Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  “I’m actually a psychiatrist.”

  “Well, then you’re probably not very good at your job, given that you’re rash enough to get mixed up in all this. I remember that Laura had become increasingly pensive and upset during that period of time, after she’d met those boys. It was clear to me that she was anxious about something, probably related to those Americans, something that had nothing to do with love and romance. I think Abraham and Fleischer were involved in something dark and dangerous, but I never found out what. And then Simone disappeared and she ended up in the hospital.”

  “There’s something else I’d like to ask you, Ms. Morel. Do you known by any chance if Mr. Duchamp mentioned Joshua and Abraham to the French police at the time? It looks like you suspected them of being involved in Simone’s disappearance and you probably weren’t the only one who thought that way. What I don’t understand is why the French police didn’t even attempt to question them.”

  “I don’t know what the Duchamps told the police, I’m sorry. As for me, nobody ever asked me anything.”

  Her mood had gradually changed and I realized that she was getting increasingly nervous. It was becoming harder and harder for her to speak clearly.

  “Ms. Morel, I’m truly intrigued by this story. You’d be doing me a huge favor if you agreed to meet with me and talk about the matter. I might be coming to Paris next week and—”

  “But you said you’re a doctor.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t you have patients and deadlines? How can you just abandon everything and leave? That doesn’t sound very normal to me, I’m afraid.”

  “I have to be in Paris for some other business, and I’d really like to meet you,” I lied.

  “Your name is James Cobb. C-o-b-b, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  I heard the sound of paper rustling.

  “It’s two p.m. here,” she said. “I’d like for us to speak on the phone tomorrow, at the same time. I have to consult my schedule,” she emphasized self-importantly, before hanging up.

  That evening I found a message from Elisabeth Gregory in my inbox.

  Dear Dr. Cobb,

  Your message awakened painful memories for me, memories I’d long since buried away. I’ve heard a lot about you and I appreciate your work, so I’m sure that you must have a strong enough reason to be interested in things that happened so long ago.

  I rarely leave the house, so I’d like to invite you to visit me, whenever is convenient for you. We’ll talk more when you come.

  All the best,

  Elisabeth

  I replied that I could visit her the next day and gave her my cellphone number. She texted me back right away—she would be expecting me at eleven a.m.

  seventeen

  ELISABETH GREGORY LIVED in Bradford Estates, a neighborhood of detached, single family homes, built back in the mid-eighties not far from Princeton Junction. There were about three dozen houses and condos spread around a golf course with a small lake in the middle.

  The house itself was a two-story home, with a white façade and a large porch. To the right there was a pond, and on the left there was a garage, in front of which I parked my car. I got out of the car and took in the surroundings.

  The property looked as if it had been put on the market the day before, and every single thing seemed to be precisely in its place. The façade had recently been repainted and the water in the pond, despite the weather, was crystal clear. I had the feeling that I was looking at a gigantic version of a dollhouse, abandoned in the middle of the field by a bored, giant toddler, who was now hiding somewhere.

  I climbed the steps of the porch and glimpsed an outline at one of the ground-floor windows. Mrs. Gregory opened the door before I could ring the bell.

  She was very tall, and despite her age you could tell that she’d once been a rare beauty. Her white hair was held back with a black headband. She wore a Fair Isle sweater and a pair of faded jeans.

  I greeted her and she invited me inside.

  “You look younger and thinner than you do on TV,” she said and smiled.

  She closed the door and led me down a passageway covered in framed black-and-white photographs. We entered a spacious living room. The interior gave you the same impression as the exterior—immaculate; each object seemed to have been placed there after long and careful thought. The scent of coffee mingled with smart air freshener and discreet perfume. The chirping of the birds and the faint hiss of an occasional passing car on Vincent Drive were the only sounds that made their way through the windows.

  “If you haven’t had breakfast yet I can offer you some wonderful croissants,” she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the kitchen. “They’re fresh, I bought them this morning.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  On the table there was a tray with a pot and two china cups and saucers. She poured the coffee and placed one of the cups in front of me. Her gestures were those of a person still firmly in control of her body, calm and measured.

  “How did you find out about me, Dr. Cobb? Why did you ask Tom to get you my address?”

  “As I wrote in my email, Mr. Fleischer mentioned your name in connection with a man called Abraham Hale. He told me that it was thanks to you that Mr. Hale got a job offer from the foundation in France in his senior year at university. Actually, I’m trying to find out more about their time as students, I thought that you might be able to provide me with some details.”

  “I see … Did Fleischer tell you anything else?”

  “No. Only that Mr. Hale was your protégé.”

  “I understand ... Is your curiosity strictly professional?”

  “To be honest, there’s more to it than that. But it would be very complicated if you asked me to be more specific.”

  “No, I don’t intend to ask you. I only want to assure myself that anything I tell you will never be made public. I hope that your interest doesn’t tend in that direction.”

  “Nothing of the sort, Mrs. Gregory. It’s purely personal and won’t end up in a magazine or a book. You have my word on that. In any case, Mr. Fleischer imposed a similar condition.”

  “I’m not surprised … How about you tell me how Joshua Fleischer came to be your patient?”

