Cold Winter in Bordeaux (9 page)

‘The usual excuses,’ Moncerre said. ‘Truth is, they’re bloody lazy.’

‘And?’ Lannes said.

‘Well, it’s interesting even if we have had to wait for it. There were no fingerprints on the champagne bottle or the glasses, none in the apartment except for those of the dead woman and the little maid who is hardly a suspect. And others on the piano which are probably those of some of her pupils. And, most importantly perhaps, she hadn’t had sex. Doesn’t sound like a crime of passion to me.’

He smiled as he said this, and Lannes thought that the smile might be directed, mockingly, at Moncerre, though perhaps even the bull-terrier had already given up his hope that this was what he had called an old-fashioned pre-war crime, without complications, and one which they might quite easily solve.

‘So we’re getting nowhere,’ Moncerre said. ‘I’d be as well to go home if my wife wasn’t there.’

‘Not quite nowhere,’ René said. ‘Eliminating possibilities is progress. That’s what you’ve always told us, chief, isn’t it?’

‘Bloody negative progress,’ Moncerre said, ‘when you find you’re arrived in a dead-end street.’

They had a second bottle of St-Emilion with the cheese which was a Cantal in perfect condition – the black market again, of course. The coffee was undrinkable. Even Fernand’s coffee was undrinkable now.

Lannes said, ‘I’d like you to talk again with the mothers of her piano pupils. Do it together this time. Be tactful, though I don’t mind, Moncerre, if you glower a bit and look suspicious.’

The brasserie was emptying. Lannes lit a cigarette and, having made sure that Labiche had already gone from the table by the door into the kitchen, went through there to hear what young Jacques had to say. The boy took off his apron and suggested they step outside into the narrow alley where they kept the rubbish bins.

‘It’s Karim,’ he said, ‘you know, the young Arab you had the old man get out of town. He’s back, said he couldn’t stand life on the farm he was sent to, for safety, wasn’t it? Maybe they didn’t want to keep him any longer. I don’t know. And I don’t know that I would believe anything he said. Anyway he’s back and came to see me.’

Even in the dim afternoon light in the alley, Lannes could see that the boy was embarrassed. He remembered how Fernand had told him that Karim had made a pass at Jacques and Jacques had smacked him in the kisser.

‘He wants to see you,’ Jacques said. ‘Insisted it was important. Urgent too. He was in a bit of a state, I thought, said he didn’t dare to come to you at headquarters. Well, that doesn’t surprise me, him being what he is, so I said I’d pass it on next time you came in which I didn’t expect to be long.’

‘Did you arrange to meet again?’

‘Well, yes we did, but only because I thought that he might really have something important to tell you. Otherwise … not that he’s such a bad chap, really, only … you understand, don’t you?’

‘I understand. All right then, if you can get in touch with him today, tell him to come to the café near the station where we talked before. Tomorrow afternoon, four o’clock. Can you manage that? If you like, I’ll tell him not to trouble you again.’

‘It’s all right,’ Jacques said. ‘He’s not such a bad chap, really, but … ’

XIII

Michel lay back in bed, sweating a little and panting. He shouldn’t have, but he couldn’t not, he thought. Years ago his grandfather, embarrassed, had warned him off. ‘It’s not that it leads to madness, that’s an old wives’ tale,’ he had said, ‘or rather the theory of doctors who are probably ignoramuses. But it’s degrading. It’s making an object of anyone whose image you are imagining, and this is wrong. Moreover it’s not only a sign of weak will to indulge in the practice, it weakens your will further every time you give in to the temptation. So it’s a bad habit.’

He wiped himself with the hand towel he had kept between his legs. It was one he had brought from the gym, and he would take it back there and soak it in a basin. Perhaps his grandfather was right and it was shameful. But he couldn’t not, and he couldn’t take Clothilde to his bed, and when he had yielded to Philippe’s urging and accompanied him to the brothel in that street behind the railway station, it had been disgusting. Not at first, admittedly. It had been all right when the woman sat beside him on the bed and stroked his cheek and said he was a lovely boy and told him to be easy and even when she began to unbutton his flies, but then it was all wrong, not just the scent she wore, though that reeked of he didn’t know what but something cheap, pervasive and nasty. So what was it? She was like an animal – that was it. No, not an animal, a machine. Anyway it was too much and all wrong. He had stammered that he couldn’t, which made him feel a child and ashamed, and he had fled. She didn’t even laugh. Somehow that made it worse, as if he didn’t matter at all.

