The Devil and Miss Prym Read online

  He picked up a stone from the ground.

  “Here’s the first of them, generously donated by Mother Nature to those who had to confront prehistoric animals. A stone like this doubtless saved the life of a man, and that man, after countless generations, led to you and me being born. If he hadn’t had that stone, the murderous carnivore would have devoured him, and hundreds of millions of people would not have been born.”

  The wind was blowing harder, and the rain was battering them, but neither of them looked away.

  “Many people criticize hunters, but Viscos welcomes them with open arms because it lives off them; some people hate seeing a bull in a bullring, but go and buy the meat from the butcher’s claiming that the animal had an ‘honorable’ death; a lot of people are critical of arms manufacturers, but they will continue to exist until there’s not a single weapon left on the face of the earth. Because as long as one weapon remains, there will always have to be another, to preserve the fragile balance.”

  “What has all this got to do with my village?” Chantal demanded. “What has it got to do with breaking the commandments, with murder, stealing, with the essence of human nature, with Good and Evil?”

  At this, the stranger’s eyes changed, as if overwhelmed by a deep sadness.

  “Remember what I told you at the beginning. I always tried to do my business according to the law; I considered myself what people usually term a ‘good man.’ Then one evening I received a phone call in my office: it was a woman’s voice, soft but devoid of emotion. She said her terrorist group had kidnapped my wife and daughters. They wanted a large quantity of what they knew I could give them—weapons. They told me to keep quiet about it, they told me that nothing would happen to my family if I followed their instructions.

  “The woman rang off saying that she would call again in half an hour and told me to wait for her call in a phone booth at the train station. She said not to worry; my family was being well treated and would be freed within a few hours, because all I had to do was send an electronic message to one of our subsidiaries in a certain country. It wasn’t even real theft, more like an illegal sale that would go completely unnoticed in the company I worked for.

  “Since I was a good citizen, brought up to respect the law and to feel protected by it, the first thing I did was to ring the police. A minute later, I was no longer the master of my own decisions; I was transformed into someone incapable of protecting his own family; my universe was suddenly filled with anonymous voices and frantic phone calls. When I went to the designated phone booth, an army of technicians had already hooked up the underground telephone cable to the most modern equipment available, so that they could instantaneously trace exactly where the call was coming from. There were helicopters ready to take off, police cars strategically positioned to block the traffic, trained men, armed to the teeth, on full alert.

  “Two different governments, in distant continents, already knew what was going on and they forbade any negotiations; all I had to do was to follow orders, repeat what they told me to say and behave exactly as instructed by the experts.

  “Before the day was out, the hiding place where they were keeping the hostages had been discovered, and the kidnappers—two young men and a woman, all apparently inexperienced, simply disposable elements in a powerful political organization—lay dead, riddled with bullets. Before they died, however, they had time to execute my wife and daughters. If even God has a hell, which is his love for mankind, then any man has his hell within easy reach, and that’s his love for his family.”

  The stranger fell silent; he was afraid of losing control of his voice and betraying an emotion he preferred to keep hidden. As soon as he had recovered, he went on:

  “Both the police and the kidnappers used weapons made by my company. No one knows how the terrorists came to be in possession of them, and that’s of no importance: they had them. Despite all my efforts, my struggle to ensure that everything was carried out according to the strictest regulations for their manufacture and sale, my family had been killed by something which I, at some point, had sold—perhaps over a meal at an expensive restaurant, while I chatted about the weather or world politics.”

  Another pause. When he spoke again, it was as if he were another person, as if nothing he was saying had anything to do with him.

  “I know the weapon and the ammunition used to kill my family well. I know which part of the body they aimed at: the chest. The bullet makes only a small hole on entering—about the size of your little finger. When it hits the first bone, though, it splits into four, and each of the fragments continues in a different direction, brutally destroying everything in its path: kidneys, heart, liver, lungs. Every time it comes up against something solid, like a vertebra, it changes direction again, usually carrying with it sharp bone fragments and bits of torn muscle, until at last it finds a way out. Each of the four exit wounds is almost as big as a fist, and the bullet still has enough force to spatter round the room the bits of tissue, flesh and bone that clung to it during its journey through the body.

  “All of this takes less than two seconds; two seconds to die might not seem very long, but time isn’t measured like that. You understand, I hope.”

  Chantal nodded.

  “At the end of that year, I left my job. I traveled to the four corners of the earth, alone with my grief, asking myself how human beings can be capable of such evil. I lost the most precious thing a man can have: my faith in my fellow man. I laughed and I wept at God’s irony, at the absurd way he had chosen to demonstrate to me that I was an instrument of Good and Evil.

  “All my sense of compassion gradually vanished, and now my heart has entirely shriveled up; I don’t care whether I live or die. But first, for the sake of my wife and daughters, I need to grasp what happened in that hiding place. I can understand how people can kill out of hate or love, but why do it for no particular reason, simply over some business transaction?

