My Chocolate Redeemer (22 page)

‘I'd like to see Monsieur Brown. If he'll see me.'

‘Of course. He's always willing to see you. I think that's why the men at the gate let you in without a challenge. It's a funny thing, Bella, but I would say that you are continually expected.'

André throws the bits of newspaper into the air and the little scraps rain down on us.

And certainly he does seem to be expecting me because my soft knock on the door of his cell is answered instantly. He is dressed in red shirt and green trousers and carries a copy of the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, it's a book in a loud red cover. On the table beside his bed is a tin of drinking chocolate with a picture of
La Belle Chocolatière
carrying her tray of drinking chocolate, a lovely homely picture of a plump pretty girl in cap and apron who comes bearing her hot, dark, sweet, blissful sleeping draught in just the way my grandmother would carry it to me each night in bed in the days before my father died and my mother fled, before my doll Gloria was kidnapped, before my uncle broke my mug with the intelligent bear being led by the fat man, a picture in which all the beastliness seemed concentrated in the man.

‘Still with those funny earphones on, still listening to your music. What is it this time?'

I give him the earphones.

‘Who are they – witches?'

Actually it's that three-woman group Vulpine who made it big with ‘Trauma', last year sometime – they all wear blonde wigs and black leather, bicycle-chain belts. The usual S & M lookalikes. They're a gothic triad, a middle- to heavyweight metallic lot who fell out of the air somewhere above Ealing last winter, like space debris, and made a bit of a splash when they came down.

‘This is the barbarism of the West,' Monsieur Brown says. ‘Doesn't this noise make it difficult for you to hear what people are saying?'

‘That's the idea. Have you started making yourself hot chocolate in the evenings? I see that
La Belle Chocolatière
keeps you company.'

He smiles. ‘No, the tin is empty. But the dear proprietor, for whom my every whim is his command, as he often tells me, seeing that I admired the portrait of the girl with the tray, gave it to me. But I can see you know her. Who is she, please?'

‘She lived quite a time ago. She's known as
La Belle Chocolatière
and she was a real person, Anna Baltauf, a girl who worked in a chocolate house in Vienna. Each day the Prince came down to the chocolate house because he loved the liquid of the gods, the fashionable new drink, and he fell in love with the waitress Anna who served him and he carried her off and married her. For a wedding present he had her painted in the same uniform she had worn when she was just a humble chocolate server.'

‘She is …' he searched for the word, ‘just right. Beautiful.'

I look at
La Belle Chocolatière
and I see that what makes for beauty is the yoking together of unlikely things that suddenly become appropriate. To make them seem as if they could never have been otherwise. To create necessity from the elements of chance meetings. The union of the most unlikely is brilliantly vindicated. Sense and necessity are born.

‘It's a chocolate fairytale!' He claps his hands like a child. ‘A marriage born of the sacred bean. If I were in Zanj tomorrow I would have someone painted like the girl on the chocolate tin.'

‘Which wife would you use?'

He doesn't answer, just gives me his big, slow smile and sits me down on the little green chaise longue. ‘Now you must tell me why you've come to see me. Is there something I can do for you?'

I look at him then, this solid, dark slab of a man with his wide, turned-down mouth, the waxy ridges of jaw bone, the corduroy quality of his skin close up, the flapping ears and the heavy jowls. Behind him is a photograph of him in all his glory. No doubt another portrait taken by delayed-action camera. And he is so ridiculous in this picture, in his white uniform blazing with medals like hub-caps, and braid, epaulettes and insignia, a broad snowy belt studded with jewels around his plump middle, the peaked cap crazed with gold; here are the familiar heavy round harsh black glasses, and behold also he carries a thick wand, or a baton, or a club, or maybe a truncheon, of midnight blue flecked with silver stars held up before him in his hand, neat in a white glove. This is the man who killed and ate his enemies. Kept them in the fridge. I should be frightened. I want to be frightened. But I'm not. All I want to know is – did he cook them first? Before he served them up with rice? I take off the diamond pendant Papa gave me and hand it to him.

‘Why are you giving me this?'

