2.
Suddenly, twin headlights pierced the fog and came toward me; it was Stéphane Pianelli’s Dacia.
“Get in, Thomas,” he said, rolling down the window. “I thought maybe you’d have trouble getting home. I’ll drive you.”
Exhausted, I accepted. The passenger seat was still piled high with junk so, as I had earlier, I climbed into the back seat next to the sleeping Ernesto.
Pianelli explained that he was on his way back from the offices of Nice-Matin. Since the paper had been put to bed early in the evening, there would be no mention of my mother’s death in the morning edition, but Stéphane had gone back to the office to write a piece for the online edition.
“I haven’t mentioned anything about your father being suspected,” he said.
As we drove along the coast toward La Fontonne, Pianelli finally admitted that he had run into Fanny earlier in the evening when he had stopped by the hospital to check on Maxime.
“She was a nervous wreck. I’ve never seen her like that.”
Alarm bells started to ring in my frazzled brain. “What did she tell you?”
We had stopped at the intersection near Siesta. The longest traffic light in the world…
“Everything. She told me everything, Thomas. How she killed Vinca and how your mother and Francis helped her cover it up.”
Suddenly I understood why Pianelli had seemed agitated when he drove me to the police station. He had not simply been upset by my mother’s death; he was overwhelmed that he had stumbled onto a murder story.
“Did she tell you what happened to Alexis Clément?”
“No,” he admitted. “That’s the one piece of the puzzle I’m still missing.”
The traffic light turned green and the Dacia turned onto the highway, heading toward La Constance. I felt completely crushed. I could barely think straight. I felt as though the day would never end, as though a wave would come and sweep everything away. There had been too many revelations, too many tragedies, too many deaths; there were too many threats still hanging over those dearest to me. So I did what no one should ever do. I let down my guard. I broke my twenty-five-year silence because I wanted to believe in people. I wanted to believe that Pianelli was a decent guy, that he would put our friendship before his job as a journalist.
I told him everything, about Clément’s murder and what I had found out in the past few hours. When he reached my parents’ house, Pianelli parked outside the gates and left the engine running. We sat talking in the battered SUV for half an hour, trying to figure things out. Stéphane patiently helped me piece together what had happened the previous afternoon. My mother had obviously overheard my conversation with Maxime. Like me, she had probably spotted the difference between the handwriting in Vinca’s book and the handwriting in the notes Alexis Clément had made on my essay. Unlike me, she had been able to use this to identify the person who had murdered Francis. Either she had arranged to meet the killer or she had tracked him to Cap d’Antibes, planning to kill him. In a nutshell, she had succeeded where we had failed; she had unmasked the monster whose murderous rage seemed boundless.
It was an insight that had cost her her life.
“Try to get some rest,” Stéphane said, hugging me. “I’ll call you later. We can go to the hospital and see how Maxime is doing.”
Despite his affectionate words, I didn’t have the strength to answer. I just slammed the car door. Since I did not have a key fob, I had to climb over the gates. I remembered that it was possible to get into the house through the garage, which my parents never locked. In the living room, I didn’t even bother to turn on the light. I set my bag and Francis’s pistol on the table. I pulled off my sodden clothes, stumbled across the living room like a sleepwalker, and collapsed on the sofa. I wrapped myself in a thick wool blanket and let sleep overcome me.
I had gambled and lost on every front. I had been crushed by fate. Utterly unprepared, I had just lived through the worst day of my life. Yesterday morning, as I landed on the Côte d’Azur, I’d known that an earthquake was looming, but I hadn’t reckoned on its magnitude, its brutal, devastating consequences.
17
The Garden of Angels
Sunday, May 14, 2017
When I opened my eyes, the midday sun was streaming into the living room. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and I had slept through half the day. A deep, dreamless sleep that allowed me to completely disconnect from the blackness of reality.
I had been woken by my cell phone ringing. I hadn’t been quick enough to answer, so I listened to the message. Using his lawyer’s phone, my father had called to tell me he had been released from custody and was on his way home. I tried calling him back, but my phone battery died. My charger was in the suitcase I had left in the rental car, so I vainly searched for a compatible charger for my phone, then gave up. Using the landline, I called the hospital, but there was no one who could update me on Maxime’s condition.
I showered and pulled on some clothes I found in my father’s wardrobe, a Charvet shirt and a vicuña jacket. I drank three straight espressos, gazing out the window as the sea unfurled its myriad shades of blue. In the kitchen, all my old things were exactly where I had left them. A large cardboard box was precariously balanced on a stool, and the hardwood counter was littered with old school essays, report cards, mixtapes, and the collection of Tsvetaeva’s poetry. I opened it again and reread the beautiful dedication:
For Vinca,
I wish I were an incorporeal soul
that I might never leave you.
To love you is to live.
Alexis
I glanced through the book, distractedly at first and then with increasing attention. Published by Mercure de France, Letter to an Amazon was not, as I had thought, a collection of poems but an essay, and someone—either Vinca or the person who had given it to her—had annotated it extensively. I lingered over one of the sentences that had been underlined. This is…the only tear in this perfect entity which is two women who love each other. The impossible thing is not resisting the temptation of a man but resisting the need for a child.
