by John Brooke
Aliette sat behind the one-way, listening in. Tommi Bonneau had admitted seeing Didi Belfort at Diabolik. He was not exactly lying. But taking pictures, threatening to sell them in Paris? Tommi hadn’t mentioned that. What game was Tommi playing with his so-called story? Obviously he pushed the limits of Article 9. But professionally. She was beginning to feel it must be somehow deeper. She returned to her desk and called Le Cri. Was transferred. ‘One little question, Tommi.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Are you honest?’
Some people would slam the phone down. Tommi Bonneau was different. He liked being dared. ‘As honest as I need to be, Inspector. Like you?’
‘Merci, monsieur. We’ll be in touch.’ Could she respond to a dare?
With the large possibility looming that they — the local police, both PJ and City — would be formally relieved of the matter within the next few hours, an army of uniforms began to comb the streets for Pearl Serein. Jean-Marc Pouliot from Identité Judiciaire was sent to go over Raymond Tuche’s room at the Cure. His colleague Charles Léger was pulled away from his examination of a burned-out crack dealer’s van discovered by the potash terminals and dispatched to Pearl Serein’s building. ‘See if you can build some kind of trail.’ Front, back, from the ground to the 11th and back again. Inspectors Patrice Lebeau and Ricky Roig headed down to the holding cell to talk to Remy Lorentz. Again. Captain Mathieu Deubelbeiss was apologetic on behalf of his own guys. Yes, they’d spoken with Remy yesterday. Good long chat. But the club was not pressing charges against anyone for Saturday night’s debacle, and beyond that…well, they’d released him.
‘Poor guy has to work for those types every day,’ Officer Beyer noted, gesturing through the one-way, where Charlotte waited the next go-round, vacant as a doll.
‘Couldn’t be easy,’ Officer Herrscher added, backing up his partner.
Aliette informed them that Charlotte was not a tennis player. But she agreed, No, it couldn’t.
Then Inspector Nouvelle requested permission to have a look through Pearl Serein’s place before the larger investigation went into full force. Mathieu Deubelbeiss saw the logic in that.
Deubelbeiss asked her, ‘Could you make sure he comes down here? We need him to explain his movements leading up to Saturday night. Won’t take ten minutes. I know it’s distasteful, but…well, he should.’
He meant Claude. She agreed.
Claude did too. He humbly went down to chat with Deubelbeiss before heading off to his appointment at the courthouse.
19
Stifling Folds of Love
Aliette returned to Pearl’s building. The strutting concierge in the silly Napoleon suit inserted his service key in the lift panel, into a unmarked keyhole above the 10th floor button. ‘Voila, madame Inspector. Please remove the key as you leave the lift or the rest of us will be stranded.’ She thanked him and turned the key. The lift rose, and with it a tremor of anticipation in her gut. Voyeuristic anticipation. She was finally going to see where Pearl Serein hid with her special life.
The lift opened directly into the living room. Well!
She went from room to room, not as a cop — just to see. Stepped outside, admired the garden and pool, the diving tower, the backboard at the far end where Pearl could work on her backhand. Not too shabby, not too shabby at all. She stood by the rail, enveloped in the midday breeze.
There was Piaf, miles below, a white speck.
