The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “Good,” Calvi said to the boy. “Remember you have very little time to get here. Ten minutes at the most.” The boy’s eyes showed that he remembered. “And ten minutes after that,” Calvi said, turning to the undertaker and jabbing his finger at the coffin, “this is on the road to Lod.”

  “Stop worrying. If they come, all they will find is ashes, just ashes.”

  “They’ll come,” Calvi said grimly. “Don’t fool yourself about that.”

  “It makes no difference. We are ready.”

  Calvi nodded.

  “Perfect,” the undertaker said. “Is there anything more you want of the boy?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” He turned to the boy. “Take the urn upstairs.” The boy lifted it and went up the steps. “So,” the undertaker said to Calvi. “The fee.”

  This had been a problem. The undertaker had no use for Israeli cash, which might be devalued at any time, and Calvi could not risk an attempt to buy foreign currency. But they had found a solution. From the front pocket of his trousers Calvi drew a little jewel box, covered in purple velvet. He handed it to the undertaker, whose fingers opened it eagerly. A single cut diamond rested on the velvet lining. Immediately it began to play with the yellow of the light bulbs and the purple of the box. It was almost the size of a pea. The undertaker couldn’t take his eyes from it. They radiated a gleam of their own, empty of the stone’s beauty but just as hard. Reluctantly he closed the box.

  “And the other one?” he asked.

  “You’ll get it later.”

  “When?”

  “When I know that the job has been done.”

  “But you promised tonight.”

  “Stop whining,” Calvi said. “You’ll get it.”

  The undertaker shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He reopened the box and gazed again at the stone. Calvi went up the stairs. “Send the boy down on your way out,” the undertaker called over his shoulder.

  Calvi walked home. A light rain fell and he had the streets to himself. Worries bubbled through his brain. They had the run of the place. He was too tired to argue with them. He wanted a glass of milk to quiet his stomach and a long sleep to quiet his mind. But he knew that any sleep which came would bring images of cremated Jews and hard diamonds and the nothingness that waited inside a coffin.

  The rain had driven off the painter in the broad-brimmed hat. Calvi saw a black four-door car parked in front of his villa. He walked past it and opened the gate.

  “Mr. Calvi,” a voice called from the car, a voice he knew.

  He turned from the gate. “Yes, Major?”

  “Would you come here for a minute, please?” Grunberg spoke in a cold tone which belied any courtesy in the words.

  “Can’t it wait till morning? I’m very tired.”

  “I am afraid not.”

  Calvi walked around the car and sat in the passenger seat. Grunberg was behind the wheel, and a very large man in an old tennis sweater occupied most of the back seat. Grunberg switched on the overhead light and looked impassively at Calvi.

  “A man your age shouldn’t keep such late hours,” he said. Calvi didn’t answer. “Would you mind telling me where you’ve been?”

  “At dinner.”

  The thick black brows which hung like cornices over the sunken eyes lifted slightly. “Your companion has been back for more than four hours.”

  Calvi stiffened. “I’m getting sick of you spying on me,” Calvi said angrily. “I am a legally elected member of the Knesset and I have a right not to be subjected to these Gestapo tactics.”

  Grunberg’s eyes remained calm but his quiet voice sounded very dangerous. “Let’s not throw that word around loosely, Mr. Calvi.”

  They sat in silence for a minute or two. The rain danced lightly on the roof and fog spread over the windows. The car was too small for the three of them. Calvi rolled down the window, letting the rain dampen his shoulder. He needed the fresh air.

  “What makes you think I’m spying on you?” Grunberg continued.

  Calvi snorted. “Don’t toy with me. Your man Picasso is rather obvious.”

  Grunberg laughed. “Picasso. He’ll appreciate that. He loves Picasso. But you’ve made a mistake. I didn’t send him here as a spy. I sent him to protect you. I shouldn’t have kept it a secret from you, that’s all.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  “Enemies. Your movement has made many enemies for you. The rally that you plan has made more. It is making people nervous. And not only in Israel. I am receiving reports of odd movements of Syrian men and armor along the border. Have you heard anything like that?”

