“Shit, man! You gonna play or what?” Sergei said.
I lost sight of Vinca as a gaggle of Chinese tourists traipsed into the park. I got to my feet and pushed my way through them, but when I reached the bench, she had disappeared.
* * *
How much should I trust that memory? It had been only a fleeting glimpse, I admit. Fearing that I might forget it, I had played it over and over in my mind to engrave it in my brain forever. Because I found the memory calming, I clung to it, knowing that it was fragile. All memories are reconstructions and contain some element of fiction, and this one seemed too good to be true.
As the years passed, I began to doubt its authenticity. But now, the incident acquired new meaning. I thought about what Claude Angevin had said: Everyone—the cops, the press, the families—missed something in the investigation. Actually, to be honest, I think the whole investigation was flawed. From the start, we missed out on something crucial.
Angevin was right. But things were changing now. Truth was on the march. Maybe there was a killer tracking me, but I was not afraid, because through him, I would be able to find Vinca. The killer was my only chance.
But I could not beat him alone. To uncover the secret of Vinca’s disappearance, I needed to go back to the past, to revisit the boy who was not like other boys, the boy I had been in my last years at Saint-Ex. The young man who had been positive, courageous, pure of heart, touched by a sort of grace. I knew that I could not bring him back to life, but he had never completely disappeared. Even in my darkest moments, I carried him within me. Sometimes a smile, a word, a flash of wisdom reminded me of who I used to be.
In my search for Vinca, I was also—perhaps especially—investigating myself.
11
Behind Her Smile
1.
Yves Dalanegra lived in a huge house in the hills above Biot. Rather than show up unannounced, I called the number Claude Angevin had given me. First stroke of luck: although Dalanegra spent half the year living in Los Angeles, he was currently on the Côte d’Azur. Second stroke of luck: he knew who I was—Florence and Olivia, the lanky daughters I had known at school and only vaguely remembered, liked me and read my novels. He immediately suggested I pop by and see him at his villa cum studio on the chemin des Vignasses.
Prepare yourself for a surprise, Angevin had said. From Dalanegra’s website, his Wikipedia page, and a number of online articles, I quickly realized that, these days, the man was considered one of the great living photographers, having taken a career path as surprising as it was unusual. Until his forties, Dalanegra had been a respectable family man, an auditor with a small accounting firm in Nice; he had been married to his wife, Catherine, for more than twenty years, and they had two daughters. Then, in 1995, his mother died, and this triggered a sudden and complete change. Dalanegra got divorced, quit his job, and moved to New York to follow his dream: photography.
Two years later, in an interview with Libération, he explained that it was at this point that he’d decided to come out as gay. He’d shot to fame with photographic nudes whose aesthetic owed something to the work of Irving Penn and Helmut Newton. Then, over the years, his work became more individual, and he photographed only bodies that fell outside the traditional canon of beauty—women who were heavily overweight or particularly small; models who had suffered severe burns; amputees; patients undergoing chemotherapy—singular bodies that Dalanegra managed to transform into something pure and flawless.
Although initially dubious, I found that I was dazzled by the raw power of his work, which was neither tasteless nor voyeuristic. The aesthetic was closer to that of the great Flemish artists than to a politically correct advertising campaign celebrating the diversity of the human form. Sophisticated, imaginatively composed, with studied lighting, his photographs were like the paintings of the old masters, taking the viewer into a world where beauty flirted with pleasure, sensual delight, and rapture.
I drove slowly along the little road flanked by olive groves and drystone walls that wound steeply uphill. From each patch of flat terrain, a narrower road branched off toward a group of houses—renovated farmhouses, contemporary residences, small developments built in the 1970s. I rounded a hairpin bend and was startled to see that the gnarled olive trees with their rustling leaves had disappeared; in their place was a glorious palm grove, as though a Moroccan oasis had been relocated to Provence. Yves Dalanegra had given me the access code. I parked in front of the wrought-iron gate and walked up the palm-lined pathway toward the house.
Unexpectedly, something bounded toward me, growling—a huge Anatolian sheepdog. I had been terrified of dogs ever since I was attacked by a Beauceron at a friend’s birthday party when I was six. I had almost lost an eye, and the incident had left me with a scar on the bridge of my nose and a visceral fear of dogs.
“Ulysses! Down, boy!”
Someone I assumed was the groundskeeper, a short man whose brawny arms were disproportionate to his frame, appeared behind the huge hound, wearing a sailor’s shirt and a cap that made him look like Popeye.
“Settle down!” he said, raising his voice. “Good dog!”
The dog stood its ground, refusing to let me pass. It could clearly sense my fear.
“I’m here to see Monsieur Dalanegra,” I called. “He gave me the code to the gate.”
The man was more than happy to believe me, but Ulysses had already sunk his teeth into my trouser cuff. I tried and failed to choke back a scream, which forced the groundskeeper to intervene. He pulled the dog away with his bare hands.
“Get off, Ulysses!” A little vexed, Popeye apologized profusely. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Usually, he’s like a big teddy bear. Must be something he can smell on you.”
The smell of fear, I thought as I walked on.
