“Great,” said Bad, mocking them. “Hey, Brian, what’s your name?”
Someone said, in French, that he wasn’t making any sense.
He told them about the woman. “An idiot in street clothes. She’s down there. Perhaps in the flooded duck. The duck is a sump.”
The blond Italian who was trying to feed Bad soup from a thermos said they would look—but what was this “duck”? The nearest sump was at the bottom of the Passage of Time.
Bad explained his terminology, sipped soup, and answered further questions.
The rescuers had run a wire through the cave and were talking to the surface on a phone. Bad gathered there had been an unseasonal deluge, a number of parties were trapped, and one other person had been swept away.
The rescuers split up; some went on down, to look for a body. The rest took Bad up. The crester run was low again, and they had rigged a Tyrolean. Bad, restored by several hours’ rest, was actually fitter than his rescuers. He soon took the lead, hurrying to get out of that horrible hole. He’d gone under in Italy and came out in France, near one of those French villages with an Italian name. He was followed closely by the blond Italian, Gino, who dried him off, fed him up, and drove him back down to the camping ground to gather up his mashed, sodden tent.
Bad jumped out of sleep. He shoved himself back against the seat and stared at the narrow stone streets of Genoa’s old town, painted by the mixed light of the detective’s head-and fog lamps.
“You were asleep,” said the detective.
Bad had been asleep, but as he’d come out of it he was fully conscious—his mind more alert than awake. And in that state he’d made a connection. He already understood that, on seeing the body in the sea cave, he’d done more than just venture an opinion—he’d gone down a rope and into the sea cave because of the sight through borrowed binoculars of the drowned woman’s hair.
The match of the dead woman’s surname with the name of a village near Le Lien Vert wasn’t a coincidence—if she was named for the village. And it wasn’t coincidental that Bad sought to make a connection, because one reminded him of the other. Martine Dardo’s particolored hair was like that of the woman he’d found and lost again in Le Lien Vert. But there was another connection, another reminder, another coincidental correspondence that Bad hoped like hell meant—what?—nothing, or something?
Because it must mean something. It was a connection that Bad felt should have a mathematical expression, like those of explosions, whose formulas express the conversion of one chemical to another, change accomplished in microseconds, with a release of great force. Bad thought of the chemical expression for the detonation of RDX—hexamine hexamethylenetetramine with legs, a chemical with all its nitritized molecules hanging out. The connection felt like a detonation: it blew Bad right out of sleep and followed him, billowing and burning.
Nine months earlier the pizza-box booby trap had set off its fertilizer bomb and blasted a hole through the ground floor of a concert hall, throwing cars around its basement and tossing the nearest living being ten meters through the air although he was wearing forty kilograms of body armor and was twenty-seven meters away from the blast. When the bomb went off, Bad was transfixed by an exhibition poster on a concrete pillar, seared by the sight, not just because his heart was pumping or because he was flooded with adrenaline and imprinted by every terrible second of time, but because Jean Ares’s Eve in a Gaucho Hat—Eve, with her long calm eyes, undershot jaw, pout, and bunched maxillary muscles—was a portrait of the woman Bad had met and lost in Le Lien Vert.
And, Bad realized, perhaps it was this recognition that had led him to nudge Gabrielle’s vacation planning toward this part of the world. Perhaps this was why he was here.
Chapter 4
EVE
It was mid-afternoon when Eve Moskelute got back from Genoa. She had been to the Questura, where she had spoken to the police, and the morgue, where she had identified the body of her friend Martine. She drove into the courtyard of her Ventigmiglia house, got out of the car, and automatically opened its trunk to look for shopping bags. Then she remembered.
She went indoors and stood for a time, subdued, in the dead air of her dark atrium. Eve found she was rubbing her fingertips together, her hands before her at the height of her waist. She could still feel the powdery interior surfaces of the plastic evidence bags she’d handled, picking them up and rubbing over what they held: Martine’s credit card and keys.
She went on down a short passage into the living room, opened the doors onto her terrace, and went out.
