by Allan Massie
‘There may be,’ Lannes said; then, seeing a shadow of disappointment darken the boy’s face, relented and said, ‘There probably is, as you say. Only I don’t want to jump to conclusions. To begin with, has anyone identified him formally?’
‘I don’t know about that, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt, according to the report I’ve had.’
‘He’s in the morgue, I take it. Then let’s go there.’
‘His lungs would be full of water if he’d drowned,’ the attendant said. ‘I know that, though I’m no doctor. I’ve seen drowned men enough, suicides mostly. Besides, look at his neck.’
He drew back the sheet and pointed to a thin livid line across the throat.’
‘That’s wire made that, take it from me. No question. You don’t have to be a doctor to tell. Besides, I’ve seen the like before. One of those murdering Spaniards, you’ll find.’
‘It’s Cortin all right,’ René said. ‘I recognize him, even as he looks now.’
Lannes had disliked the little clerk, nevertheless felt indignation on his behalf.
‘We still need a formal identification. Has his wife been told? He did have one, didn’t he? All right, we’d better have her sent for.’
‘I knew he’d bitten off more than he could chew.’
Madame Cortin sat very upright in the chair in Lannes’ office. He’d given her the one with arm-rests, in case she needed support, though she had shown no emotion when she looked at the body and agreed that, yes, it was indeed her husband’s. Now she twisted her handkerchief in and around her fingers and occasionally dabbed at her eyes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Mean? What should I mean? How would I know? He kept things from me, but I always knew when he was doing so and told him straight. “Out with it,” I said. We’re respectable folk, always have been, naturally, Jules being in the administration.’
She paused and dabbed her eyes again.
‘Has your husband been anxious about anything lately?’
‘Anxious? Who isn’t anxious these days? Tell me that. Jules has always been anxious, he’s conscientious, the nervous type, I have to say that. He didn’t like it when you had him in here for questioning – it was you, wasn’t it? – though he kept that to himself for three days, till I got it out from him. He did well for himself, you know, a position in the mayor’s cabinet, and he deserved it because he was clever and hard-working. But I had to push him, he could never quite believe in himself. He wasn’t at home in the city, not really, not like me. I’m a true Bordelaise. But Jules was a country boy – even if he was happy to leave the mountains where his old brute of a father used to beat him and say his foster-brother was twice the man he would ever be. That’s because Jules liked to read books, which is harmless enough, you see, when he should have been doing . . . whatever peasants do. Because that’s all his father is when you come down to it, a peasant, even if he boasts of how he could buy up all his neighbours. And I daresay he could, for he’s clever, even if he can’t do more than sign his name. Jules wouldn’t have made it as he has but for me. I’ve prodded and pushed him all the way. I’ve had to. It’s not been easy, I’ll tell you, though I’m not the sort that complains. And what’s to become of me now, after all I’ve done? Will they even pay me the pension I’m entitled to, with things as they are? Can you tell me that?’
Lannes didn’t try to interrupt the flow. It was a maxim of his: let them talk and they’ll usually reveal more than they want to.
She took a sip from the glass of water René had placed on the table by her side.
‘Did your husband have any enemies that you know of?’
‘Enemies? Why should he have enemies? People like us don’t. We’re respectable, I tell you. Jules was respected. The mayor always addressed him as Monsieur Cortin. If he had had enemies, I’d have known, and, since I don’t, then he hadn’t any. You can be sure of that.’
‘So, no enemies that you know of, and yet someone killed him.’
‘No enemies at all. As I say, he couldn’t have kept that from me. That’s why his death must have been an accident. Or a case of mistaken identity. Or someone attacked him in order to rob him. These days, you can’t rule that out, even here in Bordeaux. The streets aren’t safe these days. It’s as bad almost as Paris or Marseilles. And you say his body was found by the Pont de Saint-Jean. That’s near the railway station. Which is where they hang out, these types, criminal types and foreigners.’
‘Were you worried when your husband didn’t come home last night?’
