by Ben Stevens
‘And?’ said Pradel testily. He considered that this conversation was fast moving away from the subject of himself.
‘What I mean is this: why don’t you come and stay? I had been meaning to ask you before, but there were… There were a few alterations I had to make.’
‘Alterations?’
Dismissing the subject with a wave of his claw-like hand, Raymond said vaguely, ‘It is an old building... Anyway, why don’t you come and spend a weekend there? A change of scenery will do you the world of good, of that I’m certain.’
‘When?’
‘No time like the present, I always say. Today is Friday, and I’m driving to my house this very evening.’
‘So soon, so soon,’ gasped Pradel, surprised by this possible disruption to his invariable routine. ‘There are things I must do, preparations I must make…’
‘Come now,’ laughed Raymond good-naturedly. ‘You can afford to neglect your duties just for the weekend, can’t you? Treat yourself for once.’
With a shrug of his wide shoulders Pradel signalled his cautious agreement... Then his fleshy face suddenly brightened as he gave the suggestion further thought, and he said, ‘I can hardly wait, you know! What a fantastic idea!’
‘I’ve got to get going, attend to a few matters. Shall I pick you up from this café at about six?’
‘I’ll be here,’ said Pradel with certainty.
Outside the large old house the wind howled and the rain crashed against the leaded glass windows. It was hard to believe that earlier, in Paris, it had been a bright and warm summer’s day.
Stoking the fire into a roaring blaze, Raymond then replaced the poker by the hearth.
‘A nasty night,’ he said.
Nodding, Pradel sunk further into the comfy leather chair that was placed close to the flames. He wondered if he’d made the right decision in accompanying Raymond to this house after all. It had been years since he’d left Paris – years since his routine of leaving his room for the café each and every day had been any different.
And away from familiar surroundings, he’d become steadily more aware that he really knew nothing much at all about this man called Raymond.
It was not as though anything in the man’s manner caused him alarm – Raymond made polite small talk and ensured that Pradel was comfortable and had a drink in his hand. The three hour drive to Hesdin had passed by agreeably enough, with a break for a drink and something to eat at a cafe halfway. But now that he’d time to think, all of Pradel’s old distrust – indeed dislike – of mankind came bubbling back to the surface of his mind.
As a prosecutor he’d quickly conditioned himself to never feel any compassion for a defendant, to never question or indeed care whether the man on trial might be innocent of the crime of which he was accused. To never wonder whether the notoriously corrupt methods of the Parisian police, or the perjured evidence of a witness, had resulted in a man being falsely charged.
As hard as he’d stared at the man in the dock, while holding the court spellbound with the power of his oratory, Pradel had seen nothing. His mind had instead created a piggish mask of filth and degradation that he used to mask the features of the defendant, so that he saw only an enemy of society who needed to be wiped from the face of the Earth.
If the man had not actually been this enemy (sometimes, in his heart of hearts, Pradel had been certain that a defendant was innocent) then he’d still done everything in his power to make it appear that he was. And before the bitch had entered his life and destroyed his career, he’d almost always been successful.
Having worked himself into a state of suspicion, Pradel now set his mind to determining exactly what it was that Raymond wanted.
Money? Was Raymond’s motive to ultimately swindle or rob him in some way? Hardly: he’d already made it perfectly obvious that he’d barely a centime to his name. Could it be, after all, that it was actually just company that Raymond sought? Pradel had never heard him talk of friends or seen him in the company of another man or woman. So it was indeed quite possible that this disfigured man was as lonely as he.
Pradel realised that this suggestion soothed his strangely troubled mind.
As the former prosecutor thought about such things, Raymond sat in the chair opposite and with his single eye stared happily at his captive. The flames of ecstatic joy burnt in his heart as fiercely as those flames in the hearth, so that he placed his hands hard on his thighs to stop his legs from shaking.
Now, after so many years spent dreaming about this moment, he could allow himself a little time to toy with this bastard...
‘What are you thinking about, Pierre? What question grips your soul?’