When Philippe asked him how it had gone, he had lied. Naturally he had lied and he didn’t like lying.

‘Mine was quite something,’ Philippe had said. ‘I don’t usually like niggers, but she was hot stuff, believe me. I’ve arranged to have her again next week. What about you?’

He had made some excuse, and Philippe didn’t ask him again. So he wondered if he had been told how it had gone, or hadn’t gone, and whether he despised him. All he had actually ever said was, ‘Your Clothilde won’t thank you for keeping yourself pure. That’s what girls pretend they want, but really they like a chap who knows what’s what, and that takes experience. They don’t ask how he came by it.’

He was a fool, really, Philippe, and jealous too, because he knew that Michel had always found it easy to get girls to kiss him, and he had seen Clothilde fall for him in no time at all.

He turned over in bed, pressing his cheek into the pillow.

There were times he had had enough of Philippe, more than enough, to tell the truth, because though he was rich and wellborn, there was something vulgar about him. ‘A bit hairy at the heels’ was a dismissive expression of his grandfather’s, and though he didn’t exactly know what it meant, he was happy to apply it to Philippe. It just seemed right.

Yes, he was intolerable really. The other day, for instance, when he had been going on about Count Pierre, and told him, ‘You should be careful. Anyone can see that he fancies you. He’s a ridiculous old aunt, everyone knows that.’

‘So why do you come to his gym then?’ he’d replied. ‘Anyway you’re being absurd. He’s a veteran of the Legion and won the Croix de Guerre in Morocco. They don’t give that medal to aunts, you know.’

And then there was politics. They’d argued about that too, and the war.

‘It’s nothing to do with us now,’ Philippe said. ‘We just have to live through it, prepare for a career after it, and meanwhile enjoy ourselves as best we can. Anything else is futile. As for your Marshal, he’s a senile old goat, and I don’t mind who hears me say so.’

For a moment he had had no reply. It was true that Sigi had told him the Marshal was only good to serve as a flag, and that something more was needed. Still it was no way to speak of the old man, the Hero of Verdun, especially if you were only a rich lout like Philippe.

‘So do you want the Communists to win?’ he had said. ‘Because that’s the alternative.’

‘They won’t,’ Philippe replied. ‘The Americans will win the war, believe me, my friend.’

‘The Americans! You have to fight to win a war and they’re doing precious little fighting, as far as I can see. Anyway America’s run by Jews and all they are interested in are their profits and their investments. They’re paying the Reds to fight Germany, and if the Reds win, all the Americans will do is call in their debts. There are three powers in the world: Communism, the Money Power, and Germany. The first two are hateful and that’s why France must be Germany’s ally, taking our part in building a New Europe.’

Philippe had laughed, but that’s what Sigi had said, and Sigi knew about these things.

Yes, he would like to drop Philippe, only Sigi had said, ‘Keep close to him. I know he’s an idiot, but he’s a useful idiot, or rather his father is. I’ve got my eye on him. So make Philippe your best friend, never mind if he talks a load of cock and irritates you.’

He would obey, of course he would obey. Whatever Sigi said, whatever. Meanwhile he couldn’t sleep. He turned over again and banged his face on the pillow. Clothilde, she was so sweet, just the thought of her, the picture of her turning towards him and smiling with her lips parted and dying to be kissed. Yes, I really am in love, he thought, we’re really in love. I so want her. Oh God in whom I don’t believe. Oh God …

He leapt out of bed, hands and feet on the cold tiles, and did twenty press-ups.

XIV

At last it had stopped raining. There was just a touch of pale blue in the western sky, even if the sun itself was still hidden by heavy cloud. Lannes’ headache had gone too, and though the sharp breeze from the river nipped his cheeks and his hip ached, he felt better than he had for days. All the same he wished he had suggested another meeting place. He wouldn’t be able to enter Chez Gustave without remembering the champagne they had drunk there on the morning Alain and his friends had left.

There was no sign of Karim, and indeed the café was deserted except for a couple of railway porters in the uniform of the SNCF. Gustave greeted him with a handshake, and without waiting for him to order picked up the bottle of Armagnac and poured them each a drink.

‘How are things?’ Lannes said.

