When he awoke, Merlin found himself gripped by a profound emotion that, for the first time, did not concern him alone. The war, long since over, had finally intruded upon his life.
What followed was the result of a curious alchemy influenced by the bleak atmosphere of those cemeteries, which reminded Merlin of the bleakness of his own life; the oppressive nature of the bureaucratic obstacles being placed in his path; and his instinctive intransigence: a public servant of his integrity could not turn a blind eye. Though he had nothing in common with them, these young men were victims of an injustice that he alone could set right. Within days, it had become an obsession. The thought of these dead soldiers preyed on his mind, like love, like jealousy, like a cancer. He shifted from grief to indignation. He became angry.
Since he had received no orders telling him to curtail his assignment, he sent a message to his superiors informing them that he intended to inspect the cemetery at Dargonne-le-Grand and immediately took the train heading in the opposite direction to Pontaville-sur-Meuse.
From the station, he walked almost four miles through the driving rain to the military cemetery. He walked in the middle of the road, his oversized shoes tramping through the puddles, refusing to step aside for the cars that sounded their horns as though he did not hear them. To pass him, they had to mount the grass shoulder of the road.
The strange apparition that materialized outside the cemetery gates was a hulking figure with a menacing air, his fists deep in the pockets of a coat that, though the rain had now stopped, was wringing wet. But there was no one there to see; the midday bell had sounded, the site was closed. On the railing was a list of all the objects found on unidentified bodies, which families could inspect at the town hall: the photograph of a young girl, a pipe, a check stub, initials found on underclothes, a leather tobacco pouch, a lighter, a pair of round spectacles, a letter that began “My Darling” but was unsigned—a piteous, tragic litany. Merlin was struck by the humble nature of these relics. So many penniless soldiers. It was unbelievable.
He looked down at the lock and chain, raised a foot and gave the small padlock a kick that would have felled a bullock, strode into the cemetery, and kicked open the wooden door to the administration shed. The only people on site were a dozen Arabs, eating lunch beneath a tarpaulin ballooned by the wind. From a distance, they watched as Merlin kicked open the gates and the office door, but, daunted by the physical prowess and obvious self-assurance of the man, they made no move to get up, to intervene; they went on chewing their bread.
What was known locally as “Pontaville Square” was a field that was anything but square, bordered by woodlands, where an estimated six hundred soldiers had been buried.
Merlin rummaged through the cabinets looking for the registers in which every operation was supposed to be detailed. Now and then, as he scanned the daily reports, he glanced out of the window. The exhumations had begun two months earlier; looking out he could see a field littered with graves, mounds of earth, tarpaulins, planks, wheelbarrows, and makeshift storage sheds.
From an organizational standpoint, everything seemed in order. He would not find here the same sickening carelessness he had witnessed at Chazières-Malmont, the caskets of human detritus like something from a slaughterhouse, which he had discovered hidden behind stacks of new unused coffins.
Generally, having checked that registers were being kept, Merlin began his inspections by making a tour of the site; he trusted to his instincts, lifting a cover here, checking an identity disk there. Only then did the real investigation begin. His work involved going endlessly back and forth between the rows of graves and the archived ledgers, but he had quickly acquired a sixth sense, an unerring ability to sniff out the slightest sign of duplicity, a minor irregularity, a detail indicating some anomaly.
This was certainly the only ministerial assignment that required a civil servant to dig up bodies, but there was no other way to check. However, Merlin’s colossal frame was well suited to the task; his hefty shoes could drive a shovel a foot into the ground, his huge paws could wield a pickax as though it were a fork.
Having completed an initial tour of the site, Merlin began his detailed cross-referencing. It was twelve-thirty.
At 2:00 p.m. he was standing in front of a pile of sealed coffins to the north of the cemetery when the site manager, a certain Sauveur Bénichou—a puce-faced alcoholic of about fifty, scrawny as a weed—showed up with two others, probably foremen. This little group was in a state of high indignation, chins jutting, voices loud and booming, this site was strictly off limits to the public, they could not have people wandering in off the road, he must leave immediately. And since Merlin did not even acknowledge their presence, they raised the tone to the next level: if he refused to comply, they would be forced to contact the gendarmerie because this site was under the auspices of the government . . .
“That’s me,” Merlin interrupted, turning toward the three men.
He broke the ensuing silence.
“I am the government here.”
He plunged his hand into his pocket and took out a crumpled sheet of paper that did not look much like an official pass, but given that he did not look much like a ministerial envoy, the men did not know what to think. Everything about him seemed suspicious: his colossal frame, his stained threadbare clothes, his huge shoes; even so, no one dared challenge him.
Merlin looked the three men up and down: Sauveur, who smelled of plum brandy, and his two acolytes. The first, a hatchet-faced man with an oversized mustache stained yellow with tobacco, patted his breast pocket to hide his lack of composure; the second, an Arab still wearing the cap, pants, and boots of a caporal d’infanterie, stood stiffly to attention as though to prove the importance of his position.
Tsst, tsst. Merlin sucked at his denture as he stuffed the paper back into his pocket. Then he nodded to the pile of coffins.
“And, as you can imagine, the government has a few minor questions.”
The Arab foreman stiffened a little more. His mustachioed companion took out a cigarette (he did not take out the pack, only a single cigarette, like a man reluctant to share, a man sick and tired of scroungers). Everything marked him out as a mean, tightfisted man.
“For example,” Merlin said, suddenly waving three identity cards, “the government is wondering which coffins correspond to these three men.”
In Merlin’s huge fists, the papers looked no bigger than postage stamps. The question made the three men distinctly uneasy.
When a row of graves was exhumed, the result was a row of coffins on the one hand, a series of identity cards on the other.
Ideally in the same order.
But one ID card misfiled or missing was enough to throw everything into disarray so that the ID cards were unrelated to the contents of the coffins.
And if Merlin was brandishing three cards that did not correspond to any coffin . . . it meant the whole sequence was wrong.
He shook his head and surveyed the area of the cemetery that had already been unearthed. Two hundred and thirty-seven soldiers had been exhumed and transported a distance of fifty miles.
Paul was in Jules’s coffin, Félicien in Isidore’s, and so on.
All the way up to number 237.
And it was now impossible to determine who was who.
“Who do the ID cards belong to?” Sauveur Bénichou stammered, glancing around as though suddenly disoriented, “Let me think . . .”
An idea occurred to him.
“You see,” he said, “we were just about to deal with this.”
He turned to his men, who seemed suddenly much smaller.
“Isn’t that right, boys?”
Neither knew what he was talking about, but they did not have time to think.
“HA!” Merlin roared, “Do you think they’re complete idiots?”
“Who?” Bénichou said.
“The government!”
He seemed like a lunatic; Bénichou considered asking to see
his official pass again.
“So, where are they, these three little rascals? And what about the three men you’ll have left over when you’re finished, what are you planning to call them?”
Bénichou launched into a tedious technical explanation about how they had thought it “more reliable” to leave writing up the identity cards until after they have a whole row of coffins, so they could be simultaneously noted in the register because if the ID cards were drafted . . .
“Bullshit!” Merlin cut him short.
Bénichou, who was having trouble believing it himself, lowered his head. His assistant patted his breast pocket.
In the silence that followed, Merlin had a strange, fleeting vision of a vast war grave, dotted here and there with families at prayer, and—as though by some second sight—he alone could peer through the earth itself, see the quivering corpses, hear the harrowing cries as they called out their names . . .
The damage already done was irreparable, those soldiers were lost, anonymous bodies sleeping beneath carefully marked crosses. The only thing to do now was to make the best of what was yet to be done.
