“No, that didn’t surprise me either,” she answered.
He looked at her, slightly shocked by her reply. “Would you care to explain?”
“I’ve never believed that one can just fall off of a boat.”
“The sea was rough—wasn’t it?”
Mme Genoux answered, “Yes, but Agathe wasn’t a dimwit. She would have been careful.”
“But I understood that Mme Barbier was very ill with seasickness. She would have been desperate for fresh air, and her illness may have thrown her off balance.”
Mme Genoux pursed her lips. “So why are you here?”
“The magistrate at the time—”
“Daniel de Rudder.”
“Precisely,” Verlaque answered. “Rudder has requested that the case be reexamined.” Verlaque did not explain why, nor would he have if Mme Genoux had asked, but she did not. “How long did you work for M Barbier, Mme Genoux?”
“Thirty years and three months,” she answered. “I began in 1979, shortly after The Receptionist was published.”
“Did you have an office?”
She made a sweep of the room with her hand. “Here. There’s a small office between this room and the bedroom. M Barbier would walk across the pont des Invalides every morning from their apartment in the 7th, carrying a recorded tape of the chapters he’d dictated the day before. He called it his morning constitutional.”
“And so you wouldn’t have done much work for Mme Barbier?”
“Oh yes, I did,” she replied. “M Barbier didn’t write every day—especially as he was becoming more and more well known and in demand. Interviews and such. So we agreed that on the days when he didn’t need me to transcribe his drafts, I would do errands for madame, if she needed me, that is.”
Mme Genoux seemed to relax more, especially as she explained her duties for the Barbiers. Verlaque tried to continue with questions of a similar theme. “Did M Barbier ever learn to type his books into a computer?” he asked. “That must have been so much work for you.”
“But it was my job,” she answered. “And I loved it. No, he bought himself a laptop a few years ago, but he said it was enough work returning e-mails and looking up the weather, so he would keep using the Dictaphone for his books. And by then his books had changed—”
“Indeed,” Verlaque said. “The romances.”
“They were longer books, so they took more time to type, but they were . . . less . . . complicated.”
Verlaque smiled. “And that week in Sardinia in 1988,” he continued. “You went because M Barbier was writing a book?”
“Yes, I usually went along when the Barbiers took long vacations.”
“How did everyone get along that week? And afterward, on the boat?”
“There were arguments,” Mme Genoux answered, picking at her long linen skirt. “I told the Cannes police at the time, after Agathe . . .”
“Yes, you told them that the day Mme Barbier died, you overheard a fight between her and M Pelloquin.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, as the wind had picked up. We were all there, except for M Barbier, who was napping down below. He was drinking a lot in those days.”
Verlaque remembered the spent limes in the sink and noticed that Mme Genoux referred to her boss of thirty years by his surname but called his wife by her Christian name. “What was Alphonse Pelloquin like?”
Mme Genoux squinted and pursed her lips. “I didn’t care for him. I thought him an opportunist.”
“And his wife?”
“Oh, her! She was—is—a prima donna. A spoiled girl who never grew up.”
“Would Agathe Barbier have reason to commit suicide?”
“Certainly not,” Mme Genoux replied, her voice raised. “And I told the police the same thing. She was happy, had a brilliant career, and was very talented.”
“Do you have any idea why M Barbier was drinking heavily? Were there marital problems?”
“I have no idea,” she answered. Her voice had reverted to the crispness it had when he arrived.
“Did M Barbier keep an agenda?”
“From the year 1988, you mean?”
Verlaque smiled and nodded.
“Yes, he kept an agenda, and we went through it together every morning. The agendas would now be in his possession, if he still has them.”
“Thank you, Mme Genoux,” Verlaque said as he got to his feet. “May I contact you in the near future if I need to?”
“Yes, use the cell phone number. But I warn you that it’s new technology for me, and I’m just getting used to it.”
“I could ring you on the land line.”
She hesitated and then answered, “I may go and visit my niece and her family in Picardy. Best to use the cell phone.” She got up and walked him to the door.
“Thank you once again,” Verlaque said.
“Indeed,” she said, opening the door.
* * *
As Verlaque walked to place de la Madeleine, he thought about how patient Ursule Genoux had been, all these years, if she really believed Agathe Barbier was murdered or that foul play was somehow involved. Why not speak up? But the elderly woman seemed like the sort of person who would never raise a fuss, who would shy away from conflict. Perhaps she had been silently waiting all these years to speak her mind. He shrugged, then hailed a taxi that was driving around the gray bulk of the Madeleine. He had never liked it and wished that some Italian artisan had gotten his hands on it and painted it a pastel yellow or pink like so many churches in Liguria or Sicily, although those churches were baroque and not neoclassical. He gave the driver Monica Pelloquin’s address in the 16th and sat back and enjoyed the view of his favorite city, at the same time trying to imagine white and gray Paris painted in Mediterranean colors. By the time they arrived at Mme Pelloquin’s apartment near the Trocadéro, he’d decided that Paris had best remain gray, to match the Seine. There was no sparkling blue sea here.
At the door, he buzzed at Pelloquin, and an accented woman’s voice told him to take the elevator to the fifth floor. Unlike first-floor apartments, fifth-floor apartments in classic Haussmannian buildings were Verlaque’s favorite: high enough for a view and lots of light, and with a balcon filant, for Baron Haussmann had decided that only second and fifth floors would have balconies. From the street, their uniformity made them look like ribbons of iron running the width of the building.
When he stepped out of the elevator, Verlaque saw a young woman standing in the doorway to one of the apartments. “This way,” she said. He thought her accent might be Portuguese.
“I’m Judge Verlaque from Aix-en-Provence,” he said, stepping inside the vast entryway tiled in black-and-white marble.
“Yes, just a minute please.” The maid—he assumed that’s who she was, as she wore a traditional black apron—turned and left him, walking through a set of double doors. A few seconds later, she came out and said, “Please, you may go in.” He hadn’t had much time to glance around the foyer, but did see some gaudy Venetian masks—the kind tourists buy on the Piazza San Marco—hanging on the wall. He much preferred Mme Genoux’s apartment, at least so far.
The living room was so big that Verlaque at first had trouble locating the apartment’s owner. Mme Pelloquin said hello, and he turned and saw her standing beside a massive fireplace at the far end of the room. It was the kind of stone fireplace normally found in Burgundian châteaus—too big, and too rustic, for a Parisian apartment. “Bonjour, madame,” he said, and walked across the room to shake her hand. Mme Pelloquin did not meet him halfway but stayed standing beside the fireplace. Had she been a friend, he would have made a joke about the long walk. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice.”
Mme Pelloquin shrugged her shoulders. Her rudeness did not faze or intimidate Verlaque, but it did irritate him. As it di
dn’t seem like he was going to be offered a seat, he jumped into questioning, already anxious to leave. “I have been asked by the former magistrate of Cannes, who officiated over the accidental death of Agathe Barbier in 1988, to make further inquiries,” he said. Since Mme Pelloquin was being noncommunicative, he decided to give her the barest of details. If she wanted to, she could look up Daniel de Rudder and see that he was now retired and living in Arcachon. He went on, “You were asleep when Mme Barbier fell off the boat that night.”
Monica Pelloquin rubbed her eyes with her right hand. “It was so long ago,” she slowly answered, as if it physically pained her to speak. Verlaque did not respond, wanting Mme Pelloquin to continue unprompted. He looked at her and saw what Mme Genoux was referring to when she called the publisher’s widow a spoiled girl. Although Mme Pelloquin must have been in her late sixties, she was wearing an outfit that Verlaque thought Marine might consider too young even for herself: a flowered empire-waist cotton dress that ended well before the knees, with pink high-heel sandals. She had long black hair, tied up in a bun, and luminous pale skin made more striking by her red lipstick. She took her hand away from her eyes and looked at Verlaque. He said, “Please, go on.”
She sighed and continued, “We finished lunch just as the storm began rocking the boat back and forth, so I went to my cabin, as did that secretary with the bad attitude. Alphonse—my late husband—put on a windbreaker and went up to the cockpit, but Valère and Agathe stayed down below, at the dining room table. As I dressed for bed, I could hear them arguing, but not what they were saying.”
“Did they often argue?”
“No,” she replied. “It was unusual, I suppose.”
Verlaque asked, “The report stated that your late husband and Agathe Barbier also argued earlier that day. Do you know what about?”
Mme Pelloquin made a tsk-tsk sound and waved her hand in the air. “No idea. It could have been anything. They were probably arguing about Valère: Valère the tortured writer. Valère the literary darling.”
Verlaque ignored the woman’s poorly concealed jealousy and asked, “You didn’t see or hear anyone go up on deck after Agathe did?”
“No, and we were rocking so much I actually didn’t fall asleep. She wasn’t up there very long when Alphonse came running down the ladder, calling for help.”
“When was the last time you saw Valère Barbier?”
She paused and answered, “It must have been at my husband’s funeral in 2001.”
“You’ve had no reason to see M Barbier since then?”
She said, “Why would I? We had nothing in common after my husband died.”
Verlaque wondered why an esteemed publisher would marry such a woman. Pelloquin had published not only Barbier but also other great novelists of that generation. Why marry a woman who openly claims not to care about that world? But Ursule Genoux had referred to Alphonse Pelloquin as an opportunist.
“Agathe’s death was not my husband’s fault,” Mme Pelloquin said. “Alphonse was a fine sailor, Judge . . . Judge . . . what did you say your name was?”
“Verlaque. Thank you, Mme Pelloquin,” Verlaque said. “You’ve been . . . very helpful. I’ll see myself out.”
Verlaque walked down the five flights of stairs. On the third floor, an apartment door opened and an elderly woman looked out. Verlaque said hello, and she quickly closed the door. “Welcome to the 16th arrondissement,” he whispered. He looked at his watch and saw that he was ahead of schedule. Marine would still be at the Sèvres museum. He walked out onto the narrow cobbled street, only a stone’s throw away from the busy Trocadéro.
He’d take a taxi to Le Hibou in Saint-Germain, where he could sit outside and smoke a cigar. It was an overpriced café popular amongst Left Bank literati and one where the people watching merited the five-euro espresso.
While walking toward the taxi stand at Trocadéro, he thought Mme Genoux’s assessment of Mme Pelloquin was very appropriate. Was the secretary also correct in her mistrust of Alphonse Pelloquin?
* * *
Marine quickly walked across the pont de Sèvres, rushing to get to her favorite museum. It was cool on the bridge; a breeze wafted up from the Seine, and she forced herself to stop. She leaned on the railing and gazed at the river: a dozen or so houseboats were tied to the shore near the museum, and she wondered what life was like in a floating house in a city on the water. Was it a paradise, but cheaper than an apartment in central Paris? Or was it a nightmare, full of mildew and who knows what floating by your bedroom window? On this warm summer day, she leaned toward the former opinion—today houseboat living looked magnificent. The boats were a few minutes away from a Métro stop, and they had communal gardens and parking, a rarity in the city. She imagined the owners having barbecues and parties on the river, like in a Renoir painting. The men mustached, the women with parasols.
A few minutes later she was inside the museum. She had called ahead, using her still-existent professor’s ID, which allowed her to set up an appointment to look at Agathe Barbier’s archives. But before that, she quickly took a turn around the museum’s vast rooms filled with ceramics from throughout the ages: Italian Renaissance majolica to delicate, hand-painted seventeenth-century Sèvres porcelain coffee services to contemporary clay sculptures like Agathe Barbier’s. In one of the last rooms, Marine looked at a white Picasso vase with a fawn-like face drawn in dark-blue glaze and handles like ears. In the middle of the room was one of Barbier’s giant terra-cotta pots; it seemed to guard the Picasso plates and vases that were displayed behind glass. Marine remembered reading that the two had worked near each other in Vallauris, and she wondered how well they had known each other. Marine looked at her watch and turned around to make her way back to where she had seen signs for the archives.
* * *
Luckily, Verlaque snagged the last available seat on Le Hibou’s terrace, an end table convenient for a cigar smoker, as he had only one neighboring table, to his right, where two young women discussed a recent translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry while chain-smoking Marlboros. He smiled and lit his Predilecto, a gift from Fabrice and Julien via Cuba, and was thankful that at least in Paris discussions like the one on his right still occurred.
He ordered an amber-colored Belgian beer and sat back and watched the crowd. It was a little after five, and their TGV was at seven. He and Marine could have dinner on the train—the microwaved risotto wasn’t bad, he’d had it before—and be in Aix by ten.
The women to his right finished their coffees and signaled to the waiter for the bill. They were not a foot from their table when a man Verlaque’s age quickly sat down with a sigh, relieved to get a spot. He glanced at Verlaque, and Verlaque pointed to his cigar and shrugged, as if to ask permission to smoke. “Pas de problème,” the man replied, smiling. Verlaque said merci and then looked at the man again. “Charles-Henri?” he asked.
“Antoine!”
“I should have guessed I’d see you here,” Verlaque said. They shook hands and laughed. He hadn’t seen Charles-Henri Lagarde in years. A dinner party in Paris, he thought, perhaps at his brother’s apartment. “How have you been?”
“Impeccable!” Lagarde replied, with a hint of forced enthusiasm, thought Verlaque.
“And you?”
“Married!” Verlaque said, holding up his left hand where his gold wedding band shone in the sun.
“Congratulations,” Lagarde replied. “And good luck. I’m divorced, three kids, two Parisian mortgages now instead of one. Who’s the bride?”
“Marine Bonnet,” Verlaque replied. “She’s a law professor in Aix-en-Provence.”
“Une Aixoise?”
“Born and bred.”
Lagarde whistled. “Is it true that the Aixoise buy the most lingerie in France?” he said with a wink.
Verlaque smiled. He remembered now why he had enjoyed meeting Charles-Henri but nev
er bothered to keep in touch. He said, “Congratulations on your new book. I read a glowing review in Le Monde.”
“And missed, I hope, the devastating one in Les Echos,” replied Lagarde. “But thank you.”
Verlaque tried to remember the book; he thought it was historical fiction, not a genre he usually read. He was about to say something about it when he saw that Lagarde seemed more interested in a woman in a miniskirt at the next table.
After a few seconds, his acquaintance asked, “Doesn’t Valère Barbier live in Aix now?”
Verlaque nodded and finished his beer. “Yes, he lives in the country, not far from Aix. Are you friends?”
“Sure, we’ve met a few times.” He glanced again at the woman, and then added unnecessarily, “At book launches and awards ceremonies.”
They chatted for a few more minutes while Verlaque waited for the bill. He texted Marine that he was running late and would meet her at the station. When Verlaque got up to leave, he shook Charles-Henri’s hand and said with genuine emotion how nice it had been to bump into him. For although Lagarde had reminded him of all that was wrong with his real-estate-mogul brother and his friends (and why Verlaque rarely saw Sébastien), Charles-Henri Lagarde had just given him the most insightful information about Agathe Barbier of the day.
Chapter Seventeen
New York City,
September 22, 2010
The Secrets of the Bastide Blanche Page 15