A French Country Murder

by Peter Steiner

  My friend and neighbor, Solesme Lefourier, continues to recover from the ordeal of her mysterious kidnapping, though the experience has changed her. I hope it is only for the moment. But it is as if the kidnappers released everything but her trust. She is more withdrawn than she was before, more guarded somehow. I passed her standing in her garden recently. I was coming back from a walk. I spoke, and she looked at me as if she didn’t know me, just watched me walk by. We still have a glass of wine together, or a cup of coffee. Maybe it is not just the kidnapping. Something happens when you get to be sixty, and you imagine the end to be in sight. Being treated the way she was steals something precious from you. It makes me loathe the people who did this.

  I’am sorry to have gotten somber again. I hope you will come visit someday, with Rosita, of course, to meet Solesme, my friend Renard, the cop, my other friends and neighbors. I would, in fact, be glad to buy you a ticket. Say you’ll come.

  Love,

  Dad

  112 Hillburton Street

  Tacoma Park, MD

  November 18, 1995

  Dear Dad,

  Thanks for your letter. I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you. No word yet on the show. It may come off. It may not. I’m trying not to care too much about it. But I find myself wanting it. Even if it is a co-op gallery. I don’t know how much you know about the gallery scene, but it could be a step to a major gallery. The owners watch these shows for stuff with promise. Anyway, I’ll let you know.

  Sorry to hear about your neighbor. It must have been rough for her. Any idea who did it or why? Did they want money or what? Is she married?

  I’d love to visit you someday and so would Rosita. It’s not going to be soon though. She can’t get away from work that easily, and neither can I. She has actually been to France. She was a little girl, and her parents took her. They were mainly in Paris. She doesn’t remember it very well. She remembers riding a pony in a big park. Was that the Tuillery (sp.)?

  Yours,

  Michael

  XXIII

  IT WAS RAINING. IT HAD BEEN RAINING HARD ALL DAY, CLATTERING on the slate roof. Zorro, the cat, was curled on the tile hearth not far from the woodstove. Louis sat nearby at his long table, reading, and eating hot soup. He was having an early supper, as he sometimes did in winter. It was six o’clock. It seemed as if the day had never really begun. It had been twilight all day, and then what little light there had been had disappeared two hours ago. The telephone rang and, after hesitating, Louis decided to answer it.

  “Louis, this is Hugh Bowes. How are you? I hope I am not disturbing you.”

  “You’re not disturbing me, Hugh,” said Louis. He stepped to the door and checked that it was locked.

  “I told you I would call when I had something to tell you about the situation we talked about. I’m glad your friend is all right, that she was released unharmed. I was able to exert some pressure there, and it may have done some good. Anyhow, I’m glad of the outcome.” Hugh paused. Louis waited.

  “I can’t tell you anything over the phone, Louis, but I’ll be in Paris in a few weeks for a meeting. On the fourteenth. December fourteenth. Can you come to Paris then.” It was not really a question. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you this way, but some very sensitive information is involved that could damage French-Algerian relations. Not to mention French-American relations, which, as I’m sure you know, Louis, do not need any more stress at the moment.”

  “I can come to Paris, Hugh. Shall I come to the embassy?”

  “No, no, no, Louis. The embassy is out. This is very sensitive, Louis. Extremely sensitive.” He paused for a moment, then said, “How about the airport? Charles DeGaulle Airport? We can meet on my way home.Aerogare Two-B. Terminal Two-B, by the arrival gate for international passengers. December fourteenth at six in the evening. I’ll be there as soon after six as possible. I might get held up though, Louis, so please wait. Of course, I don’t need to ask you not to tell anyone and to come alone, do I, Louis. That goes without saying.”

  “Of course, Hugh. That goes without saying,” said Louis.

  Louis drew the curtains tighter and checked the door yet again. He pulled his chair to the stove. He put Zorro on his lap and scratched his head. The cat purred, but jumped off when the phone rang again. When Louis answered, there was no one there. It rang twice more that evening, but there was no one there.

  “And you didn’t call me immediately?” Renard was furious. Louis had come into his office the next morning and invited him for a cup of coffee at the Hotel de France. They sat in the bar under autographed photos of the British racing teams.

  “I did not call you,” said Louis, “because five minutes later he called back to make certain I was not on the phone. Besides, Jean, what could you have done?” Renard was startled to hear his first name and he looked up. Louis was smiling at him. “Could you persuade Jean Marie to come visit next weekend?”

  “You are actually planning to go through with this meeting at Charles DeGaulle Airport with someone you believe intends to kill you, or have you killed, and who, as you have repeatedly pointed out, has the power to do it easily?” said Renard.

  “It is a public place; what could possibly happen?” Louis said and smiled again. “Besides, you will be there . . . at a discreet distance. I have laid a trap for him and he is walking right into it.” Renard stared at Louis as though he were a madman. Louis just looked back at him and smiled yet again. For the first time in months he felt free. It was liberating to finally know the date and time of his intended death. And, if things worked out as he hoped they might, he would not be killed. Instead he would be free of Hugh Bowes. The peaceful existence he had built for himself over the last twenty years would be restored.

  Of course Louis already knew in the back of his mind that that was not possible. What he had built over the last twenty years was the illusion of tranquility, an illusion that could never be restored. In creating a “sordid world,” and then cutting himself off from it, he had done nothing so much as try to amputate his past. One day much later, after Solesme had died, after Renard had left Isabelle and then come back again, after Jenny had visited, in short after everything had changed and nothing had changed, he realized that the operation had been a failure. After the amputation of a limb, there is often what is known as phantom pain. A combination of damaged nerves and mysterious psychological stirrings brings about pain that seems to come from the limb that is no longer there. Louis thought for a long time that the year which began when he found the dead man on his doorstep was a year of something like phantom pain. But it wasn’t. How could it have been? His past had never been cut off to begin with. It was still there, still his past.

  Louis invited the three Renards for dinner that Saturday. He prepared a lamb stew he knew Renard liked. He had gotten the recipe from Isabelle, but had embellished it. He served the stew over couscous with a sliced beet and onion salad.

  “Louis thinks he can buy Jean Marie’s help with a serving of lamb stew,” said Renard, mopping the last sauce from his plate with a piece of baguette.

  “It was delicious, Louis,” said Isabelle. “What did you add besides the black beans and red pepper?”

  “Cumin,” said Louis. “And I am not buying anyone. I am asking Jean Marie for his help. I wanted you both to hear what is involved so you could assure yourselves that what I am asking him to do is not dangerous. It involves electronics, Jean Marie, which is your specialty.” Jean Marie nodded. “It involves coming up with a method, or a device, to connect the public telephone system, the one for internal communication within the airport, the so-called courtesy phones, with the loudspeaker system. What I need is to be able to broadcast a telephone conversation over the loudspeakers and to control the broadcasting of the conversation from a courtesy telephone. Then the connection should be quickly removable so that airport communications can be returned to normal, and, of course, so that all traces of your involvement disappear.”

  “A pl
ug-in circuit and a switch or two would do it,” said Jean Marie, brushing his pale mustache with the back of his hand and smiling proudly at his mother and then his father. “There’s nothing to it. The tricky part is the switching back and forth, but I could do that from the central panel. I can get the key. It is not a high-security situation.”

  “He could lose his job,” said Renard.

  “If he is caught,” said Isabelle. “But Jean Marie is clever, and he won’t be caught.”

  “The choice is yours, of course, Jean Marie,” said Louis, astonished at the unexpected support he had gotten from Isabelle. “It is, as you see, not dangerous to you, but, as your father points out, it might be dangerous to your career.”

  “When you put it like that, Louis,” said Jean Marie with a laugh, “how can I possibly refuse?”

  “Jean Marie, you’re just like your father,” said Isabelle with a laugh, and kissed her son and then her husband. Then she leaned across the table and kissed Louis on the cheek.

  Louis had always been a reticent man. His Washington experience had made him all the more loathe to share confidences with even his closest friends. Which made it doubly strange that he chose to tell Solesme what he had in mind. True, he spoke in generalities, keeping the specifics vague, concealing the place, the date. But even so, he wondered later, what could he possibly have been thinking? He knew Solesme was protective of him and that she was stubborn and resourceful. He should have known she would find a way to be there.

  So, as Solesme lay in his bed one gray morning late in November, he told her he planned to meet the murderer. On arriving at Orly—he changed the airport—he expected to be summoned to a public phone to receive directions to the site of his own execution. He intended, by means of electronics he could not himself begin to understand, to record and, more importantly, to broadcast the murderer’s summons along with whatever incriminating evidence he could entice from him, so that all the passengers, airline personnel, visitors, bus and cab drivers, the hundreds of people in the terminal would suddenly hear an English conversation between two men—discussing what, had it been murder?—coming over the airport’s loudspeaker system. Most of the people who heard it probably wouldn’t notice, and those who noticed wouldn’t understand, but some would understand what they had heard, and they thus became unknown and anonymous witnesses to the crimes that had been committed and to the one that was about to be committed.

  Moreover, their witness would prevent its occurrence, that is, would keep Louis alive. And if Louis was correct in his calculations, their witness would put a stop to the murderer. The exposure of Hugh Bowes would be tentative, that is, Hugh could never be certain who had even heard, but he could be reasonably certain someone had heard something. But what? In this case the uncertainty worked in Louis’s favor. Just the possibility that someone might have heard something incriminating seemed to Louis to be a more powerful deterrent than any certainty could have been.

  Solesme did not express astonishment or concern. Did she approve or disapprove? Louis could not tell. She merely drew back from him, as she sometimes did, and watched him as he spoke. When he had finished, she asked him when this was to happen. It did not seem to matter to her that he refused to tell her.

  As a girl of sixteen, Solesme had been in love with a boy named Julien Trignet. She had lived then on her father’s farm outside Saint Leon. Julien lived in the village of Dissay where his father was the butcher. Solesme and Julien went to the same school. They were in classes together and both sang in the school choir. Julien was a thin boy with a narrow chest, but he had a deep and beautiful baritone voice which, despite his lack of training and singing experience, was lovely to hear. The first time Julien visited Solesme at her home, she begged him to sing. He refused at first, but when she continued to plead with him, he sang a ballad, his cheeks flushed with excitement and embarrassment while Solesme’s mother, father, and the two sisters who were still at home all listened in silent amazement. They clapped enthusiastically, and Solesme beamed with pride.

  Solesme could not ride a bicycle, except with the greatest difficulty. So Julien visited her home frequently, while she remained pretty much a stranger at his parents’ home in Dissay. After another year both left school. Solesme found work as a seamstress. Julien worked in his father’s shop as an apprentice. Julien continued to visit when he could, but his work kept him away more and more, and one day he stopped coming altogether. Solesme called on the telephone, but he did not come to the phone, or when he answered and heard her voice, he simply hung up the phone. She wrote him anguished letters, wondering why he had stopped coming, why he didn’t call, what had happened between them, were his parents keeping him from coming, from calling, had she done something wrong?

  “Where is Julien?” said Solesme’s mother.

  “He had too much work to come over,” said Solesme.

  But a mother who has two sons and five daughters knows things without being told. She knew that the fault lay with Julien, that he had decided not to tie his fortunes to those of a girl with a crippled back.

  Two years later word came of Julien’s engagement to a girl from Dissay, a pretty blond girl who worked as a cashier in the grocery store. Their wedding was on a bright Saturday in June in the church in Dissay. After the service, the reception was to be at a small country inn a few kilometers down the road. The procession to the inn was to begin in the small square in front of the church and proceed through the whole of Dissay, then out into the fields. The cars that were to carry the bridal party had been parked in front of the church facing in the proper direction. The road through town was so narrow that turning a single car around, let alone a wedding procession of cars, would have been out of the question. The car which would carry Julien had been decorated in the traditional way with flowers, a broom, dolls, and a baby carriage, and lots of gaily colored streamers.

