The Fury of Rachel Monette (41 page)

The kiosk stood beneath one of the spreading plane trees which lined both sides of the Cours. High above the pavement the leafy boughs embraced, forming a shady bower that gave tourists trouble with their F-stops and made Rachel slightly claustrophobic. Eight DePoes were listed in the directory, but only one had two numbers: the first for the department of anthropology at the University of Aix, the second for the professor's residence. Rachel gave the address to the driver.

It was an old narrow house on a little street off the Cours. The two flanking buildings, bigger and newer, were squeezing the life out of it. And she had done her part too, Rachel thought, and might do more before the night was over.

She opened her suitcase on the seat and took out the painting of the bridge on the Seine. “Would you wait for me, please?” she asked the driver. “I won't be very long.”

The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror. He was an old man with worn-out skin and a big runny nose. “I haven't seen any money.” He spoke a coarse Mediterranean French which she understood with difficulty.

“How much to hire the cab for the night?”

He wiped his nose on his sleeve to give himself time to think. “One hundred and fifty francs.”

Rachel gave it to him. “Wait here.”

She got out of the car and rang the doorbell. The door opened immediately, as if she had been expected at any moment, but opened only as far as the brass chain permitted. The thin profile of a woman's face appeared.

“Excuse me for calling so late, but I need to have a painting authenticated. It's very urgent.”

“Prehistoric?” the woman asked. She had the kind of Parisian accent which made the word something Rachel wanted to hear again. It turned the vowels to honey and wrapped them in crystal consonants. “I am sorry. My husband is away on a field trip.”

“It's nothing as old as that,” Rachel said. “I'm told it's one of yours.”

“Mine?”

Rachel held up the painting so the woman could see it. “You are Lily Gris?”

“Lily DePoe. I was Lily Gris, a long time ago.” Her voice sounded distracted: all her attention was on the painting.

“Is it yours?”

Lily DePoe did not answer at first. She could not lift her gaze from the picture. By the poor light of the street lamp Rachel thought she glimpsed a fascinated terror in the woman's face, as might come over a rabbit encountering a rattlesnake. “Yes,” Lily DePoe answered finally. “Where did you get it?”

“From a collector. If you don't mind I'd like to ask you a few questions about it.”

“I don't know—”

“I'll take no more than three or four minutes. It's just that I'm impressed by the painting and want to know more.”

“Very well.” Lily DePoe unhooked the chain and Rachel stepped into the hall. In better light she saw a striking woman, almost as tall as she, and very thin; her wrists were like test tubes. Despite her age she did not look at all absurd in her almost Bohemian dress—black clogs, dark brown leather trousers, black turtleneck sweater. Her face allowed her to get away with it: white delicate skin stretched tightly over fine angular bones, so tightly that the lines of age did not penetrate the skin but seemed to have been drawn on its surface. Her long hair was collected in a bun on the crown of her head; it was a shiny jet black that no hair could naturally be. The whole, Rachel realized, clothes, skin, hair, was a dramatic setting for her eyes, blue eyes without the least hint of green. The effect was almost shocking. It made her think of the painting in her hand.

Lily DePoe led her to a small sitting room off the hall. Evidently she had been there during the evening. A cigarette in a stone ashtray had burned to a long cylindrical ash; beside it a book lay open upside down. Huysman's
Au Rebours.
There was a faint smell to which Rachel could not quite give the name. Incense? Perhaps the whole house was a setting for those eyes.

They sat in matching velvet chairs. Now that she had seen the painting Lily DePoe seemed to have little more interest in it. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

Rachel was surprised. She had been prepared for a line of questions about how she had known Lily DePoe was Lily Gris, how she had found her in Aix. “Well,” she said, off guard, “what's it about?” She knew as she spoke that she could not have chosen a more stupid question to ask an artist, but it didn't seem to bother Lily DePoe.

“Death,” she answered.

“Death of anyone in particular?”

“Anyone in particular?”

“Yes. Someone you knew, for instance.”

