“And?”
“I spent more than five and a half hours waiting for him, just hanging around.”
“Dupont was released?”
“I went home.”
“Without waiting for him?”
“A lot later—around midnight, Jerry turned up at my place. I was in bed, and he banged on the door and woke me up. You can’t imagine how glad I was to see him, the poor bastard.”
“Hadn’t caused you to lose any sleep.”
“You’re very cynical, but in fact I hadn’t been sleeping—I’d been worrying. He came into the flat and I offered to make him a hot drink. Almost as much for myself as for him. Only this time Jerry needed something stronger—a lot stronger. I gave him rum, which he drank neat, one shot after another. As you can imagine, he got drunk very quickly.”
“And you?”
“Stuck to a tisane. Soon he went off to the lavatory. By this time I was pretty tired. There was nothing physically wrong with Jerry; the police hadn’t touched him—and at the time I was convinced it was an act.”
“An act?”
“He was overreacting.”
“So you kicked him out?”
“I let him drink. I thought he would calm down. I was relieved, you see. I’d been worried.”
“Did he calm down?”
“Not exactly. He went to.…”
“Yes?”
“He went to piss, and when he didn’t reappear from the lavatory, I went looking for him. Found him sitting on the lavatory seat, his trousers round his ankles and blood all over the tiled floor. He’d taken my razor, the stupid bastard, and had tried to slit his wrist.”
Anne Marie said, “Messy.”
“Less serious than it looked at first. People say I’m a hard man—and perhaps I am. But I abhor violence. I detest unnecessary suffering.” He shrugged. “That night Jerry slept on my bed, and I slept on the floor.”
“Good of you.”
He looked at Anne Marie. “Not much else I could do for a fellow human being who’d fallen into the hands of the colonialists. The following morning I gave him a good breakfast. I got the impression he’d cheered up.”
“And Jerry Dupont went back to teaching?”
“No.”
As the technician turned the page of his magazine, Anne Marie recognized the soft colors of pornographic photography. The look on the man’s face was of deep concentration. The tip of his tongue was visible between his lips.
“It was Whitsun and I had to visit my parents in Marie Galante. I invited Jerry to come with me. The trip would’ve done him a world of good. But he refused. Said Renseignements Généraux had forbidden him to leave Pointe-à-Pitre.”
“When did you next see him?”
“I didn’t, madame le juge.”
49
Massif central
Carreaux’s eyes were cold. “Jerry didn’t come into the university the following week. Or ever again. We all assumed he’d been arrested. The atmosphere was tense. Riot police and armored cars patrolling the streets of the city. I’d once visited him in Cité Mortenol and so I went back looking for him. I went with a colleague—a man called Auguste. We knocked on Jerry’s door, but there was no reply. The neighbors said they hadn’t seen him for several days and so we left. What else could we do?”
“The police had arrested him?”
“The newspapers and the radio tried to hush everything up, but they couldn’t stop people from talking. The neighbor—the same woman that Auguste and I had spoken with—had noticed a smell and it got worse as the days went past—it was the beginning of June when the temperatures are up in the thirties. Then she was plagued with flies. She spring-cleaned her house—but the flies wouldn’t go away.”
“She alerted the police?”
“Not something my compatriots like doing. But the smell got a lot worse—and finally she felt she must contact the police. When those gentlemen felt they could spare a moment from beating natives and firing at the cane workers on strike, they sent round a patrol. An officer tried to knock the door down.”
“You were there?”
“No, madame le juge.” Carreaux shook his head. “When the officer couldn’t get through the front door, he went through the neighbor’s apartment and climbed in over the balcony.”
“And?”
“Hanging from the ceiling. That’s how he found Jerry Dupont.” Philippe Carreaux smiled grimly. “Dead and in an advanced state of putrefaction.”
“He wasn’t murdered?”
“Of course he was murdered. Renseignements Généraux were as guilty as if they’d put the noose round Dupont’s neck. The poor bastard—he’d managed to live twenty-three years of his life, and it was in Guadeloupe—in a strange country and at the hands of the forces of reaction——that he had to die. Like a tracked animal.”
