Gaëtan's Secret

He had told her the truth, or a piece of it, which was the best kind of lie and the one he had been trained to tell.

"I didn't know," he had said, in the cab, with the marsh road rough under the wheels. "I guessed. When the radio went. You heard her, the dispatcher. That voice. That's not check the plates again. That's drop everything. Something's happened somewhere else, somewhere bigger, and they want every car they've got." He had kept his eyes on the road. "I've seen it before. In Lyon. They stop you for a broken light and then the radio goes and they're gone before you've got your licence back in your wallet."

"You were stopped a lot in Lyon?"

"I'm called Yassine," he had said, and felt her go quiet beside him, and hated himself, a little, for how well it worked.

She had not asked again. She had looked at him for a while longer in the green glow of the dashboard, and then turned her face to the window and the dark, and when they got back to the mas she had taken the carrier bag out from under the seat and carried it into the house without a word, and the next morning at five the broom had hit the ceiling exactly three times, as always, and he had thought, lying there listening to it, that perhaps it was over. He did not really believe it. He did not believe anything any more that he could not see with his own eyes, and sometimes not that.

• • •

On the Tuesday she sent him to the summer grass.

"The cows," she said at breakfast. "Somebody has to check them, and the troughs down there, and the fence by the dunes where the campers cut it last year. Take Mistrau. Take food. Stay the night in the cabane and come back in the morning." She did not look up from her bread. "Timéo can go with you."

"Timéo's got the dentist," said Timéo, with his mouth full.

"Since when?"

"Since my mother made the appointment. Thursday. I told you."

"Today's Tuesday."

"Then I've got the dentist on Thursday," said Timéo, unperturbed, "and today I'm going to the beach with Lucie from the bakery."

Magali looked at him with an expression of such weary contempt that Fredo, at the head of the table, made a sound that might in another man have been a laugh. It was the first sound like that Yassine had heard him make since the funeral.

"Alone, then," Magali said, and looked at Yassine for the first time that morning, briefly. "You'll manage."

• • •

It took him four hours in the heat, by the old dike, the same way they had brought the cows in the dark. In daylight it was a different country. Flat and enormous and white with glare, the lagoons on either side lying like sheets of tin, the far tamarisks floating on their own mirages, and nothing moving on it anywhere but the heat itself and the slow black dots of the egrets and now and then a harrier, low over the reeds, tilting. Mistrau went well. He shied twice at herons and once at a plastic bag caught on a fence post that flapped at him like a living thing, and each time Yassine sat it, his weight going down and back without his telling it to, and felt the horse come back under him afterwards, still trembling, still furious, but there.

The summer grass lay behind the dunes in a long shallow basin of glasswort and rush and sand. The cows were scattered across it, black on the grey green, grazing, their calves lying in the shade of the few tamarisks. The cabane was at the north end, on a low rise, a gardian's hut of the old kind: whitewashed walls, a thatched roof of reeds coming down almost to the ground at the back, rounded like the stern of a boat to take the mistral, and on the ridge at the front a pair of crossed horns nailed to a post. Inside there was a table and a bench and a bunk with a straw mattress and a rusted stove, and a calendar from the feed merchant in Vauvert, this one from eleven years ago, turned to March.

He checked the troughs. He counted the cows, and got forty, and the calves, and got them all. He mended the fence by the dunes where someone had cut it, though not, he thought, campers, because campers did not cut a gap exactly the width of a horse with a pack saddle, at the exact point where a track came down through the dunes from the beach. He mended it anyway. Then he sat in the doorway of the cabane in the shade with a hunk of bread and a tin of sardines and a bottle of water gone warm as blood, and watched the light go long across the basin and the cows drift slowly towards the water, and let himself, for an hour, think about nothing.

Nine days. That was what was left of Granier's two weeks. Nine days, and he had nothing. He had a deadline, the August moon, and a man in a linen jacket, and a dead old man in a cemetery on the marsh road, and nothing else. No night. No beach. No name but Arnaud's, which Granier already had and could do nothing with.

