The Fury of Rachel Monette (24 page)

On the Champs Elysées busboys swept the dirt from the patches of sidewalk used by the cafés to those that weren't. A jogger in a red track suit loped by on his way to the Bois de Boulogne. The busboys shrugged their shoulders at each other. “Crazy Americans,” one muttered. Rachel watched the jogger cross the circle to the Arc de Triomphe, pass the grave of the unknown soldier, and disappear.

She sat at a table on the perimeter of the territory of a large café, a café which clung to a fading fame as a gathering place for the chic, although the chic had long ago moved on. Her choice of table annoyed the waiter. It forced him to walk an extra thirty feet on each round trip. On top of that he could tell at a glance that she wasn't one of the chic. He kept hoping that one day they would return, like migrating geese, but they never did. The recurring disappointments made him surly with the customers.

In revenge he served two businessmen who had arrived after Rachel. They each ordered coffee and cognac. While they waited for the waiter to return, one of them began complaining about a television producer who had double-crossed him before he had time to figure out how to double-cross the producer. His companion tapped his fingers on the table and looked at different parts of Rachel's body. When the waiter reappeared the second man said something to him. The waiter sighed and went back inside. After a few minutes he returned, carrying a glass of cognac. He walked all the way to Rachel and set it on her table.

“What's this?”

“From that gentleman,” the waiter explained in a bored voice. He raised his arm and pointed at the second man. The second man beamed at Rachel. The happiness in his face didn't mean that the mere sight of her had brought joy into his heart; it meant that it takes some kind of a lover to pick up girls at seven in the morning.

“Thank him,” Rachel said, “but I don't drink at breakfast. You have it after I'm gone.” The offer made the waiter see Rachel in a new light. He asked if there was anything she wanted. She wanted scrambled eggs, bacon, and toasted rye bread. She settled for croissants and brioches. The saga of betrayal which appeared to center around a program called “Uncle Renard's Magic Farm” drew to a close. The two men drained their cognac and stood up. As they left, the second man gave Rachel a pitying look. She had lost her chance with one of the lords of amorous life, it said. Nothing could expiate the sin of frigidity.

Rachel took a taxi to the Sorbonne. The driver had dandruff on his shoulders and a pornographic magazine on his lap. He studied it at every red light, but there weren't enough: it would take the stop-and-go traffic of rush hour to make him an expert. When she paid him he grumbled for a few moments about the size of the tip, but his spirit wasn't really in it. They both knew where it was.

She and Dan had spent an afternoon trailing one of Dan's colleagues on a tour of the Sorbonne and she remembered it quite well. She went straight to the library and followed the signs to the periodical department. A young black man with lively eyes and tribal markings on his cheeks found the reel of microfilm she wanted. He wound it deftly on the spools of the viewer and switched on the rear screen light. Rachel sat down in front of the screen and began reading what
Le Monde
had printed on New Year's Day 1948.

It must have seemed important at the time but she saw nothing in the grainy light of the screen that made New Year's Day 1948 worth preserving on microfilm. She rolled the film ahead to January 2. Near the bottom of page five, beside a story about a fire in a restaurant kitchen, she found what she was looking for. She translated as she read.

YOUNG AMERICAN WOMAN DROWNED

At approximately 2:20 on the morning of January I a tragic accident took the life of a young American resident of Paris. The victim has been identified as Madame Margaret Monette, aged 30, wife of M. Xavier Monette, former officer in the army of France and resident at 298 rue de Millet, apartment three, first arrondissement. Police report that Mme. Monette fell from the east side of the Pont Neuf and apparently died of drowning. The body was recovered a few hours later. Mlle. Lily Gris of 298 rue de Millet, apartment five, employed as babysitter by the deceased, was taken to hospital and placed under mild sedation.

Rachel copied the French text into her notebook. She unwound the reel and returned it to the young man.

“Do you know a rue de Millet in the first arrondissement?”

“No. I've only been in Paris a month.” But he knew how to find it. He took a street atlas from his back pocket and began thumbing through it.