Two women who love one another…Exquisitely written, the essay—penned in the early 1930s—was a poetic paean to lesbian love. Not a manifesto but a thoughtful reflection on the impossibility of two women having a child that was biologically both of theirs.
It was at this point that I finally understood what I had been missing all along. And it changed everything.
Vinca loved women. Or at least, Vinca had been in love with a woman. Alexis. The name was unisex. Although in France, it was almost exclusively a man’s name, in English-speaking countries, it was more usually a woman’s. I was blown away by what I had discovered, though I could not help but wonder whether I was on the wrong track again.
The buzzer for the front gate sounded. Assuming that it was my father, I pressed the button and went out to meet him. But rather than seeing Richard, I found myself face-to-face with a thin young man with delicate features and piercing eyes.
“I’m Corentin Meirieu, Monsieur Pianelli’s assistant,” he said as he took off his bicycle helmet and shook out his flame-red hair.
He leaned his contraption—a curious bamboo bicycle with a spring-mounted leather saddle—against the wall.
“Please accept my condolences,” he said with a compassionate expression that was half hidden by a bushy red beard at odds with his youthful face.
I invited him in for a coffee.
“Thanks, as long as it’s not Nespresso.”
We went into the kitchen, and while he was studying a pack of arabica near the coffeemaker, he patted the messenger bag slung across his chest.
“I’ve got some info for you.”
While I made the coffee, Corentin Meirieu sat on a stool and pulled out a sheaf of annotated documents. As I set down a cup in front of him, I caught a glimpse of the front page of the Nice-Matin late edition sticking out of his bag. There was a photograph of the coastal
path with the headline “Fear Stalks the City.”
“It wasn’t exactly easy, but I managed to dig up some interesting information on who’s financing the building project at Saint-Ex.”
I took a seat opposite him and nodded for him to continue.
“You were right—funding for the project is completely dependent on a substantial donation recently made to the school.”
“How recently?”
“Early this year.”
Around the time Francis was murdered. “Who’s behind the donation? Vinca Rockwell’s family?” I had been considering the idea that Vinca’s grandfather, unable to cope with the loss of his granddaughter, had somehow managed to organize a vendetta from beyond the grave.
“No,” Meirieu said, adding sugar to his coffee.
“Who, then?”
The bearded hipster checked his notes. “The endowment was made by an American cultural association, the Hutchinson and DeVille Foundation.”
The name did not immediately ring a bell. Meirieu drained his coffee in one gulp.
“As the name suggests, the foundation is funded by two families, the Hutchinsons and the DeVilles, who made their fortunes with a brokerage company they started in California after the war. They now have hundreds of branches all over America.” He glanced down at his notes. “The foundation acts as a patron of the arts and most of its donations are to schools, universities, and museums—St. Jean Baptiste High School, Berkeley, UCLA, the SF MoMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art…” Meirieu tugged at the sleeves of a denim shirt that was so tight, it looked like a second skin. “At the last board meeting, the directors were called in to vote on an unusual proposal. For the first time, it was suggested that the foundation fund a project outside the United States.”
“This was the project at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry?”
“Exactly. It was a very heated debate. The project in itself was not without merit, but it included a number of bizarre elements, like the creation of a garden by the lake to be called the Garden of Angels.”
“Stéphane mentioned something about a huge rose garden.”
“That’s it. The intention was that it should be a contemplative space dedicated to the memory of Vinca Rockwell.”
“But that’s insane, isn’t it? Why would the foundation rubber-stamp such a bizarre project?”
“That’s the thing—a majority of the board voted against it. But one of the families is now represented by a single heir. Apparently, there is some history of mental illness, so the directors were wary of this person, but according to the statutes of the foundation, she holds a large number of votes and managed to get the necessary additional votes to win a narrow majority.”
I rubbed my eyes. I had the strange impression that I was close to the truth and yet did not understand a thing. I got up to get my school backpack. I wanted to check something. I dug out the 1992–1993 school yearbook and as I flicked through the pages, Meirieu continued.
“The heiress in question is named Alexis Charlotte DeVille. I think you used to know her. She was a teacher at Saint-Ex when you were studying there.”
Alexis DeVille…the charismatic English teacher.
Dumbfounded, I stared at the photograph of the woman everyone had called Miss DeVille. Even the yearbook did not give her first name, only the initials A.C. I had finally found Alexis, the woman who had murdered my mother, killed Francis, and tried to kill Maxime. The woman who, indirectly, had hastened Vinca’s tragic fate.
“She now spends six months of the year on the Côte d’Azur,” Meirieu reported. “She bought the old Fitzgerald villa down in Cap d’Antibes—you know the one I mean?”
I rushed out the door, only to realize that I didn’t have a car. I considered stealing the bamboo bike but instead went down to the basement and pulled the plastic tarpaulin off my old moped. I sat on the saddle and, as I’d done so often when I was fifteen, tried to kick-start the Peugeot 103.