Pradel looked slowly up at him, thoughtfully sipping his brandy. The fire gave a sudden, fierce crackle, jagged yellow flames shooting angrily up into the chimney. The cracked marble mantelpiece above the hearth was bare except for an old wooden clock whose hands had long since stopped at ten to three. The smell of damp that had greeted the two men’s entry half an hour earlier had begun to diminish with the warmth of the fire; but the brown paper on the unadorned walls had peeled in places, exposing old and fragile plaster.
‘You must forgive my rude silence, Raymond,’ Pradel said slowly, with uncharacteristic humility. ‘For some years now I have been used to my lodgings and the café. This change in scene bewilders me, to a certain extent. I feel the remoteness of this house contrasting strongly with the liveliness of Paris.’
‘Are you sorry that you came, sorry that you’re experiencing this solitude?’
‘Hardly solitude, Raymond, for I’m not alone. I am adapting to a change in scenery, that is all. Familiarity is something that’s not easily relinquished, you know.’
‘But Pierre – earlier in the café you informed me that you were bored of Paris! So much for familiarity!’ Raymond exclaimed, his solitary eye now shining with some strange kind of mischievous pleasure.
Suddenly feeling deeply uneasy, Pradel murmured, ‘Well, all the same…’
‘Do you like familiarity? Do you need familiarity? Do you need to know exactly where you are each day every day, year in, year out? Is that what satisfies your soul?’
Flushing red, Pradel said angrily, ‘I think, Raymond, that you are assuming a touch too much familiarity on too short an acquaintance. I think what satisfies a man’s soul is best known only to himself, wouldn’t you agree?’
He took a gulp from his glass; then he flushed even redder, and held a hand to his forehead.
Closing his eyes, he heard Raymond say, ‘Pierre, what is the matter?’
‘I feel touched by fever. My head aches…’
‘You have had three glasses of brandy…’ Raymond tentatively suggested. He, of course, hadn’t touched a drop.
‘Perhaps… Perhaps… You mentioned dinner…?’
‘Yes, yes, in a while,’ Raymond said brusquely, so that Pradel opened his eyes and looked hard at him. Now seated on the edge of his seat, the man with the glass eye was clearly in a state of excitement.
He said, ‘Please, Pierre, I must return to the matter of our short acquaintance. Or rather, what you believe to be our short acquaintance. For you see, this was actually made nearly twenty years before I walked into that drab café a month or so ago, and sat down at your table for the first time.’
Wondering just what on Earth this madman was talking about, Pradel said slowly, ‘I don’t understand.’
Leaping up from his chair and limping rapidly around the moderately sized, almost empty room, Raymond then cried, ‘My real name is Henri Grandet! There!’
Pradel’s fat face was entirely blank. ‘Is this… Is this supposed to mean something to me?’ he asked quietly. Considering that he was effectively the prisoner of a madman, he wondered if he ought to try and grab the poker, so to use it as a weapon...
Henri’s reaction surprised him: he sagged back into his seat and covered his ruined face with one hand. He appeared utterly crushed.
S
eizing the opportunity, Pradel leant slowly out from his seat, his hand stealthily reaching for the poker.
He froze when – still covering his face – Henri said, ‘You do that and I’ll kill you now.’
For a short while Henri remained silent; then he removed his hand from his face, and looking at Pradel said mournfully, ‘I should have known, of course. One of just how many men was I? Of course you don’t remember me. Had I not been so badly burned you would still not have recognised me...
‘But still and all – when I think of the furore surrounding my case, the newspaper reports…! Think, man – think! Henri Grandet: Henri Grandet.’
‘The name means nothing to me,’ Pradel said obstinately.
With a curt nod of his head, Henri stopped looking so sorrowful.
He said brusquely, ‘My story should be heard in two parts, with the latter half first, and the former last. Do you think that after all the time I have spent listening to your ceaseless babblings about yourself, that you can hear my story?’
Again Pradel put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.
