His words hung in the air while Morel and Lila glanced at each other and at Anne Dufour, whose face looked like it might crack from the tightness of her smile. Jacques Dufour gave his wife a perfunctory kiss and strode out the door with a wave. They heard the sound of the car engine and tyres on gravel as he pulled out of the driveway.
Upstairs, the sound of the crying child had stopped. There was instead the sound of a vacuum-cleaner being moved across the floor. Anne Dufour looked at her hands.
‘How old are the children?’ Morel asked.
She looked up and her eyes flitted over his face, as though struggling to remember what he was doing here.
‘The youngest is five. The older boy is fourteen. He’s at boarding school.’ She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Jacques isn’t his father.’
‘Madame Dufour,’ Morel said. ‘Would you sit down and tell us about your mother-in-law. The sort of woman she was. Whether she had many friends, whether she went out much, whether she was religious at all.’
Anne Dufour continued to smile. Morel realized he was smiling too, the same insincere widening of the lips. He stopped.
‘I don’t know if she had any friends,’ she said finally. ‘I only know she got very little from her family.’
‘Were there any problems?’ Morel asked.
Anne Dufour looked at Morel properly then. ‘Problems? I suppose it depends what you define as a problem. I mean, these things are relative, aren’t they?’
‘When did you see or speak to her last, Madame Dufour?’ Morel asked.
The reply came without hesitation. ‘It was two days before she died.’
Anne Dufour smiled. This time the smile was both sad and genuine.
‘She told me on the phone that she was happy, that she hadn’t felt so good in years. She sounded cheerful, optimistic.’
‘Any idea why that was?’ Lila asked.
Anne Morel wiped a tear from her face.
‘I didn’t ask,’ she said.
SIX
He knows the neighbourhood well. He comes here each Saturday when the boys are playing soccer, sits on the sidelines with the other dads and mums. Pretends he is here with his kid too. Cheers, but not too loudly. Wouldn’t want anyone to get too friendly, to start asking, which one is yours? It happened to him once before and he pointed his chin towards the playing field, keeping his arms crossed against his chest. He thought he saw the woman look at him a little more carefully than she should after that.
It freaked him out. Not that he’s doing anything wrong, it’s just an innocent game he likes to play. He sits there and makes himself believe he is a father watching his son kick a ball on a football pitch. Him and César. Only César isn’t there, he doesn’t take him to the soccer grounds and he knows what people would think if they realized he was on his own.
Now he turns up at a different field, at the other end of the city. Here the parents seem less concerned with chatting. No one’s bringing back coffees for everyone or walking expensive dogs on leashes around the pitch. There are no long-legged, smooth-complexioned girls standing on the field looking bored while the fathers try their best to look as if they don’t see the unattainable future in their daughters’ sleek limbs.
He is not interested in the girls but they are fascinating, in a way. To be so certain that you own the future, that the world will flatter and reward you. Looking at these girls, it seems to him that attitude is all you need. The rest just follows. Someone should have told him that back then.
César too is slender. He has the same refined looks that can’t be bought. He could be one of them if it weren’t for the weakness in his leg. And then there is his muteness. He cannot speak, has no means to defend himself or tell people his story.
Armand doesn’t know the full story but he has lain awake at night trying to block the images. The cold, bleak building where he first met César. Rows of tightly packed beds. The still, malnourished bodies of small children. Lying on their backs or curled up for days on end because no one has the time or the heart to pick them up. And the smell! The first time he’d walked into the room, he’d gagged.
Armand knows what it’s like to have a broken heart, but he cannot begin to imagine what César has borne. There is a point at which numbness overtakes pain, which is where César is at, he thinks. How else can you live?
Sometimes he thinks about what will happen to César if he dies. César is not his real name, but he thought it a kindness to give it to him. What better way to wipe out the past and get a fresh start than to take an emperor’s name? They had picked it together, that first year of their new life together.
‘César,’ Armand had said. ‘Emperor of the Romans.’ The boy had smiled then, for the first time.
God is on their side, Armand thinks. So many people think this means something big and obvious, but it doesn’t. Armand sees it as a constellation of stars that brightens a corner of your life, the way a torch will form a tidy circle of light in the dark.
SEVEN
After they’d interviewed the Dufours, Morel dropped Lila back at the office to brief the rest of the team.
‘Where are you off to?’ she asked.
‘Going to see a friend of mine who might be able to help us with the pamphlet,’ Morel said.
He had intended to drive straight to Nanterre but instead Morel took a detour by Neuilly, thinking he might drop in at home and check on his father. He’d left early to avoid having breakfast with him, but he felt uneasy. His father was becoming more solitary, withdrawing further into his books. He wondered whether the old man was all right.
It was a broody, restless sort of day. On Avenue de Neuilly, a woman who looked a lot like Solange stepped out of a caterer’s carrying a large box tied with a ribbon. A traffic warden was walking the streets, avoiding eye contact. It looked like it might rain. Morel hoped it would, just to clear the air.
He parked outside his house and got out. Just then his phone rang. It was Adèle, asking whether they could meet up.
‘When?’
‘Now, if you can.’
