Walls of a Mind

by John Brooke

  To be sure, there is also fatalistic nuance on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

  The lizard stopped. It was staring at her. Kindred spirits? The lizard gave up trying to penetrate her gaze. It scuttled down to the base of the wall and disappeared inside a crack.

  Aliette did not feel like moving.

  · 35 ·

  PRINCE AT A PICNIC

  Atrocity at Maraussan! filled Saturday’s front page. Prince had found a copy on a chaise longue by the pool behind the house where he’d passed a miserable night. Not as miserable as the night before; the unlocked cabana was filled with pool equipment and accoutrements, including an inflatable mat. One small blessing. But he was still hungry, and now morbidly certain as to his role as dupe in someone’s nasty game. The Just Friends were not mentioned in the coverage of the assassination of Regional President Roland Bousquet. No surprise — it was not a name many people knew, reporters included. The paper suggested that so-called ‘wine terrorists’ were now resorting to deadly extremes. Maybe they were. What mattered was that he was surely in a frame for murder, an impossible box of someone else’s making. The logic of last weekend’s arrests and Monday’s bombs was just too easy and someone had used it for all its worth. Who were they? How had they known? Prince found himself under a difficult cloud as he stumbled on through another brilliant Midi morning.

  The mountainous woman marking the place where Stephanie McLeod either was or wasn’t waiting for him remained in the farthest distance. He had to get there, he had nowhere else to go. The words of the Just Friends manifesto were well etched in his memory. He tried marching to the words that contained the ideas that had brought him to this place…They say the family is coming back, the couple is coming back. But the family that’s coming back is not the same one that went away... But repetition only opened a dangerous door to the past. And doubt.

  There were so many cause-and-effect moments between then and now.

  He wanted to believe it had started with the simple, clear conviction: I hate this, because it’s not right. He needed to think it had built from that personal moment — a revelation? — toward inevitable encounters with like-minded souls, the shared sentiment that to plant a bomb might be a useful thing to do. Noble! It had always been a group endeavour — excluding some legendary individuals, the growth process does not happen alone. And it hadn’t happened overnight. One grows gracefully, through reading, thinking — Prince had a suitcase full of key books that travelled with him. And listening — to teachers, lovers, mentors. Magical people, strong people. They had seen the right thing, passed him along to the right people — voilà, he’d found himself at meetings. Real meetings. Real plans. Suddenly you’re working on an operation. Your name is Prince…

  Prince had been through the dream so many times in these last days.

  It felt like the last days. It felt like the dream couldn’t hold.

  Dream and memory. And the distressing cracks as he stumbled on…

  With each step, Prince, born MacGregor Spratt to staunchly middle-class parents in the heart of Edinburgh, heard a chorus singing, ‘Greggy Spratt! Greggy Spratt! Where are you? Where are you?’ They sang as if it were a game, because it was for them, searching for the skinny boy hiding in the muddy creeks of Holyrood Park. ‘Come out, come out, Greggy! Here, boy! Here, boy! No point hiding. Come out and face it. We gonna kick yer wee bottom and send you home! Here, boy… come on, Greggy, come take your medicine!’ And he would run, but they would find him. Leave him shivering in tears, without his trousers. A boy’s first real challenge: How to make it out of the park and home without your pants on.

  He hadn’t thought of it in years.

  Does a professed anarchist block out the past because it’s useless? Or merely painful? Is a professed anarchist a bullied child bent on revenge? He knew too well there was no nobility in that… Don’t give in to self-pity now! It’s not about you, it’s about the Cause. But the loneliness that morning was vivid, overpowering. Prince indulged in some serious sadness as he wandered in the wilderness.

  Toward love? Could Stephanie McLeod actually love him?

  I love you… I’ll be in touch. You either believe. Or leave. Prince knew that if he left without trying, everything would have been in vain. He marched.

  He chanted, Dream it through, man, dream it through.

