Malediction

by Sally Spedding

  “Pray if you must. God knows, we need to,” he muttered.

  Mathieu stared, puzzled.

  “I won’t be. Thank you.”

  “Please yourself, squire.”

  “I intend to.”

  “We move off at 16.30. It’ll take at least an hour to get back. By the way, which car? The traitor’s Laguna?”

  Duvivier slumped sideways, his legs stiff as splints. Doom in his tiny eyes, doom on his lips. “Yes, but we’ll torch it down in the vineyards. There’s enough heat round here at the moment.”

  “What you getting at?” Vidal unscrewed a half bottle of Evian and gargled it down his throat.

  “I mean I had a call.”

  “And?” the Lanvière priest’s face obscured by the label’s image of glacial peaks and a cerulean sky.

  “Eberswïhr have arrested your papa. 4.18 this morning. Good, isn’t it? Another little cross for us to bear.”

  Vidal let the bottle slip from his grasp and watched as the only pure thing in that stinking place trickled away into the mud.

  XLIX

  LES MORTS. (SEPT VICTIMES RESTENT ENCORE DISPARUES)

  Simon Heckel 26 Raymond Aubry 41 Patrick Roth 60

  Lucien Schwab 50 Olivier Bailbe 45 Julius Weber 61

  Sarah Wassover 49 Eugene Fuchs 47 Julie Schnabel 54

  Jean-Marie Rube 47 Henri Tobiasz 52 Karl Joseph 51

  Fritz Chomensk 61 Marc Kraemer 63 David Bosom 38

  Émile Rauch 30 Charles Beckman 48 Ricard Jermann 46

  Martin Altman 32 Harry Klemper 39 Abram Wolkowitz 68

  Franz Mittelberg 46 Michel Lammel 49 Paul Green 45

  Sarah Gluck 52 Daniel Hoverstadt 35 Felix Zimmerman 63

  Georges Kaufman 39 Jules Broder 40 Jan Lappidus 49

  Micha Weinberg 57

  PAS ENCORE TROUVÉS

  André Lipman 41 David Wolpert 42 Nat Moulx 52

  Pierre Escher 54 Olivier Grunfeld 48 Serge Moise 51

  Tony Mendelsöhn 53

  LES EMPLOYÉS

  Geneviève Baudet 20 Francis Gallieni 43 (capitaine)

  Laurence Chabon 24 Jean-Paul Lantiez 25 (securité)

  Annik Caby 19 Louise Ernée 27

  Josette Grouiller 23 José de Romero 46 (securité)

  Bruno Rey 52

  Christelle Frenois 36

  L

  The tunnel’s meagre light had deteriorated, and without candles, that gloomy coffin space was empty even of rats.

  Now all Colette and Nelly were contemplating was how to exit. Their fear and humiliations past and present, had clearly given the Abbot more than a frisson of pleasure. His voice now reached them from behind.

  “Is Mademoiselle Augot feeling better after that little interlude? I do hope so.”

  “I’m OK.” Then under her breath, “no thanks to you, slimy old creep. And where’s my gun?”

  Colette stared at her with a mixture of admiration and alarm, remembering his gun. Remembering hers...

  “Exactly. Quite right to ask, my dear,” he purred. “But I was simply ob...”

  “Obeying orders?” Colette found the courage to interrupt. “The past fifty years in this country have been founded on that pathetic excuse.”

  “Madame, I was about to send out for the antidote as I wasn’t prepared to have a corpse for Madame Gramme to deal with, but you beat me to it, remember?”

  “That’s so kind. So who rang your doorbell? Was it him?”

  “No. Just a neighbour wishing me a happy birthday,” said Désespoir, helping himself to another glass of wine, this time from an already opened Bordeaux. His pistol still too handy. His mouth eerily lined by a dark redness.

  Suddenly, without warning, came the strangest sound she’d ever heard.

  “Sssh! Listen!” She took Nelly’s arm as shofars and more sirens – this time, en masse – the broken sounds of shevorim and t’ruah filtered up the ancient tunnel, permeating the very stones of the former Seminary. The Paris Jews still holding to the voice of Jacob proclaiming God’s kingdom from every synagogue north, south, east and west of the Seine. Yet another blood river like the Rhine and the Don, risen too close to its banks... “What in God’s name is going on out there?”

