He stood and checked the Rolex. “Got to go. We’re leaving to see the lawyer in Carpentras in half an hour.” He leaned over me. “I could hurt you. And I will, if I have to. So keep your mouth shut.”
He went to the door and let himself out.
It was a long struggle to free myself from my abominable pantyhose. When I did, they were nearly as tattered and full of runs as they would have been after a couple of normal wearings. There was now no question of making the one o’clock bus. I wandered around the room gathering my possessions, thinking about Alexander’s story. If he really could prove he’d been on that plane, he hadn’t killed Carey. And after all this, I still didn’t know who had.
I sorted my scattered clippings. Why was I doing this? They were of no use to me now. I could toss them in the hotel incinerator before I left.
Even so, I looked at them. And as I looked, I realized I wasn’t quite through. I had to go back to Mas Rose one more time.
NICE BOY
The hotel proprietor agreed to extend my stay with his customary lack of grace. I showered, dressed in fresh clothes, stowed the clipping in my shoulder bag, put on my straw hat. My loins reasonably girded, I started out.
Beaulieu-la-Fontaine was closed down. Light sifting through the plane trees made moving patterns on the sidewalk, and a bird perched on the rim of the fountain. I left the town and walked out into the blazing countryside. The weather was getting warmer; it was almost June. Summers in Provence, I’d heard, were hot and dry. I wouldn’t be here to see for myself. For me, Provence was spring— blazing poppy fields, climbing roses, the first eggplants and melons of the season. Or that’s how I’d have liked to remember it.
The road climbed upward, and the woods closed in. I wasn’t afraid. Everybody was on the way to the lawyer’s office in Carpentras, to learn details about the good news. I’d see what I had to see and go. If Marcelle was there, perhaps I could tell her good-bye properly. I didn’t want to return, but I wouldn’t suffer through all this and leave without knowing.
Mas Rose came into view at last, a tile roof glimpsed behind the cypresses. I had thought it was so beautiful when I saw it for the first time. It was just as beautiful now, and as indifferent to the emotional storms it had sheltered. Our short visit was nothing, less than nothing, in the life of Mas Rose.
Sun reflecting from the white wall made my eyes water. At the gate I stopped and looked in at the patchy yard, the olive trees, the shed, the stone table. The glass doors to the kitchen were closed, a curtain drawn across them. Alexander’s motorcycle was parked in its customary spot, but the car was gone. By this time, the group should be well on its way.
With the creepy feeling of being a trespasser, I crossed the yard. Mount Ventoux stood against the sky with etched clarity. I opened the door of the shed and went inside.
It was dark. The windows were closed, the air stuffy and still. I pushed open the shutters and light streamed in. The place looked much as it had when I saw it before. “Nice Boy” was still propped against the wall, the ape as grotesque and the Mona Lisa as calm. I pulled out the Patrician Homes clipping and unfolded it.
Just then I heard a noise in the doorway, and someone behind me screamed, “No!” I half-turned, and caught a heavy impact on my shoulder that staggered me but didn’t quite knock me down.
Blanche, her eyes streaming, flailed at me with both hands. “No!” she screamed again.
I wanted to cry out, to tell her to stop, but I was too startled to speak. I tried to catch her wrists, but she was moving too wildly. One of her blows landed painfully on my cheekbone.
She continued to shriek, “No! No! No!” with rising hysteria. I managed to push her away, and she hit the wall, but charged back at me, her face contorted and her eyes wild.
I bent over, trying to escape the rain of blows, and my shoulder bag slid down my arm. Its weight was hindering me, and I let it fall. It hit the floor with a thok! that reminded me of the boule I’d stolen. Under the hail of Blanche’s blows, her screams resounding in my ears, I stooped, reached into the bag, and grasped the boule.
By now, I’d found my tongue. As I tried to straighten up I cried, “Stop it, Blanche! Stop!”
“No! No!”
She was completely out of control, lunging at me again. Still bent over I backed away from her. I threw the boule.
It hit her, not between the eyes, but in the upper chest. She looked shocked when it made contact. She gasped and stumbled back, losing her balance and falling heavily to the stone floor. She didn’t try to get up but lay sobbing, her hands over her face.
“Why didn’t you go to Carpentras, Blanche?” I asked. Of all the things I could’ve said, it seemed the most sensible.
She didn’t answer. A voice said, “Blanche and I stayed behind, where we belong.”
Ross was standing in the doorway. He crossed to kneel beside Blanche. “Buck up, Blanche,” he said.
The ragged crying went on. Ross stood. The Patrician Homes clipping I’d had in my hand lay on the floor near his feet, where I’d dropped it when Blanche first attacked me. He picked it up. “You came to have another look at ‘Nice Boy’?”
