Turncoat, page 25
“There’s one other question, Lily,” I said as casually as I could after Pascal had brought us second cups of coffee. “You remember, there’s supposed to be another copy of that film of your father’s?”
“How could I forget? Those two creeps.”
“Well, Charles Lebrun said something interesting to me when I was in Barcelona.”
At the mention of his name her mouth turned down. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in anything Uncle Charles said, Pete. He was a collaborator too, as bad as my father. Well, almost as bad. Anything that man told you, he told you for his own good, not yours, believe me.”
“Don’t worry, I’m aware of that. But what he told me was kind of intriguing—if it’s true. He said that your father said you’d know where it was.”
“I’d know where the film was?” She looked up from lathering a piece of croissant with strawberry jam. “My father told him that?”
“No, according to Lebrun, your father said it to their cleaning lady, and she told Lebrun.”
She was shaking her head. “It’s not true. How could I know anything about it? I never heard of it until he showed up out of nowhere and pushed it at me that morning.” She went back to applying jam. “And I don’t want to know.”
“No, that’s not what I thought Le Brun was saying. When the time came, you’d know where to find it, was what he said. It was supposed to be an insurance copy that your father hid away. And what I thought Lebrun meant was that you’d be able to figure out where to look, if it ever became necessary, that it was someplace only you’d be likely to think of.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense, Pete. How would he expect me to know there was another copy hidden away somewhere, let alone where to look for it? Or when it ‘became necessary’? Do you see what I mean? I hadn’t heard a word from him since 1944. Unless he let me in on the secret, how could I possibly—” She put down the butter knife and croissant. “Oh, boy.”
“Lily, what is it?”
“Pete … he wrote me a letter.”
“A letter? You never told me that.”
“I didn’t open it. It came the day after he was killed, the morning after those awful men broke in. I just tore it into a thousand pieces and threw it away the minute I saw it was from him. You don’t suppose that’s what it was about?”
“Could be,” I said with a sigh. “You wouldn’t still have those pieces somewhere, would you? At home?”
“Ugh, no. I didn’t want anything of his in the house. I’m really sorry, honey, I was just so … wait a minute,” she said slowly with the faintest of smiles. “Someplace only I would be able to think of? I wonder. …”
I waited, holding my own breath.
“Our secret place,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. “We used to spend whole, wonderful afternoons there. He used to tell me stories—”
“You mean the old root cellar? Right here on the farm?”
“Yes, that was our place. Nobody else had used it for years, maybe for centuries.” She clapped her hands. “There’s a kind of natural vault in one of the walls, where one of the stones was loose. We used to put our treasures in it—a rabbit bone, a piece of Etruscan pottery—and cover it up again with the stone. Pete, you don’t think—”
“Well, let’s find out.” I gulped down the rest of my coffee. “Where is it, under the house?”
She didn’t answer. Her excitement had died down now. There was a doubtful little frown on her face, as though she were reconsidering whether or not she really wanted to find it. “I’m not even sure the place is still there any more. They probably filled it in.”
“Lily,” I said, “I don’t give a damn what’s on that film. All I want is to have it found and out in the open. Listen to me. There’s someone out there who’s already shown he’s willing to commit murder over it. And if there’s any possibility that he thinks you’re the one who stands between it and him …”
She shuddered. “I understand. All right, let’s go see. It’s not under the house, actually, it’s built into the hillside up above, more like a cave than a cellar, really. It—”
We were interrupted by a frightened yelp from a woman several tables away; the mother from the family of three that had been at dinner the previous night. Sitting alone with the boy this morning, she had just yanked the ten-year-old roughly to his feet, upsetting a pitcher of milk onto his trousers. “Come! Run!”
“Bandits!” somebody else shouted.
“Stay there! Nobody move!”