‘Of course I was worried. It wasn’t like him. And then we’ve this curfew, even though as one of the mayor’s cabinet he had a special pass that allowed him to breach it. He was very proud of that pass. But it wasn’t like him all the same. I didn’t have a wink of sleep, lying awake worrying that some accident had befallen him. That’s what I thought: an accident. What else could have kept him out?’
‘But you didn’t report him missing?’
‘Certainly not. We’re not people who like to draw attention to ourselves.’
‘Why in fact was he out?’
‘He had a meeting, a late meeting. It was public business, he said, and that was enough for me. I’m not one to pry. He was excited about it, not anxious as you suggested, excited. He said it was going to make a big difference to us.’
‘But you didn’t enquire further?’
‘He’d have told me in good time. I’d have seen to that. He told me everything, eventually.’
Lannes had been here too often, heard too many wives – also, though more rarely, husbands – assert their complete knowledge of their spouse. It was never true. Everyone had secrets, a part of themselves they kept to themselves. It was usually innocent, a daydream of escape into another life, which they would be ashamed to confess and which they would very seldom put into action. But he had known that happen; known men who had walked out of a marriage without warning and with as little apparent fuss or drama as they might display stepping out of a train on to a platform. Perhaps Cortin had been like that, in his dreams.
‘I questioned your husband about the car he reported stolen, the car from which a shot was fired. I didn’t altogether believe him.’
‘Of course it was stolen,’ she said. ‘What other possible explanation could there be. My husband was truthful. Besides he had no imagination. He was incapable of making up stories.’
‘You said he had bitten off more than he could chew. What did you mean by that?’
‘Did I? I don’t remember.’ She dabbed at her eyes again and sniffed. ‘You must excuse me. I’m confused and distressed. Seeing him lying there, it’s not natural. I never thought he would be the one to go, not with the palpitations I suffer from. I should like to go home now.’
‘Just one other thing. You spoke of your husband having a foster-brother. Can you tell me something about him?’
‘Him!’ She sniffed again, twice and deeply. ‘I want nothing to do with him. He’s trouble. That’s what I told Jules when he turned up again. The bad penny, I said. Trouble. A good-for-nothing, a jailbird even, for all his smart suits and hand-made shoes. You’ll have nothing to do with anything that one proposes. That’s what I said.’
‘And did he take your advice?’
‘Advice? It wasn’t advice. It was an order. And of course he obeyed. Why wouldn’t he? I’ve always been the one as has to take the decisions. He knew I knew best.’
‘And do you know,’ René said, ‘when I saw her home and asked if there was anything else I could do for her, she didn’t even reply, not a single word, and no “thank you” of course, but shut the door in my face.’
‘So, kid, for once your charms failed,’ Moncerre said. ‘There’s no need to blush. But think how much worse for you if she’d said, “come right in, little one, and give me what my old man could never manage”.’
He drank up his beer and gestured to the boy behind the bar.
‘How long will the Boches allow us b
eer? What do you think? Or will we just run out of it? So: make the best of it while we can. That’s the way to live now. Enough beer and I can even forget that there are still three women in our apartment.’
‘No sign of your wife’s sisters going home?’ Lannes said.
‘They’ve forgotten they have any home except mine.’
The boy brought their drinks, beer for Moncerre and René, an Armagnac for Lannes.
‘So the foster-brother’s our Marcel, is he?’ Moncerre said. ‘I like it.’
‘It’s possible, even probable. I’ll have to see old Marthe again, find out if she knows the name of the family the child was sent to.’
‘I like it. I like it a lot. How about this? Cortin lends his car to his foster-brother, unsuspecting – and why not? But he doesn’t tell the wife because she disapproves of Marcel and he’s scared of her. Then he finds out what it was used for and when Marcel appears in Bordeaux again, threatens to shop him like a good little paper-shuffler. So Marcel tops the silly bastard. Yes, I like it a lot.’
