The Dave Bliss Quintet (26 page)

Daisy's mother breaks into inconsolable sobs as the bitter memories bite, but finally she brightens a little as the war reaches its end, and Daisy translates, “It was twenty-four August, 1944,
la Libé ration.
Zhe American Sixth Army came and zhe Nazis run like
poules mouil
lé es —
like wet chickens — and zhe mayor, zhe
chef de police
, and some other men, zhey find some guns and go to zhe château.”

The town's men returned stone-faced and with vomit-splashed shoes, she explains. The Germans had gone, but the horrors that confronted the men were too dreadful to retell. There were no survivors, and for weeks afterwards a small group of sad men spent their days digging in the grounds. And although nobody in the small town truthfully expected a happier outcome, everyone prayerfully retained a hope. Silence gave them strength. During the war no one spoke of the château — it was a malignant tumour in the heart of the community for which there was no cure, and by general unspoken consensus it was never mentioned.

Nothing changed with the war's end. When the advance party returned to the town hall, families clam-ouring for information were gently taken aside and told they should forget, that they would gain nothing by seeing the sights in the château. So they silently went home, carried on with their lives, and, by continuing to ignore the château, kept their hopes alive.

Listening to the horrifying story, Bliss realizes that the selective amnesia of the townsfolk is more than a simple reaction to indescribable visions of torture and terror. It is a shared and pervasive sense of remorse. In Daisy's moth-er's tone he hears a note of guilt and shame that the malignancy had been allowed to fester amongst them when radical surgery may have saved some of the men, if not all. And, as his comprehension grows, he can't help feeling that, in a way, little has changed over the years. Everything on the surface in sleepy St-Juan-sur-Mer is still normal and above-board. But no one looks beneath the surface. No
one peeks under the beds of some of the inhabitants of the villas on the hillsides. No one will challenge their guards and check to see if they have skeletons in their basements.

“Who were the owners?” Bliss enquires of Daisy, when it seems her mother is running out of nightmares.

“Zhey were Jewish,” Daisy interprets, and doesn't need to explain.

“Auschwitz or Dachau,” he muses, guessing they would have been prime furnace fuel, being not only Jewish but rich property owners. They might have got away, he momentarily thinks, with a degree of hope — some did. Then why didn't they come back after the war to reclaim their home? OK. They didn't get away.

Now, with the château's ugly history exposed, the painted advertisements on the sides of old shops in the town have meaning. The badly faded signs proclaiming
Charcuterie, Traiteur
, and
Boulangerie
had obviously been left deliberately. The butchers, caterers, and bakers who'd owned the family stores hadn't simply gone out of business — they'd gone, though not in the minds of the locals. An entire generation had accepted a code of silence that kept men alive, in many cases well beyond their natural lifespans. Wives, once young and vibrant, and even a few surviving mothers, still waited for the day when the front door would burst open and a strapping young man would walk in and throw out his arms in joyous greeting.

The bright moon has replaced the sun by the time Bliss and Daisy leave the apartment and descend the narrow steps, but the balmy evening air does nothing to take the chill off Bliss's mind. Daisy's mother has levered herself
out of her chair and stands at the top of the stairs in her long, black dress and gives them a parting wave. Waving back, Daisy whispers to Bliss, “She has not been so happy for a long time.”

Turning for a final look at the diminutive old lady in her widow's weeds, Bliss reflects on the depths of melancholy she has surfaced from. And if she has found happiness it has come at a gruelling cost. Daisy did not translate her mother's tears — those needed no translation.

Bliss's promise to become part of the conspiracy cheered the old lady somewhat. It was an easy decision, knowing that should he, or anyone else, reveal the secret of the château, the place would swarm with neo-Nazi nutcases and other bloodthirsty freaks bent on snatching a genuine torture instrument or a few shreds of blood-soaked clothing. For the world's weirdos such a find would be Atlantis. In any case, he doesn't want to be the one to rip the rug out from under an entire community.

