There’s only one way to lie, Fanny, and that is to repudiate the truth, to obliterate the truth with your lie until, eventually, your lie becomes the truth.
Annabelle walked me along the platform to my carriage and kissed me goodbye. It is possible to live with a blood memory, she said. She told me she knew this from personal experience. And she left me to think about this quote: “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”
14
The Prom
1.
Fanny concluded her story in a fever close to frenzy. She was no longer sitting on the carved stone steps but standing in the middle of the church, teetering as though on the verge of collapse. As she took a few steps and staggered between the pews, she reminded me of the last passenger on a sinking ship.
I was scarcely in better shape. I could hardly breathe. My mind was racing; I was unable to put these events in any sort of perspective. Vinca had been murdered by Fanny, and my mother had helped to dispose of the body. I couldn’t reject the truth, but it seemed utterly at odds with everything I knew about the characters of both my mother and my friend.
“Fanny, wait!”
She had just raced out of the church. A second earlier, she had looked as though she might faint, but now she was running as though her life depended on it.
By the time I stumbled out of the church and onto the square, Fanny was long gone. I tried to run after her, but I had twisted my ankle and she had a head start and was faster than me. I limped through the village and down the chemin des Vachettes as quickly as I could. There was a parking ticket on my car. I crumpled it up, slid in behind the steering wheel, and tried to decide what to do next.
My mother. I needed to talk to my mother. She was the only one who could confirm what Fanny had told me, the only one who could help me disentangle the lies from the truth. Having turned off my phone in the church, I now turned it on again. No word from my father, but a text message from Maxime asking me to call him back. I put the key in the ignition as I hit Redial.
“We need to talk, Thomas. I’ve found out something—something really fucking serious that…”
I could hear the tremor in his voice.
“Tell me.”
“Not over the phone. Let’s meet up later at the Eagle’s Nest. I’ve just arrived at the Alumni Prom, so I need to press the flesh a little.”
In the quiet of the Mercedes, I tried to organize my thoughts as I drove. On Saturday, December 19, 1992, two people had been murdered only hours apart in Saint-Ex. First Alexis Clément, then Vinca. It had been that coincidence that had made it possible for Francis and my mother to create an unshakable alibi to protect Maxime, Fanny, and me, first by making the bodies disappear and then—and this was the real stroke of genius—by shifting the scene of the crime from Saint-Ex to Paris.
Thinking back over what Fanny had said, I decided I needed a second opinion on something that had puzzled me. I tried calling my own doctor in New York, but I only had his office number and the practice was not open on weekends. Having no alternative, I called my brother.
It would be an understatement to say we didn’t talk much. Being the brother of a hero was daunting. Whenever I phoned him, I felt like I was taking up time he could be spending treating disadvantaged children, which made our conversations somewhat awkward.
“Hey, bro!” he said when he answered.
As always, his enthusiasm, far from being contagious, actually drained the energy from me.
“Hey, Jérôme, how’s life?”
“Why don’t we skip the small talk, Thomas. What do you need?”
Today, for once, he made the conversation easier.
“I saw Mom today. Did you know about her heart attack?”
“Of course.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She asked me not to. She didn’t want you to worry.”
Yeah, right.
“You’re familiar with Rohypnol, yeah?”
“Of course. It’s a vicious drug, but it is not really prescribed these days.”
“Have you ever taken it?”
“No. Why on earth do you want to know about Rohypnol?”
“I’m writing a novel set in the 1990s…how many pills would someone have to take for it to be fatal?”
“Impossible to say. It depends on the dosage. Most tablets contain one milligram of flunitrazepam.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it still depends on the person who’s taking them.”
“You’re a great help!”
“Kurt Cobain tried to kill himself using Rohypnol.”
“I thought he shot himself in the head.”
“I’m talking about a failed suicide attempt a few months before he died. They found fifty pills in his stomach.”
Fanny said she’d given Vinca a handful of pills. That was a far cry from fifty. “What if you took fifteen?”
“You’d be pretty fucked up, and you could end up in a coma, especially if you took them with alcohol. But, like I said, it all depends on the dose. Back in the nineties, the lab producing it also made a two-milligram tablet—fifteen of those and some Jim Beam might finish you off.”
Back to square one.
Another question popped into my head.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a doctor in Cannes called Frédéric Rubens?”
“Ha! You mean Dr. Mabuse? Everyone knew him, and not for the right reasons.”
“Mabuse was his nickname?”
“One of many.” Jérôme sniggered. “Freddy the freak, Freddy Krueger, Candy Man…he didn’t just supply; he was a junkie himself. He was involved in all sorts of illegal stuff—dealing, practicing medicine without a license, selling prescriptions…”
“I assume he lost his license?”
“Oh yes, but not soon enough, in my opinion.”
“Do you know if he still lives around here?”
“With all the shit he was taking, he was never likely to make it to old age. No, Rubens died back when I was a med student. So this next novel, is it a medical thriller?”
2.
