Theory of Remainders (45 page)

Which is when he surprised himself by saying it.

“I still love you, Yvonne.”

The conversation ground to a halt.

He nodded to himself.
That
was why he’d come back. Out of the need to say this. One way or another, he’d had to utter those words. Otherwise he might just as well have cut his own tongue out, for there would have been nothing else worth saying.

When she finally responded, her voice was a whisper. “I know you do.”

He lay out in the garden, draped over a chaise longue in the sun. How good it felt to be outdoors, away from Monsieur Bécot’s little hotel room! His eyes were closed, and he’d been reliving the life of back then. Why not? Hervé’s minions would find him soon enough. There was nowhere to go in the meantime. Besides, since his call with Yvonne, he’d concluded his work in Yvetot. He was at ease. Let them come; he was ready.

In his mind he played the footage of seven-year-old Sophie running across the brand new carpet with muddy shoes. Then there’d been that disastrous—and hilarious—birthday dinner. Next came the images of the Christmas circus they attended when she was nine, when Sophie had watched slack-jawed as the contortionist backed her head through her own legs. Then came the bicycle lessons, followed by the tennis games.

And then there were the other sequences,
after
. The police. The funeral. The court. The arguments. The end.

He shifted on the chair. The sun had gone behind the trees, and there was a chill in the air. He thought about Sophie’s tomb. The wilted flowers. The first lines of lichen creeping over the top. The grave. Her name—formed not by the application of ink or paint, but by the presence of a void, by grooves in the stone. Engraving: a form of writing that spoke through absence. Just as Melanie Patterson had said: the rests are as important as the notes.

I can tell you exactly nothing
, Morin whispered,
or nothing exactly
.

And then, although he was no longer trying to see anything at all, he opened an eye. Then a second. A moment later he found himself sitting up.

What if saying
exactly nothing
was a way of speaking? What if silence was not the refusal to communicate, but in fact the very vehicle of expression—its voice, its tongue?

A first example of this had occurred when Morin referred to Sophie by way of three French villages: he had named her silently. And this practice had continued as he dipped and swerved into other languages, ceasing to speak in one so that he might shield himself with another. At each transition, everything shifted—everything except, perhaps, for one thing: the buzzing accent that carried through all of Morin’s languages, the one that hummed through everything he said.

This accent—if that’s what it was—had remained a mystery, and Philip had paid no attention to it, for accents had nothing to do with the meaningfulness of language. Or so he’d thought. But then Roger had lectured him about how much accents matter, what they reveal about the speaker. Yvonne, too, had seconded this: accents were
complicated
, she’d insisted. They were part of language and yet outside of it. Time and again he’d seen firsthand what his own American twang signaled to other people.

He plodded back into the kitchen and pulled out the recorder, listening to a snippet of Morin’s words. He repeated the buzzing accent with his own voice, hearing his missteps, correcting them, and trying again. Once he figured it out, it wasn’t so hard. Aside from the lilt of French in the background, or the exaggerated burst of British, it consisted simply of the elimination of the sound produced by the letter S. Whenever a word risked hissing, Morin’s vocal cords came into action, turning the S into a Z.

He sat down at the kitchen table and reached for the diary. Turning through the pages, he recited phrases that Édouard had uttered, trying to imitate his humming voice. At the end he came to the list of aphorisms pronounced in the library of the hospital.
The kernel of our grief
, he read out loud, and something in the phrase rang odd. He tried another:
I am the boy of my father
. This, too, harbored a kind of strangeness. One by one Philip marched through the six phrases, reading them with Édouard’s accent.
The apple fell near the tree.
A king gave law by an oak
.
We each carry a burden
.
The Calvary, a likely mount.

What stood out about these sentences was simply that Édouard’s humming accent did not affect them, and suddenly Philip understood why. The linguistic contortions that replaced simple words like
son
,
seed
, and
cross
with more unusual forms served one purpose alone: they avoided every single instance of the sound associated with the letter S.

The diary fell from his hands onto the kitchen floor.

Somewhere in Rouen Hervé Legrand was turning the crank of bureaucracy like a monkey at a barrel organ. Perhaps the cogs were already spinning and wheezing. Francis Boucher might be sitting in the Yvetot police station, his feet on the desk, ignoring the e-mails from Rouen as they pinged in his inbox. Philip might still have a little time, but it would be measured in hours, not days. Worse, he wasn’t sure where to start. He had a voice recorder, a diary, and the letter S, a squiggle of a sign that meant nothing at all—but that Édouard Morin had gone to great pains not to say.

What does it mean to look for a letter? Most of the time language floats over the surface of the world, but every now and then a connection sprouts between words and things—the way upholstery buttons tether fabric. Philip understood that a connection existed between Édouard Morin’s language and the space within which he lived. He just didn’t know where to find it.

Cruising through town in the Smart Car, he studied street signs, the curve of walls, the designs in cast-iron fencing. Even the layout of roads in Yvetot felt like a kind of writing, with thoroughfares inscribing shapes on the tablet of the land.

Anyone who found his car would know just how far Philip had gone, so he ditched it in a side street. Not that it would help very much. A six-foot-three foreigner couldn’t keep out of sight for long in a French town.

