He took her back to the bench and gave her a handkerchief and held her a long time. He didn’t give a damn about anything else. After a while she regained her composure.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just . . . this is unbelievable.”
“Why did you leave without even telling me?” he asked.
“Leda said you had figured out what we were doing, why we had come to San Rafael. You were shocked, angry. You didn’t want to have anything else to do with me.”
“She said pretty much the same to me,” he said, “only she told me the scheme was yours, essentially to have me replace Lacan as your benefactor.”
The revelations kept coming. They were both in a state of dismay. As each layer of the story was peeled back, the proportions of Leda’s scheme came into focus for him. It was not the complexity of the scheme that floored him, but the extent of her feelings that drove the scheme. It was hatred that had driven her, hatred for him. Such loathing was breathtaking, but to be the object of such loathing was sickening.
Céleste sat back in the corner of the bench, wadding his handkerchief, looking at it, looking at him.
“I told her,” she said, “after I saw you that last night—I told her I was through. I was leaving. We argued. It went on for several days. Finally she said let’s go back to Paris. We weren’t thinking straight. I didn’t care. I just wanted out of San Rafael. Paris was the only place I had to go.
“I didn’t know, of course, about the message she’d left in the bank box. I wouldn’t have left you like that, Ross. But . . . not knowing . . . thinking you wanted to have nothing to do with me . . . I decided you’d be better off if the two of us simply disappeared.”
“You should’ve tried to talk to me anyway.”
“I was so ashamed of what we’d done. It made sense to me that you wanted nothing more to do with us. I could imagine the betrayal you must have felt. And you didn’t make any effort to try to see me. I could only believe that she was telling me the truth about it.”
He felt a genuine bleakness in the face of all the misread communication. Leda had meant to deceive them, it was true, but she would not have been able to succeed if they had not been afraid of their own emotions, of their own feelings for each other. What were they holding back for? Why had they been afraid to simply tell each other how they felt? How could two reasonably intelligent adults who had seen so much life, who already had lived so many mistakes, persist in living them again?
“It’s incredible,” he said, “how we let this happen. We practically threw our lives away to her. I’ll never know how that happened.”
Céleste sighed a jerky sigh. She sat up straighter.
“Nothing changed for me after we got here,” she went on. It was as though she wanted to get it all out, get it over with once and for all.
“I still couldn’t live with it. Or her. One night, after another hateful argument, I told her I was leaving her. I just couldn’t stand to be with her. I told her she would always have money, but I couldn’t live with her. She flew into a rage, she was distraught . . . a madwoman.”
She paused, swallowed. “Sometime during the early morning hours that night, she crawled into her bathtub and cut . . . the insides of her thighs . . . and her wrists.”
“God.” He was stricken by the image of Leda, reclining awkwardly, her hump forcing her to a position from which she had to watch her blood spilling out onto the white porcelain between her legs. Unless she had closed her eyes. But he knew that she hadn’t. He knew that she had watched until her sight failed.
“The death certificate,” he said.
She nodded. “I changed the name, photocopied it, sent it to you. In my mind, we no longer existed for you. It was over.”
“But I would’ve thought Leda was still alive.”
“I know. But I knew you’d never hear from her.”
“Didn’t you think I’d be waiting for the other shoe to drop? Sooner or later there’s bound to be an investigation of some sort. I would’ve worried about Leda dealing with it. By this time I knew she was trying to destroy me, even if I didn’t know why.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I just wanted it over. It wasn’t until after I’d sent the letter that I . . . that I started putting all of that together. The more I dwelled on it . . . I knew I’d done the wrong thing. But I couldn’t bring myself to get in touch with you. At first . . . I thought I was being tough with myself. I thought that by making you think I was dead, I was being brutally self-disciplined.”
“Then . . . why . . .”
“Why?” She shook her head. “It turned out that I didn’t have the strength to live with that, either. The lies, the whole monstrous pile of lies we had tormented you with, haunted me. I couldn’t get on with my life. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think . . . and I couldn’t stop thinking . . . of you. So I sent the letter asking for the meeting. I needed to tell you everything, no matter how shamefully it reflected on me. All that mattered to me after a while was that you know the truth and that you learn it from me.”
She looked down again, and he did, too. She was twisting his handkerchief with such force that the backs of her hands were ribbed with the strained lines of taut tendons converging toward her wrist.
“I’m sorry . . . ,” she said, “so sorry . . . it’s impossible to express how sorry I am . . . for what we have done to you.”
• • •
As the afternoon light turned from bright gold to amber, they strolled through the cemetery’s allées and avenues and talked. Sometimes the fallen leaves were so thick upon the ground that their feet never touched the cinder at all. They had no idea where they were going or where they had gone, and when they encountered others on the quiet lanes, they were unaware. A lifetime had passed since they had last spoken. They had been given back what they had thought they had lost forever, and such a gift had the power of resurrection. The world changed. Life changed. Now, a second time since they had met, they knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
Chapter 43
They left the Cimetière du Père Lachaise and took a taxi to the Marais. After Leda’s suicide, Céleste had closed down Lacan’s large house in the staid Chaillot district and had taken a flat in the Marais. It was an area that held happy memories for her from her early years in Paris after leaving school in London.
