Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  A silence. Dupain’s fingers go on torturing his mustache.

  “Well, what bloody reason do you think would make a man want to stay in bed with his wife?”

  Jacques Dupain stares straight at Laurenç Sérénac’s face. His eyes are like two fists. Nothing about the confrontation escapes Sylvio Bénavides. Once again he thinks Jacques Dupain is defending himself rather well.

  “No one’s reproaching you for that, Monsieur Dupain. Nobody. Don’t worry, we’ll check out your alibi. As to motive…”

  Sérénac studiedly pushes away the boots piled up at the end of the desk and produces the photograph of Stéphanie and Jérôme Morval, hand in hand on the path up the hill.

  “Jealousy might be a motive, don’t you think?”

  Jacques Dupain barely glances at the picture, as if he already knows what’s in it.

  “Don’t cross the line, Inspector. Treat me as a suspect by all means, if that amuses you, why not? But don’t involve Stéphanie in your little game. Not her. Are we in agreement?”

  Sylvio is wondering whether to intervene. He has a sense that the situation could degenerate at any second. Sérénac continues to play with his prey. He is holding two blue boots in each hand, distractedly trying to reconstitute the pairs. He looks up.

  “That’s a bit meager as a defense, Monsieur Dupain. In a legal sense, I would even call it a tautological defense: defending oneself against a possible motive of jealousy by displaying an excess of jealousy…”

  Dupain gets to his feet. He is shorter than the inspector, by at least seven inches.

  “Don’t mess with me, Sérénac. I understand your little game perfectly. If you come any closer…”

  Sérénac doesn’t deign to look up at him. He throws one boot aside and picks up another, then gives a smile.

  “Surely you’re not going to tell me, Monsieur Dupain, that you want to obstruct the smooth running of our investigation?”

  Sylvio Bénavides will never know how far Jacques Dupain would have gone that day, but he doesn’t care. And that’s why, just in time, he rests a soothing hand on Jacques’s shoulder, and gestures to Sérénac to calm down.

  33

  Sylvio Bénavides walked Jacques Dupain out of the police station. He used the polite set phrases, the usual veiled apologies. Inspector Bénavides is good at that sort of thing. Jacques Dupain got into his Ford, still furious, and in a gesture of defiance, he drove across the parking lot with his foot to the floor. Bénavides closed his eyes, then came back to the office.

  Sylvio Bénavides is also good at judging his superior’s state of mind.

  “What did you think of that, Sylvio?”

  “You were hard on him, Chief. Too hard. Much too hard.”

  “OK, let’s blame that on my Occitan side. But apart from that, what did you think?”

  “I don’t know. Dupain isn’t innocent, if that’s what you mean. Having said that, you can understand him. He has a wife that, naturally, he wants to hold on to. You’re certainly not going to disagree with me there. But that doesn’t make him a murderer…”

  “Good God, Sylvio. And that business about having his boots stolen? It doesn’t stand up for a second! Neither does his alibi. His wife, Stéphanie, told me he went hunting on the morning of the crime…”

  “It’s worrying, I agree. We’ll have to compare their statements. But we also have to recognize that the evidence is piling up a little too easily. First the photograph of his wife strolling with Morval that we were sent anonymously, then his hunting boots disappearing… You could think that someone’s trying to make him look suspicious. And then as far as that boot print is concerned, he’s not the only one who needs an excuse. We haven’t managed to flush out all the inhabitants of Giverny by any means. We’ve been met by closed doors, empty houses, Parisians who are hardly ever here. We need time, lots more time…”

  “Damn it…”

  Sérénac picks up an orange boot and holds it between two fingers by the heel.

  “It’s him, Sylvio! Don’t ask me why, but I know it’s Jacques Dupain!”

  Laurenç Sérénac suddenly hurls the orange boot at the ten or so sitting on the shelf opposite him.

  “Strike!” Sylvio Bénavides observes placidly.

