Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  I suddenly felt my mouth turn dry, and I had to clear my throat before speaking. In that short interval, I’d remembered a scene, like a flash: I was talking with the super, a man named Mike, about painting the apartment before moving in. He had a stinking cold and kept blowing his nose on some paper tissues. And I’d remembered something else: the daily clutter of the dustcart passing down the street, at eight o’clock in the morning sharp.

  I looked out the window again. The sun was up and the sky was streaked with blood-red trails. It had rained during the night and a few puddles were still glinting in the courtyard. A black bird glided soundlessly toward the ground and then soared up.

  “So the whole thing was just a charade?” I asked.

  “No, Jack, it isn’t a charade. It’s a delusion.”

  “But what about Hale, Fleischer, and Simone, all those people and places I hadn’t even heard of before? What about the notebooks I told you about?”

  “How do you explain that they vanished?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I’m guessing Simone destroyed them after I made the mistake of telling her about Hale’s diary. She probably searched the apartment when I wasn’t there, and found them. I hadn’t exactly hidden them. They were on the coffee table in the living room.”

  “Listen to me, these are the facts we know so far. You’ve lived in that apartment since 1994. You moved there four years ago, when you started working for the Queens County Public Administrator. Before that, you worked for a retail company, and before that, you lived in California for five years. That’s as much as the police have been able to piece together so far.”

  “Never been to California, doc, that’s for sure.”

  “Oh, yes you have. As for the rest, you’re a ghost. There was a James L. Bertrand born and raised in Mercer County, New Jersey, the son of John and Nancy Bertrand, but he died in 1968, when he was twelve, from pneumonia. He’s buried in Greenwood Cemetery. The police presume that at some point, back in the eighties, or even earlier, you changed your identity and assumed a different name. Whoever forged your papers must have used Jack Bertrand’s identity because he died young and had no close relatives.

  “The police are still trying to confirm what Mr. Fleischer told us about your real identity. There are no fingerprints, dental records or medical information on file older than ten years, but you’ve offered me some clues during our discussion. I compared them with what Mr. Fleischer has told us and I think that your real name is Abraham Hale, and you two met a long time ago, at university.”

  And he proceeded to shove his version of my life down my throat, turning black into white.

  According to him, about two years ago I began seeing a doctor by the name of Vincent Roth, complaining of symptoms that suggested paranoid schizophrenia. The doctor prescribed some medication and I was hospitalized for three weeks in Bellevue, on 1st Avenue. I was discharged, but things got worse. I gradually lost all connections with my own life, and I started thinking about it as if it were the existence of a different person, a poor and profoundly disturbed man named Abraham Hale, whose life had been destroyed by one of his friends, someone he’d met at university when he was in his early twenties.

  The notebooks weren’t real. I probably knew all those details about that story—if they were true—because they were more or less my own fragmented recollections, which had been poured by my disturbed mind into a different mold.

  A year ago, after leaving the hospital, I’d met Margaret Lucas and asked her to come to my place once a week and play the role of a French woman named Simone Duchamp. So we’d begun a kind of bizarre relationship. When I ran out of money, she refused to continue. Finally, one night I went to her apartment, stabbed her to death, and watched her die. Earlier that night, I’d had an altercation on the street with Fleischer.

  Just in case, the DA’s office had gotten in touch with the French authorities and had asked if they had a case in their archives involving a Parisian woman by the name of Simone Duchamp, who had gone missing back in the mid-seventies. Their answer was no.

  I have so many questions, but don’t want to argue with anybody, because I know it would be useless. Money means power and rich people can get anything they need and do anything they want. Insignificant creatures like me have one single fundamental purpose, to do their bidding, and one single fundamental duty, to stay alive as long as they can in order to serve them. When a member of the master race gets angry, he can swallow you alive, gulping you down in one bite. That’s what this is all about.

