Édouard whined, Albert stood firm. They quarreled.
Édouard pounded his fist on the table, stared blackly at Albert and gave a hoarse, menacing growl.
Albert snapped that he had gone to war and was not about to go to prison.
Édouard overturned the couch, which did not survive the fall. Albert rushed over, he had been fond of the couch, it was the only stylish piece of furniture in this bleak hovel. Édouard went on howling, the noise was incredible, spittle sprayed from his exposed throat, it came from deep in his belly like an erupting volcano.
Albert picked up the pieces of the couch and said that Édouard could break every stick of furniture in the place, but it would not change anything, that neither of them was cut out for a career in crime.
Still Édouard howled, lumbering awkwardly around the room, breaking a window with his elbow, threatening to smash what little crockery they possessed. Albert rushed at him, grabbed him around the waist, and they tumbled on the floor.
They had begun to hate each other.
Albert was beside himself, he lashed out, hit Édouard on the side of the head, punched him in the chest, slammed him against the wall, all but knocking him unconscious. They both scrambled to their feet at the same time, Édouard cuffed Albert, who responded with a savage punch. Right in the face.
But Édouard had been standing right in front of him.
Albert’s fist sank into the gaping void.
Almost up to the wrist.
And stuck there.
Horrified, Albert stared at his hand, buried in his friend’s face as though it had split his head in two. And above his hand, Édouard’s incredulous eyes.
The two men stood, frozen, for a second.
They heard a scream and both turned toward the door. Louise, her hand clapped over her mouth, was staring at them in tears; she raced out of the room.
They managed to extricate themselves, not knowing what to say. Awkwardly, they shook themselves. There was a guilty, self-conscious silence.
Their friendship could never survive this image of a fist lodged in a face as though splitting it in two. That gesture, that feeling, that hideous intimacy, it was all too shocking, too terrifying.
They did not share the same rage.
Or they expressed their anger very differently.
Édouard packed his bags the following morning. It was his haversack. He took his clothes, nothing else. Albert was leaving for work, he had thought of nothing to say. His last glimpse of Édouard was of his back as he sat, packing very slowly, like a man who cannot bring himself to leave.
All day, as he trudged the Grands Boulevards with his sandwich board, Albert brooded.
That evening, a simple note: “Thanks for everything.”
The apartment seemed desolate, just like his life after Cécile left him. He knew it was possible to recover from anything, but every day since he had won the war, he had felt as though he was losing it.
23
Labourdin laid his hands on the desk with the same contented air as he might at a dinner table when seeing a baked Alaska arrive. Mlle Raymond looked nothing like an ice cream, yet the image of the delicate golden meringue was not entirely incongruous. She was a peroxide blonde with reddish highlights, a pallid complexion, and a rather pointed head. Whenever she came in and saw her boss in this pose, Mlle Raymond would give a disgusted, fatalistic pout. Because as soon as she stood next to him, he would slide his right hand up her skirt in a gesture that demonstrated a surprising agility for a man of his girth and a skill he conspicuously lacked in every other domain. She would swivel her hips, but in this Labourdin seemed to have intuition that verged on premonition. No matter which way she turned, he always hit his target. She had come to terms with it, she would wriggle quickly away, set down the file and, as she left, give a jaded sigh. Her piteous attempts to prevent this practice (tight-fitting skirts and dresses), served only to heighten Labourdin’s pleasure. If she was a mediocre secretary when it came to shorthand and typing, her forbearance more than made up for her flaws.
Labourdin opened the file and clicked his tongue: M. Péricourt would be happy.
It was a fine set of regulations outlining “an open competition for designs from artists of French nationality for the construction of a memorial to those who died in the Great War of 1914–1918.”
In this extensive document, Labourdin himself had written only a single sentence. He had insisted on drafting article 1, subsection (ii) all by himself. Each carefully weighed word was his own work, every capital letter. He was so proud of it that he insisted it be set in bold type: “This Monument should evoke the painful and glorious Memory of our Victorious Dead.” Perfectly cadenced. He clicked his tongue again. Mentally, he patted himself on the back once more and then swiftly skimmed the rest of the document.
