Beneath an arcade was a covered patio. I crept around the villa until I found a half-open patio door, then slipped into the house.
Except for the fact that the view was of the Mediterranean rather than the Hudson River, the living room looked much like my loft in Tribeca, a minimalist space where every detail was carefully curated. The kind of interior you might see in Architectural Digest. The library contained many of the same books that mine did, reflecting the same breadth of culture—classical, literary, international.
The place also had that strange perfection of houses where there are no children, the slightly melancholy coolness of homes that do not pulse with the very substance of life: kids’ laughter, stuffed toys, pieces of Lego everywhere, food crumbs stuck all over the table…
“Clearly, people in your family have a habit of walking into the lion’s den.”
I spun around to find Alexis DeVille standing ten meters away. I had seen her the day before, at the fiftieth-anniversary ceremony for Saint-Ex. She was simply dressed—jeans, striped blouse, V-neck sweater, Converse sneakers—but she was the kind of person who had a naturally commanding presence whatever the circumstances. A presence emphasized here by the three large dogs behind her: a Doberman with cropped ears, a black and tan pit bull terrier, and a Rottweiler.
I regretted having come without any means to defend myself as soon as I spotted the dogs. I’d rushed out of my parents’ house on impulse, driven by sheer rage. And I had always thought that my most effective weapon was my mind, a lesson I’d learned from my teacher Jean-Christophe Graff. But as I thought about what Alexis DeVille had done to my mother, to Francis, and to Maxime, I realized that I had been wrong to be so impulsive.
Now that I had traced the truth back to its source, I felt helpless. In the end, I did not expect Alexis DeVille to tell me anything new. I already understood. But I could well imagine the exhilaration these two intelligent, liberated, beautiful women must have felt at the time. The intellectual intimacy, the physical intoxication, the feverish feeling of transgression. Although the idea troubled me, I realized that Alexis DeVille and I were not so different. We had both fallen in love with the same girl twenty-five years ago, and neither of us had ever gotten over it.
Tall, slim, with smooth skin that made it impossible to guess her age, Alexis DeVille had pinned her hair into a chignon. She seemed convinced that she was in control of this situation. The dogs did not take their eyes off me, but Alexis nonchalantly turned her back to me and studied the countless photographs on the walls—the famous glamour shots of Vinca that Dalanegra had told me about. His work was equal to the beauty of his model. He had perfectly captured the troubling, enthralling beauty of Vinca. The ephemeral nature of her youth.
2.
I decided to go on the attack.
“You’ve convinced yourself that you still love Vinca, but you’re wrong. We do not kill those we love.”
DeVille tore herself away from the photographs and turned her icy gaze on me, looking me up and down contemptuously.
“I could easily counter that by telling you that sometimes, killing someone is the ultimate act of love. But that’s not the issue. I didn’t kill Vinca—you did.”
“Me?”
“You, your mother, Fanny, Francis Biancardini, and Francis’s son…on some level, you’re all responsible. You’re all guilty.”
“I suppose Ahmed told you?”
She moved toward me, flanked by her hellhounds. I thought of Hecate, Greek goddess of the shades, always accompanied by a pack of dogs howling at the moon. Hecate, who reigned over nightmares and suppressed desires, those parts of the human spirit where men and women are the most impure and the most fragile.
“Despite the evidence, I never believed that Vinca ran away with that guy,” Alexis said. “I’ve spent years uncovering the truth. And by a cruel twist of fate, when I least expected it, it was served up to me on a platter.”
The dogs growled at me. Panic was beginning to set in. The very sight of the animals left me paralyzed. I tried not to look them in the eye, but they could sense my fear.
“It happened about seven months ago,” Alexis explained, “in the fruit and vegetable aisle of a supermarket. I was doing my shopping, and Ahmed recognized me. He asked if he could talk to me. The night Vinca died, Francis had sent him to collect some of her things, clean up her room, and get rid of any evidence that might implicate you all. When he was going through her coat pockets, he came across a letter and a photograph. He was the only one who knew from the start that I was Alexis—a secret the dumb bastard kept for twenty-five years.”
Beneath her apparent calm, I could sense her rage, her fury.
“Ahmed wanted money to get home to Tunisia, and I wanted information. I gave him five thousand euros and he told me everything: the bodies walled up in the gym, the horror of that blood-soaked December night in 1992, the fact that you had all gotten off scot-free.”
“Saying something over and over doesn’t make it true,” I said. “There’s only one person to blame for Vinca’s death, and that’s you. The person responsible for a crime isn’t always the one who held the gun, as you well know.”
For the first time, Alexis DeVille’s face glowered irritably. As though responding to some telepathic order from their goddess, the three hounds encircled me. I felt cold sweat trickle down the small of my back.
In spite of my rising panic, I continued.
“I remember you back then. Your charisma. All the students admired you. Me most of all. A bright, beautiful thirty-year-old teacher who respected her students and knew how to get the best out of them. All the girls longed to be like you. You represented a kind of freedom, an independence. To me, you represented the triumph of the intellect over the mediocrity of the world. A bit like a female version of Jean-Christophe Graff and—”
At the mention of my old teacher, Alexis gave a bitter laugh.
