Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  The detective drained the glass of wine in a single mouthful.

  This was one of the few sensations he would miss: the inimitable taste of this distinctive yellow wine burning deliciously as it moved through his body, allowing him to forget for a moment this obsession, the unsolvable mystery to which he had devoted his life.

  Grand-Duc put the glass back on the desk and picked up the pale green notebook, wondering whether to open it one last time. He looked at the yellow Post-it: for Lylie.

  This was what would remain: this notebook, these pages, written over the last few days… For Lylie, for Marc, for Mathilde de Carville, for Nicole Vitral, for the police and the lawyers, and whoever else wished to explore this endless hall of mirrors.

  It was a spellbinding read, without a doubt. A masterpiece. A thrilling mystery to take your breath away. And it was all there… except for the end.

  He had written a thriller that was missing its final page, a whodunit in which the last five lines had been erased.

  Future readers would probably think themselves cleverer than he. They would undoubtedly believe that they could succeed where he had failed, that they could find the solution.

  For many years he had believed the same thing. He had always felt certain that proof must exist somewhere, that the equation could be resolved. It was a feeling, only a feeling, but it wouldn’t go away… That certainty had been what had driven him on until this deadline: today, Lylie’s eighteenth birthday. But perhaps it was only his subconscious that had kept this illusion alive, to prevent him from falling into utter despair. It would have been so cruel to have spent all those years searching for the key to a problem that had no solution.

  The detective reread his final words: I have done my best.

  Grand-Duc decided not to tidy up the empty bottle and the used glass. The police and the forensics people examining his body a few hours from now would not be worried about an unwashed glass. His blood and his brains would be splashed in a thick puddle across this mahogany desk and these polished floorboards. And should his disappearance not be noticed for a while, which seemed highly likely (who would miss him, after all?), it would be the stench of his corpse that would alert the neighbors.

  In the hearth, he noticed a scrap of cardboard that had escaped the flames. He bent down and threw it into the fire.

  Slowly, Grand-Duc moved toward the mahogany writing desk that occupied the corner of the room facing the fireplace. He opened the middle drawer and took his revolver from its leather holster. It was a Mateba, in mint condition, its gray metal barrel glimmering in the firelight. The detective’s hand probed more deeply inside the desk and brought out three 38mm bullets. With a practiced movement he spun the cylinder and gently inserted the bullets.

  One would be enough, even given his relatively inebriated state, even though he would probably tremble and hesitate. Because he would undoubtedly manage to press the gun to his temple, hold it firmly, and squeeze the trigger. He couldn’t miss, even with the contents of a bottle of wine in his bloodstream.

  He placed the revolver on the desk, opened the left-hand drawer, and took out a newspaper: a very old and yellowed copy of Est Républicain. This macabre set piece had been in his mind for months, a symbolic ritual that would help him to end it all, to rise above the labyrinth forever.

  11:54 p.m.

  The detective glanced over at the vivarium, where the dragonflies were making their dirgelike rattles and hums. The power supply had been off for the last thirty minutes. Deprived of oxygen and food, the dragonflies would not survive the week. And he had spent so much money buying the rarest and oldest species; he had spent hours, years of his life, looking after the vivarium, feeding them, breeding them, even employing someone to look after them when he was away.

  All that effort, just to let them die.

  It’s actually quite an agreeable feeling, Grand-Duc thought, to sit in judgment on the life and death of another: to protect only in order to condemn, to give hope in order to sacrifice. To play with fate, like a cunning, capricious god. After all, he, too, had been the victim of just such a sadistic deity.

  Crédule Grand-Duc sat on the chair behind the desk and unfolded the copy of the Est Républicain, dated December 23, 1980. Once again, he read the front page: “The Miracle of Mont Terrible.”

  Beneath the banner headline was a rather blurred photograph showing the carcass of a crashed airplane, uprooted trees, snow muddied by rescue workers. Under the photograph, the disaster was described in a few lines:

  The Airbus 5403, flying from Istanbul to Paris, crashed into Mont Terri, on the Franco-Swiss border, last night. Of the 169 passengers and flight crew on board, 168 were killed upon impact or perished in the flames. The sole survivor was a baby, three months old, thrown from the plane when it collided with the mountainside, before the cabin was consumed by fire.

  When Grand-Duc died, he would fall forward onto the front page of this newspaper. His blood would redden the photograph of the tragedy that had taken place eighteen years earlier; it would mingle with the blood of those one hundred and sixty-eight victims. He would be found this way, a few days or a few weeks later. No one would mourn him. Certainly not the de Carvilles. Perhaps the Vitrals would feel sad at his passing. Emilie, Marc… Nicole in particular.

  He would be found, and the notebook would be given to Lylie: the story of her short life. His testament.

  Grand-Duc looked at his reflection one more time in the copper plaque, and felt almost proud. It was a good ending: much better than what had gone before.

  11:57 p.m.

  It was time.

  He carefully positioned the newspaper in front of him, moved his chair forward, and took a firm grip of the revolver. His palms were sweaty. Slowly he lifted his arm.