  “How would I hear that kind of information?”

  “Tell me. I’d like to know.”

  Calvi grabbed the door handle and jerked it open.

  “Just a minute.” Grunberg’s voice froze his hand where it was. “Close the door.” Calvi closed it. “Thank you,” Grunberg resumed. “As I was saying, I have a duty in these circumstances to protect you. A man in your position has a right to a bodyguard. Twenty-four hours a day.”

  “No thank you.”

  Grunberg shook his head. “You have no choice in this matter. My department is responsible for your security. From now on, at least until after the rally, you will be accompanied by a bodyguard whenever you leave your house.”

  “The hell with that,” Calvi said, raising his voice.

  “Let me introduce the man taking the first shift,” Grunberg said, ignoring him. He turned to the man in the back seat. “Sergeant Levy, this is Mr. Calvi.” The huge man bared his teeth at Calvi in a big cheerful smile. He held out a hand that looked capable of crushing melons. Calvi let him hold it there. Grunberg touched Calvi’s arm. “Please try to cooperate, Mr. Calvi. If you should happen to disappear, on a bus near the King David Hotel for example, Sergeant Levy is under orders to notify the police, who go on a full-scale alert until you are found. Don’t make us waste the taxpayers’ money like that.”

  Calvi got out of the car and walked toward the villa. Sergeant Levy got out too, and went to stand under the carob tree across the street. Grunberg drove slowly away.

  No lights shone in the villa. Calvi entered the bedroom. Gisela slept on the far side of the bed, her back toward the middle. Calvi undressed, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor, and lay down. He closed his eyes and saw everything he feared he would see, and more.

  21

  “Wake up madame,” a female voice urged her. “We are on the ground.” Rachel opened her eyes and slowly focused them on a face that was ready to play the role of Carmen at a moment’s notice. All the woman had to do was take the little stewardess cap off her pile of hair. “That’s the way,” she said, smiling. She had missed a tomato seed caught between her front teeth, but you had to be front row center to see it. “There’s no time for sleeping in Paris.”

  But sleep was all she wanted. She felt a filament of saliva against her cheek and wiped it away with her sleeve before moving to stand up. The seat belt kept her firmly in place. The stewardess found it amusing. “What have you been doing to get so sleepy?” she tut-tutted, reaching down to undo the buckle. She led Rachel off the empty plane.

  A sodden sheet of gray had been thrown across Paris, hiding the sky. It dripped steadily on the city, making the old buildings look just plain old. It couldn’t do anything to the new ones that hadn’t already been done. The taxi careened around the Arc de Triomphe, splashing any pedestrians it could get near, and braked to a violent stop in front of the Hotel Lancaster. It was the only hotel Rachel knew in Paris; she and Dan had stayed there on their trip to Europe. She was too tired to worry whether it would bring back memories.

  Rachel remembered the doorman. He had a neatly trimmed white moustache and the face of a benevolent king. He remembered her too and seemed happy about it. “Mrs. Monette, isn’t it?” he said, taking her suitcase. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Four years,” she replied, wondering what kind of tip Dan had g
iven him.

  “As long as that?” He looked at the departing taxi. “And the professor? He will be coming later?”

  “No.”

  They gave her a room on the top floor, overlooking the courtyard. She opened the French windows which led to the balcony. The last time she had seen the courtyard it had been full of people drinking champagne and nibbling homemade potato chips. Now black tarpaulins covered the wrought-iron furniture and wet pigeons pecked at the marble flagstones, searching for crumbs. The hum of traffic barely reached her ears, although the Champs Elysées was only a few yards away.

  Turning back into the room she saw herself in the full length mirror on the bathroom door. She was filthy. A grimy film covered her clothes, skin, and hair. She stripped and examined herself closely. Bones showed where they had not shown in years. She had bruises she couldn’t remember getting, except for the one on her jaw.

  She started a bath. While the water poured into the white tub she called room service and ordered two ham and cheese sandwiches and a half bottle of red wine.

