Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 04 - Old Bones

by Old Bones

  "Best to simply be thankful these things occur so infrequently," René concluded with a radiant smile, his logic triumphant and irrefutable.

  René du Rocher was a soft, placid, somewhat dandified man of sixty-two, a year younger than his wife—with shiny, thinning, plastered-down hair, a cherubic pink-and-white complexion, and small, delicate hands that he frequently rubbed together with a dry, rustly sound. He was clean in his habits, used cologne liberally, and took pride in the masculine vigor of his three-week-old moustache.

  In all, he looked like an affable and self-contented bank manager, which in fact he was. Or close enough; Monsieur du Rocher was a corporate-lending officer in the international division of the Crédit Lyonnais in Frankfurt, to which city he had moved three years earlier with his family, after three decades of unexceptional advancement in Paris, Geneva, and London. The advancing years had enhanced his naturally sweet temper and, less fortunately, his predisposition toward a slight vacancy of mind. At the urging of his superiors, he was now contemplating retirement.

  "I’ve always liked this room," he said mildly. "Did you know that Henri IV and his party were once feasted here? In 1595. The manoir was already a hundred years old."

  "Oh, be quiet," Mathilde said absently, picking an invisible shred of lint from the dark, broad, woolen field of her bosom.

  Jules had consumed the olive. His eyes roved to the hors d’oeuvres tray on the coffee table. "The point is," he said querulously to his father, "that Cousin Guillaume hasn’t asked the Fougerays to a family council in decades, or haven’t you noticed?" Emulating his mother, he had adopted this petulant, deprecatory tone toward his father at fourteen, had found it satisfactory, and had not modified it in the ensuing sixteen years. "And with good reason. Look at the man; the quintessential peasant. Aside from a certain repulsive fascination, it’s awkward to be in the same room with him. Is he really related to us?"

  "You shut up too," Mathilde muttered, now brushing a thread from her ample skirt. "What a prig you are, Jules."

  If her son felt injury at this inconsistency, he did not show it. He concentrated instead on loading a triangle of buttered toast with all the beluga caviar it would bear and conveying it slowly and carefully to his mouth. As cautious as he was, a few oily, shining beads fell into his lap. Mathilde lowered her lids and looked the other way.

  Across the room, Claude Fougeray smiled stonily at his wife and daughter, not easy for a man whose hyperthyroid condition afflicted him with a pop-eyed stare of permanent, outraged surprise. "Let them look down their long noses at us, these damned du Rochers," he said. The tight smile faded to a sneer. "Look at them. I could buy all of them put together, if I wanted to. I have—"

  Leona Fougeray, tiny, vivid, raven-haired despite her fifty-three years, interrupted her husband. "Yes? I’d like to see you buy Guillaume du Rocher." Her mobile lips turned downward. "And you’re drinking too much. As usual."

  "Goddamn it," Claude whispered throatily, bald head lowered like an angry bull’s, so that his neck, thick and stubby at the best of times, all but vanished. "I didn’t say Guillaume, did I? I said anyone in this room. Do you see Guillaume in this room?"

  Leona, on the verge of replying with heat, thought better of it and settled for glaring reproachfully with her intense, jet-black Italian eyes. This was lost on Claude, who glowered at the ancient Aubusson carpet, an artery throbbing sluggishly at each temple.

  "I’m not leaving," he said suddenly. "They can kiss my ass. Who the hell are they supposed to be? They don’t even live in Brittany. They don’t even live in France." He took an angry gulp of his third Pernod. "And what are you looking so glum about?"

  The question was directed at their daughter, who sat staring mutely at her untouched glass of blanc-cassis. Of necessity she had long ago grown used to being snubbed by her distant relatives, but she had never felt it so keenly.

  "I asked you a question, my girl."

  She started and looked up. "Father," she murmured, "no one is talking to us. Nobody wants us here. Please, mayn’t we go?"

  Her lips trembled slightly, emphasizing the tiny, radiating lines that had recently begun to appear around her mouth so prematurely. Not yet thirty and never beautiful, with fine, pale hair, she already had a wan, faded look that her birdlike mother would not have at eighty. Only her eyes, a lucid gray-green, shone with warmth, but these were often cast down, as they were now.