  I don’t know how much Fleischer paid to stage the whole thing and how long I’m going to stay locked up in this funny farm. I don’t really care. But I’ll never let them take my memories from me. I know who I am and what I did and what I didn’t. I can remember lots of things: names, places, faces. I have a past, I’m wasting my present within these walls, and I’m still trying to imagine my future. I’ve walked down hundreds of streets, met thousands of people, and uttered millions of words. And they’re trying to do to me what they did to that man, Abraham Hale: to erase me, to nullify me, to take everything I have from me.

  I regret losing the notebooks. They would have proven once and for all how intelligent and good hearted was Abraham Hale, and what a manipulative monster is Joshua Fleischer. So every now and then I try to recall everything I read in those pages, every single word and every single comma. Maybe I’ve missed something, and the secrets of that time in Paris were hidden somewhere between the lines and now are buried among my recollections. I feel I still have a duty to that man to reveal his real character, even though he intended to make himself obscure while writing those notes: he concealed the mystery inside another mystery, and then inside another, like those Russian dolls. But one day I’ll remember everything, I’m sure. There’s no need to hurry, because here life itself has lost all shape and consistency and it’s been turned into a swarm of echoes, stirring through the caves of time.

  fifteen

  New York, New York, six months ago

  MALLORY CALLED ME after a couple of days and asked if I’d read the diary.

  “Yes, I have. Did that Bertrand guy die in hospital?”

  “Yes, in Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, in March 1999. He hanged himself in a toilet.”

  “Were they sure that he was actually Abraham Hale?”

  “Well, that’s what they thought, based on what Joshua Fleischer told them and on what was in that diary. But they couldn’t find anyone who was able to identify him for sure, because Fleischer didn’t want to get involved in this matter and there were no legal means of making him cooperate against his will. Bertrand’s parents had already passed away, and there was no next of kin. And just between you and me, I don’t think that the police spent too long trying to figure out who the guy really was. He killed that woman, got arrested at the scene, found guilty but insane, and put behind bars in a forensic hospital. The case was closed, so everybody was happy. No one really gave a damn whether he was some nobody from Louisiana or a loser from New Jersey, as long as he was locked up in a nuthouse.”

  “Yes, you’re probably right.”

  “On the other hand, I talked to my contact in France again. There’s no Simone Duchamp filed under Missing Persons either. Could you check whether it’s the right name? Maybe Fleischer lied to you and our girl never even existed.”

  “I don’t think he lied to me, why would he have done that? And he wasn’t delusional, either. Listen, I know that Simone lived in Lyon with her parents for many years. Her adoptive father, Lucas Duchamp, was a hero of the Resistance. Oh, yes, she had a younger sister, Laura. Did I mention that?”

  “No, you didn’t. Okay, I’ll keep digging around, but I ought to tell that you might be wasting your money.”

  “Did you find anything about the period when Josh and Abraham were living in Paris?”

  “I think I’ve tracked down their apartment, on the Rue de Rome. In the mid-eighties, the building was completely renovated and converted i
nto a small hotel. A man named Alain Bizerte worked there as a super at the time, but he died ten years ago. There’s no record of the people who rented rooms there before it became a hotel. The foundation that rented the apartment, L’Etoile, ceased operations in eighty-one, and nobody knows where its archives are. So …”

  “I really need to know the truth about this case, Ken.”

  “Well, if wishes were cars, panhandlers would drive Jags. I’m good at what I do, but I’m not a wizard. I was lucky enough when I came across that diary. See me for a coffee on Friday at three p.m., at Starbucks on 80th and York.”

  “I know a nice restaurant in the area.”

  “Thanks, but my wife put me on a diet.”

  That evening I worked until late, and then slept like a log until morning. When I woke up, tired and confused, the dawn was gilding the windowpanes. I took a shower, shaved, and dressed, thinking of Josh.

  During our conversations, he’d mostly described himself and Simone as victims of Abraham’s complexes and frustrations. But after the first session of hypnosis, he’d also told me that the memories which had risen to the surface made him believe that he was the perpetrator.

