Beyond Revanche, page 28
Mathieu crouched silently on one knee and drank in every possible alternative. Motionless. Guarded. Sensing danger close at hand, his brain defaulted to automatic. He had trained for such an eventuality in another life, years before he became a policeman. Slowly, he crawled onto the grass verge that laced the land-side of the tow-path and crept along the canal. Two painful miles down his pilgrim’s way he found Bistrot’s horse slurping on the wild grass, untethered. Behind, on the muddied track, his master lay prone, unmoving. Still no sound other than the hungry horse taking advantage of forbidden fruit. Mathieu moved towards man and beast with grave caution. There was no room for error. Unseen sniper? Hidden Greek? Dead friend? Anything was possible.
He checked Bistrot’s pulse. Well, at least his heart was beating. An angry lump had grown over his left eye and forehead, but there was no external bleeding. The barge lay still; its deck littered with mounds of uncut stone so that the vessel sat low on the canal. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, Mathieu clambered on board quickly, keeping an eye on the surrounding hedgerow. The sound from below was muted but a guttural cry gave him sufficient warning. He leaped to his right as Timon threw himself from the hold, great coat fanned behind him as if he was a gigantic bat, renting the air with yet another roar. This time the Greek looked triumphant. This time he intended to end it all. This time the bloody policeman would get what he deserved.
In every man’s life there comes a point where running away is eminently more sensible than standing up to fight. Trouble was, Mathieu had no option but to defend himself. The burly Greek towered above him, heavy coat open to the elements, lined, cut by a stylish outfitter, with special pockets sewn into the fabric like gun holsters. He laughed at his quarry’s discomfort. The detective was trapped, his ankle twisted by his fall onto the stone.
“Well, Mathieu Bertrand, at last. I have waited a long time for my revenge. But I want you to know I will enjoy this. Every second of your pain brings me joy. Pure joy, do you hear?” He reached into the left hand pocket. “This is my gift to you.”
“Ah, the classic touch,” Mathieu said, anticipating his next move. “The brick to the face once the victim is helpless. Well, that won’t work this time round. It may do for me, but we know who you are, and there’s no hiding for a cop-killer.”
The Greek leaned over and hissed in Mathieu’s face, his breath strangely sweet from expensive mouthwash. “If anyone can find a cop’s body amongst the thousands of mutilated dead in these fields, Bertrand, I will have lost my lucky touch forever.”
“They will know that this is Zaharoff’s doing,” was the last card in his hand, but the game had swung in the Greek’s favor.
He threw back his head in delight and laughed down at Mathieu’s broken form. “You think I work for Monsieur Zaharoff? Well, yes I do, but it’s not an exclusive contract. No, no, no…Vincent!” he laughed and spat in the same singular movement
Mathieu gasped audibly through his pain… He knew? Impossible.
“Oh that shocked you, eh? Yes indeed, they know all about you, Vincent. I can assure you your grandfather’s name will not protect you forever. Believe me, I am paid in a number of currencies. And I haven’t time to tell you which!”
With every gram of strength he could muster Mathieu crashed his forehead into the stooped Greek’s face, rocking him back on his heels. Momentary respite allowed him time to raise himself up, unsteadily, so that he stood briefly toe-to-toe with his enemy. Timon feigned left and struck him down once more with a well-aimed blow to the head from the other side. Mathieu cried out in pain, not from the blow, but from his twisted ankle. It refused to bear weight.
“Beating you to pulp will be the best moment of my life.”
The Greek took out the brick so that Mathieu would see what struck him, raised it high above his head, and with a swish and a crack, fell. Both men moaned in agony, prostrate, pain devouring but not overcoming them. Timon’s body had broken Mathieu’s leg in the fall, but the Greek seemed unable to rise from the wooden deck to take advantage of his double injury. Lying there, cheek by jowl, he grabbed at the detective’s throat, entirely focused on murder. Timon began to throttle the injured foe lying prone beside him and raised his torso from the hip to gain more purchase.
Swish.
