Ti-Loup whispers again: ‘He is somewhere else.’
Gently, Cap takes the ladle from her father and serves.
The fiery glow from the cast-iron stove throws a warm red-gold light on three faces. We are like Cézanne’s Card Players, Cap thinks. Three of us leaning in over the table, the ghost of Ti-Christophe watching us with his back against the wall.
She says, ‘There’s a painting in one of Father JG’s books. It reminds me of us, right now, in front of the fire.’
‘Ah!’ Cap’s father says, startled, as though awareness has suddenly pricked him like a dart and he has returned from wherever he was to the table in front of the stove. ‘Speaking of paintings. A package came in the mail from Myriam Goldberg. Two things. A letter for me and a small padded envelope for you, Cap. Wait. I’ll get it.’
Cap studies the padded envelope with wonder. ‘American stamps!’ she says, fascinated. ‘What’s in it?’
‘I haven’t opened it. It’s addressed to you.’
Cap tugs on the red thread that says Pull to open and extracts something that is hidden between two pieces of cardboard. It is a small painting, on thick brown box-flap, done in oils.
‘It’s Cap!’ Ti-Loup says. ‘It’s a portrait of Cap.’
‘No, it’s her mother Lilith,’ Grand Loup says. ‘Myriam Goldberg wrote that she painted it from memory not long after they first arrived in New York.’
19.
In the tranquil inner courtyard of what was once the address of the Goldbergs on Madison Avenue, and indeed was once her own address during four years at NYU, Cap finally feels sufficiently calm to open the manila envelope that had been delivered to the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park. She can, she hopes, manage to subject herself to a view of the final photographs in the pack.
There are two that she has been holding at bay.
The fourth one is ghastly.
It is a close-up of the corpse of Olivier, full body length, face in three-quarter profile, the gash across his heart gaping like a mouth drooling blood The photograph is black and white, the body a ghostly pale grey. It lies on its right side, the left arm falling limply across the torso, the right arm, on which the head rests, is extended in a graceful curve like the curve of Adam’s arm in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, but it touches no finger of God, no reaching finger at all. The white margin at the edge of the photocopied image occupies the space where Petit Christophe’s hand would have brushed Olivier’s index finger.
No one but Michel Monsard or his father could have taken this photograph.
And what had they done after that?
Cap wills herself to stay calm. The next photograph, she knows, will be of the body of her brother and she needs to prepare herself. She focuses on the Lipchitz bronze, gift of the Goldbergs, rising from a foam of white caladiums, green-veined, within a wider inland sea of hostas and ferns. The sculpture itself is as full of space as it is of mass and seems to loft itself into flight from the dense groundcover like an eddying upward wisp of prayer.
Cap recalls that long-ago moment in the gardener’s cottage when Myriam Goldberg first seemed to mistake her for Lilith, the mother she never knew. Petit Christophe was there. I remember that, her brother said. He meant the unloading of linens from the laundry van with the SS watching. But her father said, No. What you remember was later.
Safe houses, Cap thinks. The courtyard of the building on Madison Avenue is one of her safe houses. She can look at the final photograph now.
It is not the photograph she was expecting.
The image is of Ti-Loup, aged fourteen, who is passing beneath massive alphabetic caryatids whose ominous forms glower above sliding glass doors.
AEROPORT DE PARIS
DEPARTS – VOLS INTERNATIONAUX – PASSAGERS SEULEMENT
CONTROLE DE SURETE
The sliding doors are of textured glass and are opaque. They are closing and Ti-Loup is turning back to wave. His eyes are huge and haunted, his face stricken, the mournful falling gesture of his hand spelling out a line from the third canto of Dante’s Inferno. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
That moment is as deeply imprinted in Cap’s memory as the smell of roasting rabbits and the moment when Ti-Loup first appeared in the gardener’s kitchen. She does know who took that photograph. The countess took it. The flashlight startled Cap and startled Ti-Loup.
