‘What the hell happened to your face?’ Isaac demanded.
I swung back to him, suddenly angry. I didn’t know whether the anger was at my brother or at the man on the floor. ‘What the hell happened to your hands?’
Our gaze fixed on the blood on them. It was daubed over his palms in a spider’s web of scarlet runnels, but how do you get blood on your hands if you shoot someone with a gun? It doesn’t happen. Unless you put a hand on them. To check that they’re dead.
‘What happened here, Isaac?’
‘I didn’t shoot him. I swear I didn’t, Eloïse.’ He pushed his hands away from him as if he couldn’t bear to have them near. He was shaking his head back and forth, denying their existence.
I had to get him out of this room. I took hold of his arm and propelled him out the door. The bathroom was at the end of the landing and I swept him inside, turned on the washbasin taps and pushed his hands into the flow of water. The basin turned pink.
‘Tell me exactly why you are here,’ I said. ‘We have to be quick. The police will be on their way.’
In the mirror I could see his face as white as the wall tiles, his lips unsteady. I leaned my body against him to offer comfort.
‘Please, Isaac.’
He kept his eyes down, his pale lashes shutting out the world and me with it. ‘I was given instructions to come here,’ he said. ‘To come to this house. I was told the door would be unlocked and I must go upstairs to wait for a message from someone.’ His gaze flicked briefly to my face in the mirror. ‘It’s not you, is it?’
‘No, Isaac. It’s not.’
‘I came here and found . . .’ The words dried up.
‘Was anyone else here?’
‘No. I felt the man’s chest to see if he was breathing but . . .’ He shook his head.
‘Do you know who he is?’
‘No.’
‘What happened next?’
‘I heard the front door open. I snatched up the gun because I thought it was . . .’
I turned off the tap. ‘You thought it was the killer returning? For you?’
He nodded, one sharp terrified jerk of his head. I lifted my skirt, it was a full circular navy-blue one, and I dried his hands on the underside of it. I didn’t want any sign of him left on the towel.
‘So you saw no one?’
‘No.’
I wiped the taps and washbasin with my skirt. ‘Tell me who gave you the instructions to come here.’
For the first time he looked at me, blue eyes dark with confusion. ‘I can’t.’
‘Isaac,’ I raised my voice, ‘this is not the time to be secretive about your Communist affiliations. You’ve been set up. Someone wants you accused of murder. Can’t you see that? The police will be here any moment. You have to get out. But first,’ I buttoned up his jacket to hide the smear of blood on his shirt, ‘first, tell me who sent you here?’
‘I can’t.’ I opened my mouth to object but he stepped away. The initial shock was passing. He was gathering himself together, his limbs stiffening, his mouth firmer. ‘I can’t tell you, Eloïse, because I don’t know. The leader of our action group within the Parti Communiste Français contacts our controller by telephone. We have no idea who it is. It’s safer that way.’
‘So you do the bidding of someone you don’t know.’
‘It is not as blind as you make it sound.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Now was not the time to argue the point. I steered him out the door on to the landing.
‘Run,’ I said urgently.
He blinked hard. Realisation was dawning on him. ‘Eloïse, you must leave with me. Right now.’
‘Go, Isaac, go. After what happened at the air base, the police will be looking to show the Americans how they treat violent Communists.’
Abruptly he wrapped an arm around my shoulders. ‘Thank you.’ He kissed my cheek. ‘Come too.’
‘First I must deal with the gun.’
He’d forgotten the gun. His fingerprints all over it.
‘Go now,’ I urged. ‘I’ll follow.’ I pushed him to the stairs. ‘I promise.’
With a last nervous look back at me, my brother raced down the stairs and out the front door. I lifted my skirt, snatched off my waist-petticoat, wet it under the tap and wiped every surface either of us might have touched, including the gun. When I’d finished, I stood over Bertin. I wasn’t sorry. I couldn’t find it within myself to wish him back into his life. The cleft like the mark of Cain on his chin. But he held no power over me now.
