Текст книги "Wolf Hunt"

Автор книги: Armand Cabasson

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CHAPTER 20

MARGONT was resting stretched out on some straw, his side in flames. Lefine came to sit down beside him. Margont watched him woozily. In preparation for being sewn up again he had been made to drink brandy and a concoction of laudanum, opium, cinnamon, cloves, wine and saffron. He was in a field hospital set up in a large farm in the village of Ebersdorf. All the wounded from Essling finished up here, either to recuperate or to die. The walls and the beams were impregnated with the odour of gangrene and blood. Even months later, the place would smell of death, haunted by those who had perished there.

Margont tapped his friend’s knee.

Thank you! Without you I’d still be there waiting for help.’

That would have been what you deserved! You galloped off like furies; several times I nearly lost you. Happily your route was not difficult to follow with all those broken branches and trampled bushes.’

‘We really almost got him.’

‘No, he almost got you! Croups of militia were circling the front line from north to south. They were crossing the Danube in boats or by ford or by the bridges that are still standing, to come and support the partisans who were already at our backs. Everyone knew that, but no! Relmyer and you, you’re always deaf to such things. A fine result, in truth!’

Seeing Margont’s grimaces of pain, Lefine took pity on him and held out his water bottle.

‘A drop of wine from the Wachau?’

Margont drank almost half of it.

‘That Austrian officer is definitely the murderer we’ve been looking for, Fernand. Not only did Relmyer recognise him, but also he deliberately fired at Relmyer before dashing off without giving any thought to the battle. He only mingled with the soldiers for one purpose: to kill Relmyer. And he would be dead had his horse not raised its head at that moment.’

‘The Wasp was saved by flies ... Yes, you’re right. But I don’t quite understand what was going on ...’

‘Neither do I. Let’s sum up what we know and try to see more clearly. First of all, I don’t think our man is a professional soldier. A professional fighter would have tried to finish me off He was not sure of succeeding even though I was injured on the ground and caught up in my stirrup. By the same token, when he did fire at me I was only a few feet away from him. He could have aimed at me but he preferred to make sure of his shot by wiping out my horse. He’s good with a rifle but not so good with a pistol.’

‘But over half the soldiers in the militia are originally from the regular army. They come directly from the army or, more often, they are veterans or have been invalided out.’

‘He’s too young to be a veteran, called back to service. As for being an invalid, right at this moment that applies to me more than to him ...’

‘Maybe he is a professional soldier but a non-combatant. An officer in charge of supplies, or a penpusher...’

Margont was feeling more and more groggy. The pain, like his

thoughts, was becoming less sharp, more diffuse. Sometimes the pain would come rushing back, making him clench his teeth and clarifying his reasoning, setting off glimmers of clear-sightedness in a fog of blurred thoughts.

‘No. If he had served in the regular army, he would have followed it at the end of 1805, when it was marching against us. But he was definitely in Vienna then because Albert Lietz and Ernst Runkel disappeared at that time, one of them in August, and the other in October. That means that there are several arguments pointing in one direction: our man is a civilian who enrolled in the militia. But he is an officer, either a lieutenant or a captain.’

‘Monarchies are keen on preserving the social hierarchy. Other officers of the Landwehr and the Volunteer force come from Viennese high society; they’re aristocrats, rich bourgeois, high-ranking functionaries ...’

‘We’re progressing! When one is lucky enough to be one of these “important people”, one can easily be tracked down. Perhaps our man is keen on hunting. That would explain his aptitude with a rifle and why he knows the forests round about here so perfectly. Did you interrogate the prisoners?’

They are as mute as carp. We captured fifty of them. Soldiers of the Landwehr of Lower Austria, and Viennese Volunteers.’

Margont shifted all the time, trying to find a less painful position. ‘We have to find out as much as possible about these two types of troops. Our man wore a particular uniform.’

‘I noticed that. Infantrymen are issued only with ill-cut grey overcoats with red facings they have to sew on themselves. Some of them don’t even have those and have to use their own coats. That devil of a man you chased after had a magnificent grey regulation coat with impeccable scarlet facings. But that would be the case for most officers of the Landwehr and the Volunteer regiments.’ Margont could not hide his disappointment.

