The Guardian of Lies Page 9

  ‘Why did you ask me to come here from Paris? What was your purpose?’

  ‘When the Caussades are in trouble, they stand together, shoulder to shoulder. You know that.’ His mouth, large and broad-lipped, softened a fraction. ‘It’s why you came.’

  It wasn’t why I came. I came because I thought André was dead. But yes, he’d summoned me and I’d come.

  ‘If the Caussades stand together,’ I said, ‘where is my brother Isaac?’

  Papa turned his head and spat on the straw. ‘The Communists are bastard traitors, ever y one of them. Driving this countr y to civil war. They’re in ever y workplace, in ever y factory, twisting the minds of fools till we are on the verge of a general strike and that wet rag of a prime minister Joseph Laniel has no idea how to prevent it tearing our countr y apart. They think they are the ones with the clever intellectual ideas when really they are all empty-headed puppets being made to dance to the tune of the violent puppet-masters in the Kremlin. How the evil bastards must be laughing to themselves and rubbing their hands. France will come crashing down while the Red Army is waiting just over the border. Do you think we fought a war against one dictator just to hand our countr y over to another? Do you?’

  His words halted. But his rage didn’t. It had filled every corner of the barn. Even Cosette felt it. She was shifting from foot to foot and watching him with ears pricked and eyes wide, white eyelashes flicking anxiously.

  I had never heard my father speak like that. He rarely said more than a dozen words to me. And never talked politics to me. For a full minute we watched each other, caught up inside our own heads.

  ‘Papa,’ I kept the word quiet, so that it would not snap the fragile thread between us, ‘do you know who this person is who is killing our animals?’

  I could hear my heart thudding and thought it was his.

  ‘No,’ he said at last. And walked out of the barn.

  *

  When Mathilde trotted nimbly into the barn carrying a tray, I was filling up hay nets for Cosette and the four other injured horses that had joined us.

  ‘Voilà,’ Mathilde said cheerfully. ‘You’ll need this, chérie, and then you must take a bath. You look terrible.’

  On the tray sat a plate of hot gardiane de taureau with a bottle of my father’s tart red wine and a glass. It was late afternoon and Mathilde should have been off to her own home long ago, but it was typical of her kindness to the Caussade family that she had remained to help.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and propped the tray on top of a barrel. ‘Any news?’

  ‘The police are still here, making a nuisance of themselves.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘That Captain Roussel, as Léon now calls himself, questions everyone.’

  ‘Have you seen my brother?’

  ‘André? I think he’s in his room. I’ve not seen him but when I was in the kitchen I heard the poor lamb. On the stairs.’

  We exchanged a look. Both of us knew the painful laborious sound she was referring to.

  When she’d gone, one of my father’s young hunting hounds, Demeter, brindled and blue-eyed, slunk in and curled up beside me on the straw, his bony frame warm and comforting. I fed him the food from the tray while I poured the wine down my own throat straight from the bottle.

  Enough, André. Enough, I tell you.

  *

  The moment Cosette finally fell into a deep sleep, I eased Demeter’s head off my lap and I slunk out as silently as the dog had slunk in. I reached the house and hurried up the stairs, my fingers still wrapped around the neck of the wine bottle. It was half empty now, but I’d saved the rest for André. He’d need it.

  Mon Dieu, he’d need it.

  I walked into his bedroom without knocking. Instantly a gun was in my face.

  In my face.

  ‘Nice welcome,’ I said.

  ‘You fool. You could have been . . .’

  He flicked the safety on the gun, tucked it into his waistband and slumped his back against the wall, but I didn’t let him escape so easily. I placed the wine bottle on the floor and stepped up close to my brother. I grabbed two handfuls of the front of his shirt, and I shook him. I shook him and I shook him. Thumping him against the wall till there must have been no breath left in his lungs.

  He didn’t try to stop me.

  When I was finally done, I released his shirt and wiped my palms on my trousers as if there was something bad on them. There was fierce colour in André’s cheeks and his gaze was sharp, but he said nothing. He knew I hadn’t finished.

