“They drove without lights,” said the gendarme finally.
After having made lists of what he did and did not know, after staring for hours at the map spread out on the desk in his office, he had decided to share what he knew with Louis. He had folded the map and walked past the police car to his own car. He did not like to use the police car unless he had to. People might think he was putting on airs.
He had wound along the road that followed the Dême. The shadows of poplars splashed across the car as he drove, causing the sunlight to flicker pleasantly in his eyes. He had turned up the lane, passed Madame Lefourier who stopped tying up her tomatoes and looked after him. Now here he sat. He could think of nothing more to say. He shrugged and drank the last of his coffee. He lit a cigarette.
The more Renard told Louis, he reasoned, the more likely Louis would be to move into action himself. And his snooping around would stir things up. That, Renard reasoned further, would inevitably turn up more information.
“Why are you telling me this?” Louis asked.
Renard shrugged again. “Maybe you will tell me what you know.”
Instead of telling Renard anything, Louis got up and took down a dusty bottle from the mantel. He poured a centimeter of clear liquor in the still-warm coffee cups. Each man dropped in a sugar cube and cradled the cup under his nose to take in the heady aroma of plums. The two men sipped at the sweet brandy in their cups until it was gone. “I only know what you have told me,” said Louis.
“What did you have to do with Africa?” asked Renard helplessly. Much to his surprise, he got a question in response, and a very interesting question at that.
“Why did the people that brought him here go to such trouble to identify him as an African?” said Louis.
Renard waited.
“When your men carried the body to the ambulance yesterday, the cap would not stay on his head.” Renard remembered his own experience at the morgue. “And yet, there he lay, after being drunk, having his throat slit, having his shirt changed, bouncing around in a car, being carried up the driveway in the dark, there he lay with his cap on. Why?”
“Unless he is not an African,” said Renard.
“Unless he is not an African,” said Louis.
“Why are you telling me this? This in particular,” said Renard.
“It is something I noticed,” said Louis. “It puzzled me. Whenever people want me to look in a particular direction, I find it useful to look in the opposite direction.”
“And now you want me to look in a particular direction,” said Renard.
“It is something I noticed,” said Louis. Then, after a long pause: “I need something from you.”
“Aha,” said Renard.
“It will be of use to you too. I need to find out about this car. It is a BMW.” He pushed a slip of paper with the license number toward Renard. It was a Paris number.
“Where did you see the car?” asked Renard.
“It may have been following me, and it may not. I don’t know.”
“Why should I help you when you have been entirely uncooperative?” asked Renard. He did not try to conceal his frustration.
“What else do you have?” asked Louis and smiled.
In his car, Renard thought about the ruse of the dead man’s cap. Had it been meant for the police? He had, of course, been taken in completely. He cursed his own stupidity. Or had it been meant for Louis, who had not been taken in at all? Or had the murderers known who would and who would not be taken in? Were they trying to lure the police in one direction and Louis in another?
And what about the car that had followed Louis? Of course, it might be the same car that Solesme Lefourier had seen. But, for the moment, Renard was more interested in where Louis might have been followed. Solesme had seen him leave for his daily shopping trip and then leave again later that evening.
Renard went home. Isabelle was in the kitchen. She was not happy to learn that Renard intended to sit outside Louis’s house and then to follow him when and if he left. Jean Marie, their only son, was home for a visit. Until recently, his job with the customs service had had him stationed in Tours. Then they had seen him frequently. But now he had been promoted and transferred to Paris. He was stationed at Charles DeGaulle Airport where he was undergoing training as a telecommunications specialist. He did not come back to Saint Leon that often.
“A murder has happened,” said Renard helplessly. “And I have to investigate.”