  When the waiter arrived she had finished bathing and was standing beside the tub watching the brown tepid water swirl down the drain. She had dirtied the bathwater like that once before. A man died that night, too.

  She wrapped herself in one of the white terry-cloth robes that lay folded like towels on a shelf above the toilet, and left the bathroom. The waiter had placed the tray on the bedside table. The fresh rich smell of the baguettes reached her nose, and the scent of vinegar from the Dijon mustard. A copy of Le Monde lay beside the wine glass. Rachel ate the sandwiches, sipped the wine once or twice, and left the newspaper folded where it was. For a few minutes she sat on the edge of the bed, very still. Then, dropping the robe on the floor she pulled back the covers and got into bed. She had no idea what she should do next. In a few seconds she fell asleep.

  Rachel awoke shortly after dawn the following morning, Monday March 29. She rolled over and looked through the window at the sky, a luminous silver-blue making a color-coded promise of a fair day. As she got out of bed she felt the soreness in her muscles and the stiffness in her joints, but her mind was fresh and clear. It even offered a thought. Perhaps it had come from her memory of people drinking champagne in the hotel courtyard, or Le Monde neatly folded on the tray: ebbing sleep had left it behind on the shore of her consciousness.

  On the Champs Elysées busboys swept the dirt from the patches of sidewalk used by the cafés to those that weren’t. A jogger in a red track suit loped by on his way to the Bois de Boulogne. The busboys shrugged their shoulders at each other. “Crazy Americans,” one muttered. Rachel watched the jogger cross the circle to the Arc de Triomphe, pass the grave of the unknown soldier, and disappear.

  She sat at a table on the perimeter of the territory of a large café, a café which clung to a fading fame as a gathering place for the chic, although the chic had long ago moved on. Her choice of table annoyed the waiter. It forced him to walk an extra thirty feet on each round trip. On top of that he could tell at a glance that she wasn’t one of the chic. He kept hoping that one day they would return, like migrating geese, but they never did. The recurring disappointments made him surly with the customers.

  In revenge he served two businessmen who had arrived after Rachel. They each ordered coffee and cognac. While they waited for the waiter to return, one of them began complaining about a television producer who had double-crossed him before he had time to figure out how to double-cross the producer. His companion tapped his fingers on the table and looked at different parts of Rachel’s body. When the waiter reappeared the second man said something to him. The waiter sighed and went back inside. After a few minutes he returned, carrying a glass of cognac. He walked all the way to Rachel and set it on her table.

  “What’s this?”

  “From that gentleman,” the waiter explained in a bored voice. He raised his arm and pointed at the second man. The second man beamed at Rachel. The happiness in his face didn’t mean that the mere sight of her had brought joy into his heart; it meant that it takes some kind of a lover to pick up girls at seven in the morning.

  “Thank him,” Rachel said, “but I don’t drink at breakfast. You have it after I’m gone.” The offer made the waiter see Rachel in a new light. He asked if there was anything she wanted. She wanted scrambled eggs, bacon, and toasted rye bread. She settled for croissants and brioches. The saga of betrayal which appeared to center around a program called “Uncle Renard’s Magic Farm” drew to a close. The two men drained their cognac and stood up. As they left, the second man gave Rachel a pitying look. She had lost her chance with one of the lords of amorous life, it said. Nothing could expiate the sin of frigidity.

  Rachel took a taxi to the Sorbonne. The driver had dandruff on his shoulders and a pornographic magazine on his lap. He studied it at every red light, but there weren’t enough: it would take the stop-and-go traffic of rush hour to make him an expert. When she paid him he grumbled for a few moments about the size of the tip, but his spirit wasn’t really in it. They both knew where it was.

  She and Dan had spent an afternoon trailing one of Dan’s colleagues on a tour of the Sorbonne and she remembered it quite well. She went straight to the library and followed the signs to the periodical department. A young black man with lively eyes and tribal markings on his cheeks found the reel of microfilm she wanted. He wound it deftly on the spools of the viewer and switched on the rear screen light. Rachel sat down in front of the screen and began reading what Le Monde had printed on New Year’s Day 1948.