‘Now is a bit difficult.’ It amazed him, the way his sisters believed he could drop everything whenever they wanted to see him. He wondered what it was about this time. Not a week went by without one or the other calling about something they thought was essential for him to know. Except that lately Maly hadn’t been calling at all.
‘Then when? It’s important.’
He named a cafe near the Pont-Neuf Métro station, and told her to meet him there at one.
After he hung up, he let himself into the house. In the hallway he ran into Augustine. She greeted him with a kiss on both cheeks.
‘Is my father here?’ Morel asked.
She shook her head. ‘He went out half an hour ago.’
‘How did he look?’
‘Same as always. Like a gentleman.’
Morel smiled. Augustine searched his face.
‘Is something the matter?’
He reached out and touched her arm.
‘No, nothing at all. I’d better go, I have a meeting.’
At Nanterre University it took him a while to find the building he was looking for. The place was like a rabbit warren. When he finally found the right door, he knocked. Before Morel knew it, he was wrapped in a hug that left him momentarily deprived of oxygen.
Morel stood back and looked at his old university buddy. He was as big and unkempt as ever. His hair was longer and he wore a beard now, making him look even more like a playful and vigorous Old English Sheepdog. ‘Well, well,’ the man said, ‘this is quite a treat.’ He patted Morel on the back and invited him to sit down. Morel looked around him. The office was tiny and chaotic. He wondered how his friend managed to manoeuvre his way around the place without upsetting the many books and piles of paper. It would require some delicate footwork. That was hard to picture.
‘There’s public education for you,’ Chesnay said, reading his mind. ‘Everything done on the cheap.�
�� He raised a meaty forefinger. ‘Shitty digs, shitty classrooms. What does that equal? Grumpy lecturers doing a half-arsed job. Everyone has a right to an education though, just as long as they don’t expect a decent one as well.’
His voice was deep and sonorous. Morel imagined he would have no trouble holding his students’ attention.
‘How have you been, Paul?’ He asked. The two had been on the same mathematics course at university before both realizing they wanted to do something different. Morel hadn’t contacted his friend in years.
‘Busy and thriving.’ Chesnay gave Morel a keen look filled with the curiosity Morel had always loved him for, and sat back with his hands folded on his stomach. ‘So tell me,’ he said, ‘how a humble professor of theology such as myself can be of assistance to an eminent commandant of the brigade criminelle.’
Morel pulled the pamphlet from his pocket and placed it on the desk before him. ‘I’d like to know what you think of this.’
Chesnay peered at the pamphlet before putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.
‘My sight isn’t quite what it used to be,’ he said.
‘I bet the girls love the glasses, though.’
‘Yes, I finally look like an academic,’ Chesnay said.
He spent the next few minutes reading through the brochure in silence. Morel looked around the room. Despite being tiny it was comfortable. It was a place that would make you forget the outside world. Morel couldn’t remember if Chesnay was married.
‘Any idea what sort of church would put out something like that?’ he asked finally.
‘It’s a hodge-podge of things, isn’t it?’ Chesnay said slowly. ‘A bit of this, a bit of that. At times, the language is reminiscent of the sort of evangelical material you might expect, say, a Baptist church to circulate. For example, where it says: Are you born again? Have you accepted the shed blood of Christ as the atonement for your sins? But then there’s this’ – he pointed to an illustration – ‘which is very Russian and one of the leading symbols of the Orthodox Church.’
‘What is it?’
‘A copy of Andrey Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity. It depicts the three angels visiting Abraham.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of Rublev,’ Morel said.
‘Andrey Rublev is perhaps Russia’s most famous iconographer. Late fourteenth-early fifteenth century. The Moscow Patriarchate made a big deal about him in the 1980s – all part of the Gorbachev-led revival, perestroika and glasnost etc. When all was forgiven and God was no longer considered a pariah.’
‘Russia?’ Morel thought about Irina Volkoff. She had said she thought the boy at her door was Russian.
‘Yes. After the collapse of the USSR, and without the safety net afforded by the Soviet state in areas like housing, health and education, people found themselves struggling, particularly the older generation. Many Russians started looking for something to fill the void left by the fall of communism. Religion was the obvious answer, but the Russian Orthodox Church, as you may already know, was discredited during Soviet times; people believed the Church was in cahoots with the Soviet regime, which of course it was. So many Russians turned to other religions.’
‘What kind?’
Paul Chesnay rested his hands on his stomach and looked at Morel.
‘Everything – you name it. Hare Krishnas, Moonies, Mormons. Some have been more successful than others. As it happens, the evangelical churches have done particularly well over there. Nowadays you’ll find, for example, that roughly half of all Baptists in Europe are Russian. It is astonishing in a way, when you consider how different these evangelical religions are to the austere formality of the Orthodox Church. Then again, maybe the very reason they have attracted so many people is because their characteristics are so far from the old-school rituals. When Billy Graham visited Moscow in 1992, just a year or so after the break-up of the Soviet Union, he made quite a splash.’
Morel tried to picture the American pastor on his Russian pilgrimage, anointing a congregation of new converts. It had a touch of the surreal, though it could be said that America had always exported its beliefs in some form or another. Politics or religion, it was a fine line that separated the two as far as that country was concerned.
