Malediction

by Sally Spedding

Duvivier and Vidal. Someone help me. Help me…

  A plumber’s van. A Bedford Rascal. Something et Fils. He couldn’t quite make it out. Mathieu’s mouth fell open. His breath on hold and fingers trembling on the handlebars.

  Father forgive them, for they know not what they do...

  A chipping flew up and scorched his cheek. Then, they were gone.

  17.23 hrs.

  He stood up to ride, all his weight on the pedals, labouring against the tricky surface. One push forward, two slides back, until he saw the grey blur of parked cars and the hotel lights beyond. Mathieu flung the bike down and charged between the Mercs and Audis towards the main entrance.

  He glimpsed Shalom scripted in gold above a star of David, but there was no-one in reception, just a hum of voices to the left. The runaway pushed open the gilded double doors and immediately, forty-five startled faces turned his way. He looked for the beautiful girl he‘d just seen, to no avail.

  “Get out!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Everyone get out! For God’s sake!”

  As if in slow motion, pens were lowered, papers put to one side before the Cultural Committee got to its collective feet. Black suits, navy suits, dark, demure dresses, all very calm without a word, reliving as one, old cauchemars, showered from above by a million faceted crystals.

  “This place will be next. I know it!” His voice unrecognisable from the tape, and never so huge in St. Jean de la Motte Mauron, had now found a cause. “Come on, vite!”

  There came the splintering of glass from the far corner as the fire alarm, half siren half shofar, echoed through the building above the terror of fleeing cars. Leila Fraenkel had used her shoe to break the glass, but her hand was bleeding.

  “Mama! Papa! Move! We have to believe him,” she shrieked, and Mathieu saw her properly, for the first time. Her shining hair, her exquisite face.

  I love you already, whoever you are.

  But her father sat still with his sheaf of papers resolutely in place. Central Synagogue. Devis de Travaux. Roof beams, re-felting, re-tiling, the new Jerusalem.

  His eyes sunk behind his glasses, caught hers.

  “My father always said to me, stay with your dream whatever storms beset you. And dear daughter, I know you understand all about that.”

  “Monsieur!” Mathieu tried to pull him from his seat. “There is a device that could go off at any time. Are you mad?”

  Both men stared at each other. Tears began from each for the other, but neither tears nor words were enough.

  “I built this place up from a ruin. Just as I want to rebuild the Synagogue. And I will. God knows I will. Remember, my name represents the Chesed. Charity and forgiveness...” He slumped back in his chair as Pauline Fraenkel was frantically trying to prise her daughter’s paintings from the wall. But they’d been mirror-plated and there was no screwdriver to release them. She tried her nails and broke them all as Mathieu dragged Leila out into the drive.

  “Mama! Leave them,” she cried. “It doesn’t matter. Oh, papa...”

  Mathieu let her cling to him, feeling her body next to his. Her mouth in his hair for comfort, any comfort and, as the blast shot the hotel in two and a massive tower of flame licked the darkening sky above, he slipped his folded-up charcoal portrait into her hand.

  LVIII

  Tuesday October 7th

  As Nelly cleared away the lunch things and stacked them by the sink, she noticed Didier Molinari move across the window. Although the glass had recently borne the brunt of the easterly rain, and her charity shop spectacles were still on her nose, he was clear enough for her to recognise.

  A tap on the door. Not the usual four, but three. She frowned, wishing Bellino’s gun was still in her pocket. Why she kept the chain on since she’d arrived at Colette’s apartment four days ago, like she’d been told, but would really have liked to allow the guard in just to gaze at his dark good looks. No matter he wore decorator’s overalls under a sou’wester with an uncool cap on his curls.

  “Car’s just been delivered,” he said. “Could you tell Madame Bataille? I’ll be waiting by the steps, just in case.”

  Then he was gone.

  Tell Madame Bataille... She was the one he’d always noticed. She the one he liked. C’est ma vie...

  “Who was that?” Colette was in Bertrand’s room putting on clean sheets and replacing fresh pyjamas inside his panda on the pillow.

  “Your other fan club says your car’s back.”

  “Oh, Nelly, stop it!” She slammed the bedroom door, said sorry to her son for her carelessness; then, having stuffed the hospital letter in her pocket, slipped her mac over her shoulders.

