Life: A User's Manual (19 page)

I hired several private detective agencies to trace, in France or elsewhere, a young woman aged between twenty and thirty, tall, blonde, with pale eyes, a slight mark beneath her right eyelid, and a mild stammer; the information card also mentioned that she perhaps used “Sampang” perfume, was perhaps using the name of Véronique Lambert, that her real initials could be E. B., that she grew up in the south of France, had stayed in England, spoke good English, had been a student, and was interested in archaeology, and, lastly, that her mother was, or had been, a singer.

This last clue was the decisive one: reference to the biographies – in
Who’s Who
and other specialist listings – of all women singers whose name began with B produced nothing, but when we checked all those who had a daughter between 1912 and 1935 your name came up together with about seventy-five others: Véra Orlova, born at Rostov in 1900, married the French archaeologist Fernand de Beaumont in 1926; one daughter, Elizabeth Natasha Victorine Marie, born 1929. Enquiries quickly revealed that Elizabeth had been brought up by her grandmother at Lédignan, Department of Gard, and had run away from you on 3 March 1945 at the age of sixteen. I then grasped that it was in order to evade your pursuit that she had concealed her true identity, but that also meant, alas, that the trail I had found stopped short, since neither you nor your mother-in-law, despite all the appeals you had put out on the radio and in the papers, had had any news of her for seven years.

We were already in 1954; it had taken nearly a year to find out whom I was going to kill: it took another three for me to find her.

For those three years, and this is something I want you to know, I supported teams of detectives who worked shifts to watch you twenty-four hours a day and to shadow both of you, whenever you went out in Paris, and whenever Countess de Beaumont went out in Lédignan, in the ever less probable case that your daughter might try to see you again or to take refuge with her grandmother. Their surveillance was completely useless, but I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. Everything that had even the slightest chance of putting me on a trail was tried out systematically: that was why I financed a huge market survey on “exotic” perfumes in general and “Sampang” perfume in particular; why I obtained the names of all persons having borrowed one or more volumes of
Les Semailles et les Moissons
from a public library; why all plastic surgeons in France received a personal letter enquiring whether they had had occasion since 1953 to conduct an operation to excise a naevus located under the right eyelid of a young woman aged about twenty-five; why I went round all the speech pathologists and elocution teachers looking for a tall blonde who’d been cured of a mild stammer; and why, lastly, I set up several entirely bogus archaeological expeditions devised uniquely to allow me to recruit through classified advertisements a “young woman with excellent English for N. American field study carrying out archaeological excavations nr Pyrenees”.

I put a lot of hope into this last trap. It bagged nothing. There were crowds of candidates each time, but Elizabeth didn’t show up. By the end of 1956 I was still fumbling and had spent more than three-quarters of my fortune; I had sold all my securities, all my land, all my properties. All I had left was my collection of paintings and my wife’s jewels. I began to dispose of them one by one so as to keep on paying the army of investigators I had marching on the steps of your daughter.

The death of your mother-in-law, the Countess de Beaumont, reawakened my hopes in early 1957, for I knew how attached your daughter was to her; but she no more came to the funeral at Lédignan than you did, and it was a complete waste of effort to have the cemetery watched for several weeks in case she was determined, as I imagined she might be, to put flowers on the grave.

These successive failures became increasingly exasperating, but I would not give up. I could not admit that Elizabeth might be dead, as if I had become the only person competent to dispose of her life and death, and I wanted to go on believing she was in France: I had found out in the end how she had managed to get out of England without leaving any record of embarkation: on 12 June 1953, the day after the crime, she took a boat from Torquay to the Channel Islands: by erasing the first letter of her name on the declaration of loss of her passport, she had managed to register under the name of Véronique Ambert, and her embarkation card, filed under A, had eluded the search made by the harbour police. This belated discovery didn’t get me any further, but it gave me a basis for my belief that she was still hiding in France.

That year I began, I think, to lose my reason. I began to explain things to myself like this: I am looking for Elizabeth de Beaumont, that is to say a tall, blonde, pale-eyed young woman with good English, brought up in the Gard, etc. Now Elizabeth de Beaumont knows I am looking for her, thus she is hiding, and in this case hiding means removing as many as she can of the distinguishing features by which she knows I know her; therefore I should be looking not for a tall, blonde, etc. Elizabeth, but for an anti-Elizabeth, and I started getting suspicious about short, swarthy women jabbering Spanish.

On another occasion I awoke covered in sweat. I had just dreamt the obvious solution to my nightmare. Standing beside a huge blackboard covered in equations, a mathematician was concluding his demonstration, in front of a turbulent audience, that the celebrated “Monte Carlo theorem” was generalisable; that meant not just that a roulette player placing his stake on a random number had just as much chance of winning as a martingale player systematically doubling his stake on the same number on each loss in order to recoup eventually, but that I had as much if not more chance of finding Elizabeth by going to Rumpelmeyer’s for tea next day at sixteen hours eighteen minutes precisely than by having four hundred and thirteen detectives looking for her.

I was weak enough to give way to the dream. At 16 hours 18 minutes I went into the teashop. A tall redhead left as I entered. I had her followed, uselessly of course. Later on I told my dream to one of the investigators who was working for me: he said quite seriously that I had only made a mistake of interpretation: the number of detectives should have made me suspicious: 413 was obviously the inverse of 314, that is to say of the number π: something would have happened at 18 hours 16 minutes.

So then I began to appeal to the exhausting resources of the irrational. If your mysterious and beautiful American neighbour had still been there, you can be sure I would have had recourse to her disturbing services; instead, I went in for turning tables, I wore rings encrusted with particular stones, I had magnets and hanged men’s fingernails and tiny bottles of herbs, seeds, and coloured stones sewn into the hems of my clothes; I consulted wizards and water diviners, fortune tellers and crystal-ball gazers and soothsayers of all sorts; they threw dice, or burnt a photograph of your daughter in a white porcelain plate and examined the ash, they rubbed their left arms with fresh verbena leaves, put hyenas’ gallstones under their tongues, spread flour on the floor, made unending anagrams of your daughter’s names and pseudonyms, or replaced the letters of her name with figures in an attempt to reach 253, examined candle flames through vases filled with water, threw salt into fire and listened to the crackling, or jasmine seed or laurel branches to watch the smoke, poured the white of an egg laid by a black hen into a cup of water, or dropped in lead, or molten wax, and watched the shapes that were made; they had sheep’s shoulder blades grilled on hot coals, hung sieves on wire and rotated them, examined carp roes, asses’ brains, and circles of grain pecked by a rooster.

On the eleventh of July 1957 there was a
coup de théâtre:
one of the men stationed at Lédignan to continue the watch despite the death of Countess de Beaumont rang me to say that Elizabeth had written to the town hall to request a copy of her birth certificate. She had given a hotel address in Orange.

Logic – if in these circumstances one may still talk of logic – demanded I should grasp this opportunity to end this inextricable affair. All I needed to do was to take from its green leather sheath the weapon which, some three years earlier, I had decided would be the instrument of my revenge: a bone-handled field surgeon’s scalpel, similar in appearance to a razor but infinitely sharper, which I had learned to handle with unrivalled dexterity, and to burst in at Orange. But instead I heard myself ordering my men simply to tail your daughter and not to relax their surveillance. They missed her at Orange in any case – the hotel didn’t exist; she had gone to the post office saying she had made a mistake and the postman dealing with mail returned to sender had fished out the letter from Lédignan town hall and handed it to her – but they caught up with her, a few weeks later, at Valence. That is where she got married, with two of François Breidel’s workmates acting as witnesses.