Who was responsible?
I hurried down the stairs and out into the street, ears straining for the sound of police boots. When I turned the corner at the end I heard a car’s engine come roaring into the street behind me. We’d made it out only just in time. As I wove my way through the old streets of Arles back to my car, I thought about the gun lying on the floor back in the house. I hated the knowledge of what it had done. I hated the hand that had held it. When I said I knew the weapon, the Smith & Wesson revolver, I didn’t mean I knew the make of it. I meant I knew the gun. The actual gun. I knew it because I’d last seen it in the drawer of Mayor Durand’s desk.
CHAPTER FORTY
I wanted to get the dust of Arles off my feet and the stink of its air out of my lungs. Worse, much worse, I wanted to get the image of a man with a hole in his chest out of my head. But I was so worried about Isaac and about Léon in his hospital bed that for one foolish slippery moment I forgot to be worried about me.
I’d parked on the wide main road again, not far from Clarisse’s hotel on the south side of the old town. My thinking had been this: it would make for a quick getaway. If I needed it. Today was Sunday, so the town was in a lazy mood under the overcast skies, quietly catching its breath after the bartering and trading and shouting of yesterday’s street market. On Sundays Arlesians stretched out their legs under a café’s small zinc table, sipped their wine and shuffled cards in a game of belote.
Sunday in Arles was not a day for holes in chests.
My 2CV was still where I’d left it under a mottled scaly plane tree, a pavement café murmuring contentedly nearby. My only thought was to get to Serriac as fast as possible. To confront the mayor. To speak to the police. To start laying out the facts in an order that made sense inside my pounding head.
That’s why I didn’t see it, not until I reached my Citroën, one hand on its door. The flat tyre. I walked around the car, inspecting it, and felt my gut twist. Not one flat tyre, but four flat tyres. I groaned and looked around me in a quick but thorough sweep. He was here somewhere, I was sure of it. I reached into my boot and removed the tyre iron.
‘Can I help you, mademoiselle?’
Each word was steeped in irony. They seemed to come from the shadow of a grey van parked in the side street next to the café, so I walked over, the metal bar tight in my fist at my side.
‘Bonjour,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
Maurice Piquet stepped forward into the light. I didn’t run. I didn’t run. Instead I did look to see if he had a knife, but he was holding nothing in his meat-cleaver hands. He was wearing a dark fedora over his spiky hair; a lightweight suit covered up his bulk and made him almost blend in among the tourists. Almost. How can you blend in when you have the eyes of a killer?
‘You’ve been restyling my car, I see,’ I said.
‘And you’ve been restyling your face. Pick a battle with a brick wall, did you?’
‘Something like that.’ I didn’t dare look away from his square face, not for a second.
Without turning my back, I moved over to the café and sat down at one of the pavement tables under a striped sun umbrella, the tyre iron discreetly across my lap.
‘Won’t you join me, Monsieur Piquet?’
He’d have joined me anyway. He was more alert now, as if his brain had ground through its gears, and he sat down heavily opposite me. I signalled the waiter.
‘Two brandies, s’il vous
plaît.’
‘What the shit are you playing at, lady?’ Piquet demanded.
‘I’m not playing. I’m serious.’
‘I don’t like games, especially bitch games.’
I let it pass. Insults were harmless, knives were not. Ask Mickey. Piquet’s voice was deep, the kind that seems to rise up from somewhere underground, which was exactly where I wished he was right now. He lit a cigarette. I waited till I had his full attention.
‘Why have you and Bertin been trying to kill me?’
He looked surprised by the question; his bristly black eyebrows shot up, but he looked tired too, as if hadn’t had it easy either and I was just one more annoyance to his day. ‘Because you and that bastard crippled brother of yours are filthy traitors to France.’
