The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  “So your uncle buys coke in wine?”

  “No. He buys large quantities of wine as a favor to Regi. My uncle orders it, as if for the cafe, but it all goes to Regi. My uncle thinks Regi’s a connoisseur of expensive wines. And the authorities just think my uncle’s cafe is doing well. You’ve seen the wine, though. The bottles at least. In Regi’s apartment.”

  Chase recalled the day he and Gaudin had searched the apartment. The kitchen counter had been covered with empty wine bottles.

  “I still don’t understand why someone pushed Regi.”

  “He sold the wine for the Paris market for his father, but took some for himself, increasing his take. Several hundred thousand euros in the last year.”

  Chase whistled.

  “He couldn’t spend any or he’d attract attention. Wrest and his friends might not keep good records, but they keep an eye on how many new cars you drive. How often you change your suit.”

  Chase wished he had Gaudin’s pocket tape recorder with him. He was not used to this kind of work. He was used to all the effort being in the preparation, then the click of a shutter. Not the unraveling of more and more elements in a view that had never been clear from the start. “How do you know all this?”

  “Like you, Wrest hired me. But unlike you, I was really hired.”

  Chase felt his job was entering the suburbs of a darker, rougher territory. “You were hired to find out where the loss in profits was coming from.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you told them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Regi then falls from a bridge.”

  “Yes.”

  “And suddenly your uncle is blamed.”

  Bombay didn’t need to answer, Chase knew. He slipped his hand from beneath Bombay’s fingers.

  “Strange,” he said.

  “I was to get Regi’s attention. I told him to meet us at the landing and that we’d all go out to dinner. I said David wanted a picture of himself from the bridge, and for Regi to take one as we neared.”

  “Who asked you to? Wrest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who pushed Regi? Wrest?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have seen him.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know he’d be pushed onto the boat, though. I thought just into the water.”

  “Did you ever think the pusher was aiming for you?” Chase asked.

  “Now, of course. Despite the odds. Of course.”

  He looked out at the rain, and closer, where it dripped off the awning and slightly splashed the pants of the lone patron. Chase noticed the level of the man’s beer. It had only sunk slightly, perhaps only from the evaporation of the foam. Chase pointed to the man and raised his eyebrows.

  “He’s okay,” Bombay said.

  “How do you know?”

  She smiled. “Because he’s my boyfriend. He knows everything.”

  “I thought you and Regi…well, I suppose not if you were hired.”

  “Regi? He’s practically asexual. I worked as a kind of assistant.”

  Chase remembered the times he had followed Regi, how he’d almost always caught Regi in the act of business. It was true. There’d seemed to be no pleasure, no sexual overtones to any of his actions. “How did Wrest approach you?” he asked.

  “It was a year ago. He asked. Paid. I accepted. Posing and modeling in Paris can be as lucrative as selling snow in the Alps.”

  “You say you assisted Regi.”

  “Like a secretary. He sold coke, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t work. He translated longhand or dictated. I’ve been able to type since I was eight.”

  “And he believed you were just a secretary?”

  She nodded. “And I was for the first few months until his father contacted me.”

  “Do you remember typing in his translation for a recent manuscript, one that could hurt the Right, or Wrest?”

  “No. There wasn’t one. The last ones I did before he fell were about economics and inflation. And the dead man’s book. About the travels of Chopin.”

  “Could there be anything damaging in those?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then it’s just a father’s punishment,” Chase said.

  “Yes.”

  “And only coincidence explains why the American was crushed by Regi.”

  Bombay shrugged. “The world is made of coincidences.”

  Chase thought a moment. “Two questions, then. Would a father really do that to his son? Have him pushed? And why would he hire someone to investigate, afterward?”

  “Yes,” Bombay said. “Wrest would. If Regi has siphoned off enough to matter. I think he wanted to scare his son, perhaps.”

  “Why didn’t Wrest just tell his son that he knew about the stealing, tell him to stop?”

