The Red Collar (4 page)

“And haven't people in the neighborhood said anything?”

“First of all, not many people live around here. But also I think that, with all due respect to you, sir, people don't view the military in a very good light in these parts. Of course, they say they're proud of our marshals and they're all praise for the soldiers. But they also remember the military police came to dig them out from their farms, and officers shooting those who weakened. You have to realize that for four years this prison was full of men going before court-martials because they'd tried to hide.”

“Are you telling me people are siding with Morlac?”

“Not with him in particular, but, you see, he's the last prisoner. And this business with the dog, it's softened everyone. At night I've seen shadows sneaking over to give the mutt food.”

The officer asked to be shown into Morlac's cell. This time the man was not asleep. He was dressed and reading, sitting on the floor to make the most of a ray of sunlight filled with dust motes that cut across the cell.

“You look as if you've calmed down. We can carry on, then.”

Lantier sat in the same place as the day before, on one of the bedsteads.

“Sit yourself opposite me, would you.”

The prisoner rose slowly, put his book down on the edge of the bed and sat down. In his civilian clothes he looked less like a lunatic visited in the hospital.

“What are you reading? Can I see?”

The officer leaned forward to take the book. It had worn corners, and the edges of the pages were curled. It must have been carted around in many a pocket and been caught in the rain several times.

“Victor Hugo,
Han d'Islande
.”

Lantier looked up and peered at the stubborn little peasant who sat before him. He thought he could see a smile on his lips. But the man immediately reverted to his sulky defendant's expression with surly, staring eyes.

“I thought you hadn't been to school.”

“That's my school,” Morlac replied, tilting his chin toward the book. “And the war, too.”

The officer put the book down and wrote something in his notebook. He didn't feel very comfortable continuing the investigation on this territory. As far as literature was concerned, he liked the Greeks and Cicero, Pascal and the classics. The only contemporaries he'd read were those who glorified France, particularly Barrès. In his works, there was veneration for both the monarchy and the Empire—in other words, authority. And there was scorn for the Republic, for which Victor Hugo was the bard.

“Let's pick up where we left off,” said Lantier, going over his notes. “You were in Champagne. Did you have any leave in the six months you were there?”

“Yes.”

“And did you come here?”

“Yes.”

“With your dog?”

“No, he waited for me there. The boys looked after him.”

“Then you were posted with the Oriental Expeditionary Force,” Lantier said, checking the file. “And did he follow you there?”

“First my regiment went down to Toulon by train. The dog came with us. But I was convinced he wouldn't go further than that. So long as we were in billets, things were still okay for him. But the port was different. In their dockyard the naval riflemen waged war on animals and didn't think twice about shooting them. We'd only been in the docks two days when the dog disappeared.”

“Did you board a military vessel?”

“No, a requisitioned cargo ship: the
Ville d'Oran
. It was an old tub covered in rust which had shuttled backward and forward to the colonies before the war. We stayed onboard for four days before casting off. It smelled of palm oil and droppings because there were about fifty horses in the hold, for the officers. Everyone was sick and we hadn't even put out to sea yet.”

“And was the dog onboard?”

“We didn't know right away. That's what's amazing about it. He must have realized that, so long as we were still on the quay, he shouldn't show his face. He came out of hiding on the second day of the crossing.”

“And didn't the officers throw him overboard?”

“Officers? We never saw them,” Morlac hissed, eyeing the major with the surly look in his eye again. “They were in the wardroom, with the captain, probably to avoid being on view when they puked.”

“The NCOs, then?”

“He's crafty, that dog, I've told you that. When he showed up, he had a rat between his jaws. In those four days we'd had time to see there was a lot of vermin on the ship, so everyone was pleased he'd come to sort things out a bit in the hold.”

“And did he become the regimental dog?”

“No, because he didn't see himself like that. He always knew he was my dog. He lay at my feet, slept by my side, and if anyone came up to me looking for trouble, he growled.”

There was something strange about the tone Morlac had adopted. He was willingly talking about the dog in favorable terms. But there was no detectable warmth in his voice. More like contempt or regret. It was as though he passed harsh judgment on the qualities he was describing.

“Did you give him a name?”

“Not me. The others did. Since he'd jumped on the train, the boys called him Wilhelm, for a laugh. Because of the Kaiser.”

“Yes, I got that,” said Lantier, slightly peeved.

He made a note of the dog's name and, while there was a pause in the interrogations, noticed that the animal had fallen silent again.

“And what happened to ‘Wilhelm' in Salonika?”

“You don't have a cigarette, do you?”

This time, the major had anticipated the ploy. He'd armed himself with a pack of shag and some cigarette papers. Morlac busied his fingers rolling. Like all soldiers who'd been in the war, he was good at this. But anyone could tell he was deliberately doing it slowly because the main aim, back there, had been to pass the time.

“Salonika,” he said, not looking up from his work, “was a strange place.”

He'd made a plump cigarette and was flattening it between fingers blackened by manual labor.

“I've never seen so many different people. French, English, Italian, Greek, Serbian, Senegalese, Annamite, Armenian, Albanian, Turkish . . . ”

“But it was mostly the French in command of the expeditionary force, wasn't it?”

“In command! In command of what, that's what I'd like to know. No one spoke the same language. No one knew what he was meant to be doing or where he was meant to be going. And down in the port was worse than anywhere else. In all that mess, a dog had nothing to worry about at all. It was heaven, even. Piles of garbage on the quay, carcasses of every sort of animal rotting in the sun, people sitting on the ground to eat and throwing bones and peelings behind them: He didn't even have to chase rats anymore.”

“But you didn't stay in the port?” Lantier asked.

“Well, yes, for a few days, until everything was unloaded by ancient cranes that kept breaking down. The officers fussed around on their horses. Headquarters sent orders and counterorders. Nobody understood a thing.”

“Then were you transferred to Salonika itself?”

“And how! They made us parade through the city, with music and flags. We liked it because it was a beautiful place, at least around the center. There were wide avenues with palm trees, and plane trees. But afterwards we had to go through the filthy suburbs, and eventually we were out in the country, marching northwards. The marching raised these hellish clouds of dust that never settled. Mind you, when you go to war in the infantry you have to be prepared to put up with everything.”

He looked away as he said this, as if to hide his distress. All at once Lantier felt very close to him. He was assailed by jumbled images of endless marching and exhausting watches, memories of appalling fear, hunger, cold and thirst. During the ensuing silence, he got the impression the other man was shuddering.

“Well, anyway,” Morlac concluded, “let's say it was hot.”

He took a long drag on his cigarette.

“There was a large camp on the plain to the north of the city. It was well organized but we only passed through. Every time we arrived somewhere we thought it was over, that we'd be setting up camp. But we always set off again and always heading north. The terrain was getting more and more mountainous, the tracks were full of stones, and we had to heave our equipment up through all that. We could see what they were doing: It was going to be the front for us.”

“Was the front far from Salonika?”

“What did we know when we set out? Luckily, there were boys coming back down who told us about the fighting. It was only thanks to them that we knew Serbia had given in and was occupied by the Austrians and the Bulgarians, and we were going up there to try to take it back. We found this out by chance, in snatches, and there were plenty of rumors thrown in too. We couldn't tell the truth from the lies. In Salonika we'd heard talk of a spring offensive. We eventually realized it had been delayed and would be starting now. It was going to depend directly on us. That's why everyone already knew what to expect when we were sent to the front line.”

The evening meal had arrived. It was prepared at the hospital with the food for the sick, and a nurse's aide delivered four servings in a can to the prison: two for the prisoner and two for Dujeux. The jailer was mortified disturbing the officer, but he felt that a meal was genuinely more important: He liked to eat his food hot and, until the prisoner was served, he had orders not to touch his own meal. Lantier suspended his questioning and left the prison, promising himself he wouldn't make the mistake of arriving so late the following day.

