The Red Collar (8 page)

“Why not?”

“I'll stay in town in the meantime.”

Lantier showed his surprise with one raised eyebrow.

“There's a woman I know who sells vegetables next to me in the market. She'll put me up for as long as it takes. She lives behind the covered market.”

“Very well.”

“Is he allowed letters?”

“Yes, but the jailer opens them and reads them.”

“In that case, I'd rather speak,” she hissed.

She had risen to her feet and picked up her basket, resting it on her hip like a lavender girl.

“Tell him that when he came back he got things wrong. The man was a comrade.”

“Do you mean that he . . . ”

“It's not you I'm talking to, but him. And him alone.”

She was clearly distressed and her emotion sat awkwardly with the restraint she imposed on herself. She was better off slipping away. She barely said goodbye to Lantier, and he made no effort to keep her there.

 

* * *

 

When he arrived at the prison to take Morlac's final confession, the investigating officer was surprised by the silence in the square. There was no sign of Wilhelm and he couldn't be heard. Lantier asked Dujeux what had happened to the dog.

“He was at the end of his tether from all that barking. He eventually stopped during the night. In the moonlight I could make him out lying flat out over there. I thought he'd died. To be absolutely honest, I wouldn't have minded. But the nursing assistant told me what had happened when she brought our food.”

“Where is he? You know I need that dog for my investigation. He's a contributory factor in the offense, a sort of accomplice or an exhibit.”

“He's over there, in one of the houses. You see the little street that leads off at an angle from the square? It's there, on the ground floor. The first door.”

“Have you been in there?”

“I'm not allowed to leave my post.”

“True. In that case, I shall go myself.”

As he cut across the square, Lantier wondered why he'd invented the story about an exhibit. Morlac could easily be judged at a court-martial without producing the dog. It was all in the policemen's statement, and his own report of his investigation would complement that. The truth was far more stupid. He wanted to see the dog. He took a personal interest in what happened to him. This thought made him smile, but he still didn't turn back.

The house Dujeux had pointed out was a one-story cottage shoehorned between two buildings. It was a vestige of what had once been a neighborhood of simple hovels, when the town wasn't much more than a village made up of a row of little single-story houses. There was a stone frame around the door. Clumsily engraved on the lintel and now nearly worn away was the date 1778.

Lantier rapped the bronze knocker, which was shaped like a hand. A woman's voice called from inside straightaway, telling him to come in. He stepped into a dark hallway that opened onto a tiny living room. The mustiness of rotting carpets mingled with a smell of cold cooking fat encrusted in the curtains and the fabric covering the armchairs. In this poky place, the height of summer was merely a digression, soon forgotten. In normal weather, in other words all year round, the stale air would never be replaced. It was doubtful whether the windows still opened.

There was so much furniture it was only just possible to move. An oval pedestal table stood in the center of the room. Between this and the marble fireplace with its cracked mantelpiece, they'd managed to squeeze an overly large sofa. Wilhelm was lying there on a sheet that had been hastily thrown over it to protect the embroidery.

Against that pale pink background he really did look in bad shape. In the bright light on the square Lantier hadn't fully assessed how thin the animal was. His ribs stood out, his stomach was hollow, and he made a whistling sound from deep inside with every breath. His dull, worn coat left his scars plain to see. He blinked slowly, exhausted, and didn't even move his head when the major came over to pet him.

“Look at the state he's got himself into! Poor creature . . . ” said an old woman, holding onto the furniture as she came over. She was wearing a wig which she didn't bother to secure so it slid over to one side like a beret.

“I've fed him every night. Other neighbors took him water to drink. But with this heat, barking like that nonstop, it's killed him.”

Lantier nodded. He sat on the edge of the sofa and stroked the dog's neck as he had out on the square. Wilhelm closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed.

“You're the veterinarian then, are you? Mister Paul must have called you. He said he would.”

“No. I'm not a veterinarian, unfortunately.”

He was afraid she would ask what he was doing there but she was heading back to the kitchen, carrying on with her previous train of thought: “Mind you, he doesn't need a veterinarian. We all know what the poor creature needs. Some shade, some food and some water. That's all.”

“Are you going to keep him here?”

“So long as he wants to stay, yes. But when he's better I'll bet he'll go and howl outside the prison again, if they haven't freed his master.”

She was coming back into the room carrying a sort of pitcher in cracked enamel.

“Those military bastards!” she grumbled.

Lantier gave a start. Was she speaking to him? How should he reply? When he saw her at closer quarters, though, he understood. She was holding onto the furniture to guide her because she was almost blind. One of her eyes was veiled by a whitish cloud, and the other peered permanently upwards. She definitely wouldn't have noticed his uniform.

“Do you know his master?” he asked.

“Everyone knows him. He's a local boy.”

“What's he done wrong?”

Lantier was fascinated to find someone who didn't know who he was, who would speak to him without having to stick to an official version.

“Nothing. He's only ever done good. He just told those butchers a few home truths. They obviously didn't like it and they're taking their revenge.”

“The military?”

“Of course, the whole lot of them. The generals, the politicians they serve and the ones who sell the cannons. All the people who sent our local boys to their deaths.”

The old woman automatically turned her gaze toward a dresser that stood along one side of the room, between the window and the wall to the hallway. Three framed photographs had been placed there, the faces of three young boys with calm, inane expressions full of hope. The eldest couldn't have been more than twenty-five. Beside them, in a larger frame, a crinkled photograph featured a man standing full-length, all done up in an engineer's uniform.

“My son and my three grandsons,” said the old woman, as if she could tell Lantier had turned to look at the pictures.

“All . . . ”

“Yes. And in the same year. 1915.”