Too much. Lily DePoe leaned slowly back in the chair, her blue eyes very alert. She should have taken more care in moving her from metaphor to reality. Now Lily DePoe had landed in it with a jolt.

“Why should it be someone I knew? Artists live in the world of the imagination.”

“But imagination can work with real events, surely?”

“I suppose.” Lily DePoe was not interested in her esthetic theories.

“I only ask because I was told you had been inspired by something which really happened.”

“Who told you that?” Lily DePoe asked warily.

“Pinchas Levy.” It was the first name that came to mind. Lily DePoe made a very French gesture with her shoulders, a shrug which said that the name meant nothing. “I'm sure the painting has passed through several hands since you finished it.”

Lily DePoe thought about that. It seemed to please her. Her eyes went again to the painting, which lay on a small table between them. “It was the last one I ever did. I was still a girl, really.”

“But why did you stop? It's a very good painting. You must have known that.” Rachel spoke with real feeling.

Lily DePoe heard it, too. “Thank you.” Rachel was surprised by the intensity of the gratitude in her tone, and the sudden wetness in her eyes.

“Did it have to do with this painting?” she asked very quietly. “Did something upset you?”

Lily DePoe lowered her gaze to the floor. “I saw a man kill a woman. He pushed her off a bridge.” Without looking she pointed to the painting. “That bridge.”

Rachel tried to keep her voice quiet and casual. “Why did he do that?”

Lily DePoe seemed to speak from far away. “They were drunk. And they had been quarreling.”

“Quarreling?”

“About the war.” Her head came up quickly, as if someone had entered the house. “The Second World War,” she explained. Her voice had lost its intimacy. She opened a little case that was studded with pieces of amber and took a cigarette. She lit it. “As I told you it was a long time ago.” Rachel felt her slipping away.

“What did you do about it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The murder.”

Rachel heard a sharp intake of breath. Lily DePoe looked away; her eyes rested on the cigarette, watched it burn for a few seconds, and returned their gaze to the floor. Rachel thought that as long as she kept her looking at the floor she would be all right. She realized that Lily DePoe was one of the most highly strung people she had ever seen, highly strung and possibly addicted to tranquilizers. She was certainly full of them now.

“Did you go to the police?” Rachel asked gently.

“No.” The distant voice had returned.

“Why not?”

“I wasn't sure. It might have been an accident. She was walking on the balustrade. He went to help her down.” Lily DePoe sat very still. The cigarette consumed itself in her fingers.

“But he pushed her instead.”

“I don't know,” Lily DePoe replied in a whisper. “I never knew.”

You knew, Rachel thought: look again at that painting. “And the others? What did they think?”

“Others?”

“With you on the bridge.”

“There were no others. Only my fiancé and I. And the little boy. I was carrying him. Daniel.” The long cigarette ash curled at the tug of gravity and fell to the floor. “I never had a child of my own.”

“And your fiancé?”

“No.” Lily DePoe shook her head slowly. “It's me. The doctor says I'm barren.”

“I meant what did your fiancé think happened that night?”

“He said it was all my imagination and never to mention it to him again. If I let my imagination control me it would drive people away.”

“Did you tell him that you had heard them quarreling?”

“Yes. He said that married people do that. He was right.”

“Did you see the man after that night?”

“Yes. A few times. He was a friend of my fiancé.”

“Have you seen him recently?”

“No. Not for years.” Lily DePoe seemed to become aware of the cigarette ash on the floor beside her foot. Time was running out.

“You said he was a military man.” Rachel tried not to rush the words.

“Did I?”

“Yes. Do you remember what rank he held?”

Lily DePoe nudged the white ashes with the toe of her clog, watching them carefully. “Captain, I think.”

“Does your husband still see him?”

Lily DePoe's fine head snapped up. “Why don't you ask him?” she said angrily. The anger did not hold her for more than a few seconds. “Forgive me. He's not even here right now, of course. He's still away on that field trip. He was due home yesterday.” She raised the corners of her lips in a weak smile: “Men. They're so naughty when it comes to sticking to schedules.”

