Theory of Remainders (27 page)

Everything was coming back. Too hard, too fast. He needed to organize his thoughts. Turning to a fresh page in the diary, he wrote SOPHIE MARIE ADLER across the top. Printing in capital letters made her name somehow more formal and distant, and this helped him retain his focus. Then, as he examined the documents and listened again to the voice recorder, he added words to the page—terms from the court reports, names of people and places, dates, repeated themes, the real or imagined pain in Édouard’s tongue—until Sophie’s name was surrounded by a galaxy of signs. Some words he linked by lines, forming half-constellations. Yet the facts felt disparate and diffuse. If some logic tied all these elements together, or linked them to the happenings of fifteen years ago, Philip hadn’t yet understood it. He needed a kind of Rosetta Stone, a dictionary for the hieroglyphs of Morin’s expression. He suspected that the key lay in the nexus of obsessions with places and words and sounds. The question was, would Philip even recognize this key if he saw it?

He rocked back in his chair, studying the ceiling. The dead ends of Sorquainville, Malamare and Adonville perplexed him. Monsieur Bécot’s description of the nothingness of these towns didn’t square with Morin’s account. Certainly Édouard was accurate in some respect: the Germans had indeed traversed Yvetot, fanning out in the direction of the coast and erecting roadblocks to slow the French retreat. But these checkpoints had not existed in the locations he’d asserted. He’d taken the historical record and skewed it, edging the truth to the side, referring to hamlets just barely off the routes the Germans had actually occupied.

He scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms, then called down to the front desk and asked for a sandwich to be sent up. While eating, he listened again to the recording from the meeting with Morin, tracking the logic from topic to topic: from foreign languages to travel, trains, geography, toponymy, vocabulary—and then to Sophie, the assertion of order, the allusions to poker, the religious imagery, the switching of languages.

It felt like a succession of detours, delaying the arrival at a point Édouard both did and did not want to reach.

By mid-afternoon he’d added only a handful of tentative observations to his notes, some of which he had later crossed out.

It was time for a walk.

He started out across the main square, where mothers pushed strollers and an old man walked a dog. Smells crowded the air, the scent of fresh bread billowing from the bakery, floral odors wafting from the gardens, the bitter stench of bitumen rising from a street repair. Chestnut trees along the boulevard were in full bloom, and greenery sprouted from cracks in stone walls, decorating even the signs of Yvetot’s deterioration. Philip strode past shop windows, angled down along the train station, and then headed east, going as far as the old Aubert home. The shutters on the living room were now open. He knocked at the front door, but no one came. The door was locked.

As he stepped down toward the drive, the image of his brother-in-law came back to mind. The night after Anne-Madeleine’s funeral, it was right here that Philip had rushed past Roger and Joëlle. Fifteen years earlier, Roger had embraced him on these same steps at the moment of another death. Both scenes had taken place at this location, practically on the Aubert threshold, a point of arrivals and departures, both meetings coming at twilit hours—at the fall of deepest night and the break of day.

Was that right? Something about this recollection felt incomplete.

As he mused, Philip looped back toward the town center, passing by the hardware store where the shopkeeper had finished repainting his sign and the ladder had come down. For now only the name MANTET was visible, but Philip suspected it was just a matter of time, and the older name would bleed through again.

As he walked by the Saint-Pierre church, he glimpsed Father Cabot heading for the doorway, a baguette under his arm. The priest waved to him. Several children played soccer on the crescent of lawn in front, and a zealous kick sent the ball bouncing in his direction. Philip trapped it and knocked it back as the boys called out their thanks.

The people of Yvetot were getting used to him. He no longer felt so out of place.

Then he headed south, and on either side of the narrow street archways opened into courtyards, some revealing dilapidated structures, others leading to what looked like small manor homes.

He couldn’t have plotted this route on a map, but Yvetot held a strange familiarity for him now. It was a town Philip knew poorly but that felt akin to a home—one replete with secret passageways and unexplored chambers.

A canopy of leaves loomed, the broad foliage of an old oak tree. By the time he reached the gate he realized where his legs had taken him: the entrance to Saint-Louis cemetery. He had not set out with this destination in mind, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was further proof of what he’d explained to Roger: we are not always in charge—sometimes someone else is at the wheel. No, his arrival at this destination was hardly the result of chance.

His mind paused over this term. Chance.
La chance
. The word was a point of overlap between the two languages, but they were false friends. In English chance referred to utter randomness, all things haphazard, while in French its twin designated good fortune, luck—that swell of confidence that whispered to you, suggesting that no matter how you throw the dice, they will turn up sixes. No, he didn’t expect ever to enjoy that feeling again.

Pushing through the gate, he stepped onto the gravel path and walked along the elongated tombs. They reminded him of playing cards, laid out in the fashion of the memory game he used to play with Sophie, dealing out the deck face down in rows, and taking turns in the hunt for pairs. Here too one might lift up a slab and find something akin to a face card, different branches of the same family scattered as if some divine hand had shuffled the oversized deck.

There was no clear logic to the organization of the graves. The dates spanned over two hundred years, old tombs alternating with newer ones. He knew how it worked. Abandoned graves were gradually reclaimed by the city, and then the plot was recycled. The old had to make room for the new, even here.

