While the Music Lasts

by John Brooke

  He appeared to be assessing this as he informed her, ‘It’s started.You have to help me.’

  ‘What has started?’ She sat, feeling his eyes, distracted, forgetting to offer a chair.

  ‘They’re going to kill me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. They. Everyone. These people…’

  He may have been paranoid, but she believed him. Automatically? The harsh thing she had discerned in the eyes of certain people around town came flooding back. ‘And so?’

  ‘They killed my dog.’

  ‘Your dog?’ No matter how you might imagine such a moment, you cannot plan how you’ll react when you actually come face to face with a star. Despite the tarnish of shame, Luc Malarmé remained a megastar, and Aliette was bedazzled, not all there, as she mumbled an apology. ‘Well, we don’t really handle that sort of thing. We are more for serious crimes. Not that killing a man’s dog isn’t a serious matter, it’s just —’ She was talking too much and he was retreating back inside himself. Leaving her, for an instant, in something of a panic. ‘But wait!…I mean, wait…’ Not that he had moved a physical inch. ‘Have you reported it to the gendarmes?’ The uniformed police were part of the community in a way judicial police could never be and better positioned for an investigation into the killing of a dog.

  The gendarmes — and dogs — lived much closer to the ground.

  But he hadn’t. ‘I don’t want all the attention the gendarmes will bring.’

  It was a matter of fact and they both knew it.

  ‘I suppose I could take a look at it.’ Adding (finally), ‘Sit, please. Tell me what you can.’

  He sat, hunched forward, hands clutched in his lap like a man explaining to his priest.

  He had been working on restarting the grapevines on the land adjacent to his villa. They had been abandoned for six years. ‘I received a letter from Francis saying he wanted to retire and I —’

  ‘Francis?’

  ‘Francis Fernandez. The man I bought my land from. He worked my vines and looked after the place. But he’s old and…’ a shrug, ‘…well, I wasn’t there, was I?’

  Aliette murmured, ‘No.’ Thought, You were in prison for killing Miriam Monette.

  Luc Malarmé nodded into his folded hands. ‘That was during the darkest part, halfway in. It felt like forever at that point. I was losing hope. A very dark time… I wrote Francis, telling him to let the vines go. To retire and forget about me and the place. And everything. You see?’

  She nodded, Go on. After listening to him sing for years while staring at his beguiling face on artfully packaged album covers, she wanted to hear him talk. And contemplate that face, now starkly unfiltered.

  ‘When I got down here at Christmas, I started thinking I’d try again. The vines. Me, I could do it. It’s a huge project to get them going again, two, three years at least. But I can learn.’ And he was determined to try. And he’d got himself a dog. ‘Lennon… like John Lennon?’

  Yes, the chief inspector knew John Lennon.

  ‘Yesterday, I was out working, Lennon was with me, then he wandered off and didn’t show up for his meal. When I went to find him, he was lying by the side of the road. I thought it must have been a car, but the vet said poison in a piece of meat. Arsenic.’

  Aliette said, ‘That’s sad.’ Though she already knew the answer, she had to ask, ‘But why would someone want to kill your dog?’

  It wasn’t complicated. ‘They can’t forgive me.’

  It’s not good practice to lead a person. You have to let a person make his own statement in his own words. Supplying him with words can help him hide the truth. Despite knowing this, Aliette said, ‘You mean Miri?’ Because she wanted to hear him talk.

  He met her eyes. ‘No. I mean me. My music.’ Quiet, as quiet as that shy boy who shimmered in and out of focus. But adamant on this point.

  There was a gap there. She was wary. ‘Not Miri?’

  ‘I’m the same man I was before Miri. I can’t change that. And they can’t stand it.’

  She did not need to ask, Who are they? It was the people in the market, and at the post office and the bakery. The ones in Paris even more so. There was a silence as she puzzled his claim, a silence that belied the open window just behind her. A silence like a spell.

  Till Luc said, ‘Miri’s gone. There’s only me.’

  Only him?

  How could he separate Miriam Monette out of the equation?

