by Jo Mazelis
‘Tadeusz.’
‘Tadeusz? Is that a French name?’
He smiled a proud, self-contained smile as if caught possessing a secret, but he neither confirmed nor denied the question.
Aaron moaned again, the sound musical as if he was crooning some strange lullaby.
Scott poured the bloody water away, got the First Aid kit and began the slow and delicate process of applying antiseptic cream to Aaron’s hands.
‘Well, I have work to do,’ Tadeusz said, hefting his bag over his shoulder. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’
‘Thank you, you’ve been very kind.’
He shrugged. ‘It was nothing.’
Marilyn saw him to the door. Another siren sang in the distance.
‘I have a question,’ Marilyn said. ‘Should we inform the police? About what happened, I mean. Tell them that everything’s fine?’
The corners of his mouth quirked down.
‘No?’ Marilyn asked.
‘Too much red tape, perhaps,’ he said.
‘And there won’t be a problem?’
Again he shrugged.
‘Okay, well thanks.’
At the gate Tadeusz waved at her and grinned. His grin seemed to indicate that he sympathised, but also that she should know that life was absurd. Absurd and fleeting.
She shut the door, and the hallway was plunged into semi-gloom again. She stood there a moment, thinking about Aaron, and Scott, and herself; assigning and assessing blame, countering her imagined accusations with the defence that none of it could have been imagined and therefore the question of guilt was neither here nor there. But she did feel that it was really Scott’s fault; he shouldn’t have gone out, he should have remembered to lock the door and remove the key when he came in, and ultimately it was he who bore the greater burden of responsibility for Aaron, who was after all his brother.
Intermittently a short burst of siren and air horn sounded, suggesting an emergency services vehicle caught in traffic, and from the kitchen, almost achieving the same Doppler effect, Aaron’s moans rose and fell in pitch.
Marilyn laid the palm of her hand on her stomach and closed her eyes. This was the closest to praying she had ever come, and what she prayed for was hardly extraordinary. ‘Please let the baby be normal. Just normal, that’s all I want, nothing more.’
It wasn’t so much to ask really.
But she felt a dark atavistic fear rising inside her, something vague and barely perceptible. It was like a little death; the death of love and the death of hope.
Duty
Michelle Brandieu, her hair restored to youthful raven-black and fixed in a halo of tight, stickily lacquered curls, hurried home and, after shuffling her tarot pack, laid them out in a simple fifteen-card spread. At their heart was the Princess of Swords – this represented a wise and vengeful woman, fearless. The card to its left was the Empress, representing beauty and love and success, the one to the right was the four of swords which stood for truth. This told Michelle all she needed to know, she barely glanced at the remaining cards.
She changed out of the unflattering but serviceable clothes she had worn to the hairdressers; a lime-green acrylic sweater with a small white cat embroidered over the left bosom, comfy grey slacks with an elasticated waist and white orthopedic shoes with lace ups, and carefully considered her options for a more serious and elegant look.
Over the years (by means of penury and monomaniacal self-deprivation) she had retained the same trim figure she’d possessed in her youth and thus her wardrobe contained clothing she had bought as far back as the late 1960s. After some thought, she chose a navy polka-dot blouse with an oversized teardrop collar, a pleated red polyester skirt and a royal blue jacket in a naval style with gold buttons and epaulettes, white tights and navy patent leather shoes decorated with a jaunty gilt chain.
She applied her make-up: frosted lipstick the colour of raw veal. Greasy black eyebrow pencil applied with a trembling hand which thus affected a rather surprised and surprising look. Then too much rouge which gave the impression she was suffering from high blood pressure, rather than the youthful and healthy glow she had meant to achieve, but with the light coming from behind her and her somewhat muted vision, what Michelle saw in the mirror was herself as she had been thirty years ago. Thirty years ago when, for a brief rare moment in her otherwise unremittingly lonely life, she had been in love.
Gazing lovingly at herself, forgetting for the time being how that love affair had ended, she perceived a new beginning for herself; she saw how she might solve this monstrous crime and would thus be asked to appear in the newspapers and on TV. How she would gain a platform for her astrology, her card readings, her powers as a medium.
