The Great Swindle

by Pierre Lemaitre

  Albert helped him to sit up, leaning him forward in case he vomited again, but no. It took some time for the coughing fit to ease. Édouard was awake, but so exhausted, to judge from the dark circles around his eyes and his general state of neglect, that he immediately slipped into a kind of trance. Albert checked his breathing and decided it was normal. With no thought for Louise, he stripped his comrade and got him under the covers. The bed was so big that he was able to perch next to him, with Louise on the other side.

  They sat like bookends, each holding one of Édouard’s hands while he slept, a worrying gurgle coming from his throat. On the large circular table in the middle of the room, they could see the long, slender syringe, the lemon cut in two, traces of a brownish powder that looked like clay on a scrap of paper, the flint lighter, the twisted wick curved so that it looked like a comma.

  Next to the table, the rubber tourniquet.

  They did not speak, lost in their thoughts. Albert was no expert in such matters, but the powder looked like something he had been offered when he was looking for morphine. It was the next stage: heroin. Édouard had not even needed a middleman to get it . . .

  Curiously, Albert’s first thought was: what use am I, then? As though, on top of all his other worries, he had not been asked to deal with this one.

  How long had Édouard been taking heroin? Albert found himself like those parents who fail to notice the signs and now find it is too late.

  Four days before they were due to leave . . .

  But what did it matter, four days before, four days after . . . ?

  “So you’re leaving?”

  Louise’s thoughts had taken the same path, her voice was thoughtful, distant.

  Albert responded with silence. Which meant “yes.”

  “When?” she said, not looking at him.

  Albert said nothing. Which meant “soon.”

  Louise turned to Édouard and, reaching out her forefinger, as she had that first day, she meditatively traced the edge of the gaping wound, the red, inflamed flesh like an exposed mucous membrane . . . Then she got up, put on her coat and, coming to the other side of the bed where Albert sat, she bent and planted a lingering kiss on his cheek.

  “You will come say good-bye?”

  Albert nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  Which meant “no.”

  Louise nodded; she understood.

  She kissed him again and left the room.

  Her absence created an air pocket of the sort people apparently experience in airplanes.

  38

  It was so unprecedented that Mlle Raymond was in shock. In fact, in all the years she had worked for the mayor, it had never happened. That she had walked across the room three times without his ogling her was one thing, but that three times she had been behind his desk, three times without him pushing his hand, middle finger erect, up her skirt . . .

  For several days now, Labourdin had not been himself, glassy eyed, slack jawed, Mlle Raymond could have performed the dance of the seven veils and he would not have noticed. His face was ashen, he trudged heavily like a man expecting to have a heart attack at any moment. Good, she thought. Die, you bastard. Her boss’s decline offered the first reprieve she had had since joining the corporation. It was a godsend.

  Labourdin got to his feet, wearily pulled on his jacket, picked up his hat, and left his office without a word. One of his shirttails was hanging out of his pants, the sort of detail that can make any man look like a tramp. In his plodding tread there was something of a cow heading to the slaughter.

  At the Péricourt residence, he was informed that monsieur was not at home.

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  He pushed open the door to the drawing room, slumped onto the nearest sofa, and stared vacantly into space, and it was in this position that M. Péricourt found him three hours later.

  “What in damnation are you doing here?”

  M. Péricourt’s arrival plunged Labourdin into confusion.

  “Ah, monsieur le président, monsieur le président . . . ,” he said, struggling to get up from the sofa.

  This was all he could think of, as though somehow the word président said all that needed to be said.

  Despite his exasperation, M. Péricourt had a farmer’s fondness for the bovine Labourdin. “Explain it to me” he would often say, with that infinite patience reserved for cattle and imbeciles.

  But today, he remained glacial, forcing Labourdin to redouble his efforts to extricate himself from the sofa and explain, “Obviously, monsieur le président, no one could have foreseen, not even you, I fear, monsieur le président, everyone believed, how could anyone anticipate such a thing,” and so forth.

  M. Péricourt allowed this torrent of futile words to wash over him. In fact he was not listening. There was no point in going on. But still Labourdin persisted in his lamentations.

  “And this Jules d’Épremont, monsieur le président, he does not exist, can you imagine it?”

  He sounded almost impressed.

  “I mean, how can a member of the Institut de France working in the Americas, not exist! Those sketches, those magnificent drawings, that magisterial project, it all had to be created by someone, after all!”

  Having reached this point, Labourdin desperately needed a response, otherwise his brain would go around in circles for hours.

  “So, the man does not exist,” M. Péricourt summed up.

  “Precisely so!” Labourdin said, genuinely relieved to have been so comprehensively understood. And just imagine, the address at 52, rue du Louvre does not exist either! Can you guess what it is?

  Silence. Regardless of the circumstances, Labourdin liked guessing games; idiots love to make an effect.

  “A post office!” he said. “The address is nothing but a post office box.”

  He was dazzled by the ingenuity of this stratagem.

  “And this is something you have only just noticed now . . . ?”

  Labourdin interpreted this reproach as an encouragement.

