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She was still going, like a wind-up doll on overload, when we finally paid the bill and rose and wound our way through the labyrinth of tables to the front door.
It was heavenly to breathe the outside air. The restaurant fronted on the long and narrow Place du General de Gaulle, and against the dark green trees the streetlamps glowed a softly spreading yellow. Further up the square the fountain gurgled merrily, and I saw the sign of the Hotel de France illuminated through the shifting leaves.
Christian apparently saw it too. He mumbled some faint words of thanks for dinner, and wandered off toward the beckoning lights. A moment later Neil Grantham followed suit. He had a long unhurried stride, and watching him I felt again that strange unbidden twinge of interest. I pushed it back, and tried to hold my thoughts to what was going on around me.
Simon and Garland had switched from Nazis now to neo-Nazis, and the rising tide of tension in Europe. “It’s all the immigration,” Garland was saying. She tossed her auburn head. “It’s the same everywhere, I think, all these foreigners moving in and taking over. It’s like the Jews all over again, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t condone what the Nazis did, don’t get me wrong, but you can almost understand it. These immigrants can get so uppity…”
It was an ugly thing to say. I stared at her, and Jim burst out: “God, Garland, honestly…!” and then to my delight Simon recovered from his own stunned silence with a vengeance and began to give her proper hell. In the midst of all this Paul turned placidly to me and smiled. “Feel like taking a walk?” he asked.
“Sure.”
I don’t think anybody even noticed us leaving. Paul turned toward the river, away from the hotel, and I ambled along beside him, content to let him set the pace.
We walked past a statue that I recognized from my travel brochures—a seated figure of the great humanist Rabelais, once a traveler and a lover of life, now confined to one small patch of garden at the end of the Place du General de Gaulle. Bathed by floodlights, the seated scholar seemed immense, brooding in gloomy silence as the river murmured on behind him.
Paul sauntered across the road and round the far side of the statue, where a narrow breach in the river wall revealed a long fall of sloping stone stairs that vanished into the dark water below. On the seventh stair down, he sat and waited for me.
“I lied,” he confessed, with a sheepish smile. “I didn’t really feel like a walk. I felt like a cigarette.” He shook one loose and offered the pack to me, but I declined, watching his face in the brief flare of the match.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.
“Only when Simon’s not around. He’s got opinions on all kinds of things, and smoking’s one of them. I try to avoid arguments when I can. In case you hadn’t noticed.” He grinned suddenly, and I knew that he was thinking not of his brother but of Garland Whitaker, and the little scene we’d just escaped from.
I envied him his self-control, and told him so. “I’m afraid she makes me lose my temper.”
“Bad luck to lose your temper on the Sabbath—that’s what my mother always tells me.”
“I’m safe, then. It’s only Friday.”
“After sundown on Friday.” He smiled. “My Sabbath.”
It took me a moment to digest that. “You’re Jewish?”
He shrugged, still smiling. “With a name like Lazarus I’d better be.”
To be truthful, I hadn’t noticed his surname at all. But then, I fancied myself a different sort of person than Garland Whitaker. I thought again of what she’d said, of how she’d said it… “She really is a hateful woman.”
“No she isn’t. Not really. She just gets a little bit much sometimes, that’s all.” His eyes touched mine briefly, warmly, then drifted away again, out across the wide expanse of river to the shadowed line of trees that rimmed the opposite shore. “She doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s simple ignorance with her, not spite.”
I wasn’t convinced. “Sure about that, are you?”
“Pretty sure. Besides, you get used to it, after a while.” He paused, drawing deeply on the cigarette, still gazing out over the swiftly flowing water. “You see those trees over there? That’s not the other side of the river, it’s an island. You can’t tell, really, unless you see it from the cliffs, or walk across the bridge, there.” His voice was soft and even, storytelling. “They burned the Jews of Chinon on that island in the fourteenth century. Accused them of poisoning the town’s wells. It didn’t just happen here, of course, it happened everywhere. Women, children, no one cared. They just burned them.” He glanced at me and half smiled in the darkness. “The Nazis weren’t the first, you know. It’s been around forever, prejudice.”
“That’s hardly an excuse for it.”
“No,” he agreed, exhaling a stream of smoke that caught the shifting light from the street behind us. “But sometimes taking the historical perspective helps you understand a little better why people do the things they do. That’s what life’s all about, I think—understanding each other. Now Simon,” he told me, his mouth curving, “sees things differently. If someone spits at Simon, he spits right back. An eye for an eye. But that doesn’t accomplish anything.” He turned his head to look at me. “People hate too much, you know?”
His face, in that instant, seemed suddenly older than my own. Centuries older. And then he laughed and looked away, and the moment passed.
“God,” he said, “I sound like my father.” He pitched the stub of his cigarette away, and it died with a hiss in the dark water. “Come on, I’ll take you for a real walk, across the bridge. You get a great view of the château from over there.”
He rose, the boy again, and led the way. The bridge was an impressive one, a gentle arc of pavement raised on heavy piles sunk deep into the river Vienne, and the river seemed to be doing its level best to wear away the unwanted obstacle. From the arched openings beneath us the roar of the rushing water rose fiercely to our ears.
I saw what Paul had meant about the island. It was a small island, to be sure, little more than a wedge of trees and scattered houses stuck oddly in the middle of the broad river, like the lone oaks one sometimes sees stranded in the ploughed stretches of a farmer’s field. It looked quite peaceful, really, pastoral, as if its murderous past had never been. And yet, and yet…
“There,” Paul announced proudly, “now turn around and look at that.”
It was spectacular, as he had promised. The soaring walls of Chinon Castle rose in floodlights from the cliffs, its long m
