Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  The Cat had found her father a changed and anxious man. He had sat down in front of her. He had even taken off his coat and hat. He talked about selling his businesses and moving to America. He said he was just back from Frankfurt. His name had been removed from the brick walls of his factories and replaced by another name that chimed better with the times.

  He had lost everything in Germany.

  “You’ve still got France! And the factories in Belgium,” his wife called out from the bathroom.

  He frowned. It wasn’t so easy in France now either.

  And so, exceptionally, he had spent several minutes talking to his daughter. He was looking at her in astonishment, as if seeing her for the first time.

  “And what about you, Emilie? Are you all right?”

  The Cat didn’t utter a word. It would take more than calling her by her first name, winking at her three times, and asking her a couple of questions to win her back.

  “If they strip me of everything,” her father was saying, “the three of us will set off together.”

  His wife was laughing loudly in front of her mirror and calling him a scaredy-cat. She emerged smelling of rose and jasmine. She hadn’t even taken off her woolen hat and promptly reminded her husband that they were expected for dinner in town.

  She ran her powdered glove over her daughter’s cheek.

  “We’ll see you soon, my angel.”

  An hour later, the Cat observed that Andrei hadn’t returned to his bedroom in the boardinghouse on the Rue du Val-de-Grâce.

  Nobody else was coming out of Cabaret Sherazade, so where had that dreadful Boris Petrovitch Antonov gotten to? She’d certainly seen him go in there, just after midnight.

  The Cat could remember a time when the word loneliness meant nothing to her. A time when she had lived suspended above the city and its people, when she hadn’t suffered in any way. That time was long since gone.

  Now Vango had disappeared, Ethel had gone back to Scotland, and, particularly in Andrei’s absence, the Cat had become an expert in loneliness, a world champion. She felt as if a part of her was permanently missing.

  But she picked herself up again. Bonds don’t break just because the people themselves have gone away. She still felt connected to the others, and it did her a world of good to feel these bonds. It was as if she was awake at last, after being asleep for the longest time.

  She was very fond of Ethel, and Vango. And she cared deeply about Andrei, even if he didn’t know she existed.

  The Cat slid down a zinc pipe: it was time to take a look, close-up.

  The street was deserted. She reached the ground and took a few steps through the snow toward the cabaret. Just as she’d made it to the middle of the street, the door was flung open. Now they were face-to-face. And Boris Petrovitch Antonov was with another man. They stopped talking when they saw her.

  The Cat was at precisely that age when half the men she met asked her, “Have you lost your parents, little girl?” and the other half asked, “Can I buy you a glass of something, you pretty young thing?” All she needed to do was change her posture or the smile on her lips ever so slightly.

  With one hand on her hip, she made sure the two men belonged to the latter category.

  Boris Petrovitch Antonov swayed as he watched the young girl.

  The snow was pocked with black footprints.

  Cold or fear? Boris couldn’t tell which was making his shoulders tremble. The man behind him had a loaded pistol in his pocket. He was called Vlad. Boris was fully aware that, when it came to human relationships, Vlad was about as refined as a vulture in mid carve-up.

  Vlad was there to bump Boris off the job.

  For months now, Boris Petrovitch Antonov had unearthed nothing in his search for Vango. He knew that, given half a chance, Vlad the Vulture would take him out in cold blood on some street corner to make this mission his own.

  For two hours, in a corner of Cabaret Sherazade, Vlad had tried to piece together the file. He wanted access to all of Boris’s leads before disposing of him. But Boris wasn’t in a chatty mood. He knew what lay in store for him at the end of their conversation.

  The cabaret lights had been switched off, and when the last of the dancers had put their coats on over their red boleros glinting with precious stones, the remaining customers were asked to leave.

  Now all three of them were standing under the street lamp on the sidewalk. Who was this girl?

  “Won’t you join us for one last drink, you pretty young thing?”

