Invitation to Provence (10 page)

Jake said mildly, “Oh come on, Felix, a little sibling rivalry, a touch of jealousy, a girl you both fancied … loved even. So tell me, what
is
the truth?”

Felix sighed. He got up from behind his desk and walked past Jake to the floor-to-ceiling expanse of bronze-tinted windows, staring moodily out at the passing show below. “I said it to Mother then, and I say it to you now: believe what you wish. It will not make me any more guilty, nor will it make my brother any less guilty.”

He swung around and stood, hands behind his back, a looming dark figure against the bronze light. “Tell me, why are you really here, Jake?”

“I come as a messenger from your mother. She’s an old woman now, Felix. There’s not much time left and she wants to see both her boys again.”

Felix gave a short bark of laughter. “And I’m supposed to go trotting back like the prodigal son.”

“That’s entirely up to you,” Jake said quietly. “Of course, do as you wish.”

Felix turned away and Jake’s eyes quickly scanned the desk, taking in the letter from the Bank of Shanghai. It was an acknowledgment that the monthly stipend paid to a Bao Chu Ching at an address in Shanghai was to be increased from thirty to fifty dollars. Jake memorized the account number and the address instantly. To him, it was the smallness of the sum that seemed significant. Thirty dollars was the average wage of the poorest workers, yet Felix paid it to this woman every month.

“I’ll give the matter some thought,” Felix said, still staring out the window, his back still to Jake.

“That’s all your mother asks.” Jake hesitated, then said, “I also have the same message for Alain. I need to find him, Felix.”

“Hah!” Felix swung around with a great snort of anger. “Of course you do.
Mama’s boy,
the
real
prodigal son. No doubt he’ll want to return to claim his inheritance. Well, sorry to disappoint you, Jake, but I have no idea where Alain is. Probably dead by now, from being too smart for his own good.”

Jake nodded. He walked over to Felix and held out his hand. “We were friends once, Felix,” he said, meeting his eyes. “You were kind to a lonely out-of-place kid who knew nothing. I’ve never forgotten that, or you.”

Felix looked at the hand outstretched in old friendship. He nodded somberly. “And I have never forgotten you, Jake.”

The two men shook hands, then Jake turned and made briskly for the door. “Think about it, Felix,” he called over his shoulder. “It means everything to your mother. And perhaps to you, too. I hope to see you there.”

As the door closed behind him, Felix stared at the envelope. His mother’s writing looked shaky, like an old woman’s. Of course that was exactly what she was now, an old woman.

He ripped open the envelope, withdrew the invitation, and read it. Then he began to laugh. “Oh, Mother, you old fraud,” he said, still laughing. “You just want to reunite the family because blood is thicker than water, right? Well, too bad, Mother, because I am not coming. You can have your family reunion all on your own, which is the path you chose all those years ago. This son is not coming
home.”

I
T WAS MUCH LATER
that night that Felix Marten’s body was found in the service alley behind the giant bronze-glass building. Apparently he had fallen from the open elevator used to haul heavy freight. He’d been killed instantly, still wearing his custom pin-striped suit and his handmade shoes, though both had come off in the fall. He’d landed head down, and his face was smashed to smithereens. Of course it was suicide, everyone agreed at first. But then, maybe not. Like many rich and powerful men, Felix had enemies. The rumors flew fast as wildfire around Hong Kong. Was it an accident? Felix had been noticeably uncertain on his feet recently. Had he been pushed? Was it murder?

Whatever the case, Felix Marten had found the final bronze silence. He slept at last. And he definitely would not be attending the family reunion.

J
AKE WAS ALREADY IN
Shanghai when he heard of Felix’s death on television. He was in a spacious, air-conditioned high-floored room at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, the tallest building in the city and the second tallest in all Asia. He had been sipping green tea brought immediately on his arrival by a diminutive floor waiter in a white Mao jacket.

Jake had been looking forward to a night’s sleep. It seemed a long time since his feet had touched ground for more than a few hours, and he was in dire need of a massage to take the crimps of air travel out of his spine, then a shower and a night’s sleep in a real bed for a change. Of course Felix’s shocking death changed all that.

