Beyond Revanche, page 20
I stand alone in an orchard, waiting and watching. I hear their laughter before I see them. Loud whispers intermingle with calls for quiet. One, two, three small heads peer over the stone boundary wall, each carefully surveying the rows of apple and pear trees. Windfall litters the ground, but they don’t want any old bruised discard. My brother leads them towards the center spot and they stand in awe at the foot of a great apple tree bearing awesome fruit. Lush and succulent. Near the top is the biggest, most perfectly formed Red Delicious ever seen. It hangs proud. An Emperor amongst the kings of apples. I follow them to the base, hypnotized by that apple.
“Go away, coward,” says my brother without turning to face me. Did he see me out of the corner of his eye? Did he sense my presence? Did he smell my fear?
“Beat it, louse.”
“Get lost, you toad.” His friends treat me with equal disgust. I stand my ground a pace behind them, downhearted but unwilling to leave. They prowl round the base of the tree looking for a point from which to climb. The bark is gnarled and featureless. No matter how they try, there is no branch close enough to grasp nor foothold to step from. They leap, arms outstretched, but flailing hands fall far short of their objective.
“Piggy-back! Up on my shoulders.” They try every possible combination without success. None is strong enough to let another stand on his shoulders.
“I can do it. I’m much lighter than anyone else. I can stand on your shoulders and reach the first branch.” They look at me and consider the proposal.
“He could you know” my brother reckons. The others agree. It’s worth trying, surely.
Eager to please, oh yes, always eager to please, I climb onto his back, and with assorted pushes and shoves, stand tall. I grasp the lowest limb and ease myself upwards. Here the branches are more plentiful and open onto a pathway to the clouds. I look back on their bemused faces. Is that a new-found respect I see? Above, the Holy Grail shines blood red, its perfection like unblemished skin on a beautiful girl. I reach up and touch the fruit. I look down and see three pygmies, mouths open in disbelief. One tug, firm and forceful. Nothing. I try again, wrapping my whole hand around the prize. Nothing. I hear a muffled snort from below.
“He can’t even pick an apple from a tree” my brother is doubled over with laughter, his friends adding to the chorus of derision.
I spin round and grab the stubborn apple with both hands and pull hard. It gives. I fall backwards into oblivion and hear myself scream. Several branches break my fall before releasing me to mother earth, winded and sobbing.
“Stupid bastard.” Pierre always had a dirty mouth.
“Someone’s coming, quick.”
They run. My brother stoops to pick up the flawless apple, and leaves me to face the consequences, heaving for each painful breath, unable to move.
A face appears above my own, quizzical, caught between concern and righteous anger. The farmer’s eldest son, Jean-Paul peers at me, lying there in fear and pain.
“Are you all right?”
What a stupid question. Have you noticed how often people ask, “Are you all right?” when it is perfectly obvious that you are not? Does that happen to you? Half dead and helpless but all they ask is, “Are you all right, my friend?”
He helps me get to my feet. “What happened here then? Did you do it?”
“They made me.”
“Oh, who made you?
“Conrad, Theo, and Maurice.” Oh no! I scream, “Not Conrad, Theo, and Maurice…other people.”
“So Conrad, Theo, and Maurice made you shoot Jean Jaurès.”
“No, NO, I did not say that…”
“How many times did you shoot Jaurès? You weren’t on your own, were you?” He shouts at me, louder this time. “How many times did you shoot Jaurès? You weren’t on your own, were you?”
“No not me. Them. No. That’s wrong, it was me. It was.”
“Them?” He looks left and right, walks as far as the stone wall, and checks for signs of intruders. “I don’t see them. I see you.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It was me alone. Me.”
He leads me to his father by my left ear and his father kicks my backside and sends me hobbling and sniveling down the orchard path. “Don’t shoot Jaurès again. Not in my orchard.”
You see how easy it is? Dreams confuse reality. Things that have happened change form. You make mistakes because you find yourself inside old memories. Bad memories. You have to be careful, Charles said.
