Swiss Vendetta--A Mystery

by Tracee de Hahn

  “We’re not a te—” Agnes stopped Petit with a glance.

  “I know what you came here to say, Inspector,” Arsov said, fingers gripping the armrests of his wheelchair like talons. “If there was a burglary at the château and also here, maybe you change your focus of investigation. Trust me. I have not been robbed since I was eighteen. You know that I have security that the Vallottons don’t. We lock our doors.”

  A bottle of wine had been decanted. Arsov took a drink, sucking the ruby liquid in between his teeth and rolling it in his mouth.

  “The Rothschilds know how to make wine,” he said after swallowing. “I used to visit their vineyard every year and buy cases and cases. Oh, the pleasure of talking wine with Philippe de Rothschild. It was the culmination of a dream I didn’t even know I had.”

  Agnes took a small sip. “This is good.”

  “Good? It is the nectar of the gods.”

  Flames in the fireplace crackled and Agnes let her mind drift across the frozen lawn. She was tired to the point that each individual muscle ached. The wine and Arsov’s confidence relaxed her. First her muscles, then her mind. The strands of her thoughts untangled, making them easier to compartmentalize. Arsov was right, she hadn’t needed to come tonight to tell him about the theft, but she was glad she had. The old man reached for his silver box of cigarettes, seeming content, for he smiled at some private thought. The room was silent for some time. Petit shifted uncomfortably.

  “Tell me why you are here,” Arsov said.

  “About the burglary.” Agnes jolted out of a near doze.

  “You are as bad as the young man. We have discussed this and for the Vallottons it is nothing. You tell me what they are missing and I say it is like losing the coins from your pocket.”

  “I think Monsieur Vallotton is worried.”

  “He will always worry, that one. What of the marquise?” Arsov flicked a piece of tobacco from his lip.

  “I didn’t speak with her this evening. She spends most of her time alone, in her rooms.”

  Arsov sucked on his cigarette, exhaling deliberately. “Officer Petit, you are restless, and this disturbs me. Have Nurse Brighton resume our tour. There is much else to see.”

  Petit nearly objected, but the nurse emerged from the shadows and took him by the elbow, urging him into the next room. Agnes stood as if to follow but Arsov motioned her to a closer chair.

  “You are looking for something—something beyond your murderer. You are at the end of your capacity.”

  She straightened, but he waved her down. “You remind me of my American friends. You think I speak of your capacity as an officer of the law. Of your work. I do not think of that, I think of you as a person. You came tonight here to escape.”

  To object was meaningless. The old man could see.

  “Few have confronted their limits, but you have. I recognize this. You are unsure. Was it the worst life will give you or is there something more? I have known the same feeling. First, when my mother and sisters died. Then when my brothers died in the battle for Stalingrad. What I saw there made me flee the armies, barely human at the time in my filth and hunger and fatigue. Later I heard the stories of cannibalism and I could not cast judgment, even though it may have been my brother or friend who was eaten. We were at the end of salvation, pushed beyond human capacity.”

  Agnes took another drink of her wine. Arsov smoked and stared toward the black reflection in the windows overlooking the lake.

  “I do not know your troubles, but I do know it is possible to survive this low point in your life. I know because I did. Because I still am. Surviving.”

  “I lost my husband,” she said without thinking. “He killed himself.” She had never volunteered this information before; had avoided it, leaving the news to official channels or gossip.

  Arsov peered at her. “And you were witness.” It was not a question. “Like her,” he said softly. “You will need to be strong like her.”

  “Who?”

  “I tell you why I open this wine tonight. This fine bottle. It was not for you who have no taste for it, it was for the past. This storm has put my mind in the past. The distant past.” He looped the oxygen tube onto his head before shoving the entire apparatus off the side of his chair.

  “France was very different from Russia. For one thing it was warmer. I was young and, despite what I had suffered, I was still a naïve peasant. I had the buoyancy of youth. I didn’t think or plan. I didn’t think that no one would trust me. Why would you trust someone you do not know when neighbors, even family, were turning one another in? I had never lived in a place where I knew absolutely no one. It shook me. I should have been even more worried, however, like your Officer Petit, youth is stupid and I was in a mood that could be called euphoric. That is what kept me alive. Compared to Russia the air felt free from death. Compared to Russia, the land was green and easy and I was happy to be there.”

