The Tenth Chamber (34 page)

Down the street, a single house lit up in stages. First the upper floor, then the lower floor. It was the cottage three doors from the café.

Luc slowed and pulled to the kerb.

Instinctively he checked the rear-view mirror. He could make out two men in dark clothes taking up positions on either side of the street. Through the windscreen he saw the same thing playing out down the road.

He was boxed in.

He got out of the car, shaking the pins and needles from his legs.

The front door of the lighted cottage opened. He stiffened. Maybe he’d be met with a shotgun blast. Like his diggers. Maybe this was how it ended.

She was dressed for a party with a festive blouse showing cleavage and a clingy black skirt, tight to mid-calf, almost vampy. She looked like she’d spent a lot of time on her make-up. Her lips were very red, aiming for luscious.

‘Hello, Luc,’ she said. ‘You’re on time.’ She was purring and friendly, as if he was expected for dinner.

He felt a deep queasiness, the kind that ripples through the gut when the first wave of flu hits home.

He forced himself to talk and the words came out strained and dry. ‘Hello, Odile.’

Her sitting-room cushions had absorbed decades of fireplace and cigarette residue. Above that smoky staleness Odile’s own sweet perfume hung heavily in the air.

They were alone. She gestured towards a wing chair by the front window. It was upholstered in damask with pink roses and green thorny stems, old-fashioned, like everything in the room. Luc half-expected a grandmother to dodder in on a cane.

‘Where’s Sara?’

‘Please sit. Would you like a drink?’

He stood his ground, arms folded. ‘I want to see Sara.’

‘You will, believe me. But we need to talk first.’

‘Is she safe?’

‘Yes. Will you sit?’

He acquiesced, his posture rigid, a stony anger on his face.

‘Now, a drink?’ she asked.

‘No, nothing.’

She sighed and sat across from him on the matching sofa. She pressed her legs together and lit a cigarette. ‘You don’t want one do you? I’ve never seen you smoke.’

He ignored her.

She dragged deeply. ‘It’s a terrible habit, but it’s done me no harm as far as I can tell.’

‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘It’s Sara I’m interested in, not you.’

If she was stung, she didn’t show it. ‘I want to talk about Hugo.’

What did she want, he thought. Absolution? ‘It wasn’t an accident, was it?’

She fiddled with her cigarette. ‘It
was
an accident.’

‘But he didn’t die in his car.’

Her black eyebrows arched in sharp surprise. ‘How did you know?’

‘Because he took a photo with his mobile
after
he was supposedly dead.’

‘What photo?’

‘A painting.’

‘Ah.’ She exhaled a cloud of smoke that obscured her face for a moment. ‘When you get involved with this kind of thing there are so many details. It’s too easy to miss one or two.’

‘Is that what Hugo was? A detail?’

‘No! I liked him. I really fancied the man.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘He came here, unexpectedly. He let himself in. He was about to see things he shouldn’t have seen. Jacques hit him. Too hard. He hit him too hard – that was the accident. I liked him. We could have had a good time together, a few laughs, maybe more. I had hopes.’

‘So you put him back in his car and ran it into a tree.’

‘Yes, of course. Not me, the men.’

‘You murdered my friend.’

She let the words slide off. ‘He didn’t suffer, you know. If you’re going to go, that’s the best way. Cleanly, without pain. I really did like him, Luc. I’m sorry he’s dead.’

Luc reached into his jeans pocket. She closely followed his hand perhaps expecting a knife or a gun. It was a piece of paper, a Xerox. He unfolded it and smoothed it on his knee, then half rose to hand it to her.

She stubbed out her cigarette and studied it carefully, her eye roaming from person to person, soaking up each image, seemingly lost in memories.

‘She looks a lot like you,’ Luc said pointedly, bringing her back.

She smiled. ‘Look how tall de Gaulle was! What a man. He kissed me three times. I can still feel his lips. They were hard.’

Luc leaned forward. ‘Okay, let’s stop playing. How old are you?’