  "Why should we go?" Her father’s voice was harsh. "Didn’t we get invited?" He finished the Pernod and hissed at the solemn servant for another. When he got it he took a long pull, then nodded to himself and smiled. "Well, I know a few things they don’t know. Oh, yes, they have a surprise coming, a big—"

  "What do you know?" Leona said impatiently, tossing her head, her Italian accent broadening, her eyes flashing more dramatically still. "You’re living in a dream world. Claire is right. They’ll make us look like fools."

  A second interruption was more than Claude Fougeray could tolerate. His hand clenched, his eyes bulged a little more. "Shut up, you Italian bitch!" he said in a voice that carried plainly throughout the room.

  The effect on Madame Fougeray was immediate and colorful. Bright disks of crimson leaped out on her cheeks, as round and red as a pair of checkers. Her mouth, caught closed while forming a word, sprang open with an audible pop. She stood abruptly.

  "The master speaks," she hissed. "Master of the sausages!"

  She spun about, the full, Turkish-style trousers of her red-and-black Paco Rabanne outfit swirling dramatically around her, and stalked out, her blazing eyes focused straight ahead of her. A few moments later her heels could be heard clacking forcefully up the stone stairs leading to the bedrooms.

  On the other side of the room Jules du Rocher had watched this domestic scene with amused, piggy eyes. "Did you hear that?" he asked through a mouthful of páté de foie gras and bread. "Wait until she gets him alone. She’ll eat him alive." He snickered at this witticism and glanced at his mother, who busily aligned her rings.

  Jules’ words, coming as they did in a moment of silence, carried further than he had intended. Claude Fougeray jumped out of his chair, brushed away his daughter’s hesitantly restraining hand, and marched quickly to the du Rochers.

  "Do you want to repeat that?" he said flatly, staring down at Jules, his thick fists held at his sides.

  Superficially they were somewhat alike, short and stubby-limbed, with torsos like beach balls, but Claude, older by thirty-five years than his distant cousin, was tense and compact while Jules was soft, flaccid, and spreading.

  "Apologize," Claude said.

  Jules coughed and blinked. Uneven streaks of red mottled his round cheeks.

  "I apologize."

  "Louder."

  Jules glanced dartingly at the others in the room: at his parents; at Claire Fougeray, who looked utterly miserable; at the dark, grave servant who stood against the wall watching impassively; at another threesome that sat looking on silently from a grouping of carved wooden chairs on the other side of the Louis XIV billiard table.

  "I apologize," he repeated, his eyes on Claude’s belt buckle.

  "Louder," Claude said again.

  "Really," Mathilde said, pulling at her pearl choker.

  René du Rocher echoed his wife weakly, reflecting her gesture with a tug at his little moustache. "Really…really, my dear man, this is really—"

  "No one’s talking to you," Claude said savagely.

  "Well…well, I was only—"

  "Don’t encourage him," Mathilde said under her breath in German, her face stiff. "Ignore him. He doesn’t know any better, the—"

  "Speak French!" Claude shouted suddenly enough to make the three of them jump. "You’re in France. Don’t give me any of that damned Boche! Ik-bik-blik-bluk!"

  "Who in hell are you to say that to anyone, you collaborationist bastard?" The speaker was one of the three people on the other side of the table, a square, big-boned woman of fifty in a functional twe
ed suit. She had observed quietly until that moment, then leaped to her feet and shouted, her husky voice strained with emotion.

  Claude turned on her. "Don’t you ever say that to me!"

  The woman was on the edge of angry tears, but her voice held steady. "I just said it." She lifted a trembling chin. "Do you want to hear it again? Collaborationist bastard!"

  "And—and what do you know about it, Sophie?" Claude shouted. "You were a baby; you don’t know anything. Why don’t you go back to America where you belong, where everything is so wonderful? You and your—your cowboy husband."

  He was losing his momentum. Jules, who had been sitting rigidly, sank inconspicuously back, flowing into the crevices of his soft chair like melting butter, as if he thought he might escape Claude’s notice altogether.