The sun was overhead and there was smoke like cement dust hanging over the tangled interchange of the autostrada. The rail lines were showing bright, like dots and dashes of solder in a circuit board. The greenhouses on the terraces at the head of the valley caught sunlight and blazed like banked stadium lights. The rest was hazy, semisolid mountains and, darker than the mountains, a forest fire of thunderclouds rolling down the valley.
Because she’d been out on business Eve had on high heels, and as she went back indoors her heels’ determined noise masked the bright utterance of the one loose tile her foot touched. She crossed to the dresser and tilted a framed photograph to the light. A chain of girls danced, in diaphanous shifts and crowns of flowers, behind them a stone wall, prickly pears, and umbrella pines. The photo was of Eve, her twin sister, Dawn, and a friend, in a garden on Cap Martin. The year was 1954; the photo was of a pageant the children had put on—The Judgment of Paris. It had been the last summer Eve’s Russian father had put in an appearance.
The first time the twins saw M. Moskelute they were five. He turned up late one evening with a bag of quail and a bicycle. The girls came out in their nightgowns to find a new bicycle on the tiny terrace of the family’s Menton apartment. In the morning the bicycle was gone, though their father wasn’t. He didn’t go till he’d run through their mother’s money, in one night at the casino. The twins’ mother stored the bicycle with a friend at his garage on the Avenue Sospel. The girls had to pretend they hadn’t seen it while their mother pretended to purchase it from the garage a piece at a time—one week the front wheel, next the rear, and so on, ending with the bell. Nothing good could be seen to come quickly—that would be bad for their character. And no good was to come from their father.
The Moskelute twins’ mother was English. And they were always told that they were English, too. Their mother would tell the girls to think of themselves as English almost as often as she’d remind them to brush their teeth. However, their names were their father’s idea. He did consult their mother before he went to the Hotel de Ville to register their births. She was still in a dusky state of anesthesia and gave him a choice of two—she hadn’t grasped what he’d said, that there were two babies. “June or Evelyn,” she said. “Either will do.” The twins’ father got drunk and sportive. He registered his twin girls as “Eve” and “Dawn.” Perhaps the registrar spoke no English and only wrote down what M. Moskelute spelled out, without understanding the words. He hadn’t asked, “Are you quite sure?” Or perhaps it was just that at that time the town was rather sloppy with records, as a form of passive resistance. The year was 1942, the Italians had withdrawn, and the Germans had entered the Free Zone.
Eve opened the cabinet that stood on the sideboard among the photographs, in pride of place. It was a gilded oak case, like a portable icon. Inside and under glass was a single illuminated page. The page was crowded—tiled—with illustrations of artifacts. There were clothes, empty but animated, as though puffed up by the limbs of ghostly mannequins. There were tools pictured, too. A paving hammer with a long curved handle. A water carrier’s velvet-covered container. A surgeon’s instruments, among them the long tweezers used to give communion to those suffering La Peste. The page was the work of an eighteenth-century artist influenced by illuminated books in the collection of Marquis Guy de Chambord, who was the subject of a biography Eve had published when she was twenty-seven.
Chambord wa
s an eighteenth-century collector and a dabbling dilettante. Chambord acquired whole volumes of illuminated manuscript books with locks, books that clasped darkness between each page like protective tissue. If he couldn’t get whole books, the marquis had acquired bits of books—the capitals from the chapter headings in early incunabula, illustrations cut from manuscripts in unguarded libraries, beauties that were only then beginning to find their way out of the night between covers, into frames, and under glass. He collected other things, too—had his cabinet of curiosities, his babies in jars of ethanol and dressed in coral bracelets, his Amazonian butterflies and sloth skeletons and stuffed giraffes posed with the male mounting the female.
The artist of Eve’s single page had had access to Chambord’s manuscript collection and had chosen to imitate. The page had found its own way into Chambord’s library decades after the marquis’s death, when it was somehow recognized and secured by the library’s custodian.
