Wolf Hunt

CHAPTER 13

THE Kriegsministerium displayed all the cold, oppressive grandeur of administrative buildings imbued with their own importance. The two sentries standing either side of the entrance presented arms to Margont and Relmyer. Their martial rigidity perfectly matched the facade.

Six other soldiers, grouped together in front of the marble columns, guarded the monumental vestibule. The duty officer had laid out his office so that he could keep an eye on the great staircase to his right and on the double doors opening on his left. Aided by two corporals acting as secretaries, he was applying himself to drawing up inventories; there was a strong odour, a mixture of wax, old papers, dust and leather. The officer had meticulously buttoned up his collar as protocol demanded, practically strangling himself to satisfy regulations. His red face, bloated by lack of circulation, turned towards one of the corporals.

‘You’ve missed a line, Carrefond! A little mistake can lead to a great catastrophe! Another error and I’ll transfer you to the voltigeurs.’ He tore up the paper and flung it into the overflowing waste-paper basket.

Finally addressing the newcomers, he demanded: ‘What do these officers want?’

Relmyer saluted him and explained what he was after, referring to but not explaining ‘an extremely grave personal matter’. The captain proved to be astonishingly friendly. He confirmed that they had not been able to seize the registers containing all the details of the Austrian army. He announced that, on principle, he was reluctant to let just anyone shuffle through what documents there were without official authorisation. Then he added that the French had taken over Vienna three weeks ago now. The archives that had remained in the capital had therefore already been partly examined. He made it clear that they were beginning to despair of finding anything at all of interest concerning the enemy army. So the Emperor preferred to rely only on his spies and on the reconnaissance carried out by them and their Russian, Polish and

Bavarian allies ... The duty officer concluded his discourse by saying that he did not agree to Relmyer ferreting about in the Kriegsministerium.

The refusal did not tally with the view expressed that the documents were effectively useless. Relmyer realised that there might be a way of changing his mind and laid out some twenty-and forty-franc pieces on the officer’s desk. The gold coins shone in the sun like a constellation in an ebony sky. Lefine was astounded. What a madman, to carry around that amount of money just to bribe an official! Relmyer brandished a second handful that he began to spill noisily onto the desk coin by coin. The captain immediately picked each one up with the alacrity of a hen pecking grains. Now he was turning from red to purple. There in front of him was months’ worth of a soldier’s pay, a large chunk of Relmyer’s life as a soldier.

‘Come whenever you like,’ said the officer obsequiously. ‘I’ll warn you if you ever have to hide yourself because of an unexpected inspection. The archives are stored on this floor and the one above. There are also several in the basement and in the attic, but they are the oldest ones.’

At that moment Relmyer felt a resurgence of hope, a resurgence that crumbled as soon as he had passed through the double doors.

The room, high-ceilinged and deep, was no more than a giant rubbish dump. Trampled papers and heaps of registers were strewn across the parquet. Interminable shelves blanketed the walls from floor to ceiling, some groaning with documents, others empty, having spewed their contents onto the floor. Lefine looked up, certain that the roof must be falling in. It appeared to him as if a deluge of shells had ruined everything in here, when Vienna had been bombarded. But no, the Austrians had pillaged their own archives and the French had exacerbated the disaster; it was chaos added to chaos.

Margont knelt down and picked up a ruined report written in a language he could not even identify.

‘We don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, nor even if it’s here,

and everything is in such a muddle.’

Relmyer stood in front of one of the shelves and started to read the titles of the documents. Ten feet above his head, about halfway to the ceiling, a long wooden walkway was also weighed down with paper. Lefine joined Margont.

‘Let’s go. We’ll come back and fetch him in ten years,’ he proposed amiably.

In spite of everything Margont decided to help Relmyer. He tried to put some order into the madness, by proposing all sorts of ideas. He proposed using chalk to tick off the documents examined, paying more attention to the ravaged shelves and the torn reports as perhaps they had been sabotaged because they were the most important. He also proposed asking one of Relmyer’s friends, who would understand what he was doing, to help. ‘On condition that he doesn’t run us through,’ Lefine had murmured. And finally he proposed trying to find and question the men who had been through the papers before them ...

However, little by little, Margont’s determination wilted under the weight of the tons of written notes. He excused himself and left, accompanied by Lefine, abandoning Relmyer, perched on a ladder, a skiff adrift on an ocean of paper.