Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Here that’s practically Marcel Proust. Keep it to yourself. The people who run Eden-Olympia have a lot of power.’

  ‘I understand.’ I noticed the date of transmission. ‘July 25? Nearly two months afterwards?’

  ‘We had some late info.’

  ‘A tip-off? Someone at Eden-Olympia?’

  ‘Who can say? Leland kept his sources to himself. Take it easy, Mr Sinclair.’

  I shook his hand and eased myself around the door. ‘Do you ever get out to Eden-Olympia?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. People there keep to themselves.’

  ‘Are they popular along the coast?’

  ‘Some are. Some definitely aren’t. A bunch of them were making trouble in Mandelieu last weekend. They set up a late-night brawl with the local Arabs in the fruit market.’

  He watched me make my way down the stairs. As he waved, I called up to him: ‘These brawlers from Eden-Olympia – were they wearing black leather jackets?’

  ‘You know, I believe they were. It looked like they were part of a bowling team …’

  I returned to the Place Nationale and sat under the plane trees outside the Oasis restaurant, where the rain had once danced in my soup. Cooling my hands around a vin blanc, I studied the transcript. The transmission times on July 25 were listed: 2.34 p.m., 3.04, 3.34, presumably following the half-hour news breaks. The abrupt end hinted that pressure had been brought to bear from Eden-Olympia, which wanted nothing to rekindle the anxieties of staff and corporate clients.

  Roger Leland, speaking from Eden-Olympia, site of the greatest tragedy to hit the Côte d’Azur in recent years. Two months have passed since the horrific day when a young English doctor, thirty-two-years-old David Greenwood, ran amok with an automatic rifle, killing ten victims before turning the weapon on himself. Investigating judge Michel Terneau is still no nearer finding a motive, but has repeatedly stated that Greenwood acted alone and chose his victims at random.

  Riviera News has now uncovered new facts that suggest the killings were carefully planned and involved at least one co-conspirator. Video film from the business park’s surveillance cameras reportedly revealed Greenwood and an unidentified white male in the TV centre car park, transferring weapons from an unmarked van into Dr Greenwood’s Renault Espace. Sadly, this film was accidentally destroyed. Mystery also surrounds Greenwood’s movements in the last minutes of his life. Driven back by gunfire as he attempted to enter the Siemens building, Greenwood returned to his villa and immediately murdered his three hostages. Logs of police radio traffic suggest that Greenwood made the 2.8 kilometre journey on foot, taking just over three minutes, a feat even Olympic athletes would find impossible. There were no reports of stolen or hijacked vehicles.

  Was there an accomplice who helped Greenwood make his escape? The possibility that a second assassin is still at large, perhaps planning his revenge, has sent alarm bells ringing throughout the business park, still struggling to regain its calm after the tragic events of May 28. Roger Leland, for Riviera News, reporting from Eden-Olympia.

  I read the transcript again, disappointed that it provided no details of Greenwood’s murder route. The references to a co-conspirator were speculation, and I turned to the contact list at the foot of the page.

  Among the worthies named were Professor Kalman, director of the clinic; Pascal Zander, acting chief of security; Claudine Galante, manager, press bureau.

  Scribbled in longhand at the bottom of the page were four more names, each with its telephone number.

  Mlle Isabel Duval. Secretary of Dr Greenwood.

  Mme Cordier and Madame Ménard. Wives of dead hostages.

  Philippe Bourget. Brother of dead hostage.

  All, surprisingly, as their phone numbers indicated, were still resident in the greater Cannes area, as if the magnitude of the crime still held them in its grip, part of the business park’s baleful gravity that would never release those who came within its orbit.

  15

  A Residential Prison

  THE ELDERLY BOULES players in the Place Delaunay stood in their Zen poses, waiting for the click of a metal ball to alter the geometry of their game. Admiring their self-control, I left the Jaguar in the Rue Lauvert. Across the RN7 were the Antibes-Les-Pins apartments, a huge residential complex that covered thirty acres between the Place Delaunay and the sea, another of the security-obsessed compounds that were reshaping the geography and character of the Côte d’Azur.

  Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk. Once my appointment was confirmed, I followed his directions towards the Résidence de la Plage, the group of seven-storey apartments nearest to the sea. Decorative gardens in the formal French style surrounded the pathway, refreshed by an irrigation system that left the brickwork perpetually damp. But the shrubs and flowering plants seemed pallid and defeated, the ground beneath them so crammed with electronic ducting that no roots could prosper. Together they awaited their deaths, ready to be replaced by the month’s end.

  High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

  If this modern-day utopia demanded a new kind of urban survivalist, Isabel Duval personified her, from pale-grey make-up to hand-knitted wool suit. She was a handsome woman in her late thirties with a pleasant but toneless face from which all emotion had long been drained. As she welcomed me into her apartment she reminded me of the deputy principal of a private girls’ school who had been passed over for the headship too many times. Any resentment had been carefully defused, wrapped in sterile gauze and placed on a secure back shelf of her mind.

  ‘Monsieur Sinclair …?’ Her smile was as quick as a camera shutter, the same flicker of the lips that had beckoned the senior executives of Eden-Olympia towards their cholesterol tests and prostate examinations. I had introduced myself over the phone, explaining that Jane had taken over from Greenwood, whom I posthumously promoted to close family friend.

  But Isabel Duval seemed not entirely convinced. Her nostrils trembled, perhaps picking up some intrusive scent from my clothes, the stale cigar smoke from Meldrum’s office. She stepped back, giving a wide berth to my rogue gait, unused to the presence of a strange man in her apartment.

  ‘Madame Duval, it’s good of you to see me. I must seem like a ghost from the past.’

  ‘Not at all. An old friend of David Greenwood, how could I refuse?’

  She guided me to a chair in the sitting room. The balcony windows looked out, not at the sea and beach, but into an inner courtyard, providing a superb view of the cameras beneath the eaves.

  ‘So many cameras,’ I commented. ‘You’re taking part in an extraordinary film that no one will ever see.’

  ‘I hope not. That would be a sign of failure by the security system. Regrettably, there are many thieves on the Côte d’Azur. They say we are safer here than in the vaults of the Bank of France.’

  ‘I’m glad. Is the security keeping the thieves out, or you in?’

  I had hoped to relax her with this modest quip, but she stared at me as if I had recited a verse of the Kamasutra. I knew that she would not be keen to talk about Greenwood. At the same time she seemed intrigued by my motives, her eyes noting every wayward crease in my trousers and the chipped toenails in my open sandals.

  ‘It was all so tragic,’ she said. ‘When did you last see David?’

  ‘About a year ago, in London. It’s hard to believe what happened.’

  ‘It was a shock to us, too. In many cases, fatal. May I ask how you found my telephone number?’

  ‘I asked someone at the clinic. Penrose’s secretary, I’m not sure …’

  ‘Dr Penrose? That doesn’t surprise me.’ She glanced
at the nearest security camera, as if warning it that the burly psychiatrist was prowling nearby. ‘Dr Penrose has made a career out of being indiscreet.’

  I leaned forward, trying to hold her attention, which seemed to wander into the side corridors of her mind. ‘Madame Duval, I’m trying to understand what happened on May 28. In London, David seemed so clear-headed.’

  ‘He was. As his secretary, I knew him well. Of course, I wasn’t involved in his charity work at La Bocca.’ She spoke sharply, as if she disapproved of the refuge. ‘It’s too late now, but I criticize myself.’

  ‘You were with him for many hours each day. What do you think drove him over the edge?’

  She stared at her immaculate carpet, where a stray grey hair caught the light. ‘I can’t say. He never confided his doubts to me.’

  ‘He had doubts?’

  ‘Like all of us. Sadly, I wasn’t with him during the last days. I might have been able to help him.’

  ‘You were away?’

  ‘He asked me to take a week’s leave. This was in April, a month earlier. He said he was going to a medical conference in Geneva.’

  ‘Presumably you saw the tickets?’

  ‘And the hotel reservations. But Professor Kalman told me that David was at the clinic throughout the time of the conference. For some reason, he decided not to go to Geneva.’