An excellent site had been found for the memorial, one previously occupied by a municipal garage—one hundred and thirty feet wide by one hundred feet deep—with the possibility of a garden surrounding the monument. The regulations required that the dimensions of the monument should “be in keeping with the chosen site.” To inscribe all these names would require a large surface area. The operation was almost settled: a jury of fourteen people, among them eminent figures, local artists, serving officers, representatives of families’ and veterans’ associations, and so forth, handpicked from among the many people who owed Labourdin a favor (being president of the committee, he held the casting vote). This highly artistic and patriotic project was to be among the defining achievements of his mayoral term. His reelection was almost guaranteed. The schedule had been determined, the competition was about to be launched, work had already begun on leveling the site. The announcement would be published in the major newspapers of Paris and the provinces; it was a triumph, one he had skillfully managed . . .
Not a detail was missing.
Except for a blank space in article 4: “the allocated budget for the memorial is in the amount of . . .”
This gave M. Péricourt pause for thought. He wanted something striking but not grandiose and, from the information he had received, such memorials generally cost between 60,000 and 120,000 francs, with certain well-known artists commanding as much as 150,000 or even 180,000. Given such a broad range, where should he set the bar? It was not a matter of money, rather one of appropriateness. He needed to think. He looked up at his son. A month earlier Madeleine had discreetly placed a framed photograph of Édouard on the mantelpiece. She had several photographs but had chosen this one because it seemed to her a “middle-ground,” neither too formal nor too provocative. Acceptable. Her father seemed strained by the changes in his life, and anxious not to overwhelm him, she moved tactfully, making small changes, a sketchpad one day, a photograph the next.
M. Péricourt had waited two days before moving the picture closer, setting it on the corner of his desk. He did not want to ask Madeleine when or where it had been taken; a father was supposed to know such things. To his eyes, Édouard looked about fourteen, meaning it would have been taken in 1909. He was leaning on a wooden railing. There was little background detail; it seemed to have been taken on the terrace of a chalet—Édouard had been sent skiing every winter. M. Péricourt could not remember where precisely, except that it was always the same ski resort, in the northern Alps, perhaps, or maybe the south. But somewhere in the Alps. His son was wearing a thick sweater and squinting into the sunlight with a broad grin, as though the person behind the camera was making faces. And this in turn amused M. Péricourt. He was a handsome boy, mischievous. Finding himself smiling now, so many years later, reminded him that he and his son had never laughed together. It broke his heart. Only then did he think to turn the frame around.
In the bottom corner, Madeleine had written: “1906, les Buttes-Chaumont.”
M. Péricourt unscrewed the top of his fountain pen and wrote: 200,000 francs.
24
Since no one knew what Joseph Merlin looked like, the four men tasked wi
th welcoming him had first considered having the station master make an announcement when the train arrived, then they thought of holding up a sign with his name on it . . . But none of their solutions seemed consistent with the dignity and solemnity required when greeting a representative of the ministry.
In the end, they decided to stand in a group near the end of the platform and keep an eye out since, after all, not many people alighted at Chazières-Malmont—about thirty, usually—and a civil servant from Paris would be easy to spot.
But they did not spot him.
In the end, those who got off the train numbered not thirty, but fewer than ten, and among them there was no ministerial representative. When the last traveler went out through the gate and the station was empty, they turned and looked at one another: Adjudant Tournier clicked his heels; Paul Cahbord, the registrar at Chazières-Malmont Town Hall blew his nose; Roland Schneider, of the Union National des Combattants, who was representing the families of the dead men took a long, deep breath intended to express the self-control he required not to explode. And they all left.
Dupré, for his part, was content simply to register the fact; he had wasted more time preparing for a meeting that would not now take place than he had spent managing the six other sites he was constantly shuttling between; it was disappointing. Once outside, the four men headed toward the car.
They were torn about how to feel. When they realized that the ministerial envoy had not arrived, each was disappointed . . . and relieved. Not that they were afraid, of course, they had carefully prepared for this visit, but an inspection is an inspection, such things can easily go awry, they all knew examples.
