Animosity

by David Lindsey

  “What’s the matter?” Ross asked. “What did you think was going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Vautrin said unconvincingly. “I thought you might have some ideas.”

  He shook his head again, and Céleste pushed the articles back across the table to Vautrin.

  “Well,” Vautrin said with a weary smile as he gathered up the papers, “this is one of those cases in which we shall never know all the answers.” He shoved the papers back into his briefcase. “I think I’ll be lucky even to think of all the right questions.”

  Chapter 46

  Ross and Céleste left the brasserie and started back to her flat. Neither of them spoke for a little while as they walked along the wet sidewalk, huddled together under a single umbrella. The rain was light, only a drizzle.

  “What the hell was that?” Céleste said finally. She was incensed. “He searched the house in Chaillot?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “That means he has some pretty strong concerns.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “‘Ml’? What was she doing? She couldn’t have been talking to Lacan. How could she? About what, for God’s sake? What would he know?”

  Ross said nothing at first. His mind was swarming with possibilities. Vautrin hadn’t seemed particularly threatening with his questions, but he was definitely on to something. But he gave up too easily. He didn’t push them. He wanted only their reaction. And he got it. The question was, what did he think about it?

  Indeed, the notes were interesting. The whole issue of Leda and Céleste plotting against Ross was an embarrassment for both Ross and Céleste. Regardless of their relationship now, it was awkward that at one time she had been out to trap him, with sex, with extortion, with whatever she could. Ross suspected that part of her anger now was from her chagrin at having had that brought up in such a cold presentation.

  Of course, Vautrin couldn’t have known that. Clearly he suspected that Leda was intending to blackmail Ross, but it must have seemed to him an odd direction for the case to have taken. Still, it made sense from his point of view. Leda was dead, wasn’t she? And Lacan was “missing,” wasn’t he . . . and presumed dead? Now, if they were involved together in a blackmail scheme against Ross, didn’t their death and disappearance point straight at Ross? And what about Céleste? Had she colluded with Ross? Or had he kept it a secret from her? Though Vautrin didn’t come right out and say all of this, he had let Ross know what he was thinking.

  Ross took Céleste by the arm. “Come on,” he said, “let’s stop in here for a few minutes.”

  “We’re just a block from the flat,” she said.

  “Please.”

  They stepped into a small neighborhood café unused to strangers and took a table next to the wall, both of them sitting at an angle that enabled them to see out the front windows a couple of tables away.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, sensing a change in his manner.

  “Lacan was worth a lot of money,” he said. “Somebody’s slipping Vautrin information. I don’t think we ought to discuss this again in your flat.”

  She frowned at him but understood.

  “God,” she said, “do you think his suspicions have gone that far?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m worried about it.”

  “He wants you to be worried about it. That whole conversation, he was letting you know, wasn’t he?”

  Ross nodded. They ordered more coffee, but they didn’t bother to drink it after the waiter brought it to them.

  “You said someone’s slipping Vautrin information. I don’t see how that can be possible. There’s got to be another explanation.”

  “Well, I don’t see one right now.”

  “It’s as if Leda is working from the grave to destroy you,” Céleste said. “As if she set something into motion that’s acquired a life of its own.”

  “There wasn’t anything . . . unusual about her suicide, was there?”

  “Oh, Ross. Really.”

  “Look, I’m questioning everything. It’s something I should have done a long time ago. I’m in this mess now because I just floated along.”

  “No one would have been able to see this happening to them, Ross. People don’t expect their lives to be targeted by that kind of deliberate malevolence. They don’t live their lives on guard against that sort of thing.”

  “What do you think Leda was up to?” he asked.

  “Up to? You know what she was up to.”

  “‘Ml.’ What’s that?”

  “No idea. I was telling the truth. I don’t know.”

  “Do you think she might have talked to him?”

  “To be honest, no. I can’t imagine it. They hated each other, and they didn’t try to hide it.”

  He looked out to the people hurrying by in the gray afternoon. It was growing gloomy outside on the sidewalks. The rain came and went, sometimes a breeze blustered and kicked fallen leaves along ahead of it in the failing light. The cars and trucks and taxis turned on their headlights, and the street lamps came on in the twilight.

  “Tell me how she first came to you with this proposition,” Ross said. “How did Leda broach this subject with you?”

  Céleste tapped her fingernails lightly against her coffee cup. She didn’t want to do this. He understood that, but he didn’t say anything to try to help her feel better. In fact, there wasn’t anything to feel better about until they figured out what they were up against.

  “She came to me and she said that—”

  “When was this?”

  “What?”

  “When did she first mention this to you? You came to San Rafael in early May, a full month before I returned from Paris. How long had you been planning this before you showed up in San Rafael?”

  “God.” Céleste held her forehead in her hand and thought. “A month, maybe. We’d been discussing it . . . just about a month. She came to me just after . . . just after I’d had a serious . . . situation with Michel.”

