Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  Taking advantage of the widow’s monologue, Sérénac’s brain stirs into action. The first impression! After talking to Patricia Morval for several minutes, he is starting to have an idea of the nature of her mourning. And contrary to all expectation, the impression is tending more toward the idea of inflamed passion, of thunderstruck love, rather than the faded, dull indifference of the abandoned wife.

  “I’m sorry to bore you like this, Madame Morval, but we both want the same thing—to find the person who murdered your husband. I will have to ask you some more… personal questions.”

  Patricia seems to freeze in the pose of the nude painted by Gabar on the opposite wall.

  “Your husband hasn’t always been, let’s say… faithful. Do you think that…?”

  Sérénac spots Patricia’s flash of emotion. As if all the tears stored up inside her were trying to douse the fire in her belly.

  “My husband and I met when we were very young. He courted me—and others—for a long time, a very long time. It was many years before I yielded to it. When he was young he wasn’t the kind of boy to set the girls dreaming. I don’t know if you see what I mean. He was probably a bit too serious, too awkward. He… he lacked confidence with the opposite sex. And girls sense this kind of thing. Then, over time, he became more sure of himself, much more charming too, and more interesting. I think, Inspector, that I had a lot to do with that. He grew richer too. As an adult, it was as if Jérôme had to exact his revenge on women… On women, Inspector. Not on me. I don’t know if you can understand.”

  I hope so, thinks Sérénac, telling himself that he will need names, facts, dates.

  Later…

  “I expect you to be tactful, Inspector. Giverny is a small village with only a few hundred inhabitants. Don’t kill Jérôme a second time. Don’t sully his memory. He doesn’t deserve that.”

  Laurenç Sérénac nods reassuringly.

  First impressions… His conviction is now forged. Yes, Patricia Morval loved her Jérôme. And no, she would not have killed him for his money.

  But for love, who knows…

  One last detail strikes him. It’s the flowers in the Japanese vase that persuade him of it: time has stopped in this house. The clock broke down the day before. In this drawing room, every square inch is still infused with the passions of Jérôme Morval. Of him alone. And everything will stay like that, for all eternity. The paintings will never be taken down from the walls. The books on the shelves in the library will never be opened. Everything will remain inert, like a deserted museum devoted to a man who has already been forgotten. An art lover who will leave nothing behind. A lover of women who will probably be mourned by none of them. Except by his own wife, the one he abandoned.

  A life spent accumulating reproductions. A life without issue.

  As he leaves the house, the intense light on the Rue Claude Monet explodes on the inspector’s face. Sylvio appears at the end of the street less than three minutes later, no boots on his feet, but the bottom of his trousers covered with mud. This amuses Sérénac. Sylvio Bénavides is an elegant man. Probably much cleverer than his meticulous side makes him look. From behind his sunglasses, Laurenç Sérénac examines the fine profile of his deputy, whose shadow stretches along the walls of the houses. Sylvio isn’t exactly thin. Narrow would be a more precise description, because paradoxically the beginnings of a little potbelly can be seen under his checked shirt, which is buttoned up to the neck and tucked neatly into his beige cotton trousers. Sylvio is probably wider in profile than face-on, Laurenç thinks with amusement. He’s like a cylinder. It doesn’t make him ugly, quite the contrary. It lends him a kind of fragility, a waist like a young tree trunk, lithe and supple, as if it could bend without ever breaking.

  Sylvio approaches, a smile on his lips. Quite definitely, what Laurenç likes least about his deputy, physically at least, is his habit of slicking his short, straight hair back or to the side, with a seminarian’s parting. A simple brush cut would be enough to transform him. Sylvio Bénavides stops in front of him and puts both hands on his hips.

  “So, Chief, what about the widow?”

  “Very much a widow! Very much. And you?”

  “Nothing new… I talked to a few neighbors. They were asleep on the morning of the murder and don’t know anything. As to the other evidence, we’ll just have to see. Everything has been bagged up or put in a sample jar. Are we going back to base?”

  Sérénac consults his watch. It’s 4.30 p.m.

