The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “Was your pal Dorschug in on it?”

  “Shut up.” Grunberg glared at her. “This affair is finished, finished forever, and finished well. Remember that if you ever have any crazy ideas. We’ll deny anything you say.”

  “Finished well?”

  “From our point of view. Don’t you understand? He was about to trigger a war.” Grunberg paused. “No, we could not have hoped for better. The Lebanese and Syrian troops are no longer on alert. We have told a few reporters we trust that we suspect he was assassinated by Palestinian terrorists who had foreknowledge of the speech and would not accept his apparent move toward moderation. That should finally make it clear to some people that this whole Sephardic business has played right into the hands of the enemy. And we’ve also arrested a suspect. Not a very likely one, I admit: a boy with nothing more than a starter’s pistol and a wild story. But he has no Israeli papers. He is probably Jordanian, and that is perfect for our morning newspapers. In the foreign press it will be nothing more than the murder of a minor politician, not a completely uncommon event these days.”

  Fine and dandy. “And what about from my point of view?”

  “I hope you find your boy.” Grunberg spoke in the tone people use for wishing friends a nice trip. “But we can do nothing more to help you.”

  “Nothing more? You haven’t lifted a finger to help me.”

  “There is nothing we can do,” he repeated implacably. “I hope you are not going to be difficult.” There was a lot more emotion supporting his second hope than his first. Rachel got out of the car and slammed the door. Anyone might have thought they were having a lover’s quarrel.

  She saw Sergeant Levy come out of the administration building and walk toward them. An anxious-looking woman was at his side, forced into a brittle trot by the length of his stride. Sergeant Levy seemed anxious too. He talked rapidly to Grunberg in a voice so low Rachel could not be sure whether he was speaking English or Hebrew. The worried look was passed to Major Grunberg.

  “What’s going on?” Rachel asked.

  The old woman turned to her with tears in her eyes. “Something has happened to them. I know it.”

  “Who?”

  “Sarah and Moses. I haven’t seen her since yesterday, and he’s been gone for three days.” Fear had a tight grip on her throat, squeezing her words to a high quavering pitch. She walked around to the front door on the passenger side, opened it, and stood holding the handle in indecision.

  “Who are Sarah and Moses?”

  “Oh God. There’s no time for this,” the woman said.

  Sergeant Levy leaned over the roof of the car and quietly answered Rachel’s question.

  “I’m going with you.”

  Grunberg’s hand darted through the open window and grabbed her wrist, very tightly. “No.”

  “Let go of me. There has been enough of that.” His hand dropped away. Rachel opened the door and sat in the back seat. “I’ll leave the country tonight,” she said to Grunberg. “On any flight you like. But first I want a look inside that house.”

  Grunberg did not say a word. Sergeant Levy sat in the driver’s seat and closed the door. “Get in, Mrs. Perlman,” he said gently. The old woman sat down beside him and Sergeant Levy started the car.

  They drove quickly through the shaded old streets of Rehavia. On its way west the late afternoon sun cast the shadows of the trees in long silhouettes across the road. A feeling of dread filled the car. It poisoned the air and made them all breathe faster.

  Sergeant Levy parked the car beneath an evergreen of a type Rachel had never seen before. They crossed the street, climbed a few stone steps, and walked across a lawn in need of water. Rachel scanned the windows of the large stone villa. All the curtains were drawn.

  Grunberg tried the door. It was locked. He took something shiny from his pocket, slid it into the lock, and pushed the door open. He led them into the house. In the front hall he called out a short phrase in Hebrew. It echoed through the house. He repeated it more loudly. The echo came back louder than before.

  “Oh, God,” Mrs. Perlman said. Sergeant Levy put his arm around her thin shoulders.

  “Quiet,” Grunberg hissed.

  From the depths of the house, from the walls themselves it seemed, came a faint whining hum. It turned Rachel’s spine to ice.

