“Someone left this under my windshield wiper,” I said, handing her the brown envelope. “Was it you?”
Fanny shook her head, took the envelope, and weighed it, seemingly in no hurry to open it, as though she already knew what was inside. A minute earlier, her eyes had flashed green; now they were gray and mournful.
“Did you take those pictures, Fanny?”
She extracted the photographs from the cardboard sleeve. She looked down, glanced at the first two snaps, then handed them back to me.
“You know what you should do, Thomas? Get on a plane back to New York.”
“Answer the question. You did take those photos, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did. Twenty-five years ago.”
“Why?”
“Because Vinca asked me to.” She tugged at the neck of her scrubs and rubbed her eyes. “I know it was all a long time ago.” She sighed. “But your memories of that time are very different from mine.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You need to face the truth, Thomas. Sometime in late ’92, Vinca completely lost it. She was out of control; she was in free fall. You have to remember, this was the beginning of all-night raves—the whole school was tripping on something. And Vinca didn’t mind getting stoned out of her mind.”
I thought back to the stash of tranquilizers, sleeping pills, ecstasy, and speed I’d seen in Vinca’s bathroom cabinet.
“One night in October or November, Vinca showed up at my door. She told me she was screwing your father and she asked me to follow them and take pictures. She—”
The receptionist interrupted her confession. “Here’s your bag!” Debbie called.
Fanny thanked her, took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and set the handbag on the hood. It was woven leather, white and tan, and the onyx eyes of its snake-head clasp looked menacing.
“What did Vinca want to do with the photos?”
Fanny lit a cigarette and shrugged. “My guess is she planned to blackmail your father. Have you asked him about it?”
“Not yet.” I could feel rage and disappointment welling up in me. “How could you go along with something like that, Fanny?”
She shook her head and took a long drag. Her eyes were misted with tears. She half closed them, as though fighting the urge to cry, but I did not let up.
“How could you do that to me?”
I had shouted this at her, but she jumped down from the hood, faced me, and shouted even louder.
“Because I was in love with you, okay?”
Her bag had fallen to the ground. Eyes blazing with anger, Fanny pushed me hard. “I’ve always been in love with you, Thomas, always! And you used to love me before Vinca came along and fucked things up.”
She punched me in the chest.
“You gave up everything for her, to please her. You gave up everything that made you who you were. All the things that made you different from other boys.”
This was the first time I’d ever seen Fanny lose control. I stood there and took the punches, perhaps because I knew there was some truth in what she was saying, because I felt I deserved it. When I decided I had been punished enough, I gently took her wrists.
“Calm down, Fanny.”
She pulled away from me and buried her face in her hands. Her legs were shaking. She looked utterly defeated.
“I agreed to take the photos because I wanted to show them to you, to show you what Vinca was really like.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because back then, it would have completely destroyed you. I was terrified you’d do something stupid. To yourself, to her, to your father. I didn’t want to take that risk.”
She leaned against the door of the car. I bent down and picked up her bag, carefully avoiding being bitten by the snake. The contents were scattered on the ground—a diary, a bunch of keys, a lipstick. As I was putting everything into the bag, I noticed a folded piece of paper, a photocopy of the article from Nice-Matin that had been sent to me and to Maxime. Scrawled across it in red marker was the same word: Revenge.
“What’s this?” I said, straightening up.
She took it from me. “An anonymous note. I found it in my pigeonhole earlier this week.”
Suddenly, the air became heavier, and I realized that the danger threatening Maxime and me was more insidious than I had thought. “Have you any idea why someone sent you this?”
Fanny slumped against the car. She was at a breaking point. I couldn’t understand why she had been sent this note. She had had nothing to do with Alexis Clément’s murder; why would whoever was stalking me and Maxime blame her?
I gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “Tell me, Fanny, please—do you have any idea why you were sent this?”
She looked up, and I stared at her crumpled, ashen face.
“Of course I fucking know!” she snapped.
Now I was the one who was confused. “Well…why?”
