by Maggy Diak
12.
After I had left Mr. Pearson, I first intended to call on Maurice but changed my mind at the first pizza restaurant. I was hungry. I ordered a pizza. I tried to put my thoughts in order. After the conversation with the Sorbonne Head, the true reason for Peter's disappearance was even less clear to me than before. What became clear was that not only Peter was crazy, Isabelle was as well. Maybe even crazier than Peter. And I suspected Maurice not to be far from that. I was surrounded by insane people! I had always thought of the intellectuals as being mavericks and high above reality, but it had never entered my mind that they were as crazy as hatters.
How can a sane person come to believe that she is the new European ruler just because of her name? Or that a sacred content changes its place? Or that a place is cursed just because it has a wrong name? Or that somebody is a sort of a copy of somebody else, who lived in the past just because of the name? I would understand if simple, illiterate people fell for this crap but intellectuals? At that moment, I doubted I would ever find out what had happened to Peter. Where he was. I paid the bill and made for my hotel. At the sight of Kate in the lobby, I remembered that Kate was with me. When she saw me, she excitedly came running towards me.
“Tibor,” she cried out, “where have you been? I have been looking for you for four hours! I thought something terrible has happened to you!”
There were tears in her eyes, but they did not move me.
“I've been working,” I said coldly and added sarcastically: “I'm paid for that, am I not?”
She looked reproachfully at me. “You could have told me where you were going.”
“Why should I reveal my plans to you or even justify myself? You are not my wife, for God's sake!”
I hurried into the elevator, wondering why, the hell, I felt so nervous. I flopped onto the bed. God, was I tired. I must have been insane when I agreed to take the case.
I heard knocking on the door but did not answer for I was in no mood for any conversation. It knocked again and Kate entered the room.
I didn’t get up.
“What do you want?”
“Why are you sulking?” she asked.
I lost my temper. “Sulking? I'm not sulking! I went to the Head of the Sorbonne, now I am tired and would like to rest! Do I have the right to rest or not?”
“You are not just tired. You are angry. And if you are going to be angry we cannot work together.”
“Who says we have to?” I replied caustically and, putting both hands under the back of my head, stubbornly staring at the ceiling, added, “the best thing for you to do is to go home and wait for the news. I'll keep you informed. You see for yourself that here you cannot be of any help at all.”
“So you want to get rid of me?”
Without looking at her, I knew she was hurt. I didn’t care.
“No. The fact is that I can do the work, which is not going to be finished so soon, without you. You probably have other work to do at home. There is no need to waste your time here.”
“My work? Come on, Tibor, you are not worried about my work in the least. You are angry because I did not jump into your bed the minute you wanted me to!”
That made my blood boil! How dared she … Giving her a scornful look, I said as calmly as I managed: “Do you think I care? Not a bit!”
“Exactly, Tibor. You don’t care. All you want is another trophy. You didn’t get it so everything is wrong now. That’s why you are sulking. Your pride is hurt.”
“You call an old hag a trophy?”
It took Kate a long time to recover from my remark. I was watching her, enjoying the hurt look in her eyes. Revenge was so sweet.
“You are right,” she answered, trying to hide her tears. “To you I would mean but another stupid woman longing to be laid. And you felt obliged to do me a favor. I was aware of that all along. That's why I didn’t give in. I knew that after that you would be asking yourself what the hell where you thinking to get involved with me. An old woman, or hag, as you say.”
Before I had time to answer, to add another insult, maybe, I suddenly spotted maliciousness sparking in her eyes. “To tell you the truth, Tibor, I don't think you yourself are either young or attractive! You too wouldn't be a trophy to be proud of.”
And so we continued for some time. At some point, after we had said to each other quite a lot of ugly things, we burst into laughter.
“We are acting like teenagers, “said Kate, choking with laughter. “I can't believe that suddenly our biggest problem is why I do not want to sleep with you. We are totally out of our minds!”
“Speak for yourself,” I corrected her and sat up. My anger subsided. I tried to be rational. “You must be out of your mind to foolishly reject relaxation and fun. It would do us both good. Believe me, it would.”
“I can't take sex as a sport or fun!”
“As what then?”
