All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  Sometimes he would recollect family outings, speaking aloud in the hope she might hear him and be soothed. Do you remember, dearest, last summer at the beach? You and your brothers decided to enter a sand castle contest and build a miniature Giza Plateau. Always such a grand project with you three. The boys ran off—don't they always!— leaving just the two of us to do all the work. But we won a red ribbon, Chloe! Your brothers insisted it was their ribbon, too, and you agreed. I was proud of you for that, but your father was prouder still. He talked about your Sphinx for days and how soon you'd be working alongside him. There will be more good days, Chloe. I promise.

  WHEN THE car pulled up to the farmhouse, tires crunching on gravel, Poincaré had just finished feeding Claire lunch and was helping her to a chair by the window, where he planned to read aloud or work a crossword puzzle, asking for her help. He might say, "What's a nine-letter word related to seasonal that begins with d ?" She would not answer, but he would continue in this fashion for as long as an hour. Because she had a fondness for historical novels, he resurrected a copy of Les Miserables from his college days and read to her in thirty-minute intervals. Sometimes he would switch on the radio and search for a changed expression, perhaps the shadow of a memory passing across her brow. Try what he may, Claire would not return.

  The vehicle on the drive could only be Laval's ancient truck, the old man arriving with news of migrant workers expected for the fall harvest. But when the door opened and closed without the usual protest of rusting metal, Poincaré walked outside to discover Paolo Ludovici, with suitcase, about to knock on the jamb. They stood on either side of the threshold for a moment, Poincaré reading in Paolo's face all he needed to know of his own slide into oblivion.

  "Christ, Henri—leave it to you to find a spot in the middle of nowhere."

  Poincaré did not invite him in just then. He stepped onto the terrace and walked Paolo through the vineyards, grateful they knew each other well enough to say nothing. It surprised Poincaré that he took comfort in his visitor. After six weeks without a single medical report that could be called hopeful, he thought all comfort gone from the world and that, in any event, he did not deserve comfort while his family suffered.

  At dusk, the three of them sat on the terrace beneath the ancient oak, overlooking the vineyard and the valley. Poincaré had grilled chops from a hog Laval had butchered, and Eva had picked greens from the garden for a salad. Ludovici regarded the contents of his glass, then the unlabelled bottle Poincaré had set on the table. "It's drinkable," he said. "Barely. I'll leave this evening if you want. I didn't call because you would have said no."

  "Stay the evening," he answered. "Eva will make up a bed."

  Ludovici stayed the week. He rose early to take on jobs that Poincaré, in better times, would have tackled with pleasure. One morning found him on the roof with a bucket of pitch, hunting leaks. Rain the evening before had left the floor of the house in puddles, and Poincaré settled for placing buckets and hoping for the best. Another morning, Poincaré woke to the sound of a truck dumping a load of firewood, Ludovici having conferred with Laval and contracted with a supplier down valley. Each day saw another chore crossed off a list Poincaré had neglected to make. It was as if he could no longer project himself into a future in which he might appreciate a roof in good repair or a warm hearth in December. Poincaré, in fact, had no future because the attacks had reduced his life to a series of endless, blasted moments. Ludovici responded with work. The repair of a stone wall, the replacement of broken windows in the barn, the re-pointing of a foundation: every new project was a hand extended that Poincaré chose not to grasp.

  Paolo did ask Poincaré's permission once—and Laval's. The hard shell case he had brought with him was a sniper's rifle he had mastered during his service in the Italian army. He worked at keeping his skills sharp but had found too few places to practice at 1,000 meters. "I can't very well shoot targets in Milan, can I?" he said. "If I miss, I kill some old lady's Pekingese." Poincaré agreed, so long as the noise did not upset Claire. Laval fought in the resistance as a teenager and could not say yes quickly enough. He joined Paolo in these daily outings and reported faithfully to Poincaré each evening. The usually taciturn old man could barely believe Ludovici's skill at hitting targets Laval had trouble seeing with binoculars. Laval followed at Ludovici's heels with questions about the latest telescopic sights that compensated for bullet drop and wind drift. Ludovici worked with two scopes of Swiss manufacture, one for level terrain and one for sloping. What used to be simple cross hairs in Laval's time were now carefully engineered instruments for determining distance to target. The bolt action gun itself was made in Germany and broke down to a briefcase. "A thing of beauty," Laval declared. "With my rifle I couldn't hit a mountain at 1,000 meters. He set out ten targets the size of my thumb at 100-meter intervals, at various elevations, and hit the center of each! I approve of your friend, Henri."

  A week passed. One afternoon as the men followed a stone wall that marked the property line Poincaré shared with Laval, Paolo announced his departure as casually as he had arrived. "I'm expected in Lyon tomorrow," he said.

  They continued for a time. At the south vineyard, Ludovici inspected the arbors that Laval, in Poincaré's somnambulance, was now maintaining. He was tying up a vine, facing away from Poincaré, when he said: "I found the middleman. Albert told you?"

  "Yes," said Poincaré.