As he and Daisy sit over a carafe of wine in a nearby bar, he ponders returning to the château, explaining to her that the ghosts in the basement are less frightful than those in her mother's mind, though he has difficulty with the words.

“You must not go back,” Daisy protests.

“Look, I'm not the only one who knows about the château. I promised your mother I wouldn't tell anyone — but what about Grimes? He's got no reason to keep quiet.... Wait a minute,” he pauses thoughtfully. “Why has he kept quiet? Why did he tell the police it was an accident?”

Staring out across the harbour towards the promontory it occurs to him that the potter would have stayed in the château only if he had nowhere else to go. People have
walked miles with whole arms ripped off in battles, he realizes, then swears to the wind. “Bugger! I'll have to go back. I must have missed a room — maybe even a wing.”

“Please don't go back. It is
dangereux
,” whines Daisy.

“Don't start that again,” he says, putting his arms round her. “It isn't dangerous — it's just scary.”

She won't be comforted and, holding her firmly, he says, “There's absolutely nothing to fear there,” although he can't believe he's saying it. Neither is he certain he can face the building for a third time, particularly as the ghosts have taken on much more substance. One ghost had particular significance for Daisy's mother — her father, whom she'd referred to in the present tense.

“What happened to your grandmother?” Bliss asks Daisy, and is bowled over when she says, “She was zhere, but she wouldn't listen to me. She put her hands over her ears and went to her room.”

“Oh my God,” he breathes, realizing the magnitude of the problem.

“She is ninety-three years old,” explains Daisy, which, Bliss guesses, would put her mother in her early seventies — probably ten or twelve years old when her innocent childhood was trampled.

“Did your mother see her father hauled away?” he wonders aloud, but Daisy doesn't know.

“Zhey never speak. Zhey zhink by not speaking maybe it did not happen.”

Bliss sits back with a jaundiced eye, finding it inconceivable that there hadn't been periods of lucidity, although he can see a certain rationale. Without a body and a marked grave wasn't it just possible he'd survived, if not actually in the château, perhaps in some remote concentration camp yet to be unearthed? Enduring the years
of silent hopefulness had clearly strengthened the memories, and if dealing with the horror in 1944 had been too much for them, with each anniversary it would have become more and more difficult. The unexpected discovery of Japanese soldiers still holding out in the jungle on a Pacific island in 1974 must have given them a real lift.

How many of them had parcelled the happy memories of their pre-war lives into brightly coloured packages in their mind and blocked out any dark images? he wonders as he looks over the moonlit bay, guessing that taking the lid off now will blow the packages to smithereens. Their hopes, however illogical, will be blown to the wind, and, subconsciously knowing that, many must have lived in fear of the day some loose-lipped drunk stumbled across the mausoleum or some Nosy Parker dug up the past and let their demons escape. But as Bliss watched the frail woman recount the tragedy it became apparent that continued concealment was more than just a refusal to accept the inevitable. As the years progressed another factor crept into the equation — embarrassment. The longer the concealment continued, the more important it became to maintain it, not just to preserve the memories and the hopes, but to avoid the world's focus, and even a degree of humiliation. Thinking of this, Bliss finds himself imagining a TV camera stuck in Daisy's mother's face and a pushy reporter asking incredulously, “So tell me, Madame … I understand you've known about the château over there for more than fifty years,” etc.

“Oh, yes.... Sorry. I forgot,” would hardly cut it, especially if the reporter were to add with a smarmy tone, “So what exactly did you think had happened to your husband — late at the office,
peut-être?”

T
houghts of Daisy's mother and grandmother holed up in their apartment for decades, waiting for her grandfather's return, play on Bliss's mind as he tries to chart his next steps. Daisy puts him in the picture about her grandfather.

“I assumed your mother lost someone in the war,” he says to her as they sit in the bar after leaving the apartment. “I noticed her black clothes.”

