When I returned my eyesight to the secret vestibule, Jean-Paul was waiting in a corner where, gulping at his feet, a more or less square hole had been sawed out of the floorboards and framed with a fluorescent strip of tape long since too crispy and burnt out to be of help.
We stepped inside, Jean-Paul first at my insistence, whereupon a simple ladder dropped us to the ground floor. There, another secret chamber, this one lofty and more mindful of a chapel than a carton, formed the anchor for another set of passages and rooms, whose hidden door and peephole combinations menaced the living room, Jean-Paul’s study, and the kitchen respectively.
Jean-Paul snatched a flashlight from some inlet and, after clicking to ascertain it was workable, we descended through another pitch-black square, where the ancient-smelling air signaled we were fully underground.
The room in which our feet touched down, the seventh by my count, looked to be a naturally occurring cavern prearranged by craggy rounded walls and an uneven hard dirt floor.
In one direction, the cavern seemed to dilate into a cave, and while Jean-Paul claimed it was no deeper than your average bathroom, he declined to tilt his flashlight and re-
assure me.
Directly opposite this so-called dent was a final exit that, when pushed, transformed one of the basement’s grungy jail cells into a turnstile, which, despite its girth and weight, spun as lightly on its axis as the revolving doors at Galeries Lafayette.
To say I felt amazed by what I’d seen would be forcing things a little. “Amazed” is not the problematic word, but rather
the idea that what had been uncovered was miraculous. For while my awe, which coalesced within a privacy where you remain unwelcome, was not inconsequential, it emanated from a very strange coincidence.
You see, the home in which I’d spent the greatest portion of my life also hid a scrawny, ill-lit secret realm similarly fashioned from the hollows of the normal-looking house, and, while far less of an involving place than the chateau’s, I assure you it was just as wicked.
I tidied up my outfit, plucking splinters from my coat sleeves and slapping dust out of my trousers, while Jean-Paul, now quite agitated with excitement from having made a confidant, began telling me the secret tunnels’ curious history.
To hear him, they’d lain dormant in the chateau’s walls for many years. But one night, amid a burst of curiosity about his fellow townsfolk, whom he had long dismissed on sight as Jean-Marie Le Pen fans, he’d ventured to a popular café and ordered several drinks.
Most of the patrons certified his base suspicions, but one man, whose outsized taste for cocktails seemed to make him something of an outcast, had introduced himself and asked Jean-Paul if the scuttlebutt was true that he was living in the chateau known to locals as the weird one.
Several Kir Royales later, the woozy gentleman confided that the chateau’s prior inhabitant had offered him a tour in return for oral sex when he was younger, a tit for tat he’d only agreed to since he was reading and enjoying a novel by Jean Genet at the time.
The secret passages this gentleman described were, first of all, too infinite and city-like to hide within the chateau’s modest structure, and, second, had been faded by his years of heavy drinking, leaving lots of creepy talk but not the vaguest hint of how this alleged kingdom might be entered.
It had taken a wary but bewitched Jean-Paul several months to find a strangely fulsome wall crack, then, using the old credit card trick popular with movie burglars, swipe an unassuming kitchen cabinet into a creaking, abstruse entrance.
It was then my iPhone pinged, and I excused myself, taking several steps into the basement. When I saw my driver’s number, I nearly slipped the phone into my pocket, but, perhaps hoping to enjoy a few more seconds to myself, I dutifully clicked “Read.”
“Some boy . . .” his text began, had asked to hide out in my car and return with us to Paris—a bad idea, he thought, but one the boy claimed had my preapproval.
Based on what you’ve read thus far, you must think Pavlov’s dog could have texted him my answer. While your assumption is correct, I’ll instruct you once again that jumping to nefarious conclusions won’t flatter you much longer.
For the record, I authenticated Serge’s lies and suggested that my driver fold him up inside the trunk.