  “I’ll lead.” Nelly offered.

  “Fine.” But Colette’s voice betrayed a nervousness grown more severe since the King David Hotel bombing. Although news of this atrocity had segued into that of the wrecked Bateau-Mouche, it was photographs of the handsome hotelier and his wife who’d perished, that took up whole front pages of the local and national press. Colette at first had wanted to try and contact their artist daughter, Leila to tell her she wasn’t alone, but Nelly would have none of it and told her to hang on for Bertrand instead. But she nevertheless felt evil draw closer, like cloud shadows on the land, and knew that before long, that same darkness she’d endured would embrace her again.

  This was the first time she’d left the flat since returning to Lanvière, and, even with Nelly in front, the solid rain found her face, obliterating all sounds from the street below. She felt doubly scared and vulnerable.

  “Where’s the bloody guard? What’s going on?” She hung back, looking along the damp concrete landings and pillars wide enough to conceal a body.

  “He’s around somewhere,” Nelly, with hope in her voice. “Come on.”

  Colette spotted Dolina Levy’s door already half covered by an À Vendre sign and touched it in sorrow.

  Someone’s not wasted much time. Poor woman...

  Then she realised Nelly had disappeared round the corner.

  “Nelly? Wait!”

  A shriek suddenly filled the air.

  Colette ran, her legs leaden with fear and saw two men blocking the way. The Molinari lookalike and another. Four silhouetted black hands...

  “Stupid bitches,” the shorter one’s voice softened by his hood. “Go for their gobs.” Gilles Ferey snatched a chunky, metal key-ring from his pocket.

  “Two gobs, two bullets. Great.”

  Colette leapt on Nelly and brought her down facing the wet floor. Cats’ piss and new rain, their breaths urgent gasps. Her wig adrift of her head.

  So this is it. All over again... Goodbye Bertrand... Nelly....

  Then a scuffle. Someone else was there. Colette recognised agent Sedan’s voice yelling for help and the thud of booted feet against the wall. The blast from the key ring gun and a hail of other shots, echoed through the apartment block.

  “Oh, Jesus.” She kept Nelly’s head close, twin heart beats racing under the cries and groans of death nearby. They froze as warm blood dried and last words evaporated. No last rites, no consoling, and only when sub-lieutenant Sedan touched her arm did she turn to look at the terrible landscape of carnage, of bodies still stirring in slow, slow motion.

  He was dying too. It was written on his face and the rest of him.

  “Help,” was a whisper in the rain that only Colette could discern with her ear next to his mouth as Nelly scrambled to her feet and charged back up to the flat.

  “I’m here. You’ll be alright,” Colette murmured to him.

  “I’ve had it. You’d better get out.”

  She cradled him as he paled – the last woman he would ever hold. Bald, pink-eyed, better than nothing and the best she could do. For a tiny, terrible moment she pretended it was Bertrand’s little breath on her cheek. But then the man stiffened, his blue eyes blanked on nothing and Colette cried out, letting him fall from her grasp.

  ***

  The SAMU car whined into the Rue St. Léger followe
d by a war of feet on the concrete steps. Someone vomited during Colette’s little prayer so there was no time to finish it. No time for the niceties of life. There were already too many dead.

  LIX

  If Abraham was prepared to offer up his son as sacrifice, well, I’ve gone seventy-one better, and I must say it would be nice to see some gratitude, even dare I say, a small reward? Are you listening up there?

  In the schooling ring at ‘L’Havre de Paix,’ its owner, Georges Déchaux drew on his panatella and tightened the lunging rein bringing his latest acquisition to an abrupt halt. Seventeen hands, and perfectly formed, the rescued Lippizaner whose last owner, Colonel Anton Kopeck had been killed in a mortar attack, stood ghost-white against the blackening sky. His vastus muscle trembled in his flank as Déchaux marched towards him in the outdoor school.

  “Cnaba, Cnaba,” he smiled. He’d renamed him ‘Glory’ in the language of its birthplace and already the stallion knew his voice, both ears on full alert as he approached. “You’re truly a horse of Heaven.” The général unwrapped a portion of tarte aux pommes and offered it up to the whiskered lips that daintily took it.