“
Maman
likes black,” she explains. “When I was young all women wore black. I didn't know it zhen, but it was because zhey had lost zheir husbands or sons to zhe château.”

The use of the euphemism doesn't escape him. Her mother did the same, saying, “Zhe château took our men,” as if their disappearance could be blamed on the defenceless old building, rather than on war or the Nazis.

Now that Bliss has been swept into the conspiracy he's discovered just how easily it could have happened. While everybody probably accepted the truth at some level, no individual wanted to speak out and be responsible for destroying the hopes of others. It's a reciprocating cycle of self-deceit, he decides: an authentic saga of the emperor's new clothes. Yet in nearly sixty years no little boy has dashed from the crowd to point out the naked reality. By hiding deep in the woods, behind the high fence and locked gates, the mansion hasn't pompously paraded its nudity, but rather has made the task of sustaining the charade easier. Keeping its head bowed it has spent the decades slowly melting into the ground, although it still has a very long way to go.

After he leaves Daisy, Bliss walks alone along the beach listening to Brubeck playing “Blues in the Dark” as he tries to pick out the château's roofs in the moonlight. “I wonder if the grand old dame will take her sombre secret to the grave,” he muses. “Or will some insensitive, money-grubbing historian realize the potential of revealing her presence and write a book … ” At this point he chokes. Until now, it hasn't crossed his mind that his book — Frederick Chapel's revelation of the identity of the man in the iron mask — will blow the lid off the château just as explosively as any historian's account. His deductions and eventual solution only hold water because of the château and its location. Once his book hits the bookstores and he gets on a few radio talk shows, the
merde
will certainly hit the
ventilateur
.

Once exposed, the attention of the whole world will focus on the previously neglected building. Millions will
flock, led by teams of skeptical historians, nonplussed at the possibility that after three hundred years of vain research by some of the world's finest in academia, a lowly London copper could figure it out in ten minutes flat.

Bliss's manuscript, now swollen to more than a hundred pages with insightful imagery of the local landscapes, reports of the weather, historical anecdotes, and depictions of local characters, sits on his kitchen table and torments him like a bunch of Tantalus's grapes. The revelation in the final few pages plagues him most, and he picks it up and rereads it as he wanders to the balcony.

The days passed slowly for Frederick Chapel. The relentless sun and continual concern sapped his energy as he idled on the beach of St-Juan-sur-Mer, feeling his neck being stretched inexorably ' twixt the blade and the rope.

In her haste to serve him, Angé lique misjudged the speed of a gentleman's carriage and sent the shying horse careering into the sleek chariot of a young cavalier. “
Bof!
” she said, and shrugged, delivering Chapel's
gobelet
with an unconcerned smile. “
Bonjour,
Monsieur Couperin.”

“Bonjour,
Angé lique.”

The war between France and Britain's northern alliance crept ever closer, and he became more and more despairing of his chances of solving the riddle and returning safely to his home in England. During the warm Provenç al nights he had turned to Dorothée, his landlady, for comfort, although he was well aware that he was not the only one supping at that particular Venusian well.

When Dorothée revealed one night that she had been to the château to provide her fulsome service to the chief of security, Frederick Chapel could hardly contain his excitement. Whilst his clandestine visit to the site a few weeks earlier had confirmed his belief that it would be possible to swim the straits to the island from the château's beach, he was still doubtful of his plan to invade the fortress. His strategy to divert the guards by the creation of a phantom invasion force had, on closer examination, become untenable.

“It is zhe big secret, Franço is,” Dorothée had said, “but I know for whom zhe château is built.”

“I do not believe you,” he had said.

“Oui.
It is true,” she had protested, sitting up fiercely on his straw
paillasse.
“Zhere is a letter zhat zhe
chef de sé curité
showed me. It is from zhe man zhey call only ‘
l' homme au masque de fer.' ”

Frederick Chapel could not believe his luck. For nearly two months he had paced the beaches and dunes of St-Juan searching for a way to identify the masked man, and now he lay with the woman who has the answer.