The Night Watch (8 page)

Place des Pyramides. You try to forget the past, but your footsteps invariably lead you back to difficult crossroads. The Lieutenant was pacing up and down in front of the statue of Joan of Arc. He introduced me to a tall lad with close cropped blond hair and periwinkle eyes: Saint-Georges, a Saint-Cyr graduate. We went into the Tuileries gardens and sat down at a kiosk near the merry-go-round. It was a familiar setting of my childhood. We ordered three bottles of fruit juice. When he brought them, the waiter told us this was the last of their pre-war supply. Soon there would be no more fruit juice. ‘We’ll manage without,’ said Saint-Georges with a smile. The young man seemed very determined. ‘So you’re an escaped prisoner?’ he said. ‘Which regiment?’ ‘Fifth Infantry,’ I replied in a toneless voice, ‘but I’d rather not think about that anymore.’ With a supreme effort, I added: ‘I want only one thing, to carry on the struggle to the end.’ This profession of faith seemed to convince him. He gave me a handshake. ‘I’ve rounded up a few members of the network to introduce to you,’ the Lieutenant told me. ‘They’re waiting for us at the Rue Boisrobert.’ Corvisart, Obligado, Pernety, and Jasmin are there. The Lieutenant
talks
about me enthusiastically: about my distress after our defeat. My determination to fight on. The honour and the solace I felt that I was now a member of the CKS. ‘All right, Lamballe, we are going to assign you a mission.’ A number of individuals, he explains, have been exploiting recent events to indulge their worst instincts. Hardly surprising given the troubling and unsettling times we are experiencing. These thugs have been afforded complete impunity: they have been issued with warrant cards and gun licences. They are engaged in an odious repression of patriots and honest folk and have committed all manner of crimes. They recently commandeered an
hôtel particulier
at 3
bis
Cimarosa Square in the 16th
arrondissement
. Their office is publicly listed as the ‘
Inter-commercial Company Paris-Berlin-Monte Carlo
’. These are all the facts I have. Our duty is to neutralize them as quickly as possible. ‘I’m counting on you, Lamballe. You’re going to have to infiltrate this group. Keep us informed about plans and their activities. It’s up to you, Lamballe’. Pernety hands me a cognac. Jasmin, Obligado, Saint-Georges, and Corvisart give me a smile. Later, we are walking back along the Boulevard Pasteur. The Lieutenant had insisted on going with me as far as the Sèvres-Lecourbe métro. As we say goodnight, he looks me straight in the eye: ‘A delicate mission, Lamballe. A
kind
of double-cross. Keep me informed. Good luck, Lamballe.’ What if I told him the truth? Too late. I thought of maman. At least, I knew she was safe. I had bought her a villa in Lausanne with the money I had made at Avenue Niel. I could have gone to Switzerland with her but, out of apathy or indifference, I stayed here. As I have already said, I didn’t worry much about the fate of the world. Nor was I particularly concerned about my own fate. I just drifted with the current. Swept along like a wisp of straw. That evening I tell the Khedive about me meeting with Corvisart, Obligado, Jasmin, Pernety, and Saint-Georges. I don’t yet know their addresses, but it should not take long to get them. I promise to deliver the information on these men as quickly as possible. And on the others to whom the Lieutenant will doubtless introduce me. The way things are going, we should reel in ‘a fine haul’. He repeats this, rubbing his hands. ‘I knew you’d win them over with those choirboy good looks.’ Suddenly my head starts spinning. Suddenly I inform him that the ringleader is not, as I had thought, the Lieutenant. ‘Who then?’ I’m teetering on the brink of an abyss; a few steps are all it would take to step back. ‘
WHO?’
But no, I haven’t got the strength. ‘
WHO?’
‘A man named
LAM-BALLE. LAM-BALLE.’
‘Well, we’ll get hold of him, don’t worry. Find out as much as you can about him.’
