A Fable

‘This afternoon?’ Picklock said. ‘You mean it’s still today? Where are we?’

‘St Mihiel. You lay over here tonight while they finish nailing enough black cloth on your carriage to make it look like a hearse. Tomorrow morning a special train will pick you up and take you on to Paris. What’s wrong? Did something happen?’

Suddenly Picklock turned. ‘Come on back here,’ he said. The stranger followed. They stood slightly apart from the others now, in the angle of the bar and the rear wall. Picklock spoke rapidly yet completely, telling it all, the stranger listening quietly.

‘What you need is another body,’ the stranger said.

‘You’re telling me?’ Picklock said.

‘Why not? I’ve got one. In my field. I found it the first time I plowed. I reported it, but they haven’t done anything about it yet. I’ve got a horse and cart here; it will take about four hours to go and come.’ They looked at one another. ‘You’ve got all night—that is, now.’

‘All right,’ Picklock said. ‘How much?’

‘You’ll have to say. You’re the one that knows how bad you need it.’

‘We haven’t got any money.’

‘You break my heart,’ the stranger said. They looked at one another. Without removing his eyes, Picklock raised his voice a little. ‘Morache.’ Morache came up. ‘The watch,’ Picklock said.

‘Wait now,’ Morache said. It was a Swiss movement, in gold; he had wanted one ever since he saw one first, finding it at last on the wrist of a German officer lying wounded in a shell crater one night after he, Morache, had got separated from a patrol sent out to try for a live prisoner or at least one still alive enough to speak. He even saw the watch first, before he saw who owned it, having hurled himself into the crater just in time before a flare went up, seeing the glint of the watch first in the corpse-glare of the magnesium before he saw the man—a colonel, apparently shot through the spine since he seemed to be merely paralysed, quite conscious and not even in much pain; he would have been exactly what they had been sent out to find, except for the watch. So Morache murdered him with his trench knife (a shot here now would probably have brought a whole barrage down on him) and took the watch and lay just outside his own wire until the patrol came back (empty-handed) and found him. Though for a day or so he couldn’t seem to bring himself to wear the watch nor even look at it until he remembered that his face had been blackened at the time and the German could not have told what he was even, let alone who; besides that, the man was dead now. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait, now.’

‘Sure,’ Picklock said. ‘Wait in that carriage yonder until they come for that box. I dont know what they’ll do to you then, but I do know what they’ll do if you run because that will be desertion.’ He held out his hand. ‘The watch.’ Morache unstrapped the watch and handed it to Picklock.

‘At least get some brandy too,’ he said. The stranger reached for the watch in Picklock’s hand.

‘Whoa, look at it from there,’ Picklock said, holding the watch on his raised open palm.

‘Sure you can have brandy,’ the stranger said. Picklock closed his hand over the watch and let the hand drop.

‘How much?’ he said.

‘Fifty francs,’ the stranger said.

‘Two hundred,’ Picklock said.

‘A hundred francs.’

‘Two hundred,’ Picklock said.

‘Where’s the watch?’ the stranger said.

‘Where’s the cart?’ Picklock said. It took them a little over four hours (‘You’d have to wait anyhow until they finish nailing up that black cloth and get away from the carriage,’ the stranger said) and there were four of them (‘Two more will be enough,’ the stranger said. ‘We can drive right up to it.’)—himself and the stranger on the seat, Morache and another behind them in the cart, north and eastward out of the town into the country darkness, the horse itself taking the right road without guidance, knowing that it was going home, in the darkness the steady jounce of jogging horse and the thump and rattle of the cart a sound and a vibration instead of a progress, so that it was the roadside trees which seemed to move, wheeling up out of the darkness to rush slowly backward past them against the sky. But they were moving, even though it did seem (to Picklock) forever, the roadside trees ravelling suddenly into a straggle of posts, the horse, still without guidance, swinging sharply to the left.

‘Sector, huh?’ Picklock said.