The Statement (27 page)

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Authors: Brian Moore

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‘Thanks. Do you have an aspirin, by any chance?’

‘Cécile, do we have aspirin?’

‘Over the sink.’

The young man brought him the bottle. He took two, swallowing them down with a drink of the brackish water. He looked at his watch. Eight-thirty-seven. ‘Are you sure it will be safe?’ he said. ‘I mean, I can’t wait too long. I have to be somewhere at nine.’

‘It’s safe,’ the young man said. ‘Nobody knows you can get out that way. Nobody but us.’

‘Wait,’ the girl said. ‘I think I heard something.’

‘What? What?’ All of a sudden he was in a panic.

‘Hold your piss, grandpa,’ she said. She went outside. He watched her walk to the edge of the parapet and look down. She came back inside. ‘A colonel, no less,’ she said. ‘You must be important. Anyway, they’re leaving.’

He stood up. ‘So must I.’

The young man gulped down the rest of his wine. ‘All right, here we go.’

He followed the young man out of the door. As he was leaving he looked back at the girl. She smiled at him. ‘I’ve seen you before, you know,’ she said. ‘How did you like my tits?’

He pretended not to hear. The pain began to ebb as he followed the young man across the rooftop through a door and down a short staircase to the top floor of the building. It was dark here. The young man switched on a light and led him down a corridor to a service lift, pulling back the iron grille of the door and motioning him to get in. The lift went down four landings and stopped with a thump in the basement of the building. The young man then led him through a furnace room and into a second room filled with old propane gas tanks and empty wine bottles. He pulled aside a sheet of corrugated iron. Beyond, in the dying Provençal sunlight, he saw a narrow filthy alley, lined with dustbins. The young man turned to him, his lips opening in a wet smile under his huge curling moustache. ‘There you are, Monsieur. The road to freedom.
Salut!
’

He shook hands with the young man. I should give him something. But his money was in the money belt and it was risky to show that to a stranger. Instead, he said, ‘God bless you, my son. Thank you.’

He heard the corrugated iron sheet screech on the concrete as the young man dragged it shut behind him. The pain was almost gone. The alley stank of rubbish but he stood, eagerly breathing in the fetid air of freedom. It had been close, closer than at any time since the end of the Occupation. The pain had gone. He looked at his watch. Eight-forty-nine. Just enough time to find a taxi, drive to the Café Corona and put himself in Pochon’s care. And now, at last, he accepted his fate. It was time to leave, time to stop running, time to sit in the sunshine of some foreign city, a glass in his hand, a servant to make his meals, no need to move, no need to look up and down each time he walked out into the street. I have won.

There was no one in the alley. Above in the narrow space of sky between the walls, the sun had darkened from bright orange to a deep blood red. In a moment it would be night in the streets of Nice. He walked on, short of breath, but confident. At the end of the alley, a steet sign:
Rue Recamier
. And there, halfway down, as the young man had told him, the taxi rank.

The Café Corona was small, decorated in
Belle-Époque
style with electric lamps fashioned to look like gas brackets. They flickered and cast shadows so that at first he did not see Inspector Pochon who was sitting at a table in the rear and who waved to him across the room. Pochon did not get up from his seat, but offered his hand very much in the way
flics
did when they were dealing with you and knew you were in their pay.

‘Any trouble? Get here all right?’

He sat down and told what had happened. Pochon, small, grey-haired, in his sixties, listened in distracted impatience, as though he had heard it all before.

‘Typical gendarmerie procedure,’ Pochon said. ‘They never cover their arse. If I’d been raiding that priory, you wouldn’t be sitting here now.’

‘Well, I am here,’ he said. ‘What’s the next move?’

‘I’m going to drive you across the border,’ Pochon said. ‘I was going to do it tomorrow, but after what you’ve told me we’d better go tonight. We’ll cross into Italy at Menton and sleep in Ventimiglia. No problem. I have police documents. The border guards will wave us through. By the weekend I should have your passport and visas.’

‘Passport? What sort of passport?’

‘French, of course. Look at you, you couldn’t be anything but French.’

He laughed at that. ‘But where are you sending me, Inspector?’

‘What about Canada? That suit you?’

‘Canada?’ He felt a rush of relief. ‘They speak French there.’

‘Some of them, yes. All right. Let’s get out of here.’

Pochon put money on the table and stood up. He was small, all right. About five feet two. A little Napoléon. ‘Ready?’ He barked it out like an order.

He nodded. As they went out into the street he thought: Canada. ‘Inspector, there’s something I wanted to ask you. My payments. You’ll send them on, will you? It will be expensive, living there.’

Pochon looked at him and shook his head in irritation. ‘Never mind that, now. The car is in the car-park behind this alley.’

He saw Pochon look up and down the street, then beckon him to follow. He saw the little man, shoulders hunched, striding into the murk of the unlit alley. And suddenly, the hackle of danger rose within him. He hesitated.

‘Hurry,’ Pochon said and turned to see what was keeping him.

Uneasy, he went into the dark. And in that moment saw Pochon raise both hands, saw the gun, a moment before the first bullet hit him in the chest. The second bullet hit while he was on his knees.

In death, he saw the dead men, lined up in a row, their feet touching the cemetery wall. There were fourteen of them, one short of the number he had promised the Gestapo. Their Jewish name tags, tied around their necks, fluttered gently in the night breeze. He would have to step over them to reach the other end of the alleyway. But, on his orders, the execution squad had placed them close together, with not enough room to pass between them
.

He fell forward, striking his head on the concrete walk. Pain consumed him but through it he struggled to say, at last, that prayer the Church had taught him, that true act of contrition for his crimes. But he could feel no contrition. He had never felt contrite for the acts of his life. And now, when he asked God’s pardon, God chose to show him fourteen dead Jews.

Pochon took a flashlight from his pocket and shined it on the dead face. He then put on a pair of surgical gloves. There must be no fingerprints on the statement. He crouched down and, carefully, using two large safety pins, pinned the statement to the dead man’s chest.

BRIAN MOORE
was born in Belfast. He emigrated to Canada in 1948 and then moved to California. He twice won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been given a special award from the United States Institute of Arts and Letters. He won the Author’s Club First Novel Award for
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
The Great Victorian Collection. The Doctor’s Wife, The Colour of Blood
– winner of the Sunday Express 1988 Book of the Year – and
Lies of Silence
were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Six of his novels have been made into films –
The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Cold Heaven, The Statement
and
Black Robe
. Brian Moore died in 1999.