His security would be the Serb and only the Serb. He would be driven by Georges. Georges who was reaching retirement age. Georges who despised the subminister. In a pinch he’d peel off to save himself, that Georges.
With the itinerary were vehicle details. Platon would arrive in a black Citroën DS 7 Crossback, this year’s model, a state car.
He would shake hands with those breeders who had won top fair prizes, taste a regional dish or two, and at 13:30 he would leave the fair.
According to Platon’s itinerary, the DS 7 Crossback’s next destination would be the department Lot-et-Garonne.
I kept my contacts updated on the plans at Le Moulin and among the farmers.
I warned my contacts that I could not guarantee these plans would not leak. If Platon got word from his own intelligence that there was going to be a big demonstration, I assumed he would cancel. I conveyed this.
We are his intelligence, they said in reply.
What I had depicted to Burdmoore that night on the dark open road was a classical “black bloc” tactic, of masked people who would create an offensive line and lob projectiles at the police.
I had given him no names. Instead, Burdmoore gave names to me, when we had a moment alone at Le Moulin, walking under the walnut trees: the two people who ran the kitchen. Felix, who oversaw the walnut operation.
“You should think about letting them in on this,” he said. “I know who is up for rabble-rousing. People are ready to split off from Pascal. There are people who think he’s talking to the cops.”
I wondered if what I’d said to Mao I and Mao II concerning Pascal had spread, as if by underground waterway.
I didn’t want or need Felix or the two who ran the kitchen. I needed only Burdmoore, and now was the time to see how far he was willing to go.
I said the plan was to charge Platon. I didn’t mention that he would have an armed escort.
“Physically attack him? What’s the point? Why him?”
“Because he’s the one who’s coming here,” I said.
Whatever stooge from Paris shows up to the Guyenne, I said, will be made to understand that their power is limited, and even meaningless. That the Guyenne is autonomous.
I felt a bit stirred up myself, in talking like this. An image flashed into my mind of the peasants and Cagots, armed and in great numbers, sending the nobles running for their lives.
I had finished speaking. Burdmoore was examining my face, his bloodshot eyes darting between my own. I didn’t like it. But when he spoke, I liked what he said.
“I have a secret I’m going to share with you. Something no one here knows about me. I’ve got a bad liver.”
He patted the cloth of his T-shirt over his big hard belly, as if his liver condition were the cause of the gut.
“It’s a casualty of my generation. Hep C. Nothing in life is fair, is it, California? The secret is that I don’t have much time left. I’ve seen what happens when people try to hang on. It’s not pretty. It is ugly. And I’m not going for miracle cures.”
TODAY WAS SUNDAY, and with the fair less than a week away, Jean and Pascal had gone to a planning meeting with some of the dairy farmers in Sazerac.
It was just me and Jérôme in the library, but we weren’t working. We were doing what European activists spend hours and hours doing: simply talking. I asked Jérôme about Bruno. I called him “Lacombe” like they did, and the word felt foreign in my mouth, a coyness that Bruno and I were in on, this distancing by formal address.
“We have had this loyalty,” Jérôme responded. “It’s been a challenge to face up to things.”
Face up to things?
Jérôme said there were growing questions among them about Lacombe’s relevance and, frankly, his coherence as a thinker. He went to retrieve a stack of papers and put them on the table.
“You can read these if you want to.”
Printouts of Bruno’s emails.
“We always felt like there was something to honor in the clandestine nature of our communications with him but it’s wearing off.”
There was a time, he said, when a communiqué from Lacombe would come through and they’d all gather around the printer like supplicants, to read these emails full of outré declarations about cave bears and cavemen. But that time had passed.
“My position, and Pascal knows this, it’s not anything I’ve kept hidden, is that you can’t go back. To live in a cave and renounce technology, renounce everything, that’s like”—he laughed—“about the most modern thing a person could ever do.”
I asked how so. It was fine to be curious. I was curious.
“A caveman isn’t rejecting what’s around him. That’s for intellectuals, people who have overthought everything. You have to deal with life as it is. This guy is talking about half a million years ago, but he’s writing about it on a computer. He’s a crudivore, renouncing the cooked, while people have been eating cooked food forever, and he’s renounced agriculture, which the people in this area have been practicing for twelve thousand years.”
He’s not against fire, I didn’t say. He just keeps his small.
“He thinks the future is in tiny clans. What about genetic diversity? What about cities, and culture? Pascal, me, Alexandre, we were trained to love the classics. What about poetry, and what about art?”
I pictured the footprints in moon milk, as Bruno called it. The white cave. Prints he suspected were a child’s.
“Lacombe thinks he can short-circuit history by denying the world. Some of the stuff he writes… he said he was hearing radio broadcasts from the 1940s, secret Resistance transmissions. He claims his cave is a temporal labyrinth that holds answers to the great riddles. At first, we all got kind of sucked in. But when you pull away, it starts to seem like madness.”
Jean had made fun of Bruno that night when he showed us his rock collection, and Pascal had laughed. Pascal enjoyed it when people devoted to him weren’t devoted to each other.
Bruno himself had spoken about this rift he had with Jean, in the email declaring his position on violence.
Bruno had gone on to say that his old comrade Jean Violaine took quite different positions from his own. Their formations were not the same. Certainly, they had both long ago rejected official state communism, such as the Soviet Union, but Jean still believed in the possibility that capitalism would be dismantled, or would collapse on its own, and be replaced by some form of communism—a lowercase c communism, as Bruno put it.
