The Red Collar (9 page)

“How did they hear this news?” Lantier asked. “You said you were cut off from the world.”

“We were, but not them. And that's exactly the point. You know, we were up against the Bulgarians, and they speak pretty similar languages. They understand each other. They were all at it; the Austrians, the Turks and the Bulgarians were getting news from Russia on a daily basis because their headquarters thought Russia's difficulties were good for their troops' morale. They promised them that once the Tsar had gone it wouldn't be long before the Russians stopped fighting the war.”

“So there was contact between the Russians and the Bulgarians, when they were pitted against each other in their trenches?”

“That's what I gathered and that's what set the whole thing off . . . ”

T
he river was low and where the current caught on stones it produced trails of foam that whitened almost the entire surface. Willow branches that in the springtime trailed down into the water now hung in the air, still holding clods of dirty waterweeds.

The young man was crouching in the middle of the river. He'd hopped from stone to stone and now stood motionless over the flowing water, barefoot on the moss-covered rocks. His eye was steady as a hawk's, trained on the pool of water beneath him. In this small natural basin a trout snaked between the dancing bright patches the sun created on the sandy riverbed. The man slowly raised a stick sharpened to a point at one end. He waited a long while and then, in one swift action, thrust the thin lance down, skewering the fish. He drew the stick out of the water. His prey writhed around the shaft that pierced through its body. The fisherman stood up but suddenly froze like a dog pointing. He'd spotted the dark silhouette watching him on the bank.

“Don't try to make a run for it, Louis! I'll always know where to find you. Come over here.”

Gabarre barely raised his voice. The river was flowing so weakly that it made little noise and the police officer's words resonated clearly in the quiet of the forest, particularly to ears practiced at picking up the least sound.

Stepping fluently from stone to stone, Louis made his way to the bank. When he reached the police sergeant he lowered his head and put his hands behind his back, trying clumsily to hide his catch. He was about twenty years old, with black eyebrows that almost met and curly hair set low on his forehead. He stood with his back stooped and a frightened look on his face whenever he met another human being. In the woods, though, his eye had all the acuity of an animal's. He lived on what he hunted and fished. His mother had died when he was ten years old, and no one really knew who his father was. He'd been sent to an orphanage and ran away twice, both times heading back to the house where he'd been born on the edge of the woods. In the end they left him there. Gabarre kept an eye on him. He knew the boy was pretty harmless but he also knew about his temptations and about his weak spot.

“Still just as agile, from what I see. Let's have a look.”

The trout had stopped moving, resigned to its fate or already dead. It was a handsome fish with shimmering scales. The point of the stick had struck it exactly through the middle.

“Tell me, Louis, you're being a good boy at the moment. But you still go to see her.”

The boy shook his head.

“No, no! I swear it.”

“Don't swear, that's unwise. Especially as I know you do. I've been watching you too, would you believe.”

Louis fiddled with the stick which was still driven through the fish.

“Listen,” Gabarre went on. “I also know you haven't done anything bad. You can't fight it, but there it is. So long as you don't disturb her anymore, you can watch her through the trees, if it makes you happy.”

The young man gave a sideways glance at the police officer. He couldn't see where he was going with this conversation.

“I'd like you to help me, Louis. You owe me that at least, don't you?”

Louis waited to hear what came next before responding.

“Do you know Morlac, Valentine's sweetheart?”

A flash of loathing lit Louis's eyes.

“He went off to war,” he said nastily. His diction was poor and his voice muted.

“He went off but he came back. And you know that.”

Louis looked away.

“You go and see her every day, am I right?”

The young man said nothing.

“Don't go telling me lies. I know your habits. You take yourself off to the woods above her vegetable patch in the mornings, so you can watch her bend over her crops. And in the evenings you go around the back of the house to watch her when she goes to milk the goat. Don't deny it. So long as you behave yourself, I don't have any complaints.”

“I only touched her once . . . ”

“And you frightened her enough with that. For her to want to call me, given how little she likes uniforms, she must have had quite a scare.”

“It's over now.”

“I believe you, Louis. And that's not why I'm here.”

“Well?”

“Well, like I said, you can help me. I want you to tell me what you know.”

Louis scratched his chest with a great square paw covered in black hairs.

“Have you seen Morlac around here since he came home from the war?”

Louis was not enjoying this conversation. He obviously wanted to react the way he did best when he wasn't happy about something: by fleeing. But Gabarre was boring into him with his hard little peasant's eyes, and Louis was afraid of him.

“I think so.”

“No stories, please. Did he come here, yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Several times?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Every day.”

The police officer paused, as if he were stowing this information in a locked cupboard.

“Do you know he's in prison?”

Louis's eyes widened. A malicious smile stole over his face but he smothered it immediately.

“No. What's he done?”

“Something stupid, on Bastille Day.”

“So that's why he hasn't been recently.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don't know about dates. Three weeks ago, I'd say . . . ”

“That makes sense. He came until the day before the parade. And what did he do when he came here? Did he talk to her?”

“Oh, no!” the young man cried out.

Gabarre sensed this was a limit that, luckily, Morlac hadn't overstepped. If he had done, the situation might have taken a different turn and, knowing Louis's suppressed violence, it could well have been dramatic.

“So, tell me. What did he do? Did he hide like you and watch her?”

“I'm better at hiding than him. He didn't see me.”

“What about her, do you think she saw him?”

“I'd be surprised. It wasn't her he was following.”

“Who then?”

“The kid.”

Gabarre took a step back and sat down on the trunk of a felled tree that lay along the bank. The heat was encroaching toward the river, despite the cool air coming off the water. He mopped his brow with a large checkered handkerchief folded into eighths.

