What Manolo Knew

Timéo came back on the Tuesday, against everyone's orders, on the back of his mother's moped because he could not hold the handlebars of his own.

He stood in the yard at seven in the morning with his right hand in its splint held against his chest in a sling made from a café tea towel and his face gone yellow and green round the eye, and said that he had come to work. Magali told him to go home. He said there was nothing at home but his mother and the television. Fredo, on the step, looked at him for a long moment and said, "The tack. You can clean the tack. One-handed. Sitting down," and Timéo said yes, Fredo, and went into the tack room and sat down on an upturned bucket among the bridles and the saddles with a tin of grease and a rag in his left hand, and did not come out again all morning.

Yassine took him a coffee at eleven. It was an excuse. He had been looking for one since the salt road.

He had not slept. He had driven back from Aigues-Mortes on the Sunday night and parked in the yard at two in the morning and sat in the car until the sky went grey, and when Magali came out to the stables at five he had got out and gone to work and said his mother was all right, a scare, nothing, and she had looked at him and said nothing either. He had worked all Monday. He had taken his turn at the pens on Monday night with Gaëtan and the rifle and had not said a word about any of it, and Gaëtan had not asked, and at four in the morning, when the watch changed, he had gone up to the room over the tack and lain on the horsehair mattress with his eyes open and watched the fish.

It was still there. At the back of his mind, under the surface. Sometime in the summer. He had not looked at it. He had felt it move every time he thought about the photograph on the driver's phone, every time he thought about the white plastic chair under the plane tree with one of its legs sunk into the soft earth, and he had looked away every time, at something else, at anything.

The tack room smelled of leather and grease and the boy's sweat. Timéo was sitting on his bucket with a bridle across his knees, working the rag into the cheekpiece with his left hand, clumsily, slowly, with enormous concentration.

"You're doing that wrong," Yassine said.

"I know. It's my wrong hand."

"You're doing it wrong with your right hand too. I've seen you." He gave the boy the coffee and sat down on a saddle rack opposite, and they sat there for a while without speaking, Timéo drinking his coffee left-handed and Yassine watching the dust turn in the bar of sunlight from the door.

"On Friday," he said. "When you came back. You said they asked you things."

The boy did not look up. The rag went on moving on the leather, round and round.

"You said they asked about the horses. About when." Yassine kept his voice low and level, the way Gaëtan talked to the herd. "What else did they ask?"

"Nothing."

"Timéo."

"Nothing. I said." The rag stopped. "I didn't tell them anything, Yassine. I swear on my mother. They hit me and they did the—" He lifted the splinted hand an inch in its tea towel and put it down again. "And I didn't say. Not about the horses, not about the beach. Not about anything."

"I believe you."

"Then why are you asking?"

Because there was a fish, Yassine thought. Because something had moved at the back of his mind on the salt road below the gold walls and had not stopped moving since. Because he had seen the boy flinch, on the kitchen floor, when he had asked what things, a quick sideways shying in the eyes, like a horse that has seen a plastic bag.

"Because you didn't say all of it," he said. "On Friday. You stopped."

The boy sat very still on his bucket. In the bar of sunlight from the door, the dust went on turning.

"They asked about you," Timéo said.

• • •

He said it to the bridle. He said it very quietly, in a voice that had none of his chatter in it, the voice of a much younger boy telling a grown-up something he has been carrying alone and does not understand.

"Not at first. At first it was the horses. When the next one was, the next boat. Who rides. How many. I said I don't know, I just muck out. Then the big one hit me, Bruno, and the other one did my hand." He swallowed. "And then after, when I was on the floor, the young one squatted down next to me. The one in the tracksuit. And he was nice. That was the worst. He was really nice. He gave me water. And he said, Listen, it's not you we want, little one. It's the new one. The one the old raseteur brought you."

Yassine did not move.

"He said, Where's he from? Lyon? You believe that? And I said yes, Lyon, everybody knows he's from Lyon. And he laughed. He said, Lyon. Like it was a joke." Timéo's left hand had closed round the rag. "And he said, The old man said Lyon too. The old man said Lyon right to the end. Stubborn old goat. And the big one told him to shut up, and he stopped talking about it, and they put me in the car."