Yves Dalanegra had had an architect design the house, an L-shaped mansion in the Californian style built from blocks of translucent concrete. A vast infinity pool offered a stunning view of the hills and the village of Biot. An operatic aria drifted from the half-open windows, the famous act-two duet from Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. Curiously, there was no bell by the front door. I knocked, but there was no answer, probably because the music was so loud. In true Provençal manner, I went around to the garden, heading toward the source of the music.
Dalanegra spotted me and gestured for me to come through one of the French doors.
He was just finishing a shoot. The whole house was one vast loft space that served as a photographer’s studio. Dalanegra’s model, now getting dressed, was a voluptuous beauty whom—I could tell from the staging and the props—the artist had just immortalized in the pose of one of Goya’s masterpieces, La Maja desnuda. I had read somewhere that this was Dalanegra’s latest obsession, reproducing old masters using plus-size models. The staging was kitsch but not tacky—a green velvet chaise longue, soft cushions, lace fringes, and gossamer sheets foaming like waves.
Dalanegra greeted me in English.
“Hey, Thomas. How are you? Come on in, come on in, we’re just finished!”
Physically, he looked like Christ, or—to continue with more artistic comparisons—like a self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer: curly, shoulder-length hair; a gaunt, symmetrical face; a neatly trimmed beard; deep-set, piercing eyes. His clothes, however, were a very different matter: embroidered jeans, a fringed buckskin jacket, and leather ankle boots.
“I couldn’t work out what you were trying to explain over the phone. I just flew in from LA last night and I’m extremely jet-lagged.”
He gestured for me to sit at one end of a long wooden table while he showed his model out. Looking at the photos plastered everywhere, I realized that men did not exist in Dalanegra’s work. They were banished, wiped off the map, leaving women to blossom in a world delivered from (male) evil.
When he reappeared, Dalanegra chatted animatedly about his daughters, then about an actress he had photographed who’d starred in a film based on one of my books. When he
had finally exhausted these subjects, he said, “So, what can I do for you?”
2.
“Oh yes, of course I took that photo,” Dalanegra said.
I had gotten straight to the point and showed him the cover of Pianelli’s book. He almost snatched it from my hands to examine it, acting as though he hadn’t seen it in years. “It was at the prom, wasn’t it?”
“More likely the winter dance, mid-December 1992.”
He nodded. “I was running the school photography club at the time. I popped in only to take a few snaps of Florence and Olivia, but once there, I got carried away and took photos of anything and everything. It was only weeks later, when people started talking about the girl who had run away with her teacher, that it occurred to me to develop the shots. This was part of the first contact sheet. I offered it to Nice-Matin, and they bought it immediately.”
“But it’s been cropped, hasn’t it?”
He peered at the picture. “You’re right—you’ve got a good eye. I obviously cropped it to focus on the two dancers, make it more dramatic.”
“Have you still got the original?”
“I’ve had all my photographs since 1974 converted to digital.”
I assumed that meant I was in luck, but then he frowned.
“They’re all stored on a server somewhere—in the cloud, as they say these days.”
Seeing my reaction, he offered to Skype his assistant in LA. A young Japanese woman appeared on his computer screen. She was not quite awake.
With her long turquoise pigtails, her immaculate white shirt, and her school tie, she looked like a cosplayer heading to a manga convention.
“Hey, Yuko, could you do me a favor?” Dalanegra explained exactly what he was looking for and Yuko promised to get back to us as quickly as possible. When he ended the call, he went around the granite kitchen counter, grabbed a blender, filled it with a handful of spinach, some slices of banana, and some coconut milk, and whizzed it into a greenish smoothie that he poured into two tall glasses.
“Taste that,” he said, coming back to join me. “Very good for your stomach lining.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a whiskey?”
“Sorry, I quit drinking about twenty years ago.” He took a long swig of the smoothie and then returned to the subject of Vinca. “The thing about that girl was you didn’t have to be a pro to take a decent photo of her,” he said, setting his glass down. “You just pushed the button and when you developed the shot, she looked even better than she had in real life. I’ve rarely seen someone with such extraordinary grace.”
I raised an eyebrow. Dalanegra was talking as though he had photographed Vinca on numerous occasions.
“Sure I did,” he said when I posed the question.
Seeing that I was confused, he related an incident I’d known nothing about.
“Two or three months before she disappeared, Vinca asked me to take some photos of her. I thought she wanted to be a model and was trying to put together a portfolio like a couple of my daughters’ friends, but she told me that the photos were for her boyfriend.”
He reached over, grabbed the mouse, and opened up a browser.
“We did two really good sessions. Soft-core—what they used to call glamour shots.”
“Did you keep copies?”
“No. That was part of the deal, and I didn’t insist. But the strange thing is that they showed up online a couple of weeks ago.”
He turned the monitor toward me. It was the Instagram page for the Heterodites, the feminist club at Saint-Ex obsessed with Vinca. The girls had uploaded about twenty photographs from the sessions Dalanegra had been discussing.
“How did they get hold of the pictures?”
Dalanegra turned up his palms in a helpless gesture.
