The Tenth Man Page 9

  He shifted and felt the heavy pocket beside him. The actor rolled onto his back and began to snore softly and persistently. Charlot could just make out his shape like a couple of meal sacks flung down at random. He put his hand into Carosse's pocket and touched the cold butt of a revolver. It wasn't surprising: we had returned to the day of the armed citizen; it was as normal as a sword would have been three hundred years before. Nevertheless, he thought, it would be better in my pocket than his. It was a small old-fashioned revolver; he rotated the chamber with his finger and found five of the six compartments full. The sixth was empty, but when he held it to his nose he smelled the unmistakable odor of a recent discharge. Something like a rat moved on the bed among the meal sacks: it was the actor's arm. He muttered a phrase Charlot couldn't catch, a word like 'destin'; he was probably, even in his sleep, playing a part.

  Charlot put the revolver in his own pocket. Then again he felt Carosse's jacket: he drew out a small bundle of papers, fastened with a rubber ring. It was too dark to examine them: carefully he opened the door and went into the passage. He left the door ajar for fear of noise and switched on a light. Then he examined the nature of his lucky dip.

  It was obvious at once that these were not Carosse's papers. There was a bill made out to a man called Toupard, a bill dated and receipted in Dijon on 39 March 1939 for a set of fish knives: a long time, he thought, to keep a receipt unless one were very careful. But careful Toupard undoubtedly was—there was his photograph on his identity card to prove it: a timid man afraid of being done, scenting a trap on every path. You could see him—Charlot had known dozens like him in the courts—making endless detours throughout his life with the idea of avoiding danger. How was it that now his papers had come into the possession of Carosse? Charlot thought of the empty chamber in the actor's revolver. Papers nowadays were more valuable than money. The actor had been ready to play impromptu the part of Chavel for the sake of a night's lodging, but could he have hoped to get away with this identity? The answer was, of course, that five years work many changes. At the end of a war all our portraits are out of date: the timid man had been given a gun to slay with, and the brave man had found his nerve fail him in the barrage.

  He went back to his room and stowed the papers and the gun back in the actor's pocket. He no longer wished to keep the gun. The door behind him shut suddenly with a crack like a shot, and Carosse leapt upon the bed. His eyes opened on Charlot and he cried with anxiety, "Who are you?" but before an answer came he was again as soundly asleep as a child. Why couldn't all those who have killed a man sleep as soundly? Charlot wondered.

  14

  "WHERE'VE YOU BEEN?" THERESE SAID.

  He scraped the mud off his shoes with a knife and replied, "In the night I thought I heard someone move by the garden shed. I wanted to make sure."

  "Were there any signs?"

  "No."

  "It may have been Chavel," she said. "I lay awake for hours thinking. It was an awful night to turn a man out in. There we were, my mother and I, praying and praying. And he was outside walking. So many Paternosters," she said. "I couldn't leave out the bit about forgiveness every time or my mother would have spotted something."

  "Better to be walking in the rain than shot."

  "I don't know. Is it? It depends, doesn't it? When I spat in his face..." She paused, and he remembered very clearly the actor lying on the bed boasting of his gesture. She'll be thinking about it, he had said. It was horrifying to realize that a man as false as that could sum up so accurately the mind of someone so true. The other way round, he thought, it doesn't work. Truth doesn't teach you to know your fellow man.

  He said, "It's over now. Don't think about it."

  "Do you think he got some shelter? He'd have been afraid to ask for it in the village. It wouldn't have done any harm to have let him spend a night here," she accused him. "Why didn't you suggest that? You haven't any reason to hate him."

  "It's better just to put him out of mind. You weren't so anxious to forgive him before you'd seen him."

  "It's not so easy to hate a face you know," she said, "as a face you just imagine."

  He thought, If that's true what a fool I've been.

  "After all," she said, "we are more alike than I thought, and when it came to the point I couldn't shoot him. The test floored me just as it floored him!"