‘I do not understand… I do not…’ he breathed; then, ‘No – of course I do. It is this wretched brandy that bewilders me. At some point in the past you faced me as a defendant. Correct?’
Henri felt entirely perplexed. There was none of the fear evident in either Pradel’s voice or face that he’d assumed this realisation would have prompted.
‘Correct.’
There was indeed no fear at all. Instead there was a look almost of relief as Pradel said firmly, ‘Then kill me, as is doubtless your intention. And do not assume that you will have the satisfaction of hearing me beg for my life, of seeing tears course down my cheeks. If my life is indeed worth nothing then I at least have my pride, and so I will go to meet my maker armed with the knowledge that I died bravely.’
Henri leaned towards him, and there was no mistaking the vengeance that shone in his remaining eye. He fought valiantly against the overwhelming urge to wrap his hands round Pradel’s fleshy neck.
No, no – he had his plan – he had to stick to it.
‘Do not assume that your death will be quick,’ he said tightly, and at length.
Only for a moment did Pradel’s composure waver. His bravery was proving of great surprise to Henri.
‘So it is torture, is it? What – Dumas’ recipe? Do you intend to place me in some dark room and let me die of hunger? Of course, I should expect nothing less from a man of your ilk. Men of my own station – they would oblige their enemy with a quick death. Such is our type of honour.’
The pallor of the good half of his face ashen, Henri slumped back shocked in his chair.
‘You speak of honour? You, who had me buried alive for a murder I did not commit?’
With another curt shake of his head his composure returned; he said, ‘Enough – you will sit and listen to me talk: you have no other choice. If you interrupt or attempt to flee, I will hold your head in that fire until your face looks worse than my own.’
Obligingly, Pradel sat very still and said nothing. Once again Henri stood up; but this time he limped slowly about the room, marshalling his thoughts.
After a few minutes had passed, he said, ‘I have already explained that this story will take place in two parts – the latter half to be told now, the former… Later. You will extend me the courtesy of listening without interruption, and you will not drink another drop of brandy. I fear that it is not good for you.
‘I begin this tale having made my final, successful break from the penal colony of French Guiana, overcoming all the odds. I have spent seven years imprisoned for a crime I never committed, sent to rot in a hellhole of disease and despair, where further ‘crimes’ such as escape are punished with savage barbarity, both mentally as well as physically.
‘It is again to Venezuela that the ocean currents carry my little boat: unlike the previous time, they will not hand me back to the French authorities as Gomez is no longer in power.
‘I am welcomed like a long-lost brother by the inhabitants of a small village by the sea, and the authorities graciously inform me that I must spend a year here as a kind of ‘probationary’ period. After that, I will be given an official identity card and will be free to go wherever I want; free to leave the country, should I so wish.’
As Henri grew more impassioned by his tale, he walked and talked more quickly.
‘A year passes and I have fallen in love with Venezuela and its people, despite having been treated so abominably by this country in the past. I have learned to speak the language fluently, as I became more than passable in it during my last, two-year stay. But I yearn to live in a big city – I have not seen one of these since I was snatched away from the streets of Paris.
‘What to do? Simple: get to Caracas, as quickly as possible! There there will be ways of making good money, if a man has the zest and vitality for life that is wholly natural to a Venezuelan.
‘Yes: I will make my pile, and then somehow I will return to France and destroy the prosecutor who tried to destroy me. For he bears the most responsibility for my downfall. The jurymen? Thick fools: idiots! Swayed only by which member of the defence or prosecuting counsel has the most persuasive rhetoric, the glibbest tongue! No: I shall do the ignorant jurymen no harm whatsoever.
‘The judge? All that fair-minded man had been able to do was pass on the hammer-blow. It was obvious that he was unhappy with my being found guilty. But wait – les flics. Yes, they’ll get theirs – and in no small measure. Their corrupt methods were partly responsible for my ruin, after all.
‘It’s that prosecutor, Pradel, who’ll cop it first, though. Cop it good and hard. But even after eight years, having thought about it endlessly, I’ve still not decided exactly how.’