Céleste directed the taxi to a small neighborhood near her flat, and they walked to several shops, gathering cold meats, wine, cheese, and bread for dinner. In the early darkness they carried the food back to her building and took the elevator up to the third floor. Her flat was roomy and on the corner of the building so that the main room looked onto a leafy intersection, one side of the room overlooking one street, the other side of the room overlooking the cross street. There were shops along the streets and a few cafés.
“The views made it more expensive,” she said, unpacking the food, “but it was worth it. In the evenings you can hear the tempo of the neighborhood changing. It might be too loud for some people, but it keeps me company.”
They put the food out on the kitchen table and sat down. Ross poured wine for each of them and then sliced thin pieces from the small ham.
After taking his first sip of wine, he said, “Okay, now what about the police?”
She was sitting across the small table from him. She nodded.
“It was the day I sent the fax to you. Despite the fact I’d already decided to talk to you, I kept putting it off. The visit from the police changed that.”
“Visit? They came here?”
“Yes. I’m sure they got my address from Lacan’s accountant. When I moved here after Leda’s death, I had to notify Lacan’s accountant. My mail comes here now. His office had to know.”
“Was there any reaction from the accountant?”
She shrugged and cut a slice of cheese. “I got a two-sentence letter: a sentence of condolence and a sentence acknowledging that they had received my change of address.”
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“Tell me about the police. That was . . . four days ago?”
She nodded. “He came here.” She sighed heavily and took a bite of the cheese and chewed for a moment, thinking.
“He was an inspector with the Police Judiciaire,” she went on, “and his name was Raymond Vautrin. At first he didn’t tell me Michel was missing. He said they wanted to talk to him and were trying to find him and when was the last time I saw him. As we had discussed, I told him . . . the time before last, which was . . . in May.
“He said wasn’t it unusual that it had now been four months. I said yes. He said, well, had I done anything about his absence? Wasn’t I worried? Had I reported it?
“I decided to get right to the heart of it, not even go to the trouble of having him worm it out of me. I told him what our relationship was like. I told him why I stayed with Michel. I told him that my life was only better the longer he stayed away. He could be gone for five years for all I cared. I wasn’t going to try to find him because he was only misery to me, and I didn’t go out of my way to find misery.
“He pointed out that Leda had been dead just over a month. There was no need to stay with Lacan anymore. Why hadn’t I broken away? I said I had, I’d moved out of his place. He said, yes, but you’re still cashing your checks from him. I said, yes, and I would continue to do so as long as they were sent to me, and even if they were sent to me for the rest of my life, it still wouldn’t compensate me for what that man had done to me. But I wouldn’t have anything more to do with Lacan. When the checks stopped coming, they stopped coming.”
They were both quiet for a while. The occasional sound of traffic passing by under the trees drifted up and through the opened windows. After a few minutes Céleste got up and closed the windows, rubbing the chill off her upper arms as she came back to the table. She took a sip of wine and tore off a piece of bread and ate it.
“Then what happened?”
“Then he told me Lacan seemed to be missing. Missing from where? I asked. The man travels so much, who would know if he was missing? Vautrin said that he had missed three meetings with his accountant, and a corporation board meeting, which he’d never missed. I didn’t know what to say.”
She cut another slice of cheese and took a tiny bite of it, her eyes somewhere on the table, avoiding him, reluctant to continue. She poured a splash more of wine even though she had plenty in her glass.
“Then he asked me if I knew about the other women. No, I said. Yes, other women like me who received money from Lacan. In Lyon. In Antibes. Strasbourg. And . . . even another woman here, in Paris. I didn’t know about Lyon.”
“He got all of this from the accountant?”
“Apparently. They all had similar arrangements.”
“You mean, financial payout.”
She nodded.
“And did they have similar stories . . . their relationships with Lacan?”
She nodded again and then took a sip of wine. “But I was the only one who knew him by his real name. And I was the only one who had married him.”
Silence.
“And there was something else,” she said. “I think . . . at least it seemed to me from Vautrin’s questions that they suspect Lacan of being mixed up in drug trafficking.”
Ross stopped cutting a piece of ham. “What? Why, what did he say?”
“He spent a lot of time asking about Michel’s names. Did I know of other names he might have used? Had I ever seen passports in any names other than the ones Vautrin had mentioned? I didn’t even know Michel had passports in any other names. Had I ever seen packages addressed to some other name come to our address in Chaillot? Had I ever seen mail, packages, deliveries of any kind, arrive from Latin America or Asia or Sicily? Had Lacan ever asked me to carry packages to these places for him or to go to these places and receive packages?”
She stopped. “What does that sound like to you?”
He sat back in his chair and looked at her. “You know, don’t you, that this is good news.”
“Of course I know that. It hardly helps.”
He understood how this must have made her feel, but at the same time, he was enormously relieved. The investigation into the disappearance of Michel Lacan was going to be complex and extensive, and more important, Céleste was going to be only one among many who might have had a motive to kill Lacan. In fact, she had no motive beyond the abuse.
“What about Lacan’s will? Was that mentioned?”
“No.”
“He already knew.”
“I’m sure he did. The accountant would have been able to put him in touch with Michel’s lawyers. It would have been easy to check.”
Céleste tore off another piece of bread and ate it with disinterest. For the first time, Ross’s hope that they might slip by being investigated to any great degree at all was grounded in something real. The question of drug trafficking was an unbelievable break.
“I’m wondering,” he said, looking toward the windows across the street, other windows, other lives, other spaces dimly lighted, “I was wondering how difficult it will be for them to trace his movements during the time he went to San Rafael. Did he use his real name? Or one of the false ones? Or did he use one that the police know nothing about?” He looked at Céleste. “Did Vautrin ask about your stay in San Rafael?”
“No.”
“But he must know about it. It’s no secret that you went there. If he doesn’t know now, he’ll know later. He’ll be running computer checks on all flights from France to Austin during the time you were there. He’ll find Lacan’s ticket. Unless Lacan flew in from somewhere other than France.”
“Ross, please. Let’s not do this. Let’s not let this consume us. If this becomes everything to us, if it becomes all that we are, consuming all of our time, all of our thoughts, we won’t have any lives left. And we’ve come through too much already to let that happen.”
She reached across the table and put her hands on his.
“We’ve been given an extraordinary second—even a third—chance. Let’s not . . . not waste it on this kind of obsession.”
• • •
She was right, of course. That night, as they lay together in her bed, her words resonated even more clearly in his thoughts. Everything about their having met and fallen in love was wildly improbable. What they had been through, and what they had done, was unimaginable. It was inconceivable.
Yet it had happened. And they had survived. They shouldn’t have, but they had slipped through the fine net of long odds as witlessly as they had been drawn into it in the first place. They had been rash. They had been blind. They had been selfish. They had been everything that people were who had needlessly wasted their lives. But they had not been destroyed. Not yet, anyway, and maybe they wouldn’t be. They had a chance now.
Surely they would survive now with even a small chance, if they had survived when they had had none at all.
Chapter 44
“It could take . . . months, years, even,” he said. He and Céleste were sitting in the sunshine in a small café across the street from her flat. They had slept late and had gone down for a breakfast of coffee and pastry.
They had talked far into the night about their future. What would they do now? Would it affect the investigation—that is, would it bring attention to Céleste that she would not otherwise receive—if she went back to San Rafael with him? If she were one of Lacan’s other women, probably not. But Céleste was his wife, even though he didn’t treat her with any more respect than he treated the other women. Still, it wouldn’t look good in the media.
“It’s no life at all, if we can’t be together,” she said. “Even if we meet surreptitiously, eventually they’ll find out. It would look even more suspicious than if we were open about it. I’m not going to wait for this investigation to resolve itself. I’m going to divorce him now.”
“What about Vautrin?”
“What about him?”
“Do you just go ahead with divorc
e proceedings without telling him?”
“I don’t know why not. A divorce would appear as though I were assuming Lacan was going to return eventually. I could even say that: I don’t care whether he returns or not. I want to be free of him. There wouldn’t be any need for me to do it if I thought I was a widow. I’m not entitled to anything in Lacan’s will, and I’m not going to seek anything. I just want to be free of him.”
“How long will that take?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ve got to get back soon.”
“How soon?”
“In a couple of days.”
“Why?”
“We ought not to be together until the divorce.”
She leaned toward him. “Ross, we have time. Whatever we do, let’s not lose our grip on each other. I couldn’t bear that. Not after everything we’ve been through.”
• • •
He returned to San Rafael without her.
Amado, of course, was stupefied, and for once he was speechless. He simply stared and listened. Ross told him more or less the truth about what Céleste had done with Leda’s death certificate, passing over the why of it with a story of misunderstanding and stress. He didn’t mention Lacan at all, except to say that Céleste was divorcing him.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and they were sitting in the kitchen of Ross’s house, drinking beer and eating fresh tamales that he had gotten in Rincon. On the other side of the screened door the patio was bright, but not as hot as before. While he was in Paris the first norther of the season had plunged down through the midwestern states and then had slowed in the Panhandle and settled gradually across Texas, breaking the back of the heat wave. The temperature highs were in the low eighties now, and the nights cooled down nicely. But there was still no rain.
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