  "Oh, if you are looking for points like that," he told her, "take me as an example. Aren't I failure enough for you?"

  She looked up at him with a terrible lack of interest. "Yes," she said. "Yes. I suppose you are. Michel sent a message by him."

  "So he said."

  "I don't see why he should have lied about that and not about the big thing. As a matter of fact," she said with an awful simplicity, "he didn't strike me like a man who told lies."

  During the night Madame Mangeot had been taken ill. Those large maternal breasts were after all a disguise of weakness: behind them unnoticeably she had crumbled. It was no case for a doctor and in any event there were not enough doctors in these days to cover so obscure a provincial corner as Brinac. The priest was of more importance to the sick woman, and for the first time Charlot penetrated into the dangerous territory of St. Jean. It was too early in the morning for people to be about and he passed nobody on his way to the presbytery. But there his heart drummed on his ribs as he rang. He had known the old man well: he had been used to dining at the big house whenever Chavel visited St. Jean. He was not a man who could be put off by a beard and the changes a few years wrought on the face, and Charlot felt a mixture of anxiety and expectation. How strange it would feel to be himself again, if only to one man.

  But it was a stranger who replied to his ring: a dark youngish man with the brusque air of a competent and hardworking craftsman. He packed the sacrament in his bag as a plumber packs his tools. "Is it wet across the fields?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Then you must wait till I put on my galoshes." He walked quickly and Charlot had difficulty in maintaining the pace. Ahead of him the galoshes sucked and spat. Charlot said, "There used to be a Father Russe here?"

  "He died," the young priest said, striding on, "last year." He added somberly, "He got his feet wet." He added, "You would be surprised at the number of parish priests who die that way. You might call it a professional risk."

  "He was a good man, they say."

  "It isn't difficult," Father Russe's successor said with asperity, "to satisfy country people. Any priest who has been in a place forty years is a good old man." He sounded as though he sucked his teeth between every word, but it was really his galoshes drawing at the ground.

  Therese met them at the door. Carrying his little attache case the priest followed her upstairs: a man with his tools. He could have wasted no time: ten minutes had not passed before he was back in the hall drawing on his galoshes again. Charlot watched from the passage his brisk and businesslike farewell. "If you need me," he said, "send for me again, but please remember, mademoiselle, that though I am at your service I am also at the service of everyone in St. Jean."

  "Can I have your blessing, Father?"

  "Of course." He rubber-stamped the air like a notary and was gone. They were alone together, and Charlot had never felt their loneliness so complete. It was as if the death had already occurred, and they were left face to face with the situation.

  PART FOUR

  15

  THE GREAT ACTOR CAROSSE SAT IN THE POTTING SHED AND considered his situation. He was not cast down by his somewhat humiliating circumstances. He had the democratic feeling of a duke who feels himself safely outside questions of class and convention. Carosse had acted before George V of Great Britain, King Carol of Rumania, the Archduke Otto, the special envoy of the President of the United States, Field Marshal Goering, innumerable ambassadors, including the Italian, the Russian and Herr Abetz. They glittered in his memory like jewels: he felt that one or another of these great or royal men could always when necessary be pawned in return for "
the ready." All the same he had been momentarily disquieted early that morning in St. Jean, seeing side by side on the police station wall a poster that included his name in a list of collaborators at large and an announcement of a murder in a village more than fifty miles away. The details of the crime were, of course, unknown to the police, otherwise Carosse felt sure that the description would have read homicide. He had acted purely in self-defense to prevent the foolish little bourgeois from betraying him. He had left the body, he thought, safely concealed under the gorse bushes on the common, and had borrowed the papers which might just get him past a formal cursory examination. Now that they could no longer be useful to him, and might prove dangerous, he had burned them in the potting shed and buried the ashes in a flower pot.

