Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  At first I liked Papé’s speeches, but now I’m starting to get annoyed. And I don’t want to annoy him, but I don’t really see the difference between the selfish ones who possess and the conservative ones who protect without sharing. I don’t say anything. I have another, more cunning way to make him react.

  ‘If you like, Papé, if you say so. But most of all I think that basically the real reason is that, like all Corsicans, you don’t love the sea. You don’t like dolphins. You don’t like the Mediterranean. You don’t like turning in that direction, towards the horizon. If the Corsicans really loved the sea they wouldn’t leave it to the Italians in their yachts.’

  He laughs.

  That last phrase was too much, now he’s going to make fun of me rather than getting angry.

  ‘I like your image of the Italians, but you’re wrong, Clotilde. About the Corsicans and the Mediterranean. You know, I haven’t always been a shepherd. I spent five years in the merchant navy, I’ve been around the world three times.’

  You are amazing, my Clo, it worked!

  Two hundred and fifty degrees. I have a sense, following the coast towards the south, that I can see all the way to the nature reserve at Scandola and Girolata, where the rocks turn red and the buzzards build crazy nests that look like watchtowers on top of the volcanic peaks.

  ‘Look, Clotilde, straight ahead, towards Arcanu. If you continue towards the sea in a straight line you reach the rocks of Petra Coda. Thirty metres, the highest of them. When I was your age, all the young Corsicans, the ones who in your view are afraid of the water, used to dive into the sea there. And, I must admit, your grandfather was the most daring of them all. My record was twenty-four metres. As the years passed, I began to jump from lower and lower heights. Fifteen metres … ten metres … But I still swim as often as I can, from Petra Coda to the Cave of the Sea-Calves, sometimes as far as Punta Rossa. Giving up the sea is giving up on one’s youth, nothing less.’

  ‘Then say yes, Papé, say yes for the dolphins, say yes for my youth, say yes just for me.’

  He smiles.

  ‘You never let go, do you, my dear girl? You would make a good lawyer. I’ll think about it, I promise. Just give me some time.’ He laughs. ‘Everything is going too quickly. Women are changing, and doing the talking.’ He laughs again. ‘Dolphins are changing, and talking to fishermen. I don’t want my Corsica to change as quickly as that …’

  ‘Then it’s yes?’

  ‘Not yet. There’s one more question, a question that you haven’t mentioned, my darling.’

  The shadow of the cross stretches over us.

  ‘I don’t know if this Natale Angeli is trustworthy.’

  *

  * *

  He murmured between gritted teeth.

  You had it, Papé.

  You had your answer.

  And it wasn’t the one you expected.

  44

  21 August 2016, midday

  ‘You missed the sunrise, Clo. You were more of an early riser when you were fifteen.’

  Cassanu sat leaning against the wooden cross, in the shadow of the seven-metre monument pitched at the top of Capu di a Veta. He looked like a pilgrim who had carried his cross to the roof of the world in order to plant it there, dig his hole in front of it and bury himself.

  Clotilde didn’t rise to her grandfather’s comment. She had just climbed for four hours and was getting her breath back, startled that this old man, at almost ninety years of age, had been able to climb all this way, while she was completely exhausted.

  Exhausted, and on edge. Throughout her solitary ascent, in spite of the breathtaking beauty of the landscape, she hadn’t been able to empty her mind, to enjoy the moment, the wind, the scents of mastic trees, citron or wild fig. On the contrary, various questions had been tumbling around her head, and were all summed up by a single one: was it her mother who been waiting for her last night in the shepherd’s cabin? She regretted not having dared to knock on the door after Franck appeared. She was cross with him for that as well, for breaking the spell. She had hardly slept that night, had been constantly thinking, delving into her memories in the hope of finding an answer to the idea that obsessed her.

  How could her mother be alive?

  She replayed the film of 23 August 1989 in her head, and there were only three possibilities.

  Her mother wasn’t in the Fuego.

