HS04 - Unholy Awakening (24 page)

‘This leads to scuffles, does it not?’

Neither man would answer.

Lavedrine began to laugh. ‘I have served for almost twenty years in the army,’ he said. ‘I have no unit, no brigade, no regiment. I go wherever I am required, whenever some crime has been committed which involves the army. I am a colonel as a result of my achievements. Is there
anything
you can tell me that I have not heard already?’

‘This person is a Prussian magistrate,’ de Blaine protested.

‘Does that prevent you from speaking? Are you afraid of him?’

Lavedrine’s temper was up, or so he wanted it to appear.

I was tempted to remind them all that three Prussians had also died, and that the threat was as great on one side as it was on the other. I waited, wondering whether either man had read the newspapers, whether they would mention the murders in Lotingen.

‘There are rival groups, monsieur,’ de Blaine admitted at last. ‘There are some times fights within the different groups belonging to the same regiment.’

‘Fights to the death?’

I happened to be staring at their feet. I saw their toes curl inwards with the tension. Lavedrine must have seen it too. He was standing over them, almost a head taller than the shorter of the two. Was that the reason for the expression of triumph which I saw in his eyes? They were trapped, caught.

De Blaine nodded.

‘There have been…accidents. When fights break out between groups, or within a regiment, that is what they call them. Accidents, colonel. You have to defend yourself with any means at hand to obtain what you want…’

‘And what is that, de Blaine? What do you wish to obtain, for example?’

He strode close to the man, peering into his face.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘What are you after?’

‘A position, monsieur. Power over others. A commission, or a transfer to a…well, to a better regiment. The possibility of fighting in the Emperor’s guards, rapid promotion and the spoils of war. No man advances, but he buys his way ahead. With cash, or with favours.’

In the silence, I could hear the breathing of de Blaine, the crackling of the spent wood beneath the brass tubs full of water. When the voice of Lavedrine sounded, it caused them both to jump, and I was not immune to it. ‘Very good, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘You can get dressed now. And if it’s any compensation to you, I’d say that your defeat today was a question of bad luck, rather than the superiority of your opponents. You’ll have your revenge, I imagine, one way or the other.’

Lavedrine strode out of the room.

I followed him onto the playing court, which was empty now and silent.

‘What do you call that technique of questioning,’ I called after him, ‘making them stand naked and in a position of physical discomfort until they tell you what you want to hear? As you did to me last night.’

He turned on me, and greeted me with a challenging smile.

‘That was different, Stiffeniis. Last night was an accident, but this was intimidation. Then again, do you know what the greatest torture was for those two, Stiffeniis?’

I shook my head.

‘Your presence,’ he said. ‘Standing naked before a Prussian. That’s what brought them down. Now, let’s see if you can work another miracle.’

The hospital was a long low building in the most remote corner of the fortress.

It was more like an abandoned shed than a hospice. There was dirt, dust, and much unnecessary clutter, as if the place were rarely used. We were obliged to pass through an empty dormitory – there must have been sixty beds, each one with a bed-mat rolled on top of it, as if they expected a rush of wounded men at any moment – before we reached the room where Henri Lecompte had been confined.

Lavedrine stopped me outside the door. ‘I want him to see you, Stiffeniis. I want him to feel the full weight of your presence. But I do not want him to be distracted by your voice. Unless you notice anything that I do not…’

We entered without knocking.

‘Good morning, Lecompte,’ Lavedrine said brightly. ‘How are you today? Found your voice, have you?’

I leant my back against the wall near the door, watching the man on the bed.

He wore a sort of bonnet made of bandages. The dressings were stained with blood, bulging out on the left-hand side where a poultice had been pressed against the wound in his neck and throat. His left eye was red, black and bloodshot. His right eye was bright blue. The tiny room stank of flesh and tar.

Somewhere, a shriek broke the silence.

It sounded very close. A moment later, there was a second cry, then a third, as if several teeth were being pulled at once. At every cry, the eyes of Henri Lecompte darted towards the door.

When Lavedrine began speaking, telling Lecompte who I was, he hardly spoke above a whisper. His look was hard, cold, menacing. I observed the effect that it had on the young man. His face was a whirling kaleidoscope of expressions. Some were due, no doubt, to pain and the discomfort of the unseen wound beneath the linen dressing; others reflected what was passing through his mind. As the interview progressed, he often stared in my direction, as if to avoid the onslaught of Lavedrine’s questioning. It was clear to me that he was trying to gauge where the real danger lay. Was the greatest threat this French man who looked any thing but a colonel, or the silent Prussian who Lavedrine told him was a magistrate? He may have thought that I was Lavedrine’s mastiff, a bulldog on a short leash, waiting for the order to attack. Or was some greater threat hanging over him, some thing more frightening than the danger that Lavedrine and I represented, something that Henri Lecompte had refused to confess up until that moment?

His eyes darted around the room like globules of quicksilver on a porcelain dish.

