A Prince Without a Kingdom (47 page)

“Where is the young bride?”

Bartholomew opened the door for them, to reveal Ethel waiting out on the sidewalk.

“Here she is.”

Upstairs, they were still singing. Vango clenched the red scarf in his hand. He had failed on every count. Ethel ran toward him. Sensing how weak he was, she tried to take the suitcase, but he wouldn’t let her.

“Wait!” the patron called after them. “If the police pick you up, tell them you were at La Belle Étoile.”

They headed off down the street, hugging each other tightly.

“Bon voyage!”
Fermini called out.

And they disappeared.

Next to the patron stood Costa, the foreigner, who had witnessed the whole scene. He seemed shaken.

What’s the matter with everybody tonight?
wondered Casimir Fermini, as he watched Monsieur Costa running after Vango and Ethel.

Fermini leaned against the wall, listening to the last German tunes. A moment later, the foreigner was back, out of breath and very pale. Fermini put a hand on his shoulder. Together, they walked into the downstairs dining room, where Monsieur Costa returned to his table. They sat down next to each other. There was no one else left.

The sounds of the New Year’s Eve party opposite were abating.

“Did you never think of marrying?” inquired Fermini.

The man seemed to wake up with a jolt.

“What?”

“Are you Spanish?”

The foreigner smiled.

“No.”

“Are you married?” asked Fermini.

“Not exactly.”

“I like that kind of answer.”

“I loved a woman,” said the man, “back home, in Italy, on an island. She left.”

“For someone else?”

“Not even that.”

They both stared at the candle, which had melted right down but was still alight.

“One day, I received a letter from her, a long letter.”

“A letter for you?”

“It was for a boy she had raised, but he never came back either. I opened it, and someone translated it for me. It tells the story of the boy’s life, and of the woman’s too. In five pages. You’d never believe what five pages could contain.”

For once, Fermini didn’t have the strength to go in search of his own manuscript, which was as heavy as a crate of apples, but he did confide: “I write novels.”

“Even in a novel, the events wouldn’t be credible. In the letter, in among all the other details, she mentioned that a long time ago, when she was still a young girl, she used to work here as an assistant, in the kitchen.”

“Here?” asked Fermini, his voice cracking.

“Yes.”

“In France?”

“Here, yes.”

“In Paris?”

“I said: here.”

And twirling his Sicilian fingers, Monsieur Costa pointed to the walls, the ceilings, and the tables of La Belle Étoile.

Casimir Fermini downed his glass in one and stared at the foreigner, who kept on talking.

“So, I said to myself, ‘As sure as your name’s Basilio Costa, one day you’ll go to see it with your own eyes.’ That’s what I told myself. ‘You’ll pay a visit to the establishment that knew her as a girl.’ And I told myself all this because I loved her.”

Fermini put his hand on Costa’s.

“Next, I learned French like a schoolboy,” Basilio went on. “I wanted to wait for the end of the war before making the journey. But as we grow old, we run out of patience.”

“Yes.”

Basilio seemed overcome. He had waited for this day for so long, when he would visit Paris for the first time, and the place where she had spent her youth.

“And that letter, well, I’ve just given it to the person it was originally intended for.”

He paused for a moment.

“It seems unbelievable, but there he was, with you, on the sidewalk opposite. I saw him. The boy, Vango. I went after him to give him the letter.”

Fermini was listening to Basilio. He didn’t know what to say to this story. He would never have dared to write it in a book.

“As we grow old, we run out of patience,” Basilio repeated. “And what about her? Who knows what has become of her?” He sighed, putting his hand over his eyes.

Just then, a head popped up from the trapdoor, a head wearing a white scarf.

“They’ve all gone, thank goodness,” announced Mademoiselle, without looking at the two men. “The Germans have all left!”

Out of sheer exhaustion, she began to laugh. She had stopped at the top of the ladder, and her shoulders were still shaking with laughter.

“Yes, chef. It’s all over,” agreed Fermini.

“Don’t ever make me go through that again, Casimir,” she said, turning toward them.

Basilio couldn’t stop staring at the face that had emerged from underneath them.

Fermini watched each of them in turn, and he knew that it was all over for him.

“Basilio?” she whispered.

“Mademoiselle.”

One street away, Max Grund was talking to his French doctor.

“Are you sure you . . . you’re happy to accompany these gentlemen?”

Grund was drunk, and his driver had to help him into the car.

“Of course,” said the doctor. “My car is parked a little farther off.”

Just behind them, Cafarello and Voloy Viktor looked more robust than their host. They were able to stand upright with a degree of dignity. Doctor Esquirol stepped gaily between the two men, linking arms with each of them.

“
Messieurs,
allow me to lead you to my car. I’ll take care of you.”

And he started singing Nina’s most famous song:
“Welcome to Paris. Glad to know you’re alive. . . .”

Viktor gently started singing along with him. Cafarello moved like a sleepwalker. They walked for several minutes, unaware that someone was following them along the roof gutters.

On entering a narrow street, Esquirol let go of both men’s arms and admitted, “I think I must have lost my way.”

