“I am not surprised,” Louis said, buttering a piece of baguette and then spreading marmalade on it from the small foil box.
“But,” said Renard. “Everyone leaves tracks. It was Jean Marie’s idea,” he said, covering his son’s hand with his own for a moment and smiling.
Louis looked from Renard’s face to the son’s and back again. “Tell me,” he said.
“It was Jean Marie’s idea,” said Renard again. “Look at this.” He pushed a paper in front of Louis.
“What is it?” said Louis.
Jean Marie spoke. “It’s a photocopy of a page from the logbook at the lost and unclaimed baggage office at Air France. Customs goes through the logbook all the time. It’s one place we look for contraband. So I thought, let’s have a look. Anyway, when baggage is reported lost by a passenger, the information is entered into the computer. It is also entered into this logbook. There is a description of the missing article—in this case, ‘large brown Louis Vuitton suitcase containing personal effects. Suitcase has name tag with name and address of passenger: Ruth Chasen; sixty-six rue Jacob; Paris, sixth arr.; telephone, etcetera.’ There’s the flight number: AF 415. And look here: the claim is signed and dated: ‘Ruth Chasen, July twenty-fifth.’ She was on the flight arriving from Washington, July twenty-fifth.”
“They cleaned out the flight and the customs records,” said Renard. “But they didn’t know she had reported a lost bag. The lost bag report is still in the computer too.”
“Chaos wins over order,” said Louis and smiled. Neither Renard nor Jean Marie knew what he meant, and Louis did not elaborate. “Jean Marie,” Louis asked when they had finished eating, “can you give me a short tour of the electronics in the airport?”
“The electronics?” said Jean Marie.
“The loudspeakers, the telephones,” said Louis, “who operates them, where their centers of operations are located. I believe that these murders might have occurred in this airport. That’s why I wanted you to meet me here. You know the airport well”—Jean Marie nodded—”and I hoped that your explanation of how the airport works, where things are, anything you could tell me, might somehow offer a clue as to how they had been committed. Then, last night, just as I was about to get on the plane, Hugh Bowes gave me the clue I needed. So, now I want you to tell me specifically about the telephones, who controls them, and from where?” The men sat for another hour, with Jean Marie talking and drawing diagrams while Louis listened. Louis did not understand electronics, but occasionally he would ask a question. Could one part of the system be isolated from other parts of the system? Could the public telephone system be connected to other systems, that is, could the isolated system be temporarily wired to broadcast over airport loudspeakers?
Later in the car, Louis leaned against the door and slept. Renard glanced over at the old man. Louis’s body sagged. His mouth hung open. Renard wondered, what happened to your spirit after you had been batted around by life the way Louis Morgon had? As you got older, Renard’s own mother had told him, a cosmic sort of tiredness invades your life and teaches you resignation. Death becomes less of a stranger, less of an enemy, as it takes your friends and acquaintances, or your husband, as it had in her case. And life becomes more of a struggle, less easy, less natural, so that at some point it becomes easier to die than it does to live. Louis was nowhere near that point, of course, but in the last months he had begun to seem his age. He was dispirited, seemed distracted sometimes, lost in thought. Renard looked over at his passenger. Louis was looking back at him with those bright blue eyes, alert, unblinking. Renard could have sworn Louis had read his thoughts.
Louis knew that Solesme was still missing. Hugh Bowes had told him so. This gave him comfort. Hugh Bowes, he reasoned, was a careful killer. And since Solesme had been a witness to the Algerian diversion Hugh had cooked up, she would be more useful to him alive, at least as long as the fiction that the murdered man was an Algerian insurrectionist and not Ruth Chasen’s murdered lover continued to be at all even remotely plausible.
“Plausible?” said Renard angrily. “What you say happened is the least plausible thing of all. It is supposition heaped on supposition. And even if I believe things happened as you say they happened, and I admit that I am inclined to, there is no evidence for any of it.”
