Beyond Revanche, page 42
Before another word could be uttered, Marshal Pétain thumped the table and blurted,
“That must be why General Pershing informed me that he was releasing fifteen history professors from army duty immediately to assist some American professor from California. He said he had permission from the top men on all sides.”
Clemenceau’s brow darkened. “I know nothing about permissions, Marshal. No one asked my permission.” He accentuated the I to disassociate himself completely with the claim.
Pétain cleared his throat and said quietly, “I imagine he meant President Poincaré.”
Embarrassment fell from the rococo ceiling and added to the general discomfort. Clemenceau drummed his fingers even more rapidly on the table. It was as if a priest had pronounced, “let us pray,” intoning a grace before a meal for which there was no food. Heads bowed. No one wished to be part of the uneasy revelation. In the pause Mathieu saw every piece of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place. Hoover had the president’s approval to remove all the evidence of malpractice during the war. It was already disappearing over the horizon to that part of America furthest from France. They were robbing Europe of its historical heritage to save their own heads. How far did this go?
Clemenceau made an instant political judgment.
“I want all of you to search for remaining documents pertaining to the war and place them with the Ministry of War. These will then be secretly locked away for safety, with access denied to anyone of lesser rank than you, Gentlemen. When we are ready, we can assess what they tell us. That of course assumes that there is anything left. Do it immediately when we end this meeting.”
“Are we free to investigate Hoover himself?” Mathieu was also convinced that the American would be the big player in the coming post-Versailles era.
“No … I’ve said it already. Do not even think about it. We need to keep the Americans sweet.” Ambassador Jusserand was obviously alarmed.
Clemenceau found a middle way. “So, gather all of the material we have on Hoover. This time send it to the Deuxième Bureau. Again, it will be placed in a secret vault. No entry without permission from the highest order. With the greatest respect, Ambassador, we have to build up a clear portfolio on a man who may yet lead our major ally. It is in the smallest of fragmentary detail that we may one day find the key to manipulate even the greatest of men.”
Mathieu was excused from the secret intelligence meeting, but as he left the Rotunda, Ambassador Jusserand caught his sleeve and took him aside.
“Captain, you have a wonderful future ahead of you. Do not put it at risk because of a snake like Hoover. Whatever you discover, keep it secret. We still need the Americans. Absolutely.”
Raoul’s Story
Family Madness
I was in hospital, surely, but why? Aaah the pain. What had happened? In a general ward with other patients. Men. Ordinary men. They recognized me. I could tell by the stares in my direction. Harsh looks. Friendless. The doctor was perfectly proper, coming as he did from a better class of people. The nurses were attentive and kind. Breathing was painful, and when they bound what seemed to be my wounds, I squirmed, gasping for relief.
“You are a very lucky man, Monsieur Villain. Very lucky.” Was he a doctor?
I was on the point of arguing, but sheer exhaustion intervened. I slept on my back.
I am going to tell you a story, my friend, and you can decide whether or not I am lucky.
After I returned to Paris to stay in Rue Jean-Lantier, half way between the elegant Rue de Rivoli and Pont Neuf, my life began to unravel from the security of absolute certainty to the eternal doubt that wraps itself around paranoia. True, I was housed in a better quality lodging and I had a regular income paid into an account at the Banque de Paris, but none of the wealth that I was promised. You could not say I was well off. No. Those who previously claimed to be my friends warned me off. The consequences would be severe, they said. I was sufficiently knowledgeable about money and coins to realize that in the post-war turbulence there was profit to be made.
