Hugh stopped chewing and he stopped cutting. He weighed the fork and steak knife in his hand, looking at one, then the other before he looked up at Louis. His face was blank the way practiced diplomats’ faces can be. If anything, he looked bored, as though what Louis had just said neither interested nor affected him in the least. “I’m afraid I don’t follow your thinking, Louis. What connection do you see between my wife’s stroke and the death of this North African. . .?”
“I don’t think he was a North African,” said Louis.
“I thought you said he was North African,” said Hugh, turning his attention back to his plate.
“I said he appeared to be North African. I wondered about Ruth’s death and this man’s death being on the same day and whether that implied some connection.”
Hugh studied the last small piece of steak on his plate. “Go on,” he said. But then he continued himself. “Do you mean to say that this dead man, whoever he might be, was killed when my wife died to somehow attract our attention? That seems very far-fetched, Louis.”
“Excuse me, Hugh, but what I was suggesting is even more farfetched. But leaving that aside for a moment—”
Hugh had finished eating. “Louis,” he said, pushing the plate aside. “You think politics is nothing but intrigue, don’t you? That policies are formulated and decisions are made primarily so that those involved can pursue their own ambitions? Doesn’t that fairly state your idea of how we operate? And that political events, and you apparently include this murder among political events, are not what they seem to be, that their occurrence is not the main event, so to speak, but a subterfuge, a distraction, designed to hide what is really going on? Doesn’t that fairly state your opinion? That’s what got you in trouble when you were in government, isn’t it?”
Louis did not know what had gotten him in trouble when he was in government, but he did not answer. Hugh examined the knuckles of both hands. He turned the wedding ring on his left hand between his fingers. “I’m going to speak plainly to you, Louis, about things you ought to consider carefully before you do any further speculating about events you know nothing about, speculations that will almost certainly embarrass and humiliate you even further. I was going to say that your speculations could ruin you, but of course you were ruined long ago.
“Whatever illusions you may harbor, Louis, the world is in actual fact a more or less orderly place. Moreover, its orderliness is apparent. Or rather, when one behaves in accordance with its orderliness, its orderliness becomes apparent. Furthermore, whatever its design, the orderliness of the world exists to our, to mankind’s, benefit. That is not to say that we don’t make mistakes in our perceptions and hence in our actions. Despite its clarity, the order of things sometimes eludes us, usually because we are distracted by our own delusions. But the appropriate response to such mistakes is not to deny the order. It is not to reject our own capacity to change things, to make things better. It is to discover the deeper order we somehow missed, it is to find out what might have allowed us to make a mistake in the first place. And to use our new understanding of things for the benefit of mankind.
“It is not only fallacious, but it is also dangerous to conclude that things are other than they appear to be. You may recall, Louis, from your own abbreviated time in government—this is particularly true when dealing with the decision makers of other countries—that it is fallacious and dangerous to assume duplicity and dishonesty, where one can discover honor and virtue. Of course duplicity and dishonesty exist everywhere in the world, and in everyone. But they are aberrant, they are abnormal. I believe honor and good will are the norm. All progress that is made toward a peaceful world, a prosperous world, comes about when one is able to assume about others, even one’s adversaries, that they are essentially and despite all appearances people of good will and of honor.”
Louis interrupted. “Is that an assumption you make about me?” Though he had asked the question with the intention of putting an end to Hugh’s speech-making, for he was certain this was a speech Hugh had delivered many times before, he found that he was genuinely curious about the response.
“It is an assumption I made about you, Louis, when I knew you before, and when you recently expressed the desire to see me. Had I known that you had already been infected by rumor and innuendo, had I known of your malice toward me, though I am at a loss to explain it, had I known these things about you, I would certainly have declined to see you.
“Don’t get me wrong: the fact that I assume honor and good will, does not imply that I am naive about evil and malice. I know the world is filled with malice, filled with evil, that people are duplicitous, that they do not act in an honorable way. I simply do not begin with the presumption that they are that way. I respond to evil as I find it. I should say Louis, that I find your suggestions about Ruth’s death to be evil. And shocking. You should stay away from Milton Hamsher.”
“Milton Hamsher is your strongest champion, Hugh,” said Louis. “Whatever suspicions I may have, are my own.”
“Then you are even more lost than I thought you were,” said Hugh. Louis expected him to slide his chair back and stalk indignantly from the room, but he seemed in no great hurry to leave. In fact, it seemed as if the conversation had come to interest him. He filled his wineglass and gestured toward Louis’s plate, saying “You haven’t touched your food.” It was as though they had been having a friendly argument about the nature of being and not a debate—albeit a veiled one—about whether or not Hugh had murdered his own wife.
“You have told me your view of the world, Hugh,” said Louis. “May I tell you about mine?”
Hugh Bowes leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. He studied his arm at rest on the table’s edge. His expensive suit, the crisp shirt, the silk tie, the polished shoes, the presidential cuff links, the wedding ring, all these things stood for the man he saw himself to be. They contrasted dramatically, Hugh thought, with the blatant failure who sat facing him.
