“That’s what I thought,” Jade said. “But then I came up with two possibilities. Maybe they somehow believed that David was the writer of that book.”
“A misunderstanding, you mean?” Chase asked.
“I know. It’s too horrible to think it was a misunderstanding or misinformation. Not something to kill a man for,” Jade said.
“If that’s what happened,” Chase said. “I mean, either they misunderstood who had written the book and what happened happened, or it was coincidence.”
“Chance,” Jade said.
“Or fate,” Bianca said.
“No,” Gaudin said. “Don’t believe that. It must have just been very bad luck.”
“But it explains the coincidence of it. Two birds with one stone. I’m sorry,” Jade said, squeezing Bianca’s hand.
“No, it’s okay,” Bianca said. “Let’s assume someone thought David had written this damaging book and that it would be translated into French. And, furthermore, that the only thing to do was scare off both Regi and my husband. Okay? Now, why would Wrest, who belongs to the party that could be damaged, hire you two to investigate?”
“I just take pictures,” Chase said, directing a smile to Jade. “I was following his son before the fall. His son…” Chase sniffed purposely. Then, with two fingers and a thumb, mimed an injection into his arm.
“I think it’s doubtful Wrest has anything to do with Regi’s fall,” Gaudin said. “Regi was his son.”
“No, you’re right,” Bianca said.
“Besides,” Gaudin said, “I haven’t found anything damaging in these books so far.”
“But it wouldn’t be in one of these books, would it?” Jade said. “I mean, it was being translated, this damaging manuscript. The only book would be the English one, if it was published in English. Otherwise just a bunch of paper or maybe even a computer disk.”
“She’s right,” Chase said.
“But I received these books from Wrest himself.”
“Exactly. He wouldn’t want you to see the damaging evidence, would he?”
“She’s right again,” Chase said. “We should go back to Regi’s apartment.”
Gaudin held up his hand. David expected someone to join them, but the crowd only ambled slowly around them, thicker as the tail end of the parade moved away on an unseen street. David heard a new band strike up in the cover of a copse of trees. The sound of brass gleamed through the air.
“It’s interesting,” Gaudin said. “But I don’t know.”
“How do you like it here?” Chase asked Jade, to fill the pause that followed.
“Under other circumstances, I’d love it,” she said, then whispered, “though I still love it.”
“I come here sometimes and just lie under a tree and fall asleep,” Chase said.
“Just like that? You don’t bring a girlfriend, or a book?”
“No,” Chase said. “Just me.”
Bianca reached down to her bag and brought out a thick stack of color photographs. She began thumbing through the photos.
“Your husband?” Gaudin asked.
“Vacation photos. I just had them developed.”
“We’ve been visiting the places where they were taken,” Jade said.
“I don’t know why,” Bianca sighed. “Just to see the places again. I almost feel as though if I don’t go to all of them I won’t find the monument or the museum or the cafe where he’ll be sitting, sitting waiting for me. Dressed in the same clothes, wearing the same squint. It’s a horrible fantasy.”
She hesitantly passed the photos to Gaudin, then rushed the movement, as though she were giving up her theory on finding David by reliving the photographs. David saw himself leaning against bridges, at the Père Lachaise cemetery beside Chopin’s grave, one shot of Bianca sunbathing on the banks of the Seine, her hands in the fur of a passing dog, another of him riding a carousel. There was even a photo of the statue of Diana aiming her next quivered shot, here in the gardens. He wished he could see all the photos so that when he saw something new now, he’d know it wasn’t just a memory evoking the scene and himself in it.
“Anything more about the cafe owner?” Bianca asked.
Gaudin shook his head. He’d taken off his sunglasses and the blue of his eyes seemed a little faded.
“Nothing helpful. He was released.”
At first, these words frightened David, but the next moment he envisioned Baptiste and knew, in his heart, that Baptiste posed no danger. He was no murderer. In fact, it might be easier to contact him now.
“Do you release someone who shoots at you? Do you release your prime suspect?” Bianca asked, her voice laced with incredulity. David could tell she’d placed hope that Baptiste would be the man in whom she could place blame.