Isabelle gave him a thermos of hot coffee. He drove back to the office and changed cars. If he was leaving Saint Leon, he would rather be in the police car. There would be less explaining to do if he needed help. He drove back out toward Louis’s house. When he got within sight of the driveway, he pulled off the road behind a tall hedge beside the Dême. This was a spot where he liked to fish for the trout that swam in the swift little stream. He turned off the engine and waited. He worked a crossword puzzle. He read the newspaper. He sipped a cup of coffee and wished he were home with Isabelle and Jean Marie. Soon they would be eating her roasted chicken.
Then Louis’s car came down his driveway and down the lane. He turned onto the road going south. When the old Peugeot was out of sight, Renard pulled out from behind the hedge and followed.
VI
LOUIS DID NOT LIKE PLAYING CAT AND MOUSE WITH RENARD. IT DIStracted him from the larger enterprise. Still, Renard was smart and could take care of himself, and, for the moment, it was something of a comfort to think that Renard might be following him. Louis did not see him, but he hoped he was back there. Louis drove slowly and kept to the main roads.
Once in Villandry, he took his suitcase from the car and went into the hotel. It was six o’clock. The chateau and gardens had just closed, and people were streaming out through the gates. The tour buses had started their engines, filling the air with clouds of exhaust. The tour leaders pumped their bright umbrellas up and down to call their stray charges back to the buses. The street was filled with families walking back to their cars. The girl from the day before signed Louis into the hotel. She gave him the key to room twelve. Upstairs, first floor, the bath was down the hall, she explained, the w.c. next to the bath. Louis had asked for a room without a bath so that he could prowl the halls if necessary. And he had asked for a room overlooking the street.
The room was clean and modern, with flowered wallpaper, a sink, a bidet, a bed, a dresser, and a television. The bed was comfortable. Louis slept for an hour. He slept on his back. He slept without dreaming. He got up and put on his shoes. On his way to the bathroom, he listened at the doors of the rooms next to his. He heard nothing. He went downstairs to eat. “Do you prefer to eat inside or on the terrace, monsieur?” asked the young woman. She showed him to a table on the terrace. It was barely seven o’clock, so the only other guests were an English couple. They were puzzling over the menu. “What the devil is ‘lotte’?” said the Englishman loudly, as though presenting him with a French menu had been a personal affront. “It’s fish,” said his wife in a loud, urgent whisper, looking pleadingly in Louis’s direction. Louis kept his eyes on his own menu. He ordered an omelette, a salade composé, and a half bottle of red Chinon, an ‘89 Domaine Alain, a wine he regarded as an old friend.
Renard left the police car in a nearby allée under a row of plane trees, and walked to the hotel. He showed the young woman who greeted him his identification, and looked at the hotel registry. Louis had reserved room twelve for one night. He had paid in advance with cash. At this moment, Monsieur Morgon was having dinner on the terrace. Did the gentleman wish to speak with Monsieur Morgon?
Renard could see Louis on the terrace, through the dining room door. He sat with his back to them. He held a glass of wine in his hand and seemed to be studying its color. No, he did not wish to speak with Monsieur Morgon, said Renard. His voice was angrier than he had meant it to be. He was thinking of Isabelle and Jean Marie and the roasted chicken. “Thank you for your help, madame,” he said. He hurried back to the car. Maybe they
would not have finished with dinner at home. He was glad to be driving the police car. He could speed with impunity.
Louis’s omelette was slightly overdone, the vinaigrette on the salad was a bit too tart, but the Domaine Alain was just as good as he knew it would be. He had a piece of goat cheese and then a cup of coffee. He left the restaurant and strolled up and down the street as the last daylight faded. The sounds of television and laughter from the campground, the church bell ringing ten thirty reassured him somehow. So did the cool air from the river. He went to his room to wait, though he did not quite know what he was waiting for. But he had made his presence apparent, and if anyone was interested, then they knew by now that he was there.
