Transgression (9 page)

W
inter descended. The ration tickets Adele queued up for every day no longer guaranteed any food in the shops. She counted herself lucky if she actually found the one egg a month she was allowed or the one bucket of coal. For the Georges family, and for most everyone else, life became a steady diet of rutabagas cooked every way imaginable over a small wood fire, the odd carrot or black potato thrown in, countless bowls of macaroni, and sitting in grey rooms, wrapped in blankets.

Despite this general deprivation, the spidery woman who worked beside Adele left the factory to have another baby. Her job was immediately filled by the young wife of a soldier who’d been killed in the first days of the war. She talked excitedly about the Russian front. She said she’d heard it was going badly, not for the Russians, but for the Krauts. Every time Adele dared to glance her way, the woman seemed to be looking straight at her.

In February, Madame Théberge arrived. She showed up at the Georges’ front door with everything she owned stuffed inside a large paisley-covered portmanteau.

An elderly aunt of Madame Georges from the district of Bretagne, she was a tall woman with large bones that pushed out from under her thin black coat at strange angles, and with hands that looked like they’d been digging up potatoes from time immemorial.

As soon as Madame Théberge and her portmanteau were settled inside the front hallway, she announced that her husband of forty-six years had died from a broken neck. Apparently he’d fallen on a piece of ice at the
beginning of the previous winter, though she spoke as if it had just happened. Another relative in Bretagne, a recipient of Madame Georges’ begging letters, had suggested that the widow Georges in Rouen might appreciate another widow’s company.

Madame Georges had never seen the old woman in her life. She led her up the stairs with an obvious lack of enthusiasm and gave her René’s old room on a temporary basis. All Adele could see was another mouth to feed, another burden, but this turned out not to be the case.

In the first week, Madame Théberge cleaned through all the house. The second week she took over queueing up for food. The third week she started pulling up the floor boards in Old Raymond’s cottage, cutting them to length and splitting them for firewood.

Adele had never met such a person–the woman seemed incapable of sitting still. She took over most of the cooking. She did the washing, too, and subdued Bibi and Jean with threats of eternal damnation. She even seemed to be making friends with Madame Georges. It wasn’t too long before Adele had to admit to Simone that her relentless presence was turning out to be a great relief. All Adele had to do any more was go to work and every two weeks hand her pay packet over to Madame Théberge.

Spring finally came and then the sudden heat of summer. Adele was walking home from Simone’s place one particularly close and humid day when she saw a young woman standing in front of her house.

When Adele came up to her, the woman smiled and said, “Hello.”

“Hello,” Adele replied and moved to go by.

“Are you Adele Georges?”

“Yes.” Adele looked at her more closely. She seemed about Adele’s age, or perhaps she was a year or two older, nineteen or twenty. She was quite plump and, in the humidity, the thin cotton dress she was wearing was clinging to her soft body in all the wrong places. She had a perfectly round face.

“My Wilhelm told me to give you this.” She held out a folded piece of paper. “I’ve already read it. All us girls share everything. It’s like a family. We have to, don’t we?”

Adele hesitated. “What is it?”

“Here,” she said, pressing the paper into Adele’s hand.

Adele unfolded it. The first thing she saw was
“Dear Adele.”
She looked at the bottom.
“Manfred.”

“Oh!” Adele cried out.

“He says he’s sorry for not seeing you, but then he doesn’t say how long he’s stayed away.”

“A year,” Adele managed to say.

The woman shook her head. “That seems like a long time.”

A long time, yes. “He’s fighting in Russia.”

“Russia? God, no! He’s on the Channel. He’s not forty miles from here.”

Adele looked at the woman’s indignant face. She looked back at the faint pencil scrawl.

“Some of them can be real bastards,” the woman said.

Tears were scalding Adele’s eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Lucille. Lucille Rocque. It would be different if he was like my Wilhelm. He can’t write French, he can hardly speak it, but your soldier could have been writing you all along. It would be censored and everything, but still, a year and not to hear.”

“He must have had his reasons,” Adele said, and thought, What reason? What possible reason? “These dates he’s written, what do they mean?”

“That’s his three-day leave. Wilhelm’s, too. All the girls go down to La Bouille to see their men. I can take you.”

Adele looked at Lucille Rocque again. She had pleasant eyes, large, hazel, almond-shaped. They dominated her round, plain face. She looked harmless enough.

