Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel) (33 page)

“It is the trivial things that surprise you the most, that shock the most—because these sorts of reminders are everywhere. They are things you would think inconsequential and so easy to tamp down in one’s mind. But Annabelle told me that all those years later, she would flinch to suddenly see a striped pattern on clothing, on a package, on a wall. And when she told me why, of course I understood. I not only understood, I understood to the core of my being. The same loathing came to fill me, too. What it reminded her of, of course, was the black and white identifying stripes that the prisoners were forced to wear, to wear until they died. Many of the survivors of the camps carried this image with them forever, Annabelle had told me, and couldn’t bear the reminder.

“She always wore long sleeves, Annabelle—to hide the tattoo, of course. Her prison number. She told me they all did—all the survivors.

“And somehow once she told me this, I took on the phobia or superstition or dread—whatever you want to call it. I let it exist in me, too, in a sort of sympathy with these women.”

“And that,” said Max, “is why you switched places at the table that night, so that you could put your back to that reminder.”

“You noticed, Father Max. That night at dinner. But I don’t think you guessed the reason.”

“I thought it was the painting that bothered you. But it was the design on the wall against which the painting hung.”

She nodded. “Things that give others pleasure only give me pain now. And how could I tell Lucie—tell anyone? Could they ever be made to understand? My mother lived on a bowl of thin soup a day, made of God knew what, while her captors gorged themselves, living surrounded by their rich furnishings and stolen artworks. Like most of the prisoners, my mother lost her teeth to malnutrition before she died. Dysentery and typhus took many of them, the conditions in the camps being indescribable. The miracle is that some of them lasted as long as they did, with every new day like a trap waiting to be sprung.”

Gabby stifled a fresh flood of tears, then slowly said, “I thought I had lost the ability to cry, at funerals or sad movies or on any other occasion. Somehow I absorbed the personality of the survivor, for whom crying is an indulgence. It takes away the energy required to keep on living. To stay alive for the sake of those no longer alive to settle the score.

“But I fight sleep every night, because with sleep come the nightmares.” She sighed, “I am so tired, Father.”

Max said, his voice tentative and leaden with sorrow, “We think children innocent in these betrayals, but there was a mania to those years. They caught the disease, some of them, from their parents.”

She said, nodding, as if still astonished, “Who ever would dream that a child could have been a denouncer? I heard Thaddeus claim he was so young during the war that he didn’t remember much. Such a liar still. But his parents were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler’s ‘vision’ for Germany. It is where the boy got his ideas, from the parents, who were fools. They thought, you see, that collaborators would be safe. Even if that were not a despicable line to take, it also was not true. The Germans took what they wanted, but they stopped returning favors once favors were no longer needed. Then everyone in France faced the shortages together, as Germany stripped the country.

“I remember, Father Max, the little chat at dinner about evil. And I remember thinking you were kind, intelligent, and even worldly-wise. You’ve seen evil—I can see that in your eyes. When you are in repose, your eyes can look very sad, did you know that? But you’ve never seen it on such a scale—when it comes to the sort of sanctioned evil that took hold, you can have little idea. May you never see it. No one who wasn’t there could know, could they? No one who wasn’t alive then. And that includes me, an infant up until the war ended. But in my imaginings … in my imaginings, yes. Asleep and awake, I can imagine it all.

“Already dying, they were made to stand in the predawn hours in freezing mud and unimaginable slime. It was an endurance test, do you see? They wanted only the strong ones to live. The ones who were finally driven to death and madness were the ones looking for a reason, for logic in the methods of the guards. A rational system of reward and punishment that they might somehow exploit. ‘If I do this, then surely this will follow.’ But logic was of no use in the face of the sadism that ruled the camps. The only people who were rewarded were the guards whose methods were the most effective.

“So the women who survived accepted that the world had gone mad and the only hope was to escape notice however possible. You never wanted the guards to see you stumble from exhaustion, to see the signs of disease, the pallor, the sores and the swollen legs, or to see you had lost too much flesh and muscle to be of use to them as slave labor.