  “Yes. Or rather, you are. I have an urgent appointment.”

  He explains to his astonished deputy.

  “I don’t want to miss the end of the school day.”

  Sylvio Bénavides thinks he’s understood.

  “You are looking for a child who is about to celebrate their eleventh birthday?”

  Sérénac gives Sylvio a complicit wink.

  “You could say that… And I’d also like to see this jewel of Impressionism for myself: the schoolteacher Jérôme Morval coveted as much as a painting by Monet.”

  7

  I wait for the bus below the lime trees in the little square that contains the town hall and the school. It is the shadiest corner of the village, just a few yards away from the Rue Claude Monet. I’m almost alone. Really, this village has become the oddest place: it only takes a few feet, a simple bit of street, to pass from all the hubbub and queues of the besieged museums and galleries to the deserted alleyways of a simple country village.

  The bus stop is in front of the school, or almost. The children are playing in the playground, behind the wire fence. Neptune is standing a little farther off, beneath a lime tree, waiting impatiently for the release of the caged children. He loves that, Neptune does, running after the little ones.

  Just opposite the village school is the studio of the Art Gallery Academy. Their motto is painted in huge letters on the wall: OBSERVATION WITH IMAGINATION. There’s a whole program. Throughout the day, a regiment of limping pensioners, wearing boaters or panamas, leaves the gallery and scatters around the village in search of divine inspiration. They are impossible to miss, with their red badges and their old-lady shopping carts used to transport their easels.

  Don’t you think that’s ridiculous? One day someone will have to explain to me why the hay, the birds in the trees, or the water in the river hereabouts aren’t the same color as anywhere else in the world. It’s beyond me. I must be too stupid to understand, I must have lived here for too long. Like when you live beside a very handsome man for too long and stop noticing.

  Anyway, these particular invaders don’t leave like the other tourists at six o’clock. They hang around until nightfall, sleep in the village, go out at dawn. Most of them are American. I may only be an old woman observing the whole circus through a cataract, but that doesn’t stop me thinking that all these old painters parading in front of the school will end up influencing the children of the village, putting ideas in their heads. Don’t you agree?

  The inspector has spotted Neptune standing under the lime tree. They really stick together, those two. He cavorts with the dog, their play a mixture of joyful struggle and caresses. I stay in the background, on my bench, like an ebony statue. It may seem strange to you that an old woman like me should stroll around the whole of Giverny and that no one, or nearly no one, should notice. Even less so the police. I suggest you just try it. Go and stand on a street corner, any corner, a Parisian boulevard, in the square by a village church, wherever you like. Stop for, I don’t know, ten minutes, and count the people passing. You will be surprised by the number of old people. There will always be more old people than anyone else. First of all, because that’s just how it is, there are more and more old people in the world. Secondly, because that’s all old people have to do, hang about in the street. And then, no one notices them. That’s just how it is. You turn to gaze at a girl’s bare navel, you push your way past the senior executive in a hurry, or the gang of young people filling the pavement, you glance at t
he buggy, the baby in it and the mother behind it. But an old man or woman… They are invisible. Precisely because they pass so slowly that they are almost part of the decor, like a tree or a streetlight. If you don’t believe me, just try it. You’ll see.

  To come back to the issue at hand, and since I have the privilege of seeing without being seen, I can assure you that he is insanely charming, this young policeman, with his short leather jacket, his tight jeans, his stubble, his crazy hair, blond as a wheat field after a storm. You can understand why he might be more interested in melancholic schoolteachers than the mad old women of the village.

  8

  After giving Neptune one last pat, Laurenç Sérénac leaves the dog and walks toward the school. As he approaches, about twenty children run out in front of him squealing, a mixture of all ages. As if he were scaring them away.

  The wild beasts have been unleashed.

  A little girl of about ten runs at the head of the group, her bunches flying in the wind. Neptune follows her, as if attached to a spring. Indeed they all follow, spilling into the Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet and scattering along the Rue Claude Monet. As suddenly as it came alive, the Place de la Mairie falls silent again. The inspector walks forward another few yards.

