A Citizen of the Country Read online

  One day, as he was walking down the street, he saw a dog in the gutter. The dog’s leg had been crushed by a wagon and a man was about to kill it with a rock. “No,” Gilbert said and took the dog to a dog-doctor. He had not known before that dogs had doctors. He had never owned a dog. Father would not have approved.

  The night the dog came back from the hospital, Gilbert made him comfortable in the kitchen. The two of them were alone in the house; it was the servants’ night out. From the library upstairs, where he was rebinding a book, Gilbert heard a low mournful baying, and then a dragging and thumping like the chains of another ghost. The dog had pushed open the kitchen door with his nose and was pulling his cast after him, stair by painful stair, to be with Gilbert.

  Elphinstone’s leg never completely recovered, but in spite of his limp he turned into a trim, handsome little dog, resembling a beagle, who loved to go outdoors. Gilbert was himself a rather reserved man, but Elphinstone had no inhibitions. He would gallop three-legged down Commonwealth Mall, spreading chaos and happiness, yelping at pigeons, other dogs, statues, nursemaids, and children, barking life, life, life. And so, though Father’s voice roared from the windows of the house, You are idle, Sir, and though he had lost Richard forever, Gilbert was happy walking his dog.

  Then Perdita wrote that she was coming to America, with Toby.

  Richard and his father

  BACK AT JOUVET, THERE was only business mail for Reisden. A part of him was hoping for a letter from Perdita. She’d have had to mail it yesterday from Paris, in the rush of packing. (And why not? he snarled internally. A postcard, left on his desk? He demanded of her more than he should.) “Did Madame and the baby get off all right?” Mme Herschner asked him. Of course, he snapped, disappointed, and went upstairs into a silence that was already beginning to feel lonely.

  The apartment had been one of their successes. When he had noticed she fumbled to find doorknobs, he had found someone to make them in red glass. All the lower cabinets locked with patent latches, too difficult for exploring little hands. Perdita loved light, so they had put skylights in almost all the rooms and filled them with sunshine. Now, in hot June, the light was too much light, was heat.

  He stood on the stairs and brooded at the photographs they had hung. Perdita, who couldn’t see them, had wanted to display pictures of their friends and family. Louis Dalloz, Victor Wills, Reisden’s nephew Tiggy with his dog Ponywolf. Five generations of Dr Jouvets, miniatures and photographs.

  He stared for a while at the picture of Gilbert Knight, then unhooked it from the wall.

  He turned the picture glass-side-down and, with his pocketknife, cut the brown paper away from the back and removed the backing. Behind the backing was another photograph: a very young man, still a teenager, holding a baby. On the back was written in Gilbert’s hand, My brother Thomas and Richard, his son, 1879. The young man was grinning solemnly; the baby’s head had moved during the shot.

  He looked at the young man: Thomas Robert Knight, nineteen.

  Gilbert had sent the picture when Toby had been born; Reisden had held it above the fire, ready to burn, more than once this winter. Thomas Robert was so very young, nineteen and gawky, with his struggling moustache and his regrettable striped vest, looking like a child playing papa. Exactly the sort of happy careless young puppy who would get a girl in trouble and marry her, and drown both of them four years later out of sheer carelessness.

  What do you call a boy like that? Father? Reisden was almost a decade older than Thomas Robert would ever be. No. You take the boy by the shoulders and shake him. Be careful, you say to him. Don’t take chances. Don’t go out in the boat. You made a d—d will, Thomas Robert, but yodu didn’t bother to name Gilbert as Richard’s guardian, because you were going to live forever.

  It was an embarrassment for Reisden even to want a father, like finding a French postcard one bought as a teenager; one thinks one’s outgrown all that long ago, and still one reacts. Furious with him, furious, disappointed, wanting—oh G-d—security, protection, all the things Thomas Robert had been too young and careless then to give and was far too dead to give now, and still too young, eternally too young, and Reisden was too old now to find fatherhood in anyone but himself, or need it for anyone but his son.

  He looked hopelessly at Thomas Robert. Toby’s grandfather?

