Vango (2 page)

In the crowd, somewhere, a pair of green eyes was flitting, like butterflies in a net. What did these people want from Vango?

The young man started moving. He stepped over his fellow seminarians and walked toward the superintendent. The police officers were edging forward.

As he advanced, Vango pulled off his white robe to reveal the black clothes underneath. He stopped in front of the cardinal and dropped to his knees.

“Forgive me, Father.”

“What have you done, Vango?”

“I don’t know, Your Grace. Please believe me. I don’t know.”

One minute and fifty seconds.

The old cardinal gripped the cross with both hands. He leaned on it with his full weight, his arm and shoulder wrapped around the gilded wood like ivy on a tree. He looked sadly around him. He knew every one of these forty young men by name.

“I believe you, little one, but I fear I may be the only one here who does.”

“That already means a great deal, if you really do believe me.”

“But it won’t be enough,” whispered the cardinal.

He was right. Boulard and his comrades were only a few paces away now.

“Forgive me,” Vango begged again.

“What do you want me to forgive you for, if you haven’t done anything?”

Superintendent Boulard, who was now standing right behind him, put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and Vango gave the cardinal his answer: “For this . . .”

Vango grabbed hold of the superintendent’s hand, stood up, and twisted Boulard’s arm behind his back. Then he flung him toward one of his men.

In a few leaps, the young man had escaped the two police officers who rushed toward him. A third brandished his gun.

“Don’t shoot!” ordered Boulard from the ground.

A great clamor rose up from the crowd, but with a simple hand gesture, the cardinal silenced it.

Vango had made his way up the platform steps. A group of choristers scattered noisily as he ran through them. The police officers looked like they were crossing a school playground. With every step, they tripped on a child or were head-butted in the stomach.

“Tell them to stand aside! Who is in charge of them?”

The cardinal raised his finger in the air, delighted.

“God alone, Superintendent.”

Two minutes and thirty seconds.

Vango had reached the central portal of the cathedral. He saw a small, pale, plump woman disappear behind one side of the double doors and close it after her. He threw himself against the wooden door.

On the other side, the lock turned.

“Open up!” shouted Vango. “Open up for me!”

“I knew I shouldn’t have,” a trembling voice answered him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm. It was the bell ringer who told me to come here.”

Behind the door, the woman was crying.

“Open up!” Vango called out again. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m just asking you to open the door.”

“He seemed a nice person. . . . Please. My name is Clara. I’m not a bad girl.”

Vango could hear the policemen’s voices behind him. He felt his legs buckle.

“I’m not blaming you for anything. I just need your help. Open the door for me.”

“No . . . I can’t . . . I’m frightened.”

Vango turned around.

There were ten men in a semicircle around the carved cathedral gates.

“Don’t move,” said one of them.

Vango pinned his back against the door that shone with brass. “It’s too late now,” he whispered. “Whatever you do, don’t open up. I’ll have to go another way.”

He took a step toward the men, then turned around and looked up. Above him was the Portal of the Last Judgment. He knew every detail by heart. There was carved stone filigree around the door. To the right, in relief, the damned of hell were depicted. To the left, paradise and its angels.

Vango chose the way of the angels.

Just then, Superintendent Boulard reached the scene. He nearly passed out when he saw what was happening. In less than a second, Vango Romano had scaled the first rows of statues. He was five meters above the ground now.

Three minutes.

Simon the bell ringer, who hadn’t seen anything, removed the eggs with a spoon.

Vango wasn’t so much climbing as gliding gently across the cathedral facade. His fingers were able to get a grip on the tiniest piece of relief. His arms and legs moved effortlessly. He looked like he was swimming vertically.

The crowd watched him, openmouthed. A lady fainted and slid off her chair like a scrap of cloth. Down at the foot of the great wall, police officers were moving around in every direction. As for the superintendent, he was frozen to the spot.

A first shot rang out. Boulard managed to find enough breath to bellow, “Stop! I told you not to open fire!”

But none of the policemen had used a weapon. One officer was pointlessly giving a leg up to his colleague. The poor devil was all of eighty centimeters off the cobbles. Others were trying to open the two-ton door with their nails.

A fresh burst of gunfire.

“Who is shooting?” roared Boulard, grabbing one of his men by the collar. “Instead of wrestling with that door, find me the person who’s shooting. What do you want to get in there for, anyway? To light a candle?”

“We thought we’d catch him in the towers, Superintendent.”

“There’s a staircase on the north side,” an irritable Boulard informed them, pointing to the left. “I’m keeping Remi and Avignon with me. I want to know who’s trying to shoot my target.”

Vango had already made it to the level of the Kings’ Gallery. He drew himself up to his full height and hung on to a column. He was breathing calmly. Determination and despair were both visible on his face. He was looking down at the square below. Thousands of eyes stared up at him. A bullet caused a stone crown to shatter into smithereens, just by his ear, blowing showers of white powder onto his cheek. Far down below, he could see the superintendent pacing in circles like a madman.

“Who did that?” boomed Boulard.

It wasn’t the police firing at him. Vango soon realized that.

He had other enemies in the vicinity.

He continued his ascent and in a few moves had reached the foot of the Rose Window. He was now climbing the most beautiful stained-glass window in the world, much as a spider glides over its web.

Down below, a hush had fallen on the crowd. The onlookers stood there, captivated by the vision of this boy hanging on to the West Rose Window of Notre Dame.

The swallows flew in a tightly packed flotilla around Vango, as if to protect him with their tiny feathery bodies.

