“Alright …”
“Do you think that one of them was involved in Simone’s disappearance or that maybe they did whatever they did together?”
“I don’t know, Claudette. I’m here to find out what happened that night.”
“Abraham wouldn’t have hurt a fly, but Fleischer … Did he confess to anything before he died?”
“He claimed he didn’t remember much about what happened on that night.”
“He lied to you!”
She’d raised her voice, and she cautiously looked around her again.
“I’m sure he knew exactly what happened and—”
I interrupted her, “Before we go on, I’d like to ask you something: which of the two was Simone’s lover?”
“What do you mean? Neither of them, they were just friends, nothing more than friends. The boys had fallen for Simone, that’s true, because she was very beautiful, but she didn’t encourage them in any way.”
“Mr. Fleischer said that he and Simone were lovers.”
“No way, James, I’m sure about that. For Simone it was nothing but a game. You know, two tall and handsome American boys, head over heels in love with her, who were sending her flowers and courting her … She enjoyed it, but there was nothing more than a flirt.”
“Mr. Fleischer also claimed that Abraham was drinking heavily during that period.”
“That’s another lie. I never saw Abraham so much as tipsy, but I saw Fleischer potted a couple of times.”
“Why did the foundation withdraw Abraham’s job offer? Do you remember that episode?”
“Yes, of course I do, I was working there, as I told you … As far as I remember, they had received an anonymous letter full of compromising information about him. Simone was upset and hinted that Abraham had told her who had sent the letter: an ex-girlfriend of Abraham’s from America. She told me that Abraham didn’t think he stood to lose very much and decided to go off to Mexico.”
“Was the letter only about Abraham?”
“It was about both of them, I guess. I’m not positive that Simone knew what exactly was in the letter, because she refused to speak to me about it, so I found out all this mostly in snatches from Laura. She liked Fleischer and told me that while I was in Lyon for my mother’s birthday, he’d given her a very nice present, a jewel, I guess. And then everything blew up: Simone disappeared and Laura went to that hospital in Switzerland.”
She whined like a sick animal, in a way that gave me goose bumps.
“I knew they were bad news, those boys! I knew that something bad was going to happen, James! May I have another drink, please? You haven’t finished yours, don’t you like it?”
I finished my drink and called the waiter. Her mood had changed yet again, and she smiled. “Now let me tell you a couple of things about that family …”
Claudia Duchamp, Simone and Laura’s mother, was born in Paris and got married at a very young age to a charming con man by the name of Antonio Maillot. That was back in the early fifties, when life was still very hard in France in the aftermath of the war. Claudia had numerous siblings and her family wasn’t very well off. Antonio had promised her the moon and had asked her to move to Marseille. After she did, he squandered the little money she’d received from her parents and vanished four years later, abandoning her and their two little children. She went back home, not having anywhere else to go, but she received a cold welcome. I understand that Simone’s grandma suffered from severe neurosis, and living with her wasn’t easy at all.
Then Prince Charming turned up, in the form of a lawyer by the name of Lucas Duchamp.
He was eleven years her senior and considerably wealthy. He’d managed to keep his fortune almost intact during the war. While in college, he’d become a member of the Resistance and had been captured and tortured by Klaus Barbie himself, the famous war criminal known all over the world as “the Butcher of Lyon.”
Even though he was very young at the time, he refused to speak. So in the end, more dead than alive, he’d been handed over to the local authorities to be trialed as a traitor. The sentence was death, but he managed to escape with the help of a French police officer who had sensed which way the wind was blowing. He remained in hiding until the Allies were approaching Paris and the Nazis were on the retreat. His parents had been deported to a concentration camp in Poland and died before the end of the war. In the summer of 1944, after the liberation, he was hailed as a national hero. In those days, people weren’t as cynical, and deeds like that impressed them. Such heroes restored France’s honor after its humiliation at the hands of the Nazis, and doors were opened for them.
As a young man, Lucas Duchamp was handsome, tall, and impeccably attired. He finished his studies and began practicing as an attorney in Paris. A relative looked after his estate in Lyon, which he visited about once a month.
He seemed to be the answer to all the poor woman’s troubles. He was kind, rich, and self-assured. What’s more, he was head over heels in love with her, courting her the old-fashioned way, with flowers, romantic dinners, and discreet gifts. Claudia, who married her first husband just two months after she’d met him, had never experienced anything like it.
Lucas Duchamp had offered to pay the rent on the apartment where she’d been living with her daughters, and also to hire a nanny to take care of the girls so that she could go back to work as a nurse.
A few months after that, Duchamp asked for Claudia’s hand in marriage and she accepted.
Moreover, he’d even proposed to adopt her two daughters.
After the wedding, there was an embarrassing episode with Antonio Maillot, like something straight out of Les Misérables. Duchamp legally needed the real father’s consent in order to formally adopt the girls. He pulled some strings, and the police tracked the guy down somewhere in Provence, where he’d been bleeding some other woman dry. When he realized what was at stake, he milked the situation for all it was worth. He claimed that he was about to look for Claudia, whom, naturally, he still loved, and that he intended to bring up their children. He said he had proof that he’d been corresponding with his daughters’ mother and that he frequently sent her money.