He was nearly to the maintenance shed when he paused, and it took a moment for him to understand why he had stopped at a particular gray sepulcher. The stone had no flourishes of sculpture. The tomb wasn’t ornate, or even well maintained. Neither grander nor more extravagant than the others, it sported a list of several descendants. What had caught Philip’s eye was simply the date associated with the most recent addition:
Julien Hesse, décédé le 27 mai 1993
. The same year as Sophie, just a little over a month earlier. She had been but one of many. People in Yvetot were queuing up for a spot in this garden for the dead. The family of Julien Hesse had barely had time to retreat from the cemetery before the Adlers and Auberts made their way in. Even death had scheduling problems.

He marched farther along the gravel, coming to a stop before the reddish slab he’d contemplated only a week earlier. The flowers he had left, along with Roger’s yellow rose, were dry and wrinkled. There again was the name, all in capitals, just as he had written it in the diary:

SOPHIE MARIE ADLER

He admired the texture of the letters, deeply engraved in the stone, marking Sophie’s name by voids. It all felt hollow to him now. An empty name above an empty tomb.

It was at that moment that the idea surged up. It appeared first like a dark, unrecognizable presence, and Philip sensed a connection with the jumble of information he’d accumulated over the course of the day. The letters of Sophie’s name, first estranged, had begun to feel newly familiar. They reminded him of the meeting with Morin, of words that had been spoken. The silhouette of an idea flitted like a sylph through the shadows.

It had to do with the roadblocks Morin had described, the ones whose existence Monsieur Bécot had adamantly denied. In Sorquainville, Malamare, and Adonville. That was the order Morin had listed them in, Philip was sure. If they were fabrications, why would Morin have chosen these particular names—ones that harbored an echo Philip could almost hear, ones beginning with the letters S, M, and A?

For those, he realized as the nausea rose within him, were the initials of the name before him now: Sophie Marie Adler. Indeed, more than initials: even the second letters matched.

It could have been coincidence. Philip couldn’t deny it. Chance—hazard or luck?—might have formed this parallel, just as two sticks falling from a tree might happen to form an X where they land. But if he was to believe Bécot and the maps, Morin had nudged history. Because the facts hadn’t suited the story he wanted to tell, he had shaved off certain details. It amounted to a kind of
rounding
, which was precisely what Morin had described. Reality sometimes required adjustments, and it became acceptable to trim the edges, eliminating remainders. By tweaking geography and history, Morin had managed to send a message.

S M A. Philip had marked these initials on the labels of endless pieces of clothing for summer camp. Anne-Madeleine had embroidered them on a pillow for her room. Yvonne had formed them with brass letters for their daughter’s bedroom door. Sophie herself had inked them in the corner of innumerable art projects.

A shiver ran through him as he realized that Morin had intended for him to make this connection. Philip had underestimated the situation. It was more complex than he had imagined. More subtle. Behind the singsong voice and the birdlike gait, there was a canniness to Morin that Philip had not appreciated. He would have to be more careful. Much more careful.

On the way back to the hotel, ideas swirled through his head like starlings. He needed a new paradigm, a different way of thinking. Only then might he have a chance of understanding.

Stopping in at the
Tord-boyaux
, he slipped past the group of regulars clustered at the bar, paying no heed to their silence as he made for the table at the back of the room. He didn’t listen to the conversation resume, didn’t hear the door opening and closing. His mind was elsewhere. He pulled out the diary and scribbled rapidly on a new page, underlining passages and stroking exclamation marks in the margins, trying to keep pace with his thoughts.

The
patronne
plodded over for his order.

“A beer,” he muttered without even looking up. It was only after she turned away that he realized what words he had spoken. Once again his mind had tried to ambush him with old habits and reflexes. Now was not the time to lose control. He called her back and revised his order to coffee.

He wrote feverishly, his fingers trembling as they clutched at the black pen. For the first time since arriving in Yvetot, he’d made a connection.

Half an hour later he strode back to the hotel, finding a new message awaiting him at the front desk: Doctor Suardet had called, and Édouard Morin had agreed to a second meeting. The news could not have been better, nor could it have come at a more favorable time. He called Yvonne from the lobby to let her know the schedule for the encounter.

Charging up the stairs to the third floor, he took them two by two. Things were finally looking up! He was onto something. It was time to call Roger. His mind was overflowing, and he needed to share his ideas.

However, when he opened the door to his room, a strange odor greeted him, and the light failed to go on when he flicked the switch. Something had gone wrong with the fixture that hung from the ceiling, which now had changed, drooped lower and gently swayed, the simple fabric having blossomed into a bouquet of yellow, red, and black tufts, all sprouting from a wad of plumage held together by two gray rods at the top, like some outrageous, oversized woman’s hat. As his eyes adjusted to the dim, Philip saw that the rods had claws, and the two gangly flaps were wings, feathers splayed at the tips. The room stank of barn and flesh, and from the stub at the bottom of this misshapen mass something dark oozed and dripped, pooling on the floor. Dark spatters dotted the rug and the cream-colored bedspread, as well as a section of the wall and even the papers on the desk.

A gnarled shape the size of a child’s fist rested on the floor, a jagged crest of red along one portion, with a wedge of hard brown that opened like parted lips. Embedded in the middle was a glossy pellet that looked remarkably like an eye.

Fifteen

After untangling the wire binding the rooster’s corpse to the light fixture, Philip wrapped the bloody carcass in a bath towel and stormed down the stairs. At the front desk Monsieur Bécot was just finishing his spiel about sightseeing to a young couple when Philip thudded the reddening bundle onto the hotel register and peeled back the flaps. The visitors blanched, and Bécot put on a passable imitation of astonishment, stammering that no, he’d seen nothing, nothing at all! And yet he’d been on duty all afternoon. No one could have gotten a key to the room.