The fear she’d felt the night before had entirely evaporated. There was not one drop of doubt diluting her resolve. Michelle knew what she had seen. Knew what it meant, knew what she now must do and knew what it would result in for her. She even, as she left her flat and passed down the three gloomy flights to the street, imagined her lover from all those years before seeing her on TV or in an interview in Paris Match. He would fall in love with her all over again, would regret his past infidelities and his hasty marriage to that librarian.
Michelle had never stopped loving him. Astrologically they were an ideal match; she was a Scorpio and he was Pisces – a conspiracy of stars, the precise day and hour of each of their births making their union perfect. Perfect except for the interference of persons and factors beyond their control. Thus it made absolute sense that they should find one another again. Or at least that was what Michelle now told herself.
It was five o’clock before Madame Michelle Brandieu entered the main door of the police station, walked smartly up to the desk where a junior PC was surreptitiously eating curry-flavoured instant noodles from a polystyrene cup, and announced that she knew who the killer was and needed to speak to the official in charge of the case immediately.
The young PC reluctantly lowered the pot of noodles into the metal waste bin under the counter. He was hungry and tired and should have finished work hours ago, but the unexplained death meant a double shift. Jean-Luc might not have minded if he had been assigned to work in the field alongside a man like Paul Vivier, but to be stuck behind a desk?
Jean-Luc was twenty-four years old, had graduated less than a year before from the police academy with high hopes of rapid progression and an exciting job. But paperwork and lost cats and unlicensed cars had depressed and bored him, and he was considering the possibility of resigning. Or was, until the moment Madame Brandieu had declared confidently to him that she knew who the killer was.
Yet that moment of hope passed so quickly. He picked up the internal phone and spoke directly to Inspector Vivier, repeating in a low tone what the woman had claimed to know of the murder.
‘Nutter?’ Vivier asked in a perfectly reasonable voice.
‘Don’t think so,’ Jean-Luc said, surreptitiously eyeing the woman as she stood waiting at the desk with two hands neatly resting on it, the fingertips partially interlaced and her gaze directed pointedly at him. The inspector’s single word question seemed to the young policeman’s hypersensitive ego to imply that both the witness and Jean-Luc (if he believed her) were crazy.
Perhaps Jean-Luc should have thrown the woman out and not troubled the inspector at all, but that would have been a dereliction of duty. He sensed that somehow by being the messenger who announced this woman, if it turned out that she was a time-wasting, and in all probability undiagnosed, schizophrenic, he would be endlessly blamed and teased about her.
‘I’ll send someone through,’ Vivier said, before hanging up.
Seconds later Sabine Pelat appeared and ushered the woman away. Jean-Luc watched through the reinforced glass of the office door as the two women moved deeper into the belly of the building. The light in the corridor had a greenish tint and the walls were painted in washable white gloss paint. It was not a cosy workplace, nor was it designed to be. Once the women
had disappeared from view, Jean-Luc found himself staring morosely down at his hastily abandoned supper inside the bin. The cup had tipped over, disgorging the pale yellow noodles with their flecks of reconstituted meat and fragments of unidentifiable vegetables onto the other rubbish.
Sighing, he made a note of the time in the diary and reported the arrival of a witness. Too late he realised that he should have taken the woman’s name. But even as he recognised his mistake, and worried that it was yet another obstacle to a speedy promotion, he felt himself giving up, letting impatience reconstruct itself into a valid and well-thought-out decision. Police work did not suit him, it was not as he had imagined, he would resign.
Restless and bored, he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a playing card he’d found on the street on his way into work. The ace of hearts, like a message to him – not that he was superstitious - but he’d pictured himself passing it to a girl in a bar, his name and phone number on it. Winking. Smiling. Winning. Ace high. Yeah, fat chance while he was stuck here! He flexed it between his thumb and forefingers until of its own accord it jumped into the air and fell somewhere – he neither knew nor cared where.