By sheer chance, I bumped into an old friend from La Santé, the warder I called Pierre. He was able to purchase silver coins from unknown sources, and I agreed to sell them on as an investment to citizens with cash. This secret arrangement continued for a couple of months and it was a profitable relationship, my fronting the business while Pierre sourced the silver. Sometimes it was the finest of silver tableware. He assured me that it came from clients who needed cash. I worked alone from a small café in Montreuil, at the corner of Rues Douy-Delcupe and de Vincennes. Close enough to lure greedy men, but otherwise anonymous. Pierre possessed not the personality to front a business. The patron accepted a few francs to turn a blind eye but someone reported us to the police and I was arrested for trafficking in silver. The ignominy. As they bundled me into the police wagon I heard one of the local patrons call me “murderer.” The desk sergeant at the prefecture in Montreuil was as fat as he was evil-looking. He practically drooled at the prospect of my being in his jail and within ten minutes of the arrest he wobbled into my cell and proceeded to lecture me with a dog-breath reprimand.
“Have you ever stopped to think,” he pontificated, “how much misery you have caused our nation? How many lives your cowardly act cost France? Do you have the slightest notion how many heads have been broken and police injured in the riots that follow you everywhere you go?”
But we won. We crushed Germany. We have Lorraine and Alsace back. And these rioters were asking for it. Anarchists and communists, I replied in my head, but said nothing. It always annoyed the guardians of the law if you said nothing.
His parting comment cut me deeply. “You are a nobody going nowhere. Do France a favor and kill yourself.”
I sat inside the solitude of my mind and realized what he said was true. I was a nobody. Again. My life caused others pain. My family didn’t want me. My friends from Action française wouldn’t speak to me. Who would notice if I killed myself? No one. But how? I took a silk scarf which I occasionally wore for effect and attached one end to the grille on the cell door, placed it round my neck in a noose, and pulled as hard as I could. I felt dizzy and began to lose consciousness, but the silk slipped from my hand and I banged my head. I tried again, with no tangible result. On the third occasion, a guard heard my fall, opened the cell, and shouted for help. Sergeant dog-breath squeezed himself inside and whispered contemptuously,” Not on my watch, you stupid bastard.”
By the time a doctor arrived to examine me I had fully recovered. They let me out four days later, but I had to appear at the 11th Criminal Chamber on 18 October. A lawyer appeared to defend me, so I must still have friends, and great play was made of my mental weaknesses. I hated that. A fine of one-hundred francs was the verdict of the court. The news triggered yet another round of Villain-baiting by the left-wing press which took every opportunity to lambast the fact that that I had escaped murdering Jean Jaures, but was found guilty of the petty crime of trafficking in silver. Their reports dripped sarcasm when they asked if that represented justice? Of course it did.
Then I thought the planets had realigned. I met a girl who accepted me as I was. Charlotte was a modest young woman who had lost her husband in the war. She didn’t know where he died or precisely when, but there were hundreds of thousands who experienced such sadness and had to get on with life. Charlotte had long red hair which shone in the bright June sunlight, and her button-nose twitched in the pollen-filled fields of Villeneuve in the Hautes-Alpes in Provence. The small hilltop town clustered around the church tower in no particular order, its red-tiled roofs bearing the stains of centuries, its close-knit streets protecting the six hundred inhabitants from the heat of scorching summer days. Charlotte held fast to an old-fashioned attitude to family duty and responsibility and we shared the same values and traditions. Her father had fought in the war of 1870 and reviled the communards and socialists whom he blamed for our defeat.
I asked his permission to marry Charlotte and dutifully returned to Auxerre to seek my father’s blessing. September rains arrived to wash the autumnal dust and clean the streets and I almost skipped up the courthouse steps to his office, certain that his pleasure at my proposal would overcome his previous disappointments.
He slapped my face so hard I was sent reeling from the room. No word spoken, not even in anger, just a colossal backhanded slap across my right cheek. The venom of his attack surpassed any previous beating but conjured a memory so deep and so painful that it had lain dormant inside a locked chamber of the mind. Until that moment. I lay stunned in the corridor, immobile. Head bowed. The pain and sound released a final image from my earliest days. Slap. Then slap again. A third slap, then sobbing. Deep, heartbroken sobbing.
