Significance

by Jo Mazelis

  He directed his gaze more pointedly at the book itself. ‘You’re not wasting police time, are you, Pelat?’

  She put the cups on the desk, took the book from its warm spot and placed it on the far end of the desk.

  ‘Downtime,’ she said. ‘It helps me think.’

  He raised an eyebrow. Sabine Pelat’s work record was exemplary. If reading a trashy novel for a few minutes while she waited for coffee to percolate helped her think, then who was he to split hairs?

  ‘That was Montaldo. Thinks he has a suspect.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t get too excited, seems Montaldo caught some jogger a few streets from the crime scene, hours after the death, but in possession of black skin and curly hair.’

  ‘Oh.’ They exchanged looks. Montaldo had been reprimanded more than once for his use of racist language, his reactionary views.

  ‘But, he did say that the man had some weird writing on his hand and that when questioned about it he said it referred to the throat.’

  Sabine thought about this, absorbing the information as she sipped her coffee. ‘It could be nothing. What did the words say?’

  ‘Don’t know, it wasn’t in French.’

  ‘Generally,’ she said, ‘they stick to their own kind.’

  ‘Who?’ Vivier was startled, he had an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps even Sabine Pelat was capable of racism.

  ‘Serial killers. If that’s what we’re dealing with. They select their victims from the same race as themselves. Blacks kill blacks. Whites, whites.’

  ‘With no deviation?’

  ‘Possibly, but as a general rule.’

  ‘I see, and according to profilers they select similar types of victim – have you seen photographs of the women Ted Bundy killed?’

  Vivier looked at Sabine Pelat’s face as he asked this and waited for her answer. If her hair was loose she would fit Bundy’s type; long glossy dark hair in a centre parting, a well-formed heart-shaped face, large doe-like eyes, a wide sensuous mouth. Though Sabine did not smile as readily as those twelve or thirteen American college students Bundy had strangled and bludgeoned to death, and she was a little older.

  ‘I think so, though I may have, possibly – sometime in the past.’

  ‘Well, they all look remarkably like one another and each in their turn also resembled Bundy’s first love – a girlfriend who dumped him and whose rejection he clearly had trouble getting over.’

  ‘Christ, he must have been stupid.’

  ‘Bundy? How do you mean?’

  ‘To not see the difference between one woman and another.’

  ‘Well, he was clearly insane…’

  ‘Didn’t he go to the electric chair?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  The phone rang again. Vivier picked it up and listened to the young sergeant on desk duty.

  ‘Nutter?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes at Sabine Pelat, as he said it. In response she raised her eyebrows questioningly.

  ‘Alright. I’ll send someone now.’ He replaced the receiver and turned his attention to Sabine again. ‘Someone’s come in off the street claiming they know who the murderer is. It’s a woman, so would you mind?’

  ‘No problem, sir.’

  Vivier swallowed the coffee in two gulps, closed his eyes as he felt the hot liquid fall down his gullet and pictured a weird internal waterfall. His throat. The girl’s throat.

  Initial reports from forensic did not suggest obvious manual strangulation – there was some bruising and swelling, but the hyoid bone was unbroken. Pelat hypothesized a carotid takedown; an attack of such simplicity and effectiveness that the victim passed out from a lack of oxygen to the brain in a matter of seconds. Six months before, Vivier might have asked if that was something she’d gleaned from one of her murder mysteries, but he had learned to hold his tongue – Pelat was not stupid, not gullible.

  And the victim had been wearing panties; not a thong, but a style that rose high over the buttocks and were a bit like the shorts Kylie Minogue had worn in a recent video and ad campaign. Familiarity with pop music’s idols and particularly their bottoms and how they chose to clothe them was not usually at the forefront of Vivier’s mind, but a few months ago someone, no one knew who, had stuck up a picture of the aforementioned princess of pop’s pert and meagerly clad rear end on the staff notice board in the corridor outside the canteen. The women members of staff had been outraged and it was swiftly removed. It did however spark a debate about exhibitionism, female sexuality, freedom of choice and vulnerability, including mention of the Muslim veil and French policy; the ironies of tolerance and self-determination and faith.