“Do you want to go?”

“Yes,” Adele said.

The train to La Bouille was full of young women, thirty or forty of them at least, a few carrying babies or balancing small children on their laps. Adele
sat beside Lucille, who had applied too much make-up, her face looked painted on. Two other soldiers’ girlfriends were sitting opposite.

An elderly conductor swayed down the aisle. He seemed to know all about these dressed-up, chattering female traitors. He didn’t call for tickets as he normally would, but instead just thrust his hand out, and whenever the lurching coach threatened to push him against one of them, he braced himself as if he were about to fall into a fire.

Adele watched the old man, and the women laughing and smiling up at him. She looked out the window. Rouen was fast disappearing behind her. She felt sick to her stomach.

It had taken her almost the entire morning to decide what to wear. For one thing she could hardly face herself in the mirror. She’d lost weight, she was sure of it, and she hadn’t even grown one centimetre-if anything, she’d shrunk. Her hair had become more unruly than ever, her skin dry and pale, shadows of exhaustion showed under her eyes like blue half-moons. What would Manfred think?

And how could he not have written?

Adele had to delay leaving the house until Madame Théberge was off somewhere queueing up and her mother had finally left on one of her daily walks. For some reason, Madame Georges had become health-conscious under Madame Théberge’s regime.

One of the young women sitting opposite touched Adele on her knee. She couldn’t have been a day over fifteen. “I understand this is your first time. Me, too,” she said. “I’m a bit scared, I mean about staying away for two nights. I don’t know what lie I’m going to tell my father.”

“I’m not telling my mother anything,” Adele replied, and smiled kindly at the girl and tried to convince herself that she wasn’t like any of these women at all. They were carrying on as if everything was normal, as if their lives would just continue on like this forever, that this riding back and forth on a train was more than good enough for them. Her situation was entirely different. She was meeting Manfred to plan their escape.

Lucille leaned forward. She had a suggestion for the girl. “Why don’t you tell your father that the police arrested you for being out after curfew and wouldn’t let you go home?”

“That’s perfect,” the girl said. She looked grateful.

Poor thing, Adele thought.

Lucille began to talk about her Wilhelm. She went on for half an hour. When she stopped to take a breath, the fourth woman spoke up. She’d been smoking one cigarette after the other and staring out the window.

“I’m telling Jakob I’m through.”

“Through?” Lucille’s large hazel eyes, encircled in charcoal, grew even larger. “What do you mean, through?”

“I’m getting married.”

“What?” Lucille screeched.

Almost immediately half the women in the carriage moved over to where Adele was sitting. They hung over the back of the seats and began to interrogate the cigarette smoker. In response, the interrogated one blew smoke out of her nose in ever more vicious streams.

She seemed about twenty-one and a bottle-blonde by the look of her roots. She was certainly one of the toughest-looking women on the train, but nevertheless, under the barrage of questioning Adele could see that her eyes were beginning to shine.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

The carriage went deathly silent. No one had to ask any more questions now that bit of news had escaped into the air, all they had to do was wait. The announcement itself would supply its own momentum.

“This fellow at work, he’s in love with me,” the woman finally said. “I’ve taken him on, if you know what I mean, and I said I’d marry him. I’m going to tell him the baby’s his, he’ll never know the difference.”

“What about, you know, just doing something about it?” someone suggested.

“An abortion? I have a friend who did that,” the blonde replied. “She nearly bled to death.”

Some others nodded. “There’re different ways,” another one said.

The blonde shook her head.

“Why don’t you do the same as Maddy?” Lucille asked.

Everyone looked toward a woman sitting at the front of the coach cradling a small child.

The blonde shook her head again.

“But you love Jakob,” Lucille pressed on.

Tears began to push through the powder on the blonde’s face.

Adele looked out the window and tried once again to convince herself that these women had nothing to do with her.

The train kept coming to unscheduled stops. She began to see soldiers high up on the riverbanks. They looked like they were building an endless series of thick concrete walls. La Bouille was still some distance from the sea and just outside the Forbidden Zone. No one could travel inside the twenty-mile strip running inland from the coast without special papers. But clearly, even this far away from the Channel, the Germans were expecting something.

The tiny platform at La Bouille was jammed full of young men. They crowded forward and gazed up at the windows as the train slowed down.

