Paris Requiem

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Further west, traffic ground to a halt as the road gave way to a pitted track.

  ‘We’ll get out here and walk,’ Madame de Landois announced.

  These were the first words she had uttered since they had started out and they were stiff with an emotion James couldn’t name. She waved her arm in a wide circle which encompassed both sides of the river.

  ‘You see all this, this mammoth effort of building work. We are poised to welcome in the new century with an Exposition Universelle. For one year, a fairy tale of a city will take shape. The elaborate structure you see here is the Italian Pavilion. Next to it the Turkish. And then your own country. And so on. And so on. A great spectacle waiting to be born. A hymn to brotherhood and progress. To industry and invention. All the nations working side by side – African, Asian, American, European. And then,’ she snapped her fingers. ‘Then nothing. It will all be torn down. All this effort will have been like a café-concert ditty to impermanence.’

  She laughed oddly, her face hidden from him by the wide brim of her intricate hat.

  Passers-by turned to stare. She was the only woman amongst scores of workingmen, their faces worn from the day’s labours. James wondered again where she was taking him. This was no place for a woman. The ground was heavy with mud. Slippery planks covered it here and there to provide a passage. He offered her his arm and she accepted it without meeting his eyes.

  ‘But perhaps that, too, is fitting.’

  He didn’t know quite what she meant. He was busy trying to navigate them through the gathering human tide that poured from gaping pits and half-erect structures. In the distance he spied the towering steeple of the iron structure which had not yet been completed on his last visit to the city, almost twelve years ago now. Maisie had clung to his arm then and cried out at its brute ugliness.

  As he looked at the finished tower now, he marvelled at Eiffel’s feat of engineering, a challenge to the visionaries of the new century. That hadn’t been torn down. He should mention that to reassure Madame de Landois. But she was pointing, tugging them to the right.

  ‘There. We go down those steps over there.’

  She paused midway down the steep incline. ‘I trust you won’t hold this against me, Monsieur. I trust too, that you have a strong stomach.’ She held his eyes for a moment before moving forward once more.

  A cobbled width of quay stretched before them. At its edge old horses lapped water and an assortment of barges swayed, two of them still part loaded with building materials. A lone houseboat bobbed amongst them, half hidden by a strip of washing. It was towards this that Madame de Landois headed with a newly determined step.

  A narrow gangplank creaked beneath their feet. From the deck a rank odour of vegetation and sewage rose like a miasma. For a brief second, James wondered whether this was what Madame de Landois had meant by her warning comment. But then, as she called out a loud greeting, there was no more time to wonder.

  A burly man with a pugilist’s threatening features appeared from the prow of the boat. He paused as he took in Madame de Landois. She uttered something James didn’t catch. A moment later they were round the other side of the deck and through a narrow door into a cluttered room.

  The air was fetid. Smoke curled round the low ceiling. In the dusky light, it was difficult to distinguish people from looming barrels and ramshackle furniture. Everyone seemed to be speaking at once. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, James made out two kneeling men, between them a prone figure stretched beneath a rumpled blanket. One of the kneeling men wore a police uniform. A few more leaden seconds passed before he realised that the other one, with his back to him, was his brother.

  ‘Raf.’ The single syllable fell into the taut silence which Madame de Landois’s entrance had precipitated.

  His brother turned and leapt up, his head narrowly missing the ceiling. His eyes were glazed. He hardly seemed to recognise him. Finally with an erratic gesture he raised his hand to grasp James’s. ‘Bad day, Jim. Bad timing. His attention flew to Madame de Landois. ‘C’est vraiment elle,’ he mumbled. ‘Her.’

  She nodded once abruptly, then clutched Raf’s arm with an intimacy from which James averted his gaze.

  It was only now, as Raf introduced Madame de Landois to someone called Durand, a small, dapper, but distinctly stout man who bowed with the exaggerated deference of a perfect functionary, that James realised the figure on the floor was dead. He took a step backwards, wishing there was an unencumbered wall to lean on.