They were alone in the little bar in the rue de la Vieille Tour. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and through the bead curtain they could see the rain falling steadily, dancing in the yellow puddles. The boy put a record on the gramophone: Marlene Dietrich singing ‘The Boys in the Back-Room’. ‘And when I die, don’t pay the preacher/ For speaking of my glory and my fame/ But see what the boys in the back-room will have/ And tell them I’m having the same.’ The film it came from, Destry Rides Again had been shown in Bordeaux the summer before the war. Lannes remembered Alain singing the song over and over again on the way home, till Dominique begged him to stop. He crooked his finger to summon the boy.
‘It’s fine by us, but I wouldn’t advise you to play English-language songs these days. You might be misunderstood.’
‘But it’s American and nobody’s at war with America.’
‘And she’s German but Hitler doesn’t like her. Put it away, son, till the war’s over.’
‘I thought it was over. Didn’t we sign an Armistice?’
‘So we did. I’d forgotten. All the same it’s good advice I’m giving you. The way things are, you can’t be too careful.’
‘What about blackmail?’ René said. ‘That seems to me Cortin’s style, and he told his wife his meeting was going to make a big difference to them.’
‘Certainly made a big difference to him,’ Moncerre said. ‘Silly bugger.’
‘Could be,’ Lannes said. ‘But if you’re right, René, then I’ll wager that Madame Cortin knew all about it. Hence her unguarded remark about her husband having bitten off more than he could chew.
‘But if she knew,’ René said, ‘why pretend she didn’t? Doesn’t she want her husband’s killer caught?’
‘That remains to be seen. Anyhow before we leap to conclusions I’d better have that word with old Marthe, and, I suppose, bring Schnyder up to date.’
‘If he can spare time from his lady-friend,’ Moncerre said. ‘Did you see the photo of them in the Sud-Ouest at the races on Sunday? He looked like a cat that had got at the cream. Cream she is, of course, that one.’
V
Schnyder stretched, arching his back and thrusting his arms upwards.
‘Do you know what the trouble is without new masters?’ he said. ‘They’re bores. I’ve just endured two hours with Schussmann. He’s not stupid, you know, but he still requires you to explain everything twice. “I like to make sure that every ‘i’ is dotted and every ‘t’ crossed,” he says, and, by God, he does. Actually, though, he’s a fundamentally decent sort and as such is terrified of his masters. Can’t blame him for that. So, what’s this you have for me, Jean?’
Lannes recounted his interview with Madame Cortin and the ideas it had given rise to. Schnyder sighed and tapped his fingers on his desk.
‘This foster-brother . . . It’s your obsession again, isn’t it?’
‘Obsession? Not the word I would use.’
‘That’s what it is nevertheless. Oh I don’t say you may not be right. You probably are. But you don’t, or rather won’t, acknowledge the reality of our position. It’s no good, Jean. We used in the PJ to have a category of people who we said were “above suspicion”, which was often not the case. Still we handled them, if we had to, with kid gloves. We’ve got a new category now, a new class whom I call “the Untouchables”. If this foster-brother is the chap you think he is, well then, I’m sorry, but that’s the class he belongs to. He’s untouchable. You know that in your heart. You just won’t admit it.’
What infuriated Lannes, depressed him also, was that he couldn’t deny the cogency of what Schnyder said.
‘What about Justice?’ he said, momentarily forgetting his reply to Léon when he had used that word.
‘You know very well, Jean, that we in the police are not concerned with justice. That’s the responsibility of the judges and the courts. We supply the material, that’s all, tie it up with a red ribbon and hand it over. In any case the angel of justice now has her wings folded over her eyes and wears a gag in her mouth. As for this fellow Cortin, believe me, there will be worse deaths in Bordeaux in the months and years ahead. My job – and yours, Jean – is to ensure that we are still in place when the war ends, one way or another.’