The inspector commenced the basic exercise of picking through the woman’s life. She peeked into Pearl’s fridge (light yogurt, half a quiche, milk, limp carrots, an unwrapped hunk of muenster, apple juice, five cans of Fischer beer), balanced her cutlery…not as expensive as it looked, checked her wine rack. She perused the notes scribbled on Pearl’s kitchen calendar (hair, tennis, tennis, mother? tennis). She gazed dumbly at wine stains on Pearl’s chic de Boers divan, the Navajo carpet in need of a fringing, the German sound system with the English speakers, the juice glasses from a Turkish bazaar… There was a book on the floor by the divan. Aliette picked it up. MATING…in smaller print, An Analysis of Devotion and Betrayal, Marriage and Divorce: How evolution shaped human love. Aliette had scanned a review in Marie-Claire. They were calling it evolutionary psychology, a hybrid of sorts, wherein the Naked Ape and Charles Darwin sit down with Sigmund Freud. Overleaf, two quotes to entice the reader. From Nisa, a woman in a !Kung San hunter-gatherer village: When you have lovers, one brings you something and another brings you something else…Your husband also gets things and gives them to you. Do not all women live this way? And from an American billionaire: A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure.’ The premise was fundamental: ‘Human beings are genetically designed to fall in love, but not, alas, to stay there. This groundbreaking, often shocking, study ties together…
A credit card marking the reader’s place fell out. She picked it up. A gas card, in the name of Commissaire Claude Néon, expiring at the end of June. Well, everyone had been reading MATING. Why not our commissaire? Though Pearl appeared to favor fiction. From Madame Bovary to Le Petit Prince to the American Fear of Flying, her books, lined neatly, covered a good range of the human predicament which love and evolution had so far created. And some pedagogical stuff: Bettelheim, Montessori, Piaget, Steiner. Plus Le guide Hachette des vins for 1992. Le guide familial de l’homéopathie. A biography of Jeanne d’Arc…But no Fleurs du mal in Pearl’s library.
Hardly anyone reads poetry any more.
In the bedroom Aliette found pictures scattered on the floor around an ancient shoebox — old snaps of parents, dogs, Pearl in younger…much younger days. Souvenirs: happy, sad, sweet and personal and real, leading back through the times of a woman’s life. So normal. On the bedside table, amid clock and pills, pencil, pad and phone, a comb, a stray earring, a brooch, some buttons and a spool of thread, quite at home in this mess of innocuous flotsam so authentically one’s own, was another book, translated from the Japanese — The Three-Cornered World by Natsume Soseki, an acknowledged master from the turn of the (prior) century. There was a woman depicted in silhouette on the cover, walking modestly away, alone under her blue parasol in the shadow of a mountain. It is the story of an artist who wants to paint a woman who fascinates him but cannot because there is something missing from her complex character.
Inspector Aliette Nouvelle knew The Three-Cornered World. It was a book from those first years in a city she had never visited or imagined as a girl, a time of getting her bearings and, despite no lack of male attention, being lonely. One endless Saturday, she had wandered into a used bookstore, where the proprietor, sensing something, had recommended it. Aliette returned to the shoebox on the floor, reconsidered the old Polaroid of Pearl’s papa. She remembered him! And this same book had spent time beside her own bed. She had read it closely and taken it to heart.
Pearl Serein’s copy opened to the part about the Maid of Nagara, a folk tale within the story. When two men fall in love with her, the well-born Maid cannot decide which one she wants. Her anguish leads her to the riverside, where she throws herself into the swirling gorge. Aliette knew the despair of the Maid of Nagara grew out of the hopelessness of choosing. Choosing love.
And having love choose you so wrongly.
There was romance galore out there to fill the lonely hours, endless variations on zipless fucks and femmes fatales and a never-ending line-up of modern thinkers to explain each passing fantasy, but for a woman waiting in an emotional holding cell, the Three-Cornered World was reality. Can you read a person from what they’re reading? It was just a book, but the inspector suddenly felt a true step closer to the elusive Pearl Serein. Aliette guessed Pearl had followed these same pages up along the misty path of solitude — her heart was by a river, her sin was wishing to be away from it all, a character wanting nothing to do with the story they had put her in…While down below men like Claude and seven others, and Tommi Bonneau and a city full of gentle readers, were all sear
ching for a clue. Pearl had been hiding in this story. A story that wasn’t even French.
…the inspector was suspended, ruminating when she heard a sound from the front.
The lift door sliding open? A woman’s voice exclaiming, ‘Isn’t this fabulous!’
Aliette crept up the hall to find Rose Saxe fingering the milky leather covering the divan, much in awe of Pearl’s domain. A man in a gray work shirt with grease stains on his forehead was standing by in the entrance area, one leg inside the lift door, waiting, nervously twisting a rag in his oily hands. When he noticed Aliette, his face flushed. He cleared his throat several times. Rose Saxe turned. The haughty demeanor, the beginnings of a gesture — but what to say? With the help of this oily man, Madame Saxe had got past the police barrier. She was breaking the law.
‘Rose Saxe! What a surprise!’ Aliette, effusive hostess, flashed her police ID card. The woman nodded slowly, circumspect… Guilty. ‘And to what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?’
‘Just a story,’ muttered Rose. ‘I had no intention of…ah…’ She breathed, stared, nonplussed.
Aliette helped the visitor through an awkward moment. ‘What do you think? Spectacular, no?’
‘Yes…’ suspicious, knowing she’d been caught, ‘though it could use a cleaning, I dare say.’
Aliette was businesslike as she sat on the de Boers and crossed her legs. Patted the cushion adjacent. ‘Sit, please.’ Rose obeyed. The inspector looked over her shoulder. ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Arthur. He works in the engine room. I have the key to a friend’s place on the seventh.’
‘Well, that’s handy… You can go back to your engines, Arthur,’ she ordered politely, playing the role (but flashed her card again just to be sure). The oily man was glad to leave. He stepped back inside the lift, the door slid shut, they were alone. ‘Now, Rose,’ said Aliette, biting her lower lip, still not sure of the right words. Then, with a slight gasp; ‘I’m sorry!…can I get you anything?’
Rose glanced at her watch, put her grossly red lips in a kissing position, considering. Barely noon, a bit early, but resistance would be impolitic. ‘Campari with a twist would be just perfect.’
‘Not a beer?’ asked Aliette, rising.
‘Well of course — if that’s what you’re having…’
‘I love beer!’ she gushed, heading for Pearl’s fridge.
Madame Saxe was closer to sixty than fifty. Her treated ash-blonde hair was tied back in the tight formal manner of bourgeois women throughout the Republic, bound in an elegant black ribbon. Aliette guessed the lady’s chin had been tucked a time or two. Sporting gold buttons again. Rose’s wattle-ridged neck kept turning, craning, her eyes bright with ill-concealed curiosity. She longed to snoop from stem to stern. Aliette offered a glass. Rose dutifully took a sip.
The inspector pointed to the lipstick smudge on the rim. ‘Is that Russian Red, by the way?’
Madonna’s color! A little bit of fun with Rose. (And Madonna was also getting old.)
‘It is…’ Taking a tissue from her purse. ‘Did I see you at the club the other night?’
‘Perhaps you might have.’ The inspector was diplomatic. ‘I saw you.’
‘But do I know you?’ she inquired, leaning forward, peering. ‘Who’s your husband?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Well, it’s more fun without one, isn’t it?’ Rose dabbed the tissue to her lip.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ confided Aliette. ‘I’ve never had one.’
‘They have different feeding patterns than we do.’ Rose took another messy sip of her beer, sighing, relaxing, ‘I do envy the younger generation.’ Arranging herself yet again, she declared, ‘Inspector, you know we’re only too eager to strike up the best of relations with the police on this.’
‘We?’
‘My editor and myself. Le Soir. I honestly hope we can work together.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Aliette spoke true. ‘But that will be up to you, won’t it?’
Rose Saxe heard subtext. Wary, she raised her glass as a sign of agreement.
The inspector returned the gesture. Looking out at the beautiful distance, she said, ‘So tell me, why exactly are you doing this? There’s no party here, madame.’
‘Purely a business decision on the part of my editor. I know the lay of the land, you could say.’
‘And you have the key to a friend’s place on the seventh,’ Aliette noted. ‘But, tell me, did you ask for this, Rose?…May I call you Rose?’
‘Of course you may. And I’ll call you…?’
‘Aliette.’
‘Aliette. I didn’t ask — I suggested, he saw the logic. These are my people.’
‘Your people?’
‘I’ve known all these poor men — except Jean-Guy Gagnon, we never saw much of him — some of them quite well.’
‘Monsieur Duteil.’
‘Went to school with his wife…but Ray Tuche, Pierre, Georges, Bruno, Didi Belfort, they were all bright young lights and very sociable, and that’s my world.’ Gazing around the spacious room. ‘We used to see Didi all the time. We were so looking forward to an evening in this wonderful home, then he took up with her and disappeared. Can you imagine not sharing a place like this?’ Rose was rueful. ‘And now we’ve lost poor Didi too.’
Aliette agreed it would be a fine party house. ‘But why,’ she wondered, ‘would Pearl invite people to a party if they write snide remarks about her and get things wrong?’
