Dead in the Dregs

by Peter Lewis

  “I guess he was making up for the national deficit,” his friend chimed in. “With exceptions, of course,” he said, nodding in apology. “Pardon.”

  I scrunched down in the booth. “Unbelievable,” I whispered. “This place is as bad as Napa.”

  “Worse,” Monique said.

  “Well, then, how about another pression?” She nodded.

  “How are you feeling?” I said when I returned with our second round. I didn’t know why I asked it, except that she appeared too relaxed.

  “About what?” Monique said. She seemed strangely unsurprised by the question.

  “I don’t know. About life. You seem relieved, almost happy.”

  “I feel cleansed.” It was an odd thing to say under the circumstances.

  I asked her what she was going to do.

  “I have to get out of here. Home first. Then I’ll see.”

  “I’m leaving Wednesday morning,” I said. “Colonel Sackheim will have to solve this insanity without me. One night in Paris, and then . . .” I imitated a plane with the flat of my hand.

  She looked down at her hands.

  “Come with me. To Paris. One night,” I said. I hadn’t planned on asking her. I wasn’t even sure why I said it, except that Gio would be gone by the time I got home, and the prospect of explaining to Janie everything that had happened suddenly loomed as an impossible task that I wanted to put off as long as possible.

  She smiled and looked down again and then up at me, her eyes pleading and sad. Abruptly, she stood up. I paid our tab at the bar and followed her out.

  We strolled down the street to a little park, and I pissed against a stunted tree. My urine smoked in the cold, and the stink scented the air. I zipped my fly and stepped back, barely dodging a pile of dog shit.

  We walked slowly, and she held on to my arm, but two rounds without any food in my stomach left me unsteady, and I realized I was leaning on her. The scudding clouds opened and closed across the moon’s face, and the stones of a belfry glowed and darkened in and out of the light. We took a circuitous path. In the center of a square, a statue of a monk stood in repose, a Mona Lisa smirk frozen on its mouth, his hand furled in an odd way.

  “You know,” I said, “in Greece that gesture—the funny way he has his hand—means, ‘Come here.’ But in Italy it means, ‘Eat shit.’”

  “How in God’s name will we ever make ourselves understood?” she asked in faux protest.

  I hugged her to keep her warm, to warm myself, and groped her ass. She slapped my hand and I stumbled a step, and as we zigzagged down the street, I brushed against a man.

  “Pardon,” I mumbled. He grunted but said nothing, and I looked back at him. He was burly and held himself tightly. From the back, his silhouette reminded me of Carrière, and I shivered uncontrollably.

  “Take me home,” I said.

  I lay down on the sofa in the living room in front of the fireplace. It was filled with ashes and half-consumed logs and smoldered, hissing and crackling quietly. I was drunk, I knew, but beyond the physical condition of inebriation, I was drunk on death.

  Monique leaned down and kissed me—long and deep—and I felt myself falling into her, falling forever, and fell asleep.

  I slept late. When I awoke, I could hear the shower running downstairs. She had left the door to the bathroom open and had failed to pull the shower curtain. It was an invitation, and I gazed unabashedly at her body as she soaped her limbs and washed her hair. Breathless, I tore myself away from the vision of her and went upstairs to brew a pot of coffee. When she emerged she had her hair swathed in a towel. I looked at her, shaking my head in disbelief, and she laughed at me like a little girl.

  “I need to see Sackheim one more time. You should come with me.”

  “Do I have to?” she protested.

  “Yes, you have to.”

  When we arrived at the gendarmerie, we learned that Sackheim had been designated DE, directeur d’enquête. The gendarme on duty directed us to Ponsard’s office, and as we headed up the staircase, we could see Sackheim’s foot soldiers racing up and down the halls, sheaves of paper in hand. Ponsard, seizing the excuse of our arrival, was visibly relieved to abandon the computer keyboard he was punching with two fingers. When it turned out that Sackheim was too busy to see us, Ponsard escorted us back downstairs and told us to wait.