  When he saw the two notices he had realized it was no good going further. Not until those notices everywhere had become torn and windblown and discolored by time. He had got to lie up and there was only one house where that was possible. The man Charlot had already lied to his mistress by supporting Carosse's imposture, and he had broken the law by harboring a collaborator: there was evidently here a screw that could be turned sharply. But as he sat on a wheelbarrow and considered the situation further his imagination kindled with a more daring project. In his mind a curtain rose on a romantic situation that only an actor of the finest genius could make plausible, though it was perhaps not quite original: Shakespeare had thought of it first.

  Watching through a knothole in the wall he Saw Charlot cross the fields toward St. Jean: it was too early for market and he was hurrying. Patiently Carosse waited, his plump backside grooved on the edge of the wheelbarrow, and he saw Charlot return with the priest. Some time later he saw the priest leave alone, carrying his attache case. His visit could have only one meaning, and immediately the creative process absorbed the new fact and modified the scene he was going to play. But still he waited. If genius be indeed an infinite capacity for taking pains, Carosse was an actor of genius. Presently his patience was rewarded: he saw Charlot leave the house and make his way again toward St. Jean. Brushing the leaf mold off his overcoat Carosse stretched away the cramp like a large, lazy, neutered cat. The gun in his pocket thumped against his thigh.

  No actor born has ever quite rid himself of stage fright and Carosse crossing in front of the house to the kitchen door was very frightened. The words of his part seemed to sink out of his mind; his throat dried and when he pulled the bell it was a short timid tiptoe clang that answered from the kitchen, unlike the peremptory summons of his previous visit. He kept his hand on the revolver in his pocket; it was like an assurance of manhood. When the door opened he stammered a little, saying, "Excuse me." But frightened as he was, he recognized that the involuntary stammer had been just right: it was pitiable, and pity had got to wedge the door open like a beggar's foot. The girl was in shadow and he couldn't see her face; he stumbled on, hearing his own voice, how it sounded, and gaining confidence. The door remained open: he didn't ask for anything better yet.

  He said, "I hadn't got beyond the village when I heard about your mother. Mademoiselle, I had to come back. I know you hate me but, believe me, I never intended this—to kill your mother too."

  "You needn't have come back. She knew nothing about Michel." It was promising; he longed to put his foot across the threshold, but he knew such a move would be fatal. He was a man of cities, unused to country isolation, and he wondered what tradesman might at any moment come up behind his back—or Charlot might return prematurely. He was listening all the time for the scrunch of gravel.

  "Mademoiselle," he pleaded, "I had to come back. Last night you didn't let me speak. I didn't even finish the message from Michel." (Damnation, he thought, that's not the part: what message?) He hedged: "He gave it to me the night he died," and was astonished by the success of his speech.

  "The night he died? Did he die in the night?"

  "Yes, of course. In the night."

  "But Charlot told me it was in the morning—the next morning."

  "Oh, what a liar that man has always been," Carosse moaned.

  "But why should he lie?"

  "He wanted to make it worse for me," Carosse improvised. He felt a wave of pride in his own astuteness that carried him over the threshold into the house: Therese Mangeot had stepped back to let him in. "It's worse, isn't it, to let a man die after a whole night to think about it? I wasn't villain enough for him."

  "He said you tried once to take the offer back."

  "Once," Carosse exclaimed. "Yes, once. That was all the chance I had before they fetched him out." The tears stood in his eyes as he pleaded, "Mademoiselle, believe me. It was at night."

  "Yes," she said, "I know it was at night. I woke with the pain."

  "What time was that?"

  "Just after midnight."

  "That was the time," he said.

  "How mean of him," she said. "How mean to lie about that."

  "You don't know that man Charlot, mademoiselle, as we knew him in prison. Mademoiselle, I know I'm beneath your contempt. I bought my life at the expense of your brother's, but at least I didn't cheat to save it."

  "What do you mean?"

  He had remembered the mayor's description of how they all drew lots. He said, "Mademoiselle, we drew in alphabetical order starting at the wrong end because this man Charlot pleaded that it should be that way. At the end there were only two slips left for him and me, and one of them was marked with the death token. There was a draft in the cell and it must have lifted the slips of paper and shown him which was marked. He took out of turn—Charlot should have come after Chavel—and he took the unmarked slip."

