Given this injury, he had to abandon the idea of taking the métro or the tram. Covering his improvised bandage and the bloodstains on his coat, he caught a taxi at Bastille.
The driver was much the same age as Albert. As they drove, he brazenly stared at his passenger, who was pale as death, perched on the edge of his seat, hugging his left hand to his stomach. He became worried when Albert rolled down the window because in the cramped car he was beginning to feel a panic he could barely contain. The driver thought the man was about to throw up.
“You’re not feeling sick, are you?”
“No, no,” Albert said, with what little cheerfulness he could muster.
“’Cos if you’re feeling sick, you can get out right here!”
“No, no,” Albert said, “I’m just tired.”
Despite this reassurance, the driver had misgivings.
“You sure you’ve got the fare?”
Albert took a twenty-franc bill from his pocket with his good hand and waved it. The driver felt relieved, but only for a moment. He was an old hand, he had seen it all, and this was his taxi. And being a businessman, he would stoop to anything.
“Sorry, friend! It’s just that, lads like you, they . . .”
“What do you mean ‘lads like me’?” Albert said.
“You know, men who have just been demobilized . . .”
“Because I suppose you haven’t been demobilized?”
“No sir, I spent my war right here. I’m asthmatic and I’ve got one leg shorter than the other.”
“A lot of guys would have enlisted anyway. And a lot of them came back with one leg a lot fucking shorter than the other.”
The driver did not take kindly to this, ex-soldiers were all the same, forever going on about their war, forever giving little homilies, people had had just about enough of heroes. The true heroes were dead! Now they really had been heroes. Besides, there was something suspicious about guys who were always going on about the trenches, most of them had spent the war sitting behind a desk.
“So you’re saying that we didn’t do our duty, is that it?”
Besides, what did men who had just been demobilized know about the hardships ordinary people had had to endure? Albert had heard the spiel before, he knew it by heart, the price of coal and the price of bread, it was the sort of information he remembered. This was something he had realized since being demobilized: to live in peace, it was best to put away the victor’s stripes in a drawer.
The driver dropped him on the corner of the rue Simart, asked for twelve francs, and before he would leave, insisted Albert give him a tip.
There were hordes of Russians living in the area, but the doctor was a Frenchman named Martineau.
Albert had met him in June when the first attacks started. No one knew how Édouard had managed to get his hands on morphine while he was in the sanatorium, but he had become terribly dependent. Albert tried to reason with him: it’s a slippery slope, old man, you can’t carry on like this, we need to get you well. Édouard would not listen and proved as stubborn as he had been about the graft. Albert did not understand. I know a legless cripple, he would say, the man who sells lottery tickets on the rue Faubourg-Saint-Martin, he was treated at the Hôpital Février in Châlons, and he told me about the sort of grafts surgeons can do these days, all right, the patients don’t come out looking handsome, but at least they have a human face. But Édouard was not even listening, it was always no, no, no, then he would go back to playing patience at the kitchen table and smoking cigarettes through his nostril. He gave off a putrid smell, which was hardly surprising with his gullet wide open to the world . . . He drank through a funnel. Albert had managed to get him a second-hand masticating device (from a surgical patient who had died when his graft failed to take, a real stroke of luck!), which made his life a little simpler, but even so, everything was complicated.
Édouard had been discharged from the Hôpital Rollin in June and a few days later began to display worrying signs of anxiety: his whole body would shudder, he sweated profusely, vomited what little he managed to eat . . . Albert felt helpless. The first seizures brought on by morphine withdrawal were so violent Albert had had to strap him to the bed—as he had in the field hospital in November . . . so much for the war being over—and stop up the door so the other tenants would not come and put Édouard out of his misery (and theirs).
A skeleton possessed by a demon, Édouard was terrifying to behold.
