John Lescroart - Son of Holmes
I called to her, and she came back to the table. We drank beer and ate slowly, talking of food and books. She had just finished War and Peace (in Russian!) and contended that it was the greatest book ever written.
“It says everything about everything,” she gushed. “I only wish this war would end with a spirit of rejuvenation.”
“I’m sure it will,” I said, taking her hand. “We’re not so old, you know.”
“That’s easy for you to say. A woman at forty, especially if she has grown children, can’t expect much rejuvenation. She gets older, that’s all.”
I laughed heartily. “And a man in his midfifties? What about him?”
“Men are different,” she replied.
“Et vive la . . .”
Her eyes twinkled. She was half teasing. “Have you read Darwin?”
“A little.”
“Do you know he says that humans are the only species whose females live beyond the age of childbearing? Why do you suppose that is?”
“To keep old males happy.” I patted her hand. “Come, dear, you’re beautiful, and spring is a time for rejuvenation. Pass me another bit of chicken, will you?”
She was about to answer, when I saw a movement in the woods at the other side of the pond. “Shh,” I whispered, “what’s that?”
She turned to look. “Merde. People.”
We’d almost finished eating, and Tania quickly gathered what food remained into the basket. She told me to grab the table and chairs and follow her a bit back into the woods.
“Come, come. Vite! Vite! Vite!”
She spread the cloth under a large oak tree. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be bothered. Not today.”
I didn’t really mind, but I was curious about the other party. I sat with my back against the tree, positioned so that I could look across the pond to where the others were moving, still well back into the trees on their side. Tania opened me another beer and lay with her head in my lap.
“There,” she sighed.
The others came down to a clearing on their side, and I saw with some surprise that it was Lupa, Anna, and Watkins. Somehow I had never associated them with a picnic in the woods, but of course they were young and really much more likely than I to be enjoying a Sunday outdoors. They came into the clearing and set up chairs and a small table, and the two men sat down while Anna walked to the pond with a few bottles. She dropped them for chilling into the water.
“You know what I found interesting?”
I looked down at Tania. “What’s that?”
“I found myself forgetting I was French. I despised the French, even though at the time I suppose I would have been as patriotic as I am now.”
For some reason, this statement made absolutely no sense to me. Lupa and Watkins had set themselves up at their table—it looked as though they were about to play some board game—while Anna busied herself clearing a spot near the water. I took a sip of my beer and frowned.
“When?” I asked.
“The Napoleonic Wars. You couldn’t help but want the Russians to win. It made me slightly uncomfortable while I was reading.”
“Ah, War and Peace.”
The two men across the pond were becoming engrossed in their game and rarely looked up, while Anna was busy making a small fire. Once Lupa called out to her loud enough so that we could hear his voice. At that, Anna got up and fetched the men some bottles from the pond, then went back to her work.
“I suppose we were wrong then.”
“I don’t believe we’d have thought so at the time,” I said. “But of course there are always reasons to start a war, just as there are more often than not no real reasons to end one. Everyone believes themselves right, which is probably understandable, but rather simple.”
“You don’t think we were right?”
“That depends. At that time I would have thought it, I’m sure. If your sons had been off fighting in Russia, you would never have given a thought to whether or not we were right. We would have had to have been right.”
“Yes. I suppose so.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. I thought she was going off to sleep. Anna had started to cook something over the fire, while the two men continued their game. The sun came down in patches there under the tree. It was beginning to get warm. Tania stirred and opened her eyes.
“But what about now?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are we right, now? Or will some German Tolstoy come along in fifty years and make us all appear to be beasts?”
“Whatever we may appear in fifty years,” I said, “for the present time we’re at least justified. France has to survive, and now it has to fight to survive.” I leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Novelists make us think war is terrible because they tend to make a personal story out of it. Nationally, war is either desirable or necessary, never right or wrong. It’s not a personal thing, any more than a storm is personal. If a bolt of lightning strikes down a man, no one says that there’s any reason behind it. Some writers try to, saying it’s an act of God or whatever, but that doesn’t wash. It just happens, like war happens.”
“But the people . . .”