‘I don’t know if I focused properly,’ the countess said at the time. ‘All these glaring fluorescent tubes, it’s horrible. I’m not even sure what I took.’ She was scrunching up her eyes and rubbing them with her silk handkerchief.
‘I didn’t know you owned a camera, Madame la Comtesse.’
‘I sent to Paris for it. I bought it this week to preserve this wrenching moment, Melusine.’
‘Madame la Comtesse …?’ Cap hesitates. The countess turns towards her and Cap makes direct eye contact and does not drop her gaze. ‘Who made this moment wrenching?’
The countess turns away and stares at the doors that have closed behind Ti-Loup. ‘You think I am cruel but it is life that is cruel.’
‘I know life is cruel,’ Cap says. Every night the bloodied arms of her brother reach for her. Every night, his face floats above her bed. Help me, he says. Find me. ‘That is why we should not do cruel things. We should not make life more painful than it is.’
‘You are both too young to believe me, but for the time being, this is the only wise thing to do, the only safe thing. I don’t only mean for social reasons although I know that’s what you think and what my son thinks. But the butcher and his son … I have come to see that you and your father are right. They are barbarians, but not just barbarians. They are barbarians with a bad conscience, afraid of being exposed, and therefore dangerous. I have become frightened of them. My son won’t be safe if he stays here and you won’t be safe either. I’m making arrangements for your safety. Don’t cry, Melusine.’
‘I’m not crying. I never cry.’
‘I know you don’t, and nor do I. This won’t be a long separation. It will be like the blink of an eye before Gwynne Patrice is back and you’ll both be attending the Sorbonne. And then we can all look at this photograph – if I managed to capture what I meant to capture, that is – and we can all smile at each other and say, It seemed such a wrenching parting back then, but it was absolutely necessary and it was nothing in the grand scheme of things.’
20.
In the grand scheme of things, Cap is not sure whether she has been blackmailed or warned. She is not sure whether she is yet to be approached by the Zimbabwean bodyguard or the Chinese defector or by someone she has not yet met. The prepaid round-trip airfare sent to Sydney left the return flights open for her to book. She does not want to walk into a trap. She does not want to advertise when she will leave. She does not want to be publicly detained at the airport.
She decides to walk all the way down Madison and then Broadway to Union Square. The four miles take her more than an hour and the crisp air makes her feel calmer. She walks on south another eight blocks to Washington Square Park, where she is surrounded by the old haven of NYU and Greenwich Village. She finds a bistro she used to know well, though of course the ownership has changed several times. She finds a small undistinguished slightly rundown hotel and checks in for five days under the name of Lilith Jardine.
Let whoever wants to find her, find her.
Nevertheless, much as she is tempted, she will not make a phone call to Australia. She has had the phones in her hotel rooms tapped before. Why make it easy for the watchers to trace the person answering the phone?
She walks miles every day. She walks to Wall Street, to Battery Park, she takes the ferry to Staten Island. She walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and back.
Every night, in her hotel room, she watches the news on TV. Bemused, she sees old fishermen in St Gilles. Le fils du jardinier … they say. La fille du boucher … Petit Christophe, they say. She buries her face in the pillow and weeps silently.
She s
leeps with the envelope of photographs under her pillow and they do nothing good for her dreams. She carries them around in her shoulder bag all day. She does not want anyone to steal them, see them, copy them.
No one makes contact. There are never any messages at the reception desk.
After five days, she calls the airlines, quotes the ticket reservation number, and books her flights and her seats.
She is waiting at her gate at Kennedy Airport for the first leg of her long flight back: New York to Los Angeles, LAX to Sydney. The manila envelope containing the photographs is in her carry-on bag and she is afraid the security scan will detect something black and malevolent. An alarm will sound. Whoever bought or stole the photographs and delivered them to her surely intends to detain her, immobilise her, neutralise whatever evidence she has or might yet gather. From wherever. The sender was signalling threat. Cap will be taken aside and patted down. Her passport will be confiscated, she will not be permitted to board.
But nothing happens. She shows her boarding pass and passport, the security guard smiles, her flight is called.