Louis did not have a gun with him. He had never owned one, though he had known since serving in the army how to use one. He had been trained in the use of various weapons. In his work at the Central Intelligence Agency, he had been required to carry a pistol on occasion, though, even then, he had strapped the holster under his arm with great reluctance. He had felt that carrying a gun into a tight spot offered but one more way things could go wrong. And yet, now, lying alone on the bed waiting for a visit from assassins, it seemed to him as though he might find considerable comfort in feeling the hard steel of a pistol under his pillow. But there was none.
Louis regarded his body in the mirror as he undressed for bed. He was trim and muscular for a man in his sixties. Still, the hair on his chest was white, his waist was thick, his hips and legs were starting to get thin. He was acquiring the body of an old man. “A gun won’t change that,” he said aloud and started at the sound of his own voice in the small room.
He had intended to lie under the covers fully clothed. Perhaps it was simply the force of habit that had caused him to remove all his clothes before getting into bed. Whatever the reason, he decided to wait in bed without clothes. Like the proverbial sacrificial lamb. He smiled to himself.
Before turning on the light, he stepped to the window and looked out onto the street. A black BMW like the one he had seen the other night was parked just opposite the hotel. He could not see the license plate or if it had a decal, but he thought it must be the same car. “Let’s see what they do,” he said. This time he did not notice that he had spoken aloud.
The little lamp with the frilly shade gave off a faint light, so that he had to lean toward the lamp and hold the book almost under it in order to read. He was just beginning Anna Karenina. When Louis had come to France to live, he had decided at the same moment to read only time-proven masterpieces of world literature, as though to make his departure from “the sordid world” absolute and complete. He gave up all contemporary writing, all newspapers and magazines, and began to work his way through Shakespeare, then through Balzac, then Goethe, Schiller, Plato, Aristophanes, through Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Zola, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Musil, Hugo, one by one, chosen at random, as the spirit moved him. Nothing but great writing held his attention. Now all of Tolstoy, all of Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Strindberg lay ahead of him, then Hamsun, Tagore, Kafka, perhaps Kraus, Hemingway, Dante, Molière, and on, and on. The prospect made him happy, as if he were facing a magnificent and endless feast.
He had never read Anna Karenina before, or any of Tolstoy. He opened the book and began: “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He let the book sink to his chest slowly and gazed past it into the darkness. Louis had not pictured Sarah for a long time. And now, suddenly, there she sat before his mind’s eye, her pretty face furrowed with anger and unhappiness. He had not seen her for more than twenty years, so she appeared to him now the way she had looked the day he had left. He had been unable to bear her looking at him there at the front door, so he had simply turned without a word and gone. Now he could not turn away. Nor did he want to. He closed his eyes in order to continue seeing her face, but it disappeared.
Louis and Sarah had married before graduate school. He had just finished two years in the army, serving as the signal officer for an antiaircraft missile battalion in Germany. Sarah had just graduated from Ohio University. Somewhere deep in their minds, they must have both known that getting married was the wrong thing to do. But, to the young, marriage often seems like the solution to the loneliness which youthful friendships and parties cannot make go away. And to Louis’s generation, marriage was simply the next step after college. It did not require preparation or thought.
He could not recall now, lying in the darkness so many years later, whether he had even loved Sarah, much less whether she had loved him. He had certainly felt attached to her. He had liked her company, felt close to her. They had shared opinions and ideas. They were outraged and amused by the same things. That must have seemed like love at the time.
They set up housekeeping. They bought towels and dishes at Sears. They rented a small furnished apartment in the top floor of a house lived in by Manny Ricosi, a grocer, his wife Florence, and their three children. Louis and Sarah had to walk through the Ricosi’s living room to get to their apartment, so that, on their way in or out, they saw with trepidation what a long marriage could become. The Ricosis screamed at one another with shocking abandon. Florence ate cake and donuts and got fatter and fatter. Manny hit Florence when things boiled over for him. The two youngest children watched television or fought with each other. Ronnie, the oldest of the three, shut himself into his room and listened to rock and roll records he played at full volume. He sang along in an atonal wail. The sound found its way through the ceiling into the Morgon’s small apartment.