“Ah, poor old Graff! Another idiot, though admittedly a cultured idiot. He was another one who never guessed the truth. He wooed me for years, wrote me poems and passionate love letters. He idealized me just as you idealized Vinca. It’s typical of men like you. You claim to love women, but you don’t understand us and don’t want to understand us. You don’t listen to us and you refuse to hear us. As far as you’re concerned, we’re just extras in your romantic reveries.”
She quoted Stendhal: “‘From the moment you begin to be really interested in a woman, you no longer see her as she really is, but as it suits you to see her.’”
I was not about to let her get away with this pseudointellectual justification. In loving Vinca, Alexis DeVille had destroyed her, and I needed her to admit that.
“On the contrary, I knew Vinca as she really was. Or at least, I did before she met you. And I don’t remember a girl who got drunk and popped pills. She was easy prey for you, a wild, uninhibited young girl just discovering life.”
“So I perverted her, is that it?”
“No, I think you got her into booze and drugs because it clouded her judgment, made her more vulnerable.”
Teeth bared, the dogs were now brushing up against me, sniffing my hands. The Doberman pressed its snout against my thigh, forcing me back against the sofa.
“I pushed her into your father’s arms because it was the only way for us to have a baby.”
“The truth is that you’re the only one who wanted a baby.”
“No, that’s not true. Vinca wanted it too.”
“With my father? I seriously doubt it.”
“You have no right to judge us.” Alexis DeVille flew into a rage. “These days, if two women want to have a child, it’s accepted, even respected. People’s attitudes have changed, the laws have changed. Science has moved on. But back in the 1990s, the very idea was rejected, dismissed.”
“You had money; you could have gone about it a different way.”
“I didn’t have a red cent!” Alexis protested. “People aren’t always as open-minded as they se
em. The DeVilles might have been from California, but their broad-mindedness was all show. My family are hypocrites, cowards, and bullies. They disapproved of my ‘lifestyle,’ my sexual orientation. For years, they cut me off. In targeting your father, we were killing two birds with one stone—we could have a child and the money we needed.”
The conversation was futile. Neither of us was prepared to give ground. Perhaps because it was pointless to try and assign blame; perhaps because both of us were simultaneously guilty and innocent, victim and executioner; perhaps because the only thing that could be said for certain was that in 1992 there had been a bewitching girl at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry who drove those she allowed into her life insane. Because when you were with Vinca, you had the preposterous illusion that her very existence was the answer to a question that we all ask ourselves: How can I make it through the night?
3.
The tension in the air was electric. The three dogs now had me backed against the wall. I could feel the palpable danger—my heart hammering in my chest, my shirt sticking to my skin—this inexorable procession toward death. Alexis DeVille had the power to end my life with a wave or a word. Now that I had finally come to the end of my investigation, I realized that there were only two choices: kill or be killed. Despite my fear, I kept talking.
“You could have adopted a child. You could have had one yourself.”
Utterly in the grip of her dangerous delusion, Alexis DeVille stepped closer and jabbed her finger at my face.
“No! Don’t you understand, I wanted Vinca’s baby. A baby with her genes, her perfection, her grace, her beauty. A perpetuation of our love.”
“I know you supplied her with Rohypnol, thanks to the sketchy prescriptions you got from Dr. Rubens. It’s a pretty twisted kind of love that can only blossom when you turn your lover into a junkie.”
“You disgusting little…”
Alexis DeVille was at a loss for words. She was finding it increasingly difficult to control the dogs. I felt my chest tighten, felt a stabbing pain in my heart. I was on the brink of passing out. I tried to ignore the panic and drove home the final nail.
“You know the last thing that Vinca said to me before she died? She said, ‘Alexis forced me. I didn’t want to sleep with him!’ For twenty-five years, I completely misunderstood what she meant, and it cost a man his life. But I know now. She meant: ‘Alexis DeVille forced me to sleep with your father, but I didn’t want to.’”
My breathing was ragged. My whole body was shaking. I felt as though the only way out of this nightmare was to split myself in two.
“You see, Vinca died knowing what a vile human being you are. So you can build a thousand Gardens of Angels, but you’ll never be able to rewrite history.”
Overcome by rage, Alexis DeVille signaled to her dogs.
The pit bull was the first to attack. The sheer power of the dog knocked me off balance. As I fell, I hit my head on the wall and then on the sharp edge of a metal chair. I felt it sink its teeth into my throat, looking for the carotid artery. I tried in vain to push it off.
Three shots rang out. The first took out the dog about to rip out my throat and sent the other two scurrying away. The other two shots were fired while I was still sprawled on the ground. I came to my senses just in time to see the body of Alexis DeVille thrown back toward the stone fireplace in a spray of blood. I turned to the sliding door and saw my father framed against the sunlight.
“Everything’s going to be fine, Thomas,” he said in the same reassuring voice he had used when I was six years old and had nightmares. His hand, steady as a rock, gripped the rosewood handle of Francis Biancardini’s Smith and Wesson.
