“There’s another one we don’t see at all anymore: Jeff, you know, the fat one. What’s happened to him?”
It is Pascal Faget, A.K.A. Youyou, the owner of Le Tropical, a private club for V.I.P.s, who poses the question. Queer down to the roots of his hair, which he dyes chestnut brown for some unfathomable reason. Why not red or blond? Darlac stares at him over the champagne flute, a foot from his face, moisturised, bronzed and smoothed by Max Factor, and he sniffs his heavy perfume, the same crap the queer uses on his ass after he’s been given a good seeing to, to mask the other smells. He wants to smash his ugly face in, but this guy is like a Who’s Who of Bordeaux: he knows everyone and who they’re fucking too, knows every bedroom anecdote—from the most harmless affairs to the most sordid crimes—involving the city’s bosses, the wealthiest wine merchants, politicians, prostitutes, drag queens. Cops too, for that matter. Faggots, pedos, sessions with whips and chains, voyeurs, sex addicts, rich pervs, religious pervs, fetishists, sodomites (in the closet or out of it), cocksuckers, asslickers, panty-eaters . . . Youyou had an inexhaustible supply of dirt. Darlac knows perfectly well that Le Tropical’s owner does not tell him everything, but what he does tell him enables the commissaire to have a good hundred honest and respectable citizens in his pocket, just in case.
“And you know what they’re saying?”
Youyou leans his thick lips close to Darlac’s face.
“That he was eliminated because he messed around too much.”
Darlac puts his glass down. Swallows his mouthful of champagne. Tries to appear indifferent and amused, creating an asymmetrical web of wrinkles across his face.
“What do you mean, he messed around too much? Who said that?”
“Oh, no-one in particular. It’s just a rumor doing the rounds. Well, I mean, you know perfectly well that . . . he does dudes now and again. And he’s not exactly discreet about it.”
Of course Darlac knows. That and the rest . . . Jeff was no prude . . . Guided only by his drives and instincts. A militiaman during the Occupation, an occasional hatchet man afterwards, he was also a robber, a rapist, a dealer. Hunting dog, guard dog, and attack dog. You had to keep him close to you, on a short leash. But he was faithful. Like a stray mutt that’s been rescued: gratitude in his guts, knowing full well that his master has saved him from the doghouse or a lethal injection. Men went looking for him after the Liberation, guns in hand, to present him with the bill for his arrests, his interrogations, his pillaging during the war. For men of his kind, everything was permitted, and he didn’t stint himself. Including the ones that no-one ever found out about. Resistance fighters who vanished as they were catching a train or while riding a bike on a country road, or just some nobody coming out of a secret dance and being welcomed by the butts of militiamen’s rifles . . . Their bodies never found. Darlac had paid for his escape to Morocco on a passenger-cargo ship where Jeff had his run of cabin boys during the trip. He had to wait until people had forgotten him. Partly that would be solved by the sudden amnesia of those who wanted him dead, but he also had to wait for the country’s vague desire for purification to wear itself out, and for the bastards to become a useful commodity again. He stayed out there nearly three years. First job: assistant in an ironmongery run by a Jew. You couldn’t make it up. After that, he ran a bar in Tangiers: a happy time that he often talked about with fondness and regret. But he had to flee again, because the father of an eleven-year-old boy stirred up the city to cut off his balls and shove them down his throat. So sensitive, those Arabs . . . and what prudes!
“So he got killed by some guy he knocked around?”
“That’s what I heard . . . But you knew him well, didn’t you? Haven’t you heard anything?”
“He probably had to go on the run. It happens sometimes. I’m not worried. I’m sure we’ll see him again before long.”
Youyou lifts his glass of fizz and invites Darlac to do the same.
“I can’t say I miss him, personally. Anyway, I’d never let him have me. Not my type!”
A roar of dirty laughter as he drinks; the golden liquid runs down his chin. He pours himself more champagne. It foams too much and overflows the glass. He hands the bottle to Darlac, but the cop refuses, turning his back and giving a cursory wave.
