Stifling Folds of Love

by John Brooke

  She had a perfect view from her balcony. She sipped beer and ate warmed-up leftover tarte flambée, observing the throng with Piaf. Celebrity gossip, the scent of crime, people milling, the truck from the regional TV News shining under the evening sun. Perhaps enjoying it? It was something exciting for a lonely person on a Sunday evening.

  Inspector Aliette Nouvelle was lonely again after a passionate winter, the happy spring of a normal life in which she had dared to think of making plans. Inside, the phone was ringing. She let it — in a mood to inflict some pain on a secret lover.

  Love is indeed a mystery, but ah what a fool to be so deluded.

  Of course it was Claude. Didn’t you figure? You must have (gentle reader).

  Who else could it have been? But why?

  It’s that stupid light of attraction Tommi Bonneau was talking about, the one that counters the dark. Beyond that, Aliette couldn’t say.

  Because people are desperate to make love with someone they can understand? A kindred spirit. A pretty basic reason. For this cop it was another cop… You get offered a beautiful face — Raphaele Petrucci’s for example, but there had been others — and you turn it down. Well, you have to start to understand: you are on the kindred-spirit path, ma belle.

  Because beauty lies inside the eyes (her mother said), and you finally believe you recognize it?

  Because you have to believe your mother?

  Because it was logical? One cop soul reaching for another, making love like police procedure.

  What? Beauty lies? Or was it Mother? Aliette Nouvelle sipped beer and watched the fun across the park. She could not stop her eyes traveling, sliding up, up, up to the dim light at the highest point, till, slightly drunk, definitely bored, she left it, drew the curtain and sat there on her bed.

  She thought it could be helpful to have something to read just now. A good book’s an essential piece of survival gear for lonely Sundays. But like the rest of it, this was too sudden — whatever book she needed right now, it was not at hand. Aliette had let her reading lapse, had sacrificed it for nights in front of the television, maybe some music, or just talking. You know?… all those kinds of pre-bedtime sharing things. All for Claude Néon.

  17

  Good Cop, Bad Cop?

  Claude Néon spent Sunday feeling pulled by a tide of inevitability. It began with a sense of being above it all — the sight of the traffic circle as a toy-sized pinwheel, the flow of tiny cars, knowing the city was watching. His wake-up call from Inspector Nouvelle had not been encouraging. What were you thinking? Truth was, he hadn’t been. He had reacted. Pearl was frightened, her steely dispassion had deserted her, she was overwhelmed with guilt. Claude had spent hours trying to calm her after the chaos at the club, given her camomile tea and aspirin, put her to bed… But at some point, he had to ask her the same question. What were you thinking by appearing like that at the height of the frenzy? Had she been looking for something to explode?

  Well, it had. And now another one was dead. Tuche.

  Claude was at the barrier, contemplating the sparse Sunday morning traffic and Aliette Nouvelle’s balcony door, thinking the inspector was not being totally professional about the situation, when Pearl was suddenly there beside him, soft and sleepy-faced, offering coffee. He saw the outline of her body where the morning sun shone through the oversized T-shirt she wore as a pyjama. She moved, her body disappeared. Claude was confronted by an impishly grinning Jean-Guy Gagnon, emblazoned on the T-shirt above his signature greeting, ‘Bonjour!…this is your wake-up call.’ Claude accepted the coffee but put it aside when he saw the cup carried a beatified image of Bruno Martel’s bearish face, a memento from the spiritual farm. He declined the offer of Jerôme Duteil’s gold-plated razor, left behind, long forgotten. Claude preferred to go unshaved.

  He informed her of Tuche and she cried again. He let her. He would let her come to him.

  She began to. Claude and Pearl talked in spurts and fragments, then separated, then found each other and talked some more. This was not difficult — inside, outside, so much space up here! The deck surrounded the apartment. The south-west side featured a landscaped terrace where Pearl kept her garden. He watched her gather fallen tulip petals. ‘To the memory of Raymond,’ she muttered, scattering orange and mauve bits of dead flower around a fiberglass female torso, modeled to scale and mounted in the earthy bed. Claude felt a pang, realizing the model had been her.