  He shivered, in spite of himself, when the cold metal of the gun barrel touched his temple. But he was ready.

  He tried to empty his mind, not to think about the bullet, an inch or two from his brain, that would smash through his skull and kill him…

  His index finger bent around the trigger. All he had to do now was squeeze and it would all be over.

  Eyes open or closed?

  A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead and fell onto the newspaper.

  Eyes open. Now do it.

  He leaned forward. For the final time, his gaze rested on the photograph of the burned-out cabin, and the other photograph of the fireman standing in front of the hospital in Montbéliard, carefully holding that bluish body. The miracle baby.

  His index finger tightened around the trigger.

  11:58 p.m.

  His eyes were lost in the black ink of the newspaper’s front page. Everything blurred. The bullet would perforate his temple, without the slightest resistance. All he had to do was squeeze a little harder, just a fraction of an inch. He stared into eternity. The black ink below him came into focus again, as if he were playing with the lens of a camera. This would be his final view of the world, before everything went dark forever.

  His finger. The trigger.

  His eyes wide open.

  Grand-Duc felt an electric shock run through him. Something unimaginable had just happened.

  Because what he was looking at was impossible. He knew that perfectly well.

  His finger relaxed its pressure slightly.

  To begin with, Grand-Duc thought it must be an illusion, a hallucination provoked by his imminent death, some kind of defense mechanism dreamed up by his brain…

  But no. What he had seen, what he read in that newspaper, was real. The paper was yellowed by age, the ink somewhat smeared, and yet there could be no doubt whatsoever.

  It was all there.

  The detective’s mind started working frantically. He had come up with so many theories over the years of the investigation, hundreds of them. But now he knew where to begin, which thread to pull, and the whole tangled web came apart with disconcerting simplicity.

  It was all so obvious.

  He lowe
red his pistol and laughed like a madman.

  11:59 p.m.

  He had done it!

  The solution to the mystery had been here, on the front page of this newspaper, from the very beginning. And yet it had been absolutely impossible to discover this solution at the time, eighteen years ago. Everyone had read this newspaper, pored over it, analyzed it thousands of times, but no one could possibly have guessed the truth, back in 1980, or during the years that followed.

  The solution was so obvious: it jumped out at you… but on one condition.

  The newspaper had to be looked at eighteen years later.

  2

  October 2, 1998, 8:27 a.m.

  Were they lovers, or brother and sister?

  The question had been nagging at Mariam for almost a month. She ran the Lenin Bar, at the crossroads of Avenue de Stalingrad and Rue de la Liberté, a few yards from the forecourt of the University of Paris VIII in Saint-Denis. At this hour of the morning, the bar was still mostly empty, and Mariam took advantage of the quiet to clean tabletops and arrange chairs.

  The couple in question were sitting at the back of the café, as they usually did, near the window, at a tiny table for two, holding hands and looking deep into each other’s blue eyes.

  Lovers?

  Friends?

  Siblings?

  Mariam sighed. The lack of certainty bothered her. She generally had a keen instinct when it came to her students’ love lives. She snapped out of it: she still had to wipe down the tables and sweep the floor; in a few minutes, thousands of stressed students would rush from the metro station Saint-Denis–Université, the terminus of Line 13. The station had only been open for four months, but already it had transformed the local area.

  Mariam had seen the University of Paris VIII slowly change from its rebellious beginnings as the great university of humanities, society, and culture into a banal, well-behaved suburban learning center. Nowadays, most professors sulked when they were assigned to Paris VIII. They would rather be at the Sorbonne, or even Jussieu. Before the metro station opened, the professors had had to cross through Saint-Denis, to see a little of the surrounding area, but now, with the metro, that, too, was over. The professors boarded the metro on Line 13 and were whisked off toward the libraries, laboratories, ministries, and grand institutions of Parisian culture.

  Mariam turned toward the counter to fetch a sponge, casting a furtive glance at the intriguing young couple: the pretty blond girl and the strapping, spellbound boy. She felt almost haunted by them.

  Who were they?

  Mariam had never understood the workings of higher education, with its modules and examinations and strikes, but no one knew better than she what the students did during their break time. She had never read Robert Castel, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Jacques Lacan, the star professors of Paris VIII—at most, she might have seen them once or twice, in her bar or in the campus forecourt—but nevertheless she considered herself an expert in the analysis, sociology, and philosophy of student love affairs. She was like a mother hen to some of her regulars and an advice columnist to others, helping them through their heartaches with professional skill.

  But despite her experience, her famous intuition, she could not fathom the relationship between the couple at the window.

  Emilie and Marc.

  Shy lovers or affectionate relatives?

  The uncertainty was maddening. Something about them didn’t fit. They looked so alike, yet they were so different. Mariam knew their first names: she knew the first names of all her regulars.

  Marc, the boy, had been studying at Paris VIII for two years now, and he came to the Lenin almost every day. A tall boy, good-looking, but a little too nice, like a disheveled “Little Prince.” Daydreamy, and somewhat gauche: the kind of provincial student who still didn’t know how things worked in Paris, and who lacked the money to look cool. As for his studies, he wasn’t a fanatic. As far as she understood, he was studying European law, but for the past two years, he had seemed very calm and thoughtful. Now Mariam understood why.