Jake immediately got on the phone to his contacts in Hong Kong and found out what he could, frowning when they said it was suicide. An autopsy would reveal more of the truth. Meanwhile, he had not yet told Rafaella he’d spoken to Felix. Now he had to call and tell her he was dead.

He dropped into a deep leather chair, his chin sunk onto his chest. Felix had seemed an angry man, a tired man, a vengeful man, but he had certainly not seemed suicidal. Of course, that didn’t mean he hadn’t killed himself. Jake had known many men who, on the surface, appeared day-to-day normal and who underneath suffered from an overwhelming
depression. He wondered about Felix. He wondered exactly where Alain was. He wondered about the woman named Bao Chu Ching, who lived right here in Shanghai at number 27 Hu Tong Road, Apartment 127, and who’d been receiving thirty dollars a month from Felix Marten for ten years, a sum that had just been increased to fifty.

He glanced at his watch. It was ten in the morning in France. He sighed as he dialed the château, hating his role as the bringer of such terrible news.

Haigh answered, sounding irritable at being disturbed. “I was just about to take Rafaella into town to do some shopping,” he told Jake. “She says she needs new shoes, though lord knows she has enough to stock a shop already.”

“It’s a woman thing,” Jake said, smiling despite himself. And then he told Haigh the bad news. He heard him gasp, then a long silence. He knew Haigh had helped raise Felix, so this was a terrible shock to him, too. “I’m sorry, Haigh,” he said. “Are you all right?”

A sigh gusted down the phone. “Yes, I’m all right. It’s a good thing I’m here though to tell Rafaella. She won’t take this easily. She had such hopes that Felix would come home again. And now he will, only it’ll be in his coffin.”

“You want me to tell her?” Jake asked.

“No, it’s my place to do so,” Haigh said, sounding solemn and dignified at the same time. “It’s better not on the phone, you know, better if I’m there to help her.”

Jake promised to call later, then he put down the phone and sprawled in the chair, staring blankly at the wall. He thought again about the woman, Bao Chu Ching, who had received Felix’s money every month, wondering if she was a clue to something in his past, something that had caused
Felix to kill himself. Or perhaps caused somebody else to kill him.

Forgoing the lure of the soothing massage, the relaxing hot green tea, and the soft bed, he took a long cool shower, put on fresh clothes, and got a taxi to Hu Tong Road.

J
AKE PAID OFF
the cab and looked around. He was in one of the poorest parts of the city, certainly not a place frequented by tourists and travelers. The lowest of workers lived in these tumbling cinder-block apartments propped up with bamboo scaffolding and linked by drooping strings of wires. The bluish light of TV screens flickered in the darkness, and the odor of sewage and decay seeped from the gutters. Here and there small, open-fronted stores filled empty niches, and the arc lights of a motorway circled the area in blinding yellow halogen, silhouetting the jagged buildings and sending the inhabitants scuttling into the shadows. Over all filtered the sounds of poverty: the snarl of a dog, the wail of a child, the angry shout of a woman, and the impenetrable high whine of Chinese music.

He checked the address again. Apartment 127 was on the ground floor, to the left of the entrance to the four-story building. As he watched, the door to the apartment was pulled open and a child stepped out. She was about ten years
old, small and thin and wearing what appeared to be a school uniform, a gray skirt and a short-sleeved white shirt. Her black hair was cut in a short fringed bob that emphasized the skinniness of her neck. She didn’t even notice him, just sped by him on sneakered feet, folded money clutched in her hand.

Jake followed her to one of the storefront businesses, a Chinese medicine shop, and saw her speak to the owner. The man took her money, unlocked a safe, took out a small packet, and gave it to her. She sped back, and this time she glanced up at Jake as she passed. He caught the look of surprise on her face at the sight of a non-Chinese in these parts. Then she was gone, back down the shadowy street, back through that malodorous doorway, into the poor home that Felix Marten had paid for.

Jake had seen her face clearly under the light over the medicine shop door, though. Sweet, startled, and wide-eyed. Wide blue eyes, the blue of the Mediterranean on a sunny summer day. They were Rafaella Marten’s eyes. He smiled. There was some good news for Rafaella after all. She had a grandchild.

The question was, Was she Felix’s? Or Alain’s?