If the tabac off the Place Gambetta was a sort of refuge or sanctuary for Lannes in these weeks, it was one to which he felt obliged to restrict his visits. Even spending time in easy conversation with Miriam felt like a small betrayal of Marguerite. All the more so when his anger made him distrust himself; he couldn’t be sure that he might not say what he shouldn’t. So it was to the bookshop in the rue des Remparts that he turned.
Léon was dusting an old calf-bound volume when he entered. Without removing the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, he said, ‘So, you see, superintendent, I’m being a good boy. Don’t think I’m not grateful to you. Henri’s in the apartment. He’ll be glad to see you.’
‘Yes,’ Henri said, pouring Lannes a whisky-and-soda, ‘he is a good boy, and to my surprise I find I’m happy to have him here. Yet I ask myself how much longer this can go on. But for my old friend Johnnie’ – he waved the whisky bottle – ’ I’d find it hard to get through the days.’
Lannes, seeing how ill and miserable his old friend looked, was all at once ashamed of his own black mood.
‘I never had much time for Sainte-Beuve,’ Henri said, ‘but I was reading one of his essays when I heard your voice below and I’d just come on this passage: “there is a moment in this meal we call life when saturation is reached; it needs only one drop more for the cup of disgust to overflow.” Good, isn’t it?’
‘The cup of disgust,’ Lannes said. ‘I don’t think it can overflow because we are all compelled to drink so deeply of it.’
‘My poor Jean, here I am sunk in self-pity while you live with death and its consequences every day.’
‘We all do that now. Death and dishonour. I’m a policeman forbidden to do my duty. What do you make of that, Henri?’
But you don’t give up, he said to himself. Because if you do that once, then it’s easier to do it a second time and a third, and then it becomes habit. You stop caring. So, leaving Henri, he made his way past the rails of the public garden, once again leaning heavily on his stick, and cursing the pain in his hip, towards the rue d’Aviau. This time however he went to the kitchen door.
‘Oh it’s you again,’ Marthe said, wiping her hands on her greasy apron.
For a moment it seemed she would bar the door, but then she stepped aside to let him enter.
‘I won’t keep you. I’ve only a couple of questions.’
‘Which I may answer, but then again I may not.’
Nevertheless she directed him to one of the basketwork chairs which stood either side of the black range on which a pot of soup was simmering.
‘And then again,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why I stay here, except it’s been my home for more than fifty years and
I’ve nowhere else to go. But I have to tell you I take no notice now of what they do upstairs, for I’ve no time for the lot of them. So you’ve allowed young Maurice to go to his father in Vichy where he’ll no doubt be corrupted. I had a postcard from the boy. You should have sent him to his mother in England, that’s what you should have done.’
She turned away and began scouring a pan in the sink, presenting Lannes with a view of the backside which the old count had fondled even in his last years.
‘Is Sigi still in Bordeaux?’
‘It’s not for me to keep track of his comings and goings,’ she said, still busy with the pan which she now scrubbed as if she had an ill-will at it. ‘He knows I’ll have nothing to do with him or say to him since he murdered his father.’
‘You told me he was sent as a child to be reared by a peasant family in the mountains. Do you happen to recall their name?’
‘It would be strange if I didn’t seeing as it’s mine and Jules Cortin is my cousin, being the son of my mother’s brother.’
‘So you have another cousin, one generation down, also called Jules, who has been employed here in the mayor’s office.’
‘And what if I have?’
‘Then I’ve bad news for you, I’m afraid. He’s dead. Murdered too.’
She turned round and began to dry the pan.
‘That’s nothing to me. He was always a feeble fellow, a long drink of water, as they say, and married to a woman who wouldn’t give me the time of day. So, much I care what may have happened to him.’
The old woman hung the pan on a hook and, without looking at Lannes, said, ‘And if that’s all you have to tell me, you’d best be off, for it’s of no interest to me at all.’
‘Very well,’ Lannes said. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Marthe.’
‘How could there be? There’s nowt I need from anyone.’
He took a card from his note-case, and scribbled on it.
‘Will you give this to Sigi? Please.’
VI