He was thinking this, or trying not to think it, when he heard the cars.

• • •

They came from the north, along the sand track that ran between the summer grass and the lagoon. Two of them. He heard them before he saw them, because the land was so flat and so silent that a car engine carried for kilometres, and then he saw the dust, a long low pale plume against the sky going pink in the west, and then the cars themselves.

The first was Gaëtan's pickup. He knew it by the dent in the tailgate and the way it sat low on the left side where a spring had gone. The second was grey, and clean, and German.

He got up from the doorway of the cabane. He did not think about it. He went round the back, where the thatch came down almost to the ground, and lay flat in the sand under the eaves where he could see along the side wall of the hut and down the slope towards the track, and the part of him that kept the notebook opened it, and the rest of him lay there in the hot sand with his heart going and his face pressed into the smell of dry reed and wished, with a violence that surprised him, that he had not seen anything at all.

The cars stopped where the track came closest to the dunes, perhaps three hundred metres from the cabane. Not at the cabane. Gaëtan must have seen Mistrau in the little corral beside it; he must have known someone was here. He had stopped short of it anyway. Or perhaps that was why he had stopped short.

Gaëtan got out of the pickup. The driver of the grey car got out of the grey car, the big man Yassine had seen only as a shape behind tinted glass, and he was bigger standing up, broad and slow and heavy in the shoulders, in a black T-shirt and jeans. And from the passenger side of the grey car, a second man, younger, thin, in a tracksuit, who stood by the open door with his hands in his pockets looking round at the empty land as if it bored him.

Not Arnaud. Arnaud's people.

They talked. Yassine could not hear a word. He could see Gaëtan standing with his back to the pickup and his arms folded, and the big man standing in front of him, close, too close, the way men stand when they want you to feel the size of them. He could see the big man's hands move. He could see Gaëtan shake his head, once, and the big man's hands move again, and Gaëtan look away, out across the lagoon towards the sunset, the way he had looked south from the rise in the dike that first evening, the way he had stood in the shallows looking at the place where the boat had been.

Then the thin young man in the tracksuit took something out of his pocket and held it out, and Gaëtan looked at it for a long time, and took it.

It was small. An envelope, Yassine thought, or a phone. He could not see. Gaëtan put it in the back pocket of his jeans without looking at it again.

The big man clapped him on the shoulder, heavily, twice. Then the two of them got back into the grey car and it turned in a wide slow arc on the sand and went away north along the track with its plume of dust going gold now in the last of the light, and Gaëtan stood by his pickup and watched it go, and did not move for a long time after it had gone.

Then he turned and looked straight up the slope at the cabane.

"You can come out," he called. "Mistrau's in the corral. You're not invisible."

• • •

They sat on the bench outside the cabane door as the sun went down, with the bottle of warm water between them and the cows moving slowly down to the edge of the lagoon, black against the copper of the water.

Gaëtan did not start for a long time. When he did, he did not look at Yassine.

"Crédit Agricole," he said. "You saw the letter. Everybody's seen the letter, it's been on the kitchen table since May. Third reminder. There's been a fourth since. And a fifth, that one went straight to Papa and he hasn't shown it to anyone. I found it in his jacket." He picked up the water bottle and turned it in his hands without drinking. "October. That's what it says. If it isn't paid by October, they start the procedure. You know what the procedure is?"

"I can guess."

"The procedure is they take the land. Not the leases, those are nothing, those go back to whoever owns them. The land that's ours. The mas. The pens. The far field where Papa sits every night. The field with Grandpa's horses buried in it. They take it and they sell it, probably to some Dutchman who wants a holiday house with a view of the flamingos, and the bulls go to the slaughterhouse in Arles because nobody's buying bulls this year, and Fangas goes with them, and that's the end." He set the bottle down. "Nine generations. That's the end."

The cows had reached the water. The calves were splashing at the edge of it, and the egrets had come down among them, white as paper.

"And your father says no."

