Vango (31 page)

But Boulard and Zefiro weren’t in the office.

He had ended up having to write a letter in great haste, which he gave to a secretary who batted her eyelashes at him before shrieking for help.

Vango started up the van.

If things went wrong, his instructions were not to wait for Zefiro. They would meet up later at the station.

A piece of paper was spread on the windshield. Vango got out to remove it. Sitting at the steering wheel, with the engine roaring, he scanned it.

It had the effect of sixteen hydrogen balloons from the
Graf Zeppelin
popping out of his chest one by one.

Vango read three words repeated several times and a first name. Those words would change his life. That first name had been haunting him ever since he was fourteen. Those words and that name had one chance in a billion of ending up on this piece of paper in this spot at this moment.

Who are you?

Who are you?

Who are you?

Ethel.

Later on that same night, in a dump at Saint-Escobille, outside the gates of Paris, the contents of a garbageman’s cart was being tipped onto a mountain of trash. A site worker pushed out what remained with a fork.

“You’re the last ones,” he told the old man in the hat, who was pulling the cart.

“They kept us for four hours at the police station. They’d blocked all the doors. I had no idea what was going on. I’m off to bed.”

The worker helped him park his cart alongside the others.

“Good night.”

“’Night.”

Silence was restored.

The only sound was the scurrying of rats.

A moment later, the stinking mound started moving. A man got out and stood up. He gave one of the rodents a good kick and wiped his hand across his greasy face.

“My God,” he said.

A few hours earlier, he had been carrying a case with
PEST CONTROL AND RAT-CATCHING
on it: Zefiro had managed to escape.

He fumbled for his watch in his jacket pocket. It was time to join Vango at the Gare d’Austerlitz.

Once he was outside and hugging the wall of the dump, he didn’t have the faintest inkling that twenty-five meters behind him, the old man in the hat was following him in the shadows.

Sochi, a few days later, August 1935

“Setanka! I don’t want to play anymore.”

Setanka didn’t answer. She was hidden in the long grass on a dune, just above the others. The little boy had been trying to find her for the best part of an hour. He was close to tears.

“Tell me where you are!”

Why didn’t Setanka enjoy these picnics on the shores of the Black Sea so much anymore? During their never-ending games of hide-and-seek, she would let her little cousin brush past without seeing her.

“Setanka, Setanotchka . . .”

As she lay there, daydreaming, she could feel the grasshoppers climbing over her skin. She was watching the clusters of people sitting in the sun.

There were so many of them, just like in the old days. Grandfather, Grandmother, Uncle Pavloucha, the Redens and their children, Uncle Aliocha Svanidzé and Aunt Maroussia, who could sing opera arias. If Setanka turned slightly, she had a view of her father, half propped against a dead tree, talking to a man she didn’t recognize. Surrounding them, standing in the rushes or in the water, a handful of guards watched over this gathering.

Until she was six, when her mother was still with them, these picnic lunches were sheer bliss for Setanka. The songs were merrier, the sun more radiant, and the tender words her uncle Pavloucha whispered in her ear as he knelt down in front of her weren’t tinged with sadness as they were today. When August came to a close, and they had to return to Moscow for the start of school, it used to be a wrench to leave their dacha in Sochi.

These days, despite everybody hooting with laughter at her grandparents’ eternal quarreling, despite Aunt Maroussia’s serenades, there was a sense of fear in the summer air that nothing could assuage.

At only nine years old, Setanka had no idea where this fear came from, but she could feel it everywhere, clinging to her even more closely than the dress on her sweaty shoulders.

Sometimes she thought about all those people who had suddenly stopped coming to the house and who were never mentioned again. Where had handsome Kirov and all the others gone? Where?

Not even in her wildest nightmares could she have imagined that her father, Joseph Stalin, was a man who ruled his country with terror, that he had just organized the famine in the Ukraine, and that in the future, he wouldn’t even spare his own family. A few months later, Aliocha and Maroussia would be arrested, Uncle Pavloucha would die in his office of a strange heart attack, and then there would be Uncle Redens, shot the following year, his wife deported . . .

“Why didn’t you give me a clue? I’ve been looking for you for an hour!”

The little boy had finally found Setanka. He was trying to hide the tearstains on his cheeks.

Setanka held out her hand and pulled him up onto the dune. He crouched down next to her.

“Are you brave?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he replied, sounding rather worried.

“Then follow me,” instructed Setanka.

They started crawling through the grass. Setanka was in front. She was the elder of the two. Nobody paid any attention to this pair of snakes advancing over the dune. The boy’s knees and elbows were turning green as he dragged himself along.

“Don’t go so fast,” he begged her.

“Shhh, be quiet. . . . We’re nearly there.”

The children slid behind a fallen tree trunk. They could hear voices on the other side. On reaching the dead tree that Setanka’s father was leaning against, they strained their ears.

Somebody referred to a piece of “good news,” and not long afterward, Setanka heard the words she was always listening for: “The Bird . . .”

Her heart leaped.

“The Bird has shown his face in Paris,” a man said. “He left a letter with the police.”

Setanka put her head to the ground. She could hear her father saying words she didn’t understand.

“No,” the man replied. “They didn’t catch him.”

A heavy silence followed.

“Is that your good news, Comrade?”

“In his message, the fugitive explained to the police that he is being pursued, but he doesn’t know why or by whom. . . .”

A fresh silence. Over by the water’s edge, Aunt Maroussia was singing.

Registering her father’s cold anger, Setanka tried to flatten herself even more.

“And you’re going to let him make fools of you again?”

“C-Comrade,” the other man stammered, “I was able to read the whole letter. . . .”

“The letter tells lies, you idiot!”

“But . . .”

“Good-bye.”

When Setanka heard the rustle of clothes, she curled herself into a ball and pushed her cousin’s face into the grass.

“Find him!”

The visitor had just stood up.

“My apologies for disturbing you, Comrade.”

Stalin let the man head off before summoning him back with a whistle.

“You mentioned the woman who brought him up. What do you call her again?”

“The Bird Seller. She poses no danger. Over there in Italy, everyone says she can’t remember anything. . . .”

“Put her in a place where she’ll no longer be a risk for us.”

“You want me to . . . ?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You . . . ?”

“Bring her here. And keep your eyes peeled. It may well be an occasion for the Bird to show himself. People become very attached to that kind of woman.”

Setanka thought of her own nanny, Alexandra Andreyevena, who had looked after her with infinite kindness ever since she was born. After her mother had died, Setanka had been saved by her nanny’s tenderness.

“An operation like that, abroad . . .” the man objected timidly.

“Act cleanly.”

“I thought that . . .”

“Deal with that woman, and don’t disturb me again on a Sunday.”

Setanka and her cousin stayed there, crouching silently in the grass, for several minutes. They had almost drifted off to sleep, their eyelids growing heavy, when they sensed a shadow of giant proportions hovering over them and heard the terrifying roar of a bear. They rolled over to one side, shrieking.

The bear smelled of tobacco. It had Uncle Pavloucha’s brown eyes. It had his long legs too, not to mention his melancholic laugh and his sand-colored jacket cut by a reputable tailor from Berlin.

The two children jumped on their uncle, who had given them such a fright.

But the game didn’t last long. It was a halfhearted attempt by Pavloucha to remind the little ones of bygone summers, when Grandfather would pretend to be the bear or when he would gleefully throw Setanka’s mother into the water.

On the other side of the dead tree, Comrade Stalin was staring at Pavloucha and the children, sprawled on the ground.

In a few hours, the order would be communicated to remove Vango’s caretaker and to put her in a secure place. Forever.

Salina, Aeolian Islands, at the same time

The moment she walked through her front door, Mademoiselle knew that someone had been in the house before her. When you live alone, objects assume a huge importance. Your eye grows accustomed to them. They stay in their allotted place, and the tiniest change is as astounding as a footprint on a deserted beach.

The cup on the table had shifted position. Not only had it moved a finger’s width, but it had also been turned halfway around. And that half turn was what startled Mademoiselle the most. This tiny nudging of a teacup was as startling for her as a horn blasting its warning through the silence of the island.

The most striking factor of all was that the cup’s handle had been turned to the right. Now, to anyone else, that might have seemed like a small detail, but for Mademoiselle it was an earthquake. She was left-handed and she always used the handle when picking up her cup, so it was impossible for this cup to be in that position without the intervention of a stranger. A right-handed stranger or, in the worst-case scenario, a left-handed stranger so badly brought up that they didn’t pick up a teacup by its handle.

Careful not to betray her surprise, she made her way over to the stone sink with her basket of fresh capers.

Mademoiselle had suspected that they’d be back one day. The last time, they hadn’t found what they were looking for. This time, they wouldn’t give her a second chance.

She started sorting the capers. She preferred eating the big juicy ones, which she put to one side, while the little ones would fetch a good price.

Capers are the buds of the caper-bush flower. Mademoiselle made two piles on a board whitened with salt. It was the end of the harvest. She always left a row of unpicked shrubs up on the hill, and that way she got to see their white flowers bursting into bloom. The flowers lasted only a single day. And right now she was wearing one in her hair.

Mademoiselle had her back to the room. She had no desire to run away.

On her way home, she’d noticed that Mazzetta wasn’t in his cave.

She had even picked up the pace to avoid him catching her with this flirtatious flower in her hair.