Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  “Even as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, women were still regarded as nymphomaniacs if they had too strong orgasms, and they risked being locked up in psychiatric clinics,” I told her. “A man who frequented brothels three times a week on average—that’s what the statistics from the Victorian era tell us—was regarded as normal, but a woman who cheated on her husband for pleasure was at risk of being declared insane and shut up in a mental hospital for the rest of her life.”

  “That’s because men are afraid of the terra incognita of the female body. Do you know what I think sex means to most men?”

  “I suspect you’re about to tell me.”

  “It’s your way of reconciling yourselves with the idea that you’re going to die.”

  “Isn’t it the same for women?”

  “I’ve long since reconciled myself with the idea that I’m going to die, and I’ve decided to choose for myself when it’s going to happen.”

  “So what does sex mean to you?”

  “It’s the best way of seeing someone as he really is.”

  I opened the envelope.

  It contained the copy of a hastily written note on two pages torn from a spiral notepad, in ballpoint pen.

  Dearest,

  As soon as you decide to die, living becomes incredibly easy. From that moment on, you can enjoy it beyond strings, fear or shame. I made the decision a long time before meeting you. Our encounter was merely an accident. It didn’t change my commitment, because nothing could do that, but it did make me delay it for a while. Perhaps you’ll never realize what wonderful moments you gave me in my last year on this world.

  Whatever I write now would sound false, but I don’t want to depart before saying goodbye. I couldn’t do it if I were looking in your eyes. You’ll allow me this one small act of cowardice, I think.

  Over the course of our relationship you’ve asked me questions about myself, and I did the same. I lied to you many times, not because I was afraid of the truth or for the sake of some perverse game, but quite simply because I didn’t know what to say to you. I’ve avoided answers and the truth all my life, ever since I was five and somebody tried to explain to me that Santa didn’t exist. It was then that I knew that the truth has no value and that imagination means everything. The so-called truth is nothing but a graveyard, a sum of things that have died because people have stopped dreaming of them. For thousands and thousands of years, millions of lovers dreamed of the moon, until Neil Armstrong went there and proved that it’s nothing but an insipid lump of dust, a barren, hostile place.

  I think I must have been like twelve when my parents planned a trip to the Grand Canyon. They showed me photos, they’d bought brochures and glossy illustrated books about it. I tried not to look at them, I wanted to open my eyes and find myself faced with a wonder I could never have imagined. I wanted it to take my breath away, to leave me speechless. It wasn’t so—my parents had taken good care of that. But that was exactly how it felt when I met you. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me and for trying to save me. In a way, you did.

  I remember a quote from that book you love so much: “I’m not one and simple, but complex and many.” Now is the time to pull myself together and leave. I’m impatient to do what I have to do. I feel like I’m about to set out on a journey to a miraculous place and rejoice that I’m the lucky one who’s been chosen.

  Julie

  It was her writing, there was no doubt. Her parents had probably hidden the letter, although it might have proved that Julie and I had had an affair.

  I think I must have sat at my desk for over an hour, looking at the pieces of paper spread over its surface, making an effort to tie my thoughts together. I tried to remember the last time I saw her and I couldn’t. What was she wearing? Did she say goodbye? Did we kiss? Did I try to call her after that? Did she answer or try to call me back?

  “You always complicate things,” she’d once told me.

  We were in my apartment, lying in bed. I was talking to her about the book I intended to write regarding my clinical experiments.

  “I hope you’re not going to turn me into ‘The Case of Miss X’ or ‘File no. 2343VM.’ Do you think that people always know, on some level, why they do a certain thing? You’re looking for events and facts that have no special meaning, combing through your patients’ minds like a mechanic under the hood of a car, but sometimes I get the feeling that you miss what’s essential. What do you hope to find? I think the most wonderful things are those which cannot be explained.”

  I gathered together the pieces of paper, put them in the small safe behind my desk, got dressed, and went out. It was raining and the city was shivering beneath a thick layer of gray clouds. The wet pavement glistened like the dark surface of a river.

  I came to Sixth Avenue, which was still seething with people and all of them seemed as alien to me as if they were from another planet. I stopped at Joe’s Pizza and got a slice, and then I walked into a bar and ordered a drink.

  Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, a man was in agony, surrounded by ghosts, in the midst of a fortune that no longer had the power to defend him from anybody or anything. Not only had he taken me by the hand and ushered me into his haunted house, but he’d also reawakened my own nightmares.

  I think it was then, in that instant, as the gray rain stared at me through the bar window, that I decided I had to find out what happened in Paris that night—if not for Josh’s peace of mind, then at least for my own.

  The following day I called Kenneth Mallory. He’d been an NYPD detective for ten years, before deciding to open his own agency. He was a favorite of the talent agencies on Broadway when they needed to find out about their clients’ past. It was risky to invest millions in marketing and then have some scandal rag blow it all away by writing about drugs and orgies and stolen cars. So he specialized in investigating past lives and became one of New York’s spooks, a man with access to the well-guarded secrets of the rich and famous, discreet, tenacious, and efficient, a flesh-and-blood shadow on the streets of the city.

