The Blood of Lorraine

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  “It’s the case I offered to you and that you urged me to give to Singer,” Didier said, casting a significant glance toward Martin. The wily prosecutor’s few words had economically delivered two messages: that he did not feel the case would be hard to solve, or he would not have given it to Rocher, and it had been Rocher who had suggested that Didier assign it to their Jewish colleague.

  “Yes, yes, yes, that one,” Rocher said as he began puffing on his cigar with pleasure.

  “Why Singer?” Martin asked. He would have liked very much to wipe that stupid, merry expression off Rocher’s face.

  “Now, now, don’t get your dander up,” Rocher said as he laid an unwelcome hand on Martin’s shoulder. “We just wanted to see what he would do. And besides, it’s about his people. We thought it would be best if he handled it.” Rocher winked at Didier, who remained stone-faced.

  “The Republic is for all people. I believe we have held to that principle since 1789.”

  Rocher laughed and glanced at Didier. “Oh my, a history lesson yet.”

  “All right. Sorry,” Martin said. Somehow whenever he began to speak about the things he held most dear, he ended up sounding like a prig. Still, he didn’t appreciate being mocked. He took a swallow of his cognac, letting its warming effect fortify him before going on. “So,” he said, turning to Didier, “since the case has gone from one judge to another, I assume it doesn’t matter if I take it over.”

  Didier pursed his lips and nodded.

  “Yes, take it if you must,” Rocher intervened, even though it was no longer his call. He blew a circle of smoke before bending toward Martin and adding, “That is, if you consider yourself a friend of the Israelites—”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.” Martin could barely conceal his anger.

  “Did you know,” Rocher asked, “that the Singer family ‘opted’ to come to Nancy when the Germans took over the other half of Lorraine?”

  Although Singer had never told him, Martin was not surprised. After France lost Alsace and half of Lorraine to the Prussians in 1871, many Frenchmen chose to become refugees in their own country rather than remain under German rule.

  “I don’t think he understands,” Rocher remarked to Didier, as if Martin were a schoolboy failing a lesson. “They are,” the old man insisted, raising his voice slightly, “taking over. It’s not enough that the city was flooded with them in the seventies. They’re even coming from Russia. Beggars all.”

  Martin could hardly believe his ears. He was torn between a desire to show his senior colleague what he thought and extricating himself as expeditiously as possible. Because of his experiences in Aix, where his involvement in the Vernet case had turned most of the courthouse against him, he knew he needed to tread carefully. He glanced at Didier, who had chosen to observe rather than take sides.

  “You’ve noticed, haven’t you,” Rocher continued, “how many children they are having. Singer has three of his own already. You, my boy, are only working on your first. How will we keep up?”

  “How, indeed?” Martin seized the opportunity offered by the fool’s last, maddening remark, “It’s good you’ve reminded me, Rocher. It must be very late. I should be getting my wife home before she gets overtired.”

  Didier’s only response was a crooked, mirthless smile. But Rocher, drunk as he was, couldn’t stop talking. “Yes, go to her,” he said to Martin, waving his cigar as his voice trailed off. “Charming woman, that one, charming….”

  Martin backed away with a slight bow. “Gentlemen, until Monday,” he said, as he left to seek out his hosts to say his good-byes. And to calm down.

  Mme du Manoir repeated her offer to rouse the driver of the family coach, until Clarie finally convinced her hostess that the walk home would do her good. Warmly wrapped and much relieved, the Martins escaped at last into the cold autumn night, exiting onto the northern corner of the Place de la Carrière. As he listened to Clarie’s complaints, Martin hoped their midnight stroll would remind his dear Provençal girl of the things she loved most about Nancy. Arm in arm they scuffed through the hoary leaves glistening gold under the flickering gas-lit street lights.

  “They suspect,” she said, “that I will bear a monster because I’ve overheated my brain by using it too much.”