  The body was a woman’s. A long lock of dark hair fell across her shoulder. One arm, bare but for the lace of a chemise, lay arched in an abrupt V at her side, as if the elbow had been cracked. The face was puffy, blotched, bloated with water. But the lashes were thick, the brow high, the bone structure fine. She was young and all-too-recently beautiful.

  A blinding flash lit up the room. For a split second it transformed the reclining body into alabaster. The blanket had been pushed aside. Limbs glowed with a pale fire. The odour of burned sulphur hung in the air.

  James took in a tripod, the hooded head of a photographer. He stepped outside unsteadily and filled his lungs with air. Through the leap and bounce of associations and half-heard words, it came to him that the dead woman must be the Rachel about whom Monsieur Arnhem had been so worried. The very Olympe he had come to extricate his brother from. Well, he was extricated now, but not in a manner even his mother might have wished. No. Then, too, death was not always a form of disentanglement, as he, himself, knew too well.

  He hurried to the far end of the boat. A young, blonde woman emerged from the shadows at the corner like a hallucination. She was sitting on a bench and nursing a baby, crooning to it.

  He averted his gaze, but her voice stopped him. ‘Vous êtes aussi du Commissariat?’

  No, no, he wasn’t from the police. James shook his head and cast his eyes to the ground. The woman’s boots protruded from the flounce of her skirt. They were black and shiny.

  He reached for his pipe, then thought better of it and turned to retrace his steps. He should go back to that room to see how Raf was doing. Yet he couldn’t quite face the sight of that body lying there so still amidst the onlookers. Maisie had had that stillness about her. Her cheeks, too, had a puffiness, but she had lain on sheets of the softest white. Yes. Maisie.

  He realised that his nails were biting into his palms. His stomach churned. He leaned against the boat’s rail and gazed into the waters, willing the turmoil of those old emotions away. He wished for a habitual task to escape to, some responsibility which would whisk him away from the clotted hold of that past ordeal.

  The man who now approached him and offered cigarettes from a silver case had the glow of a saviour despite his appearance. He was of middle height, bearded, slightly built. His shirt protruded from his open jacket as if he had forgotten to tuck it in. His tie was askew. Lank hair fell over his brow. There was an unsavoury air about him as he took a long puff of his cigarette.

  ‘The second Mr Norton, je crois. I am Gilles Touquet. Journalist, Anglophile, and a friend, a collègue of the first Mr Norton.’ His laugh was hollow as he tipped his bowler. ‘Bad business, this. Very bad business. La Tristesse d’Olympe. You know, Olympe Fabre once did a dance to which she gave that name.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ James asked.

  Touquet shrugged. ‘Who knows! But I found her. Well not exactement found. I do the crime,’ he pronounced the word in the French way, ‘for my paper. Le Journal. You know it?’

  James encouraged him with a nod.

  ‘I heard from one of my contacts at the Préfecture that a body had been fished out of the Seine. I rushed over. Recognised Olympe Fabre immediately, but I pretended not to. I wanted to get your brother here. I knew he was looking for her.’ He threw James a swift sidelong glance.

  ‘And he came quickly, made a big brouhaha. Insisted that the police get Durand on the scene.’

  ‘Durand?’

  ‘Yes, Chief Inspector Emil
e Durand, you saw him perhaps. The stout little dapper man with the heavy brows and the big broom of a moustache.’

  He gestured down the deck and moulded his body into a perfect parody of the man James had noted. ‘Durand is high up in the Judiciaire and a reputable detective. One of the force’s all too rare upholders of justice and scientific investigation. If you had come a few moments earlier, you would have heard him chastising the boatman for dragging Olympe’s body along the deck, perhaps breaking her arm, obliterating useful clues. He was fierce.’

  Touquet chuckled, then stopped himself abruptly. He puffed at his cigarette. ‘It’s a good thing, too, that Rafael brought Madame de Landois here. Her association with the case will mean that our police take the matter seriously. Otherwise you know, they can be a little lazy. Another lovelorn grisette in the Seine. Another suicide. What difference can it make, eh?’ He shrugged in exaggerated fashion.

  A half-empty bateau mouche passed them. One of the passengers waved. Touquet beckoned back in hearty fashion. Waves rocked the boat. James clung to the rail. His stomach was churning.

  ‘And is it suicide?’

  Touquet peered at him from his bulging eyes. ‘Your brother does not think so.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. And now that Madame de Landois is here to cast her Paris – how do you say – influence, there will be a proper investigation. An autopsy, too.’ He flicked his burning cigarette into the water. ‘So we shall know.’

  Heavy steps echoed over the length of the deck. Two uniformed men bearing a stretcher appeared. They paused at the door of the cabin. James saw Madame de Landois come out, followed by Raf, Chief Inspector Durand and the surly thickset man they had first seen, who was evidently the boat’s owner.

  James walked towards the group. Touquet followed.

  ‘He found her,’ Touquet gestured. ‘Quite a raconteur he is, when he’s got a few glasses in him. Fished her out. Thought he’d fished himself a sirène, at first. You’ll read all about it in the paper.’

  The prospect took James aback. He gave the man a sharp look. The latter was oblivious to it.

  They had reached the others. Durand was gesticulating, his demeanour Napoleonic. ‘You can rest secure, Madame. My men and I will take care of everything. Everything.’ He bowed to Madame de Landois with the magisterial panache of some defender of the grandeur of the French state and ushered them away.

  Raf held back and looked once more into the room where a single light had now been lit. By its yellow glow, the body of Olympe was being raised onto the stretcher.

  James was struck by the longing in his gaze, Orpheus losing Eurydice to eternal darkness. Everything was clear in that shivering look. His mother had been right. Raf loved this woman more than he ought. Loved her with a terrible passion which made James recoil. He held himself rigid against a sudden tide of nausea.

  Madame de Landois urged Raf into motion. Two-by-two, like a funeral cortège, they made their way slowly off the boat and onto solid ground, trudging up the steps and along what was now deserted terrain. The spectral frames of the twilit pavilions hovered like some ghost town to their side.

  Madame de Landois’s carriage waited at a short distance from where the paved road began. She and Raf were engaged in a murmured conversation. James would have liked to overhear, but he kept his distance. In the flickering light the carriage lamps cast, her face was sombre. She turned to James as the coachman held open the door.

  ‘Our first meeting may not have been propitious, Monsieur Norton, but I hope for all that we shall meet again soon.’

  James bowed. He only realised as the carriage pulled away that he had half expected Raf to accompany her. Instead, the three men were left on the darkened street. They walked along it in desultory fashion, his brother firing off short bursts of sentences to Touquet until the man tipped his hat and disappeared round the first turning.

  ‘I badly need a drink, Jim. What about you?’

  James nodded.

  Raf hailed a passing cab, gave directions to the driver, then sat back in his seat. His handsome face, so often a witness to fleeting passions, was stonier than those of the statues which flanked their passage to the right bank. James, himself, felt seized by a torpor which made both mind and tongue too heavy for use.

  At last, after what seemed an interminable rat run over cobbles, the cab stopped.

  ‘You should feel right at home here, Jim.’ Raf spoke at last. ‘It’s one of my regular haunts.’

  He led him into a long dim tavern tucked between unremarkable buildings on an unremarkable side street. A few lone drinkers sat at its highly polished zinc counter. The wall behind it, covered in mirror, reflected a string of booths and trebled their number.

  ‘This is Bill. From Minneapolis.’ Raf introduced the shirtsleeved barman. ‘A whisky for me, Bill, a large one. And for Jim here … what’ll it be, Jim?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘And get Armand to bring us a plate of whatever’s best.’

  They settled in a booth towards the rear of the bar. Raf swallowed a large mouthful of his whisky and met his brother’s eyes. ‘To paraphrase our grand friend, you’ve chosen one helluva time for your Parisian holiday, Jim.’