  She pointed out doubtfully the obvious flaw: "You could have demanded the draw again."

  "Mademoiselle," Carosse said, I thought at the time it was an honest mistake. Where a life depended on it, one couldn't penalize a man for an honest mistake."

  "And yet you bought your life?"

  He was playing, he knew it, a flawed character. The inconsistencies didn't add up: the audience had to be stormed by romantic acting. He pleaded, "Mademoiselle, there are so many things you don't know. That man has put the worst light on everything. Your brother was a very sick man."

  "I know."

  He caught his breath with relief: it was as if now he couldn't go wrong, and he became reckless. "How he loved you and worried about what would happen to you when he died. He used to show me your photograph..."

  "He had no photograph."

  "That astonishes me." It was an understatement: momentarily it staggered him. He had been confident, but he recovered immediately. "There was a photograph he always showed me; it was a street scene torn out of a newspaper—a beautiful girl half hidden in the crowd. I can guess now who it was: it wasn't you, but it seemed to him like you, and so he kept it and pretended... People behave strangely in prison, mademoiselle. When he asked me to sell him the slip..."

  "Oh, no," she said, "no. You are too plausible. He asked you... That wasn't how it happened."

  He told her mournfully, "You have been filled with lies, mademoiselle. I'm guilty enough, but would I have returned if I was as guilty as he makes out?"

  "It wasn't Charlot. It was the man who sent me the will and the other papers. The Mayor of Bourge."

  "You don't have to tell me any more, mademoiselle. Those two men were as thick as thieves. I understand it all now."

  "I wish I did. I wish I did."

  "Between them they cooked it perfectly." With his heart in his mouth, he said, "I will say goodbye, mademoiselle—and God bless you." 'Dieu'—he dwelt on the word as though he loved it, and indeed it was a word he loved, perhaps the most effective single word on the romantic stage: "God bless," "I call God to my witness," "God may forgive you"—all the grand hackneyed phrases hung around 'Dieu' like drapery. He turned as slowly as he dared toward the door.

  "But the message from Michel?"

  16

  CAROSSE LEANED ON THE FENCE GAZING TOWARD THE SMALL figure t
hat approached across the fields from St. Jean. He leaned like a man taking his ease in his own garden: once he gave a small quiet giggle as a thought struck him, but this was succeeded, as the figure came closer and became recognizably Charlot, by a certain alertness, a tautening of the intelligence.

  Charlot, who remembered the revolver in the pocket, stood a little distance away and stared back at him. "I thought you'd gone," he said.

  "I decided to stay."

  "Here?"

  Carosse said gently, "It's my own place, after all."

  "Carosse the collaborator?"

  "No. Jean-Louis Chavel the coward."

  "You've forgotten two things," Charlot said, "if you are going to play Chavel."

  "I thought I'd rubbed up the part satisfactorily."

  "If you are going to be Chavel you won't be allowed to stay—unless you want more spittle in your face."

  "And the other thing?"

  "None of this belongs to Chavel any more."

  Again Carosse giggled, leaning back from the fence with his hand on the revolver "just in case." He said, "I've got two answers, my dear fellow."

  His confidence shook Charlot, who cried angrily across the grass, "Stop acting."

  "You see," Carosse said gently, "I've found it quite easy to talk the girl around to my version of things."

  "Version of what?"

  "Of what happened in the prison. I wasn't there, you see, and that makes it so much easier to be vivid. I'm forgiven, my dear Charlot, but you on the contrary are branded—forgive my laughing, because, of course, I know how grossly unfair it is—as the liar." He gave a happy peal of laughter: it was as if he expected the other to share altruistically his sense of the comedy of things. "You are to clear out, Charlot. Now, at once. She's very angry with you. But I've persuaded her to let you have three hundred francs for wages. That's six hundred you owe me, my dear fellow." And he held out his left hand tentatively.