“She’s sleeping soundly,” Agnes remarked as she approached. The little girl, Mimi, lay curled up on a long silk sofa, covered by a thick blanket. A stuffed elephant lay wrapped under her arm.
“I asked Monsieur Vallotton to allow Mimi to remain here,” said the nurse. “She was traumatized and out in the cold too long. I want to keep an eye on her.”
“Shouldn’t she be with her parents?” Agnes asked.
“She lives with the Vallottons.” The nurse moved the blanket higher up the girl’s shoulders and touched her forehead as if checking for fever. “Adopted by old Monsieur Vallotton when her parents died.”
“She’s fine. Cognac cures most things,” Arsov said.
Agnes noted the empty chocolate pot and cup nearby and her gut hollowed. She had used the same technique on her boys the night she told them their father died. The familiar soothing chocolate concealing the sleep-inducing cognac. She buried the memory and sat across from the old man in a wide, deeply cushioned chair. The arms were gilded and she was reminded of the marquise’s silver chair earlier in the evening. The rich certainly liked their precious metals on display.
Under the watchful eye of the butler, who now wore earmuffs in addition to his gloves and scarf, a stream of servants brought in more candles to expand the circle of light. Beck-and-call parade, it looked like to her, yet somehow different than what she had experienced at the Vallottons’. The marquise gave the impression of austere control, whereas Arsov’s staff appeared as more of a stage piece, with everyone playing their part until they exited behind the curtain. Brighter now, even the salon resembled a stage set more than a living space. Agnes wouldn’t have blinked if Napoleon and Josephine had walked in trailing their court.
Satisfied that Mimi was resting peacefully, Nurse Brighton draped a blanket over Arsov’s shoulders in addition to the one he normally kept over his legs. The blankets gave him bulk and it was possible to imagine him as a younger, more powerfully built man, while the trick of candlelight made his wheelchair fade into obscurity. He flipped the oxygen cord onto the top of his head and removed a richly carved gold lighter from his pocket. The nurse sighed in exasperation and snatched the entire apparatus away, dragging the small tank across the room and away from the open flame. Arsov took a long drag on his cigarette and closed his eyes as he exhaled, then he coughed like it was his last breath. Nurse Brighton murmured something about being unable to recharge the oxygen tank without electricity but she didn’t move to stop him smoking.
Agnes peered into the corners of the room, wanting to remember the details to tell her boys. And Sybille. The wallpaper was cut velvet and matched the burgundy curtains, and the paintings were palatial: life-sized portraits and great battle scenes. Ten pairs of glass-paned doors filled the wall overlooking the lake, and groupings of chairs and sofas and tables extended across the parquet floor. She estimated the room was large enough to house a tennis court. Truly amazing. The nurse drew a chair close to the fire, extending her white-clad legs and feet near the flames.
“Scared you, didn’t it? The woman dead out there,” Arsov said. “You think about the cold and what it can do. You think this will keep me inside now?” He took a deep draw on his cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. Agnes resisted the urge to shift nearer and inhale. “You think it’s cold tonight? You haven’t felt cold until you have lived through a Russian winter. We used to wake up with frost on our blankets every morning from October till April.”
The nurse made a disparaging sound and Arsov laughed. “You imagine I exaggerate? Find someone who grew up in the country eighty years ago and they will tell the same tales. Cold, real cold, hurts. It reaches into your lungs and burns with each breath. It dries your eyes and numbs your ears. Winter in Russia is a hard lesson.”
A log crashed in the fireplace and the flames blazed. Agnes felt the added warmth and realized that her back was growing cold as the room lost the last of its electric heat. Reaching for a blanket from the stack left by the servants she was struck by the idea that she was seeing the room as it was originally experienced: a world lit only by fire.
“Tell me what happened tonight,” she said. “Julien Vallotton came here to telephone the police?” She had already asked Arsov if he knew the dead woman. He didn’t. Hadn’t seen her. Didn’t recognize her name.
