Fever (2 page)

Finally, Father Matthias had finished eating. He clasped his hands over his plate, his lips moving silently, his eyes closed. Then he opened them, pushed his chair back from the table a little and crossed his
right leg over his left, revealing two sinewy, hairy calves under his habit.

“I have to go to Switzerland, Inspector,” he said. “I have two sisters-in-law there, one in Basel, the other in Bern. And it's quite possible I may get into difficulties and have to turn to the police for assistance. If that should happen, would you be willing to help me?”

Studer slurped his coffee, silently cursing Madelin, who had fortified the hot drink all too generously with rum. Then he looked up and replied to Father Matthias, also in French.

“The Swiss police does not usually concern itself with family matters. If I'm to help you, I have to know what it's about.”

“It's a long story,” said the priest, “and one I hardly dare tell. You'll all,” he made a circular gesture with his hand, “laugh at me.”

Godofrey protested politely in his parrot's voice. He called the priest
mon père
, which for some unknown reason struck Studer as extremely funny. His laugh was concealed by his moustache, and he was still spluttering with laughter as he raised his cup, which had been refilled, to his lips. In order not to give offence he pretended he was blowing on his hot coffee to cool it.

“Have you ever had anything to do with clairvoyance?” Father Matthias asked.

“Cartomancy? Crystal balls? Telepathy? Cryptomnesia?” Godofrey reeled off his litany of questions.

“I see you're well informed. Have you had much to do with that kind of thing?”

Godofrey nodded, Madelin shook his head and Studer muttered a curt, “Con tricks.”

Father Matthias ignored him. He was gazing into the distance, though in the little bistro the distance was the bar with its shining coffee percolator. The landlord
was sitting behind it, hands clasped over his belly and snoring. The four at the table were his only customers. The bistro didn't start to liven up until around two in the morning, when the first carts with hothouse vegetables arrived.

“I would like to tell you,” the White Father said, “the story of a little prophet, a clairvoyant, if you prefer. It's because of that clairvoyant that I'm here, instead of visiting the little forts in the south of Morocco, reading mass for the lost sheep of the Foreign Legion.

“Do you know where Géryville is? Four hours beyond the back of beyond! In Algeria, to be precise, on a plateau 5,000 feet above sea level, as the inscription on a stone in the middle of the barracks square tells you. Ninety miles from the nearest railway station. The air is dry, which is why the Prior sent me there last September, since I've got a weak chest. Géryville's a small town with only a few French living there; most of the population is made up of Arabs and Jews. You don't get anywhere with the Arabs, they don't want to be converted. They do send their children to me – that is, they allow their little ones to come to me . . . There's a battalion of the Foreign Legion up there as well. The legionnaires came to see me sometimes. My predecessor had set up a library, so along they came – corporals, sergeants, now and then a private – and went off with books, or smoked my tobacco. Occasionally, one of my visitors felt the need to confess. Strange things go on in the souls of those men; there are moving conversions of which people who think of the Foreign Legion as the dregs of humanity have no conception.

“Well . . . One evening a corporal came to see me. He was shorter than me, with a face like a crippled child, he looked sad and old. He was called Collani, he said, paused and then started to speak in a feverish
rush. It wasn't a regular confession in the sense the Church understands it. More of a monologue, almost as if he were talking to himself. He spoke for quite a long time. There were lots of things he had to get off his chest which have nothing to do with my story. It was evening and the room was filled with a greenish half-light; it comes from the skies they get there in autumn, they often have strange colours . . .”

Studer was resting his cheek on his hand and was so engrossed in Father Matthias's story he didn't notice he had pushed up the skin round his left eye so that it was a slanting slit, like a Chinaman's.

The high plateau! . . . The wide-open spaces! . . . The green twilight! . . . The soldier making his confession!

