He stood up, breaking free from me. ‘Why are you here, Eloïse? What is it that has brought you back to the Camargue?’
I smiled. To make him stay. ‘Papa summoned me. He thinks that when the family is in trouble it needs to work together.’ I felt such a yearning to sit him back down beside me, to wrap an arm around his thin waist as lovingly as my mother had done to me in the exact same pew nineteen years ago. ‘Isaac, Papa doesn’t make it obvious, I know, but I’m certain he would value it if you would come out to the farm. Share a meal with us . . .’
He drew a hand through the air, cutting me off. ‘I know you mean well, but it’s too late. I’m sorry, Eloïse. Can’t you see?’ He tipped his head on one side as if he could somehow find another me, another Papa, hiding behind the pew. ‘Tell Papa from me that anyone who hands over his land to the American Air Force for nuclear weapons and a fleet of aircraft designed to destroy the Soviet Union is no father of mine. It is treachery.’ His young mouth twisted. ‘Treachery against France.’
‘No, Isaac, no.’ I stood to face him. ‘Don’t.’
But he retreated into the aisle. ‘Listen to me, Eloïse, don’t fall for all their blatant capitalist propaganda. The American bastards will destroy Europe if we don’t put a stop to their godforsaken plans.’
‘Isaac Caussade!’ A deep voice boomed out at us from the altar like the voice of God himself. ‘I will not suffer such profanity in the house of God.’
Father Jerome came sweeping down on us, his long Bible-black soutane flowing around him, and I thought as always of the wings of a crow descending to peck our eyes out. That flash of childhood fear came and went, a hangover from schooldays when the edge of a ruler would rap knuckles if their owner was found wanting in Latin.
‘Father Jerome,’ I said to divert his attention, ‘the town is all stirred up out there today.’
Father Jerome was the kind of man who believed in castigation and praise in equal measure, depending on whether it was before or after his midday cognac. He had a drinker’s bulbous nose, large and intimidating, but Isaac was no longer the gangly youth who used to mess about in the back row. He was a fully fledged docker.
‘I’ll curse when and where I like,’ Isaac said, ‘without a by-your-leave from God.’
‘Did I not teach you not to take our Holy Father’s name in vain?’ the priest demanded.
‘I have one unforgiving father already. I don’t need another.’ Isaac started walking towards the door, but he swung round to look over his shoulder with an unexpected half-smile for me. ‘I will ask,’ he said. ‘About the stables.’
‘Thank you. Goodbye, Isaac.’
I let my brother take his anger back out on the street.
*
‘Eloïse, wait one moment.’
Father Jerome held up his hand as though stopping traffic. He blended in with the church as naturally as the pews or the organ.
‘What is it, Father?’
‘A word about your brother.’
‘He meant no offence when he spoke.’
‘Of course he meant offence. Offence to God.’
I let it pass.
‘But I didn’t mean that brother,’ he continued. ‘Your other one.’
‘André?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about him?’
‘How is he?’
‘He has crippled legs. How do you think he is?’ I drew a steadying breath. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound rude. I am shaken by . . .’ I waved a hand towards the great arch of the door. Let him work out whether it meant Isaac or the vehemence of the demonstrators, whichever he chose. ‘André is as well as can be expected.’
There. Better.
‘He wasn’t at Mass this morning, so I was concerned.’
My mouth dropped open. I shut it quickly. ‘Does he usually come to church on a Sunday?’
‘Oh yes.’ His eyes grew gentle. ‘God would welcome you here too, Eloïse. It might bring you the comfort you seek.’
I stared at him. My mind jammed. Still trying to absorb what he was saying. ‘You mean my brother André comes to church here in Serriac every Sunday.’
‘Yes, he does.’
I remembered the hymn book at his bedside. The midnight cry for help in the darkness.
‘How does he get here?’ I asked.
He looked at me perplexed. ‘Your father drives him.’
I bit down on my tongue to stop it from telling him he was lying.
‘My father comes to church as well?’