‘Because I think it belongs to you.'

‘It doesn't. It's yours.'

‘Yes, Papa gave it to me. But you gave it to him, didn't you? All the jewels he gave to me and my mother came from you. The stones of the Wouff.'

‘Gifts. It's a custom among my people, the people of the stone.'

‘Gifts for favours. Bribes.'

‘There's no such word in our language. Besides, these stones for us are not what you regard them as: treasures, valuables. They're the sacred signs of our gods and they represent marks of friendship and affection that we felt, your father and me. Freely passed, freely accepted. Given like promises. Why do you want to return it to me now?'

‘After my father died the men from the government in Paris came to see us and they took all the diamonds and jewels away from my mother. All except this one. So I want you to take it because I feel it's yours. It doesn't belong to me. Please, we have enough trouble here. My grandmama is very ill.'

‘You believe that this is why I came? You give me the diamond because you hope I'll take it and leave?' Very gently, he takes the pendant and replaces it around my neck.

‘Ah, no, my dear. I will go – but not yet. Keep it. One day you might be glad. It's a special stone. Only certain people may wear it.'

‘I don't think you understand. My uncle and the Angel and Father Duval – they're powerful men. My uncle's the mayor and Monsieur Cherubini runs him like clockwork. They have a new party, the PNP, which many people in the village belong to, and the police chief too. And they're keen to begin to stir things up.'

‘My compliments. You have important tribal relations.'

‘There's a big rally on Saturday.'

‘And you wish to invite me? Very well, I will come.'

‘There will be trouble. You must get out.'

‘You worry for me! You are a good girl.'

‘Please.'

‘My dear young miss, it is you who don't understand. This is not something I can decide myself. Those men out there in the parking lot – why do you think they watch me day and night?'

‘For your protection. Because you have enemies.'

‘Yes. But also so that I should not slip away and never be seen again. So that I shouldn't run home to my own country where my people cry for me. I hear their voices on the wind –' He cocks an ear to the silent, velvet night beyond the windows. ‘Come home, Redeemer! – they cry – Save us from the tyrant … I hear their cry but I cannot reply. Believe me, if the door stood open I would fly tomorrow. Tonight. This second! But the watchers are ready. I do not move without their knowledge. You see how I am in this place. They chose it, took it over for me because of its position. A fine place to imprison a man, an easy place to guard, no access except by the little lake road, the water before, the mountains behind …'

‘There might be a way.'

‘Can you see such a way? They have patrols on the autoroutes outside the village, people standing by to catch me at the airports. Yet if I could get out then they would have trouble stopping me, this I know, because people don't recognise people they are not expecting to see. I would glide by them like a ghost. If, and I say
if
, I could get away … If I had help, a friend, a guide …'

‘By water,' I hear myself say, ‘that's the only route. Late at night, tomorrow night, Friday. That would be the time.'

‘But how do I get clear of the village? The lake, yes, possibly, to escape from the Priory. But how to get from the village thereafter?'

‘You don't, not immediately. You wait, hide, until Saturday morning when the rally begins and when everyone is fully occupied. The entire village is expected to turn out. No one's allowed to park in the square, so there will be motor cars all over the village, unattended, available. You understand?'

‘Such consternation when they find me gone! The scandal!'

‘Monsieur Brown, if we do this properly there will be no consternation. No one will know you've left the hotel. You will spend Friday night quietly in some hiding place and then when the rally gets underway, you disappear.'

‘Where will you hide a person of my prominence?'

‘Leave that to me. Come down to the private beach tomorrow night, at two in the morning exactly. Don't bring much – just what you're standing up in.'

‘And a song on my lips, hope in my heart and my people's voices ringing in my ears!'

He takes up a position in front of his picture, the one with the wand and all the medals, and he beams like crazy. I think in his own mind he's already back in Zanj, back in his uniform. Back getting ready to chew up some opponents? Well, I don't ask that question. You appreciate my diffidence, it's not easy suddenly to turn round and ask someone if he eats people. You need to nudge the conversation along. And anyway, what do I say if he says ‘yes'? Between the two of us, I think I'd be even more worried if he said ‘no'.

