She lifted her shoulders.
“And am I supposed to feel guilty about that, Mr. Cobb? How on earth could I have known all this? I’m not sure what Joshua told you about us, but the truth is that we barely knew each other. He was just a nice and handsome young man who was courting my sister. Then the tragedy happened, he left the country, and that was that. I never heard from him again.”
In the dim light filtered through the dusty glass panels, her pale face, surrounded by tiny clouds of cigarette smoke, looked almost ghostly.
“You know, Ms. Maillot, I kept asking myself questions about Josh, trying to understand why he would have hurt your sister. I examined his possible motives, his past, and his character. What I didn’t realize until yesterday was that the story was never about him, but about you, your sister, and your father. About the Duchamps. In the real story, Josh and Abraham were just minor characters, who had nothing to do with what was really going on backstage. For you, at least, there has always been just one leading character: your stepfather. And now we come to the name I’ve mentioned, Nicolas Perrin.”
She was listening to me carefully. I imagined her sitting there, year after year, decade after decade, surrounded by her secrets and no other sound than the moaning of the wind.
“After the war,” I went on, “your stepfather was considered a hero. He was one of the few members of the local Resistance who had escaped the Gestapo’s clutches. Although he’d been tortured for weeks, he didn’t betray his comrades’ whereabouts. Or this was the official story.
“In the late forties, the French authorities began to chase Klaus Barbie, the former chief of the Gestapo here in Lyon. Finally, in seventy-one, he was identified somewhere in Peru, where he was hiding under an assumed name, Klaus Alttmann. It was a scandal, because the American secret agencies were suspected of having helped him avoid extradition in exchange for what he knew about the network of Soviet sleeper spies in France. Immediately after that, he fled to Bolivia and managed to escape again.
“Under those circumstances, the stories directly related to Klaus Barbie all of a sudden came back into the spotlight. A couple of important newspapers ran articles on that subject and your stepfather’s name was mentioned repeatedly on TV and radio. Had Barbie been extradited to France, your father would have been a key witness at the trial, because he’d been interrogated a couple of times by Barbie in person.
“Well, to cut a long story short, Barbie was finally extradited in eighty-three and sentenced to life. He died in prison in 1991. But your father never testified against him in court. Why?”
She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette, got up, and threw back her shoulders. “What do you want from me?” she asked me. Her voice had turned aggressive. “And why do you care?”
“I came here because I simply wanted to know what really happened to your sister, and because this story needs an ending. I’m now sure that neither Josh nor Abraham, despite their troubled past, had anything to do with what happened that night. It’s none of my concern whether your stepfather was a hero who withstood torture and refused to betray his comrades, or whether he was a traitor, as Perrin claimed after he saw his name all over the news.”
“Perrin was a madman, a liar, and a coward!” she exclaimed, bending toward me. She slapped her palms down on the table and a small cloud of dust rose into the air. “Before he came here and tried to blackmail my father, he’d been in jail for a hit-and-run, did you know that? He was old, desperate, and paranoid. After my father sent him away, he tried to sell his story to the press, but nobody believed him.”
“Maybe, but the authorities considered his story reliable enough to carry out a discreet inquiry, the result of which was ambiguous. Perrin had been a member of the Resistance too, and he’d been arrested by the Gestapo shortly after your stepfather. He’d been told during his interrogation that Lucas Duchamp was the one who had betrayed him. Coincidentally or not, nine members of the local Resistance’s cell had been caught after your stepfather’s imprisonment. All of them, except for Perrin, had been executed.”
“Lies …”
“Eventually, the authorities decided to drop the inquiry, because it might have been used by Klaus Barbie’s defenders and by far-right revisionists. Perrin died from a heart attack in March 1978, and so the whole affair was buried.”
Her eyes were glued to mine and her lower jaw was moving, like she was chewing gum. “What kind of man are you?” she hissed at me. “Do you have any idea what they did to him? He told me that they carved his skin and tore his nails off! I never gave a damn what that lunatic was claiming, whether it was true or not. Back in the day nobody cared anymore about what really happened during the war. There were endless discussions about who did what and to whom in those years, about who was a hero and who was a collaborator and why. It was fashionable to rewrite the entire history sitting in an armchair with a pipe in your mouth and to blame the former generation, good and bad people all together. All nonsense.”
“You got me wrong, I’m not judging him.”
She didn’t seem to hear me.
“Alright, maybe he couldn’t withstand the tortures and did what anyone would have done. But who are you to question his integrity? Do you know what it’s like being tortured? Did you experience something even close to what he went through? I don’t think so, Mr. Cobb! But I do know that he saved us and was like an angel to us.”
“Is that why you did what you did, Simone? Did you try to protect him?”
For a while she just looked at me blinking rapidly, her lips quivering. Then she sat down on her chair and asked, “Why would you call me that?”
