Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  One case caught Noah’s eye. A woman of twenty-four, pressured into working as a CI, found dead in a trailer. “The medical examiner concluded that heroin and alprazolam (Xanax) had been injected behind her knee.” Afterward her grandparents “heard rumors the people she was with may have known she was an informant.”

  That motel on Long Island. Had the dealers found Victor’s wire, then held him facedown on the carpet and stuck that syringe in the back of his knee?

  Possible. Likely even. But unproven. Unprovable, now?

  I’m so sorry, Victor. Sorry that wrong had been done to him and none of his family had understood. Sorry for what had come before, and after.

  Michael was playing a game on the cracked screen resting on his ribs. “What?” he asked without shifting his gaze.

  “What?” Noah said back.

  “You were looking at me.”

  Instead of explaining, Noah changed the subject. “What are you playing now?”

  “Just spectating, I died already.”

  “So you can keep watching after you die? That’s better than the real world, all right.”

  “No contest,” Michael muttered. “And in most games you can respawn.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Come back to life.”

  “Handy.”

  “I like save states, too. You freeze the moment you’re in, so if you fuck up you can go back to it.”

  Noah thought of Victor lying on that carpet. Because he was a fuckup, they’d all assumed he’d fucked himself up, but sometimes even fuckups got fucked up by forces beyond their control. By life itself.

  If Victor had been murdered because he’d been a snitch, how was Noah ever going to find a way to break it to Michael? How to begin to explain the strain the young man had been under, the moral gray areas, the awful ambiguities of the so-called war on drugs?

  It occurred to Noah with a pang of relief that he had no right to (like the ghost in Hamlet) blurt out a wild theory about a father’s murder. It would be for Amber to make that judgment call. Noah would talk to her about Victor’s death; she might have her suspicions already, but he doubted anyone would have shown her the autopsy report. Maybe he and she could figure out together whether it was worth trying to prove Victor had been a CI, or that he’d been killed.

  Noah could also hire a good attorney to see what could be done for Amber, if she let him. Might she appeal her sentence on the grounds that her public defender hadn’t represented her adequately?

  The future was more urgent than the past, he decided, even if the two were entangled. Like the line he’d read in the Resistance museum: never hate, but never forget.

  Waiters came out of restaurants to hose the sidewalks; Monday morning smelled of pine cleaning fluid. A single window caught the sun, like a covert signal. The peaks in the distance were acute. “That sharpness,” Noah said, “that’s how you know the Alps are still young mountains.”

  Michael scanned the horizon like Julius Caesar contemplating an invasion.

  “Mature mountains are curvy. They get lower as they get older.”

  The boy grinned. “So I’m super sharp, and you’re practically flat?”

  “True. How’s your foot this morning? Any redness or swelling?”

  “Nah.”

  They had bananas from a convenience store. Noah rested his back against a wall while Michael went off to watch a gold-painted living statue stand frozen until enough children gathered around him. Finally the statue winked and made them scream.

  Putting the peels in a garbage can, Noah caught sight of an angel silhouetted high on the hill. “Oh, I nearly forgot, I need to visit my grandfather’s grave.”

  A token groan from the boy.

  “The cemetery’s just up there, at the back of the Colline du Château.”

  “The hill with nothing on it ever since the King of France blew it up?” Michael asked.

  “A-plus for attention.”

  At the base of the higgledy-piggledy staircase, Michael shook his head, which made his helmet shimmy. “Go ahead and climb if you want, I’ll be here.”

  “Come on, you’re a lot fitter than I am.”

  The boy shrugged. “You do you.”

  Which Noah realized must be a modern way of saying no.

  Then Michael pointed at the letters over a red brick archway through which a little knot of people seemed to be disappearing right into the hill, Pied Piper–style. “What’s ask-an-sewer?”

  “Ascenseur…elevator,” Noah read. Could it really be an elevator in a hill?

  “Cool! Can I get a ticket?”

  “It says it’s free,” he admitted.

  “Score!” Michael cantered off that way.