The dust turned in the sunlight. Outside in the yard a dog barked once and was quiet. Somewhere far off across the marsh a tractor was working, a faint steady drone like a bee against a window.

"I didn't know what it meant," Timéo said. "I still don't. I thought about it all weekend. The old man said Lyon right to the end." He looked up at last. His eye, the good one, was wet. "Manolo. They meant Manolo, didn't they? They asked Manolo about you. Before." His voice cracked. "Why would they ask Manolo about you?"

• • •

He did not remember leaving the tack room.

He remembered the yard, white with noon, and the plane tree, and the heat coming up off the gravel through the soles of his boots. He remembered walking past the stables and the pens and through the gate into the near pasture and on, across the pasture, through the dry grass, towards the far field, not fast, not slow, with his hands hanging at his sides, the way a man walks who is going nowhere and must keep moving or fall down. He remembered the bulls lifting their heads to watch him pass. He remembered that he did not stop until he came to the fence of the far field, where Fredo sat in the evenings, and that he put both hands on the top rail and held on to it, and stood there in the full white glare of the day with the sweat running into his eyes, and let the fish come up.

It came up.

Sometime in the summer. A photograph of the first page of an authorisation, on a desk in bad light, at an angle. Target: Manade Plantier. The agent's name on the second page, which they did not have, or had not photographed. They know there's somebody, Granier had said. And I'd imagine it isn't very difficult, if you know there's somebody, to look round the Manade Plantier and ask yourself who's new.

Who's new. And who brought him.

They had not needed his name. They had only needed to ask who the new one was, and someone at the fête, someone at the bodega, someone in the bar under the fading flags shouting Pailladin, would have told them: Manolo's boy. Manolo Segura brought him. Manolo answers for him. And so they had gone to the bull school one night after the arena was dark, the big one and the nice one in the tracksuit, and found the old man in his plastic chair under the plane tree with his newspaper on his knee, and asked him. Where's he from, your boy? What is he?

And Manolo had known.

That was the thing. That was the thing that came up out of the dark water at last and lay there on the surface in the white noon light where he could not look away from it. Manolo had known. Not that he was a policeman now, not that he had been sent. But that he had been one. You'll want to keep that in your pocket, the old man had said at his kitchen table, under the photographs. I'll say you were in Lyon. I'm not a talker. Ask anybody. Manolo Segura is not a talker.

They had asked him. And he had said Lyon.

He had said Lyon with two men standing over him in the dark at the gate of his own school, and he had gone on saying it, and he had said it right to the end. Because the boy had asked him to keep it in his pocket. Because a crochet goes to whoever runs next and you don't make a speech about it. Because he was not a talker. Because he had answered for him.

Yassine held onto the rail of the fence. He held on to it with both hands until the splinters of the old grey wood went into his palms, and he did not feel them, and he bent his head down over his hands in the heat and opened his mouth, and the sound that came out of him was not one he had ever heard himself make, and the bulls in the far field lifted their heads all at once and turned them towards it, and stood listening, quite still, the way they had stood beside the canal at Aigues-Mortes on the first morning, all their heads turned one way.

• • •

He went to Fredo at nine that night.

The old man was in the kitchen at the head of the table with the rifle in its blanket at his elbow and the lamp on, and Magali was at the sink, and Gaëtan was in his chair on his father's right with his elbows on the oilcloth and his head in his hands, the way he had sat every evening since the boy came walking up the track. Yassine stood in the doorway. His palms were bandaged where Magali had pulled the splinters out of them that afternoon without asking him how they had got there, and he did not sit down.

"Eight days," he said. "Six now."

Fredo looked up.

"They'll come," Yassine said. "On the moon. If they don't get an answer, they'll come up that track with Bruno and the other one and whoever else, and the rifle won't stop them, and the dogs won't stop them, and next time it won't be fingers." He did not look at Gaëtan. "Or they'll take what they want some other way. They'll take the boy again. Or Magali, on the road to Vauvert. Or Fangas. You know they will."

