Century Rain Part 20

"It doesn't matter," Aveling said. "All you need to know is that E2 is hostile territory-which is

something White forgot. She was careful to begin with: they always are. Then she exceeded the remit of her mission, took risks and ended up dead."

"What kind of risks?"

Before Aveling could get a word in edgeways, Skellsgard said, "Susan felt she was on to something- something big, something significant. Because she wouldn't return to the portal, all we got from her were cryptic messages, things scribbled on postcards. If she'd at least taken the time to build a radio sender, or return to the base station, she could have told us something more concrete. But she was too busy chasing leads, and in the end it got her killed."

"Supposition," Aveling said.

"If we don't think she was on to something," Skellsgard said, "why are we in such a hurry to get those papers back? It's because we think there might be something in them, isn't it?"

"It's because we can't risk cultural contamination," Aveling corrected. "a.n.a.lysed with the right mindset, the papers might reveal White's origin. We don't know how indiscreet she was. Until we get the papers, we're in the dark."

Skellsgard looked at Auger. "I guess all I'm saying is...take care out there, OK? Just get in and do the job. We want you back in one piece."

"Really?" Auger asked.

"Oh, sure. Can you imagine what the return trip would be like if I only had Aveling for company?"

NINE.

It was the middle of the morning by the time Floyd returned Custine to Susan White's apartment, heavy toolkit in one hand. Custine's practicality never ceased to amaze him: the man could turn his hand to almost anything, whether it was repairing the Mathis, fixing the plumbing in their apartment or attempting to repair the jury-rigged receiving equipment of a dead spy. Floyd knew a little about fixing boats, but that was about his limit. He had questioned Custine once about where this practicality came from, but the only explanation Custine had offered was that a certain skill with electricity and metal was very useful for an interrogator in the Crime Squad.

That was as much as Floyd wanted to know.

He waited in the car while Custine was let in, then drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for another five minutes until Custine's form loomed in the fifth-floor window. Custine did not expect to get any results before the middle of the afternoon, but they had arranged to speak by telephone at two regardless.

Floyd pulled away from Blanchard's street and drove to Montparna.s.se, negotiating the smaller side streets until he found the house where he had left Greta the night before. In daylight the house seemed a little more cheerful-but only a little. Greta opened the door and escorted him up to the spa.r.s.ely stocked kitchen that the tenant Sophie had shown him around the night before.

"I called the telephone company," Floyd said. "It should be working now."

"So it is," Greta said, surprised. "Someone rang through on it only an hour ago, but I was so distracted that I didn't really think about it. How did you persuade the company to reconnect her? She still can't afford to pay them."

"I told them to put the charges on my bill."

"You did?" She c.o.c.ked her head. "That's awfully decent of you. You're not exactly rolling in money either."

"Don't worry about it. It's not as if..." Hisvoice trailed off.

"Not as if it'll be for ever?" she finished for him. "No. You're right. It won't be."

"I didn't mean to sound callous."

"It's all right." Now she sounded cross with herself. "I'm taking it out on whoever's within firing range. You don't deserve this."

"Don't worry about it. You're doing a pretty swell job from where I'm standing. How is Marguerite today?"

Greta spread honey on to a slice of b.u.t.tered toast. "About the same as yesterday, according to Sophie. The doctor's already given her a shot of morphine for the day. I don't know why they can't give it to her later, so that she could at least get a good night's sleep."

"Maybe they're worried that she'd get too good a night's sleep," Floyd said.

"That wouldn't be such a bad thing," Greta said quietly. She was dressed all in white today, her black hair tied back in a white bow. The bow shone luminously, like something in a washing-powder commercial. Greta pa.s.sed him the toast, then licked her fingers clean with girlish little pops of her lips. "Thanks for staying with me last night, Wendell," she said. "It was kind."

"You needed the company." He bit into the toast, tilting it to avoid spilling honey on his shirt. "About Marguerite. Would it be all right if I said h.e.l.lo to her? I know what you said last night, but I really would like her to know that I care."

"She may not even remember you."

"I'm ready for that."

