“Does he have his heart set on it?” Narbonne asked.
“Quite,” Doc replied.
The following day, Major Mercier sat at their table. He was a square-shouldered, square-jawed man with a square forehead. His face looked like a wooden mask with very bright eyes which betrayed a gloomy, ill-restrained rage, as well as an insatiable desire for risk. Even though his duties and rank forbade him from flying, he often took a fighter plane out on his own and went out on patrols. Everyone admired his courage, but nobody loved him.
Nevertheless, the major quickly knew how to dispel the unease his appearance had caused and appeared to gladly take part in a game that was too meek and modest for his own taste. After an hour, seeing that Narbonne and Herbillon kept losing, as usual, he exclaimed: “You’re playing really badly. We’re going to skin you alive!”
“We’ve had a lot of practice when it comes to losing, Major,” Narbonne replied.
“No, I must insist, it shames me to take so much of your money. Let’s play Shimmy instead, at least you might stand a chance with that.”
“It’s a little dangerous,” Doc said. “We’ll get carried away.”
“Come on, let’s start small. One louis a hand.”
The officers yielded. Narbonne began. He lost right away. The game went on, hand after hand, with varying degrees of success, while everyone noticed that Mercier limited himself to watching the game without taking part.
When it was his turn to the banker dealer, he casually pulled out a 100 franc note and said: “I’m afraid I don’t have any change, gentlemen, but don’t feel obliged to cover my bet.”
As there were a few of them playing, it worked out easily. Mercier won. He banked 200 francs. Then he won again.
“Twenty louis, banco,” he said leisurely.
A few hands placed some small, partial bets. In order to pleasure the major, Narbonne proclaimed: “I’ll take the bet.”
Mercier still played the better hand.
He looked at the sum, which had since doubled, and pondered.
“I’ll deal again,” Mercier said.
“I’ll still take the bet,” Narbonne said.
He lost. The major picked up the banknotes, pushed the cards away and jokingly asked: “So who’s going to be the banker now?”
Narbonne thought he detected a challenge in the major’s sentence: was Mercier looking for another match, or was this simply that unavoidable time of night when one became oblivious to the meaning of money? He couldn’t tell, but his astonished comrades heard him exclaim: “I will, Major.”
He laid out sixteen 100-franc notes.
“I never play the first hand against the bank, it’s up to you, gentlemen!” Mercier said.
Everyone placed small, partial bets. Once the cards were dealt, Narbonne played his hand—he had a nine.
“Hey, good for you!” Mercier exclaimed.
The officers saw the same cruel, voracious sparkle in Mercier’s eyes that made them gleam whenever he flew off in his fighter plane.
“Banco,” he said.
He looked at his cards and declared: “I’ll stand pat.”
Narbonne had a three.
“I think I’ve struck a bad deal,” he said, taking another card. It was a five.
“Good draw,” the major said. “It cost me 100 louis, are you going to stop?”
“No, I’ll keep going.”
“Very well then, banco!”
Narbonne drew a nine again. Mercier handed over 4,000 francs.
A great silence filled the room, because everyone knew that the major lived entirely off his army pay. Yet his square face didn’t twitch in the slightest and his voice was very calm when he said: “This hand passed seven times, that’s unusual.”
Embarrassed, Narbonne rapped his fingers on the table. He didn’t want to quit the game after having won so much but, on the other hand, how could he possibly continue? His eyes met the major’s and, despite their hardness, he thought he could see a kind of entreaty in them, which made him feel bad. He made the following suggestion: “Would you like to play again, Major?”
“Gladly!”
All eyes were fixed on them. Eight thousand francs were at stake, and the morbid attraction of instant gain, the uncertainty of luck and the size of the sum being played for seemed to rise from the table like unhealthy fumes.
“I’d like a card,” Mercier said.
But on seeing the King that Narbonne dealt him, his jaws clenched.
Narbonne had pulled a six, and thus won the game when, to everyone’s surprise, he drew another card.
“He must be crazy,” Herbillon thought, “or maybe he just wants to lose.”
Narbonne drew a three. He was doing even better.
“I owe you 8,000 francs, old chap,” Mercier said, pretending to get up.
“No, Major, I couldn’t possibly leave you like this. Would you like to play another game to redeem your debt?”
“Double or nothing!” Mercier exclaimed, his voice echoing far too loudly in that little room.
Doc whispered in Herbillon’s ear: “He could probably pay off the 8,000, just about, but 16,000? Never!”
“But he’s bound to win, you see—it’s just a matter of mathematics.”
This time, Mercier’s fingers trembled slightly as they gripped the cards. He drew an eight. Narbonne drew a nine.
The discomfort in the room was such that the officers hung their heads to avoid seeing the major’s face. Without hesitating, Mercier said:
“Banco. Thirty-two thousand francs.”
Even if he’d wanted to, Narbonne couldn’t have shied away from the challenge, and he won again.
Mercier persisted in playing double of nothing for another three times and lost on each occasion. He now owed Narbonne half a million. Everyone thought he seemed as though he was about to sink into an abyss.