‘That letter?’ Rose smiled. ‘Did you ever see anything so absurd? So tiny?’
‘She stood up for herself. I think she has more character than you give her credit for.’
Rose sniffed. ‘A question of being graceful. Obviously it’s beyond her. We were talking about Jerôme Duteil, not her little teaching bac. There’s something wrong with that woman. Apart from having a ruinous effect on some very good men, she’s too secretive. Anti-social. If you’re going to snub your nose, you should have friends around to protect you. That’s what my husband says, and he’s a lawyer. He should know. .’
Aliette responded to the cue. ‘Don’t think I’ve run into him. Do you have the same last name?’
‘Not professionally,’ said Rose, but declined to mention her husband’s name. ‘Pearl Serein has no friends,’ she continued, ‘at least none we know of. Just not interesting. Very low.’ She must have noticed her host wince at this. ‘Yes,’ she conceded after a dainty gulp of beer, ‘you’re quite right: a horrible thing to say. But it’s what she is. Father one of those tedious woolly men with a bookstore. A used bookstore. Dies…American mother gone back home. Not much of a base at all, quoi? No, really quite gauche and probably troubled, I’ve always said.’ Rose reprised her smile. ‘Of course a person can make herself interesting. What life’s all about, isn’t it, Inspector?’
Aliette asked, ‘What about Remy Lorentz?’
‘What about him?’
‘Remy is quite adamant he’s a friend of Pearl. Highly protective, in fact. Willing to fight.’
The eyes of Society Notes grew narrow. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Only that you could be sitting right on top of a very hot lead. For your story?’
Rose blushed slightly. ‘Fight? Perhaps…He’s a very hot-blooded boy. But never kill.’
‘Nobody has said anyone’s been killed,’ replied Aliette, ‘The medical-examiner says heart attacks. Seven in a row. Strange but true. A mystery, most certainly. But as such, no criminal case, not in the least.’
Rose stood, clearly slighted. ‘But that would mean I do not have to discuss this any further with the likes of you.’
‘I’m afraid you do, madame. Not only did you break and enter in coming here…’
‘I did no such thing!’ Rose went striding to the lift and pressed the call button.
Aliette followed. ‘You also violated a police barrier. Both highly serious crimes.’
‘I know how you people work. Don’t think I do
n’t. Michel Souviron is my good friend.’
‘It is a very small town, indeed,’ Aliette said. ‘I almost feel like you’re my cousin. Has Michel ever explained our Cousins Program? It helps us cops fit in.’
Cousins brought Rose up short. ‘You know, Aliette, we could help each other, we really could. Pearl Serein is going to have to explain herself. She owes us an explanation and I have the connections to ensure she provides it, one way or another. I’m sure it will dovetail with those same legal gaps you are trying to fill. My story will open some eyes.’
‘And I’m looking forward to your story.’ Aliette patted Rose’s arm. A dear old cousin who had never quite learned to do her lipstick. ‘But if we are going to work together, it means we have to be allies and not enemies after your story hits the street. Yes? It means I’m looking forward to reading your story first, madame. You get a scoop, I want it too. D’accord? Safety is paramount. We wouldn’t want to hurt anyone who’s not really involved. One lawyer is quite enough. Right, Rose?’
‘I take your point.’
‘And I’ll trust you to keep our meeting off the record.’ There was silence till the lift arrived and the door slid open. Coldly professional, Rose Saxe extended her hand. Aliette shook it. ‘Rose, I am so glad you caught me. It was lovely to see you. We must do it again.’
‘Au revoir, Inspector.’ She bowed. The door closed
A little bit of fun, oui. But really quite a horrid Rose. Quoi?
Then it was back to the places a detective is meant to go: Pearl’s drawers, back of closets, behind the mirror. There were no weapons, needles or vials, and not a single picture evoking time spent with the most eligible men in town. Nothing about high romance. Or murder. Nothing like that at all. Just banal souvenirs and a cherished book. The inspector sat on Pearl’s bed, left unmade and chaotic like the waters in a swirling gorge, and read it again. Before throwing herself into the gorge, the desolate Maid of Nagara leaves a poem: