Léon and Louise (27 page)

It pleased Léon that his children were genuine Le Galls. True, they had each been endowed from birth with characteristics unmistakably their own. Robert was fair-haired, Yves auburn, and Muriel on the dark side; the first had inherited his father's inoffensive stolidity, the second his mother's acumen and tendency to hysteria, and the third possessed a talent for diplomacy hitherto unknown in the family. But the backs of all their heads were flat, they were amiably rebellious, and even the youngest ones displayed a propensity for cheerful melancholy.

While surveying his sleeping children, Léon silently recapitulated his highly personal argument in favour of the immortality of the human soul, which he had cobbled together with the aid of basic theoretical physics and probability calculus. The foundation of his theory was the obvious fact that human beings aren't soulless automata – his children certainly weren't, he would have staked his life on that – but are quite clearly endowed with a soul from the moment of their birth.

From that, in conformity with the law of conservation of mass, Léon inferred that the soul could not have created itself out of nothing. And this, in turn, meant either that it must have existed as an entity before birth – and thus probably before conception as well – or that it took shape from previously inanimate particles or sources of energy in the course of incarnation.

Léon determined by process of elimination that only the first of those alternatives was feasible. This was because the second possibility – that the soul of each of the millions of human beings born every day was spontaneously formed every time out of previously inanimate particles or sources of energy – was just as unacceptable according to the laws of probability as if the miracle of the genesis of life out of lifeless mud had not occurred just once at the beginning of all time many millions of years ago, but was forever recurring a million times over in every puddle and rivulet throughout the world.

Still in his armchair when dawn broke, Léon sat up with a start. He went to the baker's and bought some bread, then put some water on for coffee. Shortly before seven he woke the children and laid out clean clothes for them. Then he climbed the stairs to the attic to wake Michel, who never heard his alarm clock ring. Back in the kitchen again, he poured the coffee water through the filter, put some milk on and buttered some slices of bread.

Then the morning hush outside was broken by the squeak of bicycle brakes. Muffled voices could be heard, followed by the sound of a woman's heels on the pavement. Léon opened the living-room window and looked down. Outside the front door was a bicycle taxi, and standing beside it Yvonne. Less than four hours had elapsed since Léon had left her at the Maternité in the care of a nurse. He ran downstairs and hurried to meet her in the entrance hall, relieved her of her bag and thrust aside a fold of blanket so as to be able to see the little face of the baby she was carrying bundled up in her arms.

‘All in order?'

‘Absolutely. Two kilos eight hundred. Flat occiput.'

‘What is it?'

‘A little Philippe.'

‘Philippe like the Marshal?'

‘No, no, just Philippe.'

‘What about you? All well?'

‘Oh yes, it was an easy birth.'

‘Still, you should have had three or four days bedrest at the Maternité.'

‘What for?'

‘We could have managed.'

‘Don't worry, I'm not going to die on you.'

‘What would I do without you?'

‘Or I without you?'

‘Yvonne?'

‘Yes?'

‘I love you.'

‘I know. I love you too, Léon.'

‘Let's go up, the milk will be boiling over.'

This exchange took them both by surprise, it was so many years since they'd uttered the words. Perhaps that was why they still sounded so fresh and pristine that morning, and why there was nothing false or contrived or affected about them. With Léon's arm around her waist, Yvonne climbed the stairs carrying the peacefully sleeping trial of patience who would be their guest for the next few years.

The next day Léon went back to the laboratory, where he would soon have been engaged in copying index cards for a year and was taking good care not to let the job drive him insane. Lying on his desk at half-past eight every morning would be a pile of a hundred smudged, curly, dog-eared index cards whose inscriptions he had to decipher and transcribe on to new, snow-white cards. At some stage after office hours, when most of the offices and laboratories in the Quai des Orfèvres were deserted, Hauptsturmführer Knochen's orderly went the rounds and collected up both copies and originals.

Léon sometimes managed only seventy or eighty copies in a day because he'd had to test an almond tart for arsenic or a bottle of Campari for rat poison. When that happened he left the twenty or thirty unprocessed cards on his desk and the orderly would add another seventy or eighty overnight, so that he again found a hundred waiting for him next morning.