  It must have seemed important at the time but she saw nothing in the grainy light of the screen that made New Year’s Day 1948 worth preserving on microfilm. She rolled the film ahead to January 2. Near the bottom of page five, beside a story about a fire in a restaurant kitchen, she found what she was looking for. She translated as she read.

  YOUNG AMERICAN WOMAN DROWNED

  At approximately 2:20 on the morning of January I a tragic accident took the life of a young American resident of Paris. The victim has been identified as Madame Margaret Monette, aged 30, wife of M. Xavier Monette, former officer in the army of France and resident at 298 rue de Millet, apartment three, first arrondissement. Police report that Mme. Monette fell from the east side of the Pont Neuf and apparently died of drowning. The body was recovered a few hours later. Mlle. Lily Gris of 298 rue de Millet, apartment five, employed as babysitter by the deceased, was taken to hospital and placed under mild sedation.

  Rachel copied the French text into her notebook. She unwound the reel and returned it to the young man.

  “Do you know a rue de Millet in the first arrondissement?”

  “No. I’ve only been in Paris a month.” But he knew how to find it. He took a street atlas from his back pocket and began thumbing through it.

  “Here it is,” he said, stabbing his finger at a spot on the page. He turned the book to show her. “In Les Halles.” He snapped the book shut. He was an energetic, efficient young man. She wondered how long he would be happy at the library.

  Les Halles was the old market district of Paris but town planners moved the market to a new location. When Rachel’s taxi arrived she saw they had replaced it with a chic imitation of downtown Houston. The rest of the neighborhood, including rue de Millet, stubbornly went on looking like Paris.

  The taxi dropped her in front of 298. It was a four-storied dun-colored structure. Brown children stared at Rachel from the open windows. Over the door a marble lintel with three roses in bas relief made a plea for respectability that the pigeons were obliterating.

  No amount of scrubbing could wash away the years of seediness; but the old woman on her hands and knees hadn’t given up. She had covered the stone steps with a thick lather which she rubbed into the stone with a wire brush. Her exertions made her buttocks wobble and hiked her worn cotton skirt up to her thighs, revealing varicose veins like worms under the gray skin and sparse patches of white hair.

  “Excus
e me,” Rachel said. Still on all fours the woman twisted her head to look over her shoulder at Rachel. Her small, faded eyes were lost in flesh. Maroon circles under the eyes cut into the puffiness. Each was a sunken pit undermining her face from the lower eyelids to the cheekbones.

  “He’s not here,” the woman said in a coarse loud voice. “And I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t bother with any of your tricks,” the woman said angrily. “I can smell a social worker a block away.” She tapped the side of her nose as if it were a secret weapon.

  “I’m not a social worker.”

  “Sure. And I’m not the mother of a forty-two-year-old boy who hasn’t worked a day in his life.” She turned away and began scrubbing furiously. “He hasn’t even learned to make his own bed,” she shouted at the steps. The brown children in the windows giggled.

  Rachel walked up to the landing and sat on her haunches facing the woman. “I’m not a social worker,” she repeated, “and I don’t know about any forty-two-year-old boys. I’m looking for a woman named Lily Gris. I understand she used to live here.”

  The woman stopped scrubbing and looked up. She tried to make her face cagey but it was too far gone to have that capability. “Is that so?”

  “Yes. I know for a fact that she lived in this building in January 1948. Apartment five. Were you here that long ago?”

  “I was born in this God-damned pigsty,” the woman said. Her voice softened slightly. “Of course it wasn’t a pigsty then. We had fine tenants who kept the place clean.”

  She raised her eyes to the stained facade, seeing it the way it used to be, or the way her young eyes had seen it. The expression on her face made the brown children giggle again. She shook her fist at them. “Now all we get are filthy blacks and filthy Arabs. I work my fingers to the bone cleaning up after them.”

  “Was Lily Gris one of your fine tenants?”