BOOK II
CAPUCINE
1.
There is a bench in Central Park on a rocky spine that juts into the lake from the densely wooded labyrinth of the Ramble. From this bench, close to the water, Capucine is watching a covey of ducks glide in and out of the dappled light. Some are preening and drying their wings on rock islets that stick out of the shallows like mooring posts. If she shades her eyes, she can see across the blinding shimmer of water to Bethesda Terrace, where the young are already gathering on the fountain’s rim, strumming guitars or emerging like meteors from out of the shadowy arches of the arcade to perform arabesques on their rollerblades. Tourists are storing all this exotic movement in video cameras.
It is early morning.
The sun is punching its blazing fist between the skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue. Cap cannot see the Loeb Boathouse on the eastern shore of the lake because more spiny and wooded outcrops of the Ramble block it from view. Nevertheless a few boats are already out, the rowers sometimes waving, more often as busy with cameras as with the oars. The important thing for the boaters is to photograph the Dakota, where John Lennon lived and in front of which he was shot down, and where Yoko Ono still lives. The Dakota rises massively on Central Park West, brown and bulky above the colossal crowns of the trees, and can only be adequately captured from a boat on the lake. Hundreds of thousands of such images are mailed around the world and sometimes are sent instantly via the newfangled World Wide Web to friends, relatives, newspapers, police departments, intelligence agencies. Sometimes the boaters focus their cameras on Cap, so peaceful on her park bench with the woods in their brilliant autumnal hues behind her, the ducks and the rocks in the foreground, the water as frame. She wonders, uneasily, how many people around the world might eventually see her image in a snapshot enclosed in a family letter. One of the boats appears to have a news crew on board – she can see the CNN logo on the equipment – and the cameraman makes panoramic sweeps of skyline and shore. Is this for a travel documentary on the city? Is it for the national or international news?
How many viewers across the planet might see this?
In Boston? In Sydney or Brisbane? In France? In the village of St Gilles?
Will there be startled viewers who ask themselves and each other, Hey, isn’t that …?
Capucine has lived in all these places and possibly hundreds of people would recognise her, though she doubts that she will be beamed back to St Gilles, and if she is she knows few people in the village will be watching world news on TV.
But if her image should reach the Middle East? Or the Balkans? Or Shanghai? Or certain African nations?
That could be a different kettle of fish. She is acquainted with only a handful of people in such places, and only a handful know her, but her image is in multiple files. She has two sets of contacts which are as different as day is from night, and each set keeps files on the other. When she travels, she is hosted by the wealthy and powerful as an appraiser of works of art that have been newly (though often secretly and often illicitly) put on the market or just acquired. Unofficially and covertly she meets with families in hiding, families whose relatives have been arrested or are missing or dead. She gathers evidence. She passes this information on.
Possibly, at this very instant, the keepers of sundry files are recognising her, tracking her, logging information about her, passing it on. She feels anxiety, but that anxiety goes with the turf. It is part of her life, at every airport, every border crossing, every port of entry or exit. She never knows when she might be detained. Given the occupations and history of both of her parents, she probably has a genetic disposition towards this particular kind of risk. Still. She knows the plot. These narratives rarely end well. Anxiety is constant, a low-throbbing migraine only intermittently kept at bay. You get used to living with this but you never completely relax. The cool and courteous mask of the unflappable persona behind which you hide is always in place, but your fight-or-flight reflex never ceases to be on red alert.
Does the unsigned typed note slipped under her hotel door that morning, just before she checked out, have any bearing on her anxiety?
Negotiations necessary. You are being watched and monitored, the note says. Be at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, in the outdoor bar, at 1 p.m.
The note was in a sealed envelope bearing the Grand Hyatt logo.