The technician put the magazine away, stood up and went to the glass door to stare out at the marina and the falling rain.
“What did you do, Monsieur Carreaux?”
“We held a meeting of the university staff. A lot of us were shocked, but of course, the university was controlled by the Communists who were playing the game of the colonialists. Time of political tension, they said—it wouldn’t do any good to drag Jerry Dupont’s death into the political arena. The real problem”—Philippe Carreaux snorted angrily—“was the cane cutters’ wages. They’re all the same, the Communists. They love to maintain they’re patriots—but their well-disciplined hearts all belong to Moscow—and to the soul of Joseph Stalin.”
“You let the matter drop?”
“Jerry Dupont had given Auguste an address in New York, and I wrote to his parents personally. They never replied.”
Silence.
Carreaux said, “Auguste was from Bordeaux. He had his agrégation, and there was a good university career in front of him. Auguste was teaching in the West Indies instead of doing his military service. A Frenchman—but he had a certain amount of human decency. He was badly shaken by Dupont’s death. He wrote a couple of letters—one to the Ministry of Education, another to the Ministry of Defense, who was his employer at the time. Felt he couldn’t let Jerry Dupont die just like that, murdered and forgotten. Auguste despised the Communists even more than we patriots did. Then one day he was contacted. He was a Freemason, Auguste—all those secret signs and small aprons and grown men playing like silly children—and it was at a meeting he was given the message. By nobody less important, less influential that the Préfet’s first secretary.”
“What message?”
“To let the matter drop.”
“Why?”
“There was more to Jerry Dupont’s death than met the eye. Let the matter drop, he was told, or on returning to France, at the end of his service, instead of teaching at the University of Bordeaux, he would be finding himself teaching in some godforsaken lycée lost in the Massif Central.”
50
Basse Terre
Modernization had not reached the third story of the Chamber of Commerce.
There was a floor of rubberized linoleum and the walls that had once been whitewashed were streaked with dirt and the passage of time. Anne Marie walked down the corridor and stopped a moment to stare out across the roofs of Basse-Terre. The small, colonial town nestled against the side of the Souffrière. A bright sun and a cloudless sky had transformed the Caribbean Sea into a Mediterranean blue.
ARCHIVES.
Anne Marie knocked and then pushed the door open. The hinges screeched unpleasantly.
A man stood directly in front of her. He appeared surprised. “Can I help you?” Several of his teeth were a grey metal.
“La Coloniale.”
“Yes?”
“Do you have the volumes for 1940?”
“Two volumes per year.” He looked at Anne Marie carefully. Behind the glasses, the red edges of his eyelids were humid. “I suppose you’re another of these students.”
“Le juge Laveaud. I’m from the Ministry of
Justice. I’ve just driven down from the university library in Pointe-à-Pitre. The chief librarian told me to contact Madame Cléopatre.”
“Madame Cléopatre.” An unpleasant laugh. “She’s on maternity leave. Perhaps I can help you.” His voice was not enthusiastic.
“I need La Coloniale for 1940.”
He nodded, put down the pair of scissors he had been holding and approached the main bookcase. “Of course,” he said. “What year?”
“1940—April and May.”
Crouching down on his spindly legs—he was wearing shorts and a pair of battered sandals—the man ran a finger along the faded volumes. “1940, first semester.” He muttered to himself. “Then here you are.” He added, “They don’t want to put in the conditioning because they want to do away with us.”
“Us?”
“Microfilm—that’s what they want. They say it’s cheaper—but I don’t see how it can be.” He hauled the book up onto the wooden counter. “All that film—it must cost a lot of money. But they go quite wild over anything they think is modern.” He shook his head, “Guadeloupe’s not America, you know.”
She took the book. “I want the volume for 1940—this is 1932.”
The spindly man held the book in both hands, turned it and studied the gold script. “You’re right, you know.” He tut-tutted. “What year do you want?”
“1940.”
“1940, you say? Bizarre.”
“What?”
“I beg your pardon, madame.”
She ducked under the hinge counter and crouched down beside the old man who was looking along the lower shelf. The dull eyes glanced at her with disapproval. His pink lips were wet. “Who are you?”
“1940, please.”