He yawned, then gazed ruefully down the empty corridor and pictured himself striding importantly along it, out of uniform, (in his imagination he now held Vivier’s job) barking orders to his inferiors and on the brink of some vital breakthrough in the case. He’d be the one to find and confront the murderer, there would be a car chase (he loved to drive fast cars) he would rescue a beautiful girl in the nick of time and he would be forced to immobilise and beat the killer with any weapon that came to hand. Jean-Luc would be a bloodied, but triumphant hero.
If only they’d give him a chance.
He’d sleep on his decision to resign, give it another week.
A month at most.
Lost Property
At the Café de Trois a waiter, while setting out the tables for the day, had noticed a delicate white cardigan draped carefully over the geraniums. Without thinking too much about it, he picked it up, carried it into the café and put it on a shelf in the back room above the washing machine and alongside some of the clean table linen.
People left things behind at the café all the time; umbrellas, hats, sunglasses, keys, mobile phones, half-empty cigarette packs, paperback novels. Rarely anything of value – such as wallets full of cash. Sometimes they returned the same day within minutes or hours, other times after a day or so.
Some years ago, one lady, a certain chic Parisian, had in the course of a conversation with the patron mentioned a silver bracelet that she’d been very fond of. She hadn’t see it for a long time and presumed it was lost forever. It was not an expensive item, but it had been the last gift she’d received from her father. She described it in loving detail recalling the unusual motif of cats and mice which chased each other nose to tail around the chain. She last remembered having it during her previous visit to the area which had been three years before.
Hearing this, the patron clucked his tongue and made a sympathetic moue with his mouth, then excused himself, went up the stairs to the flat above the café where he then lived with his wife and children. He went into his daughter’s room and opened her jewellery box, releasing the small plastic figure of a turning ballerina and setting off the slow plinking music of a sluggish Swan Lake. Inside the dusty red velvet interior, amongst paste beads and broken gold chains, a tiny bird’s skull and a few foreign coins, he found what he was looking for. Namely a silver bracelet which, after several months in exile in the café’s lost property box, his wife had given to his daughter. Not that his daughter had ever seemed to like it particularly, which was why he had no qualms about taking it back.
With the bracelet coiled tightly in his left fist, he hurried back to the dining area and bore down on the Parisian lady utterly unable to temper the broad and quite maniacal grin that had plastered itself to his rather oily face. He was so delighted with the miracle he was about to perform that he quite forgot himself, and instead of politely enquiring if this was the lost item and then respectfully returning it to her, he bent slightly and leaning closer with rather, to the Parisian lady’s surprise, too much familiarity, said, ‘Goodness, what’s that behind your ear?’
Panicked, as she imagined a hornet, bee or worse, a spider, the Parisian lady froze and allowed this rather peculiar man to touch the side of her head. His thumb grazed her ear and his fingers seemed to play momentarily with her hair and the naked soft skin at the base of her skull.
‘Ah ha!’ he said, withdrawing his hand and showing her his closed fist. If it was a spider then she really didn’t want to see it, but the fingers were slowly opening and she could not quite avert her gaze.
‘What is it?’ she demanded, her voice somewhat shriller than she might have liked.
The patron’s grin merely broadened.
‘Little creatures,’ he said.
She imagined a thousand baby spiders erupting from a broken egg sac and flowing from his palm, then spilling onto the table, onto her arms, into her clothes and hair. But then his hand fully opened and there, nestled on his damp palm, she saw the beautiful bracelet her papa had given her on her sixteenth birthday.
‘Oh!’ she said and her right hand went to her throat – that instinctive gesture that suggested extreme vulnerability. Yet she hesitated to take the bracelet from his outstretched hand, as if she could not quite believe her eyes and the silver ornament must be some sort of mirage.
‘It has been here – what? Three or four years. We never dispose of lost property, Madame; we value our customers too highly.’
It was only a little lie and one that put him in a good light.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, the colour rushing to her cheeks as her eyes began to fill with tears.
He opened the tiny catch and held the bracelet out in readiness.
‘Here, allow me.’