Adele searched for Manfred’s face. She couldn’t see him. Lucille was already up and hurrying along the aisle. So were all the other women. Adele continued to sit there, watching her fellow passengers step off the train and push into the crowd.

When the coach was finally empty, Adele got up and walked down the aisle. As she stepped onto the platform, a wall of laughter and shouting in both German and French pressed her back against the side of the train. Women and soldiers were embracing all around her, kissing as desperately as if they’d been separated for a life time.

Still no Manfred. Adele started to make her way through the crowd toward the station. When she emerged on the other side, she saw a soldier who looked familiar sitting on a bench by the station door. When he saw her, he slowly stood up and took off his cap. The sun shone off his naked skull, there were long, deep shadows where his cheeks used to be. He looked ten years older. Adele couldn’t make her feet move.

Manfred came up to her.

She reached up and touched his face. She kissed his mouth, his cheeks, his reddening eyes.

“I’m here,” she said.

I
t began to rain hard, huge drops pounding through the over-hanging branches. They scattered the maggots and made the green intestines shine.

Jack held his handkerchief up to the rain until it was thoroughly soaked and, pressing it against his nose, circled around the corpse looking for a stick. He found a sturdy-enough one and, kneeling down, began to dig one-handed where he assumed the head should be.

A tangle of black hair came up out of the mud.

Jack dropped the stick and began to probe around with his hand. One of his fingers pushed through into something soft and mushy. He knew he was making a mess of things but he couldn’t stop, he had to see the face. He began to push handfuls of mud aside. A white eye appeared. It had been punctured and pushed back so that it was turned half-way around. It looked blind. He knew that he’d just done that in his frantic, stupid haste. He began to push at the mud some more. A strip of skin peeled away.

Jack sat back on his heels. The rain thundered down around him. He looked toward Brandy but he couldn’t see him any more. He knew he was disgracing himself, had disgraced himself already, and for what good reason? For the slight chance he might recognize this stinking, rotting thing and he could get a jump on the Ontario Provincial Police.

“Jesus God,” Jack said.

The intestines had a pool of water in them. The maggots were drowning. It occurred to Jack that at some time something had dug into the shallow
grave and opened the body up.

Dogs, probably, he thought. Not good old Brandy, though. Feral dogs. There were plenty of them running around the countryside killing sheep and scaring people half to death.

Jack looked at the solitary hand more closely. The rain had washed it a ghostly white. It didn’t seem to be a large hand even in its bloated condition. There were little flaps of punctured skin all over it. At least this went some distance in proving his theory about the rats.

Water was running in a steady stream between the stumps of the fourth and fifth fingers. If the little finger was in his refrigerator, the corpse was probably a man. If it was the fourth finger, then maybe he was looking down at a woman.

He couldn’t make himself touch the black muck any more. And he couldn’t tell.

Clarence Broome’s face went instantly pale when Jack asked him if he had a tarpaulin. Jack and Brandy were standing just inside the stable door-they both looked drowned.

The rain was still coming down, though not as hard as it had before. It was only mid-afternoon but it seemed like dusk, all the light had faded from the sky.

“Why?” Clarence asked.

“I found it,” the chief said.

Clarence nodded. He didn’t have to ask what Jack had found. He took a deep breath. “Where?”

“Near the river. About a hundred feet or so up from the bank. In a grove of trees.”

“Not on my property then.” Clarence looked relieved.

Some hay fell through an open trap door on the floor above them and landed with a soft hiss. The men could hear boots shuffling above their heads.

“That’s just Andrew,” Clarence said, “getting ready to feed the cows.”

Jack shifted his eyes upward and then back to Clarence. His wet granite face remained expressionless. It gave Clarence a chill. “There’s a tarp in the drive shed,” Clarence said.

Jack made the inevitable phone call from the Broomes’ kitchen. Three hours later an unmarked car with two young detectives and a truck clearly marked
Ontario Provincial Police
and carrying two uniformed officers pulled into the lane.

The Broomes had invited Jack in to eat something after he’d come back from covering up the corpse with the tarpaulin, but Jack had said he wasn’t hungry, even though he was, and that he’d prefer to sit out in his car and make notes.

He didn’t make any notes. He just sat there in the rain listening to the ball game broadcast from far away Wrigley Field and tried not to think about anything to do with the case. He had fucked up the crime scene. It was a holy mess.