"Well, all right," Greta said heavily. "I suppose she's as sharp now as she'll ever be. But don't stay too long, will you? She gets tired very easily."

"I'll keep it brief."

She led him upstairs, Floyd finishing off the toast as he went. The floorboards creaked as he made his way across the landing. Greta eased open the bedroom door, slipped inside and spoke very softly to Marguerite. Floyd heard the old woman answer in French. She spoke nothing else, not even German. She had been born in the Alsace region, Greta had told him once, and had married a German cabinetmaker who had died in the mid-thirties. At home they had spoken only French.

When things became difficult for Greta's family in Germany-Greta was Jewish on her mother's side- they had dispatched her to live with Marguerite. She had arrived in Paris in the summer of 1939, when she was nine years old, and had lived in the city for most of the last twenty years. There had been a great deal of anti-German sentiment after the failed invasion of 1940, but Greta had weathered most of it, speaking French with a p.r.o.nounced Parisian accent that revealed nothing of her true origins. On first meeting her, Floyd had never guessed that she was German. The disclosure of that secret to him had been the first of many intimacies, each of which had brought a small, stabbing thrill of mutual trust.

She called to him from inside the room. "You can come in now, Floyd."

The door opened wider to reveal Sophie, who was just leaving, carrying a tray with her. He stepped aside to let her pa.s.s, then walked into the shuttered quiet of the bedroom. There were subtle squares and oblongs on the walls where paintings, photographs and mirrors had been taken down. The bed had been made neatly around Marguerite, presumably in readiness for the doctor's visit, and the old lady was now sitting almost upright, supported by three or four plump pillows. She wore a high-collared, long-sleeved floral nightgown that seemed to belong to the nineteenth century. Her white hair had been combed back from her brow and her cheeks dabbed lightly with rouge. Floyd could just about make out Marguerite's face in the muted light, but what he saw was a thin, cursory sketch of the woman he had known. He thought it would have been easier if there had been no similarity at all, but she was recognisable, and that made it all the more difficult.

"This is Wendell," Greta said gently. "You remember Wendell, don't you, Aunt?"

Floyd presented himself, holding his fedora in both hands like an offering.

"Of course I remember him," Marguerite said. Her eyes were surprisingly bright and clear. "How are you, Floyd? We always called you Floyd rather than Wendell, didn't we?"

"I'm...doing swell," he said, shuffling his feet. "How are you feeling?"

"I am all right now." Her voice was a rasp. He had to concentrate to make out her words. "But the nights are difficult. I never imagined sleeping could take so much energy from me. I'm not sure how much I have left."

"You're a strong lady," he said. "I'm sure you've got a lot more energy than you think."

She placed one of her thin, birdlike hands atop the other and rested them on her stomach. The newspaper was spread across her lap like a shawl, open at the Parisian news pages. "I wish I felt that were true."

She knows, Floyd thought. She might have been frail and she might not always have quite this good a grip on what was happening around her, but she knew perfectly well that she was ill, and that her illness was never going to let her leave this room.

"What's it like outside, Floyd?" Marguerite asked. "I listened to the rain all night."

"It's clearing up a bit," he said. "The sun's coming out and..." His mouth suddenly felt dry. Why had he insisted on this visit? He had nothing to say to Marguerite that she must not already have heard a hundred times before, from similarly well-intentioned visitors. He realised, with a spasm of shame, that he hadn't come up here to make her feel better, but to make himself feel better instead. He was going to stand before her and never once allude to the fact that she was terminally ill, as if there was an elephant in the room that no one dared acknowledge. "Well," he said, fumbling for words, "it's beautiful when the sun comes out. The whole city looks like a painting."

"The colours must be beautiful. I've always loved the spring. It's nearly as breathtaking as the autumn."

"I don't think there's a time of year when I don't love this city," Floyd said. "Except perhaps January."

"Greta reads the paper to me," Marguerite said, patting the pages spread before her. "She only wants to read the light news, but I want to know it all-the bad as well as the good. I don't envy you young people."

