by ML Longworth
“I know. That suit looked gorgeous on Étienne.”
Marine hit Vincent over the head with her newspaper. “You rat! You know that I was talking about the château.”
Vincent laughed. “I know. It sounds terrible, but maybe now she can sell it after all. I’m sure François isn’t interested in keeping it.” Marine nodded and walked to the cash register, anxious to be gone before she blurted out everything. She wished she had someone to talk to, someone whose shoulder she could cry on. There was only Verlaque.
“Well, I have to get to class,” she said, getting her wallet out of her purse. “Great jeans, Vincent. I’ll leave them on. Just rip off the tag so I can buy them.”
“At your service,” Vincent answered. “And I’ll give you my student discount, since you’re sort of a permanent student.” They walked to the front door together, and Vincent then asked, “Do you want to know what I know about the judge?”
Marine frowned, and thought for about three seconds. “No,” she said.
“Good girl,” Vincent answered, and he gave her a loud bise as she left the shop. Vincent stood in the doorway, remembering his sighting of the judge and an English model the week before. Lotus had been packed, and so Vincent had found himself standing next to the couple at the bar, waiting for tables. This had annoyed Vincent, for up to that point he had been making much progress with Dario, the Italian barman. Vincent and Verlaque had said hello and chatted briefly, and then the judge had turned his attentions to his companion, who seemed to Vincent to be one of those women who demanded a lot of attention. And although he didn’t understand their English, he understood well enough their unspoken words: the affectionate gestures and cooing noises that couples always make, whatever their sexual preference or nationality. He was fairly sure that Marine had been hiding something from him. Well, he had his secrets too.
Marine walked up the rue d’Italie, to a café that she didn’t like, but it received the afternoon sun. She took a seat at a round marble table and ordered a coffee, thankful to be sitting. She was exhausted. She put on her sunglasses and watched people walking by, most of them unaware that a young man, father of four, had just had his funeral. She watched as a tall, wide-shouldered man approached her. She shuddered at first, thinking it was Verlaque, but this man was too tall, and she relaxed her shoulders. She then sat up straight, embarrassed—it was in fact Arthur. In the past few days she had forgotten all about him. Was that normal? She now realized how much Arthur resembled Verlaque. One of Sylvie’s theories was that women always go after the same physical type. And like many of her friend’s theories, it was right.
“Hello, sweetie,” Arthur said. “Are you watching the world go by?”
“Yes. Funny how life goes on.”
Arthur Vassan took Marine’s hand and kissed it. “How was the funeral?”
“Beautiful,” Marine answered. “Does than sound horrible? Can a funeral be beautiful?”
“I would imagine so, yes. I’ve never been to one, though.”
“You’re kidding. Not even your grandparents’?”
“All still living,” he said. Marine reminded herself that Arthur was still in his twenties. He continued, “Some of my great uncles and aunts have passed away, but my parents thought it best that the children stay away from the funeral.” Marine thought it odd that a doctor would use the term “passed away.”
“Oh, I totally disagree. At the funeral you come to terms with the death. And you are there, in spirit, with the deceased. They know you are, of that I’m sure. They can feel it.”
Arthur shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Marine would have liked to carry on with this discussion—she would have done so with Verlaque.
“Let’s not talk about funerals,” Arthur suggested, putting his arm around Marine and leaning in to kiss her.
“So, when do you leave for Palo whatever?” Marine said as she pulled away from him.
“Palo Alto. Tonight. Marseille to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to San Francisco.”
Marine finished her coffee and left some coins on the table. She was desperate to get home, but to get away form Arthur too. She couldn’t stop thinking of Verlaque and their meeting that night.
“Do you have to go?” Arthur asked. “I thought you might be able to help me pack,” he said, winking.
“I have to go to the university.” At least that wasn’t a lie, Marine thought. She really did have a meeting with the head of the law faculty. “Have a great time in California, and wow them at the conference!”
“Thanks! I’ll call you when I get back.”
Marine smiled and waved and yelled, “Righto! Ciao!” over her shoulder as she walked down the street in the direction of the university. Why not just say “died”? she thought as she wove her way through the throng of shoppers. She then realized that it was one of Verlaque’s pet peeves: why use an incorrect, long word when a short, true one will do?
