At last he finds the place on his map, under the gleam of his torch. A cul-de-sac at the end of this street, a dead end in the labyrinth where he will find an infuriated Minotaur. A one-story house with closed shutters, dark as a cave.
Darlac is about to lift the door knocker when he hears a woman screaming from inside, furniture banging against walls, and then a man yelling. He listens to this racket for a while, trying to picture the scene, not that it’s difficult: a flurry of punches, some shoving, insults. The woman is probably lying on the floor, given the shrillness of her cries, perhaps protecting herself from the man’s boots. He bangs on the door so hard that a sudden and absolute silence falls inside the house. Nothing moves. All Darlac can hear above the moan of the wind is the tapping of an electricity cable or maybe a loose gutter. He knocks again. Four times. “Who the fuck’s bothering us now?” the man yells from inside the house.
Darlac takes out his card as the guy opens the door.
“Police.”
He climbs the two front steps, pushes the door open all the way as the man takes a step back and enters the hallway without paying him any more attention.
“Hey! Hey!” the man complains. “Where do you think you’re going like that?”
“I came to see your son, Norbert. Is he here?”
“Who are you?”
“Commissaire Darlac. You want to see my card again?”
Darlac keeps walking, but the man grabs him by the shoulder and forces him to turn around. He’s a big guy, slightly taller than Darlac, and he smells of wine. His waxy face gleams with sweated-out booze.
“You can’t just barge into my house like that, you cop bastard! Get the fuck out of here now!”
A long-haired woman, eyes swollen from crying, leans against a door frame. She wears only a slip, with one strap torn off, so she has to constantly pull up her neckline in order to conceal her breast. She pats a blood-soaked handkerchief against her mouth and nose and watches the two men. Her arms are covered in bruises.
Darlac feels the man’s hand tense on the shoulder of his jacket. “Let go of me, and I’ll explain.”
“Fuck that. Get out of here.”
The man lets him go though, all the same, and Darlac takes advantage of this fact to grab his pistol. The man recoils.
“Jesus,” he says. “I didn’t do anything.”
Darlac moves closer to him and slams the gun barrel into the bridge of his nose, then smashes him over the skull with the butt. The man falls to his knees and Darlac hits him again, splitting his ear by using the pistol as a hammer. The man groans, his face streaming with blood which drips slowly onto the floor.
“Alright,” says Darlac, leaning over him. “Now shut your stupid mouth and let me do my job. I’m not your fucking wife who you can beat like a dog whenever you’ve had a drink. Try that with me and I’ll smash your fucking face in until your brain runs out your nose. Do you understand me, dickhead?”
Darlac stands up straight and turns to the woman.
“Is your son here?”
She doesn’t have time to respond. Norbert appears behind her, holding a shawl that he drapes around her shoulders before pushing her gently into the kitchen. He looks indifferently at his father, who is moaning weakly on the ground. With a little nod, he takes a cigarette from his pocket and lights it, then starts smoking, never taking his eyes off the man on the floor. Darlac instantly grasps the rock-hard hatred lodged in this kid’s heart.
“You know why I’m here?”
“For that guy . . . the one you’re looking for.”
“Exactly. You know who it is?”
“I do now. You said it earlier. It’s Daniel’s father.”
“That’s right. His father, who came back from the camps in ’45 and who, instead of coming here to find his son, stayed up in Paris to have a good time. He’s wanted for several murders. You think that’s normal, a father acting like that?”
Norbert looks down at his own father again.
“No,” he says. “Daniel talks about him sometimes, but he says he doesn’t remember much about him. Says he wouldn’t even recognize him.”
“Of course not. From what I know of this guy, Jean Delbos, he was a gambler and a womaniser. Didn’t give a shit about his wife and kid. So how could Daniel have any memory of him?”
Norbert nods his agreement.
“Why did you come here?”
Darlac leads him aside. They enter a small living room. The chairs are lying on the floor; Darlac picks them up and arranges them around the table.
