“I’m not talking about accidents.”
“Well, the best way to avoid another is to forget any in the past. Tomorrow. Come out to the house. Six o’clock.”
The phone went dead. Gaudin caught Chase’s glance.
“We’re seeing Wrest tomorrow,” Gaudin said.
“Good,” Chase said.
Gaudin climbed back into bed, unconvinced.
Gaudin woke to a fat knock on the door. He’d only just registered that it was morning when Chase entered, slamming the door behind him. He was fully dressed, even shaved.
“He’s good,” Chase said. “The bastard’s good.”
Gaudin sighed and gave up the idea of sleeping any longer. “Let’s have it.”
“They lost it. They fucking lost it!”
“Let me guess.”
“Right,” Chase said. “The wine sample.”
“Even the bottle?”
“Even the fucking bottle. Even the fucking cork. Who doesn’t Wrest know?”
“The Virgin Mary.”
Chase left him. Gaudin could hear his footsteps stomp down the hall. Gaudin showered and dressed. He then moved to his bag and pulled out a heavy T-shirt. He unrolled the T-shirt and grasped the pistol he’d kept hidden within. Gaudin placed his open hand between his belly and pants, then his pants and his back, deliberating where he would have the most room for the weapon he did not wish to carry, and had gone so long without. It was then that Bianca knocked, entering as Gaudin slid the pistol into the hollow of his back. She held a copy of the winery’s deed in her hands. “You haven’t slept much,” he said.
“No.”
“Have a seat.” The hotel room was humid from his shower. He turned on the a/c. “Do you want something to drink?”
“No, thanks.”
He realized he had nothing but wine and groaned at his stupidity at offering it, now of all times, as they waited for Jade’s return. As exhausting as the last couple of days had been, Gaudin thought it was perhaps good that Bianca’s mind was occupied by someone who was returning to her, as opposed to David, who wouldn’t.
“My husband didn’t sign this,” Bianca said, sitting down on his unmade bed and handing him the deed to the winery. “It looks just like his handwriting, even the date, but that’s how I know it’s not his. Here, look at this. The seven in the date is crossed, the way you Europeans write it. David never wrote it that way.”
“Good,” Gaudin said, though he hadn’t honestly expected the signature to be authentic.
Bianca gazed at him half-questioningly, half-hopeful. “Do we have him?”
“On drug smuggling, perhaps. Or nearly, if we had a sample. But not on David.”
“That’s okay,” Bianca said. “As long as I know he’s taken down on something.”
“You don’t care who actually pushed Regi?”
“Not as much. Much less.”
When she left, he moved the pistol to his gut and looked at himself in the mirror.
For someone who’d gone through Wrest’s toxic version of Vin Mariani, Jade looked exquisite to Chase. She was thinner, a bit sallow, but her eyes were bright and forgiving.
“What a relief,” Chase said, meeting her at the hospital entrance. “Are you ready?”
“Hell yes.”
“Okay.” He put his hand on her upper arm, then let go. She took his fingers in her hand, then dropped them as they reached Toro’s Citröen.
“Whose car?”
“Borrowing it from a friend.” He eased her inside.
“It’s okay, Chase. I’m not an invalid.”
“Do you feel anything?”
“Tired.”
“We’ll take care of that.”
Chase entered, inserted the key and turned it. The car rose slightly on its hydraulics. Jade was instantly enamored.
“It’s like a dog,” she said. “It sees you coming and gets up on its legs.”
“Or a camel.”
“That’s even better. A camel.”
He drove back to the hotel. The air was hot, the streets brown and dusty and the car heavy with the smell of someone else’s sweat, the scent of borrowed things. At the hotel, he left Jade in his room. The maid had come, removing any sign of Joël except for a kind thank-you note he’d left on the hotel stationary. Jade slept. Downstairs, he and Gaudin decided they would go to the farmhouse, if only to try and find another bottle of the cocaine wine. It made Chase uneasy, especially as the hour drew close for them to leave. As he changed clothes in his hotel room, Jade still asleep on the bed, Chase couldn’t help but feel both excited and in harm’s way, the way he felt walking some streets late at night, in arrondissements far from his own. Turning to leave, he wanted to kiss her, but was afraid of waking her. He wanted to apply some kind of astringent to his sense that things were moving fast and without resolution. He moved to Gaudin’s room and picked up a neat pile of paper with blue cross-hatching.
