A Citizen of the Country Read online

  New “Director’s Cut” Edition

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  9 Union Square #123

  Southbury, CT 06488

  January 2016

  Copyright © 2000 by Sarah Smith

  Revised edition copyright © 2015 by Sarah Smith

  Reading group topics and questions for discussion copyright © 2000 by Random House and Sarah Smith

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including posting text or links to text online, printing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher.

  Originally published in August 2000 by Ballantine, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  ISBN: 978-1-938263-16-3

  Original cover design incorporates vintage photographs of Mount St. Éloi

  Text design by Stephen Thomas

  For more about the “Theatre of Blood” and Arras witchcraft, and Sarah Smith’s other books, and to contact her, visit:

  http://www.sarahsmith.com

  For Kate Ross

  a good friend

  gone too soon

  Omnia mea dona Dei

  We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn’t matter where. It is only gradually that we compose within ourselves our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively and each day more definitely.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  To call [war] a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance. It is also the punishment of a crime.

  —“Private 19022” [Frederic Manning], Her Privates We, 1930

  A baby, Jack the Ripper, and other disasters

  REISDEN AND PERDITA’S BOY was born a conspicuous eight months after they married, which explained far too much about why they’d married. Intellectually, Reisden had always advocated that the mad shouldn’t have children. Do you give a child mental instability as a christening present? Do you ask a woman you love to marry a madman? You do not. He had planned to stay a childless bachelor.

  Plans go awry.

  Before the child was born, he told Perdita that she and the child could, should, go back to America; she should divorce him. “Nonsense,” Perdita said a little shakily. “Alexander, you aren’t helping at all.”

  And then Toby’d arrived.

  Toby. Red and skinny and bean-shaped, bags under his eyes, wailing as he came into this cruel world, and why not; but a person, a new person, a new chance. And when Toby was cleaned and wrapped in a blanket, Reisden had held him; and Toby’s tiny wrinkled scrap of face turned toward him, and Toby’s perfectly shaped little fingers reached out trustingly to grab Reisden’s thumb, and Reisden fell utterly, inconceivably in love, and everything changed.

  He kept an index card in the locked middle drawer of his desk, with a list on it. He read it every morning before work. It was reminders to himself: Perdita must be able to make music and I will not hurt myself. The day after Toby was born he wrote the list over and headed it with a new item.

  I will be worthy to be Toby’s father.

  How would he tell Toby what he had done? Child: I shot my grandfather to keep him from killing me. I was eight years old. Your papa went just a bit crazy because of it.

  He had failed Toby before Toby had even been born.

  I will be worthy. He didn’t know how.

  ***

  So, of course, he didn’t want his marriage to fail; but circumstances were against him.

  Perdita adored Toby, as he did, but she was a stranger in a foreign country. A year ago she had been a music student, now she was a baroness. European nobility tend to play rough with outsiders; she was an outsider in every sense, probably the only American woman at their level who wasn’t an heiress, and she was trying to be a professional musician, which the French reserve for the French.

  They were living in a construction site. On the very day that he and Perdita had married, as if it were an omen, the front wall of Jouvet had collapsed. It was an old building; Paris had flooded, a sinkhole had opened in the street, and Jouvet had essentially fallen in the hole. The bedlinens smelt of wet plaster; they woke to the sound of hammering.

  And then there was the war.

  There’s usually a war. The Middle East had been a tinderbox for years. The Germans were trying to stir up trouble; his was ordinary enough, since the Germans and French had been fighting each other everywhere but Europe for forty years.

  But now the Germans seemed to be aspiring to a big war. “If the war comes,” he told her, “you and Toby are going back to America. It won’t be safe here.”

  ***

  It would be very unsafe for him and any of his; and he didn’t want to tell her why.

  The trouble was his company, Jouvet. And himself.

  Jouvet Medical Analyses treated madmen and had done so for two hundred years. Five generations of Dr. Jouvets had ingratiated themselves with five generations of the mad upper classes of Europe. Among Jouvet’s archives were the uncomfortable secrets of kings and consorts and ministers, and of all the less illustrious people who liked to go to the same doctor as royalty. Manufacturers; railroad barons; generals; bootmakers to the Army; people far more vital to a war than the average king.

  Buying Jouvet had probably been the single most naive thing he’d ever done.

  He’d been an academic then, and he’d bought the company for the archives, to do longitudinal studies of family madness. He’d had only a general idea what was in them, and when Jouvet unexpectedly had proved to be a going concern, he’d laid the archives project aside.

  In the chaos after the Flood last year, they’d had to move the files. He’d asked his secretary what dead files they should be especially careful of; and she’d brought him a stack that had clearly been waiting for him to ask. He’d taken them into his private office that night; he still remembered it, sitting by the study lamp with a glass of wine, innocent as a lamb.