There was a brief silence, then the woman shuddered slightly to brush aside the emotion. She drove a rubber tube into Wilhelm's mouth and lifted up the pitcher to pour the water. The dog swallowed noisily. He coughed and choked but let her carry on, as if he understood it was all for his own good.

“And what would you do if they sentenced his master to death? Could you keep the dog here?”

“Sentenced him to death! Oh, poor miserable soul! I should hope the good Lord won't let a thing like that happen. For four years they came looking for our boys to kill them, but the war's over now. What about the prefect and the police and all the big-shot draft dodgers who did well out of it? It's about time they paid their dues. If they sentenced that boy to death it would be a terrible thing.”

The dog had a violent bout of coughing, and water spilled from his mouth, spreading over the sheet.

“Blast! I poured a bit too quickly. Easy, my beauty! Easy!”

She lowered the pitcher and withdrew the tube. All of a sudden a thought came to her, and turning her dead eyes to Lantier, she asked, “Anyway, who are you exactly?”

He felt uncomfortable.

“A friend.”

“Of the dog's?” she sniggered.

“Of his master's.”

Afraid she would pursue this and he would have to lie, which could have regrettable consequences, he swiftly took his leave.

“I must go, I'm so sorry. I'll come by again. Take good care of him. And thank you. Thank you again.”

The major left and as he closed the door he heard the old woman joking with dog:

“He has some funny friends, that master of yours!”

 

* * *

 

Lantier hadn't wasted too much time with this detour to the old woman's house. When he reached the prison the abbey-church clock was just striking nine.

He could tell at first glance that Morlac had been waiting for him. A radical change had taken place in the prisoner. He was no longer enduring the major's interrogation, but looking forward to it.

One of the charms of the military is that once an order has been given, it takes another order to abolish it. Lantier had said nothing to the contrary to Dujeux the day before, so the jailer led the defendant and his judge directly out to the courtyard at the back of the building, and closed the door to leave them to talk. From time to time he put his nose up to the square window in the door and came away reassured.

This time Morlac steered the officer toward a stone bench which, happily, was in full sunlight.

“I warn you, this is going to take quite a long time today.”

“I've plenty of time.”

The cool of the night stayed trapped in the confined space of that courtyard as it would in the bottom of a well, and the sunlight that reached them was like a warm caress.

“I've told you about 1916,” said Morlac, “the year I arrived on the eastern front. A year of pointless suffering. Failed offensives, and that winter coming in on top of everything else, freezing up in those mountains, and the bickering between all the different people who made up the Oriental Force. We could call them Allies 'til we were blue in the face, it didn't fool anyone. They each had their own aims. With the English it was about the gateway to India. They did as little as possible in Salonika and, if we'd listened to them, we'd have sent everyone to Egypt. The Italians were only interested in Albania. The Greeks kept changing their minds, some wanted to support the Germans, and some were in favor of the Allies. Basically, it was a shambles at top-brass level. It was even worse for the troops. In winter we froze, and in summer there was malaria and our failing stomachs.”

“Did you have any leave?”

Morlac didn't appear to like the question. He looked away.

“No. And I didn't want any, anyway,” he said and then quickly changed the subject, going back to his account: “In '17 things got going again with offensives in the north. I was in the eastern sector, in Macedonia. We were up against the Bulgarians. All we knew was Romania had caved in. We had no idea about anything else. The terrain was all gorges and strings of mountains, with ridges where they shot at us from. Our objective was the river Tcherna. But the enemy were well-fortified, and in the end we got dug in, too.”

“In fact, it must have been like in France: trenches and pillboxes.”

“Waiting, mostly. And we were a long way from home. We didn't get any mail. We went through these strange villages with white houses, they didn't look like anything we'd ever known. You couldn't trust anyone. No one liked us but, God knows, the locals made a song and dance when they saw us. You'd have thought we were the answer to all their prayers, every time. And then two days later we realized they were informing the enemy, and that's when they weren't slitting our throats themselves.”

“Were there other Allied troops with you?”

“I'm just coming to that.”

Dujeux's face was briefly framed in the small window in the door.

“We had the Annamites to our left. The poor things were freezing to death. They packed it in completely in those conditions. They turned grey and stopped moving. It was hard to get three words out of them.”

“It was the same in Argonne.”

“My friends told me to keep an eye on Wilhelm because they had a reputation for eating dogs. But he went to their sector two or three times and they didn't do him any harm.”

“A lot of exaggerating goes on about that. I never saw them eat dogs.”

Morlac gave an evasive shrug. He wanted to get to the point.

“To our right were the Russians. They were so close that our lines met. If we walked along our trenches we came across theirs. They were a friendly bunch and they knew all about winter. They didn't have much to eat but their supply corps always made sure they had something to drink. They made music in the evenings and Wilhelm often went over there. One time they even made him drink some vodka and everyone laughed when he came back because he couldn't walk straight.”

The sun had moved round and they shifted to the end of the bench to stay in the light.

“I often went to look for him in the Russian sector, in fact I ended up getting to know quite a few of those boys. There was one, Afoninov, who spoke French and I liked talking with him. He was a regular soldier but he'd had an education. He was a typographer in Saint Petersburg. He'd had some trouble with the Tsar's police, and had been sent to the front without anyone asking his opinion.”

“Did the officers keep an eye on him?”

“There weren't many. And I got the feeling all the Russians in that part of the world must have been pretty much like him. They held meetings together and talked politics for hours. At the beginning of 1917 they were more and more wound up. When they heard about the February Revolution, they went crazy. They danced all night, until our officers intervened because they were worried the enemy would take the opportunity to attack. The Tsar's abdication made them almost delirious. They couldn't stand still. You'd have thought they were going to head home straightaway.”