  Again, according to reports, the girl had not been sexually assaulted, but this did not mean sex wasn’t the motive – sexual satisfaction could be achieved by more indirect means than simple penetration. According to Freud some adults got frozen in the development of their sexuality, were perpetually stuck at the point of looking or displaying, and while they might masturbate to images of the opposite sex, they might actually fear them. Freud also mentioned some men’s fear of full congress because of what is known as the vagina dentata – the vagina with teeth.

  La Petite Mort

  Aaron in bed. A drugged sleep. Scott had given him a sedative. Bright spots of red turning dirty brown-burgundy on his bandaged hands. Marilyn and Scott had stood over him, watching him. As if they were afraid he would evaporate. Or as if they willed him to evaporate, to go out of focus, to fade, leaving only the warm bed and the tangled bloodstained bandages strewn over it like abandoned ribbons.

  Scott and Marilyn standing side by side, inches apart, afraid to touch one another, as if they did not deserve that comfort.

  Scott troubled by secrets. The old memory of himself as a child standing as now by the side of his sleeping brother. And last night too, his words to the young woman, his bottled up anger and desire. Then forgetting to remove the keys from the door. Forgetting perhaps to even lock it.

  How does one forget? Is there, in truth, no forgetting? Only the work of the subconscious artfully spinning reality into the form it desires. The reptile brain viciously, heartlessly achieving its selfish needs by any means possible.

  ‘I think you should tell them,’ Marilyn said. ‘They should know. They’ll see his hands; the cuts won’t have completely healed by then.’

  ‘No, it’ll only worry them. Christ, you know what my mother is like; she’ll be on the first flight over here with her first aid box.’

  ‘Will they blame us?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so. Maybe they won’t let us bring him again. Won’t trust us or him, or France or whatever.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Marilyn and Scott each considered the words he’d just spoken. To be blamed was one thing; that sat heavy in the heart. They had tried, but failed. And yet what a punishment they might be given for this failure. To be no longer trusted with Aaron. To be deprived of this burden. To be free.

  And there was Marilyn’s secret too. A beautiful, but still troubling secret. The baby. No real outward sign yet. Her breasts a little fuller than before. A thickening of her waist, so that she had begun to leave the top button of her jeans and skirts undone and to favour the loosest dress she had brought. She longed to see a more visible bulge, a great dome ballooning out. She would be a sort of walking miracle. Not really, of course, and yet for her, for Scott too, this new life they had made was magical.

  Unless.

  Unless whatever was wrong with Aaron was genetic, could skip over individuals and generations like a girl’s feet skipping over hopscotch tiles, landing here, missing there; and then?

  Marilyn shivered.

  ‘Hey,’ Scott said, and at last put his arm around her shoulder, and she gratefully slotted herself in against his body. ‘You cold?’

  ‘No. Yes, just a little, I guess.’

  He rubbed her arm.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  �
��For all of this. For dragging you into this. I’m sorry he’s the way he is. I’m sorry I’m not a better person. I’m sorry I’m not like you.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘Yeah, you.’

  He kissed her. A peck on the forehead, then he ducked his head away again even as she tilted her face, her mouth up to meet his.

  ‘But you’re a good person,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m lousy.’

  ‘Scott!’

  This last word was spoken loudly. Aaron whimpered in response, or so it seemed.

  They watched the sleeping young man again. Angelic, as all innocents are when asleep.

  ‘Come on. I’m exhausted, let’s see if we can get some shuteye too.’

  ‘It’s only seven o’clock,’ Marilyn said, but allowed herself to be led from Aaron’s room and into theirs. Light poured in through the white muslin curtains, light that seemed to fill the whole space illuminating everything equally. As if the room were some glass aquarium and they were creatures who ate, drank and breathed light. Marilyn, uncertain if she actually wanted to sleep right now, uncertain of the wisdom of it, as she might not sleep later, went and stood in front of the small desk under the window, her notebook upon it, a poem half written, her uncapped pen lying across the page.