"I know," said Fredo.

"So give them an answer."

The old man's face did not change. Behind him at the sink, Magali had gone still.

"Give them yes," Yassine said.

Gaëtan lifted his head out of his hands.

"Tell Arnaud yes. Tell him the Plantiers will carry the white on the moon. Tell him the old man has seen sense, the boy's hand changed his mind, whatever he wants to hear. And then let him bring it. All of it. Let him send the boat in to the beach with whatever's on it and his own people on the sand to watch it come in, because he will, the first time, he'll want to see it with his own eyes. And then—" He stopped. He made himself go on. "And then don't be there."

"Don't be there," Fredo repeated slowly.

"Don't be on the beach. Not one of you. Not a horse, not a pannier, not a hand on anything. Let them land it, and let them find there's nobody there to carry it, and let them try to carry it themselves. In the dark. Across ground they don't know. On the one track a car can take out of there, the dike track, with the river at the end of it and the bac shut until morning." He looked at the old man. "And on that night, on that beach, there'll be other people waiting. People who've been wanting Thierry Arnaud on a beach with his hands full for twenty years."

The kitchen was silent. The lamp hummed. A moth battered itself against the shade, over and over, with a sound like someone tapping a fingernail on glass.

"What people?" Magali said.

Yassine did not answer. He did not look at her. He kept his eyes on the old man at the head of the table.

"We'd need to tell him yes," Fredo said at last. "To his face. Or on the telephone. And he'd need to believe it. And he would not believe it from me." He did not move his eyes from Yassine's. "I've said no to him for nine years. If I say yes now he'll smell it."

"Not from you."

Gaëtan reached into the pocket of his shirt.

He took out the cheap black phone, the one from behind the dunes, the one with a single number in it, and laid it on the oilcloth among the faded lemons, and sat back, and looked at his father. His face in the lamplight was grey and wet and entirely naked, the face of a man who has been carrying something heavy for a long way in the dark and has put it down at last at somebody's feet.

"From me," he said. "Papa. They gave it to me. Two weeks ago. Behind the dunes at the summer grass. They wanted me to do it without you. One run, the bank paid, and then it's finished. I said I'd think." His voice broke and he let it. "I was thinking about it. God forgive me. I was thinking about it when they took Timéo."

Fredo looked at the phone for a long time.

He did not shout. Yassine had been braced for him to shout, for the table to go over, for the old man to stand up and strike his son across the face. He did not. He sat at the head of the table with his big hands flat on the oilcloth on either side of the phone and looked at it, and then at his son, and then at it again, and something went out of his face and something else came into it, slowly, the way the tide comes into the salt pans, so slowly you cannot see it move and then it is everywhere.

"He'd believe it from you," he said quietly.

"Yes."

"He thinks you're the weak one."

Gaëtan flinched. "Yes."

"Good," said Fredo. "Then let him think it." He picked up the phone and held it in his palm and weighed it, as if it were a stone, or a cartridge, or the last of something. Then he held it out across the table to his son. "Tell him yes."

Gaëtan took it.

"And these people," Fredo said, without turning his head. He was still looking at his son, at the phone in his son's hand. "These people who'll be waiting on the beach. On the moon. With their hands empty, waiting for Arnaud." He paused. "They'll be there?"

"They'll be there."

"You're certain."

"I'm certain."

The old man nodded slowly. He did not ask how Yassine knew. He did not ask who they were, or why a man from Lyon who had come to them seven weeks ago with fat shoulders and Manolo's word should be certain of anything at all about what would happen on a beach in the dark on the night of the August moon. He did not ask anything. He sat at the head of his table in the lamplight with the moth tapping at the shade and his daughter motionless at the sink behind him and his son holding the phone, and looked down the length of the oilcloth at Yassine in the doorway with his bandaged hands, the long slow look from the doorstep, from the horns to the hocks and back, and whatever he saw there, he kept.

"Then that's what we'll do," Fredo Plantier said.