Eventually, Docteur Martineau—a surly, distant man who claimed to have performed twelve amputations in the trenches in 1916—had agreed to give him an injection, and Édouard did become a little calmer. It was Docteur Martineau who had put Albert in touch with Basile, who became his supplier. Basile obviously made his living breaking into pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics; he could get any medication you wanted. Shortly afterward, Basile had offered Albert a grab bag of morphine ampoules he needed to offload; it was a clearance sale of sorts.
Albert carefully recorded the each injection, together with the day, the time, and the dosage, to help Édouard cope with his dependence, and he would lecture him in his feeble way, though it had little effect. But at least for the moment, Édouard appeared to be on the mend. He no longer cried for hours on end, but he no longer drew, despite the sketchpads and the pencils Albert had brought him. He seemed to spend his time lying on the sofa staring into space. September came around, the stock of morphine was exhausted, and Édouard was still not weaned. In June, he had been taking sixty milligrams a day; three months later he needed ninety milligrams, and Albert could see no end of it. Édouard lived as a recluse; he barely communicated. Albert, meanwhile, spent his time desperately trying to find money to pay for the morphine, to pay for the rent, the food, the coal—new clothes were out of the question, much too expensive. Money ran through his fingers at an alarming speed. He had pawned everything he could, he had even fucked Mme Monestier, the fat manageress at L’Horlogerie Mécanique for whom he stuffed envelopes and who, in return, put a little more in his pay packet (this was how Albert saw it, he liked to play the martyr. In fact, he had rather enjoyed the opportunity, after six months of being without a woman . . . Mme Monestier had huge breasts, he never knew quite what to do with them, but she was kind and had every reason to cheat on her husband, an arrogant bastard who had been on the home front and claimed that any soldier who had not been awarded an Iron Cross was unworthy of the name).
Most of Albert’s budget was spent on morphine. The price was soaring, the price of everything was soaring. Morphine was just like everything else, the price was linked to the cost of living. Albert deplored the fact that a government who, to stem inflation, could introduce the costume national, a cheap suit that cost a hundred ten francs, could not introduce an ampoule national of morphine for five francs. They could also have implemented “national bread,” “national coal,” “national shoes,” “national rent,” and even a “national job”; Albert wondered whether these were not precisely the measures that led to Bolshevism.
The bank had not taken him back. Gone was the time when members of parliament were wont to declare, hand on heart, that the country “owed a debt of gratitude to les chers poilus who had fought in the trenches.” Albert had received a letter explaining that the state of the economy made it impossible to rehire him; that to do so would mean laying off men who, during “the fifty-two months of this brutal war, had provided singular service to the company . . .” etc.
For Albert, getting money had become a full-time occupation.
The situation had become yet more complicated when, in an ugly scene, Basile was arrested with his pockets stuffed with drugs and spattered with the blood of a local pharmacist.
Finding himself without a dealer overnight, Albert took to hanging out in seedy bars and asking for addresses. But finding morphine proved to be less difficult than expected; with the cost of living spiraling, Paris had become a hub for trafficking of every kind; a man could find anything he needed—Alb
ert had found the Greek.
Docteur Martineau disinfected the wound and sutured it closed. Albert winced and gritted his teeth.
“A fine knife,” the doctor muttered and said nothing more.
He had opened the door without comment or question. He lived on the fourth floor in an apartment that was unfurnished save for a sofa tucked in one corner, the curtains were permanently drawn, the floor littered with crates of books, paintings were stacked against the wall; two chairs facing each other in the hallway served as a waiting room. He could have been mistaken for a lawyer but for the adjoining room, which had a hospital bed and surgical equipment. His fee was less than Albert’s taxi fare.
As he left, Albert thought of Cécile, though he did not know why.