Timon’s left hand reached to close the gaping hole that had been slashed under his jaw. He gasped. Blood spurted like an oil gusher in the desert. The Greek’s head turned to look to his right. Incomprehension frozen on his face as the hole in his throat yawned open.
Bang. Definitely a metallic bang.
Timon’s skull disintegrated as it flew to the side, but hung on grimly to his body, precariously attached by some sinew-like matter. For a moment the world stopped spinning. Nothing made sense. Mathieu could not understand why the near decapitated murderer collapsed in front of him, before sliding slowly over the side of the barge, his passage lubricated by his own dark blood. Heart pounding, he struggled to comprehend what had happened as Timon’s lifeless body sank into the muddy canal, weighed down by its own special ballast.
A woman stood over him, coal shovel in hand, watching intently for any sign of life in the water. She grunted, her entire body animated by the adrenalin which surged through her veins. Mathieu recognized who it was as she slowly came into focus. Margarite. She was speaking to him in a series of noises which he could not decipher. Whatever, she was uttering, she had saved his life. Where did she come from? How? How? Shivering violently, he slipped into a coma of sorts, semi-conscious and confused. But he was determined not to die. Things to do, you know.
26
Bonds That Bind
A nun. Mathieu didn’t like nuns. A nun with a large starched wimple was leaning over him, her black wide-sleeved habit shielded by a grey apron. She made no effort to touch him, which was fine, but her disapproval marched before her. What was this layabout doing in the convent hospital? Her lip curled up towards a fine almost invisible moustache which would not have been so obvious had she kept her distance. He blinked. She drew herself up to her full five feet and left.
He was comfortable. His body was still sore in places, but the agony had passed. Mathieu knew that his ankle was held in a splint with his leg firmly bound and bandaged. Patches of memory returned, but not immediately.
“Can you say the Lord’s Prayer?” asked Sister Glum later that afternoon.
He had decided on her name immediately.
“Hail Mary full of…”
“That’s close enough,” she assured him, before placing a bed pan by his side. He looked at it. She looked at him. “I advise you use this carefully, if you have to. You also need to wash, you know, beneath.”
What was that woman talking about? Beneath what? The bed? A few minutes later the occupant in the next cot explained. “Beneath the waist. They don’t like dealing with the lower parts of the male anatomy.”
This made no sense.
“Your private parts. Nuns don’t go there. Don’t look. Don’t touch. Don’t wash.”
“Ah.”
That made sense. It was a fate worth avoiding, anyway.
Mathieu did not at first realize that his broken ribs were constricting his lungs. It hurt to laugh or sneeze. His midriff was also tightly bound and his left arm hung limp, held by a loosening sling.
He remembered Timon’s head. Grotesque. Turned from human to misshapen to hang by a sliver in two mighty blows from old Grandmother Time. Scythe became spade. Spade became scythe, her height altered by his view from the deck. No she wasn’t old it was…
Mathieu opened his eyes and there she was. Margarite, and beside her, Bistrot and Sister Glum.
“Your visitors can stay for ten minutes. Please impress upon them the need to keep the ward clean.” One had to wonder if Glum disliked everyone.
“Margarite, you angel of mercy…and Bistrot…what happened?” Bistrot checked that no one was listening before divulging his secret story of The Murder.
“You won’t arrest her will you?”
“What for?”
“She did it to save you.”
“She did save me.” Mathieu realized that he, too, had begun to speak in whispers as if they were involved in a conspiracy. “Bistrot. No one’s getting arrested. In fact, unless you have reported finding a body in the canal, no one has died. Officially.”
He looked blankly at Mathieu, unable to work out precisely what he meant. Behind him, Margarite gave a broad knowing smile. Uncomplicated. Thankful.
“So…what happened? How did he get into the barge.”
“I was about to feed the horse when this huge foreigner appeared from the field. He was shouting angry words which I didn’t understand and he slapped Hugo’s arse.”
“Hugo?”
“The horse.”
“Ah… Hugo the horse.”