Things
were getting complicated. Was it my fault? Each camp had set me up as a double agent. I didn’t want to let anyone down – not the Khedive and Philibert any more than the Lieutenant and lads from Saint-Cyr. You have to choose, I told myself. A squire in the ‘Company of the Knights of the Shadows’ or a hired agent for a dubious agency on Cimarosa Square? Hero or traitor? Neither one nor the other. A number of books provided me with a cleared perspective:
Anthology of Traitors from Alcibiades to Captain Dreyfus
;
The Real Joanovici
;
The Mysteries of the Chevalier d’Eon
;
Fregoli, the Man from Nowhere.
I felt a kinship with all those men. I am no charlatan. I too have experienced what people call ‘deep emotion’. Profound. Compelling. There is only one emotion of which I have first hand knowledge, one powerful to make me move mountains:
FEAR.
Paris was sinking deeper into silence and the blackout. When I talk about this period, I feel as though I’m talking to a deaf man, that somehow my voice isn’t loud enough, I WAS SHIT SCARED. The métro slowed as it approached the Pont de Passy. Sèvres-Lecourbe – Cambronne – La Motte-Picquet – Dupleix – Grenelle – Passy. In the morning, I would take the opposite route, from Passy to Sèvres-Lecourbe. From Cimarosa Square in the 16th
arrondissement
to rue Boisrobert in the 15th. From the Lieutenant to the Khedive. From the Khedive
to
the Lieutenant. The swinging pendulum of a double agent. Exhausting. Breathless. ‘Try to get the names and addresses. Looks like this could be a fine haul. I’m counting on you, Lamballe. You’ll get us information on those gangsters.’ I would have liked to take sides, but I had no more loyalty to the ‘Company of the Knights of the Shadows’ than I had to the ‘
Inter-commercial Company Paris-Berlin-Monte Carlo
’. Two groups of lunatics were pressuring me to do contradictory things, they would run me down until I dropped dead from exhaustion. I was a scapegoat for these madmen. I was the runt of the litter. I didn’t stand a chance. The times we were living through required exceptional qualities for heroism or crime. And here I was, a misfit. A weathervane. A puppet. I close my eyes and summon up the smells, the songs of those days. Yes, there was a whiff of decay in the air. Especially at dusk. But I confess, never was twilight more beautiful. Summer lingered, refusing to die. The deserted boulevards. Paris vacant. The sound of a clock tolling. And that smell that clung to the facades of the buildings, to the leaves of the chestnut trees. As for the songs, they were: ‘Swing Troubadour’, ‘Étoile Rio’, Je n’en Connais pas la Fin’, ‘Réginella’ . . . Remember. The lavender glow of the lights in the métro carriage making it hard to distinguish the other passengers. On my right, close at hand,
the
searchlight atop the Eiffel Tower. I was on my way back from the Rue Boisrobert. The métro came to a shuddering halt on the Pont de Passy. I was hoping it would never move again, that no one would come to rescue me from this no man’s land between the two banks. Not a flicker. Not a sound. Peace at last. Fade into the half-light. Already I was forgetting the sharp tone of their voices, the way they thumped me on the back, the way they pulled me in opposite directions, tied me in knots. Fear gave way to a kind of numbness. My eyes followed the path of the searchlight. It circled and circled like a nightwatch on his rounds. Wearily. The bright beam faded as it turned. Soon, there would only be a faint, almost imperceptible shaft of light. And I, too, after my endless rounds, my countless comings and goings, would finally melt into the shadows. Without ever knowing what it was all about. Sèvres-Lecourbe to Passy. Passy to Sèvres-Lecourbe. At 10 a.m. every morning, I would report to headquarters on the Rue Boisrobert. Warm welcoming handshakes. Smiles and confident glances from those brave boys. ‘What’s new, Lamballe?’ the Lieutenant would ask. I was giving him increasingly detailed information on the ‘
Inter-commercial Company, Paris-Berlin-Monte Carlo
’. Yes, it was a police unit entrusted with doing ‘dirty jobs’. The two directors,
Henri
Normand and Georges Philibert, hired thugs from the underworld. Burglars, pimps, criminals scheduled to be deported. Two or three had been sentenced to death. All of them had been issued with warrant cards and gun licences. A shady underworld operated out of Cimarosa Square. The hucksters, heroin addicts, charlatans, whores who invariably come to the surface in ‘troubled times.’ Knowing they were protected by officers in high places, these people committed terrible acts of violence. It even appeared that their chief, Henri Normand, had influence with the
préfecture de police
and the public prosecutor office, if such bodies still existed. As I went on with my story, I watched dismay and disgust spread over their faces. Only the Lieutenant remained inscrutable. ‘Good work, Lamballe! Keep at it. And write up a complete list of the members of the agency.’

