The Great Swindle

by Pierre Lemaitre

  “I see,” he says, though he does not really see what this is about.

  Édouard points to a scribbled calculation at the bottom of a page.

  “30,000 memorials × 10,000 francs = 300 million francs.”

  Now Albert begins to understand, because this is a lot of money. In fact, it is a fortune.

  He cannot begin to conceive what one might buy with such a sum. His imagination batters itself against the number like a bee against a pane of glass.

  Édouard takes the sketchpad and shows him the last page.

  Patriotic Memories

  Memorials, statues, stelae

  in commemoration of our heroes

  & in celebration of a victorious France

  Catalog

  “You want to sell war memorials?”

  Yes. That’s right. Édouard is thrilled with his scheme, he slaps his thighs, making that strange keening sound in his throat, Albert does not know where it comes from, only that he finds it grating.

  Albert finds it difficult to understand why anyone would want to make war memorials, but the figure of 300,000,000 francs has managed to flutter into his imagination: it means “mansion,” like the townhouse of M. Péricourt, it means “limousine,” even “palace,” it means . . . he blushes—“women” was what he thought—and for a fleeting second he pictures the little housemaid with the devastating smile. It is natural: when you have money, you want a woman to share it with.

  He reads the lines that follow, an advertisement written in block capitals so neat it looks as though it has been printed:

  “. . . AND IN YOUR GRIEF YOU FEEL THE NEED TO KEEP ALIVE THE MEMORY OF THE CHILDREN FROM YOUR TOWN, YOUR VILLAGE, WHO WITH THEIR VERY BODIES MADE A LIVING RAMPART AGAINST THE INVADER.”

  “This is all very well,” Albert says. “Actually, I think it’s a good idea . . .”

  Now he understands why he was so disappointed by the drawings; they are not meant to represent an artistic sensibility but to express a collective grief, to appeal to the wider public, who need sensation, who need heroism.

  Later in the paragraph: “. . . TO ERECT A MONUMENT WORTHY OF YOUR COMMUNITY AND OF THOSE HEROES WHO YOU HAVE CHOSEN TO HOLD UP AS AN EXAMPLE TO FUTURE GENERATIONS. ACCORDING TO YOUR RESOURCES AND YOUR BUDGET, THE MEMORIALS DEPICTED IN THIS CATALOG CAN BE SUPPLIED IN MARBLE, GRANITE, BRONZE, CAST STONE. OR COPPER ELECTROTYPE . . .”

  “But your plans sound a little complicated . . . ,” Albert says. “First, because it’s not enough to draw the memorials, you have to sell them; and second, once you’ve sold them, someone has to make them! You’d need money, employees, a factory, raw materials . . .”

  He is staggered at just how just how difficult it would be to set up a foundry.

  “. . . and even if you can get them made, the memorials would have to be transported and erected on the site . . . You’d need lots of money!”

  It always comes down to this. To money. Even the most industrious people cannot simply rely on energy. Albert smiles gently and pats his friend’s knee.

  “All right, listen, we’ll think about it. I think it’s great that you feel you want to work again, though I’m not sure this is the best way to go about it. Memorials are complicated. But let’s not worry about that. The most important thing is that you’ve found your passion again, isn’t it?”

  No. Edward clenches his fist and saws at the air as though polishing a pair of shoes. The message is clear: No, we have to act now!

  “Act now, act now . . . you’ve got some odd ideas.”

  On a blank page of the pad, Édouard starts to scribble numbers: 300 memorials—he crosses out 300 and writes 400. He’s excited. 400 × 7,000 francs = 3 million!

  He seems to have lost his mind. It is not enough that he wants to take on this impossible project, he wants to do it right now. In principle, Albert has nothing against three million francs. In fact, he would be all in favor. But Édouard has lost all perspective. He tosses off a few sketches, and already he is setting up a foundry. Albert takes a deep breath, steels himself, and tries to sound calm and reasonable.