17
May 1915-December 1916 – Survival of the Wealthiest
The war continued to hemorrhage men and youths in epic numbers. Faced with the advisability of reorganizing the Deuxième. Chief-Superintendent Bernard Roux acted before any outsider could interfere. Mathieu continued his investigations into the international arms dealer but was obliged to keep a low profile, even when Basil Zaharoff went to England. Rumors about him rattled across tottering empires. He was a spy for the British. He was a spy for the Germans. He traded national secrets for gold. He was seen in Switzerland. He was seen in Athens. He was a Greek or a Turk or a Frenchman. The privileged air of diplomatic small talk grew thick with speculation but there was nothing which could definitively prove his war profiteering. Roux’s inner ear heard it all, and for as long as the prince of darkness remained outside the borders of France, his department was impotent. The injured bodyguard, Timon, had been shipped off to a nursing home in the Bernese Alps. A unique perk in unique times.
He called his team together and shared his decision. “Pascal, I need you to stay on for a few more months.” The old captain looked, listened, and refused.
“No. You said Christmas, then just a few weeks more, then Easter. I’ll die on the bloody job, chief.”
“You won’t. I’m going to switch your responsibilities with Mathieu’s. You can watch over Zaharoff and foreign visitors, and he can deal with the black market and criminal fraternity and do some real police work.” Before Pascal Girard could reject his request outright, he added, “You’ll be directing operations from here. The younger ones can tread the streets.”
The team knew that Pascal’s family had suffered their own bitter tragedy and teetered on the abyss of extinction. They admired him for accepting his fate with a stoicism which he and many like him endured on a daily basis. War is a wicked imposition. Pascal Girard had known Guy Simon as a friend and encouraged him to join the Tigers when the flying squad was set up. He felt his loss deeply in the first weeks of the war and agonized over his inability to convince Guy to stay in Paris. Worse followed. Pascal’s youngest, Henri, was killed in a gas attack near Ypres during the second battle for the iconic debris which had once been an ancient Flemish town. The Girard family knew the misery of forlorn hope, believing at first that Henri was missing, then that he had been rescued and taken to a military hospital where he was recovering. All lies and conjecture. Henri had been dead for three months before official confirmation arrived via soulless telegram. Three months of useless prayer. No one knew what to say. Condolences are but words no matter how eloquently spoken and well-intended.
Pascal’s devastation continued when his wife, Helene, died because living was no longer important. And, for the first time in his adult life, he was alone. His daughters were spread across the country, married with responsibilities of their own. Pascal’s options were to stay in an empty house, no longer a home, replete with anguished memories, or keep working. He chose work for now.
Agnès, too, bore the marks of fatigue at close quarters. She was not easily given to complaint but when she stole time with Mathieu on a quick visit to Paris in the company of the broken, she unburdened herself in a torrent of welled-up emotion. No self-pity or indulgence passed her lips but she spent her days in hell and cruel images had been irreparably burned into her being. When Agnès left Paris in the first weeks of the war she broke free from the sarcasm and derision of men forever. Mathieu had been aware that some newspapers urged women to stay at home and serve their country by replacing men temporarily in offices, sew uniforms, and help out in childcare refuges so that the business of war could be left to the fighting man. The heroes. Behind the unbending determination which nurses had to instill in their own discipline, vicious stories claimed that female volunteers engaged in sexual activity with wounded men, were chasing officers, and had countless ulterior motives; that they wore their uniforms as the latest in fashion accoutrements. “Nursing should be left to nuns,” the whispering bourgeoisie told each other in the safety of their middleclass tearooms.
Lying together on top of a patchwork quilt which Agnès felt was eiderdown, she kissed Mathieu’s torso and stroked wisps of breast hair which might one day grow grey. He waited patiently for her to speak.
“Bad, eh? As bad as they say?”
Agnès inhaled the cold air in her apartment, appreciating its comparative purity, knowing that less than three hundred kilometers to the north, men were drowning in pitiless mud. She caught her breath, uncertain if she should speak.
“If I told you that our main enemy wasn’t the Germans, what would you say?”
Mathieu leaned on his left elbow and looked directly into the eyes he had longed for, wondering what she meant.
“That France has many enemies who call themselves friends.”
