Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  The rifle comes down to the inspector’s neck. With infinite slowness Sérénac brings his hand up along his waist and then suddenly extends it.

  His fingers close on a void.

  Jacques Dupain has sprung back a yard, but the rifle is still leveled at him.

  “Let’s not play at being cowboys, Inspector. You’re wasting your time. How many times must I tell you? Write me a nice breakup letter.”

  Sérénac shrugs contemptuously.

  “Don’t count on it, Dupain. This farce has gone on long enough.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “That this farce has gone on long enough!”

  “This farce?”

  Dupain stares at Sérénac, his eyes popping. All cynicism, all disdain, has vanished from his face.

  “This farce? Is that what you said? You really haven’t understood a thing, Sérénac. You refuse to look reality in the face. There’s something… something you don’t know, Sérénac. You have no idea…”

  The cold barrel of the hunting rifle settles on the inspector’s heart. For the first time, Laurenç Sérénac can’t manage a reply.

  “You can’t even imagine, Sérénac, how attached I am to Stéphanie. How capable I am of doing anything for her. Perhaps, Sérénac, you love Stéphanie; perhaps your love is even sincere. But I don’t think you realize how little weight your ridiculous affection for her carries compared to my…”

  Sérénac swallows his disgust as Dupain continues:

  “My… call it what you will, Sérénac: madness, obsession, absolute love…”

  His finger curls around the trigger.

  “But you will write that breakup letter for me, Inspector, and then you will disappear forever!”

  70

  Stéphanie Dupain can’t help glancing at the clock above the blackboard.

  4:20 p.m.

  Another ten minutes! In ten minutes she will be leaving the children in Giverny, and will run to join Laurenç on Nettles Island. She feels as giddy as a schoolgirl whose pimply sweetheart is waiting for her by the bus shelter at the end of the school day.

  She feels slightly ridiculous too. Yes, of course. But how long has it been since she had the courage to listen to that heart that is beating wildly, to look up toward that blue sky and see in it nothing but cloudless happiness, to feel that desire to leave the children where they are, right now, to give each one of them a big kiss on both cheeks and tell them she’s leaving to travel the world, and that by the time she sees them again they’ll be grown-ups.

  To laugh out loud at the horrified expressions on their parents’ faces.

  So ridiculous, yes. Deliciously so. And anyway, she isn’t in the right mood to teach today; she chuckles like an idiot every time a child says something vaguely silly. She didn’t even deliver a lecture when none of the children handed in a painting for the Robinson Foundation competition. Not even the most gifted pupils. Any other day, she would have delivered a long sermon on opportunities that mustn’t be missed, the little shoots of talent that must be cultivated, the desires that mustn’t be allowed to die, the embers that must be fanned, all the advice that she drills into them all year-round and which, in fact, is really addressed to herself.

  Now she has listened to her own advice.

  In nine minutes’ time, she is running away!

  The children are supposed to be solving a math problem. It makes a bit of a change from Aragon and painting. Some parents claim she doesn’t give their offspring enough problems to solve, math problems, science problems.

  The crime of dreaming…

  Stéphanie’s water-lily gaze drifts out through the classroom window and flies far above Monet’s poplars.

  “You didn’t hand in your painting?” Paul murmurs, turning toward Fanette.

  Fanette doesn’t hear him. Their teacher is looking in the opposite direction.

  I’m off!

  She edges over to Paul’s desk.

  “What?”

  “Your painting, for the competition?”

  Vincent is looking at them strangely. Mary seems to be itching to raise her hand and call the teacher as soon as she turns her head.

  “I couldn’t get it this morning. My mother took me to school and she’d have had a fit! She’s picking me up at the end of the day too.”

  Fanette glances out of the corner of her eye to check that the teacher isn’t looking in their direction. With the other, she watches Mary. Mary is, in fact, about to get to her feet. As if he’s ahead of her, Camille leans over toward Mary’s exercise book and explains the question to her.

