Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  “Not me, I’ll never betray you.” Which was true, I never did, but at that moment I spoke quickly, leaning over the bed, childishly, sincerely eager to make sure he knew I was on his side.

  “I’ve broken off with someone who used to be very close to me.”

  “What happened?” I grew alarmed. Z was sweating slightly and wiped his forearm across his brow as he rolled over on his back.

  “I was hoodwinked.” He looked so serious, but at the word hoodwink, I had to suppress a laugh. What I could never figure out about him was this: did he con himself or just everyone else? Was there a divide with Z on one side and the rest of the world on the other, or did he believe his advertisements for himself?

  “An informer gave me a diagram of a gun, which turned out to be no more effective than a toy, and I passed this information on as if I believed it genuinely dangerous.” He rolled onto his back and blew smoke into the air. I didn’t yet ask where this traffic in documents was going or what the source might be, but I wondered about the identity of his informer. I was never told exactly, but he gave the impression the former intimate was someone important, a general or a duke. Convinced he was persecuted by everyone, Z could cook up fantastic stories of conspiracy and fraud, but at the same time he was the consummate victim, he always portrayed himself as one innocently mauled and left for dead by the roadside.

  “Where can you go then?” I asked. I genuinely believed this layabout was in danger, but had the sense to know there were few places he could flee to where he wouldn’t end up hating everybody in sight. (His style: Look, I’m your confidante. I told him everything, even knowing he had a history of bilking even his nearest and dearest of everything they possessed.) The landscape was littered with the friends and relatives he’d swindled, from nephews to dueling partners. He rolled away from my reach.

  “Maybe you should get a job.”

  At this he abruptly changed the subject, picking topics out of the air that had nothing to do with me or anything I knew about. This was his strategy when he felt uncomfortable.

  “One night in Cairo I paid a woman the equivalent of fifty francs to go into a private room with myself and three other men. We were led through a series of chambers, one after the next, all of which were practically bare except for a few pillows and rugs.” He made a walking gesture with his fingers. “Finally when we arrived at the last room the woman was told to take off her clothes and lie down on the floor. We took off our jackets, rolled up our shirtsleeves, and proceeded to play cards on her back.”

  I learned to look wide eyed and dumbfounded. He’d never traveled to Egypt, I’m sure of it. The story was lifted from Maxime du Camp. It was an erotic story, but typical of Z, the eroticism was in the suspense, nothing really happened, and he liked the image of a subjugated person who was incapable of putting up much resistance, who for a price would do what he demanded. He lay on my floor, deflated, arms and legs spread out. I lay on the floor next to him, nestling my neck on top of his arm, but he rolled over and stood up. He got up quickly as if he just remembered he had to be somewhere else and began to dress, buttoning his shirt before a small mirror, talking partly to himself, partly to me. He wanted to be somewhere else. He wanted to be someone else. Why did I ignore the danger signs? I was completely taken in. He could say anything, and he did.

  “You know, Claire, you shouldn’t trust me or ask for what I can’t give you now. I carry tales to the adulterer who thinks I sympathize with him absolutely while I size up his catch as well. I take the side of the debtor and the collector. I know how it feels to be in everyone’s shoes.”

  “So why do I feel I’d follow you to the end of the earth? I’m not interested in everyone’s shoes, just you.”

  He paid no attention to me.

  Because he had no sense that the various roles he played might contradict one another, he developed a great talent: the ability to be on opposing sides simultaneously. Z spoke seven languages. I watched him change gestures, even height as he switched tongues. He seemed entirely comfortable in the roll of syllables and confident he was enchanting if not convincing his audience, unfurling a carpet of sounds and information, taking them in, then rolling it back up again. A multilingual emperor, unlike the poor illiterate woman who emptied wastebaskets in the German embassy and turned in papers found there to the French secret police. He could easily imagine himself an officer in another army, killing French citizens as fast as he could.