  Except that her mother had been sitting in the passenger seat, with Nicolas sitting behind her, and Papa at the wheel. Clotilde had seen her, before getting into the car, after they had set off, on the journey. They had smiled and talked to each other. There was no doubt about it, all four of them had set off from Arcanu.

  Her mother had got out of the Fuego before the accident.

  Except that the Fuego hadn’t stopped, it had barely slowed down on the descent from the farm, and Clotilde was sure she hadn’t dozed off on the journey before Petra Coda. In any case they had only driven a few kilometres, and her mother was still in the car when the Fuego had left the road. Papa had taken her hand.

  Her mother had survived the accident.

  This was the only believable hypothesis, even if the Fuego had performed three somersaults, killing each time, even if she had seen the three bodies, shattered, exposed, then wrapped in plastic bags before being taken away … But she had been in a state of shock. Perhaps her mother was still alive? Perhaps the emergency services had performed a miracle? But then why announce her death? How could they justify resuscitating a patient, saving her, and then not telling anybody? Not even her daughter. Why make her an orphan? To protect her mother? Because she was the one someone had wanted to kill? She was losing her mind. She didn’t know who to trust. Was Cervone telling the truth about her brother Nicolas and her parents’ accident? Was Franck, her husband, playing some unlikely double game? Had Natale really seen her mother’s ghost? What did grandfather Cassanu know? Who was the one pulling the strings right from the beginning?

  Like a reluctant teenager being dragged along on a hike by her parents, she had spent a good part of the climb on her phone, trying to get through to three people.

  With Franck and Valou, first of all. To no avail. No reply, just a silent voicemail service that endured her insults without complaint.

  Then she had managed to get through to Natale, at the beginning of the climb, and demanded that he join her, that he go with her with to the top of Capu di a Veta, but the fisher of dreams had declined her invitation. It’s impossible, Clo, I can’t get away before this evening, I’m working all day at the shop, but Aurélia is on duty at the clinic tonight, so, yes, Clotilde, tonight if you can, if you want to.

  OK, until this evening, my brave knight.

  More than anything, Clotilde had had the impression that, even after all these years, he didn’t want to see Cassanu. Her pirate wasn’t much of a mountaineer, and perhaps he was also a bit of a chicken.

  It wasn’t important anyway. Papé Cassanu seemed harmless enough. Leaning against the vast wooden cross, he looked as if he would never be able to get back on his feet after that insane climb. They were both panting from the exertion and could barely speak.

  Towards the middle of the climb, Clotilde had made her final call, the most unexpected of the three, and this time the person at the other end had answered after two rings, in almost impeccable French, with a German accent barely any stronger than his father’s.

  ‘Clotilde Idrissi? Mein Gott, how strange to speak to you after all this time.’

  Clotilde was amazed – Hermann Schreiber didn’t sound at all surprised to receive her call.

  ‘My father phoned me yesterday,’ he explained. ‘After your visit. We talked a bit about the summer of ’89.’

  He addressed her formally. His voice had a slightly disagreeable authoritarian tone. Clotilde wondered if Hermann remembered his nickname, the Cyclops. She dismissed the idea of throwing that sobriquet at him.

  ‘You remember that summer?’ she asked instead. />
  ‘Yes, all the names, even the faces. It was quite a traumatic summer, though, wasn’t it? For all of us.’

  Especially for me, you great plank.

  She decided to forge ahead and tell Hermann the reason for her call, summing up in a few words what Cervone Spinello had revealed to her: her brother Nicolas, crashing the car a few hours before the accident, damaging the steering column and the bolts without realising it. Hermann sounded surprised, as if he couldn’t believe it. Then, after a moment’s reflection, his voice became almost solemn.

  ‘Then we are the ones who should have died. All five of us. Nicolas, Maria-Chjara, Aurélia, Cervone and me. We were all supposed to get into your parents’ car at midnight and go to that nightclub, with your brother at the wheel.’ He seemed to reflect for a long time before continuing. ‘Yes, that changes a lot of things. It feels quite strange, after all this time. A bit like missing a plane that then crashed.’ Another pause. ‘It was us, all five of us, who should have ended up in that ravine. If I’m alive, it’s entirely down to one question, Clotilde, one question to which only you can have the answer: why did your father change his mind that evening? Why did he decide to take the car and his family and go to that concert after all?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘These things don’t just happen by chance. If you examine your memories, you are bound to find an explanation.’

