The Inheritors Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE INHERITORS

  ‘[The Inheritors] has everything we love about [Hannelore Cayre]; damaged but memorable characters, sharp language, ferocious humour, an undercurrent of political rage, a punchy narrative and lashings of subversion.’ —Lire

  ‘As corrosive as ever, the author of The Godmother unleashes her caustic eloquence in a hilariously black tale that mocks the self-perpetuation of the élite.’ —Paris Match

  ‘Social justice fuels the noir works of this author and lawyer: the little guys win, the powerful lose. So it was in The Godmother, in 2017, and so it is again, now more than ever, in The Inheritors.’ —Le Monde

  ‘[Cayre’s] language takes your breath away, as the author so often does with her rapid-fire style.’ —Causette

  ‘A work of noir fiction worth its weight in gold.’ —Le Journal de Montréal

  ‘The author has a knack for producing one irresistibly eccentric character after another.’ —Les Echos Week-end

  ‘A funny, irreverent and exhilarating novel, in the purest tradition of French anarchistic crime novels.’ —Femme Actuelle Senior

  ‘A fabulous work of crime fiction – very funny and very politically incorrect – masterfully drawn by a specialist in the genre.’ —Bernard Poirette, Europe 1 podcast

  HANNELORE CAYRE is a French writer, director and criminal lawyer. Her most recent work, The Godmother, won the European Crime Fiction Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and has been shortlisted for a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger award. The Godmother was also featured on The New York Times’ ‘100 Notable Books of 2019’ list and has been made into a major film starring Isabelle Huppert.

  STEPHANIE SMEE left a career in law to work as a literary translator. Recent publications include the translations of Hannelore Cayre’s The Godmother, and Françoise Frenkel’s rediscovered World War II memoir No Place to Lay One’s Head, which was awarded the JQ–Wingate Prize. Her translation of Joseph Ponthus’ prize-winning work, On the Line, is forthcoming.

  Book club notes are available for The Inheritors from blackincbooks.com.au

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Editions Métailié, Paris, 2020

  Originally published in France as Richesse Oblige in 2020

  English translation © Stephanie Smee 2020

  Hannelore Cayre asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781760642662 (paperback)

  9781743821527 (ebook)

  Cover design by Akiko Chan

  Text design and typesetting by Akiko Chan

  Cover image: Martinedoucet/iStock

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgements

  It was in the moonless countryside, pitch black, that I saw it for the first time, the green fluorescent rabbit, vivid green in its abandoned field, living its life, oblivious to its own peculiarity, in a burning halo, like when you close your eyes to somebody’s memory, a signal in the black night, a small dot.

  Olivier Cadiot, Retour définitif et durable de l’être aimé

  (Definitive and Lasting Return of the Loved One)

  ‘DO YOU THINK IT’S APPROPRIATE for a funeral, that outfit?’

  ‘Yeah, I do, why? It’s my nicest tracksuit . . . The velour one! And anyway, have you looked in the mirror? You’d think . . . But really, who gives a shit?’

  She was right about that, Hildegarde, who gave a shit. It’s true, we both looked like two spaced-out losers, and anyway, we’d be getting weird looks from everybody no matter what we decided to wear.

  There was Juliette, my daughter, in khaki greens. She was going through her camo stage. And Pistachio and Geranium, our two ugly mutts wearing neither leash nor collar but sporting bows around their necks. Hildegarde, wearing her black velour tracksuit in an attempt to be chichi, and her size 46 black Nikes which she must have quickly dusted over with a rag. And then there was me, with my new Japanese titanium orthoses, which meant I could manage without my crutches. They pretty much had me goose-stepping when I walked, but it was improving every day. It’s fair to say we stood out somewhat at the Trocadéro cemetery, where the de Rignys had their vault – smack-bang between the Dassault and Bouygues families.

  A lot of people had come, seeing as I had made a statement by taking out the most expensive notice in Le Figaro to announce Tata’s death, but none of them had acknowledged us. Worse still, a gap had emerged, a sort of cordon sanitaire between the three of us and everyone else which meant they could avoid being contaminated by our presence.

  Who were they? Friends from bridge? People who filled their days going from one society event to another? Geriatrics who’d come to celebrate one of their idols taking such a long time to die? No idea! Eight months we had looked after Aunt Yvonne and we’d never received a single visitor at her townhouse mansion apart from her lawyer and her bank manager. All of this aside, though, I’m sure we were the ones most affected by her passing. The fact is we had grown attached to the old woman, especially when towards the end she was going so loopy she used to sing us Colette Renard’s Evenings of a Demoiselle, inexplicably, all day long:

  There’ll be some sucking of the sweet

  Some stroking of the fish

  There’ll be some starching of the shirt

  And some nibbling on a treat

  Which, at the age of ninety-eight, you’ll admit shows quite some panache.