The brusque command, in a Corsican dialect that I could barely understand, came from behind me, where I also heard a churning of gravel. I spun in my chair to see four men running toward us at full tilt. The two on the outside brandished ancient-looking rifles with canvas slings, much like the one that had been in the cab of Benedetti’s truck. Behind them, in the parking area, dust still rising from its tires, was a battered. rust-streaked mini-bus with the side doors ajar. Before I could do anything but start to get up they were on us, surrounding the table. One of the ones with a rifle shoved the muzzle into my belly, pushing me back down, then kept it trained on my forehead. It was the second time in less than a week that I’d looked into the barrel of a gun, I thought distractedly. How was it possible that anyone’s life could turn around like this?
“I—”
“Shut up! Be quiet! If you move, you’re dead.”
“What do you—”
But I didn’t have to ask what they wanted. They wanted Lily. One of the ones without the rifles gestured roughly at her: get up. She looked wildly at me, but before I could respond (and what was I going to say?) he had jerked her out of her chair by the arm.
She struggled to pull away from him and I started up again, but the man who had her produced a knife from somewhere—a frightening, scimitar-shaped thing, probably a hunting knife—and inserted the point deliberately into her ear, staring straight into my face all the time. Lily and I both froze. Even her eyes stopped moving and went unfocused.
“Sit, you,” he hissed at me. Wolfish and snaggle-toothed, with nervous, crazy eyes, he looked as if it wouldn’t take much to put him over the edge.
I sat quickly, holding both hands out in what I hoped was a conciliatory gesture. “Look, I don’t know what you want, but you’ve made some kind of mis—”
One of the others jerked his head toward the mini-bus. “All right, all right, we have her. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“No, wait!” I yelled, starting toward them . “At least take me too! Take me instead! Please, just let me go with her!”
For an answer I got the but of the rifle in the middle of my chest, sending me back into the chair and tipping it over in the process. By the time I untangled myself from it and scrambled up, the van doors had been pulled closed, the tires were screeching and they were on their way down the driveway with Lily inside.
The whole thing had taken maybe thirty seconds.
Chapter 22
“Now, now, I don’t think we have to involve the police in this,” Mr. Salvini, the innkeeper, said placatingly, meanwhile inserting himself between me and the telephone on the wall beside the reception desk. “My advice is to wait and see what happens.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I yelled, trying to elbow by him. “They have my wife! They just walked in and took her!”
“Yes, but you’re not from here, you don’t understand the way things work here.” We were jostling each other in what might have been a comical-looking encounter at any other time. Both his hands were on my chest, trying to hold me off. “Calm down. Believe me, they won’t hurt her.”
So I hoped with all my heart, but I wasn’t about to take his word for it. “God damn you, get the hell out of my way!” I screamed into his face, and I guess I looked formidable enough (or hysterical enough) to scare him, because he gave up and stepped meekly aside.
It was an old-fashioned telephone with a handle. I cranked it a couple of times and picked up the earpiece. “What’s the number?”
Salvini shrugged.
“You have to ask the operator,” volunteered Pascal, who’d been slouched in a corner watching absently, silent until now except for the steady cracking of his gum.
* * *
“Is everybody here crazy?” I said hoarsely to Brigadier-chef Jean Bertout, the benign, phlegmatic policeman who had come up to La Castagna from the sous-préfecture in the village in response to my call. He had just finished giving me the same incredible advice I’d heard from Salvini: calm down, don’t do anything; wait and see what develops. “What kind of policeman are you?”
“Sit down, don’t get so excited. Would you like a cigarette? A Coca Cola? Pascal, bring Mr. Simon a Coca Cola.”
“All I want is my wife,” I said, leaning on the table at which he sat, calmly smoking a smelly black cigarillo. My jaws hurt from clenching my teeth. I felt unutterably frustrated and befuddled, caught in some kind of nightmare quicksand I couldn’t claw my way out of. “How can you just sit there? Don’t you understand?”
“If you’ll sit down again, I’ll try to explain,” he said with a long-suffering sigh, as if this were a daily occurrence here, unfamiliar only to ignorant strangers. “Take my word for it, Mr. Simon, carrying on like this isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
“I don’t believe this,” I mumbled, slumping back into my chair. We were at one of the tables in the inn’s dining room.