They had been arguing loudly, father and mother, about someone whose name I did not recognize, and he threatened to send her back to the asylum. Back? Had she been there before? I closed off every other sight or sound to concentrate on the image he had released. She squared up to him in the parlor, hair tied behind her head, luminous in the sunlight of my recall. She called him “unworthy” and slapped him. He slapped her so viciously that she gave way at the knees and staggered to retain her dignity. Did she know I was there, behind her? He slapped her again and as she fell, he saw me silhouetted in the door-frame.
“Go to your bedroom, boy. Now!”
Hesitation betrayed my loyalty. He slammed shut the door so hard that the corridor shook at his violence. I looked at the hall lamp swinging in protest and hid lest it consumed me with its knowledge of what had come to pass.
Then they came to the house, doctor, priest and lawyer. I crawled slowly from my room and put my ear to the door. Father explained that mother—he called her Marie-Adele, refusing to dignify their years together by using her married name—had been committed to an asylum in Chalons-sur-Marne at his request by a Doctor Bonnet for hysteria and a complete loss of reason. AT MY FATHER’S REQUEST. He requested it? It was true. She had been initially committed but released shortly afterwards. So she had been condemned twice. I never knew that. I heard my father tell them that she had slapped him in front of the younger boy and accused him of immoral deeds. She was, he claimed, completely out of control and unreasonable and had become a danger to the children. My mother was never a danger to me. She loved me. I know that.
I heard the priest confirm that Marie-Adele—he spoke in honeyed tones, drunk with pathos and insincerity—had become paranoid with wild ideas of persecution. The doctor’s opinion was that she was displaying chronic delirium.
“I’ve heard,” whispered the fish-wife confessor, “that she claims someone accused her of poisoning the children.” He was the font of local gossip. “And it’s hereditary, you know.” I could not see my father’s reaction but the parish dipped its fingers in the chapel’s font of all knowledge, blessed itself in purifying holy water and prayed for her soul.
Authorized by representatives of the courts, religion, and medical practice, the doctor signed papers in our parlor which justified my mother’s commitment to the mental hospital. What I had not realized till that moment was my father’s determination to condemn her to a life of medicated imprisonment. She would never slap him again. He made sure of that. She was a mere woman. I picked myself from the floor and strode into his office. What possessed me, I do not know, but I heard myself begin, “It’s a long time since I’ve seen you slap a person so hard.” He stared back at me, countering my defiance.
“What do you want?”
“I have some good news, father.”
“You do! How marvelous. Is this you the coward-murderer, or you the convicted trafficker in stolen silver? My son the assassin or my son the convict? You are no son of mine. You are HER son. You should have been locked up in an asylum, too.” His unjust rant dragged up every conceivable childhood misdemeanor he imagined I had committed. I watched his blood pressure rise with considerable interest. If he died now I would have the pleasure of witnessing it. He came to a stop or was it a pause? No matter.
“Calm down, Father. I’ve some good news. Honestly. I intend to get married to a wonderful girl and I’m here to seek your blessing.”
He stared at me and covered his moustache and mouth with his left hand. I thought he was about to show tender emotion, too late for love; be pleased for me, realize I had turned a corner. But behind the mask which crossed his lower face, his sandstone eyes hardened to flashing marble. He banged his fist into the desk as if striking a gavel to bring the court to order.
“You will not be married. You will not. Don’t you understand that you are enfeebled, vulnerable, mentally ill, possibly a danger to children. Like your mother? You cannot do this to an innocent woman.”
“You did.” My aggression took him by surprise.
“She was mad, not me,” he protested.
“No. You are mad. You know it. Grandmere was mad. Your mother was mad, and so are you.”
Despite my best intentions, I burst into tears, shamefaced and desolate.
He rose from his desk, shaking. Anger moved to apoplexy as he thumped his fist again on the hard wood, self-control disappearing in the red mist of furious contempt. He grabbed me by the lapels and thrust his face into mine.
“You have disgraced your family and yourself beyond forgiveness. You will not extend the family line into further disgrace. You will not.” He dropped his hands and threw me backwards against the wall, knocking over a hat stand in the process. How I hated this man.
