Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  Sérénac doesn’t respond, and concentrates on the road once more. Sylvio leans his pallid face out of the open window. His nostrils try to inhale the scraps of fresh air.

  “Are you all right, Sylvio?” says Sérénac, concerned.

  “I’m OK. I must have had a dozen coffees last night to stay awake. This morning the doctors decided to keep Béatrice in till the bitter end.”

  “I thought you only drank tea, no sugar?”

  “I thought so too…”

  “So what are you doing here, when your wife’s in the maternity ward?”

  “They’re going to call me if anything happens. The gyno is dropping by. The baby is still nice and warm in its cocoon, lucky thing, and they say this could go on for days.”

  “And you’ve spent all night on the case?”

  “Got it in one. Well, I have to keep busy, don’t I? Béatrice snored like a dormouse in her room for the rest of the night.”

  Sérénac takes a hairpin turn toward the heights of Giverny, along the Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet. Sylvio glances in the rearview mirror. Two police cars are following behind them. Maury and Louvel are just about keeping up. Sylvio manages to restrain a burp.

  “Don’t worry,” Sérénac goes on. “The Morval case will be solved in the next thirty minutes. You’ll be able to set up a camp bed at the hospital. Day and night. The graphology experts are clear: that message carved into the paint box, ‘she’s mine, here, now and for ever,’ matches Jacques Dupain’s handwriting. You have to admit that I was right, Sylvio.”

  Sylvio takes big, deep breaths of the air outside. The Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet snakes along the hill and Sérénac is still driving like a lunatic. Bénavides wonders if he’s going to be able to survive the whole climb. He holds his breath and brings his head back inside the car.

  “Only two experts out of three, Chief… And their conclusions are more than nuanced. According to them, there are certainly similarities between the words carved in the wood and Dupain’s handwriting, but there are also a considerable number of divergent features. I get a sense that the experts haven’t a clue.”

  Sérénac’s fingers tap nervously on the wheel.

  “Listen, Sylvio, I can read the reports as well as you can. There is a similarity with Dupain’s handwriting, that’s the expert opinion, isn’t it? As to the divergences, I just think that carving in wood with a blade isn’t exactly the same thing as signing a check. It all links up, Sylvio; don’t make life more complicated than it need be. Dupain is insanely jealous. Numero uno, he threatens Morval with the message in the postcard, the quote from Aragon, the extract from the poem ‘Nymphée’: ‘the crime of dreaming, I agree to its creation’; numero two-o, he repeats his threats in the message on the paint box; numero three-o, he bumps off his rival…”

  The Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet is now reduced to a six-and-a-half-foot-wide ribbon of asphalt that twists and turns before it reaches the Vexin plain. Sylvio hesitates to contradict Sérénac again, to point out that faced with inconsistencies in the expert testimony from the graphologists, Pellissier, the specialist from the Palais de Justice in Rouen, mentioned the possibility of a clumsy attempt at imitation.

  A brief swing around to the left.

  Sérénac, who was driving in the middle of the road, has a near miss with a tractor that is coming down the hill in the opposite direction. Just in time, the startled farmer abruptly steers into the ditch. He watches in disbelief as two more blue cars come speeding past him.

  “Dear God!” Sylvio yells, peering into the mirror.

  He takes a deep breath, then turns back toward Laurenç Sérénac.

  “But how is the paint box involved in this whole story? According to the analysis, the paint box is at least eighty years old. A collector’s piece! A Winsor and Newton, the best-known trademark in the world, a brand that has been supplying painters for more than a hundred and fifty years… Who could this damned box have belonged to?”

  Sérénac goes on anticipating the hairpin turns. Indifferent sheep in the meadows barely turn their heads as the wailing cars hurtle past.

  “Morval was a collector,” says Sérénac. “He liked beautiful things.”

  “No one ever saw him with this paint box. Patricia Morval, his widow, is absolutely positive on the matter. Not forgetting the fact that the link with the crime has not been established. That paint box could have been thrown into the river by anybody at all, several days after Morval’s murder.”

  “They’ve found blood on the box.”