He walks, slightly groggy, incapable of thinking about anything, then, coming out on the Allées de Tourny, he stops to contemplate the view of the Grand Théâtre: a boring and arrogant building, he thinks, perfect for this sad, spineless city. He starts walking again, more quickly now, up the cours de l’Intendance to pick up his car. His mind is filled with images of Mazeau’s and Jeff’s bodies, tangled up in their sandy hole the way he’d seen them after being thrown in there by Francis, but found by a hunting dog or a rubber-tapper and soon afterwards laid out—monstrous, half-eaten by the quicklime—on the coroner’s table. Or dug up by gendarmes after a tip-off. If that pansy Faget is starting to go on about it, then other people must know, or think they know, or suspect. Which means the corpses will soon be discovered. Which is definitely not good news.
Back at home, in the darkness of the entrance hall, in that familiar odor of waxed floorboards and stone, he stands motionless for a moment, breathing fast, then bolts the door, leaning on it with all his weight, as if taking shelter from the nightmare which is starting to pursue him. Francis. He has to find that son of a bitch and shut him up for good.
27
Sergent Castel walks at the head of a column of thirty men who are climbing the path up to the village. Meyran is behind him, lugging the radio set. Daniel comes next, his loaded Garand in his hands. He listens to the quiet tramping of the men’s feet, their panting breath, the intermittent jingling of their straps and harnesses. The rest of the platoon is going up the other side, commanded by the new lieutenant who was sent here after the death of Vrignon. Caunègre, that’s his name. He was near Constantine, on the general staff of a battalion. The hill stands out starkly against the pale eastern sky. Thickets of bushes, slouching roofs, lopsided shacks. The houses are huddled together in blue shade. Two or three cocks crow loudly, apparently thrilled by the new morning. A smell of woodsmoke reaches the men and the cool wind blows over them and Daniel looks up at the transparent, straw-yellow sky, slowly turning blue.
Suddenly, two dogs surge from a field below, barking and growling furiously as they head straight for the sergent and Meyran. The sergent shoots the first in the head; it leaps backwards and falls on its side, its body shaken by convulsions. The second one turns back and jogs away, tail between its legs, so Daniel catches it in his sights and puts a bullet in its backside, then finishes it off after it collapses on the ground and lifts its head to howl. The other men whistle in admiration, and he hears a few compliments uttered in hushed tones. When they reach the dogs’ corpses, Daniel and the sergent drag them over to the grass and throw them on their sides and the men stare at the two dead animals, their wounds, taking care not to walk in the blood that is already soaking into the dust.
Shouts and screams reach them from the village, woken by the gunshots, so the sergent orders them to run over to the first houses.
They spread out through the streets, yelling loudly, and break down doors and enter dark rooms where they can see nothing apart from the pale stain of a piece of clothing or the flickering red of a fire and they start bellowing like frightened blind men, kicking over tables, smashing chairs, shoving benches against walls, breaking shattering vases and jugs, stamping on plates as women and children scream. Daniel misses the step that separates the street from the hard earth floor and lands on his knees in the middle of a room where all is dark except for the gleam of a copper plate hung on the stone wall. Meyran and Baltard yell that they can’t see a thing for fuck’s sake, don’t they even have windows in these shitholes? A shutter bangs and they get a better view of the miserable furniture, the stone sink, the hearth full of ashes and, above all, that woman and her
four children who press tightly around her: two girls in their early teens and two younger boys who hide in their mother’s skirts. One of them is hardly old enough to walk, dressed only in a dirty undershirt, his lower half naked, and he wails piteously so Meyran grabs him and lifts him up by his undershirt, carrying him across the room like a parcel and throwing him outside. The mother hangs onto his shoulders and he hits her in the face with the butt of his rifle. The woman falls to her knees, groaning, face bloody, and then walks over to her son who is moving his arms and legs confusedly, lying on his belly, as if he’s trying to swim along the gravel path. The other boy and one of the girls rush over and they all start crying and shrieking around the little one, hugging each other close. Daniel is in the doorway. He hears a burst of sub-machine fire further off, the screaming of humans, the bleating of goats, the yapping of dogs, and he doesn’t know what to do. He wants to unpin one of the grenades that hang from his kit and toss it into this hovel to blow it all up, to make it all stop, to leave nothing in the smoking ruins but silence and calm.