  The condemning voices echoed, a chorus chanting, outrageous! shameful!

  He didn’t hear them. Aliette saw this in his bottomless eyes and it brought her fully back to herself. A cop, a woman…a woman who expected men to make excuses, a cop who had grown weary of hearing them, a woman who knew that no matter how a man’s wife may have provoked him there was no excuse for a punch to the side of her head, a cop who sensed — who saw — that Luc Malarmé was long past all excuses… The cop overrode. Miri was a police matter and it had been dealt with. The killing of his dog was a different police matter and he had come to her. Aliette felt the complete absence of Miriam Monette. Luc Malarmé was talking to her.

  ‘Tell me.’ What else could she say?

  He told her, ‘I have songs for everything, but it’s still me who’s singing. Me. They still need the songs but they don’t want me to sing them.’ He offered a large shrug for a notion that did not make sense. ‘There’s no else to sing them. How could there be? It’s only me and always will be.’

  Aliette was not sure how to respond. She wrote his name at the top of an empty page. Luc M.

  Then she sat as he described a resentment spreading through the world. ‘They want me to be who the song makes them see. But it’s not me, it’s themselves. I don’t matter. Just the song.’ He said it was because people did not understand what was happening to them from one turn of the world to the next. He said he had faced it since the first time he’d stood up in front of people. ‘I don’t know, seven, eight…Very frightening till I understood it. The need was there. But they kept their distance. What I mean is, they accepted the song but kept their distance from me.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now, it’s a different world. Now they’re desperate. You see?’

  ‘I think I might.’ Better to say, Aliette felt what he was saying. She was aware of wondering how Miriam Monette had felt in a similar situation. Miri must have been exactly here at some point. Aliette knew Miri’s films as well as she knew Luc’s music. She had loved many of them, had willingly steeped herself in Miri as Miri lived through yet another story. Miri had helped her understand inchoate things inside. So effortless. A tilt of her head, the camera on her eyes.

  But Luc was telling the truth: Miri was gone. It was as if Luc’s voice blocked her out. The longer he sat in front of her and said things that made no sense, the less she could conjure Miri’s image over her own psyche’s blank space. The chief inspector bathed dumbly in this man’s gaze, hearing his rambling deposition, Thinking, No, and I don’t know what’s happening to me.

  Luc Malarmé seemed to know exactly what was happening to him. He stared from across the table. ‘They’ve grown holes in their hearts from the disappointment. It’s worse than it ever was. They want to kill me. They will if they can. They killed my dog.’

  ‘But who? I mean, it’s so…’ Killing a dog? She made a face, embarrassed to be human.

  But he’d said all he could. ‘They all hate me.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Well…’ He smiled hopefully at her.

  She breathed. Thought she should open the window, but it was already open.

  She promised, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  He thanked her, shook her hand and left.

  Aliette dutifully made some notes, but they made no sense.

  Mathilde Lahi returned to her post, the phone rang, the
world swung back into motion, the day moved forward. There was a team meeting concerning the impending move against the Roma break-and-enter ring. Inspectors Magui Barthès, Henri Dardé, Junior Inspectors Bénédicte Barnay and Isabelle Escande were all present. Afterward she sat with Magui for an hour, clarifying points and honing paragraphs in her report. People continued to arrive for interviews and depositions on various ongoing matters. A busy afternoon. Mathilde served tea at four.

  Aliette did not mention Luc Malarmé to anyone.

  She kept his visit to herself and took it home.

  Sergio spent weeknights at his place in the city. When he called, she didn’t tell him either.

  The killing of Luc Malarmé’s dog felt like something highly confidential.

  ‘Love you too. À demain.’

  Leaving her judge to a Tuesday night with his usual case-file homework, the inspector closed the shutters, opened a beer, took out an old CD and listened, carefully, studying the music. It was not the lyrics, which were interesting, though not so much as she’d remembered. It was not the way the instruments blended round his voice. It was his voice, pure and simple, the essential musicality of Luc Malarmé. The most enticing bits were when he stopped singing and spoke, the way musicians sometimes do. Like when he was speaking to her. Just her.

