The Nights Lords

Nicolas Freeling

ONE

SUNSET

Henri Castang, at the end of the day, drunk with fatigue and with a tension too long maintained and too brutally released, was driving home through rush-hour traffic. The job was done: he had gone without free time for a fortnight: the one idea in his head was to get home to wife, shower, supper, bed. Then why stop? And what a place to stop in! It was forbidden to park on the bridge. A lot Castang cared for municipal police regulations…

     The bridge was a strung bow, a taut and graceful arc of stressed concrete crossing the railway. Castang bumped the scratched dusty police car up onto the pavement, gave the door a kick and leaned his elbows on the parapet. Below him forty shiny steel ribbons and the spider-web ladders of overhead cable showed the way to the freight yard; and Paris, some hundreds of kilometres further. Behind him a rushing stream of tin cans paid him no heed. Their jagged owners, if they glanced at him at all, thought he had had a heart attack – or the Renault had; much the same thing and no affair of theirs. But in front of him the sky was full of setting sun.

     A winterset: the huge sky was a hard bright blue. On one side, over the city, was a piled mass of white cloud, static, painted all over with pale gold. In the very centre, straight above the railway lines, was one stab of pure bright gold that scorched the eye. The left side, over the interminable suburbs, was scribbled over with fragile lace of a warm bluish grey: God smoking a huge beautiful cigar from Celestial Cuba. The thin veils broke as he looked at them: beyond, tiny islands of white and gold, high and far, promised silence, a glad peaceful tomorrow.

     Castang knew no cops who looked at sunsets. He couldn’t remember when he last did so himself. For nearly five minutes he leaned on the parapet and breathed in and out. When he got back into the car he kicked it straight out into the traffic without signalling, so that the onrushing queue of baa-black-sheep braked in frenzy, klaxonning furiously and hanging out of the window as they overtook to scream, ‘Crucify him.’ Again cop, he didn’t give a roger for the rats. At the red light he lounged back and stared ahead, languidly insolent like a chauffeur in a Rolls-Royce.

     On the quay, bordering a disused canal and pretty with poplar trees, where he lived (a Good, Bourgeois, Frightened district) he locked the car and gazed again for a moment. The sky had gone pale. A lame-brained huge jet plane, like a bewildered pterosaur, lumbered sadly down towards the airport. Poor thing! In its belly, more poor things. There was a silver thumbnail of new moon. Castang felt insanely happy at this new manifestation of good fortune, as though he had drunk the goldfish bowl full to the brim with champagne and then swallowed the goldfish out of sheer insolence. He turned to go into his house; got the fright of his life. The vast, serene pile of cloud seen ten minutes before, whitey-gold as the Pope’s triple tiara, was marching dread and mighty across the eastern sky; one immense incandescent flame of pale orange. As the population of France goes, Castang was highly unsuperstitious, but he shuddered and his hand feeling for latchkeys in the pocket made an instinctive sign against the evil eye.

     Vera, his wife, who was peacefully reading a magazine, looked up keenly.

     ‘Finished at last? Hallo! Have you met somebody you thought was dead?’

     ‘It’s finished,’ sitting down and kicking his shoes off. ‘Something like that. I’m tired, I suppose. I saw heaven and I saw hell. I saw God in the middle, come to judge the living and the dead.’

     ‘There’s nothing very odd about that,’ said Vera who had a theological cast of thought.

     ‘I suppose not. God was smoking a very big Cuban cigar.’

     ‘You saw the sunset,’ said the woman of rapid understanding. ‘I was studying it too. You’ve had a hard time. Are you getting your days off now?’

     ‘Yes, unless some idiot holds up a bank.’

     ‘Let’s go somewhere with no telephone. There’s potato soup.’ Vera’s potato soup was Slav, like her. One got a big bowl, and three little bowls, with chopped chives, and little soldiers of fried bread, and rashers of bacon, grilled crisp and crumbled up. It put heart back into Castang. He wished he’d had a shower. Vera sniffed rather, and it was probably his socks, but she was too polite to say so.

     ‘How’s your baby?’ he asked.

     For she had been paraplegic for three years after an accident. She had re-educated herself, helped by much female bloody-mindedness, into walking; could manage now short distances without crutches, and as though in celebration had managed to get herself pregnant for the first time. Now in the third month. It had given Castang a whole new sense of responsibilities and a different awareness: he was not ordinarily given to looking at sunsets.

     ‘It’s quiet, and comfortable.’ She would not be ostentatious. She was knitting a lot, but there was no display of tiny garments. Not going to lever a vast belly all over the place, either. Everything was going to be undramatic. Breath-control exercises, a nice change from birth-control; there would be no sweaty groaning or clutching of bedposts. Plainly, it was Castang that would create all the uproar. Life as a cop was not yet reconciled to the blushing-father bit.

     They would sort it out, the way they handled all their problems; together. There were things about being a cop that he did not tell her; mostly she guessed at them, and passed them over in a tacit agreement. Most of what had happened in the last ten days she knew. She knew the two sides of a policeman’s existence; the arrow that flies by day, and the quieter, more sinister knife in the dark.

     There was not much to tell her about the English family: she knew all about that, understood it perhaps better than anyone, had been instrumental, perhaps, in disentangling it. She knew all about the property speculator too. She knew about the last brush – too close – with violence. It was best so. This was what being married meant. Indeed without this confidence in each other, they could not have stayed married.

     ‘I’ll have a shower,’ taking the gunbelt off, carrying his trousers into the bedroom to put on a hanger. Castang the meticulous. Won’t last much longer, he thought. Place will be full of babies and nappies and whatnot. An end, finally, to a tidy, careful, egoist existence.

     He sat on the bed to peel plaster strapping off his body; the itch was driving him dippy.

     ‘Healing,’ said Vera, studying the angry red scar just above his liver. It was; he knew from the itch, and had looked when Fausta changed the strapping: no, he wasn’t going to tell Vera about that detail.

     ‘It needs a day or two’s rest,’ he said. ‘We’re going out tomorrow night, to celebrate.’

     ‘Are we? Where?’

     ‘To your friend Monsieur Thomas. We’ve both earned that. He’ll be an unwilling but lavish host.’

     ‘That adds edge to appetite,’ going off to do the washing-up. She wasn’t smoking at all, because of being pregnant. He was smoking much too much. This was all wrong but she was going to be placid about it. ‘I’ll make some coffee, shall I?’

     Yes, that was a good idea, before he tumbled down asleep under the shower.