A Prince Without a Kingdom (13 page)

“My dear . . .” came a voice from below her.

The Cat bent over to push open the window and pop her head inside.

“Are you feeling better, Your Highness?”

“Much better,” replied the little old lady, drawing on her reserves of energy. Her complexion had gone from the color of porridge to that of fresh butter.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, my dear, when it comes to petticoats, how many do princesses have to wear? Because I’m awfully hot.”

“You can take off as many layers as you like.”

“Was I good?” whispered the princess, as if she had just come off stage.

“Very good. You were terrific.”

The Princess of Albrac gave a modest smile.

In real life, her name was Marie-Antoinette Boulard.

It had all begun four weeks earlier in Paris.

One morning, before leaving for work at the Quai des Orfèvres, the superintendent had informed his mother that his Russian teacher would be paying another visit the following evening. They were both in the kitchen. Madame Boulard kept pouring the coffee without showing any signs of interest.

“I’ve put your ham-and-cheese sandwiches in your satchel,” she told her son.

Ever since his first day at school, in the previous century, the superintendent had set out every morning with his packed lunch.

As soon as Boulard had turned the corner at the end of the street, his mother put on her slippers and rushed downstairs to pay a visit to the concierge.

“It’s me,” whispered Madame Boulard through the glass.

The door opened.

“It’s set for tomorrow,” she said.

They stared at each other and had an emotional holding of hands. The big day had come at last. Their plan had been ready for some time.

The next evening, at about ten o’clock, there was a ring at the Boulards’ door.

The superintendent and his mother were finishing off their dinner. It was dark outside. Boulard seemed anxious and checked his watch.

“Is that your Rasputin?” asked his mother.

“It’s too early.”

“I’d better go and see.”

“No. Wait.”

Boulard pushed back his chair and went into the entrance hall. His mother strained to hear.

The superintendent returned.

“It’s Madame Dussac. She says there’s something she wants you to hear on the wireless.”

For several weeks now, the concierge kept popping up at unexpected hours of the day and night to let Madame Boulard know about interesting programs on the radio.

“She enjoys getting me to listen to her favorite songs,” Madame Boulard explained to her son as she stood up and folded her napkin.

“Take your time,” said the superintendent, relieved that his mother would be out of the way during his interview with the terrible Vlad.

Madame Boulard and Madame Dussac headed downstairs to the caretaker’s lodgings, where they turned out the lights and mounted guard.

At five to eleven, one of the main double doors opened.

“Here he comes,” whispered Madame Dussac.

The Vulture walked past the two women, who remained hidden in the dark behind the net curtain. He was holding a hat. His head had been shaved, and the top of it gleamed under the light.

Vlad went through the glass door that led to the stairs, on the right. Every time he trod on a step, the handrail shuddered from top to bottom. He rang the bell. Up on the sixth floor, the door could be heard creaking open. The two women hugged each other to summon their courage.

When they emerged from their hideout, Madame Boulard had a crowbar on her shoulder and Madame Dussac had a bayonet gun from the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

They tiptoed as far as the staircase, where they laid down their weapons. Madame Boulard was rather out of breath. They knelt in front of the first step and rolled up the hall carpet, whose screws had been removed in advance. A large double trapdoor appeared. It had been fitted into the parquet floor for coal provisions fifty years earlier and was no longer in use, since everybody had switched over to gas. The door led down to a cellar. Madame Boulard used her crowbar as a control lever, while Madame Dussac slid her hands into the gap. Five minutes later, the lid had been heaved to one side and there was now a lion trap at the bottom of the stairs: a gaping hole over a pit that was four meters deep, with a heap of sodden coal at the bottom.

Madame Dussac carried Madame Boulard on her shoulders in order to unscrew the lightbulbs in the stairwell. It was pitch-black between the second and ground floors.

“We’re done; put me down!” said Madame Boulard, who felt a giddy turn coming on.

Stepping carefully around the hole, the women reconvened at the bottom of the stairs.

“Good luck. I’m going to my post,” declared Madame Dussac, whose curly hair had come tumbling loose out of her bun.

Marie-Antoinette’s dimples had also rediscovered their youth. The two women shook hands again, and their eyes shone.

Madame Dussac was now back at her lodgings, standing sentinel with the bayonet. Her mission was to prevent the return of the lovers from the second floor. Since four o’clock that afternoon, she had ticked off the names of all the residents as they headed up to their apartments, but, as usual, the lovers from the second floor still weren’t back. They had married at the beginning of the summer and hadn’t yet understood that an upstanding couple should be home by eight o’clock. They risked foiling the master plan.

Madame Boulard remained at the bottom of the stairs. The building was silent. As she grew accustomed to the darkness, the superintendent’s mother was able to make out the dim glow from the bulb switched on in front of the concierge’s premises.

She was thinking about what had led her to play cowboys and Indians at the age of eighty-seven. It had taken her a long time to realize that her son was no longer a free agent. At the beginning, she had assumed that he was caught up in some dodgy business. She had decided to give him a talking-to. She remembered doing exactly that when the young Auguste had been involved in marble trafficking on the school playground. There was no reason why it couldn’t work again sixty years later.

But she hardly recognized Boulard after his recent visits from the Russian. This was altogether more serious than marbles. Her son was in danger; she was convinced of that. For as long as Rasputin was free, the superintendent could not be.

Madame Boulard clutched the metal bar firmly with both hands. She had just seen something pass by above her. A cat? Could cats cling to the ceiling? And anyway, where had it come from? There was no access to the small interior courtyard from the first three floors.

“Are you there?” A voice addressed her from a few paces away.

