‘Where’s the rest of it?’ one said.
‘I threw it away,’ the sergeant said. ‘Poured it out.’
‘Poured it out, hell,’ another said. ‘He sold it.’
‘When?’ another said. ‘When did he have a chance to? Or pour it out either.’
‘While we were all asleep in the lorry coming out here.’
‘I wasn’t asleep,’ the second said.
‘All right, all right,’ the ex-picklock said. ‘What does it matter what he did with it? It’s gone. We’ll drink this one. Where’s your corkscrew?’ he said to a third one. But the man already had the corkscrew out, opening the bottle. ‘Okay,’ the ex-picklock said to the sergeant, ‘you go on and report to the officer and we’ll take it up and be putting it into the coffin.’
‘Right,’ the sergeant said, taking up the empty valise. ‘I want to get out of here too. I dont even need to want a drink to prove I dont like this.’ He went on. They emptied the bottle rapidly, passing it from one to another, and flung it away.
‘All right,’ the ex-picklock said. ‘Grab that thing up and let’s get out of here.’ Because already he was the leader, none to say or know or even care when it had happened. Because they were not drunk now, not inebriates but madmen, the last brandy lying in their stomachs cold and solid as balls of ice as they almost ran with the stretcher up the steep stairs.
‘Where is it, then?’ the one pressing behind the ex-picklock said.
‘He gave it to that corporal riding up front,’ the ex-picklock said. ‘Through that panel while we were asleep.’ They burst out into the air, the world, earth and sweet air again where the lorry waited, the driver and the corporal standing with a group of men some distance away. They had all heard the ex-picklock and dropped the stretcher without even pausing and were rushing toward the lorry until the ex-picklock stopped them. ‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’ But the missing bottles were nowhere in the lorry. The ex-picklock returned to the stretcher.
‘Call that corporal over here,’ one said. ‘I know how to make him tell where it is.’
‘Fool,’ the ex-picklock said. ‘If we start something now, dont you know what’ll happen? He’ll call the M.P.’s and put us all under arrest and get a new guard from the adjutant in Verdun. We cant do anything here. We’ve got to wait till we get back to Verdun.’
‘What’ll we do in Verdun?’ another said. ‘Buy some liquor? With what? You couldn’t get one franc out of the whole lot of us with a suction pump.’
‘Morache can sell his watch,’ a fourth said.
‘But will he?’ a fifth said. They all looked at Morache.
‘Forget that now,’ Morache said. ‘Picklock’s right; the first thing to do is to get back to Verdun. Come up. Let’s get this thing into that box.’ They carried the stretcher to the lorry and lifted the sheeted body into it. The lid of the coffin had not been fastened down; a hammer and nails were inside the coffin. They tumbled the body into it, whether face-up or facedown they didn’t know and didn’t bother, and replaced the top and caught the nails enough to hold it shut. Then the sergeant with his now empty valise climbed through the rear door and sat again on the coffin; the corporal and the driver obviously had returned too because at once the lorry moved, the twelve men sitting on the straw against the walls, quiet now, outwardly as decorous as well-behaved children but actually temporarily insane, capable of anything, talking occasionally among themselves, peacefully, idle and extraneous while the lorry returned to Verdun, until they were actually in the city again and the lorry had stopped before a door beside which a sentry stood: obviously the commandant’s headquarters: and the sergeant began to get up from the coffin. Then Picklock made one last effort:
‘I understood orders said we were to have brandy not just to go to Valaumont and get the body out, but to get it back to Paris. Or am I wrong?’
‘If you are, who made you wrong?’ the sergeant said. He looked down at Picklock a moment longer. Then he turned toward the door; it was as though he too had recognised Picklock as their leader: ‘I’ll have to sign some bumf here. Take it on to the station and load it into the carriage and wait for me there. Then we’ll have lunch.’
‘Right,’ Picklock said. The sergeant dropped to the ground and vanished; at once, even before the lorry had begun to move again, their whole air, atmosphere changed, as if their very characters and personalities had altered, or not altered but rather as if they had shed masks or cloaks; their very speech was short, rapid, succinct, cryptic, at times even verbless, as if they did not need to communicate but merely to prompt one another in one mutual prescient cognizance.
‘Morache’s watch,’ one said.
‘Hold it,’ Picklock said. ‘The station first.’
‘Tell him to hurry then,’ another said. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, starting to get up.