“If this guy, Jean Delbos—your friend’s father—comes to see your boss, for whatever reason, call me. Here. My office number is on this card. My men will know where to find me if I’m not there when you call. Help me, and I’ll help you.”
“You’ll help me? To do what?”
“Your father. That bastard lying on the floor out there. I’ll file charges against him and you’ll be rid of him for a long time. And you and your mother won’t be afraid anymore. You understand? I was sickened by what I saw tonight. But it has to be quid pro quo. I’ll have him called in tomorrow. Your mother will have to come in to press charges. It’ll scare the shit out of him. He won’t be so tough then. What do you think?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Darlac holds out his hand, but Norbert seems to hesitate.
“There’s a guy who brought a motorbike in to be repaired. A Norton. I don’t know if it’s him. But the boss yelled at him and threw him out, twice. Anyway, maybe it isn’t him. I’m just saying . . .”
Darlac conceals his triumph. It was so easy.
“Don’t worry, kid. It probably isn’t him. But keep your eyes peeled, and I’ll keep my promise.”
He holds out his hand again, as warmly as he can, and shakes the boy’s, which is weak and cold, and he crushes it a bit, just so the kid knows who’s in charge, so he knows that he could get hurt.
24
Same way back. And still the same dusty heat, even in the shady parts of the valleys. They drive more slowly as the two water trucks are full to the brim of water, which must already be hot and will probably taste of dirt and rust. Baltard is slumped over the machine gun, perhaps asleep, indifferent to the jolting movements of the caterpillar tracks. The path, which is beginning to meander now, is still paved but with occasional ruts that shake the men’s bodies as they look around them, seeing nothing through the cloud of dust but the parched slopes of the hills on either side.
Daniel fights against sleep, his mind numbed by confused thoughts: a long daydream in which he imagines his first leave, his arrival in Bordeaux, the hugs and kisses, Irène’s body held tight against his. In odd moments he regrets not having gone with the others to see the Arab whores, so he could ease this painful impatience, purge the brutality he senses within himself and keep only his purest desire for her. But he senses, he knows, that nothing is ever entirely pure, that part of it is always an exchange of bodily fluids, of odors, of grunts and moans, that love does not consist only of staring deep into each other’s eyes and touching your fingertips together. He knows all this and he knows nothing, his knowledge restricted—as with all virgins of his age and gender—to what he’s heard others say and what he’s seen in magazines like the ones that used to circulate the barrack room during training. Reduced to stroking off as he tries to imagine what it will be like when he’s the one doing those things and she’s wriggling about and moaning. Virgin. To hear them talk, you’d think there weren’t any in the platoon; listening to some of them, you have to wonder if they’ve ever been virgins. The lads talk about practically nothing else in the evenings, slouched over the tables in the mess hall, taking turns to recount their experiences, their heroic adventures, their greatest fucks, their most intensive bombardments. Licking, teasing, pumping, screwing, banging. Daniel listens to all this and feels as if he is hea
ring about work at a building site. It’s all heavy lifting, all diggers and bulldozers. And it’s not exactly a holiday for the girls either: they go from horse riding to active gynecology, not forgetting the contortionist poses in the back seats of cars or in a corner of a factory changing room. Anonymous wombs, faceless pussies, cunts, cracks, holes, chasms, gash . . . Apparently there are even special things, but the man who’s saying this suddenly stops mid-sentence, claiming that he really shouldn’t talk about it like that, and the others push him for details—come on, fuck, you’ve said either too much or not enough—but no, the guy suddenly acts all shy, blinking fast and looking down, no, lads, sorry, I prefer to keep that to myself.
Ooh, la-di-da, you big fucking wuss! I bet you finish yourself off with your hand, don’t you?