  There was a backboard and half-court built against the windowless north wall, ‘in honor of how we met,’ Pearl said. How she’d met Didier Belfort. She smashed a ball till she was sweating, said it helped alleviate the stress. Claude promised himself he would learn to play tennis.

  Inside, looking north-east and decorated with framed posters from Pierre Angulaire’s films, was a mini-gym-cum-laundry-room where Pearl could warm up before her usual run in the park.

  He would not allow her to go for a run in the park. For her own safety. Not with a murderer on the loose. When she complained, Claude reminded her that he was a man trained to keep her safe from harm. Sullen, she acquiesced and went for a swim in her pool. Got a glass of juice and read her book — her Japanese novel. Claude climbed the three-meter ladder to the board suspended over the pool. It had to be one of the highest points in the city. He felt he could touch the mountains.

  ‘You can have it,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t been up it once. Scared to death.’

  She read. Claude stood alone in the sky. You couldn’t hear the city. Only the wind.

  A crowd began to gather far below. Her phone rang constantly. Nerve-wracking, but he warned her not to touch it: only media jackals. He knew Strasbourg was also wanting a word, but, sorry, unless the PJ team’s two-ring-stop-and-try-again code was in play, Claude refused to answer. When they made contact, he and Pearl conferred, and he passed the information on, guiding his team in the hunt for the missing Belfort. He would be proactive. He would shape this thing. But beyond his portable phone and his gun — neither of which he’d carried to the club — he was missing the file he’d been compiling. He needed these basic tools. Monique was not around. Because Inspector Nouvelle was being such a bitch about it, he instructed Junior Inspector Bernadette Milhau to go into his office, open his computer, find the pearlsboys file, print a copy of the Belfort pages and deliver it, along with his government-issue revolver, in his desk drawer, to the concierge downstairs. ‘And the book that’s there…Yeah, put that in.’

  Pearl was a big reader? Well, Claude Néon would be too.

  In due course the package arrived, delivered direct from lift to living room by the discreet man in the valet coat and hat. (Pearl said no, one did not tip salaried staff.) Bon. Claude felt better equipped to drive the search and deal with any eventuality. Didier Belfort would certainly have access to the building if he wanted. If he dared.

  Pearl scoffed bitterly, ‘Claude, you’re pushing this into fantasy land.’

  ‘Pearl…’ Why did she refuse to imagine it? ‘Anything is possible when it comes to a man who feels his pride has been abused, his heart broken.’ Claude took her hand and held it in both of his. ‘I can understand a person not wanting to face the fact of having been intimate with a killer. I see it everyday.’ Pearl tensed at this. ‘I know the heart doesn’t need it and will do all it can to make the mind deny. But a policeman has to see through to the thing in the mind that can’t resist the cry of the heart. You can sometimes see it straight off, plain as day. Sometimes love is love,’ explained Claude. ‘Other times it can be a hell of a thing — I mean the destructive thing at the heart of it. You can’t fathom it. It stays unsolved. That’s the worst: something horrible, brutal, unsolved. You might solve the crime, but you’ll never solve the person.’

  Pearl let her hand relax. ‘What do you mean, love is love?’

  ‘Only that people react in a predictable way and one can usually predict those people.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sure. If spontaneity has a link to the soul,
then you have to believe the crime of passion is one of the more purely imaginative of acts, an instinctual thing, and the law allows it to be defended as such. By framing it as irrational to start with, the police and the courts can go at it in the kind of clinical way they need to, you see?’

  ‘I think I might. Law is rational. Love is not.’

  ‘Of course the psychologists are getting adept at making pictures for us. So many of these types are so bland. Evil is just a bored little man.’

  ‘Looking to fall in love?’ Pearl’s eyes were wide as she beheld him. She seemed to recognize something. She gently withdrew her hand.

  ‘Yes… Well, not exactly. Not the way you’d think.’ Claude ran with it, talking too much, he knew, but couldn’t stop himself. It had to do with his credibility. ‘Now the obverse of spontaneity is calculation. Blinds drawn. Evil takes charge. Serious planning, absolute care in concealing… People say they can sense danger coming. They can’t. What they hear is their own fear.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Fight fire with fire. Face it with a colder logic, a darker cast of mind.’