Eventually Mrs. Broome came out of the house, a raincoat draped over her shoulders and carrying a Thermos of tea and a cold roast beef sandwich. She looked pale and nervous.

Jack rolled down the window and smiled. He could be almost charming when he wanted to be.

“Much appreciated,” he’d said.

Harold Miles was the provincial detective in charge, though he didn’t look much older than Jack’s son had been when he’d left for the war. There was one difference, though. Miles was almost as tall as Jack and cut an impressive figure in his fedora and a long tan raincoat. Jack’s son had been quite a bit shorter than his father and slightly built, and he’d never cut an impressive figure in all his life.

After introductions and a conversation off to the side between Harold Miles and Clarence Broome, Clarence climbed up on his tractor and led the truck along the muddy trail between the front fields. They were heading toward the woods.

Miles sauntered back to Jack and said that his detective partner, who seemed even younger, would drive their car around the concession and park by the railway bridge. His partner would walk in along the tracks. He himself, however, wouldn’t mind the opportunity to stretch his legs by taking a hike through the farm if Jack didn’t mind the trek back.

The rain had eased off to a steady drizzle. Jack nodded. He’d already been chilled straight through once. Why not one more time?

“They’ll be waiting for us near the railway tracks,” Miles said as they headed along the flooded wagon trail. “I guess you’re the only one who knows where the body is, exactly.”

Jack nodded again and thought to himself, Me and Brandy, actually, sonny boy. And whoever laid the corpse in the ground–because it didn’t bury itself.

Jack knew why Miles had decided to stretch his legs despite the drizzle and the water lying all over the place. It was perfectly natural and it was perfectly obvious. He wanted time to question the local cop.

“Clarence said something about a finger. I guess that’s what got you out here in the first place.”

Jack strode along in silence, going straight through a puddle. His feet had been soaked for hours, it didn’t matter to him. Miles skirted around it.

“When was that, chief?”

“When was what?”

“When Clarence’s daughter found the detached finger? When Clarence called?”

“That would be yesterday,” Jack replied.

“And where is it now?”

“Where is what now?”

“The finger.”

Jack turned and grinned at Harold Miles. “It’s in my refrigerator.”

There was no use playing a cat and mouse game. The best thing to do was to partner up with this young detective, make a friend out of him and proceed as if something like this happened in Jack’s jurisdiction every day. Not that he was in his jurisdiction, but he was only a mile and half out of it.

“It could have been the result of an accident, the severed finger, I suppose,” the young detective was saying. “Is that what you were thinking?”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

“You know different now, though.”

Jack didn’t think it was necessary to reply to that question. The answer was obvious.

“You did the right thing, as soon as you found the body, calling us in. You didn’t disturb anything, did you?”

Jack didn’t look at Miles this time. He seemed to be addressing the soggy field in front of them. “I’ve been a police chief for twenty-eight years,” he said, and that was all he said.

Jack marched grimly on. There would be no more questions.

It didn’t take the Provincials long to get organized. As soon as Jack had pointed out Clarence’s tarpaulin, they drove six-foot stakes into the ground near the four corners of the grave and hung a tarp for a roof to keep off the rain. They pitched a large tent just beyond the tree line. They set up lights and fired up a gas generator. More police arrived. A coroner arrived, one whom Jack had never seen before.

When he asked one of the cops who he was, Jack was told that the coroner had driven in from Hamilton, a city some forty miles distant. In fact, the whole forensic team had come in from Hamilton.

Clarence’s tarp was finally pulled away. Dusk had settled into the trees and a pool of light flooded the gravesite. A plain-clothes cop began to take pictures, his flashbulb popping again and again.

Jack stood some distance off rigid as a tree. He was soaked through once more but he refused to shiver.

The picture-taking came to an end and some gnome-like characters in rain suits crouched down beside the grave and began to brush away meticulously at the mud. Every once in a while young Harold Miles’s face would come up out of the crowd and look over at Jack in a kind of disbelieving way. Once he even shook his head. The chief stared back at him, never changing his expression. The generator filled the trees with a steady, nerve-jangling racket. Beyond the floodlights, the night moved steadily in.