  “You can’t kill all of them,” I poked his elbow.

  “No, you can’t kill all of them, but you can try.”

  “I’ll tell you one story,” he turned from the glass to look at me. “The morning I seconded for a Captain Foa in his duel against Drumont, I rose very early and sent a note to Drumont.”

  “What did you write?” I was startled. Foa and Drumont hated each other.

  He wouldn’t tell me, but Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole, who was publicly known to want all citizens of Foa’s race deported from the country, became one of Z’s protectors. If this wasn’t enough, Z began a correspondence with Drumont’s notorious colleague, the Marquis de Morès, Badlands rancher, founder of a railroad in Vietnam, a firm believer that the Syndicate had ruined him and all its members should be annihilated post haste. Z would sit at his desk writing to Morès yet half an hour later he would compose a letter to Edmond de Rothschild, claiming to have been a former classmate. His aim in the latter case was, of course, money. Both letters went out in the same post. The moment they were dropped in the box he was terrified that he’d put the wrong letter in the two previously addressed envelopes, accidentally interchanging them

  “This is what I wrote to Rothschild; I’ll recite the letter to you.” He quoted, smiling as he stood before the glass, “ ‘Even though we had lost track of each other for thirty years, you were, when I contacted you, good to me, whereas some who could have, who should have helped me out did nothing; I am deeply grateful and although in the more than precarious situation in which I find myself and which can change only with the death of my uncle it seems impossible for me to do anything to convey to you how grateful I am, I might nevertheless be of some use to you.’ ”

  “What uncle? Did he die?”

  “Let me finish. ‘The extremely cruel necessity which I am forced to confront (without succeeding at it, moreover) has forced me to undertake in secret and outside my profession certain (extremely honorable) tasks which my uniform nevertheless forbids. Those efforts have allowed me to penetrate into circles in which I have learned things of gravity, which I believe you would have an interest in knowing. I repeat that I am neither a madman nor a fool.’ ”

  “Did you interchange the letters? Did you send the letter intended to one to the other?”

  “I’ll never tell you.”

  He left a few minutes later, and I rolled over in bed, shutting my eyes hard until I saw blue comet shapes travel across my field of vision. If he was neither a madman nor a fool, where did that leave me? How did he manage to keep all these people from talking to each other? As long as they hated one another, his subplots and counterplots might succeed, and then Drumont had said, anyone who swindles one of them is a friend of mine, and Foa and Rothschild were unquestionably two of them. Z had a nose for the right track. It’s true that we present a different face to each audience, but Z’s identity was entirely made up of ever-splitting fractions. I knew, or had met, perhaps five or six of Z’s identities, so I had to assume there were five or six unknown ones besides.

  Why did I buy it? I don’t know, but I did. I let Z become my foreign legion; he could turn me into an amnesiac, a sleepwalker, an automaton whose only possibly authentic feelings lay in a desire for him.

  He often wanted to be someplace else, like Cairo or Vienna. He faltered at pronouns, he was rarely part of a we but was very clear about they. (Ironically, I wonder if Dreyfus came to falter at the plural also? No one would ever tell me.) He was outside everything, and he needed to take revenge. Someone, I won’t s
ay who, opened the door and he walked in.

  After Z’s final swindle, I lost the apartment, but one night I had a statue of Hermes stolen from what had been my courtyard. The theft was a sort of last grandiose gesture as I hovered on the threshold of the poorhouse, and now it’s here in Montreuil waiting for you.

  So that’s the true story of Z.

  Still no thieves.

  July 26,1934

  Dear Lille,

  The man who quoted La Fontaine didn’t wait for an answer, which I’d never have written. Perhaps he guessed I was through with thanking people for gifts delivered out of the blue. Acting on intuition and a great deal of nerve, he appeared two days ago. Sylvie, who knew nothing of his letter, let him in. Hearing an unfamiliar voice, I hurried upstairs from the cellar where I was rearranging my papers, but was too late to prevent his entry. The stranger in my hall was a man of medium height with a slight stoop, round eyes like a Spaniard, and a receding hairline. He held his arms crossed over his chest, leaned toward Sylvie like an American who knows little about servants. He stepped back when he saw me approach, held out his hand without smiling. I motioned him into the library. He calls himself M. Fontaine.