  “Wrest had no real proof. I wasn’t the best at collecting it. Just as I can’t give you any hard proof that he had Regi pushed. I just know it wasn’t my uncle, and I know Wrest had the motivation.”

  Chase shook his head. “You were there, in Regi’s apartment. All the wine was there. You said it yourself. You could have taken a bottle any time you wanted and given it to Wrest.”

  Bombay bent down behind the bar. When she straightened, she had an old Brownie camera in her hands. She placed it on the bar. “You like cameras, right?” she asked, her voice bright and distracting.

  Then he knew. Knew without even having to ask her. She, too, must have taken an occasional bottle of that wine, but for herself. Why else wouldn’t she turn Regi in? She had no physical relationship with him, no binding work other than shadowing and spying. And Chase felt sure Wrest would have rewarded her, financially, for finding the necessary evidence. Except, then, it would come out that she, too, was involved. And that potential reward must have been less than she took, or thought she could. He turned the camera in his hands and put it down.

  “You’re afraid he’ll find out about you,” he said.

  She didn’t pause for long. “Yes. I’m afraid he’s known for a while.”

  “Why don’t you go to the police?”

  “My uncle. I’m afraid of what will happen to him. Worse, what would happen to him if he learned about the wine. About me.”

  “You could still go to the police and indict Wrest.”

  “I’m not going to jump off my own bridge, thank you.”

  “Why did Wrest hire Gaudin, then? Why did he hire me?

  “There’s no better way of looking innocent than by paying to have the nonexistent guilty party found. Meanwhile, Gaudin, and perhaps you, too, can find loose ends that Wrest can then take care of. Anybody else who could blab about Regi’s indiscretions, or knew about the missing money or coke. Quality control, as they say.”

  “That doesn’t make all of this very safe for Gaudin.”

  “He can take care of himself.”

  Chase realized how deeply he himself was mired. A sense of base fear opened beneath him. He realized that whereas Bombay had once been alone with her strands of the tale, he, too, now shared this information. The drug smuggling. Who was involved or wasn’t. Should he choose to use this information, he’d make himself as equal a traitor as Bombay toward their employer. And with that possibility of betrayal, the equal possibility of punishment. And what if Wrest didn’t wait for betrayal? What if he could simply smell it in them and act preemptively. For a fleeting moment, he considered turning Bombay in and getting some monetary reward, but then Wrest would know what information Chase held.

  “You’re leaving quite a few loose ends with me, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I should have stayed home today,” Chase said.

  Bombay placed another drink on the counter. “Here. Next time follow those instincts.”

  Chase drank down the sweet mango taste that felt so out of place on this damp gray Parisian afternoon. His tongue searched for the aftertaste of a drug he himself had never tried but which, he now recalled
, he had enough pictures of Regi selling. He swallowed, then realized why he’d been hired in the first place. He had supplied the photographic proof that Wrest’s son Regi was doing more than dealing Wrest’s cocaine-wine. With this knowledge came the distant but very real sense of complicity in the death of Bianca’s husband, if, in fact, Wrest had punished Regi by having him pushed. And some measure of responsibility for having put Bombay in harm’s way.

  “What will you do now?” Chase asked.

  “Like you, I’ll try to keep a watchful eye on his son. If Regi tries to share the blame and completely betrays me to his father, I’m lost.”

  “He’s moved out.”

  “But I know where he’s going.”

  Though they had nothing yet, Chase felt a plan taking shape in the dark interior of the cafe, a tucked away safe-house from a city that seemed Wrest’s. Just an hour earlier, he’d felt free from fear. He could walk away from it all, take that inexpensive vacation. But the picture in his mind of Bianca and Jade, and of that sleeved arm in the photo pushing Regi, drew Chase around to a firm resolve. What he needed was evidence against Wrest, if only to protect everyone from the old politician. Chase would do it for Bianca and Jade, and for the memory of the American, and for Gaudin who didn’t yet know the dangers he might face—or perhaps knew and was therefore being cautious. And he’d do it for Bombay’s uncle.