  Martin suspected, in turn, that Clarie was exaggerating. “Come,” he said, as they passed the Palais de Justice, which lay at the southern end of the block, “let’s take a peek at the park.” He turned the corner towards the gate to the Pépinière, the vast public park which had once been the private hunting grounds of the nobility. The Martins had often strolled through its gardens, imagining their own child there, playing ball or pointing with delight at the animals in the zoo.

  “It’s cold. I would rather not.” Clarie shrank away from him, still mulling over her time with the other women. She kept walking straight ahead toward the Arc de Triomphe.

  “All right, then. But remember, this is the only formal dinner we have had to go to in two years,” he said as he hurried to catch up, “and by the time you have to go again you will have a beautiful baby to brag about.” Even though her head was turned away from him, he knew he had made her smile. “Besides,” he continued as they entered the Place Stanislas, “we have all this. The theater, the opera, the cafés, the shops, the gallant officers flitting about, flirting with the ladies.”

  They paused for a moment at one of the gilt-edged wrought-iron gates that opened upon the central jewel of Nancy. She took his arm again, as they looked across the sparkling fountains and statues toward the broad Hôtel de Ville. This was the side of the last century that Clarie liked best: its wit and its charm, even though the uniformed soldiers who frequented the nightlife were a reminder of their own time and the fact that the German border was only twenty-five kilometers away.

  “Is there something wrong?” Clarie peered into his face. “You don’t usually wax poetic about our armed guards.”

  “No,” he shook his head as he led her homeward, across the darkened square. “Just trying to—” he shrugged without ending his sentence. Trying to what? With a sudden pang he realized that he needed cheering every bit as much as Clarie. As his eyes followed the silhouette of his wife and their unborn child preceding them on the gas-lit cobblestones, Martin knew more than ever that he could not tell her about the troubling and gruesome details of his new case.

  3

  Saturday, November 17

  “WHAT A WONDERFUL CHANGE FROM last night,” Clarie sighed as she leaned back toward the mirrored wall to survey the half-empty Café Stanislas. Martin had proposed they stop for an early supper after a long afternoon stroll. They had spent the day as he intended, remembering—and forgetting.

  Clarie had never looked more beautiful, her great brown eyes shining and cheeks still red from the cold. Although she had declared that she would never be hungry again after being “force-fed” by the du Manoirs, she had voraciously consumed her grilled trout. On her plate lay a perfect fish skeleton, exposed and picked into a translucent shadow of its former self. As she took another sip of Riesling, she wrinkled her nose in distaste at the wreckage of Martin’s choucroute. “I told you that was too much after last night. No dessert for you,” she added brightly.

  Martin grunted as he forked through the clumps of pungent sauerkraut and potatoes and overturned a sausage. His distractions had sapped his appetite. When he reached for his beer stein, Clarie placed her hand on his.

  “So now, you must tell me what this is all about.”

  “What do you mean?” Martin feigned innocence.

  “All this. Spending the afternoon going past all our favorite haunts, reminiscing about how we met, bringing me to this café. What is bothering you?”

  “You mean I can’t take my pregnant wife on a romantic walk and buy her a dinner? Soon we won’t have such freedom.”

  Clarie slumped back and stared at Martin. “Are you nervous for me?”

  Of course he was, a little. Mar
tin could not bear the thought of his beloved Clarie in pain or in danger. But she was young and strong. And brave, of course. “No,” he lied, aware that it was a husband’s duty to reassure a pregnant wife. “Everything is going to be fine, I’m sure of it.”

  “Then, what?”

  “Today was beautiful and clear, and as I told you—”

  “Were you trying to make up for last night’s torture?”

  She was exaggerating again, and teasing him. She had always seen through him. From the first moment at her aunt and uncle’s restaurant in Aix, she had understood his shyness. When he had to hide his best friend from the police, she had, without asking why, given him food, and worried. Days later, when he did tell her about Merckx, and what he had gotten her involved in, all she had cared about was him. Certainly he would tell her about the mutilated baby, and Rocher and Didier. But later, as with Merckx, when it was over and she was safe.

  “Well?”