S struck him as the key, as the only possible solution to the problem Morin had presented. But he didn’t know where to find the lock that this key would open. It was meaningful only in Morin’s intensely personal language, for which there existed no dictionary.

So Philip searched as he walked, circling Saint-Pierre, striding through the commercial district, studying the monuments and fountains. Very quickly he discovered that the problem lay not in detecting the presence of the letter S in Yvetot, but rather in sorting through its superabundance. The town teemed with S’s: from the signs of stores to the names of streets, to the words Philip overhead in conversations. Yvetot positively whistled with sibilants. The letter was everywhere, in ways he would never have expected: in the curve of a metal brace in the masonry wall; in the F-holes of the violin displayed in the music store window; in the rippled slide of the playground off the main square; in every instance of the number 2 or the letter Z seen in reverse through the back of shop windows.

And because S was everywhere, it was essentially nowhere. Nothing distinguished one instance from another. No occurrence of the letter brought Philip any closer to the images Morin had carefully clustered in his cryptic phrases: Saint Louis, the cross, the Calvary, the son, the sorrow, the oak. He felt infinitely closer than he had been at Le Mont de l’If, but it was a closeness that left him nowhere. A
non-lieu
.

Soon the sun foundered on the horizon and Yvetot sank into the shadows of dusk, letters becoming harder to read in the dim light. Even with Boucher’s obstructions, Hervé would be closing in. Perhaps they would by now have dispatched police straight from Rouen. Night was falling, and he had no option but to interrupt his search, a pause that would in reality mean a full stop. At this point there was nothing left to do but wait. The authorities would escort him back to Paris. They would put him on a plane. Hervé would make sure he couldn’t return. In twenty-four hours he would find himself in Boston again, where he’d have to try to lower the lid on his past once more.

The first streetlights flickered on as he passed the entrance to La Cauchoise. What the hell. If Hervé was going to appear at any moment, he might as well finish things right where he’d started, in the lobby of the old hotel. He climbed the steps and pushed through the wooden door. Bécot stood at the reception, as stout as a sea captain.

“Monsieur Adler,” he said, greeting him with actual warmth. “I heard you were back in town.”

“I see you’ve followed the news, Monsieur. I’m afraid I’m here for a very short time.”

“Oh yes, I heard that, too. It sounds like Monsieur Legrand will find you very soon. That is what they all say.”

“Then I suppose he may as well find me here.” Philip slumped into one of the armchairs in front of the desk. The old craving was back. As long as he was on his way out, maybe he’d top it off with one last shot. “I don’t know if you remember, Monsieur Bécot, but the very first night I arrived in your hotel, you offered me a drink.”

“That’s right, Monsieur Adler. Of Calvados.”

“I’d take a glass of that now, if you’re still offering.”

“But of course! It will be a much more pleasant way to wait.” He disappeared into the back room and reemerged with a bottle and two glasses.

“Would you like some company?” he offered.

Bécot poured the vaporous liqueur, then settled into the armchair opposite Philip. The two men clinked their glasses.

“To S,” said Philip.

“What is that?” Bécot asked.

“S marks the spot. The target. The bull’s-eye. It’s the place I couldn’t find. Anyplace. Or no place.”

Bécot nodded as if it all made perfect sense. “I have never heard of such a place.”

“Neither has anyone else.” He rolled the alcohol in his glass, warming the bowl with his hand. He took a swallow, wincing as it burned the back of his throat. “In some ways it will be good to put this behind me. As you said at the very beginning, one should let a sleeping cat lie.”

“Yes. I think that’s often best.”

“I’ll let Yvetot take care of itself. You don’t need me for that.”

Bécot nodded. “As I always say, Yvetot is a dying town.”

“A dying town. That’s right.” Philip could already feel the powerful Calvados seeping into his system. He forced a bitter chuckle. “I thought of that when I saw another tomb from the same year as Sophie’s. One family after another. It’s as if the people of Yvetot are all lined up, just waiting their turn.”

Bécot dipped his head this way and that. Maybe yes, maybe no. He wasn’t disagreeing. Then he furrowed his brow. “Who was it?” he asked.

“Who was what?”

“The tomb you have seen, the one from the same year as your little girl? I’m trying to think back. It was 1993, no? Perhaps Josiane Perrin? No, Josiane would have been in ’95, I believe.” His face lit up. “Perhaps it was old Fenouil?” Then he caught himself. “
Non, non
. I think, he was the year before.”

In fact, Philip didn’t remember the tomb clearly. It had an arched top with a cross emerging at the peak. Not too far from Sophie’s. With the name he’d seen bleeding through on the hardware store sign. The same one that was close to Sophie in Guérin’s registry of births and deaths.

“Haus?” he said. Even before Bécot shook his head, he knew that wasn’t right. But it had that kind of ring to it, a heavy, German-sounding name with an H. “Hosse?” No, that wasn’t it either. Then it came to him. “Hesse,” he said.

Bécot stared blankly. “But there is no one by that name.” He thought hard, then his eyes brightened. “Wait—I see, Monsieur Adler, it is your accent.”

Of course Bécot was right. There he’d gone again, aspirating the H, just as he did each time with
Hair-vay
. He opened his mouth to correct this error, eliminating the initial puff, and the sound that escaped from his lips was simple and short: “S.”