  Monique and I sat there flipping through dog-eared copies of Paris Match, and I was starting to think that we should come back later. Just as we were about to head outside for a smoke, Lieutenant Ponsard appeared.

  “S’il vous plaît, venez avec moi.” He led the way. “Here is not the place to talk. Meet the colonel at Le Gourmandin. Une heure et demie.”

  “Merci, Ponsard,” I said as he opened a door at the end of the hallway.

  It was drizzling outside.

  “I love Sackheim,” I said as we walked to the car. “Here he is, in the middle of a triple-murder investigation, and he makes a lunch reservation. Unbelievable.”

  “He may be a cop,” Monique said, “but first he’s French. Nothing gets between a Frenchman and un bon repas.”

  We drove to the center of town and parked.

  “Let’s walk. We have half an hour,” I said.

  We strolled down the street and soon came into a small square, a church at one end.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Church?” she asked in disbelief.

  “We need all the help we can get,” I said, taking her by the hand up the steps. We entered the quiet sanctity of l’Église de Notre Dame, our footsteps echoing, the drone of confession and contrition noticeably absent on a Tuesday, and stood gazing up to the figure of Christ. In the sacristy I dropped a two-euro coin in a box and took three candles, lighting them from one that had nearly sputtered out.

  “One for each victim,” I explained.

  “And I shall light one,” she said, taking another candle, “for Jean.”

  We walked outside. The rain had quickened, driving in a fine sheet and shattering against the cobblestone.

  Sackheim had already arrived. A waiter directed us to a staircase at the back of the restaurant, and we picked our way toward it between tables and through the parties that were midway through their meals.

  Our host stood as we approached the table. There was no one else in the room.

  “I know the owner. They keep this salle closed at lunch, but I thought it would be more private,” Sackheim said.

  But he never broached the subject of death, murder, or suicide. He asked instead about Monique’s family.

  “Your parents, they live where?”

  “Bordeaux,” she said. “But they are divorced now.”

  “I see,” Sackheim said. I could tell that he was curious about her name, and so could Monique.

  “My father, stepfather, is Moroccan. He adopted me when I was very young.”

  “This explains it,” he said. “And your English, it is impeccable.”

  “My mother insisted, when I was a young girl. She found a tutor for me.”

  Having learned these facts, Sackheim didn’t pursue the subject of her family any further. He wanted to talk politics. He was obviously relieved that Obama had won the election.

  “We French did not like your President Bush and his cowboy mentality,” he said to me. “‘You are with us or against us.’ ‘Bring it on.’ ‘Dead or alive.’ At this stage of human evolution, it is, how does one say, primitive, non? Now, perhaps, one can love America again.”

  Feeling the press of time, Sackheim had taken the liberty of ordering for us and apologized for his presumption. He needn’t have. The food was simple and nicely done. He seemed particularly pleased with the wine, an utterly remarkable Givry from a young man whose name sounded surprisingly like Joe Blow.

  “If every Joe Blow made wine like this,” I couldn’t resist commenting, “the world would be a better place,” but the play on his name was lost on my companions.

  The owner sat with us a mi
nute over coffee as we savored three portions of crème caramel.

  “You know, these scores for wine, c’est criminel,” he said. “Pardon, Colonel, mais I care nothing of scores. Ninety-two, seventy-two, what’s the difference? The purpose of wine is to give pleasure. You sit here. You have a good meal, nothing fancy. A little fish, a morsel of duck, some good bread, a wine that satisfies you. What more do you need?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said. “And thank you. It was delicious.”

  “We are content,” Sackheim said. “Bring me the check, please. I regret that I must get back to work.”

  The patron shook hands and went downstairs.

  Outside the weather had broken, patches of blue breaking through the racing cloud cover. Sackheim turned to face me.

  “And you, my friend.” He took my hand. “We do not say good-bye. We say au revoir. ‘Until I see you again.’” And he embraced me, kissed me on both cheeks, and walked away.