Her response was to light another cigarette and to watch the curling smoke rise to the beamed ceiling. ‘You, know, by years, I’m not so young. But age is how you feel. I feel young. Isn’t that what counts?’

He asked again. ‘How old are you, Odile?’

‘Luc, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything you want to know. That’s why you’re here. To make you understand. We’ve done some bad things, but out of necessity. I’m not a monster. It’s important for you to see that. We’ve done great things for France. We’re patriots. We deserve to be left in peace.’

She began to ramble, chain-smoking and talking in spurts. After a while, she offered him a drink again and this time he accepted, numbly following her into the kitchen partly as a way to satisfy himself they were still alone. She didn’t object. Over the kitchen table there was a large clean rectangle, where something had hung on the wall for a long time. She caught him staring at the blank space but offered no explanation. She simply poured two brandies, took the bottle with her and led him back to the sitting room. Back in the wing chair he kept up his guard and started on the drink only after she drank hers first.

Before she was done talking, he’d allowed his glass to be refilled.

Her first strong childhood memory, the earliest one that really stuck, was toddling into her father’s café from the living quarters above.

The stairs connected the kitchen of their flat to the kitchen of the café. She always remembered the magical feeling of having two kitchens because it made her feel special. None of the other children in Ruac had two kitchens.

She was upstairs in her bedroom playing with a family of rag dolls when she heard two sharp bangs that frightened but also beckoned her. She was a sprig of a girl, a little black-haired beauty, and none of the men spotted her in their midst before she’d spent a fair amount of time mutely studying the scene.

She’d seen many dead animals, butchered animals, even put-down old horses with their brains blown out. So she approached the bloody sight on the café floor more with curiosity than revulsion.

She was mainly drawn to the young blond man, whose face was untouched owing to the trajectory of the bullet. His eyes were open and still glistening blue, retaining the last vestiges of life. They were friendly eyes. He had a kind face. She would have liked to play with him. The other man looked old and rough, like the men in the village and besides, his face was grotesque with a nasty exit wound through the eye socket.

Her father saw her first. ‘Odile! Get the hell out of here!’

She stayed put, staring.

Bonnet rushed forward and scooped her up with his thick arms and calloused hands and carried her up the stairs. She remembered the way his pomaded black hair smelled and the curve of his long black sideburns. He threw her down on her bed, slapped her hip with the back of his hand hard enough to hurt and called for his wife to take charge of her.

It was 1899. She was four years old.

She remembered being taken to visit the cave soon after the strangers were shot. Her father and some of the others had already been there, and while guards stood along the cliffs in case a walker happened by, the villagers were given the chance to see it one time.

Her father toted her on the steep parts of the climb, but he was holding her more tenderly than before, talking to her along the way, telling her she was going to see pretty pictures in the dark.

She remembered the hissing sound of the kerosene lamp and the colourful animals prancing in the darkness and the huge bird man who the grown ups said would scare her, but he did not.

And she remembered her mother holding on to her dress to prevent her wandering off the edge while the men built a dry wall of flat stones to hide the mouth of the cave and close it for ever.

She was a rebellious child. Some girls easily fell into the rhythms of village life and went with the flow without question. Not Odile. Early on she discovered books and magazines, one of the few village children who took to the printed page. There were snickers about the black-haired Canadian who had wandered into Ruac some nine months before Odile was born. Hadn’t he been some kind of professor? What ever happened to him? At that, the men would make snorting sounds and turn the conversation to Duval’s fat pigs and Canadian-flavoured rashers.

When she was eighteen, just before her initiation was to occur, she ran away to Paris, to live, to be free. She had a strong sense that once initiated, freedom would be as elusive as a butterfly winging over the cliffs. Her father, Bonnet, and his best friend, Edmond Pelay, the village doctor, went looking for her, but the city was too vast and they had no firm leads. Besides, trouble was brewing and they had to suck up their worries about Odile’s loose tongue and return to Ruac to deal with the coming storm.

Nobody knew exactly where the fire would spark, but all of Europe was dry tinder, with shifting alliances, land grabs, boiling anger and mistrust. As it happened, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian–Serb student assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. If that hadn’t started the war, it would have been something else. There was a sad inevitability to it.

Odile fell in with a bohemian crowd of artists and writers in Montmartre and when the young men in her circle went to war, she moved into the grimy studio of an older painter with a bad leg and a worse drinking habit who supported himself fitfully by driving a taxi. It was a time of danger and foreboding. The Germans were on the offensive and Paris was in their sights. Still, for a country girl from an insular village in the Périgord, the urban chaos was exhilarating and she drank the excitement like wine.

By the end of August 1914 the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force had been forced back to the Marne River on the outskirts of Paris. The two main German armies that had just polished off Belgium were advancing towards the capital.

On 6 September, the Germans were on the verge of breaking through the beleaguered ranks of the French Sixth Army. The word went out to the garrisons of Paris that reinforcements were needed at Marnes. The 7
^th
Division was at the ready but all military transport vehicles had been pressed into service and the rail system was choked to the point of paralysis. Then the military governor of Paris fatefully declared, ‘Why not use taxis?’

The call went out across the taxi ranks of Paris and within a few hours a convoy was forming at the Esplanade des Invalides. Odile heard the call. Her boyfriend was in the midst of a bender, blind drunk at the time. She jumped into action; the hell with him! The Germans were coming and she knew how to drive a car – that much she’d learned from her miserable beau. The red Renault taxi with its yellow-spoked wheels, one of the more beaten-up specimens on the streets of Paris, was at the ready so she jumped behind the wheel and joined the convoy.

She may or may not have been the only female driver that day; she liked to think she was an army of one. The column of taxis made their way empty to Dammartin where at dusk, at a railway siding, they met the infantrymen reinforcements who clambered five at a time into each taxi and took off in the dark without auto lights.

The boys who pulled Odile’s taxi, hooted and hollered at their good fortune all the way to the front. She kissed each one goodbye, let one of them squeeze her breast and began to turn back for another round trip when a volley of German artillery shells rained down.

There were ear-splitting booms and flashes of light. A spray of wet dirt landed in her open cab, covering her clothes and hair with a sticky mess. She looked down. There was a bloody palm in her lap and when she picked it up it was like holding a boy’s warm hand on a date. She threw it onto the ground, prayed it didn’t belong to one of the lads she’d just dropped off, and headed back to Paris for a second run.

That night, the taxis of Marnes delivered four thousand reinforcements who turned the tide and saved Paris and, for all anybody knew, France.

Odile wanted Luc to know.

After that night, Odile stayed at the front for weeks, helping the nurses, doing whatever she could for the wounded boys. She stayed until some kind of fever almost killed her. Exhausted and shocked by the calamities of war, she limped back to Ruac and allowed her mother to tuck her into her old bed, where under the soft covers she sobbed for the first time in years.

Her father came to talk to her when he was assured she wouldn’t break down. He wasn’t one for feminine emotions. He had only two gruff questions for her: ‘Are you ready to join us now? Are you prepared to take the initiation?’

She’d seen enough of the outside world to last a lifetime. Ruac was far from the madness of the trenches.

‘I’m ready,’ she answered.

War came again soon enough.

This time the Germans were more successful invaders and as occupiers of all of France the villagers of Ruac couldn’t avoid them. Bonnet was now the mayor. His father, the previous mayor, had passed away as the Second World War began.

The new mayor wrote out his father’s death certificate with the old man’s thick fountain pen, falsifying the date of birth, as the previous mayor had done for generations. And his father was duly buried in the village plot, which had surprisingly few stones considering its antiquity.

Furthermore, comporting with their custom, the stones had the name of the deceased only. There were no chiselled dates of birth or death, and since the plot was tucked away, down a lane through a private farm, no one seemed to notice the oddity.