The Avignon Quintet (112 page)

“My sister Livia?”

The thought echoed on in her mind, striking it with a deep amazement because of the improbability of such an eventuality. What would Livia be doing here? Strangely enough this question was soon to be answered, though for the moment she put it aside in order to apply herself completely to the work which had now become more exacting because of the season of frost and wind. For journeys now one had to count upon occasional sunny days when roads were not too frost-bound. The close friendship with Nancy Quiminal ripened day by day until they were as close as sisters – closer indeed than she had ever been with Livvie. They undertook alternate journeys, dividing up the responsibility.

Once Nancy came back from a visit to Aix and told her that she had seen all the Paris intellectuals playing at
boules
, rigged up in
berets basques
and complaining bitterly about the food shortage. “I felt such a disgust and shame that I almost wept – but then what else could the poor things have done?” Indeed. Constance was reminded of this one evening when she arrived to overhear the children of Blaise playing in the barn among the haystacks. They were exchanging caresses, making free with each other, and at the same time repeating memorable recipes of long-vanished dishes. It was one way to allaying their hunger in the prevailing dearth – she was both touched and amused. If only Sam had been there to share such things with – yet in a special sense he still was. And then from the conversations with Blaise suddenly some ancient French would rear up its head in the middle of a phrase; she was on the lookout for these cherished exceptions. As, for example:
“Quand l’arbre est vertueux taillez le en bol.”
Or else:
“Madame, je vous signale que le zinc est une matière noble!”

Then one evening something unusual happened; the duty car dropped her at the corner of the forest path – it would return on the morrow – and she made her way on foot for the last few hundred metres, glad to breathe in the forest for a moment before closing her door upon it. It was dusk, with a fading light. Outside the garden gate stood a duty car with a soldier at the wheel. She peered in at him and with a movement of perplexity invoked an explanation of his presence there at such a time. But the chauffeur did not wind down the window. He simply pointed to the house and then turned away his gaze with an air of brutish insolence. Seeing that there was nothing to be got from him she opened the gate and entered the little garden. And peering through the lattice of the old-fashioned windows into the kitchen, now warm and rosy with firelight, she saw a German officer seated before the blaze, but with his chin sunk upon his chest, apparently asleep. For a moment she thought it might be the General – an irrational enough surmise – and then, peering more closely, she made out the profile of Smirgel. He slept on under her gaze, he seemed hardly to be breathing, with his grey eyes doubly hooded, once by the heavy vulture’s eyelids which covered them, twice by the thick-lensed glass with which he covered them. He heard the snap of the latch as she entered the room and drew himself upright in the chair, sighing and rubbing his eyes apologetically, shamefacedly. His greeting sounded ingratiating in its warmth and she was too startled to return it. Instead she said curtly, “What brings you here?” He looked at her for a long moment during which she discerned that his attitude towards her had changed – it was stern now and earnest. “My duty,” he said sharply. “We have never really had a talk, have we? Not a really warm confidential talk, have we?”

He stood now and watched her as she went about her conventional duties, taking off her coat to hang on the hook behind the door, smoothing her hair and unpacking her shopping bag, arranging her few spare articles of kitchenware on the tall dresser. Over her shoulder she said, “I trust you know my status, if this is intended to be an official interrogation?”

“Of course I do,” he said and as if to punctuate the thought gave the shadow of a heel-click. “I came to put before you some of my own problems in the hope that you may supply some answers. Your sister has been very helpful – of course you know she is here?” Her consternation both puzzled and elated him. He said, “You did not
know?
She has not made contact, then? How strange, for she spoke of you all with great affection, great affection.” Constance sat down with some abruptness upon a chair before the fire. “So Livia is here after all?” she cried, almost in a fury, and the officer nodded. She is a nurse now in the Army,” he said. “She is working on shock cases at Montfavet – and Quatrefages is in her ward, in her care. Why have you never asked to see him?”