She left Valence that same evening with her husband. They had certainly guessed they were being followed, and for more than a year they tried to evade me; they did everything they could, laying all sorts of false trails, decoys, and simulations, dropping misleading clues, holing up in sordid lodging houses, and accepting squalid jobs in order to survive: night porterage, bottle washing, grape picking, cess-pit cleaning. But week by week, the four detectives whose services I could still afford to use tightened the net. More than twenty times I had the opportunity of killing your daughter with impunity. But each time, on one pretext or another, I let the opportunity slip: it was as if my long pursuit had led me to forget the oath in the name of which I had undertaken it: the easier it became to assuage my vengeance, the more I drew back from doing so.

On 8 August 1958, I received a letter from your daughter:

Sir
,

I have always known you would use every effort to find me. At the moment your son died, I knew it would be no use begging you or your wife for a gesture of mercy or pity. News of your wife’s suicide reached me a few days later and convinced me you would spend the rest of your life hunting me down
.

What was to begin with only an intuition and an apprehension was confirmed over the following months; I was aware you knew almost nothing about me, but I was sure you would use every available means to exploit to the full the meagre details you possessed; on the day when in a street in Cholet a researcher offered me a sample of the perfume I’d used that year in England, I guessed instinctively that it was a trap; a few months later a small ad asking for a young woman with good English to accompany a team of archaeologists told me you knew more about me than I thought. From then on my life became a long nightmare. I felt I was being watched by everybody, everywhere, always, I began to suspect everybody, waiters who spoke to me, check-out girls who gave me change, customers at the butcher’s who shouted at me for not waiting my turn; I was being followed, tracked down, observed by taxi drivers, policemen, pseudo-drunks slumped on park benches, chestnut sellers, lottery-ticket sellers, newsboys. One night, at the end of my tether, in the waiting room at Brive station, I began to hit a man who was staring at me. I was arrested, taken to the police station, and but for a quasi-miracle I would have been sectioned in a psychiatric ward: a young couple who had witnessed the scene offered to take charge of me: they lived in the Cévennes, in a deserted village whose ruined houses they were rebuilding. I lived there for nearly two years. We were alone, three humans, a score of goats and chickens. We had no newspapers and no radio
.

With time my fears evaporated. I convinced myself you had given up, or died. In June 1957 I returned to live among men. Shortly after, I met François. When he asked me to marry him, I told him my whole story and he had little difficulty persuading me that my sense of guilt had made me imagine that incessant surveillance
.

I regained my confidence bit by bit, sufficiently to risk asking the town hall for a copy of my birth certificate, since I needed it to get married. It was, I guess, one of the mistakes which you, in your lair, had been waiting for me to make
.

Since then we have lived continually on the run. For a year I believed I could get away from you. I know now that I cannot. You will always have luck and money on your side; it is pointless believing I will ever succeed in getting through the holes in the net you have cast, just as it is illusory to hope that you will ever cease to pursue me. You have the power to kill me, and you believe you have the right to do so, but you won’t make me run any further: together with my husband François, and Anne, to whom I have just given birth, I shall live from now on, without shifting, in Chaumont-Porcien, in the Ardennes. I await you with serenity
.

For more than a year I made myself give no sign of life; I sacked all the detectives and investigators I had hired; I closeted myself in my flat, hardly went out, lived on ginger crackers and tea bags, using alcohol, tobacco, and maxiton tablets to maintain myself in a sort of pulsating fever which gave way at times to bouts of complete torpor. The certain knowledge that Elizabeth was waiting for me, went to bed each night thinking she might never awake, kissed her daughter each morning almost surprised to be still alive, the feeling that this reprieve was for her a new torture every day, was sometimes like being inebriated with revenge, a sensation of evil, omnipotent, ubiquitous exaltation, and sometimes it threw me into a boundless depression. For weeks on end, day and night, unable to sleep for more than a few minutesd all

I regained my confidence bit by bit, sufficiently to risk asking the town hall for a copy of my birth certificate, since I needed it to get married. It was, I guess, one of the mistakes which you, in your lair, had been waiting for me to make
.