  “Oh, there’s usually something every day. If it’s not some festival or other it’s troublemakers. Too many people, not enough work. The same everywhere. I thought you‘d find it interesting.”

  “Sounds more than that to me.” Colette strained to listen, and the awareness that something terrible had happened, gradually dawned. She looked at Nelly who tapped her watch.

  Bertrand. And time’s running out. Go on...

  “My son was troublesome, you said.” Colette reminded him yet again. “Why the past tense?” She’d sensed his wavering, his confusion, and like the fly trap around the hovering prey, she would choose her moment. The Abbot procrastinated, waiting until the housekeeper had cleared away the empty wine bottle and the wine glasses.

  “My sister,” he declared the moment she’d gone.

  “My son,” snapped Colette.

  “Ah, yes. Where was I?”

  He stood by the plate glass window where already a fine mist of condensation was clouding the view. “We’ve got four hours. I need to be on the road before dark. That is essential as I am not a night driver, you understand.”

  Colette and Nelly stared at each other.

  What’s the old dickhead going on about?

  “I want to know about my Bertrand. Now.”

  Christian Désespoir pulled two dining chairs away from the table and with a nervous flick of the hand, told them both to sit down.

  “I am an old man, and I can with a pure heart and an easy conscience say I have loved my country all my life. Almost too much, some would say.”

  Where the Hell’s this leading? Bertrand, darling, make him tell me...

  Colette crossed herself so quickly she might have been dusting something off her chest. Her eyes suddenly tired, the lids itching with the growth of new lashes.

  “I now need to spend the rest of my days talking to God,” he continued, avoiding their disbelief. “What days He’ll be good enough to grant me.”

  “You have sinned,” Nelly said suddenly, in a voice Colette didn’t recognise. “More than anyone else I’ve ever known. What about Chloë Doumiez and the triplets? What’s happened to them? And poor Bertrand?”

  The pistol. He’s still got it. And Nelly’s gun. Be careful.

  The founder of the Brothers in God and the Pauvres Soeurs suddenly looked as old as the earth itself. He sank into his chair, clasping both hands under his chin.

  “You’re right again, of course, and I’m afraid, Madame Bataille, I’m very much afraid.. ” His aqueous eyes met hers. Colette’s breath leapt from her lungs but found no escape. Her heart was alive with too much trepidation. “Your son is dead, of course. And even though I’m not the one to say it, may his soul rest in peace.”

  The silence became a chasm into which her very being plunged. Her belief, doubtful all along, vanished with those words, beyond recall. Forever. While the Abbot of Lagrange Vivray weary of his supporting role in the Great Scheme of Things, the Unfinished Business, recounted with clinical precision, what he knew.

  Nelly held her, cradled Colette’s shorn head, her thin limp body, and tried every way she could to lessen the reality. To weave impossible scenarios of hope as light as thistledown, only to be broken on a breath.

  “My baby! My baby! Where is he?”

  But everything she and Bertrand had said and done from her handing him over the priest’s keys and his strange smile at her request, to his final wave as he’d ridden away on his mission, recurred with such grim clarity, it rendered her silent.

  I knew it. I knew it. It’s all my fault. Dear Mary, Mother of God.

  “Madame, as you can see, I have not been blessed with the wherewithal to give birth, but I can understand. And because I understand, I cannot oblige you.”

  Nelly turned to tap the Abb
ott’s velvet arm. Still unsteady, but deadly serious, spiced with a coquettishness learnt from her mother on the streets. “Père Supérieur, you have to confess, and whatever you say will stay a secret. That’s a promise.”

  “I do have need, you are right. And to go over to St. Nicholas’ church now would be too dangerous.”

  “I’ll listen instead.” She looked up at him, her lips moving on silent words...

  ‘I had a git like you inside me not so long ago, with a piece of old rope for a dick. You’re no better.’

  “Do sit down and make yourselves comfortable.”

  With the tunnel now clear behind him, and a fresh candle lit and thriving, the former inhabitant of Désespoir village began the saga of his transgressions. When he’d finished, he handed his speechless audience five hundred francs each, which they promptly threw to the floor. He ignored the gesture, urging them instead to leave immediately but stay hidden.

