The Collector

by Anne-Laure Thiblemont

  “Where will you hide it?”

  “At my mom’s place.”

  “Your mother’s place? I thought we should hide it at your lab.”

  “No, not a good choice. There are too many people during the day and nobody at night. Anybody could steal it. But my mom makes jewelry. Remember? She’s got all sorts of boxes. But I need to stress this, though: I’m being followed.”

  Marion tensed. While worrying about her own vulnerability, she had neglected to consider Chris’s.

  “Are you absolutely sure of that?”

  “Sure of it? I’ve never spotted anyone, but I still feel this presence lurking behind me. I’m not dismissing it anymore or telling myself that it’s all in my imagination. Someone is following me. But why me? And wouldn’t it mean that you’re being tailed too?”

  Without answering, Marion cracked open the door to Bruno’s office and checked to see if Romarel’s chauffeur was still waiting. Sure enough, he was sitting in the reception area, just behind Sophie, who looked as stiff as a board.

  “So? What did you decide?” Chris fired. “Are you giving it to me?”

  “I have another idea. We’ll meet tonight at your mom’s place. I’ll bring the sculpture. I’ll make sure Romarel’s chauffeur drives me.”

  “Do you think you can trust this guy? And even if you can trust him, do you think he’ll make any difference if you’re being tailed?”

  She shot him an unequivacal look.

  “Okay. I give up. You bring it.”

  He was right. The chauffeur was no insurance. But Marion intended to be the one to take the blame if anything went wrong. She didn’t want to put her friend in that position.

  Chris started to leave but stopped. “Please be careful, Marion. This is serious stuff. Think it over some more. You don’t actually believe this sculpture just randomly fell into your lap, do you? Someone could have given you a little help. You got your inheritance, then two days later a guy was murdered. His sculpture got stolen, and it wound up with you. You could get nailed as an accomplice to murder!”

  She just nodded. It was too late to turn back.

  Once alone, Marion began skimming though the pages of an auction catalog. She didn’t want to think about it or analyze it anymore. Then, making a split-second decision, she threw on her coat, grabbed her bag, and left like a bat out of hell. When he spotted his charge darting down the hallway, Romarel’s chauffeur rose to his feet.

  “Are we leaving?” he shouted as he headed toward the exit.

  With a tweak or two, it could have been Sophie’s parting shot.

  “So you’re leaving me by myself again!”

  17

  Jacqueline de Romarel had opened the door to Marion and let her in, but she wasn’t even looking at her guest. She was staring absently at a Neapolitan painting in the next room, as though she wasn’t aware of Marion’s presence. Only the hum of the furnace broke the silence. Marion didn’t know exactly what to do. Say something to disrupt the spell? Wait for Romarel to speak?

  It was hard to determine the woman’s age. Sixty-five? Seventy-five? Her red hair was fixed in place with a gel as thick as plaster. She had a peach-fuzz mustache and was wearing lip liner, smudged eye shadow, and powder. Marion tried not to stare but couldn’t help herself. Romarel’s skimpy dress revealed her saggy breasts and loose skin. Yet she was also wearing a silk scarf to hide her neck wrinkles. Her arms were toothpick thin, and her torso was pitifully gaunt. And this made her legs seem all the more shocking. They looked like two hefty barrels.

  “My father must have been blind to have slept with this woman,” Marion said to herself. Still, she had beautiful hazel eyes, and there was something intriguing about her—something simultaneously harrowing, ridiculous, and magnificent, like a commedia dell’arte performance.

  “Let’s have a seat in the other room,” Romarel suggested, finally coming alive. She pointed her cane to a door on the right. “I hope it’s not too hot for you. I spend a fortune heating this place. I keep it at a constant eighty degrees all year, day and night. For me the seasons are all one in the same. Ever since I’ve been forced to stay inside they’ve lost meaning.”