  Should she write or sleep? Forgetting for an instant Scott in the room behind her until a hand, or the tips of his fingers really, gently, almost imperceptibly, drew the hair from her neck in order to kiss the tender skin there.

  ‘Oh. That’s nice,’ she said, sighing.

  His other hand reached around the front of her, his warmth against her back, his mouth warm and wet, opening and closing on her skin, consuming her. Then his hands, one snaking under her blouse, wriggling into her bra, cupping her breast, the other on her belly, its palm with fingers splayed pressing her against his body. Then him taking backward steps, drawing her with him to the bed, then the tumble, the tumult.

  ‘We shouldn’t,’ she said at one point, but by then they had already gone too far.

  Labyrinths

  Michael Eszterhas, atheist, anarchist, agitator, ex-secretary of the International Socialist Students’ Association and ex-jailbird was following the path of the labyrinth set into the tiled floor of Chartres cathedral. His wife, Hilda, was stepping uncomfortably behind him. Since breakfast their conversation had been stilted.

  This was not how they had pictured the future. An elderly couple, taking holidays in France, visiting cathedrals. Not that either of them had developed a taste for spirituality or organised religion. Nearer to death, but no nearer to God. Maybe that would come in their dotage, but they doubted it.

  And yet it seemed that lately the abstract entity which they believed in, which was in some ways very like that other abstract entity, God, had lost its powerful gleam. This entity, this thing, this belief had shone like the most powerful beacon in their youth. It had been out there on the horizon, almost visible, almost palpable. They knew the journey towards it was hard, there would be sacrifice, physical discomfort and pain, bloodshed even, but the light was so strong. Once they had called this thing revolution. The word had tripped off their tongues with absolute certainty.

  It was a case of when the revolution comes, not if. But this was before the word became vulgarised, became a Beatles song. Before the name of Cuba’s hero, Che Guevara became a chain of shops that sold jeans and t-shirts. Before everything got mixed up with slogans. ‘Make love not war’ and ‘be sure to wear some flowers in your hair’ and drugs and hedonism, the whole amnesic mess. Now instead of revolution Hilda and Michael spoke of ‘change’, a quieter word, but one spoken with dignity.

  Hilda followed a few paces behind Michael, her eyes watching her own feet as well as his on the worn coffee-coloured tiles. They had been set into the floor as a tool for meditation. Monks’ and pilgrims’ feet had walked here before them.

  Michael was wearing sandals and khaki-coloured shorts that seemed to suddenly no longer fit him. Hilda looked at his calves. Knotted with twists of bulging varicose veins, but tanned and shapely, though the skin in other parts of his body had grown loose. After years of being slightly overweight, of carrying a modest paunch, he had at last lost weight. Hilda however, no matter how careful she was about her diet, continued to slowly gain weight. Her breasts in particular seemed determined to swell regardless of their non-functionality. She and Michael, once brave and beautiful revolutionaries – not that she had ever thought herself beautiful or even remotely attractive – were turning into Jack Spratt and his wife. Old people, invisible, safe and probably boring as hell. Who would want to hear now of the things they’d done, the people they’d met, what they had seen? All of it now history without even the chance of being written on a gravestone. To be buried was, after all, politically incorrect, though they had of course been to Highgate cemetery on numerous occasions to visit the grave of Karl Marx.

  They had seen Ginsberg at the Albert Hall in ’65. They’d met (and given donations for the cause to) Daniel Cohn-Bendit at the University of Nanterre in early March of ’68. Had been arrested separately, but within minutes of one another in Grosvenor Square later that same month when Michael was charged with assaulting a police officer, Hilda with disturbing the peace. Disturbing the peace? When peace was what they wanted? They had gone to the Bogside in Derry in ’69 to show their solidarity with the Catholic civil rights movement. They had marched in Southall in 1979 and witnessed fellow protester Blair Peach being bundled into an ambulance. Later they heard he had died.