‘So his uniform tells us nothing about him. Which units did we confront?’

‘At least two companies, one was the 3rd Battalion of the Landwehr of Lower Austria, and the other was the 2nd Battalion of the Viennese Volunteer force.’

‘So our man is an officer in one of those two battalions?’ Margont pulled himself up immediately. ‘Unless he was wearing a fake uniform – although that doesn’t seem possible because how would he have justified that to his superiors? – or he was accompanying the battalions but didn’t serve in either of them. He’s so tricky that you would expect him to have covered his tracks yet again. He knows the woods so well that he could have convinced the two companies to take him along as a guide to help them organise the ambush.’

‘While you’re waiting for an orderly to be free to stitch you up, I will go and find out what I can. According to the last estimates, Austria has lined up more than a hundred thousand militia. And to that they have added the Volunteer regiments. So their lieutenants and captains can be counted in their thousands ... The man we’re looking for lives in Vienna or nearby. The militias are organised by region. A priori, he must therefore serve in the Viennese Landwehr, in the Landwehr of Lower Austria or in the Viennese

Volunteer regiment. Let’s begin by finding out about the two battalions that attacked us. That will already be a start.’

Margont racked his brain for an idea, for a new approach.

‘If we succeed in convincing one of the prisoners to give us the names of the officers of the two battalions ...’

‘I don’t think they’ll even know them. The Landwehr was hurriedly thrown together in June 1808. A hundred thousand militiamen had to be organised in under a year. As for the Viennese Volunteers, that’s an old formation that has disappeared and been resurrected regularly since 1797. It’s made up of civilian volunteers who were exempt from serving in the Landwehr. The Viennese Volunteer force hastily re-formed on 1 March while we were marching on Vienna. Most have been soldiers for only three months and they are even more confused about this war than anyone else. Did you notice, several of them didn’t even open fire during the attack, because certain regiments of Austrian hussars also wear green pelisses. They took Relmyer’s hussars for Austrians and they shouted at them to stop fighting; it was a misunderstanding!’

Margont sat up and was overcome by a wave of pain, which jerked him sharply out of his alcoholic haze.

‘So how is it possible? We are relentlessly looking for someone and they turn up in front of us, as if by magic! Where is Relmyer? I want to talk to him – oh, yes! I would be grateful if you would bring him here.’

*

Relmyer had been wearing himself out trying to extract information from the prisoners, but in vain. When he came to see Margont with Lefine, his face cleared.

‘You seem to have recovered already.’

‘Lukas, you must take us for imbeciles!’ retorted Margont. ‘It’s absolutely unthinkable that this was a coincidence! Someone betrayed us by telling our man the route that we were going to take.’ Relmyer blinked at this reception.

‘If it wasn’t a coincidence, well ... there must have been a leak ...

Perhaps one of my hussars mentioned it to someone ...’

‘He’s lying to us,’ Lefinetold Margont.

Margont suddenly made the link between two apparently unrelated events and everything became clear. He pointed furiously at Relmyer.

‘It’s you who betrayed us. This expedition came about in exactly the same way as your duel with Piquebois. Antoine is fiercesome with a sabre, so you knowingly launched a risky attack. Thinking you had made an error, he dodged and launched his own attack. Antoine could not pass up such an opportunity to triumph! His attack obliged him to expose himself in his turn and your riposte hit him. Your first attack, which put you in danger, was solely intended to incite your opponent to act. So, you launch your second attack and the biter is bit; your opponent collapses, skewered. You arranged it so that the man we’re tracking learnt that you were going to lead an expedition into hostile territory. That journey through the forest was your “first attack’’. It led your adversary to show himself in order to try to kill you, which permitted you to counterattack.'

‘It’s true,’ admitted Relmyer. ‘I have been preparing the plan for several weeks, even before I met you. It’s what I call “the tactic of the false weakness”. It worked! We’ve seen him again, I sparred with him!’