  “Exactly, monsieur le président! Although . . .” (he raised a finger to emphasize the finesse of his approach) “I had my doubts. Obviously, we received a receipt, a typewritten letter explaining that the artist was in the Americas, and the various drawings that you’ve seen, but, for my part, I . . .”

  He affected a doubtful expression gave a little shake of his head to express what words could not convey: his acute perspicacity.

  “But you paid him?” M. Péricourt said icily.

  “But, but, but, but, but . . . what choice was there? Of course we paid, monsieur le président.”

  He was categorical.

  “No payment, no commission, and no commission would mean no memorial. What could we do? We made a down payment to Patriotic Memory, we had no choice.”

  As he spoke, he took some sort of pamphlet from his pocket. M. Péricourt snatched it from him and nervously leafed through it. Labourdin did not even wait for him to ask his next question.

  “The company doesn’t even exist!” he yelped, “It’s a . . . it’s a . . .”

  He stopped in his tracks. He had been mulling over the word for days. and now he had forgotten it.

  “It’s a . . .” He carried on because he had noticed that his brain was like an automobile engine, a few turns of the crank and sometimes it would start up again. “Front. That’s it. It’s a front organization!”

  He gave a beaming smile, proud to have overcome this linguistic hurdle.

  M. Péricourt continued to flick through the slim catalog.

  “But . . . these designs are for mass production,” he said.

  “Um . . . yes,” Labourdin said, who did not see what the président was getting at.

  “We commissioned an original work, did we not?”

  “Aaaah,” Labourdin said, having briefly forgotten this question might arise, though he recalled preparing an answer. “Quite right, my dear président, indeed, most original. The thing is that Monsieur d�
�Épremont, membre de l’Institut, has designed mass-produced sculptures, but he also creates works that are ‘tailor made,’ as you might say. The man can turn his hand to anything!”

  And then he remembered the individual he was describing was purely fictitious.

  “I mean he could . . . turn his hand to anything.” His voice dropped to a whisper, as though the artist had recently passed away and on that account was unable to complete a commission.

  As he turned the pages and studied the various memorials, M. Péricourt came to appreciate that the swindle had been on a national scale.

  There would be a colossal scandal.

  Without regard for Labourdin, who was hiking up his pants with both hands, M. Péricourt turned on his heel, went back to his study, and contemplated the scale of the setback.

  All around, the sketches, the framed drawings, the models of “his memorial” magnified his humiliation.

  It was not about the money he had lost, not even the fact that he had been swindled. No, what wounded him was that they had made a mockery of his grief. He cared little about money and reputation, he had a surfeit of both, and the business world had long since taught him that anger is a bad counselor. But mocking his grief amounted to denigrating his son’s death. As he had done himself, once. Far from making amends for the wrongs he had done his son, this war memorial had compounded them. What he had hoped might be an atonement had become a farce.

  The Patriotic Memory catalog offered a range of mass-produced memorials at an attractive discount. How many of these nonexistent memorials had been sold? How many families had poured their money into these pipe dreams? How many towns and villages had been fleeced, victims of their trusting innocence. That anyone could have the effrontery, that anyone could have the temerity to contemplate swindling grieving people was literally unbelievable.

  M. Péricourt was not sufficiently great hearted to feel a kinship with the possibly countless victims of this scheme, nor to think of coming to their aid. He thought only of himself, of his pain, his son, his story. He was sorry that, having failed to be a good father, he would never become one now. But, more egoistically, he felt furious, as though personally targeted: those who had paid for mass-produced models were gullible victims of a huge hoax, while he, in commissioning a unique monument, felt like a victim of extortion.

  His pride was sorely wounded.

  Sickened and appalled, he sat at his desk and reopened the catalog, which he had unthinkingly been twisting in his hands. He read the long letter the charlatan had written to the mayors of towns and villages. It was clever, reassuring, it sounded so official. M. Péricourt paused for a moment at the line that probably, more than anything, guaranteed the scheme’s success, the “exceptional offer” that, to those with modest budgets, must have seemed like a godsend . . . Even the symbolism of the date July 14 . . .

  He looked up at his desk calendar.

  Swindlers rarely give their victims time to react or to verify who they were dealing with. Since they had received a formal acknowledgment of their order and a receipt in due form, they had no reason to worry before July 14, the date when the supposed promotion ended. Today was July 12. A matter of days. Since there had been no mention of the scheme in the newspapers, the swindlers would doubtless wait around to collect the last down payments before they fled. As for their customers, the more shrewd—and the more suspicious—would soon want to confirm that their trust had been well placed.

  What would happen then?

  The scandal would break. In a day or two, perhaps three. Perhaps it was only a matter of hours.

  And then?

  The newspapers would vie with each other in jingoistic emotion, the police would come under considerable pressure, outraged on behalf of the nation, members of parliaments would cloak themselves in patriotic virtue . . .

  “Bullshit,” M. Péricourt muttered.

  And when these louts were eventually tracked down and arrested, it would be three, perhaps four years before they came to trial, by which time tempers would have cooled.

  Even mine, he thought.