“Because you’re Simone, not Laura, isn’t that right? One of the things that puzzled me the most was: why didn’t Lucas Duchamp do more to find out the truth about her disappearance? She might have still been alive somewhere, kidnapped, waiting for help. But after just a couple of days, when nobody could have known for sure what had happened to her, Laura left the country and went to that hospital. Your stepfather had money and power, he knew the right people, and he was a lawyer. He knew how to put pressure on the police. At the same time he’d have been able to track those boys all the way to Alaska, if he’d really wanted to. But no, he didn’t do much, did he? I carefully read the case file, Simone. Honestly, what the police did was next to nothing. And then I figured out the only pertinent answer: Lucas Duchamp didn’t do anything because he wanted to protect someone. And whose reputation and freedom could be on the line? Laura’s? No way. She’d rebelled against him, and she’d never been his favorite. Had Laura hurt Simone, Lucas Duchamp would never have helped her to get away with that. By the way, you didn’t recognize the pendant. It was a gift for your sister from Josh.”
“I recognized it,” she said. Her voice was dry. “She was wearing it that night.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“But why didn’t Josh recognize it? … He’d have realized it was Laura’s body, not yours … He told me he’d found the pendant in a drawer later on, along with Abraham’s passport.”
Suddenly, I figured out the answer. Abraham had woken up first. He’d seen the body, and arranged the crime scene in order to protect Simone. He must have realized what had really happened and that Simone had made the mistake of leaving that pendant around her sister’s neck, so he’d removed it and taken it with him.
Did he try, the next day, to set up Josh, leaving the pendant in his apartment on the Rue de Rome? Did he try to draw the attention of the police by throwing that suitcase on the street? Unlike Josh, he must have known all along that Simone didn’t die that night. It’s probably why, much later, when he was already deeply shattered by madness, he’d staged that masquerade with the actress, scraping together an imaginary world in which he and Simone were finally lovers. But then his troubled mind had turned his imaginary Elysium into a nightmare, where Josh was trying once again to take her from him.
“I was sure you did it, Simone,” I sai
d, “but I couldn’t figure out why. Initially, I thought that it must have been something connected to Josh, because you’d arranged the meeting with him that evening.”
“It had nothing to do with him or with Abraham.”
I knew she was ready to tell the truth and I didn’t want to push her harder. She lit a cigarette and just smoked for a while, absently, avoiding my gaze.
“That man, Perrin, came here on a Saturday afternoon, when Laura and I were both home,” she said. “Purely by chance, we’d come home for the weekend. Laura and I were together, looking up a book in the library, on the first floor. We heard voices coming from my father’s office, and so we eavesdropped. That man was accusing my father of being a traitor and a liar. My father never knew that we were there that afternoon. Later on, when he asked me why I did what I did, like you today, I told him that I was jealous, because Laura and I had fallen for one of those American boys. I’d have rather died than tell him that Laura was thinking of betraying him.
“I didn’t mean to hurt her. She was my little sister and I loved her. When she burst into my suite that night, crying, screaming at me, insulting me, I was afraid that the boys would wake up and hear what she was saying about our father. I asked her to leave me alone, but she attacked me. I couldn’t immobilize her hands and stop her, because she was stronger than I’d thought. I must have lost my temper, grabbed something near at hand from the nightstand, and hit her over the head. When I eventually came to my senses I found myself holding the lamp, which was covered in blood. Laura was lying on the carpet motionless, battered. I dragged her to the bathroom, undressed her, and heaved her into the tub. I tried to resuscitate her for a time, but I realized that she was dead. Despite my efforts, she had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. When I went back into the room, Abraham opened his eyes for a moment and gazed at me, apparently without even seeing me. I went into the adjoining room—the door was still open—washed myself, gathered Laura’s clothes, and left. I didn’t know that Claudette had been with her that night.”
She was crying. No grimaces or sobs, just tears trickling down her face, heavy and shiny like two minuscule creeks of molten lead. I’d desperately wished to know the true about what had happened, for reasons which I myself couldn’t entirely understand. But at that moment, when I finally got to the bottom of the story, I felt as if I’d traveled to the ends of the earth to assemble something important, only to end up collecting another person’s bad blood. What’s the point of absorbing somebody else’s nightmare, when you’ve got yours? Perhaps Josh had been right, and sometimes facts can simultaneously be true and false, because in real life there’s no such thing as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The cat gave a sudden start and left. Outside in the garden, the shadows of the apple trees traced twisted patterns between the dark puddles.
“But why did Laura come to the hotel?” I asked her. “What’s the connection to the story about your stepfather?”
She shrugged and stubbed out the cigarette.
“I didn’t care about what that man, Perrin, had insinuated, but Laura acted differently. She carried out her own research and jumped to the conclusion that Perrin was telling the truth: our father had been a traitor. We argued for days. I tried to convince her that she was wrong: If our father were a traitor, the Nazis wouldn’t have deported his parents, who had died in a concentration camp. But she wouldn’t listen to me, and her so-called arguments against our father were totally irrational. I never knew whether she really believed them or she was just trying to punish our father because I had always been his favorite and not her.