  He laid the picture down, and the cardboard over it, and fitted the nails back into the frame; he cut a piece of paper from the roll of wrapping paper in the kitchen and glued it over the back of the frame. Covered up, not forgotten, not burned, not finished with; why did he torment himself? He turned over the picture and stared at Gilbert Knight’s face, seeing Thomas Robert there, and Richard, and Toby, and himself.

  His job to fix things. He called the Most Assassinated Man in Paris. “Jules? Reisden. May we talk about André?”

  “Reisden? Thank goodness. You’re the only one who can help.”

  Jules asks for help

  “I’M BEING BLACKMAILED,” THE Most Assassinated Man in Paris said.

  Jules paced around Reisden’s office, too nervous to sit, looking at the ominously titled medical books in the glassed-in shelves, the Vesalius etching of the flayed man, the crimson doorknobs. He sat down, took out his handkerchief, and wiped his palms. He balled the handkerchief between his big hands. He got up again, roamed around the room, looked out the window, checked the time on the clock on the mantelpiece, checked the clock against his watch. “I’ll have to be at the Necro soon.”

  This was funk and not worth a reply.

  Jules stared at the mantelpiece. On one side, the sandstone figure of a Renaissance courtier held up the mantel. There had been two before the building had collapsed. Now, against the wall by the bracing, leaned a sandstone carving of a skeleton, smiling a deathly smile, holding a scythe bound with ribbons. The skeleton matched the courtier perfectly; André had an eye; but one does not necessarily want to be terrified in a medical office, a detail André would neglect. “That comes from Montfort,” Jules said.

  Reisden nodded. “He’s just sent it. As a present.” Another plea from André, Katzmann had said. It means don’t forget to help me.

  “And you don’t know how to send it back?” Jules said. Both men smiled. Jules let his breath out slowly, a small release of tension.

  “André’s not like anyone else in the world,” Jules said. “People don’t understand that.—If I told you—I mean, could I hire you or retain you so that no one, ever, would have to know about this? And it has to be you, you personally.”

  “Of course.” Reisden seated himself behind his desk, Jules in one of the clients’ chairs. Jules found in his pocket a louis d’or, the traditional medical retainer, and laid it on the desk. Reisden nodded. Now they were under the seal of confidence.

  “There’s a man who threatens to spread rumors about me.” Jules took a deep breath. “About André, through me. Here’s what happened. You know, maybe you don’t, André and Sabine went to Egypt for their honeymoon. He wrote four plays about mummies’ curses, evil priestesses trapped in a tomb, all that, so from his point of view the honeymoon was all right.”

  André had sent the newborn Toby a cat mummy as a present. What could one say about André that wasn’t exceeded by what he actually did?

  “But something happened in Egypt. Or,” Jules took a long breath and let it out, slowly, embarrassed. “Or— As far as we know. It didn’t. Happen. When they got back, André sent Sabine down to the country. He’s making her live there. Away from him. It’s nothing like what this blackmailer says—” Jules jammed his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders; red came up in his cheeks and suffused his face. “But he says that André and his wife don’t get on because André and I have—an unnatural connection.”

  Jules was ordinary; it was his strength. Nothing unusual happens to people like him. A rival carpentry shop opens nearby, his soccer team loses. André turned Jules into a vampire, had him decapitated by a mad Russian countess, evis
cerated him at the bloody hands of the inmates of Dr. Wardrell’s Asylum every night and twice on Wednesdays, and the audience loved it, because Jules was like them, an ordinary handsome pleasant man.

  Jules hadn’t married. He lived with his sister in a flat near the theatre. He escorted women to play openings but never elsewhere; “I’m too busy to marry,” he said with a smile whenever some mama hinted. “What woman wants her husband off being murdered every midnight?”

  “He could say what he pleased about me,” Jules said, “if it weren’t about André—It is not true,” Jules leaned forward. “André’s working on,” Jules hesitated, “a new project, he’s been working on it all winter, a film. Perhaps he’s simply put her off to one side, to deal with later, you know how he is when he’s working. But he ought to pay more attention to her. I—all of us at the theatre tell him to go home.”