“There, you see? Isn’t that better?” he asked.
“No, it’s not better. Who knows what they’re doing to her right now?”
His crumpled features relaxed into a benevolent smile. “They’re not doing anything to her, I assure you. Let me explain.”
I was half out of my chair again. “How can you possibly—all right, all right, go ahead, explain.”
“That’s better.” He took a last, slow drag on the cigarillo and placed it in an ashtray. “Now. How familiar are you with the bandits of Corsica?”
“A lot more than I want,” I said impatiently. This sounded like the start of a lecture.
A lecture it was. Corsican banditry had a long tradition, dating back at least to Genoese times, Bertout told me in his leisurely growl. Today’s bandits could be divided into two strains. The first were common, vicious brigands who preyed on the innocent. But the ones we had encountered that morning were not of that category. They hadn’t actually hurt anyone, had they? They hadn’t robbed those present at gunpoint, had they, even though they had every opportunity? No, they had come with a single, well-formed purpose in mind—
“Yes, to get Lily.”
—had efficiently accomplished it, and had gone on their way, harming no one.
“The hell they didn’t—”
The other strain, to whom these men clearly belonged, were descended from the bandits d’honneur of the last century, men who had taken to the maquis to hide from the authorities in the course of a bloody but honorable family vendetta. There they could and did live off the land for decades. They did not rob or harm innocent people, but only the enemies of their families or of Corsica itself. These brave, wild men had all but died out by the 1930’s, but when the Nazis came, a new generation of them took to the mountains to wage guerilla war on the occupiers; men of honor, men of purpose. After the war, for one reason or another—the accidental killing of a neutral bystander, the continuing enmity of those who had collaborated with the Nazis and were still in positions of power—a few bands remained in the hills, living the old life.
And there they still were, not model citizens, no one would make such a claim—they often resorted to ransom and extortion—but not a danger to the average Corsican or the well-meaning tourist, but only to those who had good reason to fear—”
“What are you talking about?” I exploded, unable to sit still any longer. “They just dragged off my wife. They did it with guns. They threatened her with a knife.”
“Yes, and that’s a question I was coming to. Why should they choose Mrs. Simon? Did she have reason to fear them? Did you?”
I opened my mouth to dismiss the idea, but snapped it closed without saying anything. Why had they chosen Lily? Did we have reason to fear them? Was it possible that this was belated revenge for her father’s activities during the Occupation? Or even against Lily herself for her sin of “horizontal collaboration”? My stomach turned over. At La Castagna, justice is served.
But how would they know about what had gone on in France during the war? How would they know who she was?
I probably should have shared it all with Bertout, but I kept it to myself. For one thing, I was deathly sick of telling strangers about it. But mainly, from the way he was going on about these “men of honor,” I wasn’t sure whose side he was on.
“What will they do to her?” I asked dully.
“Do to her?” He seemed surprised, almost offended. “Nothing. They wouldn’t harm a woman, in any case. No, no, clearly they are holding her for ransom; a business transaction, that’s all.”
I prayed that he was right.
“Why they would choose her in particular, I don’t know,” he continued. “Are you a rich man, Mr. Simon?”
“No. I’m a teacher. Now look—” I was trying my hardest to sound reasonable and unruffled. “—surely you can’t mean we just sit here until we hear from them? Shouldn’t we be trying to find them, or at least find out who they are, or—or something?”
Slowly shaking his head, he lit another of his crooked cigarillos. “Listen, let me tell you what would happen if we found them. Immediately, it would be out of my hands; the divisional commandant would take charge. Fifty of us would descend on them with vans and cars. There would be a standoff. The police would go in shooting. Your wife might easily be killed. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen before. Better to wait.”
“For what? Until when?”