‘No. Not Aristide Caussade. He drops André here and picks him up when Mass is finished. But he will always be welcome too.’
I nodded. I had no words. I made quickly for the door, blinking away tears. More than anything in the world I wanted André to find his own peace of soul.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I stood with my back to the wall. It was warm on my shoulder blades. The air was fizzing, energy-snapping. Nerves tight. I watched it closely, the mass demonstration in the street. The mass thoughts. The mass mind. Drawing power to itself with every shout. The placards with their messages of hate and the voices hitched together like horses in a yoke by their chants of rage.
‘Yankee bastards! Out! Out! Out!’
‘No nukes here! No nukes here!’
I took a few quick snaps of the crowd with my camera, but I found it hard to keep my eyes off Léon in his uniform, coolly efficient as he went about his job. Prowling at the edges of the crowd, watching, digging out the troublemakers like weeds. Isaac had vanished. And the crowd was growing quieter because on the steps of the town hall Mayor Durand stood and addressed them, his powerful tones carrying over their heads as he sought to beguile them down the path of negotiation and debate.
He spoke well, but I did not stop to listen. I had work to do. The grey clouds had lowered a tin lid above our heads, trapping the anger in the town.
*
The back door of the town hall was locked, of course it was. But this was Serriac. It wasn’t Paris, was it? So it was nothing more than an old brass warded lock, a simple basic design that was begging to be picked. They’d spent more money on the ornate brass door-knocker with its floral festoon than on the security lock itself.
I extracted two L-shaped picks from the pouch of tools in my bag, inserted one to slide the bolt across and one to raise the single lever. And voilà. A knife through butter. Job done. I slipped inside the building, quietly closed the door behind me and took a look around. I was in a rear vestibule of some sort, closed doors leading off it, a corridor straight ahead. High ceilings and fancy cornices even back here, and a woodblock floor of a silky pale oak that Papa would have loved. I made no sound.
I listened hard.
Silence. Except for the thump of blood through my veins. I could hear no voices, no sound of any kind, because everyone would be crowded out on the street to watch and listen to the events unfolding on their front steps.
Behind them lay an open goal.
*
Foolish Mayor Durand.
I thought he would know better. He hadn’t stopped to lock his office door. I could picture it. The sudden alarm, blood pressure shooting up to danger zone, a flight-or-fight response. He stayed to fight, needless to say, because that was his job and that was the kind of man Durand was. But he would have heard the shouts and angry chants of the protesters coming closer and experienced a flicker of panic. A door left unlocked.
I pulled on a pair of finest silk gloves, opened it and slipped quickly into the beautiful room once more. The tall windows were half-shuttered to keep out the heat and looked out on to a gravelled garden at the back of the building. It meant the light was low but I would be unobserved.
I moved fast. His black desk was my starting point. I snapped open drawers, one after the other, working at speed, delving, sifting and skip-reading each item. Pushing aside packets of Gitanes, notepads neatly stacked, a wooden ruler, an address book, a list of telephone numbers with no names or i
ndication who they might be, and a shaving kit. A framed photograph of his daughter Marianne, sitting smiling on the back of a carousel horse.
A manila folder of letters. I flipped through them. Letters of complaint about the air base. About the noise of the aircraft. About the hell-cursed nuclear bombs. About the American airmen. About the chain-link fences stealing French land. About their guard dogs. About damage to the environment. About the night lights. About the smell.
What smell?
Complaints about complaints.
It was a fat file.
I replaced it and tried the last drawer, bottom right. It was locked. I felt a kick of expectation. He had something to hide. I dropped to my knees on the floor and tweaked the lock with a couple of picks until it obliged, but my expectation hit the dirt because inside lay nothing more exciting than a pistol. Behind it sat a small box of ammunition. I didn’t linger but relocked the drawer and sat back on my heels.
Mayor Durand was not a man with nothing to hide, of that I was certain.
