by Anna Porter
There were peach-colored carpets, soft beige drapes, pink hyacinths in earthenware pots against the mirrored wall.
Eva was curled up at one end of the C-shaped white sofa, her legs pulled in under her, her black skirt fanned out in soft folds. Her head was bent forward and to one side, listening to the music, absolutely still. A mauve macramé shawl covered her shoulders like a tent. Her hands, wearing beige lace gloves, lay in her lap.
There was a faint smell of lilacs.
Ligeti ducked behind the sofa where the stereo set and massive, full-size speakers occupied the back wall. He turned the volume down to bearable and faced the room again with a grin of joyful expectation. The woman lifted her face. Her hair formed a gray halo of curls around her head. “Now why did you have to go and do that?” she asked querulously, her voice a deep, gravelly tenor. “You know I like it to drown out all the noise. I am tired of hearing myself breathe.” The same accent Judith remembered from the phone conversation—light on the consonants, each syllable receiving the same treatment, no inflection.
“Judith Hayes is here,” Ligeti pronounced from behind her. “She is late, but she has come. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that what you wanted?” As though he was talking to a child—humoring her. “Come in, come in,” he called to Judith, who had stopped a foot or two from the doorway, watching Eva Zimmerman as she turned her face this way and that, her light blue eyes scanning the room but not focusing on her.
“Hello,” Judith said as she approached.
At once Eva’s eyes seemed to settle on her, the pale narrow face fixed in concentration. “Ah yes, please, do come in. Do sit beside me. We don’t much stand on ceremony around here. No time for that, is there, Miki?” She had high, almost Asian cheekbones, a round childlike forehead, gently arched eyebrows, dark hollows around her eyes. A light jagged line ran from the right corner of her mouth toward the outer edge of her right eye. The scar gave her a permanent quizzical half-smile that somehow suited the rest of her expression. She wore no makeup. It was easy to see that she must once have been a stunning beauty, and even now, her features had a fineness unmarred by age.
She patted the couch next to her, saying “Sit, sit,” to Judith.
Ligeti joined them, bringing a silver tray with coffee, white china cups, cream, sugar, and a half-bottle of Grand Marnier.
“One or two?” he asked Eva.
“Three, this morning, I think,” she replied.
He poured three teaspoonfuls of liqueur into Eva’s cup with the coffee and winked at Judith. “And for you?” he asked.
“Too early for me, thanks,” Judith said.
“Nonsense,” declared Ligeti. “We’d like to welcome you to Paris. It’ll make you relax. We’ll chat for a while. We’ll rest a little. No rush.” He put a generous helping of liqueur into her cup.
“It’ll keep you warm. Take it,” Eva commanded. “You’ll need all the warmth you can get if we’re going to talk about Paul Zimmerman. He’s not a warm subject, mmh? Miki, how does she look?”
Ligeti gazed appraisingly at Judith. “Hmm,” he said, touching his forefinger to his chin. “She is tall, five-seven or so, long auburn hair, thick and shiny, amazing sea green eyes, small pert nose, thick eyebrows, generous mouth. I’d say she’s slender and maintaining it. Forty, maybe thirty-seven, a bit insecure, but then who wouldn’t be, arriving here without sleep, some crazy pair of Hungarians talking about murder...”
“Would you mind telling me what’s going on here?” Judith tried to maintain a polite tone.
“She’s blind, don’t you know,” Miki said. “Cataracts. Won’t hear of an operation, though I’ve been trying to persuade her, God knows... She’s afraid of the knife.”
“I’ve always had a visual imagination,” Eva said. “So difficult to talk to someone I can’t see. Miki’s my eyes. Hope you don’t mind.”
Judith said she didn’t.
“Some blind people paw all over your face to get an image. That’s so personal. Doubt if you’d like it. Invading your space, I think they say.” She drank up her coffee and asked for more. She prattled on some more about how much she could judge people by the quality of their voices, the feel of their skins when they shook hands. Then she stopped abruptly and turned her watery eyes to Judith. “But we were going to talk about Paul. That’s why you came. So. Where do we begin?” She sat forward, attentively, her small, childlike hands still resting in her lap.
“You said on the telephone that Paul Zimmerman was expecting to be murdered,” Judith said.