If Lavedrine’s intention was to frighten the man, he had succeeded. He had begun the interrogation in classical fashion, and might have been following the guidelines of a manual written by Robespierre for the Committee of Public Safety: if the witness retreats into silence, prise him out of it, frighten the life out of him. Terrorise him. If you lack the means to make him talk, persuade the witness that you can hurt him more than whoever has convinced him to play the part of a mute in the conspiracy.

‘I told you this morning,’ Lavedrine snapped. ‘The body of Grangé has been found. You are the only one who is still alive. Can you believe that they will leave you in peace, Lecompte? Are you sure they won’t come back tonight to finish off the job?’

Lavedrine paused, tenderly massaging his throat with his hand.

It might have seemed as though the gesture was unthinking – provoked by an itch, per haps, not meant to scare – yet Lavedrine’s manner had been purposeful, contrived and callous from the moment that we entered the room. Lecompte was alone in a cell which would have seemed cramped to a Franciscan friar. Now he had to share the space with us, and Lavedrine crowded in on him.

‘Sit up,’ he commanded. ‘This Prussian magistrate wants to hear the story from your own lips. Every word of it. And damn your throat!’

Lecompte raised himself up on his elbow, his head on one side as if his neck was painful, not saying a word, as if it were a soldier’s duty to a higher rank. He must suffer the unwanted visit of a colonel, who would, eventually, talk himself to a halt, give up, go away and leave the sufferer in peace.

I slid onto a wooden chair beside the door.

There was a tiny window high up in the wall above my head, and it was open. A draught of cold air struck the top of my head, but it was not enough to dissipate the cloying smell of coal-tar in that room. The lieutenant’s wounds had certainly been dressed with it, but that was not the reason for my sense of suffocation. The smell reminded me of the death-room of my child. Lotte had insisted on swabbing out the nursery with coal-tar water every day for a week. I avoided going in there any more. The smell persisted in the house, as did the memories that I associated with it. I looked around me, noting the graffiti on the wall above the bed – scribbles, drawings, words both rude and desperate – made by injured men to pass the time, and leave a bit of themselves behind.

My eyes met those of Henri Lecompte.

The left side of his face was a map of jaundiced skin and dark bruises. Burst veins had drawn a delta of red lines across his cheek. And yet, the form of his face was square-cut, a well-designed chin, his nose long and straight, black hair cut short, bristling on his head. Had he celebrated his thirtieth birthday? His hands were those of an old man. They were dark with fuzzy hair, the nails cut short or broken off, with calluses on both thumbs, which he had chewed at. My impression was of a big, strong country lad who had been carried off from a prosperous French farm and deposited in the military hospice in Marienburg. No doubt he had found opportunities in the
Grande Armée
which had not existed before the guillotine carried off half the nobles of the officer corps. He was a grasping child of the Revolution. Boys like him had risen to the top. They had defeated hardened Prussian warriors who had been trained to fight from childhood. Our men wore their hair in long plaits in the fashion favoured by Frederick the Great. This man, like many of his fellows, had no doubt hacked off those Prussian plaits as gruesome souvenirs in the calm after the battles of Valmy and Jena.

The face of a boy, but the bloodstained hands of a man.

‘We have spoken with other officers,’ Lavedrine went on. ‘They told us of the cliques which form in the officers’ mess. They spoke of duelling, jealousy, death. Can this behaviour go unpunished? French officers slaughtered like beasts by their fellows! General Layard is determined to stop whatever is going on between the men under his command.’

Lavedrine sat down on the bed next to Lecompte. ‘Your first concern should be for yourself,’ he said. ‘You may be able to smash the enemy on the battlefield, but what can you do when the enemy wears the very same uniform? You can’t always be awake. You cannot always be on your guard. They’ll do to you what they have done to Grangé and Gaspard. They’ll attack you when you least suspect it.’

Silence hung heavily in the room.

I watched, Lavedrine waited, but no-one said a thing.

My eyes darted instinctively towards the window and the door. It was as if a shrill wind had begun to blow. The sound was coming from the man’s throat, I realised. His vocal cords had been damaged. The noise seemed to bubble and hiss before it formed it self into words.

‘What did they say?’ he wheezed.

‘What did
who
say?’ Lavedrine fired back.

‘The other officers,’ the wind was forced to whisper.

Lavedrine’s head jerked up, and he looked hard at Lecompte, his face a pantomime of irritation. ‘I am not here to report to you, lieutenant,’ he sneered. ‘I’m waiting for you to answer
my
questions.’

Lecompte looked at me for an instant, then his eyes lashed back to Lavedrine. Eventually, they settled on the wall. There were drawings and scrapings on the plaster, as I mentioned before. Until that moment, I had not paid much attention to them. They had been done with a bit of charcoal, and they looked like the sort of thing that a condemned man might scrawl the night before his execution.

I shifted my position to have a better view of them.

I was reminded of a chapel I had seen in a church outside Milan. There the walls were covered with
ex-voti
, which are little paintings illustrating accidents. I remembered a picture of a man crushed beneath a heavy wagon, another of a child being savaged by a wolf. Most of all, I was impressed by the miniature silver limbs which were hanging all over the chapel. Arms, legs, ears, noses. Every bit of the human anatomy. A friar had told me that the faithful left them there when they were cured of some malady through the inter cession of the Virgin Mary. In the military hospital of Marienburg, the patients had left their amputated arms and legs behind them in the form of drawings.