  ‘Are you saying a cop is someone who’s bad but can control it?’

  ‘More like someone who’s been trained to understand where others stop understanding.’

  It was then she whispered, ‘Merci, Claude.’

  Claude finally felt Pearl knew why he, of all of them, was there.

  Later, he left his command center, got a beer from Pearl’s fridge. Took his book. The sun was warm, they spent the latter part of the afternoon by her pool, he in shirtsleeves and barefoot with his pants rolled up, she in her bikini, though not topless as in the missing shot taken on Pugh’s boat.

  Claude mentioned this, calm, professional but pointed, striving for more intimate ground.

  Pearl said she had no copy of that picture and could barely remember that day. All that remained of her time with Georges was her brass paperweight — the bust of a famous jurist.

  Yes. Claude had been contemplating it while making his calls from her desk. Pushing it further, he said, ‘You have all these trophies, but no gallery.’

  Her mouth drew tight. ‘My gallery is private… I put it away.’

  ‘I think I need to see it, Pearl. Your private gallery.’

  She studied the page in front of her, a page in The Three-Cornered World. ‘Because you think you might find that picture of me and Georges.’

  ‘We’ve been looking for it. If you have it, we need it.’

  ‘I’d hate to have your job,’ said Pearl. Before he could reply (what could he reply to that?), she stood, wrapped a towel around her hips in sarong fashion and headed inside.

  He followed but waited respectfully at the door to her room as she took a shoebox from her armoire, opened it and began to sift through. Slowly. Then quicker, her face clouding. By then he was standing at her shoulder. There were several envelopes filled with photographs, many of them old snaps from another time, adults and children, none of whose faces meant anything to Claude. Growing frantic, Pearl spread them on her dresser…let them fall haphazard on the floor.

  There was no picture of Georges and Pearl on the boat at Lac Como. There were no pictures of any of them, Pearl’s sorry line of famous men. There were no pictures of Pearl.

  ‘Someone has taken every one!’ Weeping again — from fear, and a deeper sense of violation.

  Claude logically thought Didi Belfort. He led her into the salon, a calming hand on her shaking shoulder. Sat her down. Went to make some herbal tea. And tried to help her help him do his job.

  ‘Tell me more about Didi. Does he give you trouble?’

  ‘Just a headache…’ It appeared she had one now. ‘He’s so melodramatic about everything.’

  ‘But would he kill?’

  ‘He never laid a hand on me.’

  ‘Not you. The others… Think, Pearl! Think about the kind of man he is.’

  She closed her worried eyes over her steaming tea and thought, but could not add to what they already knew. But her puzzling opened the door to Claude to ask,

  ‘Why were you there last night?’

  ‘I was lonely.’ Barely a whisper. He waited. ‘I had to go… I couldn’t just sit here.’ Stronger now. He waited. ‘Sit with all this…this death. I needed to go and have a taste of life. Show them! You understand, Claude?’ He nodded, mirroring her complications. And waited. He sensed Pearl was rising to a place he hadn’t seen since Thursday. Her spirit. The fight in her. He liked that she seemed to understand him now — his role, his presence; but he’d liked her better on Thursday. It was complicated for him too. ‘…I went to show them I’m not the cause of their pathetic little hearts and… Oh mon dieu.’ Huge sigh. She was sinking back again, into it, her guilt, the weight of it.

  ‘I understand, Pearl.’

  She nodded. Shrugged.

  The evening rolled in, the place was still. No more calls…no answer at Inspector Nouvelle’s. Claude had to hope the team was out there searching, closing in on the noble. Pearl was deep inside herself and Claude backed off with the questions. He sensed the theft of her pictures had numbed her — somehow more than the death of the ones depicted. Or so it seemed to Claude. She sat staring at something just beyond the tip of her nose. Grim. Befuddled. A slow, constant shaking of her head. She seemed without earthly weight as she cut bread, prepared a salad, arranged cheese on a plate, opened and tasted a bottle of wine — nothing of the woman inside, just a pair of hands at work.