“And there never will be,” said Louis, looking at the policeman, “beyond the few scraps we have.”
“These scraps of what you call evidence are beyond circumstantial. This case is a string of suppositions. And nothing links it to Hugh Bowes but more suppositions, different suppositions.”
“It is not a case at all,” said Louis, sounding weary again. “You are quite right. It is not the kind of truth a policemen needs. You look for evidence, and all we find is where the evidence once lay. If we are lucky. Our evidence is the absence of evidence, a collection of negatives. It isn’t much.”
“It’s nothing,” said Renard, still angry. “What can you do with nothing?” Their exit came up and they left the autoroute. Only when they had driven away from the tollbooth did Louis respond, and then in such a curious and troubling way that Renard stopped the car and stared at him. That is, Louis began to sing. He faced straight ahead, sat very erect. His eyes were closed and he sang in a surprisingly light and clear tenor. Renard thought he might have heard the song before. He couldn’t be certain. In any case the words stayed with him, though he couldn’t say why. They were nonsensical. And they certainly had nothing to do with Louis or Hugh Bowes or anything they had been talking about.
“Charles the great has come at last,
Come at last to stay.
He knows not where he’s going, though
He thinks he knows the way.
Charles the great might disappear
While thinking you can see him.
But life is short and art is long,
And she can live without him.”
XXII
ONE PART OF BEING HUMAN IS THAT WE ARE ALWAYS WAITING FOR something, though it is usually something so vague and ill-defined that we cannot feel our own waiting. So we do not even know we are waiting, except somewhere in our inner souls. As far as we can realize, we are merely living in time or, more likely, living out time as it passes. But now Louis knew he was waiting, and he knew what he was waiting for. He was waiting for Hugh Bowes to kill him. “It is his only possible course of action,” Louis would maintain over Renard’s angry reaction. He insisted Renard was powerless to stop his murder, that Hugh Bowes could accomplish it at will, when he desired, how he desired.
Renard knew Louis was right, that if Hugh Bowes wanted to have him killed, he would have him killed. In the face of that knowledge, which was, for Renard, the knowledge of his own helplessness, it was not surprising that he began to keep his distance from Louis. He found routine police business that needed attending to. He regularly called his superior at the prefecture to inquire about the disappearance of Solesme Lefourier. “There is no news, Monsieur Renard,” his superior would say each time. “We continue our investigation and follow leads as we receive them.” But there were no leads. Weeks had passed since her disappearance, and Renard was certain that whatever trail the kidnappers had left had grown cold. “The trail is not cold,” his superior assured him. “Her kidnappers are Algerian extremists who believe she witnessed them committing a crime. We have a good idea who they are. We need for them to make some kind of a move.”
“She did witness them committing a crime,” said Renard, trying unsuccessfully to contain his exasperation.
“We will let you know as we develop any leads,” said his superior. “And, of course, you will notify us should anything develop where you are.”
“They probably know less than you do, Renard,” said Isabelle. That thought did not comfort him.
Louis, meanwhile, to his own surprise, began to spend time with Pierre Lefourier, the great pyramid, whose grief seemed no less colossal than his size. Pierre seemed enshrined in gloom and despair. And
yet he was also able, again to Louis’s surprise, to converse with Louis as he had never done when Solesme had been there. He talked about his youth in Russia, the years he and his sainted mother, bless her long departed soul, had lived in Paris where he had worked as a journalist and, for a brief period toward the end of the war, as a spy, first for the Germans, then for the resistance. His mother had died during the war. During the chaos that immediately followed the liberation of Paris, Pierre had left the city forever. He waved his hand vaguely when Louis asked the reason for his leaving. There was nothing there for him but the apartment he had lived in with his mother, and bad memories. So he left.