  At the end of the service the wedding party came through the ancient wooden doors and stopped on the top step. Solesme stood in front of the decorated car. She was wearing a black dress that was cut low in the back. Her skin was pale, her face was beautiful. As the bridal party nervously piled into the cars and started their engines, the wedding guests watched from the stairs. Except for a few indignant whispers, everyone was silent. As the cars began to inch forward, Solesme started down the middle of the street. The procession moved at a funereal pace, for Solesme could only walk slowly and with difficulty, and she walked in the middle of the street so that no one could pass. She may even have exaggerated that strange twisting motion of hers which was both disconcerting and beautiful to watch.

  Dissay is a small town, but the procession to the edge of town took many minutes. Julien sat slouched in the backseat, not wanting to look out the front of the car, but unable to look anywhere else. His cheeks were red with anger. His pretty bride was in tears. At the edge of town where the buildings ended and orchards began, Solesme stepped to the side of the road and let the cars pass. They raced off to the inn as fast as they could.

  Of course there was music and dancing at the reception. There was champagne and lots of food prepared by the bride’s mother and the groom’s mother. The bride and groom were presented with funny gifts that made everyone laugh. Glasses were repeatedly raised to the happy couple. The guests all danced and drank. They seemed to have put the strange wedding procession out of their minds. But, to everyone’s surprise, when Julien was asked to sing, he refused.

  XXIV

  DECEMBER FOURTEENTH. IT WAS COLD. THE SUN SAT PALE AND low in the sky. The countryside was silvery with frost. Wood smoke hung in low clouds over the roofs of the village. Ice was forming along the edges of the Dême. “I will be back tonight,” Louis said as he stroked Zorro’s head. He did not know whether it was true. Louis put on a gray suit, his only suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. Why, he wondered. It was as though he were attending a solemn ceremony. He put on his gray overcoat. He looked in the mirror before he left and was alarmed, as he almost always w
as these days, at what he saw. He smiled at himself.

  Louis drove to Le Mans and waited on the platform as the train sped into the station. Inside the train, he took his seat and was immediately lost in his thoughts. What do people think about when their death is imminent? What do they think in the morning, when they know they will die that evening? Louis wondered who would take care of the cat. He wondered how long it would take before his old car would be discovered and towed from the train station parking lot. How long it would be before it was noticed that the car no longer had an owner.

  Louis wondered whether Milton Hamsher would learn of his death and somehow weave it into the conspiracy to discredit Hugh Bowes. Maybe Hugh would already have sent him a note:

  December 14

  MILTON:

  Louis Morgon, who was formerly employed at the Department of State and the CIA, and who was dismissed under questionable circumstances, was seen today meeting with known Algerian revolutionaries at Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris. They then boarded Air Tunis flight 1221. After leaving the plane in Tunis, they got into a black Mercedes which was waiting for them and left the city.

  Louis wondered whether his life had had some logic to it, whether he had moved consistently through it in a direction which, while it eluded him, might be discernible to others. To him his life’s patterns and themes were invisible, swallowed up in its overlapping events, its pleasures and celebrations, its dilemmas and confusions, the realities and the illusions, the day by day that had gradually accumulated over the sixty years. He could not see the sense of it. He remembered a story—was it by Chekhov?—about how quickly the traces of your existence disappear after you die.

  “Excuse me, are you all right? Can I do something for you?” It was the young woman sitting next to him. She spoke with an American accent. “Are you ill?” she asked. “You were breathing heavily.” Then: “I thought you were sick. I’m sorry if I bothered you.” Louis’s mind had flooded with memories from his life. That is supposed to happen when you are dying, he thought. But now he felt as if he were coming alive again. It was as if his own death had entered his life, laid its cold hands on his innards. Then, before it had gotten a grip, this woman’s inquiry, this stranger’s quite ordinary and understandable concern, had driven it from him. He took a deep breath, and then another, as she watched him with a mixture of curiosity and concern.