  Josh had also suggested that Abraham was deeply troubled and possibly quite ill. It also seemed that he’d recognized his former friend that evening, back in ninety-eight, although, for one reason or another, he didn’t consider it necessary to share that piece of information with me. However, even though he knew that Abraham was a psychotic and had killed a woman under similar circumstances, he still believed that he rather than his former friend was the one who killed Simone. But why would his mind have invented a world in which he was a murderer? False memories are usually created to protect, to tamper or even to erase tragic recollections, not the other way around.

  On the other hand, Abraham’s diary indicated that he and Simone had been victims of Josh, who was depicted as an unscrupulous manipulator, and that the killing of Margaret Lucas, twenty-two years later, had somehow reenacted the gruesome murder committed in Paris. But it was obvious that the diary belonged to a paranoid man, whose testimony didn’t meet the minimum standard of credibility. In fact, it was highly likely that Abraham had killed Simone too. Schizophrenia often has its outset in late adolescence. Abraham was in his early twenties when he went to Paris, so he was almost certainly a psychotic, harboring a deep-seated delusion, even though his entourage hadn’t realized the gravity of the situation. Later on, he did nothing but confirm his diagnosis.

  At the same time I had to ask myself whether Josh had been totally sincere during his confession. For example, why hadn’t he told me about his encounter with Abraham in 1998? In the course of my clinical research I’d repeatedly proven that a psychotic remains psychotic under hypnosis and that even in an altered state of consciousness he behaves accordingly, that is, differently from a sane individual.

  Not even the deepest trance, induced by the most skilled hypnotizer, can completely peel off the thick shell of false perceptions, hallucinatory distortions, and aberrant convictions that such a person has painstakingly constructed for himself, sometimes for decades. Neurotics can be cooperative and sometimes even react positively to posthypnotic suggestion, but psychotics never do. They remain captives in the tangled labyrinth their minds have constructed, often over the course of an entire lifetime.

  But nothing had suggested to me that Josh might have had a mental disorder. His career had been successful, without any of the relapses characteristic of psychotic behavior. He’d never undergone professional treatment, and therefore his affliction—if he’d ever suffered from one—would have grown steadily worse, his delusion would have become systemic, and his personality would have gradually disintegrated a long time ago, which was of course what had happened to Abraham. Josh didn’t seem to suffer from auditory or visual hallucinations and he was perfectly functional physically, mentally, and emotionally, within the limits of the serious illness he was suffering from.

  And the most important question: Why would he have done something like that? Lied? Why would he have spent his precious, limited time just to lead me by the nose?

  Abraham had mentioned in his notes a charity called the White Rose, founded by Josh in the late seventies. I searched online and found out that the information was genuine: the NGO did exist and was focused on helping women who were victims of domestic violence. Perhaps the choice of this area, rather than any other, was the key to understanding the entire situation: Josh had thought of himself as guilty right off the bat, at least for triggering the chain of events that finally led to Simone’s death. Although the circumstances and some of the details remained unclear, I wondered whether he’d ever really doubted that he’d murdered Simone. Had he expected me to confirm or shatter that belief?

  I also questioned whether Josh had really been under hypnosis or whether he’d merely been faking a trance.

  A patient must be extremely skilled to playact during a session of hypnosis, but it isn’t completely out of the question. And the recording of the sessions had remained in his possession, so I no longer had the option of examining them at length. All I had were my written notes, which weren’t enough.

  I remembered that Josh had mentioned a woman named Elisabeth Gregory, thanks to whom Abraham had gotten that job offer from France. At that point, with Josh and Abraham Hale dead, she might be my only lead. I sent an email to Thomas Harley, a former colleague who was now a professor at Princeton University.