  Marion watched as the stooped woman started inching, crablike, toward the room she had indicated. Once at the doorway she stopped Marion, blocking her with her arm. Romarel slowly turned to a kitchen cart, opened a photo album on top of it, took out a picture, and handed it to Marion. It was a portrait of a beautiful odalisque stretched out on a cruise ship’s lounge chair. She was unrecognizable. Maybe Magni wasn’t so blind after all.

  “That was me,” Romarel said.

  Marion heard the anger in the woman’s voice. She felt like leaving then and there. She was wasting her time.

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  For the first time, Romarel’s eyes met Marion’s.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Romarel closed the album and started making her way into the sitting room, with Marion close behind. On the far side of the room, an indoor greenhouse containing tropical plants created an array of shadows on the wall.

  “What do you know about him?” Romarel asked as she continued her labored trek.

  “Nothing.”

  “Not even about his childhood?”

  “No.”

  The old woman dropped into an armchair and nodded to another chair. Marion sat down. Romarel was breathing heavily, and her hands were shaking.

  “In order to understand, you have to be on the inside,” she said once she had stopped panting. “But you—you’re on the outside. You’ll never get anywhere without me.”

  Her tone was as sharp as a knife. Jacqueline de Romarel was not a likeable person, and she made no effort to be one.

  “Do you know about the will?”

  Romarel interrupted her with a wave of the hand.

  “You’re aware of how your father kept a tight fist on his collection. What you don’t know is that he also kept all of his paperwork. Magni didn’t throw throw anything away. Bills, gift certificates, letters, bank statements… He kept it in his tomb room. I’m sure you never saw it.”

  Marion shook her head.

  “It’s a room whose walls were lined with cardboard boxes—all identical. They were labeled by year. That’s how he organized his documents. He’d keep everything in his office until the year ended, and then, into the tomb room it would all go, in its own neatly labeled box. Apparently he had some idea of when he would die, because he had all the boxes, including the one for the year that’s not yet finished, delivered to my home. Some stunt—as if I wanted them!”

  “Was it a joke?”

  “Yes, a prank. That’s how I heard about you—from the estate attorney. And Fabien, my chauffeur, has been looking for you ever since. But you were an elusive target.”

  Marion shifted in her seat.

  “I was on the outside too. I hoped he’d fall in love with me eventually. How deluded I was. I never could have imagined the power his objects held over him and just how far they had removed him from the rest of the world.”

  Jacqueline de Romarel fell silent, and Marion was hesitant to pick up the conversation. She was clearly a bitter woman, having stewed in her disappointments for many years. Nothing Marion could say would change any of that.

  Romarel started talking again. Her strained voice was barely a whisper, and Marion had to lean forward to hear. “Try one-upping a seductive mask or an alluring alabaster sculpture,” she said. “It can’t be done. Those mistresses are much more tantalizing than the real thing. You lust for them but never manage to unlock their mysteries. Who created them? Who were they created for? It was their well-guarded secrets that fascinated Edmond. And, in the end, they were much easier to live with than a real woman. After all, what sculpture would argue, contradict, or cause doubts?”

  “That didn’t stop him from living with you.”

  “But look what it cost me! I had to accept the fact that Edmond would touch them, stare at them
lovingly, and wake up in the middle of the night screaming, ‘I want her, I want her!’”

  The regrets and loneliness pouring out of her host washed over Marion. Feeling dispirited, she began rubbing the fingers of one hand over the palm of her other hand. Why torture her with my questions, Marion wondered, torn between her reluctance to poke at old wounds and the desire to know more about her father. What good would it do?

  As if she had read her thoughts, Jacqueline de Romarel fixed Marion in her gaze. “I wouldn’t want you spending your best years chasing after him like I did. I did everything I could to understand who he was. Learn from my mistakes.”

  “I don’t understand where his fortune came from,” Marion said, intent now on staunching the flow of melancholy.

  “From his father’s father,” Romarel answered. “He left on a cargo ship with nothing and come back with a full hold. He founded a cotton business in Africa. It was successful enough to support several idle generations.”

  “The attorney didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Edmond went through it all shortly after we parted ways.”

  “Why?”

  “I wasn’t there anymore to pay for his coveted pieces. He used his inheritance.”

  “All that time, you agreed to—”

  Jacqueline de Romarel nodded.

  “Our family had money, as well,” she said.

  “You could have said no.”

  The old woman sighed. “I didn’t want to lose him.”

  “He wasn’t always like that,” Marion said, thinking of her mother. She had hung onto him with no money of her own.

  “Maybe we should start from the beginning,” Romarel suggested. “That’s the key to it all.”

  She propped her legs up on a gilded-wood footrest, prepared to deliver a long requiem.

  “It all started with his father’s death. The poor man killed himself. He committed the grim act by a river smack in the middle of his property. He blew his head off with a shotgun. Edmond was the one who found him. A terrible thing for any child, but especially a keenly impressionable one like Edmond. You see, Edmond was born with an artistic gift. When he was no more than ten, his father built a studio for him and made sure he had the best materials. Edmond spent days sculpting in that studio. A child with his talent couldn’t dream of a more extraordinary playground. So you can imagine his devastation when his widowed mother got rid of everything and closed the studio. She didn’t want him to become an artist. She had other plans for him. But what could he do to oppose her? He dealt with his feelings by becoming a collector. He started bringing home broken rulers, pencil stubs, plastic bags, pieces of soap… Whatever he could get his hands on.”

  Romarel cleared her throat and looked into the distance.

  “And then one day he discovered a chiseled-ivory skull. He was thirteen. That was the start of his quest. First it was skulls and bones and then those notorious mortuary sculptures. His mother paid for them. By this time she regretted destroying his studio and was willing to do anything to get her son to quit hoarding trash. But all that she managed to do was transfer Edmond’s obsession to more valuable objects. He was desperately trying to fill the emptiness inside himself, and she couldn’t change that.”

  Romarel stopped talking. “Pour me some water,” she ordered. “There, on the table.”

  Marion got up and walked over to the heavy crystal carafe. As she started filling the glass, she lost her grip on the pitcher. She managed to regain her hold before it fell to the floor.

  “He was just as clumsy as you, which is odd, because he was so gifted with his hands. And there’s something else. I’ve been watching you since you got here. You have the same tic. When he was nervous or preoccupied he’d start drawing on the palm of his hand. Not with a pen, but with his finger.”

  A tic that connected them? The mention of it seemed to suck Romarel into a solitary daydream. She sipped her water with an absent look on her face. The old woman rested her head on the back of the chair and finally picked up the story again.

  “If he had been an introspective man, he might have realized what he was doing and perhaps freed himself from his inner demons. But he was driven by his subconscious. Do you know what I think?”

  The old woman lowered her voice as though she were about to reveal an incredible secret. “Those objects gave him proof that death didn’t mean the end of existence. They were silent witnesses to his father’s immortality. And his own immortality too, of course. Those objects were the only things that wouldn’t abandon him. He’d abandon them, throw them into that basement morgue of his, but they were always there. In the end, they were all disappointments, just like I was. He’d bring one home, convinced that it would make him feel whole. But it wouldn’t last long. Once the piece was in his hands, he’d lose interest. Into the cellar it would go, having lost all its magical powers, and he would start again. The next object had to be even more beautiful, rarer than the one before it. It was like a drug. He had to up the dosage each time to feel the drug’s calming effects. That was all he thought about and talked about. He’d go through catalogs at all hours of the day and night. And sadly, the little boy who was lonely and isolated grew into a man who cut himself off from other people, ensuring that he was just as lonely and isolated.”

  Marion looked on dispassionately. What crap. He should have gone to see a shrink.

  “As the years passed, and Magni became more selective, he began to make a name for himself. Eventually he became a tour de force. Everyone was jealous of his collection, even though nobody had ever laid eyes on it. He was a mythic figure in the art world. But I knew what he was. He was a sick man. I should have helped him instead of engaging in his perverted game. But I wanted him to see me, love me. I was so stupid. He only wanted me when I made it worth his while.”

  “You could have left once you realized what he was doing.”

  “That meant I’d have to admit my failure in getting him to love me. I couldn’t do that. I stayed, but I changed my strategy. It was my turn to be his obsession.”

  Somewhere in the apartment, a clock started chiming. Jacqueline de Romarel was quiet and alert. Marion counted the chimes. It was already four o’clock.

  “Where was I?” the old woman asked when the chiming stopped.

  “You wanted to become his obsession.”

  “Ah yes… I started by insisting that I see every piece he wanted to acquire. After all, it was my money. I knew he wanted to go alone to the auction houses, antique shops, private showings, and flea markets, so I’d insist on accompanying him. And the night before I was supposed to give him the money to buy a piece, I’d wake him up and tell him that I’d changed my mind. I’d say it wasn’t a good idea. I’d been spending too much, or my sister needed to borrow some cash. I was scared of him, but it was also exciting to see him suppress his anger and swallow his pride and then grovel at my feet. I liked that. He told me things I wanted to hear. And every time I’d end up giving in.”

  Marion was staring at Romarel, perfectly attentive to her sad disclosure. She wanted to understand what it was that made a woman so desperate. Had her mother stripped herself bare as well, become so overwhelmed by love and ego that she went insane? And her disgust, her visceral hatred for primitive art—was that her only awareness of how she had debased herself? What did these two women have in common?

  “The only instruments of pleasure I had left were my tricks and schemes,” Romarel continued. Her face looked peaceful now, as though telling her story was bringing relief. “And that’s a slippery slope to hell. I reached a point where I didn’t think I had a choice. I decided that I would take every piece he desired away from him. I made Fabien buy them first. But Edmond didn’t bat an eye. No fretting, no questions. Nothing. I thought it was a sort of disengagement. A road to rehabilitation. I never imagined how diabolical he was. As it turned out, I was merely buying his bait. He was secretly indulging in other pieces.”

  “With what money?”
<
br />   Jacqueline de Romarel shrugged.

  “His own. Well, someone else’s… I realized he was leading a double life when I started going through his things. How could I go that far—waiting for the moment when I could slip my hand inside his pockets or feel the inner lining of his coat? I was obsessed with a single goal: finding a receipt or credit-card statement that would prove there was an intruder. I was the wife who follows her husband to the place where he trysts with his new lover. Jealousy is most certainly a madness that drives you to destruction—destruction of yourself, the other person, or both of you. Someone always loses. And so one morning Edmond showed me how I had destroyed him.”

  Jacqueline de Romarel buried her face in her hands. Marion knew she should get up and comfort her. But she couldn’t. Did she even want to hear the rest?

  “He gashed his face,” Romarel said, pulling herself together. “Three swipes with a razor blade across his right cheek. Just like that. Without any warning. He just gave me a cruel and arrogant little smile before his skin disappeared beneath a gush of blood. We were in the bathroom. There were mirrors on every wall, and they reflected his bloody face over and over. My head was spinning. I fainted, and when I came to he was gone. He never came back. In that one act he showed me what my compulsion to possess him had reduced him to.”

  Jacqueline de Romarel shot Marion a wounded look.

  “You never tried to see him again?”

  “No. Strange, isn’t it? After spending so many years sucking the smallest bit of love out of him, I let him run off. The thing is, I felt free. No more chains, no more limitations, no more dread. I could finally live by myself and for myself. But eight months later I came down with lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease. I was treated, but not before developing elephantiasis. My legs swelled and became so deformed I couldn’t stand looking at myself. Even if I could get around, I didn’t want to go out anymore. I became a willing prisoner in my apartment.”

  Jacqueline de Romarel had been driven to a premature old age. Like Marion’s mother, she was wasting away. They both had cut themselves off from society—one psychologically, the other physically. There was nothing in this world that either of them wanted enough to abandon their cocoons.