“My perception of sex contains a small flaw, Tibor. I can have sex only with somebody I at least like if not love. And after the intercourse I like or love that person even more. Sex for me is a union, not only of two bodies but of two souls as well. I do not exaggerate if I say that sex for me is a sort of sacred. I always connect it with conceiving. Giving life. I know it is stupid to think of it that way at my age, yet primarily, I think, it was and is meant as giving life and that's why I can't abuse it! I mean, take it just as a sport or fun. You might find me weird, but thinking of sex, I feel a kind of piety. The flaw I mentioned before is, in fact, not in my perception of sex, it is in what I feel after it. And this flaw gets on men's nerves. I just can't pretend that nothing has happened between us. I can't behave as a stranger or just an acquaintance to the man I was so close to. And if this is the man I am not married to, such close relationship brings me nothing but suffering. And I don't want to suffer. Not again. Not at my age.”
“We would be in touch,” I tried.
“No, we wouldn't. You would return to your wife.”
“And you to your husband.”
I gave her tit for tat.
“But there would be a difference, Tibor,” she said firmly. “I would long for you, you wouldn't for me.”
I jumped up. “Goddamn, Kate, why are you women always so sure what men think or feel or will do! Why do you have to make the simplest things so complicated? Sex was given to us, yes for reproduction but also for pleasure! If it was meant only for reproduction, we would mate like animals once a year! However, we were given the strength and wish to do it whenever there is opportunity! We were given it to use it not to suppress it!”
She gazed at me for a few minutes. Then she said: “Tibor, we are not here to have sex, we came to find my husband. I'll not go home and wait for your calls, no, I would be too nervous. We'll continue looking for him together. But if you think you cannot stand my presence any more, I'll find somebody else to help me.”
My first thought was to pack my things, go to the airport and fly home. Instead, I said abruptly: “I'll call Maurice to make an appointment with him. “
Maurice didn't answer the phone. I reached for my jacket. “I'm going to his University,” I said.
Kate followed me like a shadow. We were walking side by side, speechless and sullen. At least, I was sullen. Kate felt, I suppose, sorrow. That's what I saw on her face. Sorrow for refusing me? Well, whatever she might propose from now on, it was too late, I decided.
Maurice studied at the University Department of Genetics. Actually, he had just graduated and was preparing a doctorate. He was five years older than Isabelle who was the second year student at the University Department of Linguistics.
At the University, we were told that Maurice had not appeared for two days and they did not know where he was. They tried to reach him too but in vain.
“What if he was kidnapped, too?” asked Kate, fear showing on her face.
“It's more likely that he joined them,” I answered.
“Joined who?”
“Peter and Isabelle.”
She asked incredulously: “Tibor, are you saying that Maurice voluntarily gave himself up to the FBI just to be with Isabelle?”
“No, no. I don’t believe any more that FBI had anything to do with Peter’s and Isabelle’s disappearance. In my opinion, it is more likely that Isabelle, Peter and maybe Maurice are planning to appoint Isabelle as the new European ruler.”
She stared at me openmouthed. Then she cried out: “What?”
I told her what I'd learned when I was at the Head of the Sorbonne. She was so shaken that we had to sit down. Although our communication became normal again, I did not comfort her anymore. She'll have to bear the blows, I thought. She herself made the decision to stay with me, which meant she would not be spared the hard blows that probably awaited us.
“What now?” she asked after a while.
“It's time to visit Provence,” I answered. “We'll go to Isabelle's birthplace and see if there are any answers.”
“But you told me, her family is not at home now. They are on holiday somewhere abroad.”
“I'm sure we'll find somebody who knows something.”
It was a nice but long way to St. Rémy. It took us the whole day to arrive there. We kept silent most of the time, pretending to admire the beautiful country of Provence. My knowledge of this country was limited to wines. Here were produced the best wines in the world. We stopped here and there for a coffee or snack. Being a driver as well, Kate took the wheel after I had got tired. It was dark when we arrived in Rémy. I pulled up in the parking lot in front of the Hotel Canto Cigalo. It had only two stars but it didn't matter as we intended to stay only one night. What mattered was that it had two one-bed rooms. Later we found out that a small number of stars did not mean bad quality. At least not in this hotel. It was clean, breakfast was rich, personnel kind. The view was gorgeous. Behind the hotel, there were cute gardens. The whole country seemed to me like a paradise. After getting the keys, we immediately went to our rooms. We were too tired to go on research that evening.
Yet, despite the tiredness, I could not sleep. I became restless and finally got up and dressed, deciding to take a short walk through the streets of the city of Nostradamus and Van Gogh. I did not wake up Kate.
