by Vargas, Fred
‘Monsieur Kehlweiler,’ he said, ‘I don’t know exactly what it is you want, but you can’t twist reality. In the Senate, my colleague Deschamps had spoken well of you to me. And I find you here chasing after some local incident, tragic, no question, but not at all the kind of thing to interest a man like you. You come six hundred kilometres to try and fit together two elements that have nothing to do with each other. I’ve been told it’s hard to shake you off, which may not be a desirable quality, but when you come up against the evidence, what do you do?’
A little criticism, a little flattery, Louis registered. No politician had ever liked seeing him turn up in their constituency.
‘In the Senate,’ Chevalier went on, ‘they say a man would rather find a bedbug in his sheets than “the German” looking through his papers. Forgive me if that sounds rude, but it’s what they say.’
‘I know.’
‘They go on to say the only way to get rid of him is like you do for bedbugs: burn the furniture.’
Chevalier gave a little laugh and threw a satisfied glance at the man who had replaced him at billiards.
‘In my case,’ he continued, ‘I have nothing to burn and nothing to show you, because you are not here officially any more. I don’t know if it’s because you’re at a loose end that you’re being so obstinate. Yes, the pit bull belongs to the Sevrans, and so did Marie, if one can say that. She’d been Lina Sevran’s nanny, always with her. But Marie had a fall on the beach, and her feet hadn’t been touched. Do I have to say it again? Sevran is a public-spirited man, does a lot of good in the village. I won’t say the same for his dog, just between ourselves, mind you. But you have no reason and no right to come harassing him. Because his dog, you need to know this for your own good, spends its life running away, prowling the countryside and snouting around in dustbins. You could be ten years trying to find where the dog picked up that bone – that’s if it was him.’
‘Shall we finish the game?’ said Louis, pointing to the billiard table. ‘Your opponent seems to have given up.’
‘Very well,’ said Chevalier.
They each chalked their cues, and Louis, played first, surrounded by a dozen spectators who passed comments or maintained an appreciative silence. Some left, others arrived, there was a lot of coming and going in this cafe. Louis ordered a beer, in the middle of the game, which seemed to please the mayor, who ordered a Muscadet and ended up winning. Chevalier had been down in Brittany about twelve years, that makes four thousand games of billiards, that adds up. Evidently feeling expansive, the mayor invited Louis to lunch. Louis discovered behind the games room a huge dining saloon with about fifteen tables. The walls were bare granite, blackened by smoke from the open fire. This old cafe with its sequences of rooms pleased Louis more and more. He would willingly have installed his bed in a corner by the fire, but what was the point, since Marie Lacasta had died on the rocks with both feet intact? The thought depressed him. He wasn’t going to find out what was at the end of the piece of bone he had recuperated so carefully, and yet, damn it all, he didn’t have the sense that he was dealing with an incident of no importance.
Sitting at table, Louis remembered Marthe’s advice. When you’re faced with someone who is trying to decide whether to accept you or reject you, sit facing him. Seen in profile, you’re intolerable, just get that into your head, but face to face, you have every chance of winning him over, if you make an effort not to put your German expression on. If it’s a woman, the same but closer to. Louis sat down facing the mayor. They talked about billiards, then the cafe, then how things were going in the town hall, business and politics. Chevalier wasn’t a native of the region, he had arrived there as a candidate for his Senate seat. He’d found it tough being exiled to the far end of Brittany, but he’d grown to like the place. Louis dropped a few confidential bits of information which he knew would please him. The whole lunch operation seemed to work, and the mayor’s wary limpness had relaxed into cordial and benevolent limpness, with a few whispered confidences. Louis was a past master at creating an entirely artificial complicity. Marthe thought this disgusting, but useful, of course, it was always useful. Towards the end of the meal, a fat little man came over to talk. Low of brow, heavy of jowl, Louis immediately recognised the director of the health spa, the husband of his little Pauline, in other words the bastard who had claimed Pauline. He was talking about figures and water courses with Chevalier, and they agreed to meet later that week.
This last encounter had unsettled Louis. After leaving the mayor on a note of insincere entente cordiale, he took a walk round the harbour then along the deserted streets of houses with closed shutters, allowing Bufo to take the air. The toad had not suffered too much inside his damp pocket: Bufo was an easy-going creature. Perhaps the mayor was too. The mayor was well content that Louis would be leaving Port-Nicolas and Louis chewed over his disappointment and his discreet dismissal. He called a taxi from the hotel, and had himself driven to the gendarmerie in Fouesnant.
XV
MARC STEPPED DOWN from the train at quimper in the early evening. It was too easy by half. Kehlweiler made him go charging around after a carrion-gobbling dog for days, and then he went off to wrap up the mystery all on his own. No, it was just too easy. Kehlweiler wasn’t the only person who liked to see things through, even nasty businesses. He, Marc, had never left an enquiry unfinished, never, because he hated leaving anything unfinished. His investigations might all be medieval ones, but they were still investigations. He had always followed his archive trails through to the bitter end, even the most difficult. The big study on village economy in the eleventh century had cost him blood, sweat and tears, but hell’s bells, he had finished it. This was obviously something else, a nasty murder, Louis suggested, but Louis didn’t have exclusive rights to nastiness. And now this son of World War II – yes, he must stop calling him that, one day he was going to blurt it out by accident – this son of World War II was off all alone in pursuit of the dog, a dog identified by Mathias, what was more. And Mathias had agreed, yes, follow the dog. That was probably what, more than anything else, had decided Marc. He had hastily packed a rucksack, which Lucien, the historian of World War I, had immediately emptied, telling him he had no idea how to fold shirts properly. Oh God, with friends like that . . .
‘Shit, you’ll make me miss my train!’ Marc had shouted.
‘No, you won’t, trains always wait for brave soldiers, it’s written up for all time at the Gare de l’Est. Women weep, but alas, trains depart, for the Western Front in that case.’
‘I’m not going to the Gare de l’Est!’
‘Doesn’t matter. And in fact you’ve forgotten the crucial thing.’
Lucien, while folding up shirts into tidy squares, nodded in the direction of the lord of Puisaye’s accounts.
And indeed, Marc had felt reassured to be able to sleep with his head resting on Hugues’s registers. The Middle Ages, his salvation. You can’t get fed up anywhere if you carry ten centuries around with you. The genius of the Middle Ages, Marc had explained to Lucien, was that you would never get to the end of it, you could go on digging around for thousands of years, and it was far more comforting than to work as he did on the Great War, which he would eventually know day by day. Massive error, Lucien had replied. The Great War is a chasm, a black hole in humanity, a seismic shift in which the key to all catastrophes lies. History isn’t meant to reassure you, it’s meant to alert you. Marc had gone to sleep between Lorient and Quimper.
A taxi had taken him to Port-Nicolas, and Marc had quickly left the neglected harbour, and the scattered settlement of which only the tiny village centre survived, to go and wander on the shingle at the shore. Night was falling, but half an hour later here than in the capital, and he lost his footing several times, stumbling on the slippery rocks. The tide was coming in. Marc walked along the water’s edge feeling calm and satisfied, rain dripping from his hair and down his neck. If he hadn’t been a medievalist, he’d have been a sail
or. But boats these days didn’t make him want to clamber aboard. Still less submarines. He had visited the French Navy’s submarine Swordfish once, underwater in Saint-Nazaire, and had had a panic attack in the torpedo chamber. So, a sailor in the olden days then. Not that the big warships or whalers really tempted him either. So perhaps a sailor way back in the late fifteenth century, setting off for one destination, getting it wrong and arriving in another? In fact, even as a sailor, he found himself back in the Middle Ages, no escaping your destiny. This conclusion made Marc gloomy. He didn’t like to feel himself trapped, closed in and predestined, even for the Middle Ages. Ten centuries can seem as narrow as ten square metres in a cell. That must be the other reason drawing him here to land’s end, the Finis Terrae, the very furthest point, Finistère.
XVI
LATE THAT EVENING, Louis roused the mayor at his home address.