He spotted Bianca in the hotel lobby, sitting with her arms on the chair rests, her legs apart, looking like someone exhausted by the heat, tipped into her position by the force of temperature alone. The sun shone through the windows, battling the effects of the air conditioning. Chase didn’t know what to say to her. He felt like he was leaving for a few days, felt that before he walked out the door to where he could see Gaudin waiting for him, cigarillo in hand, he should say something.
“Call this number in Paris should anything happen,” he said, handing her Luc’s number. Ever since Bombay’s crash, he had thought of Baptiste’s words of warning to Wrest—and of the apparent disregard Wrest had for following Baptiste’s suggestions. He feared Wrest had a list of everyone who was in the know. He paused, then handed a sheaf of papers to her.
“This is more of what Baptiste’s been writing,” he said. “You read French?”
“I can manage,” Bianca said.
“I don’t want this to hurt you, but Baptiste claims to hear from David,” Chase said.
Bianca glanced down at the pages.
“Perhaps it’s like what you told me about the sevens in the deed,” he said. “Not his voice, really, not crossed.” He paused, then walked outside.
“Ready?” Gaudin asked, standing in the shade of a tree.
“Yes,” Chase said, unlocking the door of Toro’s car. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” Chase asked, letting them both into the car. They pulled out into the road.
“If I believe in ghosts, I believe in second chances,” Gaudin said. “If I disbelieve, if I believe in nothing, then life is really horrible.”
“I never took you for a religious man.”
“I’m not,” Gaudin said. “I’m an optimist out of necessity.”
Gaudin pointed out the roads to take, as they approached them. The sun was edging toward late afternoon as they left the last buildings in Orange and continued driving east through fields of sunflowers, yellow heads gazing at their approach. Chase hadn’t met Wrest since that day in Luxembourg Gardens, when they’d strolled around the pool, when Wrest had told him to call him Ostrich. Chase wondered what he’d do seeing Wrest again, a man who could hurt his own son, then take him back again. One who could inflict pain on the innocent, who could kill those with knowledge of his personal crimes. What did such a man do to fools who drove to his doorstep?
Chase looked at Gaudin.
Gaudin pulled his pistol from its lodging place in front of his gut and placed it on the floor of the car. His stomach had lost the more gripping contours of his youth. In those early days, a woman had once told him he had the world’s finest navel. She had run her tongue around it for so long it had filled with her saliva. Gaudin rubbed his face in an effort to distract himself from remembrances of the past. He knew they were weights he was better off not carrying. Gaudin caught Chase staring at the pistol.
“Watch the road there,” Gaudin said, looking at Chase. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Let me see it.
”
Gaudin moved his cigarillo to his other hand and placed the piece in Chase’s hand. Chase gazed at the metal—gazing more, it seemed, at the sight of his hand holding the metal than at the gun itself. Gaudin reached over and held the steering wheel to keep the car straight. It was strange how the easiest task felt so difficult when done from a foreign position.
“C’mon. Drive,” he said. “Haven’t you ever held a pistol?”
“No.” Chase returned the gun. “Yes, now.”
“Turn right up here,” Gaudin said, pointing out a side road.
“Already?” Chase asked.
“A few kilometers.”
“Let’s tell him we know he ordered the push as a warning to Regi. We’ll tell him we know about Bombay, Jade, and the cocaine wine. And Baptiste’s letters. How David’s following Wrest.”
Gaudin shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Let’s leave that last one out.”
“Why? You believe in ghosts.”
“What if Wrest isn’t reading what Baptiste’s writing? You’ll sound like a fool.”
“Okay, we’ll leave it out. Incidentally, since when am I the one who’ll be doing the talking?” Chase asked.