‘Is any of that useful to you?’ Chesnay asked.
‘Everything you’ve said is interesting and helps, in a sense. In some ways, though, it doesn’t make my job any easier,’ Morel admitted. ‘I can’t work out where I should be looking.’
Chesnay took off his glasses and pinched his nose. ‘All I can say is that it’s unlikely to have come from an established organization. It’s not coherent at all. I’d say it’s the work of an individual on a personal crusade. Incidentally,’ Chesnay continued, ‘I notice your guy keeps coming back to the word “crusade”. Now there’s a word that crops up often among Baptists, particularly your modern-day Southern Baptists. Including the illustrious Billy Graham,’ he said, articulating the word illustrious with exaggerated emphasis.
‘In what sense?’ Morel asked.
‘Graham called his evangelizing sessions crusades, after the medieval Christian campaigns to conquer Jerusalem. Like I said, these are people who see themselves as crusaders for truth, seeking to redeem a new Holy Land.’
Morel was wondering what any of this had to do with his case. ‘So you think my evangelist could be one of these crusaders?’
Chesnay stood up and paced the narrow area behind his desk. He cut a ludicrous figure, like a bear trying to pace inside a phone booth.
‘Could be, could be. He’s definitely on a mission. Though what he’s preaching is hard to tell. Going by what’s in here –’ he tapped the pamphlet with his hand, ‘he’s pretty confused. And he’s not acting on anyone’s behalf. Organizations that are trying to draw people in usually have some sort of contact details on their brochures. This one has no number, website or email – nothing.’
‘I noticed that too,’ Morel said. ‘So why distribute something like this at all, if no one can come back to you? What would someone get out of it?’
‘Maybe they genuinely believe they are spreading the word of God.’
‘Saving souls.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe he’s trying to save himself.’
EIGHT
Morel got back to Quai des Orfèvres at 12.30 and parked the car. From the office he walked towards the Pont-Neuf, past the bronze equestrian statue of Henry IV, one of France’s most popular kings before he was killed by a fanatical Catholic at the age of fifty-six. His popularity had stemmed from the novel fact that he seemed genuinely interested in the welfare of his subjects. Even more untypical at the time was the monarch’s religious tolerance. Maybe someone like Henry IV would be better suited as France’s ruler in 2010 than Sarkozy, Morel reflected. Tolerance was not high on this government’s agenda.
Henry IV was getting a fair bit of media coverage this week following the announcement that a forensic examiner with Poincaré University Hospital in Garches had identified the king’s mummified head, thus solving a 400-year-old mystery. The head had vanished in 1793, presumed taken by robbers during an attack on graves at the Royal Basilica.
Leaving Henry IV behind, Morel thought back to his conversation with Paul Chesnay. He thought about Russia and the New Age missionaries who were flocking there. His conversation with Paul had been stimulating, as always, but did it have anything to do with Dufour’s death? Morel felt like a man without a compass. He had no idea which direction he needed to take.
Adèle was at a table drinking coffee when he got there. She smiled when he walked in.
‘Thanks for agreeing to see me,’ she said. Of Morel’s two sisters she resembled him the more. They had both inherited their father’s height and their mother’s dusky looks – her thick black hair and smooth complexion.
Adèle stirred her coffee and crossed her legs. She wore a red strapless dress that fell to just above her ankles. Black sandals and crimson toenails. Hair worn loose around her
shoulders. The dress clung to her body, drawing stares.
‘What is it? Has something happened?’ He caught the waiter’s eye and called him over. He ordered a coffee. Tables were set up outside on the cobbled footpath. Morel watched the smokers sitting at the outdoor tables and wished he were among them.
‘It’s Maly. Karl has asked her to marry him.’
‘And?’ Morel said. Already he was beginning to wonder why he’d agreed to this meeting in the middle of a busy day. He didn’t have time to discuss his sisters’ love lives.
‘She said yes.’
‘Did she now?’ He looked at his sister. ‘That’s great.’
‘Is it?’
‘I think so. Karl’s a nice guy.’
‘You don’t know a thing about him.’
‘Do you?’
‘I know he’s dull.’
‘What has that got to do with you?’ Morel said.
‘She’s not happy. I think she’s going through with this because she’s getting on and worries that otherwise she’ll miss the boat.’
‘What boat?’
‘The baby boat.’
Morel sighed and looked at his watch. ‘I really can’t discuss this now. I have to get back to work,’ he said.
‘Will you talk to her?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Nothing! Just see how she is.’
‘Sure, I’ll give her a ring,’ Morel said. He didn’t tell Adèle that he’d already tried several times and left messages. Maly wasn’t returning his calls.
‘Thank you.’ She seemed to relax, and she looked at him now, while he fished in his pocket for change to pay for their drinks. ‘What about you? How’s life at home with Dad?’
Morel counted out the coins and left them on the table. ‘It’s fine. He’s a bit difficult at times.’
Adèle snorted. ‘A bit! I don’t know how you can stand it.’
Morel leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘I have to go.’
The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) Page 6