  Fat Camille is being incredibly nice to me. It’s as if he already understands. And Mary really isn’t very good at math. She’s not very good at anything at all. Camille is the opposite, showing off is his way of flirting. With Mary, in the long term, it might just work…

  Fanette is still crouched beside Paul’s desk.

  “Paul,” she whispers, “could you go and get my painting? You know, from the hiding place. And could you bring it to Miss, just after school?”

  “You can count on me. It’ll only take me five minutes to get there and back if I sprint.”

  Fanette slaloms back between the desks toward her seat. Discreetly. Except that stupid Pierre has left his satchel lying on the floor again. Fanette trips over the bag and knocks it against the leg of the chair. Inside it, something weird and metallic echoes like a bell around the classroom.

  What an idiot she is!

  The teacher turns back toward her pupils.

  “Fanette,” she says. “What are you doing? Go back to your seat this instant!”

  71

  The barrel aimed by Jacques Dupain is still resting on Inspector Laurenç Sérénac’s leather jacket. Right against his heart. The plain looks like a classical temple, with the rows of poplars as the pillars. Silent and sacred. Behind the trees, like a distant echo, lies the turmoil of the Seine.

  Sérénac tries to think quickly, methodically. Who is this individual in front of him? Is Jacques Dupain Jérôme Morval’s murderer? If he is, then he’s a meticulous criminal, organized and calculating. A man like that wouldn’t shoot a policeman in broad daylight. He’s bluffing.

  Jacques Dupain’s face doesn’t give him a clue. He adopts the same expression as if he were hunting a rabbit or a partridge on the Astragale hill: concentrating, frowning, his hands damp and slightly trembling. The normal stance of the hunter, except that the prey at the end of his gun is a bit bigger than usual. Sérénac forces himself to reverse his reasoning. Maybe, in the end, Jacques Dupain is just a jealous husband, deceived, humiliated? In which case he’s just a poor bastard who wouldn’t kill anyone in cold blood.

  It’s obvious. Criminal or not, Dupain is bluffing.

  Sérénac forces himself to sound calm:

  “You’re bluffing, Dupain. Mad or not mad, you won’t shoot.”

  Jacques Dupain blanches again, as if his heartbeat was becoming so slow that it was no longer irrigating the arteries above his neck. One hand clenches on the steel barrel, the other on the trigger.

  “Don’t play this game, Sérénac, don’t play the hero. Stop doing your little calculations. Have you still not worked it out? Do you want an act of carnage on your conscience, is that it? Carnage rather than giving in…”

  Everything is starting to get confused in Sérénac’s head. The inspector is aware that he has to gauge the situation and react instinctively. But he wishes he had more time at his disposal, to think, to be able to discuss all the details with Sylvio Bénavides, his famous three columns, trying to find the connection between Jérôme Morval and all the unknowns in this investigation, the Water Lilies, the painting, the children, the ritual, 1937… With every breath he feels the icy tube of the gun pressing harder against his flesh.

  “You’re mad,” Sérénac murmurs. “A dangerous madman. I’m going to find you guilty, and if it isn’t me it’ll be somebody else.”

  Neptune shakes himself under the
poplar tee, as if woken by the raised voices of the two men.

  “Sérénac, will you listen to me, Christ alive! There’s nothing you can do. I’m not going to let Stéphanie go. If the police arrive, if you try anything, if you try to trap me, I swear, I’ll kill her and then kill myself. You claim you love Stéphanie, so prove it. Just let her go. She’ll live happily, and so will you. It’ll all be fine.”

  “Your blackmail is ridiculous, Dupain.”

  “It’s not blackmail, Sérénac!” Dupain yells. “I’m not negotiating here! I’m just telling you what will happen if you don’t go. I’m capable of blowing everything sky high, and myself with it, if I have nothing to lose. Do you get that? You can call all the police in the world, you still won’t be able to prevent a bloodbath.”

  The barrel presses still harder against his heart. Sérénac is aware that it’s now too late to make the slightest movement. Dupain is alert. The inspector’s only remaining option is to use words to persuade his adversary.

  “If you shoot me, then you’ll lose Stéphanie anyway.”

  Jacques Dupain stares at him for a long time. He steps back slowly, without taking the gun off the policeman.

  “Come on. We’ve wasted enough time. I’m asking you one last time, Inspector, scribble a few words on a piece of paper and then get out of here. It’s not that difficult. Forget everything and never come back. Only you can avoid this becoming a bloodbath.”

  Jacques Dupain’s lips suddenly twist and a whistle comes out. Neptune runs happily to his feet.

  “Think, Sérénac. Quickly.”

  Sérénac doesn’t say a word. His hand settles instinctively on the silky fur of the dog, who rubs up against him.

  “You know Neptune, I assume, Inspector? Everyone in Giverny knows Neptune. The happy dog who runs about after the children? Who wouldn’t love this innocent dog? I love him too, I love him more than anybody, he’s come hunting with me a hundred times…”

  In a flash, the barrel of the rifle comes down level with Inspector Sérénac’s knees, eight inches from Neptune’s muzzle. One last time, the dog studies the two adults with blind trust. A baby smiling at its parents.

  The shot splits the silence beneath the poplars.

  Point-blank.

  Neptune’s muzzle explodes, shattered.

  The dog collapses in a heap. Sérénac’s hand closes on a ball of sticky, bloody fur. The cuff of his sleeve and the bottom of his trouser legs are spattered with scraps of skin, guts, the remains of an eye and an ear.

  He feels an intense panic rising inside him, wiping out any attempt at lucid reflection. The barrel of the rifle in Dupain’s hand has risen again in a fraction of a second and is once more pressed against the inspector’s torso.

  It is crushing a heart that has never beaten so fast.

  “Think, Sérénac. Quickly.”

  72

  The school is a prison on such a sunny May day.

  4:29 p.m.

  The children run shouting from the classroom. As if in a game of tag, they are caught midflight by parents clustered in the Place de la Mairie, although most of them slip through the outstretched hands and the lime trees, and race down the Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet.

  Stéphanie passes through the door of the classroom, barely a few seconds after the last child has left. As long as no child has a question to ask her… As long as no parent, this evening of all evenings, holds her back.

  Another few minutes and she will fall into Sérénac’s arms. He must have reached Nettles Island by now. Only a few hundred yards separate them. In the corridor, she hesitates a moment before lifting her jacket off the hook. In the end she leaves without it. That morning she put on the light cotton dress that she was wearing when she met Laurenç for the first time, ten days ago.

  In the Place de la Mairie, a lascivious sun greedily devours her bare arms and thighs.

  As if it were shining just for me…

  Stéphanie surprises herself with these intoxicating girlish thoughts, this bargain-basement romanticism.

  The windows of the town hall reflect her silhouette. She is also surprised to find herself pretty, sexy, in that insignificant little dress that Laurenç will fling into the nettles on the island. She resists the idea of running down the Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, running like the children. Instead she takes three steps toward a window to examine her face, to let down her hair and make it less modest, to spread out the silver ribbons so that they can tease the sun. She even says to herself that she could waste a few extra seconds, go back to the classroom or back home, slip off her dress, take off her underwear, and slip the dress back on over her naked body. And walk through the whole of Giverny like that. She has never even imagined that before… Why not? She hesitates.

  The desire to see Laurenç as quickly as possible carries her on. She blinks her big mauve eyes at the vague reflection in the window. She embellished her eyelids this morning with a hint of makeup. The bare minimum. Yes, if she asks Laurenç with sparkling eyes like that, eyes that implore, laugh, and undress, all at the same time… Yes, she will be saved.

  Laurenç will take her away.

  Her life will never be the same again.

  Stéphanie speeds up, almost trots down the Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet. When she reaches the Chemin du Roy, she decides not to skirt the Moulin des Chennevières and take the path, but instead cuts straight across the wheat field in front of her, as the children do.