“You seem to have it all figured out.”
“So I, or you, or we’ll tell him what we know. And that it’ll all come out if he doesn’t stop trying to cut off loose ends.”
“Okay.”
“But look what happened to Bombay. If Wrest did anything to Jade or Bianca, I’d get him.”
“Like Bombay’s boyfriend.”
“Right.”
“And what would you do?”
Chase stared hard at the road, as though the answer were a sign just coming into view, his reply delayed until he could read the letters there. “I’d kill him.”
“You would?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have much experience at that, do you?”
“No.”
Gaudin picked up his pistol and offered it again. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take it.”
He watched Chase look at it. A bead of sweat lay above his lips. His eyes jumped back and forth between the road and the pistol.
“Well, come on. You had it in your hand a minute ago. Release one hand from the wheel and take the pistol.”
Gaudin watched Chase’s hand relax on the wheel, then tighten. “You better come up with something better, then.”
Chase wiped his face with his shirt. “We’ll say we have another bottle of wine. It’s at an independent testing lab.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll say it’ll go into the papers. All we know and more.”
All I know, Gaudin thought. He could feel his Mediterranean retirement slipping away from him. He cracked his window to throw out the butt of his cigarillo. The air whined in, carrying with it the raw smell of uncut sunflower stalks. Gaudin hadn’t been to the farmhouse in a couple years. The last time Gaudin had been here, Wrest had been paying him to keep tabs on Emilia, to see if she was seeing someone. She had only been flirting with him, even tried to do him once, in Wrest’s bedroom. He wasn’t foolish enough to cross Wrest, even knowing Wrest’s own numerous indescretions. Though he rebuffed her, he still felt uneasy. He made up an imaginary lover for Emilia, someone to deflect any suspicions on himself. This lover was crazy about Emilia, but his love was never requited. He told Wrest he had nothing to worry about.
Gaudin grew nervous as the farmhouse came into view. He’d always considered himself a man who knew what was right and wrong and, given the circumstances, which choice would be the most advantageous. But now, with Wrest’s own son injured, Bianca’s husband dead, Jade made ill, Bombay killed—he felt hollow. He’d been responsible for only the minor beginnings of that unfortunate cascade, and yet he felt haunted. Not by the man he had pushed, nor the man who’d felt the heavy body of his hand, the flesh from his unintentional smack. Bianca haunted him.
“The wind bothering you?” Chase asked.
“No.” He rolled down his window completely so that he felt the wind down to his scalp. “No, it doesn’t bother me at all.”
The farmhouse was just ahead now, rimmed with a garden, a low brick wall, and fields of sunflowers. The road ahead stretched toward the blue and sand-colored mountains and Mont Ventoux. Just remove an approaching car and it could be a tourist postcard, Gaudin thought. The car weaved into their lane. “Watch this guy,” Gaudin warned, then sensed something carnivorous in the approaching grill, the headlights, his fear confirmed as the car roared past them, snatching off the Citröen’s side mirror. The Citröen’s tires spit gravel as they swerved onto the gravel shoulder, turned and began to spin, the ride suddenly smooth and quiet as they went down the embankment. They hit the ground and roared forward just as everything exploded into gray. Gaudin felt suddenly incapacitated. From the corner of his eye, the air fluttered with shadow, stalks scraping the metal sides of the car in rapid squeaks, like a hundred nails down a hundred blackboards. Under his shoes, he could feel the vibration of earth thrown up against the belly of the car. He hugged the gray airbag as a thought passed through his mind –it was far too bright a day to die—and this made him, briefly, unafraid. And then, as the car finally stopped, the seatbelt at his waist clutched him with a force as though the planet had halted in its spin. His throat burned and for a moment, he felt the need to vomit. The air buzzed madly in his ears. He yawned to get rid of it, but the annoying absence continued.