  Agnes could picture the Mediterranean landscape of France. There were similarities to Switzerland: the hills verdant slopes leading to mountainous crags and isolated villages. She leaned back on the soft cushion and let his voice float through her.

  “I made my way north, through Vichy toward occupied France, with no plan, only a need for action. I slept out of doors, stealing small bits of food from gardens and eating nuts from the forest. I needed to destroy the Germans. I needed revenge for the way my mother and sisters had died. I saw people on the road and we exchanged stiff greetings from a careful distance. I didn’t know how to say: I want to help you rid yourselves of the Germans, are you loyal to France or do you support the invaders? This is not a question easily broached. I have told you that evil does not rest on a man’s face when he walks a country lane on a Sunday afternoon.”

  Agnes poured herself another glass of wine, feeling slightly drunk. The candlelight flickered and for the first time in days she was warm. She registered the idea of George and Carnet deep in her mind but at the same time it seemed a distant problem. The image of war, and of a young Russian man wandering the French countryside, occupied her. War and the millions who died. How could her trouble compare when this man had lost so much more and at such a young age? She took another mouthful of wine and enjoyed the rawness on her tongue.

  “My mission found me. I had been watching a farmhouse for a week. Men came and went in the middle of the night. They weren’t in uniform and Germans wouldn’t behave this way. I sat and waited and pondered. I was a boy who understood the life of a small place, and I tried to imagine what my family would do if a stranger approached them. I tried to decide what to say.”

  “Even a perfect accent wouldn’t hide that you were a foreigner.”

  “You know this, but I didn’t.”

  “I was born here, my French is as good as anyone’s, but they know.” Agnes waved her hand, encompassing the room. “They know I’m different, somehow. They know my parents weren’t Swiss, so I’m not really Swiss. Not like they want me to be.”

  Arsov blew a series of perfect smoke rings. Agnes inhaled.

  “I was concealed at the edge of a wood,” he said. “This night I would approach. They had to be working against the Germans. I could help them.”

  Agnes felt her eyes close and shook her head to wake. The warmth, the wine, the smoke, and his voice were lulling her into a stupor. She picked up the trail of his words.

  “Foolish idea. At the very moment I thought it was time to approach, I heard voices, then men running and the noise of a car. There were gunshots, rat-a-tat-tat. The noise was close enough that for a moment I thought I had been hit. Not five meters from me heavy cars careened around the final bend in the road to the farmhouse and men clambered out; they were in uniform and I held my breath. Were they friends of the household, these Germans? If so, then I had a near escape.” He turned to look directly at her. “What do you think, Inspector Lüthi?”

  She nearly dropped her wineglass on the table. “I think the men you were watching—the household—they
weren’t friends of the Germans. I think they were in danger and you were right to be frightened.”

  “You are correct, and if I had gone to the farmhouse earlier I would have been rounded up and shot, for they died right there. The Germans left the bodies and drove off.” He shifted the blanket covering his chest, gripping the trim in his thin hands. “I was lying there, wishing I had a cigarette, when I heard a sound. A scrape. Then a moan, very faint, but something human. I replayed the events in my mind. Had a man fallen from one of the cars? The Germans would not leave any of their kind behind. Then I remembered those first shots, when they had fired into the night before they arrived. The night sounds of the forest were loud and it took me some time to pinpoint the human ones. I had not lived through Stalingrad by luck alone and I was suspicious. I crept up to the man as if he was a threat. When I neared, I saw that he was dressed as a peasant and that he was bleeding badly. He looked at me and raised his gun.”

  Agnes gasped and Arsov gave a hacking laugh.

  “You are afraid for wrong reason. This man raised his gun to his own head. Like I say, I have a great deal of experience, and we Russians would have done the same to escape the war camps of the Germans. I was healthy and strong and fast and held his hand. As we struggled, I identified myself. I was strong enough to take the gun and he had to listen. It was my clothing that convinced him. I would have been a terrible spy in those days. My shirt and pants and coat weren’t French. The cut was close enough to pass at a distance in the country, but to a man whose life depended on detail I looked foreign. In those first moments that helped him believe my story. I helped him bind his wounds and together we made our way north. When I returned his gun, he invited me to join his band of the Resistance. I had arrived.”