He decided to go the rest of the way on foot. He needed to keep moving. Cécile, the life he had once had, the hopes he had once nurtured . . . It seemed foolish, succumbing to maudlin nostalgia, but as he wandered through the streets with his shoebox under his arm, his left hand bandaged, thinking about all those things that had so quickly faded to memories, he felt like a stateless person. And, as of tonight, a thug, perhaps a murderer. He had no idea how this vicious cycle would end. Barring a miracle. And even then . . . Albert had experienced a miracle or two since being demobilized, and each had turned into a nightmare. Take Cécile, since Albert was just thinking about her . . . This problem with Cécile had begun with a miracle made possible by his new stepfather. Albert should have been suspicious. After the bank declined to rehire him, he had searched and searched, applied for every job he could; he had even taken part in the rat extermination program. But as his mother pointed out, at twenty-five centimes a rat, he was not about to make a quick fortune. In the end, all he had come away with was a rat bite, which was unsurprising, he had always been a clumsy boy. All this to is say that, three months after being demobilized, he was as poor as Job—not much of a catch for a girl like Cécile. Mme Maillard felt for the girl. And it was true: what future could he give the delicate, graceful Cécile. It was clear that, in Cécile’s shoes, Mme Maillard would have done the same. And so, after three months spent doing piecemeal work and waiting for the “demobilization bonus” that everyone had talked about but the government could not afford to pay, the miracle happened: his stepfather found him a job as an elevator attendant at La Samaritaine.
The management would have preferred a veteran with rather more medals to flaunt, “for customer relations,” but they would take what they could get; they took Albert.
He operated a handsome wrought-iron elevator and announced the floors. Though he never said as much to anyone (although he mentioned it in a letter to Édouard), he did not much enjoy the work. He did not quite know why. The realization finally came one afternoon in June when the doors opened and he saw Cécile in the company of a square-shouldered young man. They had not seen each other since her last letter, to which he had simply replied, “As you wish.”
That first second had been his first mistake; Albert had pretended not to recognize her and busied himself with the control panel for the elevator. Cécile and her friend were going to the top floor, which seemed to take an eternity given that the elevator stopped at every floor. It was an ordeal. Albert’s voice croaked as he announced each floor. Despite himself, he inhaled Cécile’s new perfume: elegant, chic, reeking of money. Her friend also reeked of money. He was young, evidently younger than Cécile, which Albert found shocking.
What he found humiliating was not so much the unexpected meeting as being seen in his ridiculous uniform. Like a tin soldier. With fringed epaulets.
Cécile lowered her eyes. It was obvious that she was embarrassed for him, she wrung her hands and stared at her feet. For his part, the square-shouldered young man marveled at the elevator, plainly dazzled by the wonders of modern technology.
Albert had never known minutes so interminable, excepting those he had spent buried alive in a shell crater; in fact to him the two incidents felt obscurely similar.
Cécile and her friend got out at the lingerie department; they did not even exchange a look. Back on the ground floor, Albert deserted his post at the elevator, took off his uniform, and left without even asking for what he was owed. A week’s work for nothing.
Some days later, moved, perhaps, by seeing him reduced to such a menial post, Cécile returned his engagement ring. By mail. Albert wanted to send it back, he did not want charity, had he really looked so poor in that garish flunkey’s uniform? But times were hard, with Caporal cigarettes selling for one franc fifty apiece, savings had to be made, coal prices had gone through the roof. He took the ring to the pawnbroker. Since the armistice, people called it the Crédit Municipal, it sounded more republican.
He had so many things there waiting to be redeemed, but he had written them all off.
After this incident, the only job Albert had been able to find was as a sandwich man, traipsing the streets carrying advertising boards strapped to him front and back; the thing weighed more than a dead donkey. Advertisements promoting the prices at La Samaritaine or the quality of De Dion-Bouton bicycles. He dreaded the thought of running into Cécile again. Being seen in fancy-dress uniform was bad enough, but the thought of being seen covered in advertisements for Campari was unbearable.
He might as well throw himself into the Seine.
12
M. Péricourt did not open his eyes until he was sure that he was alone. All that fuss . . . All those people milling around the Jockey Club. As though fainting in public were not embarrassing enough . . .