  Reisden nodded.

  “Sabine—she’s pretty, she’s rich, she wants attention.” Jules tilted his hand back and forth. “She’s a little, you know how those girls with money are, always on the defensive, they know it wasn’t romance that got them married.” Jules looked at him uneasily, as if hoping that he hadn’t said anything unjust about André’s new wife.

  “That’s awkward.”

  “Can I prove André and I don’t—aren’t--?” Jules moved his shoulders uneasily. “I work in the theatre, we spend hours together every day, but it’s not as though—” He blushed dark red. “We don’t spend hours alone—André comes over to the flat sometimes, but Ruthie’s there—at least she is sometimes—This is horrible. I’ll have to give up the theatre.”

  “Don’t. That would only make it look true.”

  Jules looked guiltily relieved. “Will this blackmailer do what he says, though?”

  “Who is he and what does he say?”

  “He,” Jules hesitated again. “I’m sorry. He said ‘André’s friend Reisden’ would tell me about him.”

  Reisden’s neck chilled. “Does he have a name?”

  “He said you would remember the Ferret.”

  In Leo’s house in Paris, he had opened Leo’s back door at night to the Ferret and people like him. The Ferret—what had his name been? Ferenc Gehazy—would waddle across the back hall toward Leo’s office. And some time after, there would be the scandal, the suicide, the political crisis.

  He’d run from all of it.

  “Ferenc Gehazy. He was a nasty bit of work, a freelance intelligencer. Leo von Loewenstein bought political information from him. Gehazy used blackmail to get the information.”

  But the Ferret was a political spy. How could trouble between André and his wife be political?

  “What did he want?” Reisden asked.

  “He wanted ‘the secret of Montfort.’ He sounded as if it were some military secret.”

  “Montfort has a military secret?”

  “Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?” Jules said. “What’s military about Montfort?”

  What secret of Montfort?

  “WHAT’S MILITARY ABOUT MONTFORT?” Jules and Reisden asked Ruthie.

  Before Jules had become the Most Assassinated Man in Paris, he had been Josef Aborjaily, Lebanese refugee and carpenter’s assistant; and when he had come to the Necro, he had brought along his sister, Ruthie, to make costumes and serve tea. Ruthie was almost pretty in a quiet way, cheerful, with lovely skin, olive blushed with rose, and only the glasses and the grey streaks in her hair to mark her for spinsterhood. Reisden had seen her for years in the background at the Necro, dispensing her mint tea, knitting, doing accounts, running errands, listening to actors’ tales of woe and André’s latest schemes for murdering her brother onstage, smiling her shy, resigned smile and becoming indispensable, while the world had gone on without her.

  The apartment the siblings shared clearly belonged to her: potpourri in a brass bowl scented the air, birds sang in a cage, and little roses bloomed in pots. In the front hall were proudly hung the Aborjailys’ certificates of French citizenship. Ruthie had spread papers and books over the dining room table. She got out her reading glasses and settled them firmly on her nose.

  “I don’t know anything about a military secret,” she said dubiously. “And I know a lot.”

  “That was quick, Ruthie,” Reisden said.

  “I know all this already, for Monsieur André’s film. We’re filming at Montfort.”

  “Film?” Reisden said. “No, don’t distract me, tell me later.”

  “Monsieur André would give you a role.”

  “Don’t want one, I’m too busy. Tell us about Montfort,” Reisden said. “Is there anything military at all but the Fortifications?”

  They sat round the table and passed documents and photographs hand to hand. In the first photos, Montfort was nothing but an enormous, half-ruined castle on a hill. A few deserted farmers’ cottages huddled against it; the ruined abbey and its crumbling towers rose above it. Then the walls began to be repaired, with suspiciously white stone. And, finally, in yearly photographs taken for the newsletters of the Friends of Montfort, the famous Fortifications began to appear, sprouting and spreading across the eastward slope of Montfort hill, every one facing toward Germany like an army of stone soldiers. Chalk towers, knee-high or shoulder-high, blocks or doll-sized castles, or even rough figures carved with their donors’ names and with defiant slogans. Aux français la France. À bas les allemands. France for the French. Down with the Germans. Alsace-Lorraine will be ours again.