  This notion did not console him; tomorrow was of no consequence, right now he was suffering.

  He closed the catalog and smoothed it with the flat of his hand.

  When Jules d’Épremont and his cohorts were arrested (if indeed they were caught), they would cease to be individuals. They would become freaks, newsworthy curiosities, as Raoul Villain13 had been, as Landru was becoming.

  Delivered up to an enraged public, the guilty men would cease to belong to their victims. And who would there be for him to despise once these bandits became public property?

  Worse still, his name would be dragged through the trial. And if, by some misfortune, he was the only person to have commissioned a custom-made memorial, then he above all would be ridiculed: See him? Poured a hundred thousand into their scheme for all he ever saw for his money. The idea was odious, people would think him a gullible dupe, a sucker. This prosperous industrialist, this formidable banker had been well and truly fleeced by a bunch of second-rate crooks.

  Words failed him.

  His wounded pride blinded him.

  Something mysterious and critical was happening to him: he wanted to get his hands on the men who had committed this crime as much as he had ever wanted anything, wanted it with a passion. He did not know what he would do with them; he knew only that he wanted them.

  Riffraff. A gang of thugs. Had they already fled the country? Perhaps not.

  Could he get to them before the police?

  It was midday.

  He jerked the bell pull and ordered that his son-in-law be summoned. Have him brought here.

  Forthwith.

  39

  Henri d’Aulnay-Pradelle strode into the vast post office on the rue du Louvre in midafternoon and chose a bench from which he could keep an eye on the rows of post office boxes lining the wall next to the monumental staircase that led up to the first floor.

  Box 52 was no more than fifty feet away. Henri feigned interest in his newspaper but soon realized that he could not keep up such a pretense for long. Before they checked their box, these crooks would surely keep watch for a while to make sure there was nothing untoward, and they probably checked in the morning rather than the afternoon. And now that he was here, his worst fear was that he would be trapped indefinitely: at this late stage, as far as the crooks were concerned, there were more risks involved in coming to pick up the last few payments than in catching a train to some far-flung corner of Europe or a steamship to Africa.

  They would not come.

  And his time was precious.

  This thought depressed him.

  Abandoned by his workers, deserted by his business associates, disowned by his father-in-law, forsaken by his wife, with no prospect of help against the impending debacle . . . Henri d’Aulnay-Pradelle had been suffering the worst three days of his life until that last-minute summons, the messenger who came to find him urgently with a scribbled note on Marcel Péricourt’s visiting card:

  “Come see me immediately.”

  He had leapt in a taxi, raced to the boulevard de Courcelles, in the house he encountered Madeleine on the stairs . . . She had that same vacant grin on her face, as always, like a goose laying an egg. She gave not the slightest sign that she remembered how coldly she had dispatched him only two days ago.

  “Ah, so they managed to find you, chéri?”

  She sounded relieved. The bitch. She had told the messenger he would find him in Mathilde de Beausergent’s bed; Henri could not help wondering how she knew.

  “I do hope you weren’t interrupted before your climax,” she said, and since Henri did not respond, added, “But of course, you’re on your way to see Papa . . . All this men’s business is so tiresome . . .”

  Then she cupped her hands over her belly and returned to her favorite pastime, trying to guess whether the baby was kicking with his feet, his heels, or his elbows, he thrashed about like a f
ish, the little beast; she loved to talk to him.

  As time dragged on and countless people came and went, opening every box except the one he had been watching, Henri shifted his position to a different bench, a different floor, he went up to the smoking area, from where could peer down at the ground floor. This idleness was death by a thousand cuts, but what could he do? He cursed Péricourt, it was his fault he was forced to hang around here uselessly. At their meeting he had been shocked by the old man’s appearance. He looked dead on his feet, his face was haggard, his shoulders hunched, his eyes ringed with dark circles . . . He had been showing signs of frailty for some time, but his condition seemed to have suddenly deteriorated. At the Jockey Club, it was whispered that he had never quite been the same since his fit of apoplexy the previous November. When speaking of Marcel Péricourt, Docteur Blanche, the epitome of discretion, lowered his eyes; that said it all. An unmistakable sign had been a fall in the share price of some of his companies. They had rallied since, but even so . . .

  The very idea that he might be ruined only for the old goat to kick the bucket afterward—too late—was unbearable. If only the bastard could die now rather than in six months or a year . . . True, his will was categorical, as was the marriage contract, but Henri still had an unshakeable confidence in his ability to get what he wanted from any woman, a talent that had only ever failed him with his wife (the irony!). But if need be, he would muster all his powers and make short work of Madeleine; he would have his share of the old man’s fortune, he’d see to that. What a mess. He had wanted too much, or too fast . . . No point raking over the past, what was done was done; Henri was a man of action, not one to feel sorry for himself.

  “You are facing very serious problems,” the old man said as Henri sat down opposite him, still clutching the visiting card bearing his summons.

  Henri had said nothing, because it was true. A problem that might have been fixed—that little business with the war graves—seemed almost insurmountable, now that he stood accused of bribing an official.