“So Hugo reared up, caught me with his foreleg, and knocked me unconscious.”
“Not Timon…the Greek? The horse kicked you.”
“By mistake.”
“Of course.”
“Margarite saw the commotion and went to fetch a compress but this big guy leaped onto the barge and started to shout at her. She jumped down into the hold and hid. He lumbered about unable to find her, banging his head on the beams, his temper worsening by the second. He was about to leave when he saw you and waited in the shadows till you climbed onboard…then attacked.”
Margarite mumbled excitedly. Bistrot translated. “She insists that he would have killed you, and she thought he had killed me, so she was…upset.”
“Don’t be, Margarite.” Mathieu had rarely been so sincere. “He was a very bad man. But who taught you to use a spade like a scythe?”
Bistrot waxed lyrical about the properties of a spade in the hands of an expert. “If you know how, a spade can become a weapon in many different ways. Taught Margarite myself. She chopped his head off like Madame Guillotine. Apparently his body didn’t float. It sank immediately, she claims.”
Images flashed though Mathieu’s mind. That was exactly how it happened as far as he could remember.
“Margarite.” He beckoned her to his side and took her hand. “Margarite, thank you so much. If you hadn’t been so brave, it would have been my body in the canal.”
“No thanks needed,” Bistrot the translator assured him. “Bloody man had assaulted Hugo, and Hugo is HER horse.”
It may have felt like six months but within ten days Mathieu was deemed ready to transfer back to Paris on the hospital train. Sister Glum reinvented herself as Sister Happiness when she heard the news. “Wonderful. See what the power of prayer can do?” Mathieu wanted to point out that twenty-four hour nursing care and experienced doctors might have influenced his partial recovery, but it would have spoiled her moment.
“I have a very special present for you. Take this for your journey home. A treat. And pray for me.” How do nuns manage to say “and pray for me” in a manner which sounds like their last day is upon them? What secret sins do they hide in their wimples? She handed him a small round package wrapped in cloth. He put it in his jacket which a second nun draped over his uninjured shoulder. This one was pretty…for a nun.
Bistrot and Margarite came to the convent hospital to say farewell to the one man on earth who knew she was a murderess…and blessed his good fortune because of it. “Are you sure you are fit to walk ?” Bistrot doubted.
Mathieu was adamant that he was, propped up by a crutch, breathing slowly. His step was painful but sure.
“Be careful, my friend,” Bistrot began, just as Mathieu’s jacket fell from his shoulder and the package hit the floor. Margarite bent to retrieve it for her injured compadre but the cloth tore and out spilled a tin of Atlantic salmon. They looked at that tin through different eyes.
“Salmon, from America. That’ll be nice,” said Bistrot, retrieving it at once.
“Wouldn’t mind a taste of that!” mouthed Margarite, her emotions as discreet as ever.
“What! Where did that come from?” Mathieu could not believe what he was looking at. “This is the stuff I was asking you about, Bistrot. You said that nothing came down the canal from Belgium. Well, this is from Belgium, I can assure you.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Don’t tell me it’s American. I know that, but this has come to Toul in a barge from Belgium.”
“No, it hasn’t. That’s not where it came from. Nothing from Belgium gets this far south. It’s from Germany.”
“What? Atlantic salmon from Germany? Impossible. How?”
“If this is what you have been searching for, you’ve been looking in the wrong direction. You went up the wrong canal. This did not come down the River Meuse. Some detective you are.” Local knowledge can make a fool out of a genius. Bistrot saw that Mathieu was struggling to understand what he meant and led him carefully to the far corner of the convent.
“There,” he pointed to his right, “is the Meuse-Moselle canal, but over to our left is the Toul-Rhine canal. Those barges in the basin, the smaller ones, carry the American flag. That’s their depot.”
He pointed to a substantial red-brick building on two floors set on the far side of the tow-path. The word “Douane” had been inscribed on the Portico. Trust the Americans to have the best of everything. In the cold morning mist which hung lightly over the waterways, it was clear from the smoking chimneys that this Custom House was kept warm and welcoming.