The old man took another long drag on his cigarette and closed his eyes as he exhaled, enjoyment in the lines of his face. He fingered the fabric of his striped cravat. “The others, they have spoken with you. They are good people. Hardworking.”
“Yes, but you were the one who saw Monsieur Vallotton arrive.” Agnes had heard the same story from each member of the staff with varying degrees of detail. The discovery of the body went as follows: Julien Vallotton had pounded on a French door leading from the salon to the lawn. Hearing him, the nurse and Arsov had rushed into the room, unlocking and opening the door. Opening the door had triggered an alarm and others arrived at a run, entering the salon in the minutes after Vallotton was admitted. The butler had silenced the alarm; still, the remainder of the household knew what had happened second- or third-hand.
“They will exaggerate. We live by routine and this will excite some into creating little details. Misremembering to make their viewpoint important.”
“I think they’ve been accurate enough,” she said. The house ran like clockwork, no one alone at any time as they cooked and cleaned and served. Their impressions coincided. “Monsieur Vallotton arrived at that door?” She pointed toward the farthest of the sets of doors facing the lake.
“He pounded and we heard.”
“We ran,” interjected the nurse. “As I told you, Inspector Lüthi, we were in the smaller salon, the room next to this, working on correspondence, and heard fists on the glass. And a man’s voice shouting.”
“She can run.” Arsov grinned. “Pushed me in here like a battalion was in pursuit. Unlocked the door and Julien ran in. I thought he was in London.”
“Mimi was with him?” Agnes glanced at the child asleep on the long sofa.
“Yes, yes, she was with him. They saw the woman and ran here because we are closer than returning to the château. They were frightened.”
“What had you heard earlier in the afternoon? Had you seen anything unusual?”
“What do you know unusual? How can we pick out what detail you must know to find your killer?”
“There might have been something, someone. A sound.”
“You want me to tell you of a man with a weapon skulking around my lawn and say, yes, that was him? This unusual man is the killer and I will direct you to this evil. Is this how you think you will find your murderer? Inspector Lüthi, I will tell you that evil hides its face until the last minute. Evil hides in the ordinary. You will not find it with these questions.”
Nearby, the nurse shifted. Her old-fashioned winged hat cast long flickering shadows. The woman looked tired, yet unable to go to bed while Arsov was awake. They were all tired and Agnes was prepared to tell Arsov she would come back in the morning when he surprised her.
“You have not seen murder before,” he said, jabbing the air with his cigarette, trailing smoke in a lazy arc. “Do not argue. This is a truth. You were nervous when you arrived tonight, the thought of crossing near where the woman died was disturbing. Ghosts were in your mind. But you have courage. You made the journey alone. I know this because I remember the first time I saw murder. I was not seventeen. And this is how I know that evil can come out of the ordinary.” Arsov grimaced. It was not a pleasing sight, and for a moment he looked every one of his ninety years.
“You are shocked that she was killed in our safe surroundings. I, too, found murder where I felt safest. In my village we knew of war, but as a distant idea. When it came, it came swiftly. It came with the Fritzes. When they invited us to a field at the edge of the woods. To collect data they said, and we believed them. We were deep in the heart of Russia and some of the children had never seen Roman letters before.
They were excited. I remember how they begged to see the list with their names.”
The nurse stood and without a word left the room, shielding a candle before her.
“When my family crossed the top of the hill we saw that the ditch was dug. The pit deep enough to hide a man and ten meters long, gutted into the hard cold ground. Easier for us. The walk wasn’t far and the surroundings were familiar, so we hadn’t time to worry. We had only a few minutes. Two … maybe three. Not enough time. Too much time.”
Agnes wanted him to stop; he was veering too far from what she needed to know, but she couldn’t speak. He was Russian and of a certain age. She knew what had happened in the last World War. The mass murders.
“In my life there are entire weeks that I don’t recall; that day I remember each fraction of time. It is as if I lived it once and then saw it every day after. Do you know this feeling?” he asked.