  Eventually he came to the crest of another hill. Directly below: a confluence of three roads, the quiet Départmentale he’d been tracing, and two others, busier; the river just beyond. Prince recognized the place and knew where he was. The giantess in the skyline hadn’t moved an inch, but the distance to his goal was now measurable — about twenty minutes by car. He had no car, but at least he knew.

  He descended to the road and, as casually as possible, crossed, heading for the river, just another backpacker out on a Sunday ramble.

  The Orb flowed fast and clean through a tight, steep-banked passage five kilometres west of Cessenon, stirring a series of not-too-dangerous rapids, carving hundreds of sandy nooks. A popular spot for swimming, kayaking, sunning and picnicking, especially on a Sunday in July. Prince came upon a busy scene in the park overlooking the gorge where families were gathered at picnic tables. His head warned him to go the other way. His stomach kept him moving forward till he loitered on the edge of the park, watching, awaiting his chance.

  A family, four cars filled with kids, adults and one grandma, had commandeered three tables and were setting up for the day — chairs, parasols, swimming toys and soccer balls, and a neatly laid table at the centre of it all with several hampers and coolers placed protectively in its shade. Preparations done, they left grandmother on guard and headed for the rocks, kiddies screeching, parents herding.

  When they were safely gone, Prince approached the elderly mamé, dozing in the shade of the parasol. She came out of her dream with an instinctive flinch.

  Smiling an empty smile, Prince proffered his gun. It was the gesture of the kind of man he abhorred, and he felt absurd. But it held the poor woman stunned in silence as he liberated two large Tupperware bowls from the stash beneath the table. Potato salad. Chicken legs. There was a baguette. And, praise the lord! the cooler was filled with pop and beer. Prince took two bottles of Kronenbourg, smiled his apologies at the lady, and ran for the adjacent fields.

  When he knew he was out of sight, he veered down through the rows of vines to the banks of the Orb. Crossing, part of his baguette got soaked. The gun too.

  He had no idea if that mattered. Prince was an angry man, but he was never a killer.

  He ran on, wet and thrilled, keeping the river in sight. At a certain point he looked and realized that he could no longer see the sleeping giantess — but he didn’t need to now. The river would take him to Vieussan. And Tupperware technology kept the best part of his loot dry and fresh till he scrambled into a thickly treed copse, sat back against a rock and gorged.

  The second beer was pure pleasure. The world seemed better.

  He napped, easily lulled by the soporific hops. Then walked for a few more hours.

  ·

  Sunday evening, he finished the food, washed the bowls in the river and then let them float away, back downstream. He hoped the old woman forgave him. It would be horrible to die with the thought of gormless men wielding guns and stealing food. But she had seemed a fit enough old dear… But why was Prince thinking of death?

  Because the situation demanded that he should.

  He understood it was not an old woman’s fate at issue here, but his own.

  He was watching the river and deciding to die well, imbued with a purpose. He removed the phone from his pack, unwrapped it and tried again. One ring. A connection. ‘Steph?’

  She murmured, ‘The first time should always be the only time.’

  His heart skipped, the line went dead. But he’d heard her. Clearly.

  Smiling at the stars, his life fixe
d in one instant of genuine certainty, Prince destroyed that final phone.

  · 36 ·

  LA VIGNERONNE

  Aliette was not sure if she was meant to put in an appearance at the funeral for Roland Bousquet. She didn’t really feel like it. She would do her best to bring the perpetrator of his ghastly demise to justice, of course, but she didn’t much like the man. He hadn’t liked her. She knew that if he hadn’t exploded, he would have skipped out on the promised interview.

  As it was, events soon intervened to send her Monday in a very different direction. The inspector had barely sipped her morning coffee when the phone rang. ‘Aliette?...Margot. I have something you should hear.’ She listened to a brief exchange intercepted the night before. After the beep, without offering an interpretation, much less asking for her thoughts, Agent Tessier moved efficiently on. ‘I’ll be heading to Vieussan shortly to set up the operation. See you there?’

  ‘What operation?’

  But Margot was gone.

