Read Online Pedigree by Patrick Modiano - Free Book Online Page B

often spent the weekend at D.’s chateau in the Loire-Atlantique. He even went on duckshoots there, which wasn’t exactly his style. I remember the few days in 1959 that we spent in Sologne, at the home of Paul Bertholle, his wife, and the comte de Nalèche, where I’d been afraid my father would abandon me and those killers would drag me into their blood sport. Just as he’d been “in business” with Paul Bertholle, he was now “in business” with Philippe de D. According to my father, D., in his youth, had been a juvenile delinquent and had even spent time in jail. He later showed me a photo clipped from a back issue of
Détective
that pictured D. in handcuffs. But D. had recently come into a large inheritance from his grandmother (née de W.) and I imagine my father needed him as an investor. Since the end of the1950s, he had been pursuing a dream: to buy up shares in a business concern in Colombia. And he was surely counting on Philippe de D. to help him achieve his goal.
    D. would marry a female racing driver and end his days ruined: as manager of a nightclub in Hammamet, then as garage owner in Bordeaux. For his part, my father would stay true to his Colombian dream for a few more years. In 1976, a friend sent me a document bearing this information: “Compagnie Financière Mocupia. Head office: 22 Rue Bergère, Paris 9. Tel. 770-76-94. French corporation. Board of Directors: President: Albert Rodolphe Modiano. Board: Charles Ruschewey, Léon-Michel Tesson … Kaffir Trust (Raoul Melenotte).”
    I was able to identify the members of this board of directors—starting with Tesson, in September 1972, when a telegram from Tangier was mistakenly delivered to me instead of my father: 1194 TANGIER 34601 URGENT SETTLE RENT BERGERE — STOP — MY SECRETARY LAID UP — STOP . REPLY URGENT TESSON . This Tessonwas a financier in Tangier. As for Melenotte of the Kaffir Trust, he had been a member of the multinational administration of free zones.
    In the years 1963 and 1964, I also met a third man from the board of directors, Charles Ruschewey. My father, hoping to dissuade me from pursuing an overly “liberal” education, pointed as an example of failure to this Charles Ruschewey, who had been in the prestigious
khâgne
program at Louis-le-Grand with Roger Vailland and Robert Brasillach, and who had never amounted to anything. Physically, he was like a clergyman in civvies, a dirty-minded, beer-swilling Swiss with steel-rimmed glasses and fleshy lips, the type who’d secretly frequent the “slags” of Geneva. In his fifties and divorced, he was living with a plump, shorthaired woman younger than he, in a windowless ground-floor room in the 16th arrondissement. He must have served as my father’s factotum and “sidekick.” He looked like someone who would compromise his principles at the drop of a hat, which didn’t stop him from lecturing me with a pedantryworthy of Tartuffe. In 1976, I would run into him on the stairs at Quai de Conti, aged and puffy-faced and looking like a derelict, shopping bag dangling from a sleepwalker’s arm. And I noticed he was living in the fourth-floor apartment that my father had recently abandoned for Switzerland, though it contained not a stick of furniture and the heat, water, and electricity had all been cut off. He was squatting there with his wife. She sent him out to do the shopping—no doubt a few cans of food. She had become a real harpy: I could hear her screeching every time the poor man walked in the door. I don’t imagine he was living off his director’s fees from the Compagnie Mocupia anymore. In 1976, again in error, I received a report from that finance company, according to which “our corporate lawyer in Bogotá was instructed to file a claim for compensation in the Colombian courts. For reference, we inform you that Albert Modiano, the president of your board