The Statement (14 page)

Fat chance. How could I be like everybody else when I was mixed up with Pierre. Did he ever love me? If you asked me to tell you what Pierre’s like in one word I’d say ‘liar’. Everything was lies. Even the story about the FFI shooting him was a lie. I was on the toilet one day, a couple of years after that, we were living in Hyères then, and Jacquot had come to see him and they didn’t know I was at home. And I heard Jacquot say, ‘I don’t know. I’m fed up. We still have the guns. We could have another go at it.’

‘It’s too risky,’ Pierre said. ‘Look what happened last time.’

‘That was your fault,’ Jacquot said. ‘You panicked.’

‘I never panicked. And I told you. It’s not like when we were in Paris. Marseille is different. It’s lousy with
flics
.’

‘It wasn’t lousy with
flics
, that day,’ Jacquot said. ‘There was only one
flic
and it was an accident that he saw us. If you hadn’t run, he wouldn’t have fired.’

‘How do you know?’ Pierre said. ‘Look, what we’re doing now is easy. Sure, it’s boring, day after day sitting with an iron in your hand. But it’s a lot less risky than what we did in Paris. I’m not going back to that.’

‘So you’re not interested?’ Jacquot said.

‘No.’

I didn’t ask Pierre. He’d lie. I asked Jacquot. ‘I heard you this afternoon. You told me it was the FFI who tried to shoot Pierre that time. Were the pair of you lying to me?’

‘Just trying to protect you.’

‘And what’s this about an iron? What’s that mean? I thought you and Pierre were doing factory work at Renault.’

Jacquot laughed. ‘Is that what he told you? How could we? We’ve no papers.’

‘So what
is
this?’

‘It’s a job. They’re fake banknotes. They look too new. Our job is to iron them and fold them until they can pass for real.’

‘And how long have you been doing this?’

‘Ever since we came to Hyères. Look, what else can we do? The Yids and the commies are out for our hides. The courts are full of commie judges. The
flics
will get a medal if they bring us in. That’s why Pierre moved here. There isn’t any legal job we can do. Do you know how boring it is to sit there day after day ironing banknotes that you can’t even spend because if you stole one of those false notes the guys we work for would break our legs. Anyway, I’m fed up. I’m going back to Paris.’

Poor Jacquot. He did. And two years later. Cancer.

She heard him call from the kitchen.

‘Nicole?’

She didn’t answer.

He knocked on the bedroom door.

‘Nicole, are you there?’

Bobi covered his head with his paws and began to whimper. She got up, went to Bobi and comforted him. ‘Stop that knocking,’ she said. ‘You’re frightening Bobi.’

‘I’ll do more than frighten him,’ he said. ‘Unless you open up.’

And he would too. She unlocked the door.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘It’s only for a few days. I’ll be out of here by Monday. In the meantime, if you want peace and quiet, just do as I say. I don’t want to leave this flat. I want my meals cooked here and cooked properly. Buy some good wine. Do as you’re told. And if you do, I promise you Bobi will be a happy doggy. Won’t you, Bobi?’

He went over to Bobi and put his hand out to pat him. But Bobi knew. Bobi couldn’t see him but he knew. That dog was uncanny. He snapped at that hand, Bobi who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who never in sixteen years had snapped at anybody.

‘Leave Bobi alone,’ she said. ‘Do you hear me, leave him alone!’

‘It’s up to you whether I leave him alone or not.’

No human being was capable of the love Bobi had for her. And she knew it.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Come on, Bobi. Let’s go shopping.’