She hurled the crowbar as hard as she could in its direction. The bar could be heard spinning through the air, but it never landed. Madame Boulard held her breath.

“We mustn’t make any noise,” came the voice. “I can explain everything. I’m on your side.”

“Who are you?”

“The person you’re trying to trap isn’t alone. There are two men waiting for him on the sidewalk. If your man doesn’t come out, they’ll destroy all of you.”

“How did you find me in the dark?” whispered Madame Boulard.

“You wear the same perfume as my mother. I saw it on the chest of drawers in your sitting room.”

“What? You’ve been inside my apartment?”

“Certainly not. I spotted it through the window.”

“Heavens above! On the sixth floor?”

“Look, we’ve got to get a move on.”

Madame Boulard’s head was spinning.

“Tell me what I should do.”

Very gently, the Cat put down the iron bar, which she had caught in midair.

“Why don’t you tell me what you were intending to do?”

“I wanted to make him fall down a hole.”

“A hole?”

“Yes, a hole.”

The Cat smiled. A hole. A good old technique from the Stone Age. From her perch up on the roof, she had seen the comings and goings of Madame Boulard and the concierge, and she had guessed that they were up to something. But a hole! She would never have expected that.

“Brilliant. And where is your hole?”

“Right here. In front of me.”

Just then, a door could be heard opening at the top of the stairwell. It closed again. The sound of footsteps on the stairs followed.

“We’ve got to block off that hole,” whispered the Cat.

Vlad was already on the fifth floor.

“It’s too heavy.”

The Cat groped her way toward a trembling Madame Boulard.

“Come on!” she coaxed as she felt the giant lid beneath her hands.

The stairs creaked with each step of the Vulture.

He stopped on the second landing. The rest of the staircase was in darkness now. He continued his descent, but more slowly. Vlad was muttering something. He couldn’t see anymore.

By the time he set foot on the ground floor, the trapdoor had been closed up again and two shadows had tucked themselves under the stairwell just in time.

Phew!
thought the Cat.

The carpet!
thought Madame Boulard.

Vlad took one step before going headlong.

He let out a raft of Russian swearwords, then stood up slowly. He kept cursing as he hunted for the exit, putting one foot gingerly in front of the other. Vlad suddenly realized that he was no longer wearing his hat. He let out another torrent of unrepeatable words and started groping around in the dark.

The Cat felt her elderly accomplice squeeze up against her, with something in her hands: the Vulture’s hat had rolled as far as Madame Boulard. Seizing it from her, the Cat tossed the hat toward Vlad. He wasted no time in finding it, and was soon crawling off again on all fours toward the exit.

The light was stronger by the main entrance. Vlad stood up in a dignified manner and walked toward his reflection in the concierge’s glass door, where he began to straighten up his clothes. His nose was bleeding from the fall. He wiped it clumsily, then dried his hands on his beard.

Invisible behind the glass, Madame Dussac was pointing her gun at him from the gloom. They were opposite each other, separated by a pane of glass and a net curtain.

As he leaned forward to adjust the angle of his hat on his head, Vlad thought he could see the ghost of a woman with a bayonet.

His first reaction was to take a step backward, but then he pressed his eyes to the pane. He wanted to make quite sure. Madame Dussac was horrified at the spectacle of the Vulture’s huge face crushed against the glass. Blood trickled down the pane. She was about to scream when the sound of giggling could be heard coming from the street outside.

“The lovers,” whispered Madame Dussac gratefully.

The main door swung open, and the couple appeared. The Vulture peeled himself off the glass and turned his head.

There they were, arm in arm. The husband had a flower behind one ear; the young wife was singing. Madame Dussac made the sign of the cross. God bless the lovers.

Vlad turned around and hesitated a second before making for the exit. He crossed paths with a couple whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears. The young woman curtsied, holding her shoes in one hand. They walked past the concierge’s lookout. The Vulture disappeared.

The lovers nearly tripped on the rolled-up carpet. When their sweet nothings had faded away on the staircase, Madame Boulard and the Cat rushed into the concierge’s lodgings. They found her sitting at the kitchen table, deathly pale.

Up on the sixth floor, the superintendent had fallen asleep, crushed by the Vulture’s latest threats. Vlad had given him one month to find Vango.

Down in Madame Dussac’s lodgings, the night was spent preparing for the future. The Cat had convinced both women that Vlad’s grip on Boulard was through his mother.

“Through me?”

“Yes. Boulard fears for your life.”

“My little darling!”

By taking his mother out of the picture, everything would be easier. Madame Boulard shivered.

“Me?”

“Yes. You must vanish.”

Madame Boulard rolled her eyes at the ceiling.

“Vanish? Heavens above, but where to?”

The Cat had an idea. She couldn’t be sure about it yet and would have to make some arrangements. She knew somebody abroad.

“Abroad?” Madame Boulard balked, already imagining herself in the jungle, eating insects. She had never been abroad.

The Cat arranged to meet the women two weeks later.

On the agreed day, thanks to an excellent program on the wireless, all three of them convened again. The music covered their voices. To the tune of “You Who Pass By Without Seeing Me,” sung by Jean Sablon, the Cat explained her idea. Madame Boulard heard her out and was clearly both won over and delighted to discover that she would also need to assume a new identity. It was her idea to become the Princess of Albrac in exile.

One Sunday at the end of the month of August, the superintendent woke up at ten o’clock in the morning. He leaped out of bed. His mother hadn’t come in to wake him up for their weekly trip to the market.

“Mother?”

He stumbled toward the kitchen.

“Mother!”

On the table, he found a few words that, after a little advice about warm winter clothes (scarf, hat, woolen socks), concluded with: