Stifling Folds of Love

by John Brooke

  Conan looked up, dubious after exploring the sculptor’s eyes. ‘Shot?’

  ‘Photographed. Tommi Bonneau…’ Gesturing at the bird. ‘How else would that happen?’

  Raphaele said, ‘But Pearl Serein’s not blind.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Pearl Serein. It’s her men. They’re dead. I want to know if they were blind.’

  ‘But why does it matter?’

  ‘Raphaele, for God’s sake…I don’t know!’ Suddenly struggling to regain the control essential to credibility. ‘Think of Claude! He’s been stalking Claude with his unholy camera. Please!’

  Conan muttered, ‘Need some help here.’ He had Tuche’s left eye clamped open and needed an extra pair of hands to position the head and steady a microscope under his light. Raphaele Petrucci was suspicious, assessing silently as he obediently gave his attention to the doctor.

  Aliette watched them for an empty moment. Then she turned to Patrice Lebeau, dutifully waiting by the morgue door. She took him aside for a word — after which, he dashed away.

  ‘I can see some sort of deterioration on the back of the retina,’ reported Conan, ‘but the man’s been dead for more than week. We really don’t have the right equipment here and I can’t honestly say I’d know what to look for even if we did… I do know an excellent ophthalmologist at the faculty who would be delighted to — ’

  Aliette interjected, ‘He’s got this elaborate camera set-up.’ It was too late to care if Raphaele, or anyone else, deduced her unsanctioned comings and goings.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Lights and cords all over the place.’

  Conan shrugged. ‘This is normal for photography.’

  ‘The electricity you were talking about…in the brain…and the heart?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I…I don’t know! But it fits and you have to give me something to get me through that door!’

  Dr. Gilles Conan backed away from the force of her. Offended? Not again…please.

  She tried to atone. ‘I’m sorry.’ This professor was open to suggestions. Was he open to the vagaries of the environment in which she had to do her work? ‘I’m not sure how to put this. I’ve pulled the judge away from his supper. He’s coming down here. It has to be tonight or I’m done. I don’t know how you scientists do it, but sometimes a cop has to make a move.’

  ‘Scientists proceed as scientists,’ grunted Conan, ‘These could be burn marks…’ Pondering it, opening the next drawer, uncovering the remains of another formerly highly eligible man. ‘Why don’t we see if these others have the same marks on the back of their eyes?’

  They hauled out Bruno, Georges and Pierre, lined them up with Ray and Didi, and had a look.

  Aliette waited, pacing in circles, rubbing her temples, trying to will a flash of brilliance.

  40

  The Judge Could See

  Gérard Richand was no crusader. There was really nothing to crusade for — or against — in this dullish mid-sized city where they’d placed him and where he’d stayed. Where he was comfortable and doing well. No crusader; but he believed in what he did and believed he made an honest effort.

  Gérard had come away from his meeting with Norbert Fauré feeling cynical. His meeting with Inspector Nouvelle had brought that feeling into high relief. He hated to bring it home. It had gnawed as he helped his two young boys with their homework, then eaten supper with his wife. He was just sitting down with some tea and a book when Inspector Nouvelle had called.

  Gérard was reading poetry. He often found it an antidote to the masses of legalese he waded through every day. It helped stanch the bitter aftertaste of the words of unscrupulous divisionnaires.

  Not Baudelaire. Too florid, too resolutely decadent. Gérard preferred an Apollonaire, so solid, honorable in his seeing, or a Paul Verlaine, champion of les nécessités de la vie et la consequence des rêves (the necessities of life and the consequence of dreams), and he sometimes even allowed himself to imagine he shared the same deep gaze as these large men. Or the ascetic eye of an Irish priest (also called Gerard) — his poem about watching a bird fly. Perfect. And he loved the abstractions of Stevens, an American, whose playful logic Gérard found so highly stimulating precisely because it almost, but never quite touched the cooler legal logic that was his own.

  Poetry was relaxing. Refreshing. Now, rudely pulled away, here he was, back at work.

  Inspector Nouvelle was presenting him with a dead bird, explaining, ‘We believe this bird may provide a link to physical evidence inside the home of Tomas Bonneau.’