He doesn’t move, the butt of his rifle wedged under his armpit, and he sees Soler kicking the mother and the children, screaming at them to get up—“On your feet, bitch!”—while inside the shack Baltard grabs the other girl by her hair and shoves her onto a straw mattress, lying on top of her as he sniggers and snorts and struggles with his belt buckle. The girl fights back, hammering her fists into the man’s ribs as he crushes her with his weight.
“Jesus, stop it!” he shouts at Baltard. “We’re not animals!”
“They are though! This is how they like to be fucked while their men are out in the brush, killing our friends! Don’t bloody start with me!”
“What’s going on?” Meyran asks.
“Baltard’s being a dick. You tell him!”
Meyran enters the house and bursts out laughing. He asks Baltard if he’d like a hand, and Baltard says they can share, so he starts unbuckling his belt too and jumps on the girl to hold her arms above her head.
“You watch the door. We’re gonna be a few minutes!”
Daniel yells at them to stop, to calm down, but they tell him to fuck off and now he can’t see anything in the darkness of the shack but a lumpy, moaning mass topped by the black mass of the girl’s hair. He looks away, sickened, and sees the woman and her children still grouped around the little boy. He decides to walk over to them and order them to get up. But as they don’t even seem to hear him over the noise of their moaning, he fires a shot in the air. They stand up then, one after another, still whimpering, and the mother holds her little boy in her arms, cradling his bruised, swollen face against her neck, letting his limbs dangle listlessly over her chest, and whispering words of consolation and pleading into his ears, between sobs.
He pushes them in front of him with the barrel of his gun, and when he hears the girl screaming from inside the house he has to aim it at them to stop them going back inside for her, and now he starts yelling too, hurling insults at them, you little shits, you fucking bitch, move forward or I’ll blow your fucking heads off, forgetting himself in his bellowing. He doesn’t know if he should cry, from rage or grief, or if he should shoot this woman in the back just to feel the thrill of her broken in two, slammed forward by the impact. He walks behind those poor limping devils as if at the edge of a chasm, suffering from vertigo, and he has the feeling that the next step will send him into the void.
At the bottom of a long, wobbly staircase, ambushed by the cool night air, he comes out into a noisy square filled with the roar of voices: soldiers barking orders, the villagers crying, exchanging words of fear as they are lined up against a wall, watched by the single eye of a machine gun. Daniel pushes his prisoners towards the crowd of other villagers, but the woman goes up to Lieutenant Caunègre, showing him her child and repeating: “He is sick, he is sick, on ground he is sick!”
The lieutenant turns to Daniel. “What’s wrong with her kid?”
“Nothing. He just banged his head when he fell. She’s been screaming like that ever since.”
“Go with the others!” Caunègre says to the woman. “We’ll sort your kid out afterwards.”
But the woman does not move. She holds out her son towards the lieutenant, and the child’s legs pedal vaguely in the air.
“He is sick! Monsieur, he is sick!”
“Go with the others, I said. Fuck’s sake, is she deaf or what?”
As the woman continues wailing, brandishing her son in his face, the lieutenant takes a step back.
“You want me to make him better, do you?”
Caunègre slowly removes his pistol from its holster, slides the breech into place and touches the end of the barrel to the child’s forehead. He cocks the hammer. Daniel has stopped breathing. His hand tightens around the butt of his rifle. He stares at the Colt, held steady at the end of the officer’s outstretched arm, and he notices that the square has gone silent, that every gaze is converged on the point of contact between the barrel of the gun and the child’s forehead.
“Take three steps back and go with the others,” says Caunègre in a hollow voice.
He does not blink, and the gun remains pressed against the kid’s head. The woman continues to hold her child in front of the soldier, but she is no longer wailing; her mouth hangs open, but she has been struck dumb by terror, her voice vanished. Daniel stares at the lieutenant’s finger on the trigger and it seems to him that its pressure is increasing. He has the impression that the hammer is moving imperceptibly towards the firing pin. He presses his rifle butt harder into his armpit, lifting it almost to his shoulder, ready to fire, the lieutenant less than two meters from him in his line of fire.