  Chief Inspector Nouvelle was not obliged to report at the behest of DST Agent Tessier. But Margot was moving and there would be no discussion — come, or miss out. Aliette was staring dumbly at the phone, trying to link Stephanie McLeod’s opaque allusion to ‘the first time’ with Margot Tessier’s stern directive, when Mathilde Lahi arrived at her office door with the prostitute from the corner on the highway to the beach.

  ‘Bonjour… Louise?’

  ‘Maryse.’

  ‘Right. Come in…’ She wore the same cheap diaphanous yellow-blue flower print dress she wore every day. Did her regulars not deserve something different occasionally?

  Sitting, the visitor ventured, ‘Perhaps there’s something.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘From last Monday.’

  Last Monday seemed long ago. ‘And so?’

  Maryse made it clear she wanted coffee. It was provided, with a bun. Then she explained:

  Not all the men who stopped to pass time with Maryse were long-haul Euro routiers. She had some regular local guys. One such man had come by yesterday. In fact, Sundays were mostly devoted to local trade. Loneliness, boredom, not interested in following the wife to mass, whatever, Sundays were when it came to a head, so to speak. This particular man owned a small parcel of vines, had five kids and a wife with a mood disorder. More to the point, he had strongly supported Joël Guatto’s feckless political campaign.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this when we talked last week?’

  The pute screwed up her face. Silly question. ‘Because it didn’t happen till yesterday.’

  ‘I meant the fact you have a client who supported Joël Guatto.’

  ‘Not important,’ said Maryse.

  ‘It is not your job to decide these things, madame.’

  Maryse held her ground. ‘This is not about him.’

  Aliette breathed. ‘Go on.’

  Maryse’s grower always told her everything. With his dwindling prospects and his wife’s loss of emotional balance, he needed a confessor. Yesterday morning, as he and Maryse passed a gentle hour in the back of his van, he’d fretted over the raft of violence escalating around the politics of wine. First Joël Guatto. Now Roland Bousquet. Not that her client ever trusted the likes of Roland, ‘…but after Friday, he’s truly worried for his own safety. He’s starting to think there’s a conspiracy — a government thing? Kept saying his kind are almost extinct in any case, would they take steps to hasten the process? He’s convinced he knows how it works — they hire people and quietly wipe out anyone with links to a problem, the big fish first, the Bousquets, Guattos, then everyone else…A lot of paranoid rubbish, of course. But I don’t judge. Between him thinking like that and his wife’s problems, what kind of life must it be at home? Mm? Poor man.’ Maryse chewed her bun, reflecting ruefully on her unacknowledged responsibilities.

  Aliette asked, ‘Is there a point to his?’

  The lady gave her head a slow, disgusted shake in response to one more civil servant who could not give a shit about anything except their own little bit of bother. Then continued:

  As Maryse did what she could to ease her client’s worry, he had lain there in the back of his dirty truck fitfully humming a tune. ‘I told him, That’s pretty, sounds like a marching song. And he tells me, But that’s exactly what it is, ma belle. “La Vigneronne,” from the glory days of ’07, a hundred years ago. He said Joël Guatto’s sister played it on the piano at some resto in the hills — election night, I mean — and it made everyone proud, despite their man’s pitiful showing.’ So the man had hummed an ode to the glory days as Maryse finished up her business. Then it was Piotr, a regular who made the trip to Spain each week for a fruit distributor in Warsaw. ‘Then Jacqueline and I — that’s my partner — we’re eating our lunch and it came to me. That was the song from Monday. I thought about it last night. My husband said because I am a good citizen, I should go and see you. Et voilà…’ Here she was.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you have a husband.’

  ‘Is it relevant?’

  ‘Which song?’

  ‘About la vigneronne. It didn’t mean a thing to me, ’07 and all that. But the tune. It’s the same tune the woman was humming when she passed by that day.’

  ‘You’re sure.’

  ‘My client’s not exactly Aznavour, but why else would it come into my head like that?’