  "In Dresden."

  Dresden? The syllables meant nothing.

  "Did he also tell you they've completely isolated Banović? He's permitted Dutch representation, only. No more contact with anyone not cleared by the International Court. They've assigned a defense attorney even though he insists on representing himself. They've completely shut him down, Henri. The trial will begin soon. They're reading the charges in open court next week."

  Poincaré secured a vine to a post.

  "Henri, are you understanding me? Banović's people are dead." Poincaré began walking again. Paolo caught up to him. "Eva's good with Claire. She's a sweet kid."

  Poincaré nodded.

  "Stop and look at me."

  Poincaré stopped.

  "I did everything I could. I barely slept."

  Poincaré opened a knife and worked dirt from his fingernails.

  "I tracked him to Dresden and found a fleshy, middle-aged snot living in an apartment with his wife and grown son. They sold vegetables in a stall at the market, and to pass him on the street you wouldn't think twice. Except he was former Stasi and confessed that since the Wall came down times had been hard for people with his talents. 'No hard feelings,' he kept saying. I assured him I didn't have any either as I threw him off the roof of his building. They're dead, Henri. All of them."

  Poincaré cut a cluster of grapes. He held it at arm's length and thought the fruit was progressing nicely. "Paolo," he said. "It's been six weeks. Etienne has two metal plates in his hip and tubes still draining his chest. They get him out of bed with a walker each day until he collapses in pain. He screams . . . and he curses me, and they sedate him. Lucille's had five skin grafts for her burns, but that's nothing compared to what she's going through with the children. She's inconsolable. She can't even visit Chloe because of the risk of infection to them both. Georges is being fitted with a prosthetic leg and cries because of the blisters and because he misses his brother and sister. Émile is in some strange sort of dream state, unresponsive one moment, rousing the next, then falling off again." Poincaré turned toward the farmhouse. "So you see, it's a little late in the day to hear that the contractors are dead. You tried. It wasn't your fault. It was my fault. It was up to me to protect my family. I didn't. I should have quit Interpol years ago. Claire told me to quit. I should have quit."

  The color rose in Ludovici's face. "You should have killed Banović in Vienna is what you should have done. You knew he deserved it. In six months the judges in The Hague will find him guilty, and then what—all this grief to satisfy some sacred code of
yours about the rule of law? Would you once, just once, call the world what it is! Curse God and get on with it, Henri. Use your anger. Come back to us."

  "Did Albert send you?"

  "No! This was my vacation, for what it's worth."

  "I'm done with Interpol."

  "You're not!"

  Poincaré was tired. Even if he still believed in the mission of a war crimes tribunal—that what separated the Banovićs of the world from the jurists who would try them was the trial itself, an insistence on conscience and law—he had neither the energy nor will to speak. Ludovici lived by a different code and would not understand in any event. "Paolo," he said. "If you find any miracles on the road to Lyon, send one this way."

  Ludovici grabbed his arm. "You're a principled, scrupulous prick!" Was Paolo weeping? Poincaré did not care. The very earth was weeping. "Do you mean you wouldn't kill him if you had the chance, not even now—if he were standing right here? I would kill him!"

  "Paolo, don't."

  "I could find a way. I still could. They're bringing him to open court late next week. A head shot at 1,500 meters when they transfer him from the prison van—I know the Criminal Court. I know the surrounding area. This could never be traced."

  "Enough," said Poincaré.

  "Come back to us, Henri. Leave Claire with the girl. You're dying here."

  Poincaré buried his hands deep into the pockets of a favorite jacket that, of late, had grown large in the shoulders and chest. He stared down the valley, struggling to recall what had drawn Claire and him to this place. Here was the same broad sky; the same acacia and cypress, the same tang of manure and the neat vineyards and the narrow road that led to a world now devoid of everything he loved. "Paolo, you're wrong," he said, turning up the hill to the terrace where Claire sat alone, a pillar of salt. "I'm not dying. I'm dead."

  CHAPTER 18

  But that was not quite true. If death meant a long night insensible to pain, then Poincaré was not finished suffering. The day after Ludovici left for Lyon, he resumed his usual schedule and traveled to Paris to sit with Etienne and the family as they slept, against Etienne's wishes, and then by day to sit with Chloe. The cost for a private ward with round-the-clock nursing was ruinous, but Poincaré did not care. He sold the apartment in Lyon, and within a month the profit was gone. He tapped his savings. The bleeding was profuse. It did not matter.

  At the sound of double doors opening at the end of a long corridor, the evening nurse, Marian Berrenger, checked several charts and looked up into the eyes of a wraith. "No change," she reported. "Your son took a few more steps with his walker, but they've given him morphine again. There's some concern he's growing dependent, and not so much because of the physical pain. The doctors are meeting tomorrow to find another drug. Georges"—she checked a chart—"he's developed some oozing where they're fitting him with a prosthesis. The child continues to ask for his brother and sister, and a psychologist has been called. Your daughter-in-law has largely fought off the infections from her burns, but Dr. Kempf is continuing an intravenous antibiotic, and I see here a prescription for a new anti-depressant. Lucille is scheduled for her sixth and perhaps final skin graft at the end of the week . . . this one on her arm, I believe. Thank goodness she wasn't burned on the face." Berrenger apologized immediately. "That was thoughtless, Inspector."