  Claude stared menacingly around the room, as if to ward off attack, and leveled a stubby finger at the woman. "You know how much worse it would have been around here if I hadn’t gone along with the Boches? Sure, all the heroes were running around the hills singing songs with the Maquis, but I was the one kissing Nazi asses and saving lives. If not for me—"

  "If not for you," the woman said, "Alain would still be alive."

  An electric silence gripped the room. Mathilde jerked sharply and gasped.

  Claude stared at Sophie, paralyzed with rage or shock; it was impossible to say which.

  Sophie began to speak again, then closed her mouth as her eyes filmed over with tears. "Oh, the hell with it," she said in English, and then turned away from him and strode out of the room.

  Her two companions, still seated, looked uncomfortably at each other. After a moment, the older man stood up, grayhaired, and rawboned like his wife, and went quietly out after her. The younger man continued to sit, embarrassed by the intensity of a scene he had imperfectly comprehended. Then he too stood up, and the eyes of the others swung to him. Uneasy at being the sudden focus of attention, he cleared his throat softly, nodded to the room at large, and self-consciously followed the other man out, his eyes on the floor.

  ONCE he’d pulled the heavy door shut behind him to stand outside in the graveled courtyard, he released the breath that had stopped up his chest. His bland, freckled, good-natured face was set, his pale-blue eyes tense.

  What had he gotten himself into? Why wasn’t he back in his cozy, cluttered office at Northern California State University getting ready for his spring-quarter seminar on comic dramatists of the Restoration? There was plenty of prep time needed, God knows, and when was he going to find it?

  Although the March air was chilly, he patted beads of perspiration from his forehead with a clean, folded handkerchief. Emotional explosions and disorder were as unsuited to the nature of Raymond Alphonse Schaefer as—well, as propriety and order were to the early comedies of Congreve. He smiled at the thought, feeling a little better. Perhaps he could work it into the seminar. Omitting the personal reference, of course.

  He stood in the clear, gray Breton light, his reddish eyebrows knit; a man of thirty-four whose stooped shoulders and air of dusty, bookish abstraction made him seem ten years older than he was, and wondered what he was doing in this place, with these strange, fervid people. Well, he knew, of course, in a literal sense. In January, a few days after his mother’s death, one of Guillaume du Rocher’s lordly summons to a family council had arrived for her. The letter had been characteristically terse.

  "I have reached a decision on a matter of singular family importance," it had said in his blunt yet oblique style. "We will discuss it at Rochebonne on 16 March." That was all.

  Ray, who had visited Guillaume at Rochebonne but had never been to a family council, had written to his elderly relative, informing him of his mother’s death and saying he would be pleased to attend in her place. Guillaume had scrawled the briefest of replies, curtly expressing condolence and telling him that he could come if he wished; it was up to him. And so he had. Rather impulsively, it now seemed.

  He folded the handkerchief into a neat square and placed it in his pocket, peering around in search of his Aunt Sophie, the only du Rocher he had known as a child, aside from his mother. Living in Texas as she did with her husband, he had seen her no more than once every two or three years, but from the earliest times he had looked forward to their visits as welcome lulls in the unending war of bickering and veiled provocation his parents waged. As a youngster he had fantasized about how it would have been if the gentle, humorous Ben Butts had been his father and the comfortably starchy, rocklike Sophie his mother; Sophie, unprovokable and serenely equal to any emergency.

  That’s what was worrying him now. He had never seen her shout before, never seen her cry, or curse, or lose control. And here, in the space of a few seconds she’d done them all.

  He walked across the courtyard to the tall stone gateposts and looked both ways down the tree-lined country lane, right towards Ploujean, left towards Guissand and the road to Dinan. No sign of Ben and Sophie. They might be walking along one of the nearby forest paths, in which case he’d be unlikely to find them. Or perhaps they were behind the house; there was a pond back there with swans in it and benches beside it.

  THREE

  THEY were there, on a white-painted wrought-iron bench facing the pond. Ray rounded a clump of smoothly sculptured bushes and came upon them from behind, deep in conversation.