  Good point. Aliette put a list of names in front of Maryse. Perhaps her local client was also a client of the Police Judiciaire, one of the dozen small growers Magui Barthès had talked to.

  Maryse did not even look at it. ‘No names. My livelihood depends on trust and discretion.’

  The inspector let it go. She teased a few more threads of description from the hooker’s memory, the key being reddish curls escaping from beneath the sun bonnet. And La Vigneronne.

  Then she offered her hand. ‘Merci, madame. Your help is appreciated.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I might have to get back to you.’

  ‘You know where to find me.’

  At her corner, in plain view — like the obvious piece of the puzzle now revealed.

  Both her inspectors were still at their desks, arranging their weeks. Aliette debated with herself whether to include Henri. She decided no. There was no time for Noëlli’s weepy games.

  She quietly ordered Magui to drop what she was doing and follow her to Domaine Guatto.

  · 37 ·

  THE UNTRACEABLE DAUGHTERS

  Madeleine Guatto was feeding the dog. Blako? ‘Oui, c’est ça,’ Magui confirmed it.

  ‘Bonjour, madame.’ She was different, not the same woman Aliette had engaged at the reception for her tragic son. Observing from the same medicated distance — no change there; but more real, if not entirely natural: Madeleine and Blako, framed in the wide, dark entrance to the cave in the quiet of the morning. And infinitely more strange: all in white from throat to ankles — her nightgown, a dirty flannel — like a well-travelled angel, lost in the ages, but kindly, come to feed a famished dog, a tired smile for the police. And very contrite as she confessed the loss of the Brazilian detective. A nice man had brought it. The book had been somewhere, next on her list, now it was nowhere. How to correct this careless sin? Aliette listened politely, eyes moving past her, into the shadows of the cave, searching for assistance, gesturing at Magui Barthès, who slipped away into the cave in search of back-up. She laid a comforting hand on Madeleine’s. ‘It’s fine, madame.’ She was sure the Brazilian detective would turn up.

  ‘I have an Italian, eats the most beautiful fish. I could give you him.’

  ‘I was really hoping to have a word with Noëlli.’

  ‘And an Austrian! Oh my, he must be the funniest Austrian that ever was, I mean if you’ve met Austrians…I could give you the Austrian and the Italian and I will send a special order to the de
aler in Paris, but it will likely take a while — it’s just that we are in the middle of nowhere here, at least as far as Paris. Be patient, Inspector, I promise I will put this to rights.’

  The inspector was trying to be. ‘Noëlli, madame. I need to talk to her.’

  She paused and stared at the dog, busy at its bowl. ‘But they took her away.’

  ‘Took her away? When?’

  ‘Yesterday? Maybe the day before. You can lose track of the days out here. And my daughter is so… how to say it? Untraceable? There was an Urgence car here, and some people.’

  Untraceable was a good word. ‘Is your husband around?’

  ‘Not really. He’s in his bed. So sad, apparently something’s wrong with his friend Roland. But, well, we work as a team, don’t we? I mean, marriage — you have to. Despite everything, we are a family and I will always feed the dog… Eh, mon beau Blako?’

  A sad murmur. The dog ignored it. He was hungry.

  Magui reappeared. Not a soul to be found.

  Madeleine Guatto asked, ‘Did you put your name in it? That could help us track it down.’

  Aliette said, ‘What about Paul?’

  ‘Ah. Good idea. I have his number.’ But where was the phone?

  It took a while — time enough for the inspector’s frustration to boil over, ‘Bordel! Bordel! Bordel!...’ then dissolve completely when weary angel Madeleine returned from the house with the offered books — but Paul Guatto finally rolled up in a dusty old Renault.

  And Magui Barthès said, ‘That has to be the car.’

  ·

  ‘A breakdown of some kind.’ Paul Guatto saw the skeptical look in both cops’ eyes. ‘A real one, even I could see that… We couldn’t find her Saturday morning. Her car was still here so we went out into the vines. She’s been doing a lot of midnight walking since my brother…’