“That he did. Exactly,” Eva said solemnly. “And so often, it had become a joke. I’d ask him if I should get my widow’s weeds ready and he’d tell me I’d look superb in black. He’d tell me I’d look beautiful in anything. From the day he first set eyes on me, he thought I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen—bar one. But that’s another story. Miki, did you know he had been in love once before? You did? Miki knows everything about me.” She listened for a sound, and when Miki cleared his throat, she grinned in his direction.
“He told you he was going to be killed?” Judith asked.
Eva knitted her brows in concentration, as if she had just recalled where she was and why. “Oh yes,” she said distractedly. “He was anticipating his own death. Every day. We were both war children, you know. We remembered the war, death seemed as natural then as eating. Or sleeping. One never knew when. And Paul, he was certain death would come and get him. At first I didn’t take it too seriously. Why should I? But he had this recurrent vision. More than that. A certainty. We kept in touch after I left him. We would talk on the phone. Once a month he came to see me—here, or in Barbados. London. Wherever I was. I decamped in 1971. Perhaps you knew that? You didn’t? Philip gets paid to be discreet. I should have done it sooner to save Arthur, but I was such an optimist. Kept believing it would all work out in the end. But some things don’t.” She launched into some long story about how to tell the difference between a pessimist and an optimist.
Both Eva and Miki broke into peals of laughter till Eva started to choke. Miki pulled a little blue object from his pocket and placed it in her hand. She thrust one end into her mouth and drew long rasping breaths from it.
“It’s a respirator,” Miki explained. “She has asthma. Or emphysema. She doesn’t care to know which.”
Eva wiped the perspiration from her face, adjusted the cream-colored silk scarf under her throat, pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders, and started to talk again. “I never told Paul about this,” she said, waving the respirator around. “I stopped seeing him altogether when it was clear he’d start to notice. I didn’t want him to see me this way. Miki?” she called, and he came up behind her, put his hand over her shoulder, and held it, reassuringly. Her hand covered his. “Even the phone has become difficult the past few months. The last time Paul came, Miki pulled down the blinds so we could be in semi-darkness. He told Paul I had a migraine headache.” She sighed. “It’s such a great pity. A terrible pity.”
Miki nodded happily and poured more coffee.
“Did he tell you who was going to kill him?” Judith asked.
“No. He never did. He said it was better for me I shouldn’t know. He had ghastly nightmares sometimes, and I would shake him awake. We would stay up, talking, till the fear passed. But he never said what it was. Some shadow from the past. And I would ask him why he didn’t go to the police. He was so efficient in everything else. He said that would be useless.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why.”
“Could have been his imagination. He must have had some dreadful memories from his childhood, maybe that’s all. We all have nightmares.”
Eva shook her head. “No. This time it was for real. He called on the first day of the New Year. He said the game was up. Those were his words: ‘The game is up, Eva,’ he told me. He sounded so sad, really; not scared as he used to. I think even disappointed. As if he had waited all this time, and when death came to stalk
him, as he had expected he would, it was not all he had imagined.”
“He said ‘he’?”
“That’s what he said. Doesn’t necessarily mean his killer was a man, though. It’s sort of traditional to refer to death as a man, don’t you think, Miki?”
“Perhaps she would like to hear what Paul said?” Miki asked. He was taking Beethoven off the stereo and searching through a stack of white-spined tapes on the shelf above. “First of January, 1987,” he said. “We didn’t get the whole thing, because we never knew when it was going to be Paul or someone else important, so the tape had to be clicked on by hand. But we did get most of it.”
“Not as rotten as you may think, Mrs. Hayes. I don’t record conversations to use against people. I record them so I can hear them again. Don’t you reread your letters sometimes?”
“Now and then,” Judith said.
“The good ones only. Second time you can read between the lines. That’s how I listen to the tapes—I can hear nuances I missed before. Especially Paul’s—he always had more to say than he knew. He was a man of so many dimensions.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Such a waste,” she said. “Please, Miki.”
The tape was already rolling. Judith recognized Paul Zimmerman’s voice saying: “...I don’t yet know what choice this leaves me. But I have to think about you and Brenda and Meredith. Especially Meredith. I’ve always felt she was more than just my daughter. So much like someone else I once knew.”
“And Arthur?” Eva’s voice asked.
“I suppose also Arthur, but he already knows. He is collecting his fee for keeping quiet. I’ve had to amend the will in his favor. Did he call you?”