  Dr. Gilles Conan backed her up. ‘There is a definite possibility of burn-type scarring common to each victim’s eyes. An overdose of extreme light is logical. The way things stand, we would be irresponsible not to investigate thoroughly.’

  A bird?

  (…you were happy in spring/ With the half colors of quarter things,/ The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,/ The single bird, the obscure moon — / The obscure moon lighting an obscure world…Sometimes Monsieur le Juge had an urge to send a few cogent lines or even an entire poem along with his memos and decisions. But he never did.)

  Folding his arms across his chest, Gérard remained silent, listening to Dr. Conan talk about electricity and light until Inspector Lebeau joined them. With a quiet word to Inspector Nouvelle, who in turn whispered something to Dr. Petrucci, the bodies and hearts of Pearl Serein’s lovers were hastily wrapped and replaced in their respective drawers. The only dead body on display when Inspector Lebeau escorted in the seedy elfin man with ragged hair, streaked goatee and gray-tinged smoker’s skin, was the bird’s. Inspector Nouvelle introduced Paulin Soublin, a retired high school biology teacher. Gérard Richand took note of the name — Gérard’s wife, a local woman, had been excited to find her old bio prof included in that day’s instalment of Le Soir’s new series devoted to the Pearl Serein scandal. His wife liked calling it a scandal. As opposed to a circus.

  Monsieur Soublin bowed. Presented with the deceased bird, he stroked his horrid beard in a bizarrely vainglorious manner and pronounced, ‘To photograph a bird or a woman, this is certainly a spiritual thing in that one must seek and wait at the same time. Yes? I told Bonneau this and he took it to heart. Some of the young women at the lycée were perfect…quite perfect.’ Gérard Richand planted his feet against encroaching vertigo. A retired teacher, and spouting such stupid muck. Observing Inspector Nouvelle and the two doctors defer to this gentleman, he retreated deeper still into a bemused distance. Pleasantries complete, they got down to the matter at hand.

  The inspector wanted to know: Had this bird been blinded before it smashed through a window and into a car and died? The retired teacher stroked his beard. A tic, surmised Gérard. The pride of celebrity so apparent in his face when introduced was now shaded into doubt, maybe fear. Well, it must have been odd for Monsieur Soublin — the police morgue, a judge, two inspectors, two doctors, and a question. But of all the dead things being considered that evening, only the bird remained.

  Without the benefit of any context that might prejudice his scientific opinion, Soublin warily accepted a pair of tweezers, took his place at Conan’s viewer and looked through it into the eyes of the bird. He adjusted the focus for a hellishly long minute, then began poking with the tweezers. He gently plucked one of the eyes, trailing a gunky mass of tissue as he pulled it free of the socket. Making an incision near the base, he positioned the eye and looked again, muttering, ‘uh-hum, uh-hum…’ in a way that must have driven thousands of adolescents straight up the classroom wall. ‘Yes,’ he finally said, ‘this bird’s optic system was certainly damaged. This misting on the cornea? A burn. Somewhat like freezer burn, you see?’

  ‘And what may have caused it?’ prompted Conan.

  ‘Too much light, most likely,’ stated Paulin Soublin — this without any hesitation. ‘It happens all the time in urban areas. They’re easily stunned, traumatized …occasionally blinded.’

  Heari
ng that, Dr. Conan motioned Inspector Nouvelle aside. As they conferred, Pathologist Petrucci began to go through his cappuccino prep routine. Patrice Lebeau waited by the door. Left facing the retired teacher with the unkempt fingers, Gérard Richand could think of nothing to say. He had never liked biology much. He asked, ‘What kind of bird is this?’

  ‘Goldfinch.’

  ‘Ah.’ Gérard’s wife had been thinking she wanted a goldfinch, to keep her company now that both the boys were off at school. But this was not something he would share with Paulin Soublin.

  Soublin asked, ‘Is this related to the murders of my former students?’

  Gérard smiled, politely unforthcoming.

  When Dr. Conan and the inspector returned to the table, Monsieur Soublin was surprised to be thanked and summarily escorted out by Inspector Lebeau. The bodies, hearts and eyeballs of the lovers were pulled out and unwrapped. Petrucci offered coffee and panettone all around.