Floyd smiled, trying to remember the last time anyone had called him young. "Things don't seem too bad to me," he said.

"You weren't here in the thirties, were you?"

"No, I wasn't."

"Then-with all due respect-you probably have no idea what it was really like."

Greta glanced at him warningly, but Floyd shrugged good-naturedly. "No. I have no idea."

"It was good, in many ways," Marguerite said. "The Depression was over. We all had more money. There was more to eat. Nicer clothes. Music we could dance to. We could afford a car and a holiday in the country once a year. A wireless and a gramophone, even a refrigerator. But there was also a meanness to those times. There was always an undercurrent of hatred bubbling just beneath the surface." She turned her head towards her niece. "It was hatred that brought Greta to Paris."

"The Fascists got what they deserved," Floyd said.

"My husband lived long enough to see those monsters come to power. He saw through their lies and promises, but he also knew that they spoke to something nasty and squalid in the human spirit. Something in all of us. We want to hate those who are not like us. All we need is an excuse, a whisper in the ear."

"Not all of us," Floyd said.

"That's what a lot of good people said in the thirties," Marguerite replied. "That the message of hatred would only be heeded by the ignorant and those who were already filled with bile. But it wasn't like that. It took strength of mind not to let yourself be poisoned by those lies, and not everyone had that strength. Even fewer people had the courage to do something about it; to actually stand up to the hatemongers."

"Was your husband one of those brave people?" Floyd asked.

"No," she said. "He wasn't. He was one of the millions who said and did nothing, and that's how he went to his grave."

Floyd did not know what to say. He looked at the woman in the bed, feeling the force of history streaming through her like a current.

"All I'm saying," she continued, "is that the message is seductive. My husband said that unless those hatemongers were annihilated-wiped from the Earth, along with all their poison-they would always come back, like weeds." She touched the newspaper on the bed. "The weeds are returning, Floyd. We mowed the lawn in nineteen forty, but we didn't put down the weedkiller. Twenty years later, they're back."

"I know there are a lot of people saying bad things," Floyd said. "But no one really takes them seriously."

"No one took them seriously in the twenties," she countered.

"There are laws now," Floyd said. "Anti-hate laws."

"Which aren't enforced." She tapped the paper with one sharp-nailed finger. "Look at this story: a young man was beaten to death yesterday because he dared to speak up against the hatemongers."

Floyd's voice suddenly sounded as weak as Marguerite's. "A young man?"

"By the railway station. They found his body last night."

"No!"

Greta slipped her hand around his sleeve. "We should be going now, Floyd."

He couldn't say anything.

Marguerite folded the paper and pushed it from the bed. "I didn't mean to lecture you," she said, with a

kindness that cut him to the core. "I just wanted to say how little I envy you now. There were storm clouds on the horizon twenty years ago, Floyd, and they're gathering again." Almost as an afterthought, she said, "Of course, it's not too late to do something about them, if enough people care. I wonder how many people walked past that poor young man last night, when he was in need of help?"

Greta edged him away from the bed. "Floyd has to go now, Aunt Marguerite."

She reached out and took his hand. "It was nice of you to come up and see me. You'll come back, won't you?"

"Of course," Floyd said, forcing a smile to disguise his discomfort.

"Bring me some strawberries, won't you? This room could do with brightening up."

"I'll bring you some strawberries," he promised.

Greta led him downstairs, still holding his arm. "That's how it is with her," she said, when they were

safely out of earshot. "She's sharp as a tack about the news, but she doesn't even know what time of year it is. You're lucky she remembered who you were. Let's just hope she doesn't remember asking for strawberries."

"I'll find her something."

"At this time of year? Don't worry about it, Floyd. She most likely won't remember a thing about it the

next time you go up there."

If she sounded cruel, Floyd thought, it was only because she loved Marguerite so much.

They sat down in the kitchen again. A pigeon was cooing on the windowsill. Greta picked up a piece of

stale bread and threw it at the gla.s.s, scaring the bird away in a bustle of grey feathers.

"It might not be the same young man," she said, guessing what was on Floyd's mind. "Maybe you don't