  • 2 •

  A FLIGHT OF SWALLOWS

  Aliette left the office and headed up Departmental 117, through Prades toward the village of Berlou on the upper northwest ridge of the valley, another eight klicks on. The road was a gently sloping climb flanked on both sides by swaths of vines, now in full leaf, divided by strips of piney forest. On a cloudless day the world was a palette of soothing green. The rooftops of Prades were still in her rearview when she turned onto a unpaved road, which ended at the tiny commune called Le Mauraury, about five kilometres east. Halfway along, a whitewashed villa stood alone on a rise. The parcels of land surrounding it stood in stark contrast to the gentle waves of green — rows of forlorn and twisted scabrous roots, naked of leaves, in lines along the exposed reddish earth. Luc Malarmé claimed he would bring them back to life and turn them into wine.

  The house at the end of the gravelled drive was designed in the regional style, the main body spread laterally, ranch fashion, along a single floor, two end sections built at slight angles to the central mass, a single upper room breaking the low-slung roofline dead centre. That would be an ex-con megastar’s master bedroom. Was he sleeping alone? There were no lawn or gardens out front; the fallow vines filled the area, ending a few steps from the drive. There was a barn-sized building behind the house. Aliette pulled up beside an ageing Jeep parked at the front door. She checked her face in the rearview. Then paused on his step. To look. And listen…

  From this spot Luc Malarmé enjoyed a view due east across the plain to the medieval tower at Cessenon. The ambience of sporadic birdsong and a sparse breeze was laced with quiet music: guitar, the slow progress of minor chords, lilting, almost dying before moving forward in no apparent pattern. She knocked gently, not wanting to disturb it. Perhaps he had a maid.

  But no one came. The aimless strumming continued, methodic, minor, sleepy.

  The door was not latched. It opened to an easy push. Stepping through, Aliette called lightly, ‘Monsieur Malarmé?’ The walls of the foyer and stairway were filled with framed tokens of his fame: photos, awards, artwork from his albums, gold laminated discs… The inspector stood rapt, remembering just who he was. Or had been. She found herself looking for Miriam Monette among the many celebrated faces. She failed to find her. She called again, ‘Luc?’ A sudden sweet, yearning note from a bluesy harmonica seemed to answer from somewhere in the back.

  She went looking for it. The salon had windows on both sides of the house and was filled with afternoon sun. The sun accentuated the dust, the unkempt clutter, the hash pipe on the coffee table. A pair of guitars waited on the divan, a mandolin and saxophone attended separately, each on its own pillowy fauteuil. The watercolour portrait gracing the mantelpiece had captured a boyish sparkle in the rock star’s eyes. The music continued, the blues harp weaving its plaintive way through the drifting strings. Had he formed a new band for a new beginning on the mean streets of Saint-Brin?

  She went the other way. The office was a minefield of large-format books spread across the carpet, opened at diagrammed pages. They appeared to be textbooks on agronomy and planting. The desk was littered with brochures filled with glossy images of grapes on the vine, receipts in piles, notebooks, too many unwashed teacups. The room badly needed air.

  As did two guest rooms at the end of the hall. They had not been used in years: there was a layer of dust on everything, spiderwebs on the lower parts of chairs and beds and dressers. A scorpion fled under the cupboard door.

  ‘Luc?’

  …the music wasn’t up the stairs.

  Nor in the dining room, where a single empty wine glass stood on the fine oak table amid repeated circular stains.

  Nor in the solarium, where years of southern sun had bleached the colour from the fabrics.

  Aliette was left standing at the kitchen door looking at a terrace surrounding an unfilled pool succumbing to cracks. There was no horse in the paddock. The fence around it had collapsed in several places. Beyond, the forest rose into the hills toward Berlou.

  The music was coming from the barn.