  “This may seem naive to you—after all, people kill each other every day for money—but that doesn’t interest me, I’m only concerned with my wife and daughters. I want to know what was going on in the minds of those terrorists. I want to know whether, at any point, they might have taken pity on them and let them leave, because their war had nothing to do with my family. I want to know if, when Good and Evil are pitted against each other, there is a fraction of a second when Good might prevail.”

  “Why Viscos? Why my village?”

  “Why the weapons from my factory, when there are so many armaments factories in the world, some of them with no government controls? The answer is simple: chance. I needed a small place where everyone knew each other and got on together. The moment they learned about the reward, Good and Evil would once again be pitted against each other, and what had happened in that hiding place would happen in your village.

  “The terrorists were already surrounded and defeated; nevertheless, they killed my family merely in order to carry out a useless, empty ritual. Your village has what I did not have: it has the possibility to choose. They will be tempted by the desire for money and perhaps believe they have a mission to protect and save their village, but even so, they still retain the ability to decide whether or not to execute the hostage. That’s all. I want to see whether other people might have acted differently than those poor, bloodthirsty youngsters.

  “As I told you when we first met, the story of one man is the story of all men. If compassion exists, I will accept that fate was harsh with me, but that sometimes it can be gentle with others. That won’t change the way I feel in the slightest, it won’t bring my family back, but at least it will drive away the devil that’s always with me and give me some hope.”

  “And why do you want to know whether I am capable of stealing the gold?”

  “For the same reason. You may divide the world into trivial crimes and serious ones, but it isn’t like that. I think the terrorists did the same. They thought they were killing for a cause, not just for pleasure, love
, hate or money. If you took the gold bar, you would have to justify the crime to yourself and to me, and then I would understand how the murderers justified to themselves the killing of my loved ones. As you have seen, I have spent all these years trying to understand what happened. I don’t know whether this will bring me peace, but I can’t see any alternative.”

  “If I did steal the gold, you would never see me again.”

  For the first time during the almost thirty minutes they had been talking, the stranger smiled faintly.

  “I worked in the arms industry, don’t forget. And that included work for the secret service.”

  The man asked her to lead him to the river—he was lost, and did not know how to get back. Chantal took the shotgun—she had borrowed it from a friend on the pretext that she was very tense and needed to do a bit of hunting to try and relax—and put it back in its bag, and the two of them set off down the hill.

  They said nothing to each other on the way down. When they reached the river, the stranger said goodbye.

  “I understand why you’re delaying, but I can’t wait any longer. I can also understand that, in order to struggle with yourself, you needed to get to know me better: now you do.

  “I am a man who walks the earth with a devil at his side; in order to drive him away or to accept him once and for all, I need to know the answers to certain questions.”

  The fork banged repeatedly against the wineglass. Everyone in the bar, which was packed on that Friday night, turned towards the sound: it was Miss Prym calling for them to be silent.

  The effect was immediate: never in all the history of the village had a young woman whose sole duty was to serve the customers acted in such a manner.

  “She had better have something important to say,” thought the hotel landlady. “If not, I’ll get rid of her tonight, despite the promise I made to her grandmother never to abandon her.”

  “I’d like you all to listen,” Chantal said. “I’m going to tell you a story that everyone here, apart from our visitor, will know,” she said, pointing to the stranger. “After that, I’ll tell you another story that no one here, apart from our visitor, will know. When I’ve finished, it will be up to you to judge whether or not it was wrong of me to interrupt your well-earned Friday evening rest, after an exhausting week’s work.”

  “She’s taking a terrible risk,” the priest thought. “She doesn’t know anything we don’t know. She may be a poor orphan with few possibilities in life, but it’s going to be difficult to persuade the hotel landlady to keep her on after this.”

  But, when he thought about it again, perhaps it wouldn’t. We all commit sins, which are generally followed by two or three days of anger, after which all is forgiven; besides, he couldn’t think of anyone else in the village who could do her job. It was a young person’s job, and there were no other young people in Viscos.

  “Viscos has three streets, a small square with a cross in it, a few ruined houses and a church with a cemetery beside it,” Chantal began.

  “Just a moment,” the stranger said.

  He took a small cassette recorder out of his pocket, switched it on, and placed it on his table.

  “I’m interested in everything to do with the history of Viscos. I don’t want to miss a single word, so I hope you don’t mind if I record you.”

  Chantal did not know whether she minded or not, but there was no time to lose. She had been battling with her fears for hours, and now that she had finally found the courage to begin, she did not want any interruptions.

  “Viscos has three streets, a small square with a cross in it, a few ruined houses and a few well-preserved ones, a hotel, a postbox, and a church with a cemetery next to it.”

  Her description this time was a little more complete. She was not so nervous now.