  “What a fool I am,” Sergeant Levy cried suddenly. He ran up the stairs, taking them three at a time. They followed him as fast as they could. A door opened violently and banged back on its hinges. Rachel heard Sergeant Levy yell something in Hebrew. She had never heard a man angrier.

  Spreadeagled on a bed in a room upstairs lay a little man with russet hair. Sergeant Levy was bent over him, unwinding the adhesive tape from his face. His fingers moved very gently, but not gently enough to stop the little man from whimpering, deep in his throat. Rachel could see how painful it was: the man’s jaw and cheeks were so swollen that the tape had gouged bloody lines in his skin. The lower half of his face was one purple bruise; the upper half had no color at all. When Sergeant Levy had stripped away the last of the tape the man’s mouth slowly opened. His tongue emerged, yellow, hard and dry as a snake’s skin, and touched his cracked lips.

  “Sarah.”

  Twenty minutes went by before they found her. They had even begun to hope she had got away when Sergeant Levy opened the broom closet and she slumped out, driving a clutter of kitchen tools ahead of her.

  Mrs. Perlman sank down beside her. “Sarah, my baby, my baby.” Her tears fell on the blue-gray skin of the dead woman’s face. “God help her, please help her.”

  But it was far too late. They all knew it from the odor that began to fill the room. Nature carried on with one of the distasteful jobs it had to do. Even Mrs. Perlman knew it. After not very long she allowed Sergeant Levy to help her to her feet.

  They went outside. Sergeant Levy bore the little man in his arms because he had no feeling in his hands or feet.

  After the ambulance left, Sergeant Levy remained to watch the house until Grunberg could send some people to go through it. Rachel stayed with him. Grunberg did not seem to notice her; if he did he was for once too tired to care.

  With heavy footsteps Sergeant Levy entered the house and sat on the stairs in the hall, looking at nothing. Rachel closed the front door and began going from room to room, systematically searching through the contents of every drawer and cupboard. She remembered some of the places she had tried when hunting through the Kopples’ apartment, but Calvi’s house yielded nothing that could help her. At last she sat at his desk in the study, turning the pages of his leather telephone and address book. There were many names in it, all written in Hebrew.

  She closed the book and stared at it for a while, her mind a void. She felt a nudging inside, like a baby bird struggling to break its shell. And suddenly she remembered the old woman with maroon circles under her eyes, scrubbing the dirty steps at 298 rue de Millet. And Lily Gris, and the friend of Dan’s father who had married her in 1948. Quickly she reached into her handbag for her notebook and found the page. She had told the old woman she would call yesterday afternoon. What was the point of taking notes if she never read them, she thought, angry at herself. But then she recalled what she had been doing yesterday afternoon.

  A black telephone sat on the desk. The phone company couldn’t bill a dead man, not even for a call to Paris. Rachel lifted the receiver and gave the operator the Paris number she had written in her notebook.

  It rang seventeen times before the operator said, “There is no answer at that number.” She seemed happy about it.

  “Please let it ring.” The operator made a clicking noise of disapproval, but she did as Rachel asked. Someone answered on the twenty-ninth ring.

  “Hello,” a man said in French. He had a loud coarse voice. Guy. The forty-two-year-old boy who sat in his underwear with his legs apart and didn’t make his bed.

  “Hello. This is Rachel Monette. I bought a painting from you last week. Do you
remember?”

  “You didn’t tell us your name then,” he said suspiciously. The connection was very clear. He seemed to be in the next room. She could almost feel the anger in him, an anger, she remembered, which pressed hard against his surface.

  “I’m telling you now. Let me speak to your mother, please.”

  He snickered. “You can’t. She’s in the hospital.”

  “Is anything wrong?” Of course there was: those faded eyes.

  “Cancer. They give her a month more, maybe six weeks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. She doesn’t care. She’s had enough, she says.”

  And you’ve had enough of her, haven’t you, Guy? Rachel could think of nothing to say that would bring the conversation around to what she wanted to discuss. She heard his breathing in her ear.

