The Red Collar by Jean-Christophe Rufin, Adriana Hunter Read Free Book Online Page B

with their tails and paws, by whining or rolling on the ground.
    Lantier watched the way this old dog wrinkled his forehead and tilted his head slightly, opening his eyes wide to express contentment or narrowing them slyly to question what the person he was with might want or intend to do. These facial expressions, teamed with eloquent little movements of his neck, allowed him to cover the whole gamut of emotions. Showing his feelings but, more significantly, responding to those of others.
    Sitting there on that bench, maddened by the heat, the investigating officer felt a terrible weariness build inside him. Four years serving his country fighting, and two defending order and authority by sentencing poor devils to death had worn him out. Moments ago he’d already been feeling nostalgia for military life; right now he was closer to regretting the emptiness it had left him with. Would he ever be able to do anything else?
    The dog must have sensed his despondency. He had moved closer and had laid his muzzle on Lantier’s knee. His breathing had slowed. It sounded painful.
    Lantier was still stroking him. His hand smoothed affectionately over the animal’s muscular neck; he scratched Wilhelm’s ears and the dog shook his head with pleasure.
    The major had had a dog himself once. He was called Corgan, and Lantier remembered how he would pet him for ages, on the steps to his parents’ house in the Perche region. Corgan was a pedigree dog, a black-and-white Pointer, well fed and looked after in his case. But he’d had the same devotedness, and Hugues Lantier had had an opportunity to gauge this the year he turned thirteen.
    In those days the Lantiers used to spend the summer at their estate on the banks of the Huisne, and would head back to Paris toward October. Only Hugues’s father couldn’t be away such a long time. He was senior banking executive for a bank based on the Rue Lafitte, and would return to Paris in early August. Hugues stayed on at the country estate with his two younger sisters and his mother.
    The family was starting to experience financial difficulties and would soon be forced to sell this property, which had been inherited from an uncle. In the meantime, they had reduced their staff to a cook and an aging retainer who used to go off in his cart to buy provisions.
    One autumn day burglars got into the house at nightfall, simply by climbing the boundary wall which had almost crumbled away in places. They were a gang of opportunists afraid of nothing and no one, and never stayed in the same place long. There were three of them and they took orders from a leader, a tall blond fellow with a bushy beard.
    They burst into the living room just before the evening meal. The leader whooped as he herded Hugues’s mother and her two daughters into a corner of the room. His accomplices brought in the cook and the old servant, and pushed them into the same corner. The third man tied them up with a washing line, and lined them up side by side on the floor behind the piano. Only Hugues had escaped because he’d been playing in his bedroom on the second floor when they arrived. He watched the scene between two balusters on the galleried landing.
    What happened next was very violent and very messy. The thieves broke into cupboards, emptied wine bottles and feasted on what they found in the larder. Two of them had a fight, hurling ornaments and paintings at each other. It was an extraordinary sight for the child. In a matter of minutes, the peaceful order in the house was obliterated and replaced by unbridled primitive desires and senseless violence. Hugues waited for the nightmare to end.
    Later, well into the night, one of the pillagers who was less befuddled by their blowout realized that they had four women at their disposal and could derive some pleasure from them. Hugues’s sisters were only ten and eleven, but the thug didn’t let a detail like that trouble him. He walked