“Precisely what I’m looking for.” He sounded offended. “You’re all the same. You come barging in here—you think you own the place—you and all the friends of Madame Cléopatre. She’s not the Préfet, you know. She’s not even God Almighty, whatever she may claim to the contrary. If she thinks she can boss me about, she’s got another think coming.” He added, “She’s not going to force me into retirement.”
The volumes of La Coloniale were out of order. The 1940 edition was wedged between the 1974 handbook to South Africa and a moth-eaten copy of the Caracas telephone directory.
“This is what I’m looking for.”
The archivist said spitefully, “Then you’ve found it, haven’t you?”
Anne Marie took the bound volume and sat down at a desk at the far end of the dusty reading room. For a while the man peered at her in angry silence, then he returned to his scissors, his spineless books, and the glue-pot.
“Madame Cléopatre,” he muttered to himself.
51
La Coloniale
The pages of La Coloniale were coarse and had yellowed with time. The mites had been at work, giving their own punctuation to the dusty pages.
It did not take Anne Marie long to find the first reference to Hégésippe Bray. FOREMAN MURDERS WIFE AND DISAPPEARS.
The article was in the edition of Thursday, May 2. It took up one of the columns on the last page:
The lifeless remains of a young woman, believed to be Eloise Deschamps, of the Sainte Marthe estate, Sainte-Anne, were found last Saturday by schoolchildren. Eloise Deschamps had been hacked to death and burned. The young woman, originally from Saint Pierre in Martinique, had worked for several years for Monsieur Calais, proprietor of the Sainte Marthe estate. She was the common law wife of the first foreman, Hégésippe Bray. Bray went missing at the beginning of last week, and it would appear that he frequently quarreled with his concubine, who was considerably younger than he. The military are actively seeking the runaway, and they believe that he may be in hiding in the Pointe-Noire area where, until recently, his sister was a primary school teacher.
Anne Marie turned the pages. Under the desk, she kicked off her shoes. They were still damp.
Most of the paper was now filled with events in Europe. There was a pervading sense of optimism concerning the outcome of the war. The paper spoke of the Shining Example of Democracy while denouncing the racial policies of the Germans. There were several references to Victor Schoelcher.
ARREST OF MURDERER OF SAINTE MARTHE
The article was on the front page of the paper, and it came a week after the first reference to Hégésippe Bray.
Hégésippe Bray, foreman at the Sainte Marthe estate for the past twenty years, was arrested Saturday, May 4, in the hamlet of Bouliqui, Sainte-Anne, where he had been hiding. He is now in the maison d’arrêt in Pointe-à-Pitre, accused of the murder of his wife.
The body of Eloise Deschamps, a domestic in the employ of Monsieur Calais, was found on April 27. After a detailed examination by the Prof. Foucan at the Colonial Hospital, the officers of law were able to identify the mutilated remains as those of the young Eloise Deschamps. There was no offspring to the doomed union; a son had died at the age of two. The enquiries of the gendarmes have been much aided by other laborers of the Sainte Marthe estate who were in a position to inform the investigators of the frequent quarrels between Bray and his young companion. On several occasions, the woman was reported to have left the conjugal hearth. Indeed, it was generally believed that the girl had quit the Sainte Marthe estate for her native Martinique until she returned to Bray at the beginning of the month of April. Like the eye in the midst of the hurricane, the ill-starred couple found a brief respite in their altercations.
The last person to see the young woman alive was Roland Remblin, cowherd on the Calais estate, who claims he saw her on April 23. He accompanied her to the house. Hégésippe Bray was waiting for her and according to Remblin, he held a whip in his hand, and he assailed the woman with a kind of language too coarse for the readers of these columns. Bray, a veteran of the Great War, has the reputation of a quick temper.
The date of the trial has been set for Monday, May 20.
Anne Marie leafed through the remaining pages. More advertisements and a single, isolated paragraph showing French troops along the Maginot line. There were two Senegalese, smiling in outsize uniforms, too loose at the neck and across the shoulders.
THE COLONIES HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN THE MOTHER COUNTRY
The volume ended with the end of May. There was no further reference to Hégésippe Bray. Anne Marie got up and, holding the pages open, walked barefoot to the counter. “I’d like a photocopy.”