“That was in May. Shortly after that, in the summer, we met Abraham and Joshua, and she came up with a bizarre plan. I don’t know if she really liked Joshua or just wanted to leave the country. She had had this fantasy about America since childhood. My father is a good person, Mr. Cobb. He never did anything to hurt us, despite the rumors spread by mean people. He was just overprotective, worried that something bad could happen to us, probably because he’d lost his family during the war and was afraid that it could happen again. I understood and accepted it, but Laura didn’t. That summer, as I told you, she came up with the crazy idea that Joshua should help her and take her with him to New York, at all costs, because she could no longer bear our father’s behavior, and if she’d stayed in France, he’d have never left her alone. So she wanted to go abroad, to a place where he couldn’t have tracked her down. Joshua was rich, so he could help her.
“In short, she blackmailed me: if I didn’t convince Joshua to help her, she’d reveal the whole story to the press. It was a lousy plan, of course. I told her that Joshua intended to stay in Paris for a while, but she didn’t care: I had to convince him to take her to the States, or everything would go in the newspapers. So I lied to her and I arranged that meeting at the hotel with Joshua. I was trying to buy time, pretending that I was going to convince him to help her. But Abraham had followed me and showed up there uninvited. He and Joshua got drunk and started arguing, as usual. I had no idea that Laura was in the next room, trying to make sure that I’d fulfil my promise. At one point, after she realized that I had no intention of talking to Joshua about her so-called plan, she burst inside. You know the rest.”
“Was it your stepfather or Abraham who removed her body the next day?”
“I don’t know and I didn’t want to know. I called my father from a payphone and told him I was in trouble. He came by car, rented a room for me in his name at another hotel, and instructed me to stay there and wait for him. He returned the following day, in the evening, and gave me Laura’s passport, some cash, and a one-way ticket to Switzerland. The next day, at the airport, while I was waiting for my flight, I saw Joshua sitting at a table in a café. For a moment I wanted to go over there and tell him everything, but then he walked away and vanished into the crowd.”
“Are you sure it was him?”
“Of course I’m sure. It was the last time I ever saw him.”
“What happened to Laura’s body?”
“I don’t know. We never discussed it. My father handled the matter, that’s all I know.”
“He handled the matter … Isn’t that what he did all his life? He handled the matters and cleaned up the trash.”
We got up and left the sunhouse. She clutched her coat around her body and asked me, “Why did you really come here, Mr. Cobb?”
“I wanted to know the truth. The truth Josh never knew. It could have set him free.”
“Truth is a very heavy word. You know what it’s like when you have a nightmare, wake up, and then you see details and images from your bad dream in reality? After a while, you can no longer tell the difference between what you dreamed and real life.”
“I know what you mean.”
“No, you don’t, you just think you do. I’m not even sure whether I truly remember what really happened or whether my memories are just snatches of bad dreams.”
A soft breeze ruffled her hair. I thought about Lucas Duchamp in his wheelchair, trapped inside that house with her like they were two prehistoric insects in the same lump of amber.
We were close to the main entrance. She took a deep breath, tossed her chin toward the mansion, and said, “This place hasn’t been a shelter. I had to lock myself up and throw away the key. I’ve lived like a ghost almost my entire life. After I came back from Switzerland, I stayed locked away in my room for over three years. Can you imagine what it’s like? My mother was eaten alive by what happened and never really forgave me … I’ve had my share of punishment, you can be sure of that. But I’m glad I’ve been able to look after my father. It wouldn’t have been fair if a man like him had ended his life in an old people’s home, surrounded by strangers.”
“Have you never been interested in knowing the truth about him?”
“I’ve always known the truth about him, Mr. Cobb. What happens now?”
“Nothing. I guess everybody’s had enough.”
; “Are you going to talk to the police?”
“I don’t work for the police.”
“So everything ends here?”
“No, I don’t think so. Things like that never really end. But I fulfilled my promise.”
I don’t know how long we kept talking for. At one point, I went back inside, took my parka and my briefcase, said goodbye to her, and set off on foot. She remained standing by the entrance, frozen. In the faint light of the noon sun, she looked like a broken toy.
I was in the middle of nowhere, so I walked for around twenty minutes along the cobbled road before I came to a gas station from where I called a cab. It started raining and the sky darkened. That story hung round my neck like a millstone.
I remembered the dog choosing one of her puppies in the ring of fire. And I imagined old wheelchair-bound Lucas Duchamp, who was still strong and able at the time, listening to his precious stepdaughter, and deciding to do what he had to do, because all he wanted was to save his favorite.
We all have to make choices and live with the consequences for the rest of our lives. Josh had chosen to run away in order to survive, because he was too young to know that surviving and living aren’t the same thing, and that there are no walls thick enough and locks strong enough to protect you from your own consciousness.
I recalled too the moment when an unknown voice told me on the phone what had happened to Julie. “Dr. Cobb? Good morning, sir, sorry for disturbing you, it’s about one of your former patients …” and I instantly knew that it was about her and that what I was about to hear over the next few seconds would break my heart forever.
They say that time heals. They’re wrong. When something truly bad happens to you, time just splits into two different streams. In one of them, you go on living, at least apparently. But in the other one, there’s only that moment, crashing down on you over and over again.
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