“People don’t matter in wars. Countries matter. Nations matter, issues matter. The last thing anyone should think about is people.”
She closed her eyes again. “I think about my sons,” she said, then added quietly, “all the time. And we both think of Marcel.”
“But we don’t know Marcel had anything to do with the war.”
She looked up at me. “Don’t we?”
I wondered how much she did know.
“And if he did have to do with the war, then he wouldn’t matter, because people don’t matter. Oh, Jules, you don’t really believe that?”
I thought of the night before, and the reasons I had decided to stay on in Valence. I had let it become personal, which was absurd. France was what mattered. But finally I didn’t believe that, and some sense of that realization had made me resign. I supposed I was, indeed, getting old. I touched Tania’s face gently.
“No,” I said, “I don’t really believe that.”
We were silent.
Across the pond nothing changed. I watched for several minutes, after which Watkins, evidently beaten in the game—I heard his “Damn!” clearly—abruptly stood up and stalked over to the fire.
“You know who that is over there?”
Tania sat up. “Who?”
“Your friend Lupa.”
“Your friend Lupa,” she said, frowning. “I’m surprised he had the energy to get all the way out here.”
“It’s not that he lacks energy—he just chooses a bit carefully how he wants to expend it.”
“Well, let’s not expend any of ours by calling him.”
“I had no intention of doing that, my dear.” I leaned over and kissed her.
She stood up. “Would you excuse me for a minute?” she asked.
She walked back a ways into the woods while I sat propped against the tree, watching the scene across the pond. Anna was removing something from the fire, while Lupa was putting up the game pieces and clearing the table. Anna went back to the pond for more bottles.
I took a drink of my beer, long and refreshing, closing my eyes and letting the cold liquid run down my throat. Suddenly there was a loud report. Opening my eyes, I saw Lupa and Watkins drop to the ground, while Anna screamed as she fell, rolling over and over. Behind me, I heard Tania call out my name, and I turned to see her running toward me. There were two more shots.
“You’re all right?” I yelled, and she said she was. The shots I’d heard had been the loud ringing noises of a rifle rather than the soft pops of a pistol, so the range could have been great.
I took out my pistol. Tania came up to me. “You’re not going—” she began.
I cut her off. “Go see to Anna. I think she’s been hit.”
“But Jules, you’re not . . .”
I was already moving back toward the road, where the shots had originated. Retired or not, I was a trained operative of the French government and knew how to act around hostile elements. Perhaps I was curt to Tania, but such times call for action, not sensitivity.
No more than a minute had passed since the third shot. As I ran, I saw out of the corner of my eye another figure moving through the woods to my left. It was Lupa, outpacing me as we sprinted.
We broke from the woods at about the same time, all the while moving rapidly toward the road, where we could see a figure retreating into the trees on the other side toward my house. Lupa fell momentarily from my vision, but, seconds later, he appeared at my side astride one of the dray horses.
“Get up!”
His hand grabbed me like a vice as I bounded up behind him. “Over there,” I yelled, pointing to a break in the copse just beyond the road. Lupa, holding the horse’s mane, leaned into the untrained beast and miraculously was obeyed.
I still held my pistol in my hand, dismally aware of its inadequacy. We were closing on the roadway and within another minute might expect to come upon our assailant, fleeing on foot. It was not to be, however, as over the sound of the horse’s hooves we heard a motor turning over and saw, not fifty meters away, an automobile kicking up dust as it spun from its hiding place into the road.
I fired one ineffectual shot—from that range, the gesture was about the equivalent of shouting “Stop!”—but Lupa didn’t hesitate. He spurred the horse back a bit to our right, directly toward my house.
“Your car!” he yelled over his shoulder.
“Tout droit! Straight ahead.” I pointed to the barn.
The car we’d seen had been covered, so we had no opportunity to see the driver or even whether there had been more than one occupant. Still, I would recognize the automobile itself—made of a corrugated iron just becoming popular here and painted a dull green.
We came to the barn and dismounted roughly. I stumbled and fell dismounting, but Lupa did not slow up at all. As I picked myself up, he was pulling back the building’s door, grunting with the exertion. I ran past him and threw myself behind the wheel.