“Why should I? I have only seen him once or twice; I know nothing about his activities except that he worked for Lord Galen. Livia on the contrary knew him much better. But what intrigues you about all this business? Lord Galen and the Prince were partners, hunting for the Templar treasure – mythical as it is I suppose. They thought they were on its traces. Or so I understood.”

Smirgel said almost sadly, “So am I, so are we, and so far with little result. I will be frank with you. We have been able to do little with Quatrefages because of his health which has broken down under the strain of our rather harsh questioning. This is all over, now; we have placed him out of reach of the Gestapo – you know that my department belongs to the Foreign Ministry, I report direct to Ribbentrop while Fischer and his colleagues depend upon Himmler. You can imagine there is some rivalry, as in any organisation. So that much that I know is not known to Them.” A very fine contempt had now entered his tone of voice upon the word “Them”. But she also felt the implication that whatever she told him would be held in confidence. It was puzzling. Later, in discussing this very perturbing visit with her friend Nancy Quiminal, the latter said, “Of course you were puzzled – you were for the first time hearing the voice of the born double agent – he was taking a sounding.” Constance’s kettle was making a slurring noise. Without more ado she poured out two cups of sage tea and sat down opposite Smirgel, examining his face with attention as she said, “You will please now tell me what is on your mind, or ask me what you have to ask. I cannot stay up all night. I am tired after a long day.”

“Of course. Of course.” For a moment he was sunk in thought, coiling (so it seemed) and uncoiling his long spatulate fingers. He placed his hands about the cup as if to warm them, and spoke now in the most friendly, kindly manner, as if the act of participating in this little refreshment had brought them much closer together. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said, clearing his throat. “I will admit that I am under a little pressure, simply because my master is, because the Führer is himself deeply interested in this matter; not, you realise, because of the fortune involved (suppose there were) but just because other astrological predictions which have been made in the past would be confirmed by such a find. You see?”

“What a farce,” she said, and he nodded as he said, “From one point of view, certainly it so seems. And yet who can say? The world is such a strange place, and we are busy refashioning it anew … we must have all the facts if we can. Now, let me carry on the story. When you were all here on holiday you were very friendly all together, Galen, Prince Hassad, your brother, the consul, and Quatrefages. At that time the last-named had made advances to Livia and been refused by her, so that he nourished a violent hatred against her. So
she
says. There is no reason why not. You were all young and on holiday. But during this period Quatrefages gave her to understand quite clearly that he had managed to pinpoint an orchard with a family vault or crypt in it which showed every sign of being the site they were all looking for. To us he denied this. Anything he might have said, he adds, would have been to seduce her. All they did discover were Greco-Roman remains dug up by the gypsies. We have accounted for most of these pieces, some were sold to the Louvre, some to New York. Can you add anything to this?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Livia is the only one who might have had such information. But had it been true either Galen or the Prince would have blurted it out, I’m sure. There was no secrecy about this purely financial adventure, nothing esoteric.”

“Au contraire,”
he said sharply, with a warning finger raised. “Quatrefages is deeply steeped in the lore of the gnostics and the Templars. All this apparent rubbish had great symbolic importance for him – he felt himself to be or the track of the Grail, the Arthurian Grail, nothing less. The treasure might have been a simple wooden cup or a priceless chalice or a loving cup buried by the knights; it could have been the cup out of which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. It was not money or specie he thought himself hunting!” His look of triumph matched her own look of surprise. She did not know what to say, the whole matter was so surprisingly novel. He now leaned forward – he had a long neck like a lizard with a pronounced Adam’s apple – and said, “This is what interests our Führer, a lost tradition of chivalry which he wishes to re-endow and make a base for a new European model of knighthood. But of a black order, not white.”

“Chivalry!” she said contemptuously, standing up before the fire, her cheeks rosy with warmth and a vivid anger. “I suppose you have not seen the trains pulling out of the station day after day?”