That wasn’t the reply I was expecting. The waiter brought our drinks and I reached for mine a little too fast. I felt the warm liquid burn the roof of my mouth and I gripped my glass to keep my hand steady. At the table to one side of us a young couple gazed at each other like new lovers and I sat back stiffly in my chair. I didn’t want anyone, even someone I didn’t know, to think Piquet and I were lovers.
‘André and I are not traitors,’ I stated. ‘You and Bertin are the ones betraying France, you and your Communist comrades in Moscow.’
He laughed and there was something in it that made my skin crawl. ‘Listen, bitch, get your facts straight. You and your Commie brother André are the ones stirring up shit here. He’s been working for the MGB for years as a double agent, thinking that we haven’t pegged him, and now he has dragged his baby sister into it too. Don’t think we don’t know what you’re doing, because we do. You’re as bad as he is.’
This didn’t make sense. Who was this man?
He knocked back his brandy and his stone-grey eyes observed me with disgust. ‘First he comes down here, sucking information out of the Yank airmen every weekend, and then you join him and take over his job.’
My teeth clamped down on my tongue. My hands kept clear of the metal bar on my lap. I didn’t trust myself with either of them.
‘You start shaking your tail at every American who comes near,’ he continued, ‘with the intention of milking them for new data – the airmen in the bar and at the dance, the major you took riding. Don’t look at me like you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, lady.’
He had a tongue in his head full of venom. I leaned forward, hands flat on the table.
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘You are the Communist. You and Bertin are both MGB Soviet agents. You are the one who chased me out of Serriac on your motorcycle, aren’t you? Admit it.’
‘You’re right, lady, I did.’
‘And the note. You put the note on my windscreen to scare me into running back to Paris, didn’t you?’
‘That was Bertin. He wanted you gone from anywhere near the air base. But you’ve got it all upside down, lady. Think about it. You are the interfering bitch who set up the visitor session at the air base, so don’t even bother denying it. I heard that you were the one who made it happen.’
I nodded.
‘You arranged it,’ he said, ‘so that your Commie hardliner comrade – the headmistress – could damage the US aircraft and runway.’
Fear circled inside me, fear of what his words meant.
‘No,’ I said. I could hear the jagged edge to my voice. ‘It’s not true. You’re lying.’
Let him be lying. Please. Let this hard-muscled murderer be a lying bastard as well.
‘Was it you or Bertin who drove the van in Paris that smashed into my car?’ I demanded. ‘The one that crippled my brother?’
This time he laughed long and loud, turning heads. ‘No. Is that what he’s told you?’
‘Did you shoot at me on the farm?’
‘Listen, bitch, if I’d shot at you, you’d be dead.’
Silence sat between us on the table. Just the grind of traffic and the clink of glasses chafed at it. I kept my face still, eyes flat and expressionless.
‘You,’ I said again, ‘are an MGB Soviet agent.’
He pushed his big square face close up to mine. To a passing glance we might look like lovers.
‘Lady,’ he hissed at me, ‘I am CIA.’
He had to be lying. Had to be. This time I was certain of it. Because if he wasn’t lying it meant that André was and I couldn’t bear that. But even as I told myself that Piquet was a lying bastard, something started to unravel in my head. Things started to make more sense.
‘And Bertin?’ I asked.
‘CIA.’ He flashed a vicious smile at me and I wanted to reach across the table and rip it off his face.
‘The pair of you? Both CIA?’
He nodded, grinning at me.
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘Believe what the fuck you want, lady.’
I didn’t want to believe this. I would sell my soul before I believed it, I would let Cosette gallop back into the fire before I believed it. I would have to walk away from André if I believed it, so no, no, I rejected his lies. To believe him would be like tearing out of me all that made me a Caussade.
‘Gilles Bertin is dead,’ I announced.
‘Now who’s lying?’ he sneered.
‘He has a bullet in his chest. Inside his own house.’
It was in my voice, the small voice of truth that rings clear as a bell, and he heard it. His face became rigid and his heavy lips drew back to bare his teeth. I felt nothing but grim pleasure to see the shockwave ripple through him and I threw what was left of my brandy in his face. He stumbled to his feet, cursing me.