  Be that as it may, she had now been dead for four days and I had become rich. Unimaginably rich. And because the rich are always in a hurry, I had more important things to do than hang around a cemetery. Our plane was leaving in six hours for our new home in the tax haven that is the British Virgin Islands – and the following Monday, because Monday’s always a good day to start bringing about the end of the world, we would get to work.

  Standing outside that vault, which the gravediggers no longer even bothered to seal given that the de Rignys were falling like flies (I’m not kidding, six in less than a year), I thought about our common forebear, Auguste. Whether his life story as I recount it in these pages reflects the life he truly lived, and whether his character was as I describe it is really neither here nor there.

  Setting down those few months in the life of that appealing, yet slightly clueless young man is a way of rendering him flesh and blood, of giving him the immortality he deserves as a thank you for his gesture to my family. A way of extracting him from ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, as Shakespeare would say. This way he’ll find himself in the company of some other faithful fellows who may not exist in real life, but rather appear in those nineteenth-century novels that fashioned my political thinking and made me who I am.

  Saint-Germain-en-Laye

  18 January 1870

  Auguste had been sitting on the edge of his bed for more than an hour, eyes fixed on this costly novelty item available in the department stores, this thing called an alarm clock, which his aunt Clothilde had given him for his twentieth birthday.

&nb
sp; Because we all know there will never be enough roosters in Paris to rouse you from your sleep, she had quipped in the note on the little card attached to the parcel.

  It consisted of a clock which had been mounted inside a finely worked case portraying birds of paradise. Pondering the invention, the young man thought sadly how it would in many respects wreak havoc with the habits of all those night owls who, like him, struggled to rise in the morning. The thing was designed to set off a bell at a particular predetermined moment. In addition to the hands indicating hours and minutes, a special hand, which one would set the previous evening, marked the time to rise. Auguste had set that hand at the number seven, one hour prior to the time indicated on his summons to attend the draw.

  This much-anticipated date had been haunting him since the month of October, when he had presented himself at the town hall for the census of the class of 1869, the year of his twentieth birthday. Trying not to dwell on the matter during the festive season, he had remained in a permanent state of inebriation until January, then had surprised himself by coming to see the draw as offering a conclusion to his agonising.

  The countdown was finally over and today was the day!

  This morning he would finally know if he drew a bad number, forcing him to abandon the Sorbonne – to give up his Parisian life, his pleasures, his indolent habits – for nine years of degrading military service, five of which would find him surrounded by brutish louts in damp barracks furnished with poor bedding.

  The ring of that devilish invention made him jump, causing his innards to contract: those not appearing for roll call at eight o’clock sharp shall be the first to be given their marching orders were the words written at the foot of his call-up notice.

  How he would have loved his mother and sister to accompany him to the draw. Unfortunately they had both been called as a matter of urgency to the bedside of an aunt who had taken ill. Nor was his father able to join him, confined to the house as he was with a poor back. That left his brother-in-law, Jules, a former officer turned businessman, and his brother, Ferdinand, an ambitious type who practised a cult-like devotion to money and whose favourite pastime was to back Auguste into a corner until he was ready to explode. Even if those two had offered to provide him with some comfort in the face of his ordeal, Auguste would have categorically refused.

  The women of the family had not, however, abandoned him entirely, since they had arranged to have a mass said at Saint-Germain-de-Paris asking Providence to spare him the fate of military service. Obviously, Auguste did not believe in God: even less so since reading On the Origin of Species, a luminous beacon of a book that succeeded in scientifically refuting the grotesque notion of life as divine creation, but privately he told himself that neither could the prayers bought by his mother do him any harm.

  He dressed hastily and made his way through the silent house, taking care not to wake anybody. Once over the threshold, he pulled his collar up to his ears, ready to launch himself into the inky darkness of that winter morning. But scarcely had he passed through the metal gate of his family home when his imagination bolted. He already pictured himself, fear in his belly, marching into battle, just as that ill-bred old soldier his parents insisted on inviting to dine at their table used to describe in words fit to terrify the ladies – a man by the name of Pélissier, a veteran of the dreadful siege of Sebastopol. In the halo of light cast by the gas street-lamps he could practically make out the twisted frozen corpses of horses half-eaten by soldiers.

  As he made his way up Rue de la République, the dawn filled with the silhouettes of people whose snowy footprints were converging on the town hall of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Children were playing battle games out the front of the building, entertaining the soldiers standing guard. Sitting astride imaginary mounts and armed with snowballs and sticks by way of swords, they launched themselves, shouting, at invisible enemies. Prussians, they said.

  Those accompanying the young men were asked to remain outside while all those who had been called up were led by privates into the Hall of Honour. Sitting at the table waiting for them, with the municipal register containing the names of all the young men born in 1849 open in front of him, was the mayor, wearing his sash of red, white and blue, together with an impatient officer flanked by a handful of soldiers.