“My agent got in touch because there were copyright issues. The girls claim they were sent to them anonymously.”
I studied the previously unpublished pictures, feeling a swell of emotion. It was a hymn to beauty. Everything that made Vinca so attractive was there. Nothing about Vinca was perfect. Her singular beauty was made up of a collection of tiny imperfections that, together, created a poised, graceful unity, proving the old maxim that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Behind her smile, behind her faintly arrogant mask, I could make out an anguish I had not noticed at the time, an insecurity that confirmed something I had later experienced with other women: beauty was not simply physical, it was an intellectual experience, a nebulous power—it was sometimes unclear whether you were using it or it was using you.
“Later, Vinca asked me to take more photos,” Dalanegra went on, “trashy photos, almost porn. I refused because I got the impression that her boyfriend wanted her to do it, but she wasn’t really happy about it.”
“By her boyfriend, you mean Alexis Clément?”
“I assume. These days, stuff like that is banal, but back then it was pretty shady. I didn’t want to get involved. Especially since…” He trailed off, groping for words.
“Especially since what?”
“It’s not easy to explain. One day, Vinca would be radiant, and the next, she’d look exhausted or wasted. I thought she was pretty unstable. And then she asked me to do something that made my blood run cold—she asked me to follow her and take photos she could use to blackmail an older guy. It was sleazy and—”
Dalanegra was interrupted by a ping announcing the arrival of an e-mail.
“Ah, it’s from Yuko,” he said, glancing at the computer screen.
He double-clicked the e-mail, which contained about fifty photographs taken at the winter dance. He put on his half-moon glasses and quickly spotted the picture of Vinca and Alexis Clément dancing.
Rafa was right; the photograph had been cropped. Seen in its original size, the snapshot looked very different. Vinca and Clément were not dancing together—she was dancing by herself and staring at someone else, a man with his back to the camera, a blurred figure in the foreground.
“Shit!”
“What?”
“Your photo is a lie.”
“As are all photos,” he said coolly.
I grabbed a pencil and pointed to the blurred figure.
“I want to know who this guy here is. He might have had something to do with Vinca’s disappearance.”
“Let’s look through the rest of the photos.”
I pulled my chair closer to the computer, right beside Dalanegra, so we could go through the pictures together. Most of the shots were of his daughters, but in some of them, you could make out other people. Maxime’s face in the background, Fanny’s, some of the alumni I had met this morning, like Éric Lafitte, Hervé Lesage (Nigel from This Is Spinal Tap), and the brilliant Kathy Laneau. There was even a shot of me, although I had no memory of that night. I looked uncomfortable, wearing the same old blue shirt and blazer I usually wore. The teachers were always grouped in the same configuration: N’Dong, the sadistic math teacher who took a twisted pleasure in humiliating students at the blackboard; Lehmann, the manic-depressive physics teacher; and the most twisted of them all, Madame Fontana, who was utterly incapable of keeping order in class but relished settling scores in the cruelest way imaginable during staff meetings. On the other side, the more humane teachers: Miss DeVille, the pretty English teacher known for her wit—with a quote from Shakespeare or Epictetus, she could shut up any disruptive student—and Monsieur Graff, my former tutor, the brilliant French teacher who had taught me in my last two years at the lycée.
“Shit! All the shots are from the same angle,” I fumed as we reached the last of the images. I knew that I had come within inches of a revelation.
“It is pretty annoying,” Dalanegra said, finishing his smoothie.
I hadn’t even touched mine, I simply couldn’t face it. The light in the room had waned. Designed to heighten the play of light, the translucent concrete transformed the house into a chamber where the slightest shift in daylight created flickerin
g shadows that glided like ghosts.
I thanked Dalanegra for his help and before I left asked if he could e-mail me the complete set of pictures, which he did there and then.
“Do you know whether anyone else was taking photos that night?” I said as I reached the door.
“A couple of the students, maybe,” he said. “But this was before digital cameras came along, and people were careful about wasting film in those days.”
In those days…these last words echoed in the vast, vaulted room and suddenly I felt terribly old.
3.
I climbed back into my mother’s Mercedes and drove for a while, not quite knowing where I was heading. The visit to Dalanegra had left me disappointed. Perhaps this was a wild-goose chase, but I had to follow the lead to the bitter end. I had to find out the identity of the blurred figure in the photograph.
As I approached Biot, I turned onto the route des Colles, which led to the Sophia Antipolis technology park. Some force was drawing me back to Saint-Ex, where only this morning I had not had the courage to face the ghosts whose existence I had so long denied.
As I drove, I mentally flicked through the photographs I had seen at Dalanegra’s place. One of them had been particularly unsettling, a picture of a genuine ghost: Jean-Christophe Graff, my old French teacher. I blinked, and the memories came flooding back, trailing grief in their wake. Monsieur Graff was the teacher who had guided my reading, fostered my desire to write from the very first. He was kind, astute, and generous. A tall, gangly man with delicate, almost feminine features, he always wore a scarf, even at the height of summer. A teacher capable of extraordinary insight when it came to literature, yet a man who seemed a little lost when it came to reality.
The Reunion Page 13