  His boss doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, then suddenly raises his voice again.

  “We’re not getting anywhere, Sylvio. Anywhere! I want to see the whole team in one hour.”

  Laurenç Sérénac, nerves on edge, is struggling to get some energy into the team brainstorming session he has called at Vernon police station. The bright room with the tatty curtains is flooded with sunlight. Sylvio Bénavides is dozing at the end of the table. Between two little snores he hears his boss summarizing, yet again, the different lines of inquiry, and setting out the impressive list of leads that they need to follow: identifying Morval’s mistresses and questioning their relatives, looking into the illegal art trade and in particular keeping a close eye on Amadou Kandy, finding out more about this Theodore Robinson Foundation, and also a closer examination of the strange case of a similar drowning in 1937. They also need to question the Givernois again, particularly the neighbors, and especially those close to Morval, those who claim they have no boots at home, or who have an eleven-year-old child. Finally they need to look into the clients at his office.

  It’s a lot, Inspector Sérénac is aware of that—far too much for a team of five people, not all of whom are working on the case full-time. They will have to shoulder their picks and strike at random, then trust to luck. Hope that just one of their blows hits the spot. They’re used to it, though; it’s always like that. The only aspect of the operation that Sérénac hasn’t reminded his colleagues of is checking up on Jacques Dupain’s alibi. He’s keeping that one for himself.

  “Any other ideas?”

  Officer Ludovic Maury has listened to his superior’s muscular list of orders with the weary attention of a substitute footballer in a changing room. The sun behind him is roasting the back of his neck. During the session, he studied—yet again—the photographs of the crime scene spread out in front of him: the stream, the bridge, the washhouse. The body of Jérôme Morval, feet on the bank and head in the water. He wonders why ideas come at one time and not at others, and raises a finger.

  “Yes, Ludo?”

  “Just an idea, Laurenç. Given where we are with this case, don’t you think that maybe we should drag the bed of the stream in Giverny?”

  “What do you mean?” Sérénac sounds irritated, as if he were suddenly annoyed by Officer Maury’s southern use of his first name.

  Sylvio Bénavides wakes with a start.

  “Well,” Maury goes on, “we’ve looked everywhere around the crime scene; we have photographs, prints, samples. We’ve also looked in the brook itself, of course. But I don’t think we’ve dragged the riverbed. Stirred up the sand, I mean, dug down below. It occurred to me when I was looking at the orientation of Morval’s pockets in the photograph: they’re angled down toward the stream. Some object, anything at all, could have slipped into the water and got stuck in the sand.”

  Sérénac runs his hand over his forehead.

  “It’s not a stupid idea. And why not, after all? Sylvio, have you woken up? Put a team together for me as quickly as you can, with a sedimentologist or whatever they’re called. You know, a scientist who can give you the precise date of all the crap we’re going to drag up from the riverbed.”

  “OK,” says Bénavides, hoisting up his eyelids like a weight lifter lifting weights. “I’ll have everything ready for the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow, I should remind you, is cultural heritage day for us both. A visit to Claude Monet’s gardens for you and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen for me.”

  34

  Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet. The evening light slips through the shutters of the Dupains’ bedroom with its sloping roof. Between Jacques Dupain’s nervous fingers are twisted glossy pages featuring Normandy cottages for sale.

/>   “I’m going to get a lawyer, Stéphanie. I’ll accuse them of harassment. That policeman, that Sérénac guy, there’s something not quite right about him, Stéphanie. It’s almost as if…”

  Jacques Dupain turns over in bed. He has no need to check. He knows he’s talking to his wife’s back. To the back of her neck. Her long, light-colored hair. A quarter of her face. A hand holding a book. Sometimes, when the blankets conspire, he can spy the small of her back, her sublime curves that he likes to stroke every evening.

  “It’s as if he’s trying to get to me,” Dupain goes on. “As if he’s made it his personal mission.”