‘Hold it, I said,’ Picklock said, gripping him. ‘Do you want M.P.’s?’ So they stopped talking and just sat, immobile and in motion, furious in immobility like men strained against a pyramid, as if they were straining at the back of the moving lorry itself with the urgency of their passion and need. The lorry stopped. They were already getting out of it, the first ones dropping to the ground before it had stopped moving, their hands already on the coffin. The platform was empty now, or so they thought, would have thought if they had noticed, which they didn’t, not even looking that way as they dragged the coffin out of the lorry, almost running again across the platform with it toward where the carriage waited on the siding; not until a hand began to tug at Picklock’s sleeve, an urgent voice at his elbow saying:
‘Mister Corporal! Mister Corporal!’ Picklock looked down. It was the old woman of the morning whose son had died in the Verdun battle.
‘Beat it, grandma,’ Picklock said, twitching his arm free. ‘Come on. Get that door open.’
But the old woman still clung to him, speaking still with that terrible urgency: ‘You’ve got one. It might be Theodule. I will know. Let me look at him.’
‘Beat it, I tell you!’ Picklock said. ‘We’re busy.’ So it was not Picklock at all, leader though he was, but one of the others who said suddenly and sharply, hissing it:
‘Wait.’ Though in the next second the same idea seemed to occur to them all, one end of the box resting now on the floor of the carriage and four of them braced to shove it the rest of the way, all of them paused now looking back while the speaker continued: ‘You said something this morning about selling a farm.’
‘Selling my farm?’ the woman said.
‘Money!’ the other said in his hissing undertone.
‘Yes! Yes!’ the old woman said, fumbling under her shawl and producing an aged reticule almost as large as the sergeant’s valise. Now Picklock did take charge.
‘Hold it,’ he said over his shoulder, then to the old woman: ‘If we let you look at him, will you buy two bottles of brandy?’
‘Make it three,’ a third said.
‘And in advance,’ a fourth said. ‘She cant tell anything from what’s in that box now.’
‘I can!’ she said. ‘I will know! Just let me look.’
‘All right,’ Picklock said. ‘Go and get two bottles of brandy, and you can look at him. Hurry now, before the sergeant gets back.’
‘Yes yes,’ she said and turned, running, stiffly and awkwardly, clutching the reticule, back across the platform.
‘All right,’ Picklock said. ‘Get it inside. One of you get the hammer out of the lorry.’ Luckily their orders had been not to drive the nails home but merely to secure the lid temporarily (apparently the body was to be transferred to something a little more elegant or anyway commensurate with its purpose when it reached Paris) so they could draw them without difficulty. Which they did and removed the lid and then recoiled from the thin burst, gout of odor which rushed up at them almost visibly, like thin smoke—one last faint thin valedictory of corruption and mortality, as if the corpse itself had hoarded it for three years against this moment or any similar one with the gleeful demonic sentience of a small boy. Then the old woman returned, clasping two bottles against her breast, still running or at least trotting, panting now, shaking, almost as though from physical exhaustion because she couldn’t even climb the steps when she reached the door, so that two of them dropped to the ground and lifted her bodily into the carriage. A third one took the bottles from her, though she didn’t seem to notice it. For a second or so she couldn’t even seem to see the coffin. Then she saw it and half knelt half collapsed at the head of it and turned the tarpaulin back from what had been a face. They—the speaker—had been right; she could have told nothing from the face because it was no longer man. Then they knew that she was not even looking at it: just kneeling there, one hand resting on what had been the face and the other caressing what remained of its hair. She said:
‘Yes. Yes. This is Theodule. This is my son.’ Suddenly she rose, strongly now, and faced them, pressing back against the coffin, looking rapidly from face to face until she found Picklock; her voice was calm and strong too. ‘I must have him.’
‘You said just to look at him,’ Picklock said.
‘He is my son. He must go home. I have money. I will buy you a hundred bottles of brandy. Or the money itself, if you want it.’
‘How much will you give?’ Picklock said. She didn’t even hesitate. She handed him the unopened reticule.
‘Count it yourself,’ she said.
‘But how are you going to get it—him away from here? You cant carry it.’
‘I have a horse and cart. It’s been behind the station yonder ever since we heard yesterday what you were coming for.’
‘Heard how?’ Picklock said. ‘This is official business.’
‘Does that matter?’ she said, almost impatiently. ‘Count it.’