  I’d first met him four years earlier, when the police suspected that one of my patients had paid a hitman to kill his wife. Shortly before she was shot dead in her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she’d signed a life insurance policy for a high six-figure sum, so the company had hired Mallory to carry out an inquiry. In the end, the real murderer had been caught, and there proved to be no connection between him and the victim’s husband.

  I wouldn’t say we became friends, because I doubted that any such notion existed in Mallory’s vocabulary, but we’d remained in touch and met for dinner two or three times a year.

  He agreed to take on the case and I sent him an email with all the details I knew about Josh, Abraham Hale, and Simone Duchamp. I suggested to him that he begin his investigation in the archives of the Paris police, because unsolved murders are put on ice and kept in the files for decades. He told me he had a contact who worked in the French police and that he’d let me know as soon as he found out anything.

  The investigation was going to cost me some time and money, but the check Josh had given me was certainly big enough to cover all the potential expenses, and I had enough spare time before starting my next project.

  On the other hand, I’d signed a non-disclosure agreement, which I’d already broken by giving Mallory real names and details about the whole affair. But he made his living by being a reliable secret-keeper, and so there was zero risk of finding the story in the press someday. More than that, at the end of the day Josh had paid me to bring him the truth about that night. I hadn’t been able to do it on my own, but with a hand from Mallory, I might still be able to do so.

  I didn’t hear from him for a week, and then he called me just as I was leaving the gym one Thursday evening. I stopped by my parked car, got inside, and answered my cellphone.

  His voice was as gruff as always. “Hi, can you talk?” he said. “Okay, now listen: There’s no murder cas
e with a victim named Simone Duchamp in the archives of the French police. Not in 1976 or in any other year.”

  I was more than surprised.

  “That’s impossible! Maybe the file went missing. Back in those days—”

  “Yes, sure, I’ve heard the tune,” he said. “They didn’t have electronic archives back then, and so on … But don’t think that before computers the detectives kept records in cheap spiral notebooks and then threw them away. My man out there checked in all the possible files and I assure you they’re kept meticulously. There’s no cold case about a woman named Simone Duchamp, aged twenty-something. They checked the whole period from 1970 to 1979. Maybe your friend got the name wrong, or the timeline might be wrong. Anyway, there are a few homicide cold cases in Paris that fit her age. I’ll send you a list by email.”

  “What about trying Missing Persons? My client told me that the body disappeared. Maybe it was never found, so it might have been investigated as a missing person case rather than a homicide.”

  “Well, I’ll do that, but in the meantime try to find out whether your man gave you the wrong name. After over four decades, your man might have gotten her name wrong. You’re too young to know that, but a part of growing old is that you start remembering everything you’ve gone through in a different way. However, in most countries, after a few years, depending on the legislation, a missing person is automatically considered deceased and registered as such. But I’ll check one more time, just in case.”

  “Thanks, Ken. I don’t think I can get in touch again with the guy.”

  He cleared his throat. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Please.”

  “Are you sure you want to be involved in this story? I mean that patient of yours is a big shot. I know from experience that these long-gone messes always have a lot of undergrowth when very rich guys are involved in them.”

  “I know what you mean, but I’m sure.”

  “Do you really trust him? You guys have spent just a few days together, so you can’t say you know him well, with all due respect for your profession. Maybe he just jumbled up a story for one reason or another.”

  “Ken …”

  “Okay, it’s your money. I’ll call you if I get something.”

  Four days after Thanksgiving, I received a letter from Josh’s attorney, along with an old black-and-white photograph and a small gold pendant embossed with an image of the Statue of Liberty.

  Mr. Cobb,

  I’m writing to inform you that Mr. Fleischer passed away on Thursday, at about three p.m. It was a miracle he hung on for so many days after your visit. He didn’t suffer and died in his sleep. I’m very happy that things turned out in such a way that we, his friends, could be with him in his final hours and keep watch over his departure. It was the least we could do after everything he did for us.

  Sincerely,

  Richard Orrin

  PS: The enclosed photograph and the pendant are gifts from Mr. Fleischer. I understand that the photograph was taken in Paris, in the mid-seventies. He kept it on his night stand in his final days.

  The locket pendant was plain, oval-shaped, and encrusted with the Statue of Liberty. I opened it; its interior was empty.

  The photo showed a young woman wearing a white dress and a sunhat with a wide brim that cast a shadow over her face, sitting with two men at a table between some trees.

  Their outlines seemed to melt into the large splotches of light, like in an Impressionist painting. One of the men was sitting in front of the woman, leaning cross-legged against the back of his chair. His flared trouser bottoms were hitched up to reveal half of his left calf. His right hand rested in his lap, while his left was placed on his hip, in a cavalier attitude. He had a proud look, heightened by his thirties-style pencil mustache. The other man, probably Abraham Hale, was seated at the head of the table, between the other two, leaning toward the woman, although his gaze was fixed on the other man, who had surprised him with a gesture or word and to whom he was about to reply.

  The picture was overexposed, causing the figures to dissolve into a kind of milky mist, and it was impossible to see them any more clearly.

