Authors: Thomas Gifford
“Where is he?” I asked. “Don’t tell me he’s working.” I smiled but they weren’t smiling back.
“You’re three days late, my friend,” Clive Paternoster said, blinking at me past his enormous nose. “The Vicar crashed in flames the other day. He is no more, Mr. Driskill. A comparatively young man. Seventy on
the button. I’m sixty-three myself.” He pushed the heavy black frames back into place. “The Vicar is dead, Mr. Driskill, cut down in his prime.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, shock in my voice. “He was a good fellow.” I was thinking: he
had
seen Val! But why? What had they talked about? Had it mattered? He’d been in Paris in the old days.… “What was it? What carried him off?”
“Oh, it was quick,” Claude said bitterly, stroking the cat. “He didn’t linger.” He looked sorrowfully at Paternoster.
“That’s what I meant … cut down in his prime.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Street violence,” Clive Paternoster said softly. “Somebody took a knife to him.” He looked at his black digital watch. “You might as well come along to the funeral. We’re putting the Vicar in the ground within the hour.”
The Vicar was buried in a small, out-of-the way cemetery in a dreary quarter of the city, not far from a convergence of railway lines. The coffin was plain, the priest not terribly interested and coming down with a cold besides, the grave dark and muddy. The gravel path was brown and wet, the grass cut too short and the color of the gravel. There were six of us mourners, nobody crying or wringing their hands with grief. There was a double row of evergreen trees flanking the path that led to the grave, the extreme symmetry seeming very Parisian. That was how the Vicar made his exit, and it only went to show you that what mattered was the living, not the dying.
Walking away from the cemetery, Clive Paternoster lit a Gauloise and plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his black raincoat. His shoulders were hunched and he gave the impression of pushing his nose on ahead of him, like a man pushing a giant peanut across Paris with his nose. Rain was dripping from the brim of his hat. “Robbie and I were roommates these last five, six years. People called us the odd couple, y’know, but we got
along fine. Two old farts facing up to the end—I lied to you before, I’m nearly seventy myself—two old farts remembering what it was like to be young and full of mayhem. Hard to believe he’s gone. Between us we covered more than our share of wars, murders, scandals, elections … I got the gimpy leg courtesy of a Mongolian sniper during the Korean fracas.” He pronounced the word
frah-kah
. “But it was the Church, that’s what you might say brought us together. Became an obsession. Interesting mechanism, the Church. Perfect refuge for scoundrels, of course.”
“Tell me how he died. Everything you know.”
He looked up at me curiously, then gave a little mental shrug. He couldn’t resist a good story. “Somebody mugged him about five minutes from our place. I found him on the landing in front of our door, he was sprawled facedown in one of his loud, horrible tout’s jackets, all plaid, y’know, and he’d fallen with his face pushed up against the slats of the railing, you remember what that looks like, and when I came in the downstairs door there was this funny sound, like a clock ticking, steady tock-tock-tock it went, and I’d never noticed it before.… I stood there in the dark stairwell, then I thought I smelled something I’d smelled before—in Algeria in a cell where they’d tortured blokes, lots of that going on in the Algerian fracas”—that word again—“and what I smelled was blood. And when I took that step forward, something dripped on my hat, tock-tock-tock, and I felt it, took my hat off, and it was all sticky, then a big fat drop hit me in the head … blood of course, blood dripping from the landing, and when I got up there, old Robbie was gone, well, almost gone, he was babbling o’ green fields like old Falstaff, y’know … talking about summertime, that’s where he was, I suppose, in some sunny summer afternoon.…”
He lit another cigarette from the stub of the first one and we kept walking. He made good time with the cane. We were somewhere in Clichy.
“Well, I followed the blood like an old Indian tracker, Robbie had been knifed in the belly and in the chest, it
was a miracle he’d gotten more than ten feet … the Vicar was a strong man, very strong … so I followed the blood, thank God it was a dry day, wasn’t much to it. Blood stopped at the corner of rue Mouffetard and rue Ortolan, which is where it must have happened … probably some
clochard
from the Place, knew who Robbie was, went round the bend, had a go at him with a paring knife …”
“Was he robbed?”