  She spoke as if Greenwood had let her down, and I wondered if she saw the murders as a kind of unfaithfulness.

  ‘A month…’ I repeated. ‘He was planning well ahead. Madame Duval, he was trying to protect you. Everything you say suggests it wasn’t a brainstorm. He didn’t suddenly go mad.’

  ‘He was never mad.’

  She spoke in a calm but firm voice. I imagined her lying awake at night, in this electrified but nerveless world, thinking that if only she had forgone her holiday she might have reached out to Greenwood and calmed his dream of death.

  ‘Was he working too hard?’ I asked.

  ‘It wasn’t a matter of hard work. David committed himself too much to other people and their special needs. He was very distracted, it explained his … carelessness.’

  ‘Over what?’

  Madame Duval glanced around the sitting room, carrying out a quick inventory of the table lamps, desk and chairs, reestablishing her tenancy of this segment of space-time.

  ‘His mind was on his patients and their medical needs. Sometimes he took things from the shops in the Rue d’Antibes and forgot to pay. Once the Gray d’Albion stopped him at the door. They called the police, but Professor Kalman explained the misunderstanding.’

  ‘The police didn’t charge him?’

  ‘It was too trivial. An atomizer of scent – we exchanged gifts on our birthdays. His thoughts were elsewhere.’

  ‘The orphanage at La Bocca? If your mind is on higher things, it’s easy to—’

  ‘Higher things?’ She laughed at my naivety. ‘Those girls used him. Arab street children are completely ruthless. He had money and they thought he was a fool. Another time he borrowed a car without permission.’

  ‘Is that wrong? There’s an emergency car pool for doctors at the clinic.’

  ‘This was in Cannes, outside the railway station. A man stepped out to kiss his wife. He left the engine running.’

  ‘And David drove it away?’

  ‘The police caught him on the Croisette. He said it was a medical emergency.’

  ‘Perhaps it was. But Professor Kalman hushed it up again?’

  ‘He set out the situation with the commissaire. Eden-Olympia is very important to the police. They benefit from off-duty payments, special fees and so on.’ Madame Duval stood up and stepped to the window, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of Eden-Olympia and the happier hours she had spent in Greenwood’s office. ‘I knew David. He would never steal. He cared nothing for money, and gave away half his salary.’

  ‘But he was distracted?’

  ‘He tried to help so many people – poor Maghrebians looking for work, students, old women. He would take drugs from the pharmacy to help the addicts at the free clinic in Mandelieu. When he was mugged it created problems with the police.’

  ‘Mugged? Are you sure?’

  ‘He had many bruises. Cannes La Bocca is not like the Croisette. He tried to stabilize the addicts before he could treat them. They were selling their drugs on the street outside the clinic. David didn’t realize it, but he became a kind of dealer.’

  ‘Doctor Serrou worked with him. Everyone speaks well of her. Why did David shoot her?’

  ‘Who can say?’ Madame Duval turned her face in profile, trying to hide the flush in her cheeks. ‘She was not a good influence.’

  I waited for her to continue, but she had finished with me. As we stood up, I said: ‘You’ve helped me greatly. Did you mention any of this to the investigating judge?’

  ‘No.’ She pursed her lips, frowning from an imaginary witness box. She spoke scathingly of herself. ‘It was the time to speak out, but I let David down. I wanted to defend his name. Believe me, there are others to blame here.’

  ‘Madame Duval … did David actually kill the victims?’

  ‘Kill them? Of course.’

  Surprised by my obtuse question, she opened the front door. The colour drained from her throat as she waited for me to leave.

  ‘It’s very pleasant here,’ I told her. ‘But why did you resign from the clinic?’

  ‘They offered me a special retirement plan. Eden-Olympia is very generous. They understood how shocked I was. At the time many people feared another attack.’

  ‘So you wanted to retire?’

  ‘I accepted that a reassignment of personnel was necessary. My presence was …’

  ‘An embarrassment? I’m sorry you left, my wife would have enjoyed working with you. It might be best not to speak about this conversation. Are you in touch with Professor Kalman?’

