God Speed the Night (21 page)

“I would not for a moment suspect you of clandestine involvement,” Von Weber said. “Please tell me about these people—in a relaxed fashion. What are they like?”

Moissac colored at the solemn reassurance. “René Labrière is the man I know best. He is not a very important man—I am speaking now of before the Occupation…”

“The photographer. Why do you make a point of his unimportance?”

“I am trying to give you a full picture, Colonel.”

“Give me fact and let me decide its significance, eh?”

“Yes, Colonel. But I do not have what you would call fact: at the moment, I have only suspicions.”

“There must be some fact on which you have based suspicion,” Von Weber said with an edge that launched Moissac instantly into his story of the arrival of the stranger that night at Gaucher’s, the subsequent discovery of him with a bride among the harvesters, the coincidence of René’s presence in
Au Bon Coin
and Madame Belloir’s visit to his studio for a photograph to send to parents whose correct address she did not seem to have. He omitted no detail: Von Weber could well have intelligence of his own. Finally he described his experience in Fauré.

“What was the message old Belloir gave you for his son?”

“If
the man is his son. The message was that the cow had calved, a fine bull calf.”

“Did you see it?”

“Beg pardon, Colonel?”

“Did you see the calf? Did you
ask
to see it?”

“No, Colonel. There would have been an excuse, I am sure. The message is code.”

“Excuses are as good as evidence. I should think as a police officer you would consider that gospel.”

“It is so,” Moissac said. “But I preferred to show no sign of suspicion to the old one. It is the young man from whom I wish to learn the meaning. Old Belloir is who he says he is, and he will stay where he is until he dies.”

“My compliments,” Von Weber said with the benevolence of the schoolmaster meting out praise. “You have reasoned well.”

The colonel’s orderly brought aperitifs on a silver tray. Moissac was flattered, but as he sipped
anis
, he remembered Madame Lebel and Madame Lebel’s daughter, and the eerie lapse by which Maman lost track of a generation in time. For just a fleeting instant Moissac wondered if, twenty years from now, tasting
anis
, he would remember sipping it with a man he was trying on his soul to believe a benefactor of France, a German of class, family, and taste who sometimes treated him with a deference he received from no Frenchman.

Von Weber brushed the moisture from his lip. “Shall we speak now of the young Belloirs, if, since you question it, they are the Belloirs? If they are not, what do you see as their purpose?”

“They are very intelligent. Not like the others this year. There are not many students. I will say it, Colonel. Since I no longer suspect him of being a Gestapo man, it occurs to me they might be members of the
Maquis
. The harvesting would make an excellent cover for recruiting.”

“It is interesting that you equate intelligence with terrorism.”

“They are better educated, that is what I meant.”

Von Weber set his glass down carefully. He took off his spectacles, polished them, and put them on again. Moissac braced himself. “Let us reconstruct saying the couple are Belloirs. A medical student and his wife come home from Paris for the harvest. They cannot have been home in many months, and yet within a day or so, they set out among strangers to harvest the fields of strangers. Most curious.”

“My very logic.”

“Thank you,
Monsieur le Préfet
. And does your logic not suggest that if they are not Belloirs, they may be Jews trying to escape across the Spanish border?”

Moissac tried hard to control the muscles of his face. He did not dare to lie. “No, Colonel.”

“And yet it happens quite frequently, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, Colonel. I am always alert to it.”

“To you they must seem very Aryan. You mistook him for a Gestapo man.” Von Weber sat and laughed silently. He ended it by rubbing his mouth with the handkerchief on which he had polished his glasses. He threw the handkerchief into the bottom drawer of his desk. Instantly, his orderly brought him a clean one. “Ah, Moissac, Moissac, love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.”

Moissac shook his head that he did not understand, and shaking it, he felt the weight of his jowls.

“I am fond of Shakespeare,” Von Weber went on. “I used to teach school, you know. Have I told you that?”

“No, Colonel, but I have thought so.”

“And do you think I am right now about the Belloirs?”

“I do not think so, but it is possible.”