“Yes.”
He studied the photograph of his creation, then the work itself. “Do you know the goddamndest thing? Nobody noticed, until you,” he said.
I looked at Blanche, huddled on the floor. “I think Blanche must have.”
He shook his head. “Vivien never knew the difference. She saw it every day and never knew. Do you know how that can hurt? But you noticed. I had a feeling you would.”
He held the clipping out to me. I compared the photo with “Nice Boy.” In the picture, the gorilla’s middle finger was pointing directly at the Mona Lisa’s smile. Now, the salute was directed lower, at her cleavage.
“It makes all the difference in the world. The statement is entirely different,” Ross said.
Too tired to stand upright, I leaned against the wall. “What happened? Did the arm break?”
“The arm fell off when Carey took it down from the wall. It’s a very heavy piece. He shouldn’t have been so careless. I didn’t have time to re-attach the arm the way it was before. I was lucky even to find glue.”
I walked over to “Nice Boy.” Ross made no move to stop me.
I pushed my fingers into the mass of fake fur at the gorilla’s shoulder and found a matted place, where the fur was stiff— with glue, or blood, or both.
“You caved in Carey’s skull with the arm?”
“He had ruined ‘Nice Boy,’ the best piece I ever did. He called it junk. He said he didn’t want it, it was stupid and banal. He told me to take it away with me.” His eyes glistened. “I only went there to talk to him, to see if we could work things out about Vivien. But he’d pulled it off the wall after she left. He broke it. He called it junk.”
I stared at him. I would have given anything – anything — for it not to be Ross.
“I found some crappy glue and fixed it up as well as I could, and I hung it back on the wall,” Ross said. “I knew I was going to be caught any minute, because surely everybody would notice. The change seemed so obvious to me.”
“And nobody knew the difference.”
“Until you.”
“You gave it away. You denied it was different when I asked.”
“When you asked, I didn’t know you had that picture. I would’ve slipped up sometime, anyway. It’s all over. I know it’s over. I’m not sorry about Carey, or Pedro—”
“Did Pedro know you’d killed Carey?”
“Oh, hell, no. He thought Alexander did it, just like Vivien does. But Pedro was threatening Vivien. If he kept agitating, and tried to get the cops interested in Alexander, the case would be scrutinized again. I was sure I wouldn’t make it through a second time. And I was right.” He sketched a salute of tribute to me. “I told Pedro Vivien wanted to settle their dispute, and asked him to meet me that night to negotiate. I hit him with a rock and made sure he went over the cl
iff. Any decent investigation of his death would have turned up the truth, but there wasn’t a decent investigation. I wouldn’t call myself a lucky person, but I’ve been lucky in some ways.”
I wanted to be strong enough not to ask my next question, but I wasn’t. “And— what about me? Was all that just to—”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “At first, I was trying to get you on my side. I could tell you were alert. I thought you could be dangerous. Later— no. Last night was something I gave myself because I knew today was bearing down on me.”
“But— you pushed me down the bluff.”
“Last minute panic, trying to scare you into giving up. It was my last try. I hope you can forgive me one day. Hurting you made me— disgusted with myself.”
I didn’t suppose I’d ever know whether this was true or not.
Blanche was sitting on the floor, knees bent and head sagging. “Ross,” she said, the name almost inaudible.
He went and knelt beside her once more. “You fought hard, tiger.”
“I wanted to stop Georgia Lee. It’s my fault she found out.”
“Somebody would have found out sooner or later.”
“I betrayed you. I let you down.”
He put his arms around her. I thought about courtly love, about unrequited passion, about The Book of Betrayal.
I left them there and went to the house to telephone the police— in Beaulieu-la-Fontaine and New York.
REUNION
The squatty statue stared at me with baleful eyes. At the tip of the flamboyant extrusion Kitty had referred to as his “private parts,” there was indeed a chipped place. On the rug, next to the open carrier waiting to transport her to Montparnasse, Twinkie sat placidly washing her face. Miss Innocence.
“How much do you think it cost?” I asked. “Round figures.”
“I have no idea. Swear to God,” Kitty said.
I suspected she had an idea, but the sum was so vast she didn’t want to tell me. “It was probably Luc’s favorite,” I said glumly.
“Luc has forgotten it ever existed, and so should we.” Kitty took the statue from the end table at my elbow and closed it up in one of her built-in cabinets. It had been banished from the shelves after the accident. Out of sight, out of mind— I hoped.
The room was filled with gray Paris twilight. The chestnut blossoms had faded in my absence, but the leaves were broad, dark green, and cool-looking. I’d arrived a couple of hours ago and Jack, back from Rome, had picked me up at the Gare de Lyon. As we lurched through the traffic towards Kitty’s place, he told me things had been happening in Paris, too. He had moved out of the house in Neuilly where he lived with his wife, Claire, and their two teenage children, and was staying in a borrowed apartment on the Ile St. Louis. When I said I was sorry, he set his jaw and didn’t answer.
I told them about it as we sprawled in Kitty’s living room drinking Sancerre. I tried to be dispassionate, which was less difficult because I’d told it a lot over the past couple of days. I began to see how Ross and Vivien had become experts at their story, learning its rhythms and eccentricities until it was burnished enough to shine like truth.
Now, when I looked at events in Provence, they had taken on inevitability. Ross had confessed to the two murders, burnishing yet another account of the events of that winter night. Strangely enough, the considerable notoriety of the case had provoked interest in his art, and prices for his work were said to be spiraling upward. As for the others, Alexander’s legal troubles with the Rolex scheme would give Vivien ways to spend her money and time. And Blanche—
“Blanche is the one I worry about,” I said, apropos of nothing, after Kitty had put the statue away.
“Will you hear from her, do you think?” Kitty asked.
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t blame Blanche if she avoided me forever. “I asked her to write.” My voice sounded more forlorn than I wanted it to.
Jack moved in briskly. No emotional scenes for him. “Did you find out why Blanche and Ross didn’t go to the lawyer’s office in Carpentras?”
I nodded. “Ross knew I was getting to the truth. He probably suspected I’d show up, so he refused to go. Blanche told me she stayed behind when she heard Ross wasn’t going, but Ross didn’t know that. She had hoped, I guess, to have time alone with him.”
Kitty said, “She knew all along Ross was guilty?”
“She suspected— feared. She’s the only one who knew he and Vivien were lying about being together that night.”
Jack lit a cigarette and tossed the match in Kitty’s fireplace. “A tissue of lies,” he said dramatically. He’d gotten his story out of it. I’d called from Provence.
“It’s a wonder it all held together as long as it did,” I said. “So many lies, so many people willing to lie in the name of love.”
During our thoughtful silence, Twinkie got up. After an arched-back, shuddering stretch, she strolled to one of Kitty’s brocade-covered chairs and began energetically sharpening her claws on it.
Galvanized, I yelled, “Twinkie!”
She put her ears back and glanced at me without stopping her primary activity.
I jumped up and clapped my hands loud, which Twinkie hates. She let go of the chair and galloped out of the room. I said, “God, Kitty, she’s destroying everything!”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kitty said, but I thought she was furtively inspecting the chair.
“That’s it. Time to go. Now,” I said.
“Alley oop,” said Jack, and got to his feet. He was going to drive us and save me the agony of taking a taxi with Twinkie.
I went down the hall to find her. I was back in Paris. We were on our way home. My career as a ghost was over.
#
Dedication
To Paule Lafeuille
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About the Author
MICHAELA THOMPSON is the author of seven mystery novels, all of them originally published under the name Mickey Friedman. She grew up on the Gulf Coast in the Northwest Florida Panhandle, the locale described in Hurricane Season, and still spends a significant amount of time there. She has worked as a newspaper reporter and a freelance journalist, and has contributed mystery short stories to a number of anthologies. She and her husband, Alan Friedman, live in New York City.
Praise for VENETIAN MASK by Michaela Thompson:
“The decaying splendor of Venice forms the backdrop for a complex and unusual murder mystery … an elaborate, surrealistic book ripe with atmosphere, plot and characterization.”
—Publishers Weekly
“…kaleidoscopic, sat
isfyingly intricate … a brainy, psychologically astute cut above most mysteries.”
—People Magazine
“[Ms. Thompson] is an enthralling entertainer, and one familiar with every nuance of Venice and Carnival.”
—The New Yorker
VENETIAN MASK
BY
Michaela Thompson
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Venetian Mask
Copyright © 1987 by Michaela Thompson
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover by Andy Brown
eBook ISBN: 9781625173393
www.booksbnimble.com
Originally published by Scribner Book Company.
First booksBnimble electronic publication: December, 2013
Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by booknook.biz
PROLOGUE
In Venice, at Carnival, a veil writhes and unfolds in the wind. A mask peers from an upstairs window. Cloaked figures, unrecognizable, linger in shadowy corners. All this can happen, even today.
In the dissolute eighteenth century, the Venice Carnival lasted six months. A black cloak, three-cornered hat, and white mask concealed the unalterable: sex, age, station. The disguised figure could be a debauched nobleman on his way to the gaming tables, a beautiful nun hurrying to meet her lover, a servant delivering a clandestine message. All were equal in anonymity. Recognition of reality was betrayal.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 40