  “So. Is that all then?”

  “No. I asked you to try to discover the name of Monsieur Monette’s friend. The one who married Lily Gris. You thought the clerk at the post office might remember, when he returned from his vacation.”

  He didn’t speak. He just kept breathing in her ear.

  “I said I would give you two hundred francs if you found out.”

  “Two hundred and fifty.”

  She had already left fifty as a down payment. “Yes. Two hundred and fifty.”

  “That’s right.”

  She couldn’t believe that anyone could breathe so loudly. “Well? Have you got any information?”

  “Yes. Monsieur Tremblay remembered.”

  “Good. What was the name?”

  Guy breathed a few times before he answered. “Where are you?” His voice had grown fur on the edges.

  “I’m out of France right now.”

  “Then how will I get the money?” There was a note of triumph in his voice, as if he had just stumped Clarence Darrow.

  “I will send you a postal money order as soon as I hang up the phone. I have your address. Two ninety-eight rue de Millet.”

  “How do I know you will send it?”

  “Trust me. You don’t know how important this is. That money will be on its way to you in ten minutes. I promise you. Two hundred and fifty francs.”

  He seemed to be considering. He breathed huskily. “I want more than that,” he said finally.

  “How much more?”

  “Not money,” he said thickly. “I want you. With your clothes off.”

  “What for? Two hundred and fifty francs will buy you any girl in rue Saint Denis. Young girls, much more satisfactory than I am.”

  She thought she could feel his breath. “I always pay for it. This time I want it for nothing.”

  “Then use the money to find some nice woman, take her out to dinner and see what happens.”

  Guy snickered again. They came from different planets. More breathing. “I want you. You’re a Jew, aren’t you? I’ve never given it to a Jew.” He grunted softly. “I’ve got it out now. It’s long and hard and ready for you.”

  Jesus. “I told you I’m not even in France.”

  “I can wait.”

  “I can’t. I have to know that name now.”

  The snicker. Another soft grunt. “All right, but first talk to me.”

  “Talk to you?”

  “Yes. Until I come.”

  So Rachel began stringing together sentences composed of all the dirty French words she knew. When she exhausted her supply she switched to English. It seemed to work just as well. She held the phone away from her ear so she wouldn’t have to listen: it gave his rutting a tinny sound. His breathing grew to panting, his grunts turned to moans. A cry. Rachel stopped talking and heard his excitement subside.

  When the silence became complete he said one word: “DePoe.” The line went dead.

  Rachel sat at the desk, struggling with a strange combination of exhilaration and stomach sickness, as if she had taken a street drug. A sudden disquieting thought came to her, and she jerked her head around to the door, half expecting to see Sergeant Levy watching her. The door was closed. It would not have been easy to explain.

  Rachel found him still sitting on the stairs. He held his head in his huge hands: he was sobbing.

  “What’s wrong?” She went to him, reached out and stroked his shoulder. It felt like a block of mahogany, turned on a lathe.

  He fought to control himself. “I am so stupid,” he said at last. “If I had the Major’s brains I might have saved that woman’s life.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re ten times the man he is.”

  Sergeant Levy sat up straight and shook his head. Rachel went on stroking his shoulder. She liked the feeling. Then she recalled her telephone conversation and the feeling disintegrated. She lowered her hand. Sergeant Levy rose, drying his eyes on a wrinkled but clean handkerchief. He looked down at her with eyes she thought were tender. Something had passed between them, both knew it, but there was not time to find out what it was.

  “Pinchas,” she said, remembering what the officer with the pipe had called him. “Pinchas,” she tried again, but it was a silly name no matter how she pronounced it.

  “You don’t like my name?”

  “No. But I like you.”

  Outside she heard a car stop in front of the house. Grunberg’s men. Sergeant Levy heard it too, and stepped back, increasing the distance between them.

  “I must leave tonight, Pinchas.”

  “I know.”

  “But before I do I need your help.”