  “Amazing luck,” Agnes said.

  “In the balance of my experiences this was nothing. The great fortune was in who he was. The modern generation, your Officer Petit, you want your heroes. Well, this is one. I was a boy with nothing to lose. I was an adventurer who went from experience to experience, always coming out alive and having learned something; this man could have chosen the path of diplomacy, or the regular army, or simply escaped the war entirely, but he had selected his path deliberately. I hated the war and what it did to my family and my country; this man was a one-man army determined to stop the Nazis. It is for him that I made use of what I had learned at Stalingrad. My skills with munitions. It is for him that I wired cars to explode and train engines to melt. We were together for over two years.”

  “You were fortunate to have found a friend,” said Agnes.

  “Friend?” Arsov scoffed. “This man had no friends. I was still very young. I turned eighteen when I arrived in France and that is young, even in war. He was twice my age.”

  “Then a mentor.”

  “You are not listening. You do not understand him or the work we did. Many, perhaps most, who worked for the Resistance lived in the town they had grown up in, where their family had lived for generations. They formed networks of old friends and connections and literally resisted by stirring up minor annoyances, destroying the rail lines, helping downed airmen find aid. He operated at a different level. He made the connection between towns, between regions, and even back to England and the Allies. This man, who we called Citoyen, knew people across the country and how they could help. This is why he was prepared to shoot himself when I found him. He would never be taken prisoner because he knew too much. I was not local and had no connections or network of my own, yet he kept me with him, using my skills to teach others and to do specific jobs. He said it was because he didn’t know how or where to integrate me into society. He had a way of speaking that wavered between teasing and seriousness, and said that if I were German or English or even American he might have trusted me to assimilate, but a Russian—he would roll his eyes when he said it—could never imitate a Frenchman in everyday life. I liked to think that he enjoyed my company, and that he was pleased to have someone with him.” Arsov motioned for another cigarette. He closed his eyes. “I was proud that he had selected me. Meeting him changed my life.”

  A cart rattled into the room. The butler pushed it near, followed by the nurse and Petit. He pulled small plates from a drawer and arranged them on the low table. Agnes was hungry now. The twist in her gut had unclenched and she regretted skipping the evening meal.

  “Tournedos stuffed with truffle, breast of ducking with pear flavored with honey, lobster bisque, and mousse with winter berries,” the butler said, pointing at the dishes before picking up utensils to serve. Petit sat close to the nurse and in a low voice peppered her with questions about the care of a newborn infant. Arsov took one small bite of each dish, closing his eyes to savor the flavors. Agnes lifted a forkful of duck. Exquisite.

  Arsov stirred. “Citoyen taught me skills to live, but she taught me how to survive.”

  “She?” Agnes asked.

  Arsov ignored her. “Citoyen’s home was not like the Vallottons’ or anything in Switzerland. It was a masterpiece of craftsmanship, of carved stone. A Renaissance palace rising from the river, all towers and gables and fairy tale. And she was there. It all started there.”

  Agnes could picture the setting from vacations in the Loire Valley. She sampled the tournedos.

  “It was Citoyen’s home but it was also perfect for our needs. The château’s foundations were built across the broad shallow river and the water flowed under it; under the high stone arches. Along the riverbank we could enter through a hidden door into a room where we could conceal those we were bringing to safety: refugees, Jews, downed Allied fliers, they all passed through. It was well situated, the road was not much used, and there were places to turn off into the woods. Plus the river was shallow and, if necessary, we could walk in its bed.”

  Petit and the nurse set their napkins aside and walked toward the row of doors, their low voices engaged in animated discussion. Agnes felt Petit’s happiness roll off his shoulders like a wave. She was pleased that he could feel such joy.

  “It was a night like any other when my life changed again,” Arsov continued. “You cannot anticipate this. You understand? Good or bad you do not predict. For me it will always be the best day of my life. It was the day that would keep me alive for all of the rest until this very moment.” He smiled to himself. “You do not believe me? But it is truth. The first time I saw Anne-Marie was the middle of the night. We had run out of supplies and I risked going into the château to talk to Madame, Citoyen’s wife, and there she was. I was so entranced, I was rude. I barely spoke to her. She waited silently in the kitchen while I spoke with Madame and I almost left without a word to her, but at the last moment I remembered that I might die that night and would have never touched her hand.”