  The doctor went over it extensively, talking about how the retina was not only like a camera, but also a brain, an information-processing nervous system unto itself, and about photo receptors, the transduction of light into electrical signals…and about electricity and heartbeat, heart rhythm and stress, then electricity again, and its correlation, emotion. He again considered the stress on men who find themselves alone with their hearts, their lives, feeling crushed, angry, susceptible…

  Listening, watching, Gérard Richand knew Aliette Nouvelle had worked her dubious magic on Dr. Conan. It was obvious the man was smitten, entranced and beaming as he dared them to consider, beaming shamelessly for her, inspired, giving them the possibilities, drawing on a lifetime’s worth of study, making theory sound like poetry.

  While she stood there, so serious, highly impatient, waiting.

  Gérard knew because he had experienced the same thing, personally (eight sweet months, nine long years ago) and professionally (every time she came through his office door): this intriguing cop’s maddening machinations. More than that: Gérard knew he was going to grant her permission to ask the procureur for a redirected mandate which would include access to the residence of Tomas Bonneau. But not automatically. Never automatically. Gérard Richand would first consider and assess, and demonstrate his place in the scheme of things.

  Gérard knew Aliette thought him stubborn, stuffy, tied to rules and principles. Well, he probably was. You had to be — if not, who were you? He had his reasons, she had hers — different roles, different reasons. He thought, pace away, Inspector. The judge ignored the restless cop.

  He sipped cappuccino, listened, asked questions, made notes.

  And after a time Gérard Richand lost track of Conan’s esoteric explanations. Yes, he could be interested in the effects of light, but he was far more interested in Conan’s strutting, which was driven by Conan’s blatant pride in his knowledge, the thing that made him who he was, and his strangely unabashed wanting more than anything to give his all for her. Inspector Aliette Nouvelle… As Conan drew links between a blast of light and the failure of a heart, Gérard began to draw his own. He was starting to see the problem as one of self-contained systems of logic within each man. Not logical like the law. More like the logic of a poem. This unsettling case was about men. Men’s hearts. Hearts were all they had to go on. The needs of hearts. A common need? There was a pattern here that made sense to a judge who was also a man.

  Gérard had heard two very different men assert their claim to Pearl Serein:

  Claude Néon. Remy Lorentz.

  Of all the things Lorentz had told him, most cogent were the answers to his very first questions:

  ‘Why did you pursue her?’

  ‘I was pissed off…had enough.’

  ‘You were angry. At her?’

  ‘No! At the Law. The System. Guys like you, the ones with the strings in their hands.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t see!’ Remy Lorentz had been adamant. ‘She belongs with me! She needs me!’

  ‘She belongs with you? Why you and not them…the others?’

  ‘My world! — not yours…Not the law. Not those rich pricks. That’s not who she is!’

  It was just there, at the locus of the workingman’s invective and the caustic bile, the uniquely personal thing separating Remy Lorentz, humble tennis instructor, so irrevocably from the ‘notable’ men in the life of Pearl Serein. It wasn’t social class or the specifics of intelligence. Here was a man’s expression, from the heart, as it were, of where he stood in his perceived relation to her. It was this idea of love and a man’s special province…

  Then Néon: an impetuous cop stuck in a maudlin hero fantasy, believing he was the last man in the world, her inevitable and only choice: ‘If it’s not them, it must be me.’ Believing it to the point of professional blindness. It had to be me, confessed the errant cop.

  My world! insisted the loathsome jock.

  Both had divulged a sense of inevitability where it came to the love of Pearl Serein.

  Inevitability arising from a proprietary heart.

  And as the scientist talked on, Gérard Richand considered Tomas Bonneau.

  The gossip columnist was an even lower form than that cretin tennis pro, but: Our Pearl…the man continued to build this fantasy that Pearl Serein somehow belonged to him and his readers. Love’s inquiry. Those of us who live in her image. Celebrity-driven trash, to be sure, but it was more than a fan club. It was as if Bonneau had set himself up as leader of an exclusive populace of the heart (the poet Stevens again, helping Gérard begin to see it clearly).