“I have become nearly obsessive about health and fitness—practically a hypochondriac. Do you wonder? Only the fittest survived. You had to stand erect—to pretend to be well, to have the bloom of health about you.”

Max looked at her face, which was flushed with emotion beneath that hectic makeup she always wore. Her attempt to mimic the bloom of health, to ward off the evil spirits that sought out the weak and the faltering.

“I won’t dwell any more on the details of what went on. Not because you will have heard it before, but because the details are unspeakable and impossible, in any event, to summarize. Words don’t begin to touch what happened. My mother survived nearly up until the end. I don’t know what she had to do to survive and I don’t care to know. The single photograph I have of her, I keep on the mantelpiece in my bedroom. You may eventually come to see it. She was pretty, so pretty. And she looks so determined—you can see it. I know how much she wanted to live. To come back and reclaim her child.”

Max closed his eyes against what he saw in her eyes, numb with the pain of her imaginings and his own. Gabby’s anger was a live thing that changed its shape, to expand and shrink, to shimmer around them. It seemed to sear the air, scorch the trees, blacken the sky. He remembered the Bible quotations she had sent him. Only someone fixated on revenge and death could dwell on those most agonizing passages.

“As the last generation of the victims die out, too many deaths will be forgotten,” she said. “They’re already in danger of being forgotten.”

“And yet,” Max said, with all the intensity he could muster, to counter her despair. “And yet in the midst of the horror, there were acts of unimaginable heroism like your mother’s and your grandparents’, and compassion on a grand scale. Mere specks of decency and courage on such an otherwise dark canvas, yes, but they were there and they were brilliant. They shine a light still. Almost the entire population of the region around the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon helped to rescue thousands from the Vichy authorities. People of almost every religion, as well as nonbelievers, banded together to oppose the Nazis, at the greatest possible risk to themselves. They provided food, clothing, fake IDs, and the chance to escape to freedom over the Swiss border. Imagine the risks they ran—especially when it only needed one person to betray thousands.”

“One little Thaddeus, yes,” she said. “But it is too simple to say atrocities are sent periodically to test mankind. There simply aren’t enough people in the world like these lunatic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who were willing to risk everything they had.”

She looked at him. “You still have questions, Father?”

“I do,” he said. “How could you be sure Thaddeus came by that earring by dishonest means? Perhaps he stole it, yes, but from someone else—perhaps someone who had stolen it in the first place.”

“And then stole the other one from my mother’s friend? Only someone who had read that letter would know who had the mate to the earring. Besides, he bragged about his cleverness, remember?

“And if I needed further confirmation, there was Melinda,” she went on. “When I asked her how she’d come into possession of such beautiful earrings, she smiled and said her husband had given them to her. That they were family keepsakes Thaddeus had ‘found’ during the war. Later, she confided that she knew he had stolen them—immersed in playing the role of the genius Thaddeus, he boasted to her one time of his cleverness, even as a child. Then as quickly, he denied what he’d said. But Thaddeus had always had ‘a little problem’ with taking things that didn’t belong to him; Melinda knew that perfectly well.”

Max knew he was playing devil’s advocate. He didn’t doubt her story for a minute.

“I must ask you to tell Cotton everything you’ve told me. As a condition of your reconciliation.”

“I already have,” she said.

“What do you mean, Gabby?”

But she shook her head and wouldn’t be drawn back into the present. “Annabelle told me the real trick was never to make your captors angry—survival was just possible if you could manage that. You were too exhausted to provoke anyone deliberately, so you were safe. But knowing that for no reason, or for any reason at all, you could be next—as you saw others, others younger and more innocent than you, being violated—that was what kept them, day to day, on the edge of madness.

“Perhaps I am mad, too, now, made mad by the events of so long ago. I only know when it comes to Thaddeus, I don’t care. I can only tell you I feel completely sane, and that in my philosophy, killing him was an act of the purest sanity.

“And I am not sorry for it, Father.”