  It always caused an empty feeling in his stomach for her to refer to Lacan by his first name. He could almost forget the things that happened between them if they always referred to Lacan by his last name, but her use of the more familiar first name reminded Ross of their intimacies, of the “snail’s trail” of Lacan’s presence on Céleste’s body to which Leda had so cruelly referred.

  “She said, ‘You can’t go on with this anymore. I can’t stand it. I’ve been thinking. I have some ideas you need to listen to.’”

  “And she had this whole thing already worked out?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, about how much?”

  She was surprised at his impatience. “I don’t know. The overall concept. Not the details. The details came later, gradually.”

  “How gradually?”

  “Where is this going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She shook her head and looked down at her coffee. “Weeks, over a period of a few weeks.”

  “You said you’d been talking about it a month before you came to San Rafael.”

  “That’s right. The reason it took a month before we did anything about it was that she had to talk me into it. And even then she probably couldn’t have done it if . . . if Michel hadn’t visited again and left me in a particularly bad mess. That last visit from him . . . scared me, scared me a lot.” She paused. “I was frightened and angry. It was that, his last visit, that convinced me to go along with the scheme.”

  “How did she know what to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did she know what real estate agent to call to find a property to lease for three months?” He had a sudden flash of Nata telling him: “She’s coming in here four or five times a week for a month now. Same time. Your time.” “How did you know about Graber’s?”

  “Think about it, Ross. She had a ton of information. She read everything about you. She even called the little newspaper there in San Rafael—an
d in Austin—and had them send her copies of every article that they had ever printed about you. There was all kinds of information in those articles, you know those personality profiles. Interviews. Your favorite this, your favorite that. A day in the life of . . . In one of them there was even a photograph of you and Amado sitting at a table in Graber’s garden with parrots all around. And another picture taken in front of Graber’s at night standing under the little pale green neon sign.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She did everything she could think of to learn every detail she could about you. She wrote the Chamber of Commerce of San Rafael, got everything they would send her about the town, maps, articles and brochures about the galleries and shops and restaurants. I knew all about it by the time I got there.”

  “You saw her do all of this?”

  “A lot of it. She would go up to that room Vautrin was talking about—it was on the third floor—and she would pore over those articles, underlining, highlighting, assembling. That room was Leda’s Ross Marteau headquarters.”

  He couldn’t believe it. When he thought about it, yes, it made sense. His life was spread all the hell over the place. Fame. It was a by-product of his success and his own greedy drive to cater to wealthy, well-known clients. He had engineered an aura of success that became a self-fulfilling prophecy and allowed him to become wealthy in his own right. He was good media fodder. Someone could do a pretty good job of working their way into his life, given the right amount of motivation and guile.

  Céleste grimaced and shook her head again. “But, God, I didn’t even think of it when I was clearing out of there. If I’d thought of it, I would have thrown the stuff away, Ross. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” he said, “none of that’s your fault. I don’t think it comes down to that, as if none of this suspicion would have fallen on me if Vautrin hadn’t found Leda’s notes. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that he would be looking at me even if he’d never found those articles.”

  “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. What made him search the house in the first place?”

  That was the conundrum that had nagged at him even before they had finished their conversation with Vautrin. As far as Ross and Céleste were concerned, the questions raised by Lacan’s disappearance should have been quieted by now. Even Leda’s suicide should have been seen as nothing more than an additional tragedy in Céleste’s life. One heard such stories, the death in a short period of time of several persons close to someone. Everyone knows someone to whom such things have happened. Usually you commiserated with someone like that, grateful that it hadn’t happened to you. That’s all it should have been in Céleste’s life. Two tragedies so close together. And that was all . . . the end of it.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. Something had happened after Leda’s death that had brought the two deaths together into a different frame of reference and tied Ross into the bundle. Ross had just enough connection to the two dead people to make it appear—if presented in the right context—that his relationship to them was in fact the red thread that tied the two deaths together.

  The clever part of the illusion was that, in part, it was not an illusion. His life was connected to the two deaths, but he was not the cause of them, as the illusion implied.

  And then—in a numbing, breathtaking realization—he knew! He knew what had happened.

  “What’s the matter?” Céleste asked suddenly.

  He didn’t know what he had done to make her react so quickly. Had he grunted as if he had been hit in the stomach? That’s what he felt had happened. Had he lurched in his chair, physically shaken? He didn’t know. But if he had not been sitting down, he would have had to.

  “Sorry,” he said, straining to gain control. If he had appeared discombobulated at that moment, he had to correct that impression. “I need to walk,” he said. “We ought to go.”

  He paid, and they stepped to the door of the café, pausing under the long awning. The little round tables on the sidewalk in front of the café were abandoned, chestnut leaves plastered to them in random, windblown patterns; rain puddled, glistening, in the seats of the chairs. They could see the darkened windows across the street in Céleste’s flat.

  “I need to walk,” he said again. “I’ve got to think.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Alone,” he said.