I would have offered Jean-Paul my hand in parting had he not seen it coming and insisted that, before it clasped his, we share a single drink upstairs and dot the i on one or two outstanding matters, as he put it.
After using the official staircase as a shortcut, Jean-Paul ducked into the chateau’s pantry and retrieved an uncorked Sauternes and two glasses before leading me outside and onto what I believe is called a veranda.
It held a single café table and two painted, sun-grilled metal chairs that would have roasted us, but, before I could suggest a walk instead, Jean-Paul dragged the ensemble beneath an ivy-strewn overhang.
First we sipped, gazing at the acreage that was just a signature away from being infamously mine. I weighed a grassy alcove between two gingko trees and then a flower bed boxed inside a waist-high hedge as likely candidates for Serge’s grave site, while a grim and staring Jean-Paul seemed to mourn the property itself.
“The truth is . . .” he said. “It was I who murdered Claude.”
His eyes were swooping in accordance with a vast flock of birds that circled high over the backyard at that very moment for its own and fractured reasons.
“Some months ago,” he continued, “Serge confessed or lied to me that Claude had been raping him for years. The shock was . . . well, calling it a shock will surely do. You can’t imagine how profoundly these alleged, covert acts attracted me since I have no ideas in that regard myself.
“Serge is gay, you must agree, and you . . . well, you’re whatever style of predator you are, but my perversions don’t explain it. No, there was something else. I knew Serge was fabricating, or I knew he had to be. I would have seen them through the peepholes, and, if I’d seen them, I would have called in the police like any father.
“I’ve watched my sons masturbate a hundred times, and those flares of unseen skin and stiffened penises never engineered even the least tingling of sensations. No, it was the idea, the concept, the product of Claude sodomizing Serge I was obsessed with. It seemed so cataclysmic next to what I had been seeing.
“I told my family I was writing a novel—a strange premise, perhaps, but I had written one when younger, imitative of Robbe-Grillet and unpublished, of course. Thus, I would be locked inside my study for lengthy periods of time. Instead, I wandered in the chateau’s secret passages for months on end, hoping to get lucky.
“I did in fact write and quite voraciously, as you might have gathered from the overflowing trash can in the small observatory next to Serge’s room, but, in that unusual case, words proved to be a mere emasculation of reality.
“When Claude and Serge did nothing more vituperative throughout those months than stare each other down, I decided to kill them both. The reason for that is very complicated.
“I eased through Serge’s secret door one night and suffocated him with a pillow. I’m certain he was dead because . . . well, in the confusion of my feelings, I sodomized his cadaver with a violence that would have coaxed a pterodactyl from its fossil, be assured. But, to a horror I was scarcely able to conceal, he came downstairs for breakfast in the morning with nothing more unpleasant than a headache.
“For a time, we had a gardener whose relentless gifts to Serge, even on the most infinitesimal of holidays, must have worn away his salary. I invited him to share a beer at this very table, and, after a bit of yard talk, let’s call it, I suggested he could tamper with my son so long as Serge died inexplicably while on their date and by some odd coincidence.
“I unforgivably neglected to insist the encounter must transpire in Serge’s bedroom. I felt so stupid. They did their business in the tool shed, and, to worsen matters, Serge was such a “hottie,” by this gardener’s es
timate, that accidentally killing him would be impractical. I fired this gardener, and he blackmailed me. He’s still blackmailing me.
“One night, an inebriated Claude mistook our backyard for a pretty park. I followed him until I knew our yells would fray against the chateau’s windows, then grabbed a rock and, waving it in upraised hands, confronted him. Had he raped Serge? I bellowed. ‘Only in the mouth, and once, and he raped me if anything, and hardly even, but you . . . Serge told me you’ve been raping him for years. So, cut the motherfucking—’
“This charge so aggrieved my mind that it seems I used the rock to answer him. The head blow didn’t kill Claude, but it left the things he tried to say incomprehensible, and his legs could not support his weight or even crawl. I dragged his slurring, flapping body to the river and laid it facedown in the water. And, to be fair, I somehow viewed myself as an avenging angel and raped him as well.
“Strangely, Claire thought Claude was partying in Paris, and Serge and he weren’t speaking, and we were in between groundskeepers at the time, so when someone finally breached that distant part of the estate, Claude’s body was so waterlogged and bloated, it might as well have been Amelia Earhart’s plane.
“Obviously, Serge had to die for, well, there are millions of compelling reasons, trust me. He had an expiration date, but, between the game of selling the chateau and hosting buyers day and night, coordinating the two schedules has proven difficult. So, are you going to kill him, or what are you going to do with him?”
The flock of birds had spiraled elsewhere, and Jean-Paul was gazing at the empty sky, which had nothing left to hint about itself unless blue air knows something I don’t know. Naturally, I’d been balancing my intake of his words with their presumptive trust and strangely smooth delivery.
I don’t believe in honesty, or not in fecklessness so thorough as to wipe a liar clean. There’s a reason why the recent drip-drip-drip of missing French boys has made the headlines without a single gendarme, worried parent, or gutter journalist showing signs of having given me a thought.
Granted, when people disappear in bulk and every one inspires a Facebook tribute page whose friends are under twenty-one and gay or female—and not to staunch this story’s flow to compliment my tastes, but the unsolved spree has not been tagged “la reconstitution historique de beauté mauvaise” for no good reason—their abductors rarely beg for chloroform as well. So, there’s that distraction to assist me.
Tweaking every word before it moved my lips, I told Jean-Paul that, circumstances being what they were—and I roughed out certain issues we’d discussed, then divulged Serge’s location—a bit of news that didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest, I’ll add—I couldn’t see the boy living more than, say, a day or two perhaps.
“This is terrible,” Jean-Paul said, “but . . . would it be possible to . . . observe the ending? While safely hidden in the passageways, of course.”
I replied that were his hands to wind up dirty—the form of dirt to be determined—which would likely need his DNA and necessitate his posing for some grisly family portraits, all of which would stay locked in my possession if uncalled for, and were the chateau’s secret walkways reenvisioned as a hiking trail that wended up a man-made mountain, I could promise any highlights would transpire within its scenic viewing spots and most conceivably, as strange as it might sound, in the kitchen.
Jean-Paul forced his jittering, inattentive eyes into a collision with mine, or at best I seemed to be their second choice.
“If I appear distracted or withholding,” he said, “it’s because this property has a deeper and more thorough secret, concealed from you until this moment, and in light of which even the passages I showed you will seem as public as a sidewalk. In truth, the chateau is a kind of theater, and its rooms and floors and private berths a tiered and complicated stage where my family and I form an involuntary cast. Never
having cause to give it words before, I can’t think of how to phrase this.”
I have a tendency to blather when a thoughtful “hm” would serve, and yet so taxing were my feelings of confusion and disinterest that I smiled suspiciously, then shook my head to show I hadn’t understood a word he’d said and likely never would.
He seemed perplexed by my misgivings, although, as years have passed and superseded his inflationary image of the chateau with my own, I’ve revised his cringe and worried gaze across the yard into a look of disappointment.
“On second thought,” he said, “it will prove more understandable if you discover it yourself.”
Chapter 2
My car is a customized Citroën Hypnos, and I don’t believe you need to know much more about it other than, perhaps, a hasty rundown on the actual revision.
The backseat was enlarged and gussied up in hopes of holding and impressing up to five short, skinny guests—six, if one or two of them have died, by which I mean are put to better use as unwitting contortionists.
This reshuffle chopped the trunk into a wedge unsuitable for luggage and barely large enough to cram a corpse, much less a boy with working lungs who also has a multilayered Emo outfit and detailed hairstyle to consider.
No sooner was the driveway’s crust of twigs and pebbles crackling beneath our tires than I heard Serge’s . . . fist, I think, bang repeatedly on something. Due to his lack of elbow room, the sound was pleasantly non-bell-like.
Azmir, my driver, has lived in France since he was ten, thanks to an epicure of scale-model Algerians. When his appointed week or two of lopsided sexual recipience were up, a gory head wound would have exiled him in Jannah had he not overheard his owner ragging on a newer harem dweller and taken it upon himself to kill the little loser on the spot, apparently so charming his master with this burst of loyalty that he was spared and given tenure.
Years later, my late father hired him as a driver and, rather oddly, fattened up some bigwig’s bank account to make the boy a citizen. Thus, Azmir’s sleaze factor and flying off the handle are so ingrained within my worries that to this day I can’t sit behind him without fingering my mace.
Azmir’s choppy voice is far too brazen for my fussing speech to illustrate, so I will neither butcher nor adorn it, except to share that the sentiment behind his first few words was “I need to fuck the weirdo.”
It seems a manageable demand, and I’m scarcely a monogamist. Still, to use a lingo I revile and yet can wield if called upon, Azmir is hung like a fire truck. While that aphorism works, its charming “fire truck” grossly underplays the threat. So, before you find his macho, well-armed act endearing, let me add that while he’ll fuck whoever I request until they’re floating like a raft on their escaping blood supply, that indiscrimination is in his job description.
What Azmir craves are ten- to fourteen-year-old white boys, or, to be precise and yet more general, their pale, outnumbered asses, or, to bring in a microscope, making Serge’s, for example, seesaw, blow gaskets, suffer quakes and aftershocks, and finally flatten like a leaky tire beneath his Herculean pumping.
Honestly, I would have paid him overtime and even held our captive down until the corpse had shit an octopus of its internal organs, but there are others in my posse, each a shade of gay, or so I’ll lazily baptize them for the moment, whose preference for working ass is moot whenever Azmir gets carte blanche, and I was pretty sure that one or two held IOUs from me.
So, I told Azmir I’d have to put his need on hold, which he knew I would say and surely hated.
It was our stony, ensuing lull that brought the graduated pace of Serge’s pounding to the foreground. The beat was slowing, in a word, and I might have blamed his spindly, tiring arm if each new tap-tap hadn’t sounded more insistent than the last.
To be safe, I cracked the backseat’s secret hatch, as I call it, although it’s technically the car trunk’s skylight. As Azmir hadn’t charged the car’s official flashlight as I had asked, I tried to figure out the trunk by squinting, and when that proved no match, I used my nostrils.
Serge must have felt a draft because his noises ceased, and he said, “Please don’t become angry with me, but I can’t seem to breathe.”
I asked if doing “this” was an improvement, and then I raised and dropped the hatch to illustrate my “this.”
“Too early to tell,” he said.
I asked if he would pique my curiosity and say whether or not he was sporting an erection.
“Yes, but any credit goes to how I’m stuck here and the shaking of your car,” he said with difficulty.
I gave him the good news that we were looking for a dirt road where his seat could be upgraded, and then the bad news that the dirt would make the ride conspicuously bumpier.
“If it’s no trouble, can you leave it open,” he asked, meaning the hatch, which I immediately closed.
Northeastern France is very harmless with its hills in quotes, repeating fields, and sprinkled trees, and quite serene thanks to its last-ditch status among tourists, but it persecutes me nonetheless for reasons I can only play at solving.
One of my family’s vacation homes lay somewhere in this region, and, to believe their photo album, we’d spent at least one local holiday. I was too small-minded at the time to savor any landscape that wasn’t melodramatic. In fact, my single recollection has me juggling a hard-on while foraging a porn stream on my laptop and staring daggers at the ceiling, which contained or rather was a giant painting of me falling from the sky that my father, having thought my bedroom’s heights an eyesore, commissioned from some trendy artist of the period.
The Marbled Swarm Page 3