  Wordlessly, she laid two places on the coffee table. He accepted wine, sat on the lush divan and turned on the evening news. She joined him. Silent, like a long-time couple on a routine Sunday, they watched Cakeface tell the story. The front door of Pearl’s building was the reporter’s basic setting. The uniformed concierge was posed there for effect. Claude bet he’d been bribed by Cake.

  She eyeballed the camera: This morning’s news of the death of sculptor Raymond Tuche has burst the simmering pot that is the Pearl Serein affair wide open. Six suspicious deaths and counting. The authorities are scrambling. The city waits for an explanation…many citizens have come to the Parc de la République on a glorious spring Sunday to catch a glimpse of the woman at the center of the storm. Pearl Serein, reclusive and evasive at the best of times, is barricaded in her luxurious penthouse atop the exclusive Place du Parc, here behind me. We have had no luck communicating with Madame Serein today. She is said to be in the personal custody of PJ Commissaire Claude Néon. The police, no doubt, have lines open to Commissaire Néon, but the situation remains unclear and somewhat ominous.

  Cut to a body bag being wheeled out of the club, pigeons flying.

  Cake VO: Raymond Tuche was last seen alive in the middle of a wild brawl at the posh Quarter Racquets Club last night. He was found dead this morning in the sauna in the men’s locker room. All initial reports describe a heart-attack victim. The body has been taken to the police morgue and we await further findings. It is the sixth such death of a prominent local man within two weeks, all of whom have been linked romantically with Madame Serein.

  Cut to view of body bag being carried out of G. Pugh’s building.

  Cut to same being carted from the house of Agnès Guntz.

  Cake VO: No criminal cause has been officially declared but pressure is mounting on justice system authorities…

  Claude saw Pearl weeping again as she watched. Again he held her hand. He let go of Pearl’s hand as they cut to Commissaire Néon — his official corporate shot. ‘What the bloody hell?’

  Cake VO: The dark element flows from the fact that Commissaire Néon was seen dancing passionately with, then aggressively escorting Madame Serein from the elegant party that erupted in a wild brawl at the well-heeled club, apparently within an hour of the estimated time of Tuche’s death. Our information is that Tuche’s protests to Madame Serein sparked the brawl. City police are conducting the investigation. Monsieur Néon has been incommunicado all day. A spokesperson said the commi
ssaire is ensuring the physical safety of Madame Serein till architect Didier Belfort has been questioned.

  Cut to head shot of Belfort.

  Cake VO: Perhaps the largest irony here is the fact that it was Monsieur Belfort who first wooed Madame Serein and brought her to the public’s attention, and, upon the termination of their liaison, made a gift of the 11th floor redoubt where the shadowy cop and beleaguered lady currently hide…

  Cut back to Cake, now in the park. She speaks to the camera while moving through the crowd: Meanwhile, it is not exactly an atmosphere of fear which binds all these good people here this evening. No, let’s say it’s —

  Pearl jabbed the remote, Cake and the crowd disappeared. ‘Bitch!’ hissed Pearl and ran from the divan to her writing desk.

  Claude, stunned, bemused…helpless, watched her snatch pen and paper from the drawer and begin to scratch a note. He roused himself and approached with caution. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I am writing to her station. She is being absurd and irresponsible.’

  ‘Pearl…’

  ‘And wrong, Claude — just plain wrong! And I am going to let them know.’

  Claude presented a face of exaggerated calm. ‘Wrong about what?’

  Pearl’s face bent with incredulity. ‘Were we dancing passionately?’ He didn’t like the way she said it. ‘And it wasn’t Raymond who started it, it was Remy. She’s wrong about everything. It’s a travesty!’

  ‘It’s normal. Cake’s always more interested in effect than details. It’s the nature of the beast.’

  ‘Cake?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Claude watched her scribble her complaint. He was smiling, but sadly. He felt pity for Pearl and was experiencing a kind of dawning awe at the vastness of his own mistake.

  ‘She should not be allowed to say things like that.’ Pearl signed her name. Proffering the pen, she told him, ‘And you’re going to sign this with me.’