It is darker now. We have taken a short-cut which leads to the village. She’s still telling me about Murraille’s apartment on the Avenue d’Iéna. On summer evenings, they go out on to the big terrace. . She brings her face close to mine. I can feel her breath on my neck. We stumble blindly through the Clos-Foucré and I find myself in her room, as I expected. On the bedside table, a lamp with a red shade. Two chairs and a writing-desk. The walls are papered with yellow and green striped satin. She turns the dial of the wireless and I hear the distant voice of Andre Claveau through the static. She stretches out on the bed.
‘Would you be kind and take off my boots?’
I obey, moving like a sleepwalker. She passes me a cigarette case. We smoke. Clearly all the bedrooms in the Clos-Foucré are exactly the same: Empire furniture and English hunting prints. Now she’s toying with a little pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle and I wonder whether this is the first chapter of the ‘Confessions of a Society Chauffeur’ I promised Murraille. In the harsh light from the lamp, she looks older than I had thought. Her face is puffy with tiredness. There is a smear of lipstick across her chin. She says:
‘Come here.’
I sit on the edge of the bed. She props herself on her elbows and gazes into my eyes. Just at that moment, there must have been an electricity cut. The room is framed in a yellow pall of the kind that glazes old photographs. Her face shifted out of focus, the outlines of the furniture indistinct, Claveau carried on singing faintly. Then I asked the question that I had been dying to ask from the beginning. Curtly:
‘Tell me, what do you know about Baron Deyckecaire?’
‘Deyckecaire?’
She sighed and turned towards the wall. Minutes passed. She had forgotten me but I returned to the attack.
‘Strange guy, isn’t he, Deyckecaire?’
I waited. She did not react. I repeated, articulating each syllable:
‘Strange guy, Dey-cke-caire. .!’
She didn’t stir. I thought she had fallen asleep and I would never get an answer. I heard her mutter:
‘You find Deyckecaire interesting?’
The flicker of a lighthouse in the darkness. Very faint. She went on in a drawclass="underline"
‘What do you want with that creature?’
‘Nothing. . Have you known him long?’
‘That creature?’ She repeated the word ‘creature’ with that doggedness drunks have of repeating a word over and over.
‘Am I right in thinking he’s a friend of Murraille’s?’ I ventured.
‘His crony!’
I planned to ask her what she meant by ‘crony’ but I needed to catch her off guard. She rambled on interminably, then trailed off, muttered a few confused phrases. I was used to this floundering around, to these exhausting games of blind-man’s-buff when you stretch out your arms but catch only empty air. I tried — not without difficulty — to steer her back to the point. After an hour I had at least succeeded in coaxing some information from her. Yes, you were certainly Murraille’s ‘crony’. You served as a frontman and general factotum in certain shady deals. Contraband? Black marketeering? Touting? Finally she yawned and said: ‘But it doesn’t matter, Jean is planning to get rid of him as soon as possible!’ That made things only too clear. We moved on to talk about other things. She fetched a little leather case from the desk and showed me the jewellery Murraille had given her. He liked it to be heavy and encrusted with stones, because, according to him, ‘it would be easier to sell in an emergency’. I said I thought it was a very sensible idea ‘given the times we’re living in’. She asked if I went out much in Paris. There were lots of stunning shows: Roger Duchesne and Billy Bourbon were doing a cabaret at Le Club. Sessue Hayakawa was in a revival of Forfaiture at the Ambigu, and Michel Parme with the Skarjinsky orchestra were playing an early evening set at the Chapiteau. I was thinking about you, ‘papa’. So you were a straw man to be liquidated when the time came. Your disappearance would create no more fuss than that of a fly. Who would remember you twenty years from now?
She drew the curtains. I could only see her face and her red hair. I went over the events of the evening again. The interminable dinner, the moonlight walk, Murraille and Marcheret going back to the ‘Villa Mektoub’. And your shadow standing on the Chemin du Bornage. All these vague impressions were part of the past. I had gone back in time to find your trail and track you down. What year were we living in? What era? What life? By what strange miracle had I known you when you were not yet my father? Why had I made so much effort, when a chansonnier was telling a ‘Jewish joke’, in a bar that smelled of shadows and leather, to an audience of strangers? Why, even then, had I wanted to be your son? She turned out the bedside light. The sound of voices from the next room. Maud Gallas and Dédé Wildmer. They swore at each other for a long time and then came the sighs, the moans. The wireless had stopped crackling. After a piece played by the Fred Adison orchestra, the last news bulletin was announced. And it was terrifying, listening to the frantic newsreader — still the same voice — in the darkness.
I needed all the patience I could muster. Marcheret took me aside and began to describe, house by house, the red-light district of Casablanca where he had spent — he told me — the best moments of his life. You never forget Africa! It leaves its mark! A pox-ridden continent. I let him go on for hours about ‘that old whore Africa’, showing a polite interest. He had one other topic of conversation. His royal lineage. He claimed to be descended from the Duc du Maine, the bastard son of Louis XIV. His title, ‘Comte d’Eu’ proved it. Every time, pen and paper at the ready, he insisted on showing me in detail. He would embark on a family tree and it would take him until dawn. He got confused, crossed out names, added others, his writing steadily becoming illegible. In the end, he ripped the page into little pieces, and gave me a withering look:
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
On other evenings, his malaria and his impending marriage to Annie Murraille were the subjects of conversation. The malaria attacks were less frequent now, but he would never be cured. And Annie went her own way. He was only marrying her out of friendship for Murraille. It wouldn’t last a week. . These realisations made him bitter. Fuelled by alcohol, he would become aggressive, call me a ‘greenhorn’ and ‘a snot-nosed brat’. Dédé Wildmer was a ‘pimp’, Murraille a ‘sex maniac’ and my father ‘a Jew who had it coming to him’. Gradually he would calm down, apologize to me. What about one more vermouth? No better cure for the blues.
Murraille, on the other hand, talked about his magazine. He planned to expand C’est la vie, add a 36-page section with new columns in which the most diverse talents could express themselves. He would soon celebrate fifty years in journalism with a lunch at which most of his colleagues and friends would be reunited: Maulaz, Alin-Laubreaux, Gerbère, Le Houleux, Lestandi. . and various celebrities. He would introduce me to them. He was delighted to be able to help me. If I needed money, I shouldn’t hesitate to tell him: he would let me have advances against future stories. As time went on, his bluster and patronising tone gave way to a mounting nervousness. Every day — he told me — he received a hundred anonymous letters. People were baying for his blood, he had been forced to apply for a gun licence. Broadly, he was being accused of being part of an era when most people ‘played a waiting game’. He at least made his position clear. In black and white. He had the upper hand at the moment, but the situation might turn out badly for him and his friends. If that happened, they would not get off lightly. In the meantime, he was not going to be bossed around by anyone. I said I agreed absolutely. Strange thoughts ran through my mind: the man was not suspicious of me (at least I don’t think he was) and it would have been easy to ruin him. It’s not every day that you find yourself face to face with a ‘traitor’ and ‘Judas’. You have to make the most of it. He smiled. Deep down, I rather liked him.