‘That’s for Mickey Ashton,’ I told him.
‘That piece of Yankee shit deserved to die. He was feeding technical information to the Russians. So when I was ordered to put an end to him, the protest march was the perfect cover. Bertin’s idea.’ The mention of Bertin stopped him in his tracks. ‘Start counting the fucking hours, lady, because you haven’t got many left, I promise you.’
I watched him go, pounding down the crooked side road back into the old town where Bertin’s house lay. And with every footstep I heard the last few links that held the Caussade family together snap apart.
*
Clarisse placed a glass of cognac in my hand and wrapped my fingers around it, but it was going to take more than that to shift the chill inside me.
‘What has happened, chérie? You look sick.’
‘I’m not sick.’
We were seated on a dainty chaise longue in Clarisse’s hotel room. A magazine lay open on the bed, her shoes had been kicked off under the coffee table, her reading glasses abandoned on a satinwood chest. The normality of it gave me something to cling on to in a world that had been spun upside down.
‘You were meant to stay at home, Eloïse, not to knock yourself out running around Arles on your own. I promised your policeman, remember?’
I laid a grateful hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t lecture me, please, Clarisse.’
‘Bad day?’
‘As bad as it gets.’
‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’
Her green eyes watched me over her glass with such affection that I came close to telling her it all. Everything. Needing to pour the poison out of me. Instead I swigged down the cognac and rose to my feet.
‘It’s too dangerous, Clarisse. I don’t want you to get hurt, which is what happens to people I am seen with. So go. Leave Arles. I couldn’t bear to see you . . .’ Dead was the word that so nearly tumbled from my tongue. ‘. . . in danger.’
She studied me through half-closed eyes, the way I’d seen her study surveillance photographs that I’d brought her in Paris, assessing their value. ‘Very well,’ she conceded, ‘I’ll go home to Paris.’ She gave an elegant shrug. ‘I’ve had enough of the stink of bullshit anyway.’
In return I found her a smile. ‘Good. At last you are seeing sense.’
But I would miss my boss, miss her a lot. I hugged her, b
ut she had become stiff and unyielding, hurt by my desire to drive her out.
‘Can I do anything for you before I go?’ she asked.
‘I need four new tyres.’
‘On a Sunday? What happened?’
‘They’ve been stabbed.’
‘Merde!’
‘Exactly.’
She walked over to the telephone beside the bed. ‘I’ll work my charm on the manager.’
I was sure she would too.
‘Clarisse.’
She heard something in my voice that made her lift her head and look at me. ‘What is it, chérie?’
‘Does the CIA kill people?’
‘Yes, all the time, I imagine. This may be a Cold War, but it’s still a war.’
He was coming for me. Whichever side he was on.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
When wounded, human instinct is to hide. Or to fly to those we love to take care of us. I was wounded. I don’t mean my face. I mean inside. I could feel the drip, drip, drip of blood and I could hear the soft sobs of pain deep within my head.
I drove fast on my four new tyres, I drove to the only place on earth I wanted to be. I kept the car windows down so that the wind that whipped across the marshes could lay the taste of salt on my lips to replace the taste of betrayal. Every field, every stream, every stretch of woodland, they all held memories of André and now it all meant nothing. He had handed me to his enemies on a plate.
I tried to hate him, my own brother, whom I’d trusted with my life, but I wasn’t capable of it. If he was working for Soviet Russia, if it were true, then what was I? A cover story? Was I the smoke and mirrors? Was I supposed to distract the CIA watchers, the Bertins and Piquets of this world, while André got on with whatever it was he was doing?
And what about the drop I’d made in Arles? The negative film I’d taken. Who picked that up? I slammed the heel of my hand on the steering wheel and felt a dull shame flush through me. My broken nose throbbed, but the pain of it didn’t come close to the pain of knowing.
The Guardian of Lies Page 24