“Gabby, please try to understand. You must see how it is.… You must make amends. There is no one who wouldn’t understand what you’ve been through, who wouldn’t understand your reasons, but…”

She turned from him as if overcome, as if to hide her anguished face. She turned back, but there had been something furtive in her movement that alarmed him. Then he saw her stricken look and the blood on her wrist, and he knew what she had done.

She was dying even as he caught her fall, her heart well past attempts at revival. The same poison she had used to kill Thaddeus was powerful, and she had opened a vein to ensure it went straight to the heart. Settling her on the ground near the spring, he put in an emergency call as he knelt beside her, even though there was nothing to be done, no way to rid her veins of the poison. He said a prayer and made the sign of the cross over her body. Finally, he covered her face with his jacket.

It was then he saw the large envelope behind the stone on which she had sat. It was addressed to him and DCI Cotton. He sat on one of the large stones near the spring and undid the clasp of the envelope.

The silence in the clearing now was absolute. No rustle of wildlife, no stirring of leaves; even the spring’s surface was flat and still. It was the eerie quiet Max associated with abandoned monasteries, and yet he did not feel he was alone.

Inside he found a pile of lined notepaper, clipped together at the top—page after page handwritten in a beautiful cursive script no doubt taught her by the nuns. She wouldn’t have had time to write this in one afternoon; he reasoned she must have been writing it for some days, as a sort of diary.

She had thought of everything. Writing out her confession, addressing it to Cotton and him, released Max from the seal of the confessional, which would have been absolute. He could never have repeated what she had told him about Thaddeus’s murder otherwise, with or without her full repentance.

Beneath the stack of handwritten pages were several e-mails she had printed out, also clipped together. They seemed all to be addressed to her mother, Claude Chaux. There were no replies, of course: Claude Chaux had been killed long ago, cheated of the richest decades of life, and alive only in her child Gabby’s imagination.

He began to skim Gabby’s confession. It was a summary of what she had told him during the Rite of Reconciliation. So far as he could tell, she had left nothing out. At the end, she had written:

I write this confession so no innocent person is blamed for what I have done. That would be the only crime. There has been enough accusation and betrayal of innocents.

I leave all of which I die possessed, especially the photo of my mother, and her earrings, to Lucie Cuthbert, for her many kindnesses.

Pray for me.

Gabby Chaux Crew

*

After Max had read Gabby’s letter, he sat quietly on that fallen menhir in Nunswood, and he thought. He thought for a very long time.

“Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?” Charles Darwin’s granddaughter had written that in a poem, and Agatha Christie had quoted it in a story of hers he’d read long ago.

It was what he had often noticed about Gabby, without seeing the significance.

Gabby had always worn long sleeves, often with gloves, every single time he’d seen her, and he’d never thought to wonder about it. But it was odd, especially for one who complained about feeling the heat of the day, as she had done just recently when he’d met her on his way to the Horseshoe. Why not at least roll the sleeves up if she was hot? It was very odd indeed that she wore long sleeves, always, regardless of the temperature. How often had he seen her tug at those sleeves, too?

The only people he knew who did that were addicts, and Gabby was no addict.

Addicts, he thought … or people trying to hide a tattoo—perhaps from a job interviewer.

And suddenly he understood.

She had just said it to him. Prisoners were tattooed. Listening to Annabelle describe the horrors, Gabby had come to take on the traits of the survivors. The same fears and memories, the same mannerisms. That tugging at the long sleeves, so no one could see. Annabelle must have done that, an unconscious gesture.

At Coombebridge’s place, surrounded by blue paintings, Max had found himself thinking of the blue-painted Picts of Scotland. It was a word that came from
pictus,
meaning “painted” or “tattooed.”

People in the camps, even small children, had been tattooed.

It was a thought too terrible to hold in his mind, and yet impossible to chase away. Finally, a wail of sirens announced the arrival of the emergency services van at the foot of the Crest. As Max watched from above, three men emerged and offloaded a rescue stretcher.