She finds her window seat, stows her cabin bag, snaps her seatbelt in place. The woman who takes the aisle seat beside her is flustered. She has two bags, a bottle of water, a magazine, and one of the tabloids. She cannot quite figure out how to manage things in the cramped space. ‘I wonder if you’d mind?’ she says to Cap, tentative. ‘Could you hold these for me, just for two minutes until I get myself organised?’ She hands the magazine and the tabloid to Cap.
‘No problem,’ Cap smiles, and then she sees the front page of the Post. There is a gruesome photograph of a body with multiple stab wounds. The caption reads:
COLD CASE HEATS UP
FRAUDULENT VANDERBILT CLAIMANT MAY BE KILLER IN UNSOLVED 1960 MURDER VILLAGE BUTCHER REVEALS EVIDENCE, MAKES STATEMENT TO FRENCH POLICE FEMALE ACCOMPLICE INVOLVED
Unidentified sources who gave evidence on condition of anonymity say that Interpol has been alerted … Arrests in Australia expected … Female accomplice has history of subversive activity … Unconfirmed reports indicate both fugitives to be charged with cover-up of 1960 killing …
As the aeroplane moves slowly away from the gate, Cap stares back through the wall of plate glass to the boarding-gate side of security. She sees a young boy, bewildered, stumbling forward as though trying to reach her plane before it leaves. Perhaps he is travelling alone. Perhaps his parents are on the aircraft or perhaps they are back in the departure lounge. He is clearly disoriented and frightened. He turns back and stands waving at the gates that have closed behind him.
BOOK III
THE COLLECTED LIVES OF PETIT LOUP
1.
August 5, 1960
Air France, Seat 34A
Dear Cap,
This is a window seat but all I can see through the glass pane are motorised carts piled with luggage and a man in a uniform waving orange sticks. I suppose he is giving signals to the pilot. We are still on the ground. I cannot see you or Maman but I can feel you watching me, still watching, still waving. If I close my eyes I can still see you crying in that last second when I turned back. I know that you will vehemently deny that you were crying. I also saw a flash of light and realised with a shock that my mother must have taken a photograph. I did not even know she had a camera. She must have bought it for this occasion. I don’t know what I feel about this. Why did she do it? Is it possible she feels, after all, that she is making a cruel mistake? Or is this more like the death mask of Napoleon? A final view for posterity?
Then the doors closed and an officer said, ‘Your passport, please.’ He raised his eyebrows when I showed him. ‘American? You don’t look American.’ I’m really French, I told him, but I was born in New York. ‘Say goodbye to France, young man,’ he said.
Say goodbye to my life, I thought. Say goodbye to my second life.
I can barely remember the first one, my five infant years in New York.
I do remember a big loud man in a uniform who frightened me. One day he was just there. ‘Say hello to your father, Gwynne Patrice,’ Maman said. Apparently I was two years old when he came back from deployment in Europe.
‘What the hell is he doing dressed like that?’ my father roared. I don’t actually remember his words. I just remember he was angry with me and I was frightened of him.
I think maybe I remember a birthday party, perhaps my third. There was a cake in the shape of a boat with three candles for funnels. My mother lit them and I blew them out and there were some black servants who clapped and sang ‘Happy Birthday’. I can’t remember anything else.
Wait …
Yes, I do remember a black woman, a big soft cushiony woman who hugged me and stroked my hair. Of course Maman always did that too, but it was different. Maman never wanted me to love anyone else (except perhaps you; I think she didn’t mind that, but I’m not absolutely sure). This black woman loved me and I loved her, but she loved everyone and she took for granted that everyone would love everyone else. Just thinking of her again feels like being back in the loft or being in the cutting room with Ti-Christophe.
The cushiony woman used to bathe me and feed me and put me to bed and sing gospel songs till I fell asleep. Swing low, sweet chariot … It’s coming back to me in English. I think she made the cake with three candles. I think sometimes she sang a song to tease me, though not in a mean way. She was never mean. She was lathering me up in the bathtub when she sang it and she was laughing and I sang along with her and we splashed each other.
