Vango (24 page)

“I beg your pardon?”

The women appeared to have only just noticed the two men.

“Are you in a bit of a rush?” simpered Ethel.

She looked thoughtful and pointed at one of the men.

“Oh, my goodness, aren’t you the same man I saw dragging your heels by the shores of the lake all evening?”

She spoke German with a singsong accent.

“Remove your car,” said the man, “or I will crush it.”

“Your romantic moonlit walk with your little friends was so touching. I wanted to throw you rose petals.”

“Come on,” said Johanna Eckener, tugging Ethel’s arm. “The gentleman is right. Our car is in the way.”

Ethel allowed herself to be led away. Their mission was accomplished. Sometimes it’s good to know when to stop.

Hugo Eckener parked his car on the side of the road, by the lake. It was almost completely dark now. The beach was deserted. He couldn’t find anyone in front of the hut. It was a white chalet, Atlantic beach–style, on low stilts. He waited for several minutes on the steps. He lit a cigar. A breeze rose up.

Eventually, Eckener strolled toward the lapping shore of the lake. He stopped.

He had just noticed something.

The commander removed his pants, his jacket, and the rest of his clothes. He was down to a long white pair of boxer shorts. He waded into the lake.

A man was waiting for him in the lake, with the water up to his shoulders.

“Are you alone?” asked Eckener. He still had his cigar in his mouth.

“No,” the other man replied, “I’m with the invisible man.”

Eckener had no trouble recognizing Esquirol, the renowned Paris doctor.

The commander was a quarter of a century older than the medic, but their affection for each other was like that of boarding school friends or soldiers in a regiment. They regretted seeing each other so rarely and only on grave occasions.

Suddenly, Eckener felt the cigar being ripped out of his hand.

“Dammit!”

The glowing red ember flew above them before being extinguished in the water four or five meters away.

“Who’s there?”

Caught by surprise, Eckener had nearly lost his footing. Esquirol hadn’t made a single move during all of this.

“I warned you I’m with the invisible man!”

No sooner had the doctor said this than a quiet chuckle was audible in the gloom, and Hugo Eckener felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Hello, Doctor Eckener.”

It was Joseph Jacques Puppet, a small man impossible to detect in the darkness. Against his black skin he wore a one-piece knitted swimming costume of the same color, which was the latest male fashion from the beaches of Monte Carlo.

He had been born in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast, in West Africa. He had nearly died at Verdun during the war, and then in the boxing rings at the Velodrome and Holborn Stadium, where he was a featherweight by the name of J. J. Puppet. He had stopped boxing just before the venues had been demolished, and now he was Joseph, the barber of Monaco, whose scissors were sought after from one end of the Côte d’Azur to the other.

Eckener was delighted to see his friends again but guessed that the situation had to be an alarming one. They had come to a dangerous country, despite instructions to meet as little as possible and never with witnesses. So this had to be a serious business.

They swam out into the lake.

“Tell me what’s going on,” said Eckener.

“We need Zefiro,” replied Esquirol, scanning the gloom around them.

“Why?”

“Because of Viktor.”

“Viktor?”

“The Paris police think they’ve found Voloy Viktor. They want Zefiro, so that he can be identified.”

Eckener was floating on his back.

He felt relieved. For a moment, he’d thought they were going to talk to him about Vango again.

“How did they find Viktor?” he asked after a pause.

“By chance, at passport control on the Spanish border.”

“Impossible,” gulped Eckener.

How could anyone believe that one of the most dangerous and elusive men in Europe would allow himself to be caught like that?

“They’re almost certain it’s him. But if someone can’t formally identify him, they’ll have to let him go. There’s plenty of pressure being put on them from on high.”

“And you want to risk Zefiro’s life for this kind of game?”

“Yes.”

“He’s already taken enough risks. Leave him in peace.”

“We need him one last time. It’ll all be over after that, but he’s the only one who can identify Viktor. We’ve got to ask him. Tell us where he is.”

None of them moved; they were floating on their backs in silence.

“Look, it’s 1935,” said Joseph Puppet, who had spoken very little up until this point. “The war has only been over for seventeen years, and it could break out again from one day to the next. You know what’s happening in the world at the moment, Dr. Eckener. You’re well positioned to be aware of all this.”

“I won’t reveal where Zefiro’s monastery is.”

They fell quiet. A car drove past on the road. They waited for the sound of the engine to fade into the distance, and then Eckener reiterated, “I won’t tell you anything.”

“Always the same, Eckener,” murmured Esquirol.

“Meaning?”

“Stop it, Esquirol!” Joseph intervened.

“Meaning,” Esquirol went on, “that you’ve never done anything to change things.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” gulped Eckener with a lump in his throat.

All three of them knew exactly what Esquirol was talking about.

Before Hitler had come to power, plenty of voices to the political left and center in Germany had asked Hugo Eckener to run for office. He had refused so as not to offend old Marshal Hindenburg, who would have been his opponent.

The marshal was elected. But he couldn’t halt the Nazi rise to power.

Hindenburg had died the previous August, and Hitler had pounced on his seat.

This episode was perhaps Hugo Eckener’s greatest regret.

In the dark, he could hear the voice of his friend Esquirol: “Now I understand why your zeppelins bear the Nazi insignia. . . .”

Eckener sliced through the water to throw himself on the doctor, but Joseph got in the way. Despite his small stature, one wouldn’t want to cross the boxer-barber of Monaco.

“Stop it!”

All three of them looked at one another.

In the small hours, returning to his house, soaking wet, Hugo Eckener found that his wife was still up.