  “Don’t worry,” the back replies. “You need to calm down…”

  Jacques Dupain tries to immerse himself once more in his housing brochure. The minutes pass slowly on the screen of the alarm clock beside him.

  9:12…

  9:17…

  9:24…

  “What are you reading, Stéphanie?”

  “Nothing much.”

  The back isn’t very chatty.

  9:31…

  9:34…

  “I’d like to find you a house, Stéphanie. Something that isn’t this cupboard above the school. The house of your dreams. That’s my job, after all. One day I’ll be able to give it to you. If you’re patient I can…”

  The back moves slightly. The hand reaches out toward the bedside table and puts the book down.

  Aurélien.

  Louis Aragon.

  She turns off the bedside light.

  “So that you’ll never leave me,” Jacques Dupain’s voice says into the darkness.

  9:37.

  9:41.

  “You won’t let him do it, will you, Stéphanie? You won’t let that policeman come between us? You know I had nothing to do with Morval’s murder.”

  “I know, Jacques. We both know.”

  The back is smooth and cold.

  9:44.

  “I’ll do it, Stéphanie… Your house, our house, I’ll find it.”

  The swishing sound of a sheet.

  The back disappears. A pair of breasts and her sex invite themselves into the conversation.

  “Make me a child, Jacques. A child, more than anything.”

  35

  James, lying on his back, enjoys the last rays of the sun: another fifteen minutes before it sets behind the hill. He knows it must be a little after ten o’clock. James doesn’t wear a watch; he lives by the rhythm of the sun, as Monet did. He gets up and goes to bed with it. A little later every evening, at the moment. The bright star is currently playing hide-and-seek with the poplars.

  This unexpected warmth is very pleasant. James closes his eyelids. He is aware that he is painting less and less, and sleeping more and more. To put it the way most of the villagers must think, he’s becoming more and more of a tramp and less and less of an artist.

  What joy! To be seen as a tramp in the eyes of those fine people. To become the village tramp, just as every village has its priest, its mayor, its teacher, its postman… He will be Giverny’s tramp. There was one before, apparently, in the days of Claude Monet. He was known as the marquis, because of the felt hat with which he greeted passersby. But above all, the marquis was known for collecting the cigarette butts outside Monet’s house, which the painter had barely smoked. He stuffed his pockets with them. Now that was class…

  Yes, to become Giverny’s resident tramp, the marquis. Now there’s an ambition. But in order to get there, James is aware that there is still some distance to cover. At the moment, apart from little Fanette, no one is interested in this old lunatic who sleeps in the fields with his easels.

  Apart from Fanette…

  Fanette is enough for him.

  They aren’t just empty words; Fanette really is incredibly gifted. Much more gifted than he is. She has a real gift, straight from heaven, as if the Lord had deliberately ensured that she was born in Giverny, as if the Lord had made certain their paths would cross.

  She called him “Père Trognon” just now. Like Robinson’s painting. Père Trognon… James would like to die like that, simply savoring those two words uttered by Fanette.

  Père Trognon.

  Two words that seemed to sum up his quest… From Theodore Robinson’s masterpiece to the impertinence of a budding genius.

  Him.

  Père Trognon.

  Who could have imagined it?

  The sun isn’t shining anymore.

  But it isn’t yet ten o’clock. Suddenly it’s dark, as if the sun has abruptly changed the game, as if it has moved from playing hide-and-seek in the poplars to blind man’s bluff. As if the sun has counted to twenty behind a poplar, giving the moon a head start…

  James opens his eyes. Stunned. Terrified.

  All he can see is a rock, a vast rock, above his face, less than two feet away.

  A surreal vision.

  Too late, he realizes that he isn’t dreaming. The rock crushes his face like some ripe fruit. James feels his temples exploding, an intense pain.