  ‘Tell me, André. Tell me right now.’ I tried to keep my voice low, but it came out bitter and angry. ‘I will not tolerate your silence any longer. Who will be next on the death list? Me? You?’ I swallowed hard. ‘Papa?’

  ‘Don’t, Eloïse. Don’t. You know I can say nothing. Don’t ask.’

  I hated the calmness in his voice, the control.

  ‘I am asking, André. And I want an answer or I will walk straight to those policemen down there in the yard and tell them everything I know about you and who you work for.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. I will do it, André. Believe me.’

  ‘If you do, you will be signing my death warrant.’

  ‘The choice is yours.’

  So harsh. So unforgiving. It frightened me.

  Something in his face changed, something slipped. I saw it in his tawny eyes. That sense of having your feet skid from under you on a sheet of ice. It would be so easy to reach out to him, so tempting to withdraw the verbal knife I had slid under his ribs, but I pinned my hands to my sides, kept my mouth shut, my eyes flat. He had to believe me, even if I didn’t believe myself.

  For a long moment we glared at each other.

  ‘Who is trying to kill you?’ I asked. ‘Names.’

  He gave the laziest of shrugs. ‘I might as well shoot myself.’ He smiled and put two fingers as a gun barrel to his temple. ‘It will make it easier for you all.’

  I marched over to where his hunting rifle was propped in a corner of the room and picked it up. ‘If you don’t tell me some names right now, I’ll shoot you myself, André Caussade.’

  He laughed. Where the hell did he dredge that up from?

  ‘I do believe you would.’

  ‘Sit down,’ I said.

  He limped the few steps to the bed and sat down awkwardly on the patchwork cover that my mother had made. I replaced the rifle and sat myself in the chair beside the bed. I didn’t dare sit closer. I might remember that he was my brother.

  ‘Names,’ I said. ‘Give me names.’

  He had withdrawn now, back behind his shell. Inspecting me. ‘Do you know how bad you look?’

  I glanced at the blood and the burns. My sleeve was more holes than fabric and I could see shiny blisters underneath. My hair smelled like singed wool.

  ‘This is nothing,’ I said, ‘compared to what your friends will do to me, we both know that.’

  ‘You always did exaggerate.’ He tried a smile of sorts but it didn’t sit well. He leaned forward and took the fingers of my hand in his. ‘Go home, Eloïse, go back to Paris,’ he said quietly. ‘You are not wanted here. We can manage well without you.’

  I removed my hand from his and rose to my feet so that I stood over him. ‘No, André, no, you can’t. From the neck down you are useless, you can do nothing to sort out this mess. You need me, you know you do. I can be your eyes and ears, I can be your . . .’ we both glanced down at the immaculate trousers of his funeral suit, ‘your legs. You need me,’ I whispered.

  Saying the brutal words took all my strength.

  I watched him die a little inside. Outside, the evening air was sultry and windless, and a pearly grey mist had crept on its belly from the fields, so that the light in the room was almost translucent.

  ‘Yes, you have every reason to be angry with me,’ I said, ‘for what I did to you in Paris, to rant and rage at me. I do it myself every night. Yes, you can banish me back to
Paris, but first let us hunt down the killers who tried to destroy you and who are now stalking this farm. And whoever wrote this note.’

  From my pocket I drew out the anonymous square of paper that I’d found tucked under my windscreen wiper in Serriac. André took it, unfolded it, and read it with a face that gave nothing away. Yet when he looked up at me, for one bright flash, he was my brother again, his eyes burning with a feeling that I’d thought was lost between us. He slipped a hand into his trouser pocket and came out with the bloodred Victorinox Swiss Army pen knife he had carried around since he was a boy. He flicked open the blade and I knew what was coming. He cut a nick in the ball of his thumb, and when I held out mine, he did the same to it, then we pressed the two together. It was a childhood ritual, the blood of the Caussades.

  ‘If you retreat to Paris,’ he murmured, ‘they will only come after you. It’s what they’re trained to do.’

  At that moment two gunshots rang out from the yard and I dived to the window. Two of the injured horses hadn’t made it. Grief churned in my chest as I sat down once more on the rush seat.

  ‘Names,’ I repeated. ‘I need names.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘The death-threat letter changes everything,’ André said.

  ‘You have to realise that we are living in a peace that is no peace.’

  My brother was talking to me. Sharing wine with me, swig for swig. It dawned on me that he had missed this as much as I had, our talks. ‘I have no close friend,’ he once told me in Paris. ‘I keep them at arm’s length. Friends are a risk I cannot afford, a luxury that is too dangerous. Friends come with curiosity and questions. Instead I travel light. Instead I have acquaintances.’

  I loved the way his face came alive. The death-mask had vanished and his passion turned him once more into the lion I remembered.

  ‘The war is over but we are still at war, Eloïse, a permanent war.’

  ‘The Cold War,’ I acknowledged. ‘I thought it would all end. When Stalin died last March, I believed it would die with him.’

  ‘Quite the reverse. It intensified. Malenkov seized Stalin’s titles but he is locked in a vicious power-battle against Nikita Khrushchev. I warn you, Eloïse, these men are seriously dangerous. Committed to taking over not only the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but the whole world. They are determined to spread Communism like a plague across the globe. Whatever the cost.’

  The room felt too small for such big statements.

  André was still seated on his bed, but he had swung his legs up on top of the quilt, using his hands to do so, and arranged them straight, the way you do cutlery. He no longer wore the brace. He reached for a cigarette from a packet on the bedside table.

  ‘In America,’ I pointed out, accepting a cigarette not because I wanted one but because he’d offered it, ‘Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy are yelling blue murder about reds under the bed, but that’s not far off what is happening here too. Is that what you think?’

  ‘Exactly. We must be so careful. There is a desire for change in France. We are a country on the edge. Governed by constantly changing coalitions. Nothing is stable. Look at the violent demonstrations in the Champs-Élysées demanding independence for Algeria from France.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s scare-mongering?’

  He turned his head sharply to look at me in the chair. ‘Do you?’

  I shook my head. ‘You think Russia is trying to destabilise France?’

  ‘Trust me, Eloïse. I know for a fact that the First Main Directorate of the MGB – that is the Soviet Intelligence agency – maintains a network of surveillance over sensitive positions in society and is infiltrating foreign governments and businesses. They are expert at insinuating themselves into industrial plants, as well as taking up posts in educational institutions to assert control over young minds. I tell you, it is happening all over France right now.’

  ‘Laniel’s government should be putting a stop to it.’

  ‘The man who should be leading us is General Charles de Gaulle. His day will come again, and when it does, things will change.’

  ‘André, why didn’t you tell me that you used to come down to Serriac at weekends?’

  The question caught us both by surprise.

  He exhaled a grey skein of smoke to hide behind.

  ‘Was there a girl?’ I pressed him. ‘Someone special you came to see?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why then? If I am to help you, André, I need to know what is going on.’

  He lay back against the pillows, staring up at the ceiling. ‘The American airmen like to come into town on a Saturday night.’ His words were slow to emerge. ‘I used to come down from Paris to mix with them, play poker to get them drunk. They are discouraged from coming into town by their senior officers because trouble has a tendency to flare up.’

  The light in the room was drifting away, the way the haze drifts over the marshes. A fat mosquito was buzzing against the window.

  ‘Do you have a girl in Paris, André?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Too dangerous to allow anyone close?’

  ‘No, in Paris their blood is too thin. Their hearts are too small. Not like down here. Here blood runs deep.’

  ‘It is such a dangerous job and you have to give up so much for it. Maybe it’s a good thing the CIA turned me down. Why, André? Tell me why you do it.’

  He sat up straight, as if I had lit a touchpaper.

  ‘It is an incredibly complicated business, Eloïse,’ he said in a solemn voice, ‘that is becoming more difficult all the time. Intelligence work means you operate without recognition. Your failures are known, your successes are not.’