  She snapped her head around at him.

  “I just want to do it at my own pace. I just want to think.”

  She stared at him, and he saw in her eyes a painful mixture of confusion and fear and compassion. She reached up and put a hand flat against his face. Then she leaned forward and kissed him.

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” she said.

  Chapter 47

  He watched her walk away. Just as she was about to step off the curb at the intersection to cross the street, a damp gust whipped up the corner of her raincoat, lifting it and her skirt with a flick, showing him the back of her leg. And then pedestrians crossed in either direction between them, and he lost sight of her as she crossed to the other side.

  That one flutter of the dress epitomized the duration of their affair. In the span of his life he had known her for only a moment, but that moment had been saturated with passion and turmoil. The intensity of their moment was completely unexpected. He thought he had left that kind of thing behind forever. He had intended to. But this time it had sought him out, recalled from his past like the sudden appearance of a disturbing memory evoked by the cadence of a stranger’s voice or the play of gray light on a rainy window.

  The moment she entered the building, he hurried to the curb and hailed a taxi.

  Staring out at the doleful evening as the taxi made its way to Montmartre, he thought of poor, wretched Leda. She might have been hating him still, poring over her clippings, staring into her mirrors at her naked buffalo’s body and her incomparable beauty, had it not been for an event that he was about to confirm. He was reasonably sure what had happened, but he did not know how it had come about. He had a wild theory, but it seemed both too simple and too complex. Whatever the impetus, the encounter had given birth to fierce events and tragedy.

  Who could imagine how Leda’s life might have been lived except for that incident? Would time have gone by in the horrible monotony of her inwardly howling grief until the years claimed her beauty and, finally, her life? Or would she have eventually turned to the lonely solace of suicide anyway? Leda. For all her madness, she had been abandoned by loveliness in all its forms, and he could not bring himself to hate her for what that had done to her.

  He left the taxi at the bottom of the small street and started up. He had taken a discarded newspaper from the backseat of the taxi and held it over his head with one hand as he turned up the collar of his raincoat against the mizzle. Everything was narrow and close here. He leaned into the sloping sidewalk, trudging past low stone walls with wrought-iron grilles and vines. He passed the doorway of a pharmacy, its bright interior throwing a pale bar across the wet sidewalk, and turned the corner, continuing upward.

  The lane made a tight turn. The stone and brick residences stacked up in ascending tiers among trees. There were few lights, and those that burned dimly in an occasional doorway or from high windows threw sparkling glints off the wet surfaces in the shadows and darkness.

  Finally he came to the address he was looking for and stopped across the lane from it, looking up at its darkened windows. Jesus, he had no idea how long he might have to wait. He stepped up off the sloping sidewalk into the doorway of a closed sewing shop and hunched his shoulders against the chill. He could see the glistening rainwater trickling down the falling sidewalk.

  Half an hour passed. His wet feet grew cold. The chill around his neck was just beginning to be uncomfortable when he saw a solitary figure round the corner below him on the other side of the lane. The umbrella was tilted forward, obscuring the face; the pace was preoccupied, unhurried. The
figure passed him by and turned into the doorway he had been watching. His breathing grew shallow. He waited, watching the windows on the second floor. When the lights came on, his heart flipped a double beat. He stepped out of the doorway and crossed the cobblestones to the other side.

  In the cramped foyer of the building he scanned the mailboxes, peering intently in the bad lighting. He found the name: Leigh.

  He avoided the lift and started up the marble stairs, the stairwell turning immediately around the caged lift shaft to the second floor.

  At the door he removed his coat, lightly shook off the rain. He threw it over his arm and knocked on the door. Nothing. He knocked again. He heard footsteps approaching from the other side. Pause. Nothing. He knocked again.

  He heard the dead bolt clack. There would be a chain. The door eased open.

  He threw his shoulder into the door so hard that it ripped the chain from the door frame with an explosive crack and flung the woman staggering backward, arms flailing for balance, until she fell over an armchair and went sprawling to the floor on the other side.

  But she was immediately scrambling to her feet, and in an instant they were standing in the middle of the room, facing each other.

  “Jesus Christ!” She gaped at him in wide-eyed surprise, her auburn hair tumbled around her creamy face in a henna storm.

  “Hello, Marian,” he said.

  The front room of the flat was comfortable and was clearly an artist’s residence. The walls were crowded with paintings and drawings, and handmade pottery was scattered about on shelves and tables. The top of a long narrow cabinet was laden with stacks of sketchbooks, and a miscellany of unframed canvases leaned against each other in the corners. The room was lit by a single lamp. Marian’s own raincoat was hanging on a hook beside the door, dripping on newspapers spread on the floor underneath it.

  Ross reached behind him without taking his eyes off her and closed the door. She was rigid, having seen the anger in his face. He didn’t care. She was making rapid calculations. Fear was slowly being displaced by a cautious curiosity. She began to recover her composure.