The Apocalypse Watch Read online

  1

  The early sun was blinding, causing the old man crawling through the wild brush to blink repeatedly as he wiped his eyes with the back of his trembling right hand. He had reached the edge of the small promontory on top of the hill, the “high ground,” as they called it years ago—years burned into his memory. The grassy point overlooked an elegant country estate in the Loire Valley. A flagstone terrace was no more than three hundred meters below, with a brick path bordered by flowers leading to it. Gripped in the old man’s left hand, the shoulder strap taut, was a powerful rifle, its sight calibrated for the precise distance. The weapon was ready to fire. Soon his target—a man older than himself—would appear in the telescopic crosshairs. The monster would be taking his morning stroll to the terrace, dressed in his flowing morning robe, his reward his morning coffee laced with the finest brandy, a reward he would never reach on this particular morning. Instead, he would die, collapsing among the flowers, an appropriate irony: the death of consummate evil among surrounding beauty.

  Jean-Pierre Jodelle, seventy-eight years of age and once a fierce provisional leader of the Résistance, had waited fifty years to fulfill a promise, a commitment, he had made to himself and to his God. He had failed with the lawyers and in the sacrosanct court chambers; no, not failed, instead, been insulted by them, scorned by all of them, and told to take his contemptible fantasies to a cell in a lunatic asylum, where he belonged! The great General Monluc was a true hero of France, a close associate of le grand Charles André de Gaulle, that most illustrious of all soldier-statesmen, who had kept in constant touch with Monluc throughout the war over the underground radio frequencies despite the prospect of torture and a firing squad should Monluc be exposed.

  It was all merde! Monluc was a turncoat, a coward, and a traitor! He gave lip service to the arrogant De Gaulle, fed him insignificant intelligence, and lined his own pockets with Nazi gold and art objects worth millions. And then in the aftermath, le grand Charles, in euphoric adulation, had pronounced Monluc un bel ami de guerre, a man to be honored. It was no less than a command for all France.

  Merde! How little De Gaulle knew! Monluc had ordered the execution of Jodelle’s wife and his first son, a child of five. A second son, an infant of six months, was spared, perhaps by the warped rationality of the Wehrmacht officer who said, “He’s not a Jew, maybe someone will find him.”

  Someone did. A fellow Résistance fighter, an actor from the Comédie Française. He found the screaming baby amid the rubble of the shattered house on the outskirts of Barbizon, where he had come for a secret meeting the following morning. The actor had brought the child home to his wife, a celebrated actress whom the Germans adored—their affection not returned, for her performances were dictated, not offered voluntarily. And when the war ended, Jodelle was a skeleton of his former self, physically unrecognizable and mentally beyond repair, and he knew it. Three years in a concentration camp, piling the bodies of gassed Jews, Gypsies, and “undesirables,” had reduced him to near idiocy, with neck tics, erratic blinking, spasms of throated cries, and all that went with severe psychiatric damage. He never revealed himself to his surviving son or the “parents” who had reared him. Instead, wandering through the bowels of Paris and changing his name frequently, Jodelle observed from a distance as the child grew into manhood and became one of the most popular actors in France.

  That distance, that unendurable pain, had been caused by Monluc the monster, who was now entering the circle of Jodelle’s telescopic sight. Only seconds now, and his commitment to God would be fulfilled.

  Suddenly there was a terrible crack in the air and Jodelle’s back was on fire, causing him to drop the rifle. He spun around, stunned to see two men in shirtsleeves, one with a bullwhip, looking down at him.

  “It would be a pleasure to kill you, you sick old idiot, but your disappearance would only lead to complications,” said the man with the whip. “You have a wine-soaked mouth that never stops chattering craziness. It’s better that you go back to Paris and rejoin your army of drunken vagrants. Get out of here, or die!”

  “How …? How did you know …?”

  “You’re a mental case, Jodelle, or whatever name you’re using this month,” said the guard beside the whip master. “You think we haven’t spotted you these last two days, breaking the foliage as you came to this very accessible place with your rifle? You were far better in the old days, I’m told.”

  “Then kill me, you sons of bitches! I’d rather die here, knowing I was so close, than go on living!”

  “Oh, no, the general wouldn’t approve,” added the whipper. “You could have told others what you intended to do, and we don’t want people looking for you or your corpse on this property. You’re insane, Jodelle, everyone knows that. The courts made it clear.”

  “They’re corrupt!”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “I know what I know!”

  “You’re also a drunk, well documented by a dozen cafés on the Rive Gauche that’ve thrown you out. Drink yourself into hell, Jodelle, but get out of here before I send you there now. Get up! Run as fast as those spindly legs will carry you!”

  The curtain rang down on the final scene of the play, a French translation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, revived by Jean-Pierre Villier, the fifty-year-old actor who was the reigning king of the Paris stage and the French screen as well as a nominee for an American Academy Award as a result of his first film in the United States. The curtain rose and fell and rose again as the large, broad-shouldered Villier acknowledged his audience by smiling and clapping his hands at their acceptance. It was all about to erupt into madness.