The sound of footsteps hurrying down the hall outside sent me leaping to my feet and my pulse hammering in my throat, but they shot past and in the silence that followed I checked the diary on his desk. His secretary was right. He was a busy man. Meetings. Lunches. Telephone calls. All scheduled. But there was nothing that caught my eye. In my time working for the Clarisse Favre Detective Agency in Paris I had come across more than one man with secrets to hide and I wasn’t about to give up on this one.
‘Think the impossible, Eloïse,’ André had told me in his room, his crutches splayed on the floor between us. ‘Use your imagination. Think one step beyond.’
One step beyond.
I dropped to my knees again and peered into the well of the desk. The underside was black, tucked away in the dark, unaccustomed to scrutiny by anyone. But I wasn’t anyone. I snatched a small torch from my bag, squirmed under the desk and flicked on the beam. I scanned each centimetre of the smooth black surface above my head, craning my neck round to . . .
Smooth?
Not there. That spot. I ran a finger over it and found a small round indentation under my fingertip. I pressed it.
A click. A faint shift above me.
I scrabbled back out, shut down the torch and found that the beaded length of decoration along the top edge of the desk-well had slid forward a fraction. I tugged at it. It glided towards me to reveal a shallow secret drawer the width of the gap. A grin stole on to my face. Secrets, Monsieur le Maire? A man like you always has secrets.
Inside lay four large envelopes. And a thick bundle of American dollars.
*
I swept the envelopes on to the desk surface, opened each one and removed the sheets of paper from inside. It felt like stepping on a landmine and I trod with care, but one exploded in my face. What I was holding in my hand were the detailed architectural drawings of the American air base, complete with underground tunnels and chambers. And the nuclear silos.
How? How did Durand get his hands on this piece of dynamite?
I laid them flat on the desk and risked popping on the desk-lamp. From my bag I pulled out my camera – a sub-miniature 9mm Minox that fitted into the palm of my hand. Little more than the length of a cigarette and the width of a matchbox, it was a brilliant piece of German technology in a shiny aluminium case. I pulled the ends to extend the case-body and reveal the lens and viewfinder, then got down to business.
Quickly I fired the shutter button. Snapped the camera shut and reopened it ready for the next frame. Simple and efficient, it was expert at photographing documents. The perfect spy camera.
Don’t leave home without one.
It took a conscious effort to keep my hand steady. I moved on to the other envelopes, all the time one eye on the door, ears alert for footfalls in the corridor. One envelope contained a bank document from the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie, but I had no time to stop to read it. I clicked the button on the camera. The next envelope spilled out a glossy photograph of a beautiful naked young woman. I didn’t recognise her, but sure as hell she wasn’t his wife.
Voices seeped in from the corridor. A man and a woman in urgent conversation, the click of high heels approaching fast.
I snatched the contents from the final envelope, hurrying, fumbling, and out slid a newspaper cutting, yellowing with age and soft as feathers between my fingers. I wanted to stop. To sit. To cradle it in my hands. A picture of two young men in uniforms of the First World War, shoulder to shoulder, rigid. As though waiting to be shot. Above them ran the headline: MURDERERS OR HEROES? 53 MEN DEAD.
The man on the left was a young Father Jerome. The one on the right was my father.
Murderers or heroes? The words swelled inside my head.
I took the photograph just as the high heels stopped right outside the door. I snapped off the lamp, threw three of the envelopes containing their contents back into the secret drawer, the fourth one I pushed into my bag as I watched the door handle start to turn. I ran across the room for the blind spot behind the door so I would be hidden when it opened, but at the last moment the handle was abandoned and Captain Léon Roussel’s voice shouted out, ‘Vite! Call Nîmes for more reinforcements.’
Their feet ran down the hallway. I could taste the fear in the building.
*
The main street of Serriac had lost its mind. Its usual quiet sense of decency and discipline had been steamrollered by a crowd that was out of control. Havoc held sway. The demonstrators had cut loose. Breaking windows. Hurling stones and battling with police.
