My Chocolate Redeemer (27 page)

‘I hardly think this is the moment for religious speculation,' protests Father Duval.

And, behold, I think he may be right. I think, further, that I am coming close to understanding what is going on here. The Redeemer has, by his appearance in the window, taken it on himself to make Uncle Claude and Monsieur Cherubini disclose themselves; he has played the part of the sheet of lead, they are the invisible particles, and we are the observers of the experiment.

You see the possibilities, don't you? You who do not play dice with the universe but rather enjoy Russian roulette. You can do just about anything with science, once you get the hang of it. I'm quietly excited by the possibility.

‘If the black man isn't here, or there – where is he?' Pesché demands. A flooding wave of relief makes me giddy and I speak:

‘Maybe the mistake we've been making with Monsieur Brown is to imagine that he must always be in one place at the same time. Here or there. Perhaps he is continually in movement, and if he is a quantum force then we must apply Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle when we analyse the reality of this creature. When we know where he is we cannot also know how fast he is travelling, and when we know how fast he's travelling we cannot say for certain where he is. What do you think of that, Uncle Claude?'

‘I've never heard such nonsense in all my life,' says the Angel. ‘We
saw
him. In the window. Standing there! It was a deliberate, calculated insult. He was there and we will find him.'

‘No, no,
patron
,' says Uncle Claude slowly, ‘perhaps Bella has a point. Some of my lessons in physics seem to be taking hold. Maybe we should rethink this. Later. But now you must give yourself to your supporters who have come a long way today to be with us. When the village is peaceful again, some time this evening, we will get to the bottom of this. I have in mind a little experiment. If Monsieur Brown is where the watchers at the gate tell us – the hotel – then this would be an ideal chance to test whether he can be in two places at once. If he is experimenting with us, we will return the compliment. Let's test the hypothesis to destruction.'

‘Do as you like,' I tell my uncle. ‘You can't touch him now.'

I speak as I do, certain that the Redeemer has got away. I see him roaring down the autoroute in the Angel's Mercedes, singing some favourite Wouff song – or humming snatches of ‘Lead Kindly Light'. Imagine my horror, then, at the discovery that the Angel's limousine has not been touched.

Chapter 12

It seems a long time before the local brigade arrives, because I suppose, at half-past ten in the evening people are hard to find and the firemen have to be summoned from nearby villages. They are a scratch crew pulled from their homes, and out of bars and cafés, dressed in a variety of outfits ranging from smart blue serge to denim jeans, and a few of them are wearing helmets. First comes the advance guard in a little truck which has to fight its way past the cars parked outside the gates of the Priory and it's at least another ten minutes before they can get their water tender through. The firemen have literally to bounce several cars out of the way and they are helped by the watchers in the Citroën, the Renault and the Deux-Chevaux, though as soon as they have done this, I notice, they go back to their cars and lean on the door jambs, put their elbows on the roofs as if they have come to an election rally, or a bullfight, or the scene of some ghastly accident, and like everybody else they stare. Everyone stares. By the time the big hoses are connected to the main water supply from the lake, the fire is raging in the kitchens and lower floors of the Priory. Smoke pours from the windows and hangs in the sky. The guests scream and run into the garden. Tertius has been burnt, his hair is alight and he has to be sprayed with water by the firemen. Hyppolyte and Armand stand shaking with fear, never has reality brushed so close. They were in the kitchen when the fire started and a sheet of flame leapt at them as they stood peeling potatoes. This seems particularly to have enraged them, the fact that the fire broke out while they were working, really working! It's as if they think the fire has waited until they were genuinely busy before attacking them. They feel that they have been doing their duty and have been endangered. I get the impression that this is a mistake they will not be making again. Last night they were pretending to be waiters, tonight they are pretending to be chefs – and tomorrow night? For them there will be no more nights. Armand puts it for them all:

‘We might have died. The bastard's got no concern for his staff!' He holds in his hand a peeled potato and with a sudden movement turns and hurls it behind him, curving upwards and into the water.

People are sitting out at the cast-iron tables under the trees, watching the progress of the fire. People will watch a fire. And there seems little else to do after the first panic is over; perhaps the guests are now beginning faintly to relish the relief that comes when danger is past and, feeling that they can now be quite safe, they sit back and look at things objectively. I can hardly blame them. There is always an element of carnival in a fire, particularly when you have the knowledge safe and sure that however fiercely it burns, beside you lie several million litres of water. Little boys begin to form a crowd around the fire-fighters who have now put on breathing apparatus and are preparing to enter the hotel. Suddenly Gudrun leaps to her feet and begins screaming. Her anguish is terrible. She runs to the front doors but the firemen turn her away and so she begins walking up and down the path in front of the hotel weeping and gnawing her knuckles and calling for her children, though as far as I can see all of them are here. Her husband is at a loss and he goes and speaks to the
pompiers
who tell him that nothing can be done until they enter the hotel and begin to search the rooms. Gudrun weeps bitterly and covers her eyes. Then, suddenly, around the corner there appears Raoul, or, as I suppose we must now call him, Dupont, the accountant from Grenoble. His face is sooty and he is carrying on his hip the little blond boy. Gudrun screams ‘Francois! Francois!' and runs and snatches the child away and hugs him frantically. Raoul/Dupont beams as the Dutch girl runs to him and embraces him.

