Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘No. Before.’

‘By Jules.’

‘Jules who?’

She shrugged her shoulders and skipped into her bathroom, where he followed to see her covered in soapy foam.

‘You don’t know anything. You make me feel like an old woman who’s teaching a schoolboy a thing or two.’

‘Jules who?’

‘Jules Laforgue.’

She splashed him with foam. Ten minutes later, fully dressed, she left for the studio where Émile Duzan was waiting for her, having rapidly abandoned her vague resolutions to quit the cinema. Between scenes she telephoned Jean, whom she now called Jules-who, and if she reached him it was always to beg him, ‘Please come, Jules-who. I really cannot cope with these pricks any more. I love only you.’

He did not believe a word of it. She still occasionally slept with Duzan, who endured torments, hated Jean, and offered him a job in his studio, in public relations. Palfy urged Jean to accept.

‘It’s an ideal job for you. You get out. No being stuck in an office. In six months you’ll know everybody.’

‘And every morning I’ll see Duzan’s ugly mug! No thanks!’

‘He’s not a bad person. His being in love and being bashful about it proves it. Anyhow, he likes to suffer; it gives him the feeling he exists. He just wants to keep his executioner close.’

Faced with the difficulty of finding anything else, Jean eventually said yes. He earned double what La Garenne had once begrudged him. And in any case a catastrophe had befallen the gallery on Place du Tertre, to which Blanche had beseeched him in vain to return. One afternoon two inspectors had arrived and introduced themselves, asking politely, but brooking no refusal, for the director to open his flies and show them his member. Terrorised and struck dumb, La Garenne had complied. Faced with this graceless object, the inspectors had nodded and requested La Garenne to follow them. Blanche had been nonplussed. She had run to Palfy, and from him had an explanation. Since June they had been taking a census of Jews, and anonymous letters had been flooding in to the Préfecture and the Kommandantur. Apparently the former Léonard Twenty-Sous was not called La Garenne but something much less sonorous, despite its being one of the most celebrated tribes of Israel, to which the Virgin Mary had belonged. Several telephone calls established that Louis-Edmond was being held pending confirmation of his identity. Once he was released, he would no longer have the right to run a business. Blanche still could not understand what had aroused the suspicion of the inspectors. Palfy tactfully explained to her the mysteries of circumcision. Blanche, who had never known another organ besides La Garenne’s, discovered how far the parents of an otherwise worldly girl might neglect her education, in the name of outdated modesty. She burst into sobs.

‘He’s broken my heart! And he claimed to be the descendant of a crusader! Why did he lie to me? I would have put up with everything from him. He’s a man of quality.’

Palfy, uncomfortable at this paean of lyricism, took her out to lunch, where she drank more than she was used to, which had the unexpected merit of bringing her back to her senses.

‘With the gallery closed and Louis-Edmond in prison, I’ll be on the street.’

‘No, I think I may have just the job for you.’

‘I don’t know how to do anything. Without him, I’m nothing.’

‘The important thing, as I repeat endlessly to Jean, is not to know how to do anything. You’re the ideal person.’

So Blanche became Madeleine’s companion, warmly recommended by Palfy and Rudolf von Rocroy — but before finding her in that role, let us not forget in passing Mercedes del Loreto. It was three days after Louis-Edmond’s arrest that Jean remembered the investigation carried out by Marceline Michette. Louis-Edmond had not even been allowed to go to Rue de la Gaîté to collect a toothbrush, which in any case he did not possess. What had happened to the poor bedridden old lady, whose sea-lion shrieks regularly shook the building? He dashed to Montparnasse with Marceline. Madame Berthe, the dresser, was propping up the bar of the café- tabac where the waiter was pouring her third glass of lunchtime medium-dry Anjou. Madame Michette took matters in hand, displaying a sudden authority that months of Palfy’s petty ultra-secret missions had been stifling.

‘Madame Berthe? Do you recognise me?’

‘Ah, the journalist. How are you? You’ll have a glass with me, won’t you? Is this your son?’

‘No, a friend.’

Madame Berthe winked.

‘Perhaps you’re in the press too? Photographer?’

‘No,’ Jean said. ‘In films …’

‘Films! Pouah!’

‘We’d like to know if there’s any news of Mercedes del Loreto.’

‘It’s funny you should mention that: this morning I was just saying to myself that it’s been a good two days since I last heard the old lady’s “ Arrh, arrh… oowowoowow …”’

*

The police station gave them the address of a locksmith, and a policeman went with them to the top floor of the building.

Sitting up in bed, supported by cushions on either side and resting with a pillow behind her head, her hands clasped on the sheet, her stiff hair dyed with henna and held in place at her temples by a pink ribbon, and her eyes, a viscid blue, wide open, she was waiting for them. One might have thought that her relaxed lower jaw, laying bare a few last teeth, the yellow colour of old ivory, that poked up out of shrunken, rotten gums, was that way because she was about to complain bitterly, with sea-lion cries, of their neglect. But she was still. The wrinkles on her face covered thickly with foundation, her bituminous eyelids, the crazed, bright-red lipstick, were frozen for ever. The room’s sour-sweet stench — a nauseating mixture of things left to rot, face creams and dead flesh — left no doubt. Mercedes had risen to the occasion of death with her sense of theatre undiminished. Her pot of foundation sat open on her bedside table, and on the floor — it must have slipped from her hands after a final inspection — lay a cheval glass, on which was written in greasepaint, ‘Down with the Jews!’ Yes, unintentionally she was berating her unknown visitors, the chance witnesses of her death — Marceline Michette, Madame Berthe, Jean Arnaud, an anonymous locksmith and a policeman (no. 2857) — for the mirror’s message was meant for the person she had waited for in vain, her whipping boy, the deplorable Louis-Edmond upon whom she had heaped infamy since the day he was born. At that moment Jean felt sorry for him, however odious and ignoble he might be. What an ordeal his life must have been, caring for this mother he had loved, admired, cosseted, washed and spoon-fed, whose chamber pot he had guiltily tiptoed out to empty daily in the WC on the landing, and whose reward, as the ineluctable proof of her brief affair with a banker, had been to be showered with insults. The banker must have acknowledged the child, then abandoned it after one tantrum too many from Señora del Loreto. The story did not seem hard to reconstruct, and one could picture the hell of these three rooms, with Mercedes hating Louis-Edmond for being the symbol of an ultimately failed career. What horror, and what a stench! The smell was unbearable, yet no one dared move, as if, pinned down by embarrassment, not one of the five witnesses could take another step. Agent no. 2857, who had already come across plenty of horrors and whose strong spirit was ready to confront more in this long, dark period, was the first to come back down to earth. He opened an attic window that no one had touched for centuries. The catch came away in his hand and a rod clattered down, freeing two panes thick with grime that smashed on the parquet floor. For the first time fresh air blew in with the sounds of Rue de la Gaîté: a newsboy selling Paris-Soir , a horse neighing. Madame Berthe stifled a theatrical sob.