  For a long time afterward, Laurenç Sérénac will think about that miracle. All his life. He will weigh each sound, the shouts of the children fading away, the wind rustling the leaves of the lime trees; every smell, every flash of light, the whiteness of the stonework on the town hall, the convolvulus climbing along the railing of the seven front steps.

  He didn’t expect it. He didn’t expect anything.

  Much later, he will understand that it was the contrast that left him thunderstruck, a tiny contrast lasting barely a few seconds. Stéphanie Dupain was standing by the door of the school and hadn’t seen him. Laurenç caught the look in her eyes as she watched the children run away laughing. A faint melancholy, like a fragile butterfly. As if their satchels contained their teacher’s dreams.

  Then, a moment later, Stéphanie notices the visitor. Immediately, the smile appears, the mauve eyes sparkle.

  “Can I help you?”

  Stéphanie offers the stranger her freshness. A great gust of freshness, cast out to the four winds, to the beloved landscapes of the artists, to the tourists, to the laughter of the children on the banks of the Epte. Keeping nothing for herself. A gift.

  Yes, it’s that contrast that so troubles Laurenç Sérénac. That vague sense of suppressed melancholy. As if he had glimpsed, just for an instant, a cave filled with treasure, and his sole obsession, from now on, would be to find its entrance again.

  He stammers, also smiling: “Inspector Laurenç Sérénac, from Vernon police station.”

  She holds out a delicate hand.

  “Stéphanie Dupain. The only teacher of the only class in the village.”

  Her eyes are laughing.

  She is pretty. More than pretty, even. Her pastel-colored eyes, with their hints of water lily, marry different tones of blue and mauve according to the sunlight. Her lips are a delicate shade of pale pink. Her little, light dress reveals bare shoulders that are almost white. Porcelain skin. A slightly crazed chignon imprisons her long, light brown hair.

  Jérôme Morval plainly had good taste, and not just in paintings.

  “Come in. Please.”

  The gentle air of the school contrasts with the crushing heat of the street. When Laurenç enters the little classroom and observes the twenty or so chairs behind the tables, he feels a kind of pleasant discord at this sudden intimacy. His eye slides over vast maps displayed on the wall. France, Europe, the world. Pretty maps, deliciously old. The inspector’s gaze suddenly stops on a poster, near the office.

  INTERNATIONAL YOUNG PAINTERS CHALLENGE

  Robinson Foundation

  Brooklyn Art School and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia

  It seems like the ideal place to start.

  “Are any of your children putting themselves forward?”

  Stéphanie’s eyes shine.

  “Yes. They do every year. It’s almost a tradition here. Theodore Robinson was one of the first American painters to come and paint in Giverny alongside Claude Monet. He was the Hôtel Baudy’s most loyal guest! Then he became a renowned art teacher in the United States. The least the children of Giverny can do today is to take part in his foundation’s competition, don’t you think?”

  Sérénac nods.

  “And what do the laureates win?”

  “A few thousand dollars. And more importantly a training course lasting several weeks at a prestigious art school… New York, Tokyo, Saint Petersburg. The venue changes every year.”

  “Impressive. Has a child from Giverny ever won?”

  Stéphanie Dupain laughs and gives Laurenç Sérénac a tap on the shoulder. He shivers.

  “If only… Thousands of schools from all over the world take part in the competition. But you have to give it a go, don’t you? Did you know that Claude Monet’s own sons, Michel and Jean, once sat at the desks of this school?”

  “Theodore Robinson never came back to Normandy, did he?”

  Stéphanie Dupain stares in astonishment at the inspector. He thinks he spots a hint of admiration in her wide eyes.

  “Do they give art history classes at the police academy?”

  “No, but you can be a policeman and like art too, can’t you?”

  She blushes.

  “Touché, Inspector…”

  Her porcelain cheeks, marbled with freckles, assume the pink of wild flowers. Her lilac eyes flood the room.

  “You are quite right, Inspector. Theodore Robinson died of an asthma attack in New York at the age of forty-three, just two months after he had written to his friend Claude Monet about returning to Giverny. He never saw France again. His heirs set up a foundation, and the international competition, a few years after he died in 1896. But I’m boring you, Inspector. I don’t imagine you’ve come here for me to give you a lesson.”