  “An amazing individual,” I said, watching him disappear around a corner. “Come on. Let’s do a little shopping. Tonight I’m going to cook for you.”

  I put a mattress in front of the fire and we lingered, eating slowly, savoring the quail I’d roasted over the coals. Curious about Jean-Luc Carrière, I’d picked out a bottle of his domaine’s Les Amoureuses. The wine was intense: silky and seductive, lovely and luscious, the fat contours of its fruit as full and ripe as the curves of Monique’s body. When we had finished, we lay our plates on the floor.

  “I’m not going to Paris with you,” she said. “This is our last night together. I need to be alone, to think. I can’t stand saying good-bye twice.” She straddled me. “I’ve got you,” she whispered. She locked her legs around me and tightened them, squeezing harder and harder until I thought she might crush me, and then released them and laughed.

  “You could have killed me,” I said, only half joking.

  She smiled. “But I am not a killer,” she said, her hair washing against my face. She buried her lips in my neck. “Mon pauvre Babe.”

  I could smell her, and it came to me, a shock of recognition that made me sit up suddenly, sending her to the mattress.

  “Jesus,” I said. “You were there.” She crouched on all fours, uncomprehending. “Your perfume. I’ve smelled it before. At Richard’s apartment in San Francisco.”

  “What are you saying?” she demanded angrily.

  “You were in California. It was you who asked Feldman to call Richard. He never said that Richard had a son, just that he had a child. I assumed it was Pitot. But it wasn’t, was it? It’s you.”

  “You’re crazy! You don’t know anything!” Her eyes flashed as her voice rose.

  “He refused you. So you called him. I listened to the goddamned messages. I can’t believe I never placed your voice. ‘You have to talk to me.’ That’s what you said. But he wouldn’t. So you followed him to Napa.”

  She picked up the bottle of wine and flung it at me. It shattered against the fireplace, the wine hissing in the flames.

  “Were you and Jean in on it together?”

  “You sick son of a bitch!” She ran to the door and turned to face me. “You think I killed my own father?” she screamed. “Go home!” she yelled, grabbing her purse and jacket and slamming the door behind her.

  For a while, I just sat there, stunned. Eventually I roused myself and cleaned up. I felt like I’d come full circle—sweeping broken glass into a dustpan, just as I’d done at the trailer—and yet the circle seemed less than complete, as if one critical section were missing. I fed the fire one last time and called Janie.

  “I’ve been dying to hear from you,” she said. “Why haven’t you called? Is everything okay?”

  “Nothing’s okay,” I said. “You simply wouldn’t believe it, if I told you.”

  “Tell me. I want to know everything.”

  I wasn’t about to tell her everything. I certainly wasn’t going to tell her about Monique—neither that I had nearly slept with her nor that she was Janie’s niece. I limited myself to the murder of Lucas Kiers, the suicide of Jean Pitot, and the discovery of Eric Feldman’s mutilated corpse. That was enough.

  “This is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard,” Janie said. “I can’t believe it.” She was practically frantic. “What about you? How are you?”

  “I feel like I’m standing in the center of a hurricane. I’m surprisingly calm, but I think the shock’s going to set in any moment. It’s totally out of control.”

  “What are the police doing? They should arrest someone.”

  “There’s no one to arrest. The French kid is dead. It’s a mess, but it’s one they’re going to have to clean up.”

  We were quiet for a while, and then she said, “When are you coming home? I told Danny he could spend Thanksgiving with you, and he’s really looking forward to it.”

  “I’ve got a few loose ends to tie up. I’m going to try to get out of here tomorrow. I’ll call you from Paris.”

  “Babe, please take of yourself. Be safe, okay?” Her voice started to work on me, and I had to choke down a sob as I realized how close I’d come to being in real danger myself and how much I missed her and Danny.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I sat in front of the fireplace until it died. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to get home for Thanksgiving, but I also needed to call Sackheim. I decided that I’d call him from the airport, relay what had happened, and leave it to the French cops to arrest Monique Azzine. Let Sackheim work it all out with Ciofreddi, I said to myself. I just want to get back to my own kid.