‘Not good, of course they’re not good – what’s good nowadays? – but they could be worse. Young Paul’s engaged to be married, you’ll be glad to hear.’

Paul was his son whom Lannes had arrested for an inept burglary, given a dressing-down, and told to go off and make sense of his life.

‘Yes, you really straightened him out,’ Gustave said. ‘I’m grateful and so’s the missus. We could see he was going to the bad, mixing with scum, and wouldn’t listen to a word we said. Now he’s again like the boy he was when he was little.’

‘He would probably have come right in his own time,’ Lannes said. ‘I did no more than give him a shove in the right direction. I hope she’s a nice girl.’

‘A nice girl and good as gold. They’re a real pair of lovebirds. Our only worry now is this talk of making the labour service in Germany compulsory.’

‘That’s bad,’ Lannes said. ‘But isn’t he registered as war-wounded? He got a bullet in his knee, didn’t he?’

‘I’m afraid they’ll pass him as fit.’

‘Tell him to walk with a limp. More to the point, if there’s any real danger of him being conscripted for service in Germany, have him come to see me and I’ll find him a job which will ensure he’s exempt. Meanwhile, pass on my good wishes and congratulations on the engagement. Ah, here’s the boy I arranged to meet. May we use your back room again?’

He picked up his glass, and jerked his head, indicating that Karim was to follow him. Even so, the boy hesitated in the doorway.

‘Come in and sit down. What the hell are you doing back in Bordeaux?’

Karim shook his head and sat down on the edge of the wooden chair. He picked at a scab on the back of his left hand. Despite the cold, he was wearing only a singlet, dirty-white, under his thin jacket, and cotton trousers. No wonder he was shivering.

‘You’d better have a drink to warm you.’

‘No, I’m all right. Anyway I don’t drink alcohol. That’s not for the reason you may suppose because though my father was an Arab and I’ve got an Arab name, I’m not a Muslim. I’m not anything actually.’

He pulled up his singlet and scratched his belly.

‘But that farm. I couldn’t stay there. Don’t think I didn’t thank you for arranging to get me out of Bordeaux once you explained the danger I was in here, because I did. But I couldn’t stay there. These peasants, they’re no better than animals, filthy animals.’

What would the farmer and his wife have thought in their turn of this half-Arab boy who prostituted himself to middle-aged men, some of them members of the Occupying Army?

‘Besides,’ Karim said, ‘I was worried about my mum. She’s an old sow, I know that, but she can’t do without me.’

She had certainly told Lannes that she couldn’t do without the money her son brought in, taking over her bed to let the Boches stick it up his arse, as she put it.

‘I try to keep her off the drink, or ration her at least. She’s killing herself, otherwise. That’s the other reason I don’t drink myself, I’ve seen what the stuff can do to you.’

He scratched his belly again. A pink spot flared on the café-aulait skin.

‘So. Young Jacques said you had something for me.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ His tongue flickered over his lower lip. ‘He’s all right, Jacques, I like him, could like him a lot, you know. Look, this is difficult. Maybe I will have something to drink. An orangeade, that OK?’

When Lannes returned with the bottle and glass and another Armagnac for himself, Karim had taken one of his cigarettes from the packet on the table, and was leaning back, smoking and frowning. The cigarette was stuck in the corner of his mouth, gangster style, and there was something pitiful, even ridiculous, in the assumption of toughness by this skinny boy whose soft skin and dark liquid eyes made him look vulnerable.

He doesn’t even shave yet, Lannes thought.

‘How old are you, Karim?’

‘Old enough.’

Certainly old enough to have assumed responsibility, in some fashion anyway, for that drunken wreck of a mother.

‘You know what I am,’ Karim said, ‘what I do, sort of. I’m not ashamed, I tell you that. The way things are, the way I am, I don’t reckon I got much choice. Leastways, that’s how I see it and it’s my business, no one else’s. Understand? So I’m not apologising for nothing. I’m not dirt, I want to make that clear. I don’t see myself as dirt and I’m not dirt. Got it?’

‘I understand.’

Lannes lit a cigarette, drew the smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled. Karim stubbed his out, reached towards the packet of Gauloises, hesitated, and looked Lannes in the eye for the first time.

‘That’s all right,’ Lannes said, ‘take one.’

He flicked his lighter to the boy who moved his face forward and looked at Lannes over the flame.