In his heart, he longed to photograph foreign landscapes at the end of days of rail or sea travel. Of everything, it was really only the outdoor shoots he enjoyed taking. He had started out ten years ago, taking photographs of nature: landscapes, clouds, riffled water. Many mornings had found him up at dawn just to capture the mist before it burned off in the sunlight. A wheat field in Estonia, Polish mountains, the green canyonlands of Madagascar. He carried around a spray bottle to moisten plants. But then, in the photos, as in life, women had begun appearing more frequently. He’d treated them in his work to the same degree as in his life: half pleasure, half a desire to focus on forms more distant. Trees, mountains, clouds. Fields. He still used the same spray bottle to wet both the leaves of plants and the bodies of women, especially if the shoot required no make-up artists, where whatever did not bring arousal could be altered or removed by computer. Moles, birthmarks, wrinkles, varicose veins, knobby spines, misshapen noses. He pitied the graphic artists, having to remove an endless raking of stretch marks, a moon of bad skin. Chase hated computers. Growing up, he’d never even used Minitel.
A woman was the real reason Chase hadn’t departed on some thin fib of a vacation. He had slept alone after the night of his birthday. Emilia called every few days to leave messages saying she’d been trying to reach him. But she exhausted him, now. He could picture her face at any time of the day or night and it was this, he thought, the readiness with which the image came fully-formed to his mind, which had made him lose all interest in her. There wasn’t a mysterious angle in the whole of it, nor an underlying complexity which coyly nudged itself aside from the field of ready recollection. That she was also Wrest’s wife didn’t help. He could only spend so many hours a day dealing with the lives of Wrest’s family. The face of another woman had kept him from abandoning Paris. A face he’d yet to see at all angles. Jade’s.
Chase rolled down his shirt sleeves and buttoned them against the breeze. The empty streets gave him the sense that everyone was elsewhere today. Relaxing. He thought of the time he was missing with Gaudin, Bianca and Jade. Mostly he thought of Jade. He’d made plans with her for later that evening and he looked forward to showing her a bit of Paris by night. He wanted to take her somewhere warm and quiet, but not dark. He wanted to look at her, discover new expressions, new angles. She wasn’t the shy young daughter of a Bulgarian farmer, but she was fairly young and bore some kind of casual rustic quality in her short black hair. In the gardens earlier that day, he’d noticed she had calluses on the soles of her feet. He remembered the way she’d introduced herself at the concert Gaudin had taken them to. She had hands so cold they were attractive, like ice in summer. And he liked the way she talked about L.A. The way she said it made the spelling of the city look like El A in his mind, filled with Spanish architecture and heavy tile roofs and palm trees so tall they bent under the weight of their high burst of fronds. He imagined she did everything barefoot in El A. Walking on the beach, buying food at the market, jogging. These images were so unlike Paris—and any place other than Paris seemed a favorable destination now. He wasn’t in love, but he was quickly moving in that general direction, at an awkward gait somewhere between walking and jogging, which is that of being enraptured but not yet sold.
As he entered a courtyard and walked up the stairs to Regi’s apartment, Chase wondered whether Jade would take a vacation with him. He just needed another paycheck. He cupped a yawn in his palm and shook his head, telling himself to focus on the task at hand. A cool wind swirled among the parked cars. As he rang the doorbell he felt a faint but gnawing discomfort at being retained by a man whose politics were right-wing. Chase tried to remain ignorant of anything particularly virulent in Wrest’s views. He wasn’t sure if working for Wrest was necessarily a higher act than taking pornographic pictures, especially when he felt his grip was already so far down on the moral pole.
He rang again and heard the doorbell chiming inside. As he stood waiting, the neighbor’s door opened and a short old man in a white T-shirt and black shorts ambled out to the railing of the walkway that encircled the inner courtyard. He glanced at Chase, then tapped an upside-down pipe against the ball of his palm, scattering ashes and the curly-cues of half-burned tobacco into the air. A gust blew down from the cloudy sky and threw the man’s thin gray hair forward onto a face cracked like old plaster. His arms and legs seemed underinflated. Chase placed him near ninety.
“You here to see the place?” the man asked.
“Excuse me?”
“The apartment.”
“Yes,” Chase said, puzzled.
“You should have the read the whole advertisement. I’m not showing it until tomorrow. You should have called first. You should have rung my apartment bell. It’s only because the World Cup is on right now that I have my hearing aid turned up.”
“I’m sorry,” Chase said, confused. “A friend of mine had the place just a few days ago. Regi.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s moved out?”
The old man blew hard through his cleaned pipe and began walking back toward his apartment. “I guess you’re not close friends.”
“Wait,” Chase said.
“Relax. I’ll get the keys. It’s the break. Or you can watch the second half with me and see it after.”
“I’ll take a look now.”
“That’s what I thought.”
The old man returned some moments later, keys in one hand, lit pipe in the other. He unlocked the door to Regi’s apartment and ushered Chase inside. Chase faced bare walls, no furniture. He noticed that the bullet holes had been puttied over, the walls repainted a hasty white. Even the bookshelf, which he’d hoped would hold the potential manuscript evidently so damaging to Wrest or the Right, was but another empty wall.
Chase didn’t know what to make of the cleared apartment and Regi’s move, but felt compelled to spend as much time there as possible. “How many square meters is it?”
The man shrugged. “How do I know? Measure it, if you’re so interested in knowing the numbers. Look around. The second half is probably starting.”
“Thank you,” Chase said, as the man left to return to the soccer match on his TV. Chase moved into rooms so spare that, had he not been there when they were furnished, he’d be unable to assign each a function. Even the odor of habitation was masked by the fading spray of some pine fragrance. The room in which he found himself could be a study, a nursery, or a bedroom; four walls that contained thousands of awakenings, hundreds of mornings of love-making or abject loneliness, suffering in the scores, dozens of anger-filled evenings, perhaps a handful of midnight crimes. But despite all that must have transpired in such an old apartment, the only item that pointed to a previous tenancy was an outlet extension Chase spied in a kitchen socket. Four small paired black holes. There had been a need for more electricity, was all it told him.
Chase felt unsure how to interpret Regi’s sudden move. Last he had heard from Gaudin, Regi’s full recovery was hampered by a couple of cracked ribs and the expected lacerations and sprains of his fall. Chase knew things like blood clots or hospital bacteria could claim a man in the passage of mere hours. But the old neighbor had said Regi moved. What was he to read into the semantics of that word? Had Regi decided to move, or been moved? Had he ever been back? The door opened behind him and he turned to express his feigned disinterest in the apartment to the pipe-smoking landlord.
Instead of the old man, Bombay stood in the apartment. “Hello,” she said.
Chase felt as though he’d been caught, but her smile dispelled the idea. “Hello,” he answered.
“You can’t keep away,” she said. Her voice evoked the feeling of putting on socks after a swim in the sea. “I saw you from the cafe.” She closed the door behind her with the flat of her hand. Her clothes were concealed by a large white apron. It clashed with the delicacy of a cocktail umbrella speared above her ear in the glossy fall of her pale hair.
Chase pointed at the white-
washed emptiness of the room. “What happened?”
Bombay moved to a window and stared down into the street. “Gone.” She turned toward him.
“I can see that. Where’s Regi gone to?”
“Oh. I meant my uncle. But Regi, he’s gone, too.”
“I heard they released your uncle.”
“Yes, but he’s a wreck now. My uncle has no alibi—he’s a lonely man and lonely men often have no alibis. Sometimes they need an alibi, even if they’re innocent.” She paused. “He now writes such crazy things. They have him carrying on conversations with the dead man.”
“I know. Gaudin’s showed me what your uncle’s been writing.” Chase recalled the papers he’d glanced through at the park. Baptiste hadn’t sounded all too stable. “Your uncle’s never been like this before?”