That Narbonne continued to accept his bets was merely the result of a subordinate being charitable to his commanding officer.
No one could tell who was more tormented by the situation: the major, who was getting thrashed, which was unusual for him, or Narbonne, who would have gladly cheated just in order to lose if he could be certain no one would catch him in the act.
Nevertheless, the game had to go on.
Mercier had even stopped saying “Banco!”, and Narbonne didn’t even bring the issue up. He merely continued dealing the cards, looking at them, drawing others when he didn’t even need them, and yet still continued to win.
Narbonne kept winning, damned by a lucky streak, as the sequence of cards he drew inevitably gave him the upper hand. It defied all calculations, probabilities and likelihood, and it seemed set to persist throughout the whole night.
After having won eighteen times, Narbonne finally lost.
Mercier stood up and left without a word, not deigning to touch the money on the table, which he’d rightfully won.
Nobody said a single word or made a single gesture to try to detain him.
That very morning, when the major went out in his plane to try out a new engine, he was killed on the spot. Afraid to vent their thoughts, the officers who’d assembled in the mess hall said: “Another loss of momentum.”
When the group met again that night at Narbonne’s, their voices were subdued. They rarely spoke, but they played cards furiously. Far from serving as a warning, Mercier’s adventure had piqued their passions. The sums that had been gambled away the previous night had now cast a spell on them. Their grasp on the value of money was completely skewed. Their hardened faces and the curtness of their speech betrayed the primitive instinct to win that was making them forsake the many ties that bound those men in friendship. One would have said that Death was keeping its pale eyes fixed on them. Narbonne, whose fortune had imparted him with a relative indifference to money, felt scared whenever he looked his comrades in the eye.
Far more susceptible to the dead major’s influence than anyone else in that group, and believing that the
cards in his hands held the very essence of his life, Herbillon’s foolish audacity was unmatched by any of the others.
When he got back to his room, where the flowers on the wallpaper already emerged out of the shadows, Jean threw himself on the bed without even removing his boots, wanting to fall asleep right away so he could forget everything. He had lost 8,000 francs’ worth of IOUs. Yet sleep wouldn’t come to him.
The images of Bloody Hearts, Flat Diamonds, Mottled Clubs and Spades with their funerary spikes, the impassive, mysterious faces of Kings, Queens and Jacks, flashed past him under his feverish eyelids, under his aching forehead, like a bedevilled crowd, a procession of the damned.
Giving up the fight against that devilish influence, the young man headed towards the open window that gave onto the summer dawn. The scent of peppermint carnations wafted up like a wave from the garden below. A thin, pinkish strip on the horizon gently gnawed away at the sky’s darkness. Witnessing the breaking of a pure, pristine morning, Jean felt miserable and soiled.
Mercier’s death had alerted the entire squadron to the existence of Narbonne’s card-playing sessions, and Claude had no difficulty in figuring out the root cause behind the crazed look on Herbillon’s face. The remaining tenderness he still felt for that young man was now compounded by a feeling of responsibility towards him. After all, hadn’t the captain entrusted him with his comrades’ well-being?
He took hold of the officer cadet’s arm and this gesture filled Jean with gratitude. How badly he needed some help and support on that day! The image of Denise was completely effaced by the calamity he now found himself in.
They walked in silence all the way to the vast gardens, where the light and the heat flowed in attenuated waves.
“Did you lose a great deal of money?” Maury gently asked him.
“Far too much!”
“Nothing to despair over… you’re young and idle…”
Then he added, thus removing any hint of reproach: “…and you feel you should be allowed to do whatever you want because our most likely fate that destiny has in store for us is death.”
Claude’s words worked like a soothing balm on Herbillon’s suffering. They offered excuses at a time when Jean felt he could no longer forgive himself, having already done so on too many occasions. Jean bitterly reflected how it had been exactly one of those excuses that had led him into the arms of the wife who belonged to the man who was consoling him.
Enfeebled by his anxiety and sleep deprivation, he murmured: “Oh! If things hadn’t changed between the two of us, I wouldn’t have taken things that far…”
An emotion Jean was too well acquainted with lit up Maury’s eyes.
“Jean,” he said, “nothing on this earth ever dies completely. For the time being, promise me you won’t go to Narbonne’s any more.”
He’d injected such affection into his voice that the young man momentarily thought their friendship appeared ready to be made new.
“At least let me try to recoup my losses, then I’ll stop, I swear.”
“Give it up, you’ll be better off that way.”
“I can’t. I lost too much.”
“How much?”
“Eight thousand,” Jean whispered.
“Listen,” Claude firmly told him, “I’ll loan you the money. You can pay me back in instalments.”
Claude instantly turned pale. Jean had pushed him away with a brutal, lifeless gesture. The abhorrence Maury felt at the young man’s refusal reawakened in him a horror that he thought he’d laid to rest for good, albeit in a harsher and more definite form.
CHAPTER VI
ALARGE SIGN was displayed in the front window of the Café de la Poste, which was situated on the main square. In huge, clumsily scrawled letters, it announced that the café was under new management and was now run by “Mademoiselle Paméla, formerly of the Saint-Martin Casino”.