“He’s…” Chase tapped his head. “Delusional.”
“Would you like to see what he’s been doing with his time?” Gaudin asked. He handed back Bianca’s photographs and reached for his leather satchel. He removed a stack of handwritten pages and began reading aloud from one. “‘Your nose is a peach pit. Look. You transcribe like a fatted Moses, all bread and beer. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Or, Hippopotamus means river horse. There it is, black on white. Mingus, mangoes, mongoose. Or, zooop zooop. Ha!’”
“I don’t understand,” Bianca said.
“It’s his confession,” Chase said. “He’s been writing things down, he claims he hears–”
Gaudin broke in. “As Chase said, the man is not healthy in his head.”
“Right,” Chase said. “Delusional. A friend of mine administered the psychiatric evaluation. The don’t have him on the pushing, just the shooting, and they’ve released him on that now, as long as he continues to see my friend.”
“Is that who gave you this confession?”
Chase nodded.
“What else does he write?”
“Nonsense.” Gaudin said. “If he writes anything that makes sense, we’ll know about it. We’ll let you know.”
If he writes anything that makes sense, David repeated. He had been trying, despite the way the words tangled his thoughts. He at least knew that Gaudin and Chase were aware of Baptiste’s whereabouts, though if he could not speak to Baptiste more clearly, Baptiste might as well vanish forever.
“What about Regi?” Bianca asked. “Anything more from him?”
Gaudin shook his head.
“I don’t envy you, having to make a case out of this,” Jade said.
“I’m not paid to make a case.”
“What are you paid for?”
“To find out if Wrest’s son was really pushed.”
“By reading novels?”
“Wrest thinks there’s something there.”
“And you?”
Gaudin held a hand against his neck, as though checking to see if he’d become sunburned. “I thought we could go someplace for lunch,” he said, changing the subject.
“Good idea,” Chase said.
They left the green chairs and made their way toward exits yet unseen. David followed quickly. For once, everything pointed in the right direction. He could follow Gaudin and Chase and end up at Baptiste. And more importantly, he could be near Bianca.
“Perhaps you could tell me what this means,” Gaudin said to Bianca as they walked. He pulled a napkin from his pocket which David recognized instantly, rouged as it was by Bombay’s kiss.
Bianca took the napkin and read. “I don’t understand.”
“Bombay gave it to me,” Gaudin said. “She said your husband wrote it down a few minutes before the accident. Do you know where it’s from?” Gaudin asked.
“No,” Bianca said. “He did this, sometimes. Wrote lines in restaurants or anywhere an idea struck him. When I first met him, he kept golf pencils and slips of blank paper in his shirt pocket.”
“Do you think the line meant he knew something was going to happen?” Chase interrupted. “He mentions death specifically.”
Bianca
reread the line. “I don’t know.”
David wished he’d kept the line to himself. How he wished to tell Bianca those words meant little, just a line that had come to him, nothing more. Would he begin to feel guilty for things he’d not committed, as she grew suspicious from the seed of that line?
“May I keep this?” Bianca asked, folding the napkin.
“Yes.” Gaudin said. They’d reached the copse of trees and he gestured in the direction of the band music. “Shall we go?”
“Yes,” Jade said. “I skipped breakfast.”
“You never eat breakfast,” Bianca said.
“One should always eat a breakfast,” Chase said.
Fuck breakfast, David thought. He almost couldn’t fathom what such an act was like anymore. To wake in the morning and take living for granted, to not be even remotely near the realization that with time he would cease to be and cease to be remembered. To indulge in breakfast. To ask, is the bread toasted? Can you pass the butter? To thumb through the paper. To gaze through a window and pass judgment on the day’s weather. To swallow.