Viktor and Cafarello came to a stop. Esquirol walked a few steps farther before turning around. He held a pistol in his hand. He was calm and collected, and his eyes were almost closed.

The two arms dealers stared at him blearily.

“In the old days,” said Esquirol, “I used to stroll the streets of Paris with two friends. Just like tonight. Those were the good old days. One of them was called Joseph Puppet, the other Zefiro. We made promises to one another, and we loved each other.”

High up on the rooftop, the Cat had come to a stop.

“Neither of my friends is still with us,” said Esquirol. “Everything has come to an end because of you. My life has changed. The world has changed.”

His hand didn’t tremble.

The Cat heard two shots. She leaned over and saw the bodies on the ground and a man standing. Then the man walked away, passing into a beam of light and undoing his polka-dot tie.

She recognized the great boss. She recognized Caesar.

At the gates of Paris, a black car had just passed a barrier. The driver had presented an Episcopal authorization, which was all in order.

“And in the back?”

“That’s my family,” said Simon.

The police officer didn’t appear surprised. He moved his flashlight and looked at the three passengers. Only one was awake. He wore a red scarf around his neck. A young woman was asleep on his shoulder. There was a letter open on his knees, and there were tears in his eyes.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” said the officer, returning the papers to Simon the bell ringer.

The car started up again. Three kilometers later, without the car slowing down, a window was opened and a suitcase hurled into the ditch. It rolled in the grass and slid on the remains of the snow, taking three seconds to come to a stop.

One, two, three.

The suitcase exploded.

A gigantic spray of light illuminated the night sky and the trees, and made the chrome on the car sparkle as it headed south between the plane trees.

Salina, Aeolian Islands

There were dark years ahead: struggles throughout Europe, families torn apart, places where death became a way of life. There were betrayals, acts of revenge, and beaches stained black with blood.

And many would later discover that they had only glimpsed the surface of the nightmare.

There were dark years ahead.

But there was also Simon, with tiny Colette in his bell ringer’s hands, waving as the car set off again. There was the fire in the hearth at Auguste Boulard’s house, in the middle of the snowy plains of the Aubrac. There were Vango, Ethel, and Paul around his table, and old Mother Boulard standing on a stool, unhooking sausages from the ceiling. There was their crossing of the Pyrenees on foot, the passes, the chamois, the snow, and then the view of Spain and freedom. There was the Cat’s impossible quest for her parents, the hopes, the dead ends, the nights spent in theater attics sleeping next to a violin; and later, when she understood that she really did need to be afraid, there was the arrival of the young Sister Marie-Cat, disguised in the large white headdress known as a nun’s cornet, and welcomed at the Abbey of La Blanche by a beaming Mother Elisabeth. There were Esquirol’s journeys back and forth to England to keep alive the Paradise Network, which he had founded in the first days of the war in memory of his friends from rue de Paradis. There was Eckener’s melancholy as he stared at the reflection of the sky in Lake Constance. There was the good doctor Basilio’s return by boat to the Aeolian Islands, with a lesson learned in his heart. There were the flowers he changed every day, while he waited, on the table of the house in Pollara. There was the revival of a monastery across the waves, with enough honey to make gingerbread again, with bells tolled on stormy evenings; but without Pippo Troisi, who had returned to his capers and his wife.

Then came deliverance for Paris: flags, and yet more tanks, with Superintendent Avignon fleeing on the day of Liberation, joyous shots fired into the air, and the crowd braying around Nina Bienvenue. There were Mademoiselle’s farewells on the sidewalk outside La Belle Étoile and the tears of Casimir Fermini. There was a very young Russian soldier, named Andrei Ivanovitch, entering a camp in the south of Poland with his regiment, searching for two people he had never met before among the deportees he had just liberated.

“Monsieur and Madame Atlas?”

And, in front of him, the gazes that wanted to say yes.

There was so much waiting. But some returns were impossible.

At last, there was a fine autumn, the bells of Notre Dame ringing for no reason, fit to burst, and two figures holding tightly to each other at the top of a tower. There was a dinner to celebrate at La Belle Étoile, where everyone ate their fill of omelets. The Boulards were there, having traveled to Paris as guests of honor, as well as Paul in his uniform, covered in medals; there were speeches, there was white wine, and, at the end of the table, the Cat, very pale, because a letter had just arrived from Moscow.

And then there was a journey. Isn’t it customary to set off on journeys after such occasions? There was a walk toward the bottom of a crater that fell away into the sea, a hamlet, and, at the end, a house made of two white cubes. There were Vango and Ethel walking between the Barbary fig trees, overwhelmed and breathless, but nothing could stop them from approaching their destination. There was a falcon in the sky.

There was a woman coming out of the house close to the cliff, a beautiful figure with a red scarf over her white hair, watching attentively, her hand shielding her eyes, looking to see who was heading down between the Barbary figs. Two beings were coming toward her; there was nowhere else in the world they could be going.

There was a cry, a call. And that was all.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

Text and cover design copyright © 2011 by Gallimard Jeunesse
English translation copyright © 2014 by Sarah Ardizzone

Picture of the
Hindenburg
© Corbis
Cover illustration copyright © 2011 by Gallimard Jeunesse

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