“Because there’s a corpse walled up inside the gym.”
4.
For a long moment, I stood there, speechless. Everything was unraveling. I was paralyzed.
“How long have you known?”
She looked punch-drunk, as though she had given up fighting and was simply waiting to fall.
“Since the day it happened,” she whispered wearily.
Then she collapsed. Literally. She slid off the car and crumpled into a sobbing heap on the pavement. I rushed to help her to her feet.
“You had nothing to do with Clément’s death, Fanny. It was me and Maxime, we’re the ones to blame.”
For a moment she stared up at me, dazed, before once more bursting into ragged sobs and burying her face in her hands. I hunkered down next to her and waited for her tears to stop, staring at our elongated shadows on the ground. Eventually, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“How did it happen?” she said. “How did he die?”
At this point, there was nothing to lose, so I poured out every detail of our terrible secret, reliving the traumatic incident that had made me a murderer. By the time I had finished, Fanny seemed to have recovered her composure. The confession had calmed us both. “What about you, Fanny, how did you find out?”
She struggled to her feet, took a deep breath, lit another cigarette, and smoked for a moment as she summoned old memories.
“December nineteenth, the Saturday of the snowstorm, I’d been up late studying. Back when I was trying to get into medical school, I was sleeping barely four hours a night. I think it drove me a little crazy, especially since I didn’t have any money to buy food. That night, I was so hungry I couldn’t sleep. A couple of weeks earlier, Madame Fabianski, the caretaker’s wife, had taken pity on me and given me a spare key to the cafeteria kitchen.”
In her pocket, Fanny’s beeper buzzed, but she ignored it.
“So I headed out. It was three in the morning, and I was walking across the campus to the cafeteria. Obviously, all the buildings were locked, but I knew the code to the fire door and was able to get into the dining hall. It was freezing cold, so I didn’t exactly hang around. I gobbled a box of cookies and left with half a loaf of bread and a bar of chocolate.”
She was speaking in a monotone, as though hypnotized.
“It was only as I was heading back to my building that I noticed how beautiful the scene was. It had stopped snowing, the wind had whipped away the clouds, and the sky was scattered with stars. There was a full moon. It was so magical that I decided to walk around the lake. I can still remember hearing my shoes crunching on the snow, seeing the blue reflected moon gliding on the lake.
“I saw a strange glow up on the hill, and that broke the spell. It was coming from the building site where they were working on the gym. As I got closer, I realized it wasn’t simply a glow—the whole site was lit up. I could hear the hum of an engine, the rumble of a machine. My instincts told me to stay well away, but curiosity got the better of me.”
“What did
you see?”
“I saw a cement mixer churning in the darkness. I was dumbfounded—why would anyone be mixing concrete at three in the morning in the freezing cold? I could feel someone nearby. I turned around and saw Ahmed Ghazouani, the guy who used to work for Francis Biancardini. He was almost as scared as I was. I screamed and ran back to my room as fast as I could, but I always thought that I’d seen something that night that I wasn’t supposed to see.”
“How did you know Ahmed was walling up Alexis Clément’s body?”
“I didn’t. It was Ahmed who told me…nearly twenty-five years later.”
“How did it happen?”
Fanny turned and nodded at the hospital building. “Last year, he was admitted with stomach cancer. He wasn’t my patient, obviously, but sometimes I’d pop in to see him after my shift. My father worked with him on the commercial port in Nice back in ’79, and they’d kept in touch. Ahmed knew the cancer was terminal, and before he died, he wanted to ease his conscience. So he told me everything. Like you did just now.”
My panic was reaching a fever pitch. “If he told you, maybe he told someone else. Can you remember who came to visit him?”
“Nobody, actually. Nobody came to visit him. He grumbled about it. All he wanted was to go back to Tunisia, to Bizerte.”
I remembered that Maxime had said Ahmed had gone back to his native Tunisia to die.
“And I always assumed that’s what he did,” Fanny said. “He discharged himself to go back to Tunisia…”
“…where he died a few weeks later.”