The girl was tall, common and rather beautiful: buxom, with thick, coppery locks and meaty lips. She kept tirelessly singing lazy love songs, risqué rhymes, drank a lot and successfully encouraged others to do so too.
This was where Marbot took Herbillon the following evening.
Standing on the cabaret’s threshold, the officer cadet thought everything about it—the smoke-filled room, the clamour, the brutally animated figures—was simply repulsive.
“What’s the matter?”
“Don’t you see? There’s nowhere to sit.”
“Nowhere to sit!” Marbot exclaimed. “I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any room for veterans of the 39. Landlady!”
Marbot’s powerful voice overcame the noise and attracted Paméla’s attention just as she was getting ready to sing. She slowly furrowed her thick eyebrows, or rather her monobrow. Her success had sharpened her impatience and authoritativeness. She didn’t let men of Marbot’s type boss her around in the slightest.
An insult was about to slip out of her lips when she laid eyes on Herbillon. He was so handsome and sad—the kind of carnal sadness women always fall for—that Paméla hesitated, then left the rickety platform that served as her stage.
“You shouldn’t outstay your welcome when all you drink is red wine,” she told two artillery farriers. “I need you to give up your table!”
“But we want to listen to you sing,” one of them protested.
“You can hear me just as well standing up.”
They obeyed the sound of her voice, as well as her thick, red lips.
“Over here, my little pilot!” she exclaimed.
“You see?” Marbot told him, looking smug. “I only have to snap my fingers to make it so…”
A waitress approached them. They ordered hard liquor.
Paméla went back to her stage.
She sang with a sharp, convincing tone and a raspy solemnity that gave her otherwise common voice and coarse gestures a greater authority. The room obediently accepted her sensual and tender invitations. Through the slow undulations of thick smoke, one could see her primal, serene face emerge distorted, swollen and exaggerated, as though it were a mask.
Perhaps the only one in the room to do so, Herbillon avoided looking at Paméla. The primal nature of the spectacle inspired an aversion in him that bordered on hatred. Far too young still to discern that his loathing was caused by the fact he saw himself reflected in that girl, Jean felt an intense annoyance swell within him, an unsavoury hatred that wasn’t directed at anything or anyone.
He tried to assuage it by drinking, but his unease wasn’t the sort that could be quelled by alcohol; in fact, thanks to his moody impatience, drinking was only bound to exacerbate it.
When Paméla finished, the crowd rose in a chorus: “Encore!”
“Sing us another!”
“Don’t be lazy!”
She regally shook her coppery locks and replied: “I’m singing myself to death here and you want more! My throat’s on fire!”
She went to sit with a police officer with swarthy skin and a vain moustache, who waited for her with a bottle of champagne in front of him as though he owned the place. While letting the police officer touch her fleshy shoulders, Paméla kept searching for Herbillon’s gaze.
“What a glorious filly!” Marbot exclaimed. “I’d ride her bareback!”
“No accounting for taste!” Jean retorted, in an almost wounding manner.
His companion observed: “You weren’t always this difficult…”
“You don’t say!”
Placing his big fists on the table, Marbot told him: “In any case, I’m warning you that I’m going to invite her over for a drink, whether you like it or not.”
“You can do so on your own.”
“As you like. I’m not going to force you.”
The only desire Herbillon felt within him—that of leaving—was disappointed by those words. They made him realize that the only things waiting for him outside were the night, the silence and his own thoughts.
“I don’t want to miss out on the show,” he said
sarcastically, “but I’ll watch from a distance…”
A table freed up on the other side of the room and Jean thus parted with Marbot, who muttered: “You’re really out of it today, cadet…”
This little argument hadn’t eluded the attentions of Paméla, who kept an unfailing watch over her realm.
“I have to go over there,” she told the police officer, “those new customers don’t look that happy to me.”
She freed herself from the officer’s arm, which was clasped around her waist, and approached Marbot.
“Did you have a fight with your friend?” she asked him.
Marbot’s eyes stealthily drifted towards Herbillon who, with his head hung low, no longer heard or saw anything, except the already drained glass in front of him, and was completely absorbed in his sad reverie.
“There are never any serious disputes between the two of us, my beauty!” Marbot cheerfully replied. “I don’t blame him. The boy’s been completely different ever since he came back from his leave. He must be heartbroken.”
A deep sense of compassion weakened Paméla’s muscles, the same kind of feeling she experienced whenever she walked through the streets of a lower-class neighbourhood and heard a plaintive love song.
“Heartbroken…” she said. “Such a handsome boy…”
“That’s exactly the kind of boy these things happen to, of course! It’s because they take themselves too seriously! Will you drink with me?”
“I won’t turn you down if you offer me one some other time, but not tonight, my policeman is jealous.”
“Well, I’m on his turf here… I understand…”
Marbot hung his head and, in a mutter, added: “Policemen… they’re worse than Fokkers.”
Paméla took a few steps back towards her table, hesitated, then turned towards Herbillon. She couldn’t resist the allure of that smooth forehead, which the officer cadet held tightly in his hands. Paméla couldn’t overcome her desire.
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