  “Listen, old man, it’s just not practical. You don’t seem to realize how much work it would take to create four hundred memorials . . .”

  Huh! Huh! Huh! When Édouard makes this sound, it means something important, it is a sound he has made only once or twice since they met, it is peremptory but not angry, it means he needs to be heard. He grabs his pencil.

  “We don’t make them,” he scribbles, “we just sell them.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Albert explodes, “but once we sell them, we’ll have to fucking make them!”

  Édouard leans closer, takes Albert’s face in his hands as though he wants to kiss him on the lips. He shakes his head, a mischievous smile in his eyes, he picks up the pencil again.

  “We just sell them . . .”

  The things we long for most sometimes happen when we least expect them. This is what is about to happen to Albert. Delirious with joy, Édouard suddenly answers the question that has been nagging his friend since they met. He starts to laugh. He laughs for the first time.

  The laugh sound almost normal, a throaty, high-pitched, slightly feminine laugh, a bona fide laugh of shifting vibratos and tremolos.

  Albert’s mouth drops open in astonishment.

  He looks down at the page, at the last words Édouard has written.

  We just sell them! We don’t make them. We pocket the money.

  “But . . . ,” Albert says puzzled.

  He is annoyed because Édouard has still not answered his question.

  “And afterward?” he says, “What do we do?”

  “Afterward?”

  Édouard explodes with laughter again. Much louder this time.

  “We take the money and fuck off!”

  21

  Not quite 7:00 a.m. and bitterly cold. It has not dropped below freezing since late January—which is fortunate because that would mean using a pickax, something strictly forbidden by the regulations—but the lashing wind is icy and wet, it seems hardly worth coming home from war to winters like this.

  Having no desire to stand around uselessly, Henri stayed in the car, though it was not much better here: he could warm his face or his feet, but not both at once. Besides, everything seems to irritate Henri these days, nothing has been going right. Given the effort he invests into his business, he is entitled to a little peace, surely? But no, there was always some hitch, some snag, he needed to be everywhere at once. It was simple: he did everything himself. He had to be constantly on Dupré’s back . . .

  It was not entirely fair, Henri had to admit, Dupré was passionate, he was a hard worker, a grafter. I need to work out how much the guy brings in, set my mind at ease, Henri thought, but right now he was angry with the whole world.

  In part, he was simply exhausted, he had had to leave in the early hours, and his little Jewish girl had been running him ragged . . . God knows, Henri had little time for Jews—the Aulnay-Pradelles had been anti-Dreyfusards since the Middle Ages—but Jewish girls could be hot-blooded little sluts when the mood took them!

  Nervously, he buttoned his coat as he watched Dupré knock on the door of the Préfecture de Police.

  The night watchman was pulling some clothes on. Dupré was explaining, pointing to the car; the concierge peered out, shielding his eyes as though staring into the sun. He already knew what was happening. It took less than an hour for news to travel from the war grave cemetery to the préfecture. One by one the lights in the office flickered on, and the door opened again, Pradelle finally got out of the Hispano and strode right past the concierge waiting to show him the way, indicating with a peremptory wave, don’t bother, I know my way around, I feel right at home.

  The chief of police did not see things the same way. At forty, Gaston Plerzec was still telling people that, despite the name, he was not Breton. He had not slept all night. As the hours passed, his addled brain began to confuse the bodies of the dead soldiers with
the Chinamen, the coffins seemed to move about by themselves, some even sported a sardonic grin. He adopted a pose he felt reflected the seniority of his rank: standing in front of the fireplace, one hand on the mantelpiece, the other tucked into his vest, chin held high—the chin was very important for a préfet.

  Pradelle did not give a tinker’s damn about the préfet, his chin, or his fireplace, he swaggered in without noticing the pose, without so much as a by-your-leave, flopped into the armchair reserved for visitors, and snapped:

  “What the hell is going on?”

  This opening gambit left Plerzec at a loss.