  Poincaré steadied himself against the desk. "My granddaughter is receiving the very best care," he said, clearing his throat.

  Why the pretense? The child would become the object of playground derision. As a young woman applying foundation cream to scars she could never hide, Chloe would run from mirrors her whole life, wondering what man could ever look past the ugliness and ask her to dance. But Poincaré could not think Marian Berrenger cruel. It was she, after all, who had saved his life that first day when Etienne, staggering to awareness, saw his father and screamed: Get out! You've ruined us! She took his hand and said: "I've seen it before, Monsieur. It's the morphine talking. Your son doesn't mean it."

  Still, Etienne's grief had knocked Poincaré backwards down a tunnel, and he recalled the sensation of falling when from somewhere a hand grabbed him and a firm voice called: "He doesn't know what he's saying. Don't lose heart, Monsieur. You mustn't!"

  He did not believe her, but he let himself be comforted that first, terrible day as she walked him to a side corridor, out of Etienne's sight but still within range of his cries. Poincaré was falling, but Berrenger would not let go. She sat him down in a chair wedged between a soiled clothes hamper and a gurney. When she returned with a cup of water, she held his trembling hands and knelt so that he might see her. She looked into his eyes. "I read the papers, Inspector. You did your job. Your job! The world can be such an awful place."

  He left the hospital that day and began visiting by night, as Berrenger suggested, while Etienne and the others slept—until such time Etienne was ready for a more reasoned meeting with his father. Six weeks into the ordeal, Poincaré had already settled into something of a routine: up before sunrise at the farm, a thirty-minute drive to the station, then a series of trains that deposited him at gare d'Austerlitz more or less around midnight. There would be a taxi ride and then the long walk to a remote wing of the hospital, where he would sit for five hours by their beds. At first light, he would leave for the burn clinic across town to keep his daytime vigil at Chloe's bedside.

  "What of Émile?" he asked.

  The nurse checked another chart. "He's developed an infection in his lungs. We're treating that with intravenous cefuroxime. Please, go in. I've set a chair by the door. And I don't need to remind you that if anyone wakes—"

  In his life Poincaré had been shot and beaten so severely he was left for dead. He had buried a child with Claire, Etienne's sister, when she was weeks old, and he had mourned three miscarriages with his wife. On a daylong trip with his father into the Rhône Alps, many kilometers along a remote trail, his father died of exertion, his heart seizing with the finality of snapped twig. Poincaré carried him out. Years later, he had prayed over a ravine filled with the bones of children, and he had sat across a table from his mother, whose dementia was so profound that she did not recognize her only child. But none of that pain could touch this pain—of watching a feeding tube run to Émile's stomach, or watching Georges sleep beneath a sheet tented over his amputated leg, or seeing Lucille propped on her side, her arm held above and away from her by a complicated trapeze. None of that pain could touch the loss of Etienne's affections.

  Poincaré gripped the arms of a metal chair, lost in his son's jagged breathing. He heard a child's voice: "Papa, look! If you place weights against the columns just so—" He could see a young Etienne piling blocks along the outward edges of two columns and feel his joy at discovering the flying buttress: "If you set the weights just so, you can build an arch and the columns won't give way. And on top of the arch you can place more blocks!"

  For her birthday that year, Etienne built Claire a gingerbread cathedral, a replica of St. Jean of Lyon. For a month or more his room had been declared off limits to both parents. When the work was complete, for the grand presentation Etienne set candles inside the cathedral and switched off lights throughout the apartment. The effect was startling; but that did not keep the Poincarés from eating gargoyles that night or nibbling the cathedral's grand façade. What had they done to deserve such a child?

  The only lights along the ward were LED readouts of machines that monitored blood pressure and respiration. At 4 AM, Etienne stirred. Before Poincaré could slip from the room, his son saw him in the half-light and croaked: "Get out!"

  Poincaré rocked forward, opening his hands.

  His son stared him down: "You didn't push the buttons. But the bombs exploded just the same, Papa. Because of you—of what you do. Leave. We're ruined." Etienne spoke calmly; it was no longer morphine talking.

  So Poincaré rose. He loved his son enough to say nothing, enough to turn and walk away.

  LATER THAT same morn
ing, as he prepared to enter the sterile environment of Chloe's burn unit, a nurse approached and informed him that the child's father, now well enough to reassert his parental rights, had called to cancel Poincaré's visitation privileges.

  "That can't be!" Poincaré protested.

  The nurse produced a piece of paper.

  "I won't!"

  "Monsieur, what you want makes no difference. I have a document."

  "But you know me," he said. "I've been coming for weeks. You yourself said no one else visits. All I do is sit and talk—where's the harm?"