  Hermann’s tone had become abrasive again. It was the voice of someone who was used to being obeyed. Clotilde guessed that for the last twenty-seven years his sole concern had probably been to make others undergo the humiliations he had suffered during his adolescence. But he was right too, the most important thing was that key question: why had her father changed his plan on the evening of 23 August? She had no explanation. The well of her memory seemed desperately dry. Perhaps the solution was written somewhere in her diary from the summer of ’89, that notebook she had been scribbling in right until those final moments on the bench at Arcanu? Perhaps she had protected her memories by hiding them in that journal? Or perhaps it contained nothing, only mere invention, the imaginings of a lying, jealous, frustrated teenager. The person she had been.

  ‘There shouldn’t be any shortage of clues to follow,’ Hermann Schreiber went on. ‘Corsica is complicated, land and family, life and death, money and power. But above all, Clotilde, are you sure you can trust Cervone Spinello? Have you found any other witnesses? What about the rest of the five? They must still be alive?’

  Apart from Nicolas, Clotilde thought. The Cyclops was still the emperor of tact.

  ‘I’ve seen Maria-Chjara,’ she replied.

  Hermann laughed heartily.

  ‘Ah, Maria-Chjara! I was crazy about her. In those days I thought quoting Goethe and playing Liszt on the violin would be enough to seduce a girl. Basically I should thank her – it was to impress girls like her that I worked so hard.’ A few more bursts of laughter. ‘Girls as beautiful as her, I mean. My wife is like her, only blonde. Except that she’s a soprano with the Cologne Opera, not a singer on TV reality shows.’

  Clotilde suddenly wanted to cut short the conversation. Was it a kind of curse, always needing to put down everything you’d loved during your teenage years?

  ‘Never mind, Hermann. And you can’t think of anything else?’

  ‘Well I can, in fact. Go back and see my father. He didn’t just collect photographs, he always talked to everyone on the campsite. I think he came up with some kind of theory. Something that bothered him after your parents’ accident, something that didn’t add up, but he only talked about it to my mother, Anke, not me.’

  Clotilde didn’t dare to admit that she’d heard nothing from Jakob Schreiber for a couple of days. She felt even more cowardly as Hermann went on.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’m getting a bit worried about my father. He has an open invitation to stay with us, with his son and his grandchildren, in our villa on the island of Pag in Croatia, it even has a swimming pool, yet the stubborn old mule prefers to spend his holidays in Corsica, all alone, in his mobile home.’

  The Cyclops’s haughty self-assurance irritated Clotilde again. Who, amongst his entourage, could imagine the shy and intimidated teenager he had once been? Hermann had started from scratch; like everyone does, he had rewritten the story of his life. Clotilde fought the urge to call him by his nickname, just to bring him face to face with his past. The German got in first.

  ‘Go back and see my father,’ he said again. ‘He spent his whole life pinning down the past with that camera of his, the way other people pin butterflies. He was like a spy, with his zoom lens pointed at anything that seemed unusual, his single eye, even though I know it was me that you lot called the Cyclops!’

  ~

  ‘Take a seat, Clotilde.’

  Cassanu’s words dragged her from her thoughts. Later. She would think again later about the questions raised by Hermann Schreiber. Her grandfather seemed to be breathing more regularly now. He pointed at the rock nearest to him, inviting her to sit down. Below them, to the north, the citadel of Calvi seemed ridiculously small compared to the town that now sprawled its way on to the slopes of the Balagne. It hadn’t looked that way to Clotilde twenty-seven years ago.

  Papé’s voice didn’t quiver. He turned his neck and looked up at the huge wooden beam he was leaning against.