Below his bell, and with a tear in his eye, Simon took the top off the first egg with his knife. Once again, she hadn’t come.

“It’s a sad world,” he mumbled.

When he heard the squeaking of the wooden staircase that led to the bell, he stopped.

“Clara?” he called.

He looked at his second egg. Confused, Simon thought for a split second that happiness was knocking at his door.

“Clara? Is that you?”

“She’s waiting for you downstairs.”

It was Vango. A bullet had grazed him while he was regaining his footing in the Grand Gallery.

“She needs you,” he told the bell ringer.

Simon felt a flicker of joy. Nobody had ever needed him.

“And you? Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” said Vango. “I’ve got no idea. I need you too.”

Out in the square, the other girl, the one with green eyes and the charcoal-colored coat, was battling against the crowd. At the precise moment when Vango had made a run for it, she had seen the man with the waxen face taking out a gun from his coat. She had rushed toward him, but the crowd prevented her from making any progress. When she finally got to the other side, he was no longer there.

Earlier, she had looked as forlorn as a bedraggled cat. Now she was a fierce lion clearing everything in her path.

And then she heard the shot. Strangely, she knew at once that Vango was the target. With the second shot, her eyes turned toward the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, on the north side of the square. That was when she saw the man. He was on the first floor. The pistol was protruding from a broken window, and in the gloom, it was possible to make out the icy reflection of the shooter. It was him.

She glanced upward. Vango was doing his balancing act on high. Heaven had wrenched him from his destiny at the last moment. But for her, everything had become possible again. As long as he was alive.

The girl with green eyes strode toward the hospital.

Suddenly, in the sky above Notre Dame, a gigantic monster rose up, almost making the crowd forget everything at ground level. As tall and majestic as the cathedral itself and gleaming with rain, the zeppelin appeared. It filled the sky.

At the front of the cockpit, Hugo Eckener, the elderly commander of the
Graf Zeppelin
, was peering through his telescope in search of his friend down in the cathedral square below. Returning from Brazil and heading for Lake Constance, he had made the balloon take a detour via Paris so that the shadow of the zeppelin would play a small part in this important moment of Vango’s life.

At the third shot, Eckener realized something was wrong.

“We have to leave, Commander,” urged Lehmann, his captain.

A stray bullet risked puncturing the balloon, which held sixty passengers and crew members in its gleaming body.

There was a final explosion at ground level.

“Quickly, Commander . . .”

Eckener lowered his telescope and agreed reluctantly: “Yes, let’s go.”

Down below, a dead swallow fell at Superintendent Boulard’s feet.

And the bells of Notre Dame began to ring.

Paris, the same evening

Superintendent Boulard was sitting in a smoke-filled room with a large steak in front of him and a checked napkin tucked in at his neck while his troops stood around him. He had some choice words for the men who were watching him eat.

“If my steak wasn’t up to scratch, I would ask for it to be taken away and I’d order a fresh one. But as for you, you bunch of spineless good-for-nothings, you’re breathing down my neck and I can’t trade you in. You’re putting me off my food. . . .”

The superintendent was eating rather heartily, as it happened. In the course of his forty-three years on the job, he had learned how to keep his morale up when the going got tough.

They were on the second floor of the Smoking Wild Boar, the famous brasserie in Les Halles.

“He made fools of you! A kid managed to get away from you in front of two thousand people!”

Boulard picked at a sautéed potato, stopped, rolled his eyes, and summed up the evidence: “You’re a bunch of incompetents!”

Incredibly, not one of the strapping men would have dreamed of casting doubt on this declaration. When Boulard said something, it was always true. If he had said, “You’re a troupe of ballet dancers from the opera house!” they would all have gone up on tiptoes with their arms in the air.

Superintendent Boulard was worshipped by his men. He let them cry on his shoulder when they were feeling low, he knew the names of all their children, he gave their wives flowers on their birthdays, but when he felt let down, when he felt really let down, he didn’t even recognize them in the street and deliberately avoided them as if they were stray dogs.

The second floor of the Smoking Wild Boar had been closed to the public so that this meeting could take place. Only two lightbulbs had been left on, and they drew attention to a large wild boar’s head just above Boulard. The kitchen lay behind them. A stream of waiters came in and out, loaded up with plates.

In a corner, some distance from the superintendent’s men, a kitchen porter, a boy, was sitting with his back to them at a lone table, peeling vegetables.

Boulard preferred this atmosphere to the one at the police headquarters at the Quai des Orfèvres. He held his meetings here whenever he could. He loved the smell of the sauces and the flapping of the kitchen doors. He had been brought up in a small family-run hotel in the Aveyron.

“And what about that zeppelin?” railed Boulard. “Does anybody know what it was doing there? Don’t tell me it was by chance!”

Nobody answered.

A man entered the room. He whispered something in the ear of the superintendent, who raised his eyebrows.

“Who is it?”

The man didn’t know.

“All right. Tell her to come up.”

The messenger disappeared.

Boulard tore off a piece of bread to mop up what was left on his plate. He gestured vaguely toward the kitchen porter in the corner.

“I want people like that,” he grumbled. “You ask him for something, he does it. As for you lot, there are twenty-five of you, but you let the kid escape. If that fellow was in this room right now, one of you would even open the window for him.”

“Superintendent . . .”

Boulard looked up to see who had dared answer him back. It was Augustin Avignon, his faithful lieutenant for twenty years. Boulard squinted at him, as if his face was vaguely familiar.

“Superintendent, there’s no explanation for what happened. Even the bell ringer, all that way up, says he didn’t see him. That kid is the devil himself. I swear we did everything in our power.”