Malediction

by Sally Spedding

  How do they know it’s him? It’s bound to be someone else. Please make it be someone else. Just because Jesus died in front of his mother doesn’t mean I have to suffer as well. Why are you doing this to me?

  “Colette? Are you ready?” he asked again, gently.

  She followed him in a trance as he knocked on another door, whereupon two more uniformed police emerged. The stairs down were difficult, but she kept the outer door in her sights, facing north-west. Facing the Capital with just numbness, no pain, no pain. Almost surreal, until she saw the young woman on the switchboard hurriedly making a connection to somewhere.

  “Who’s that?” Colette asked, loud enough for all to hear.

  “Mademoiselle Zeresche. A trainee. Why?”

  “I have to say something.”

  Deep black water... my baby, my baby...

  “What is it, Madame?”

  “Our phone line at my flat. You know, the special one. I’m sure it’s tapped. After your last call I heard something odd.”

  At this, the young brunette tried to duck under the sectioned counter, but the two officers were on her as she kicked and wrestled with them to retrieve her gun.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, with the rain coursing like a blown veil off the windscreen, the unmarked Peugeot with its driver and three passengers sped south towards Verdun to join the A4, the fastest route to the Metropolis.

  As urban sprawl supplanted fields of grazing livestock, and traffic thickened, news from the Rue St. Aubin came over Yannick Wintzer’s radio. A handwritten suicide note and impromptu will had been found in Christian Désespoir’s study. Undated, but judging by its condition, had been recently composed. The reporter kept his voice under control as he began…

  “...The Armée Contre Juifs used my initiative for Les Pauvres Soeurs in Libourne like a parasite, to grow even bigger than its reluctant host. It still grows, nourished by the Unfinished Business of Jews in Europe. Général Georges Déchaux has threatened myself and my wife – Madame Gamme – with our lives every day since August 1995 when the Refuge first opened. The fists of this arch-criminal and his friends in the Police and Secret Services have been linked together for too long, while we too, sinned in the eyes of God.

  “Because of my transgressions, we wish to leave what remains of our estate to the furtherance of racial tolerance in this country I have loved since my childhood in the Mayenne. I was twelve when the enemy first appeared with those black serpents on their arms. Now they are among us again.”

  LXI

  Robert Vidal sat alone outside the Bar du Pont in Chȃteauroux, having tried the pay phone to try and reach Colette.

  In his own clothes, jeans, black leather jacket and lumberjack shirt he could have passed for anyone. Everyman, except that his burdens were growing by the minute, to match his loneliness and isolation. He needed Colette’s voice, her just being there, and this need gnawed at his soul, obliterating his choir, the ritual demands of his religion, and the fact that his father had vanished from police custody, now rendering himself to all intents and purposes, an orphan.

  What if François should start singing?

  There’s nothing I can do.

  He sucked the bitter citron pressé through the straw, flinching at the sourness on his tongue. In five minutes, he’d try her again, before his journey. By 20.00 hours he’d be in Lanvière, feeling her body against his, her scent more than incense could ever be...

  DEATH TO THE NEO-NAZIS! Join LES FLAMMES!

  A long-haired student sandwiched between the words in red, stopped at his table and held out his cap. Vidal obliged with ten francs, alarmed by the tremor in his hand.

  Stupid shits. Go and do something useful.

  “Thank you, Monsieur.”

  Vidal watched him pester the rest of the clientèle until le patron saw him off with a wave of the menu. He then finished his drink. Duvivier had been summoned urgently and without explanation by the général, and left an hour before, strained and jittery. He couldn’t pretend for much longer that only two of the first cell remained. That the ACJ’s third project in Strasbourg, during Hanukkah, was in doubt.

  His problem, not mine. I’m through with it all. I want a life. Or rather, a death…

  Suddenly, as a coda to his reverie, a blue van veered into the kerb, throwing dust and gravel in its wake. A dirt fleck landed in his glass.

  The driver chucked a slab of newspapers to the ground. “Journaux!” he called.

