Chapter 18

Suzannah had never met her grand-father, he was a sort of mythical family figure. In the seventies, news filtered through from the other side. He was coming over. He’d found a way out. He never arrived and nobody heard of him again. In the West. In the East, he was crossed off a list of suspected defectors.
She was pretty sure he’d been in the SS too, but no-one talked about it. So much silence. No-one talked about the war either. They studied Nazism at school, and although the time was one of coming to terms with the past, she and many of her friends still had horrible feelings of guilt.
When she was twenty-five, she left Germany to see the world. In Paris, she saw commemorative plaques to Jewish deportees and civilians gunned down in the street.
In a métro station, there was an exhibition on the capture and execution of the resistance fighter Colonel Fabien. He seemed so good and we so bad.
Somebody started speaking to her, something about typical French logic, putting it here when there’s a station named after the man four stops away. She began to feel uncomfortable, caught in the act.
The conversation got off to an uneasy start. She mentioned the plaques she’d seen in the Marais that afternoon.
“Think of it: a country whose glorious past has been crushed and trampled on had to do something to blot out the humiliation. They’re a statement: This is France! Land of heroes, a way of wallpapering over the 50 million letters of denunciation they sent to the Gestapo.”
“What? 50 million!”
“Well, I think that’s the figure, but it doesn’t matter, any country would do the same, or something equally despicable. War does things to people.”
“I know, I’m German...”
“Have you heard the Mayflower story?”
“No, what’s that?”
“America. If the boat actually held all the ancestors that people claimed, it would have sunk before leaving the port. Same thing for the French resistance.”
“Well, maybe, but they did exist.”
“Yes of course they did, could even show you where they used to meet if you like.”
“Dunno, where are they?”
“Underground, there’s the Wine Museum, old quarries they used to use. Then again, if you’re really interested, I could show you some much better places.”
“Like what?”
“Dozens! There’s the underground shelter beneath the Rue des Feuillantines, there’s the...”
Suzannah was only half listening. “My grand-father...” She didn’t know what she wanted to say.
“What about him?”
“Nothing...”
“It’s alright, I’m not from the police!”
She laughed. “Yeah, no, it’s nothing but...” saddening again, “well, we think he died trying to escape.”
“Over the Wall?”
“Under. But I just don’t know. It must have been horrible.”
“Dying is rarely nice.”
“Yes, but no, not that, the crawling about in dark tunnels and being trapped like a rat.”
“Crawling? No, they’re like normal corridors. OK, now and again, you have to get down on your hands and knees, but if Berlin’s anything like Paris...”
“Maybe, it’s just I’ve got this picture of him digging his way through the earth, you know, in the dark with a candle, and suffocating or something.”
“Digging, I doubt. Almost every main city has its own catacombs, Rome, Athens, you name it. There are even whole towns underground in Turkey. Have you ever been down one?”
“No.”
“Well look, I go down quite a lot, doing archaeological digs into Paris’s Roman history. Going down later on. Come and have a look. We’re working on a mosaic at the moment, so there’s quite a few of us.”
“Really? A mosaic…”
“And it’s beautiful too… Listen, here’s my number, if you feel like coming, give me a call or just meet me there at seven.”
“Seven?...”
“Some people do have jobs you know!”

Since his last fiasco, he’d had some thinking to do. He had to find something that sounded perfectly plausible, and he thought he had. Since he couldn’t use the car, he had a wider choice of manhole covers. The one he chose was half hidden behind the buttress to a convent. Anyone looking down the alley would see nothing. It was good, but still not enough. He called in at a silk-screen printer and had a poster made, a one metre square of tarpaulin. Printed in official red and blue, it gave the name of the archaeological association, its telephone and registered number, the Numéro d’Autorisation issued by the Paris Town Hall, and a range of prettily invented icons.
He didn’t plan on using it often, but needed a trial run to make sure it worked.
At six fifty, he removed the cover, tacked the poster to the wall, and hung some lamps down the shaft. It looked very good.

Suzannah arrived.
“Hi!” he said, “you’re the last one, everyone else is there already.”
She looked down. At the bottom, a radio was playing.
Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. “If my mother could see me now, climbing down drains in the middle of the night!”
“It is not a drain, thank you. Do you seriously think I make a habit of enticing beautiful women into the sewers?”
She laughed as well and they both clambered down.
Ladies first. Guy folded the tarpaulin up and put it away, then closed the cover.

The radio was a good idea, it hid the silence. Guy set himself on autowaffle but didn’t really need it, for a first-time visitor the catacombs are staggering.
“Here look!” He pointed to some graffiti. It was dated 1754.
Then they saw a broken seashell embedded in the limestone.
Then they spotted an old coin in a corner: “1883! Amazing! Can I keep it?”
Of course you can my pretty little thing.
“Right, here we are, I’ll go first.”
Without realising it, Suzannah had no option.
Guy was waiting for her. He wrenched off her head-torch and threw her into the water.
She came up screaming: “You bastard!”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.” He kicked her fingers off the rim then pushed her head down hard. She came up gasping, but it was short-lived. He forced her under a second time then jumped on top of her and clamped his thighs around her neck.
There was nothing she could grab, the walls were smooth and slippery, she punched, but hit nothing. The legs around her throat squeezed harder, tighter, it was suffocate or drown. In her struggling, writhing, kicking panic, the last minutes of her life were the most intense she ever lived, but they were short.
Then came the convulsive jerks Guy knew so well, then silence. He let her go. Slowly, her body sunk.