  “How do you suppose we clear Baptiste and protect ourselves?” he asked.

  “Wrest and Regi are leaving Paris. They’re traveling to Orange for the music festival. Usually, when they travel south, it means a new shipment of coke has come in, especially as the vineyard is within a drive from Orange. They’ll bottle soon after.”

  “But together? Why would Wrest and Regi be so amicable?”

  Bombay shrugged. “When all the money you’ve had has come through your father, one way or another…perhaps he reentered into the family’s graces.”

  “On a bent knee.”

  “Anyone can forgive.”

  “The prodigal son.”

  “Not quite.”

  “No.” Chase pushed his empty glass toward Bombay and slid off his bar stool. “I should be going.”

  “Wait.” Bombay pulled an umbrella from a stand filled with what must have been a decade’s worth of forgotten protection. “You need one of these.”

  “Thank you,” Chase said, taking the real umbrella. He stood at the rain’s edge, pried open the dust-clamped umbrella, and let it burst into form. As he exited, he tapped the table where Bombay’s boyfriend sat. The man glanced at him. He was young and sad.

  “You have a good woman there,” Chase said.

  The man nodded.

  “Good luck,” Bombay said, standing in the dark interior.

  Chase walked into the premature dusk. Drizzle fell all the way to St. Germain des Prés, turned to rain as he walked down Rue Bonaparte, and by the time he passed St. Sulpice the skies gushed so that his shoes and the lower half of his trousers were soaked. The umbrella only succeeded in keeping his head and shoulders from the rain, a dry bust. Admitting defeat, he ducked under a cafe’s awning. He glanced at his watch. He had been with Bombay at Cafe Le Coin for longer than he’d thought. Dinner now entered his mind nearly above all other concerns.

  He called Luc to invite him to dinner, but he wasn’t home. Chase left a message on his machine, then entered the cafe. He took one of the many empty indoor tables facing the street and ordered a pepper steak with béarnaise sauce and a bottle of wine from a vineyard he knew had no ulterior sources of income. He was a bit off-balance from the earlier drinks, but he planned to eat and drink slowly now. After an hour or two, he hoped he’d arrive at some plan of action. Some things he already knew. He would have to tell the others what he’d learned. The information Bombay had passed to him was all they had to go on. To keep it from Bianca would be cruel. He tried to think like Gaudin, looking not for the seen—as he was used to—but capturing the unseen and suspected. Creating evidence and hoping it was true.

  The wine arrived just as Chase finished his surreptitious removal of wet shoes and socks. The waiter uncorked the bottle, poured a glass and set the bottle down in front of Chase before turning his attention to another patron. Chase returned to his feet. He rung out his socks under the concealment of the tablecloth, then spread them out on the floor with his cold stiff feet. When warm, he was incredibly dexterous. At a party once, he’d caused a drunk woman to urinate from laughing too hard as he used his toes to remove a match from a matchbox, strike it, and light the woman’s cigarette. Straightening, Chase picked up the bottle, slipped his thumb into the bottom indentation of the punt, and stared deep into the glass, wondering how there could be space within the blood-red wine to tuck white wealth, death, and future danger. He felt sure it came to this: what they needed to link Wrest to the cocaine—and what they needed to protect themselves—was a bottle of that wine. He drank quickly to warm himself.

  Halfway through his meal, there was the rap of a ring finger on the window. He turned and saw a woman smiling at him, one hand opening and closing in a childish wave. He eclipsed his smile when he remembered who she was, a girl from a photo shoot last year. A lesbian tryst taken at sunset on a rooftop. She wasn’t especially pretty, but had a tongue as long as an amphibian’s. Please walk on, he thought, following her movement down the street, a gait that became obscured by the tight angle of himself to the glass. He watched the door, waited, and sighed when it opened. The day seemed so full of seriousness that he didn’t know if he had the patience to throw himself back, even temporarily, into the frivolous world of pornography. But it wasn’t the woman who entered. It was Luc.