  “My gun,” Nelly said.

  “Please believe me, Mademoiselle, at the moment, my need for it is greater than yours. Until your lover whom we’ve just seen, decides you also know too much.”

  Before Colette could protest, the eighty-three-year-old excused himself and, bending low to turn his bony buttocks in the air, elegantly eased himself into another headstand.

  LI

  Friday October 3rd

  News of the massacre was everywhere Colette and Nelly turned. On radio and TV; the front of every newspaper and on everyone’s horrified lips from the Mediterranean to the Channel coast. Images of Roquette IV’s fragments floating along a reddened Seine and of traumatised emergency personnel would linger long in their minds. As for the victims’ photographs taken in happier times, those carefree smiles possessed an almost grotesque poignancy. Only Sarah Wassover, mother of two teenage boys and director of a bed linen company in Amiens, had survived – albeit with terrible injuries – only to die during the rush to hospital. Seven other diners were still missing, presumed drowned.

  The latest hourly report from the Paris police confirmed that the search for five white Caucasian men, who’d been spotted behaving suspiciously on the boat the day before, was in full swing. Whoever they were, had been well-prepared and ruthless. Heads would roll. Reprisals sure to follow. Meanwhile, every synagogue in the land was offering prayers for the dead and bereaved. Families, who would never be the same again, and for those survivors of the WWII round-ups, this tragedy would only restore their worst nightmares.

  Colette had taken it all in, sick to her stomach that no-one had listened to her warnings. And at 10.08 a.m. the next morning, she and Nelly Augot both stood on the threshold of Number 6 Apartments Cornay in the company of two officers from the Eberswïhr Gendarmerie. Sub-lieutenant Olivier Sedan and the unfortunately named Captain Jules Prêtre. Both tall, out of uniform in smart Le Coq Sportif casuals as though a golf course might be their next port of call.

  Stranger already to the apartment’s grey ordinariness, and unwilling to step where Bertrand’s room lay waiting like the black chasm she’d already imagined, Colette was still crying, unable to rationalise anything, including the state of Dolina Levy’s flat. Her windows blanked out with whitewash for privacy had been scored with swastikas and equally shameful messages. Mitzvah, her pretty tortoiseshell cat had been found speared by the boundary railings; his neck broken. His mouth stretched wide with terror. It was as if the evil that had fouled the Seine had reached here. Her sanctuary.

  Colette prayed hard for all the dead, and the widow’s soul to rest in peace, but she couldn’t ask that for Bertrand. Until he appeared, there was still hope, despite what Désespoir had said. And it was hope that finally spurred her on to the welcome mat and into their home, to switch on the television and radio for any news.

  “With so many dead from that bomb, it seems selfish to focus on Bertrand.” She said, blowing her nose, eyeing the clear-up taking place on the capital’s river of death.

  “You’re his mother,” Nelly reminded her, taking a look round. “I’d be the same.”

  The police from Eberswïhr had already been in two days before – Sedan had already admitted that – but also that it was obvious to them that someone else had got there first.

  “Not the same freak who killed poor Madame Levy?” Colette turned to him with fresh fear.

  “More than likely, but don’t you go worrying about that now. We’ve taken prints, and,” his tone became frighteningly confidential, “we’re DNA testing semen found in your underwear drawer.”

  Colette and Nelly gasped in unison. There was worse to come. They knew it.

  “Bloody sicko!” Nelly looked shaken like the vulnerable little girl she’d once been.

  “I’m sorry, ladies, not very pleasant, and I’m afraid we’ve had to take certain items away for the time being. But, of course, where we could, we’ve made replacements. Just one thing,” he looked at Prêtre for concurrence. “This place was also bugged. Very cleverly indeed, I might add. Whoever did it knew a thing or two and had the time to do it. Still,” he patted her shoulder, “you should find everything back to normal.”

  “Bugged? Normal?” The words were grotesque.

  “Surely after what’s happened to Colette’s poor old neighbour, you’re not going to leave us on our own?” asked Nelly, paler then ever behind her party glasses.

  “Us?” Sedan looked quizzically from one to the other. They didn’t look the sort, besides it was Madame Bataille who’d notoriously seduced the curé from the straight and narrow.

  “Even Robert Vidal might be a threat.”