Daniel laughs, daydreams, gets hard, listening to all of this. Wonders sometimes how it’s even possible. True or imagined, these stories do everyone good. What they’re talking about is life. Everyday, peacetime life. A local dance in a village hall. A girl, a paso doble or two, going out to smoke a cigarette in the summer night, slipping your hand under a corsage . . . Their eyes shine, and not only with lust. There are breathless silences after each lewd epic, and dreamy eyes that betray a tenderness that men never talk about to each other. Eyes lit up by the distant sweetness of civilian life, so much more beautiful seen from here, in these shitty quarters where they waste their best years in fear, hoping only that they won’t be the next one to take a bullet, to step on a mine and leave their legs behind, to get their bollocks sliced off by fellouzes . . . All the shit they have to go through every day at home, the routine, the slow, gloomy weeks spent waiting for Saturday or for payday, are nothing, seen from here. They cling to the hips of girls they’ve screwed—or haven’t—like sailors clinging to lifebelts after a shipwreck in the middle of a storm-tossed ocean.
Amid the roar of the caterpillars and the rumble of the engines, they hardly even hear the explosion. But they see it straight away, above them: a cloud of black smoke rising through the air like a huge balloon before dissolving.
Daniel is thrown backwards with the others by the sudden braking, and for two or three seconds they are all entangled. Enough time to understand what’s happening. Someone yells, “Mine! Mine!” and Daniel is surprised to hear the voice so clearly, then he realizes that the engine has stopped. The half-track’s front doors bang open and they hear men running, shouting, “Quick, quick, fuck’s sake, come on!” He grabs his rifle and jumps out of the vehicle and the others follow him and there, crouched behind it, none of them understand, to start with, the meaning of that hammering on the metal body. Then, seeing the sparks on the road and realizing that they’re being shot at, they split in two to move forward, behind the water truck, and that’s when they finally make out the sound of the gunshots, up there on the hillside to their left, on the shady slope scattered with bushes and boulders.
“Where are those fuckers?” Baltard yells, behind the half-track’s machine gun.
“Over there,” says the caporal, with a vague wave. “They’ve got a machine gun. I just hope they don’t have a mortar.”
Baltard loads the gun then fires a few short bursts blindly, screaming insults at the enemy, and they see the bullets hit the hillside, producing little mushroom clouds of dust. The men hunch their shoulders round their heads. Daniel feels every gunshot like an unsuspected artery that is suddenly beating so hard it’s about to burst. “There! Under the trees! You can see the puffs of smoke! No, lower!”
The machine gun’s bullets spray the top of the bush and vanish into the ground.
“Ammo! Give me ammo!”
“Go and open the crate for him,” says the caporal to Giovanni. “You know where it is?”
Giovanni runs. Daniel follows him and leans on the hood of the armored car to fire two cartridges at a rock where he saw something move. He hears Giovanni fire his sub-machine gun before climbing onto the platform. Peyrou and Meyran are lying on their bellies under the truck and firing their rifles pretty much at random. The machine gun rattles then stops then rattles again. Giovanni yells at the crate where the cartridge belts are stored. Between each burst of gunfire, they can hear the fells shouting from their hiding places.
“The lieutenant’s been hit! Someone get him out of here!”
Daniel fires two shots, runs, gets down behind an embankment ploughed with bullet holes, and fires again. The jeep is thirty meters away, lying across the road, its front right side buckled over. He hears the machine gun hammering away behind him, and the smaller, almost pathetic shots of the M.A.S.-49s. When he gets there, he finds Ferrier, the driver, covered in sweat and blood, kneeling next to the lieutenant, behind the jeep. To start with, he does not understand what has happened. Then he sees the lieutenant’s right trouser leg torn up, soaked with blood, and his face bone-white, big eyes full of tears staring up at him, mouth frozen in a terrified grimace. Daniel cannot see the lieutenant’s foot. There is nothing left of the trouser leg but a few red tatters and for a few seconds he forgets to breathe because he can’t get his head around the reality of the scene. He is about to ask what’s happened to the rest of his leg, but a volley of bullets drums against the jeep, ricocheting loudly off the tarmac, so he throws himself to the ground and sees Charlin, who was the jeep’s machine-gunner, lying sideways on the ground, gazing calmly at him, his head askew inside his helmet, with a deep blue gash in the middle of his forehead, as narrow and neat as if it had been chiselled.