Her words were as hollow as her smile. She had no talent for making ladies' chitchat. Her talent was for painting.

Rachel stood up. “I won't keep you any longer. You've been very generous with your time.”

“It's easy to be generous with time. For me.”

Rachel's eyes were drawn to the painting. “I'd like to leave the painting as a present.”

“Oh, no,” Lily DePoe said with horror.

Rachel picked it up and left the house. The driver lay across the front seat, asleep. He had locked all the doors. Rachel knocked on the window.

“Not now,” he muttered in his sleep, loudly enough for Rachel to hear.

But it was now, and Rachel kept knocking until he sat up and let her in. “Orange,” she said. He sighed and turned the key.

It was not a long drive, an hour and a half at most. When they had gone half the distance Rachel opened the window and threw the painting into a field. It was very good and had been painted by a very talented hand, but there were many reasons why she didn't want it either.

35

The night was clear, cool, and very quiet. At first they saw a few other cars on the road, but later none at all. As the traffic thinned the old man seemed to drive more slowly, reluctant perhaps to be cut off from humanity. Once Rachel asked him to go faster; he pressed down on the accelerator for a minute or two, then eased off and drove even slower than before.

Rachel did not bother him again. She knew that no speed could satisfy: her mind was racing faster than any car. She thought of Angela telling her of Dan's recurring nightmare—his mother and father, towering over him, screaming at each other. They had a quarrel about the war, Lily Gris said. And she thought of Dan in Lily Gris's arms on the bridge over the Seine, in the first hours of 1948, watching his mother falling a long fall into the cold dark water. Had the path of his studies, his whole career, been determined somehow in that moment? He had become an expert on the war, one of the two or three leading men on the subject of the French collaboration. He had discovered new evidence, developed new theories. Had it all been an unconscious but unrelenting effort to unlock his memory of that night? What did you do in the war, Daddy? Was that what he really wanted to know? Mummy found out. If not everything, at least enough to arouse suspicion. And she was too high spirited and independent to forget about it. Had she overheard him talking with DePoe, reliving the good old days of Mhamid? Or had he mumbled in his sleep, drunk and unguarded? Mummy found out so he pushed her off a bridge.

As Lily Gris had said, it was a long time ago. Long before Xavier Monette had even heard of a man named Simon Calvi. How had it happened? Had he, like Hans Kopple, seen a photograph in a newspaper? A photograph of a man he knew as Victor Reinhardt. Private Victor Reinhardt of the Wehrmacht. Missing and presumed dead. Only he wasn't dead; he had turned up in the new state of Israel, the reborn homeland for the Jews, the ones who were left, and was becoming a successful politician. A spokesman in the beginning for the Moroccan Jews, but later for all who were not of European origin. A useful man to know.

Then he would wait. Wait and watch the course of Simon Calvi's career. And at the right moment, the moment when Simon Calvi had progressed to the point where he had too much to lose, he would go to his house at night, or meet him in a cafe, and say, much as she had said, Hello, Victor Reinhardt. And when they had finished discussing old times he would say, Here are some interesting political ideas you may want to adopt. Nothing very dishonorable in the beginning of course: just carry on with what you are already doing, build your power base.

Later he would make greater demands, and greater still, driving Calvi like a wedge into the new state. When had he brought in the Arabs? Surely they were not partners from the beginning; he would bide his time until he was certain Calvi was well hooked. There would never be any reason to even let Calvi suspect that the Arabs were involved. Which probably suited the Arabs perfectly: how delighted they must have been at the whole divisive affair. They would pay, and pay well.

And Calvi would be allowed to go on believing, if he could, that he was a legitimate spokesman for a repressed minority. They would keep him on a loose rein, not push too hard. But in the end they had pushed him too hard. No longer content to play the patient long-term game, they had raised the stakes. Higher than Simon Calvi could stomach. So they had lost, and the game was over. Grunberg was right. For Israel it had finished very well. With a jolt she realized that was partly due to her.