It is the kind of note that Lucifer might send, except that Lucifer has never bothered to be melodramatic or indirect. If it were not for the fact that someone has brought her to New York and paid for her to stay in the Grand Hyatt for several weeks – weeks that have included both the trial and post-trial revelations – Cap would not even entertain the idea that the note could have any bearing on the Vanderbilt affair. Perhaps the timing is purely coincidental. But then again, who else besides Lucifer might have or could have set up the meeting in the Oyster Bar?
Actually, there are a number of people in New York who no doubt tap multiple sources of information on her whereabouts and her contacts. In particular, there are two collectors who do seem more likely sources of surveillance and more likely writers of the note pushed under the door. The encounters with these art collectors had been subtly menacing. One involved an African dictator’s mistress infamous for her lavish lifestyle. That meeting had taken place in London a little over a year ago when Cap’s advice had been sought for the furnishing of a sumptuous palace under construction in Zimbabwe. An article had appeared in the Guardian the next day suggesting that both the art-buying spree and the palace were financed by blood diamonds. There was a second article in the Independent focusing on the corrupt misuse of government funds for luxury living in a nation where starvation was rife.
Cap was still reading these articles in her hotel room in London when reception called to say a distinguished African diplomat wished to meet her in the lobby lounge. Who is it? she asked. He does not wish to identify himself, the reception clerk replied, but he says you will recognise him.
When Cap emerged from the elevator doors in the lobby, the distinguished diplomat raised his eyebrows and his Scotch and beckoned for Cap to join him. He had described himself the day before as Personal Assistant to the Art Collector who was the dictator’s mistress and the mother of the dictator’s son. The diplomat cum Personal Assistant to the mother of the dictator-in-waiting had the look of a bodyguard.
‘I suppose you’d like white wine,’ he said.
‘Scotch is fine.’
The diplomat raised his eyebrows again, smirked, and snapped his fingers for a steward. ‘The little lady would like a Scotch with soda and ice.’
‘Straight up,’ Cap said. ‘No ice.’
‘Well, well,’ the bodyguard said. He raised his glass. ‘To a cordial establishment of ground rules.’
‘The ground rules for art appraisal are rigorous,’ Cap said, clinking her glass against his. ‘We are subject to international standards.’
‘Speaking as the Personal Assistant of our national art collector,’ the bodyguard said, ‘I believe that client confidentiality is one of the bedrock rules.’
‘It is indeed.’
‘Then why did you speak to the press?’
‘I did not speak to the press,’ Cap said. ‘I never speak to the press about my clients or my appraisal advice.’
‘I see. Obviously someone did. We will find out who that loose-lips was, and they will suffer consequences. Am I understood?’
‘This is not an issue that concerns me.’
‘Let us hope that is true.’ The Personal Assistant sipped his Scotch and rolled the viscous fire in his mouth. He smiled. Cap had a list of smiles that sometimes showed up in nightmares and this smile would be added to the list. ‘If the source of the leak turns out to concern you,’ the bodyguard said, ‘not only will your invitation to supervise the palace placement of paintings and antiques be revoked, but you will look back to these cocktails as the last safe moment in your life.’ The bodyguard chuckled. ‘Or possibly we wi
ll send your visa and air tickets for the palace’s interior decoration, but you will mysteriously disappear soon after your arrival at our airport. Am I understood?’
Cap raised her glass. ‘You are always free to make do with second-rate appraisal and art-placement advice. It’s nothing to me.’
The Personal Assistant’s smile grew broader. ‘I think I will enjoy taking you on.’ He laughed again and raised his glass. ‘I think we will make your flight reservations.’
So far, to Cap’s disappointment (and also to her relief), nothing has come of the invitation, a devastating blow to those survivors-in-hiding who are waiting and praying for her visit. They have photographs and eyewitness accounts to loft into the outside world like paper planes. Cap shies away from sending back word that the world already knows and does not care. Nevertheless she does want to retrieve those photographs and personal diaries. She wants to preserve them. Decades from now, they will matter. They may give comfort and crucial historical data to the descendants of those who have been tortured, if any descendants survive.