  “It’s too soon, boss! We haven’t had the analyses back yet. There’s no certainty that it’s Morval’s blood. Forgive me, but I think you’re going too fast…”

  As if by way of reply, Inspector Sérénac turns off the siren and pulls on the handbrake as they reach a small parking lot.

  “Listen, Sylvio, I have a motive, I have a threat aimed at the victim written in the hand of Dupain, who has no alibi, but who serves us up a grotesque story about stolen boots. So I’m going in! When your jigsaw fits together differently, with your damned three columns, let me know. The other thing to support the charge against Dupain, is—even if I know you don’t agree—my personal conviction.”

  Sérénac gets out of the car without waiting for a reply. When Sylvio steps out of the vehicle in turn, he feels the ground spinning around him. He tells himself that he’s not coping with all the coffee, or with all the excesses in general, and that he’d be better off going to throw up behind the pines at the end of the parking lot.

  Except that it wouldn’t be very discreet. Three gendarmerie trucks are parked at each end of the car park, and a dozen police officers are getting out and stretching.

  The boss has pulled out all the stops on this one. About fifteen men at the very least, a good proportion of the Vernon station, plus the gendarmeries of Pacy-sur-Eure and Écos. He’s put on a big spread, Sylvio thinks, chewing the chlorophyll-flavored gum that Louvel has just given him, and he’s demonstrating a liking for theater that is perhaps a little disproportionate.

  All this for just one man.

  Who might well be armed.

  But who might not even be guilty.

  The brown rabbit bolts in desperate zigzags across the limestone meadow, as if someone has taught it that the long steel tubes carried by the three shadows in front of it are capable of taking its life in a flash of white light.

  “That one’s yours, Jacques.”

  Jacques Dupain doesn’t even raise his gun. Titou looks at him with astonishment, then shoulders his rifle. Too late. The beast has disappeared between two gorse bushes.

  There is nothing in front of them now but the bare grass grazed by the recently introduced flocks of sheep. They carry on toward Giverny along the Astragale path.

  “Damn it, Jacques, you’re not on form,” murmurs Patrick. “I think you might even miss a sheep.”

  Titou, the third huntsman, nods in agreement. Titou is rather a good gunman. If he hadn’t left that rabbit for Jacques, it wouldn’t have gotten farther than six feet… Quick on the draw, as his friends often tell him. Because otherwise it’s a matter of finesse.

  “Is it because of the investigation into Morval’s murder?” he says, turning toward Jacques Dupain. “Are you scared that the policeman’s going to throw you in jail just to steal Stéphanie from you?”

  Titou explodes with laughter. Jacques Dupain stares at him with controlled irritation. Patrick sighs, but Titou won’t let the matter drop:

  “I have to say, you’re having a run of bad luck with Stéphanie. First there’s Morval, and now here comes this cop chasing after her.”

  The gravel trickles down the Astragale path as they walk along. Behind them, on the hillside, two black-and-white ears appear.

  When he gets going, Titou can’t stop.

  “You know, if you weren’t my friend, I’d happily give Sté—”

  Patrick’s voice breaks in: “Shut up, Titou!”

  Titou lets the end of his se
ntence disappear into his mustache. They continue down the path, sliding rather than walking. Titou seems to be ruminating over something, then he bursts out laughing once more.

  “By the way, Jacques, I hope my boots aren’t hurting your feet.”

  Patrick stares at Titou in disbelief. Jacques Dupain doesn’t show the slightest reaction.

  “I’m just pulling your leg, guys. You know that, right, Jacques? I’m just pulling your leg. I know you didn’t kill Morval!”

  “Damn it, Titou, stop—”

  This time it’s the end of Patrick’s sentence that is lost in his throat.

  In front of them, the lot where they left their van has been turned into the Alamo. There are six cars with rotating lights and almost twenty policemen. Urban police officers and rural gendarmes stand in front of them in a semicircle, hands on their hips, fingers on the white leather holsters of their revolvers.

  Inspector Sérénac stands a few yards in front of the huntsmen. Patrick instinctively steps aside. His hand closes around the cold barrel of Jacques Dupain’s rifle.