My father helped me to my feet, keeping an eye out in case the hellhounds came back. For a moment, when he laid a hand on my shoulder, I was once again that six-year-old boy. And I thought about that endangered species, the dying generation of men like Francis and my father. Gruff, rugged men whose values belonged to a different age. Men I had been fortunate enough to encounter not once, but twice. Men who, in order to save my life, had not hesitated to get their hands dirty.
By plunging them into a bloodbath.
Epilogue(s)
Beyond the Night
The Curse
of the Nice Guys
The days that followed Alexis DeVille’s death and my father’s arrest were among the strangest of my life. Every morning, I woke up convinced that the ongoing police investigation would lead to the case of Vinca’s and Clément’s disappearances being reopened. But from his prison cell, my father skillfully managed to mitigate the danger.
He confessed that he had been having an affair with Alexis DeVille for months, that his wife had found out about the affair and gone to see his mistress armed with a rifle, that Alexis, feeling her life was threatened, had killed my mother, and that he, in turn, had killed her. It was a plausible scenario. It gave each of the central characters a clear and credible motive. Its chief advantage was in portraying the murders as crimes of passion. My father’s lawyer was positively ecstatic at the prospect of a trial. The brutality of my mother’s murder, Alexis DeVille’s history of mental illness, to say nothing of her setting her vicious dogs on me, made my father’s actions look like justifiable homicide, and while they would not lead to an acquittal, they made a lenient sentence more likely. Most of all, framing the murders as crimes of passion meant that there was no connection to the disappearances of Vinca and Clément.
But it all seemed too good to be true.
* * *
For a few weeks, I thought that fortune might continue to smile on us. Maxime had woken up from his coma and his condition quickly improved. In June, he was elected to Parliament, and his name was often mentioned in the press as a potential minister. The investigation into the attack on Maxime meant that the area surrounding the gym was a crime scene, so the demolition could not proceed according to schedule. Then at a board meeting of the Hutchinson and DeVille Foundation, it was decided, given the circumstances, to withdraw the proposed endowment to the Lycée Saint-Exupéry, and the project was shelved indefinitely. The school governors instantly put forward a rationale entirely at odds with their previous stance. Citing environmental and cultural reasons, the governors of Saint-Ex insisted that to build on a site of such natural beauty would threaten the very soul of the landscape they cherished.
* * *
Fanny called me when the news broke that my father had been arrested. We met up at the hospital and spent hours by the bedside of the still-unconscious Maxime, teasing out the truth of what had happened that night in 1992. The revelation that she had not been responsible for Vinca’s death made it possible for Fanny to finally get on with her life. Not long afterward, she split up with Thierry Sénéca and got in touch with a fertility clinic in Barcelona to discuss IVF. After Maxime regained consciousness, Fanny and I often met in his room at the hospital.
For a time, I truly believed that the three of us might escape the tragic fate to which the bodies walled up in the gym should have condemned us. For a time, I truly believed we had managed to overcome the curse of the nice guys.
But I had not reckoned on betrayal by the man I had mistakenly trusted: Stéphane Pianelli.
* * *
“You’re not going to be happy about this, but I’m writing a book telling the truth about the death of Vinca Rockwell,” Pianelli calmly announced one evening in late June as we were sitting at the bar in a pub in Antibes, where he’d invited me for a drink.
“What truth?”
“The only truth,” Pianelli said coolly. “People have a right to know what happened to Vinca Rockwell and Alexis Clément. Parents of students at Saint-Ex have the right to know they’re sending their kids to a school where two corpses have been walled up for twenty-five years.”
“You realize that if you do that, you’re as good as throwing me, Fanny, and Maxime in jail?”
“Veritas omnia vincit!” he declared, slapping the bar. “Truth conquers all!”
To muddy the waters, he launched into a long tirade about a cashier who’d lost her job because her till was a few bucks short and how this compared to the leniency of the judicial system when dealing with politicians or employers. He then segued into his predictable speech—the one he had been giving since high school—about class struggle and capitalism, a system of slavery in the service of shareholders.
“For God’s sake, Stéphane, what the hell has all that got to do with us?”
He stared at me with a mixture of gravity and glee, as though, from the very first, he had been hoping to find himself in this position. And, for the first time, I realized the extent of Pianelli’s visceral hatred for everything that we represented.
“You killed two people. You have to pay.”
I sipped my beer and tried to seem offhand.
“I don’t believe you. You’ll never write that book.”
He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a contract with a publisher in Paris for a nonfiction book titled A Curious Affair: The Truth About the Vinca Rockwell Case.
“You haven’t got a shred of evidence for any of this, you idiot. All you’re going to do is destroy your credibility as a journalist.”
“The proof is the gym.” Pianelli sniggered. “When the book is published, I’ll rally the students’ parents. There’ll be so much pressure that the school will have no choice but to knock down the wall.”
I knew the publishers who had offered him the contract. They weren’t particularly prestigious or particularly rigorous, but they would make sure that the book got a lot of publicity. If Pianelli ever did publish this book, it would have dramatic repercussions.
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