes the image would come to life, so he could see Olga pass by and smile at the lens or pull a face at him. Maybe she would be wearing that mauve dress with golden polka dots that suited her so well when she was suntanned, after walking on the beach or lying in the sand to read a romance novel. Then he would see other figures, probably recognize faces from that time when they would spend Sundays, from May onward, in that little shack near the port in Andernos that Abel had bought at a knockdown price from some sucker who owed him money and who, months later, was found hanging from a tree in the forest: ruined, knackered, abandoned by his wife and hi
s daughters and the women he had kept for years.

  When they could, they would arrive late in the afternoon on a Saturday, by bus, and Abel would come to fetch them in his car, smiling behind his sunglasses and his thick moustache. They would go to buy oysters, enormous sea bream that they’d grill, or crabs if they’d decided to make a fish soup. Olga insisted on bringing white wine and Abel told her every time that there was no need, that he had crates of the stuff in stock and three or four ready in the fridge.

  Abel was a big spender, a gambler, a thief, a charmer, a fraud. A handsome fellow, as women and cops say. You could give him your shirt and he’d cut the sleeves off and sell it back to you, persuading you that it was too hot for sleeves, and you’d have thanked him as you paid him cash on the nail. He could sniff out a sucker just by looking at him, before he even spoke a word. In the street, he could spot a prey by the way he walked, by the way he held his hands in his pockets, the way he crossed the road. Afterwards, when he’d got his hooks in them, he would work subtly for his prize, using reason, persuasion, analysis. He was capable of making a profit from all those stupid, naïve, greedy people, who always turned nasty whenever they felt their actions protected or permitted by the law or by anyone in authority, even the lowliest minion. He knew all the places to find ordinary cowardice, unconfessed baseness, buried secrets. He would tap into cash stashed in various places, not all of it entirely above board. Sometimes he’d open a cupboard where a skeleton was drying, dispossessed of its hoard by heirs in a rush or a particularly corrupt notary. He would find treasure troves hidden on lost islands surrounded by oceans of lies or little, shark-filled pools of disgrace.

  He was a benefactor, Abel: an anarchist banker, a sort of godless inquisitor of the petit-bourgeois; he would pass the question on to his clients, he always said, before passing them on to the cash register. And how he revelled in this quest for salubriousness. Over aperitifs he would describe swindles that would not have fooled a five-year-old but which somehow entrapped respected fathers willing to dispossess ancestors and children in order to make some quick cash on the side. How these would-be schemers would throw away their money in the hapless and greedy pursuit of wealth.

  He’d been in prison twice, the first time in ’34, but he’d come out more determined than ever to wring out the savings from complacent crooks who slept close to their nest-eggs, gun under the pillow. He’d learned to play poker while he was behind bars, had even come close to having his face rearranged because he’d cleaned out a gang boss who considered himself invincible, and that had seemed to him an honest way of earning money, a way of adding to his day-to-day business. That was how André had met him, at a poker table; they’d spent a whole night observing each other, cards in hand, eyes half closed in the drifting cigarette smoke, neither of them winning or losing. In the morning, with a taste of copper in their mouth and a searing migraine, making them walk slowly, they had eaten breakfast at the Capucins among tough men and loudmouths, butchers and truck drivers fuelling up on rillettes and red wine.

  To begin with, Olga had hated this man who stole away her husband at night, was almost jealous of him, but he brought her flowers and cakes, spoke well, was not only charming but ridiculously kind. And it wasn’t every night. André knew how to find opportunities elsewhere. She let herself be won over, and anyway she knew that, with him, André would be good, and though he would come home early in the morning, he would at least come home, stinking of tobacco, with a baguette and warm croissants. Abel was there when Daniel was born; he’d held the baby in his hands first in fact, because André, weeping with joy, his body trembling, did not even have enough strength to wipe the tears from his cheeks.

  She was always happy to go to those Sundays by the Arcachon bay, letting herself be lifted up by the muscular arms of that affable con artist who would cover her with kisses without any ulterior motive, even if one day he said to André—who would sometimes go to bed with drunken slappers after wild parties in backrooms—that he should be careful not to mistreat a rare pearl like Olga because she would end up in the arms of a man who did respect her. That had troubled André for a few days, and he had suddenly become attentive, considerate and sincere, before once more being possessed by his demons, lured by the voices of sirens, and he had forgotten his friend’s warning.