“There is no blessing. There will be no marriage. Do you understand?”
He was screaming at me, words tripping over themselves in a rush of garbled incoherence. He stood there, head bowed, trying to find his next sentence. He looked me up and down and nodded slowly. Had he finally come to terms with the fact that I was an independent man who deserved better? Finally come to his senses?
“I have a pistol in this desk.” He pulled open the top drawer on the right-hand side and rummaged around before producing his old Modele 1873 with its checker-patterned grip. I didn’t know he had kept his army service revolver. “And I invite you to use it.”
He slammed it onto the desktop, turned his back, and picked up a handful of assorted files as if to indicate that the meeting had come to an end. I looked at the gun. It was a solution. I picked it up, hands shaking, and wondered how proud he might be if I shot him in the head? Like Jaures?
“You are the coward, Father. You. You beat my mother and condemned her to the asylum. You are the coward.”
He turned to answer just as I pulled the trigger—and shot myself. Trembling hands fumbled around the trigger mechanism, but the gun exploded and pain shot into my abdomen. He looked at me contemptuously. I was on my knees, the gun on the floor in front. He walked across, picked up the revolver, and handed it back. “I believe you have barely scratched yourself. Try again.”
I was bleeding. I had been shot…and all he could say was, “Try again.”
“You bastard. You callous bastard,” were to be my parting words as I turned the gun into myself and fired again. I’m not a bad shot but the angle and circumstances mitigated against accuracy. The second bullet also hit my abdomen, but well clear of any vital organ. As I slumped prone on the floor, his office door flew open and staff rushed in, thinking, no doubt that he had been the victim of an attack.
“Monsieur Villain…”
My fucking father pointed in my direction with a disregard which spoke volumes about his attitude toward me…and I woke up in that hospital.
So what would be your opinion about luck, my friend? How much luck did I have with a father like him? Eh?
42
Picking At Sores
Moutie slid into a seat in the back parlor of the Café Gabrielle in Montmartre, picked up a menu, and chose a croque monsieur. His loose association with Mathieu brought him increased respect in his twilight zone because it was neither secret nor a threat. The shadow-world of the impoverished underclass knew that Moutie had led Raoul Villain by the nose into a conviction for illegal trafficking in silver coins because he told them. Served the bastard right. There was no love for Villain inside the criminal fraternity. War had cost them dearly. If Raoul Villain thought that he was being watched, it was not paranoia. He had more enemies than he knew. Moutie saw to that and reported it to Mathieu who slipped into the chair beside him. He was running late and looked tired.
“Ah, Captain Bertrand, my friend, the pursuit of justice is starting to wear you down. I’ve ordered a croque monsieur. What would you like to eat?”
Mathieu waved away the offer. For a start, he wasn’t sure who’d be paying for it.
“He’s thinking about moving on again, our man Villain. Paris is far from safe. Would be so easy to stick a knife in his ribcage in an alleyway. No one would see it, I promise you.”
“No, Moutie. Let justice take its own meandering course. If he’s living in hell in his Paris hovel the prolonged pain is well deserved. Let him die by a hundred thousand disappointments. Let it rend his soul into shards of fear.”
He called for a coffee and resisted the temptation to eat, though the smell of fresh baking was instantly attractive. Mathieu’s resolve was further tested when Moutie’s beautifully crafted dish was placed on the table. The soft sourdough, gruyère, smoked ham, and creamy mustard mayo tempted his taste buds.
“Are you sure you don’t want to eat, Captain?” the waiter enquired hopefully. Business was slow.
“Thank you, but not at the present.”
A mouthful of melted cheese and ham was no obstacle to continued conversation. Moutie’s table manners had never been particularly refined. In a family of nine siblings, he or she who hesitated at the table went hungry. It was the primeval law of survival in every ghetto.
“Are you saying we should let Villain be? Stop torturing him?”
“Well, I don’t ever recall the word torture, but now that the foreign hordes are preparing to leave France to return—”