  It was Boris’s only chance of survival. Vlad the Vulture wouldn’t kill him in front of a witness. He would almost certainly have been ordered to act with complete discretion. If the girl agreed, she’d become his accidental bodyguard until daybreak.

  “Leave her alone,” said the Vulture.

  He spoke only in Russian.

  “We’re in Paris,” replied Boris. “We can’t leave a pretty young girl all by herself. . . .”

  “Shut up. Tell her to be on her way!”

  The girl looked starry-eyed.

  “Just a glass, then. I’m tired, but I don’t like walking alone at night.”

  Vlad didn’t have time to intervene. The Cat gave Boris her arm, which he clung to for dear life.

  “You’re quite right,” he said. “These streets aren’t safe.”

  They spent a long time looking for a bistro that was open at that hour. In the end, they found one on the slopes of the Sacré-Coeur.

  As she sat down, the Cat felt dizzy. The room was small and smoky. The customers were talking loudly. She could feel her claustrophobia getting the better of her again.

  “I’ve got to go outside,” she declared, standing up.

  “What?”

  She looked at the two men and, in that same glance, she saw Boris’s terror and Vlad’s satisfaction. Her eyes half closed, she breathed out slowly through her mouth.

  “A double grenadine, please.”

  Bravely, the Cat fell back into her seat.

  Only the Vulture’s look of glee had made her change her mind.

  An angry Vlad was trying to obtain the final missing pieces of information. Next, he had to locate Andrei. That boy was useless, but he knew too much.

  Vlad had orders to eliminate both of them.

  “What happened to that young boy you hired, the violinist? I’ll need to speak with him too.”

  “Andrei?”

  The two men were talking in Russian, but the Cat recognized Andrei’s name. She stopped drinking her grenadine. She had even forgotten her claustrophobia. Recalling Andrei’s gray eyes was enough to turn the roof above her to glass.

  Boris responded with a few words, including one that the Cat could pick out: meeting.

  He must just have told the Vulture where and when he would be able to meet up with the boy with the violin. This was why she had followed Boris in the first place. The Cat could sense how much danger Andrei was now in.

  The Vulture had understood that he wouldn’t get anything more out of Boris. He stood up and used a sign language of sorts to ask where the phone was. A small staircase leading to the basement was pointed out to him.

  A moment later, the Cat noticed that Boris Petrovitch’s waxen face had broken out into beads of sweat.

  “I’ll be back.”

  She saw him heading off in turn. He went down the spiral staircase, grabbing a butcher’s knife on his way past the kitchen.

  The Cat held her breath.

  People at the bar were laughing. They were coming in from the local nightspots in Pigalle. From the Boule Noire and the accordion dance hall, L’Ange Rouge, which had just opened on Rue Fontaine. The Cat knew these places only by their rooftops, from where she watched the fights between warring gangs in the surrounding streets. Two years earlier, she had witnessed the battle of the Corsicans against the Parisians.

  The smell of coffee wafted through the room. In one corner sat a chimney sweep, who was still perfectly clean at this time of day, chat
ting with a laundress. It looked like any other early morning in Paris.

  Had she dreamed everything? Had she fallen asleep?

  All of a sudden, the Vulture appeared at the top of the stairs, grimacing. He was clutching his belly as if he’d been wounded. He didn’t even glance in the Cat’s direction but rushed out into the street.

  Some customers starting screaming.

  A dead man had been found in the basement.

  Panic spread through the bar.

  Outside, the Cat was already running over the snow, guided by the thin trail of blood the Vulture had left behind.

  The Highlands, Scotland, Christmas Eve 1935

  Bare highlands gave way to forests, but the rain, mud, and fog made everything blurry. The hounds were braying for death. Horns were being sounded on one side and then the other, giving contradictory orders.

  The hunt had started seven hours earlier. And for seven hours, the pack had been after one beast. A diabolical animal, fiendishly difficult to catch, and on the verge of making thirty riders and fifty hounds lose their minds.