  She liked walking alone, early in the morning, by the waterside or in the forest, not going back until about eleven so she could make lunch while she waited for the men to return from fishing. She prepared the food with Jacqueline, aka Violette, a former whore from Marseille who was chatty, volcanic, beautiful, and coarse as a rough diamond, sparkling in strange and unexpected ways, who had run away after being fucked by different men on moored boats for two days solid, a punishment enforced by her pimp. Violette had arrived, staggering, covered in blood and cum, at the apartment of a distant cousin, who was herself with a client and who had introduced her to Abel. Everything was arranged between the two of them, just like that. He took her home with him, gave her a room, brought in an unlicensed doctor—a gentle, silent abortionist—who had healed her and rid her of the vile goo that had been growing inside her, the residue of one of those forty or fifty men who’d screwed her in a wardroom stinking of rust and sweat.

  Often surprise visitors rolled up in cars: card players, little misfits trying to act tough, a girl on their arm, a bottle of fizz in their hand, men that Abel or André had met one night or in obscure places on some kind of sleazy business. A wild, noisy bunch of shady men in fedoras and funny men in straw boaters full of ripe gossip, drunken pimps come to make coffee for their current favorite and take her out for a break, poor little slut.

  When there were too many people, when there weren’t enough seats for all the wild beasts, wily coyotes and timid strays, Olga would go for a walk and sit down on the beach in the sun, skirt pulled up to brown her legs, and on Sunday evenings André would delight in all the subtle shades of her suntanned skin and she would let him find the parts that the sun had not been able to reach because he always knew how to make her feel hot even in deep shade.

  Darlac dropped by, several times. They were all his prey, but he came without dog or rifle and reassured them all that he was not a hunter of small game. He knew everyone, and everyone knew where they stood with this young detective with his eye on the jackpot, always there, with his colleagues in the daytime and alone at night, around the card tables or in the bars, drinking with the whores or their pimps, watching the top burglars and the armed robbers that were pointed out to him. He saw everything, but knew when to close his eyes, and people said he was corrupt because he had big needs, would swagger brazenly, living it up with all the girls who fell for his handsome mug and his police badge, happy as a wolf in a sheepfold. He played them off against each other, breaking up alliances, controlling the puppets, pulling the strings, tying slipknots in them, always several moves ahead. This mastery of the underworld enabled him to solve big cases that put him at the head of the race for promotion: senior inspecteur principal, commissaire . . . The future was bright, and commissaires divisionnaires were slapping him on the back.

  André and Darlac liked each other. Who knows why? Maybe because of Olga who, without ever trying, attracted the cop’s insistent gaze, his tender solicitude. And above all because Darlac knew how to make himself useful and then indispensable when André had a few run-ins with a gang of armed robbers on the Basque coast and when some of Darlac’s colleagues, who should have minded their own fucking business, tried to have André arrested for abuse of trust and passive procurement. Darlac had saved his skin, but now had a firm grip on his balls.

  *

  He comes out of the bar feeling groggy and disoriented, then begins walking down the street, staring vaguely at the ground. All he sees are feet and legs, shapeless forms. Like a drunkard lost in a whirl of memories.

  He reaches place Gambetta, the air full of noise, and it takes him a few seconds, standing still i
n the middle of this rushing crowd, to shake off the fog of the past where the faces of Olga and Abel still float, blinding him with their smiles. His own face, blurred and ghostlike, is in the newspaper and he would like to become invisible, a real ghost, instead of wandering, flesh and blood, amid all these dangerous eyes.

  He catches a bus and is buffeted about for a quarter of an hour, hanging onto a hand strap, until he gets off outside the station. He hurries over to rue Furtado, passing the garage on the opposite sidewalk, then stops and stands for a moment in front of the shop window of a baker’s, watching left and right for anything suspicious. There’s that young guy smoking a cigarette outside, leaning against the signboard. The apprentice. André examines the cars, squinting through the reflections on the windows to distinguish figures inside.

  Because he feels sure that Darlac is already on his scent, now he’s identified him. The commissaire knows everything he needs to know about him: he knows the people he and Olga hung out with before the war, their night friends as well as their day friends, the people she knew when she worked at the factory, the women especially; those people André met sometimes, feeling uncomfortable in the middle of their discussions, their talk of unions and the Spanish Civil War, their anger at the fascists and the bosses who should all be lined up against the wall. He sensed their mistrust, perhaps even their contempt of him, like those superstitious people who are afraid of night birds.