Gaudin reached into his pants for his pocketknife and stabbed the airbag. The air was stale, then dry and clean as a breeze swept through the inside of the car. Once gray, the world was now green and yellow. He read the faces of the flowers and the first thing he knew was that the car pointed south. Chase said something, but the words seemed to come from so far away. He noticed that Chase’s airbag hadn’t deployed. “How do you like that?” he said, though he could barely hear his own voice. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to Chase. “Here, you split your lip open. Press hard.” Chase took the handkerchief and stepped out of the car. Gaudin reached around on the floor of the car and found his pistol under the deflated airbag. He shoved his door open against the stalks. Gaudin looked at Chase across the roof of the car and he knew they were both thinking of Bombay, and of Wrest. He turned. The roof of the farmhouse poked up just above the stalks. He gestured for Chase to follow. His feet felt unsteady as each step pressed into the crumbled dirt, here and there settling unsteadily on a loose rock, his hands held in front of him like the bow of a ship to split the sea of yellow. He tripped on something in the field, got up and slapped his half-numb leg.
“Are you okay?” It sounded like Chase was whispering.
Gaudin reached down and held up a cow’s skull for Chase to see, then threw it behind them. They climbed up the embankment and crouched at the edge of the road. It was empty. As they approached the farmhouse, it was just as Gaudin remembered it—a two-story stone building, walls of mixed brown, tan and blue rock, with a red terra-cotta roof pitched at a low angle. Drapes the color of the surrounding fields hung in the uppermost windows, the glass of the ground floor reflecting their approach. He could see that he was limping. The only car in the drive was a blue Opel parked under a tree, its roof littered with prematurely august leaves, its windshield smashed. It didn’t look like anyone was home.
Wrest’s Great Dane sat in front of the entrance, the same dog Wrest had been training to respond to commands in Esperanto, the last time Gaudin had been here. The dog rolled onto its back like a dead insect as they drew closer, its tongue hanging from its jaws in anticipation. Chase reached down and rubbed its teated chest.
“I saw this dog in town, drinking from a fountain,” Chase said.
Gaudin pushed the front door open. A girl yelled at him from the foot of the staircase.
“Hey,” Gaudin said, tucking his pistol away into the hollow of his back. “It’s okay. I know you.”
He recognized her from the glint of gold in her nose. She wore a man’s T-shirt and nothing else. Her fingers were bloody and holding a blood-soaked cloth against a young man’s arm.
“Shit,” the man said. “Where’s the ambulance?”
Gaudin hadn’t seen this much blood in years.
“He was stabbed,” the girl said. “The crazy fuck stabbed him.”
“I’m the gardener,” the young man said.
“Who stabbed you?”
“He burst in looking for Wrest. He said he was Jacob and I knew who he was. He thought I was Wrest.”
“No,” the girl said. “His name was Joël.”
“Where’s Wrest?” Gaudin asked.
“At the concert.”
“Did you tell Joël that?”
“Yes.”
He figured Joël had maybe ten minutes on them. For a moment, he felt like fixing himself a drink, taking it out to Wrest’s hammock, and watching the sunset as Wrest got his. Joël should kill Wrest, he thought. But then Joël would spend years in misery. And prison life would not make anything right.
Gaudin glimpsed a trail of blood spots winding up the staircase to the bedrooms. In the distance came the faint siren of an ambulance. He turned and was startled at the closeness of the vehicle, already tearing onto the gravel drive, the air clean in front of it, but billowing with dust out the back. Chase ran to the window and spoke to the driver and soon the two paramedics were lifting the gardener into the back of their vehicle.
“Wait,” Gaudin shouted as a medic began shutting the door. “Make some space. We’re coming with you.” He and Chase climbed into the back of the ambulance. As they pulled away, Gaudin could see the girl blowing kisses and crying at the same time. The Great Dane licked her neck. From the road, she looked like a small child standing beside a normal-sized dog. He turned to Chase.
“In the bar today. How much did you tell Joël?”
“I don’t remember. We were both a little drunk.”
“The man who stabbed me. He was a little drunk, too, I think,” said the now half-naked gardener. The thin pancake of blood on his arm had begun coagulating, covered with the white lint of the removed cloth, like a swarm of aphids.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 28