Chapter Thirteen
Marine walked up the rue du 4 Septembre, from the university, as if in a daze. The thought of going to Antoine’s apartment—however much she wanted to be involved in the investigation and help to determine how Étienne de Bremont, and now François, died—gave her butterflies. As much as she tried to deny it, Marine had never been as physically attracted to anyone as she had to Verlaque. She couldn’t explain it. Sex with Arthur was sweet and tender, but Arthur did not have the same effect on her as Antoine did. Just thinking of his hands on her body caused her to blush, as she had done while reading Paris Match in the dentist’s office.
She passed some of her third-year students trying to splash each other in the fountain on the place des Quatre Dauphins. “Salut, Professeur Bonnet!” they shouted. She waved and kept walking. She remembered fountain fighting when she was younger—in high school perhaps. It was certainly in high school, she thought. Junior high, even.
Her students this year seemed so young and apathetic. She had just given a lecture on French legal history to her first-year students, a class that she herself had loved when she started law school. But today she struggled to keep their attention, trying to incite some kind of debate. It was as if they only wanted to be spoon-fed, to take notes and then strut off and throw each other into fountains. Each year she noticed that her students were just as intelligent as the previous year but less cultured, not interested in the world around them. Verlaque blamed it on the Internet and MTV, but Marine remembered her mother making the same complaint over thirty years ago.
She turned right, onto her street, past a third-story apartment from which classical piano music poured out onto the street through the open windows. Aix-en-Provence touted itself as a ville de musique and was certainly right to do so. One could walk down any street in the quartier Mazarin and hear live opera singing or cello or piano. “Love is the voice of music; love is the voice of music”—she couldn’t figure out where those lyrics came from. Some house music CD Sylvie had burned for her, she was almost sure. Marine scolded herself. Now is not the time for such whimsies. Two brothers dead, one murdered. She thought of Jean-Claude and what it must have felt like to discover the bodies—bodies of your employers and your former playmates. What did he do? Did he yell for help? Or was he speechless?
The guy who owned the computer store on her street was walking the opposite way. Marine stopped and gave him bises. Normally she would have taken a moment to talk, but she wanted to have a glass of white wine on her terrace before heading off to Antoine’s. There were times when she needed to see the spire of Saint-Jean-de-Malte, and today was one of them: she needed to feel grounded, and the church’s steeple always did that for her. She also wanted to check on her climbing rose bushes, which had started to bloom. Marine liked to fuss over her plants—it made her feel as if she were one of those cultured English women who spent all day untangling rose bushes in their immense gardens in Somerset or Devonshire and at night ate simpl
e dinners of tinned tuna and fresh tomatoes, and then wrote poetry in the fading twilight, looking out onto their dewy gardens or the rough English sea. Antoine and his grandmother had introduced Marine to English literature, which, unlike them, she read in translation.
Marine punched in the code for her building’s heavy green door, and walked quickly up the stairs to her third-floor flat. She dropped her purse and keys in an old Quimper faience dish that sat on a black glass console she had bought on sale at Habitat, and walked into the kitchen. She opened her fridge and poured herself a glass of white wine. Not wanting to go to Verlaque’s on an empty stomach—for fear of getting drunk too quickly, or for fear of repeating the olive scene from Monday’s lunch—she forced herself to nibble on some cheese while she looked out the patio door at the church’s spire. The wine was excellent with the cheese, even she could tell. The cheese was an old Comté—hard and dry on the outside yet the inside still very moist, almost fatty on the tongue. She opened the patio door and walked out onto the terrace.
The church’s spire was the pale yellow of an early evening in April. By eight o’clock it would be a brilliant orange, lasting only for a few minutes, and then, with the blink of an eye, it would turn to gray, the gray of Paris and of other northern French cities. Marine sipped her wine—and thought, once again, of Étienne de Bremont falling from the window. The hollowness she had felt earlier returned. Her head felt heavy: Étienne was her past—her easy, comfortable childhood. He was dead, and she suddenly felt old. She couldn’t bring herself around to the idea that François de Bremont could have pushed his brother to his death, even if François was in debt and possibly in trouble with the law. And if their hunch was right, and Étienne was killed, the same person must have killed François. She had never liked François as a child—he had had a sinister side to him that had frightened her. Marine once overheard her mother say to her father, when she thought Marine was out of earshot, “It’s as if one brother received all the good and the other all the bad.”