  Halfway down the pile were Jack the Ripper’s medical records. The most shocking thing about them was who the man was related to. It went on from there, spectacularly.

  The British royal family; the German imperial family; the Russian imperials, the Austrians, members of most of the families Reisden had grown up with.

  So here we are, Reisden, Alexander Janasz von Reisden, Austro-Hungarian, not even a Frenchman, a dubious foreigner; and look who his guardian had been, not dubious at all, known to be no friend to France. Reisden, now head of Jouvet. Not a medical doctor. Not previously interested in the history of the mad. He’d bought Jouvet, more or less between Thursday and Saturday.

  What he had bought with the Jouvet archives was the largest trove of blackmailable information in Europe.

  Dear Heaven, who’d believe he wouldn’t use them?

  ***

  “There will be a war sometime,” Reisden’s guardian had said to him years ago. “And Germany must lose it; and blackmail is a weapon they will certainly use.”

  Count Leo von Loewenstein. His ostensible job was something relating to agricultural trade agreements between France and Austria; but everyone in Paris knew Count Leo was the Austrian spymaster. Count Leo had just begun to hint to Reisden what his real job was. Reisden had barely guessed. He must have been fourteen.

  “Blackmail? Aren’t they our allies?”

  That day Count Leo had been playing a desultory game of chess with him, “Dear boy,” Leo had said, moving a piece, “one doesn’t play chess one move at a time. They are our
allies now. In five or ten or twenty years—?”

  “They’ll fight Austria.”

  “I hope not; if they fight us, we’ll lose. No, the Germans must fight the French and lose,” Graf Leo had said patiently, moving a pawn to lure Reisden’s bishop. “If they win, they will eat up France, then they’ll go after us and win. No, they must spend their forces against France.”

  The war between France and Germany had been going on for a century, and forty years ago the Germans had won it. The Prussian armies had invaded and defeated France. Thirty thousand soldiers had marched through Paris (after which the Parisians had pointedly scrubbed the paving stones of every street with disinfectant). The Germans had taken the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as war booty and imposed a crushing indemnity they thought would bankrupt France for decades to come.

  But France had paid off the war debt in three years, and then France had made alliances with England, Germany’s rival on the sea, and with Russia, Germany’s eastern neighbor.

  “And Germany has allied with us, as if we could say no,” Leo had said. “They have armies, they are making a navy. The only thing they don’t have is time. And that, my dear boy, is why they’re resorting to blackmail; and that is why we are putting together a little treasure box of secrets too.”

  Leo indicated pieces on the chessboard. “France, the key to Europe,” the queen. “Britain,” a bishop, “can attack quickly in combination with France, but Germany can take both if Russia doesn’t join them.” Leo held up Russia, a rook, and moved it entirely off the board, holding it up in his hand. “And Russia is far away.. The Russian troops will take six weeks to mobilize and reach the German frontier. If Germany can conquer France, crush France utterly, in six weeks, Russia will back down and Germany will need to fight only a sea war with England.”

  The key to victory was those six weeks. “Delay, confuse,” Leo had said, moving pawns like a magician, “and the Germans will win; how would you do it, Sacha? We are not talking about chess, but men, and the sides are not so clear as black and white.”

  Reisden had reached out and taken the black queen with her own pawn.

  “Exactly! Turn the French against themselves, with scandal, blackmail!”

  “How?” Reisden had asked.

  You’d have think he’d remembered this before he bought Jouvet.

  Suppose that an Army quartermaster had a Turkish young man on the side. Suppose a railroad scheduler could not keep himself from gambling. Blackmail might turn them; it might paralyze them; and they could always simply be sacrificed.

  Suppose that in May or June of some summer, the quartermaster’s liaison was revealed, the railroad scheduler was exposed. Disgraced, forced to resign, the quartermaster and the scheduler would be replaced by less experienced men; and a month later, when war suddenly broke out, no one would quite know how to get boots and bullets to the front -- Multiply this by not very many pawns. Distract the flighty French with scandal while the Germans gathered armies. Hours lost here, a day there; too many hours and days and the Germans would reach Paris.

  “This is why the Germans collect gossip like an old lady with ten cats; and this is why sometimes at night, men and women with gossip come to our back door. You will let them in and send them up to see me.”

  ***

  And so he’d been a part of Leo’s world, a very minor part, for a while, opening doors and occasionally asking questions; and then he’d discovered biology and gone in another direction entirely, and discovered who he’d been before he was Reisden. All of that was more important.

  Until the flood.

  In the Great Paris Flood last year, half of the front of Jouvet had fallen onto the street. Repairing the building was going to take more money than he had. He didn’t want to sell, but he had responsibilities; his child’s father wasn’t going to go bankrupt, he had to be reasonable.

  But he wasn’t going to sell the archives.