“What you mean, Moissac, is that you do not feel so.”

Moissac shrugged.

“Some men feel truth,” the colonel said, “and some men feel so much that is not true, the truth eludes them like a rabbit a St. Bernard.”

Even the choice of dogs in the comparison made him uncomfortable, Moissac having but the moment before felt jowlish.

“It would be pleasant for you perhaps if they were Jews,” the colonel suggested.

“I do not understand,” Moissac admitted again.

“Think about it: you are responsible to me for the clearance of all these harvesters. Is that not so?”

“In St. Hilaire, yes, Colonel. That is why I have consulted you.”

“In the district, Moissac. That is my jurisdiction. You will operate in liaison with Military Security, but that should not be too difficult…After all, your first suspicion was security, wasn’t it?” He sat thinking for a moment. “Do you enjoy the hunt?”

“Sundays, I do a bit. Yes, Colonel.”

“The wild boar is my favorite. You would have thought so, wouldn’t you?”

Moissac was not sure he was not himself being baited. He would not think a schoolteacher the likeliest hunter of the wild boar at all. He took a chance: the colonel did not have much more humor than he had himself. “Yes, Colonel. I would have thought that.”

“Why?”

“It is one of the oldest sports of aristocrats. Is that not so, Colonel?”

“It is exactly so.” Von Weber looked at his watch. Moissac started to rise. “Don’t go for a moment. I should suppose my ancestors would have hunted the boar through this very country. There is nothing like it, Moissac, except possibly what you are engaged in now. He’s a clever fellow obviously.”

“Yes.”

“And he will be protecting the female of the species?”

Moissac flushed to the roots of his hair. The German studied him for a few seconds. He leaned back then and said as though unleashing a dog: “Go get them!”

As Von Weber again hiked his cuff to look at his watch, Moissac got up. “But suppose it turns out that they are not Jews, Colonel?”

Von Weber took his arm. “That would be a pity, but I have every confidence in that great nose of yours,
mon préfet.”
He walked him to the door of the Rotunda. “The court martial has acquitted Lieutenant Heinrich, by the way. The old woman was adjudged mad.”

“I have said so myself,” Moissac said.

“You would agree, then, a bullet was a mercy?”

“I could not say that, Colonel, and long remain a peace officer of the republic.”

“You could under the New Order. You ought to think that way, Moissac. It is a great tonic for men who are not sure of their own worth.”

Moissac left Von Weber’s office in a state of high excitement, something he had not been able to conceal from the German so that he pretended it was the prospect of the hunt that had infected him. And in a way it was, but only in a way. Moissac could not account even to himself what was happening to him. He went out from the
Hôtel de ville
feeling in all ways the German’s equal, for which he supposed he would have to thank Von Weber himself. It did not even seem extraordinary to him that the colonel should treat him with such camaraderie.

To Maman it seemed extraordinary that he should speak to him at all. “There will be something he wants of you, some dirty work.”

“A policeman’s work. That’s all. Some people call it dirty, some duty. It has profited us, maman, and until lately you have praised me for it.”

“I will not entertain the German in this house, Théophile. I will not cook for him.”

“I have not asked it. I don’t intend to now, but if I did, I would expect you to do your duty too.”

She looked up at him, the little black eyes trying to pry their way into his. “It is not the German we are really talking about, is it?”

He did not answer. He could not meet her eyes. Instead he looked at the goose where she had hung it from the beam over the sink, naked as sin, stripped of its feathers.

“Come, I want to show you something,” she said.

She led the way through the house to the front door which was rarely used, overlooking the river. She opened the door. On the dark wood a huge scythe had been painted in white. They spoke simultaneously.

“What is the meaning, Théophile?”

“When did it happen, maman?”

“Tell me what it means.”

“There was a woman shot in the field.”

“I know that. By a German. What does it have to do with us?”

“She was a crazy woman, but the Resistance is making a martyr of her. That is their symbol now.”

She gave up trying to get a direct answer from him and resorted to an old weapon. “You will have to paint the whole door white. And maybe yourself as well. A pretty sight.”

He caught her by the wrist. “Don’t you make fun of me, maman. You have my thanks for what I am. I happen to like it just now.”

As always when he asserted his will over hers, and he kept forgetting this until pricked by necessity, she gave way. She made her arm go limp in his grasp. “I have always liked what you are. That is why I get angry with you. You are not a collaborationist, and that is what they mean, isn’t it?”

He let go her arm and closed the door. “I don’t know. I want a change of linen packed, maman. I may be going away for a day or two.”

She began to rub her wrist. He had not held her that firmly. “Take me with you, Théophile. You need me to look after you.”

“No, maman. It is not possible.”

“It is not possible because you do not want me. You can’t even look at me. You hide your eyes like your father did. I used to loathe him for it.”

“Why did you marry him then?”

“Close the parlor door,” she said, and herself returned to the kitchen.

Moissac closed it. Why they had a parlor he did not know, except to entertain the monsignor in. The monsignor, he thought, would wait a while for another invitation.

Maman brought the plates from the warming oven to the table. She looked at her bony hands and twisted the wedding band, much too loose except that the joint was swollen so the ring would not come off. “He was such a pathetic man, always trying to please me. Never a complaint…”

Moissac had thought she had chosen not to answer and he wished now that he had not started her on his father.

“Like St. Joseph,” she said suddenly, and with a defiant toss of her head. “I have always thought St. Joseph pathetic.”

“That’s enough, maman.”

“I thought you’d say that.” She was enjoying herself. It happened the instant he reproved her. “Oh yes, a really pathetic man, pushed from one thing into another with no idea of what was going on.”

He caught her by the elbows and shook her even as she had shaken him as a child. “Aren’t you afraid at your age to talk like that?”

“Of course I’m afraid. That’s why I do it.”

“I do not understand you.”

“Nor I you, my son.”

He had just removed his coat and sat down to the table when the telephone rang. He went into the vestibule and answered it. The call was from the prefecture. An answer had come from Paris: Jean Belloir and his wife had returned to their flat in Rue Vanquelin after several days’ absence. If further information were required, he was to so instruct.

Moissac wished no further information for the moment. In terms of time it was just barely possible for the couple to have left the harvesters and returned to Paris: that this was not so was the first thing of which he had to be certain. He instructed the desk man to have René picked up that afternoon, and to have him available for interrogation on Moissac’s return.

When he hung up the phone he saw Maman standing in the doorway. “So that was all Von Weber wanted from you, Théophile? The arrest of your friend.”

“Do you not think there is something for which to arrest him, maman?”

“There is always something for any man. If that wasn’t so where would the martyrs come from? Men make martyrs. They are not made in heaven.”

“You are in a strange mood, maman. It is a shame I have to go so soon. Put up some soup for me and let it cool.” Moissac glanced at himself in the hall mirror, wishing he had shaved more carefully. He lingered, studying his face. It was the dark beard as well as the nose.

“What do you see, Théophile? Open your eyes and look well, my son. Then tell me what you see and you will feel better.”

“I feel just fine. Please, maman, the soup.”

A few minutes later she watched him pour wine from his glass into the soup. “You will not permit me to go in the car with you?”

“No. I do not know what may happen or when I will get back. I will send someone to paint the door.”

“I will paint it.”

“If you like.”

“I do not like, but I will do what must be done.”

“Leave it. I will probably be home tonight,” he said, exasperated at her melodrama. “You sound as though I were going away forever.”

“That is how I feel. But that is because I want to feel that way. I admit it. Self-pity is an overcoat you slip into very easily in old age. It is a shoddy fabric, but no one cares. Everybody knows they won’t have to wear it for long. I will pack your valise now.”

M
ARC AND GABRIELLE HAD
worked apart that day. It was Gabrielle’s wish and Marc had responded by assigning himself to the machine, working at the grain spout, filling and replacing the bags. In fact, he had placed himself as far apart from her as possible, behavior he recognized as more becoming an adolescent than a man three days widowed.