Standing on the doorstep, Chevalier stared at him with his wide blue eyes, moving his fine disenchanted lips soundlessly. He appeared to be mouthing ‘shit’ to himself, in a resigned way.
‘Chevalier, I need to talk to you some more.’
Should he just kick Kehlweiler out? Pointless, he’d be back in the morning, he knew that. So he let him in, explained that his wife was already in bed, without saying why, and Louis sat down in the armchair indicated to him, in silence. The chair was as slack-looking as its owner, as was the dog lying on the floor. Here, at least, the rule certainly applied. It was a fat male French bulldog, tired after chasing female bulldogs perhaps, and it evidently thought it had done enough today to prove it was a dog, so don’t count on it now to start howling just because there’s a stranger in the house.
‘That looks like a dog that’s come to terms with life,’ said Louis.
‘If it interests you,’ said Chevalier, settling himself on the couch, ‘he’s never bitten anyone, or eaten any feet either.’
‘Never bitten anyone?’
‘Maybe once or twice when he was a pup, and only because he’d been teased,’ Chevalier admitted.
‘Yeah, sure,’ said Louis.
‘Cigarette?’
‘Thanks, yes.’
The two men remained without speaking for a moment. There was no animosity between them, Louis noted. A sort of understanding, born of resignation and mutual acceptance. The mayor was not a bad guy to be with, very restful, Vandoosler the younger would have said. Chevalier waited for the other person to speak, he wasn’t one to take the initiative.
‘I went to the gendarmerie at Fouesnant,’ said Louis. ‘Marie Lacasta died by fracturing her skull on the rocks.’
‘Yes, we’ve already established that.’
‘But she was missing the top joint of her left big toe.’
Chevalier did not jump, he tapped out his cigarette, and said ‘shit’, this time out loud.
‘Impossible,’ he muttered, ‘it’s not in the report. What on earth is all this?’
‘I’m really sorry, Chevalier, but it is in the report. Not the one you showed me, the other, the next one, written on the Monday by the pathologist, and they posted out a copy to you on the Tuesday, marked “Confidential”. I know I’m not here officially, but why didn’t you tell me?’
‘But I haven’t seen that report! Wait a minute, let me think. It must have arrived Wednesday or Thursday. Wednesday, I went to Marie Lacasta’s funeral, then I went straight to Paris. Meetings in the Senate until Saturday. I got back on Sunday, and this morning I was in the town hall . . .’
‘And you didn’t open last week’s post? When I came to see you, it was almost midday.’
The mayor spread his arms and twisted his fingers.
‘Good Lord, I’d only got there at eleven, I hadn’t had time to check the post, I wasn’t expecting anything urgent. But there was a burst main at Penfoul Bay, and I wanted to deal with that before I had all the residents on my back. It’s a pain in the backside that bay, I should never have let them build there, and for God’s sake don’t you go poking your nose in.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m on to something different from local flooding. But I thought your office hours started at nine.’
‘My office hours, as you call them, are held in the cafe at aperitif time as everyone knows. You think I read the report and didn’t tell you? No, Kehlweiler. At ten o’clock I was still asleep, like it or not. I’m no good in the morning,’ said the mayor with a frown.
Louis leaned across and put his finger on the mayor’s arm.
‘I was asleep myself.’
The mayor took out two glasses and poured them each a cognac. Louis’s morning lie-in seemed to have sent him up in his estimation.
‘Worse,’ Louis went on, ‘I take a siesta. In the Ministry, I would close my door, and lie down on the floor with my head on some big law book. Half an hour sometimes. I would forget about the book on the floor, no one ever knew why I was consulting points of law on the carpet.’
‘Well?’ asked the mayor. ‘What’s in this second report?’
‘The gendarmes did the first appraisal on Sunday, as you know. The body had been rolled about by five successive tides, it was battered and covered in mud and seaweed. The head wound was clear to see, but not the damage to the foot. All the same, Marie Lacasta was barefoot. Apparently she always wore short rubber boots belonging to her husband when she went to the beach, and they were too big for her.’