“Perhaps, because that’s your world. In mine, war is a relentless succession of horror with the dead and the dying piled up and cast aside. It’s backbreaking, heartbreaking and soul destroying. Living conditions are only tolerable because you have to sleep exhausted, but the round the clock bombardment, the rats, the mud, the bone-chilling winter wind, rotten food, and crass stupidity of the generals eventually wears you down. The non-stop triage of dressings, operations, and death become everyday companions. Depression sucks your spirit. And those boys, those poor, poor boys……”
Mathieu kissed her bare arm and pulled a cover from the floor. “You’re here now, my darling. Safe, do you hear?” But Agnès did not.
“And then something happens, something ordinary and unexpected, and you can’t take any more. Waiting for a letter which never comes can break the spirit. No water to wash underwear, which should have been cleaned three weeks before, crushes your sense of worth.”
A single tear slipped down her cheek, but the very act of wiping it away enraged Agnès. She broke free of her protector and let rage have its way.
“But nothing, nothing, nothing compares to the madness and stupidity of our military authorities. Do you know what the first instruction is when a wounded man is brought in, eh? Never mind the severity of the wound, the pain, the hopelessness? We have to fill in form forty-six. Form forty-six. A must-do before treatment can even begin. You find yourself asking a man who cannot hear, who cannot see, who is tottering on the tightrope of life or death, what his personal details are. Form fucking forty-six.” Her tears stormed from their own trenches and drowned the sickening memory.
Paris, Roux’s Paris, was also in what felt like permanent decline, even to an in-comer like Mathieu. In the first six months of the war she had taken unexpectedly ill to the newfound limitations. Then she aged badly. Drained of her gaiety, the face of the old city became lined with grief. Her laughing eyes sagged, dragged down by darkening tears. Her lifeblood lacked oxygen. Like all the wounded she protected inside her boundaries, Paris needed time to recover, but there was no time. Renewal was strained by the primacy of victory. All else had to give way.
By the third winter the city looked like an impoverished urchin; her former finery, torn and bedraggled, unkempt, neglected. Even sleaze in the Pigalle lost all semblance of sparkle. The Moulin Rouge stuttered to life haphazardly, unlit outside and unheated inside. Mathieu had heard that organized crime in the Milieu was scarcely able to make ends meet. In the underworld, war’s cancerous calamity grew intense as the native population thinned through a plague of deprivation. Even the more affluent had to learn to do without. Metro and bus services no longer ran at night. Lamplights flickered, electricity cuts became more frequent and those who still kept candles dreaded the day these would be finally extinguished. Coal supplies for the ordinary citizen choked. People accepted that factories, especially those engaged in armaments and engineering, had to be fed first.
“It’s the war, you know.”
Color faded from the weather-beaten townscape. All was grey. Chilling Artic winds swept down from the north. Lonely citizens died in front of unlit stoves. The Seine froze from rutted bank to rutted bank, picturesque in watercolor, miserable in real life. Hoarding became an issue which divided neighbors, friends, and families. As the days shortened towards mid-winter, cafés, shops, and bakeries opened in the late morning and closed early. Food shortage accelerated towards crisis, except for the very rich and the black-marketeers.
In the midst of this pitiful sacrifice, Chief Superintendent Bernard Roux of the Deuxième was invited to the official celebration hosted by the Banque de Paris in the magnificently elegant Hotel Ritz. His invitation bore the pompous Latin inscription which claimed that the bank’s fortunes might fluctuate but never sink, written in florid gold. How much did that alone cost? The fare was as sumptuous as ever, the guest list, less so. Any self-respecting man or woman might have asked what crime they had committed to be included in such a glitter of diamond-studded aristocrats, minor royalty, ancient title-holders, bankers, financiers, newspaper owners and editors, industrialists, former generals and part-time admirals, politicians and their glamorously coiffured wives and mistresses. This was no collection of the Great and the Good. Just the Great, as defined by themselves.
Obliged to sit at a table of his peers, Roux was far from impressed by the president’s speech in praise of the war effort. Poincaré’s fawning admiration for the support France was receiving from England and America, and beyond, left him colder than the bitter wind outside. No thought was given to the men in the trenches. Their wives and children made no fleeting appearance. This was money talking about money-making; a self-congratulatory indulgence.