  Warm against warm, Cnaba then sniffed the left-over cigar, the skin cream, the hair restorer before sighing against his new owner’s neck.

  For the first time, for a small moment, his Havre de Paix – meaning safe haven – seemed to match its name.

  “Too much has gone wrong, my friend,” he began. “Better that the Landsturm had been a herd of pigs with Plagnol as Hauptsturmbannführer. They’ve let me down. Badly. Six weeks too soon with Marheshvan nowhere in sight. Damn every one of them, and Line and Ferey – local bunglers. Waste of bloody skin, don’t you think?” Déchaux used his handkerchief to pick an insect from the corner of the horse’s dark blue eye. “Let’s hope pretty Nina Zeresche keeps her head on her shoulders at Eberswïhr. And what about those other girls, my beauty, who, without myself and Sister Marie-Ange, would have been walking the streets?” He lowered his voice. “Lefêbvre was the worst. Duping me by sending the Breton’s tape to the Jews in Essecotte. I should have finished off her and Kirchner at the Salpêtrière. However, better late than never, don’t you agree?” He looked over to where a pile of new cavaletti lay near the schooling ring’s fence, covering a length of heavy sand. Deep and freshly impacted.

  Excellent. A nice quiet grave. Adieu, Claude, ma jolie lesbienne…

  Cnaba teased the man’s mole, and he smiled, for unlike the critical youngster in Ghirlandajo’s Vieillard, the animal seemed to be finding some pleasure in it.

  When the général slackened the rein and flicked the lunging whip near his thigh, the horse began a collected trot, widening the circle, his tail high over his rump and nostrils glowing like carnelians. Then a change of leg at the canter followed by a cabriole from a sudden stop, and a whinny of ambition.

  “That’s my boy.” Déchaux stared in wonderment while the sky succumbed to the quiet dark and the girls’ bedroom windows in his farmhouse flickered on and off like morse. Recalled from duty, they were, with the exception of Ruffiac, restless and demanding. All his ‘poules’ come home to roost.

  He lit another cigar as he led his charge back through the gate across a chalky field once full of brood mares he’d brought up from Provence, to the stables that lined the eastern wall. One of those detained upstairs – his ‘souris rouge,’ – had made a nameplate from a pizza base with the letters CNABA scripted in felt pen. But he’d been insulted enough already, and had jammed her mouth with it instead. Cnaba, his special creature would have silver instead. Maybe the best porcelain. He would have to decide which.

  It was like old times watching the stallion walk sweetly into his stall, to be knee deep in fresh straw. After just a day, the Russian-bred was settled, and now as his fine enquiring head was turned his way, the mother-loving Father André’s preachings from Revelations came to mind...

  Behold a Pale Horse, and he that sat on him was Death...

  Déchaux shivered and hastily filled the metal feeder with a mix of bran and the best oats from a dealer in Foucourt. Even though he was on official sick leave, lying low, he still had five hours work ahead to save himself.

  Revenons à nos moutons.

  Old Désespoir and his peculiar wife had disappeared, and their home village was already under surveillance, but from his conversation with the lovely Sister Superior at the Refuge, they were known to be near Saintes and heading south to Libourne.

  Soon these rats will be wearing the biggest smile of all.

  The Banja Lukan exile picked at his feed, as if mindful of his new owner’s audible thoughts and nuances of tone. His mouth peppered by grain, his huge ultramarine eyes fixed on him with disconcerting depth.

  “And now, my Seian Horse.” The man stroked the pink muzzle, soft and pliant as Ruffiac’s breasts had been. “Tell me, what is poor Georges to do with himself?” He paused, waiting politely just like his Confessor at Ste Trinité had always done... “I see. You are absolutely right, of course...”

  Almost five hours left until Duvivier’s visit for a business chat and then, with a sextet of girls to choose from, with one more still to come, who could ask for a better nightcap? The général set the alarm and secured the end stable door.

  ***

  The sky over the chalk downlands south of Reims was almost dark, not naturally from subtle dusk, but by the swathe of onyx cloud that had stealthily advanced from the north-east. From its coal slags and war fields. A kind of grim Gethsemane that silently clasped everything to its dark heart, and as the général discarded his riding boots and unlocked the side door to the farmhouse, the telephone in his office was ringing.

  LX

  Wednesday October 8th

  When her employer, Guy Baralet called at Number 6, Apartments Cornay with a spray of pink chrysanthemums, he looked a worried man. It was Colette who responded first, having used the spy hole and recognising his voice on the Intercom. His weary smile echoed her own, prelude to a long embrace, while Nelly hung back.

  Colette then introduced her. “Guy, this is Nelly Augot. She actually saved my life.”

  The ex-student greeted him warmly. Another good-looking man, until she saw his wedding ring. Baralet was trying not to stare at his former secretary. The new wig that Jacqueline Noiret had helped her choose, her bruised and swollen feet, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask for a glimpse of her eyes. Those sunglasses were giving nothing away.

  Colette had felt good to be dressing for a man again, and that hadn’t included Didier Blanco. She’d had two hours since Guy Baralet’s call to get ready. Checking her make-up, doing her nails...

  “You look wonderful,” he lied badly.

  “Thank you.”

  “We’ve all missed you terribly, Colette, and I have to say, that although I’ve never been back inside a church since I was a nipper, I have been praying. Lise as well.”

  “You’re both too kind.” She found a matching vase under the sink and he saw how with one deft movement his gift was arranged and placed on the table.

  “Flowers of gold. Lise was telling me. For a golden lady.”

  Colette blushed.

  “Do thank her. They make all the difference.”

  He took her hands. “We know what you’ve both been through, and neither of us could bear it. And your dear Bertrand? Still no news?”

  I am shameful. How can I tell her that the Seine near the Pont Neuf was being dredged, and those seven dead passengers found from the boat were all over forty and from the Oise? Forgive me.

  “No, not yet.” She gripped him even more tightly. “But I am praying.”

  “And what about our curé?” He studied her carefully. “Seems he has some questions to answer.”

  “What on?”

  “Tell him.” Nelly urged, setting out cups for coffee. “You must.”

  “ OK. He’s tried to get in touch. And been taped.”

  “Not the only one, from what I heard this morning.”
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  “Meaning?”

  “Leila Fraenkel claimed to have recognised Dominique Mathieu’s voice on the hate tape sent to the King David’s Hotel. He’s one of the five priests still being hunted. A Breton. It’s been officially matched up, but all very hush-hush at the moment.”

  Colette felt as though a stone had settled in her stomach.

  “Young, good-looking, he must have been deranged,” Nelly went on.

  “No, he wasn’t. He was the only one with any heart.”

  Baralet raised his considerable eyebrows.

  “Some heart,” Nelly said wrily as Colette blinked away stinging tears.

  “What about Leila Fraenkel, then? I could go and tell her what he was really like.”

  “I wouldn’t. Anyhow, she’s been tucked away somewhere. Out of sight out of mind for the time being.” The businessman’s frown stayed put. He coughed, as if unsure how to start. “Look Colette. I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” he began softly, “and as the whole thing’s still being investigated. Prêtre’s not saying much, but closer to home, our man of God’s in pretty deep, too. Up to here, in fact.” He pointed to his forehead, then suddenly checked the window in case he’d been followed. “I’d keep well clear, if I were you. If he makes contact again, tell Captain Prêtre straight away. Myself as well. I’ve arranged a new line, nothing to do with Medex. Strictly private.” He passed her a small card.

  “Good grief, how much did that cost?”

  ”Doesn’t matter.”

  She blushed again. Guy Baralet released his hands to pat her shoulder.

  “Thanks to you and Nelly, they’re now sniffing right at the top. This is one hell of a bottomless cesspit. If you thought The Beast that Brecht referred to had died in 1945, you’re wrong. It’s merely been dozing...”

  Perspiration crawled under Colette’s wig as Baralet went on.

  “Someone’s trying to warn me off as well. Swastikas, you name it, all over our new walls. Then Les Flammes have just put their spoke in, so it’s a right bloody mess at the moment. Just had a quote today for nearly half a million to put the damage right. But,” he took his coffee and managed a smile for Nelly. “it’s you both I’m worried about, and I don’t know if it’s been made clear to you how much danger you’re both in. Look,” he drained his cup, “why don’t you come and stay with us at ‘La Passerelle’? Our daughter’s away, so we’ve got two extra rooms, all mod cons...”