She swallowed, remembering George’s death. The distant scream that only later she knew was his. How the rain started to fall. The exact temperature of the air. The sound of traffic. All ordinary and yet all now part of that day in a way that made her pulse quicken and her mouth taste of adrenaline.
“I can tell you how the air tasted heavy with fir,” Arsov continued, “and the smell of cow dung mixed with fresh earth. The air was dry and cold. Truly cold, so that our lungs hurt while we walked and so dry you could draw a spark merely by rubbing against someone.” He tapped his cigarette ash and it fell to the floor and singed the antique carpet. Transfixed, Agnes watched the silk threads char.
“The sun touched the tops of the trees and the pit was in shadow. It took us a few extra seconds to understand. To see. Those who came before had laid their shovels at the edge of the ditch and were waiting. Not running or threatening or begging, but waiting. Disbelief on their faces. You know what is about to happen but your mind says—impossible.”
Yes, impossible, she wanted to scream. Impossible that he was dead. That he had killed himself. That he deliberately left her and their sons. She reached for a glass of water and it shook, sloshing liquid onto her lips and down her suit jacket.
“I held my mother’s hand and helped her climb across the uneven ground. My baby sister, my Anya, clung to my other hand and behind us I could feel the touch of the others bracing so they wouldn’t stumble as we pressed together. We didn’t want to humiliate ourselves. Can you imagine the state of someone’s mind to ignore the men with guns pointed at them, the harsh commands of a tongue few understood, and the obvious threat of that ditch, and yet be concerned about falling? About loss of dignity?”
Agnes glanced up at the light of a candelabra to stop the tears from forming. Why? she had wanted to scream every day since George’s death. Why?
Arsov smoked and watched the fire. “The Germans are an efficient people. It took only a few minutes for us to be in place and another few for the job to be over. I had never heard gunfire like that. The report of a rifle I had known from infancy, but not the thunder of a machine gun, and it sounded like the end of the world. In a way it was. My mother and sisters turned to me, they clung to me in desperation and that is how they saved my life. When the guns sounded I fell with my family, pushed down the embankment as they collapsed. The bastards shot into the ditch. My father taught me languages and I could understand the orders and heard them pointing out survivors. ‘There! In the blue cap!’ ‘There, the woman with the crying baby!’ You can’t imagine what these words meant to me. My friend in the blue cap he hated but that his grandmother made for him. My older sister and the crying baby, her daughter.”
Outside there was a loud crack followed by a thundering boom. Agnes half rose. Branches, even entire trees, were snapping under the weight of the ice, bringing down more power lines and blocking roads across the region. Arsov ignored everything and she sat down awkwardly.
“Few died instantly. I could feel them move and whimper. Blood from my mother and sister drained onto my face and into my mouth and eyes but I couldn’t wipe it away; I was pinned by their bodies. I held my baby sister’s hand as she died and felt her struggle to breathe with a bullet in her lung. I lay there from the time the sun hit the tops of the trees until it had disappeared and the sky was filled with stars.”
Agnes remembered the blood on the ground beside George, how they had tried to cover it, but she saw. And the edge of his hand when it slipped off the gurney. Later she wished she’d been allowed to touch it, to touch him while he still had the vestiges of human warmth.
Arsov motioned toward Mimi. “She is Anya’s age, almost. They can’t last long in the cold at that age, they are so frail. Anya’s fingers were those of a musician, long and thin and frostbite would have taken them even if she lived. I held her hand and felt it grow cold. All around me the cries turned to rasping gurgles and low moans, then they stopped. First Anya, then my mother. My older sister and her baby. All around me was death and still the Germans toyed with us. Then night fell, the wind rose, and the temperature dropped. Like tonight.
“When the Germans left, I couldn’t believe it. They had their beautiful coats and gloves and boots, but they were too cold to stand over us and watch us die. They were too cold to finish the job. I waited until the moon was halfway across the sky, but not one of the bastards returned and so I pulled myself out from under my dead family and childhood friends and crawled out of the pit and started walking away from my village into the night. I had survived and swore I would cut down these weak men who hid behind bullets but ran from the cold.”