“The radio?”
“Don’t know,” Ferrierpants. “Behind. Fuck, he’s going to croak!”
Daniel jumps to the back of the lopsided jeep, the hood raised and twisted, the sheet steel puckered into sharp slats like razor blades. The windscreen is smashed and its frame bent. He crawls behind the machine gun, which swivels when his head bangs against its handle, and he shrinks behind the seats, pressing his body as low as possible when a burst of bullets hums past above his head. The boys fire back at the sparks of gunfire they see up on the hill, about a hundred meters away. He grabs the strap of the radio, wraps it around his wrist and gets out of there. But the radio is heavier than he expected and he is dragged back by its deadweight, unable to simply step across the jeep’s platform to get back to safety. He throws his rifle on the ground, picks up the machine with both hands, groaning with the effort, and feels first a burning on his shoulder then a throb of pain deep in the flesh.
He falls face down on the ground and the radio crushes his wounded shoulder, and for a few seconds he doesn’t move, mouth open, dust coating his tongue, trying to breathe, hoping that some strength will return to him. When he lifts his head again he can no longer hear—through the rumbling that pounds in his brain—the .50 on the half-track firing. Everything else has fallen silent, even the crackling of rifles and sub-machine guns. When he glances across the spare tire at the hill where the attack came from, it seems to him that no sound has ever emerged from that rocky slope other than the silence of the wind. The caporal stands up and yells, “Cease fire!” and Baltard turns around, both hands still on the handles, eyes crazed, and stares at them all disbelievingly as they cautiously get to their feet, as if surprised to find them alive.
“They’ve pulled back, the bastards,” says the caporal, scanning the hillside. “Peyrou, Meyran, and Péret, go and see what’s there. If we’ve wounded one of them, we can fry his balls to make him talk. Baltard, cover them, and don’t fuck around.”
He runs to the jeep and asks Daniel if he’s alright: yeah, well, it’s bleeding, it’s in the muscle, a cut, like a knife wound. He goes over to the lieutenant, still being cradled by Ferrier as if he’s a sick kid or a woman. Around this scruffy, bloody Pieta, propped up against a wheel, are scattered a sub-machine gun, two magazines, cartridge cases and blood, spreading in a corolla inside a rut in the path just in front of the two men.
Ferrier does not react when the caporal approaches
and then crouches down. He examines the damaged leg, the cloth of the trousers stained not only with blood but with purplish-black diarrhoea.
“He can’t stay there. Help me carry him.”
The caporal takes one of the lieutenant’s arms and drags him towards him, and Ferrier lets his hands drop to his thighs and watches the corpse move away from him and then tip over so suddenly that Bernier staggers under the weight and shouts “For fuck’s sake, are you going to help me or what? We’ve got to lie him down somewhere!” So the soldier stands up and picks up the lieutenant’s one remaining leg, turning his eyes away and breathing heavily with a sort of whine, as the two of them struggle to pick up the dead man properly without inflicting any further damage on his body.
Daniel turns to them helplessly, one hand pressed to the top of his arm to stop the blood spraying out, and he follows them to the water truck to where they half drag, half carry the lieutenant and gently lie him down. Then they stand for a few seconds contemplating the earth-colored face with its badly closed eyes.
“O.K., what about the radio?” the caporal asks suddenly. “Does it work?”
He jogs towards the jeep and tips his helmet back when he gets there. He lifts up the radio set and puts it on the driver’s seat. The men watch him fiddling with the buttons, then he starts speaking into the handset.
After the War Page 35