  Ethel, who was looking for a stray ewe that had abandoned its lamb for the past three days, found herself caught up in all of this.

  Mary had turned up in Ethel’s bedroom that morning with the three-month-old lamb in her arms and bleated at her mistress to find its mother again.

  Ethel was guiding her horse through the fog toward the boundaries of the Everland estate. Not a single hunter paid her any attention.

  Occasionally, she would spot a horsewoman riding sidesaddle between the trees, a few birds flying scared, or hounds splashing through the water. Nobody seemed to hear her or see her.

  At one point she was galloping alongside a man who could barely sit anymore. He let out a howl of pain every time he came into contact with the saddle.

  “You haven’t found a sheep, by any chance?” Ethel asked him.

  The man stared at her as if she were a lunatic before deigning to answer.

  “I can assure you there are no sheep here, young lady! Unless flying, tree-climbing sheep that play havoc with our nerves and wreak mayhem on . . . ouch . . . my bottom!”

  Ethel thanked him and left him to his pain, letting her horse pick up pace before riding through a small copse. The barking of the hounds to the right was getting closer. Two hunters emerged on the left without seeing her. Her horse jumped nervously over a series of dead trees. It wasn’t used to the thunder of hounds and horns.

  The horse and its rider felt their hearts beating together as one, as if they were the game in this hunt. But Ethel didn’t want to abandon her search.

  She galloped over bog land toward the braying pack. Where was this beast? Ethel was intrigued by the wild creature that had outwitted the entire hunt since dawn.

  A yapping noise prompted her to slow down. They had arrived at a mound of rocks, in the middle of the trees, known as Chaos. Ethel had heard tales of strange things happening there at night.

  She could see a lone hound with a piece of black cloth in its mouth. It was sniffing the ground frenetically, then howling up at the sky. She dismounted from her horse.

  “Come here. Give that to me,” she ordered, walking toward the hound.

  Ethel led her horse by the reins and took the piece of cloth from the dog’s mouth.

  On taking a closer look at the wet, panting, slathering hound, she sent up a prayer that Lily the doe hadn’t wandered off from the tame copses surrounding the castle.

  The hound raised its muzzle. A faraway whistle summoned it back to join the rest of the pack. It disappeared. Ethel slipped the scrap of torn cloth into her pocket. A bird flew overhead. She mounted her horse again and headed away from the chaos.

  The hunt was going around in circles now. Trails led nowhere. The pack was scattered. At one point, Ethel found herself elbow to elbow with a huntsman on a black mare. They were flanking a thorny hedge.

  “I simply can’t understand it,” the huntsman confided in Ethel. “Never seen anything like it. I’ve been hunting for forty-five years, and I’ve never known a hunt this hard.”

  “I suppose the stag has to win from time to time,” muttered Ethel.

  The rider, who had his horn slung across his shoulders, was riding jockey-style.

  “This isn’t a stag,” he said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Using the crop on his mare, he straddled the thorny hedge and parted company with Ethel.

  She decided to go around one last time before heading home. Her curiosity was still keen, but her horse was flagging. It was not fit enough to gallop for this long. Since Andrew had left, on Saint Nicholas’s day, there was nobody to ride out the horses at Everland on a regular basis.

  Andrew had announced he would be back in April, and Paul had absurdly accepted his departure, even though Ethel had pointed out that a groom was useful only during the winter months. As soon as spring arrived, the horses lived outdoors. Ethel didn’t trust the Russian vagrant: he was too gentle, too handsome; he went away for five months of the year, and he played the violin in the garage like a child prodigy.

  Suddenly, jumping over a ditch, she landed on the sand and sawdust of a felling area. The horn of a vehicle tooted as her horse reared up high. A car had nearly mown them down. It braked shortly afterward and the driver could be heard letting out a torrent of swearwords. It was pouring rain. And the car was open topped.

  Ethel calmed her horse by stroking its neck. This track was completely unsuitable for motor vehicles. There was no reason for a car to be driving around here.