Whatever it was that Mayor Durand had said to them in his address had failed miserably to hold them and when two fighter jets streaked through the sky like a taunt to the demonstrators they set fire to a street bench in the middle of the road. Two cars were overturned, more shop windows shattered. As if the town were to blame for the nuclear warheads on its doorstep.
Locals struck back. Fights broke out with café seats for weapons, and rage rolled at me like a wave, setting fire to something dark within me that made me want to strike back. To defend my home. To protect my people. Something tribal and gut-wrenching. I helped a middle-aged woman back on to her feet, her head gashed, and tucked her into a shop for safety, but when I emerged I heard someone shout my name above the noise.
‘Eloïse!’
Léon was further down the road by the bank, working with five other officers to corral a section of the crowd. I raised a hand.
‘Go home,’ he shouted at me, ‘get out of here before . . .’
But I didn’t hear before what. He moved his group of demonstrators away, slicing them from the body of the crowd. Systematically weakening the collective rage. He looked calm as he issued orders, but I wanted to shout, ‘Be careful.’
And Isaac? Where was he?
I searched for his blond head and clambered up on a chair in a shop doorway where an old woman had been dozing before she fled inside. No sign of Isaac. But further down the road was a sight that jerked a moan from my lips. Six men in a circle. Big men, muscles like stevedores, heads thrust forward, threatening a lone figure at the centre of the circle. Wolves on a boar. The figure was no weakling, ready to defend himself with fists up, but he didn’t stand a chance.
‘No!’ I screamed, and threw myself into the crowd, elbows flying.
The lone figure was Mickey, my mechanic from Chicago.
*
I reached Mickey just after the first blow had been thrown. His lip was split, blood spooling down on to his white shirt. At least he’d had the sense not to wear uniform, but he oozed American-ness with his crew-cut and his aftershave and his strong American teeth. His sense of owning the space he stood in. He blended into Serriac’s ancient streets as well as a giraffe would.
‘Leave him,’ I said, and waved an arm around the circle to keep the Marseille men at bay.
A man doesn’t hit a woman in public, though the biggest one with fists like meat-cleavers and dense black w
hiskers looked ready to do so.
‘Eloïse!’ Mickey exclaimed.
He tried to push me behind him but I stood firm at his side. Mouth dry.
‘He has done nothing wrong, nothing to hurt you,’ I said to the whiskers.
‘He’s a fucking Yank. Bringing nuclear bombs to French soil. And you call that nothing wrong? Get out of my way, stupid bitch.’ He pulled a short metal bar from under his jacket and the circle grew tighter.
The gun at the bottom of my bag was itching to come out.
‘Run, Eloïse,’ Mickey shouted.
A hand grabbed my shoulder. It was one of the wolves behind me, and I smacked his arm away, but right at that moment a great wave of people came charging into us all, crushing and pushing and pressing us back, as they rushed to escape whatever it was that was coming up the street.
A jet of high-pressure water hit us. Soaking and battering us. Knocking some off their feet. I held tight against Mickey to keep us both upright, but more people backed into us, jostling shoulders, scrabbling to get away, when a great red truck barged its way along the centre of the road. The brigade des sapeurs-pompiers. Léon had called in the fire brigade.
Shouts of protest surged around me and I heard Mickey’s voice let loose a piercing cry. His arm abruptly clamped around my neck with a harsh grip and I felt his weight drag on me.
‘Mickey, let’s get out of . . .’
My words jammed on each other. Mickey had released his hold on me and was slowly sliding down to the ground, the fingers of one hand splayed out as they clawed at my sodden dress.
‘Mickey.’ My voice scraped against my teeth.
The US airman lay sprawled on the slick road on his side, as though he’d had enough of all the fuss and decided to sleep. Eyes closed, mouth slack. I dropped to my knees, hands shuddering as I brushed his wet cheek.
The back of his white shirt was covered in blood.
*
I think of that moment as a dividing wall. There is what came before. And there is what came after. With that moment standing between them, a wall with death dancing upon it.
The Guardian of Lies Page 14