  Dear Tom,

  I hope you’re well. During a therapy session with a patient, I came across an interesting story that took place at Princeton in the early seventies. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that two young men were involved, both of them students at the time. One was Joshua Fleischer, an English major, and the other was Abraham Hale, a Philosophy major. I also know that they shared a house in their senior year, and that Hale was the protégé of a woman by the name of Elisabeth Gregory, the owner of a small translation company. She must have been in her mid-thirties back then. Would you be so kind as to put me in touch with anybody who might be able to provide me with further details about the two students and Mrs. Gregory?

  Regards,

  James

  In the evening, I found his reply in my inbox.

  Dear James,

  It must be six months since I last had the pleasure of talking to you, so I was delighted to receive your email. I was about to go to Zurich for a conference, but Amy was ill and I didn’t want to leave her on her own. She’s here next to me and sends you her best. I don’t know whether you’re up to date, but I left my position at the university four months ago. I’m now in the research division at Siemens. I’ve always envied our peers in the sciences for having an alternative to academia, so I was glad to have found something similar for myself.

  I promise I’ll contact the board about those men, Fleischer and Hale. Maybe they were students at the same time as some of today’s professors.

  I remember Elisabeth Gregory well. She’s retired now, but she’s still living in Mercer County, as far as I know. If you like, I can get hold of her address for you.

  Yours,

  Tom

  I thanked him and asked him to send me Ms. Gregory’s information as soon as he had it. I received his reply the next day, so I wrote her an email, broadly explaining what I wanted to talk to her about.

  On Friday, before meeting Mallory, I conducted three therapy sessions in a row at my practice. When I finished, I told my assistant to go home and I headed for the coffee shop on East 80th Street on foot. It had stopped snowing, but a keen frost had descended upon the city from a deep blue sky and the buildings glittered in the cold sunlight.

  I walked inside, got a table, and ordered a coffee. Mallory arrived a few minutes later. He asked for a coffee and carefully scanned my face.

  “You look tired. Is everything okay?”

  “I had a long day at the practice. Now, tell me what you’ve got.”

 
“I have two pieces of news for you. First, I got to the bottom of our problem with that girl, Simone. Her family name wasn’t Duchamp, but Maillot, let me see, M-a-i-l-l-o-t, with two ls in the middle, and she had a middle name, Louise. So her name was actually Simone Louise Maillot. Apparently, Lucas Duchamp never formally adopted her and her sister Laura, so they kept their real father’s name. The girls went by Duchamp informally, but officially their name was Maillot. Secondly, yes, there was a case of a missing person under that name, Simone Louise Maillot. It’s in the French police archives, dated October 1976. My associate in Paris will send me the full details in a day or two. It seems that the victim, who was twenty-something at the time, disappeared from home one evening and was never found. In charge of the investigation at the time was a detective named Marc Oliveira. Unfortunately, he died in ninety-one.”

  “Okay …”

  “Laura Maillot dropped out of university after her sister’s disappearance, and returned to Lyon, to her parents. She’s now looking after her stepfather, Lucas Duchamp, who’s still alive. He must be over ninety years old now. They live at the same address. The guy had a stroke about ten years ago and he’s now in a wheelchair. I tried to contact her, but she’s very reclusive. I don’t think they even have a phone at home. But my French associate tracked down one of her longtime friends, Claudette Morel, and talked to her. It sounds like she’s ready to spill the beans for a fee. I don’t how reliable she is, I understand that she has a drinking problem, but there’s her number. Good luck.”

  “Thanks, I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  He took a sip of coffee. “Look, I’m pretty much sure that Hale’s diary answers all your questions,” he said. “The guy was already unstable and violent back then in Paris, and he went on to commit a second crime twenty years later, with a similar MO. He probably killed that girl, Simone, fled, went back to the Rue de Rome the next day, took her body while Fleischer was sleeping, and managed to dispose of it somewhere and cover his tracks. He came back to the States and changed his name, but gradually went totally insane and killed the hooker.”