  “Hey. Luc,” he said, raising his hand and anchoring his friend’s inquisitive gaze through the cafe. Chase smiled, happy that the girl had moved on through the rain. He felt his old self falling away and a more precarious, but promising, future emerging, a metamorphosis from what had been stagnancy to the beckoning danger that was all around him. The job at hand now was not about vicarious pleasure but about the real things in life. Life itself, and death.

  “Chase.”

  “Your American butterfly isn’t going to be angry, eating alone?”

  “I’ve moved on,” Luc said. “She had another metamorphosis in her.”

  He was clean-shaven and, Chase noticed, newly cut. “You have no steadfastness in you.”

  “I know. I’m terrible,” he said, sitting down. “But she had terrible nails. Long, sharp. My back looked like I was being whipped. That’s one thing I’m not into. Like making love to a beetle.”

  The waiter approached.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Luc said, warding him off.

  “What, no dinner?” Chase asked. “Let me guess. You have another woman now, and this one makes you watch your weight.”

  “Yes, and no. I’m meeting her for dinner in a half hour, not far from here. You’d like her. She bites her nails.”

  “That’s the problem with you, Luc. I can’t like them too much. Who knows if they’ll be around a month from now.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “I take the pictures. I’m not in the pictures.”

  “I’m joking.”

  “I know,” Chase said, breaking into a smile. He and Luc went back a number of years. They met at the university, where they’d worked together on the school’s satirical newspaper. Their triumph—and expulsion—had been a photograph Chase had managed to take showing a professor in bed with two students. Printing it hadn’t seemed in exceptionally bad taste. The entire newspaper had been a collage of bad taste.

  “You don’t want anything?” Chase asked.

  “I’ll split your bottle,” Luc said, picking it up. “Or have the last few drops.”

  Chase felt a little embarrassed that only a half-glass of wine remained for Luc. Chase didn’t usually drink much. He turned a glass right side up and gave it to Luc. “Okay, what do you think of Baptiste? You’ve analyzed him.”

&
nbsp; “He seems normal, in every way. Except, of course, for what he writes. Extraordinary stuff, really. It doesn’t seem to reflect him at all, as though he has another personality that only manifests itself through writing. He can’t talk in this voice. It only comes out when he writes.”

  “I’ve seen some of it. Is there more?”

  “Well, he’s plagued by this voice telling him to write. Your dead American.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’ve tried making it easier on him. I told him I want a daily journal of what this voice of his is saying. I hope he’ll feel like he’s writing for me, and not for his voice. It should make it easier for him, in the meantime.”

  “Meantime?”

  “He’s been sent south to a place outside Avignon. There’s no reason for him to be locked up.” Luc got up from the table. “I should get going. Let’s walk. It’s almost stopped raining.”

  “What’s in Avignon?” Chase asked. He opened his wallet and left enough money to cover the bill.

  “A private institution. Expensive. My initial recommendation was just medication. Normally I wouldn’t be called in to do this kind of evaluation, but I was. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have sent Baptiste to Avignon, of all places.”

  “Strange,” Chase said, quickly lacing up his shoes. He stuffed his wet socks in his pockets.

  “Yes. And stranger still is that the bill is being footed by your employer of late.”

  “Wrest.”

  Chase rose to follow Luc, but held onto the table for a minute. He’d definitely had too much to drink. Luc headed toward the door. It was no longer raining outside when Chase joined him. The air was humid, and the sky, dark.

  “So this journal, is it something I can see?”

  “You know it’s confidential, Chase.”

  “I know. That’s why I asked.” He knew Gaudin received the earlier entries through Luc. What he didn’t know was whether they had passed through Wrest’s hands on the way between Baptiste and Gaudin. “Do you think Baptiste pushed Regi?”