14

From the very first time he saw Nicole he had lusted after her. He remembered lying on the couch in the living room of her little flat on Rue Paradis, seeing her pass by, half-naked, going to the shower or into her room, unable to touch her because of Jacquot. She was just a kid, jailbait, and living with her like that, he thought about it all the time. It was not being able to touch her that made him so hot for her, but it was also a time when he was changing, when God had come back into his life. In the forties he had drifted away from his boyhood faith, from mass and confession and the memory of kneeling down nightly with his parents to say the family rosary. He had lived a rough life in the years he fought for the Maréchal and for France. There were no saints in the
milice
. But then, in those first post-war years, the years of the hold-ups, the black market, the counterfeit notes, he had met Abbé Feren and begun to think again about heaven and hell. In those days, living in Nicole’s little flat, he had begun to pray again. Nightly. He had been condemned to death
in absentia
. The thought of death, of capture, led him back to God. And to this Abbé who understood what it was like to have been in the
milice
, and be abandoned when the communists won the war. ‘My son, of course you have committed sins in the past,’ Abbé Feren said. ‘But God’s mercy is infinite. He forgives our sins and asks only that we sin no more.’ He wanted to believe the Abbé. In those years everyone wanted to be forgiven. The clergy, the politicians in the National Assembly, people in shops and factories and on the farms, every sensible person said that what happened in the war years was best forgotten, that the war trials were revenge, not justice, that the Resistance had been run by the communists and now they planned to hand the country over to Stalin. And, of course, who did the communists hate more than an ex-
milicien
? He was a victim of the times, wasn’t that the truth? He wanted to get married, to hide away from the past, to live a quiet life. Abbé Feren knew about the temptations of the flesh. He knew that it wasn’t possible to get a marriage certificate. But the Abbé was a saint. He told him he would marry him in the only way that counts, in church in the sight of God. And after Abbé Feren had married him to Nicole in the sight of God, there was a time, and he remembered it well, when he would lie in bed on a Sunday morning, waiting for her to come back from mass, and when she would come into the bedroom in her Sunday best, her missal in her hand, he would make her take off all her clothes and lie there on the bed, and he’d lie there beside her with his cock sticking up, looking at her naked body, telling himself that he could have her any way he wanted and all the time and be without sin in doing it. Never before had he fucked a girl without knowing he’d have to tell it in confession. But now that he had returned to God, now that he tried to live in a state of grace, now that Abbé Feren had heard his confession and given him absolution, it was a good thing he was no longer tempted by that sin. The Abbé, and later Monsignor Le Moyne, always thought of him as a devout Catholic who obeyed the commandments. And he was. He had a young wife with a lovely milk-white arse and there was no sin in doing it.

Of course, later, he fell from the true path. In the sixties, when he had to leave Hyères and start a life of living in monasteries and presbyteries, no matter how much he prayed, there was always temptation, loose girls on street corners, showing their thighs. He was only human. He had money. Money from the priests, money from his typing, and, later on, the Commissaire’s payments. So he could afford it. But each time he did it, each time he fell from grace, he did not go to Monsignor Le Moyne, his confessor, but anonymously, to some
curé
who didn’t know him. Those were special confessions in which he confessed just that one sin.

‘Come on, Bobi. This way.’

He heard the front door shut. Blind old beast, it should have been put down years ago. And Nicole. Poor bitch, what use is she to anyone now? Old and ugly, no kids, no relatives, except for me, if you can call me a relative, her brother’s dead long ago, what kind of life is it for her, living in this little shithole of an apartment, taking the bus to La Napoule six days a week to clean up other people’s dirt. She’s not even religious. Her religion is that dog. 6,000 francs I gave her. How long would it take her to earn that much? She’ll spend it on the dog. Well, that’s all right. It’s Yid money. Give it to the dog. It’s all part of what’s happening now, I know it, the roulette wheel’s turned against me. It’s bad-luck time.

He got up, went to the kitchen dresser and opened the bottom drawer. A half-used litre of
gros rouge
and a bottle of cheap
porto
. He took a glass and tried the
porto
. Too sweet, but better than nothing. I told her to buy good wine. She’ll do as she’s told. Remember, no one in the whole world knows I’m here, not even the Commissaire. I told him Aix. It’s risky, though. He might phone there to check up on me. I’ll ring him Sunday. I’ll say I’m still in Aix.

