33

“It’s nice here . . . ,” Pauline said, looking around.

Albert wanted to say something, but the words stuck in his throat. He spread his hands wide, dancing from one foot to the other.

Since they had known each other, they had always met outside. She had a small attic room in the servants’ quarters of the Péricourts’ mansion, and the agency had been clear: “Visitors are strictly forbidden, mademoiselle,” the accepted way of telling one’s domestics that if they wished to fuck, they should do so elsewhere, we’ll have none of that here, this is a god-fearing house, and so on . . .

Meanwhile, Albert could hardly bring Pauline back to his apartment. Édouard never went out—where could he go? And besides, even if he had agreed to let Albert have the apartment to himself for the night, it would be no use. Albert had been lying to Pauline from the start, what could he do now? I live in lodgings, he had told her, the landlady who runs the place is very strict, very suspicious, visitors strictly forbidden, just like yours, but I’m looking to find somewhere else.

Pauline had been neither shocked nor impatient. In fact she seemed reassured. She said it was all right, that she was “not that kind of girl” (implication: she did not sleep around), that she wanted a “serious relationship” (implication: marriage). Albert found it impossible to sort the truth from the lies. She did not want to “do it,” he accepted that, but every time he took her home and they were about to go their separate ways, there were wild, passionate kisses; they would huddle in doorways, legs entwined, rubbing against each other frantically. Pauline would inevitably push Albert’s hand away, but she did so later and later; in fact the other night she had gripped him harder, let out a long hoarse cry, and sunk her teeth into his shoulder. He had climbed back into the taxi gingerly, like a man carrying explosives.

This was how things stood on June 22, when the Patriotic Memory scheme eventually took off.

All of a sudden, money began to pour in.

Torrents of it.

Within a week, their tidy little sum quadrupled. More than 300,000 francs. Five days later, they had banked 570,000 francs; by June 30, they had 627,000 . . . there was no end to it. They had orders for 100 crosses, 120 torches, 182 busts, and 111 memorials of various designs; Jules d’Épremont had even won the contract for the memorial to be built in the arrondissement where Édouard was born, a down payment of 100,000 francs had been paid by the council.

Fresh orders came in every day, and with them more payments. Édouard spent his mornings making out receipts.

This manna from heaven had a curious effect; only now did they begin to realize what they had set in motion. They were already rich, and Édouard’s hypothetical million francs no longer seemed a pipe dream. July 14 was still some way off and the bank account of Patriotic Memory was swelling daily . . . Each day, 10,000; 20,000; 50,000; 80,000 francs . . . it was incredible. One morning, there had been a draft for 117,000 francs.

At first, Édouard was delirious with joy. When Albert had come home with a briefcase filled with bills, he had tossed them in the air and watched them fall like life-giving rain. He asked whether he might take some of his share right now, and Albert, laughing, had said of course, no problem. The following day, Édouard created an extraordinary mask, a swirling spiral made entirely of two-hundred franc bills. The effect was superb, a seething mass of bills that seemed to be ablaze, wreathing his face in a halo of smoke. Albert was amazed, but he was also shocked, one did not do such things with money. He might be swindling hundreds of people, but he had not abandoned all moral sense.

Édouard, for his part, was stamping his feet with glee. He never counted the money, but the orders he carefully preserved like trophies, rereading them at night, sipping a drink using his pipette; this file was his Book of Hours.

When the wonder of being rich began to fade, Albert began to comprehend the magnitude of the risk. The more the money poured in, the more he felt the noose tighten around his neck. Ever since the total had reached 300,000 francs, he had thought only of getting away. Édouard demurred; his target of 1 million was not negotiable.

And there was Pauline to think of. What could he do?

Albert, besotted, longed for her with a passion magnified a hundredfold by the self-restraint she imposed on him. The problem was, he had started out on the wrong footing; one lie had led inevitably to another. Could he really tell her the truth now, without losing her? “Pauline, I need to tell you something, the truth is I work as a clerk in a bank, but only so I can get my fingers in the till because a friend (a crippled war vet with a hole for a face and a loose grip on reality) and I have set up a deeply immoral scheme to swindle half the country, and two weeks from now, on July 14, we plan to run off to the far side of the world, do you want to come with me?”

Did he love her? He was crazy about her. But with Albert, it was impossible to know what would prevail: the fierce desire he felt for her or the mounting dread of being arrested, tried, and sentenced. He had not dreamed of the firing squad since those long nights back in 1918 after he had been interrogated by Général Morieux under the stern eye of Capitaine Pradelle. Now he had those dreams every night. When he was not making love to Pauline, he was being gunned down by twelve identical facsimiles of Capitaine Pradelle. Whether it ended with him dying the little death or the actual one, the effect was the same, he would wake with a start, bathed in sweat, haggard and howling. He would grope for his horse head mask, the only thing that could calm his fears.

The first feverish joy of realizing that their plan had succeeded mutated quickly, in both men and for different reasons, into an strange coolness, the calm one feels after completing an important task that has required a great deal of time and that, in hindsight, no longer seems as necessary as one had supposed.

With or without Pauline, all Albert could talk of was leaving. Now that the money was rolling in, Édouard could think of little reason to demur. Reluctantly, he accepted.

It was agreed that, since the Patriotic Memory promotion was to come to an end on July 14, they would leave on the fifteenth.

“Why wait until the day after?” Albert said, flustered.