I looked over Jordan and what did I see,
coming for to carry me home?
A boy in a blue dress waiting there for me,
begging me to carry him home.
I wonder if I made that up later? Or made up some of the words? I think I might have because I never left the house back then. House? No, it wasn’t a house, it was a penthouse, but I didn’t know that until Maman used to talk about it after we came back to France. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know that other boys didn’t wear dresses. We didn’t need to leave the penthouse. We had a terrace and a courtyard and a nursery room. I remember that my father didn’t want anyone to see me. Even then, I somehow knew that I embarrassed him and that he was furious with my mother but she was never going to give in.
I can’t remember if there was a cake when I turned four, but I do remember the cake for my fifth birthday. It was shaped like the number 5 and instead of candles it had five sparklers and I was allowed to light them and it was like skyrockets and shooting stars and lightning.
That first life must have ended soon after the fizzing cake, maybe the next day or next week. The only other thing I can remember is the smell of the penthouse which smelled of sadness and anger – my mother’s sadness, my father’s anger.
In the airport I tried to look back one last time as the doors closed on my second life. All I could think of was Dante passing through the gates of hell. I could see the text on the green glass above the portal: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Obviously that was a hallucination but the letters looked real.
What were you thinking when I walked through those sliding doors?
I knew what Maman was thinking. Her face was like a thunderstorm closing in. She was unforgiving. Betrayal, she was thinking. How could my son do this to me? A butcher! A butcher! How could he humiliate me like that? I will record this instance of betrayal for history, her eyes were saying. Here is the face of the traitor, she was thinking as the shutter on her camera clicked. And of course she was still furious that not only had my father never shown up to ‘collect’ me in Boissy, as he’d promised, but had not shown up in Paris either. I was glad that he never came to Boissy because if he had you would not have been invited to come with us on the train to Paris. And if my father had been in Paris as he promised, you would not have been here at the airport.
But what are you thinking? What are you thinking right now?
What were you thinking when I walked through
those security doors?
You looked like Grand Loup at our last supper. You were somewhere else. But just like Grand Loup you were determined not to cry and you almost didn’t.
I’d promised myself I would not cry and I didn’t. It’s exhausting, isn’t it? To keep your fist in the hole in the dyke when the entire ocean is slamming up against you like a tidal wave or a German tank. But I’ll confess to what I did instead. That last morning in Grand Loup’s loft I took off the pillowslip and kept it. I stuffed it into my duffel bag and I’m cuddling it now like a teddy bear, though I’m pretending it’s because I’m cold. I’m holding it as unobtrusively as possible. It smells of Ti-Christophe. It smells of Grand Loup and of the loft and of you.
Here’s an admission I never thought I would make. I now understand the potency of relics, which I’ve always mocked, which Father JG taught us to mock.
We are moving now, very slowly. I can’t see the man with the orange sticks. We are turning. We are gliding down the runway like a flat-bottomed boat on the Vienne, except faster and faster. We are going to take off. I’m not scared. Well, not of flying, I’m not scared of that, not at all – in fact, I wouldn’t mind a quick sudden death as we leave. But I suspect I’m going to have to live long and miserably and lonely. I know I’m flying into a dark tunnel with no light at the end of it and I am scared of that. I’ve been there before. I’m abandoning hope. When I said that to you two weeks ago, you got angry with me, but when I looked back and saw your face as the doors were closing, I thought you were doing it too.
I thought you were abandoning hope.
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 5, 1960
Air France, Seat 34A
After take-off
Dear Cap,
Now all I can see are clouds. First there was blue sky with towering pillows of whipped cream but now it is all cloud, whitish-grey. There is an American woman next to me in 34B. When we took off, she grabbed my arm and held on as if the pilot had announced a crashlanding. I could feel her fingernails like a row of spikes. Remember Father JG’s class on the Spanish Tickler, those iron claws the Inquisition used to scrape heretics down to the bone? That’s what it felt like.
The Claimant Page 28