“Their barges have to stop where the locks have been sabotaged near the French-German border, then they unload their cargo onto trucks and are allowed to pass freely as neutrals. Once the cargo has been checked, it is transferred onto the barges you see there on the other side of the unofficial border. Lots of the boxes are stamped Rotterdam, but that’s in the Netherlands, not Belgium.”
The enormity of the moment struck Mathieu physically and his legs buckled. “That’s where Hoover’s relief agency is based.”
Bistrot caught him before he fell.
“Wait. Let me try to work this out. The Americans, as neutrals, are allowed to export to all nations. I know that. But the food they take to Rotterdam is for the Belgians…”
“Are you certain?” Bistrot was perplexed. For a senior detective, this lad didn’t know much at all.
Barely able to stand, Mathieu grabbed Bistrot’s shoulder and spun him round. Anger added to his unwillingness to accept what was being said. He wanted Bistrot to be wrong.
“How would they get the permits? Why would the Germans let food through to France? To Paris? It doesn’t make sense.”
“That depends on how much the Americans provide for the Germans. They do deals every day, these people. Where do you think Berlin gets its rich-man luxuries?”
Bistrot understood. Mathieu struggled with the facts before his very eyes. They were at war, but behind the scenes food which was supposedly earmarked for Belgium was sold down the Rhine. Supplied to both sides? Surely not. It wasn’t just illegal—it was treasonable.
Mathieu tried to clear his confusion by repeating the question slowly. “Are you saying that the Americans are selling or supplying both sides? To Germany and Belgium and Northern France?”
“I suppose so, if you put it like that.” Bistrot had never considered the matter as anything other than business. And war is a business.
The ambulance arrived to take Mathieu and the walking wounded to the station and onwards to recuperate in Paris.
“Bistrot.” He handed the bargeman a piece of paper. “If anyone comes asking questions about the Greek I want you to take a note of what he looks like and contact me at this telephone number. Do the same if the Americans change their routines or do anything that looks wrong. In fact, go to the police station and ask them to contact Paris. Ask for me personally.”
Though he felt like a fraud in the company of men who would never recover from the savage wounds inflicted by war, Mathieu was injured. Doctors had examined his foot and considered amputation. Please God, no. He knew that he would have to be patient until his infected ankle healed properly and the break in his leg had mended. His collar bone would heal. They had no doubt about that, but his ribs could bear no pressure at all. He understood now the sense of denial which wounded men experience. He knew his bones were broken. He knew that the pain would pass helped by the strong drugs they fed him. But he expected to be whole within days, not weeks.
Mathieu was a hopeless patient. Rest gave him too much time to think, and thinking brought its own frustrations. He was angry at himself. He hadn’t trusted his own instinct at Saint-Mihiel. He had jumped to a conclusion about the canal system. He should have known that Timon was stalking him, not the other pilots. He was lucky to have survived thanks to a dumb woman’s anger. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out to be a detective? He was hot, uncomfortably so. Possibly he was wearing too many clothes?
Mathieu was met at the Gare de l’Est by Dubois who had no inkling of what he had endured. Shocked by his friend’s condition, Paul called for a porter and together they helped support him from the train into the waiting car. When the Renault reached no. 36. Toussaint was waiting at the front entrance, eager to carry the wounded man up the stairs on his own. Even in the discomfort of his injuries, Mathieu could smell Toussaint’s early morning Cognac and prayed he was fit for the task. Jacques stood beaming at him at Roux’s office door and saluted his friend as if he was his commanding officer.
Dubois laughed aloud and confessed’ “I should have told you, Mathieu, things are so bad these days that the chief decided to keep this hanger-on and promoted him to Sous-Lieutenant. Can you imagine?”
Mathieu’s smile said it all. “Excellent. At last I’ve got someone to make my coffee.” but his attempt at good humor was superficial. Pain sharpened his breath though he was determined not to show it.
“Ah, the wandering minstrel.” Roux rose to greet him and pointed to a comfortable chair with padded seat and armrest.