  As we drank our coffees, I told her about how Josh had contacted me, without going into too many details, and about Abraham Hale’s diary, but I avoided telling her that before he’d been committed to the hospital, Hale had become a murderer.

  She listened to me carefully, without taking her eyes off mine. When I finished my story, she asked, “Both Abe and Joshua are gone now, Dr. Cobb … Then why is something that happened so long ago so important to you?”

  “You’re quite right to ask me that … Well, what I haven’t told you yet is that Mr. Fleischer believed that he or Mr. Hale committed something terrible in Paris. In the meantime I’ve discovered that events may not have transpired in the way he remembered, but what I’m trying to do now is to discover why he created such a false memory.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Sure. What we call memory isn’t a video camera recording the reality around us, and preserving it as such, unaltered. Distortions occur during the recording process. Other distortions intervene over the course of time, as our perception of things changes. According to research, as much as eighty percent of our recollections are more or less false.”

  “Has that terrible thing got anything to do with a woman?”

  “Yes, with a young French woman he and Mr. Hale met in Paris, in the summer of the year they graduated. Her name was Simone Duchamp and she went missing in the fall of seventy-six.”

  “Then it may be that I have an explanation, Dr. Cobb. I have strong reasons to believe that shortly before they graduated, Fleischer was guilty of another terrible deed. Except that Abe covered for him. It had something to do with an inheritance, if I’m not mistaken. Perhaps Abe did the same thin
g in Paris.”

  She held her spine very straight, not touching the back of the armchair she was sitting in. She stared into empty space for a time, and then got up and went to a sideboard. She opened the top drawer, searched for a few moments, and then removed a photo. She came back to the coffee table and handed me the photo without a word.

  It was quite blurred, having been taken with a cheap Polaroid, and the colors were distorted, but I was able to recognize my host as a young woman, with the body of a goddess, arm in arm with a tall, thin young man wearing a black shirt and a pair of jeans. He was flashing a peace sign at the camera and smiling. They were standing in front of a tall rose bush and in the distance I could see what appeared to be a church spire. I looked at the back of the photo. In the bottom left it was dated June 14, 1976.

  “The year Mr. Fleischer and Mr. Hale graduated from college,” I observed.

  She nodded. “It’s the only photograph of us together. And you’re the first person I’ve ever shown it to.”

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Gregory, but did you have a relationship with Mr. Hale? Mr. Fleischer told me some of it, but he didn’t seem very au fait with the details.”

  “He was very au fait with the details, believe me,” she said, “sufficiently to blackmail us. This is how it happened …”

  She leaned back in the armchair and closed her eyes, as if it were easier for her to tell her story without looking at me.

  “I met Abe after his sophomore year at Princeton, during an internship at my company. He was astonishingly intelligent, shy, and very handsome. For his age, he’d already read enormously. He was far more capable than the other students, and it was difficult not to notice him. Now you told me he was mad. With all due respect, I don’t think so, Dr. Cobb. The Abe I knew was the kindest person in the world.

  “I had a private talk with him and asked him whether he intended to embark upon an academic career. He confessed that he wanted nothing else. I became a kind of mentor to him, if you like, without having any other intentions.

  “The situation remained unchanged until the end of the year. That summer, he lost his scholarship. For months, he’d been very depressed. He was finding it difficult to concentrate, he had all but given up his studies, and for days on end he didn’t even leave the house.”

  “Don’t you think that what you describe might have been the onset of his illness, Mrs. Gregory?”

  “No, I don’t think so, because despite his chronic sadness, he was completely rational. But he didn’t get along with his father at all—his mother had died when he was just a child—and he was terrified of the prospect of not finding work here and having to go back to his hometown, to a community where he’d always felt like a stranger. His exam results had been disastrous and, as I said, he lost his scholarship.

  “I arranged for him to work for my company again over the summer. I didn’t take a summer vacation that year, so we saw each other more often. That’s when our relationship began. I didn’t feel pity for him, don’t get me wrong. I had quite simply fallen in love with him. I think I fell in love with him the first day we met. I was still married merely because I didn’t believe in divorce, but my husband, Matt, lived in New York City and I barely ever saw him. He was a notorious womanizer, who in his day had dreamed of becoming a new Arthur Miller, but ended up a tedious drunk, like all alcoholics.”

  She stood up and opened one of the windows wide. A wave of cold air flooded the room.

  “Every spring since I first moved into this place I intend to build a pool and to do all kinds of other things,” she said, returning to the coffee table and sitting in the armchair. “And every fall I realize I haven’t done anything. Time has a completely different dimension when you’re growing old. You probably know lots of things about the relativity of what we call hours, days, and years, don’t you, Dr. Cobb?

  “Anyway, I don’t want to go into details about my relationship with Abe, because it isn’t relevant to our discussion. I will merely say that I discovered a young man more wonderful than I ever thought could exist. All the people we hate seem to resemble each other, but the people we love are always different from one another.