It was getting dark as I pulled up outside the school. The security guard had left the barrier open and was simply checking names against a guest list. I wasn’t on any list, but having seen me a couple of hours earlier, he waved me through and told me to park my car down by the lake.
In the gathering darkness, the campus looked magnificent, more unified and cohesive than it did in daylight. Swept clean by the mistral, the sky was cloudless and stippled with stars. Seen from the parking lot, tea lights, flaming torches, and strings of Christmas lights created a magical atmosphere as they led guests to the celebrations. There were a number of different events for different classes. The prom in the gym welcomed those students who had graduated between 1990 and 1995.
Stepping into the vast hall, I felt a sudden queasiness. It looked dangerously close to a Worst Outfits of the 1990s costume party. Forty-somethings had raided their wardrobes for their old Converse high-tops, ripped 501s, Schott bomber jackets, and lumberjack shirts. Most of the athletes were wearing baggy pants, Tacchini tracksuits, and Chevignon jackets.
I spotted Maxime, wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey. People were flocking around him as though he’d already been elected. The name Macron was on everyone’s lips.
When Maxime saw me, he made a little gesture: Ten minutes? I nodded and, while I waited, melted into the crowd. I made my way across the gym to the bar. The whole place was festooned with paper chains and vintage posters. I felt no more uncomfortable than I had this morning. No bad vibes. Of course, I knew that my brain was doing everything in its power to reject Vinca’s death.
“What can I get you, monsieur?”
Thankfully, there was alcohol. There was even a bartender making cocktails to order.
“Could you make me a caipirinha?”
“With pleasure.”
“Make that two!” I heard a voice from behind me and, turning, sa
w that it was Maxime’s partner, Olivier Mons, who ran the multimedia library in Antibes. I congratulated him on their two beautiful little daughters and we swapped stories about the “good old days” that had never really been that good. While I remembered him as a bit of a poser, he was actually charming and very funny. We chatted for a couple of minutes, and then he confided that he had been a little worried about Maxime over the past few days. He was convinced there was something Maxime was not telling him and equally convinced that I knew something about it.
I opted for a half-truth and told him that, with the upcoming elections, some of Maxime’s rivals were trying to find skeletons in his closet to stop him from running. I was ambiguous, saying vaguely that this was the price of being involved in politics. I promised to do whatever I could to help Maxime and said that the whole thing would quickly blow over anyway.
And Olivier believed me. It was one of the weirdest things about my life. Though a worrier by nature, I had the strange ability to reassure other people that everything was going to be okay.
The bartender brought our cocktails and we clinked glasses and stood laughing at the hideous outfits of the other guests. Like me, Olivier was fairly conservative in his style. The same could not be said about our former classmates. Some of the women seemed nostalgic for the days of crop tops and exposed belly buttons. Others were wearing denim shorts, black camisoles over white T-shirts, choker necklaces, or bandannas tied around the handles of their handbags. Thankfully, no one had dared to wear Buffalo platform wedges. What was it all for? Were they just having fun, or were they trying to recapture their lost youth?
We ordered two more cocktails.
“And this time, don’t be so stingy with the cachaça!” I said.
The barman took me at my word and made stiff caipirinhas. I took my leave of Olivier and, cocktail in hand, went out onto the terrace where the smokers were gathered.
3.
The night was still young, but already some guy in a dark corner was openly dealing coke and dope. Everything I had always loathed. Dressed in a battered leather jacket and a Depeche Mode T-shirt, Stéphane Pianelli was leaning on the fence, vaping and sipping alcohol-free beer.
“So you didn’t go to the concert in the end?”
He nodded to a five-year-old playing under the tables. “My parents were supposed to be babysitting Ernesto, but something came up at the last minute,” he said, exhaling a plume of vapor that smelled like gingerbread.
“Ernesto? After Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara?”
“Why? Have you got a problem with it?” Pianelli raised a warning eyebrow.
“No, no,” I said, eager not to offend him.
“His mother thought it was a bit clichéd.”
“Who’s his mother?”
He looked at me, poker-faced. “No one you know.”
I had to laugh. As a journalist, Pianelli thought everyone’s private life was fair game except his own.
“It’s Céline Feulpin, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s her.”
I remembered her well from my last year in school. She had always been very passionate about injustice and had been on the front lines of every student protest; she was a female version of Stéphane, and, like him, she had gone on to study literature. As left-wing activists, they had fought together for the rights of students and minorities. I had bumped into Céline two or three years earlier, on a flight from New York to Geneva. She was a completely different person. She was dressed in Lady Dior and was draped over a Swiss doctor she seemed enamored with. We had chatted a little and I thought she seemed happy and fulfilled, something I was careful not to mention to Pianelli.
“I’ve got some info for you,” he said, changing the subject.
He stepped to one side, and for a moment, his face was lit up by the Christmas lights. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark circles under them, as though he hadn’t slept in days.
“Did you manage to get information on the financing of the school construction work?”
“Not really. I put my intern on the case, but it’s all pretty hush-hush. He’ll get in touch with you when he has something.”