The plants were looking green and healthy, she was pleased to note. The snowball plant was always the first to bloom in spring—Marine ran her fingers over the snowballs—each one was made up of forty or fifty tiny delicate five-petaled, ivory-colored flowers. Her two climbing rose bushes, one on either side of the kitchen door, were full of fat buds waiting to burst into flowers. On the other hand, her raspberry bush, which she had planted for Sylvie’s daughter, Charlotte, looked half dead. Marine would call her parents to get advice about the plant—she liked to have a reason to call them, they were so busy that at times she felt like she was bothering them if she called out of the blue.
And the lavender—always the last plant to bloom—it waited until the deathly heat of July, a time of year so hot that Marine couldn’t stand to be out on the terrace during the day. But at night, while she ate dinner by candlelight, the lavender’s scent would linger. She kneeled down and shook the leaves a bit, the scent reminding her of afternoons driving around Haute-Provence with Verlaque: the top of the Porsche down, and the scent of wild lavender surrounding them. Verlaque didn’t like the typography of Provence. He was always complaining of the lack of green grass and cows. The real Antoine, she reminded herself, is lurking somewhere around a villa in Normandy. But he had grown to love Provence, she was sure, and he now had read more Jean Giono stories than she had. Once when she was sick in bed with the flu, he picked up Giono’s Man Who Planted Trees and read it to her, sitting on the edge of her bed.
Marine walked back into the kitchen and put her empty glass in the sink and picked up her purse. Merde, she mumbled, looking at the clock on the oven. She would be a few minutes late meeting Verlaque. She opened the front door and ran back to get her cell phone, which lay on the kitchen counter. Out on the street her telephone vibrated, telling her she had a text message. It was Verlaque: “I’m leaving the Palais de Justice now. Could you pick me up a cigar?”
Half of Verlaque’s cigar club was sitting on Le Mazarin’s terrace when she crossed the cours Mirabeau. Bises were exchanged and numerous iterations of tout va bien? and ca va? Jean-Marc jumped up and pulled Marine aside, kissing her on the cheek. “That was a beautiful funeral, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, exactly what I thought. Beautiful.” Marine was calm now, a serenity she always felt in Jean-Marc’s presence. “Jean-Marc, when somebody dies, what do you say?”
“I don’t get it.”
“You know . . . do you say he ‘passed away’ or ‘moved on’ or something of that nature?”
Jean-Marc laughed. “No, I just say that he died. Simple, straightforward talk for a lawyer, non? Did I give you the right answer, professor? I have a feeling I was being quizzed.”
“Yes, good answer.” The butterflies in her stomach disappeared. “Now, what kind of cigar should I buy Antoine? I’m on my way over to his place for a drink.” Two of the other men overheard and a series of whoops and “na-na-nana-na’s” began. “Business,” replied Marine, which only got the men teasing her even more. She turned back to Jean-Marc. “Any suggestions?”
“An Upmann. Definitely a Cuban,” said Fabrice, president of the club and a permanent fixture at the café. “An Upmann 46. Just ask Carole to get it for you,” he said, referring to the olive-skinned beauty who ran her parent’s tabac. More laughs from the guys. Marine excused herself, bought Verlaque’s cigar, and walked up the rue Clémenceau, glancing in the store windows as she walked. She passed two lingerie shops on the tiny street—Aix had recently been voted by some magazine “the sexiest town in France.” It seems that women in Aix—les Aixoises—buy, per capita, more lingerie than even Parisiennes. Well, it was certainly true of herself and Sylvie, and probably Carole.
She turned left onto the rue Espariat and stood to look at the place d’Albertas, where two young men were busy placing a piano on the cobbled square. “Concert tonight?” she asked them. “Yes, ragtime jazz,” the more disheveled of the two answered.