  Leo was dead now, but his son, Sigi, was in the family business. Sigi had come to visit Jouvet when the floodwater was still waist-deep in the cellars and piles of rubble were being cleared out of the courtyard. Sigi had surveyed the bracing beams holding up half of the building, the smashed furniture and instruments, the boxes of rescued records in disarray, and had offered Reisden a blank check.

  “Don’t worry about money. Don’t think about it. I can help.”

  Hard on the heels of Sigi had come the Russians, who offered him a great deal more than the Evidenzbureau had; and then an Italian who was fronting for the German Abwehr and expected him not to know it. He even had a visit from the British.

  “Be careful to be on someone’s side,” Graf Leo had said to him on that long-ago day over the chessboard. “Your fault, Sacha, is that you always prefer to be independent and alone. That is how pawns get hurt. Pick a side and play the game.”

  One way or another, Jouvet would get sucked into Leo’s game, unless Reisden found an ally.

  He found one.

  ***

  General Lucien Pétiot of the French army had a pointed beard and twinkling sky-blue eyes, the color of his dress uniform. He was supposedly in charge of procurement (Medical Section) for the French army. General Pétiot bought miles of bandages, barrels of mercurochrome, trainloads of cough pastilles for the French army. Now he wanted to administer intelligence and sanity tests in the same large numbers. Every man in France, even convicted criminals, served three years in uniform, and the army needed to identify potential problems before a problem picked up a gun and shot its commanding officer.

  Jouvet hadn’t done competency testing on this scale before; but no one else had either. Jouvet did do competency testing, forensics for criminal courts, specialized neurological testing for hospitals. Reisden began making friends in the conservative wing of the French army; he put together presentations for one army committee after another; he made a particular friend of Pétiot, who became as familiar at Jouvet as the concierge’s cat, poking his nose into the morning staff meetings, sniffing at a technician’s bench, hovering outside the locked and guarded doors of the famous Jouvet medical archives.

  No one else from French intelligence talked to Reisden, which made Pétiot’s actual role fairly clear; and, like everyone else, Pétiot eventually asked about the records. The archives were potentially quite valuable, Pétiot said. One would not want them to fall into enemy hands.

  If you are playing chess with an indefinite number of sides and no way to tell among them, make your own rules.

  “Jouvet has kept secrets for two hundred years,” Reisden said. “It’s a tradition I intend to continue.”

  “The Jouvets kept secrets,” Pétiot pointed out. “But they were French and you are Austrian. Leo Loewenstein’s boy. One wonders would you act the same way?”

  “Let me show you something,” Reisden said and took him downstairs. Through the glass doors to Intake, they looked at the patients waiting.

  “They deserve their secrets,” Reisden said. “The archives are medical records, and they will not be used for anything else.”

  “I imagine you’ve been approached by our enemies,” Pétiot said.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you listen to an approach from us?”

  “Not from anyone.”

  “So you propose to be—”

  “On our patients’ side, and only theirs. They’re not pawns.”

  “But you’re asking us for the medical testing contract. What do you intend to give?”

  Reisden chose to let himself look amused. “Results.”

  Pétiot shook his head. “You intend to be Switzerland. A little country of your own. Dangerous. You will be invaded. You, your little American wife, your child…”

  He forced himself to keep smiling. “You would find me quite comprehensively savage toward anyone who threatened them.” He was sickened at the idea that he was playing with Toby and Perdita’s safety. “I mean to be useful. Help me help you by giving Jouvet the contract.”

 
“Put you under our protection? You’re an idealist,” Pétiot said. “You won’t spy, you won’t be threatened, and you want our help.”

  “If I were to give way to any pressure, neither of us can guarantee it would be yours. We both know how to play this game. Recognize an obstacle as an opportunity.”

  Pétiot looked at him almost with amusement. “Count Leo trained you well.--Who knows, perhaps you’ll get away with it.”

  ***

  He was then officially a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he hadn’t lived for— forever, really. At Pétiot’s suggestion, he applied for French citizenship. “We must have that much of your loyalty.”

  He hadn’t shared this bit of his history with Perdita—all right, yes, he was ashamed of it, though largely because it would shock her.

  Even becoming a French citizen shocked her.

  “I shall have to say I support the French government and renounce America?” she said.

  “It’s actually Franz Josef you’ll be renouncing. Being French is better than being a citizen of the K-und-K, darling.”

  “But I’m not French, Alexander. I’m American.”

  She was not American. She had lost her American citizenship by marrying a foreigner; she was now officially a citizen of Austria-Hungary too. She’d never be American again, unless he turned American, which he wouldn’t.

  Or if she left him. Which, against his principles, he no longer wanted her to do.

  The citizenship process would take probably a year unless he was declared to be of special value to France—which might happen, since he owned Jouvet. Meanwhile the contract with the French army inched along a parallel path, with even more papers translated into French, authorized translators, legal experts, and apostilles.