  From the rear of the theater an old man in torn, shabby clothes lurched down the center aisle, screaming at the top of his coarse voice. Suddenly he pulled a rifle out of his loose trousers, held by suspenders, causing those in the audience who saw him to panic, the panic instantly spreading throughout the succeeding rows of seats as men pushed women below the line of fire, the vocal chaos reverberating off the walls of the theater. Villier moved quickly, shoving back the few actors and members of the technical crew who had come out onstage.

  “An angry critic I can accept, monsieur!” he roared, confronting the deranged old man approaching the stage in a familiar voice that could command any crowd. “But this is insane! Put down your weapon and we will talk!”

  “There is no talk left in me, my son! My only son! I have failed you and your mother. I’m useless, a nothing! I only want you to know that I tried.… I love you, my only son, and I tried, but I failed!”

  With those words the old man spun his rifle around, the barrel in his mouth, his right hand surging for the trigger. He reached it and blew the back of his head apart, blood and sinew spraying over all who were near him.

  “Who the hell was he?” cried a shaken Jean-Pierre Villier at his dressing-room table, his parents at his side. “He said such crazy things, then killed himself. Why?”

  The elder Villiers, now in their late seventies, looked at each other; both nodded.

  “We must talk,” said Catherine Villier as she massaged the aching neck of the man she had raised as her son. “Perhaps with your wife too.”

  “That’s not necessary,” interrupted the father. “He can handle that if he thinks he should.”

  “You’re right, my husband. It is his decision.”

  “What are you both talking about?”

  “We have kept many things from you, my son, things that in the early years might have harmed you—”

  “Harmed me?”

  “Through no fault of yours, Jean-Pierre. We were an occupied country, the enemy among us constantly searching for those who secretly, violently, opposed the victors, in many cases torturing and imprisoning whole families who were suspect.”

  “The Résistance, naturally,” interrupted Villier.

  “Naturally,” agreed the father.

  “You both were a part of it, you’ve told me that, although you’ve never exp
ounded on your contributions.”

  “They’re best forgotten,” said the mother. “It was a horrible time—so many who were stigmatized and beaten as collaborators were only protecting loved ones, including their children.”

  “But this man tonight, this crazy tramp! He so identified with me that he called me his son!… I accept a degree of excessive devotion—it goes with the profession, however foolish that may be—but to the point of killing himself in front of my eyes? Madness!”

  “He was mad, driven insane by what he had endured,” said Catherine.

  “You knew him?”

  “Very well,” replied the old actor, Julian Villier. “His name was Jean-Pierre Jodelle, once a promising young baritone at the opera, and we, your mother and I, tried desperately to find him after the war. There was no trace, and since we knew he had been found out by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp, we assumed he was dead, a non-entry, like thousands of others.”

  “Why did you try to find him? Who was he to you?”

  The only mother Jean-Pierre had ever known knelt beside his dressing-room chair, her exquisite features bespeaking the great star she had been; her blue-green eyes below her full, soft white hair were locked with his. She spoke softly. “Not only to us, my son, but to you. He was your natural father.”

  “Oh, my God!… Then you, both of you—”

  “Your natural mother,” added Villier père, quietly interrupting, “was a member of the Comédie—”

  “A splendid talent,” broke in Catherine, “caught in those trying years between being an ingenue and being a woman, all of it made horrid by the occupation. She was a dear girl, like a younger sister to me.”

  “Please!” cried Jean-Pierre, leaping to his feet as the mother he knew rose and stood by her husband. “This is all coming so quickly, it is so astonishing, I … I can’t think!”

  “Sometimes it’s best not to think for a while, my son,” said the elder Villier. “Stay numb until the mind tells you it is ready to accept.”

  “You used to tell me that years ago,” said the actor, smiling sadly, warmly, at Julian, “when I had trouble with a scene or a monologue, and the meaning was escaping me. You’d say, ‘Just keep reading and rereading the words without trying so hard. Something will happen.’ ”

  “It was good advice, my husband.”

  “I was always a better teacher than I ever was a performer.”

  “Agreed,” said Jean-Pierre softly.

  “I beg your pardon? You agree?”

  “I meant only, my father, that when you were onstage, you … you—”

  “A part of you was always concentrating on the others,” jumped in Catherine Villier, exchanging a knowing glance with her son—and not her son.

  “Ah, you both conspire again, has it not been so for years? The two great stars being gentle with the lesser player.… Good! That’s over with.… For a few moments we all stopped thinking about tonight. Now, perhaps, we can talk.”

  Silence.

  “For God’s sake, tell me what happened!” exclaimed Jean-Pierre finally.

  As he asked the question, there was a rapid knocking at the dressing-room door; it was opened by the theater’s old night watchman. “Sorry to intrude, but I thought you ought to know. There are still reporters at the stage door. They won’t believe the police or me. We said you left earlier by the front entrance, but they’re not convinced. However, they cannot get inside.”

  “Then we’ll stay here for a while, if need be all night—at least I will. There’s a couch in the other room, and I’ve already called my wife. She heard everything on the news.”

  “Very well, sir.… Madame Villier, and you also, monsieur, despite the terrible circumstances it is glorious to see you both again. You are always remembered with great affection.”