It was almost midnight before the body was lifted into a long canvas bag and removed from the grave. And it was two o’clock by the time Jack
reached his home, opened up the refrigerator and handed over the pungent and shrivelled finger to Miles’s detective partner. Neither man exchanged a word.

Jack sat alone in his kitchen and downed a half bottle of rye. He climbed the stairs, remembered he hadn’t taken off his wet clothes, let them drop in the hallway and drew himself a bath. He sat in it bleary-eyed and unthinking until the water had turned cold, until the phone rang down in the kitchen.

It was Detective Harold Miles. He asked the chief of police if he’d had a good sleep. Jack stood there naked and dripping and said, “So-so.”

“There’s a few things I’d like you to examine. I’ve got a room down at the Arlington Hotel. Have you got a minute?”

Jack stood there in the dark holding the telephone to his ear. He didn’t know exactly what he had. He knew what he wanted to avoid, a public humiliation. At the same time Miles seemed to be suggesting some kind of collaboration. Or was he?

Jack felt emptied-out. That was all he felt.

“Chief Cullen.” The young man’s voice seemed a bit testy at the other end of the line. “Are you there? Will I see you this morning?”

Jack was trying to shift his brain into gear. What the hell time was it? He switched on the light. Almost five. Maybe he could establish a relationship with this young punk after all, maybe he could tease some information out of him, maybe he could manage to get one step ahead of the whole goddamn Provincial Police force.

“I’ll be right down,” Jack said.

He didn’t go right down. He took all the time he needed to shave and press out his spare uniform until the various creases were just so. He put on a fresh blue shirt and a fresh blue tie, polished his second pair of boots until they shone with a high gloss, swallowed some milk so his breath wouldn’t betray the presence of alcohol, and then he went downtown.

Harold Miles was waiting for him in a small room on the second floor of the hotel. He was in shirt sleeves and didn’t look like he’d had any sleep, either. The bed was untouched, except for an open suitcase full of clothes sitting on top of it. He shook Jack’s hand unenthusiastically, sat down in a chair and motioned for Jack to sit down on the other one.

Jack thought about it. If he remained standing he’d tower over Miles, which was good, but standing also suggested a subordinate position. Jack sat down. He took off his cap and laid it on the writing desk. Taking his cap off seemed to even things out. Two equals, face to face, ready to collaborate.

“There were lots of boot tracks all over the grave,” young Miles said, “all made by the same pair of boots. I assume they were yours.”

Jack stared at him for a moment. “What is it you want to show me?”

“And I suppose it would also be safe to assume that you were the individual digging at the grave with a stick, and also with your hands?”

Jack didn’t answer.

“What happened to the eye, chief? It would be useful to know if it was damaged before the body was laid in the ground or during the course of your investigation. We noticed there was some wet mud pushed into the socket.”

Jack continued to stare at Harold Miles but if the young man felt intimidated he wasn’t showing it.

Jack picked up his cap and put it carefully back on his head, taking the time to tilt it just so. “I’ll tell you,” he finally said. “Not having a crew of ten at my disposal and in the middle of one hell of a storm, I took it upon myself to have a look at the body before the rain did irreparable damage. However, as soon as I’d determined that putrefaction had set in to such an extent it wouldn’t make any difference, in fact might make identification even more difficult, given the force of the rain, you see, then of course I stopped.”

“And the eye?”

“I didn’t notice the eye.”

“Until you pushed it in?”

“No. I didn’t notice the eye. Full stop,” Jack said.

“You should have left the site untouched, chief. You should have backed off and called us right away. It just makes our job a little more difficult.”

Your job, that’s what the fuck you think, Jack thought to himself. He could feel his adrenalin percolating and blood rushing into his chest and into the large muscles in his arms. It was an old and familiar feeling.

Miles got up from his chair before the chief could rise out of his.

“I wanted to talk to you about this before it went into my report. That’s the way I do things, it’s only fair.” He walked over to a corner of the room
and picked up a large satchel smeared with mud.

Jack had been about to open the goddamn door and just walk the hell out of there but the sight of the satchel had changed his mind.

Miles put it on the desk and drew back the zipper. “There’s a few things I wanted to show you before I sent them off to the lab. Just in case you had any ideas.”

The young detective pulled a jacket out of the satchel, a brown tweed smeared with mud. And a tattered plaid shirt. A pair of trousers. Wool socks with holes. Underwear. A leather belt. And two worn-out dress shoes.