  "That rat!" Sophie Butts was saying. "That turd!" (He was most certainly going to have to revise his assessment of her if this kept up.) "That little toad! Can you believe that Guillaume actually asked him here? Someone ought to shoot him! Claude, I mean."

  "Now, honey," her husband said soothingly, "you don’t mean all that. You know what my daddy used to say about revenge?"

  She smiled weakly. "What?"

  Behind them, Ray smiled too. One could always trust Ben to pull a rustic aphorism out of his pocket when things needed smoothing over.

  "My daddy," said Ben, his Texas accent thickening, as it

  did whenever a homily was in process, "he said ain’t nothin’ costs more nor pays less’n revenge."

  REE-venge was what he said, and Sophie smiled a little more bravely. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. "It was a long way back, Sophie. Time to forget."

  "Forget Alain? Oh, Ben, if you’d known him…Do you know," she said, her voice trembling, "I haven’t seen Claude Fougeray in over forty years, not since I was ten years old. But I’d gladly shoot him myself, today, right now—"

  "I know, I know." Ben held her hand in his and slowly stroked the back of it.

  Ray’s instinctive tendency was to quietly go away, but something in him also wanted to go to Sophie. While he dithered, Ben looked up and saw him.

  "Come on over, Ray."

  "Sophie?" Ray said hesitantly. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes, of course." She sniffed, pulled herself together, and patted the arm of a garden chair next to the bench. "Sit," she said, her throaty, pleasant voice more controlled.

  Obediently he sat. His thin legs, not overly long, seemed nonetheless to wrap themselves around each other three times, with his left ankle ending up behind his right foot.

  Sophie appraised him with her lips pursed. "Poor man, you must think we’re all crazy."

  "No," he said quickly, "not at all." He smiled tentatively. "Perhaps a bit, er, histrionic?"

  She fixed him with a candid eye. "Raymond, just how much do you know about went on here during the war?"

  "Here at the domaine? Almost nothing. I know Guillaume was a hero in the Resistance, but that’s about all. You know the way he is, and Mom never had much to say about it either."

  "Yes, she was in Paris then with Aunt Louise, but I think it’s time you learned. Wouldn’t you agree, Ben?"

  "I would, hon. Looks like we’re choosing up sides in

  there, and we may as well have Ray on our side. Better to have him inside the tent pissin’ out than outside the tent pissin’ in. So my Uncle Floyd used to say."

  Having made his cont
ribution, he leaned back and away, against an arm of the bench, giving center stage to Sophie. He held out one hand, trying to attract the attention of a swan that had glided over.

  "All right, then," Sophie said. "Raymond, do you know who Alain was?" There was a tremor at her mention of the name.

  "My uncle?" Ray asked uncertainly. "That is, your brother?"

  "Yes, or rather my half-brother. René and I are full brother and sister. Which means," she added out of the side of her mouth, "that the unmentionable Jules is my nephew. And your cousin. In any case, my brother Alain was a product of my father’s first marriage; he was quite a bit older than René and me, almost as old as Guillaume."

  "Ah," Ray said, already lost. He swallowed and sat up straighter, knitting his sandy eyebrows to improve his concentration.

  "Early in the war, our parents were killed and our home was destroyed. All of us—Alain, René, and I—came here, to the domaine, to live with Guillaume. That was in the days when there were three hundred acres, before it got sold off piece by piece, as if Guillaume weren’t rich enough already. René and I were children, of course, but Alain was grown."

  She dug in her purse and came up with an old locket, its filigreed pattern tarnished and sad. She clicked it open and handed it to Ray. "My brother Alain," she said simply. Ray noted with a surge of sympathy that she avoided looking inside it.

  On one side was a flattened, dun-colored lock of hair, possibly once chestnut. On the other a sepia photograph from the 1930’s of two elegant, athletic-looking men in their

  twenties, wearing white duck trousers and open-throated shirts with the cuffs folded casually back on their forearms. One sat on a simple wooden bench looking up at the other, who stood beside him, one foot on the bench, smiling directly into the camera. Both held old-fashioned wooden tennis rackets with long handles and small, round heads.