  “Yes, the horrible, terrible dinner,” he said with a wave of the hand. “I wanted to wash that out of your mind with some fine wine and fond memories.”

  “Humph.” Clarie put down her glass, unconvinced. “Well, at least now I know what you are dealing with at the courthouse. Du Manoir was nice, if a bit pompous. Didier,” she widened her eyes, “was rather scary, despite that nice young wife. And Rocher,” she shook her head, “where did he come from?”

  “He’s been around a long time,” Martin mumbled as he gave his plate a definitive shove toward the side of the table.

  “And why wasn’t Singer there? I was looking forward to meeting him. You’ve talked so much about him and what a fine man he is.”

  Martin shrugged and hoped that Clarie would not notice the blush he could feel rising up toward his forehead. Without knowing it, she had hit upon the very source of his distraction. Why hadn’t Singer been invited? And what had he gotten Martin into?

  Fortunately, at that moment, the waiter came to clear their dishes and ask if they wanted more. The café was beginning to fill up. Behind him Martin could hear the murmur of recently arrived diners and the great coffee urn behind the bar begin to hiss. Clarie, of course, ordered the tarte, Martin asked for coffee.

  “You could have one too,” she remarked as soon as the white-shirted waiter left them.

  “So you could eat mine?” he teased back.

  It was her turn to shrug and blush a little. She had a passion for the local Mirabelle plums. “Anyway, perhaps even before the baby comes, we should have the Singers over. After all, he is the one who put us in contact with the Steins. You know all the teachers. I should know your friend.”

  The truth was, and they both knew it, that the Martins were much more comfortable with the teachers and their husbands, and even with their landlords, who owned the drygoods store in their building, than with the coterie at the Palais de Justice. Two of Clarie’s colleagues were married to teachers who taught at the boys’ lycée, the third to a carpenter. Their clothes, their language, their concerns, their lack of wealth and connections echoed the social strata from which Clarie and Martin had come, even though Martin, being a judge, had presumably risen above it.

  But maybe David Singer, the only colleague with whom Martin discussed troubling cases, the courthouse and politics, was different. Maybe he would not find anything amiss in the Martins’ more humble way of life.

  “You’re right. Of course, you must meet him,” Martin said as the waiter placed a glistening triangle in front of Clarie. He smiled as she became quite engrossed in the decorative criss-crossing of the rosy-gold plums before, once again, digging in.

  4

  Monday, November 19

  THERE WERE TIMES IT SEEMED that Monday morning would never arrive. The Martins spent the gray, cold Sunday confined to their apartment. Mercifully, Clarie had stopped asking questions about Singer and the courthouse. Instead, she spent most of her time in front of the fire, stitching tiny clothes or staring into space, long periods of quiet broken only by inexplicable spurts of dusting or fluffing up pillows or fussing over the crib that sat beside their bed. Clarie seemed to be in another place, a waiting place. Martin longed to be there with her, but every time he tried to think or talk about the arrival of their child, he was assaulted by the memory of the baby in the morgue. He had to rid himself of that grotesque image. The only way to do that was to get the case behind him by finding out exactly what had happened in the wet nurse’s cottage. That’s why, early on Monday, he left for the courthouse as soon as he could without rousing Clarie’s suspicions.

  By the time he entered his chambers, he was ready to interrogate, to threaten, to wait out the suspects, to do whatever it took. He was in no mood for unforeseen obstacles.

  “Monsieur le procurer wants to see you right away.” Guy Charpentier, always excessively formal, stood up to greet him. Martin noted that his fastidious clerk had already ejected the errant pencil from his desk, and his notebooks were open and dated in anticipation of the day’s work. Charpentier had also donned a new outfit, a deep blue frock coat with a matching silk cravat. His thick auburn hair was parted in the middle, forming two drooping wings around his forehead. His dark brown eyes shone with the obscene curiosity he always showed when there was a possibility of conflict in the Palais. It was all very irritating.