  “Before I got married I’d never had even so much as a boyfriend, and for me men meant my father—whom I’d adored and who died when I was twenty-one—and Matt, my husband—an arrogant and heartless hypocrite, with whom I’d nevertheless been in love for a few years. Abe was different from them both. He had neither the strength I’d sensed in my father nor the huge talent my husband later drowned in alcohol. But he had something else: an almost infinite tenderness, an angelic gentleness, and a delicacy that I’d previously thought only women were capable of.

  “But then two things happened: Abe met Fleischer, who moved into the same house as him. And my husband caught us together one night. Our relationship was destroyed.”

  She made no gestures as she spoke, and her tone was even, almost monotonous. I’d noticed the pupils of her eyes when she opened the door for me, and I wondered what kind of pills she was on.

  “That night was the first night I asked Abe to stay over. We’d gone to my house so that I could change my clothes before going to the motel, and suddenly I asked myself why we had to do that, when we had a house at our disposal, my house. The neighbors across the street were away for the weekend, so there was nobody to see us. I lived in Port Hertford at the time. It was the most unfortunate idea I’ve ever had.

  “Matt had his own key and we didn’t even hear him come in. He climbed the stairs into the bedroom and saw us in bed. We were both asleep and he didn’t wake us. He left me a note in the living room saying that he was at a nearby motel. He called the next day and asked me to come and meet him.

  “He asked me who Abe was and how I’d met him. He used vulgar language, he accused me of all the ills in the world, said that if I didn’t break off the relationship he’d destroy me. I wasn’t afraid of him—physically, I mean. I knew he was nothing but a coward with a big mouth, but I was afraid of a scandal. So Abe and I agreed not to be seen together in public for a while, until Matt grew bored of playing the wronged husband and cleared off.

  “That was when Fleischer made his appearance. Abe enthusiastically introduced me to him almost immediately after they met.

  “Up until then Abe hadn’t told me about any close friends, only about casual acquaintances. But he seemed fascinated with Fleischer. I could partly understand why—he was very attractive, well dressed, and highly cultivated, a real club panther, as they used to call them back then, self-confident and charming. I knew his type well, because I was born and raised in New York. I knew that behind the glittering exterior there was usually a perverted soul and a mind stuffed with fashionable clichés. But for Abe it was something new to be accepted into the entourage of such a king of the jungle.

  “Fleischer had inherited a large fortune and had useful connections in every field. Although they were the same age, he treated Abe like a little brother, with a condescendence that I’d have found insulting. But at the same time it was obvious he cared about Abe a lot.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Fleischer made a good impression, he was cultivated, and most of the time he was cheerful and relaxed. But behind the appearance you sensed something dark and dangerous, even if you couldn’t put your finger on what exactly. Maybe it was the feeling that under certain circumstances, he could do you a lot of harm. There are certain people who are incapable of doing any harm, physically I mean, even if their life were in danger, just as others are capable of the darkest cruelty in certain circumstances. Joshua was like a beautiful house, which you can walk around with pleasure, but where you’d inevitably reach a locked room and quickly realize that it’s somewhere you should never set foot.

  “But I think that Abe was too young and too tired of being alone to realize all that. And then the scandal came.

  “Abe and I had spent the evening together, at the motel I told you about. After what happened with my husband, we avoided spendin
g the night together at my house. I’d gone home, ready for a long and absurd phone conversation with Matt, who was in the habit of calling every evening, usually very late. If I took the phone off the hook or didn’t answer, he’d come to New Jersey spoiling for a fight, so I preferred to answer and put up with his drunken rants.

  “He always began with the same words, which were, We need to have a serious talk. As if during our previous talks, which had lasted for hours, we hadn’t talked seriously and had only been chatting to pass the time.

  “Each time he called he’d be drunk, but the first few minutes of the conversation would go relatively normally. After that, no matter what I said, he’d start to reproach me. Our life together, he claimed, would have been like a paradise if I hadn’t committed a series of mistakes and if I hadn’t done a number of things that sprang from my innate badness. I’d probably been cheating on him all along, with every man that crossed my path. And lately I’d descended so low that I was getting it on—he loved expressions like that—with young students, like a horny bitch. He’d bring up the few male friends we’d had as a couple and interrogate me about my supposedly adulterous relations with each of them.

  “That evening—it must have been past midnight—I heard the doorbell ring just as I was trying to bring a ‘conversation’ to a close, in fact one of his rambling, incoherent monologues that had gone much more badly than usual.

  “It took me another ten minutes to get rid of him, and I went to the front door. It was Abe. I invited him to come in, and he told me that a young woman named Lucy had accused Fleischer of raping her. In the meantime, the phone kept ringing and I was sure it was Matt. I asked Abe to wait while I answered. It took another hour before I could get him off the line, and in the meantime Abe kept pacing up and down, signaling at me desperately every minute.

  “In short, he was asking me to provide Fleischer with an alibi, for us to make a statement that he’d been with us at the time of the alleged rape. I refused.

  “He told me that he knew for sure where Fleischer had been at the time—absolutely not at home, where the so-called victim claimed the rape had taken place—but he couldn’t tell anybody, not even me, where exactly he’d been or who his friend had been with. So he knew Fleischer wasn’t guilty and that the whole thing must be a setup or a mistake.