I really can't look. That's why I turn around and it's because I turn around, away from the fire, that I see Clovis. He's up on the headland that forms the right-hand arm of the little bay. He is on his motor-cycle. The last of the evening light glints on something – of course, the glass boot. As I watch, the bike shoots forward and Clovis soars into space. For a long moment he stays on the bike, riding it through the air, Hermes flying through the heavens, but then the machine, being heavier, begins to fall away beneath him and both of them twist and turn through the air as they drop towards the water. One force in the Grand Unification Theory we can absolutely rely on: gravity. It's over very suddenly, there's no noise, they're too far away for that, not even a splash, boy and machine simply aren't there any longer. I turn back to the fire and the guests at the tables. Am I the only one who saw Clovis fly? Certainly no one else gives any sign of it, they have eyes only for the fire. I want to do something. Of course I want to do something but Clovis is too far out, no one can reach him in time, even by motor-boat, and, besides, the surface of the water where he disappeared is as clear and as clean as a newly swept floor.

Now the front door of the hotel opens and two firemen carrying a stretcher come down the steps. One blue espadrille protrudes from beneath the white sheet and I know at once it's André. Tertius, Hyppolyte and Armand jump to their feet as the stretcher is carried down the slate path between the tables towards the ambulance. They stare, and point, but there's no sign in their faces of grief or concern. Shock, yes, disappointment certainly, and more than a touch of anger; they're watching the one person to whom they wish bitterly to complain being carried past insensible, quite possibly dead.

The crowd outside the main gates of the Priory where the ambulance waits is even bigger now. There are many people from the village but they still don't come into the garden because it is, after all, private property and even though the property in question looks as if it is about to be razed to the ground the people of our village always observe the proprieties.

‘Is he bad?' someone asks.

The fireman turns to the questioner the great goggle-eyes of his monster face in its breathing apparatus, and very slowly lifts the mask. He shrugs hopelessly. ‘He is hot to the touch.'

Hot to the touch!

The words sink into my head where, despite their meaning, they fail to warm. Quite the opposite. I believe everyone who hears them shivers. To the villagers gathered around the front gates of the hotel the menus upon the gateposts speak from behind their polished glass frames of Veal Soup with Pasta and Cheese, of
Paupiettes de Sole Déglère
, the dishes for the day, the specialities of the house; they speak, in fact, of another cooler, happier period when fire and smoke and ambulances were unknown. The ambulance accepts the still figure on the stretcher and speeds away up the winding hill, its siren wailing. I begin to recognise people: old Laveur, the drycleaner along with the two De La Salle sisters who run the pizzeria and the florist at the top of the village; young Brest, the butcher, who must have been working because he's still in his apron with blood in the creases across his belly; the entire family Gramus are here, father and mother and several children as well as the granny with the warts and the pointy chin. Because the Gramus family in years gone by had provided all the undertaking services in the village, their presence in any number, even today, is regarded as a bad omen.

The works of man are insensible to his grief. Several of the villagers studying the menus give low whistles over the prices of the dishes. They do this sort of thing across the way at
Les Dents Sacrés
. The air of festival is growing.

‘He smelt like burnt biscuit,' says the younger of the De La Salle sisters, a lady of about seventy who wears strings of dark metal jewellery around her thin throat and wrists (it makes a harsh crunching sound when she moves, like the clash of boots on gravel). The other sister smells always of cold flower water from her florist's shop.

Hot to the touch!

The Angel, Uncle Claude and Father Duval arrive in the big Mercedes which should not be here. The watchers at the gate, who had been standing guard over the Redeemer, become quite excited at the sight of the Mayor although they still do not leave their cars but stand beside them in an attitude of patient expectation, feet on the bumpers, hands hooked into waist-bands. For the first time I see their guns visible beneath their jackets and for the first time it is as if they do not care who sees them. The unexpected has broken in on routine and its reward is this revelation of metal in trouser waist-bands and in holsters under the arms.