Fanny’s beeper echoed in the deserted parking lot. “This time, I really have to get back to work.”
“Of course, go ahead.”
“Let me know when you’ve talked to your father.”
I nodded and headed back to the visitors’ parking lot. When I reached the car, I couldn’t help but turn back. I had walked twenty meters, but Fanny was still there, staring at me. Framed against the light, her blond hair glowed like the filaments of a magic lantern. Her face was hidden in shadow, and in that moment she might have been any age.
For a fleeting instant, I imagined she was once again the Fanny I’d known back in the summer of The Big Blue. And I was once again the boy who was “different from other boys.”
The only version of Thomas Degalais I had ever liked.
9
The Lives of Roses
1.
With its meandering roads, its olive groves, and its neatly trimmed hedges, the district of La Constance had always reminded me of certain pieces of jazz, an easy, laid-back call-and-response where elegant motifs are repeated, embellished, and echoed.
My parents lived on the chemin de la Suquette, which took its name from the Occitan word for “hill.” It was here, overlooking Antibes, that the Château de la Constance had once stood, a vast estate to the east of the city. Over time, the château had been converted into a sanatorium and later into luxury apartments. The surrounding lands had mushroomed with elegant villas and housing developments. My parents had moved here not long after I was born, when the road was little more than a flower-strewn dirt track. I could remember my brother teaching me to ride a bicycle here, and on weekends the locals would often organize games of pétanque. Now, it was a wide paved road clogged with traffic. It was not exactly a highway, but it was not far off.
I pulled up outside number 74, the Villa Violette, rolled down my window, leaned out, and pressed the entry-phone button. No one answered, but a second later, the electric gates glided open. I shifted gears and set off down the narrow driveway that snaked up toward my childhood home.
My father, I noticed, was still loyal to Audi, and his current car, an A4 Estate, was parked right outside the door, strategically placed so he could take off whenever he wanted to (an inclination that I felt entirely summed up Richard Degalais). I parked a little farther away on a gravel forecourt next to a Mercedes convertible I assumed belonged to my mother.
I stepped out into the sunlight, trying to collect my thoughts and figure out what I hoped to achieve here this afternoon. The house had been built at the brow of the hill, and I was mesmerized, as always, by the view: the slender silhouettes of the palm trees, the cloudless expanse of sky and sea, the vast sweep of the horizon. I brought my hand up to shield my eyes from the dazzling sun, and as I turned my head, I saw my mother standing on the porch, arms folded, waiting for me.
I hadn’t seen her in almost two years. As I raced up the steps to her, I held her gaze and studied her closely. I always felt vaguely intimidated in her presence. I had spent a serene and joyful childhood close to her, but late adolescence and adulthood had driven a wedge between us. Annabelle Degalais—née Annabella Antonioli—was an ice queen, a Hitchcock blonde without the radiance of Grace Kelly or the impulsiveness of Eva Marie Saint. Tall and angular, her physique perfectly matched that of my father. She was wearing pants in a clean, modern cut with a matching jacket. Although her blond hair had faded to ash gray, it was not yet white. She had aged a little since my last visit.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hello, Thomas.”
Her glacial eyes had never been so clear, so piercing. I was always hesitant to hug her. Each time, I felt as though she might take a step back. Today, I decided not to even risk it.
When she was a child, her schoolfriends had nicknamed her “the Austrian.” Her family had had a troubled history, and this was the one excuse I had come up with to explain her coldness. During the war, my maternal grandfather, Angelo Antonioli, a peasant farmer in Piedmont, had been conscripted into the Italian Expeditionary Corps, two hundred thirty thousand soldiers who, from the summer of 1941 to the winter of 1943, had been posted to the Eastern Front, from Odessa to the banks of the Don to Stalingrad. Barely half of them made it home. My grandfather Angelo was one of those who didn’t make it back; captured by the Soviets during the Ostrogozhsk-Rossosh Offensive, he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp but died on the march to the gulag. This beaming boy from northern Italy had fallen in the icy cold of the Russian steppes, victim of a war that was not his. To add to the family’s woes, during his absence, his wife had gotten pregnant and could scarcely hide the fact that it was the result of adultery. As the product of my grandmother’s forbidden love for an Austrian laborer, my mother was born into scandal. The shame that attended her birth meant that she grew up to be uncommonly determined and dispassionate. I had always had the impression that nothing truly unsettled or upset her, a manner that starkly contrasted with my own sensitivity.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were ill?” I blurted out the question almost without thinking.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“I just wish I’d known, that’s all.”