  The men had met twice before, at the technical meeting to inaugurate the government program, and at the groundbreaking ceremony for the cemetery—a speech by the mayor, a moment of silent prayer—Henri had spent the time stamping his foot impatiently, did these people think he had nothing better to do? The préfet was well aware—was there anyone who did not know?—that M. d’Aulnay-Pradelle was the son-in-law of Marcel Péricourt, a former classmate and personal friend of the Ministre de l’Intérieur. The Président de la République himself had attended his daughter’s wedding. Plerzec hardly dared imagine the complex web of friends and acquaintance involved in this affair. This was what kept him awake; faced with the distinguished list of people behind these shenanigans and the power they represented, his career felt like a wisp of straw threatened by a flame. Only a few weeks earlier, coffins had begun to arrive at the future necropolis at Darmeville from all over the region, but seeing how the reburials were being carried out, Préfet Plerzec immediately became worried. When the first problems became apparent, he had instinctively tried to cover his back; a small voice now told him that he had probably acted out of panic.

  They drove in silence.

  Pradelle was beginning to wonder whether he had been too greedy. Fuck it.

  The préfet coughed, the car drove over a pothole, he bumped his head, no one uttered a word of sympathy. In the backseat, Dupré, who had bumped his head many times before, now knew to sit with his knees splayed, with one hand gripping here, one hand there. The boss drove like a lunatic.

  Having been alerted by the concierge, the mayor, with a ledger tucked under his arm, was waiting for them in front of the gates of the future Dampierre military cemetery. It would not be very large—nine hundred graves. It was impossible to work out how the ministry decided on the sites.

  From a distance, Pradelle studied the mayor: he looked like a retired lawyer, maybe a schoolteacher—they were the worst. They tended to be nitpickers who took their responsibilities and their prerogatives very seriously. Pradelle settled on lawyer; teachers tended to be scrawny.

  He parked the car and climbed out, the préfet trotting next to him, there were silent handshakes, this was a serious moment.

  The temporary gate was pushed open. Before them was a vast, bared leveled field of stony soil over which, with string stretched taut, lines had been traced that were perfectly straight, perfectly parallel. Military. Only the most distant rows had been finished as graves, and crosses were slowly covering the cemetery like a flag unfurling. Next to the gate stood a few workman’s huts that served as offices, dozens of white crosses were stacked on palettes. Farther off, in a large barn, covered with army-surplus tarpaulins, perhaps a hundred coffins were piled up. Under normal circumstances, coffins were reburied as they arrived, so the surfeit of waiting caskets meant work had been delayed. Pradelle glanced around at Dupré, who gave a curt nod to confirm that they were running late. All the more reason to speed things up, Henri thought, quickening his pace.

  It would be dawn soon. There was not a tree for miles around. The cemetery looked like a battlefield. The group followed the mayor, who was muttering “E13, let me see, E17 . . .” He knew precisely where grave E13 was—he had spent almost an hour there only yesterday—but to go straight there offended his scrupulous sensibilities.

  Finally, they came to a freshly dug grave, where they saw a coffin, covered by a thin layer of dirt. One end had been cleared and raised slightly making it possible to read the inscription: “Ernest Blachet—Brigadier 133ème infanterie—Died in the service of his country, September 4, 1917.”

  “So?” Pradelle said.

  The préfet nodded to the register the mayor was holding open in front of him, like a bible or a book of spells, and read aloud.

  “Grave E13: Simon Perlatte—Soldat 2ème classe—VIème armée—Died for his country, June 16, 1917.”

  He snapped the register shut with a bang. Pradelle frowned. He felt tempted to repeat his question, “So?” But he allowed the information to percolate. And so the préfet—who, in the division of powers between the city and the départment, was tasked with delivering the coup de grâce, spoke up.

  “Your work crews have mixed up the coffins and the graves.”

  Pradelle turned to him, looking puzzled.

  “The work is being done by your Chinamen,” the préfet said. “They don’t even bother to look for the right grave, they just bury the coffin in the first hole they find.”

  This time Henri turned to Dupré.

  “Why the hell would the damn Chinamen do such a thing?”