  “Easy does it, Jacques. Easy does it.”

  Inspector Sérénac steps forward.

  “Jacques Dupain. You are under arrest for the murder of Jérôme Morval. Please come quietly.”

  Titou bites his lip, throws his rifle on the ground, and raises two trembling hands, as he has seen people do in films.

  “Gently now, Jacques,” Patrick says again. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Patrick knows his friend very well. They’ve been going out, walking, hunting together for years. He doesn’t like that marble face, he doesn’t like it at all, that absence of expression, almost as if his friend had stopped breathing.

  Sérénac steps forward again. Alone. Unarmed.

  “No!” yells Sylvio Bénavides.

  He passes through the semicircle of policemen and goes and stands next to Sérénac. It may be a symbolic gesture, but Bénavides has a sense that he’s breaking a kind of symmetry; as if he hoped to disrupt the relentless mechanism of a duel in a Western by crossing the street at the wrong time. Jacques Dupain rests his hand on Patrick’s wrist. Without a word, Patrick has understood. He has no choice but to let go of the steel barrel.

  He hopes he won’t regret it.

  He is alarmed to see Jacques’s hand clenching the trigger and the barrel gently rising.

  Under normal conditions, Jacques’s aim is even better than Titou’s.

  “Stop, Laurenç,” Sylvio murmurs, his face pale.

  “Jacques, don’t be a fool,” Patrick whispers.

  Sérénac steps forward, one more pace. The inspector slowly raises his hand and stares the suspect straight in the eye. Sylvio Bénavides is horrified to see a defiant smile appearing at the corner of his superior’s lips.

  “Jacques Dupain, you…”

  The barrel of Jacques Dupain’s gun is now aimed at Sérénac. An imposing silence has invaded the Astragale path.

  Titou, Patrick, Officers Louvel and Maury, Inspector Sylvio Bénavides, the fifteen policemen, even the least clever among them, even the least skilled at guessing what might be hiding inside a brain… they all read the same thing in Jacques Dupain’s cold eyes.

  Pure hatred.

  55

  The girl behind the desk at the Évreux public archives always begins her sentences with four words: “Have you checked if…” She studiously does an impression of an overworked employee behind the double screen of her computer, but then finally looks up, through her gold-rimmed glasses, at the old man asking her for copies of the late lamented Républicain de Vernon, the local weekly newspaper that became Le Démocrate after the Second World War. He wants all the issues between January and September 1937.

  “Have you checked if they have archives in Vernon, at the offices of Le Démocrate?”

  Chief Inspector Laurentin stays cool. He’s been haunting the local archives for two hours, trying humbly to play the part of the charming old man who is kind toward women much younger than himself. It usually works. Not this time.

  The girl behind her desk couldn’t care less about his sweet murmurings. It would have to be said that around the wooden tables of the archive’s consulting room, the ten people present are all men aged over sixty—budding septuagenarian historians or genealogical archaeologists digging for their roots—and they have all adopted the same strategy as Chief Inspector Laurentin: gallantry has become a tad outmoded. Laurentin sighs. It was all much simpler when he could simply hold his tricolor card under the nose of a disaffected civil servant. Of course, the girl has no idea that she’s dealing with a police chief inspector.

  “I’ve already checked,” Chief Inspector Laurentin explains with a forced smile. “At the offices of Le Démocrate, they don’t have any archives before 1960…”

  The girl recites her usual litany: “Have you checked in the Vernon local archives? Have you checked the magazine department of the National Archives in Versailles? Have you checked if…”

  Is this girl paid by the competition?

  Chief Inspector Laurentin takes refuge in the patient resignation of the pensioner who has all the time in the world.

  “Yes, I’ve checked! Yes! Yes!”

  His research into Henriette Bonaventure, the mysterious potential last heir of Claude Monet, has yielded absolutely nothing so far. It isn’t so important. There’s another trail that he wants to pursue, unconnected. To do that he just has to persist until the girl behind the desk understands that she’s going to waste more time putting this stubborn old man off than by granting him his wishes.