  Instantly Vidal saw half of a headline DOGS OF WAR, then half of himself and the others. His lungs numb while he gave a sign of the cross so rapidly that no-one noticed le patron pick up the pile and take it into the bar.

  The priest left a generous tip then hurried in the direction of a lorry park on the edge of an industrial estate next to the River Indre. He phoned Colette again. No reply. He broke into a trot going against all the advice for someone on the run with a newly public face.

  Meld. He reminded himself. Fucking impossible.

  Everything was here for the weekend for DIY and gardening punters. Huge white hangars spilled their stock out on to their forecourts. Barbecues in reconstituted stone as big as crematoria, and picnic chairs stacked to impossible heights spotted with migrant bird slime. Vidal too, passed through it all towards the juggernauts.

  Fredo Rattino, Norbert Dentresangle, Spedition, Eddie Stobart with a UK number plate all slumbered in warm, diesel rows with their curtains drawn. Rétameur, tailleur, soldat, matelot... which one to choose?...

  Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the cab window of Jaime Bonnêtre, Fruit et Légumes. Paris plate. Hopefully going north.

  The daisy-patterned curtain on the driver’s side, stirred and a young face looked out. A woman, no more than twenty-five, sleep still round her mouth.

  “Yes?”

  Too late to try another. She’s seen me now, and would remember....

  “A 20 North?” His Midi accent good.

  “I might be.”

  “I need Paris, then Reims.”

  “Now, shall I tell you Monsieur, what I need?”

  “OK.” His pulse quickened.

  “I need rough scum like you like a dose of the claps. Clear off.”

  But Vidal was already on the door and he pulled it open. Once she’d seen the pistol she edged over so he could perch alongside. Then he drew his pretty little curtain over and noticed her fingers.

  No ring.

  “Move it, Mademoiselle.”

  “Madame, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t.”

  She pursed her lips, pushed her hair back and jerked the gear stick into reverse, before edging round to the exit. He didn’t like the way she kept sneaking glances at him from the corner of her eye, so he stubbed the Zastava against her thigh, skinny as a chopstick.

  “Act normally, or I’ll get busy.”

  She flashed, raised her hand as she overtook a Gröningen cheese truck.

  “Don’t do that again.”

  “He’s a mate of mine.”

  “I said, don’t.” He settled back and pulled the day‘s France Soir from the crowded glove box as she reached 110 heading for Viérzon. She must have just bought it. The ink was still soft.

  Mother of God.

  ‘LE MALIN.’

  He was looking at himself again. The same shot Toussirot had taken before the Mary Magdalene concert in July. The flash trapped in his right eye.

  Toussirot the sly cunt...

  “Step on it,” whispered the choirmaster as she held the middle lane, alongside caravans petrol tankers and the frequent but unescorted convoi exceptionnel.

  “Don’t worry, I know who you are,” she said suddenly. “You’re that priest from Lanvière.” Her blue eyes met his, and he could see she was genuinely unafraid. Something was making her secure, or else she was mad. But the knife-edge he stood on was honing to such a deadly nothingness, that for the first time since he’d gone to Plagnol’s flat with the Breton, he was unsur
e what to do.

  No new ID, no home to go to, his own bed a relic of the past. Just the third payment in the Banca del Corte that morning, from a man he’d never met.

  “Best if you don’t speak if you’ve nothing intelligent to say,” he said quietly. But saw how his hand was shaking, the pistol like a road drill against her leg.

  “Get that thing off me or.. ”

  “Or what?”

  The driver’s jaw stuck out resolutely. While she had the wheel, she held the power. He wasn’t stupid.

  “I can cause an incident, Father. Easy as pie. The flics would take less than three minutes to get here from Vaudebois. You wouldn’t have a prayer.”

  The cheeky bitch. My last lap. The only way to Colette. I’ve no choice. She’s right. What prayers can I say now?

