The Baker's Secret(35)
The second officer reached with both hands, but the first one wagged a finger and stepped away. He had more to say, and since he possessed both the gun and a knowledge of its proper use, he would not permit his dissertation to be abbreviated.
Emma’s sense of approaching disaster grew, and she began pulling the wagon again, hurrying herself out of range. A moment later, however, she heard the second corporal shout. Emma turned to see a quick tussle, then the student overpowered his teacher and stepped aside holding the gun. He raised it, bracing the stock against his hip, and with a cry of glory he fired a rapid volley into the trees.
Instead of silence, however, or the whine of a ricochet, the gunfire was followed by screams. Both soldiers froze. Had they shot someone by accident? Emma shuddered to think that her premonition of tragedy had been accurate.
But the screams sounded inhuman, so high in pitch and coming so rapidly one on another, as if the person did not breathe between peals, that she was puzzled about who could make such a noise, until she saw a wild boar come charging out of the hedgerow, squealing like the end of the world, a bloody wound in its right rear shank. The boar, plenty quick on three legs, dashed between the corporals, who by then were leaning on one another laughing uproariously.
Before the wounded animal darted back into the woods, Emma had a better look. He lacked the tusks she would have expected. He was not bristled with coarse hair either, but had skin a bonny pink. This was no wild boar. It was a farm pig, as plain as bacon, escaped from his pen once upon a time and surviving since then by feral foraging, but unfortunately doing so on a spring evening in the wrong place at an unlucky time.
The surprise had sobered the corporals sufficiently that they straightened themselves, such as they could, shouldered the gun, and marched back to their barracks for an extended off-duty nap. Emma marked well where the pig had run into the hedgerow, calculating how he might find a less tangled path, and therefore where he might choose to rest and wait for his bleeding to cease.
She hurried the wagon home, leaving it in the barnyard without disturbing Mémé, then hastened to the rectory. The priest was not there, and neither was he fetching a new corpse over which to pray. Thus his wheelbarrow leaned against the cottage’s back wall, idle. Emma helped herself, vowing to return it shortly, and wondering if it was a sacrilege to carry a pig in a device that delivered human bodies to the sanctuary. Hurrying in case the animal proved to be less wounded than it had seemed, Emma decided she was already guilty of far worse blasphemies, and broke into a run.
No one knew the hedgerows better, not even a pig living amid them. Emma dodged machine-gun placements, a mortar pit, soldiers on guard duty or reading or smoking or cleaning their weapons in an atmosphere of palpable boredom. Had she been a spy, Emma could have delivered these units’ locations to the Allies in half a minute. This time none of the soldiers saw her, or heard her, or noticed the wheelbarrow rushing through the underbrush as she made use of all the routes she’d learned in nearly two years of operating her clandestine network.
The pig was still alive, lying on its side and panting, but its eyes had gone glassy. They did not so much as turn in Emma’s direction when she trotted past, then caught herself and wheeled back to stand beside the wounded sow.
“Oh my darling,” Emma said. “You gorgeous thing.”
It was a wrestling match, loading the pig. She tipped the wheelbarrow on its side, then grabbed all four hooves and rolled the pig into the basin. The animal grunted but did not protest. Emma knelt, pig blood soaking into her dress, dirt grinding into her knees, and hooked her hands under the wheelbarrow’s bin. Pushing with her legs, straining her back, she had to press her face into the warm side of the pig for greater leverage, and with the grunts of a workhorse she lifted one side of the load. After she’d achieved a certain angle, gravity helped and the wheelbarrow fell into its normal stance, one passenger aboard.
Emma attempted to wipe blood from her face, but only smeared it onto her neck and ear. Then she grabbed the handles and tested the weight. One hundred kilos at least. More than any man in the village, and no one near to help. Philippe, she thought for the thousandth time, where are you? The trees made no answer, only a wren calling from somewhere concealed. But Emma would not abandon such a prize for so small a reason as not being strong enough. She lifted with straight arms, pushed with her thighs, and the wheelbarrow began inching homeward.
By the time she reached the eastern well, it was almost dark and she was drenched in sweat. The pig had ceased breathing, which made her somehow heavier. Did the body, Emma wondered, change its substance in death?
Who should be drawing water at that moment but Odette, who set down her bucket in awe. “Don’t tell me,” she said, eyes bright. “Did you really kill him with your bare hands?”
Emma answered by emptying the bucket over her head. An hour later, Odette returned with all the essentials for their plan.
Many of the officers had Calvados on the shelves of her café. They would buy a bottle, the label marked in ink with their name, and work at it over several visits. Since Emma insisted that the only successful crime was one that no one knew had occurred, she instructed Odette to steal no more than half an inch from each bottle, too little for an officer to notice, especially given that the last time he had seen it he also had a bellyful of the brandy. The cumulative effect was a near magnum of the drink, which she corked and carried and placed in the center of Emma’s table. Beside it she set two clean glass tumblers.