  As a matter of pride, now, Noah had to toil up the zigzag staircase on his own. His feet thumped the flat paving stones, and he counted, to keep his mind off his lungs. This was more of a hill than he’d realized. Seventy-seven, seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty (just like him, today), eighty-one… He paused at a turn to catch his breath, pretending to take in the flowering slope. Then climbed again. One-twenty-seven, one-twenty-eight.

  Maybe you should have ridden up with the boy, Joan suggested.

  Noah pressed on to show her she was wrong. One-ninety-three, one-ninety-four, one-ninety-five. Christ, how much farther? He looked down at the steeples, terra-cotta roofs, little domes tiled in multicolored Genoese style, the greenery, the cyan sea, but he couldn’t enjoy it. Was Michael cutting in line, deep in the bowels of the hill? Messing with the elevator controls? To soothe himself he glanced to the right, toward Cannes in the gauzy distance. Climbed again. Paused to gasp, and examine a huge pink disk-shaped flower. Clinging inside it was a green grasshopper of some sort.

  After another turn, Noah thought he was done—but the path curved and flourished into more steps. Breathless, he’d lost count.

  Michael was lounging against a wall at the very top, arms crossed, helmet pushed back on his head like some disdainful warrior. “You took forever.”

  Noah didn’t have enough breath to answer. He led the way past a flattened-earth court where ceremonious old men were taking turns throwing metal balls. “Pétanque,” he said after a minute, enjoying the recollected word. “You have to get your ball near a smaller ball.” Had his pépère played it? He thought of Père Sonne and Margot, fox-trotting to keep warm. “In New York there’s a different version, bocce. Ever try it?”

  Michael shook his head. “We play basketball, handball, skelly…”

  “We called that skully. Shooting metal bottle caps into chalk squares?”

  “Milk-jug caps, we use.”

  “I was rather good at skully in my day,” Noah said.

  “Why do you keep saying that? In your day.”

  “Do I? It just means when I was young.”

  “But isn’t this still one of your days? Just about.”

  “Well, I suppose.” At the overlook, Noah stared down at the gorgeous jumble of yachts in the old port, the hills rising on the other side of the harbor. Soft saxophone notes drifted up from below, and the faint cries of children. (Always hard to tell, at a distance, if they were happy or screaming.)

  Michael had his phone up and was taking a burst of photos, which Noah decided was a compliment to the view.

  Crossing the hilltop, they came across archaeological remains, and modern mosaics in the Roman style; one was a sailboat, with the classic verse Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage. “Like Odysseus, you’re happy if you’ve…had a good trip,” Noah translated. No, that made it sound like a tourist-board slogan. The original was about travel in the older, more active sense. And not bland happiness, either. He tried again: “Lucky the man who’s gone voyaging.”

  Michael scoffed: “Lucky if you can afford the tickets.”

  “Good point.”

  The first cemetery they found was the Jewish one. The Holocaust memorial just inside the gate held an urn containing ashes from the gas chambers, and another of so
ap made with rendered human fat. Speechless, Noah couldn’t bear to translate any of that for Michael. The kid had to know the truth, but not all of it quite yet.

  He swiveled away and pointed out the prewar tomb of a little boy, topped by a stylish stone car.

  Michael nodded. “Nice. I wouldn’t mind one like that.”

  The Catholic graveyard was next: a vast city of the dead arranged in orderly gravel paths. Noah found the protector angel who could be seen from so many points in the streets below; it turned out to be a monument to a nineteenth-century couple, the Grossos, who’d left all their worldly goods to the city. (They’d lost their two children, whose marble portraits were shown in disconcerting bas-relief.) “See the broken anchor? That means death.”

  “How come?” Michael asked.

  “I suppose your anchor snaps and your boat drifts free.”

  “Look, a head’s sticking right out of this one!” The boy trotted over to a figure with deep-cut features, shadowed with black; a long drip from one eye, as if the marble mourner was crying ink.

  “Those stains are algae, or maybe fungus,” Noah told him. “And see where this other one’s fingers have almost melted away? Acid rain, due to sulfur in the air.”