  “But you did?” Agnes remembered the start of love, when all things are possible. The rush of blood to the face, the trembling hands, the lightness of an unsettled stomach.

  “Anne-Marie had emerged from the darkness of the château like a tigress, hiding a knife behind her as if that would protect Madame from me, a hardened fighter. A young boy, her brother Frédéric, cowered behind her. She didn’t know who I was and I had never heard Madame laugh as she did at the sight of us eyeing each other. She introduced us very formally, and I did not know what to say. I know I scowled, frightening the boy. Then I said Madame had told me that her guest was a nuisance. Were those words to say to the one you would love more than your own life?” He tapped cigarette ash into a bowl, eyes fixed in the distance.

  “When I left, I walked right up to her where she cowered in the corner with her knife, and brushed my lips on her hand. It was an electric shock.”

  Agnes wondered what it would have been like to fall in love and stay together for the long decades of life. How long had Arsov lived with Anne-Marie? He was very old. The dark recesses of her mind squirmed and she remembered Carnet’s confession. That was what he felt when meeting George. An electric shock. A feeling reciprocated. They had not ended happily
.

  “Although it was dangerous, now many times I found reasons to return to the château. Anne-Marie and her brother—he was much younger, maybe four years old—had taken refuge with Madame and Anne-Marie stayed even when Frédéric was sent deeper into the countryside for safety. I was young and vain and knew that she stayed for me. It was heart-wrenching, her tears and his cries the day he left. I was young and full of idealism. The boy would be safer, and she and I would not be separated. For me she was my heart, the one who would come to know all of my secrets. They knew my true name, what my life had been before. With her I began to dream of life again.”

  The flood wall had broken and, unbidden, her dreams, hers and George’s, flowed. What had they dreamt of? Was their dream ever truly his dream?

  “I had found someone to live for. We were the same, Anne-Marie and me. Madame was of another world, yet for the duration of these years she was our partner in a strange way. She guarded Citoyen’s secrets carefully. We used the château and he hated that it put her in danger, but she insisted. Anne-Marie and Madame lived in that great place all alone and it was silent and forbidding and they were always waiting, not knowing when we would need their help; Madame afraid someone would realize her husband had not fled the country at the start of the war and use her to get to him. She lived a dangerous double life, always balancing a need to keep the villagers suspicious and aloof, mixing disdain and chilly acceptance of the Germans, and her real work for the Resistance.”

  “She is the one who showed you how to survive?”

  Arsov started, as if dragged from a dream. “Yes, she showed me how to survive the worst that can happen.” He motioned for a cigarette and Agnes held out the silver box. “I remember the beginning of the end so clearly. On this particular trip Citoyen and I were in the region to meet a man important to the war effort. He is dead now, this man, but I will call him Monsieur X for his role in the war remains a great secret. We were ambushed on our way to the rendezvous. Citoyen was injured, badly, bullets in his abdomen and his thigh, and we were separated. There was another hiding place that we occasionally used and I took Monsieur X there, then left to find Citoyen. Because of his injuries, I knew he would have to make his way to the château, for there we had medicine. He traveled slowly and, despite my detour, I arrived just after him. From the bank of the river I heard the shots, then saw Anne-Marie run screaming from the château into the arms of the Germans who were jumping from their automobiles. She was hysterical—that was not acting—screaming that an injured man had broken in and that Madame had shot him. She sobbed and fell on the ground and the German captain ordered a search for more partisans. I knew what had happened without the explanation that came later. Citoyen hadn’t time to hide; the Germans were too close and he had shot himself, standing in the kitchen of his home in front of his wife rather than be taken or implicate her. Anne-Marie was sent out to sell the story to the Germans when they arrived only a few minutes later. Her hysteria was real and they believed that she was frightened of the man. They searched the château. I could see lights flickering through the normally darkened windows, but they were looking for others like Citoyen, men who had crept in under darkness to steal. They did not look, really search, for secret hideaways and those who were in the room under the bridge were not discovered.”