“No.” Bombay bit her lip. “I don’t know how to help him,” she said. She thrust her hands into the broad pockets of her apron, pulled out a corkscrew still spearing a cork. She examined it as though it were an unfamiliar item, before returning it to her pocket.
“Tell me. Maybe I can help you.”
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
He didn’t say anything, hoping she would perhaps give him something to go on. Wasn’t one of the best attributes of an investigator being silent? He couldn’t remember. It certainly wasn’t the way he operated when he’d worked at the newspaper. He wanted to find out who’d pushed Regi, but he didn’t necessarily want it to be Bombay’s uncle. If she could cross Baptiste off the list of suspects—which he hadn’t yet formulated—he could move on to others.
“What about Regi. Do you know where he is?”
“You don’t know anything,” she said. “You’re being played and you don’t even know it.”
Chase felt the moment turn fragile. Were he to do or say the wrong thing now, some knowledge could be lost. He patted a wall just to feel something solid. A faint skin of paint stuck to his palm. “What do you want?” he asked, rubbing off the white scum.
“For my uncle to be able to come back here, to run his cafe.”
“Where is he?” Chase asked, hoping to force her into a lie. A phone conversation earlier that day with his friend Luc, who’d been the psychiatrist to evaluate Baptiste, had told him Baptiste would be sent south to a clinic in a matter of days, if he wasn’t there already.
“He was taken to a hospital,” Bombay said. “Then sent somewhere else. He’s not crazy, though.”
Chase felt she needed reminding. “He shot at us.”
Bombay threw her hands up adamantly. “But he knows nothing. It’s not like him.”
“Where was he then, the night Regi fell? If he has no alibi.”
“He was drunk. Passed out in his room.”
“You were there?”
“No, but he’s like that some evenings.”
Chase felt sorry for her now, for being caught up in all this. She had the look of having evaded all hardships, or, he felt, of having met many but borne them with such grace that they left no outward mark, until now.
“Why is Baptiste so important to you?”
“He’s my only relative.”
Chase nodded. “Are you running the cafe now?”
“Yes.”
“When did you stop living here with Regi?”
“I never really lived here. I came and went. I had another apartment, elsewhere, but I’ve given it up to stay above the cafe at my uncle’s place.”
The apartment door opened.
“What do you think?” It was the old man again. He hadn’t been gone long. Chase figured the neighbor’s favored team was doing badly, or was a couple goals ahead, making the game boring.
“Thanks for letting me in, but no,” Chase said. “Too narrow.”
The man shrugged. “Everything is square meters,” he said. “When I was young the only measurement we were interested in were centimeters. Here,” he said, cupping his hands in front of his chest to form breasts. He squeezed the air.
“You want it?” the landlord asked Bombay.
“No.”
The old man locked the apartment, leaving Chase and Bombay outside looking at the wet sky. At the bottom of the stairs, the mist turned to rain. Bombay walked quickly into the narrow street. Chase had to jog to keep up with her. He followed her into her uncle’s cafe and took a stool as she swung to the backside of the bar.
The top of the bar was long and empty. A fan turned reluctantly in the ceiling, its cutting edge rimmed with a gray line of dust.
“I hate that old guy,” Bombay said, gesturing to Regi’s apartment across the street. “Sometimes old men fill up with pure spook.”
“What do you have to be afraid of?” he asked.
She smiled sadly, a patronizing twist in her lips that made him angry. “It’s Wrest’s building.”
“What about me? I work for Wrest, too. Aren’t I a risk to you? I could be the roughest guy you’ve never heard of.”
“You? If you’re working for Wrest…”
“I am.”
“I know. I know. As a photographer. Really, you only think you’re working for him. I mean, if you’re really working for him and what I tell you gets out, I will make a eunuch out of you.” She passed a thin blade through a lime, slicing a wedge which she affixed to the rim of a glass of something tropical.