Lecompte was staring at one image in particular.

I saw that it bore a legend:
Lec. et la bête
. A man was lying on the ground, blood spurting from his throat like a spouting whale. Over him a swirling, dark cloud floated, and what seemed to be an arm and a ripping talon emerged from it. It was not precise in any respect, and might well have been a fantasy, except for two large eyes which stared out from this malignant cloud.

Had he tried to draw his impression of the attack?

Meanwhile, Lavedrine continued with his assault.

‘Have you nothing more to say?’ he demanded.

Lecompte shook his head from side to side; he appeared to shudder.

‘You have only recently returned to the fortress,’ Lavedrine went on. ‘You were at some sort of training camp in the country. Is that correct?’

Lecompte nodded, but he added nothing to the bare information.

‘You, Gaspard, Grangé, and who else?’

‘There were twelve of us. Not just the Eleventh. From the Fourth, as well…’

‘How long have you known Gaspard and Grangé?’

Lecompte cleared his throat, then he spat blood into a rag. ‘We are Bretons. From Quimper. I…Philippe and I were at the same school. He knew Sebastien.’

‘And what of the men in the Fourth?’

‘Gone, monsieur. We are cavalry. They are grenadiers. We did not mix.’

His words were mangled, not always easy to comprehend. Blood and mucus filled his mouth as he spoke, causing him to spit frequently into the rag in his hand. Lavedrine made a gesture, as if to suggest that he should speak more slowly.

‘
Merci
,’ Lecompte murmured.

‘Do you belong to a Masonic lodge, Lecompte?’

The man managed a smile, then wiped away spittle with his rag. ‘No, monsieur.’

‘To a group, then?’

‘My friends…’ Lecompte said slowly. ‘You are an officer, monsieur, you know these things.’ He clutched his hand to his throat, though it was not pain which inspired the move. The sound which issued from his mouth was stronger when he pressed. ‘When the recruiters come to a town, they prefer a group of friends, a school class, brothers. One man joins, another follows. Some are forced…’ He coughed and spat again. ‘Anything can happen on campaign. For good, or for bad. When a Breton bites the bullet, he bites it with his friends. We look out for each other…’

His voice broke, and he brought up blood again.

Lavedrine turned to me. ‘Have you ever been in the army, Stiffeniis?’

I shook my head.

‘Living through a battle depends on many things,’ he said. ‘Apart from your sabre. It depends on who the commander is, the name and strength of the regiment, who gets the best tent, the thickest blanket. If you sleep well, you’re ready for the battle. If you don’t, you may die. Am I right, Lecompte?’ He waited for the man to nod, then he went on: ‘If you know one of the cooks, you’ll eat more and better. Life is made of these little things on campaign. The more of those that you have, the better life is. Then again, if you are an officer, there’s your career to think of.’

Lavedrine was speaking from experience, and I saw Lecompte nod his head occasionally as he listened.

‘Fighting’s not the only thing,’ he went on. ‘You could die tomorrow. You want the best of everything. If towns are being sacked, you want to be the first man entering the richest town, not bringing up the rear in some forgotten village out in the middle of nowhere. If you’ve got money, you can buy a place near to the general if you want to be noticed and be promoted to his staff. If the group that you belong to has power, you have power, too.’

The same tale might have been heard from the mouth of any Prussian officer. Any officer in any army in the whole of Europe. Lavedrine knew it from experience, and so did General Layard. ‘Tell me about the training, Henri.’

Lecompte looked at Lavedrine uncertainly. His eyes were the bluish-grey of unpolished gunmetal.

‘We were there together,’ he murmured.

‘And you were sent away together,’ Lavedrine said quickly.

Lecompte looked away again.

‘You were sent back early to Marienburg. In a word, you three were cashiered. What happened out in the country?’

Lecompte shook his head, but it did not prevent him from speaking. ‘We were lodging in a big house. General Layard had chosen the place…’ His eyes turned in my direction.

‘Go on,’ Lavedrine encouraged him. ‘Procurator Stiffeniis was in the Realm of Universal Intellect not half an hour ago. General Layard was present.’

Lecompte studied my face before he answered. ‘We were sent there to learn new methods, monsieur. Methods which have come from Spain. There was a colonel there to teach us. But then…Well, there were Prussians living in the house, monsieur. Women. And Grangé…’

‘What about him?’

‘He was like a cat at night. He was onto something…’

His eyelids flickered nervously, as if he regretted having said so much.

‘Sebastien Grangé and a woman from the house?’

Lecompte was silent. Then, he seemed to come to some decision. ‘We wanted to know who she was, but he just laughed. Cover for me, he said, there might be something in it for us all.’

Lecompte was showing signs of growing discomfort, growling deep in his throat, turning his head from side to side. Lavedrine jabbed his forefinger into the man’s ribs.

‘Something?’ he asked. ‘Was he talking of the woman? Of money? What?’