Hunting Ground (8 page)

It’s an outburst I regret, but she reaches for my hand anyway and says she’s sorry. ‘Now that we know your name, there’s no need for us to slip you across the frontier. The French Embassy will provide you with a temporary identity card and passport.’

‘I never had a French passport. I wasn’t considered a citizen. Besides, I’d sooner slip across. No one else is to know exactly where I am. Not for a bit.’

‘This Dupuis?’ she asks.

Sacré nom de nom,
she’s so innocent! ‘Yes, him, especially.’

‘And the Vuittons?’

‘Them also, and my husband.’

‘And Tommy? What about him? How certain are you that he was killed?’

‘Very. There’s no question of it, nor that it was my fault. Me, I’m the only one who’s left.’

‘And Marcel—he’s a possibility, isn’t he?’

She wants so much to offer hope, but hope is delusional. ‘Marcel might be alive. I really don’t know. We never could tell with him. There was always doubt in my mind. I’ll have to settle things about him later. As yet I’ve been unable to trace him.’

I know she’s thinking I’ve made other phone calls and sent other little packages in the post—that black pasteboard I insisted on having, that piece of white chalk, but she doesn’t say this. ‘Is there more to that weekend you were telling me about?’ she asks.

‘A little.’

She fidgets. She craves a cigarette almost as much as I do. ‘Dupuis will be here in the morning,’ she says. ‘He can catch a flight from Paris. Even with all the difficulties of travel, Zurich’s easy for such a one. He’ll have the authority.’

‘My things are packed. I need only to get dressed.’

‘You could tell me about it in the car. There’s a place I know of, a hut in the mountains. I could take you there until …’

‘They’d only kill you, Doctor. Just get me across the frontier. Please don’t try to alert the Swiss police. Dupuis will be watching for just such a thing and will only think you know more than you’re saying. Just let me deal with it myself.’

‘Strasbourg … We’d better cross over into Germany and head for there. At least, that way your transit papers will be of some use. I can simply say I’m returning you to the hospital in Bremen.’

She’s so green it hurts. ‘Katyana crossed the frontier at a little place called
Au-Dessus-de-la-Fin
—Above the End. There are some fields and woods, rough farms, pastures. Tommy said she used a farmer named Marius Cadieux and his son. They’re good, reliable people. They never charged a sou for the service, and we used it several times. Not myself, you understand. Only some of the others and those they were taking with them. Packages, we used to call them. Downed British aircrew, escaped prisoners of war. Spain, too, of course.’

It doesn’t take us long. The car is warm, the night still dark, and I know she’s debating whether to come with me and still thinks I’m suicidal.

‘Katyana … that’s Polish or Russian. Look, I really wish you’d confide in me, Lily. I’m certain we could help each other.’

I stare emptily out the window towards the lake. There are houses in the darkness, moonlight shimmering on the water, trees, and more trees—sometimes I used to count them as the railway cattle trucks rumbled eastward with their cargoes of humanity. ‘Katyana was Nicki’s wife, but they came into things a little later on.’

‘And the rest of that weekend?’

‘Please slow down. Let’s open the windows and have a cigarette. Me, I’ll inhale the secondhand.’

Rebuked, she begins to relax, and as I light a cigarette for her, she says, ‘Thanks. I needed this. So, okay, that weekend.’

I begin it again. I remember it as it all was, my sister, the memory of her and of Pincevent. Barges plied the river. The Bugatti touring coupé Jules loved to drive was parked beside the economical two-door Renault I had forced him to buy in 1937. The night before, he hadn’t even come to bed.

Janine was sitting on the sand, holding Marie between her knees. In the palm of her hand, there was a scraper, a small flint tool that had once been used to clean and prepare reindeer hide.

‘Where’s Jules?’ I demanded.

‘With Marcel.’

‘But I thought …’

‘Lily, what you thought wasn’t correct. Marie-Christine and I’ve been breaking open the clay balls, haven’t we, darling?’

‘Stone tools, Mommy. Hunters.’ She scrunched up her nose so seriously, we both had to laugh.

We began to hunt in earnest, two sisters, two childhood friends, and the children. In spite of everything, I had come prepared. When nothing further was found, I let Nini see me take a Roman coin from my pocket and secret it in the sand. ‘Jean-Guy, try here. Here’s a good place, isn’t it?’

With him digging between us, and Marie crawling into my lap, I looked steadily into my sister’s eyes but couldn’t say what I’d wanted so much to say.

Later, with the children happily playing at our feet, I told Janine that I would try to go to England to see our father and perhaps stay for the duration of the war. Jules wasn’t to know. This she understood. ‘You ought to come with us,’ I said, only to see her shake her head and hear her say: ‘Ah, no, not me. I belong here. I’m far more French than you.’

There wasn’t any sense in arguing. There never had been. ‘I’ll tell Papa we’ve been here. He’ll like that, and he’ll understand why I wanted us to be together. May I take the scraper to show him that we can still find things here?’

‘Yes, certainly. Please do.’ I knew she was thinking we might never see each other again. I felt the same myself, and couldn’t be angry with her.

The knife was razor sharp. From the windows came the sound of driving rain, from the skies above, that of thunder. Lightning filled the kitchen, momentarily startling me so that the yelp I gave caught in my throat as the sound of thunder rolled away.

Blood ran over Marcel’s fingers and thumb. He gripped the throat more tightly to still the jerking body. Then he laughed as the eyes glazed over, and he slit the skin, first around the neck, then down the stomach and around each of the legs.

Yanking off the pelt, he gutted the thing into a basin. ‘A rabbit slips its skin like a whore sheds her clothes, Lily.’

I had never seen Marcel kill anything before. ‘You took pleasure in that. Why couldn’t you have hit it on the head first?’

The dirty stub of a dead
Gauloise bleue
clung to his lower lip. He gave a ragged cough, brought up quantities of phlegm, and spat into the sink. Swiftly lopping off the head and feet, he said, ‘Would it have mattered?’

‘If you had been the rabbit, yes.’

‘And the whore?’

‘I … I don’t know what you mean?’

Jules, the Vuittons, and the others were upstairs in the library listening to the wireless. ‘That your sister’s being one and that because of what she’s done with Jules, you’ve accused me of stealing from him.’

‘And didn’t you?’

Marcel washed the carcass and laid it with two others in the cast-iron casserole. Adding chopped garlic, some butter, thyme, and oregano, a liberal wash of the rough wine he preferred, he said, ‘I didn’t, and you know it. Lily, why must you hate me? Jules is my friend.’

‘Your benefactor. Hah! He couldn’t lend you any more money, could he? Are your things in hock? Has the concierge confiscated them in lieu of back rent?’

He dried his hands on one of the tea towels, left streaks of blood, struck a match on the stove, and lit that filthy stub. Again, he coughed. ‘You’re jealous of me, of the attention Jules pays to my paintings. Aren’t you curious to find out what I would do with that piece you made in wax?’

‘You?’

He tossed his head to one side, threw up his bushy black eyebrows, and became the Marseillais fisherman he ought to have remained. Short, swarthy, and with brawny arms, he had the gut that perpetual sponging brings.

‘Me, for sure,’ he said. ‘That piece, Lily. That gorgeous piece of ass. Janine.’

He had had no business finding it, but he and Jules must have been searching for the treasure. ‘You would melt it down.’

Sadly, he shook his head and began to cut leeks into the casserole. Some carrots, handfuls of quartered potatoes, the whole of a cauliflower followed, after which he laid strips of fatty bacon over everything.

Then he stuffed the casserole into the oven, burned a thumb, and swore as he slammed its door.

‘I would do no such thing. I may be a pig, I may even be a poor artist in your eyes, but I know good work when I see it.’

Apprehensive now, I asked, ‘What would you do with it?’

‘Me? Remember, madame, that it was me who suggested this. Me, I would take it to a foundry and have it cast in bronze. Even at a time of war, I would do this, paying a little extra, of course.’

‘You couldn’t pay a sou for anything.’

‘Then let’s leave it, eh? Let’s give it time. Then go to the Gallery Pascal on the rue la Boétie and see for yourself.’

That was a street of old mansions, many of them cut up into little hotels, galleries, and other things, and I couldn’t believe him. I never could anyway.

‘Why don’t you talk to your sister?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps if you told her how you felt, she would leave Jules alone.’

‘I can’t. It’s not her fault. She’s not a whore. It’s Jules.’

‘Men can want a lot of women, but women can’t want a lot of men, eh? You’re a purist, Lily.’

‘I didn’t take that jewellery.’

‘And neither did I.’

‘So?’

‘So now Jules trusts neither of us and we two hate each other a little more.’

‘Lily, I want it back.’

‘You’re afraid, my husband. Is it that you’re worried someone else might discover what’s in that box?’

‘Just what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘A certain tiara, I think. One that the Vuittons must know of. One with emeralds and diamonds.’

I thought he would hit me, but he held back, flashed a cruel smile, and said, ‘It’s a fake. Worthless paste!’

Had I been so wrong about it? ‘The box is in the cellar, under the barrel my sculpture’s on.’

He didn’t sigh or smile with relief. He simply looked through to the other room to where that bitch Nefertiti was sitting. ‘I’ll tell them it’s safe, and you’ll put it back in the attic where you found it, but after we’re gone. Even though they were worried about it, your little outburst last night had the desired effect. Vuitton and that wife of his have agreed to use us as a repository for some of the extra pieces from the Louvre. They’ll be arriving in a few days. Give the men a glass or two of wine. Nothing from the cellar, but make a big fuss over them. Everything depends on our being designated.’

Everything, even if they
were
worried about a fake.

At midweek, in the late afternoon, I took the children and walked down the road to see Georges and Tante Marie. The Morissettes had been retainers of the de St-Germains for years. Tante Marie had had a good deal to do with the raising of Jules. Childless, Georges looked up to him as he would to a son who had gone off to university and become a success.

The news I was bringing wouldn’t sit well, but what else could I have done? Someone had to tell them their services could no longer be afforded. Not that Jules ever paid them much. Five hundred francs every quarter, sometimes seven hundred. What they didn’t get in cash, they more than made up for in bread, cheese, apples, pears, vegetables, a few old boards, some wire and nails, tools now and then, an old coat, whatever they could manage to scrounge or borrow. I’d have done the same, of course. Still it wasn’t fair of Jules to have forgotten to pay them this past quarter nor to have asked me to let them know. It could only bring trouble for me.

Leaves blew about on the road or piled up in the ditches where Jean-Guy went to kick them. Marie-Christine kept stopping to examine something, an ant, a bug, a last butterfly that warmed itself. All about us the air was cool and full of the scent of autumn. The road went up and down over gentle rises and for a moment, one precious moment, there was nothing else but the three of us and the open road.

Then the cottage came in sight, laid against the woods, basking in the last of the sun. Georges was splitting firewood in the yard. Tante Marie was taking in some laundry. Stuccoed years and years ago, the cottage was in need of repair. One old horse, a gaggle of geese, a few scruffy chickens, and a pig kept them busy. They had little else to do now but live from day to day and gossip.

I knew that’s what they’d do once I’d told them the news. Straight off they’d hitch the horse to the wagon and go into Fontainebleau to see Tante Marie’s sister. Had they told her already of Tommy’s visit? Had Jules been informed of it and said nothing?

As Jean-Guy called out to them from the top of the last hill, they both stood still, rooted to their little plot of earth. Suspicion, a wariness of strangers, the sharp divide between the classes—all these and more ran through my mind.

Georges Morissette was seventy-two; Tante Marie, who knows? Some said sixty-five; she said sixty-one, but that couldn’t be. Some said eighty, and it was those who had felt the acid of her tongue.

Georges lowered the axe and ruffled Jean-Guy’s hair. Marie-Christine clung to me, intuitively understanding that her brother was the favoured even though she bore Tante Marie’s name.

‘Madame, is something the matter?’ he asked.

‘Ah, no. We’re just out for a walk. It’s so beautiful, isn’t it? All this?’

I indicated the last of the autumnal colours. He was mystified. Giving a shrug, Georges lifted a hand to scratch the grey stubble of a cheek, then got under the double chin and did the throat. ‘Beautiful … perhaps, but the winter, eh? That’ll be something with all this talk of war. You should be splitting wood like me and not strolling about.’

‘We’ve already done the wood. Today, we took up the last of the onions, didn’t we, Marie? Jean-Guy, he has come home from school at noon to tie them in perfect bunches. Together we have hung them from the beams in the storeroom.’

Georges clucked his tongue and slid his thumbs under the broad straps that held up the baggy, faded
bleu de travail
yet let his stomach move with ease. Squinting into the sun, he pushed back his black beret and rubbed his forehead until a glint of opportunity came into his dark brown eyes. ‘You mind the mice like I told you. That old place, it needs work, madame. My cousin’s boy, young Louis, the one who lost his foot in the train accident, he’s good with the hammer and saw, you understand. If Monsieur Jules would like the eaves fixed, Louis and me, we could …’