It pays to keep one’s machinery in top condition, as I had done. Immediately, the motor caught, I slammed the gearshift into position and nearly ran over Lupa as the car lurched forward. He caught the windshield and leapt onto the running board, barely clearing the doorway.
I pressed the hand throttle to its limit, and before we had left my property, we were closing on fifty kilometers per hour. On the unpaved and pitted drive, the ride shook my very bones. I hoped the automobile would handle the shocks better.
“Anna?” I began.
“Not now!” Lupa bellowed.
As soon as we hit the road, however, it became smoother. The car skidded slightly as we turned left, and I nearly lost control of the wheel, but Lupa grabbed it and righted me as we continued our acceleration.
We hadn’t gone a kilometer, though, when the ride very nearly ended. What I thought at first was a backfire, or perhaps a blowout, made me lean forward against the steering wheel. That move may have saved my life. Lupa, without the worry of watching the road, spun and evidently made out a glint of metal in another stand of trees by the road. It had been another shot.
“Keep driving,” he yelled as I began to slow down. “Let Watkins get him.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Our man’s in the car.” he said. “Drive!”
Lupa pulled a weapon from under his coat. The pistol, an M-1911 Colt American military issue .45 automatic, boomed like a cannon as he fired off four rounds with what seemed to be impossible rapidity, the smoking brass jackets flying out the side of the weapon and onto the road. The fire was returned as we heard one more report from behind us.
“Damn!” Lupa spun around, grabbing his cheek. A sliver of red appeared and he wiped at it with his hand.
“You all right?”
“Scratched. Nothing more.”
No more than three minutes had elapsed between the enemy’s car breaking from the cover of the trees and our turning into the road in pursuit. With the speed of my Model T, if the chase lasted more than fifteen kilometers, I thought we had a chance of overtaking our prey. I kept the accelerator jammed to the floor while Lupa dabbed at the cut on his face with a handkerchief. Just as I turned to look his way and question him again about the initial shooting and how badly Anna had been hurt, we crested a small hill and I was forced to skid again, braking hard, as we came upon a horse-drawn produce cart from the other direction. We barely missed it as we screeched to a stop.
The driver had leapt off the cart to the roadside and lay sprawled in the shallow grass. “Has there been another car?” I asked.
Clearly furious, swearing violently, he seemed inclined to rush us. Lupa pointed his gun at the man’s head and quieted him. “Has there been another car?”
“Oui.”
“How many passengers?”
The man shrugged. “I didn’t notice,” he said. “I was getting out of the way.” In spite of Lupa’s weapon, his anger spewed over again. “You bastards don’t own the road, you know. I’m reporting this. I . . .”
We couldn’t stay to discuss the niceties of priorité á droit, but pressed onward. If we were having trouble making headway, perhaps we were not alone.
The top was still off on the Model T, and the wind brought tears to my eyes, slightly impairing my vision. I didn’t mind it, pushing the car to nearly 120 Ks. Very few other machines could match that speed. The road’s surface, relatively smooth, nevertheless provided its share of bumps and necessitated my full attention.
Lupa stemmed the flow of his blood, then removed the clip from his weapon and refilled it. To my inquiring look, he answered, “We could have hurt him. The range is close to fifty meters.”
“Who do you think it might have been?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He dabbed again at his cheek reflectively. “I just don’t know. Perhaps Watkins will come up with something.”
I finally got the question out. “Anna was all right?”
He shook his head wonderingly. “Again, just a scratch. We’ve been uncommonly lucky.”
I thought of Marcel. Our luck had its limits.
Within moments, we were on the outskirts of Valence. Cart traffic and a few military vehicles slowed our progress as we stopped and started, honking, through the narrow streets. The town was a maze of alleys, any one of which could hide the man we sought. But we had no choice other than to pursue his logical path—toward St. Etienne.
The frustrating ride through the city streets, where we were stopped time and again by carriages, children, geese, dogs, and pedestrians, continued and continued. Our only hope was that the car we followed was experiencing similar delays.