  “Actually, I’d love that.”

  Sérénac says that just to make her blush again. It works.

  “And what about you, Stéphanie Dupain. Do you paint?

  Once again, the young woman’s fingers float in the air nearly touching the inspector’s chest. The policeman forces himself to see this gesture as merely the reflex of a teacher who is used to leaning in close to her children, looking into their eyes as she speaks to them, touching them.

  An incendiary innocence?

  Sérénac hopes he isn’t blushing as much as she is.

  “No, no. I don’t paint. I don’t… I have no talent.”

  Very briefly, a cloud passes over her bright irises.

  “So what about you? You don’t have a Vernon accent! And your first name, Laurenç, that’s not very common in these parts.”

  “Well spotted. Laurenç is the equivalent of Laurent, in Occitan. My personal dialect would be local to Albi, to be precise. I’ve just been transferred.”

  “Well, in that case, welcome! Albi? So your taste in painting must derive from Toulouse-Lautrec?”

  They smile.

  “Partly… I suppose Lautrec is to the people of Albi what Monet is to the Normans.”

  “Do you know what Lautrec said about Monet?”

  “I’m going to disappoint you, but I have to confess that I wasn’t even aware that they knew each other.”

  “They did. But Lautrec said the Impressionists were a bunch of brutes. He even said that Monet was an idiot because he wasted his huge talent painting landscapes rather than human beings.”

  “It’s a good thing Lautrec died before he saw Monet going off to live like a hermit and paint nothing but water lilies for thirty years.”

  Stéphanie laughs out loud.

  “That’s one way of looking at things. Or you might consider that Lautrec and Monet chose opposing fates. For Toulouse-Lautrec, an ephemeral life of debauchery spent chasing the desires of the fles
h; for Monet, a long contemplative life devoted to nature.”

  “Complementary rather than opposing, wouldn’t you say? Does a person really need to choose? Can’t you have both?”

  Stéphanie’s smile drives him mad.

  “I’m incorrigible, Inspector. I don’t imagine you’ve come here to talk about painting. You’re investigating the murder of Jérôme Morval, I assume?”

  She nimbly lifts herself onto the desk and crosses her legs. The movement is quite natural, but the cotton fabric of her dress slips halfway up her thigh. Laurenç Sérénac can hardly breathe.

  “And what does that have to do with me?” the teacher whispers innocently.

  9

  The bus is parked just in front of the Place de la Mairie. There is a woman driver behind the wheel. She doesn’t look like someone who wanted to be a boy, or a truck driver; no, she’s just an ordinary little woman who could just as well be a nurse or a secretary. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s increasingly common to see women driving these enormous great hulks, especially in the countryside. You never used to see that in the old days, female bus drivers. I’m sure it’s because it’s only old people and children who take public transport in the villages. That’s why it isn’t considered a man’s job anymore.

  I painfully lift my foot onto the running board of the bus. I pay the girl, who gives me my change, and then I sit down at the front. The bus is half-full, but I know from experience that a number of tourists will board on the way out of Giverny and most will get off at Vernon railway station. There’s no stop directly outside Vernon Hospital, but in general the drivers take pity on my poor legs and set me down before the stop. Now you can understand why women drive buses—they accept this kind of thing.

  I think about Neptune. Yesterday I took a taxi back from Vernon. It cost me exactly thirty-four euros. An incredible amount, don’t you think, for just four miles? Night rate, he told me, the man behind the wheel of the Renault Espace. They definitely take advantage—they know very well that there’s no bus to Giverny after nine in the evening. And, by the way, you will notice that it’s always men behind the wheels of taxis, never women. They must circle around the hospital all night like vultures, just waiting for an old woman to come out, an old woman who never learned to drive. At times like that you suspect they already know you aren’t about to haggle! Well… I say all that, but it’s possible I will be very happy to find one not long from now. Because from what the doctors have told me, this evening may be the last one. So there’s a risk it could stretch on into a good portion of the night.