The Red Collar (3 page)

During conversations in the trenches it was sometimes possible to forget issues of rank like this. It was rather like those card games where a road-mender can rail at a notary without anyone taking offense. Inside that cell, the investigating officer remained an investigating officer, carefully writing his report, but the interrogation was also a conversation between fellow soldiers who would soon be leveled by death.

“I spent most of the war with the English in the Somme,” said the officer.

“Were there any dogs?”

“A few. In fact, when I was given your case I immediately remembered several of my own men who became so attached to their dogs it was only thanks to them they could cope with the war at all. They ended up thinking of them as brothers-in-arms, alter egos. To tell you the truth, and despite your provocative comments, I intend to draft my statement in those terms. At the end of the day you established a connection with this dog as a comrade-in-arms. Put like that, you'll get a pardon, I'm sure of it.”

Morlac straightened and hurled his cigarette against the wall at the far end of the cell. He looked furious. The war, which had deprived him of the softer facial expressions associated with joy and pleasure, had clearly developed his capacity to express anger and even loathing. The officer was familiar with reactions like this from soldiers but he hadn't expected it in this instance and, more significantly, couldn't work out the grounds for it.

“I don't want you to write that, do you hear me!” Morlac shouted. “It's not true, it's just not true.”

“Easy, easy! What's gotten into you?” Lantier asked with an ill-tempered sigh.

“I didn't do what I did because I love my dog. Exactly the opposite in fact.”

“Don't you love him?”

“This isn't about whether or not I love him. I didn't do it for him, I tell you.”

“Who for, then?” Lantier looked him in the eye.

“Who for? Well, for you, how about that, for the officers, the politicians, the profiteers. And for all the idiots who follow them, who send others off to war, and also for the ones who actually go. I did it for everyone who believes in that claptrap: Heroism! Bravery! Patriotism!”

He'd risen to his feet as he shouted these last few words. The blanket had fallen to the floor and he was just in his underwear as he stood there yelling, scowling at the officer. He looked ridiculous and pathetic but also worrisome, because there was a palpable sense that his anger could drive him to extreme acts, and nothing and no one could stop him from completing them.

After a brief stunned silence, Lantier recovered his officer's instincts. He snapped the file shut, stood up very straight and, with all the authority readily available to a clothed man—and, what's more, in uniform—before a naked man, he said forcefully, “Calm down, Morlac! You're overstepping the line. Don't overestimate my good nature. It has its limits.”

“You want me to talk, I'm talking.”

“And what you're saying is unacceptable. You're aggravating your situation. Not only have you failed to mitigate the gesture that brought you here, but you're compounding it with insults to an officer and dishonor to the nation.”

“I've already sacrificed too much for it, for the nation. That gives me the right to tell it a few home truths.”

He wasn't backing down. Disheveled as he was, Morlac was squaring up to the investigating officer and answering him back. That was what four years of war had produced: men who were no longer afraid, who'd survived so many horrors that nothing and no one could make them look away. Luckily, there weren't too many of them. Lantier knew it was better to cut this short than continue a discussion that undermined the authority he represented.

“You pull yourself together, old boy. We'll leave it at that for today.”

Dujeux, the jailer, must have come over when he heard raised voices. He popped out from behind the door, threw a thunderous look at Morlac, and escorted the officer away, clanking his keys along the metal doors as he walked.

Outside, the dog had started baying again.

 

* * *

 

Lantier du Grez had offices in Bourges, right in the town center in the Louis XIV building that the locals called the Condé Barracks. He liked it well enough, until something better came along. His wife had stayed in Paris with their two children, and he was hoping for a transfer so he could go home to them at last.

Until he had finished investigating the Morlac case, there was unfortunately no question of him returning, either to Bourges or to Paris. For the duration of his inquiry he had taken lodgings in a modest hotel for traveling salesmen, near the station. The brass bed creaked and the towels were threadbare. The only pleasant time in the establishment was breakfast. The owner, who was a war widow, kept a farm with her sister on the outskirts of town. The butter, milk and eggs came from this farm. She baked her own bread and made her own jams.

At half past seven in the morning it was already obvious it would be a hot day. Lantier had breakfasted by a wide-open window. He thought about this wretched man and his dog. Truth be told, he hadn't stopped thinking about him since the previous day.

He'd had to leave him abruptly. He couldn't allow himself to be insulted, taking into account what he represented. But personally, he was peculiarly fascinated by this stubborn little character.

During the course of that endless war, Lantier had been through every kind of emotion. He'd started out as a young idealist typical of his social standing (solidly middle-class despite the lesser nobility suggested by his family name). All that mattered at first was his country and the high-blown ideals that went with it: Honor, Family, Tradition. He thought individuals and their pitiful personal interests had to be subjugated for their sake. And then, in the trenches, he'd lived at close quarters with these individuals, and had sometimes taken their side. Once or twice he'd reached the point where he wondered whether their suffering was owed more respect than the ideals in whose name it was inflicted on them.

After the armistice, Lantier saw his appointment to the military justice system as serendipity. The relevant committees must have felt he was ripe for this difficult responsibility: protecting the military institution, defending the interests of the nation and also understanding men's failings.

But this prisoner was different. He belonged in both camps: he was a hero, he had defended his country, yet at the same time he loathed it.

Lantier spent the whole morning strolling about town. He'd stopped at a bistro outside the abbey-church, and had organized the notes he'd taken the previous day in the prison.

He didn't intend to see Morlac again before the afternoon. He had to give him time to calm down and think, even if he didn't really believe Morlac would.