But the food was divine. Bernard Roux had no stomach for the company, but…ah…the food. From a menu which dripped with descriptive pomposity, he could find no fault with the plates which were laid before him. After the third course, which had been mastered by chefs schooled in excellence, he thanked the attending waiter and asked, “How do they do that? It tasted like Atlantic salmon of old. Flawless.”
“Thank you, Monsieur. I will pass your regards to the kitchen.”
Good manners sometimes pays unintended dividends. As he cleared the venison dish, the waiter whispered in Roux’s ear, “The chef thanks you for your kind words, Monsieur, and asks you to take this gift with you as a memento.” He slipped something into Bernard’s pocket and withdrew. Caught in mid-conversation with the minister of the interior, the chief superintendent neither touched the gift nor acknowledged what had happened.
Roux sat pondering an unopened tin lying at the center of his desk as Mathieu brought him a note of complaint from the mayor about drunken soldiers urinating on the exterior of public urinals. Remarkable what the middle classes thought important.
“Was at the Ritz last night. One of the disadvantages of office, might I say. Banque of France affair. Clearly while we desperately need millions of francs in war loans, the Banque is sufficiently liquid to splash out at the Ritz.” He picked up the tin and reexamined it, turning it over to the base and back again.
“I was given this by a waiter.”
He placed it carefully in Mathieu’s right hand and sat back, reaching into his jacket for a Gauloises. It was a small tin of red salmon. Unopened. Images of a leaping fish wound round its side and on the top, a silver-stained salmon danced through blue and white-topped waves. Best Quality Atlantic Salmon, the bold print claimed. Mathieu carefully turned it over. On the back another label claimed that the contents hailed from Nova Scotia in Canada but that had been scored through and over-written with Belgique.
Mathieu appreciated the flaw. “You don’t get Atlantic salmon from Belgium.”
“Mmmmm,” his boss mused, extinguishing the match with which he had lit his cigarette. “Not usually, no. But these are unusual times.” They both nodded. “Why do you think a waiter in the Ritz slipped this into my pocket?”
“Bribery?”
“Don’t think so. Doubt if I would recognize him again anyway.”
“Then it has to be a message.”
“Where would you buy Atlantic salmon, here, right now?”
“Black market? Would have to be.”
“So tell me, what is the link between the Paris black market and occupied Belgium?”
“Finding a link between the Ritz and the black market would be easier. But Belgium? No. I mean these could have entered France from Brest, Bordeaux, Biarritz, or even Marseilles.” He thought longer. “Switzerland, perhaps?”
“Possibly. Possibly even legally, for the top end of the market willing to pay exorbitant prices. But Belgium?” Roux had clearly thought this over.
“Could be a ploy to waste police time.” Mathieu played Devil’s advocate.
“Could be someone who wants us to investigate another black market scandal?”
“Or a rival? But where would we start?” Mathieu was far from sure that an inquiry into Atlantic salmon was worth the effort.
“Mmm. Let’s not get sidetracked. It may mean nothing. Just be aware of Atlantic salmon. Pass the word. See what’s out there.”
18
In Search of Atlantic Salmon
See what’s out there? Mathieu knew that the only service which was flourishing in the capital was prostitution. Without it, organized crime might have closed down. But no. At least forty brothels were licensed to practice the ancient art and God only knew how many abandoned women and war widows survived on a day by day basis because of it. Let the preachers rant about the wrath of God on loose women. You didn’t see many starving clergy on the hungry streets of the capital. With thousands of soldiers passing through the city or taking advantage of a few days leave, the streetwalkers hardly had time to wash their faces. Sexual disease spread faster than rumor and hunger in this harsh reality. Petty crime was rife in the poorer quarters, but who could quantify the problem? People disappeared, returned to pre-war homes, sought refuge with relatives, or simply gave in and died; alone. Men and boys went off to war and if they did not return, great sadness prevailed. They had died for France. For civilization. Their memories were saluted in good wine. But women were disappearing, too, slipping under the surface of civilized society like ducklings sucked under the water by an unseen predator.