It took a while to pump the water out. Eventually, the trickle ceased, and he laid her on the bench.
Guy looked at the naked corpse waiting for him. He was fed up. He didn’t even want her, fucking slut, let the rats have her.
He was exhausted. He felt utterly drained and tired of everything. A drip caught his ear. The girl’s face was still wet, water dripping off her hair. He watched the slow progress as droplets slid down the hair and fell to the floor.
He sat and watched the naked, immobile body. He stood up and fetched his knife, then looked back at the body glistening with water in the pale light. Naked, immobile and glistening. Glistening with water in the pale light. He watched, transfixed.
He was gone.
The blade was seven inches long. He stabbed. The first went in to the hilt. The second hit the stone beneath. The third got stuck in the backbone. The fourth... the fifth, the sixth... and on and on and on and no matter how much he clawed and bit and spat and screamed the past was always there to kick him in the face and slide its razor fingers beneath the skin.
He plunged, biting furiously, burying his face into her guts. Face smeared with lifeless gore, he spewed and bit again.

Hours passed. She was cold, he was cold.
He stared at the black water, then bent down and washed his face and arms. His body sagged and pulled him down. The dark surface of the water was smooth, unruffled and inviting. Black water, night, everlasting night. The emptiness and longing bruised his chest in a dull and mindless hugging pain. He wheezed and his lungs hurt. His mind was numb, just the smooth boulder of despair weighing massively on his chest.
He closed his eyes and swung round, dipping his feet into the cool water. He knew he couldn’t go on. Every day a day of lies. He was a sham, he knew it. There was nothing real about his life, nothing but shadow and secret, lies, make-believe and pretence. And futile, empty craving. He knew what he was. Was: will be no longer. He slipped in.
But he couldn’t open his mouth to breathe in the cup of death.
He got out and stood up, dark stains dripping down his body, somebody else’s life-stream. He was bewildered, he couldn’t bring himself to turn round and look at her. She was gone. He couldn’t bring her back to life. It was finished. She was dead. Dead and taken the love she never had for him with her.
Guy snuffed out the candle and gathered up his things in the dark. Outside, dawn was breaking.

Nightmares, sweat-drenched awakenings and hour after hour of loathing.
He went to his favourite oak in a wood outside Paris and sat high among the leaves listening to the sounds of nature. A jogger ran past, twice. He could have taken her. So what? He climbed down and walked off, not too sure of his restraint. All afternoon, he wandered aimlessly through the bracken. People have been trampled to death by wild boars. When evening came, he lay down on the ground and breathed in a forgotten past of freedom. He saw Figeac, pipe gripped between his uneven teeth, tramping placidly among the ferns, hunting. Both barrels went off and shredded his face.
Guy was tired but couldn’t, wouldn’t, sleep. Trees creaked softly in the wind, branches wove tapestries with the stars and all around he heard the timeless rustle of leaves. As long as he didn’t sleep.
Slowly, he stood up and started walking again. Reaching a road, he turned left and strode off. He needed to walk.
At Pigalle, he went into one of the sleazier bars open at that time of night and had a beer at the counter. He looked around him, sickened by the debris of wasted life. Should have stayed in the woods. Converting hops into belch and flatulence: this can’t be life. He went out.
Neon rainbows, tourists, loners and all the empty hearts of mistranslated yearning.
He went into an all-night cinema. On the screen, tired erections and sagging breasts groped and grunted in the dark. It the audience, strange hands and faces played the relentless game of checkers.
It didn’t take long. As the boy bent down for lunch, Guy’s hands clamped over mouth and face like a vice, twisted sharply and broke his neck. People come and go in cinemas like that. Nobody noticed him leaving.

He decided to go away. He needed some air. At Nice airport, he hired a car and drove along the coast to the hotel he’d stayed at years before. A couple of days of paid servility put him back into reasonably good spirits. He picked up a transient - an opportunist whore - on the Croisette and took her for a meal in Saint Jean Cap Ferrat. He could see her evaluating the leather seats, fat as his wallet...
Over the meal, he realised how much he’d changed too. Still the same old Guy, but more suave, more worldly and no longer able to be intimidated. Even by the little blue-eyed beauty opposite.
Later that evening, afterwards, he ate her kidneys. It was so simple, why did he have to get out of control so?
Afternoons on the beach, evenings on the terrasse, and breakfast in bed. Peace. He strangled a hitch-hiker going to Saint Raphaël, just to see. Nothing. So he went home. ¶ 1:54 AM