“Here it is,” he said, stabbing his finger at a spot on the page. He turned the book to show her. “In Les Halles.” He snapped the book shut. He was an energetic, efficient young man. She wondered how long he would be happy at the library.

Les Halles was the old market district of Paris but town planners moved the market to a new location. When Rachel's taxi arrived she saw they had replaced it with a chic imitation of downtown Houston. The rest of the neighborhood, including rue de Millet, stubbornly went on looking like Paris.

The taxi dropped her in front of 298. It was a four-storied dun-colored structure. Brown children stared at Rachel from the open windows. Over the door a marble lintel with three roses in bas relief made a plea for respectability that the pigeons were obliterating.

No amount of scrubbing could wash away the years of seediness; but the old woman on her hands and knees hadn't given up. She had covered the stone steps with a thick lather which she rubbed into the stone with a wire brush. Her exertions made her buttocks wobble and hiked her worn cotton skirt up to her thighs, revealing varicose veins like worms under the gray skin and sparse patches of white hair.

“Excuse me,” Rachel said. Still on all fours the woman twisted her head to look over her shoulder at Rachel. Her small, faded eyes were lost in flesh. Maroon circles under the eyes cut into the puffiness. Each was a sunken pit undermining her face from the lower eyelids to the cheekbones.

“He's not here,” the woman said in a coarse loud voice. “And I don't know when he'll be back.”

“Who?”

“Don't bother with any of your tricks,” the woman said angrily. “I can smell a social worker a block away.” She tapped the side of her nose as if it were a secret weapon.

“I'm not a social worker.”

“Sure. And I'm not the mother of a forty-two-year-old boy who hasn't worked a day in his life.” She turned away and began scrubbing furiously. “He hasn't even learned to make his own bed,” she shouted at the steps. The brown children in the windows giggled.

Rachel walked up to the landing and sat on her haunches facing the woman. “I'm not a social worker,” she repeated, “and I don't know about any forty-two-year-old boys. I'm looking for a woman named Lily Gris. I understand she used to live here.”

The woman stopped scrubbing and looked up. She tried to make her face cagey but it was too far gone to have that capability. “Is that so?”

“Yes. I know for a fact that she lived in this building in January 1948. Apartment five. Were you here that long ago?”

“I was born in this God-damned pigsty,” the woman said. Her voice softened slightly. “Of course it wasn't a pigsty then. We had fine tenants who kept the place clean.”

She raised her eyes to the stained facade, seeing it the way it used to be, or the way her young eyes had seen it. The expression on her face made the brown children giggle again. She shook her fist at them. “Now all we get are filthy blacks and filthy Arabs. I work my fingers to the bone cleaning up after them.”

“Was Lily Gris one of your fine tenants?”

“Yes,” escaped from the old woman's lips before she could clamp them shut. She bent over the scrub brush, hiding her face.

“I'm not going to cause you any trouble,” Rachel said. “I just want to talk to Lily Gris, that's all.”

“I told you our fine tenants are gone. They're all gone, long ago.”

“When did Lily Gris go away?” The old woman continued to scrub the steps. Through the thin wisps of her hair Rachel saw the skull underneath, as white as bone. “Was it soon after Margaret Monette died?”

The brush stopped moving. The old woman looked up at Rachel, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “If you know, why ask?”

“Where did she go?”

“I can't remember,” she mumbled, and began working the brush. Rachel stood up and stepped on it.

“You're not trying,” she said quietly.

“Why is it so important?” the old woman whined. A sudden thought wrinkled her brow. “Did her paintings end up making her famous?”

“That's it,” Rachel said.

“Are they worth money?”

“Some.”

“How much?” Excitement rose in her tired eyes.

“It depends on the painting.”

“How much for one about this size?” The old woman held her hands apart.

“I'd have to see it before I could tell you.” The old woman's eyes went to a pigeon on the lintel but it didn't give her any prompting. With a grunt of effort she got to her feet and wiped her hands on the front of her faded skirt.