  “As from now,” he consulted his watch, rather than respond to that one, “you’ll have a guard outside, twenty-four hours a day until we feel you’re in no more danger. And I’ve arranged for Doctor Blanco to call at four o’clock and check you over.”

  “We’re fine,” Nelly protested.

  “Better to be on the safe side.”

  “Of course,” Colette said bleakly.

  Sedan signalled to Prêtre to join him at the table and sat down. “Now then, you’ve told us about Libourne, the Abbé de Lagrange Vivray and what you witnessed in that tunnel, but we need anything else you can recollect, however small and inconsequential it may seem to you. If we’re to help our Paris colleagues make arrests. If we’re to find your boy.”

  If, not when. He’s now twenty-four...

  Silence as Colette dried her eyes.

  “Nothing’s been inconsequential I can assure you We’ve both told you everything.”

  She then went over to the sink and filled the kettle. Such a wonderfully simple thing to grip its handle, feel the familiar weight of it in a comfortless world, but when she offered the two men coffee, they declined.

  “We think you ought to know that a Monsieur François Vidal formerly of Eberswïhr has been detained on matters relating to his son,” said Prêtre.

  Colette stopped. Her coffee tilting recklessly in its cup.

  “Did you know he was living with him?” asked Sedan.

  Her thoughts raced in time with all the other events, now out of control.

  “I’d no idea. I know nothing about him. Father Jean-Baptiste never mentioned his parents except to say that his mother died in childbirth.”

  “A pity he didn’t,” the sub-lieutenant mumbled, screwing on the top to his pen. “Well, we’re talking about a serious and committed neo-Nazi here. A very unsavoury type indeed. But we only have forty-eight hours to hold him. Some pretty colourful stuff outside his old flat, mind. Obviously not very popular with some of the natives. We could get them for that, but there’s too much on right now.”

  “Who?”

  ”Les Flammes. Call themselves anti-fascists, you name it...”

  “I remember now,” Nelly interrupted. “Just before I set off for Libourne, I met some roux who said he belonged to them.” She wasn’t going to mention Bellino and he certainly wasn’t going to get his gun back. He was history. “Degree in Medicine if you please, from René Déscarte
s, and jobless like me. He tried to get me to join them rigging flags on the Vedettes de Pont Neuf and the Bateaux-Mouches...”

  “Bateaux-Mouches?” Sedan queried, jotting it down.

  “Yeah, crap like that. Kindergarten stuff; oh, and the Pompidou. So he said. Anything to draw attention to the growing problem. Then François Vidal’s name came up, and someone else, Guillaume Farges, I think. Public enemies, he called them.”

  “Got him as well. Yesterday.” Prêtre announced as Colette’s stomach shifted into pain mode. Her lover’s shadow indestructible, blacker than the Devil himself. “So we’ll see what they’ve got to say for themselves.” The younger man was using too many clichés in an effort to keep the tone light. “He might do us all a favour and tell us where we can find his son. On the other hand, he might be as bloody minded as old Toussirot. They know the law, see. Clever like that. And you can’t touch them. The Bishop knew Robert Vidal had gone up for the Mass but swore he didn’t know anything else. Funny thing, my wife’s a believer. Me, I’d like to see a little more honesty among God’s representatives before I commit myself.”

  Colette interrupted. “Have you tried the Hôtel Marionnette in the Rue Goncourt? The management there may have overheard something.”

  “All hotels have now been contacted. It’s odd his choir’s performance at Saint Sébastien was cancelled. Bit of a music freak, isn’t he?”

  Colette nodded in shame.

  “Apparently Father Anselme had chest pains last minute. Told us he’d been very honoured to be asked to stand in, but he’s old, so there we are.”

  “Official covering up all round,” Sedan sighed, “and there’s not a lot we can do. However, we’ve done a run through of all the parishes, with the help of the R.G., of course.”

  “The R.G?” Nelly pulled a face.

  “I can assure you, Mademoiselle, they’re not all rotten apples.”

  “Just a few, then.”

  Colette frowned as Sedan continued.

  “Some of their priests are unwell, some are practically walking corpses, but there are one or two with – how shall we say – irregular absences. And, Colette, may I call you that? The names match the ones you gave. Thank you. We’re indebted.”