Margont flushed with anger. ‘It was a suicidal tactic! We all nearly didn’t make it!’

‘I thought, I hoped, that he would try something, but how could I have guessed that he served in the militia and that he would throw himself on us with a crowd of soldiers?’

‘Is that all that you have to say to justify that carnage?’

‘No, that’s not all I have to say in my defence!’ stormed Relmyer. ‘Certainly there could have been many deaths and it would have been my fault, but I could very well have been the first victim! I was the bait. I thought my hussars and you would be the hook, not a second worm. I gave myself a one in two chance of surviving his shot and that was the reason that I needed you! Had I been killed I would have died knowing that I was bequeathing the investigation to Pagin and to you two.’

Lefine was appalled. This man is insane!’

Relmyer persisted, supporting his discourse with great sweeping gestures, which were not normal for him.

‘It has nothing to do with madness, it’s mathematics! If your opponent is an exceptional horseman, attack him while he’s having lunch at an inn! Everyone has a weak spot and that’s where you have to strike him! The man I’m looking for is a remarkable defensive tactician. He hides his traces, never draws attention to himself... So I harassed him, irritated him with my provocations, more and more. Until his exasperation obliged him to seek a direct confrontation. I acted like a beater who makes so much noise to frighten the prey that he eventually leaves his hiding place. I forced him to attack and reveal himself, which was so different from his normal way of proceeding that he showed himself much less effective than usual. That’s why the ambush was a big setback for him: badly prepared, badly organised and badly executed. On the other hand, as soon as our man returned to his favourite tactic

– hiding in the forest, avoiding head-on confrontation, using treachery – he regained the upper hand. If you abandon me, I won’t hold it against you, of course. Pagin and I will in the end flush this wolf out of the forest!’

‘How did the man find out that you were looking for him? How did he know where to find us when?’

‘I told you: I’ve been preparing my trap for a long time. I have been endlessly planting clues wherever I’ve been so that he understood that I had returned and was searching for him. I put little tin soldiers along approximately the path where he kidnapped me, in the ruined farm and around my old orphanage. Children’s toys in the places that linked us: the message was clear. And then there was the ruckus I made at Lesdorf Orphanage, the official and unofficial complaints by Madame Blanken, the scene with the police and magistrates when I tracked them down in Vienna to complain about their incompetence ... Everyone was talking about my return.’

Margont pressed his injured side so that the sharpened pain would chase away the effects of the alcohol again. Lefine, understanding what Margont was doing, shook his head, alarmed. Margont did not take his eyes off Relmyer.

‘When I went with you to explore that ruined farm, it had been burnt down. Apart from the fact that he wanted to burn any possible evidence, it was his response to your provocations. He was letting you know that he had received your message loud and clear, that it was in your interest to abandon your search and that, if you continued, you would end up like Franz and Wilhelm! He was trying to scare you.’

‘At first, I was shocked,’ conceded Relmyer. ‘But then I was happy! My plan was working, the man was starting to panic.’

‘The scene you made at the ball was all part of your plan!’ ‘Absolutely. And I also left a tin soldier on poor Wilhelm’s freshly dug grave.’

Relmyer’s assured facade was crumbling. Another facet of his personality started to show through the tatters.

‘What choice did I have? To sit on the terrace of a Kajfeehaus on the Craben, sampling the coffees all day and hoping to see him pass by? No, I had to force him into an error, and to do that I had to lower my guard. Yes, I almost got myself killed, but see how we have progressed, thanks to my plan. Now we know that he serves in the militia and that he’s an officer! I’m going to find out all about the Landwehr and the Viennese Volunteer regiments! And all that in addition to the clues we might find in the registers Ah yes, the registers, let’s talk about those properly! What exactly was that report that threw us into the lion’s mouth. Is it a fake?’