“Come inside.”

The woman led her through the doorway and down a narrow flight of poorly lit stairs. The numeral one was painted on the door at the bottom in chipped white enamel. The old woman opened it and stood aside for Rachel to pass.

She entered a dark and smoky room. The only light came from two small windows in the top of the wall on the street side. Through them she could see the treading feet of passersby. The smoke rose from an unfiltered cigarette held loosely between the yellow fingers of a man seated in a lumpy armchair. He wore a cotton undershirt and cotton briefs. Both had once been white. They bore the scars of frequent repair, like an aging fighter's face. The man's own face was not a fighter's: he had buckteeth and a receding chin. The chin needed shaving and the teeth were coated in nicotine. His soft brown eyes looked at Rachel with interest. He crossed his skinny legs and brought the cigarette to his lips. Anyone guessing his age might easily have said forty-two.

“Get dressed, Guy,” the old woman said. “This lady wants to see the painting. She says it might be worth money.”

“What painting?” His voice was no lower in pitch than hers, and just as loud. They lived in a world where the sound was always turned up.

“How many paintings do we have? The one Mademoiselle Gris left behind, of course. Go get it.”

“I always said it was a good painting, didn't I?” He rose from the chair. “How much money are you talking about?” he said to Rachel.

“I can't say until I've seen it.”

His protruding teeth gnawed his lower lip. “It may not be for sale. It has a lot of sentimental value.”

“Then I won't buy it,” Rachel said. “But I can give you an idea of what it's worth.”

“Stop trying to be clever and get the painting,” the old woman snapped at him impatiently. He left through a doorway at the back of the room. “It's true he was very fond of Mademoiselle Gris,” the old woman explained. “She used to keep an eye on him when I was out. Naturally I took a little off her rent. That was how she made ends meet, babysitting Guy and the little Monette boy.”

The thought of Dan and the man in the underwear being boyhood friends gave Rachel a jolt. “Did she often take care of him? The Monette boy, I mean.”

“Yes,” the old woman answered. She looked thoughtful. “But I don't see that has anything to do with the painting.”

“I think it does.” The old eyes went far away.

“They were kind people, the Monettes,” she said at last. “Of course Madame Monette was very high spirited, but underneath she had a good nature. A lot of the time I think she had Mademoiselle Gris help with the boy because it was the only way she could give her money without making it look like charity. Often they would go out before dawn for an hour or two and put the child in number five with Mademoiselle Gris. They didn't have to. They could easily have saved the money by leaving him asleep in his own bed. The Monettes had number three. It was our nicest apartment in those days.”

“Where did they go for an hour or two before dawn?”

“To the market.” The old woman gestured impatiently toward the street, then abruptly stopped her hand and let it fall to her side. She went on more quietly: “Madame Monette loved to eat onion soup and watch the market open.”

“It sounds like they were well off.”

“No. Not well off. No one had money in those days. Not around here. But they had a little more than most. And they were generous with it.” The thought of money combined with generosity brought the old woman's eyes back to the present. “No one has ever had any money around here,” she said bitterly.

Guy returned to the room, still in his underwear. He carried a painting carefully in his hands. It had a plain wooden frame and wore a thick layer of dust. He handed it to Rachel. She blew the dust off and held the painting up to the light.

It was a night scene, lit by a full moon partially obscured by clouds. The clouds had an eerie translucence. The moonlight shone dimly on a still river. Out of the depths of the water rose the blurred shape of a black bridge, like a prehistoric sea monster.

“Well?” said the old woman.

Rachel gave the painting back to the man. “I may want to buy it. But first I have to know a few details.”

“What kind of details?” the woman asked impatiently.

“Anything that would authenticate the painting. For example, I need to know when it was painted.”

“I remember that,” the man said quickly. “She painted it just before she left.”

“When was that?”

The buckteeth gnawed again at the lip. “I don't know exactly. I never thought much about dates when I was a kid.”

“You still don't,” his mother said.