Obviously, these were blatant lies, but the man had a talent for that sort of thing and the adoption procedure could have dragged on for months or even years. In the end, Duchamp decided to pay him a large sum of money in order to get his signature for the adoption papers. After grabbing the cash, the loving father vanished and was never seen again.
The girls lived in a wonderful mansion and had everything they needed, because Duchamp proved to be a very generous man. Both of them attended an elite private high school, and later a prestigious university.
But after Simone’s disappearance, everything went downhill. Claudia Duchamp died, and five years later Lucas Duchamp had a stroke that put him in a wheelchair for life.
The waiter brought us fresh drinks and Claudette lit another cigarette. She looked drunk and was barely able to speak.
“You know, James, I’m not exactly sure when the rumors began, but I remember that the girls were in high school. We were neighbors at the time and visited each other. People can be mean and envious of others’ happiness. To cut a long story short, some of them claimed that Lucas Duchamp’s love for his stepdaughters was more than a normal attachment, if you get my meaning. They went as far as to claim that Claudia Duchamp knew about the whole thing, but that she was unwilling to do anything about it, or that she didn’t dare, because she was afraid of her husband.
“The sisters weren’t really bothered by the stories at the beginning, but the allegations hovered over them like a dark cloud. At one point, people were saying that Laura tried to commit suicide. Later, she told me it wasn’t true. She was shy and withdrawn, distrustful of others, and she didn’t really have any friends, except for me.
“The truth is that Lucas Duchamp was obsessed with them, especially with Simone. He personally drove her to school every day. If she wanted to g
o out with friends, the girls had to come pick her up at the house and would be subjected to a thorough interrogation. Sometimes, he’d get in his car and come and check whether she really was where she said she would be. Of course, there were also times when an outdoor bistro she wanted to go to was too crowded or it was raining so she’d go somewhere else. As Laura told me, such incidents were treated like catastrophes and the outcome would be interminable discussions about loyalty and truthfulness.
“You know how children think: whatever adults do is automatically right, because in the mind of a child, grownups are never wrong. So they just thought that their stepfather loved them and took care of them, probably in an exaggerated way sometimes, yes, but with the best intentions.”
Things got worse after the girls were offered places at university and went to live in Paris, Claudette stressed.
Every Friday, Lucas Duchamp would be waiting by the door of the lecture hall to take them back home. They weren’t allowed to spend a single weekend in Paris, not under any circumstances. And they obeyed. Their mother didn’t intervene.
In her senior year, Laura took on a part-time job and shared an apartment with Claudette. Simone had graduated a year previously and was making her way in her career.
“When Abraham and Fleischer arrived in Paris, everything changed,” Claudette went on. “They both fell in love with Simone and were arguing with each other all the time. Simone didn’t fall for either of them, not really, but she was amused and flattered by the situation. At one point, Simone and Laura invited them to Lyon. The atmosphere was tense, and on top of that, Fleischer did everything he could to transform those days into a living hell. He complained about the room and the food, left the estate in the middle of the night and checked into a hotel in the city, and got drunk every day. Simone was very upset, but Laura strangely accepted his behavior, inventing all kinds of excuses for his blunders. Eventually, Abraham had an argument with Fleischer and left for Paris, but Fleischer spent another couple of days in Lyon with the girls.”
She stopped talking and sipped her drink. For a moment, I thought she’d fallen asleep with the cigarette dangling between her fingers.
“You don’t get it, do you?” she suddenly asked me, raising her eyebrows.
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Simone didn’t particularly care about those boys, James. She had other cats to whip, as we say in this country. I mean she was all about her career. It was Laura who was trying to get under Fleischer’s skin, God knows why. She and Simone were very different from each other, you know … Simone had taken ballet and piano classes, was always confident, and used to spend a lot of money on clothes and trifles. Laura was as beautiful as Simone, but she was an introverted frump with two left feet, plainly dressed, shy and reclusive.
“On top of that, something happened to Laura in that spring. It must have been connected to her father, I think, because suddenly she refused to submit any longer. Each time he’d come to see her or to take her home for the weekend, she’d either avoid him or simply ignore him. She seldom returned to Lyon, and when she did, it was only to see her mother. I asked her what had happened, but she just shrugged and told me that some people pretend to be someone they aren’t. She borrowed from the library a pile of books about the Resistance and read them. I told myself it was just a caprice and I minded my own business. I remember that on a Sunday evening she came home with an elderly, one-legged man whom I’d never seen before, and they spent the whole evening together in the kitchen, whispering to each other. When Laura showed him out, she had tears in her eyes. The situation was strange, because up until then we hadn’t kept secrets from each other. I didn’t have time to resume the discussion, though, because shortly after that she came home one evening very agitated and asked me for help in a crucial matter. I had a very bad feeling from the start, but she was my best friend and I didn’t want to let her down, so I accepted.”
“What kind of help?”
