The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “Can you show me where Xavier Monette lives?”

  The gold pen wavered above the map like a bird unsure of its landing spot. “Are you a friend of his?”

  “Family.”

  “I didn’t know he had any family,” the manager said. The tip of the pen settled gently on a point beyond the outskirts of town. “We don’t see him very often.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s retired. He likes to stay at home and tend his vines.” The pen made a little circle around the point in the road. “He makes good wine. You will see.” He gave her directions to the house. It was less than three kilometers from the hotel. She asked the manager to send a taxi for her in an hour, and set off on foot.

  A high stone wall enclosed the house and grounds, and some of the fields in the distance. The iron gates were closed. Through them Rachel saw the house set far back from the road in a grove of peach trees. It was a big solid house, white with black trim, and an orange tile roof. Several outbuildings were scattered nearby. One of these seemed to be a miniature Greek temple. It had broad marble steps leading to a shallow portico. The undecorated pediment was supported by four columns which any ancient Greek architect would have rejected for their squatness. A faded sign tacked to the trunk of a tall cypress near the gate warned of a bad dog. Rachel’s eyes were still searching the grounds for it when a rifle shot cracked behind her.

  She whirled about and saw Xavier Monette striding toward her through the vineyards on the far side of the road. He held a rifle in one hand; a small reddish animal dangled by its tail from the other. The clothing he wore, a faded pink shirt and white duck pants, accented his deep tan. The soft breezes ruffled his pure white hair in the way that hair ruffles when it has just been cleaned. Stepping onto the road he looked as healthy as a senior citizen in a yogurt commercial.

  “I finally got the little vandal,” he said to her cheerfully in French. And then he seemed to notice who she was. The walnut brown eyes, so like Dan’s in appearance yet so different in effect, opened wide in surprise. The jaw, finer than Dan’s and not quite as strong, dropped slightly before the mouth settled into a smile. “What an unexpected pleasure,” he said in English. The little fox dripped blood from the hole where its head used to be. It made a red puddle on the road.

  “I tried to call you but your number is unlisted.”

  “How stupid of me not to have given it to you. I’ll write it on a piece of paper the moment we get inside.” Tucking the rifle under his arm he took keys from his pocket and unlocked the gate. He held it open for Rachel. A telephone was set in a small nook in the far side of one of the stone gateposts. Monette put it to his ear and listened for a few moments.

  “Mademoiselle Hoff? We have a visitor. Would you please bring coffee to the terrace?” He dipped the mouthpiece below his chin and said to Rachel: “Are you hungry?”

  “Not very.”

  He spoke into the telephone. “That will be all, Mademoiselle Hoff. Please be quick.”

  Monette faced the house and whistled once, sharply. An enormous Doberman, the largest Rachel had ever seen, burst from the peach grove and charged toward them, scarcely touching the ground. Monette flung the dead fox in a pinwheel through the air, scattering drops of blood like sparks from a Roman candle. The Doberman leaped to head height and took the furry body in one sure and savage chomp. Rachel heard the bones crush. It was torn to ribbons almost before the dog landed. The fun over, it started running back toward the house, but became aware of a scent, turned and saw Rachel. The great body stiffened, its muscles forming ridges under the sleek coat. Monette raised his hand and made a soft karate chop in the air. The Doberman lay down.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Monette told her. “All he cares about is sport.”

  “If you call that sport,” Rachel said. He gave no sign that he heard her as they walked slowly along the rust-colored gravel lane to the house. “What do you call the gentle creature in case I should ever meet him in a dark alley?”

  Monette laughed. “You are witty,” he said as if he had just been converted to an idea that was already generally accepted. “But if you meet in a dark alley there is not much you can do. He has no name.”

  Beyond the peach trees a thick-set woman wearing an apron was walking from the house toward the Greek temple. She carried an enormous aluminum washtub piled high with linen and plainly very heavy. She disappeared behind the temple. Monette followed the direction of Rachel’s gaze.

  “The previous owner was a Greek,” he explained. “I believe he made a lot of money selling cheap olive oil in counterfeit Italian containers. Enough money to be able to keep his mistress here. Unfortunately she pined for her homeland, so he had this temple shipped here stone by stone from her native island. He told me it was dedicated to Venus. Now we use it for storage and laundry.”

  The walls of the temple had no windows. A brass padlock hung from the heavy wooden front door half-hidden behind the columns. “Those columns aren’t Greek,” Rachel said.

  “You are absolutely right. That was one of my strongest arguments when we negotiated the selling price.” He laughed.

  “It must have cost a lot.”

  “Not really. The Italians had uncovered his little game and were pressuring him through the Common Market. He needed the money.”

  “When did you buy it?”

  “A few years ago.”

  They walked among the peach trees. Fresh green leaves shaped like little lances sprouted through the rough skin of the branches. As they went by the temple Rachel turned and saw the woman in the apron emerging empty-handed from the small door at the rear of the temple. She locked it and ran with short heavy strides to the side of the house, entering by a screen door.

  “It is a shame you didn’t delay your visit by a few weeks,” Monette said. “The blossoms will be out.”