David followed them as they made their way past the large white pavilion from which a small brass band played. The musicians were dressed in dark blue uniforms, golden braids arcing across their chests. The bills of their caps were the same glossy black as their shoes. Around the platform, Parisians sat in chairs or leaned against the trees or into their lovers, or stood with dogs who were leashed and lying with their bellies in the dust. For a moment, David felt the image before him waver in his mind, the sight feeling like a living painting—especially the way the light fell through the canopy in a patchwork of hues. The light dappling on the ground and on people’s clothing and hair made the scene seem an evocation of a Renoir painting. Everyone had pink, ruddy faces flushed with life. David stood mesmerized as the music played on, capturing everyone in this Impressionistic tableau. Perhaps it was the music, or the light, or the smiles in faces which had carried over from one of Renoir’s paintings, or, more accurately, from the Paris of long ago. The people were different, but something had survived. The legacy of lazy holidays in gardens. Then, two dogs broke out fighting in the dust, quick snarls and yelps and the snap of leashes. And the scene reverted to a crowd of people listening and clapping to the increasing tempo of a cancan.
David turned to catch up with Bianca. She and the others had nearly reached a gate separating the park from the bustle of the city. He already spotted cars swirling around a mid-avenue fountain, here in the foreground of the Pantheon. David didn’t want to leave the gardens. Being here in his wife’s company, like walking with Chopin along the Seine, made him unafraid of the Vikings. He knew if he couldn’t keep Baptiste writing or his loves and friends recollecting, the Vikings would use the force they’d only so far insinuated.
Chopin had not had a satisfying explanation for the presence of Vikings. Baptiste was a Dane, an ancestral Viking. Perhaps Baptiste would commit some act which would forever carve out David’s soul from the memory of his body. Or had. Would the Vikings remain bivouacked outside his small realm of safety, then one day strike? Or, could they, also, be paid to leave? David wondered what intangible monies he was still in control of and could use. He needed to get the words Baptiste had scribbled into Bianca’s hands. The moment had come so close when Gaudin had read aloud to Bianca from Baptiste’s writing. But David respected Gaudin for withholding words which might throw Bianca into more confusion. How would she react if the rein on David’s tongue continued to be twisted so that the words that came out were such a confusing spill?
David feared becoming lost in the city in which he had once tried so hard to become a temporary resident. There was a sense that if he wandered too far, he would somehow step out from the remembrances of others, becoming, like the last names of childhood friends, forgotten. Or worse, be on route to Baptiste and forget the purpose of his journey. One lost in the crowds. A line from Chopin’s letters came to him, a description of an angry crowd marching past this very spot so many generations ago. “An enormous crowd, not only young men this time, but a general crowd, collected in front of the Pantheon and crossed Paris to Ramorino. It increased like a snowball as it passed from street to street, till by the bridge (pont neuf) the mounted men began to disperse it.” David looked at Gaudin, Chase, Bianca and Jade and wondered which of them—if it was one of them—was thinking this line.
David found himself hoping the cause of his death would never be found out, keeping the mystery of his passing an unresolved open question that would remain in their thoughts. What had those crowds Chopin described protested against? It was the movement that was remembered, not the incitement. But, looking at Bianca, David quickly took back the wish that his death would remain a mystery, realizing that of all things, this would be only worse agony. He then remembered that he and Bianca had indeed once had a discussion about death. It had been precipitated by the bloated carcasses of a seal which had washed ashore. Bianca had tried to tell him her theory of whale beachings, that whale pods were basically cults which spent their years in quasi-philosophical ponderings until, realizing their predicament, they would sometimes commit mass suicide by beaching themselves. Bianca spent hours in the sun and David remembered that he’d joked that her mind was becoming overdone. Afterwards, they had talked of their own passing. She seemed to think she’d pass on first. He told her he wished they’d plunge off a cliff into a beautiful landscape, together. To pass on simultaneously and prevent a broken heart. He had told her that were he to pass on first, he’d want her to remarry. The idea of anything else seemed virulent. Only now did he fully realize the implications of such a quickly cast remark. Of course Bianca would do with her life as she rightly pleased, but the more quickly she passed from grief to eventual happiness, the more expedient would be his own fading. She’d forget him, not completely, but with long spaces without his coming to her mind. In love, she would forget she had loved equally strongly before. He marveled that there was not a single canvas upon which he, or anyone else, could capture themselves with any permanence approaching infinity. He thought about his childhood faith—ideas of everlasting life, of newborn permanence and infinity. They seemed sickly taunting to him. Wishful, well-plotted stories. Then he wondered if these were really his own memories or shaded by Bianca’s own lack of faith in anything beyond the existence of sun, sand and sea.