It was so completely different from what you saw around you every day! The French Foreign Legion! The sergeant remembered he had once been going to enlist, when he was twenty, after an argument with his father. But he hadn't wanted to cause his mother distress, so he'd stayed in Switzerland and made a career for himself, even rising to the rank of chief inspector in the Bern city police, before that business with the bank had cost him his job. Then, too, he'd felt like dropping everything and . . . But he had a wife, a daughter, so he'd given up the idea, swallowed his pride and started at the bottom again, patiently working his way up. But deep inside there still slumbered a yearning for the wide-open spaces, the desert, the battles. And then along came a White Father and awakened it all again.

“So he spoke for quite some time, did Corporal Collani. In his pale green greatcoat he looked like a chameleon in need of a rest-cure. Then he was silent
for a while and I was just about to get up and send him back to barracks with a few words of comfort when he suddenly started to speak in a completely different voice, deep and hoarse, as if there were someone else speaking from inside him. And the voice sounded strangely familiar to me:

“‘Why's Mamadou taking the sheet off the bed and hiding it under his coat? Aha, he's going to sell it in the town, the swine. And it's me who's responsible for the linen. Now he's going downstairs, across the barracks square to the railings. Of course, he's too scared to go past the guards. And Bielle's waiting for him at the railings, takes the sheet from him. Where's Bielle off to? Aha! He's going to the Jew in the alley, sells the sheet for a
duro
—'”

“A
duro
,” Madelin explained, “is a silver five-franc coin.”

“Thank you,” said Father Matthias. He was silent for a while as he rummaged in his habit under the table. It must have had a deep pocket somewhere, for he brought out a magnifying glass, a rosary, a wallet woven out of strips of red leather and, finally, a snuff-box, from which he took a generous pinch. Then he blew his nose with a loud blast. The landlord behind the bar woke with a start, but the priest went on with his story:

“I said to him, ‘Collani! Wake up, Corporal, you're dreaming!' But he went prattling on: ‘I'll teach the pair of you to swipe Legion property. I'll show you tomorrow!' Then I grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him a good shaking, I was finding the whole thing pretty eerie. He woke up and gave me an astonished look. ‘Do you know what you were telling me?' I asked. ‘Of course,' Collani replied and repeated what he had said in his trance – that's what it's called, isn't it?”

“Certainly,” Godofrey hastened to assure him.

“– in his trance. After that, he left. When I came out of the house at eight the next morning – it was a very clear September morning, you could see the
chotts
, the great salt lakes, sparkling in the distance – I ran straight into Collani with the quartermaster and the captain. Captain Pouette told me Collani had reported that sheets had been going missing and claimed he knew both the thieves and the receiver. The thieves were already locked up, now it was the turn of the receiver. Collani looked like a water-diviner without his divining rod. Though he was completely conscious, there was a fixed look in his eyes and he was pressing forward.

“I won't bore you any more. At the bottom of an orange box in a tiny shop run by a Jew who sold onions, figs and dates, we found four sheets. Mamadou was a negro in the fourth company, he admitted the theft. At first Bielle, a red-haired Belgian, denied it, but then he too confessed.

“From then on Collani was always called the clairvoyant corporal and the battalion doctor, Anatole Cantacuzène, organized seances with him: table-turning, automatic writing, in short they tried all the accursed nonsense on him that the spiritualists practise here without the least idea of the danger they're putting themselves in.

“You will be asking yourselves, gentlemen, why I have told you this long story. It was just to explain why I could not ignore Collani when, one week later, he told me things that affected
me
personally.

“It was 28 September, a Tuesday.”

Father Matthias paused for a moment, put his hand over his eyes and continued:

“Collani came to me. I spoke to him, as is my duty
as a priest, imploring him to give up these satanic experiments. He remained defiant. And suddenly his eyes glazed over again, his upper lids came halfway down over his eyeballs and his lips were twisted in a disagreeable, mocking smile, revealing his broad, yellow teeth. Then he said, in a voice I knew so well, ‘Hello, Matthias, how's things?' It was the voice of my brother – my brother who died fifteen years ago!”