  For the children a field of wheat, with all the alleyways between the ears, is like a huge maze. She doesn’t care, she isn’t worried about getting lost in the labyrinth. She’ll take the shortest route. She goes straight on. Straight on forever, now.

  73

  Paul carefully steps onto the bridge over the Epte. Although he doesn’t know why, he’s feeling uneasy. Perhaps because Fanette is being so mysterious, telling him that he alone knows the hiding place of the fabulous Water Lilies she’s painted. Fanette likes that kind of thing—secrets, promises, weird things. Perhaps he’s also uneasy because of that business about the murdered painter, that American, James.

  Did Fanette really see his body in the field? Or did she make it all up? And then, of course, there are the police, the police questioning everyone in the village because of the murder of that other man.

  It’s all quite frightening. He doesn’t say anything in front of Fanette, he shows off a bit in front of her, playing the brave knight, but in reality he finds it all terrifying, like that mill nearby with its waterwheel and its big tower like the tower of a haunted house.

  There is a noise behind him.

  Paul turns round abruptly. He doesn’t see anything.

  He has to be careful. Fanette has trusted him with a mission, to recover her painting from under the washhouse, take it to their teacher, and tell her that it’s for the Robinson Foundation competition. It’s an easy mission—even walking to the washhouse only takes five minutes from school. Ten minutes there and back.

  Paul studies his surroundings once more, checks that there’s no one on the bridge, in the courtyard of the mill, in the wheat field behind it, then leans over the steps of the washhouse and slips his hand into the space.

  Suddenly he’s frightened.

  His fingers grope about in the darkness. He panics; he can’t find anything. Just a void. Ideas shoot through his brain. Someone has come. Someone has stolen the painting. Someone who wanted to take their revenge, hurt Fanette… Or else someone who has guessed the true value of Fanette’s first painting, because one day Fanette’s paintings are bound to be worth a lot, as much as a Monet.

  That’ll be it. His fingers brush cobwebs, close on air. It isn’t possible! Where could that painting have got to? He saw Fanette sliding it in there yesterday.

  Behind him something moves.

  There’s no doubt about it now; someone is walking along the path. Paul thinks quickly. It must be someone passing by; people are always crossing the bridge, it isn’t important. Paul can’t turn round,
not right away. The important thing is to find the painting. Paul twists onto his belly. He reaches his other arm into the narrow hole under the washhouse. He waves his hands around, searching.

  He is wrapped in a vast wave of heat. He isn’t going to fail stupidly like this. He isn’t going to go back to Fanette and tell her, like an idiot, that the painting wasn’t there. Paul realizes that he can’t hear footsteps on the path anymore.

  It’s too hot. Paul is too hot.

  His arms are electrified all of a sudden, as if he had touched bare wires. Right at the back bottom, in the darkness, his fingers have closed on thick paper. Paul pulls. His hands go on exploring, blindly following the flat parcel, the right angles.

  No doubt about it. It’s the painting!

  Paul’s heart bursts with joy. The painting is there, it had just been pushed in a bit too far. What an idiot he is! He scared himself. Who could have stolen the painting? He kneels down and pulls on the package again. At last the cardboard emerges into the daylight.

  Paul recognizes it. The same format, about fifteen inches by two feet, the same brown paper covering it. He’s going to open it to check, he’s going to open it and see it once more, so that the cascading colors explode in his face…

  “What are you doing?”

  The voice freezes his blood.

  Someone is standing behind him. Someone is speaking to him. A voice that Paul knows very well, too well, perhaps.

  A voice so cold it’s as if he’s bumped into a corpse.

  74

  The shadow of the water tank gives me a bit of shade. It’s a kind of large reservoir. Sometimes I curse myself, I curse my poor legs. Crossing the meadow from the mill to the Epte is as difficult for me now as crossing the Arctic Circle. A real expedition. Yet it’s barely a half mile. How pitiful! When I think that Neptune has already been waiting for me down there, at Nettles Island, for half an hour…

  Right, I’d better get a move on.

  I rest for another few moments and then set off again.