He went first to Orleans, then to Nantes. He thought he would like it near the sea. Eventually, though, a friend from Paris, who had gone back home to Saint Leon after the war, invited Pierre for a visit. He came on the train from Nantes. The small town appealed to him. He found a job in the fish market. Then he found a job at the bank. He and his Paris friend bought the small Hotel de France which they sold a few years later when the friend moved back to Paris. They sold out to Didier LeDru who later sold the hotel to the Chalfonts. It was while Pierre had owned the Hotel de France that the British racing teams had begun staying there each year during the Le Mans races. Pierre had sold his share in the hotel for enough to buy a small share in the mushroom caves. Solesme was his Paris friend’s youngest sister. She was four when Pierre arrived from Paris. They married when she was twenty. As he repeated the story yet again to Louis, Pierre began to weep silently, tears pouring from his closed eyes, his great, ancient body heaving in the chair.
Mostly, Pierre talked and Louis listened. Louis had the feeling that Pierre had never talked like this before, that he had been gathering and saving his life story, as one might save money for retirement, investing it and watching it grow until the moment comes to start spending. He did not ask Louis anything. He always seemed glad when Louis knocked at the door. As soon as Louis came inside, Pierre began to talk.
He stopped talking to Louis, stopped his story in midsentence, so to speak, the day Solesme reappeared. It was October. Pierre called Louis. The police had called from Tours. She had been put out of a car near the train station in Tours early that morning after being driven from somewhere near Nantes. “Nantes,” said Pierre. He said it again like it was the answer to the entire riddle: “Nantes.”
According to the police report Renard received by telefax that evening, the missing person, Madame Solesme Lefourier, had been freed by her kidnappers without ransom or other demands having been made. She had been beaten repeatedly. Two fingers and the thumb on her left hand had been broken. Several ribs had been cracked. Her jaw had been broken. She was immediately taken to the hospital. She was examined and her injuries were treated. She was given a thorough physical and psychological examination. It was determined that she was in good physical and emotional condition, considering the severe and continuing hardship—torture was not too strong a word—she had experienced for the last seven weeks.
Louis drove Pierre to the hospital in Tours where they sat at Solesme’s bedside. Her face and arms were bruised. Her jaw was bandaged, so was her hand. “They threatened to cut off my fingers. They came in with a bolt cutter. But they broke them instead,” she said. “It was the large one. He did it with his hands. I heard the bones snap like twigs.” She began to cry at the memory. Pierre sat caressing her arm. She fell asleep.
A week later a police ambulance brought her home from the hospital. Louis and Renard sat with Solesme at her kitchen table. Pierre sat nearby in his chair. He might have been listening, but you could not tell. He had retreated back into himself. “It was the people I saw that night carrying the body to your house. I saw eight different people altogether while they held me. Four different people interrogated me. Two men I had never seen before drove me back from Nantes.
“When they first took me, it was to somewhere near Libourne. They moved me three times. They threatened me. Then they hit me. They broke my fingers at the same time. It was the big one. He did it with his hands.”
“Madame,” said Renard, “were they all North Africans?”
“Algerians,” said Solesme. “Liberationists. The Algerian Liberation Front.”
“How do you know?” said Renard.
“They told me so,” said Solesme, brushing a strand of hair from her face. She looked uncertain.
“Do you think it was true?” said Louis.
“I do not know,” said Solesme. They had asked her questions about Louis, about his trip, about her own politics, about Pierre, about things she couldn’t imagine could be of any interest to them.
“What things?” said Renard.
Her life in Saint Leon. What she knew about Louis. What she knew about his earlier life. “They did not interrogate me often, but when they did, I got the impression that they were asking questions for the sake of asking the questions. They did not seem interested in the answers I gave them. That is, when I was able to give them answers. They did not follow any direction in their questions. They just asked questions. What I said didn’t seem to matter. Their beatings seemed random too. My answers didn’t matter. Until right before they released me, that is. It was strange.”
“What happened?” asked Renard.
“It was the first man again, the large one, the one who broke my fingers. He threatened to break the fingers on my other hand. But now the same answers I had given before seemed to satisfy him. No matter what I said. Whether I knew the answer or not.”
The man had rubbed his hands together eagerly, energetically, and with each answer, whatever the answer, had taken a small step toward Solesme, apparently more out of relief than for any other reason. Leaning very close, he asked her more questions—when Louis had first arrived in Saint Leon, how long she had known him, questions she, or anyone else in Saint Leon, for that matter, could have answered. She answered every question she could answer.
Finally, the man had looked at his watch. He had smiled at Solesme. “ ‘Madame, I want to congratulate you on your good sense. It was most wise of you to cooperate.’ Those were his exact words,” said Solesme. “I remember, because they seemed to make no sense at all.” The next morning, two men she had never seen before put her in the back of a truck and drove her to a warehouse near Nantes, a drive of an hour, she guessed. She could tell it was on back roads because of all the stopping and turning. Inside the warehouse, they put her in a waiting car, a large Peugeot. They sped east on the autoroute. No one spoke. After an hour and a half, they reached Tours.
“They kidnapped me, hurt me, asked me stupid questions they could have asked anyone, and then brought me home. The whole thing makes no sense at all. It was like a terrible charade.”
“It may have been just that, madame,” said Renard, leaning back in his chair and looking over at Louis. Louis was watching Solesme intently, but his face was without expression.
She continued. “It was as though they wanted me to believe I had been kidnapped by Algerians. Of course they were Algerians,” she said. “I’m quite certain they were Algerians.”
“Yes, madame, I’m sure they were Algerians. But whose Algerians were they? That is the question.”
That evening Solesme and Louis lay in each others arms. “I am sorry,” said Louis, “for the trouble I have brought into your life.”
“Are you feeling sorry for yourself?” asked Solesme. Louis admitted that he was feeling sorry for himself. “And why do you think I was kidnapped?” said Solesme.
“I think you were kidnapped to throw us off the track,” said Louis.
“Who was murdered?” asked Solesme.
Louis was tempted to say, I cannot tell you. For your own protection I cannot tell you. But instead he held her tightly and told her everything he knew and everything he suspected.
Solesme’s injuries healed. Her recovery coincided with the return of a certain equilibrium to Louis’s life. He painted again. He ate meals on his terrace, watching the Virginia cre
eper leaves turn red and then drop to the ground. They swirled around him in little whirlwinds and settled under the laurel bushes. The days were short, the nights frosty, and the mornings thick and moist with fog.
Louis wrote long letters to Jenny and Michael describing what he was doing. And they wrote back.
La Frenellerie
Saint Leon sur Dême
October 23, 1995
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your last letter. I am glad to hear that you and Rosita are thinking of getting married. Are you surprised that I am for marriage, given what a mess I made of my own? I am somewhat surprised by my own sentiments. It is true that I think of marriage as a dangerous and, at best, sloppy business. For two people to get along is difficult enough without hanging the millstone of society’s expectations around their necks. But I have come to believe that marriage is the beginning, the basic atomic unit, of the larger civilization—if that is what you can still call it—in which we live. By that I mean that in the institution of marriage one finds the things that are necessary in order for us to have a prospering and healthy society: commitment to something outside ourselves and to someone other than ourselves. Love, consideration, and the recognition that these things are important. I’m sorry to go on this way. I hope it doesn’t feel like I’m weighing your plans down with lofty concepts. It’s just my convoluted way of saying I’m happy for you and wish you the best.
Any word on your show? If and when? Let me know. I would love to see it. Do you ever paint with oils? I started with acrylics, and for a long time they were right for me. But sometime about five years ago, I found that I needed to slow things down, so I switched to oils. I’m still fiddling with underpainting, but it has gotten more complicated. In effect I’m doing several paintings on top of each other. They’re mostly landscapes, and not very good. They’re usually either overworked, or over-calculated, which amounts to the same thing.
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