Then one morning, everyone seemed to be in a particularly sombre mood. The Lieutenant cleared his throat: ‘Lamballe, we need you to carry out an assassination.’ I took this statement calmly as though I’d been expecting it for some time. ‘We’re counting on you, Lamballe, to take down Normand and Philibert. Choose the right moment.’ There was a pause during which Saint-Georges, Pernety, Jasmin, and the others
stared
at me with tears in their eyes. The Lieutenant sat motionless at his desk. Corvisart handed me a cognac. The last drink of the condemned man, I thought. I could clearly see a scaffold in the middle of the room. The Lieutenant played the role of executioner. His recruits would watch the execution, smiling mournfully at me. ‘Well, Lamballe? What do you think?’ ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ I replied. I wanted to burst into tears, to confess my tenuous position as double agent. But there are some things you have to keep to yourself. I’ve always been a man of few words. Not the talkative type. But the others were always eager to pour out their feelings to me. I remember spending long afternoons with the boys of the CKS. We would wander through the streets around the Rue Boisrobert, near Vaugirard. I would listen to their rambling. Pernety dreamed of a just world. His cheeks would flush bright red. From his wallet, he would take out pictures of Robespierre and André Breton. I pretended to admire these two men. Pernety kept talking about ‘Revolution’, about ‘Moral awakening’, about ‘Our role as intellectuals’ in a clipped voice I found extremely irritating. He smoked a pipe and wore black leather shoes – these details still move me. Corvisart agonised about being born into a bourgeois family. He wanted desperately to forget the Parc
Monceau,
the tennis courts at Aix-les-Bains, the sugarplums from Plouvier’s he ate every week at his cousins’ house. He asked whether I thought it was possible to be a Socialist and a Christian. As for Jasmin, he wanted to see France fight harder. He had the highest esteem for Henri de Bournazel and knew the names of every star in the sky. Obligado published a ‘political journal’. ‘We must bear witness,’ he explained. ‘It’s our duty. I cannot stay silent.’ But silence is easily learned: a couple of kicks in the teeth will do the trick. Picpus showed me his fiancée’s letters. Have a little more patience: according to him, the nightmare would soon be over. We would be living in a peaceful world. We’d tell our children about the ordeals we had suffered. Saint-Georges, Marbeuf, and Pelleport graduated from the academy of Saint-Cyr with a thirst for battle and the firm resolve to meet death singing. As for myself, I thought of Cimarosa Square, where I’d have to turn in my daily report. They were lucky, these boys, to be able to daydream. The Vaugirard district encouraged such things. Tranquil, inviolate, like some remote hamlet. The very name ‘Vaugirard’ spoke of greenery, ivy, a little stream with mossy banks. In such a haven they could give free reign to their heroic imaginations. They had nothing to lose. I was the one they sent out to battle with the real world, and I was
fl
ailing against the current. The sublime, apparently, did not suit me. In the late afternoon, before boarding the métro, I would sit on a bench in the Place Adolphe Cherioux and, for a few last moments, soak up the peace of this village. A little house with a garden. A convent or maybe an old folks’ home? I could hear the trees whispering. A cat padded past the church. From nowhere, I heard a gently voice: Fred Gouin singing ‘Envoi de fleurs’. And I would forget I had no future. My life would take a different course. With a little patience, as Picpus used to say, I could come through this nightmare alive. I’d get a job as bartender in an
auberge
outside Paris,
BARMAN.
Here was something that seemed to suit my inclinations and my talents. You stand behind the bar. It protects you from the public. Nor are they hostile, they simply want to order drinks. You mix the drinks and serve them quickly. The most aggressive ones thank you.