  James studied him. Raf had changed. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but there was a quickness to his movements, a kind of contained determination, where before there had been cocky languor. He had always had an abundance of charm, been almost excessively handsome, but his features now seemed sharper, more defined, edged with drama. The dark eyes, once sleepy, darted with an intelligence he had failed previously to notice in them. They made him feel big and slow and somehow inert in comparison. The longer fall of hair, the sweep of moustache were incidentals. It was more that Raf seemed to have been put into a firm and foreign mould and had turned out successfully – had turned into a man. He wondered what, aside from time itself, had wrought the change.

  ‘I hadn’t intended exactly a holiday.’

  ‘No, of course. You’re here to urge the return of the prodigal. And his hapless sister. We mustn’t forget her. Have her letters been complaining about me?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Well, that’s something. Not that I believe you.’

  The hostility in Raf’s voice was a surprise. His younger siblings had always been so close. A mere woman couldn’t have produced this animosity. There had been women in Raf’s life before. Plenty of women.

  ‘It’s just that Mother …’ James began again.

  ‘Wants me back.’ Raf finished for him.

  ‘Yes.’

  Plates had arrived brimming with fries and slabs of steak. Raf dug into his meat. ‘Her letters have hardly been unclear on that point. They make my own virtually impossible.’

  ‘She’s ailing.’

  ‘Aren’t we all!’ His voice had grown grim. ‘Look, Jim, to be perfectly blunt, I can’t think about all that now. I’ve got rather more pressing business.’ He looked at his plate and pushed it abruptly aside.

  ‘The dead girl … Now that … that she’s gone, why is she your business?’

  Raf didn’t answer. He was staring into the distance, his knife and fork forgotten.

  ‘I met her father earlier,’ James continued. ‘Not altogether a prepossessing figure.’

  ‘What do you know about it, Jim?’ Raf stabbed the air with his fork. ‘You think the man’s had the advantages of our alma mater. Not to mention the grandparental millions.’

  James persisted with a kind of perverse stubbornness. ‘Mother has been worrying about the company you keep.’

  ‘So that’s it, is it? The gossips have been at it. Worrying her about the fact that Olympe is Jewish. Well, the dear woman must worry about something.’

  ‘She thinks,’ James invented brashly, ‘that this whole Dreyfus matter you’ve been so immersed in also influenced your choice of … of women.’

  Raf glared at him. ‘Let her think what she will. It hardly matters now.’


  ‘So you’ll come home?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jim.’

  Silence covered them, edged with animosities, old and new. At least he had got it out, James thought. He had hardly presumed, whatever the circumstances, that Raf would be instantly amenable. But what next? He hailed the waiter and asked for another round, just to cut through the thickness of the atmosphere.

  Raf fixed him with an intractable gaze indicating that he was willing to talk, but not about coming home.

  ‘How did you happen on Monsieur Arnhem?’

  ‘He came to Madame de Landois’s home. She was excessively kind.’

  ‘Hardly surprising. Narrowness is not one of Marguerite’s characteristics.’ He paused, waiting for James to take in the comparison, then asked softly, ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was hoping to have some news of his daughter. He was worried. Rightly as it turns out.’

  ‘Some forms of parental worry are more justified than others.’

  James nodded equably enough, despite Raf’s ready provocation. ‘How did you come to be … to be involved with the girl?’

  Raf didn’t seem to have heard him. He looked tormented, as if Olympe’s lifeless body were once again before him. ‘I thought I’d prepared myself for the worst, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t. I shall have to go to him.’ He downed his whisky in a single gulp and reached for his hat.

  ‘Now? He’s hardly your concern. Surely the police …’

  ‘Don’t be such a pompous ass, brother dear. And don’t forget you’re not my father – even though you’ve taken on the paternal role for so very long I imagine it’s hard to shed.’

  James was astonished at the bitterness in Raf’s voice.

  ‘None of this need implicate you. I’ve hardly asked you to come along and besmirch yourself.’

  ‘But I am coming, Raf.’