The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  Beatrice, who was parked on the bench with a glass of sherry in her hand, shook her head regretfully. “I was completely in shock from what I’d heard. I couldn’t believe it. Part of me was skeptical. I thought, Franca is either drunk or crazy. What she was saying sounded so absurd. By the time I got back to the table, Julien was already about to go. He was in a hurry.”

  “Of course he was in a hurry,” said Alan. “Because he wanted to get to his buddies in Perelle Bay. But strangely, he never showed up. As if he’d known.”

  “When I got there,” said Beatrice, “the place was teeming with police. He probably saw that and turned around. Julien isn’t just going to run wide-eyed into his own undoing!”

  “It makes me angry that he escaped,” Alan wouldn’t let it go. “He’s one of the criminals, and he should have had to go to prison along with the rest of them.”

  Beatrice said nothing in reply, she just took a sip of her sherry. Franca, who had just walked outside and heard these last few words, gave Beatrice a piercing look. Beatrice returned the look with utter nonchalance. Franca gave an almost imperceptible nod: she had understood, and would keep her judgment to herself.

  They had all had to go through hours of police questioning. Especially Alan, who had witnessed Kevin being shot. They had taken him into the greenhouse and held him hostage there, barricading themselves in.

  He still could not believe he was still alive. When he was lying in the grass he had been convinced that Gérard was going to shoot him. There didn’t seem to be any reason why he wouldn’t. But then he had heard Gérard saying to the others: “The girl’s calling the cops, you can count on it. We’re not getting out of here. Let’s go, get him into the greenhouse!”

  Strong arms had grabbed hold of him and set him on his feet. He’d almost lost consciousness from the agony. Bolts of pain from his foot shot through his body like deadly poison. The way to the greenhouse felt endless, it was a torture unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. Once inside, he collapsed between a planter with a few wilted African violets and a large wicker basket filled with flower bulbs. He gasped for breath and made an effort to think of something other than the throbbing pain in his leg. He looked at Kevin, but Kevin looked away. The men conferred quietly, he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  Everything that happened after that he experienced as if through a fog. The pain had lain on top of him, it had grabbed hold of him. At some point he came to understand that the police were outside, and then that reinforcements were on the way. By then the gangsters had announced they had a hostage. Strangely, it took him a long while to realize they were talking about him.

  He didn’t know how much time had passed. Later he learned that the whole drama had lasted a little over two hours. For him, it could have been days. The pain completely filled him: his body, but also his mind, his soul, his every emotion. There was nothing beyond the pain. Nothing else mattered. All he wanted was for the hammering in his foot and in his leg to stop.

  How did it happen that, all of a sudden, a shot was fired? Later, the police wanted to know exactly that, and he wracked his brain trying to give a report of what happened that was close to the truth. He had lain there, between the African violets and the bulbs, had felt the thrum of pain in his head. He kept his eyes shut, had closed himself off in his fear and despair. One of the men’s voices pierced through, maybe because it suddenly sounded so shrill and stirred up.

  “They’re coming in! God damn it! The cops are coming in!”

  “Ok,” said Gérard, “so now we tell them we’re gonna plug the hostage. If that’s what they want, let ‘em go ahead and come on closer!”

  One of them yelled something outside.

  “They’re really closing in,” cried one of the men. “They’re still closing in! Son of a bitch! We should have made a run for it!”

  “Well that’s that, then. Things aren’t looking good for our friend here,” said Gérard. “But they should watch. Stand him up!”

  Even more than dying, Alan feared that they would make him stand. He wouldn’t survive the pain. It was torture. He whimpered as two men grabbed him and roughly hauled him upright.

  “Please don’t,” he begged. He was almost in tears. “Please don’t.”

  They paid no attention. He put his weight on his uninjured leg, but that didn’t stop the pain from laying into him like a rabid animal. Tears came to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, and there was nothing he could do to hold them back. He sensed that they wanted to move him in front of the door. He didn’t know how he was supposed to bear it. He hoped he would lose consciousness.