  ‘No. But someone from the finance department comes every month, to see if I have special needs. There are accumulated cash benefits paid to founder-employees like myself.’

  ‘As long as the business park prospers?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Isabel Duval smiled her first smile, a slow grimace of the lips that revealed a dry knowingness. ‘Eden-Olympia is very civilized, and very corrupt. Once you are there, they look after you for ever …’

  16

  Widows and Memories

  ‘FOR EVER’ WAS a difficult concept to grasp along this ever-changing coastline. Port-la-Galère, where the chauffeurs’ widows now lived, lay between Théoule and Miramar, five miles to the west of Cannes. I set out along the beach road from the Vieux Port towards La Napoule. A midnight storm had covered the sand with driftwood carried across the water from the Îles de Lérins, where legend had imprisoned the man in the iron mask for ten years in the grim Ste-Marguerite fortress.

  By contrast with its gloomy cells and triple bars, Antibes-les-Pins was a most civilized detention centre. Isabel Duval was, after all, free to leave at any time. I imagined this rather proud and strained woman moving among the holiday-makers in the streets of Juan-les-Pins, staring into the windows of the boutiques as she held tight to her memories of David Greenwood. Her apartment at Antibes-les-Pins was a decompression chamber, where the explosive forces set off on May 28 were allowed to leak away.

  If anything, Isabel Duval was still suffering from rapture of the deep. Her picture of the shoplifting and car-stealing doctor, exploited by orphans and drug addicts, was the reverse of the haloed image that bereaved spouses usually created. Her desperate listing of Greenwood’s petty failings was an attempt to fix his reality in her mind before it faded for good. The shoplifting at the Gray d’Albion was probably part of the same recklessness that Jane had shown in the tabac near the Majestic Hotel. The commandeering of the car, unlike my own light-headed prank, might well have been the reflex of an exhausted doctor alerted by his mobile phone to yet another medical emergency.

  At La Napoule I crossed the motor bridge over
the marina complex and drove into the hills of the Esterel. A few cork trees and umbrella pines had survived the forest fires, but most of the hillsides were bare, exposing the red porphyry to the sunlight, the ancient rocks so porous that they resembled immense rust-spills, the waste tips of past time.

  Port-la-Galère would be more modest, I assumed, a survival of the old Côte d’Azur, an unspoilt fishing port with cobbled quays and net-strewn jetties. Here the chauffeurs’ widows would eke out a modest living gutting dorade and boiling crayfish, close-mouthed about their husbands’ years at Eden-Olympia.

  My problem was to persuade them to speak freely to me. I remembered the ampoule of pethidine in my jacket pocket, which I had taken from Jane’s valise, intending to show it to Wilder Penrose, a possible clue to Greenwood’s state of mind. The widows might appreciate the sedative drug, ready to try anything that would free them from the stench of the quayside.

  Théoule was so discreet that I almost failed to notice the resort, an enclave of luxury houses rented by fashion designers and media academics. I passed a tracked excavator digging a trench along the kerb of the corniche road, laying the land lines for a cable-television contractor. Rather than sit on their balconies with an evening drink, enjoying one of the world’s most striking views, the owners of these exclusive villas preferred to slump in the dark of their rumpus rooms, watching Hitchcock films and English league football.

  I overtook the excavator, and turned left at a sign that advertised ‘Port-la-Galère’ in rustic lettering. Beyond the guardhouse an asphalt road curved around the hillside towards another gated community. The villas and apartment houses had been designed by a latter-day Gaudi, the walls and balconies moulded into biomorphic forms that would have pleased the creator of the Sagrada Familia. Not a dorade was being gutted, nor a crayfish simmered. The marina was filled with yachts and powerboats, sleek multihulls fitted with the latest satellite-navigation gear that would steer the owners painlessly towards similar luxury berths at Portofino and Bandol. I edged the Jaguar between the parked Porsches and Land-Cruisers. At the waterside cafés a Parisian smart set in weekend yachting rig chattered against a backdrop of chandlers furnished like boutiques and boutiques furnished like chandlers.