And yet, despite his best efforts—perhaps because of his intense desire that his carnal self not exist at all, maybe because of the urges and passions which just now seethed inside him, and most certainly because of his acute awareness of the flaccid, pale flesh which he knew that Louis knew to hang beneath his clothes—his shame was all but unbearable. He raised his eyes and looked across at the man looking back at him. And because he wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else, he spoke slowly, casually, with a languid look, and a light wave of his hand. “I would be curious to hear your view of the world, Louis.”
Louis sat with his hands folded on his lap. For a long moment he imagined Solesme, frightened or dead. “It is not surprising to me, Hugh, that you would choose to see the world as you do. After all, your view carries with it an implicit justification of the life you have chosen to live, by which I mean a life of public service and devotion to the greater good. You believe in this greater good, and, more importantly, you believe in your own capacity, your own superior ability to discern and serve it. You believe that you are uniquely suited to know what the world needs and how to accomplish it.”
Hugh kept his eyelids lowered, but his eyes were fixed firmly on Louis. He watched as each word formed on Louis’s lips and emerged softly into the room. Instead of the tirade he had hoped for, instead of conspiratorial rantings, what he heard Louis say was perceptive and true. What Louis said that Hugh believed in, was what Hugh believed in, and, although there was nothing startling about what Louis said, it was disconcerting to be accurately summarized in this way, and doubly disconcerting for someone whose professional achievement and success depended on his maintaining a large degree of inscrutability. Moreover, Louis did not seem cowed or intimidated. Despite’s Hugh’s best efforts to reveal nothing, Hugh felt his body grow tense as though he were in the presence of an approaching danger.
“The world”—Louis thought of the night sky over France—“and, if the world then the universe, could be, might be orderly, but I do not be
lieve, as you do, that the order of things is apparent or even available to us. Nor do I believe that anyone, not even you, Hugh—and I do not mean that ‘not even’ ironically—can perceive and understand the workings of things, even things much smaller than the world, like American foreign policy, or things that seem even smaller than that, like marriage, just as an example. I do not believe one can understand these things with a thoroughness and detachment sufficient to recommend one as life’s designated engineer.”
Hugh objected to marriage being made in any way analogous to foreign policy. “Fine,” said Louis. “Leave marriage out. Foreign policy, then, since that is your chosen arena. You imagine yourself sufficiently versed in the ways of world politics to know what to do to make things better. But that is an illusion born of your shame, or your own deep sense of your own insufficiency, of your ultimate powerlessness, which thought, I believe, is all but unbearable to you. I have been a witness to your shame, you will remember, as you have been a witness to mine. But your shame, I believe, which is all but unbearable to you”—Louis repeated the phrase—”has driven you to do things which, but for your arrogance, you too would see as more than wrong. It has driven you to do evil, to use your word. I am still leaving marriage aside.”
Hugh looked at Louis through narrowed eyes. He did not move. Even his breathing was shallow and imperceptible. It was not possible for Louis to tell whether Hugh had been listening. Hugh continued to practice his studied diplomatic indifference. But some faint tremor—did his eyelid flicker?—betrayed the uncertainty and fear which had begun to emerge from deep in the heart of his being.
Louis had found him out. And what was far more shocking: he had, for the first time, made Hugh known to himself. In all his years of thinking and reflecting about the political and social world, Hugh had, of course, thought about his own role on the world stage. But he had never once actually reflected upon his own weakness. How should he have? There was no place for weakness in his life. He had put his life together, managed and arranged it as though it were something apart from himself, something that existed on its own, as though it truly might have been that work of art Louis had spoken to Renard about. Its construction was Hugh’s only sustained and sustaining passion.
If Hugh had other passions, he was unaware of them. But in fact he did. His humiliation by Louis many years earlier had caused him to experience a violent and passionate reaction. The discovery that Ruth, his wife, had taken a lover had caused him to have another. In Hugh’s peculiar psyche, such moments of extreme feeling almost immediately gave way to his rational self, which he regarded as his true self.
Hugh treated the murderous moment as though it might be a natural or, better, political event, like a war, for instance, or a famine. It was something outside himself which had occurred and had to be reckoned with, but which, except that it had occurred within his range of knowing, had nothing to do with him. He did not deal with or even acknowledge these passions as belonging to him, so that it would not have occurred to him to feel either remorse or sorrow. They were simply things which had happened and which, therefore, had to be disposed of.
Hugh’s disposition of these events was, of course, in large part, designed to conceal his part in them. One could, therefore, argue that he recognized his own wrongdoing. But, in fact, the concealment was no different in his mind than any other political strategy. He sought to conceal his part in the death of Ruth Chasen and her lover, and the subsequent taunting of Louis, not to protect himself, but rather to protect that work of art—his life of service to the greater good—which he had been working on for as long as he could remember.
The carefully planned murders had obviously not been executed in a moment of passion. Neither had dumping the lover’s body at Louis’s door. But this malevolent prank had certainly sprung from Hugh’s passionate hatred of Louis. Hugh’s hatred had begun, as Louis correctly surmised, at the time of Louis’s early and rapid successes in the State Department and had reached its culmination on being found in bed with Sarah. Perhaps Hugh’s affair with Sarah had been meant as a similar prank. Perhaps Hugh had simply intended to reassert his superiority, and then Louis had inadvertently turned the tables on him.
But why, Louis wondered, had Hugh risked everything this time? Why had he gone to such elaborate lengths to conceal his part in the murders, and then turned around and foolishly jeopardized his efforts? If the body had not been deposited at Louis’s door, Louis might never have even known about Ruth’s death. Hugh must have known that Louis would eventually think of him, despite his elaborate ruse to implicate the Algerians.
It is a truism, Louis thought, that all criminals yearn to be caught, and that the cleverest desire it most deeply. For, without being discovered, their cleverness remains undiscovered and unappreciated. And their hatred remains incomplete. It needs to be perceived by others, especially by those against whom it is directed, in order to be real. But hatred also has its own reasons beyond explanation. It was not Hugh’s hatred of him that puzzled Louis. It was the depth, the murderous force of Hugh’s hatred which he could not fathom. Louis leaned forward slightly and looked into Hugh’s face in search of an explanation. But Hugh’s face remained mask-like, his half-closed eyes glimmered.
Then with an exaggerated gesture, Hugh looked at his watch. “I’m sorry Louis,” he said. “Your ruminations are fascinating. Unfortunately, there are real and important affairs of state that require my attention.” He removed the napkin from under his chin. He stood without haste. Then without looking at Louis again, he strode from the room.
XXI
GOETHE ONCE SAID—WAS IT IN HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH ECKERMANN?—that he could not imagine a crime which he could not himself commit. Louis pondered this as he stared at the cold steak on the plate in front of him. It glistened under a film of congealed fat. The baked potato beside it was still wrapped in its foil. His wineglass was full. Louis felt the emptiness of the small room, sensed the door behind him, sensed the restaurant dining room, the street, the city beyond that, and felt afraid for his life.
The reasons for Louis’s exile from the United States, which had gradually become less distinct in his mind over the course of the years away, now came rushing back to him with alarming clarity. Of course, the principal reason had been the desire, no, compulsion was the better word for it, to flee from the remnants of his disintegrated life—his failed marriage and career. He had, at the time, regarded Sarah and the children as the detritus of his failure, the floating wreckage of who he had once been or, rather, who he had considered himself to be.
Despite his fears, Louis waited until fairly late the next evening to leave for the airport. A man with an American flag on his baseball cap was driving the cab. The man opened the trunk without getting out from behind the wheel, and Louis lifted his bag in. “O.J. done it, sure as shit,” said the driver as soon as they had started down the road. Louis knew very little about the trial of the famous football player who had just been acquitted of murdering his estranged wife. The man was looking at him in the rearview mirror. “But what do you expect when you get a bunch of niggers together on a jury?” Louis turned his gaze out the window and watched the highway pass.
The sense Louis had of himself as someone with a powerful enemy was of little use to him. There were no precautions he could take. He had decided not to call Sarah again, not to speak to the children again either. It allowed him the illusion that he was protecting them by keeping them out of it. Moreover, they would have immediately detected his uneasiness. He was relieved to have the day to himself, to think his own thoughts, to allow the feelings that his visits with Sarah, Michael, and Jenny had stirred up in him to settle. Sarah, Michael, Jenny.
At the Air France counter he was the last passenger. Everyone else was already at the gate. The young attendant typed the information from his passport into her computer and assigned him a seat in the middle of the plane just adjoining the smoking section. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but the aircraft is
very full.”
He stepped through the metal detector. As he approached the gate, he heard his name over the public address system. “Louis Morgon. Louis Morgon, please pick up a white courtesy telephone.” Louis found a phone near the gate. The last passengers were boarding.
“Hello, Louis,” said Hugh Bowes. His voice was casual and light, almost friendly. “Just a word. I won’t let you miss your flight. In the matter we spoke about, I wanted to bring you up to speed. Your neighbor was kidnapped, we think, by Algerians, probably because she saw the body being left at your home. We’ll continue looking from here, and I’ll let you know when I have something more. I have your number in . . . Saint Leon sur Dême is it? Pretty name. We’ll talk soon, Louis. Bon voyage.”
“Thank you, Hugh,” said Louis. “I appreciate your help.”
“What are friends for?”
Louis hung up the phone and hurried onto the plane.
He was glad when he spied Renard and Jean Marie waiting for him in Paris just beyond the customs booth. It was eight o’clock in the morning. The flight had been smooth, but Louis had not slept. He had tried to read, still Anna Karenina , but couldn’t concentrate. When the lights were turned down and the other passengers pulled the little blankets over their heads, Louis had stared into the darkness.
The three men shook hands. “Thank you for coming, Jean Marie. How is your work going?” Jean Marie was handsome in his blue customs uniform. He looked like Renard, but was taller. He had his mother’s bright eyes. They stopped in a small airport cafeteria for breakfast.
“Neither Robert Pendergrass nor Ruth Chasen went through DeGaulle, according to airline records, or according to customs records,” said Renard, sipping his coffee. He noticed that Louis’s eyes had dark circles under them.
A French Country Murder Page 17