  I was at a loss over how to begin to speak to him, but he took control of the interview, telling me what he wanted and expecting to get it. For someone who entered the house as a complete stranger he was relaxed, as if he belonged here and nowhere else. The upstart lit a cigarette, holding his hand under the ash while he looked around the room searching for an ashtray. Nothing phased him. I nodded toward the top of a stack of plates piled by the tardy or forgetful thieves, and he took a saucer from the tower. His suit was rumpled but fashionably cut. His face turned toward the carpet as if he were looking for something, then he got right to the point.

  “I don’t have much money, but will pay something if you require it. I’d like access to your letters.”

  You would think anyone who wanted to approach me for my letters would try to establish that we had certain interests in common. He might praise Charles Maurras who claimed his prison term was Dreyfus’s revenge, but my visitor didn’t grow hysterical or mention Action Française. His directness betrayed a kind of arrogance, and I lost my footing for a moment. I meant to discourage him, but wasn’t sure I wanted him to leave entirely. I liked this overconfident boy. The letters are a representation of myself, I confess, but at the same time they captured only a perverse streak, a grimy, not altogether realistic picture.

  “There’s nothing left to discuss or to print. All my papers have been read and gone over by everyone from policemen to archivists. The matter has been closed for some time.”

  “Surely,” he asked, “there must be other letters, ones you’ve never shown anyone.” He put his hand under Delphine’s chin and called her something like wise guy in English. What’s up, wise guy?

  “No. There aren’t any letters. None. You’re after fool’s gold,” I lied. Sylvie served him coffee.

  “I wouldn’t mind having a look at even the old ones. After thirty-five years, many don’t remember these details.”

  “No one will remember me, you mean.” Sylvie looked in the mirror, and as I spoke, she patted her hair.

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” Turning red, he must have been born long after the letters’ publication.

  “If I gave you copies of these letters and copies of the original forgery, hoards of journalists and assassins would knock down my door.”

  “You could tell them you’ve given me everything. There’s nothing left.” He was very sure of himself. Why didn’t he just grind his ash into the carpet? He had stiff reddish hair and dull green eyes. They might have been brighter, but in order to save money, the lamps are few and dim. At that moment, for the sake of my own patchy vanity, I was glad of it.

  “Why should I give you some kind of monopoly, a cartel of forged evidence? I know nothing about you except you want access to my papers, which I give to no one anyway.”

  “Why?” He stood very close to me. What was he going to say? Because I like you, Claire? I doubted it.

  “Think about it,” he said. “I’ll be back.” Delphine licked his hand, he picked up his hat and left.

  When we played in the Luxembourg Gardens, Lille, you would give away your toys, your coat, and you seemed to love everybody, even the tattered men who lurked at the edges of the park. I used to wonder what you were after really, when all was said and done, you were scheming, I’m sure of it. One wasn’t supposed to go near those men, even if they enticed you, yet somehow your angelic smile seemed to shame or even cancel the rule every child knows: it’s considered dangerous and foolish to talk to strangers. Or did you really know what you were about? I remember once you were seen talking to a man, well dressed, but his clothes were greasy, and from where I stood his trousers looked undone. Honestly, they did, the memory is quite clear. You handed him some bread, and at dinner everyone spoke of your kindness and generosity. They hadn’t seen his fly which I, of course, mentioned. We were just talking, you said. He was a nice man. Nicer to me than you ever were. (Yes, I’m sure that’s true.) I was sent to my room. I wish now that I could emulate the way you gave away things while really hoarding the dividends of what passes as good nature. Under the guise of charitable acts and emotional generosity, you got away with murder. When I was left alone, shipwrecked in a dark apartment, you pretended I didn’t exist. Smiling at strangers, whenever you had the opportunity, portraying me as someone who slept with riffraff, with pretenders.

  It amazes me how some words stick and stick, and not only do they never come off, but they spread like an infection. Within the frame of the word traitorous one can be accused of many crimes. Once one is a traitor, one can also very easily be believed to have been a tax cheat, a prostitute, an embezzler, a perpetrator of incalculable frauds. I might define a liar as one who interprets the truth differently from myself, but many give single words the long arms and legs of inference, and so I’m doomed. I think Dreyfus and his family learned this too, ironically, but my family remained pretty much immune from the brush that tarred me, despite the fact that the word traitor has legs.

  If I could give away something to the young man while actually giving nothing, it would be a pleasure. In reality it wasn’t me, but you, who was the first to discover the link between courtesy and danger, and it was a short step from there to a recognition of how pleasure and danger might be intertwined.

  Soft rain misted for two days, then turned harder. Just as Sylvie was preparing to lock up, Fontaine rang the bell again. She couldn’t leave him standing in the downpour, and I believe he had calculated this. He was drenched, but his eyes were bright, the color of beryl. He claimed to have neglected to bring an umbrella with him when he left the city.

  “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky this morning,” he defended his unexpected arrival as he walked into a front room and found a chair. “After visiting friends just down the road, I wandered through the old Star Films studio, kicking rusty tools and looking at the junk lying around. I saw your light and decided to ring. I didn’t think you’d mind my coming out of the rain.”

  Star Films was abandoned years ago, and most of its panes and spars have been broken one way or another. There isn’t a solid wall left, I don’t think.

  “Do you have any cigarettes?” He held out a sodden pack.

  “Check my desk in the cellar,” I directed Sylvie while he took off wet clothes, and she soon returned with an old pack of Gauloises, cover faded and shredded.

  “They’re better than nothing,” he said.

  Offended, I lit one myself and politely asked if he wanted a drink. (Insult me and I’ll still bow deeply, knocking my head against the floor, happy to do so.) He put his stockinged feet up on a stack of books. Muddy water had made a dark outline around his gray socks as if his shoes had been painted on. He saw me looking at his grimy socks and took them off, baring his feet which were long and yellow. He had dirt between his toes.

  “
I haven’t changed my mind about the letters but wish you would be clearer about what you’d like to do with them.”

  “I only intend to read them.”

  “If you wanted to print sections of my letters, in what sort of context would they appear? What frame, what caption would accompany the papers?” I didn’t believe he or anyone else simply needed something to read on a rainy night. The letters are strong documentary evidence but not consistently accurate. The lines reflect only a narrow moment when I was not myself.

  “None. I haven’t any interest in publishing them.”

  “How did you find me?”

  He paused, looking up from his coffee, as if thinking of the best answer.

  “I’ve kept no memoirs, have few photographs.” Remember, you may know a fraud or two here or there, but I was led on by the biggest confidence man in the Third Republic.

  “Could I look at some of those?”He perked up at the word photograph. He was like the man who wanted to shake hands with the man who shook the hand of Napoléon.

  I looked at him closely. Relentless, rude, and what was he really after? I didn’t trust him, but my vanity over a few pictures can be stupendous, as you know. I wanted the owner of those feet to see what I used to look like, and at the same time I didn’t. It would have been like introducing him to a beautiful younger woman while at the moment I only shared him with a German shepherd. We spent so much time talking that he missed the last train, and I invited him to spend the night. Then I silently bemoaned the bed in the attic. It would be too ridiculous. He would be unable to stand up straight under the sloping eaves. He would knock his head and trip over the detritus that’s stored there. I can have the frame and bedding moved back downstairs in the morning. You never know. There may be other rainy days.