  “It had to be now.”

  Monette led her down a terra-cotta hall which went from the front of the house to the back. All the doors along the hallway were closed except one. Rachel glanced inside as she went by. It was the kitchen. With her back to the door the woman in the apron was reaching up to a spice rack above the sink. She tilted her head up to read the labels. In that position her short blond hair covered most of the thick neck.

  Coffee awaited them on the terrace behind the house. They overlooked a narrow strip of vines, perhaps seven or eight rows, an olive orchard, and fields which rose gradually into treeless round hills, pale green in the distance. Rachel and her father-in-law sat under the same rich luminous blue sky that had long ago put the troubadors in a singing mood. A brown hawk circled lazily as if he owned it.

  Monette sipped his coffee and watched the bird fly. After a while he placed the mug carefully on the glass table and looked closely at Rachel’s profile. “Have you begun to accept it?” he asked her gently.

  She swung around and stared at him in disbelief. “On what basis?” she said sharply.

  “Perhaps a religious one?” His musical voice was very soft. “Forgive me if I am wrong, but doesn’t your Bible frequently call on you to make sacrifices? The story of Abraham and Isaac, for example. God demands the sacrifice of Abraham’s firstborn son.”

  “What kind of God is that?”

  “The Jewish God,” he replied quietly. “Perhaps you don’t appreciate the significance of the story. It is really quite beautiful. In return for his willingness to take the life of his son, Abraham was given a land for his people.” His eyes went to the hawk, endlessly circling, and he spoke almost to himself. “Unfortunately the next step, the next moral step, was too much for them. They will lose it. It is inevitable as the crucifixion.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “One day you will. Some people require more time than others. In the end everyone accepts.”

  She got up quickly and stood in front of him. “Let’s get this straight,” she said, clenching her teeth to hold back the fury: “I will never accept
what has happened to me. Never. There is nothing I can do about Dan except find out who killed him and why. At first that didn’t matter to me very much; now it does, and I’m going to do it. As for Adam, he is alive and I will find him no matter what it takes. They’ve drawn first blood, whoever they are, but I won’t let them make a sacrifice of my son.”

  She looked at Monette’s face, lifted up to watch hers, and she saw the face of a sunburned old gentleman who was a little afraid of her. “Please don’t be angry with me,” he said. “I was only trying to help you. It hasn’t been easy for me either.”

  She remembered the expression on his face when she found him in Dan’s study, trying to bring to life an image of his son from a dust jacket photograph. “I’m sorry.” She sat down and picked up her coffee mug. Her hand was shaking too much to be reliable. She lowered it to the table.

  Monette cleared his throat. “What do the police say?”

  “They are idiots.”

  The sun rose higher, warming their faces as they sat in silence. Beyond the olive trees a boy drove a flock of sheep slowly across the fields. They stopped and started randomly, stubborn balls of wool.

  “Have you thought of a way to begin?” Monette asked after a few minutes.

  Rachel opened her eyes and looked at him. The breeze had pushed his fine white hair over his forehead, like Robert Frost’s. “I found a document. There’s no doubt that he was killed because he had it.” She took the English version from her handbag and gave it to him. “I think Dan considered sending a copy of it to you, but he never mailed it.” She got up and stood behind him as he read. “This place Mhamid is in the Moroccan desert. He must have thought you might know something about it, since you fought in North Africa. I’m hoping the same thing. That’s why I’m here.”

  Monette laid the sheet of paper on the table. “I’m sorry. I know it only on the map. I spent the war far to the east.”

  “Have you ever heard of Camp Siegfried?”

  “No.”

  “Were there atrocities in the desert?”

  “Of course there were atrocities,” he said with an edge to his voice. “It was war.”

  Rachel walked across the terrace and gazed at the shepherd. He sat in the field with his back resting against a rock and his cap pulled over his face. The sheep grazed around him. It was peace on earth, goodwill to man, as far as the eye could see. She turned her back on it.

  “What about civilian atrocities?”

  “Civilian atrocities?”

  “Yes. Like the Nazi death camps, on a smaller scale.”

  The tanned face wrinkled in puzzlement. “I never heard of anything like that. The only death camps were in Germany and Poland.”

  “What would happen if someone discovered that there was another death camp, not on German soil? A death camp run by the Nazis but with the co-operation of a foreign government.”

  “What foreign government?”

  “Yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “Vichy.”

  His skin reddened beneath the tan. “That was not my government,” he said bitterly.

  “Never mind that. Don’t you see? It would be an incredible scandal. There would be an investigation. People would lose their jobs. French prestige would sink. Some people have a lot to lose, and they are fighting to keep the facts from coming out.”

  Monette picked up the sheet of paper from the table and turned it over in his hands as if there were something there he wasn’t seeing. “You know all that from this note?”

  “And other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “Things people have done to me when they thought I knew.”

  Monette reread the copy of the document. “Where is the original?”

  “Where no one can get his hands on it.”

  “But you will need it to make your case, won’t you?”

  “If I need it I can get it.”

  “And, forgive me, what if something should happen to you? If what you say is true, then you are in danger. Is there anyone else to carry on, anyone else who knows where this document is?” The walnut eyes watched her face.

  “Yes.”

  “Someone reliable?”

  “Of course.” Ed Joyce was reliable, in his way. “I’m not doing this all by myself.”

  Monette’s hand went to the coffee mug, but the mug was empty. He sighed. “Your evidence seems very tenuous,” he said. “How do you think Daniel got this document?”

  “It probably came from someone who had read his book. It fits. The book was about French behavior during the war.”

  “I’ve read it,” he said mildly. “Was there a letter with the document?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What about the envelope? Did it have a postmark?”

  Rachel thought. “Yes. It did.”

  “Where?”

  “Nice.”

  Monette closed his eyes and raised his face to the sun. “Nice is a big city.” He folded his hands across his flat stomach. After a minute or two his chest rose and fell in deep regular rhythm.

  Not far away a car honked its horn. “My taxi,” Rachel said. She rose and turned toward the door.

  “If I may say so I think you should forget all this and go home.” His eyes remained closed.

  Rachel thought of the charred ruins of home. “No. I’m closing in. I can feel it.” She entered the long hallway. “Goodbye,” she said.

  “Be careful.”

  Rachel walked along the hall. Now the kitchen door was closed like the others. As she left the house Rachel looked back. Framed in the rear doorway the stocky maid was clearing the coffee mugs from the glass table. She dropped one of them into a wastebasket under the table, and carried the other toward the house.

  Rachel walked through the peach orchard. A few blossoms were already showing, like pink chips of mother-of-pearl against the bark. Above her the brown hawk glided silently in the blue sky. The Doberman with no name still lay exactly where his master had told him. He was watching the hawk. When Rachel emerged from the orchard he fixed his eyes on her. He didn’t like her but he had his orders.

  23

  As Rachel walked into the station the train to the Côte d’Azur pulled out. The baggage clerk told her that there would not be another until the next morning. He also told her where she could rent a car.

  None of the big agencies considered Orange worthy of their presence. That suited the hefty woman who rented sprung and rusted Deux Chevaux from her gas station on the southern edge of town. Credit cards were not part of the world as she knew it; fixed prices were the devil’s work. Rachel brought both ideas into the conversation, causing the fat lips to purse and make bird noises. Only a hefty deposit had the power to bring her out of it. Rachel paid without much complaint: her record for returning rented cars had not lately been good.

  She avoided the main route to the coast, via Aix-en-Provence, taking the more northerly back roads which cut across the departments of Vaucluse and Var. It looked shorter on the road map. There was almost no traffic at all and she drove very fast, but not fast enough to escape the feeling that time was running out.

  A tangible hypnotic silence began to close around her, separating the world of the car from the world outside. The little villages she passed through seemed to have been deserted moments before her arrival. Even when she saw movement, a cow drinking from a pond by the road or an old man in a black beret raising a pipe to his lips, it appeared to be part of a painting. There was something immutable about the rust-colored furrows, the stone bridges over the little streams, the high pine forests, the rounded green hills, the rounded Romanesque churches in the valleys. She was the only mutable flaw in never-never land and it made her feel lonely. More lonely than she had felt even in the desert, more lonely than she had felt in her life. She tried to rehearse in her mind all she had found out, but she couldn’t even remember the German names in the document. All she could remember clearly was Adam’s face, the s
ilky hair against her lips.

  And suddenly she found herself remembering the feeling on her lips of Dan’s hair, too—the hair on his head, and on his chest. It made her think of a picnic long ago in Vermont, just she and Dan. The countryside had looked like this, but it hadn’t made her feel lonely at all. She remembered the hot sun and the wine and the prickling grass against the backs of her thighs as they made love under a blue sky. It came back vividly, physically, in a way that made her swallow several times and take her eyes off the road.

  Descending the southern slopes of the Côtes du Luberon, Rachel missed a turn. The small car bounced across a ditch and spun around several times in a grassy meadow. She got out and walked away, breathing deeply and rapidly.

  The sun had lost its warmth. It was pushing the shadows of the cypress trees at her from across the meadow. She drove the Deux Chevaux back onto the road and stopped in the next village in front of a small café. She couldn’t get her mind off the picnic. Her thighs prickled at the memory.

  How do you pick up men? Women have tried batting their eyelids, dropping handkerchiefs, pretending to be interested in football. Rachel went in the café.

  There was no one inside. Three small round tables, tin ashtrays supplied by Pernod, a plywood bar, a few bottles on the shelves. Rachel sat at one of the tables. After a few moments the plastic strips that hung in the doorway behind the bar were parted and a man entered.

  He had lived long enough for the sun to cut a few deep lines in his face and for life in the village to make his eyes sad. He was used to hard work: the veins in his big hands stood out and the legs under his blue overalls looked solid. Glints of gray were scattered in his thick black hair like iron filings; there were more in his day-old stubble.

  “Yes?” he said from behind the bar.

  “A glass of wine, please.” She had not been certain the words would come. Her scruples were blocking her throat. But she needed him, or someone like him. Her scruples would have to be reexamined anyway—she had killed two men.