  “As we all know, it used to be a haven for outlaws until our great lawmaker, Ahab, after his conversion by St. Savin, succeeded in transforming it into the village we know today, home only to men and women of goodwill.

  “What the stranger doesn’t know, and as I am going to explain now, is how Ahab managed to achieve that transformation. At no point did he try to convince anyone, because he knew what people were like; they would confuse honesty with weakness, and his authority would immediately be placed in doubt.

  “What he did was to send for some carpenters from a neighboring village, give them a piece of paper with a drawing on it, and order them to build something on the spot where the cross now stands. Day and night throughout the next ten days, the inhabitants of the village heard the sound of hammers and watched men sawing up planks of wood, fitting them together and screwing one piece to another. At the end of the ten days, this giant jigsaw puzzle was erected in the middle of the square, covered with a cloth. Ahab called all the villagers together for the inauguration of the monument.

  “Solemnly, without any speeches, he removed the cloth: there stood a gallows, complete with rope, trapdoor, everything, brand new and greased with beeswax to withstand the ravages of the weather for many years. Then, taking advantage of the fact that everyone was there, Ahab read out a series of new laws that protected farmers, encouraged the raising of livestock and rewarded anyone bringing new trade to Viscos. He added that, from then on, everyone would either have to find honest work or leave the village. That was all he said; not once did he mention the “monument” he had just inaugurated. Ahab did not believe in making threats.

  “When the ceremony was over, people gathered together in various groups. Most of them believed that Ahab had been duped by the saint, that he had lost his nerve, and that he should be killed. During the days that followed, many plans were made with that objective in mind. But the plotters could not avoid the sight of the gallows in the middle of the square, and they thought: What is that doing there? Was it erected in order to deal with anyone who goes against the new laws? Who is on Ahab’s side and who isn’t? Are there spies in our midst?

  “The gallows looked at the villagers, and the villagers looked at the gallows. Gradually, the rebels’ initial defiance gave way to fear; they all knew Ahab’s reputation and they knew he never went back on a decision. Some of them left the village; others decided to try the new jobs that had been suggested, simply because they had nowhere else to go or because they were conscious of the shadow cast by that instrument of death in the middle of the square. Before long, Viscos had been pacified and it became a large trading center near the frontier, exporting the finest wool and producing top-quality wheat.

  “The gallows remained in place for ten years. The wood withstood the weather well, but the rope occasionally had to be replaced with a new one. The gallows was never used. Ahab never once mentioned it. The mere sight of the gallows was enough to turn courage into fear, trust into suspicion, bravado into whispers of submission. When ten years had passed and the rule of law had finally been established in Viscos, Ahab had the gallows dismantled and used the wood to build a cross instead.”

  Chantal paused. The bar was completely silent apart from the sound of the stranger clapping.

  “That’s an excellent story,” he said. “Ahab really understood human nature: it isn’t the desire to abide by the law that makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.”

  “Today, at the stranger’s request, I am pulling down the cross and erecting another gallows in the middle of the square,” Chantal went on.

  “Carlos,” someone said, “his name is Carlos, and it would be more polite to call him by his name than to keep referring to him as ‘the stranger.’”

  “I don’t know his real name. All the details he gave on the hotel form are false. He’s never paid for anything with a credit card. We have no idea where he came from or where he’s going to; even the phone call to the airport could be a lie.”

  They all turned to look at the man, who kept his eyes fixed on Chantal.

  “Yet, when he did tell you the truth, none of you believed
him. He really did work for an armaments factory, he really has had all kinds of adventures and been all kinds of different people, from loving father to ruthless businessman. But because you live here in Viscos, you cannot comprehend how much richer and more complex life can be.”

  “That girl had better explain herself,” thought the hotel landlady. And that’s just what Chantal did:

  “Four days ago, he showed me ten large gold bars. They are worth enough to guarantee the future of all the inhabitants of Viscos for the next thirty years, to provide for major improvements to the village, a children’s playground, for example, in the hope that one day children will live here again. He then immediately hid them in the forest, and I don’t know where they are.”

  Everyone again turned towards the stranger, who, this time, looked back at them and nodded his head.

  “That gold will belong to Viscos if, in the next three days, someone in the village is murdered. If no one dies, the stranger will leave, taking his gold with him.

  “And that’s it. I’ve said all I had to say, and I’ve re-erected the gallows in the square. Except that this time, it is not there to prevent a crime, but so that an innocent person can be hanged, so that the sacrifice of that innocent person will bring prosperity to the village.”

  For the third time, all the people in the bar turned towards the stranger. Once again, he nodded.

  “The girl tells a good story,” he said, switching off the recorder and putting it back in his pocket.

  Chantal turned away and began washing glasses in the sink. It was as if time had stopped in Viscos; no one said a word. The only sound that could be heard was that of running water, of a glass being put down on a marble surface, of the distant wind shaking the branches of leafless trees.

  The mayor broke the silence:

  “Let’s call the police.”