  The gravel was in need of raking, scrubby grass breaking through in patches everywhere. Inside the barn was a mud-spattered Renault 4L van, baby-blue, circa 1990, a small green tractor, tools and equipment, chemical products in boxes and cans, baskets, pails, spools of wire, the things one needs to grow and harvest grapes. A flight of rough wood stairs brought her to a finished room strewn with musical instruments, extension cords, microphones on stands.

  Luc Malarmé was hunched on a stool in front of a huge window. Head bowed, eyes shut, ears encased in headphones, he was oblivious to the world beyond, entranced, blowing poignant notes on his harp. A mic was bent close. A laptop was open on a stool within reach, a guitar waited on a stand. At the end of the room, a glassed-in booth. It was a rudimentary recording studio. Lost in his own sounds, he did not sense her as she entered and drew near.

  Aliette stood behind him, contemplating the dream-captured face in the window’s reflection: a man deep inside the lazy motif of his harmonica, wandering through loose chords of a guitar drifting from unseen speakers, a man alone in an ineffable space, a place he lived in effortlessly. To a mere cop, it seemed a miracle that he could go to that place, and then bring others in. The world recognized the miracle. In exchange for opening the door to that sublime place, the world had given Luc Malarmé everything he could ever want. And more. Luc also had the unthinkable dark of killing Miri to carry now.

  At each pause, she expected him to lay his harmonica aside and sing. It seemed he would, leaning closer to microphone as if to tell a secret about the unimaginable life within his music. Or share a kiss. But Luc would draw back, keeping it to himself, keeping her waiting, and it seemed a long time till he saw her as she saw him, transparent in the window.

  The harmonica stopped. He touched a button on the console. The guitar stopped.

  She spoke to his reflection. ‘You need a band.’

  He replied in kind. ‘Not really. Not with this stuff. It’s all inside me.’

  Megastar arrogance? Or simply fact? She moved closer. ‘I like your sound.’ He shrugged, nodded a vague merci. Everyone had told him this. She blushed, abashed — and confused by that. ‘But I do. I was listening last night. I hadn’t for… for a while. I mean…’ What did she mean?

  ‘Nine years?’ Luc Malmarme looked away, out at the bright world, chagrined. ‘It’s hard to find a band these days.’

  She whispered, ‘I didn’t mean to imply —’ but tripped over her tongue again.

  He waited.

  It was automatic. One felt o
ne cared…

  ‘It sounds like it always has,’ he finally said. ‘It’s like breath.’

  ‘I felt you were speaking to me.’

  ‘I was.’He grinned. This was their secret.

  It occurred that maybe he was high. Yes, and maybe she was too? The space was hermetic, without the sound of his music there was only the two of them. Now he was reaching to touch her and she stood there, grinning back.

  But perhaps his movement echoed somehow. Swallows, evidently living in the eaves above the window, suddenly swirled in a chaotic mass beyond the wanton image in the glass and the mad clutter of their flight broke the spell. Aliette obeyed the cosmic message and resisted a deep urge to take him in her arms. Without a word she signalled, Stop — she did not want that.

  Though she did. Her body knew she did. But the moment passed through her soul and was gone, and at the core of her she knew that she was more disappointed than relieved.

  Mindless abandon is a rare thing and she had turned her back.

  But he obeyed. The normal space between two strangers flowed back into place.

  ‘What was your name, again?’

  ‘Aliette?’ She looked away, touched his guitar.

  He asked about his dog. She asked if he might show her where he’d found poor Lennon.

  Aliette Nouvelle was distracted as they walked down the drive to the road. Luc Malarmé was not inclined to talk, as if he knew her thinking perfectly and she needed space to fathom it. She was thinking she had walked into his world and left her bearings at the door. Her world included Sergio Regarri and she was confused by deepening shame for leaving Sergio so utterly in the lurch, so easily, without a thought, but for a flight of swallows. Should she be angry with herself, or with this man beside her? She had no idea what to say. It was as if they were walking through parallel worlds.

  Luc did not seem to need an explanation. So they simply walked in the afternoon sun.

  ‘Here.’ A spot by the side of the road. A murder scene?

  ‘You saw no one pass?’