“Alright, the fourteenth,” Édouard wrote.

Albert threw himself on the shipping company maps, tracing a line from Paris—a night train that would arrive in Marseille in the early hours—then the route of the first ship leaving for Tripoli. He was thankful he had kept the military record belonging to poor Louis Évrard, which he had stolen a few days after the armistice. The next day, he would buy the tickets.

Three tickets.

One for Eugène Larivière, two in the names of M. and Mme Louis Évrard.

He had no idea how to go about things with Pauline. Was it possible, in two weeks, to persuade a girl to leave everything and flee eighteen hundred miles with you? He was beginning to have his doubts.

This particular June seemed to have been made for lovers, a blissful balminess and, when Pauline was not on shift, for long endless evenings, hours and hours spent caressing, talking, sitting on park benches. Pauline told him about her girlish dreams, about the apartment, the children she wanted one day, talked about a future husband, her description gradually coming to sound more like the Albert she knew and less like the real Albert, who was nothing but a small-time crook about to flee the country.

In the meantime, he had money. Albert looked around for lodgings where he could bring Pauline, if she agreed to join him. He dismissed the idea of a hotel, deciding that, in the circumstances, it would be in poor taste.

Two days later, he found a clean, tidy lodging house near Saint-Lazare run by two sisters, broad-minded widows who rented two apartments to straitlaced civil servants, but reserved a small second-floor bedroom for clandestine couples whom they welcomed, day or night, with a complicit smile, having had holes drilled in the partition wall at bed level: each sister had her own.

Pauline had been hesitant. The same old refrain, “I’m not that kind of girl,” but then she agreed. They took a taxi. Albert opened the door to a room that was furnished in just the style Pauline dreamed of, heavy curtains that looked swanky, wallpaper on the walls. A small pedestal table and a squat armchair made it seem as though it were more than just a bedroom.

“It’s nice . . . ,” she said.

“Yes, it’s not bad,” Albert said.

Was he a complete idiot? Whatever the case, he certainly did not see what was coming. Allow three minutes for going in, looking around, taking off her coat, add another minute for boots because of the laces, and you had Pauline, naked, standing in the middle of the room, smiling, accessible, confident, breasts so white you could weep, deliciously curving hips, a perfectly trimmed delta . . . All this to say that this was not her first time, and that, having spent weeks protesting about the kind of girl she was not, having paid lip service to respectability, she was keen to get started. Albert was completely out of his depth. Add another four minutes and you have Albert howling with pleasure. Pauline looked at him, puzzled and concerned, but quickly closed her eyes again because Albert still had reserves. He had not experienced anything like this since Cécile, the night before he was called up, some centuries ago, he had so much catching up to do that eventually Pauline had to say, it’s two in the morning, darling, maybe we should get a little sleep, all right? They snuggled like spoons. Pauline was already asleep when Albert started crying—quietly so as not to wake her.

He would come home late at night after leaving Pauline. From the day she first lay on top of him in the little furnished room, Édouard saw less and less of him. Before picking her up on the nights when she was not working, Albert would go back to the apartment with his briefcase crammed with bills. Tens, hundreds of thousands of francs were stuffed into a suitcase and slipped under the bed he no longer slept in. He would check that Édouard had eaten and, before going out, he would say goodnight to Louise, bent over tomorrow’s mask, and she would answer distractedly with a sulky stare as though he were abandoning them.

One evening when Albert came home—it would have been July 2, a Friday—with a briefcase containing 73,000 francs, he found the apartment empty.

With a multitude of masks of every shape and color hanging on the wall, the huge room looked like the reserve collection of a museum. A caribou with outsized antlers fashioned from tiny slivers of wood glowered down at Albert. Everywhere he looked—from the richly bejeweled Indian with lips like snakes, to the strange, tortured individual with the enormous nose, like a liar caught in the act, who made you want to absolve him of his sins—creatures gazed at him kindly as he stood in the doorway with his briefcase.

You can imagine his panic: Édouard had left the apartment only once since they had moved in. There was no sign of Louise. No note on the table. Albert dived under the bed, the suitcase was still there, and if there was any money missing, it was not obvious—there was so much cash, someone could take fifty thousand and it would be impossible to tell. It was 7:00 p.m. Albert dropped his briefcase and rushed down to Mme Belmont.

“He asked if he could take Louise away for the weekend. I said yes . . .”

It was expressed in her usual tone, clipped, impassive, factual, like a headline in a newspaper. The woman was utterly disembodied.

Albert worried because Édouard was capable of anything. Imagining him at large in the city was enough to panic anyone . . . Albert had explained a thousand times that the situation was dangerous, that they had to leave as soon as possible. And that if they really had to wait (Édouard was deeply attached to the idea of his million) they had to be vigilant, and, above all, to not attract attention.

“When people realize what we’ve done,” he said, “it won’t take them long to track us down. There’s evidence I was at the bank, people saw me every day at the post office on the rue du Louvre, the mailman has been delivering cartloads of mail here, we hired a printer who will turn us in the moment he realizes the mess we have got him caught up in. It will take the police a couple of days to find us. A couple of hours, maybe . . .”

Édouard assented. A couple of days. Be vigilant. And now, two weeks before they were due to disappear, he had walked out of the apartment and gone wandering around Paris with a little girl, or elsewhere, as though he were no more hideous or identifiable than any other war veteran you might see on the street . . .

Where in hell could he have gone?