Eve had acquired the work in the late seventies, a month before the death of her famous husband.
Eve met Jean Ares in July 1971, when she was away from home, inland at Arles. It was her birthday, an anniversary that found her in flight from the familiar. It was the second birthday after the death of her twin sister, Dawn. She had passed the first in the hospital, had barely passed it. The birthday was five weeks after Dawn’s accident—and her own admission to St. Roch, in her bloodied nightdress, with a towel wrapped around her punctured wrist. Those five weeks were a pinched place in Eve’s life. That first birthday had gone by without Eve knowing. She’d sat in a chair in the dayroom or walked along the hospital corridor, her balance so impaired by tranquilizers and antipsychotics that she’d had to walk with one hand against the wall. She didn’t know what day it was. Her mouth was dry. There were days and nights but no dates.
A week before the second birthday after Dawn’s death, Eve went to Avignon. She knew the town well, had lived there for a time while she was researching her biography of Chambord. But Avignon was no good. At a certain time each evening Eve would remember phone calls she’d made to her sister, just checking in or excited by her research. She remembered how everything had seemed to lie before her, how she was coming down into her life with a stately hydraulic progress, it seemed, in a movement like an extension bridge. Her roadway would meet another, with the strong machinery of her family behind her and publishers’ contracts and academic appointments before her. Roads would join; she would get off and go on. Eve had felt this in Avignon only three years before—but Dawn had been on the other end of the phone then.
So Eve left Avignon for Arles. It was the week of the festival of the Arlesiennes. The town was full of costumed women, with embroidered aprons, black patent-leather boots, and lacquered hair. It was hot and the streets smelled of fresh horseshit. Camargue horses, their black-flecked white hides polished smooth, were parading under the plane trees on the town’s avenues. All the leaves of the trees were burned brown at their edges and made a constant rattle in the wind, so that the streets were loud although the traffic had been diverted.
It was very hot. Eve wore a sundress with chains of embroidered daisies for straps. She stopped at troughs and fountains to dampen her chest and face and arms but felt as if she were walking through warm water wearing a pressure suit and weighted boots. In shops the freezers had given out, and the pavements were slicked by rivulets of fluorescent syrup from melted Popsicles.
Eve moved from one café to the next, resting, drinking water or pulpy orange juice. Between stops she inclined with other onlookers against walls on the shady sides of streets, with the heat from the nearest patch of sun reflecting up into their faces.
Eve didn’t want to go back to her hotel room and wait out the day on her plastic-wrapped mattress. She didn’t want to think what day it was and how strange, how castaway she was in this parched, dusty, tumultuous celebration. She felt more estranged by the festival and heat wave than she had by her previous birthday’s Thorazine.
She didn’t know Arles well, so it was by chance that she found the coolest place in town. She visited the cathedral, and there she saw a sign directing tourists to the Roman storage cellars. She found their entrance, paid her fee, and went down. After two turns of the stairs, she had shaken off the wind. She couldn’t hear it anymore. At the bottom of the steps Eve opened her bag, took out her white cotton cardigan, and put it on.
The cellars were vast, a square of low, vaulted ceilings and columns, of arcades in receding ranks. The space was poorly illuminated by fluorescent lights, tubes behind greenish plastic, and recessed, so as not to spoil the contours of the arches. The floor was wet in places, its surface sometimes corrugated clay, sometimes paving stones sunk in dark silt.
Eve wandered about in the gloom and lost sight of the entrance. The space was huge and—although it was the only habitable place in the whole town on that hot day—empty. All other tourists were out watching the festival, packed into patches of shade.
Eve was alone for an hour and remained in motion, walking off her anniversary as one walks off an overdose. The joints in her jaw ached from keeping her mouth closed, her lower lip anchored on her top teeth, till she could almost hear her mother telling her—or possibly Dawn—that she was “frowning like a puppet.” Eve thought of their orthodontist: “It isn’t an overbite, and I can’t correct it, Madame Moskelute. Your girls simply have underdeveloped lower jaws.”
After an hour another party arrived in the cellars. Eve stopped still in the dimness partway along the central arcade and waited for them to appear. They were making a circuit of the outer walls, as she had. They were a family group, with children, some costumed—the girls in white aprons and puffy-sleeved shirts, the boys in black waistcoats and breeches buckled at the knee. Some of the adults were in costume, too, the women fanning red faces and sighing as they let the cold air in under their skirts. A family—a solitary grandparent, his children and their spouses, and their children.
The old man was wiry, bald, and bandy-legged. His children surrounded him in a phalanx, most heads turned his way as he talked, waved his brown arms and big, long-fingered hands. None of the grandchildren were infants; they soon left the adults and exploded into the dark, running and shouting. Two boys passed Eve, the tassels of their waistcoats flying. They jumped when they saw her and veered away, looking back to ascertain that she wasn’t a ghost, only a woman in a white dress. Eve could see it in their eyes, fear for a moment, then indifference. She vanished for them, was only an obstacle, like the columns.
The girls found her next. They made a few passes around her, to check her clothes. Eve was young and stylish enough to excite their curiosity. When the adults eventually strolled by they, too, were startled but recovered quickly, the women inclining their sleek, dressed heads.
Eve heard the family gather at the back of the cellar, the children dropping pebbles through a grille that covered steps down to another level, only partly excavated. She heard stones clink on steel and rattle on stone, then the children called away by their mothers.
Two women were talking about a trip they planned to take to the States. The men were discussing public access to a beach below a property one of them owned. They talked about the mayor (of Nice, for one named him: “Médecin”) and of “pressing their advantage.”
There was talk about Paris and “another show.” One man said he hoped his father realized that there would be more advantage in scarcity of supply. He was answered instantly: “I cannot play shopkeeper with God’s gifts.”
“Must you always be so high-handed, Papa?”
The group passed Eve again, several hesitating, then looking more closely. The women nodded again and went on.
They were talking about the time now and the tables that would be laid along the road to the necropolis. “I want to be quite sure it’s cooler before I set foot in that street,” someone said.
A few minutes went by; then the grandfather came back and stood beside Eve, as if the arch she was und
er were a bus shelter, beyond which was a rainy night. He waited, not looking at her.
Eve knew he was concerned about her, and felt embarrassed. She cast about for something to say, a polite reassurance or a plausible excuse. She said she had feared the heat would result in a migraine.
He said he’d had the same thought—though his migraines were sometimes worth it. He wouldn’t be willing to trade in the aura with the headache. On the last occasion he’d had one he said he’d seen a sort of sketch—black figures on the kind of white surface to be seen in the cinema when the film breaks, leaving projected white light. In black on white, a row of swings, animated and swinging out of sync. The swings’ seats were the lash-fringed upper lids of shut eyes.
Eve said she always had her best ideas in the days before a migraine. She’d solve problems in her work.
He said he knew his own mind—he should, at seventy—but his migraines weren’t his mind, as such; they were more like dramatic mental weather. A divine light that turns into sunstroke.
“My auras are sometimes silly,” Eve said. “I see that diagram from school textbooks, of an ape evolving by increasingly hairless stages into a man.”
“Ah,” the old man said, “that picture. My grandchildren have it, too. One of those creatures looks at the viewer—does he not? It isn’t ‘modern man’ who is stoutly striding off, out of the right edge of the page.”
Eve finally looked directly at the man she was talking to. She saw that he was relaxed and animated; she saw that his eyes were a paradox: black yet as bright as lamps. “It’s Cro-Magnon man, I think,” Eve said.
“Yes, Cro-Magnon man. Grimy and sullen and patient. Like a refugee.”
The old man said that at each festival there was an alfresco meal set out on the shaded way to the necropolis, at the end of the Via Appia, the great Roman road. Would Eve care to join him and his family? He held out his hand. He hadn’t introduced himself or asked her name—they were somehow already on a more intimate footing.
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