  He had been waiting for her. His Emilie.

  She had arrived this year, in September, so she must be two or three years younger than he.

  They shared certain traits. That slightly low-class accent, which Mariam could not locate, but which was indisputably the same. And yet, in Emilie’s case, the accent somehow seemed wrong; it did not fit her personality. The same could be said of her name: Emilie was too ordinary, too bland for a girl like that. Emilie, like Marc, was blond and, like Marc, she had blue eyes. But while Marc’s gestures and expressions were clumsy, simple, unoriginal, there was a je-ne-sais-quoi about Emilie, a strikingly different way of moving, a kind of nobility in the way she held her head, a purebred elegance and grace that seemed to suggest aristocratic genes, a privileged education.

  And that was not the only mystery. In terms of money, Emilie’s standard of living appeared to be the very opposite of Marc’s. Mariam had a knack for evaluating, in an instant, the quality and cost of the clothing worn by her students, from H&M and Zara to Yves Saint Laurent.

  Emilie did not wear Yves Saint Laurent, but she wasn’t far off. What she was wearing today—a simple, elegant orange silk blouse and a black, asymmetrical skirt—had undoubtedly cost a small fortune. Emilie and Marc might be from the same place, but they did not belong to the same world.

  And yet they were inseparable.

  There was a complicity between them that could not be created in only a few months at the university. It was as if they had lived together all their lives, perceptible in the countless protective gestures that Marc made toward Emilie: a hand on her shoulder, a chair pulled out for her, a door held open, a glass filled without asking. It was the way a big brother would behave toward a little sister.

  Mariam wiped down a chair and put it back in position, her mind still churning over the enigma of Marc and Emilie.

  It was as if Marc had spent the previous two years preparing the ground for Emilie’s arrival, keeping her seat warm in the lecture hall, a table near the window in the Lenin. Mariam sensed that Emilie was a brilliant student, quick-witted, ambitious and determined. Artistic. Literary. She could see that determination whenever the girl took out a book or a folder, in the way she would skim confidently over notes that Marc would take hours to master.

  So, could they be brother and sister, in spite of their social differences?

  Well, yes. Except that Marc was in love with Emilie!

  That, too, was blindingly obvious.

  He did not love her like a brother, but like a devoted lover. It was clear to Mariam from the first moment she saw them together. A fever, a passion, completely unmistakable.

  Mariam did not have a clue what this could mean.

  She had been shamelessly spying on them for a month now. She had glanced furtively at the names on files, essays, placed on the table. She knew their surname.

  Marc Vitral.

  Emilie Vitral.

  But ultimately, that did not help. The logical supposition was that they were brother and sister. But then what about those incestuous gestures? The way Marc touched Emilie’s lower back… Or perhaps they were married. She was only eighteen: very young for a student to marry, but not impossible. And, of course, it was technically possible that they just happened to have the same name, but Mariam could not believe in such a coincidence, unless they were cousins or belonged to a more complicated kind of family, with stepparents or half siblings…

  Emilie seemed very fond of Marc. But her expression was more complex, difficult to read. She often seemed to stare into space, particularly when she was alone, as if she were hiding something, a deep sadness… It was that melancholy that gave Emilie a subtle distance, a different kind of charm from that of all the other girls on campus. All of the boys in the Lenin stared hungrily at her, but—probably because of that reserve—none of them dared to approach her.

  None except Marc.

  Emilie was his. That was
why he was here. Not for his courses. Not for the university. He was here purely so he could be with her, so he could protect her.

  But what about the rest? Mariam had often tried talking with Emilie and Marc, chatting about any old subject, but she had never learned anything intimate. But one day, she was determined she would find out their secret…

  She was cleaning the last tables when Marc raised his hand.

  “Mariam, could you bring us two coffees, please, and a glass of water for Emilie?”

  Mariam smiled to herself. Marc never drank coffee when he was alone, but always ordered one when he was with Emilie.

  “No problem, lovebirds!” Mariam replied.

  Testing the water.

  Marc gave an embarrassed smile. Emilie did not. She lowered her head slightly. Mariam only noticed this now: Emilie looked awful this morning, her face puffy, as if she hadn’t slept all night. Was she worrying over an exam? Had she spent the night revising, or writing an essay?

  No, it was something else.

  Mariam shook the coffee grounds into the bin, rinsed the percolator, and made two espressos.

  It was something serious.

  As if Emilie had to give Marc some painful news. Mariam had witnessed so many conversations like that: farewell dates, tragic tête-à-têtes, with the boy sitting alone in front of his coffee while the girl left, looking embarrassed but relieved. Emilie looked like someone who had spent the night thinking and who, by early morning, had made her decision and was ready to accept its consequences.

  Mariam walked slowly toward them, the tray in her hands bearing two coffees and a glass of water.

  Poor Marc. Did he have any inkling that he was already doomed?

  Mariam also knew how to be discreet. She placed the drinks on the table, then turned and walked away.

  Also by Michel Bussi

  After the Crash