  Finally, his tenacity pays off. Just over thirty minutes later, Chief Inspector Laurentin is holding the weekly newspaper in front of him. Le Républicain de Vernon.

  A yellowed old copy dated Saturday, June 5, 1937. He lingers for a moment on the front page, which details a mixture of national events and local news items. The chief inspector scans a moving editorial on Europe in flames: Mussolini celebrates his entente with Hitler, the possessions of the Jews are being confiscated in Germany, Franco’s supporters are crushing the Republicans in Catalonia… Below the dramatic editorial a blurred photograph explodes with the platinum-blond hair and dark lips of Jean Harlow, the American idol who died a few days later, at the age of twenty-six. The lower part of the first page is devoted to more regional concerns: the forthcoming opening, less than sixty miles from Vernon, of Le Bourget airport; the death of a Spanish agricultural worker who was found with his throat slit in a Freycinet barge moored in Port-Villez, almost directly opposite Giverny…

  At last Chief Inspector Laurentin opens the second page and finds the article he is looking for: “Fatal Accident in Giverny.”

  In ten lines, over two columns, the anonymous journalist set out the tragic circumstances of the death by drowning of an eleven-year-old boy, Albert Rosalba. The incident happened in a place known as the meadow, near the washhouse given to the village by Claude Monet, and the Moulin des Chennevières, in the millrace channeled out of the Epte. The boy was alone. The gendarmerie concluded that it was an accident: the little boy was thought to have slipped, his head hitting a stone on the bank. Unconscious, Albert Rosalba, who was an excellent swimmer, drowned in eight inches of water. The article went on to evoke the pain of the Rosalba family and little Albert’s classmates. It even slipped in a few lines on the controversy that was brewing. Claude Monet had been dead for over ten years now: shouldn’t that artificial stretch of river be shut off and the insalubrious lily pond, which was now basically neglected, be allowed to dry up?

  A blurred photograph accompanies the cutting. Albert Rosalba poses, his black jacket buttoned up to the neck, his hair cut short, smiling behind his school desk. A moving photograph of a good little boy.

  That’s him, thinks Chief Inspector Laurentin.

  He takes a school photograph from the bag at his feet. The date and place are written on a black slate hanging from a tree in the school playground: “Giverny School: 1936–37.”


  It was Liliane Lelièvre who helped him unearth that image from the Copains d’avant website, as Patricia Morval had suggested on the phone. Liliane told him that the site was a place where you could stroll back through the classes you had attended, from primary school onward; where you could find the faces of people you come into contact with during your life, and not just behind your school desk: the people with whom you’d shared a workplace, a regiment, a summer camp, a sports club, a school of music—or a school of painting…

  It’s quite surreal, thinks Chief Inspector Laurentin. It’s as if there’s no need to remember anything for yourself. As if your whole life has been archived, classified, revealed, and even made available to share… Or almost. Most of the photographs on the site date back ten years or so; twenty or thirty at the most. Strangely, that school photograph from 1936–37 is by far the oldest.

  Bizarre…

  As if Patricia Morval had put it online deliberately so that he would find it. Chief Inspector Laurentin concentrates on the photographs again.

  That’s definitely him…

  The photograph from the Républicain de Vernon is a perfect match for the little boy in the school photograph, sitting in the middle of the second row.

  Albert Rosalba.

  No child’s name is attached to the school photograph from the Copains d’avant website. The names must have been written on the back, on the original. Never mind. Laurentin closes the issue of Le Républicain de Vernon dated June 5, 1937, and opens the next few issues. He takes time to read the local pages, to examine the details. In the issue dated June 12, 1937, mention is made of Albert Rosalba’s funeral at Sainte-Radegonde’s church in Giverny. And of the grief of his family.

  Three lines.

  Laurentin continues, opening and closing the newspapers that are piling up, beneath the anxious eyes of the girl behind the desk. August 15, 1937…

  At last Chief Inspector Laurentin finds what he is looking for. It’s an insignificant little article, a few lines, no photograph, but the headline is quite explicit: