The Great Swindle

by Pierre Lemaitre

  Henri found himself looking at her differently. What first struck him was the staggering size of her breasts. Through the sheer negligee, he could see her huge, dark nipples, the curve of her shoulders . . . Henri took a moment to contemplate her, Madeleine smiled, it was a moment of intense intimacy, he felt a fierce desire for her, and this wave of passion did him good. The fierceness of the desire also had something to do with the motherly, protective air that Madeleine radiated, one that that made one want take refuge in her arms, to melt away. The subject of their conversation was grave, yet there was a lightness about the way she listened, something simple and reassuring. Gradually, Henri relaxed, his voice became softer, the torrent of words slowed. Looking at her, he thought: this woman is mine, and felt a sudden, unexpected pride. He reached out a hand and touched her breast, she smiled gently, the hand glided over her belly, Madeleine’s breath became heavy, almost labored. There was a measure of calculation in Henri’s gesture, he had always had a way with Madeleine—but it was not just that. It felt like being reunited with someone he had never really met. Madeleine spread her legs, then quickly gripped his wrist.

  “Now is hardly the moment,” she whispered, though the tone of her voice said otherwise.

  Henri nodded slowly, he felt strong again, he felt confident.

  Madeleine plumped the pillows behind her, took a deep breath, settled back with a sigh, and stroked the prominent blue veins on the back of his hand as she listened, he had such beautiful hands.

  Henri gathered his thoughts, he needed to get back to the point.

  “Léon has walked away. I can expect no support from his father.”

  Madeleine was indignant, she was shocked at the idea that Léon would not help, surely it was his business too?

  “No, that’s the problem,” Henri said, “He has no stake in the business anymore. Neither has Ferdinand.”

  Madeleine’s lips formed a silent ah.

  “It would take too long to explain,” he said sharply.

  She smiled; her husband was back. In one piece. She stroked his cheek.

  “My poor darling . . .”

  Her voice was tender, affectionate.

  “It’s really serious this time?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut—yes—then opened them, and then took the plunge.

  “Your father has always refused to help me, but . . .”

  “Yes, and if I ask again, he will refuse again.”

  Henri was still holding Madeleine’s hand in his, but now their arms were resting on their knees. He had to persuade her. The idea that she might refuse was impossible, unthinkable. Old man Péricourt had wanted to humiliate him, well, now that he had succeeded, he had (Henri fumbled for the word) a duty—that was it—he had a duty to be reasonable. After all, what did he stand to gain by seeing his name dragged through the mud in the event of a scandal? Well, not a scandal exactly, there were hardly grounds for that, let’s say an unpleasant incident. Granted he might not be well disposed to help his son-in-law, but surely he could do this small favor to make his daughter happy? He spent his life intervening on behalf of other people, often on matters that did not even concern him personally! Madeleine agreed.

  “That’s true.”

  But still Henri sensed a reluctance. He bent over her.

  “You don’t want to ask him . . . because you’re afraid he will refuse, is that it?”

  “No, no,” Madeleine said quickly. “It’s not that at all.”

  She withdrew her hand from his and laid it on her belly, the fingers slightly splayed.

  “I won’t ask him because I don’t want to ask. The fact is, Henri, I’m happy to listen, but I have no real interest in this business.”

  “I understand,” Henri conceded, “and I’m not asking you to take an interest, all I’m asking . . .”

  “No, Henri, you don’t understand. It is not your business that does not interest me, it is you.”

  She had said it with no change of tone, her manner was still casual, smiling, affectionate, terribly intimate. It was such a shock that at first Henri thought he had misheard.

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Of course you do, my darling, you understand me perfectly. It is not what you do that leaves me cold, but what you are.”

  He should have got to his feet and left, but Madeleine’s eyes held him there. He did not want to hear any more, but he was a prisoner of circumstance, like a defendant forced to listen to the judge pass sentence.

  “I never had any illusions about what you were,” Madeleine told him. “Nor what our marriage would be like. I admit I was in love for a time, but I soon realized how things would end. If I stayed with you, it was because I needed you. I married you because I was the right age, because you asked me, and because Aulnay-Pradelle has a nice ring to it. Had it not been so mortifying being your wife, being constantly humiliated by your affairs, I would have liked to keep the name. But, no matter.”

  Henri got to his feet. This time, he made no spurious appeals to honor, he did not argue, did not mire himself in more lies: Madeleine’s tone was calm, deliberate, what she was saying was final.

  “What saved you until now, my love, was the fact that you are handsome.”

  Lying back in bed, hands cupping her belly, she watched as her husband made to leave, she spoke tenderly, intimately, as though bidding him goodnight.

  “I’m sure you’ve given me a beautiful child. I never expected anything more of you. Now that he’s almost here” (she patted her belly gently), “you can do as you please, you can do nothing at all, I really do not care. It is a shame, but I’ve got over it because I have my consolation. As for you, judging by what little I know, it sounds as though you are facing a catastrophe from which you will never recover. But it no longer concerns me.”

  All too often in such circumstances Henri smashed something—a vase, a figurine, a window, an ornament. Tonight, however, he simply walked out and slowly closed the door to his wife’s bedroom.

  As he shambled down the corridor, he thought about la Sallevière as he had seen it only days ago, its majestic facade impeccably restored, gardeners had set about redesigning the gardens in the French style, painters were about to begin work on the ceilings of the salons and the bedrooms, restorers were working on the cherubs and the paneling . . .

  Stunned by the series of betrayals he had suffered in a few short hours, Henri desperately tried to give substance to this cataclysm, but he could not, it was all words, images, there was nothing real.

  To lose everything like this, as swiftly as he had gained it, was something he was incapable of grasping. If, eventually, he succeeded, it was thanks to something he said aloud as he stood alone in the corridor:

  “I am dead.”

  37

  The last deposits brought the balance of the Patriotic Memory account to 166,000 francs. Albert did a quick calculation, he needed to be clever, not to make conspicuous withdrawals, though the bank was large enough to trade 7 or 8 million francs in a day, and the steady flow of cash from businesses and department stores meant the cashiers’ desks could take in 400,00 or 500,000, sometimes more.

  Since the end of June, Albert could hardly bear to go on living in his own skin.

  In the morning, between fits of nausea, and as dog tired as if he had led an assault on a German position, he would go to work in a state close to implosion. He would not have been surprised to find that a scaffold had been erected outside the bank during the night so he could be summarily guillotined in front of the assembled staff, led by M. Péricourt.

  He spent his days moving through a thick haze, voices reached him only after a long delay. Speaking to him meant breaching this wall of dread. Albert would look as though he had been drenched by a jet from a fire hose. “Huh, what?” were always his first words, but no one paid any attention, they were used to him now.

  He spent his mornings lodging the previous day’s payments received in the Patriotic Memory account and trying to e
xtract from the seething turmoil in his brain the precise amount he would withdraw in cash. At noon as, one by one, the tellers took their lunch, Albert would make the rounds of the vacated cash desks and make his withdrawals, nervously signing Jules d’Épremont, as though the customer always visited at lunchtime. As he went, he stuffed the money into a briefcase, which, by afternoon, would have swelled to four times its usual size.

  Twice before, heading toward the revolving door in the evening, and hearing a colleague call his name, or thinking a customer was eyeing him suspiciously, he had pissed himself and had been forced to take a taxi home. On other nights, he poked his head out of the door before leaving in case the guillotine that was not there in the morning had been erected during the day in front of the métro—you never knew.

  In his briefcase—which most clerks used to carry their lunch—Albert took home 99,000 francs in large denominations. Why not a hundred thousand? Superstition, you might think, but it was not that, it was about style. A matter of elegance—mathematical elegance in this case, but even so—because in doing so, Patriotic Memory had now swindled 1,111,000 francs. To Albert, there was beauty in that neat row of ones. The minimum Édouard had stipulated had been successfully exceeded, and for Albert, today was a personal victory. It was Saturday, July 10, and he had asked his manager for four days’ vacation in honor of July 14, and since, by opening time on the fifteenth, he planned to be on a ship bound for Tripoli, today was his last day at the bank. As with the armistice in 1918, he was just astonished to have come through alive. Anyone else might have thought himself immortal. But Albert could not imagine that he would survive a second time; even as the hour of his departure for the colonies approached, he did not truly believe it.

  “See you next week, Monsieur Maillard!”

  “Huh? What? Eh . . . yes, yes, goodnight.”

  Seeing that he was still alive, and that the totemic total of one million had been reached, Albert began to wonder whether it might not be wise to change the tickets for the train and the boat and leave earlier. But on this point, more than any other, he was torn.

  He would be happy to leave soon, right now if that were possible . . . but what about Pauline?

  A hundred times he had tried to talk to her, a hundred times he had lost his nerve, Pauline was wonderful, silk outside and velvet within, and so clever. But she was the kind of working-class girl who had middle-class dreams. A white wedding, an apartment, three kids, maybe four, that was what lay ahead for her. Had it been up to him, Albert would happily settle down, Pauline, four children, why not? He would have been glad to keep his job at the bank. But now that he was a notorious swindler—soon, God willing, an international fugitive—that future was fast disappearing and with it Pauline, their marriage, their children, their home, and his career at the bank. There was only one hope: confess everything, persuade her to leave with him three days from now, with a suitcase stuffed with a million francs in large bills, a friend with a face that looked like a split watermelon, and half the French police force on their heels.

  In other words, there was no hope.

  Or he could go alone.

  Asking Édouard for advice would be like talking to a wall. Though he loved the man for all sorts of reasons, in the end Albert thought Édouard rather selfish.

  He visited him every other evening, after he had stashed the loot in a safe place and before meeting up with Pauline. Now that there was no one in the apartment on the impasse Pers, Albert had decided that it was not a safe place to keep the money on which their futures depended. He considered various solutions, he could have rented a safe deposit box at the bank, but in the end settled on a left-luggage office at the Gare Saint-Lazare.

  Every evening, he checked the suitcase out, went into the station café toilets where he added the day’s takings, then returned it to the baggage clerk. They thought he was a traveling salesman. Girdles and corsets, Albert had said, it was all he could think of. The counter clerk would wink at him, and Albert would give a discreet shrug that only further enhanced his reputation. Just in case they needed to leave in a hurry, Albert had also left a hatbox in which he had packed the framed sketch of the horse’s head—he had never had the glass replaced—and, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, his horse head mask. Albert knew that if even he had to make a run for it, he would abandon the suitcase rather than that hatbox.

  After he had been to the train station and before meeting Pauline, Albert would pay a visit to the Lutetia, working himself up into a terrible state. A luxury Parisian hotel was hardly ideal for someone trying not to attract attention . . .

  “Don’t worry,” Édouard wrote, “The more visible you are, the less people see you. This is about Jules d’Épremont—not a living soul has ever seen him, but everyone trusts him.” And he gave one of the braying laughs that made your hackles rise.

  Albert had counted off the weeks, then the days, and now that Édouard, under his assumed identity of Eugène Larivière, had taken to committing his quirks and caprices at a grand hotel, he was counting down the hours and even the minutes to their departure, set for July 14, taking the 1:00 p.m. Paris-to-Marseille train so they would be in time to catch the Messageries Maritimes steamship S.S. D’Artagnan for Tripoli the next day.

  Three tickets.

  Those last minutes as he prepared to leave the bowels of the bank that afternoon had been as agonizing—he supposed—as childbirth, every step was painful but, finally, he emerged onto the pavement. He could hardly believe it. The sun was shining, his briefcase was heavy, to his right, no sign of a scaffold, to his left, no waiting gendarmes . . .

  Nothing but the slim figure of Louise standing on the pavement opposite.

  He was disconcerted by the sight of her, a bit like when you bump into a shopkeeper you have only ever seen behind the counter, though you recognize him, you dimly feel that this is not the natural order of things. Louise had never come to meet him. As he scurried across the road, he wondered how she had found the address of the bank, but the girl spent her time listening, she probably knew a lot about their scheme.

  “It’s Édouard,” she said, “You have to come right now.”

  “What about Édouard, what’s the matter?”

  But Louise did not answer, she had already hailed a taxi.

  “The Hôtel Lutetia.”

  In the car, Albert set his briefcase at his feet. Louise stared straight ahead, as though she were driving. Fortunately for Albert, Pauline was working this evening, and since she would finish late and had an early start tomorrow, she intended to sleep “at home.” Which, for a servant, means someone else’s home.

  “For God’s sake . . . !” Albert blurted after a minute, “What’s happened to Éd . . .”

  Noticing the driver’s sidelong glance, he quickly corrected himself.

  “What’s happened to Eugène?”

  Louise’s face was contorted, like a worried mother or a wife. She turned to Albert, spread her arms. Her eyes were filled with tears.

  “I think he’s dead.”

  Albert and Louise crossed the lobby of the Lutetia at a pace they hoped looked normal. They could not have been more noticeable. The elevator attendant pretended not to notice their nervousness, he was young, but very professional.

  They found Édouard on the floor, his legs splayed, his back propped against the bed. In a sorry state, certainly, but not dead. Louise reacted with her usual calm. The room stank of vomit, she opened all the windows and mopped up the vomit with towels from the bathroom.

  Albert knelt and bent over his friend.

  “What’s up, old man? Not feeling well?”

  Édouard’s head nodded gently, his eyes fitfully opening and closing, he was not wearing a mask and the stench from the gaping wound in his face was so strong that Albert had to draw back. He took a deep breath and, grabbing his friend under the armpits, dragged him onto the bed. When a man has no mouth, no jaw, nothing but a cavernous hole and a set of top teeth, it’s difficult to pat
his cheeks. Albert forced Édouard to open his eyes.

  “Can you hear me?” he said over and over, “Can you hear me?”

  Since he got no reaction, he decided to use strong-arm tactics. He got up, ran into the bathroom and filled a glass with water. Turning back to the bedroom, he got such a shock that he dropped the glass and felt so dizzy he slumped to the floor.

  From the back of the bathroom door, like a bathrobe on a peg, hung a mask.

  The face of a man. The face of Édouard Péricourt. The real Édouard, as he had been before. Only the eyes were missing.

  Albert lost all sense of where he was and found himself in the trenches, a few feet from the ladder, the other guys are all there, some in front, some behind him, tense as drawn bows, ready for the assault on Hill 113. Over there, Lieutenant Pradelle is scanning the enemy lines through binoculars. Berry is standing in front of him, and in front of Berry, a guy he hardly knows turns around, Péricourt gives him a smile, a beaming smile. Albert thinks he looks like a boy about to do something naughty; before he has time to respond, Péricourt has turned away.

  This is the face he saw that night, without the smile. Albert is stunned, he never again saw that face, except in his dreams, now here it is, emerging from the door, as though Édouard himself is about to appear like a ghost. It triggers a sequence of images, the two soldiers shot in the back, the assault on Hill 113, Lieutenant Pradelle slamming into him, the shell crater, the wave of earth crashing over him.

  Albert screamed.

  Louise appeared in the bathroom door, alarmed.

  Albert shook himself, ran the tap, splashed water on his face, filled the glass again and, without looking at the mask, marched back into the bedroom and tipped the whole glass down his friend’s throat. Édouard immediately hauled himself onto his elbows, coughing uncontrollably, as Albert himself had probably coughed when he returned from the dead.