  ‘You remember, my dear girl, in 1989, the cross that was here before? The wood was rotten, the nails were rusty, it threatened to come crashing down on us. Since then they put up a new one, which didn’t last very long, and then another, this one, less than three years ago. At least the Austrians are consistent.’

  ‘Why did you want to meet here?’

  ‘For that.’

  Her eye took in the sweeping view. She recognised the sleeping crocodile. The coast, from L’Ile Rousse to Calvi, from the Revellata Peninsula to Galéria, looked like a rim of white thread, a fine piece of lace, a pure line drawn by a sure hand. She knew, however, that it was merely an illusion, a question of scale. The coast was jagged, and the white rocks threw themselves into the sea, sharp and pointed like a thousand sharpened knives.

  ‘For that?’ Clotilde repeated.

  ‘For that. For this view. This landscape. For the privilege of looking at it one last time. With you. You can call our little family meeting whatever you like, a blessing, a handover. You are our sole heir, Clotilde, the only direct descendant. All of this,’ he drew a large circle with his hand, ‘will be yours one day.’

  Clotilde didn’t reply. Such a legacy seemed so unreal, so remote, so alien to what she was going through, to the urgent questions at stake. She didn’t want to provoke her grandfather straight away, to ask him about the sabotaged steering column of the Fuego; she preferred to stick to her plan. Check first, then accuse. Like any good lawyer. Check if Cervone Spinello was telling the truth. Only then accuse her brother Nicolas. And for that she needed Cassanu. She adopted the tone of an angry nurse, assessing the seven hundred metres of altitude.

  ‘Do you think it’s clever, engaging in this kind of feat at your age?’

  ‘You call this a feat! I read about a Japanese man who climbed Everest at eighty, and his father had skied down Mont-Blanc at ninety-nine. So climbing to the top of this goat-path …’

  His voice had got louder. Cassanu seemed to be in outstanding shape, but it had probably been more of a test than he was letting on. He coughed for a while, then continued.

  ‘The first time I came up here was in 1935, and then from 1939 onwards I climbed up here several times a day to help the partisans, bringing them food, guns and ammunition. We were the first to get rid of the Nazis, here in Corsica, well before the Normandy landings, and without any help from the Americans! The first French département to be liberated, but the history books have forgotten that. The first time you climbed up here, my dear girl, you were fifteen. You remember? Of course you do, it was just before …’

  Papé couldn’t finish his phrase. Of cour
se Clotilde remembered. The binoculars around her neck, the snack of goat’s cheese and coppa, the rising sun, the peregrine falcons wheeling through the sky. Cassanu had seemed old to her even then. But he was indestructible, more indestructible than the cross.

  She studied the varnished wood, which was already cracking. The iron nails, already rusty.

  Her grandfather would survive this one too.

  Perhaps.

  ‘Lisabetta must be dying of worry,’ she said.

  ‘She’s been dying of worry for sixty years.’

  She smiled.

  ‘I have some questions to ask you.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  Clotilde’s gaze wandered seven hundred metres below. The coast was merely a sequence of peninsulas, like grey tentacles covered with moss that a god seemed to have allowed to proliferate to increase the number of secret inlets, watering holes, paths. A corrupt god who would have understood the profit to be drawn from them one day.

  Before she began, Clotilde’s eyes turned due east, towards the sea. From here you could make out the bungalows of the Euproctes campsite, the foundations of the Roc e Mare marina, the shadow of the Tropi-Kalliste beach hut on Oscelluccia beach.

  ‘The last time we both sat here, there was nothing, Cassanu, nothing but olive trees to pitch your tent under, a track to take you down to the beach, a fisherman’s boat moored in the sea and, in Revellata Bay, some dolphins. How is that you’ve allowed Cervone Spinello to develop his business? All his ambition, his concrete. He’s telling everyone that he has the all-powerful Idrissi eating out of his hand.’

  Cassanu didn’t take offence.

  ‘It’s complicated, little one. Everything changed years ago, a great deal. But I suppose you can sum it all up in one word. Five letters. Money, Clotilde, money.’