Some nights, many nights, in the first years of their marriage, after Louis had turned out the lights, Sarah lay in bed weeping. She wept silently so that he would not know, but he felt her trembling beside him as her sadness filled the room. Louis would stare into the darkness, feeling helpless and alone. “What’s the matter?” he would ask finally. “Tell me what’s the matter.”
“It’s nothing. Sometimes I just have to cry,” she said. They went to sleep finally, neither one knowing anything more about the other, neither one feeling any less lost. They were so young and inexperienced, they did not even know how to ask each other questions. Had he loved her? Had he felt the generosity of spirit, the sense of joint purpose, had he been interested in their differences, curious about her particularities? Did he possess even the remotest knowledge of any one of that entire complex of good impulses which he now regarded as love?
He had been twenty-five years old. Louis tried to remember what that was like. He remembered that he had been entirely absorbed in being a graduate student of international politics. He was excited by his studies, by the intellectual challenges of graduate school, by his own emerging expertise in international relations. He had come up with the idea that, if by applying cybernetics to the study of politics, you could make the study of politics more scientific, then you would eventually be able to organize men and events to achieve a desired outcome with a high degree of predictability. He began to develop new structural frameworks, new methodologies to make this new approach to politics a reality.
“My God.” Louis heard himself, now, these many years later, sighing in the dark: the arrogance, the hubris, the sheer craziness of the idea! What had he known then? What could he possibly have been thinking?
Louis’s mentor had been Professor Kascht, a man whom he had not even thought of for decades. “Professor Johann Kascht.” He pronounced the name slowly; it felt unfamiliar in his mouth. Tolstoy’s first sentence had released a torrent of memories, and Louis could not have stopped their washing over him if he had wanted to. He pressed ahead, struggling through the memories surging and rising like dark floodwater around him, as though recalling these things might be of the greatest urgency. And in some sense it was of the greatest urgency. For Louis believed this was where the dead man’s journey to his doorstep had begun, that this crime had its beginnings in his past.
When Louis had begun studying with Kascht, the professor’s own studies of Middle East
ern politics had, for some time, been helping to shape American foreign policy. Louis worked diligently to learn what Kascht had to teach him. And Kascht, in turn, introduced Louis to important people at the State Department. So it happened that even before Louis had begun writing his dissertation, he was awarded a contract to apply his cybernetic models to relations between Egypt and Israel, Syria and Israel, Jordan and Israel.
In a series of papers, Louis laid out a systematic plan which, he argued, would guarantee Israeli strength, security, and autonomy, while, at the same time, keeping the three Arab states out of the Soviet orbit and dependent on the United States for their eventual security and prosperity. Meanwhile, at night, Sarah, his wife, lay weeping beside him. Science and cybernetics failed him at night. That should have told me something.
Louis and Sarah did what many couples do when they see their marriage failing. They had a child. Then they had a second. Their love for their children was limited by their failure to comprehend who they were, just as their love for one another was limited. They did not consider, could not even remotely understand, what Jennifer and Michael might learn by watching their parents manufacture their own unhappiness. Now their children were grown and estranged from them both and from one another, and only now, these many years later, did Louis understand how that had happened.
At first, upon making this discovery, he had blamed himself. Then he had simply tried to put it out of his mind, thinking that his insights had come much too late to help anyone. Louis did not fear life. He accepted things as they came. But he did fear life’s shadows and reflections—the memories, the recollections, the reconsidering, the thinking things over. And so he had determined, unconsciously perhaps, to count his family—Sarah and the children—as but one more aspect of “the sordid world,” which he had come to France to escape. But now he realized, in fact, just in the last two days since the dead man had been deposited on his doorstep, that in leaving behind what he could leave behind, he had also tried to leave behind what he couldn’t.
A French Country Murder Page 3