“I was there that night, James, at the hotel. Let me tell you what happened …”
She told me that both Abraham and Fleischer were putting pressure on Simone. Abraham, who had lost his job at the foundation, was planning to go to Mexico, and he asked Simone to come with him. Fleischer intended to buy an apartment and settle in Paris for a while, so that he and Simone could live together. The game Simone had been playing up until then, flirting with both of them, wasn’t a game anymore. Laura and Claudette were following Josh and Simone to see what she was up to. For Claudette it was a kind of adventure: she wasn’t sure what was going on, but she was playing detective with her best friend.
When Laura found out that Simone had checked into Le Meriden, she thought her sister was secretly planning something with Joshua. But she was sure that Abraham, who had started behaving increasingly strangely, wouldn’t accept such a situation and something bad would happen. By chance, one of the suites next to the one Simone had rented was vacant, so Claudette took it under her name. The suites were linked by a locked connecting door and Laura bribed the maid so she’d give her the key, in case things took a turn for the worse.
They got there at around five o’clock in the evening and began to wait. Claudette wanted to leave almost immediately, but Laura begged her to stay. They drank some wine from the minibar and smoked a few cigarettes. Three hours later, they heard voices in the room next door and pressed their ears against the connecting door. Fleischer was angry and Simone tried to calm him down. Then Abraham arrived; Laura and Claudette heard his voice, but they couldn’t make out the words. Ten minutes later, the doorbell to the other suite rang; it was room service. They couldn’t make out what was happening in there for the next two hours or so, but from time to time they could hear snatches of conversation. The door kept opening and closing. Abraham and Joshua must have gotten drunk, because their voices grew increasingly louder. They were arguing with each other.
Claudette didn’t look drunk anymore, but exhausted and ill, as if she regretted that she was giving me, a stranger, an all-access-tour ticket for the darkest byways of her life.
“They must have been sitting near the door, because suddenly we heard Simone’s voice clearly,” she went on. “She laughed and sarcastically mentioned something about her going to Mexico. Fleischer said that Abraham was nothing but a loser, incapable of taking care of himself, let alone Simone.”
“I don’t know … I looked around me, and the whole situation seemed suddenly grotesque. We stood there, two ridiculous girls, lurking by a hotel room door. Laura was furious and told me to unlock the door between the suites, because she wanted to talk to her sister straightaway. But I refused and left. I went home and tried to sleep. Laura didn’t come home the next day or attend any of her classes. I called her mother and she told me that Laura was home, in Lyon, because she had had a nervous breakdown. She refused to put her on the phone. A couple of days later, when I called again, she told me that Simone had disappeared, and Laura had left the country for medical treatment.”
“So you don’t know what actually happened after you left?”
“No, but those men must have known. I never forgot that night and later, as time went by, I sought information about Abraham and Fleischer. I couldn’t find anything about Abraham, but I discovered a lot about Fleischer. That’s why I told him in my letter that I’d been there that night and I know what he did. In a way, I’ve always been angry with myself because I let Laura down when I left her in that hotel room. Probably she never forgave me, because she refused to talk to me after she came back to France. If I had stayed with her, maybe I could have done something to avoid the tragedy.”
“After you heard that Simone had disappeared, did you try to contact the police, to tell them what you knew?”
“No, I didn’t, and nobody asked me anything.”
“Was Laura interviewed by the police? She’s not even mentioned in the case file.”
“Probably she’d already left the country when Simone was officially reported mis
sing, I don’t know …”
“How much money did you ask Mr. Fleischer for?”
“I asked for a hundred thousand dollars. It hardly meant much to him. Perhaps you regard me as a despicable person, eager to take advantage of a tragedy in order to make money. But don’t be quick to judge me too harshly. In my life too many people have done so already. I’m not a bad person, please believe me, and I was totally sincere with you today.”
“I promise I’ll try to send you some money after I get back to the States,” I told her and signaled for the waiter to bring the bill.
She looked at me in amazement and said, “Is that all? Are you leaving? Aren’t we going to talk seriously about money?”
She’d raised her voice, and faces from the adjacent tables had turned toward us.
“You’ve been leading me on, haven’t you?”
The waiter brought the bill. I paid with my card, and then I placed a few coins next to the receipt. He thanked me and left, while Claudette was staring at me.
“I don’t even know whether you’re telling me the truth,” I told her and stood up. I put a business card on the table. “That’s my email address and phone numbers.”
She took the card, gazed at it with her blurry eyes, and thrust it in her purse. “I’ll never see you again, right?”
“You never know.”
“Can you leave me some money? I’d like to stay here a little longer. I rarely get out.”
I took all the euro bills I’d exchanged at the hotel and laid them on the table.
“I’m sorry that this is what I’ve become,” she said and looked away. “I don’t know where I went wrong. I lived a good life, but then everything went downhill. You won’t think badly of me for trying to get hold of some money, will you?”
“No, I won’t. Take care of yourself, Claudette.”
“I didn’t lie to you. Every single word I’ve said today is true, please believe me. Maybe I could remember more things …”
Bad Blood Page 20