  “Thank you, Charles,” said Catherine. “You look well, my friend.”

  “I’d look better still if you were back onstage, madame.” The watchman nodded and closed the door.

  “Go on, Father, what did happen?”

  “We were all part of the Résistance,” began Julian Villier, sitting down on a small love seat across the room, “artists drawn together against an enemy that would destroy all art. And we had certain capabilities that served our cause. Musicians passed codes by inserting melodic phrases not in an original score; illustrators produced the daily and weekly posters demanded by the Germans, subtly employing colors and images that sent other messages. And we in the theater continuously corrupted texts, especially those of revivals and well-known plays, often giving direct instructions to the saboteurs—”

  “At times it was quite amusing,” interrupted the regal Catherine, joining her husband and taking his hand. “Say there was a line like ‘I shall meet her at the Métro in Montparnasse.’ We’d change it to ‘I shall meet her at the east railway station—she should be there by eleven o’clock.’ The play would finish, the curtain fall, and all those Germans in their splendid uniforms would be applauding while a Résistance team left quickly to be in place for the sabotage units at the Gare de l’Est an hour before midnight.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Jean-Pierre impatiently. “I’ve heard the stories, but that’s not what I’m asking. I realize it’s as difficult for you as it is for me, but please, tell me what I must know.”

  The white-haired couple looked intensely at each other; the wife nodded as their hands gripped, the veins showing. Her husband spoke. “Jodelle was found out, revealed by a young runner who could not take the torture. The Gestapo surrounded his house, waiting for him to return one night, but he couldn’t, for he was in Le Havre, making contact with British and American agents in the early planning stages of the invasion. By dawn, it was said that the leader of the Gestapo unit became furious with frustration. He stormed the house and executed your mother and your older brother, a child of five years. They picked up Jodelle several hours later; we managed to get word to him that you had survived.”

  “Oh … my God!” The celebrated actor grew pale, his eyes closed as he sank down into his chair. “Monsters!… No, wait, what did you just say? ‘It was said that the leader of the Gestapo—’ It was said? Not confirmed?”

  “You’re very quick, Jean-Pierre,” observed Catherine. “You listen, that’s why you’re a great actor.”

  “To hell with that, Mother! What did you mean, Father?”

  “It was not the policy of the Germans to kill the families of Résistance fighters, real or suspected. They had more practical uses for them—torture them for information, or use them as bait for others, and there was always forced labor, women for the Officers Corps, a category in which your natural mother would certainly have fallen.”

  “Then why were they killed?… No, first me. How did I survive?”

  “I went out to an early dawn meeting in the woods of Barbizon. I passed your house, saw windows broken, the front door smashed, and heard an infant crying. You. Everything was obvious and, of course, there would be no meeting. I brought you home, bicycling through the back roads to Paris.”

  “It’s a little late to thank you, but, again, why were my—my natural mother and my brother shot?”

  “Now you lost a word, my son,” said the elder Villier.

  “What?”

  “In your shock, your listening wasn’t as acute as it was a moment before, when I described the events of that night.”

  “Stop it, Papa! Say what you mean!”

  “I said ‘executed,’ you said ‘shot.’ ”

  “I don’t understand.…”

  “Before Jodelle was found out by the Germans, one of his covers was as a city messenger for the Ministry of Information—the Nazis could never get our arrondissements straight, much less our short, curving streets. We never learned the details, for as impressive as his voice was, Jodelle was extremely quiet where rumors were concerned—they were everywhere. Falsehoods, half-truths, and truths raced through Paris like gunfire at the slightest provocation. We were a city
gripped by fear and suspicion—”

  “I understand that, my father,” broke in the ever more impatient Jean-Pierre. “Please explain what I don’t understand. The details that you were never given, what did they concern and how did they result in the killings, the executions?”

  “Jodelle said to a few of us that there was a man so high in the Résistance that he was a legend only whispered about, his identity the most closely guarded secret of the movement. Jodelle, however, claimed he had learned who the man was, and if what he had pieced together was accurate, that same man, that ‘legend,’ was no great hero but instead a traitor.”

  “Who was he?” pressed Jean-Pierre.

  “He never told us. However, he did say that the man was a general in our French army, of which there were dozens. He said if he was right and any of us revealed the man’s name, we’d be shot by the Germans. If he was wrong and someone spoke of him in a defamatory way, our wing would be called unstable and we would no longer be trusted.”

  “What was he going to do then?”

  “If he was able to establish his proof, he would take the man out himself. He swore he was in a position to do so. We assumed—correctly, we believe, to this day—that whoever the traitor was, he somehow learned of Jodelle’s suspicions and gave the order to execute him and his family.”

  “That was it? Nothing else?”

  “Try to understand what the times were like, my son,” said Catherine Villier. “A wrong word, even a hostile stare or a gesture, could result in immediate detention, imprisonment, and even, not unheard of, deportation. The occupation forces, especially the ambitious middle-level officers, were fanatically suspicious of everyone and everything. Each new Résistance accomplishment fueled the fires of their anger. Quite simply, no one was safe. Kafka could not have invented such a hell.”