Merlin reorganized the work, wrote instructions in large letters, issued orders in a curt, peremptory tone—You, over here! Now listen carefully—threatening formal proceedings, fines, dismissals if the work was badly done; whenever he walked away they could distinctly hear him say “fucking morons.”
As soon as his back was turned, it began again, it was never ending. This fact, far from discouraging him, served only to fuel his rage.
“You, over here, now! Move it!”
He was speaking to the man with the mustache; he was maybe fifty and his face so thin his eyes looked as though they were perched on either side, like a fish’s. Standing about a yard away from Merlin, he resisted the urge to pat his breast pocket again and instead took out a cigarette.
Merlin, who had been just about to speak, paused for a long moment. He looked like someone struggling desperately to remember a word that is on the tip of his tongue.
The mustachioed foreman opened his mouth, but before he had time to utter a sound, Merlin had dealt him a resounding slap. Against his flat cheek it sounded like a bell. The man stepped back. All eyes turned to stare. Bénichou, emerging from the shed where he kept his pick-me-up (a bottle of marc de Bourgogne) gave a hoarse roar, but all the workmen were already moving. The dumbfounded mustached man was clutching his cheek. Merlin quickly found himself surrounded by a baying pack, and had it not been for his age, his colossal build, the authority he had displayed since the start of the inspection, his huge hands and his monstrous feet, he might have worried; instead of which, he calmly pushed past everyone, took a step toward his victim, thrust a hand into the man’s breast pocket and bellowed “Aha!,” when it reemerged as a fist. His other hand held the man by the throat; he looked about to strangle him.
“Oh my God!” Bénichou shouted as he finally staggered up.
Without releasing his grip on the throat of the man who, by now, was starting to change color, Merlin held his closed fist toward the site manager, then opened it.
A solid-gold identity bracelet appeared, turned the wrong way up. Merlin released his prey, who immediately started coughing his lungs out and turned to Bénichou.
“What’s his name, your boy?” Merlin asked, “His first name?”
“Er . . .”
Sauveur Bénichou, beaten and helpless, shot his foreman an apologetic glance.
“Alcide,” he muttered grudgingly.
It was barely audible, but that did not matter.
Merlin turned over the bracelet as though it were a coin and they were playing heads or tails.
There, engraved on the nameplate: Roger.
30
My God, what a morning! If only he could wake up to such a morning every day! Everything seemed to be going perfectly.
First, the designs. Five had been chosen by the selection committee, each more magnificent than the last. A distillation of patriotism. They brought tears to your eyes. Labourdin had been carefully preparing for his moment of triumph: presenting the designs to Président Péricourt. For this, he had contacted the municipal works department and ordered a large wrought iron display stand to be made and assembled in his office, on which the designs could be hung to their best advantage—an idea he had got from his one and only visit to the Grand Palais. He could imagine M. Péricourt, hands clasped behind his back, strolling in a leisurely fashion between the sketches, going into raptures over one (“France, Sorrowful Yet Victorious,” Labourdin’s own favorite)—studying another (“The Triumphant Dead”), pausing, hesitating. He could already picture the chairman turning to him, awestruck and embarrassed, unsure which to choose . . . At that point, Labourdin would utter a perfectly cadenced sentence that he had been honing, weighing, polishing, one that communicated both his aesthetic taste and his sense of duty:
“Monsieur le président, if I may be so bold . . .”
He would then move toward “France, Sorrowful” as though to slip an arm around her shoulder.
“. . . I feel that this Magisterial Opus perfectly encapsulates everything our Compatriots wish for, to express all their Anguish and their Pride.”
The capital letters came instinctively. Flawless. First, “Magisterial Opus,” a stroke of inspiration, next “Compatriots” which sounded rather better than “constituents”; finally, “Anguish” and “Pride.” Labourdin was in awe of his own genius.
At around ten o’clock, with the wrought iron display set up in his office, the hanging had begun. A stepladder was needed to hang the sketches: Mlle Raymond was called.