  “What kind of help?” Feet moved on the stone path leading to the door.

  “I need a gun. A gun that can’t be traced. I have to get on the plane without being searched. And—I need your advice.”

  “Advice?”

  “On how to kill a man.”

  As the doorknob turned Sergeant Levy said simply, “I will help you.” For a horrifying second Rachel feared he thought of her as a female Grunberg, someone cold and smart to be obeyed without question. She hoped it wasn’t true because she knew she wanted to see him again. After.

  34

  The big jet glided through the night over a sea as dark as outer space. Steadily a distant cluster of lights drew nearer, glowing like an undiscovered galaxy. But from the moment the tires made their first shrieking contact with the runway it was only Marseilles.

  The immigration officer found her passport in order and admitted her to France. A customs man allowed her baggage in with her. From years of habit and training they had both developed an iron discipline to guard against the temptation of behaving politely. But they were not rude enough to lift her skirt and find the gun taped to the inside of her thigh.

  In front of a car-rental counter Rachel hesitated, remembering a jeep in the desert and a Deux Chevaux parked outside the airplane terminal in Nice.

  “May I help you, madame?”

  People in the rental business felt upset when their property dropped into limbo; they might even use their computers to keep track of those responsible.

  “No, thanks.” Rachel took a taxi to Aix-en-Provence, eighteen miles north on the autoroute of the sun.

  April is too early to find massed ranks of tourists in Aix. Even the Cours Mirabeau, the broad central avenue, was quiet. A few late coffee-drinkers lingered at outdoor tables. The waiters stayed inside, avoiding the night chill and waiting for the annual migration from the north and the money that came with it. Rachel spotted a telephone kiosk and asked the driver to stop.

  The kiosk stood beneath one of the spreading plane trees which lined both sides of the Cours. High above the pavement the leafy boughs embraced, forming a shady bower that gave tourists trouble with their F-stops and made Rachel slightly claustrophobic. Eight DePoes were listed in the directory, but only one had two numbers: the first for the department of anthropology at the University of Aix, the second for the professor’s residence. Rachel gave the address to the driver.

  It was an old narrow house on a little street off the Cours. The two flanking buildings,
bigger and newer, were squeezing the life out of it. And she had done her part too, Rachel thought, and might do more before the night was over.

  She opened her suitcase on the seat and took out the painting of the bridge on the Seine. “Would you wait for me, please?” she asked the driver. “I won’t be very long.”

  The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror. He was an old man with worn-out skin and a big runny nose. “I haven’t seen any money.” He spoke a coarse Mediterranean French which she understood with difficulty.

  “How much to hire the cab for the night?”

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve to give himself time to think. “One hundred and fifty francs.”

  Rachel gave it to him. “Wait here.”

  She got out of the car and rang the doorbell. The door opened immediately, as if she had been expected at any moment, but opened only as far as the brass chain permitted. The thin profile of a woman’s face appeared.

  “Excuse me for calling so late, but I need to have a painting authenticated. It’s very urgent.”

  “Prehistoric?” the woman asked. She had the kind of Parisian accent which made the word something Rachel wanted to hear again. It turned the vowels to honey and wrapped them in crystal consonants. “I am sorry. My husband is away on a field trip.”

  “It’s nothing as old as that,” Rachel said. “I’m told it’s one of yours.”

  “Mine?”

  Rachel held up the painting so the woman could see it. “You are Lily Gris?”

  “Lily DePoe. I was Lily Gris, a long time ago.” Her voice sounded distracted: all her attention was on the painting.

  “Is it yours?”

  Lily DePoe did not answer at first. She could not lift her gaze from the picture. By the poor light of the street lamp Rachel thought she glimpsed a fascinated terror in the woman’s face, as might come over a rabbit encountering a rattlesnake. “Yes,” Lily DePoe answered finally. “Where did you get it?”

  “From a collector. If you don’t mind I’d like to ask you a few questions about it.”

  “I don’t know—”