When the church bell struck noon, the streets were in a state of complete torpor. Lantier cut across town to have lunch in a restaurant he'd spotted near the covered market. The shutters were closed on all the houses to keep the rooms cool. Behind metal doorways he heard women's voices and the clink of plates coming from gardens: People were getting ready to eat outside.

The restaurant was deserted, except for one table at the back where an elderly man was seated. Lantier du Grez settled himself at the far end of the banquette, toward the window. The room had a high ceiling with stucco yellowed by grease on the walls and tall, badly flaking mercury mirrors. The owner had wound the canvas awning down over the terrace and opened everything he could—windows, doors, transoms—to create a draft. But the steam laden with a smell of frying that came up from the kitchen defeated all these efforts, and it was very hot.

The food on offer was the same all through the year, essentially comprising hearty dishes suitable for rainy weather. Lantier ordered rabbit chasseur, hoping against his better judgment that the sauce wouldn't be too fatty.

He asked for a newspaper and the owner brought him one that was two days old. He read the headlines, which were mostly about the prowess of the aviator Charles Godefroy, who'd flown his plane under the Arc de Triomphe.

“You're here for Morlac, aren't you?”

Lantier looked over at the old man who'd called across to him. The latter rose slightly from the banquette with a sketchy wave of the hand.

“Norbert Seignelet, attorney-at-law.”

“My pleasure. Major Lantier du Grez.”

There'd been an attorney-at-law in his section when he was a lieutenant. He'd been a punctilious, self-righteous character, always negotiating interpretations of the law in order to do as little as possible. And yet, with the first offensive, he'd climbed out of the trench before the others and was killed within two yards of the parapet.

“I am indeed here to investigate the Morlac case. Do you know the man?”

“Sadly for me, Major Lantier, I know everyone in this town, in the whole region, even. That's what happens with my line of work and my age. I should add that in my family we've been exercising the same duty for five generations.”

Lantier nodded, but, as his rabbit had arrived steaming, he busied himself spooning the meat from the earthenware serving dish, careful not to take too much sauce.

“When I saw him go past with his dog in the Bastille Day parade, I would never have imagined . . . ” the attorney said, adopting a cautiously comical expression which could have evolved into indignation or an unabashed smile, depending on the route Lantier adopted. But the latter, who had tucked into his rabbit, chose not to help him out.

“And what did you think of what he did?”

The older man screwed up his eyes and looked at Lantier evasively.

“I was surprised. I wasn't expecting that from him.”

“What do you know of Morlac?”

“Before the war he was just an ordinary man. I knew the family by sight. The father was a plowman, very pious, very hardworking. He and his wife had eleven children but only two survived, this Jacques who's in prison and Marie, a sister four years younger. They're both scrawny things by the looks of them. But don't pay any attention to that. They're the ones that survived.”

“Did he have any education?”

“Not much. That's not the custom in these parts, especially when there aren't many children in the family. The parish priest gave him lessons, so he could read and count. Then he went out in the fields to help his father.”

Lantier nodded but was actually mostly preoccupied trying to get shards of shattered bone from his meal out of his mouth. He didn't like thinking about how the animals he ate had been killed. In this instance, though, he couldn't help it.

“No friends? No political leanings?”

“He knew a few other young men in the area. He'd see them on market days and sometimes at a dance, not that he went very often. As for politics, it's pretty quiet around here, you know. People vote the same way as their priests. Oh, there's a handful of agitators, particularly teachers and railroad men, and they get together in a café over by the station. Near your hotel, actually.”

“So you know which hotel I'm staying in?”

The attorney shrugged and didn't bother to give any reply but a smile.

“And since he came home from the war?”

“We hardly knew he was here, except for that infamous day . . . He'd taken furnished lodgings. His sister's married and he doesn't really like his brother-in-law, so he hasn't set foot back on the farm. But that's hardly surprising. Lots of war veterans have gone completely feral.”

The officer took this comment personally. After all, he was a war veteran, too. And if he thought about it, he had to admit he hardly saw anyone now and people must have found some of his behavior strange.

“Does he have a wife?”

“That's a mystery. He never lived with anyone. But in a small village not far from here there's a girl who people claimed, for a while, was his sweetheart. You know what it's like: people talk, but where's the truth in that?”

“What is her name?”

“Valentine. She lives on the edge of the village of Vallenay.”

“Does she have family?”

“No, they all died in a measles epidemic. She inherited a small property that she's put out to a tenant farmer. It brings in a bit for her, and she makes wicker baskets. Oh, I was forgetting. She has a child.”

“Of what sort of age?”

“Three, I think.”

“Is it Morlac's?” Lantier couldn't help asking.

“No one knows.”

“But he was at war . . . ”

“He came home on leave.”

Lantier had almost finished his rabbit. What with the sauce and the heat, he was breaking out in a sweat. He unbuttoned his vest and mopped his face. The next few hours were going to be unbearable. It would be better to go back to the hotel, lie down and sleep.

The attorney didn't have much more to tell him but he wanted to be rewarded for these confidences with military secrets. He could have spared himself the trouble, though, because Lantier paid for his meal with a yawn, and took his leave without putting his jacket back on.

B
y the time the rabbit chasseur had settled, it was four o'clock in the afternoon and Lantier, still smeary-faced, left the hotel and headed for the prison. He now knew the town well enough to take the shortcut and get to the former barracks without doubling back on himself.

At first he thought the dog had stopped barking. But that was because he was coming along a different street, at the back of the building. When he turned the corner, he heard it. It seemed to him the animal wasn't howling so loudly. No doubt the exhaustion. The jailer told him that in three days the dog had only stopped once, during his own visit the day before.

“Does he bark at night too?”

“At night, too,” Dujeux confirmed, rubbing his eyes that were puffy with insomnia.