  Something had indeed died, kept dying or at least mutating. There in the cool space of the vast cathedral, walking the labyrinth, still together after all these years as friends, comrades and more lately, lovers, they were true believers who had yet to get to heaven.

  Hilda, feeling not so much in a state of blissful meditation as one of stupefaction, did not notice (though she had been watching his feet the whole time) that Michael had come to a halt and so she blundered into him, her shoes catching the back of his heel and scraping the skin where it was most vulnerable. He stumbled and she, trying to arrest his fall, but herself off balance, staggered sideways half dragging him with her. Neither fell, but a group of teenagers witnessed their clumsy hop-a-foot; their pained, surprised expressions as they staggered comically about, and sniggered cruelly.

  Thus was ended the sojourn in the cathedral; with two old folks limping out, one with a wound that bled copiously and extravagantly (helped, Michael supposed, by movement and gravity), the other with a pulled muscle in either her shoulder or her neck (always a vulnerable place with those unwieldy breasts to heft around), hissing blame at one another.

  Afterwards, sitting in bitter recriminating silence on a bench outside in the sunshine again, as Michael fastened a wad of tissues around his ankle with a camera cord, they might never have spoken to one another again, had not Hilda said, ‘Well, He did say “vengeance is mine” didn’t He?’ And Michael, laughing, had taken her hand and pressed it thankfully between both of his.

  ‘Little sods,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Laughing at us.’

  ‘Oh, it must have looked funny.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been funny if we’d actually fallen.’

  ‘But we didn’t.’

  Michael gazed off across the broad square.. Hilda noticed how his cheek had begun to look a little sunken, giving him a gaunt aspect. The weight loss; had they been wrong to celebrate it? Was it not the outcome of a healthy diet (last year they had both given up anything containing wheat as well as whisky and other spirits) but the portent of something much more sinister and troubling; the beginning of disease and the slide towards death?

  As this thought entered her mind, the sudden vivid reality of it, Hilda could not help but gasp.

  ‘Alright, darling?’ Michael said. ‘Where does it hurt?’

  ‘All over,’ she said, uncertain really as to just what she meant by that, but unable to utter another word as she found herself w
eeping suddenly and noisily.

  ‘Time to go back, I think,’ he said, when at last her tears had subsided (he had never known her to cry in this fashion before, or at least not for many, many years) and he gently tapped her knee.

  They arrived back in the town at around five to see a uniformed gendarme trotting easily up the front steps of their hotel. An old fear gripped them both, that money they’d handed over years ago to the student leader, their names on certain lists, their faces circled in photographs of particular demonstrations, Michael with a motorcycle helmet on, Hilda with a Palestinian scarf being ripped from her surprised face, while her hand was raised in a clenched fist, their old passports criss-crossed with the sites of all their earnest involvement in the struggle. Perhaps they were not the only ones who had long memories, who had not forgotten.

  Michael took her hand and bravely, together, they followed the gendarme into the dim lobby of the hotel.

  Blood Ties

  It was Lamy who told Vivier about the boy who had been seen covered in blood in the rue Félix. Not that any of the police had seen the boy, let alone spoken to him. By the time they arrived on the scene all the reports were secondhand – some were wildly exaggerated, others sympathetic. A wild boy, blood around his mouth and all over his hands, had been cornered by a mob and it was only this that prevented him from killing again.

  Killing again?

  There was no evidence he’d killed once. But there was a wildfire rumour, something about a small animal being torn apart and eaten; a rabbit, a kitten, a tame bird.

  Several people had called the police, but by the time they arrived there was no sign of the wild boy. No sign that is, apart from splashes of dried blood on the pavement, a partial bloody handprint on a wall and a razor blade which was still lethally sharp.

  A wild boy, a frightened boy, a boy who had hurt himself, who had hurt others. A foreigner. German. Or Dutch. English. American. Fingernails like claws.