The man looked up. His glasses had slipped down his nose.
“Who exactly are you?”
“I work for the Ministry of Justice, and I would like a photocopy of these two articles, please. I am le juge Laveaud.”
“You’ll have to pay, you know.”
“I will ask you for a receipt, of course.”
He resembled a tired rat. What had once been intelligence in the brown eyes was now senile cunning. He took the volume and went over to the photocopying machine. “Which article?”
“The entire front page, please.”
He nodded unhappily.
Anne Marie lifted the hatch and approached the shelves, looking for the second volume to 1940. Surprisingly, it was where it should have been—on the bottom shelf, next to the first semester for 1941. She took the book and went back to her desk. Her feet sought her shoes under the desk.
There was no reference to the trial in the first weeks of June. Instead, the paper spoke solely about the tragic events in France. The optimism had vanished from the faded pages. The word defeat made its first appearance; similarly, there was no mention of the faithful role of the colonies.
The report came at the end of June. The trial had taken place on Wednesday the 26th, and the article took up most of the back page, beneath an advertisement for a dental surgeon—with the latest equipment from Paris, Berlin and Rochester, New York, including electric drills.
Anne Marie ran a finger along the title.
MURDERER CONDEMNED TO PENAL COLONY FOR SEVEN YEARS.
“One franc fifty fo
r the photocopy,” the man said, aggrieved. Anne Marie nodded. “In a few minutes.”
The one-time foreman on the Sainte Marthe estate, Hégésippe Bray, illegitimate son of Florentine Bray of Douville, Sainte-Anne, was condemned last Friday to seven years of forced labor in the penal colony of St.-Laurent-du-Maroni in the Guyanas. This judgment follows several weeks of frenetic labor on the part of the colonial gendarmerie and the admirable juge d’instruction, M. Timoléon, despite considerable administrative difficulties arising from the situation in Europe. The avocat général was successful in obtaining the condemnation of Hégésippe Bray after two days of impassioned debate, thanks largely to the evidence of neighbors and fellow workers on the estate, several of whom were called to the stand. They testified to having heard and seen violent struggles between Bray and his young concubine.
Bray’s defense was bizarre, to say the least, and clearly put his lawyer, Maître Gillon, to some difficulty. Bray admitted to having killed his woman. The weapon, he said, was her magic potion! Despite frequent laughter from the public benches, obliging the president to call for silence more than once, Bray forcefully maintained that the woman was a she-devil inhabited by evil spirits who delighted in tormenting him. Speaking solely in vernacular, he went on to state that Eloise Deschamps frequently changed her appearance. At nights, he maintained, she would travel the countryside of the Grande-Terre in the form of a bird or a dog. Bray admitted that in her womanly state she frequently mocked him for his lack of amatory ardor. Furthermore, he believed that his companion had been pregnant at the time of death.
This last assertion, however, was soon conclusively dismissed by the science of Dr. Foucan, who was called to the stand.
According to Bray, after a particularly vehement altercation between Eloise Deschamps and himself, the young woman had left home. The woman led him to believe that she was carrying the unborn child of another man. She stayed away for several weeks, returning to Sainte Marthe in April. Although there was a reconciliation between Bray and her, Mlle. Deschamps continued to practice her black arts, Hégésippe Bray stated. One day, while she was working in the house of Monsieur Calais, Bray returned early to his own abode where he found two vials belonging to the woman. Each vial contained a sluggish liquid. Following the advice of a Voodoo doctor, Bray carefully decanted the liquid, exchanging the contents of the two bottles, each of which was marked with hieroglyphics beyond his understanding. The following Tuesday night, Hégésippe Bray was awoken from his sleep, and leaving the house, he found his companion lying in the grass. He said that she had been burned. After a few words of Voodoo prayer that Bray failed to comprehend, the poor woman breathed her last. Overcome by remorse and fear, Bray cut up the corpse and then hid it. Hindered from accomplishing this grisly task by the dawn, he carried the remains to L’Étang Diable where they were later found by schoolchildren.
Another Sun Page 18