  “You’re a downer, and so is this place.”

  “Death’s very useful, though, to the species if not to the individual.”

  The boy put his head to one side. “Because otherwise the earth would be so full of us we’d be tripping over each other?”

  “True, but also because it stops our accumulated cellular mutations from being passed on.”

  Michael puzzled that out. “You mean, like, you shouldn’t make any babies at eighty because they might have three eyes?”

  Noah nodded. A clearing of accounts, biologically speaking; an editing of errors. From a truly scientific point of view, who could be afraid of that?

  Mind you, from an evolutionary perspective, having three eyes might be an advantage.

  Michael marveled at an elegant pair of stone feet protruding from a tomb; then a beautiful, limp youth held up in a giant three-taloned bird foot; and the most gothic, a black slab with a golden braid (clutched by two little hands) bursting out of it. “Like some psycho walled-up Rapunzel!” He sprawled back on the tomb for a selfie.

  When Noah finally located the right grave, it was rather an anticlimax: a plain slab.

  Isabelle Personnet née Gaspard

  1865–1930

  Pierre Jean Personnet, dit Père Sonne

  1860–1944

  “What’s dit?”

  “Called,” Noah told him.

  “It doesn’t say much.”

  “I suppose he didn’t feel the need to blow his own trumpet.” Or perhaps Margot had made that last decision for her father. “The photographs are his real memorial.” Genius had rung through Père Sonne like a bell. It occurred to Noah that Joan had been the same way: no dithering, no grousing. Perhaps geniuses had to be a little ruthless; always aware of their task and of the fact that there’d never be quite enough time to get it done.

  Graves really didn’t matter. Still, Noah wished he’d thought to bring a few flowers for his grandparents. (Something less miserable than those chilly daffodils for Victor, in Central Park; something Mediterranean, scented.) He felt in his pockets and in his satchel for something to leave. Nothing but lint.

  “Do you want a pic with Nodaddy Ding?” Michael waved his phone. “Since you brought his old hat all the way back for a visit.”

  Noah stood by the headstone, then managed to crouch beside it.

  Michael pressed the shutter.

  Noah was straightening up with difficulty when he thought to say, “One of you too, I mean one with you? Their great-great-grandson.” A postscript, one more PS. DNA chiming down through four generations; some kind of inheritance.

  The two of them stood on either side of the headstone, a little awkward. “Where’s your selfie stick when we need it?”

  “Don’t remember. I think maybe I lost it,” Michael said gloomily.

  Noah was secretly delighted. “OK, lean in and take off your helmet. Give me your phone—my arm’s longer.” He fumbled and almost dropped it. But managed to take the picture in the end.

  They considered the image together. “Well, aren’t we the odd couple,” Noah said. Sixty-nine years between them, for starters; a smooth beech sapling beside a gnarled oak.

  “It’s not a bad ussie,” Michael said.

  “A what?”

  “Like a selfie for more than one. I’ll send you a copy.”

  “Thanks.” Was that a sort of goodbye in advance, Noah wondered?

  He flicked back through more of Michael’s photos: odd angles on buildings, people cavorting in Carnival masks, fish in the water between two boats. Noah liked one of himself taken from directly overhead, defamiliarized: his hairless head like some unevenly colored planet. When and where had Michael taken that one? The boy had an artist’s eye as well as a scientific mind. “That’s a great shot.”

  A shrug. “It’s not all that.”

  “Yes it is all that, actually. Learn to take a compliment.”

  A roll of the eyes.

  Noah risked it: “I think you’re all that.”

  Michael turned away. “You don’t count. You’re family.”

  A strange hiss behind them, then an explosion so loud that Noah staggered. He reeled around and spotted a plume of smoke going up behind a cypress. The whole hill still seemed to be shaking. Was someone blowing up the whole city?

  Michael was laughing. “Your face!”

  Noah swallowed hard. “That was just the cannon? It’s so much louder up here.”

  “Can I get a hot dog?” Michael asked as they emerged from the cemetery.