Out of consideration for his family, Léon now refrained from making too many mistakes. For a while he had tried staging an unofficial go-slow by poring over each card for as long as possible, drafting the text in pencil, and inscribing the final, ink version in schoolboy calligraphy. Although he succeeded in reducing his output to twenty cards a day, the calligraphy gave him writer's cramp and the go-slow became boring in the long run. After a few days' strenuous inactivity he gave his temperament free rein and reverted to working at his normal speed.

But he never drank the mocha which Hauptsturmführer Knochen, with malicious regularity, made sure was delivered to him week after week. He put the unopened red, white and black packets, each of which contained a quarter of a kilogram, in the cupboard where he had also kept the Italian mocha jug. Furthermore, he banished the new desk lamp to the window sill beside his desk, and, when the captain hadn't shown his face for several months, exchanged it for an old lamp he'd found in the attic.

But one sunny morning in late summer, after a shower of rain during the night, everything changed again. On his way to work Léon had kicked chestnuts across the glistening wet cobblestones and looked up at maidservants wielding their feather dusters in the open windows; on the Pont Saint-Michel he picked up the last of the chestnuts and flung it zestfully into the Seine, and when he turned into the Quai des Orfèvres he ran a few steps from sheer exhilaration.

When he entered the laboratory, however, his old lamp had disappeared and the Siemens lamp was back on his desk. He searched high and low, went out into the passage and peered in both directions, scratched his head and frowned. Then he returned to his desk, picked up the index card on top of the pile, and began his day's work.

It wasn't until late afternoon that his fears materialized. On returning from a visit to the lavatory he found Knochen sitting in his chair. The German had propped his elbows on the desk and was massaging his face with both hands. He was looking thoroughly world-weary.

‘What are you standing around for? Come in, Le Gall, and shut the door behind you.'

‘Good afternoon, Hauptsturmführer. Long time no see.'

‘Let's not fool around, I'm sick of playing games. We're both grown men.'

‘Whatever you say, Hauptsturmführer.'

‘Sturmbannführer. I've been promoted.'

‘Congratulations.'

‘I'm here to caution you, Le Gall. You've been indulging in sabotage again, and I can't let it pass. Take care, I warn you.'

‘But Sturmbannführer, I'm doing my best.'

‘Don't talk nonsense. You're too much of a coward for genuine sabotage, of course, you merely play the
résistant
so no one gets hurt. You want to assuage your conscience, so you deliberately make schoolboy howlers. In your place I'd be ashamed.'

‘May I be quite frank, Sturmbannführer?'

‘By all means.'

‘In your place I would also be ashamed.'

‘Really? Why?'

‘You come here and throw your weight about, knowing you've got all those tanks and guns behind you.'

‘At least I
do
have them behind me.'

‘If you were in my place and I in yours – '

‘Who knows, Le Gall? The fact is that last autumn, when you still had the wind up about your little daughter, your errors averaged eight per cent. Now that a few months have gone by and she's probably peeing the bed only every other night, you get cocky again and allow yourself fourteen per cent.'

‘I didn't realize – '

‘Shut up, don't talk nonsense. You aren't back to seventy-three per cent of errors, not yet, but they're on the increase. While we're on the subject, what was the matter with this desk lamp? What harm did it do you?'

‘It's just a lamp.'

‘Does it bother you that it's a Siemens?'

‘I've got sensitive eyes, it's so bright it dazzles me. The old lamp – '

‘Shut up, the lamp stays where it is. Take this as a final warning.' Knochen sighed and planted his boots on the desk.

‘May I ask you a question, Sturmbannführer?'

‘What is it?'

‘Why me?'

‘What do you mean, why me?'

‘I'm the only person in the building you've treated to coffee and a new desk lamp.'

‘You've asked around?'

‘Why me, Sturmbannführer?'

‘Because you're the only one that makes difficulties.'

‘The only one in the Quai des Orfèvres?'

‘You're the only one out of a staff of five hundred who plays the hero. And now make me some coffee, I'm tired. Nice and strong, please.'

‘Coffee?'

‘Yes, right away.'

‘Filter or mocha?'

‘Mocha. None of that wartime pigswill of yours. And use the mocha jug, not that funny filter thing.'

‘It's just that – '

‘What?'

‘The mocha you send me isn't ground.'

‘Well?'

‘I don't have a coffee mill.'