Chase began mentioning nearby cafes they could try.
David suddenly felt light and empty, made so, it seemed, by everyone’s sudden preoccupation with lunch. He felt tethered to the park, unable to follow into the flurry of traffic. He watched these four bearers of who he was mingle precariously with the stream of other oblivious biographers who dodged among the army of speeding cars. Knowing the precariousness of their steps, the sound of engines became a sound as ominous to him as the dip of oars and northern laughter. Even stepping back into the park—his ears filling now with the beat of the cancan—he knew that to be forgotten forever needed only an accident. He could be done in by a two-stroke Vespa.
Chapter 15
Chase neared Regi’s apartment, alone. The morning sun had been extinguished by afternoon haze, the precursor to a day he sensed would turn damp. He wished he’d brought along a rain jacket.
On the pretense of an upset stomach, he’d excused himself from lunch with Gaudin, Bianca and Jade. Unlike Gaudin, Chase doubted anything would come from gleaning novels for clues, nor from sitting in parks extrapolating possible explanations for Regi’s fall. They’d all been acting too much like ancient Greeks discussing convincing-sounding, yet unsubstantiated, proofs. Ostrich, Wrest rather, had paid him to assist Gaudin. At the decent rate he was receiving, Chase felt it inappropriate to consider thumbing through books and sitting about in parks as a definition of assistance. He had decided to do a little of his own investigating, telling himself he was obligated to follow up on Gaudin’s inaction by at least searching for clues in the material world. Searching Regi’s apartment again was the fir
st thing that had come to mind. He also hoped there would be some greater financial reward for an expeditious discovery of Regi’s pusher, even if it meant usurping Gaudin’s role. Though Chase had never put his powers of deduction to the test, he hoped so little use might mean his faculties would prove fresh and quick right out of the gate. In a week or so he could have answers. In a week he could have enough money to insure a little vacation, and rent money for a month or two into the next season.
Despite the relative warmth of the air, Chase could foresee the coming seasons. He imagined the tired green leaves going orange-brown, the trees stripped naked, the leaves frozen to the ground in silver skirts of ice-suspended rot. He knew he needed to live the cliché and take one day at a time, not think about the coming seasons, nor how he hadn’t even spent one lousy week outside of Paris this year. He inhaled and detected the scent of spent gunpowder. In the gutter lay shreds of firecrackers colored like fall leaves. Red, yellow, orange. Clots of gray. By Bastille Day last year, he’d already returned from a week in Barcelona. One day at a time, he told himself. One day.
He turned a corner onto a narrow residential street. A gust slapped off the stone buildings. Chase ran his fingers through his disheveled hair, attempting order in wind that ricocheted from one side of the street to the other. That morning, while combing his hair, he’d found not one but three gray hairs on the left side of his head, not far from his ear. The hairs were straight and resilient, like those on a dog. He clipped them away with toenail scissors, twisted them together with his fingers, then lit the end with a cigarette lighter. They disappeared, except for where he pinched and held them. Earlier that year he’d noticed a few silver hairs in his beard. Since then, he’d become clean-shaven. Whenever he went a few days without a razor, he’d spot more of the gray hairs shining in his skin like flecks of mica.
Examining the buildings near Regi’s apartment, Chase noticed a sunflower on the balcony of one of the apartments, triggering a remembrance of a dream the night before. He had dreamt of fields. Endless stalks, bright sun. He supposed it was the distance and difficulty of getting from here, in Paris, to such a place that could freeze hairs gray with forfeiture. Working for Wrest had given him just enough money for a spartan trip. But experience had told him that he should save money for the colder seasons. Even if he went back to porn shoots, he knew the magazines would be primarily using up the glut of summer shots until at least early March, despite what the cold does to nipples.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 18