Chase paid less attention to her threat and more to the news that she, in fact, had something to tell him. And from the sound of it, he would be the first to hear. She set the drink before Chase, not even bothering with a cocktail napkin. She removed the paper umbrella from her hair and set it in the glass. Chase was thirsty, more so now with the quenching sound of the summer rain, but he made a mental note not to touch the drink, no matter how much it tried to entice his tongue. He would wait a few minutes, at least.
“All right,” Chase said. “You want your uncle completely cleared. What you need is knowledge of who pushed Regi, if he was pushed.”
Bombay nodded her head. “Wait here,” she said, stepping from behind the bar. She approached a patron sitting beneath the awning. In Chase’s eyes, she played the role well, the role of one plunged into managing an unexpected responsibility. She brought a deliberateness and care to every transaction: the manner she took the order, the gait of her walk, each step probably beating the words of the order to keep it in memory. Even the way she pulled a glass and placed it beneath the tap seemed overly conscious, coupled with the unnecessary strength with which she pulled the handle. She angled the glass perfectly, as though too much or too little foam was a portent of disaster.
The backs of chairs beyond the awning were a rich red where the rain rejuvenated the fade of days of sun. He considered bringing the wet furniture to Bombay’s attention, but felt this could be one of those remarks that could cost him the information he wished to hear. There seemed to be some vacillation in her character that he didn’t wish to test, if only for fear of causing her to change her mind about what she would, or wouldn’t, reveal.
“I don’t know who pushed Regi, but I know why,” Bombay said, returning. She lit a cigarette, drew on it with lungs like an opera singer, then exhaled.
Chase suspected his curiosity would go unsatisfied. He was less interested in motives than in perpetrators. He already knew about the book that contained damaging information. That was why he was at Regi’s apartment, not to confirm the motivation, but to find the name behind it. If Wrest was behind the push, then Wrest had lousy sources to mistake David for another author and make him the catch-all of his falling son’s misdeeds. Such imprecision made Chase’s interest in the case seem unwarranted, even to himself. Too much slipshod information, too much slack to form tight excitement. But there was potential money. There were fields to go to and photograph.
“It was about the book, right?”
“What book?” Bombay asked.
“The one damaging to Wrest. The one Regi was translating or going to translate.”
“
There’s no such book,” Bombay said. “I’d know. I did all the typing. I opened and answered his mail. No, it was because of the wine.”
Chase immediately glanced up from the floor, where his mind had begun thinking of a trip while his eyes took geometric routes through the grout between the tiles. “Wine?” Chase placed the paper umbrella in a shirt pocket and tasted mango around his tongue as the drink went down. He paused in mid-swallow, feeling that whatever she now said he would have to believe—or else betray her. “Go ahead. Tell me.”
“Wrest makes some of his money off dope. Nothing fancy, no designer. But nothing light, either. Mostly coke. Some of it goes through here, through the cafe.”
“Financing his political party?”
“I never said that. I said Wrest makes money off narcotics.” Bombay put her hand over his. He was surprised by the chill in her fingers, that anything living could survive at such a temperature. Unlike Jade’s hands, these seemed too far gone toward cold for her to feel anything.
“It’s in the wine,” she said.
“The coke?”
She nodded. “They conceal it by adding it to wine in a fairly undetectable blend.”
“Why mix it at all?”
“It can be shipped anywhere, easily. The stuff comes in pure in Marseilles. Wrest has a vineyard and there they add it to the wine, bottle it and send it north to Paris or Lyon, Germany, Netherlands, maybe Denmark, but it usually runs out before getting that far.
“Let me see a bottle,” Chase said.
“That’s the problem. I can’t find one. There’s none left. It’s a vintage that goes down the drain after extraction. None was ever kept here in the cafe, except, of course, for the time between the order arriving and Regi picking it up.”
The Path Of All That Falls Page 19