But the basement was cold and damp, and the engine stalled. I ferreted out a toolbox and came back, removed the suppressor cap, and took out the spark plug. It was black and caked with soot. As I’d done a hundred times in the mornings before setting off for school, I wiped the spark plug with an old rag, rubbed it down with sandpaper, and put it back.
I wheeled the moped out into the driveway and tried to kick-start it again. There was a slight improvement, but I couldn’t get the engine to idle. I flipped up the kickstand, jumped on the saddle, and let myself coast downhill. The engine sputtered, coughed, and then backfired and started. I swung onto the main road, praying that it would hold out for a few kilometers.
Richard
Images collide inside my head. Excruciating, unreal. More terrible than the worst nightmares. My wife’s face, crushed, splintered, shattered. Annabelle’s beautiful face reduced to a mask of bloody flesh.
My name is Richard Degalais and I am tired of living.
If life truly is war, I have not just faced an enemy assault, I am lying in the trenches, my belly sliced open by a bayonet. Forced to surrender unconditionally in the most painful of all battles.
I stand motionless in the living room amid the dust motes that glitter golden in the light. My house is empty now. It will forever be empty. I find it difficult to accept the reality of what has happened. I have lost Annabelle forever. But when did I really lose her? A few hours ago on the beach at Cap d’Antibes? A few years ago? A few decades ago? Or it might be better to say that I have not really lost Annabelle, since she was never mine to lose.
I stare, hypnotized, at the pistol on the table in front of me. I have no idea what it’s doing there. It’s the sort of Smith and Wesson with a wooden grip you sometimes see in old Westerns. The cylinder is full—five .38-caliber bullets. I pick up the gun, gauge its weight. The gun is calling to me. A swift and sure solution to all my problems. In the short term, I find the prospect of death comforting. Gone would be the nearly fifty years of a strange marriage spent living with an unknowable woman who claimed that she loved me in her own way, which in truth meant that she didn’t love me.
The truth is that Annabelle tolerated me, and, all things considered, it was better than nothing. Living with her was painful, but living without her would have killed me. We had our little private arrangement whereby, in the eyes of the world, I was the philandering husband—which I was—and that shielded her from gossip. Nothing and no one had a hold over Annabelle. She defied all classification, all norms, all proprieties. It was her freedom that fascinated me. After all, surely what we love in another is the mystery? I loved her, but her heart was not to be won. I loved her, but I was unable to protect her.
I press the barrel of the Chief’s Special to my temple and suddenly, I can breathe more easily. I would love to know who put this pistol here for me to find. Thomas, maybe? The son who is not my son. This child who, like his mother, never loved me. I shut my eyes and I see his face in a dozen precise memories from when he was little. Images tinged with wonder and with pain. Wonder at this boy who was intelligent, curious, and a little too wise; pain because I knew that I was not the father.
Squeeze the trigger if you’re man enough.
In the end, it is not fear that makes me stop. It’s Mozart. The three-note figure for harp and oboe that alerts me whenever Annabelle sends me a text message. I flinch. I put the gun down and dive for my phone. Richard, you have mail. A.
The message was sent just now from Annabelle’s phone. Only that’s impossible because Annabelle is dead, and besides, she left her cell phone here. The only explanation is that she set a timer to send the message before she died.
Richard, you have mail. A.
Mail? What mail? I check my phone but find no new e-mail. I go out of the house and down to the mailbox outside the gate. Next to a flyer for a sushi-delivery place, I find a thick blue envelope that reminds me of the love letters she used to send a lifetime ago. There are no stamps. I tear open the envelope. Annabelle might have put it there herself yesterd
ay afternoon, though more likely it was delivered by messenger. I read the first sentence: Richard, if you are reading this letter, it means that Alexis DeVille has killed me.
It takes me an inordinate length of time to read the three pages. The contents leave me shocked and upset. It is a postmortem confession. And, in her inimitable way, it is also a love letter. It ends: Now you have the fate of our family in your hands. You are the only one left with the strength and the courage to protect it, to save our son.
18
Night and the Maiden
1.
The moped’s engine had conked out. Looking over the handlebars, I was pedaling furiously, standing on the pedals as though I were competing in the Tour de France carrying a fifty-kilo weight.
From the street, Villa Fitzgerald looked like a bunker. Despite the name, F. Scott Fitzgerald had never lived there, but old myths die hard. Fifty meters before I reached the house, I abandoned the moped on the pavement and stepped over the railing that ran along the shore. In this part of Cap d’Antibes, the golden sandy beaches gave way to a rugged, inaccessible coastline—steep rocky bluffs sculpted by the mistral, cliffs that tumbled into the sea. I scrabbled over the rocks, risking life and limb, and climbed the steep ridge that backed up to the garden of the villa.
I stepped onto the polished-concrete deck that surrounded the long cobalt-blue swimming pool. It extended as far as the steep staircase carved into the rock face that led down to a small pier. Clinging to the cliff, the Villa Fitzgerald almost literally had its toes in the water; it was one of the modernist houses built during the Roaring Twenties, with art deco and Mediterranean touches. The lime-washed geometric façade was surmounted by a flat roof terrace that was sheltered by a pergola. At this hour of the day, sky and sea merged in a single, shimmering blue.
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