He looked at her in amazement. “You surprise me,” he said, “for I thought you would have grasped by now the scope of the New Order, the terrifying new order which now through German arms is trying to establish itself in the western world. You do not see beyond the fate of a few Jews and gypsies, and such riff-raff which will soon be swept away together with the whole Judeo-Christian corpus of ideas based upon gold – for in alchemical terms the Jew is the slave of gold. Spiritually we are on the gold standard of Jewish values. At last this has been recognised, at last someone has dared to break away, to break through into the historic future. You cannot belittle the enormity of the evil we have unleashed in order to outface it; we Germans are a metaphysical race
par excellence
– beyond good and evil stands the new type of man the Führer has beckoned up. But so that he perfects himself we must first go back and start from the wolf, so to speak. We must become specialists in evil until the very distinctions are effaced. Then he will come, the new man whom Nietzsche and Wagner divined. You underestimate the vast scope of the new vision. Our world will be based no more on gold, but on blood – the document of the race-might.”

Constance felt the weight of this discourse fall phrase by phrase on her mind, creating an ever-growing shadow of apprehension and horror. Her flesh crept – she realised for the first time that she had, in fact, been in danger of underestimating the vast hysteria of the German belief in all this hocus pocus and Wagnerian black magic, because it did not seem that people could act upon such propositions. Here was a whole nation welded together and orientating its activities in precisely this grim sense.

“But it’s a pathology,” she exclaimed with a violent disgust, and to her surprise he smiled and nodded his head, as if he took it in a complimentary sense. She said to him with evergrowing dismay, “How innocent we were, how trusting! We were raised not to believe in politics but in man and his innate capacity for justice and a search for equity and happiness, and now this thing.” She stared intently at him, seeing him for the first time as a new kind of species, a new kind of insect. He looked like a praying mantis, with all the cold mechanical fury of such a thing in love. After a long pause he continued in a low voice, talking as if to himself, “Nature can be both purposeful and frivolous. One must watch out. Also wasteful, a spendthrift. We are not imitating her in everything. But the minute you understand the far-reaching conception behind the New Order you cannot withstand its black violence and poetry. We are not washed in the blood of the Christian lamb, but in the blood of inferior races out of which we shall fashion the slaves which are necessary to fulfil our designs. It is not cupidity or rapacity which drives the Führer but the desire for once to let the dark side of man have his full sway, stand to his full height. Seen in this way Evil is Good, don’t you see?” He raised his hand and sketched a blow upon the table. But he did not deliver it. He, too, had now a high colour, a flush as if he had been drinking. He found it difficult to support the look of the two contemptuous blue eyes which fixed themselves upon him, it was so obvious and so extreme, her feeling.

There was a long moment of silence, during which she stared fixedly at him – fixedly yet absently for she was intent upon the purport of what he had said, and indeed still shocked and surprised at so trenchant a revelation of unholy faith in this black cause. As if he followed her inner thought he said, “If I have reservations in anything it is perhaps because of our timing which has placed a great burden upon our men and materials. In my view we should have dealt with Communism first – how everyone would have welcomed that! Later the turn of the Jews would have come, more gradually. But what’s done is done, and must be followed out to the end. And of course war is a game of chance as well.” He suddenly took up his briefcase and hunted in it for a document which he extracted from among a number of photostated materials.
“Tiens,”
he said, and the French word sounded strange on his tongue, “I thought that this might interest you – our service intercepted it. It’s addressed to all heads of diplomatic missions abroad and signed by Churchill himself, as you see. At this moment to harbour illusions is rather dangerous, don’t you think?”

She was curious enough to take the document and hold it to the light. It was a circular of a standard Foreign Office kind, and had been sent not in cipher but
en clair
, showing that it was not of any great secrecy. But the text had a characteristic ebullience, for it said, “By this end of this year our fortunes will seem to be at their lowest ebb, with bad news coming in from every theatre of war. Nevertheless I can with reason authorise you to feel a distinct measure of moderated optimism. A radical factor has at last emerged from the picture. The enemy has begun to think defensively for the first time; he is stockpiling in rear areas on a scale which proves that he envisages coming retreats. Maybe later historians will describe this as being the real turning-point of the war.”