“No, that was funny. Made me think it was a fellow who went psycho—”
“Yes, I suppose so.” There was nothing else to say. Maybe he really had been killed by a maniac, maybe there was no connection to any of my troubles, and maybe the moon was made of green cheese. And maybe I was off the edge with my suspicions.
We finally caught a taxi and went back to Contrescarpe. Clive Paternoster showed me the corner where Robbie was knifed. We followed the path he took trying to get home and went inside, stood in the stairwell, climbed the stairs to the landing where he finally bled to death. Paternoster’s charwoman had scrubbed the stained carpet and most of the blood had come out. Now there was an even more obvious trail of bleached-out spots marring the tatty old carpet.
He took me inside the apartment and I saw the place where the two crusty old bachelors had made their home among all the mementoes of two long careers. There were so many bits and pieces. A wooden propellor from the Battle of Britain, crossed oars from a Henley regatta, a cricket bat from a match at Lord’s, a photo of the Vicar and the Fuehrer, the Vicar with Pope Pius, Clive Paternoster with Pius and Torricelli, de Gaulle having dinner and Jean-Paul Belmondo smoking a cigarette and Brigitte Bardot on Paternoster’s lap and Yves Montand and Simone Signoret and Paternoster, Hemingway and the Vicar with their arms around each other’s, shoulders beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Quite a pair of lives, once wide ranging, once part of the history of their times, but now drawing in, tightening, growing smaller. Paris, Place
de la Contrescarpe, Tabbycats, the bloody street corner, the bleach spots on the carpet, the little apartment with the souvenirs that would someday wind up for sale in an odds and ends flea market deep in a side street …
The
clochards
had a fire going and were clustered around it, ignoring the evening’s cold drizzle. There were two huge frying pans, black cast iron with toweling wrapped around their handles, full of sizzling garlic sausages and onions and peppers and chunks of potato. Bottles of cheap red wine, long crusty loaves of bread, a kind of
clochard
’s picnic. It smelled wonderful, mixing with the smell of the rain and the autumn fading into early winter. As I watched, one of the tramps doused the contents of both skillets with wine. It sizzled and steam puffed away in a cloud.
Clive Paternoster and I were sitting at the one table in the window. Balzac was contemplating the banana tree. We were having dinner,
pot au feu
after a coarsely grained garlicky pâté with cornichons, a very nice Margaux. “I’m not saying the Vicar didn’t have his faults,” Paternoster said, dipping bread into the thick gravy, “but I miss the man. We knew all the same things, we could talk. We could remember. You get a little older and it’s not so bad, sitting around on a rainy evening, remembering. He wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t half bad.”
“What did my sister want to see him about?”
“All the old World War Two malarkey. She wanted to know about Torricelli and—” He stopped himself, his eyes flickering up at me from their crinkly sockets. His eyebrows were shaggy, like a hedge in need of trimming.
“And? What? Don’t stop.”
“She was very interested in everything from that period. Anything we could remember. I was there, too, of course. Torricelli! Now, there was a beauty! God, wasn’t he the slick and slippery old devil. He knew the facts of life and the way of the world—a twisty old heathen! But then, he had to be, didn’t he? Man in the middle and not wanting to be odd man out. Nazis on one side, the Church on the other—talk about the frying pan
and the fire! Particularly after D’Ambrizzi got here from Rome. He was a pistol, that one.” He shook his head, recalling those days. “He drove Torricelli crazy.”
“What all did you tell my sister?”
“Oh, she met with the Vicar on another occasion when I wasn’t available.” He shrugged. “So I don’t know—but the main thing was he called Philippe Bloody Tramonte about the papers—”
“What papers?”
“Tramonte’s the old bishop’s nephew, a runty little git, poofter if you ask me, but he’s very grand indeed. He’s the chap in charge of Torricelli’s collected papers. Calls it ‘the Archive.’ I mean, really! If you want to know what your poor sister was up to, you’ll have to take a look at the rummy old Archive.” He laughed disparagingly. “I’ll call Tramonte in the morning if you like, set it up for you.”
We were having our second cups of coffee when I asked him the question that had been knocking so insistently at the back door. “Do you know if the Vicar had another visitor recently—a priest, tall man, roughly the same age as you two? Distinguished-looking man, silver hair, very fit—”
Paternoster wrinkled his mole’s nose, his eyes widened. “You do get around! I commend you. How, may I ask, did you know?”