BARMAN
was a much nobler profession than was generally accepted, the only one that deserved comparison with police work or medicine. What did it involve? Mixing cocktails. Mixing dreams, in a sense. Antidotes for pain. At the bar they beg you for it. Curaçao? Marie Brizard? Ether? Whatever they want. After two or three drinks they become maudlin, they reel, they roll their eyes and launch into the long litany of their sufferings
and
their crimes, plead with you to console them. Hitler, between hiccups, begs your forgiveness. ‘What are you thinking about, Lamballe?’ ‘About flies, Lieutenant.’ Once in a while he would invite me into his office for a little tête-à-tête. ‘I know you’ll carry out the assassination. I trust you, Lamballe.’ He took a commanding tone, staring at me with his blue-black eyes. Tell him the truth? But which truth? Double agent? Triple agent? By this time even I no longer knew who I was. Excuse me, Lieutenant,
I DO NOT EXIST.
I’ve never had an identity card. He would consider such frivolity unpardonable at a time when men were expected to steel themselves and display great strength of character. One evening I was alone with him. My weariness, like a rat, gnawed at everything around. The walls suddenly seemed swathed in dark velvet, a mist enveloped the room, blurring the outlines of the furniture: the desk, the chairs, the wardrobe. ‘What’s new, Lamballe?’ he asked in a faraway voice that surprised me. The Lieutenant stared at me as he always did, but his eyes had lost their metallic gleam. He sat at the desk, head tilted to the right, his cheek almost resting on his shoulder, in the pensive and forlorn posture of Florentine angels. ‘What’s new, Lamballe?’ he asked again, in the same tone he might have said: ‘It really doesn’t matter.’ His eyes were filled with such
gentleness,
such sadness that I thought for a moment Lieutenant Dominique had understood everything and had forgiven everything: my role as a double (or triple) agent, my helplessness at being a straw in the wind and whatever wrongs I had committed through cowardice or inadvertence. For the first time, someone was taking an interest in me. I found this compassion terribly moving. In vain, I tried to say some words of thanks. The Lieutenant’s eyes grew more and more compassionate, his craggy features softened. His chest sagged. Soon, all that remained of this brimming arrogance and vitality was a kindly, feeble old grandmother. The crashing waves of the outside world broke against the velvet walls. We were sunk down into darkness, into depths where our sleep would be undisturbed. Paris, too, was sinking. From the cabin I could see the searchlight on the Eiffel Tower: a lighthouse guiding us to shore. We would never come ashore. It no longer mattered. ‘Time for sleep, son,’ the Lieutenant murmured, ‘
SLEEP.’
His eyes shot a parting gleam into the shadows, sleep. He glanced one last time into the shadows ‘What are you thinking about, Lamballe?’ He shakes my shoulder. In a soldierly voice: ‘Prepare yourself for the assassination. The fate of the network is in your hands. Never surrender.’ He paces the room nervously. The hard edges of
objects
had returned. ‘Guts, Lamballe. I’m counting on you.’ The métro moves off again. Cambronne – La Motte-Picquet – Dupleix – Grenelle – Passy. 9 p.m. On the corner of the Rue Franklin and rue Vineuse, the white Bentley the Khedive had lent me in return for my services was waiting. The boys of the CKS would not have been impressed. Driving around in an expensive car these days implied activities of questionable morality. Only black marketeers and highly-paid informants could afford such luxuries. I didn’t care. Exhaustion dispelled the last of my scruples. I drove slowly across the Place du Trocadéro. A hushed engine. Russian leather seats. I liked the Bentley. The Khedive had found it in a garage in Neuilly. I opened the glove compartment: the owner’s registration papers were still there. It was clearly a stolen car. One day or another we would have to account for this. What would I plead in court when they read the charge sheet of the many crimes committed by the ‘Inter-commercial Company Paris-Berlin-Monte Carlo’? A gang of thugs, the judge would say. Profiting from other people’s suffering and confusion. ‘Monsters,’ Madeleine Jacob would write. I turned on the radio.