The moment she stepped into the room, she realized what was being asked of her and clenched her knees instinctively. Labourdin, standing at the foot of the stepladder, a smile playing on his lips, was rubbing his hands like a horse trader.
Mlle Raymond scaled the four steps with a sigh, and began to squirm. Oh, what a glorious morning! As soon as the designs had been hung, the secretary clambered down, clutching her skirt. Labourdin stepped back to admire the result, the right side, he felt, looked a little lower than the left—don’t you think? Mlle Raymond closed her eyes, climbed again, Labourdin rushed to the stepladder; never had he spent so much time under her skirts. By the time everything was in peace, the district mayor was in a priapic frenzy approaching apoplexy.
But bang, just when everything was ready, Président Péricourt canceled his visit and sent a courier to fetch the designs and bring them to him. All that work for nothing, Labourdin thought. He followed in a hackney cab, but despite his expectations, he was not admitted to the deliberations. Marcel Péricourt wished to be alone. It was almost noon.
“See to it a light lunch is brought for monsieur le maire,” M. Péricourt sent word.
Labourdin rushed over to the young housemaid, a ravishing little brunette with doe eyes and a firm bust, and asked if he might have a glass of port wine, cupping her left breast as he did so. The young girl merely blushed; she was new to her job and the position was well paid. When she brought the port, he launched an attack on her right breast.
My God, what a morning!
Madeleine came upon the mayor snoring like a furnace bellows. His sprawling frame, together with the remnants of the chicken in aspic that he had devoured and the empty bottle of Château Margaux on the low table next to him, lent the scene a pathetic, almost obscene licentiousness.
She knocked discreetly on the door to her father’s study.
“Come!” he said immediately, recognizing her knock.
M. Péricourt had propped the drawings up against the bookcase and cleared a space so that, sitting in his armchair, he could see them all at once. He had barely stirred for more than an hour, engrossed in his thoughts, his eyes moving from one to the other. From time to time he got up, went over to study some detail, then returned to his chair.
At first, he had been disappointed. Was this all there was? They looked just like the other memor
ials he had seen, but larger. He could not help but check the prices, mentally calculating the tariff and the volume. He needed to concentrate. Then choose. But, yes; disappointing. He had had great hopes for the project. But now that he saw the proposals . . . So what had he expected? This would be a memorial like any other, not something to appease the seething emotions he found so overwhelming.
Madeleine, though not surprised, shared the same impression. All wars are alike; all war memorials, too.
“What do you think?” he said.
“They’re all a bit . . . bombastic, don’t you think?”
“They’re lyrical.”
They fell silent.
M. Péricourt sat in his armchair, like a king enthroned facing a row of dead courtiers. Madeleine studied the proposals. They agreed that the best of them was Adrien Malendrey’s “Victory of the Martyrs,” which alone encompassed all the victims: the widows (a woman in a mourning veil), the orphans, (a little boy, hands pressed together, praying as he gazed toward a soldier), and the soldiers themselves. The sculptor’s chisel had fashioned the whole nation into a martyred country.
“A hundred and thirty thousand francs,” M. Péricourt says.
He cannot stop himself.
But his daughter does not hear, she is studying a detail in a different portfolio. She picks up the drawing, holds it to the light; her father gets up and comes over, he does not like this submission, “Gratitude”; nor does Madeleine, she finds it overstated; no, it’s not that, there is something about it, some trifling detail . . . what is it? In the panel of the triptych entitled “Valiant Soldiers Attacking the Enemy,” almost hidden in the background, a soldier lies dying, he has an innocent face, full lips, a strong nose . . .
“Wait,” M. Péricourt said, “Let me see.” He bends and pores over the drawing. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right.”
The soldier looks vaguely like the young men in Édouard’s sketches. He is not exactly the same: this man stares out of the picture, while Édouard’s models tended to have a slight squint. And a dimple that seemed to cleave the chin. But the similarities remain.
The Great Swindle Page 31