“Are you sure about this? It was the kid he was watching?”

“Why would I lie?”

“Did he try to talk to him?”

“No.”

“He didn't talk to him or he didn't try?”

“He didn't try.”

The police officer heaved a sigh. Conversations with Louis were always littered with traps like that. The boy's mind didn't grasp nuances. He took words at face value. You couldn't hold it against him. But it was trying.

“Do you mean he actually did? He talked to the kid, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“How did it happen?”

“It was one morning. She was in the house.”

Louis always said “she,” as if her name, Valentine, was too violent, too painful.

“The kid had gone off to play near the château.”

This was the name the locals used to give to the ruins of a fortified house, which, it was claimed, had been the home of Agnès Sorel, mistress to the fifteenth-century king Charles VII. The name was used less and less because the ruins in question were now just a pile of loose stones and brambles. But Louis stuck to the old ways.

“Did you follow them?”

“Of course. The kid
is
kind of her, you know.”

Gabarre realized the poor simpleton cherished the foolish notion that, by protecting Valentine's son, he could earn her gratitude and perhaps her love.

“What did they say to each other?”

“I was too far away. I couldn't hear. This guy of yours, Morlac, he came out of hiding and talked for a long time. The kid listened to him but when Morlac tried to take his hand the little critter did what I'd have done, Lord knows. He scrammed.”

“Did Morlac try again after that?”

“Once. But when the kid saw him he didn't let him get near. He ran off.”

“Do you think he told his mother about it?”

“I'd be surprised.”

“What makes you think that?”

“If he'd said something then she wouldn't have let him carry on going out on his own. Yes, that's why I think he didn't tell her anything: so he could carry on running about wherever he liked. Well, that's what I'd have done in his situation.”

The police officer nodded and then stood up, came over to Louis and pinched his ear. It was what Napoleon used to do to his soldiers, and Gabarre knew this. But, after all, what harm was there in copying the emperor's finer characteristics? Louis was used to this liberty, and saw it for what it was: an encouraging gesture, a sign of praise.

“You'd better expect to see me back soon!” trilled the police sergeant.

But the phrase was all part of the ritual, and Louis knew that months could go by without him hearing a word from Gabarre. He affected a respectful and slightly frightened expression to make it look as if he'd learned his lesson. Then, not waiting to hear more, he slunk off with his trout.

 

* * *

 

The sun had gone so Morlac and the major were now walking around the yard, with their hands in their front pockets, making the fabric bulge out of shape.

“After the February Revolution the Russians started bickering,” the prisoner said.

“The Tsarists with the revolutionaries, I imagine?”

“There weren't many Tsarists. Maybe among the officers, but they kept quiet at any rate. No, the squabble was between the supporters of the provisional government and the Soviets who wanted to carry on with the revolution. Afoninov was all for the Soviets.”

“And you?”

“Me?”

Morlac looked flustered. He knew he'd have to talk about himself. He took responsibility for his role in this business. But it was how it started that he seemed to find difficult. How could he explain the way he'd ended up in the whole thing?

“You know, in the early days, I never thought one day I'd have to use the books I'd read.”

“The books you'd read at Valentine's house?”

Morlac didn't want to answer and, on this occasion, Lantier felt it was tactless of him to have been so unnecessarily blunt.

“When I was on leave I read a lot. The war had changed me. I couldn't have imagined all that sort of thing existed: shelling, hordes of people in uniform, fighting where, in a matter of minutes, thousands of men lay dead in the sunlight. I was just a little peasant, you see? I didn't know anything. Even though I started reading before the war, they were meaningless books. When I came back on leave it was different: I needed to find answers. I wanted to see what other people had managed to make of war and society and the army, power, money, all the things I was just discovering.”

“How long were you here on leave?”

“Two weeks. Nothing like enough. But the books I didn't get around to reading I took with me.”

“You can't get many into a kit bag.”

“I took three.”

“What were they?”

Morlac stood tall as he gave the titles, as if announcing the Gospel.

“Proudhon's
Philosophy of Poverty
, Marx's
The Eighteenth Brumaire
, and Kropotkin's
Anarchist Morality
.”

“Didn't you have problems with material like that in your bag?”

“The staff actually only started worrying after the Russian Revolution. And I'd taken my precautions. I'd changed the covers. From the outside they looked like romantic novels.”

Lantier thought about Valentine's father, well versed in clandestine tricks. His daughter had been taught to hide things from a very young age. She must have rather liked introducing Morlac to this territory, sharing these dangerous secrets with him.

“And what did you find in these books?”

“When they explained the world, I understood what they were saying. But I thought their ideas on revolution were just pipe dreams or, in a pinch, a promise for the afterlife, like paradise. With the events in Russia, I realized it was all possible.”

Morlac had come to a halt and was looking Lantier squarely in the face. He was transformed. There was no cheerfulness in him, no, still none of that, only a sort of radiance coming from within him. His eyes were more ardent and he breathed more deeply, his skin was colored by a sudden rush of blood. This was no longer a peasant with blinkered thoughts about his land, but a man full of eagerness for expansion and the future. If it weren't for what he was saying, he could have been mistaken for a lunatic.

“Just think. We were in the pit of hell, in a cesspool. The world had descended into barbarity. But at the same time there was a place where the will of the people had allowed a nation to rid itself of a tyrant. We had to finish what was started. We had to carry on with the revolution, not just in Russia but everywhere. And to do that, the first thing we had to do was end this war. If we revolted, the generals would be left to sort it out on their own . . . We could bring them down using the same methods that got the better of Nicolas II.”