But Picklock didn’t open the reticule yet. He turned to Morache. ‘Go with her and get the cart. Bring it up to the window on the other side. Make it snappy. Landry’ll be back any minute now.’ It didn’t take long. They got the window up; almost immediately Morache brought the cart up, the big farm-horse going at a heavy and astonished gallop. Morache snatched it to a halt; already the others in the carriage had the sheeted body balanced on the window sill. Morache handed the lines to the old woman on the seat beside him and vaulted over the seat and snatched the body down into the cart and vaulted to the ground beside it; at that moment Picklock inside the carriage tossed the reticule through the window, into the cart.
‘Go on,’ Morache said to the old woman. ‘Get the hell out of here. Quick.’ Then she was gone. Morache re-entered the carriage. ‘How much was it?’ he said to Picklock.
‘I took a hundred francs,’ Picklock said.
‘A hundred francs?’ another said with incredulous amazement.
‘Yes,’ Picklock said. ‘And tomorrow I’ll be ashamed I took even that much. But that will be a bottle apiece.’ He handed the money to the man who had spoken last. ‘Go and get it.’ Then to the others: ‘Get that lid back on. What are you waiting for, anyway: for Landry to help you?’ They replaced the coffin lid and set the nails in the old holes. The absolute minimum of prudence would have dictated or at least suggested a weight of some kind, any kind in the coffin first, but they were not concerned with prudence. The ganymede returned, clasping a frayed wicker basket to his breast; they snatched it from him before he could even get into the carriage, the owner of the corkscrew opening the bottles rapidly as they were passed to him.
‘He said to bring the basket back,’ the ganymede said.
‘Take it back then,’ Picklock said: and then no more of that either; the hands snatching at the bottles almost before the corks were out, so that when the sergeant returned about an hour later, his outrage—not rage: outrage—knew no bounds. But this time he was impotent because they were indeed in coma now, sprawled and snoring in one inextricable filth of straw and urine and vomit and spilled brandy and empty bottles, invulnerable and immune in that nepenthe when toward the end of the afternoon an engine coupled onto the carriage and took it back to St Mihiel and set it off on another siding, and waking them only because of the glare of yellow light which now filled the carriage through the windows, and the sound of hammers against the outside of it, which roused Picklock.
Clasping his throbbing head and shutting his eyes quickly against that unbearable glare, it seemed to him that there had never been so fierce a sunrise. It was almost like electricity; he didn’t see how he could move beneath it to rise, and even on his feet, staggering until he braced himself, he didn’t see how he had accomplished the feat, bracing himself against the wall while he kicked the others one by one into sentience or anyway consciousness. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Get up. We’ve got to get out of here.’
‘Where are we?’ one said.
‘Paris,’ Picklock said. ‘It’s already tomorrow.’
‘Oh Christ,’ a voice said. Because they were all awake now, waking not into remembering, since even comatose they had not really forgotten, but into simple realisation like sleepwalkers waking to find themselves standing on the outside of forty-storey window ledges. They were not drunk now. They didn’t even have time to be sick. ‘Christ yes,’ the voice said. They got up, staggering for balance, shaking and trembling, and stumbled through the door and huddled, blinking against the fierce glare until they could bear it. Except that it was electricity; it was still last night (or perhaps tomorrow night, for all they knew or for the moment cared even): two searchlights such as anti aircraft batteries had used against night-flying aeroplanes during the war, trained on the carriage and in the glare of which men on ladders were nailing long strips of black and funereal bunting along the eaves of the carriage: to whom—which—they paid no attention. Nor was it Paris either.
‘We’re still in Verdun,’ another said.
‘Then they’ve moved the station around to the other side of the tracks,’ Picklock said.
‘Anyway it’s not Paris,’ a third said. ‘I’ve got to have a drink.’
‘No,’ Picklock said. ‘You’ll take coffee and something to eat.’ He turned to the ganymede. ‘How much money have you got left?’
‘I gave it to you,’ the ganymede said.
‘Damn that,’ Picklock said, extending his hand. ‘Come on with it.’ The ganymede fumbled out a small wad of paper notes and coins. Picklock took and counted it rapidly. ‘It might do,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ There was a small bistro opposite the station. He led the way to it and inside—a small zinc bar at which a single man stood in a countryman’s corduroy coat, and two tables where other men in the rough clothes of farmers or laborers sat with glasses of coffee or wine, playing dominoes, all of them turning to look as Picklock led his party in and up to the bar, where a tremendous woman in black said,
‘Messieurs?’
‘Coffee, Madame, and bread if you have it,’ Picklock said.
‘I dont want coffee,’ the third said. ‘I want a drink.’