He caught his son’s eye and gave him a little wave.
“However, I did manage to get a look at the final plans. It’s massive. There are some really expensive features that serve no purpose I can think of.”
“Like what?”
“Part of the project involves a huge rose garden—the Garden of Angels. Have you heard about this?”
“No.”
“It’s completely insane. The plan is to create a contemplative space that would extend from where the lavender fields are now right down to the lake.”
“What do you mean, a contemplative space?”
He shrugged.
“It’s something my intern mentioned over the phone. To be honest, I don’t get it either. But I’ve got something else for you.”
He gave me a mysterious look, dipped into his pocket, and brought out a piece of paper scrawled with handwritten notes.
“I managed to get hold of the police report about Francis Biancardini’s death. Whoever it was really did a number on the poor bastard.”
“So he was tortured?”
I saw an evil glint in his eyes.
“Oh yes, seriously. As far as I’m concerned, this backs up my theory that it was someone settling old scores.”
I heaved a sigh. “What old scores, Stéphane? Are we back to your conspiracy theory about money laundering and the Mafia? Just think about it, for fuck’s sake. Even if Francis was working for the Mafia—and I don’t believe it for a minute—why would they bump him off?”
“Maybe he tried to double-cross the guys in Calabria.”
“Why? Francis was seventy-four and he was rich as Croesus.”
“For guys like that, you can never be too rich.”
“The whole idea is ridiculous. It just doesn’t make sense. So, did he try to write the killer’s name in blood?”
“No, the journalist from the Nouvel Obs admitted she made that bit up to give the story some drama. But he did phone someone just before he died.”
“Do we know who?”
“Yes—your mother.”
I looked at him, deadpan, mentally trying to defuse the bomb he had just set. “I suppose it’s logical. After all, they were neighbors and our families have always been close.”
He nodded, but I could see what he was thinking: You keep telling yourself that, my friend, but don’t think I’m going to fall for it.
“Do we know whether she picked up?”
“Why don’t you ask her?” he said and drained his drink. “Come on, Ernesto,” he called, going over to fetch his son. “Let’s go home. You’ve got soccer practice tomorrow.”
4.
I glanced around the room. Maxime was still surrounded by his admirers. At the far end of the terrace there was another bar, decorated to look like it belonged in a sleazy dive, that was serving shots of vodka.
I ordered a vodka shot (mint) and then another (lemon). It was irresponsible, but after all, I didn’t have a son to take home or to soccer practice in the morning, and besides, I have always hated alcohol-free beer and I was probably just a couple of days away from a life in prison.
I had to track down my mother. Why had she run off? Was she afraid that I’d discover the truth? Or was she afraid she might suffer the same fate as Francis?
I ordered a third shot (cherry), convinced that I might think more clearly while intoxicated. There was often a moment of lucidity along the path to drunkenness, a moment when ideas collided and when, before chaos set in, there might be a glimmer of understanding. My mother had taken my rental car, which was equipped with GPS. Maybe I could call the rental company and claim someone had stolen the car and ask for the location? It sounded plausible, but it was Saturday night, so it would be tricky.
One last shot (orange) for the road. My brain was now running at full speed. It was exhilarating, t
hough I knew it wouldn’t last. Then I had a brilliant idea. Why not just try to locate the iPad I’d left in the car? Modern surveillance made this only too easy. I took out my phone and launched the app, which was pretty efficient and worked most of the time. I logged in and held my breath. A blue dot began to flash on the map. I zoomed in. If my tablet was still in the car, the car was now at the southern tip of Cap d’Antibes in a spot I knew only too well: the parking lot next to Keller Beach, the lot used by tourists who wanted to walk along the coastal path.
I immediately called my father.
“I’ve tracked down Mom’s car!”
“How did you manage that?”
“We can talk about that later. She’s parked down by Keller Beach.”
“What the bloody hell would Annabelle be doing there, for God’s sake?”
Once again, I felt that he sounded unduly worried and realized that he was hiding something from me. He vehemently denied this, and I flew into a rage.
“You really piss me off, Richard! You’re happy to call me when there’s a problem, but then you don’t trust me. What the hell is going on?”
“All right, all right,” he said. “When your mother left this afternoon, she took something with her.”
“What?”
“One of my hunting rifles.”
My head was spinning. I could not imagine my mother with a gun. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to picture her.
That’s when I suddenly realized I had been wrong; I could easily imagine Annabelle with a rifle.
“Does she know how to use it?” I asked my father.
“I’m heading down to Cap d’Antibes” was all he said in response.
I was not convinced that was a good idea, but I didn’t see what else we could do.
“I’ll just finish up here and then meet you there. Okay, Dad?”
“Okay. Make it quick.”
I hung up and went back into the gym. The mood had changed somewhat. Fueled by alcohol and drugs, people had begun to let their hair down. The music was deafening. I looked around for Maxime but couldn’t see him. Then I thought maybe he had gone outside to wait for me.
The Reunion Page 18