Since the problems with the Chinamen at the Dampierre cemetery, Henri d’Aulnay-Pradelle had been on edge. Like a bear with a sore head. He was breathing down Dupré’s neck, issuing orders that invariably contradicted those he had given before. They needed to move faster, employ fewer people, cut corners wherever possible, as long as no one noticed. He had been promising Dupré a pay raise ever since he had hired him, although it never came. But: “I’m counting on you, Dupré, you know that?”
“The nerve!” Paul Chabord grumbled. “You’d think the ministry might have sent a telegram.”
He nodded sagely: who did they take them for, they had sacrificed themselves for the Republic, the least they could expect was to be kept informed, etc.
As they were about to get into the car, a cavernous voice made them all turn suddenly.
“Are you the men from the cemetery?”
He was an elderly man with a very small head on a large body that looked hollow, like a chicken carcass after the meal. His limbs were too long, he had a red face and a forehead so narrow his close-cropped hair almost met his eyebrows. And a mournful expression. To make matters worse, he was dressed in a threadbare greatcoat of a prewar style that, despite the cold, hung open to reveal an ink-stained purple velvet jacket with several buttons missing, a pair of shapeless gray pants, and—this was the worst—a pair of huge, clodhopping shoes that looked positively biblical—a veritable scarecrow.
The four men were speechless.
Lucien Dupré was the first to react. Taking a step forward, he held out his hand.
“Monsieur Merlin?”
The ministerial representative made a sucking sound with his tongue against his gums as through removing a morsel of food. Tssst. It took a moment before anyone realized he was shifting his dentures, an irritating tic he continued to employ during the journey and made one want to find him a toothpick. As they pulled away from the station, what had been hinted at by his ragged clothes, his vast, filthy shoes, and his general appearance was confirmed: the man reeked.
As they drove, Roland Schneider launched into a sweeping strategic-military-geographic explanation of the region. Joseph Merlin, who seemed not to hear, interrupted him in midflow to say:
“For lunch . . . can we have chicken?”
His accent was nasal and grating.
In 1916, at the start of the battle of Verdun (ten months of sustained fighting, three hundred thousand dead), the region of Chazières-Malmont, which was not far from the front lines, accessible by road and close to the hospital that was the primary supplier of corpses, had come into its own as a practical place to bury soldiers. On numerous occasions, the shifting battle lines and strategic uncertainties had encroached upon the sprawling quadrilateral, which was now the resting place of more than two thousand corpses—no one knew the exact number, some said there were five thousand buried here, which was not impossible, this war had broken all records. These temporary graveyards generated registers, maps, and inventories, but when you have fifteen to twenty million shells falling on you in the space of three months—some days, a shell every three seconds—and you have to bury two hundred times more bodies than anyone could have expected in Dantesque conditions, these registers, maps, and inventories are of limited value.
The government had decided to create a huge war grave at Darmeville for all those buried in the makeshift cemeteries in the region, particularly the one at Chazières-Malmont. But, since no one knew how many bodies needed to be exhumed, transported, and reburied in the new necropolis, it was impossible to establish an overall price. The government was paying by the corpse.
This was one of the directly awarded contracts Pradelle had secured without having to bid. He had calculated that if they found two thousand bodies, he would make enough to be able to reroof half of the stables at la Sallevière.
Three thousand five hundred and he could reroof all the stables.
More than four thousand, and he would renovate the dovecote.
Dupré had brought some twenty Senegalese men to Chazières-Malmont and, to keep the authorities happy, Capitaine Pradelle (Dupré still referred to him thus out of habit), had agreed to employ a handful of local laborers.
The initial phase of the work entailed exhuming those soldiers whose relatives had been clamoring for their return and whose remains could easily be found.
Whole families had descended on Chazières-Malmont, an endless procession of tears and wails, of gaunt children, wizened parents tottering over precarious timber walkways so they did not have to wade through mud—as if to spite them, it had rained incessantly. The advantage of this was that, with the lashing rain, no one was keen to linger, so the exhumations were swift. Out of propriety, French laborers were hired because—for some inexplicable reason—some families had been shocked to see Senegalese laborers digging up the bodies; did the army think that exhuming their son’s body was a menial task to be delegated to Negroes? When children arrived at the cemetery and saw these tall black men in the distance, soaked to the skin, unearthing and transporting coffins, they could not take their eyes off them.
The procession of families took forever.
Capitaine Pradelle was on the telephone every day.
“Is this bullshit nearly over, Dupré? When can we start the real work?”
The “real work” entailed the exhumation of all the other soldiers to be reburied at the Darmeville necropolis.
The task was far from easy. Some of the bodies could be cataloged because the crosses bearing the names were still in place, the balance remained to be identified.
Many soldiers had been buried with their broken identity disks, but not all of them—far from it; sometimes an investigation needed to be carried out based on objects found on the body or documents found in the pockets. These corpses had to be put to one side and listed while waiting for the results of the investigations, but all too often almost nothing was found, and such bodies were marked “unidentified soldier.”
Work was now progressing well. Almost four hundred bodies had been exhumed. The coffins arrived in truckloads with a team of four men to assemble them, a second team to carry them to the gravesides and back to the wagons that would transport them to the necropolis at Darmeville, where another team of workers from Pradelle & Cie would rebury them. Two men were responsible for keeping the lists o
f names, epitaphs, and notes.
Joseph Merlin, emissary of the minister, strode into the cemetery like a saint at the head of a procession. His huge shoes tramped through every puddle, splattering all around. Only at this point did anyone notice he was carrying a battered leather briefcase. Though full to bursting with papers and documents, it seemed to flutter on the end of his arm like a sheet of paper.
He stopped. Behind him, the cortège froze, anxiously. Joseph Merlin slowly surveyed the scene.
The cemetery was pervaded by the acrid odor of putrefaction that could hit you in the face like a cloud moved by the wind, it mingled with the smoke rising from those caskets that, when disinterred, were damaged beyond repair and, according to regulations, had to be burned. The lowering sky was a grubby gray, and here and there were men carrying coffins or bent over the graves; two trucks stood with their engines idling while they were being loaded with coffins. Merlin shifted his dentures, making the disagreeable sucking sound, and pursed his lips.
This was what he had been reduced to.
Almost forty years a civil servant and, just when he was about to retire, he had been detailed to inspect cemeteries.
Merlin had served variously at the Ministry of the Colonies, the Ministry of General Supplies, the Undersecretariat for Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Supply; thirty-seven years in the civil service, thirty-seven years of being pushed from pillar to post, of failing again and again, of being beaten down in every post he had ever held. He was not a likable man. Taciturn, prone to pedantry, conceited and cantankerous all year round, he was not a man to joke with . . . For decades, this disagreeable man, by his arrogant, bigoted behavior, had courted the contempt in his colleagues and the wrath of his superiors. He would arrive in a new post and be assigned a task, but his colleagues would quickly tire of him, and finding him ridiculous, truculent, old-fashioned, they would laugh at him behind his back, give him nicknames, play cruel pranks, he had seen it all. And yet he had never deserved this fall from grace. Indeed, he could provide chapter and verse on his heroic bureaucratic achievements, a list he kept constantly up to date so as not to have to reflect on a lugubrious career of overlooked probity that had merely succeeded in making him an object of derision. Sometimes his stint at one or other department had seemed like a daylong round of bullying; more than once he had had occasion to raise his walking stick, whirling it angrily about him, bellowing in his thunderous voice, ready to take on the whole world, he terrified people, especially women—it’s got to the point where they don’t dare go near him, they insist on having someone with them, we simply can’t keep a fellow like this in the department, especially since—how do I put this delicately?—frankly, the man smells, and it’s most off-putting. No one had kept him. In all his life, he had known only a single moment in the sun, which had lasted from the day he met Francine, one July 14, to the day Francine left him for an artillery captain the following November. Thirty-four years ago. That he should end his career inspecting cemeteries had scarcely come as a surprise.
The Great Swindle Page 25