  His vision was getting dim by the time they had dragged him to the door. He hung in their arms like a limp rag. He made an effort not to make a noise. Somewhere in his mind there was still the thought that, after this was over, the talk shouldn’t be of him whining like a little child in the final moments of his life.

  What happened next he had tried again and again to reconstruct for the police officers, but blind spots remained in his memory.

  “He pointed the gun at me.”

  “Who did?”

  “The Frenchman. They call him Gérard. I don’t know if that’s his real name.”

  “Ok, so he pointed the gun at you. About how far from you was he standing?”

  “Three steps? Maybe four? I was standing in the door, he was standing a bit farther inside the greenhouse. He aimed right at me.”

  “You saw our guys closing in?”

  He tried to remember, but it was like grasping at shadows.

  “No. I don’t think I was aware of anything. Or anyone. All I saw was the pistol. I couldn’t really think. The pain was almost driving me mad.”

  “What happened then?”

  “It all happened so fast … And several times I closed my eyes. But I think that Kevin was standing a few steps to the left of me. At the same moment that Gérard shot …” He had shut his eyes with the effort of remembering. “At that same moment Kevin screamed.”

  “What did he scream — Mr. Hammond?”

  “He screamed, ‘No!’ And all of a sudden he was in front of me.”

  “He leapt in front of you?”

  He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “I just know that he was there all of a sudden. And at the same time he collapsed.”

  Gerard had hit Kevin right in the heart. He had been dead in seconds.

  “Is it possible that he was pushed?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. But I can’t really imagine it. Why would his own guys do that?”

  “Why would Mr. Hammond sacrifice himself for you?”

  He had thought about that afterwards as well, over and over again. Why would Kevin sacrifice himself for him? Sacrifice his life?

  “I could imagine that he acted on impulse. That he wanted to stop Gérard from actually shooting. Maybe he thought Gérard wouldn’t do it if there was another man standing there all of a sudden … Or, it was his feelings of guilt. Kevin Hammond has been a friend of our family for a long time. At my mother’s house he was free to come and go as he pleased. Helene had already lost her life. Maybe he couldn’t bear it that somebody else had to die. He would’ve done everything to stop it.” He corrected himself. “He did do everything.”

  But there was something else to it as well. A theory he kept to himself, because he had no proof. It was a feeling, and he himself didn’t know where it came from: Something told him that Kevin had sought death out. He wanted to die. Now, looking back, Alan thought that he had detected a vague death wish in Kevin for a long time. Maybe even always. Kevin had never been of this world, and it hadn’t had anything to do with his sexuality. He had been a dreamer, a man who had preferred the company of flowers to that of other people. Who had gotten along well with an old woman, a woman who treated him kindly and full o
f consideration, who had suffered life’s hardships and the insensitivity of others just as much as he had. Kevin had tried to hold himself at a safe remove from everything that was crude, ugly, and harsh. He had ensconced himself in a life that had been gentler, more pure, and more beautiful than other people’s lives. His tragedy had been that in the end he’d been on more intimate terms with the truly evil, brutal, and violent, than others usually were. Since he had thrown his lot in with the criminals, he had become ever grayer, ever more weary and ever more sad. He had been like a shadow in the past two years. And now he had ended his life, which he no longer felt capable of coping with. Maybe, in that fraction of a second, he had seen his chance, and taken it.

  Everything had happened very quickly after that. The police had stormed the greenhouse, just instants after the shot had been fired. At that time Alan had been lying on the ground, half-conscious. The men had let him fall when Kevin had collapsed. He didn’t know why Gérard hadn’t shot a second time. Maybe it was because the police had gotten there so fast. Or because even he, cold and utterly unfeeling as he was, had been shocked to suddenly see Kevin lying there at his feet, lifeless.

  Alan wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive. Only when a doctor was bent over him at some point, feeling his foot and giving him a shot for the pain that very quickly unleashed its wondrous effects, only then did he realize that he had made it. And the very next image had been of Franca, who was holding his hand and telling him something crazy about how she was sorry she hadn’t acted more quickly, she’d called the Sea View first, and all for nothing, since Julien escaped anyway, and then she’d had a severe panic attack, and that took some time …

  He didn’t completely understand what she was trying to say, but he said soothingly, a few times, “Ok, it’s all alright, everything’s alright.” He had looked at her and felt secure and comforted.

  He hadn’t known yet that Kevin was dead.

  They could all see that Beatrice was grieving for Kevin. She sat there on the porch on that sunny day, held tight to her glass of sherry and said, “I’ll never get to have a drink with him again.”

  Franca and Alan knew at once that it was Kevin she was talking about.

  “Kevin was unstable,” Alan said, and immediately asked himself why he’d said it. After all, it wouldn’t be any comfort to his mother. “A more stable person would never have let himself get so entangled in a criminal activity as Kevin did.”

  His buddies had spilled everything to the police. According to them, Kevin had first come in contact with the gang two and a half years ago — by way of a very young Frenchman he’d been with at the time. The Frenchman had introduced him to his friends. At some point it had become clear to Kevin that these were criminals he was dealing with, but back then he’d been wax in his boyfriend’s hands. Under no circumstances had he wanted to put the relationship in jeopardy, and had been used as a lackey on more than one occasion: He’d made drop offs, passed along information, run reconnaissance. Finally, he’d even let himself be talked into buying the empty greenhouses in Perelle Bay and using his name and his nursery business as cover. For the first time they had hidden a boat there and repainted it. Shortly thereafter the relationship between Kevin and the young Frenchman had gone down the tubes, and Kevin had wanted out of the whole business. But then they had blackmailed him: if he backed out, they would expose him. There was no risk for them: They could easily have taken off back to France and gone off the grid. But Kevin would have been ruined, his livelihood destroyed. He had to keep playing the game.

  Unfortunately, Kevin had confided in his boyfriend in an intimate moment that he had found in Helene a willing patroness with an inexhaustible fount of money, and this information was passed on to the others. Now they’d started demanding more and more money from Kevin — which he then would have to try and squeeze out of Helene.

  “The business with the stolen ships was getting riskier and riskier, and the payoff was getting smaller and smaller,” one member of the gang told the police. “We just weren’t making the profits we had been before. Whenever we needed money, we went to Kevin Hammond. Then he borrowed it from the old lady. One time, last year, he refused. We smashed his car up as a warning. He understood, and was again cooperative in the usual manner.”

  It weighed on all of them — Beatrice, Alan, and Franca — to learn afterwards how hopeless Kevin must have felt. He’d been under the most extreme pressure and had obviously not dared to confide in anyone. On the evening of May 1st that had turned disastrous for Helene, the situation had escalated: full of resolve — which, however, was mixed with intense fear — Kevin had declared that he wanted out, once and for all. “I won’t be intimidated anymore!” he had screamed. “Leave me in peace!”

  Gérard had informed him that he would be paying him a visit on the evening of May 1st.

  “I assume,” said Beatrice, “that that’s why he invited all of us over. With so many guests there, he thought, they wouldn’t be able to do anything to him. He was shocked when I dropped Helene off and then left, and then on top of that he had to find out that Franca wouldn’t be coming either. He must have been filled with fear.” She shuddered, her fingers tightened around her glass. “There’s a lot that’s just now becoming clear to me. His sudden fearfulness. His new habit of locking the door … I thought he was starting to become funny. The truth was he was simply afraid. And his fear was as real and justified as can be.”

  “Helene was killed by this guy Gérard?” Franca asked. She had already been questioned, but hadn’t yet been informed of anything that was revealed by the other interrogations.