She had not always been so distant with me. Thinking back to my childhood, I remembered moments of genuine intimacy and affinity, especially when we talked about novels and plays. This was not my wounded pride rewriting history; I had seen countless pictures of myself as a child with my mother smiling, clearly delighted and proud to call me her son. Later, things went sour, though I never really understood why. These days, she still got along well with my brother and my sister but markedly less so with me. In an unhealthy way, I thought of it as a badge of honor. At least I had something my siblings did not.
“So, you’ve been at the fiftieth anniversary of Saint-Ex? I don’t know why you’d bother…”
“It was good to see old friends.”
“You didn’t have any friends, Thomas. The only friends you had were your books.”
This was true, but hearing it stated so baldly was still upsetting. “Maxime is my friend.”
Standing motionless and unblinking, ringed by a shimmering halo of sunlight, she looked like a marble Madonna you might find in an old Italian church.
“Why are you here, Thomas?” she said. “You don’t have a book to promote at the moment.”
“Couldn’t you at least pretend to be happy?”
; “Is that what you’re doing, pretending?”
I sighed. We were going in circles. Both of us had considerable unspoken bitterness. For a split second, I almost told her the truth: I killed a man, his body is walled up in the school gym, and by Monday, I might be locked up for murder. Next time you see me, Mom, I might be flanked by two burly cops or behind the glass wall of a prison visiting room.
It’s unlikely that I would have done it, but she did not give me a chance. Without gesturing for me to follow her, she had turned and was on her way up the steps. She had obviously had enough, and so had I.
For a moment, I stood there alone on the terra-cotta tiles of the terrace. Hearing voices, I wandered over to the wrought-iron balcony overgrown with ivy. My father was talking to Alexandre, the elderly gardener who also took care of the swimming pool. The pool had sprung a leak. My father thought it was near the filter but Alexandre, more pessimistic, was talking about digging up the lawn to get to the pipework.
“Hey, Dad.”
Richard looked up and gave a little nod as though he’d seen me yesterday. He was the reason for my visit, but as Alexandre wandered off, I decided to go and rummage in the attic.
2.
Well, an attic in a manner of speaking. The villa didn’t have an actual attic, but it had an enormous cellar accessible from the garden, almost a hundred square meters that no one had ever thought to organize, so over the years it had turned into the family’s junk room.
While every other room in the villa was elegant, immaculately polished, and tastefully furnished, the cellar was filled with a grotesque collection of random stuff and illuminated by flickering strip lights. Here were stored the repressed memories of the Villa Violette. I managed to clear a path through the chaos. There were old bikes, a scooter, and pairs of roller skates that probably belonged to my sister’s kids. Next to a toolbox, half hidden by a tarpaulin, was my old moped. My father—always a gearhead—had completely refurbished it. The body had been stripped and beautifully repainted, and he had replaced the wheel rims and the tires—my pathetic old 103 MVL now looked properly hot. He had even managed to track down the original Peugeot stickers. Deeper into the room, there were toys, trunks, suitcases, and vast piles of clothes; my mother and father had never skimped on clothes. There were stacks of books gathering dust. These were the books the family actually read but that weren’t literary enough to earn a place on the walnut bookshelves in the library—my mother’s thrillers and love stories, the popular nonfiction my father liked. Handsome leather-bound editions of Saint-John Perse and Malraux lined the shelves upstairs, but in the cellar were the true manuals of our lives—Dan Brown and Fifty Shades of Grey.
The Reunion Page 10