  I turned it over. In old-fashioned calligraphy, the following words were written in the bottom right-hand corner: A memory of Paris: Abe, Josh, and Simone, September 29, 1976. I put it on my desk and I looked at it for a while.

  So, there was no farewell. I brought to my mind Josh’s eyes, his withered hands, his breathing, his features furrowed with the trenches of a battle I didn’t know whether he’d lost or just won.

  It was the first time that I’d interacted so intimately with a man so close to death and I was sure that I’d never forget those days we spent together, that I’d always remember every detail, each expression on his face, each word and gesture, and each moan of the wind against the windows.

  Mallory called a couple of months later, after the winter holidays. He told me that he’d found something interesting, and we met the following evening at the Gramercy, in Union Square. After we ordered our sides, he handed me a notebook over the table. It was bound in black leather, old and worn.

  “You might find this helpful,” he said. “I’m not sure, but … Well, it’s a very tangled story, you’ll see, but those guys’ names are mentioned in there. Officially, the diary belonged to a man named Jack Bertrand, who died in a mental hospital fifteen years ago. He was arrested in the late nineties, charged with second degree murder, found guilty but insane, and committed to Kirby Forensic Hospital Center. Don’t ask me how I got this, you don’t want to know. Take your time reading it, and then we’ll talk.”

  I put the notebook in my briefcase and changed the subject, but I could scarcely wait to glance over the notes. After getting home, I made myself a cup of coffee and studied the pages, which were covered in a loopy handwriting. But the text was almost unintelligible, so the next day I asked a tech-savvy I knew to scan the pages and run them through a handwriting re-composition program. The final result was an almost clean 25,000-word document, which I started reading that same evening.

  ten

  Jack Bertrand’s diary (1)

  New York, New York, December 1998

  IT ALL STARTED WITH A woman looking for a man who wasn’t me.

  But I should tell you the story from the beginning, because what I’m trying to do is to turn random, meaningless slices of reality into a story that might help you understand why I wound up in a hospital for the criminally insane, accused of a murder I didn’t commit.

  About two months ago, on October 11th, a woman called 911 to report that something seemed to be amiss with one of her neighbors. The man, named Abraham Hale, had failed to move his car from one side of the street to the other, in accordance with parking regulations, and so he’d wound up with a ticket under the wiper of his Toyota. It was something that had never happened before, the woman stressed. She’d tried to get in touch with Hale, but he hadn’t answered when she’d rung his doorbell and he wasn’t picking up the phone. She’d last seen him on Thursday afternoon.

  They lived in a pre-war four-story brownstone in Jackson Heights, Queens, near Travers Park. Ms. Jenkins worked for the DA’s office, so her call was taken seriously and twenty minutes later two patrol officers arrived at the door of apartment 8, accompanied by the super. They rang the doorbell for a couple of minutes, with no reply. Eventually, the super produced the key from his pocket and tried to open the door, but the latch chain was on, so they broke it and entered the apartment.

  A man was lying naked on the living room floor, by the couch. He was tall, slim, and his skin was bone-white. There was no congealed blood, no signs of violence or burglary. None of the things in the room seemed to have been disturbed, but the man lying on the carpet was obviously dead. An officer checked for a pulse and found none, so his colleague called the medical examiner’s office. The super confirmed that the dead man was indeed the apartment’s current tenant, Mr. Abraham Hale. The door and windows didn’t show an
y signs of forced entry, but the officers noted the presence of two glasses on the coffee table, one of them smeared with red lipstick. They waited in silence, as if the slightest noise might disturb the corpse.

  After an initial examination of the body, the assistant medical examiner established that, at a glance, there was no evidence that any criminal act had been committed, and he officially pronounced the man dead. The paramedics zipped up the body bag and drove the corpse to the morgue at Queens Hospital Center, on Jamaica Avenue.

  Neither the super nor any of the neighbors knew anything about the guy’s next of kin: he wasn’t married, didn’t have a partner, children, or any known relatives, which complicated matters, because legally it meant there was nobody to officially identify the body at the morgue. He’d moved into the building about four years previously, renting the apartment through a real-estate agency.

  The medical examiner took his fingerprints and sent them to the law enforcement agencies, but nothing came up. An autopsy was carried out, and the lab confirmed that there didn’t seem to have been any foul play. The man had died about twenty-four hours before the police found his body, and the cause of death was ingestion of a lethal cocktail of pills: antidepressants, lithium, and benzodiazepines. The guy’s body was like a mobile drug-testing lab, the coroner remarked.

  Had Hale committed suicide? It was difficult to tell for sure, but he probably hadn’t. He’d been taking pills for a good few years, so there had to be a prescription somewhere in his apartment, signed by a doctor who should be able to provide more information about his late patient. Most likely, he’d mixed up the doses, the prescriptions, or both, and it had turned out to be fatal. Could somebody have slipped him the pills, dissolving them in his drink without him noticing? Very unlikely: That volume of pills would have drastically altered the taste of any drink, strongly enough for anyone to realize, and the guy hadn’t consumed any alcohol in the forty-eight hours prior to his death, so he couldn’t have been too drunk to notice. The body revealed no signs of violence, not so much as a small contusion or scratch.