Two days ago, during the Vanderbilt trial, she read in the New York Times that a Zimbabwean art collector – her own Zimbabwean art collector – was currently in Manhattan on a shopping spree involving designer clothing and shoes. The New York Post carried a front-page photograph of the dictator’s mistress in Prada, with Manolo Blahnik shoes. EXOTIC BEAUTY, the headline read. Also visible at the edge of the photograph was a bodyguard. Cap recognised him. He had bought her Scotch in a London hotel.
The other meeting (the other suspect for the surveillance and for the note slipped under her Grand Hyatt door) had taken place in Shanghai with a Chinese official who was shipping his art collection to the US. Cap’s appraisal estimate had been required by insurance companies. The Chinese official had been cited for corruption in Beijing and word was that he was not only under imminent threat of expulsion from the Party but also of imminent confiscation of his passport. He too is currently in New York.
It is certain that the dictator’s mistress and the Chinese official would have their own agents and lobbyists in Washington and New York, lobbyists whose task it would be to keep an eye on Cap and on anyone else in possession of evidence damaging to their image. One or other of these two clients, she suspects – or one of their emissaries – is planning to meet her for lunch.
Cap thinks of leaving the bench, of retreating into the impenetrable woodland cover of the Ramble, of moving out of the line of sight of the boaters and their cameras, but then again, what difference would it make? The die has been cast. She wants to sit and watch the ducks and watch the light on the water.
She thinks it would be a desirable after-image on the retina’s final Lights Out.
She discovered the Ramble when she was an undergraduate at NYU, newly arrived from rural France and homesick for the Forest of Chinon and the quicksilver movement of deer and for ponds with snapping turtles and for the vineyards in the valley of the Vienne.
Dislocated, Cap used to walk for hours every day in Central Park. The Ramble was paradise, a miraculous illusion, a place from within whose wooded trails she could neither see nor hear the roar of the metropolis. For an hour at a time she could pretend she was back in the hunting preserves of the valleys of the Loire and the Vienne, or scouting for mushrooms in the woods around the Château de Boissy and the village of St Gilles.
She is mesmerised by the random circling of ducks and boats, a geometry of chaos, as bewildering as the map of her life. Is it possible that she has travelled from a gardener’s cottage in rural France to this point of repose in Central Park while a sensational trial has just concluded in Lower Manhattan and while two fabulously wealthy and fabulously corrupt clients are staying in nearby hotels?
This does not seem credible.
Most of Cap’s life does not seem credible to her.
Occasionally other devotees of the Ramble, other meditative loiterers, leave one of the woodland trails and encroach on the little promontory where Cap sits. But there is an instinctive mutual respect among those who love the Ramble. They pause, they exchange brief polite greetings, or perhaps they merely nod and smile and say nothing, and then they withdraw.
Cap notes the first red and gold leaves of the fall eddying on the surface of the lake. Do they make patterns? Perhaps. She could impose form: a ragged spiral; a cluster disrupted by ducks; a single leaf caught between reeds. She could impose symbolic meaning. She believes this may be life’s primary requirement: to impose a tolerable meaning on randomness. A gold leaf is washed up at her feet. That is the way her own life drifts through her memory, one bright fragment at a time, the sequence unpredictable and not under any conscious control because recollection never keeps chronological rules.
Here is a maple leaf, bright crimson, caught in a funnel between two rocks, turning but going nowhere, lovely as the red quilt in the loft of the gardener’s cottage in the grounds of the Château de Boissy on the banks of the Vienne, a half-mile outside the village of St Gilles, which is thirty minutes by car from the railway station in Tours, which is just one hour south-west of Paris by TGV, Train à Grande Vitesse, the high-speed rail service that travels at 200 mph though it certainly did not exist when Cap was a child.