  In the morning I drove into Beaune. I turned in my car and had the attendant call me a taxi. The cab arrived and I settled into the backseat, then sat up and said, “Never mind. Sorry,” and grabbed my bag. He cursed me as I got out of the car.

  “Hey! I changed my mind, okay? Fuck yourself,” I said in English, tossed him ten euros, and went back into the Hertz office.

  27

  I apologized to the agent and explained that something had suddenly come up and that I’d need the car for another day or two. She was aggravated at having to print out another contract. As she prepared the paperwork, I stepped outside to call Janie.

  “There’s one more thing I need to do before I take off. It’s too complicated to explain. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take.” Her silence was damning. “I might not make it back tomorrow.”

  “Christ, Babe. I can’t believe you.”

  “Tell Danny I’ll make it up to him. I promise.”

  “Do you have any idea how much he was counting on this?” she said and hung up.

  Then I called Air France and changed my reservation to the following day. I’d need to wake up at dawn to catch a train back to Paris, but I had little choice. The ticket cost a fortune, and I was suddenly grateful that Janie had refused my refund of her check.

  I drove to the gendarmerie. Sackheim hadn’t arrived, and I waited in the car. I couldn’t get Monique out of my mind. She had implicitly conceded the salient fact that Richard was her father but had failed to answer the only question to which I wanted an answer: Had she killed him?

  Sackheim arrived in his Citroën. I caught up with him on the gravel. He was astonished.

  “This isn’t over yet,” I said. “I couldn’t leave. I need you to come with me.”

  He pondered this for a moment, examining me skeptically.

  “No, you come with me,” he said.

  I followed him into the station, where he greeted the officer on duty with a cursory bonjour and led us up the staircase and down a hallway. The place was virtually empty. Other than a few computers at which several officers were tapping away and what sounded like a whirring fax machine, the station was strangely quiet. Sackheim escorted me to the room where he, Ponsard, and I had met two days before. Ponsard’s geneaology was still on the blackboard, but now the bulletin boards lining the walls were covered with photographs, reports, and handwritten notes.

  “Wait her
e,” Sackheim ordered me. “I have a few things to attend to. Then we will talk.”

  He disappeared, and I walked around the room. There were photographs of Lucas Kiers from a dozen different angles interspersed with photographs of the Bois de Corton and photographs of the Pitots’ house—the front yard, the well, the antique wine press, and, of course, the grave from which they had disinterred Feldman’s body. The photos of Feldman were particularly gruesome. It was hard to say, but it looked to me as if Pitot had tried to flay him, had found the task too difficult, had given up, and then had furiously sliced chunks of the writer’s arms and legs off. I was no expert, but the nicks that dotted his corpse appeared to have been made in an outburst of frustration, completely random and violent slashes inflicted by a mad young man overwhelmed by the horror of the act he was committing. I stopped in front of the photograph of Feldman’s left wrist. It was a clean cut, probably done with a pruning saw.

  Sackheim returned to the room, came up beside me, and gazed at the photo.

  “I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” I apologized. “I know your hands are full, but where is everybody? I thought this place would be a madhouse.”

  “Yes, well, we have three deaths to deal with, but two of them are Americans. Paris has taken charge of the investigation. It is out of my hands.” Sackheim seemed at a loss. “But you, I thought you were leaving today, non?”

  “Yeah, well, I thought so, too. But there’s something I have to tell you, something that happened last night.”

  He walked to the table and took a seat, gesturing for me to do the same. He folded his hands and nodded for me to proceed.

  I described the scene at the gîte the night before. I left out the part about my rolling around with Monique on the mattress and cut to the part of her confessing that Richard Wilson was her father.

  “And how did you . . . ?” Sackheim’s face was knotted.

  “I smelled her. Her perfume . . . I smelled the same perfume at Wilson’s apartment in San Francisco. When I told her, she went crazy. She basically admitted it was true.”