He finished the
porto
then went into her bedroom and lay down on her bed. He felt his pulse. Eighty-six. Calm down. I need a rest. I need a good night’s sleep. This bed’s big enough for both of us. I’ll eat a big dinner, drink some wine, go to sleep. Not to dream. No dreams.

But he dreamed.

Legrand was excited. ‘Execution squad! Execution squad! Lecussan told Knab we’ll shoot fifteen. OK? Who will I take?’

‘Come with me.’ He got up from his desk, from the papers, the damn papers that took up so much of his time. This was more like it. As chief of the second section it’s my pick, my authority. Now I’ll see the fear in their eyes.

In the big room there were forty-six of them, most of them Resistance, plus some Jews rounded up in the past month. Which was which? He went in with Legrand behind him. He stood very straight, his beret at a proper angle, his trousers, shirt, boots, immaculate. Prisoners who were walking around in the big room stopped at the sight of him. The others lying on the stinking straw on which they slept rolled over and got to their feet, afraid that they’d be kicked if they did not. He shouted an order. At once, six
miliciens
came running upstairs and into the big room. They pointed sub-machine guns at the prisoners. The prisoners stood, stock still. They did not look at the men with guns. They looked at him. It was the moment of joy, the moment of power. I am God. I am God!

Legrand looked to him. ‘At your orders, my Commandant.’

He stood silent for almost a minute. Then he said, ‘Drop your trousers. All of you.’

They started unbuttoning. Trousers fell around their ankles. He gestured. ‘Pull down your pants. Get your pricks out.’

Forty-six men turned in his direction, all of them with their pricks hanging out. He took his revolver from its holster, and went to the first man. With the barrel of the revolver, he jerked the penis up for a better look, then the next, the next, the next. The fourth man had a black-looking prick, circumcised. ‘Jew?’ he asked.

The man hung his head and was silent. ‘Yes, he’s a Yid,’ Legrand said.

He nodded to the miliciens
. They herded the man into a corner. He felt, now, the rush of power, the moment of life and death. Keep them in suspense. The Resistants don’t know what I’m after. He walked to the next group of men and again, flicked their penises with his revolver barrel. Again, the fourth man was a Yid. He gestured. Legrand began to grin. The other boys too. They knew the game now. But he did not smile. He felt the rush of power go right to his own prick. He had a hard-on. He picked only Yids, only those whose foreskins had been cut off long ago by some stinking rabbi.

But there were only fourteen Yids in that batch of forty-six. Never mind. He lined them up in a row. ‘Pull up your trousers,’ he told the room. ‘That’s all, for now.’

But then Legrand asked the question and he answered it. He said the thing about the Yids, the thing that fucked everything, the thing that made this dream come back, again, again, the bad-luck dream, the thing the Yids quoted in the complaint against him, the thing that made it a crime against humanity.

‘There’s only fourteen here, chief. Lecussan’s asked for fifteen.’

‘We’re short one Yid,’ he said. ‘I want Yids, only Yids. That’s all. Dismiss.’

Fourteen Yids. He had driven out with Legrand in the car he’d requisitioned from Lehmann before he sent Lehmann to Auschwitz in that last big draft of Jews, ordered by Monsieur Le Préfet. It was a yellow Panhard roadster, the top down, very smart. The execution squad and their prisoners followed in a farm truck. When they arrived at the cemetery, he ordered the Jews to be lined up against the cemetery wall. ‘Are the cards ready?’ he asked Drumont. He had ordered fourteen pieces of cardboard with the Jews’ names on them.

‘Why the cards, chief?’ Legrand asked.

‘To impress the population.’

The boys in the firing squad laughed at that. They were nervous. Firing squads were always nervous.

He liked executions. They were a form of war. The enemy was cornered and in his power. He was God. He gave the order.

Sub-machine guns. They fired in bursts, but even with sub-machine guns, you had to make sure. There must be no witness. He and Legrand walked down the line, giving the
coup de grâce,
a bullet in the back of the neck. That stopped their moaning. And their twitching.