  Beatrice nodded. “They found traces of blood on his switchblade. There’s no doubting its Helene’s blood. She’d been in the dining room with Kevin when the men arrived. They were able to force their way in through the kitchen door, which Kevin heard. He met them in the kitchen, but said nothing about having a guest in the next room. These people threatened him, they were going to destroy his livelihood, and they were determined to act against him personally, too — slash his tires, smash his windows, things like that. Kevin begged to be allowed to get out. It seems that Helene eavesdropped on the conversation. She might’ve just wanted to see what was keeping Kevin, why he was in the kitchen for so long. Coming closer, she heard something that disturbed her, and she stayed where she was and listened. She must have gone from one horror onto the next. And then, very softly and quietly, she called the taxi from the telephone in the living room. It’s possible she waited a while after that. The men in the kitchen heard the door click as she was sneaking out of the house.” Beatrice was silent for a moment.

  “She must have been terribly afraid,” said Franca.

  “Helene, who ran away from every spider,” said Beatrice. “Helene, who kept her eyes shut tight when any detective show was on the television. And then all of a sudden she finds herself in the middle of a gangster plot.”

  They all looked at one another, and each of them sensed the same thing: any moment from now Helene would have to be walking out to them through the open kitchen door. In a frilly summer dress that was meant for someone far younger than she was. She would get all wide-eyed and say, “Oh — here you all are, sitting out here. Why didn’t anyone tell me?” And they all would have sensed the reproach and kept silent, embarrassed, and Helene would have gotten herself a glass and poured herself a sherry like the rest of them. She would have stroked Alan’s hair and given Franca a compliment that would have been sincere. Then she would have sat down and started whining. About the weather and about world affairs. And about Misty, whose hair covered every chair in the house. Eventually Beatrice would have gotten irritated and said, “Yes, Helene, we know! Life is horrible, and to you especially it’s never been anything but mean. Now could you be quiet for once and let us enjoy the nice day?”

  “Fine then,” Helene would have said, and pressed her lips together in a narrow line.<
br />
  “Gérard,” Beatrice continued, “wanted to know at once who it was who’d just left the house. Kevin stammered out something evasive, but one look in the dining room and the criminals knew right away that there must have been a guest there. It wasn’t hard to come to the conclusion that the guest had crept off because she’d heard something she shouldn’t have. Gérard ran out, and the garden was the first place he looked; no one knew about the phone call, and he probably guessed that Helene would try to hide herself in the bushes somewhere. When he finally got the idea to check the street out front, he saw Helene getting into the cab. There’s nobody out at night in Torteval. It was clear to Gérard that the old woman must have been Kevin’s visitor. He got in his own car and followed her. And killed her. To keep her from talking. That was the only reason that Helene had to die.”

  “If Michael hadn’t shown up that day,” said Franca. “If Alan hadn’t …”

  “If I hadn’t gotten so wildly drunk,” said Alan when he noticed she wouldn’t say anymore, “then Mum wouldn’t have gone off to lose herself among the cliffs of Pleinmont, and you wouldn’t have been sitting in a restaurant with your husband. You would have gone with Helene to Kevin’s and maybe she would still be alive. But it’s pointless to think about it. Even more pointless to accuse yourself. These things can’t be changed. Maybe it was just fate.”

  “Yes, maybe it was,” said Beatrice. “Maybe it was what was intended for Helene from the very beginning. To die on the same day as her husband, exactly fifty-five years later, in the middle of the night on the country road to Petit Bôt Bay. Nothing would have saved her. No one could have protected her.” She set her glass down and stood up. “You know,” she said, with a strangely harsh tone of voice that did not match the expression on her face, “even if you all don’t believe it: I miss her. I miss her, and I doubt anything about that will change for the rest of my life.” She left the porch, walking quickly down to the garden. Franca had seen that she had tears in her eyes. She’d be going somewhere where she could cry without being disturbed. She wouldn’t let anybody see her do it.