‘That’s right. She would put them on without socks to go out after shellfish.’
‘So the waves must have washed the boots off.’
‘Yes, she was barefoot, it said that in the first report. They found one of the boots about ten metres away on the rocks.’
‘And the other?’
‘The other was missing. It must be halfway to New York by now.’
‘In his first examination, done late that first night, the local doctor at Fouesnant looked at the head in particular, where the fracture was obvious, and the foot, covered in mud, didn’t engage his attention. No blood to be seen. He made his diagnosis, which was correct, that she had died of a fractured skull, the front of her forehead was caved in, from falling against a rock. And that was the preliminary report which reached you. The police pathologist only came along next day, because he’d been called to an accident on the main road on the Sunday evening. His conclusions about the blow to the head were the same as his colleague’s. About the foot, this is what he wrote.’
Louis felt in his trouser pocket and brought out a crumpled piece of paper.
‘I’ll summarise. Joint 2 missing on left toe 1. The toe had not been cut off, but torn off, so the pathologist ruled out any human intervention. From the context, he suggested seagulls. So, accidental death, followed by some carnivorous creature. The time of death couldn’t be given with any precision, but at latest Friday morning. Marie had been seen on Thursday at about four o’clock, so she died between, say, four thirty Thursday and midday Friday. Did she ever go out to get winkles in the early morning?’
‘She might have done. She was free from Friday to Monday. But still, the pathologist agreed it was an accidental death, in spite of the nasty detail about the toe. So where does that get you? The seagull theory is a bit dodgy, but why not? – there are thousands of them around, they’re savage and they might flock round a wound.’
‘Chevalier, you’re forgetting that I didn’t find this bone in the stomach of a seagull.’
‘True, I forgot.’
Louis leaned back in his chair, his stiff leg stretched out in front of him. The cognac was good, the mayor was obviously changing his attitude, and he waited for thoughts to arrange themselves inside the politician’s head. But he would like to know whether or not Chevalier really had seen the second report, whether he had been surprised this evening, or whether he had been lying this morning, hoping that Louis wouldn’t pursue the matter any further. With a man like this, it was impossible to be sure. His shapeless features and relaxed body language covered up any trace of his actual thoughts. It was as if t
he thoughts were drowning until they came to the surface and reached the light. Everything about him was submerged, floating, between two tides. A very fishy character. Which made Louis realise that those round, wide-open eyes, which had seemed somehow familiar, were ones he had seen before – on the fishmonger’s slab. Louis glanced at the old dog to see if he had eyes like a fish too, but the bulldog was asleep, slobbering on the tiles.
‘Look,’ said Chevalier suddenly. ‘Yes, the facts are on your side, Sevran’s pit bull could well have bitten off Marie’s toe, it’s revolting, and doesn’t surprise me, coming from that dog, I’ve often warned Sevran about it. But again, so what? Marie falls over, dies as a result, the dog comes along in his usual horrible carrion-eating way – though all dogs are a bit that way inclined, it’s their nature – finds itself on the beach and bites off her toe. Well, it still doesn’t prove anything. You can’t take a dog to court for mutilating a corpse, can you?’
‘No.’
‘Right you are, perfect, that’s an end to it. You’ve found what you were looking for, and there’s no more to be said.’
The mayor refilled the two glasses.
‘There is just one little thing,’ said Louis. ‘I found the bone on Friday morning, after the rain on Thursday night. But it was already there on the grid at about 1 a.m. Sevran’s dog must have gone past between two in the afternoon on Thursday, when the grid was clean, and 1 a.m., when I noticed it had done its business there.’
‘You have a funny way of spending your time. Working for the Ministry of the Interior must make you a bit crazy . . . you might call it obsessional behaviour.’
‘Never mind, the dog still passed that way before 1 a.m. on the night from Thursday to Friday.’
‘But for crying out loud, of course it did! Sevran drives to Paris every Thursday evening! He gives classes at Arts et Métiers on Friday. He leaves at six, arrives at midnight. He always takes the dog, because Lina is afraid to be alone with it, and just between ourselves, she’s quite right.’