“Oh, I’ll be very surprised if we haven’t heard from them by this time tomorrow.” He pushed back his chair and rose, smiling. “And then we’ll put our heads together and see what’s best, eh? That’s my plan.” An avuncular hand patted my shoulder. “And that’s the best way, Mr. Simon.”
* * *
I spent the rest of the morning and the first part of the afternoon in a daze of bewilderment and dismay, unwilling to accept Bertout’s “plan,” but unable to come up with anything workable on my own although my mind never stopped working at it. I thought of going to higher levels of policedom; perhaps the commandant that Bertout had spoken of, or the prefecture in Calvi, but Bertout had struck fear into my heart with his shootout scenario. At one point or another I buttonholed each of the other guests—what had they seen? What did they think? What should I do?—but they either agreed with Bertout and Salvini or they scurried off, unwilling to become involved.
At about three o’clock, while I was pacing around and around the worn grass surrounding the inn, incapable of remaining in one place for more than a minute and hoping vainly for inspiration to strike, the kitchen door opened as I neared it and Pascal, the young waiter and busboy, sauntered down the stone steps drying his hands on his apron. Apparently he was the dishwasher too.
“That cop was full of shit,” he said offhandedly as I passed. “He doesn’t know anything. You want to find your wife?”
I stopped and stared at him. Pascal was the one person in the place I hadn’t talked to about the kidnapping. An unappealing youth of eighteen with a bad complexion, a slouching manner, and no traits of note other than his gum-chewing (unusual for a European), his slight resemblance to James Dean, of which he was clearly aware, and his ability to spit a good six feet with no apparent ejaculatory effort (a skill I would have sold my soul for when I was twelve), it simply hadn’t occurred to me that he might have anything useful to contribute.
“What did you say?” I whispered, hoping I’d heard him right.
“I know who those guys are,” he said carelessly, pleased with the reaction he’d gotten. “They know me too.” He leaned back, resting both elbows on the stairs’ iron railing. “I did stuff for them in the old days, when I was a kid. They trust me.”
I doubted it, but I was in no position to pass up anything. “Who are they? What do they want?”
“Pascal!” Salvini’s voice came through the partially open kitchen window. “Look at this place. There’s not one clean saucepan in here. You want your job or not? Or did you suddenly get independently wealthy?”
“Five minutes,” Pascal yelled over his shoulder, and then, more quietly: “Old fart.” He took me familiarly by the arm and walked us a few yards up the hill, to stand beside an old, slate-roofed, stone hut built into the hillside, so that its back wall was of earth. The root cellar, I thought absently. At this point, I didn’t much care.
“Tell me,” I said.
They were called the Ozouf gang, Pascal said, a group of former maquis led by an ex-Resistance captain named Raoul Ozouf. Like the other Resistance groups they had come down from the mountains after the war; unlike them, they had continued as a clandestine organization of Nazi-hunters, ferreting out islanders who had trafficked with the occupying Germans but had escaped trial or had not, in Ozouf’s opinion, been properly brought to account by the law. Ozouf and his people would hold kangaroo courts, complete with the testimony of victims, and mete out their own punishment. The worst offenders were killed, sometimes brutally; others were beaten, or held for ransom from their families, or frightened off the island one way or another.
These acts of revenge—a sort of patriotic vendetta that brought to mind the bandits d’honneur of the past— naturally made them heroes to much of the populace, but after a grace period that lasted a full decade, the local authorities, pressured by the police high command in Paris, had begun going after them. Warrants were issued. Arrests were made. With some of his men, Ozouf had taken to the hills again. That had been six years ago. Since then they had existed entirely outside the law, living mostly by blackmail and kidnapping, but they had remained on the good side of the locals by limiting their misdeeds to unpopular citizens—ex-Nazi-sympathizers, corrupt politicians, and the like—as much as possible. There were some unavoidable exceptions, of course, especially when they hired on to carry out occasional jobs for outsiders; some sort of intimidation, usually, or extortion of one kind or another. But they only rarely killed anyone nowadays.