  It was the préfet who answered.

  “Because they are illiterate, Monsieur d’Aulnay-Pradelle . . . To carry out this task, you have employed men who cannot read.”

  For an instant, Henri was unsettled, then he snapped back:

  “What fucking difference does it make, for fuck’s sake? When parents visit the grave, do they dig it up to check that it’s their body, not someone else’s?”

  Everyone was shocked. Except Dupré, who knew his boss: in the four months since they started work, he had seen him plug a series of increasingly large gaps. The project was full of exemptions and exceptions, to keep an eye on everything would mean hiring someone, but the boss flatly refused; “we’ll make do with what we have,” he would say, “I’ve got too many men working on this thing already, and besides, there’s you . . . I’m counting on you, all right, Dupré?” So the fact that there was a corpse where another corpse should be was unlikely to daunt him.

  The mayor and the préfet, on the other hand, were outraged.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute . . . !”

  This was the mayor.

  “We have responsibilities, monsieur. This is a sacred duty!”

  No preamble, straight in with the grandiloquent words. It was obvious what sort of man he was dealing with.

  “Oh, I understand,” Pradelle said in a more conciliating tone, “A sacred duty, of course. But, you know how it is . . .”

  “Yes, monsieur, I know exactly how it is. It is an insult to the dead, that’s what it is! So I am hereby suspending all work.”

  The préfet was relieved he had telegraphed the ministry in advance to warn him. He was covered. Phew.

  Pradelle thought for a moment.

  “Very well,” he said at length.

  The mayor heaved a sigh; he had not expected his victory to be so easy.

  “I plan to have all these graves reopened,” he said, his voice louder, more peremptory, “in order to check.”

  “As you wish,” Pradelle said.

  Préfet Plerzec allowed the mayor to do the talking, because the idea of an accommodating Aulnay-Pradelle left him perplexed. On their first two meetings, he had found the man brusque, arrogant, not at all the amenable man he seemed today.

  “Very well,” Pradelle said, pulling his coat tighter. He seemed visibly touched by the mayor’s situation and prepared to make the best of a bad situation. “Have the graves reopened.”

  He made to leave, then turned back, as though to check on a minor detail.

  “Obviously, you will let us know when we can start work again, won’t you? In the meantime, Dupré, have the Chinamen transferred to Chazières-Malmont, we’re running a little behind there. In fact, this whole thing could not have come at a better time.”

  “Wait a minute!” roar
ed the mayor, “It’s the job of your workmen to reopen these graves!”

  “I fear not,” Pradelle said. “My Chinamen are here to bury coffins. That’s what they’re paid for. Though, actually, I have no problem with them exhuming. I’ll simply bill the government by the unit. Though it would mean three separate invoices—for burying the coffins, digging them up again and—when you’ve worked out who should go where—reinterring them.”

  “Absolutely not!” the préfet bellowed.

  He was the one who signed off on invoices and expenses, he was the one responsible for the budget allocated by the state, and the one who, if there was any overspending, would get rapped across the knuckles. As it was, he had been transferred here because of an administrative error—a problem with the mistress of a minister who disliked Plerzec had escalated, and within the week he had been transferred to Dampierre—so there was no way he was about to risk spending the last years of his career in the colonies. He suffered from asthma.

  “You cannot invoice three times, it is out of the question!”

  “Sort it out between yourselves,” Pradelle said. “I just need to know what to do with my Chinamen. Whether to keep them working here or send them elsewhere.”

  The mayor was distraught.

  “Now, now, gentlemen!”

  He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the whole cemetery suffused by the dawn light. It was eerie, this vast expanse with no trees, no grass, no boundaries, beneath the cold milk-white sky, with these mounds of earth waiting to be tamped down by the rain, the discarded shovels, the wheelbarrows . . . It was a heart-wrenching spectacle.

  The mayor reopened his register.

  “Now, now, gentlemen,” he said again, “we’ve already buried a hundred and fifteen soldiers.”