  “You’ve heard, then,” Martin murmured as he unwound the woolen scarf from around his neck. “We’re to carry out a minor investigation this morning. Did you get the dossier from Singer?”

  Charpentier shook his head. “Monsieur le juge Singer just left. He told me to tell you that Monsieur le procurer Didier asked to see it again and wanted to hand it to you himself.”

  “I see.” Martin took his time hanging up his coat, methodically fastening each button. As long as his back was to Charpentier, his clerk could not see how much the Proc’s interference troubled him. Usually Didier assigned cases without comment. What was different this time?

  He turned to Charpentier. “Do you know if the witnesses have arrived?” Martin asked, in part to indicate to his clerk that he felt neither cowed nor rushed by the Proc’s request to see him.

  “The inspector said that they are waiting for you downstairs in a cell.”

  “All three?”

  “Yes. Monsieur le juge Singer said that since they’ve already got their lies in order, it would do no harm to keep them together.” Charpentier could not repress a smile. He loved to watch witnesses flail and stew in their own juices.

  “Well, then,” Martin said, in as light a tone as he could muster, “I’ll go see what Didier has to say.”

  The Palais de Justice occupied one of the most elegant old mansions on the Carrière. Although the building was a complicated interlocking of former private chambers, servants’ quarters, and large salons, Martin had a direct route to the Proc via the polished wooden staircase directly across from his chambers. Annoyed and apprehensive, Martin took his time trudging up to the second floor. Didier’s office was well situated near the head of the stairs, close to the great hall, a former ballroom, where the most important trials took place. Before knocking on his door, Martin took a moment to pull himself together. If he were to suffer a reprise of Friday night’s idiotic encounter, he’d have to find a way of staying calm. He rapped hard and went in.

  Didier was at his desk in shirtsleeves and a gray vest. When he saw Martin, he lifted the pince-nez from his nose and set it down on top of the document he had been reading. He stood up to hold out his hand. With his long reach, from behind his mammoth desk, the prosecutor seemed to tower over Martin, an illusion fostered by Didier’s Cassius-like thinness.

  The handshake was perfunctory, but Martin could not tell if the greeting was cooler than usual. At the courthouse the Proc was all business. He did not even invite Martin to sit; instead, without taking his steely blue eyes off his visitor’s face, Didier asked Roland, his greffier, to leave the room.

  Roland, who had been sitting at a desk every bit as cluttered as Didier�
��s, wiped off his ink pen and departed, closing the door without a sound. The stooped, white-haired, ever-discreet Roland was the clerk that any of the examining magistrates would have liked to have in their employ. But he was Didier’s, and it seemed quite fitting that the formidable prosecutor should have acquired the most diligent and subservient greffier in the courthouse.

  It was equally fitting that Didier inhabited the largest office at the Palais de Justice and that it was painted a grim olive green. The long rectangle led from Didier’s desk on one end to a gray marble fireplace on the other. Roland occupied the desk near the fire, perhaps to warm his aging bones. Didier’s half of the room always seemed chilly, which never seemed to bother the prosecutor, a man of unbounded energy, accustomed to generating his own heat.

  After staring at Martin for another moment, Didier went to a window which gave onto a small cobbled courtyard below. The tall, lanky prosecutor crossed his arms and positioned himself at an angle to observe the comings and goings on the Place de la Carrière. Martin found himself tapping his foot in time with the ticking of the black lacquered clock above the fireplace.

  “Martin,” Didier began, “do you know who lives on the Carrière? That is, besides President du Manoir?”

  “Many—”

  “Ah, yes, many,” Didier nodded and gazed out the window as if he were considering the answer that he had not even allowed Martin to articulate. “Many, but who is particularly relevant to our conversation of Friday night? Which,” he hastily added before Martin could respond, “you left in a rather precipitous fashion.”

  “What do you mean?” Martin’s pulse began to race. Was he about to be toyed with as if he were some common criminal?

  Didier walked over to his desk and grasped it with both hands as he leaned toward Martin. “I just want us to be very clear about why it will be important to handle this case with discretion and dispatch.”