‘Of course it’s a fake! I suspected as much. It was too good to be true. Vienna is crawling with spies and Austrian sympathisers, and we know our man sometimes crosses over to our side of the line. He must have asked one of his acquaintances to find out about me. He learnt that I was spending my days in the Kriegsmin-isterium. It was even easier to discover since I was doing everything possible to make it known. Obviously he must have understood that I was on the trail of the registers. All he had to do was make up that false letter ... I can only dare to hope that he wrote it himself: but all the same he wouldn’t make us a present of his handwriting.’

‘How did he get it into the Kriegsministerium?’

Relmyer lowered his gaze. ‘I didn’t find it there, in fact. A Viennese man sold it to me. He claimed to work for the army and to have stolen a heap of documents just before Vienna fell to the French. He said he wanted to make money selling them to the French. According to him, he was keeping a watch on everyone who went into the Kriegsministerium, trying to find out what they wanted and seeing if that corresponded with what he possessed: maps, reports, files on officers, inventories, the layouts of fortified buildings ... I offered him a tidy sum in exchange for a dozen letters relating to the Austrian army. Only the one I showed you had any bearing on our case. The Viennese man must have been hand in glove with our murderer. Unfortunately the murderer used an intermediary. I know that because while I was launching my expedition, two of my hussars, who were discreetly following the Viennese fellow, grabbed him to interrogate him. He described the individual who had contacted him and paid him to make sure I received the false letters. The description did not tally at all with the man we’re looking for. Alas, it has not been possible to identify him. I turned in the charlatan to the general staff. If he really does possess confidential documents, our marshals will be very interested by what they find at his house.’

Relmyer did not care about the war. His remark was merely an attempt to placate Margont and Lefine, but it failed dismally.

‘It was a dirty trap!’ responded Margont. ‘You knew it: that’s why you pretended that you found the document yourself. It looks as if our adversary did not even bother to finesse this story of the trade in stolen documents. I believe that he suspected that you had guessed that it was just a trap! It’s as though together you had agreed a sort of rendezvous! The two of you, you agreed to play the game! And you, Lukas, you even limited the size of your escort so as not to dissuade him from attacking.’

Relmyer rapidly assessed these words.

‘I don’t know if he knew that I was a willing victim of his trap. But your friend Piquebois had definitely spotted that my first attack was intended to incite him to act. He believed that his assault would prevail anyway/

Lefine concluded, exasperated: ‘And here you are, all in disarray except for our enemy. Lieutenant Relmyer, you have manipulated us since the beginning because you knew that we would oppose your tactic of the earthworm on the fish-hook!’

Relmyer could not justify himself any further. He turned away from them.

‘I am truly sorry. But I would do it all again if I had the chance. I will leave you. I’m going to Mazenau, even though I’m sure that Johann Crich is an invention of our murderer. But you never know. In any case, this business is nearly over one way or the other.’ Saying this, he left. Outside three duels were waiting for him, three possible deaths.

CHAPTER 21

THE two élite hussars were waiting in the sun. NCO Cauchoit had unsheathed his sabre and was amusing himself using it to reflect light into the faces of the passing soldiers. Oh, if only he could annoy one of them into challenging him! But no. They hurried past, pursued by the light, or they let their retinas burn gently, pretending not to notice anything. Cauchoit was having fun when Relmyer came out of the hospital.

‘I’m not waiting any longer, Officer!’

‘Where has your companion gone?’ queried Relmyer in surprise. The NCO glowed, like his blade.

‘I laid that pretentious hussar of the 5th out cold while we were waiting for you. You must have seen his stretcher-bearers as you came out. Let’s fight here! What better place for a duel than a hospital?’

He was almost in ecstasy. Like a lover on the point of climaxing with his sabre.

‘Victory at first blood?’ he proposed.

Relmyer nodded. Yet he had heard that Cauchoit was a sudden death expert. Of the nine ‘first blood’ duels that he was known for, seven had ended abruptly with the death of his opponent (and this figure assumed that the hussar of the 5th Regiment was going to survive). He was nicknamed ‘the widow-maker’ ... Cauchoit had the falsely innocent cruelty of a little boy who finds it funny to throw the cat in the fire.