"My father says no." Gaëtan's voice was very quiet. "My father says no to the white, and no to selling the bulls, and no to selling the summer lease to the Conservatoire, and no to the bank, and no to me. My father would let the whole place go into the sea with him standing on the step of the mas saying no, because his father carried cigarettes and never carried anything worse, and because Maman—" He stopped. "Because of things. Because he's proud. Because he's a stubborn old bastard who'd rather lose everything than lose an argument."

"And Manolo?"

That made Gaëtan look at him.

"They say it wasn't them," he said. "Arnaud's people. That's what Bruno said. The big one. He swore it. He said Arnaud was as shocked as anybody, he said Arnaud sent flowers. He said there are other people on this coast, people from the cités who think they can push in, and that's who it was, and Arnaud's going to deal with it." He laughed, a short ugly sound with nothing of the old laugh in it. "Arnaud sent flowers. Did you see them? A big white wreath. With deepest sympathy, T.A. I put it in the bins behind the church."

"Do you believe him?"

Gaëtan did not answer that. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out what the thin man had given him. It was a phone. A cheap black phone, almost exactly like the one in Yassine's own pocket, with nothing in it, probably, but one number.

"One run," Gaëtan said, looking at it. "That's what they're offering me. Not Papa. Me. One run, on the August moon, the white mixed in with the rest, and the bank's paid. All of it. Every letter. And then we stop. All of it. The resin too. No more boats, no more Arnaud. He said so. He said he'll find another route and leave us alone forever and we can go back to being a manade that sells meat to tourists and runs its bulls at Lunel on Saturdays." He turned the phone over. "One night. I've done forty nights. What's one more?"

"Have you said yes?"

"I've said I'll think." Gaëtan put the phone back in his pocket. "That's what this is. So I can tell them when I've thought." He was quiet a while. "Papa doesn't know. Magali doesn't know. Nobody knows but you, and you only know because you were lying in the sand behind the cabane like a lizard." He looked at Yassine sideways, and something of the old laugh came back into his face, faintly, like a light coming on in a house a long way off. "What were you doing back there, anyway?"

"I don't know," Yassine said, and found that it was true.

"Manolo's boys," Gaëtan said. "You're all the same. All of you. Always watching." He picked up a handful of sand and let it run out between his fingers. "He used to watch me like that. When I was at the school. Like he was reading me. I hated it." The sand ran out. "I miss him. I didn't think I would. I miss him like a tooth."

The sun had gone. The sky over the lagoon was green going to grey, and the first stars were out over the dunes, and the cows were coming back up from the water in a slow black line with their calves at their heels.

"You won't tell Papa," Gaëtan said.

It was not quite a question. Yassine looked at him. In the last of the light his face was tired and open and younger than it had been in the yard after the tri, younger than in the bodega, younger than anything, and it was the face of a man who had not said this to anyone and had needed to, and had chosen him.

"No," Yassine said. "I won't tell him."

Gaëtan nodded slowly, and looked away out across the basin, and put his hand for a moment on Yassine's shoulder, heavily, the way his father had once leaned on the back of a chair, and left it there.

They sat like that while the dark came down. Yassine did not move. He sat on the bench in front of the gardian's hut with the crossed horns over the door and his friend's hand on his shoulder and the cheap phone in his own pocket, the one that held a single conversation with a man on the fourth floor of a glass building in Montpellier, and he thought about Sunday, and the toilet with the frosted window, and the tap running, and a report that would say G.P. observed meeting two associates of T.A., received communication device, cocaine run proposed for August new moon, subject undecided, which was everything Granier had asked him for and more, the beginning of a night and a beach, the thing that would save the Plantiers from five o'clock on a Tuesday morning with the BRI and a dog.

He thought about it for a long time. And then, sitting there in the dark with Gaëtan's hand on his shoulder, he understood that he was not going to write it, not this Sunday, perhaps not ever, and that he had two secrets now instead of one, his friend's and his own, and that he was keeping both of them from everyone, and that he did not know any more, if he had ever known, which of them weighed more.