She offered him her arm and fumbling slightly he managed to wrap the bracelet around her wrist and close the tiny hook.
When he looked at her again she was openly weeping.
This story had been told to the waiter during the first week of his employment. The patron had a habit of embarking on long-winded tales which were illustrative of his ethics and habits in the workplace. As long as the lecture took place when the waiter should have been polishing glasses or sweeping the floor or doing some other onerous and oft-repeated duty, then he didn’t mind too much, but the patron, early on, had a habit of launching into these stories just as the waiter was finishing his shift. Listening patiently on the patron’s time was one thing, on his own it was quite another.
On first hearing the story of the Parisian lady and her absurd cat and mouse bracelet, the waiter had disbelieved it. He was reminded of those moral tales told him in childhood where good behaviour was rewarded and bad punished, but last year to his surprise, the same woman returned. She was slightly less elegant, less beautiful and at least fifteen years older than the impression he’d got from the patron. She nonetheless wore the bracelet and happily allowed all and sundry: the chef, the pot boy, the waiting staff and a few regular customers, to inspect it and hear the all too familiar story from her perspective.
So. Lost property.
Not that, on idly picking up the cardigan, the waiter imagined his own tale of happy restitution, rather it had become an ingrained habit, like replacing dirty ashtrays, or wiping down tables, and once he had collected the cardigan from the geraniums and placed it on the shelf in the back room, he promptly forgot about it. Forgetting even to inform the patron of his find. Forgetting in part, because of the commotion of the sirens which had begun to fill the air around mid morning, followed by rumours of an unexplained death that filtered through in fits and starts, much of it wildly inaccurate.
One of the older waiters told him, for example, that another woman had been killed. In his mind he conflated ‘another woman’ with ‘another prostitute’ and so when others mentioned a
dead woman, he tended to ask a question which took the form of a statement, ‘She was a prostitute, wasn’t she?’ And in this way speculation became fact and half the town was convinced that the unnamed dead girl was a known prostitute.
Lucy Locket Lost her Pocket
Lucy, even while she lay dead; caught precariously on a stout root above the run-off ditch from a factory, nonetheless lived on stubbornly, resolutely and vividly in the minds of all those who knew her. Her lover, Dr Thom McKay, thought he knew by her sudden and wilful silence that he had, in her mind at least, committed some crime and was now being punished. He knew too, that eventually she would answer her phone, that they would meet, the particulars of his crime would at last be revealed and he would have the chance to defend himself; to disabuse her of her notions of his suspected infidelities, his sins of omission, his lack of consideration. A careless word or look of his would be brought under the scrutiny of her judgement, analysed, contextualised, explained. He would be reminded of her sensitivities, her vulnerability, the stories of her past life.
Lucy was, for him, a sort of representation of everything that was light and joyous and exquisitely girlish. He loved her sense of fun, her lithe body, her curiosity, her wonderful lateral thinking. But he did not like the dark turns her mind took, the way her facility for invention could elaborate on a small detail – a phone call not returned, a misplaced word, a forgotten anniversary. Yet she had, over the years, come to recognise that her mind was capable of this trickery, that she had a tendency to succumb to paranoia, but as Lucy herself often said, laughing lightly, gaily at her own folly, ‘Even paranoids have enemies.’
It had been ten or twelve days since they last spoke. She had been edgy and brittle on the phone saying she felt like an interloper in her own life. Thom had misunderstood the earnestness of that comment, had made a rather sorry quip, the substance of which he had instantly forgotten, but she had gone silent.
Or not quite completely silent, and he had pictured her face at the other end of the line, tight-lipped and frowning as she stubbornly responded to all his subsequent questions, apologies and statements with the merest and meanest of sighs, grunts and grudging mm-hms. It was as if she was suddenly transformed into her namesake, that mute and naked Lucy whose effigy stood implausibly in the Museum of Natural Science. Australopithecus Afarensis Lucy was named, during an evening of campfire celebration when the song was repeatedly played, after the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. That Lucy was found in an arid gulley in Ethiopia and had breathed her last over three million years ago.