 

* * *

 

The major had slept very badly. A group of partygoers had been carousing under his window in the middle of the night and he hadn't managed to get back to sleep afterwards. He kept thinking about Morlac, about his refusal to grab at the lines he'd thrown him. Why wouldn't he agree to say he'd been drunk? Why not admit he harbored a real passion for his dog and that was why he'd momentarily lost his head? He'd get a light sentence and no one would say any more about it.

All the same, without understanding why, Lantier was grateful to him for not backing down. Since his appointment as a military investigator, he'd seen a lot of straightforward cases: utterly guilty or truly innocent. It wasn't very interesting and, with these cases, he'd put all his energy into making them more complicated, trying to find the element of idealism in a culprit or the darker side of an innocent man.

With Morlac, he felt he was dealing with a more complex defendant, in whom there was a combination of good and bad. It was irritating, appalling even, when he came to think about it. But at least there was a mystery to solve.

He got up before dawn. The ground floor of the hotel was shrouded in darkness but there was light coming through the glazed door to the staff area. Georgette, the hotel's aging cook, was riddling the fire in the stove. She sat him down on the corner of the table covered in chinaware where she was laying out dishes.

“Do you know the village of Vallenay?”

“It's a couple of miles away, on the Saint-Amand road.”

“Would someone be able to take me there this morning?”

“What time would you be coming back?”

“For lunch.”

“In that case, take the bicycle in the courtyard. Madame lends it out occasionally to customers who want to visit the area.”

When Lantier set off, the sun was sifting through the hedgerows creating a dazzling pincushion of light. Beyond the station he was straight out in the country and there were more signs of life than in town. Carts traveled along the road, harnessed horses were starting work in the fields. He could hear the farm laborers clicking their tongues to keep them moving. Swallows flew in delirious circles through the still-cool sky.

After a long rise, the road dropped down toward a wide plain dotted with ponds. The water flowed from one to the other. In winter they made the area even damper. Willows grew along their banks, and the surrounding fields were striped with the tall stems of bulrushes because they were flooded for six months of the year. But in this oppressive heat, the place was cool, shady, and not as dry as the town.

After asking an old carter for directions, Lantier had no trouble finding the house where Valentine lived. You had to follow a path that ran alongside the last of the ponds. Even in the height of summer, parts of the path dove down into thick, black mud, and you had hop over on stones that had been thrown into it. Lantier hid the bicycle in a thicket of hawthorn and continued on foot.

Valentine was in her vegetable garden, a large square of land she'd been turning over by hand for years now. It had given her gnarled fingers with black-edged nails. She never spoke to anyone without crossing her hands behind her back to hide them.

When she saw the officer coming up the path toward her home, she let go of her basket, stood up and clasped her hands in the small of her back.

Lantier du Grez stopped three paces away from her and doffed his forage cap. In the sunlight his uniform looked worn and felt almost violent, it was so out of place to be dressed like that in such heat. It could only be due to an unpleasant wish to stand out from other people and incarnate a sense of authority. Now that the war was over it was mostly ridiculous.

“You must be . . . Valentine.”

The attorney had given a first name. That had been enough to find her but, when it came to addressing her, this ignorance on his part looked like overfamiliarity, and he flushed.

She was a tall, thin girl. For all her simple blue cotton dress, she didn't look like a farmer. Her long bare arms with thick veins streaming down them, her dark hair, which was most likely cut with the same shears she used for the sheep, her bony face—nothing about her suggested bucolic peacefulness but rather the torture nature can subject people to when it is their only means of eking out a subsistence. And yet the insults inflicted by winter and manual labor had not robbed the beauty and nobility from this body they'd afflicted. Embattled on all sides, these qualities had withdrawn into her eyes. Valentine's eyes were black, but shining, direct and clear, not only in the way she looked at Lantier but the way her expression truly opened a pathway to her soul. Despite her destitute appearance, her eyes proclaimed not only that she accepted her situation but also that she was not resigned to it. It was more than pride: It was defiance.