My blood was running cold, but every lawyerly instinct I had was up and saluting. It was coming together, another connection. “A shot in the dark. He was one of the last people to see my sister.”
“A bringer of bad luck, then.”
“What did he want from the Vicar?”
Paternoster shrugged. “He just showed up one day. Robbie and I were standing right outside here, one morning last week. Dammit, it was the day before he was killed. This silver-haired priest was suddenly standing there … introduced himself to the Vicar … said he was, let me see, it was Father August Horstmann, I think that was it. Yes, August Horstmann. And the Vicar did a bit of a double take, then he said a funny thing … he
said, ‘Bless me, August! I thought you’d been dead these forty years!’ And then he introduced me and I went on about my business and the two of them went off together … old pals.”
“Old pals,” I said.
“That night I asked him about this fellow and the Vicar didn’t have much to say about him. I gathered that Father Horstmann was someone he knew during the war—”
“In Paris,” I said softly. “During the war.”
And the next day the Vicar was dead. Four days ago.
I had the feeling that Clive Paternoster was a very lucky man.
And August Horstmann had known I’d find my way to Robbie Heywood.
After another of my routinely hellish nights—hellish because I couldn’t stop being scared anymore—it was a relief to see the anemic gray light outside my window above the Boulevard Saint-Germain and notice a couple of swallows sitting on my balcony railing staring at me. I was tired and the tension that came from being afraid I was being watched by Horstmann had jammed the hot poker into my back again. Still, being up and awake was better than being in bed with my dreams.
By midmorning I was standing only a ten-minute walk away from my hotel, pressing a button next to an ancient, warped wooden door with hinges like anchors. A long wall stretched away on either side, blocking any view of the house within or its interior courtyard. It could have been any of a thousand such arrangements in Paris. I rang the bell again after a five-minute wait. An old caretaker who looked like original seventeenth-century equipment pulled the door open. It needed oil. The day was gray and misty. Splotches of dampness spotted the stucco walls. Wet gravel in the courtyard crunched underfoot, reminded me of the little cemetery in Clichy the day before. The caretaker clanged the door shut and spit through his mustache and pointed to the doorway in the foundation. He walked away, hunchbacked, a rake in his
hand, and when I looked back at the darkened doorway a man in a crimson velvet jacket with some shiny, worn patches was standing there waiting for me.
Philippe Tramonte looked like he’d been designed by Aubrey Beardsley: thin, pale, tall, the velvet jacket, pearl-gray slacks with creases that might have been laid on with a pen, black tasseled loafers. The hooked Shylockian nose with its bony bridge proved the genetic linkage to his uncle, the bishop. A huge amethyst ring set in gold on his little finger: it looked as if it were intended for kissing. His voice was high and thin, his English heavily accented but expert, and his sighs—gargantuan, expressive, overwhelming—accompanied us on our way to the Archive much in the manner of Maurice Jarre background music. He wanted me to understand that his role of archivist was a hugely taxing one. I sympathized. Things were tough all over.
He led me down a long hallway to what had once been a very grand drawing room, now somewhat in decline. The ornate molding was chipped. A frayed carpet about the size of Atlantis but infinitely older filled the center of the room. Two long trestle tables with chairs and lamps were centered on the carpet. An enormous easel stood at one end beneath a tapestry of your typical knight slaying your typical fire-breathing dragon caught in the act of making off with a blonde. Some things, across the centuries, never change. The easel was empty, but my mind flashed on the painting my father had done of Constantine having the vision that reshaped the Church and the western world forever. My father always preferred the large themes. No knights, dragons, or blondes for him.
Tramonte showed me to a wall of glass-fronted bookcases and explained that he understood I was interested in the papers my sister had inspected. He was, of course, much too burdened with his own concerns to express any sympathy about her death. He pointed languidly at the matching boxes on the shelves. They were labeled 1943, 1944, and 1945. Those were the ones. He sighed, his narrow chest quaking, and asked me to please be careful,
keep the material in the order I found it, and replace each box as I finished with it. I told him he was too kind. He nodded, receiving his due, and pattered away, leaving me alone. I took the first box of papers to one of the tables, long and dark and highly polished, and got out my notepads and went to work.