Henri gave a sudden, unnerving chuckle; he shook his head.
‘But I’m running ahead of myself here! I’ve only just arrived in Caracas, and the size of the city and its sheer life bewilders me. I have to again learn how to live on my wits, how to first spot an opportunity and then develop it. I make a vow to myself, however, that I will not commit even one crime, no matter how small.
‘For this country has given me my freedom, and so however I get my pile will be done through honest means. Even if I was never guilty of the crime of which I was convicted in Paris, I was still a bit of a rogue. But no more: now I am entirely straight.
‘Nightlife – sweet, sweet nightlife! Who needs the day when the dark holds all the pleasures of the world? And the people who seek such pleasures – drink; brief, unbinding love – they will of course do so in places called bars.
‘So I’ve seen the opportunity: now it’s time to develop it. There is an empty building almost in the centre of Caracas, and through sheer dogged persistence I manage to obtain the money to buy it. Then further capital is scraped together, so that I can obtain the necessary licences to turn my property into a late-night entertainment joint.
‘I buy what I think will be the necessary amount of drink and food; I hire dancing girls and decorate the place in lavish colours. I recruit door staff who will be courteous and yet quick to react should there be even a sniff of trouble. Prices are a little more than usual, but people are paying for a night out at a bar that’s better than anywhere else. That, at least, is what I’m banking everything on.
‘Yes, yes – it’s true! Attendance is better than I’d dreamed: I’d advertised well and now I am reaping the benefits. I am finally becoming a rich man; my ultimate goal, if still very far away, at least no longer seems quite so impossible to attain...
‘...A few years pass. An ugly bastard owns a few joints near my own, and he aims to queer my pitch. Reluctantly, I am forced to concede that living a completely crime-free life is not always going to be possible, if I am to protect what is rightfully mine.
‘Suddenly I turn the tables and the ugly bastard’s bars are my own – but those others which are owned by peaceable men continue to trade as normal. I
f I am attacked I will come out fighting, but I am no bully.
‘It is important that I continue to focus on my ultimate objective. For living the grand life that I do it would become all too easy to forget all about it – about the hammer-blow that almost wiped me out of existence.
‘But I fail to account for the power of love, until Marie enters my life and bewitches me with her beauty and her sweetness. As perfect a woman as God ever made, she persuades me to confide in her everything that has been gnawing away at my soul for more than a decade.
‘Unbelievably, I find myself making a vow to her: I will relinquish my vengeance. That evil prosecutor, those corrupt pigs: let those bastards die in their beds, if indeed the worms haven’t eaten them already. Why should they worry me any longer, now that I am loved, respected and wealthy? I have escaped the road down the drain: I am truly blessed and happy.
‘Or so I think. Dear God, how cruel you are to me! Who would think that my princess could get cancer at her young age, that her heavenly body could be reduced to skin and bone, that she could be so wracked with pain? The five years I have spent with her have passed in a blissfully happy haze, and now I throw money at doctors but they can do nothing. The disease is incurable. She is dying.
‘She is dead. Completely destroyed, utterly crushed, I take to drink and another ugly bastard sees the chance to make his move on my joint and I do nothing. My days are long ordeals of grief – a grief which is assuaged only by alcohol. I seek death, yet – as before – I refuse to end it all by way of suicide.
‘Instead I pick fights with dangerous sods in the hope that one of them will kill me. Unfortunately, Venezuelan hard-cases have a habit of helping their beaten opponent off the floor and buying him a drink, rather than producing a knife and finishing him off.
‘How long this all continues for I do not know – who can be conscious of the passing of time when reduced to such a state? A strange salvation comes courtesy of a cigarette I drop onto my bed, one night as I pass out as usual. I awake in hospital, severely burnt, my eye gone. A brave neighbour – one of my few friends who did not desert me when I turned wild – saw the flames and broke into my house, saving my life. But it is not expected that I will live, and so I am given morphine to ease my painful passage to the grave.