“No. You know I wouldn’t help him, Paul. Not against you.”
“I know,” he said. “I may never be able to speak to you again, Eva. I don’t know how it will come or when. The only thing I know is they’re going to kill me—” a pause “—and that I wish I could see you again.”
“When?” Eva asked.
“I’m not sure, but it’s a matter of weeks, at most. And you know, I hardly care when. I’m dying anyway.”
The tape ended as abruptly as it had begun. “Problems with the machine,” Miki explained.
“Could have been another of his nightmares,” Judith said.
“Not this time,” said Eva. “I know the difference. I knew him better than anyone. Better than Brenda. He’d put on too much veneer by the time he met her, too much civilization. When I met Paul he was a raw youth, and tough as they come. And I, for one, would like to know who in hell killed him and why. And how he knew all those years they were going to come for him. Makes a great story, don’t you think? I just love intrigue. I used to read mysteries when I could still see. Such fun unraveling the string till you caught the killer.” She stretched, straightened her legs, and stood, steadying herself against the sofa’s arm. “Who knows, perhaps I’d like to shake his hand. It’s rumored that pain fades faster from one’s memory than happiness. Don’t you believe it.”
She walked directly toward the window, stopped an inch from the glass, reached for the brass handle, and pulled the window open. “I think I need fresh air,” she said, breathing deeply. “Is it sunny, Judith? It feels warmer than it has any right to in March, and I can tell it’s sunny.” She held her face up toward the light.
When Judith went to stand beside her, she was surprised at how small she was, a pale China doll.
The view over the Tuileries’ bare trees was clear all the way to the Louvre in one direction, and over the double towers of an old church to the top of the Eiffel Tower in the other. “Oh yes, it’s a beautiful spring day,” Judith agreed. She longed to be outside, away from the stifling peach-colored room.
Eva must have read her thoughts, because she suggested they take a short walk in the gardens. “Marvelous for your health. A little respite for both of us. Miki, do please get my coat.”
“What a superb idea,” Miki enthused, clapping his hands. “We shall walk in the gardens.” He dashed off through a doorway and returned with a black sable coat and button-up leather boots for Eva. He knelt to help her on with the boots. “We’ll meet you in the foyer,” he told Judith. “Marie,” he called over his shoulder, “Marie, envoyez le chien. Nous allons dehors.” Whereupon a small round ball bounced out of another doorway, rolled across the frothy carpet, and leapt into Eva’s outheld arms. It licked her face while she squealed with girlish delight.
“Mumu speaks such perfect French,” Miki said. “He doesn’t understand another language, but he is fluent, better than I am, in French, n’est-ce pas, chéri?”
A maid in black dress and white pinafore brought a thin gold chain and a sparkling red ribbon for Mumu’s leash. Judith went to get her own new coat, which seemed surprisingly shabby.
Twenty-Four
“THERE’S NOT ANOTHER hotel like it. It has hordes of ambience,” Miki stated, as much for the benefit of the smartly obsequious doorman as for Judith. “Eva did try the Crillon, but it’s overstated. Too modern. Catering to the Americans—or what the French think the Americans want. The Meurice has a sense of the past. It used to be known as the ‘hotel of kings.’ Did you know, our suite has been occupied by Queen Victoria and some kings of Spain, Denmark, and Italy. For months it was Salvador Dalí’s home. It’s the view from our window that persuaded von Choltitz not to blow up Paris.”
He had donned a sealskin jacket over his jogging pants. He held the end of Mumu’s gold chain in one hand; with the other, he guided Eva across the Rue de Rivoli and down the steps into the gardens.
Mumu was about the size of a chipmunk with somewhat longer legs. In addition to the red ribbon around his neck, he wore a tiny white barrette to keep a tuft of longish hair out of his eyes and a stylish jacket of red wool that made him look like an idiot. As soon as they descended the steps he made a rush for the stone lion and lifted his leg against its massive base. Obviously he needed to restore his self-esteem.
Eva was taking long deep breaths, her mouth open, gulping air. “Feels so much cleaner in the winter,” she said, gasping. “We’re not overwhelmed by the attentions of the whole world. You can walk in the gardens without clusters of tourists clogging up the paths. Miki, are there buds yet? Has the grass begun to sprout?”
“Soon,” he told her reassuringly. “It’ll be full spring in another couple of weeks.”
Mumu had found something brown and sticky and began to roll in it, making a mess of his jacket.
“I saw Arthur yesterday in New York,” Judith began. “Must have been an interesting day for you,” Eva said, smiling. “He is a rather unusual boy.” She emphasized “unusual.”
“You said if you had left Paul Zimmerman sooner, it might have saved him. What did you mean by that?” They were walking down the central pathway toward the main alley that stretches all the way to the Louvre in one direction, toward the Champs-Élysées in the other. The trees were stark, bare, and forbidding. In the absence of lush summer foliage, the naked statues dotted among them were grotesque imitations of human bodies, caked with grime.
“He was a very sensitive boy,” Eva said, “and I allowed his father to break him—to toughen him up, as Paul put it. It’s difficult in hindsight to understand how I could have permitted the boy to be tormented that way. Paul had some notion that a son had to be strong, that to survive he had to know how to withstand pain, and how to inflict pain without flinching. I suppose he told you about the butterflies?” She had put her arm through Miki’s and walked next to Judith but leaning away from her. That, and the thick sable collar rolled high around her chin, made it hard to hear what she was saying. “First time he made Arthur kill the butterflies, the boy vomited. Then Paul beat him.”
“And you? Did you let him?” Judith asked.
“She had no choice—” Miki said quickly, but Eva interrupted him.
“Of course I had a choice, silly. We always have choices. I just made the wrong one. In those days I believed he could do no w
rong. That if the boy had to get tough, he had to get tough. What did I know about boys anyhow? I’m not proud of it now. I hated Paul as much, in the end, for what he was as for what he made me become. But I have no excuses, only explanations. I think my father sensed something in him that didn’t ring right, but my mother was as much in love with him as I was. He had a way with women. The two of them would often stay up nights playing cards and tippling—if that’s all they did. At the time, I was jealous. Astonishing, isn’t it, Miki?”
“She is never jealous of me,” Miki agreed wistfully. “I have more freedom than any man I know. It worries me sometimes, chérie. Do you think it should, Judith?”
“It depends,” said Judith, wondering whether he was Eva’s lover or her gigolo, now that she had eliminated the possibility of his being just a faithful servant.
They had reached the middle of the gardens and began to wander slowly toward the octagonal pool near the Obélisque. The last time Judith was here, the terraces and stairways around the pool had been crowded with tourists and young mothers with children. There were hundreds of colorful toy sailboats on the water. Today it was deserted. She could hear the gravel crunch under their feet. Eva sat on a bench near the pool and put on a pair of dark glasses with emeralds embedded in the frames. “Is there anyone else here?” she asked. Her voice echoed around the stone layers.
“No,” Miki assured her.
“I was 18, a student nurse at Montreal General. My father had a store on St. Urbain Street. An old-fashioned drugstore, where you could buy everything you wanted. I loved the smell in that store. I still remember all those wonderful aromas of soap, spices, fresh dill pickles. Paul barely spoke English and had never learned Yiddish, so we always spoke Hungarian. He learned English fast. He was arrogant, confident, and more aggressive than anyone I had ever met. He was going places, and I think Mama wanted me along for the ride. She wanted all the things for me she’d never had, and by God, did I get them. And I loved it, Judith; don’t ever let anyone convince you that money isn’t fun. It’s...well...look around you. Another poor old blind woman: who’d give a damn if she starved, or froze to death in the gutter tonight. Me, I’m living at the Meurice and I’ll have entrecôte bouchère aux herbes for my dinner, and maybe you’ll join me in a bottle of Château Lafitte Rothschild 1957—an excellent year. I’ve enjoyed it all, oh dear, yes. But there was a price to pay. And some of the price was paid by Arthur. That’s what I regret the most.” She gestured as if to swat at a nasty thought. “Too late now. It was too late when we left. Did he tell you how his father would lock him into the cellar so he would conquer his fear of the dark? That he bought him an Arabian stallion, and when Arthur didn’t want to ride it, tied him to the horse with a rope and whipped them around the paddocks? When Arthur fell off, he continued to whip him. Not hard, but enough to make the boy roll into a ball in the mud, trying to protect his head with his arms...” She trailed off, her breathing loud and rasping again. Miki put his hand over hers and pressed his fingers between her gloved ones. Judith noticed she wore a huge red ruby over her leather-covered ring finger.