  ‘But you live for your work. You love it, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, smiling reluctantly. ‘I do.’

  I smiled at him fondly. ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can explain it. All I can say is that it is about finding the truth. Though we deal every day in lies. But the sense of purpose . . . the sense of accomplishment . . . the incredible sense of pride and privilege that comes from serving my country. This far outweighs anything else. I am a lucky man.’

  ‘Who is it who wants to kill me?’ I asked flatly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I held my tongue. I rose to my feet and walked to the window from where I could see the gardian Louis in the yard, his face in his hands. Léon Roussel’s arm lay across his shoulder, and the dog Demeter was standing nearby. The tension on the farm was raising everyone’s hackles. In the far distant sky I spotted a bomber cruising past. I waited for André to speak.

  ‘A Soviet Intelligence operative,’ he said at last. He retreated into his professional shell once more, cool and controlled.

  ‘Why would he want to force me back to Paris?’

  ‘Because you are going round asking questions. Stirring up things that people don’t want stirred up.’

  ‘Maybe Mayor Durand is right. It’s just a bunch of Communist hotheads. Activists who are part of the movement of industrial unrest that is sweeping through the country. They are vehemently opposed to the Americans marching their boots into France again and bringing their nuclear bombs with them. So not personal to me. They just turn on anyone who assists the USAF forces.’ I let my breath out slowly. ‘It’s possible.’

  He threw his cigarette stub in the ashtray at his bedside. ‘For God’s sake, will they never see that America is the only one who can save us? They have the bombs, the equipment and the desire to stand firm against the Soviet threat. France will end up as a Soviet puppet state like East Germany if we blink for even a moment.’

  I stood with my back to the window. ‘I don’t intend to blink, André.’

  ‘Keep your eyes open and your door bolted.’

  ‘Give me names. Who is Piquet? The bruiser at the hospital.’

  ‘Maurice Piquet. He is an Intelligence operative who works as one of their heavies. He’s a cleaner. He deals in the dirty wor
k, the dirtier the better. Watch out for him. He likes to hurt.’

  ‘He works in Paris?’

  ‘Usually, yes.’

  ‘Not always?’

  ‘No. Wherever there are dirt and lies to be found, he could turn up. So yes, if necessary he could be sent to clean down here.’

  ‘His friend?’

  ‘Gilles Bertin.’

  ‘The one with a prissy thin moustache and a chin that looks as though someone took a meat-cleaver to it.’

  ‘That’s him.’ André’s lips gave a half-smile. ‘He makes scum like Piquet seem like a pussycat. He’s the brains. He doesn’t often deign to get his fingers bloodied. He collects information. But he favours the good life on the ChampsÉlysées, so rarely leaves Paris. But if you ever spot him,’ his voice was stern, ‘don’t hang around. Just run like crazy. Got that?’

  I nodded. It was enough.

  ‘The only reason I am agreeing to you working with me on this operation is because of the note left on your car. They won’t leave it at that, and I don’t want you blundering in blindly.’

  I kept my face calm.

  ‘The air base is where we start,’ he announced. ‘You will be my eyes and ears. My legs. To gather information.’

  ‘Well, that’s fortunate, because I have arranged to go there tomorrow evening.’

  ‘How the hell did—?’

  ‘To a dance. I was invited. By one of the airmen.’ His sandy eyebrows shot up. ‘That didn’t take long.’ A knock at the door startled us both.

  ‘Come in.’

  Mathilde’s grey head popped around the door. ‘Telephone call for you, Eloïse. From Paris.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Clarisse Favre.’ My boss.

  *

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘Hello, Clarisse.’

  ‘Your brother. Is he alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m happy for you, chérie,’ she said. ‘So what are you up to down there in your dreary wilderness? Having fun?’

  I laughed and the sound of it was odd in the gloomy hall of my father’s house. ‘What can I do for you, Clarisse?’

  ‘When are you coming back? Paris needs you.’