  But here was a real question: Was Bonneau the disinterested creator of the fantasy of Pearl Serein, a priori, the hard X around which these discombobulated hearts revolved?

  Or was he another player, like Néon and Lorentz? And the seven victims?

  So mused the judge, yanked away from his reading for the sake of a dead bird.

  It was just a bird. A goldfinch.

  But the judge could see it might be a way of progressing, of moving one step closer to an answer. He almost smiled. Almost. Because Gérard avoided smiling when he was working. It was an absurd situation but a serious matter. He stood, taciturn, the way they expected him to, watching a learned scientist, in his element, doing his utmost bit to win a smile from Inspector Nouvelle.

  It was the heart. It was a sense of ownership.

  The judge could see it plainly.

  41

  Anne-Marie Regrets

  While the judge was in the morgue assessing, Anne-Marie was in her van, sipping wine, studying regret — the double-edged kind, partly bitter, partly sentimental, her mind going in circles, feeling a familiar emptiness, that mix of misunderstanding and mistakes. Tommi…Tommi, Tommi. Twenty days of crazy magic. Exquisite energy. That awful anger. She had known it would end like this — because it always did. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have to wonder why.

  …At first Anne-Marie couldn’t believe Tommi Bonneau wasn’t completely cranked on speed. He was insulted when she’d dared to hint at it. His body was clean. He said his drug was light. ‘Electricity, Anne-Marie.’

  Electricity? She did not know much about it. It worked in guitars. Hair dryers. Kettles. Light bulbs — sure. But…His lights? So he showed her. It was horrible to see — his face ashen, his blasted red-rimmed eyes. But proof’s in the pudding, no? Running: When Tommi powered away into the empty night, it was the best thing she’d ever seen. Tommi’s body was sinewy and rock hard. The way he moved was creature-like in its intense exactness, large hands grasping ledges, railings — whatever there was to grasp Tommi found it and fastened on, long legs pushing, relentless. And he had a lumbering kind of energy when horizontal in his bed, an energy which built to a delirious hammering. She would dare him to go again. Tommi enjoyed being dared.

  Anne-Marie was raw below and empty-headed. She hadn’t eaten so much fish in her life.

  ‘Brain food. You want the brain to be working as fast as possible. As fast as it
was meant to.’

  And his vitamins and supplements. Carrots by the bag-full for his eyes. Grapes, green tea and flax-seed oil, ‘to keep the blood vessels open wide and clean.’ He would sip a glass of wine, a heavily watered pastis, but she hadn’t seen him do serious booze or gorge on sweets.

  On the other hand, one evening they’d stopped at a certain door for something not quite legal. ‘Growth hormone. Try some? Helps the heart pump more efficiently.’

  Tommi could do 500 ab crunches, 100 pull-ups, 250 push-ups without stopping…100 one-arms if he wanted to punish himself for a lapse in concentration. Concentration was everything. ‘The heart requires focus, Anne-Marie.’

  Then he would sit for an hour and breathe. ‘Breath is rhythm, rhythm is control of power.’

  Then he would stand in front of his beloved lights and blast himself to the point of delirium.

  It scared her — seeing him writhe in front of it, refusing to turn away.

  But Tommi fought through it. Till he controlled it — sucking all that light into his heart.

  He dared her to try it. She did. It hurt. It added nothing to her natural speed. It left her eyes burning, flooded with popping pools of over-brilliant flashing, her heart going wildly, her body needing to be used. Was that the power of electricity? The pulsing stopped but the light continued, an ever-deepening halo. ‘I can’t see, I get afraid.’ Blinded, lost for that bottomless time as the green-white rings opened and opened, seemingly limitless inside her mind.

  Tommi said, ‘It’s not because you can’t see. It’s because you can’t think.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Lying in his bed. Listening closer than she ever had to a man. It was not like the famous outlaw she had spent some years with. Poor Jacques, alone, overweight, maundering on about his lost heroics. You didn’t really need to listen, all you had to do was be there. Tommi was not Jacques. Anne-Marie listened to Tommi Bonneau. She knew she would never remember all the complicated words — only the sound of them. And being mesmerized.