  One could tell the politics of any Frenchman with perfect accuracy by his reaction to Montfort. If one were Cyron’s dog, one would think it sublime.

  “How many towers are there now?” Reisden asked.

  “My goodness, the Friends come every weekend to build towers. You can’t count them.”

  “For the glory of France,” Reisden said. “To resist the Germans. I suppose, if a German army seriously thought of capturing Montfort, it wouldn’t take them more than five minutes.”

  Montfort castle had stood for a thousand years, but for the last five hundred it had been in ruins, ivy-covered and bat-haunted. When Cyron had come to restore it, there was no question of his creating an actual military fort; Cyron had spent money as actors do, on visibility. Many of the repairs and all of the Fortifications were made of chalk, locally quarried. You could gouge the walls with a spoon.

  “What would the Germans do with Montfort if they had it?” Jules said.

  “Laugh at it. If it were a Vauban fort,” Reisden thought aloud. “Modern and so on. But it’s Montfort. And even the Vauban line didn’t stop the Germans in ‘70.”

  “It’s on a hill,” Jules said. “It’s close to the Arras road,” the main highway from the city of Arras to the Belgian border.

  “And the Germans would want the Arras road. I suppose they’d want to take Montfort.”

  “The army might be testing something on the hill at Montfort,” Jules said, “or in the plains around it.”

  “Traction vehicles with treads,” Ruthie suggested. “Military balloons, or radio, or planes.”

  “Radio?” Reisden said. “It’s on a hill. Marconi aerial?”

  “The abbey tower?” Ruthie said.

  “That would be possible,” Jules said.

  “But it’s hardly a military secret that Montfort is on a hill,” Reisden said. “It’s not on a railroad line. It simply sits on a hill in a plain, surrounded by sheep and beet fields. It’s no use to anyone; no one wants it.”

  “The witches do,” Ruthie said.

  Reisden turned and looked at her. In honor of the company, he made it a good double-take.

  “Witches, Ruthie.”

  “Witches,” Jules said dismissively.

  “They’re a little old-fashioned out there in the countryside,” Ruthie said. “Herbs and stuff and full moons…”

  “Don’t even talk about the witches,” Jules said. “They’ve been nothing but trouble.”

  “André never told me about witches,” Reisden
said.

  “You mustn’t think broomsticks and such,” Ruthie said. “It’s like a club, or, I don’t know, like a lot of different little clubs, they quarrel with each other.”

  “Do you mean covens?” Reisden asked, delighted.

  “Well, really, they’re just clubs. You know, they make a mystery of what they do but I’m sure it’s just drinking and playing cards.”

  “They know the boves, though,” Jules said. “That’s the only way they’re useful.”

  “Boves?”

  “Now there would be a military secret,” Jules said, “if they were secret. The boves in Arras. The famous boves. Never heard of them? Boves are cellars under the town. The whole center of Arras is one big cellar underneath, like a big cave. The boves are how Cyron was so successful back in the war. His men would hide out in them, and the witches helped him. Omer Heurtemance showed Cyron and his soldiers places to hide.”

  “Omer Heurtemance? A witch?” Reisden guessed. “Warlock?”

  “Our witch, for the film. He’s a darling. I don’t care what Monsieur Cyron thinks,” Ruthie said. “I’ll show you his picture.” Ruthie went across the hallway to the library and stopped on the way back to feed her caged birds. She stood there fore a moment, with her hand inside the cage, thinking, a pretty girl once, left on the vine; and closed the door gently. “Here’s our Flanders witch,” she said, handing Reisden a snapshot. “Isn’t he a darling?”

  The witch was a man about sixty, posed by an ancient building that seemed to be some kind of shop. He wore glasses, unusual in illiterate Flanders, and an ordinary sheepman’s ancient tweed jacket and corduroy trousers; one could almost smell the sheep dung. But his beard extended to his watch chain, his hair tumbled to his waist, and both beard and hair were tangled and felted in elflocks as though they had never been cut or combed.