And then there had been Madeleine, his son-in-law, his housekeeper, all standing at the foot of his bed wringing their hands, and the telephone in the hall ringing and ringing, and Docteur Blanche with his drops and his pills, his voice like a curate and his ceaseless prating advice. Not that he had found anything wrong, he talked about heart trouble, exhaustion, anxiety, the unwholesome air of Paris, he talked a lot of nonsense—the man was well suited to a university position.
The Péricourt family owned a vast town house overlooking the parc Monceau. M. Péricourt had given over most of it to his daughter, who, after her marriage, had the third floor, where she and her husband lived, redecorated to her taste. M. Péricourt confined himself to a six-room apartment on the top floor, though he only really used the vast bedroom—which also served him as a library and a study—and a bathroom, which, though small, was adequate for a single man. As far as he was concerned, the whole mansion was reduced to this apartment. Since the death of his wife, he had rarely set foot in the other rooms, except the immense ground-floor dining hall. Had such things been left to him, receptions would have been held at Voisin, and that would be an end to it. His bed was set in an alcove curtained in dark-green velvet; he had never brought a woman here—he went elsewhere for such things—this was his space.
Earlier, when he was brought home, Madeleine had sat patiently with him for a long time. When, finally, she took his hand, he bridled.
“It’s like a damn wake!” he said.
Anyone but Madeleine would have protested; she simply smiled. The opportunities for them to spend time alone together were rare. She really is not a pretty girl, Péricourt was thinking. He looks old, thought Madeleine.
“I’ll leave you in peace,” she said, getting to her feet.
She gestured to the bell pull, he nodded, yes, fine, stop worrying, she checked the glass, the bottle of water, the handkerchief, the tablets.
“Turn the light out, would you?” he said.
But he quickly regretted his daughter leaving.
Though he felt better—the bout of apoplexy at the Jockey Club was already a distant memory—he suddenly experienced the same strange malaise that had struck him down earlier. It started in his belly, coursing through his chest to his shoulders, his head. His heart pounded wildly, as though trying to escape. Péricourt reached for the bell pull, then changed his mind; something told him that he was not dying, that his time had not yet come.
/> The bedroom was bathed in a dim glow, he stared at the bookshelves, the paintings, the pattern on the carpet as though seeing them for the first time. He felt terribly old, perhaps because everything around him, every tiny detail, seemed unexpectedly new. The feeling of suffocation was so intense, the sudden tightness in his throat so brutal, that tears sprang to his eyes. He began to weep. A flood of simple, honest tears, a sadness more overwhelming than he could remember ever feeling—except perhaps as a child—but one that brought with it a strange relief. He surrendered to it, allowed the tears to trickle unashamedly, warm, comforting. He wiped his face with a corner of the sheet, caught his breath, but it was no use; the tears kept coming, the grief engulfed him. Am I going senile, he wondered, though he did not really believe it. He propped himself up on the pillows, picked up a handkerchief, and blew his nose, burying his head beneath the covers so no one would hear, so no one would worry, so no one would come. Was he ashamed someone might see him crying? No, that was not it. True, he would not have liked it, it was degrading for a man his age to be seen sobbing like child, but mostly he wanted to be alone.
The vise around his throat loosened, though his breathing was still labored. Gradually the tears subsided, leaving a terrible emptiness. He felt exhausted, but sleep refused to come. All his life, sleep had come easily; even when his wife died and he had been unable to eat, he had still slept soundly. He had loved his wife, a wonderful woman, so many admirable qualities. And to be taken so young, it was unjust. But being unable to sleep was unusual and worrying for a man like him. It’s not my heart, thought Péricourt, Blanche is an idiot. It’s anxiety. Something heavy and ominous was looming over him. He thought about his work, about his meetings that afternoon, searching for an answer. He had been out of sorts all day. It could hardly be the conversation with the stockbroker, there had been nothing there to worry him, nothing out of the ordinary, this was his business, he had crushed dozens of stockbrokers in the course of his career. On the last Friday of every month he held the customary financial review with bankers, brokers, and middlemen all standing to attention before him.
The Great Swindle Page 14