R
AFAELLA STOOD AT THE
door of Felix’s old room over the front portico, staring at the polished brass knob, unable to bring herself to turn it and open the door. The tears seemed stuck behind her eyes. She could not cry and she wondered, the way mothers always do, where she had gone wrong.

This room contained Felix’s entire life up until the time he’d left the château at the age of twenty-three. His clothes were still hanging in the closet with his shoes arranged in rows beneath. He was always a neat boy and he’d grown into a fanatically neat man. His room had a military spareness about it that, when he was seventeen, had prompted Rafaella to suggest the army as a career for him.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” he’d said, with that contemptuous little line about his lips that had always worried her. “Of course I’m not going in the army. I’m going to run the winery.”

And Felix would have run it well, Rafaella thought now, leaning tiredly against his door. Of course he would have alienated everybody, that was the way Felix was, but he would have produced good Marten wine efficiently enough.

Finally, she gathered her courage and opened the door. Haigh had been there before her. He’d taken off the dust-covers, made sure the room was thoroughly cleaned, laid out
a suit of clothes on the bed ready to dress Felix for the last time. She looked at the formal morning suit, the gray jacket and striped pants, the immaculate white shirt and gray silk cravat. Even the correct socks and shoes awaited Felix’s final dress engagement, and her heart brimmed with grief for the son she had lost so many years ago.

“But why would he kill himself?” she asked Haigh, “Felix was always so strong.”

“Too strong for his own good,” Haigh answered grimly.

Looking now at the remnants of Felix’s life, Rafaella wondered how her chubby, sailor-suited boy had come to this sad end. This son who had deserted her, who’d accused her of believing he’d killed the girl, when all she asked from him was the truth. “I’m your mother,” she’d said. “I’ll help you. Just tell me it was an accident. I know that’s all it could have been.” But in her heart she had not believed his story, and somehow Felix had known that.

She sank into the big green leather chair by the window. The sun illuminated every line on her weary face and finally the tears came, racing down her powdered cheeks, leaving little tracks, extra new lines, but of grief this time. Outside the door the dogs whined miserably.

Rafaella was remembering when she gave Felix this room. He was just seven years old. “Let’s go take a look at your new room,” she’d said, and he’d stared at her surprised. Holding his hand, she’d walked, barefoot as always, along the broad chestnut-floored hallway, past the pairs of exquisitely painted double doors leading to various rooms, past the great sweep of the staircase with its polished banisters and gleaming brass stair rods, around the corner to this big room immediately over the front portico.

“Here?” Felix asked, amazed, because this was the finest guest room in the house.

“You’re my eldest son,” she explained, smiling. “It’s only right that you have the best room.”

“My desk will go under the window,” he’d decided, marching around the room, lifting the beautiful curtain fabrics, testing the bed with his hand, stamping his feet on the Beauvais carpet, hating its softness. “And my green leather chair.”

“And which green leather chair is that?”

“The one in Papa’s study,” he said sharply. “After all, he never uses it. He’s never here.”

“Right,” Rafaella agreed meekly, because it was the truth.

And, just the way he was to be for the rest of his life, Felix took charge, changing the room from a beautiful boudoir to the spartan masculine space where he allowed no one entry except the housekeeper and then only because he wanted his place to be spotless.

Of course Felix never allowed his brother into his room. He kept his door locked, with the key on a chain attached to his belt. But anything “forbidden” was fair game to Alain. He’d found the housekeeper’s key and one afternoon when Felix was safely on the tennis court, he’d sneaked in.

The inevitable happened and Felix had found him “going through my stuff,” he shouted, outraged and Alain, the little blond angel, had stared him down, daring him to do anything about it. So Felix hit him, sending blood spurting from his nose and down his shirt-front. But no tears had spurted from Alain’s eyes. Instead he punched back. In no time they were rolling on the floor, yelling at each other, and then the grownups came running, screaming at the sight of all that blood.

Haigh had separated them by means of a good kick on the rump for each one. They’d rolled off each other, glaring up at the new enemy.
“Je vous emmerde,
Haigh,” Alain had cursed, and Haigh had given him a whack and set him on his feet, thrusting a towel into his face. “Go to your room,” he said, while Rafaella ran to Felix’s side, not knowing how injured he was.