‘May I paint you?'

‘What?' For a moment I don't understand because he has a camera in his hands, one of those cameras which gives you prints immediately and he's examining me through the viewfinder as I sit on his little green settee.

‘Something to remember you by. Something to take away with me. The daughter of my friend whom I have travelled so far to see. My rescuer!'

‘We haven't done it yet.'

‘I have faith. Please, just one picture. Let me arrange you. Excuse me but you seem to have newspaper in your hair. May I remove it? What lovely pins! There!'

So he arranges me. I have a little pillow behind my head and I sit on the edge of the settee with my left knee raised. Very gently he takes the right shoulder of my dress and pulls it down, baring my arm and showing the pendant around my neck. Then he goes over to the fire and lights it. He gives me a mirror to hold and I look at myself, glad to see I am still there, still in one piece. Once the fire is blazing he sets the camera on automatic and crouches in front of the flames with his back to me. He takes several pictures before he's satisfied. He constantly feeds the fire. The room becomes terribly hot, I can feel the flames playing along my legs, I have beads of sweat on my lip and forehead. His red shirt is the colour of the flames crackling in the grate.

Afterwards he shows me the original. A picture torn from a magazine.

‘
Les Beaux Jours
'. I like the title,' says Monsieur Brown. ‘And I recognise you in the picture.'

‘But her hair is redder than mine and I think she's quite a bit shorter. She's wearing a pearl necklace, not a pendant. It isn't me.'

‘It is now,' he says.

I am walking through the darkened cloisters of the Priory towards the front door, after leaving him, and the whole place is deathly quiet, the guests asleep, André absent. Then, in the dark of the Prior's garden, through the glass walls, I see him lying by the well, beneath the virgin who examines the foot of the Christ child. Clovis. Out for the count, stoked to the eyeballs. Has he been taking Chinese heroin or durophet or LSD or the whole damn caboodle? I can't say, but he is out cold. He's become again the old shooting, popping, sniffing Clovis, stoned out of his unstable little mind. Where is the new Clovis of the salmon-pink overall and the perspex boot, full of life and high hopes? My first thought is to wonder how on earth he got past the watchers at the gate who would let no one in. But then I guess Clovis was so high he was flying and simply soared over their heads, Mercury, the messenger of the gods, only he wasn't wearing a funny hat like a golf cap, which Monsieur Brown wore when he played Mercury in the painting. Clovis just wears his hair as green as Ireland and is lying now on the ground as if he's dead, or has given up all hopes of life and happiness.

I go upstairs to André's room and knock on the door. It takes him some time to answer and when he does he is wearing a lavender silk dressing-gown and his eyes are red. It looks to me as though he has been weeping. He opens the door just a little but when I tell him about Clovis he comes out immediately, though not before I see behind him the big wide bed, and I mean really wide, and there tucked up like the three bears without Goldilocks are Armand, Tertius and Hyppolyte, sleeping like three little mummified babies stuck in the womb, sleeping soundly and smiling broadly, tucked up in the mammoth bed under a white blanket pulled up to their chins. All this I take in and he sees that I do and he doesn't care. He helps me to carry Clovis inside to the empty television room on the ground floor and we call the doctor.

Twice tonight Dr Valléry has stepped from the tepid depths that are his mistress and he is not best pleased. I think that he's beginning to imagine that I'm a bird of ill-omen.

‘Heroin,' says Valléry after a while.

‘Come, we will carry him to one of the rooms and put him to bed,' says André. ‘I will nurse him.'

‘Will he die?' I ask.

‘If he's lucky,' says Valléry.

At home I find no sign of my uncle or the Angel. Father Duval sits downstairs reading an old copy of the
Life of Charles Maurras
. When I speak to him his eyes fill with tears.

‘A terrible thing, Bella. A sacrilege has been committed! He was wailing like an animal so I went upstairs. I feared he would wake your grandmother. I opened the door of your uncle's study and he ran out into the night. A mad creature. Go and see for yourself.'