The Angel, seeing the assembled crowd, and still smarting from the major interruption of the rally, climbs onto the bonnet of his car and begins addressing the onlookers:

‘My friends, we meet in unhappy circumstances. One of the monuments of La Frisette is engulfed in flames. Our ancient Priory stands gasping for breath! For hundreds of years it has endured in holy tranquillity, a hospice for weary travellers, a refuge for the sick, a light to passing ships on the lake. Who knows if we are not today here present at its death? You have seen, I believe, its owner and its dearest friend, carried away on a stretcher, overcome no doubt by smoke and flames as he fought to contain the blaze. Our valiant fire service are risking life and limb to bring this catastrophe under control and we are proud of them. But this is not the time for words. However, let me say that I give you my pledge – and I know that Monsieur Dresseur, the Mayor, who is also here to comfort his young niece, will support me – the Priory will not die! No matter what the damage, no matter what the cost, it will rise again from the ashes. No part of our beloved village of La Frisette is disposable, or dispensable. Its fabric is as precious as our bones! Be it our little church on the hill, or the old Mairie, we fight to preserve them.'

The crowd hear him in silence and applaud politely. Old mother Gramus speaks for many when she asks: ‘Did he start the fire on purpose,
patron
? For the insurance? This place must be costing him a packet and we all know it.'

And young Brest, yellow-haired in his white plastic apron, calls out, ‘What about the black fellow – the one with the disease? Is he also burnt?'

‘You are referring, of course, to the hotel's foreign guest,' the Angel observes.

‘To the dictator,' says old Laveur. ‘The one they call the King of the Caramel Islands. Where is he?'

The Angel shrugs. ‘Who knows? You see the firemen entering the hotel. Perhaps they will find him.'

‘If he's still there he'll be all melted by this time,' suggests the elder of the De La Salle sisters, throwing up a hand to her mouth, pale and transparent and delicate as a blue-veined leaf.

She is renowned for her salty humour and the crowd love the joke. There's no doubt that there is now a real carnival atmosphere and it's not just the exhilarating effect of the fire that brings it on. There's another reason for this festive mood. I see it now, all the village people are taking part in an old ritual, something they surely remember in their bones because it was in just this place that the villagers would have once gathered in the middle of the seventeenth century, and again early in the eighteenth during the Revolution when the last remaining monks were expelled by the Revolutionary Council.

On June 30th, 1793, all the village came down to the lakeside, summoned by drum and trumpet to a kind of people's free rock concert. It must have been, in a way, just as if a group like, say, Neanderthal were playing a waterside gig, you know the lot, pretty good on bangs and brass and a soul-scouring synthesiser (I'm thinking especially of their all-time smash ‘If I Had Double Barrels Would You Press Me To Your Heart?'). Because that's how it must have seemed, two hundred years ago on this spot with the crowds and the music and the flames, everyone pushing and shoving under the chestnut trees to get at the wine the monks had left behind them when they fled. All the officials were here, the municipal officers with boots up to their thighs and coats picked out in dazzling designs, red, white and blue belts, hats tufty with feathers. And of course there were the flames, the big bonfire they made to receive the treasures of the Priory, the vanities which were pitched into the fire, the maps, the paintings, books, scrolls, statues. I could hear them cheering, the ancestors of Laveur and the De La Salle sisters and, yes, of my own family, the Dresseurs, as they snatched up the wooden madonnas, the painted Christs, the canvasses and the priceless brocades, eight centuries of treasure, sacred and profane or simply silly, saints' molars, the crutches of visiting cripples who had put up in the Priory for a few nights and had been miraculously cured of their afflictions, chalices, silks, croziers, all pitched into the flames.

Quite a night it must have been. They also set fire to the Priory itself but the blaze was doused by municipal officials using a chain of wine skins passed by hand from the lakeside. This was mainly due, the old story goes, to the fact that they feared that the mounting hysteria of the crowd might make them start raising fires all over the place and a horrid conflagration would consume their beloved village.

From that time on it was expected that the ruin would stand, blackened and empty, as a warning to succeeding generations about the idiocy of the Church and the terrific cleansing and destructive power of the Revolution; all was to endure until Kingdom come. In fact this state of affairs lasted only until André arrived on the scene, kissed the old ruin awake and breathed life into it. It must annoy the various gods, the God of the Bible, or of history, that Man is such an incorrigible optimist, well-meaning interferer, short-term artist incapable of taking a long view, must always be up and doing, fixing and refurbishing, never heeding the warnings, never letting well alone, always having to be stopped and warned and, when he won't be warned, destroyed … Only for him to get up out of the ashes and try again.

Hot to the touch!

‘Come into the garden with me, Bella. We get a good view from there. The firemen are inside the house now, searching room by room.'