“At what time?” Marine asked.
“Whenever we get our shit together,” the other answered, laughing as he struggled with the piano.
“Seriously, Madame, around nine p.m.,” said the first. Marine walked away laughing, and then stopped. They had called her “Madame.” Merde! I must look like I’m forty, she thought. Her cell phone rang with a message from Sylvie, who knew that Marine was on her way to Verlaque’s. The message was Sylvie, attempting to sing the words to Donna Summer’s hit “I Will Survive” in very bad English. At the end of the song Sylvie said, “Be careful—remember that you are just as strong as he is, and sexier, to boot. And can you babysit Charlotte on Saturday night? Bises, ciao chèrie.” After another five-minute walk she reached Verlaque’s street and turned right. She pressed the only button that had no name posted on it. The door buzzed open without words exchanged on the intercom, and she began climbing up the four flights of stairs. Will Verlaque be there to greet me? she wondered. He’d usually left the door ajar a bit, and she had to walk into his apartment and find him. She had never been easy with the fact that he wouldn’t greet her at the door when she arrived. Rude man, she thought, especially after she had just killed herself walking up the four steep flights in heels. She got to the top of the stairs and took a deep breath, not wanting Verlaque to know she was a bit out of shape. He wasn’t at the door, and so she walked in. “Coucou? Where are you?” she called out. “Typical, Verlaque, that you’re not at the door to greet me,” she muttered. She might regret saying that later, but the words had fallen out of her mouth naturally.
“I’m on the terrace,” Verlaque yelled. She followed a trail of wet footprints through the glass doors that opened onto the patio, where Verlaque stood, drying himself off. “Oh,” said Marine, turning half away. “You’re not shy.”
“Sorry,” Verlaque, who was wearing only boxer shorts, replied. He had installed a teak shower on his deck and preferred to shower out there when the weather was war
m enough. He quickly grabbed a clean polo shirt and put it on. She was looking absolutely beautiful, but then she always did on his terrace.
The pink light of dusk shone on her freckled face; the birds chirped and circled quickly above their heads; kids kicked a soccer ball in the square below. She stood there with her hands on her slender hips and stared at him, smirking; her confidence was palpable and Verlaque had to hide his sudden desire for her. “I didn’t think you’d get here so fast,” he stammered. “I have the champagne chilling here in a bucket.” Verlaque pointed with his bare foot to an antique silver bucket on the teak deck. “Would you mind getting two glasses from the kitchen?”
“No problem,” Marine answered, glad not to have to watch Verlaque finish getting dressed. She walked into the kitchen and opened the cupboard to the left of the sink, only to find it full of plates and bowls but no glasses. Antoine’s done some rearranging, she thought, and she finally found the glasses on the right-hand side of the sink. She ran back up the steps, anxious to hear the news about François.
She walked back out onto the deck, and Verlaque opened the champagne, not taking his eyes off her.
“So what happened to François?” Marine asked, panting. “Tell me everything.”
“Murder, it’s certain. Strangled.”
“My God,” Marine murmured, feeling sick. They sat down at Verlaque’s teak table, and Marine sighed and put het head in her hands. François de Bremont may not have been a trustworthy character, but Marine now felt incredibly sad.
“Poor Jean-Claude,” she said, sighing. She looked up through her curls at Verlaque and saw his stern expression. “Antoine, you don’t think he did it? He couldn’t hurt a fly.”
Verlaque answered, “We questioned him at the police station but let him go home after a few hours. He was in a bad state but nervous too. We’d all like to think he didn’t do it, but the fact is that we have a dead body in the morgue right now. Bruno thinks that François was killed by someone he knew—there was no sign of a disturbance—and I agree with Bruno. Anyway, I went out to Saint-Antonin as soon as we got the call. The firemen and the medical examiner arrived just as I did. Poor François was floating facedown in that ornamental pool in front of the château. He had been dead less than an hour. I questioned Auvieux on the spot. He said that he woke up at six, as usual, and around seven thirty put on the coffee for François—they were planning on going to the funeral together. Around seven forty-five, Auvieux said, he took a walk in the olive orchard.”