  He withdrew the Browning and buried it in his pocket alongside the rosary, whose beads were now simply beads. A dead weight he no longer needed. “Would you like these instead?” He pulled them out. Black and scarred, the Aves and Pater Paternosters dangling in his lap. Her laugh was hard and scornful.

  “Oh, put them away, for God’s sake. I’m a Pantheist.”

  Vidal lowered his window just enough to cram them through the gap and heard their death rattle under the wheels.

  “Tell you something I did like...” She set the wipers to intermittent and sent washer spray over the view.

  “What’s that?”

  ”I heard your latest tape. The one that came out last July. Pérotin. I was impressed.” But Vidal felt no pride, just sweat leach under his collar, and his neck begin to burn. “Got it for my papa’s birthday. He is, was, I mean, a big fan of yours.”

  Was. That says it all. My choir, my boys. He remembered Charles, the ten- year-old with the voice of liquid silver, and Kevin who could hold a note longer than anyone. And Moussac, murdered, his mouth full of yellow pus...

  “I think you’d better stop,” he said suddenly. “The next Services will do.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Correct, Madame.”

  She turned to look at him.

  “Where exactly do you want to go? I don’t have to pick up until midday tomorrow.”

  “No tricks?”

  “No tricks.”

  “Melun. Thanks.”

  ***

  Silence as the shaved fields gave way to the Legoland of dealerships and wholesalers – Peugeot, Renault, Citroën, and a string of cheap out of town hotels.

  “I’ll need to fill up before Orléans.”

  “That’s OK.” But he had other words ready, swelling, boiling in his mouth. and he was with a stranger, just as he in his time had been stranger to a multitude of guilty tongues in the dark vertical coffins at the l’Église de la St. Vierge. Each one with their own secretive windows, whose intricate carvings had been softened by a million sighs. And now it was necessary that in this open, makeshift confessional, she listen.

  “I still care for a woman who lives there.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yes. And it’s her grief that’s destroying me. You see... I’m sorry I don’t even know your name...”

  “Joëlle.”

  But he didn’t seem to notice.

  “You see, she had a son who once begged to sing in my choir, but because of our – you know – liaison, and not because his voice had broken as I’d made out, it was impossible. But that’s nothing to what happened later.”

  The young woman slowed down to cruise, the rain thickening on the windscreen, and from far away, the growl of thunder almost devoured his words.

  “He was tall for his age. So tall, he almost had to stoop. I suppose that made him seem older, and he’d always been teased about it at school, even at University, so that made her more protective. Nothing was too much trouble – she wanted the world for him, and when the world didn’t respond, he changed. Surly and secretive, you know. Teenager thing, except he was twenty-three. He hated me. I used to see him with that look during the Sunday Mass. I knew he’d do anything to land me in it, and he did. He wanted his mother all to himself. He spread the word. Why I ended up in a boot camp...”

  “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “How could I? She doted on him. He was the first proper man she’d ever had round the place. Her eyes, her ears.”

  “Wasn’t she ever married?”

  ”Once, when the boy was nine. But he’d got some kind of wasting disease and died in ’86. She’d not had much luck...” Vidal tailed off as his driver signalled right and turned off into the Aire des Beaux Champs. Petrol, diesel and a boutique. Almost deserted.

  “So when she suspected me of...”

  “Of?” Huge eyes on his. He hesitated. “Go on.”

  “I’m going to say it. I’ve always had a problem with Jews. No, this isn’t some self-pitying confession, God knows I’ve heard enough of those. It’s how it really was, after the war. Starting with my grandparents. They lost everything on account of the Rosenbaum’s turning up, demanding shelter. Then my father gets the push from this Jewish firm where he’d worked all his life. No reason given, just on a whim. Finito. But apart from all that, it’s the expectations of faith that hold the key, and the more I studied the Scriptures, the more I resented the supreme arrogance of their rejection of Christ who was the only true prophet – the Dominus Mundi – whose nailed hands held our pasts our futures. The Jews still wait for the Messiah, whoever that may be.”

  “What about Buddhists and Hindus etcetera?”

  “They didn’t crucify Him.”

  “Ah.”

  She switched off the engine and got out her purse.

  “So the woman I love...”

  “Love is it now?” She looked up, her eyes narrowing.

  “Well, it used to be, before all this. As I was saying, she gives her son the key to my house to see if he could find anything of interest. A stick to beat me with. She used to say to me, “you never say anything kind about poor old Dolina Levy,” a Jew living in the same block of flats. Or I’d get, “Why don’t you give some of the church collection to help her out. God won’t mind.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t, would he?” she said.

  But Vidal wasn’t listening.

  “Anyhow, the snooper son strikes lucky.”

  “And?”

  “He finds my letter of introduction to Opération Judas.”

  “What’s that?” Joëlle frowned.

  “In a moment, if you don’t mind. Where was I? Ah, yes... So he passes it on without a qualm to my bishop, without realising the consequences for himself or his mother. And because he’d discovered too much, he was, you know, taken care of.”

  “I bet she’s feeling good. Is he still OK?”

  “His mother thinks he might be.”

  “Maybe she’s right...”

  “No, no. They put him in the Seine. Fully dressed.”

  “Holy shit.” The driver gasped, her fingers locked round her door handle. “Who’s ‘they?’”

  “The Armée Contre Juifs. The first cell.”

  “My God.” She stared at the man alongside. Someone quite different was there now. Someone who’d just sent an arrow of fear through her system. “Didn’t you try and help him, I mean, after all, as he was your lover’s son?”

  “No.”

  “Ugh!”

  She slammed the door shut, trapping him in a vacuum of dread. It wasn’t just Duvivier who’d been a reckless simpleton. He’d told a total stranger far too much and, instead of feeling a certain blessed release, the partial confession had served only to fur his lungs, and finally numb his tongue.

  Nothing to lose. Time to go.

  He knew what the girl must be thinking. Maybe she’d chance a quick call to the flics, or tell the cashier in his booth.

  I should have finished her off while I could. Merde... merde...

  He peered round his curtain. Saw in the wing mirror the driver behind getting restless. And her. Where was she? She was neither by the Caisse, nor
as far as he could tell, near the shop.

  ***

  16.00 hrs.

  He slid over into her seat. No key, but a scour of the various compartments, for this and that, yielded a spare attached to a circle of dirty string.

  Why am I still deserving of miracles?

  Unlike the Honda, this was a dinosaur. Slow and churlish past the pumps, then a tight circle back to the Paris sign. With his heel on the floor, the Mercedes joined the dual carriageway and took the first exit.

  No Péagé, thank God. No need to stop...

  He picked up the mobile, tried Duvivier and let it ring, but no answer.

  Selfish freak show.

  He crossed himself again as the empty hulk roared through straggling villages and open farmland, under universal grey in the gathering storm. The thunder closer, with lightning to the west, briefly bleaching the sky.

  Colette again. His fingers automatically settled on her number. Was it her voice or interference? He’d never had that before. But his heart leapt at the small sound.

  “Colette?” he shouted.

  “Yessss? Who’s that?”

  “Number 2. I’m coming. Be ready. That’s all I ask. I’ll be at La Sainte Vierge on Friday night ‒ to allow for any hold-ups. Then we can fly to...” He listened hard and thought he detected breathing, magnified into his ear. Then rien.

  The phone followed his rosary on to the road as rain and spray lashed his face and the first sign for Montargis loomed up out of the rain.

  East, east... Give me wings...

  But who was listening? There was only the piston of his heart needing more than could ever be given, as one hundred and ten kilometres due north in the Hôpital St. Camillus, Colette Bataille drew back the sheet and saw at last, the bloated, purple face of her dead son.

  LXII

  Thursday October 9th

  The curtains in Dominique Mathieu’s small bedroom high above the Orléans Centre Gare, moved with each breath of the rising wind as the staccato rain began to fall.

  He turned away, pulling the hostel’s sheet tight over his head while night trains slid in and out of the deserted platforms below.

  Oh, that I was a corpse already. How much longer will it be?