He took off his pelisse and his dolman and held them out to his friend, the trumpeter, who willingly played the role of coat-stand. Every gifted duellist seemed to have a beatific disciple, a Pagin. Relmyer put his belongings in a wagon stained with dried blood. The sharp sunshine made the white of their shirts dazzling. Cauchoit talked all the time he was warming up, trying to unsettle Relmyer. He mentioned his past successes, hinted that Relmyer was a coward ... For him the duel had already started: his comments were his first strokes.

Relmyer was not listening to him. He found himself in an internal turmoil with which he was all too familiar. His past resurfaced and invaded him, like black water flooding brutally inside him. A man stood opposite and wished him harm. The features of Franz’s executioner imposed themselves on Cauchoit’s face. This confusion of identities, of time, of histories and general contexts generated a hellish chaos in Relmyer’s mind. He was terrified of seeing the man triumph anew and walk away to commit other crimes; the idea obsessed him. He had reached the point where he was no longer paying any attention to what was happening around him, to the extent that he felt he was in a sort of corridor, his only exit blocked by an enemy. Relmyer felt the irrepressible conviction grow in him that he must vanquish this man so that he could escape this tunnel, rejoin the world and resume normal life. It was as if his opponent were the stone in the cellar, which he had to make fall in order to free himself.

Relmyer had to control this whirlwind of emotions and to do this he had his blade, which hid an entire universe. The teaching he had followed, the training sessions, his reflections on the meaning of violence, the ability of mathematics to express the most apparently confusing phenomena in the simplest terms: all these interacted to channel the forces jostling within him. Anger, sadness, rancour, rage, anguish, hate, dismay, painful memories and unresolved grief: he managed once again to make all these currents converge towards one aim. To annihilate his opponent. Cauchoit temporarily became the focus of all his suffering.

Cauchoit strutted gracefully, the beautiful embodiment of death.

‘I find there is something of the chicken about you/ he taunted Relmyer. The way you ran away after we were attacked by the grey mice of the Landwehr reminds me of the stampede in the poultry yard when a fox appears. I would wager that your blood has the ruby colour of pigeon blood!’

Relmyer saluted him with his sabre. Cauchoit responded in the same way, then immediately lunged, trying to stab Relmyer in the side, clashed with Relmyer’s weapon and withdrew for fear of a counterattack. A simple test that he judged conclusive. Then he charged at Relmyer. In response to this head-on tactic, Relmyer

produced a complex compound attack. He pretended to parry a lunge to the throat but at the last minute dodged and feinted towards Cauchoit’s chest to threaten his left shoulder. Cauchoit, caught short, beat a retreat.

Relmyer immediately unleashed a frenetic succession of assaults: attacks, composite attacks, false attacks, attacks to the left side, whipped strokes, feints, jabs, false parries, beats, ripostes, parries, unexpected sequences ... He aimed for one side, then the other, the waist, the head, the throat, the side again, the thigh, the right wrist, the left hand ... Relmyer seemed to be able to do whatever he wanted. During his duel with Piquebois, he had studied his tactics. He had, as it were, ingested them and now reproduced them in his own way. Cauchoit, disconcerted, uselessly parried a false attack to the abdomen and received a circular blow full on the temple, which landed him in the dust.

He got up immediately, put his hand to his head and looked at his bloody palm.

‘It’s nothing! What a relief! I thought for a moment I was bleeding.’

Fury made his cut inaccurate. Relmyer dodged and plunged his sabre into Cauchoit’s thigh, pitching him for a second time to the ground.

‘You can see it better now, Monsieur?’

The trumpeter Sibot looked at his friend writhing in pain but the sight made no sense to him. He persisted in thinking that even though he could see Cauchoit on the ground, in reality it was Relmyer who had been defeated. He took several seconds to take in the true situation. And then hesitation gave way to raw violence. Sibot thrust the point of his sword in the direction of Relmyer’s face, bounding forward like a cat. Had he hit his target, the first blood would have been Relmyer’s, flowing from his burst eye, and at the same time from his brain. But Relmyer had been sharpening his reflexes for a long time and he was able to parry the blow even when his adversary’s blade had already almost completely obscured his vision. He counterattacked immediately, thrusting his sabre into the musician’s shoulder. The bone cracked, blood spurted, the man collapsed and Relmyer found himself

motionless, bespattered and dazed, alarmed by his uncontrollable capacity to trigger violence all around him.