Three Sikorski helicopters pass over the village, heading east. Paratroop reinforcements sent to clean up the jebel, which the Legion has been searching since yesterday. The woman looks up at the choppers, then retreats, holding her child tight to her breast. Staggering, bent double, she joins the other villagers, then sits on the ground and cradles her son. Other fearful women, other feeble old people are brought to the square. There are maybe a hundred of them now. The oldest boy might be twelve or thirteen. Hunchbacked, frail.
The lieutenant holsters his pistol. He walks over to the villagers, hands on hips, and the N.C.O.s give orders to the men with shouts and gestures, and the men all aim their guns at the crowd.
“Three soldiers were killed by cowards, four days ago. You all know it. It happened about ten kilometers from here.”
A caporal shoves an old man forward and tells him to translate. The villagers listen, impassive. Children weep and babble.
“We know that an armed group passes through here on a regular basis to pick up supplies. We know that all the men of this village have gone to the brush. We know you’re helping the rebels and we hold you responsible for the deaths of our comrades.”
He nods at the old man: translate. Women exchange words, start to argue.
“What are they saying?”
“That it’s not true, what you say. They say the bandits haven’t been here for a long time, and that their men were forced to go.”
The women shout louder. They shake their fists or walk towards the soldiers, holding out their hands imploringly. The children whine. The lieutenant signals to the machine-gunner. The breech clicks into place. Everyone freezes at the sound of gunfire. A few men flinch. Above the crowd of villagers, mud-bricks explode in pieces that flutter down onto the children and women who have thrown themselves to the ground, covering them with grey dust.
Caunègre waits for the dust to settle and the people to get up.
“Understood? Shut your mouths or I’ll shut them for you, permanently!”
The old man starts to translate. He speaks just as loud as the lieutenant, and sounds just as angry.
The lieutenant is about to add something, but a jeep and two G.M.C. trucks arrive in the square. So
ldiers jump out, about twenty of them, and a capitaine emerges from the jeep. He walks towards Caunègre and salutes him. Legionnaires.
“So? What’s happening?”
“We haven’t found anything. So we’re explaining to them what we’re doing and what we’re going to do.”
“You’re explaining to them?”
The capitaine laughs silently. He whistles to his men, who are standing close to the trucks, and signals them over.
“Look what we’ve found.”
One of the trucks reverses, stopping close to the villagers. Three soldiers drop the tailgate and push out two men, hands tied behind their backs. They land on their knees, and a soldier prevents them getting up. Panting, they stare at the ground: faces swollen, lips split. Blood on their shirts and their trousers. Head wounds.
“They talked like concierges,” says the capitaine. “They’ve got wives and kids here. You’ll see.”
He confronts the crowd and points at the two men.
“Where are the fatmas of these two heroes? They can come out and kiss them goodbye before we take them away.”
The old man translates again, staring wide-eyed at the two men.
Several women are teary-eyed. Others hold their heads in their hands. The kids stare at the two fellaghas and blink furiously. But no-one moves.
Daniel is still close to Lieutenant Caunègre. He watches the prisoners, electrical wire cutting into their wrists, bare feet bleeding, dressed in rags, kneeling unsteadily on the pebbles. These are the first ones he has seen alive. He recalls the face of the machine gunner that he shot last month, appearing almost abstract, so distant, in his scope, whereas his wounded body, afterwards, was merely that of a man down, seeking only to live a few minutes longer. So this was the enemy. So these were the men who had killed Lieutenant Vrignon and Charlin. And Giovanni. The ones who hide and fire at them, as if they were coconuts at a fairground. Lambs to the slaughter. But he shakes his head. He has trouble imagining either of these two aiming at a man and putting two bullets in his body. All he sees are two miserable wretches covered in blood and bruises, on their knees, perhaps watched by their wives and their kids.
After the War Page 38