  “This is a historic site,” Noah reminded him. “I really don’t think there’ll be—”

  The boy pointed his finger like a gun at a parked van that said Le Giant Hot Dog New-Yorkais. The same one as the other day, or was there a whole fleet?

  “Water,” Noah called as Michael ran ahead.

  “Nah, I haven’t had my Coke of the day.”

  Noah was still full from breakfast, so he checked his phone while Michael ate his lunch, the helmet on the wall between them.

  He was surprised to see an email from Monsieur Benoit at the museum. Possibly of interest? the header said, with a link to an article in a Nice paper from August 2014.

  Once it loaded, Noah glanced through: celebrations for the seventieth anniversary of the Liberation, nothing very interesting there… In the last paragraph, the journalist quoted a local named Lucien Demetz.

  “Listen to this.” Noah’s voice wavering as he translated for Michael. “In 1943, when I had—when I was only three years old, it was necessary for my parents to give me into the, ah, safekeeping of Monsieur Abadi. He gave me a new name, René Jacques, and hid me at a boarding school run by monks. When he came to collect me at the end of the year, I asked for my parents, and he wept.”

  Michael nodded. “Poor kid.”

  “No, but…René Jacques, that was this Lucien Demetz’s nom de guerre, the war name the Marcel Network gave him. René Jacques—R.J.”

  “The smiley boy in your mom’s photo!”

  “It must be. And what’s more, it says he lives in a maison de retraite—an old folks’ home—in Cimiez, where we were the other day. Or he was living there three and a half years ago, anyway,” Noah added, suddenly doubtful. This Lucien would be only seventy-seven now, but still that was getting on, for a man. “Let’s go see if we can talk to him.”

  First they went back to the Excelsior for Noah to collect his photos and the Pick-Pick Bird.

  When they stepped off the bus in Cimiez, Michael recognized the ruined silhouette of the Roman arena. “This place? You’re going to make me give the helmet back.”

  “Of course.” Though it hadn’t actually occurred to Noah, in his state of preoccupation with Lucien Demetz. “You know it’s the right thing to
do.”

  “I’m not apologizing to that bitch. She wouldn’t understand my English anyway.”

  “Oh, I think she’d know the word sorry.” Noah weighed the matter. “But she was so nasty, I’m not sure she deserves an apology.”

  Michael brightened.

  Noah beckoned for him to hand over the helmet.

  The boy took it off slowly, as if it was made of lead, and planted a kiss on the crest.

  Noah would have to find the kid another one like it for his birthday.

  He had an idea for how to avoid a mortifying conversation with the museum attendant. He crossed the grass to intercept a tour party gathering around its leader (identified by the tiny Chinese flag she held above her head) outside the doors. He handed the helmet to a random man and gestured toward the interior of the building.

  Honored, the man put the helmet on and bowed to Noah.

  Hidden behind a tree, Michael was watching in disbelief.

  “Done and dusted.”

  “What if she calls the cops on that poor sucker?”

  “She won’t—she knows it was you.”

  Michael sniffed, watching the tour party disappear into the museum. “I’ve got to say, I wore it better.”

  Noah was only half-listening as he checked his phone for the correct turn to the maison de retraite.

  It was behind a high wall (because some of the residents had to be prevented from wandering, he supposed). He pointed out the heavy branches of the fruit trees: “Clementines.”

  “What?”

  “Like satsumas. Mandarins? Little oranges.”

  Michael studied the gate’s elegant metalwork and official signage. “Will they let in a couple of strange Americans?”

  Noah hadn’t tried calling ahead, because he figured his chances were better in person. “I’m going to say my mother knew him.”

  “That is total bull.”

  “Partial bull,” Noah corrected him. He held down the button on the little box and in his crispest French announced himself as a family friend, un ami de la famille de Monsieur Demetz. Fingers crossed that the man wasn’t dead yet. Who’d raised him after he’d been orphaned in the Holocaust, Noah wondered? If he’d stayed around Nice, that might be an indication that he did have some family here.