“Did you go for a swim, Hugo?” she inquired, taking a towel to rub him down.

For some time, her husband had been behaving like a teenager going through an identity crisis. . . .

“Where’s Ethel?” he asked, purple lipped.

“I offered her a bedroom, but she’s back on the road. I’ve taken rather a shine to her.”

“Yes,” agreed Eckener. “Me too.”

He closed his eyes but didn’t sleep a wink.

Eckener already regretted what he’d done. He spent the rest of the night thinking about Zefiro and Vango. It was a curious destiny that had reunited these two hunted lives on one island.

Eckener had just provided his friends with the exact location of the island of Arkudah.

Arkudah, two weeks later, June 1935

Small damp clouds caressed his face.

Vango was hanging from the top peak of the island in a giant cotton net. He had climbed up there that morning before the mist had cleared and was gazing at Mademoiselle’s house in the distance, a tiny white dot among others on the island of Salina.

As far as he could tell, his nurse’s life was almost back to normal again following the incident with the two armed intruders one year earlier. The good doctor Basilio had restored the blue tiles on the walls, while Mazzetta stood guard with his donkey, a few strides away.

On the first day of each month, since returning to the monastic life, Vango had borrowed a boat without mentioning it to anyone, tied it up at the foot of the cliffs of Pollara, and gone to stalk around Mademoiselle’s house. Always waiting in ambush, Mazzetta would suddenly rise up and nearly knock him out.

“It’s me!” Vango would whisper.

Mazzetta would groan and lower his arm.

“It’s you?”

When he finally recognized Vango, Mazzetta would lead him into his cave without making a sound, so as not to attract Mademoiselle’s attention.

She had taken a long time getting her strength back after her house had been ransacked. She was convinced that her aggressors were after Vango. But she chose to explain to the doctor that they must have been hoping to steal her savings in the belief that this woman who lived all alone, and who came from a foreign country, had a pile of gold stashed away in her underwear drawer.

After loitering in the area for a few days, the visitors had set off again. Mazzetta had discreetly escorted them as far as the port of Lipari, to make sure they actually left the Aeolian Islands.

“Let me speak with Mademoiselle, now that they’ve gone,” Vango would beg Mazzetta.

But the older man always managed to discourage him.

Don’t say anything to her, remain hidden, don’t pay her a visit.
This was the only way to protect her. If the two men came back, they would stop at nothing to make her talk. Vango had to resist the temptation to rush over to the white house and throw himself into the arms of his nurse.

And so, perched in his net every morning, with his head in those clouds of mist, he would stare emotionally across the sea at the island of Salina. Then he would clamber down, loop by loop, until he reached the ground, where his work awaited him.

Vango began by untying the ropes that held the masts in place. These five gigantic nets were hoisted every night above the monks’ island. Zefiro had devised this system. And it was the secret to his enchanted gardens.

One day, when Vango had first discovered the island, while staring at the abundant and healthy lemon trees, he had quizzed Zefiro: “Where does the water come from for all that, Padre?”

Zefiro had pointed one finger at the sky, and at first Vango had thought there must be a metaphysical explanation. But he had quickly realized that the monk was simply pointing to the clouds.

There was no water source on the island.

Water from the clouds, captured each night on the summit, slowly soaked through the cotton nets and flowed as far as the little channels that supplied the underground cisterns.

Two thousand liters, per net, per day. The winter and autumn rains were carefully collected to supplement these enormous reserves of pure water.

There was enough to slake the thirst of a herd of a hundred cows in this desert.

When he left the chapel in the mornings, Vango’s first task was to lower the nets from the top of the island in much the same way as the sails of a boat are collapsed.

In twelve months, Vango had got under the skin of what it meant to be an invisible monk. Everyone admired the speed with which he had re-adapted.

He studied and prayed just as they did. He was able to conform to the strict order of this existence, following each stage of their day.

In chapel, his voice blended in perfectly when the monks were singing.

And he was always ready to work hard.

“For it is thus that they are truly monks, if they can live from the labor of their hands,” Brother Marco used to say, citing the rule.

Vango did everything to enter into the monastic rhythm.

Since the early Middle Ages, the centuries had polished and perfected the equilibrium of these monasteries so that it was like a beautiful pebble that had spent thousands of years in the waves.

Vango would have given anything to enjoy the kind of peace that people thought he experienced.

But he knew that his life was an illusion. Despite all his best efforts, he was in a cyclone. The mysteries of his past troubled him from morning to night, and from night to morning. Where did he come from? Who was after him?

He didn’t sleep, but spent his nights kneeling on the stone floor of his bedroom. He was trying to understand. His prayer was a silent cry.

And yet for ten years he had dreamed of this existence. At the seminary in Paris, despite the walls surrounding him, he had questioned himself every day to make sure his choice wasn’t merely a childish whim. Despite Zefiro’s reticence, he was sure this was the right path for him.

He wanted a life without limits. And for him, that meant a life here.

He had reached this decision so simply, one rainy day when he was twelve years old. It was as if someone had entrusted him with something, saying, “Look after this for me; I’ll be back.”

But now he found himself alone, still holding this “something” in his hands, and life was going on all around him, full of mystery and pain. He couldn’t let go of what he’d been entrusted with, still less bury it; he couldn’t leave it or hand it over to the first person who came along. Because in his eyes it mattered.

And then there was Ethel, another horizon that never left him.

Some evenings, lost in the midst of these desires and fears, he would dive from the cliff tops, behind the monastery. Vango was no longer afraid of the sea. He launched himself off like a bird. He emerged from the water, his skin glowing white in the moonlight.