  A woman started insulting them from the passenger seat.

  Ethel and her horse trotted over to the car.

  The driver was holding an open umbrella and examining a scratch on the metal bodywork through a magnifying glass.

  “Damn and blast . . .” the driver muttered.

  Then the woman in the passenger seat cried, “Vandal! Vandal!”

  “Your horse scratched my car!” said the driver.

  “Heavens above!” exclaimed the woman. “Look, Ronald, it’s Ethel.”

  Ethel had just recognized the entire Cameron family. They resembled a bunch of sopping-wet floorcloths. Lady Cameron’s hairdo had collapsed under a makeshift paper rain hat, and her husband’s ankle boots made dubious glug-glug noises with every step he took.

  In the back, Tom had turned as pale as the beige car upholstery. This was his favorite form of camouflage.

  “Hello,” said Ethel. “Out for a spin?”

  “No, my dear,” Ronald Cameron corrected her. “We’re hunting.”

  “You’re hunting?” Ethel smiled in amazement, staring at the two picnic hampers swimming on the backseat.

  “Yes, we’re the guests of the Earl of Galich. He’s a friend of ours. I’m lending him a field for his horses this evening.”

  “He’s a close personal friend,” Beth Cameron was quick to point out.

  “We’re hunting by car. It’s more sporty,” boasted her husband.

  “I’m very happy to see you, Ethel,” declared Beth Cameron, taking up the baton. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your plans. This whole story has been rather trying for us.”

  “Now is hardly the time or the place,” her husband protested.

  “Be quiet, coward!” snapped Beth Cameron.

  Tom, who hadn’t said a word up until this point, stood up.

  “And you can pipe down too,” shouted his mother before he could even get a word out.

  “Th-there! Look!” Tom managed to stammer, pointing at the horizon.

  Ethel turned around to see a mud cloud rising up at the end of the path. Thirty riders and fifty hounds were galloping at top speed in their direction.

  “Heavens above!” gasped Lady Cameron.

  “I . . . I’d better pull over to the side, perhaps,” said Lord Cameron.

  “Perhaps you had, yes,” his wife agreed.

  The thunde
r of hooves on the wet path was already audible.

  Ronald Cameron started up the engine and clung to the steering wheel. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The wheels were spinning on the spot, sending up huge amounts of sawdust and sand.

  “Heavens above!” repeated Lady Cameron.

  The stampede of dogs and horses was getting ever closer.

  Cameron pressed down on the pedal one more time. His wife was bouncing about in the passenger seat.

  “You can’t do this to me, Ronald! You simply can’t do this to me!”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” ventured Ethel, “but I suggest you leave your car and make your way over to the edge. I’ll help you.”

  “Never!” boomed Sir Ronald. “I won’t give in!”

  “Never!” echoed his wife, who was soaked to the skin and trembling like jellied beef.

  “Please, Tom!” cajoled Ethel. “Come with me over to the side.”

  Tom glanced at his parents.

  “Tom, if you desert us, I shall never speak to you again,” declared his mother.

  “Lady Cameron,” shouted Ethel, “they’re almost here!”

  “We Camerons don’t behave like that.”

  “In any case we’ll be out of here in a flash. This is a brandnew car!”

  Tom didn’t budge.

  At the last moment, Ethel ordered her horse to ride on.

  Fifty hounds and thirty hunters rode straight over the Cameron family and their new automobile. It didn’t take long. At the end of it, there weren’t many spare parts in the car worth saving.

  The Cameron family itself, on the other hand, emerged from this experience sufficiently unscathed to continue hunting on foot.

  An hour later, just as the hunt was about to disband for the day, a rumor went around that they had found the animal at last.

  Hunters and hounds gathered around a small oxbow lake with a bulky gray shape moving in it. Tom and his mother were standing on the shore in a pitiful state.

  “He’s got it! He’s caught it!” crowed Beth Cameron, approaching a man who was dismounting from his horse.