Agnes pictured the dead woman outside, and the ice and wind, and felt despair.
Five
It was the middle of the night and Agnes thanked the Vallotton housekeeper once again for offering the hospitality of the château in such strange circumstances, telling Madame Puguet she could find her own way to her bedroom. Over the past hours they had done all they could, although it hadn’t felt like enough. Theft of money was a terrible crime, but this, stealing a life, weighed more. Now, walking the corridor to the bedroom wing she followed the directions she’d been given, clutching a small leather bag under her arm. Pleased that she had remembered the emergency “stop-over” kit George had put together years ago. She had laughed at his Swiss-ness when he showed it to her. Nothing left to chance. Always prepared. Just a few toothbrushes and other toiletries, he had said, before putting it in the car and most likely forgetting about it. Now it was a talisman of his thoughtfulness. How he’d taken care of her … of all of them, really. She wondered if she had appreciated him enough. She was certain she had. He must have known how she felt. But then, why? Why had he taken his life? No note, no explanation, but a dozen witnesses who saw him carefully climb the railing and step off the Pont Bessières. A deliberate choice.
She turned a corner and found the marquise staring down a flight of stairs. Backlit by flickering torches set in the walls, her profile was strong and beautiful despite her age. Her candelabra dripped white wax on the floor and Agnes liked the imagery and suspected the other woman knew the effect she had. According to Petit, the marquise had been widowed young. That meant that the vast majority of her years had been spent in this place where centuries of her ancestors had lived before, walking these same steps illuminated only by candlelight. Agnes clicked off her flashlight.
The marquise acknowledged Agnes with a nod, before glancing down the staircase to the door leading to the lawn. Agnes knew it was likely the victim walked—or ran?—through that door to her death.
“She has nothing to do with us,” the marquise said. “Or perhaps it is that we had nothing to do with her. Not in a way that would lead to her death.”
“She died here; there will be a connection. We’ll find it.”
“She seemed a smart sort of person, but not altogether truthful.” The marquise glanced at Agnes. “Don’t mind me, I am judging too harshly. She was young and the young always have their secrets. I have been reading Diogenes and have become too immersed in his theories.” She turned
as if she could see all the way down the stairs and across the lawn to the bench. “To fall and die like that; it is a feeble generation.”
“I suspect feebleness had little to do with her death.” Agnes stifled a yawn. They stood shoulder to shoulder in silence.
“My nephew tells me Mademoiselle Cowell was wearing the coronation gown.”
“Her gown was white, with stones on the bodice, if that’s the one he means.”
“It is distinctive, white pleated silk with a spray of diamonds. It was worn by one of my ancestresses to Napoleon’s coronation. Julien is quite sure that is what Mademoiselle Cowell was wearing.”
“Stolen?” Agnes willed the word back as soon as she’d said it.
“How could it be stolen when it was on our property?” The marquise smiled coolly. “Mademoiselle Cowell had leave to look at our possessions as part of her work on the auction.”
“I understood it was only art for sale?”
“Clothing can be art.” Before Agnes could respond the marquise continued, “No, it was not part of the auction but perhaps what she called staging. Unnecessary in my mind, although that is Julien’s concern and I told her as much. I only point out the gown as a matter of interest and to suggest that you will find her own clothing in the fur vault where she may have changed. Perhaps there you will also find … a clue. That is what you are looking for, isn’t it? The reason you and your colleagues must stay the night. The reason for these questions.”
“You could call it that, a clue.”
“There are others who stay as part of this interrogation. The man who found a way down from the village for your colleagues, Monsieur Estanguet? I met him in the corridor a moment ago. It is like living in a hotel, strangers walking into and out of bedrooms.” The marquise fingered her rubies. “He was distressed, nearly incoherent.”
Swiss Vendetta--A Mystery Page 5