The three men round the table in the little bistro by Les Halles listened in silence. Commissaire Madelin gave a faint smile, as you might after a weak joke. Studer's moustache quivered, though it wasn't obvious why. Only Godofrey attempted to relieve the feeling of embarrassment at the improbable story.

“Funny how life keeps forcing you to deal with ghosts . . .” It could be a profound statement.

Very quietly Father Matthias said, “This strange and yet so familiar voice was coming to me from the lips of the clairvoyant corporal . . .”

Studer's moustache stopped quivering, he leant over the table. The stress on that last sentence. It sounded false, feigned, affected. He shot a glance at Madelin. There was the hint of a grimace on the Frenchman's bony face. So the commissaire had sensed the false note too. He raised his hand and placed it gently on the table. “Let him speak. Don't interrupt.” And Studer nodded. He had understood.

“‘Hello, Matthias, d'you remember me? Did you think I was dead? Alive and kicking, that's me.' That was the point at which I suddenly realized Collani was speaking German. ‘You'll have to hurry, Matthias, if you want to save the old ladies. Otherwise I'll come for them. In . . .' At that point the voice, which was not Collani's voice, became a whisper, so that I couldn't understand what came next. But then it was loud and
clear again: ‘Can you hear the hissing? That hissing noise means death. Fifteen years I've waited. First of all the one in Basel, then the one in Bern. One was clever, she saw through me, I'll save her till last. The other brought up my daughter badly, she must be punished for it.' There was a laugh, then the voice fell silent. This time Collani was in such a deep sleep, I had difficulty waking him.

“Finally his eyes opened fully and he looked at me, astonished. So I asked him, ‘Do you know what you have just told me, my son?' At first he shook his head, then he replied, ‘I saw a man I nursed in Fez fifteen years ago. He died, he had a nasty fever . . . in 1917, during the Great War. Then I saw two women. One had a wart by her left nostril . . . The man in Fez, what was his name now? What was his name?' Collani rubbed his forehead, he couldn't remember the name and I didn't prompt him. ‘The man in Fez gave me a letter. I was to post it – fifteen years later. I sent it. On the anniversary of his death, on 20 July. The letter's gone, yes, the letter's gone!' he suddenly shouted. ‘I don't want anything more to do with it. It's beyond bearing. I did!' he shouted even louder, as if he were responding to an accusation from someone invisible, ‘I did keep a copy. What am I to do with the copy?' Collani wrung his hands. I tried to calm him down by telling him to bring me the copy. ‘That will ease your conscience, my son. Go and bring it now, at once.' ‘Yes, Father,' the clairvoyant corporal said, got up and went out. I can still hear the screech of his hobnails on the stone outside my door . . .”

“And I never saw him again. He disappeared from Géryville. They assumed he had deserted. The battalion commander instituted an inquiry, which discovered that a stranger had come by car to Géryville
that evening and left that same night. Perhaps he took the clairvoyant corporal with him.”

Father Matthias fell silent. The only sound to be heard in the little room was the snoring of the landlord interspersed with the quiet tick-tock of the clock on the wall . . .

The White Father took his hands away from his face. His eyes were slightly reddened, but their colour still recalled the sea – though now there was a bank of mist over the water, hiding the sun. The old man who looked like the tailor from the fairy tale scrutinized his audience.

It was no easy task telling a ghost story to three seasoned members of criminal investigation departments. They let the silence drag on until finally one of them, Madelin, rapped the table with the flat of his hand. The landlord shot up.

“Four glasses,” the commissaire ordered. He filled them to the brim with rum and said, in an expressionless voice, “A little something will do you good, Father.” Father Matthias emptied his glass obediently. Studer took a long, slim leather cigar case out of his pocket and found to his dismay that he had only one Brissago left. He went through the ritual of lighting it, then handed his matches to Madelin, who had filled his pipe, with which he gave his Swiss colleague a sign, clearly inviting him to start the interrogation.