  Auguste went to join a small group of bourgeois civilians standing around a large coal brazier, who had been joined, naturally enough, by the offspring of their servants. He greeted the Bertelot boy, who he knew had harboured designs on his cousin at some point, as well as his childhood friend Duchaussois, whom his father was constantly holding up as an example after he had pursued a position in the magistracy. He saw his high-school friends Berquet, Bruault and Fromoisin . . . and there was Portefaux, too, the son of the mortgage registrar. Auguste hardly recognised him he had gained so much weight: he was hoping to be declared unfit for service on the grounds of obesity, he said. Auguste was equally surprised to see the fellow whom his mother had always called little Perret, the youngest son of their gardener, who it seemed had been born the same year as him. Then there were the sons of the town’s shopkeepers. Some of them he knew from church, from having played with them when he was younger, or simply from having glimpsed them at the back of their parents’ shops. A cheerful hubbub was very quickly heard emerging from this inner circle.

  A little removed, keeping a respectful distance from the stove, stood a crowd of young workers clad in factory coats, as well as a few peasants battling silently against the cold, dressed as if heading to Mass. They had all made the effort to put on clean clothes, for if their poverty was tolerated it was only because they had made the effort to dress properly and did not allow their impoverishment to cause offence to those with whom they were required to rub shoulders.

  Auguste could not help but observe them surreptitiously.

  ‘There are so many of them,’ he thought, astonished. ‘How awkwardly they conduct themselves, and how stubborn their silence. Their manner sits at such odds with the ease and civility of the well-to-do. Why are they not the ones approaching the stove so they might warm their bones, with their meagre clothes and inadequate shoes, so poorly suited to the cold?’

  ‘These poor lads had a price, it seems. How much for that sturdy specimen hopping from one clog to another so as not to freeze? And would he agree to sell himself, that man, if he weren’t given his marching orders? Did he think that to have himself killed in the place of the son of a wealthier family is “a matter of outlook” as Monsieur Thiers recently asserted in the Chamber? Did he think it self-evident, a given, much like conceding his place around the fire?’

  ‘How complicated it all is!’ he thought, sighing.

  Despite the Emperor’s desire to bring some ethics to the trade in men, the principle of freedom to contract had once again triumphed in the Chamber as a result of pressure exerted by the country’s paterfamilias.

  The liberal deputies had voted by overwhelming majority in favour of bringing back military substitution as it had been practised prior to the accession of Napoléon III. Thus, it was no longer a question of the state being responsible for finding a replacement, in exchange for a fee, for those young men refusing to go, but rather a matter for the families themselves. There had of course been the minor socialist group led by Jules Simon protesting this white slave trade, this resurgence of traffickers in human flesh – but it was against a backdrop of general indifference. The conservatives, for their part, had brandished the spectre of war with Prussia. And contrary to all expectations, that country, while considerably smaller than France, had just crushed Austria at Sadowa in a single battle, thanks entirely to its compulsory service and its army of 1,200,000 men, but the conservatives too had been preaching in the wilderness.

  At around ten o’clock, the officer present started to call the roll that had been stripped of exemptions, while a soldier turned the handle of the drum containing the 127 numbers slotted into their wooden casings.

  Each time
a name was called to be drawn, Auguste, who was not only in a state of panic but also bad at mathematics, would jump and lose track of his reasoning: ‘There are 167 on the list, and twenty of them are exempted, so given that the municipality has to supply twenty-five men and assuming there’ll be ten discharged for various reasons, a number would become truly bad from twice that, so from fifty, which means there’s one chance in . . .’

  Duchaussois was the first of the little group around the coal stove to be called. Were he to draw an unlucky number, he would seek to rely on a document he had thought to have prepared by a public prosecutor of the Imperial Court in Paris who was a family friend, which referenced his position as an acting judge on the Seine Tribunal, a position he had occupied for three years without remuneration. He drew a 10, asserted his claim, and was exempted.

  Portefaux was the next name to be called . . .

  After hesitating for some minutes as he mumbled who knows what sort of incantation, the young man was called to order and pushed unceremoniously towards the urn for the draw. When he extracted the number from its casing, he started to weep with relief: 120.

  ‘You’ll be able to start your diet, you great lazy oaf,’ mocked the soldier, as he returned to cranking the handle of the drum.

  At last, around midday, it was Auguste’s turn.

  When his name was called, his face crumpled. His body felt like it weighed a tonne as he dragged himself to the urn, plunged in his hand, then yanked it out as if from boiling water.

  ‘A 4,’ he murmured, defeated.

  ‘Selected!’ cried the officer, before reeling off the relevant articles of the Code in an emotionless voice. ‘Monsieur, in view of your number and unless you qualify for discharge, your position in the contingent is hereby confirmed. The recruitment board shall make its announcement on 18 July, whereupon you may proffer such replacement as you may have identified from any département in the Empire. The mayor shall inform you of the conditions of said replacement’s acceptance, as well as any documents you may be called upon to produce. We are relying on your zeal in performing your duty, and remind you of the unfortunate consequences which shall befall both you and your family in the event of your failure to comply.’