When I stepped out the hotel, I suddenly experienced something I wouldn't expect even in my dream! I nearly bumped into J.E.! “What, the hell, are you doing here?” he howled.
“And what, the hell, are you?” I asked in his style.
I expected another shower of angry words but instead he said, after a few moments of silence: “Come with me, I'll show you something.”
We went down a long but well-lit street, then turned into a darker one, passed some houses and blocks of flats and stopped in front of a low, old block of flats.
“What's that?” I asked.
He did not answer. He pushed the front door open and a moment later, we were climbing the stairs. We stopped in front of a shabby door on the third floor. J.E. took a key out of his pocket and unlocked it. It was dark inside. We entered the flat and switched on the light. The air was heavy with some kind of rottenness. Later I noticed a big wet stain on the ceiling expanding down the wall. This was probably the cause of the unpleasant smell. The flat was old and so was the furniture. It was faded and scratched.
“This is Isabelle's flat,” said J.E., grinning wickedly at the sight of my surprise.
“That can't be! She lives in a luxurious house!”
“Bullshit! She deceived you aa. Well, she certainly did not deceive me, because I have a nose for liars.”
He stood in front of me, getting on my nerves with his cocky grin. However, he had just revealed to me an important information, god knows why, but it was hard to believe that he did it because of the goodness of his heart, and as I was expecting more, I had to be patient. “Liars?”
“Believe me, this girl was lying through her teeth. I knew it, I told it, yet people are so blind, so …”
He shifted closer to me, so close that our noses nearly touched. I hate being so close to strangers but didn’t give him the satisfaction to move away.
“I don't need to tell you what I have discovered, nevertheless I am going to,” he said, emphasizing each word. “After this, I hope you will finally believe I am never mistaken! I have never been; I never will be!” I had it on the tip of my tongue to ask if he was a god, however, I thought better. “After I equip you with all the news, I expect you to stop meddling with the case that isn't your business at all and return to where you came from,” he concluded.
He stepped back and I felt a feeling of relief.
“Isabelle has never lived in a luxurious house! She is an illegitimate child, who lived with her mother in this, hired flat. She has no brothers or sisters, her mother died three years ago.”
I was really perplexed. “And nobody knew this? Not even Maurice?”
“Ah, Maurice, “he said viciously,” he's even a bigger surprise. I discovered the background of his birth and again I was right. He's not pure French at all! I have a nose for such scums as well. His grand-grandmother was a daughter of a Turk who had illegally fled to France, was given a flat and a job of course, thus robbing a decent French who should have got them instead of him! The crossbreeds of his type are extremely dangerous! Nothing is sacred to them, least of all the country that was kind enough, or stupid enough to offer them more hospitality than they deserved.” He was getting angrier and angrier. “However, they are never satisfied. No, they want more and more and if they don't get it they start breaking and smashing whatever comes within the reach of their hands. After I find this monkey, I'll have the other two too.”
He laughed in my face. “Have you unraveled the secret of the trinities that the Foreigner mentioned in his lectures?”
“No.”
“Of course, you haven’t. The trinities are the Foreigner, Isabelle and Maurice! Abraham, Lot, Sarah/ Bush, Elisabeth II, Laden/ Jesus, Pilates, Iscariot/. They are all the Foreigner, Isabelle and Maurice!”
“Really?”
I decided not to contradict him. By then I had learnt enough of him to know that nothing I would say would shake his conviction. The best thing to treat such people is to be silent and act your way.
“You bet,” he said, marching out of the flat. We returned to our hotel.
“If you'd told me before what you had been planning to do, I could have spared you the long way to here,” he sneered at me while we were waiting for the keys of our rooms.
I could not ignore his arrogance any further. I had to return the blow.
“Maurice has disappeared,” I said. I saw that the news hit him unprepared. I enjoyed it! Finally, I knew something he didn’t.
However, his confusion lasted only a second. He lit a cigarette, to gain some time, with slow and long strokes of his hand extinguished the match and while puffing the smoke out of his mouth, he said in a dull, casual voice: “I know.”
I laughed, hoping with all my heart that my laughter sounded mocking.
When I was in my room again I hid behind the curtains and waited. I was right. Ten minutes later J.E. came, almost running out of the hotel, threw his bag into his car and drove away. I knew that now he was after Maurice.