  Everything collapses. He turns onto his belly and crawls into the ears of wheat. He isn’t very far from the stream, from a house, that mill. He could cry out. But no sound comes from his mouth. He struggles not to lose consciousness. A terrible roaring sound saturates his thoughts, his skull swells like a steam engine that’s about to blow.

  James goes on crawling. He feels that his attacker is there, standing above him, ready to finish him off.

  What’s he waiting for?

  His eyes latch on to a pair of wooden feet. An easel. His hands reach out, desperately. The muscles in his arms stretch in one last attempt to drag himself upright.

  The easel collapses with a deafening crash. The paint box falls right in front of him. Brushes, pencils, tubes of paint scatter in the grass. James thinks fleetingly about the message engraved inside it. She is mine, here, now and for ever. He couldn’t understand that threat, who engraved it, or why.

  Has he seen something that he shouldn’t have seen?

  He is going to die without knowing. He has the feeling that his thoughts are abandoning him, that they are flowing away into the earth, along with his blood, his skin. Now he is dragging himself through the tubes of paint, crushing them, eviscerating them. He continues straight on.

  He is aware of the shadow, right above him.

  He knows that he should stop, turn around. Try to get up. Say something. But it’s impossible. He is frozen by panic. The shadow wants to kill him. The shadow is going to start again. He has to get away. He can’t think anything else, there’s too much roaring in his head. He can only think in primal impulses. Crawl. Get away. Escape.

  He knocks over a second easel. Or he thinks he does. The blood fills his eyes now. His gaze is blurred. The landscape in front of him is stained with red, with purple. The stream can’t be very far away. He might still get through, someone might come.

  He crawls again.

  An easel, another one, in front of him. With his palette, his brushes, his knives.

  The shadow comes closer.

  It is in front of him now. Through a glowing red filter, James sees a hand gripping his scraping knife. Coming toward him.

  It’s over.

  James crawls a few more inches, then raises himself on his elbows, using the last of his strength. His body rolls over, once, twice, several times. For a moment James hopes he will follow the direction of the slope, that he will slide down the slight incline of the meadow toward the Epte; that he will get away.

  Just for a moment.

  His body topples into the crushed ears of wheat. On his back. He didn’t make it six feet. He can’t see anything now. James spits out a mixture of blood and paint. He can’t put two thoughts together.

  The shadow approaches.

  James tries to move once more, a muscle, just one, but can’t do it. He is no longer in command of his body. His eyes, perhaps.

  The shadow is above him.

  James looks up at it.


  All of a sudden it’s as if his brain has been returned to him. The last thought of the condemned man. James immediately recognizes the shadow, but he still refuses to believe his eyes. It’s impossible! Why such hatred? What madness could be feeding it?

  One hand pins him against the ground; the other is about to plunge the knife into his chest. James can’t move. His brain has almost stopped him from feeling pain. He is terrified.

  Now, he understands.

  Now, James wants to live!

  So as not to die. His own life is so unimportant. He wants to live to stop what is happening, stop this monstrous, ineluctable sequence of events, this terrifying plot in which he plays only a bit part, a walk-on in a subplot.

  He feels the cold blade digging into his flesh.

  He is too old. He isn’t even suffering anymore. His life is leaving him. He feels so useless. He was unable to halt the unfolding tragedy. He was too old to protect Fanette. Who will be able to help the child now? Who will protect her from the shadow that is about to engulf her?

  With one last glance James embraces the windswept wheat field. Who will find his body amid the ears of wheat? How long will it take? Hours? Days? In one last hallucination, he thinks he sees a woman approaching with a parasol, Camille Monet, amid the wild grass and the poppies.

  He has no regrets now. This is why he left Connecticut. To die in Giverny.

  The sun gently sets.

  The last thing James feels before he dies is the shiver of Neptune’s coat against his cold skin.

  DAY NINE

  May 21, 2010

  (Chemin du Roy)

  Sensitivity

  36

  The second sunny day in a row. In Giverny. Believe me, for the season, that’s practically a miracle.