She can hear the mice in the eaves, feel the shifting lumpiness of the straw mattress, smell the remnants of the cassoulet, see the smoke that seems to settle and reside permanently in the attic from the cast-iron stove below, hear the heavy breathing and soft snores of her father from his couch in front of the stove. The air is sweet with the earthy scent of her brother on his pallet at the other side of the loft. He smells of the vegetable garden, of compost, of the vineyard, of fish fresh-caught in the Vienne.
Above all three of them – above her father, her brother, her small self; above the gardener’s cottage; above the village of St Gilles – looms the great hulking shadow of the empty chateau. It is almost as large as the twelfth-century church of St Gilles. The two buildings, pocked and turreted rock monoliths, hover like guardian angels over the handful of people who live between.
Capucine’s father is the manager of the estate of the chateau – also its gardener and its viticulteur – but he concerns himself only with the earth on which the chateau stands, all twenty hectares or fifty acres of it, and with the tilling and the blossoming and the caretaking of those hectares. He alone has the keys to the wrought-iron gates of the walled courtyard and to the great oak doors of the chateau itself, but he never goes inside the mansion. Once a month, he lets Marie-Claire into the chateau to dust and sweep the cobwebs away and check that the aged pipes have not burst. Three dogs, guardians, prowl the courtyard to ward off intrusion. Cap’s father cares for these dogs and the dogs adore him. He feeds them daily. In the evenings, he lets them loose for a couple of hours in the Forest of Chinon. When he whistles, they come obediently – each usually has a rabbit or a rodent in its mouth and drops its trophy at her father’s feet – after which her father locks them back in the courtyard.
Cap also adores the dogs. They are as lean as wolves and full of wolf-like energy, and Cap is jealous of the rabbits so delicately held between their teeth. She rolls with the dogs in the woods and on the sandy grit of the chateau courtyard.
She has never been inside the chateau.
‘Can we, Papa?’ she sometimes asks.
‘There’s nothing to see,’ her father says.
‘Can I see the nothing?’ It is such a huge nothing. It fills her with awe.
‘I used to go there every day,’ her father says, ‘when la comtesse was young, when her mother was still alive, when we were both children. But I haven’t set foot in the building since the Nazis were quartered there. I’d rather step through the gates of hell. If you want to see inside, you’ll have to get Marie-Claire to take you.’
Marie-Claire lives in the village and has her own family but she also cooks for the gardener and keeps the empty chateau under wraps. When Cap begs to accompany her, just to see inside, Mari
e-Claire is brusque. ‘It’s a castle of ghosts,’ she says. ‘It’s damned. It’s the devil’s outhouse. It’s full of lost souls. Every piece of furniture is covered in white canvas. You want to see inside a grave? You want to go down where the shrouds and the cobwebs are?’
Cap shudders. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’
‘I won’t take you. Believe me, you don’t want to see inside the chateau. Bad things happened there.’
‘What bad things?’
‘Never mind. It’s no place for a child. I don’t like going there myself and I’ll never go there after dark. I can hear the walls scream.’
‘So why do you go?’
‘Because I’m paid to do so,’ Marie-Claire says. ‘Just like your father is paid to look after the vines and the grounds.’
‘Papa?’ Cap asks at the dinner table in the gardener’s cottage, ‘Who pays you to look after the chateau?’
‘La comtesse pays me. Who told you I’m paid?’
‘Marie-Claire did. Where is la comtesse?’
‘In America. She went there after the war. No one lives in the chateau now.’
‘Why not?’ Cap wants to know.
‘Because the war wore itself out. Because la comtesse married an American and went to live over there.’
‘Will she come back?’
‘Who knows?’ her father says.
‘She’ll never come back,’ Petit Christophe says, brushing a cloud of imaginary mosquitoes from his face, ‘because she knows she’d be eaten alive by Cap’s questions.’ Cap mock-punches her brother, who is eight years her senior, and he responds by picking her up, grappling with her, tickling her, wrestling her, both of them thrashing about playfully on the floor.
‘Marie-Claire says bad things happened in the chateau,’ Cap gasps between shoulder-locks. ‘What happened?’
The Claimant Page 13