Stretcher-bearers hastily gathered up the two élite troopers. Margont noticed the agitated throng pass in front of him and disappear into the little room where he himself had been sewn up. The floor was roughly flagged. After a few operations and one or two amputations, the accumulated blood was sluiced away with large bucketfuls of water.

Margont and Lefine were silent a moment, amazed at what had happened.

‘When Relmyer is not chasing after death, it’s death that comes to him,’ concluded Lefine, finally.

Shortly afterwards the figure of Antoine Piquebois appeared framed in the entrance. Four hussars of the 8th Regiment accompanied him. They were friends from his old regiment with only one desire: to convince him to become a hussar again. To them, their friend’s invalidity was because he was not thinking straight, not for any physical reason. They surrounded Margont and Lefine.

‘Don’t tell me that you all want to fight a duel with Relmyer!’ said Margont, irritated.

‘Not at all. We’re not at his level, alas,’ Piquebois reassured him. ‘Dear friend, I’ve heard all about your chase and your wound ... You know how I love horses. No beast understands man better! Between man and horse a harmony can be established that ...’ Words failed him. There was a gap in his discourse right there where he would have liked to express the heart of it. A tic played at his lips.

‘All right, if no one understood what I was trying to say, let him learn to ride a horse. But there is one particular case – just one! -where an event transcends our love of horses.’

‘One particular case, just one!’ echoed the hussars.

‘It’s when the first horse is killed under you in combat! In Cod’s name, that’s a baptism! It’s like the first girl one beds!’

Piquebois and his companions produced goblets they had been hiding behind their backs. A warrant officer held one out to Margont.

Piquebois, joyously excited, shouted: ‘In honour of the first horse killed under my friend Captain Margont!’

Everyone emptied their goblets, the warrant officer clinking for two people since Margont refused his glass.

‘You’re all stupid!’ exclaimed Margont. ‘I was almost killed, I ... Oh, get out! Go on!’

Piquebois and his companions went on their way, laughing. They were young and there was a war on: life was sweet. That was the way they saw the world ... In spite of the shooting pains travelling through his battered body, Margont turned to Lefine.

‘Why am I surrounded by idiots?’

‘It’s because you attract them, damn it!’

‘Listen to me: Jean-Quenin thinks I will be able to leave hospital the day after tomorrow, so I’ll leave this evening. That will be good enough; he is always too cautious. Go and see our major and tell him from me to make sure Antoine doesn’t leave our regiment; he can tell him that he’s putting him on guard or that there’s going to be an inspection of the company, or anything at all that will keep him there ... Because otherwise the malady of our friend Antoine, the “hussar manque”, will recur and we will have two Relmyers for the price of one. Can you also find me a new horse and keep me informed about the prisoners? If one of them finally decides to talk ...’

Lefine sniggered. ‘Isn’t it enough for you, all that’s already happened?’

‘No!’ persisted Margont. ‘It would take a great deal more than that to make me give up.’

‘For heaven’s sake! At the rate things are going, you’ll soon have your “great deal more”!’

But Margont was no longer listening. Luise had just arrived in the company of a hussar that Relmyer had sent to inform her what had happened. She was in tears and the man had to point out Margont before she spotted him. She crossed the room, lifting her pale blue dress slightly, but the bloodstains had still accumulated at the bottom and were gradually creeping up the azure material. She stopped in front of him.

‘Is it serious?’

‘No, it’s nothing.’

‘Why did you let yourself get wounded?’

She leant over him. Margont thought she was going to kiss him, but she slapped him hard.

‘Idiot!’

She immediately left as the wounded soldiers guffawed. Lefine shrugged his shoulders philosophically.

‘There are some days when everything goes badly and others when things go even worse ...’