The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  A wind began to sigh in the evening. In the streets, you could hear the café awnings rattling. On the pavement of the rue Rembrandt, I saw some yellow leaves flying along, like the ones I’d noticed at Nanterre, and when I went up to my room I felt more than ever like François, lying in his attic alone after Meaulnes has left, listening to the wind in the plane trees, except this was a warm wind and the wind at Sainte-Agathe always seemed to be cold.

  At about one o’clock, I got up to pee. I didn’t put on the light, but stood in my bathroom peeing by the reflected street light, and gradually, in the semidark, I became aware of a noise I’d never heard before: the door behind the clothes rail – the door to the locked room – was rattling.

  I didn’t flush the lavatory, but stood still, almost without breathing, and listened. It was as if the catch was loose in its metal socket, letting the door move very slightly, as the wind from the open window caught it. As I crossed the bathroom and moved aside the rail of Valentina’s coats and dresses, I suddenly knew what I was going to discover: the lock had been forced by Carmody’s men. And when I turned the handle of the door, it opened.

  The attic was a junk room, just as Valentina had said. A lot of the junk must have come from the Gavrilovichs’ café, long ago. There was a red-and-white awning, folded up. There was a huge Wurlitzer jukebox, an old billboard advertising Dubonnet, stacks of dusty bentwood chairs, an oven. But there was also a bed. The bed was against the wall, under the window, across which the curtains were still drawn. It looked tidy and ready for use, with a faded yellow bedcover thrown over it and a bedside table near it with a lamp and an ashtray. In the ashtray, there was a single cigarette butt, with a tipped end.

  And there was a kind of pathway through the junk that led directly from the door to the bed. You could imagine the occupant of the room moving things around, so that he or she didn’t have to step over the oven in the middle of the night. I didn’t blame them. I’d never shared a room with an oven. I thought, that’s one way to measure whether someone is poor or not – if they have to share their room with a kitchen appliance.

  I crossed to the bed and sat on it and looked at everything. There were stacks of boxes round the walls and when I got up to examine them I saw that Carmody’s guys had only ripped open a few of these and then given up. They contained a mountain of Valentina’s books. On the covers were garish pictures of damsels wearing tall hats and knights in armour on white horses flying through dark forests in the moonlight. You could just hear the brigadiers from the commissariat sneering and saying: ‘Nothing here, Inspecteur. Only what appear to be medieval romances.’

  And then they would have moved on, past a café umbrella stuck into a stone, a pile of red and blue curtains, two medieval-looking typewriters, a wire plant holder, a toolkit and a roll of carpet, to the Wurlitzer, where the titles of old songs, typed and numbered, were still faintly readable: Chanson d’amour, La Bohême, A Whiter Shade of Pale, Que c’est triste Venise, Milord. I stood by it, selecting numbers. But the records were gone and I didn’t recognise any of the titles. I needed Valentina to tell me what they sounded like and which ones were her favourites in the old days of the Café des Russes.

  I liked the Wurlitzer. I wouldn’t have minded sharing a room with it. The body of it was a candy-pink kind of colour and you could tell it weighed about a ton. Hugh once said technological progress could be measured in weight alone. He said by the time I had children of my own, a CD player might weigh less than a daffodil.

  I was wondering whether the Wurlitzer could ever be made to work again and where all the records had gone, when I noticed that on its pink body, on the left-hand side, there was a tiny little dial and a lever. I knelt down and tried to turn the lever. I thought that if they’d put this door on the Wurlitzer, the records might be inside. But the lever wouldn’t move. Then I saw why. The dial was a combination lock. Valentina had turned the jukebox into a safe.

  There was a tiny dusting of white powder, like talcum powder, on the floor directly underneath the lock. I assumed from this that Carmody had found it and dusted it for prints. What I couldn’t tell was whether he’d worked out the combination and looked inside, where the plunder of Valentina’s visits to Cartier must lie.

  I began to spin the dial, trying combinations at random. In certain movies, safe-breakers can crack number codes just by putting their ears to the lock, as if the lock were a human voice whispering to them, but it’s never explained to you how this works. The only kind of movies that I like are ones where you understand exactly how everything works. If I were a scriptwriter, I’d spend a lot of time on research into the material world.

  When the safe didn’t open and didn’t open, I started to wonder how much Valentina’s jewellery was worth. It had to be a lot. I thought I would say to Carmody that if a ransom demand came, all we had to do was blow the safe and hand over the jewellery. And then, when Valentina was back again, sitting at her dressing table while I brushed her hair and she put on her lipstick, she would say to me: ‘I think I shall wear the sapphire-and-diamond earrings tonight, darling,’ and I’d tell her they were no longer there. I’d say: ‘We bought your life with them. You’d be in your grave now if it hadn’t been for Cartier.’

  I had a dream that Valentina was in her grave, but still alive, trying to breathe in the tiny bit of air between her nose and the coffin lid. I was digging in heavy, wet clay, digging with my hands trying to reach her. As I dug, I called out: ‘It’s OK, Valentina! It’s Lewis. I’m going to get you out!’ But I kept on and on digging down and down and found nothing.

  I woke up to the sound of hammering. I thought I was in my dream and the hammering was Valentina in her box under the earth, but then I realised it was morning and what I could hear was Didier on the roof.

  It was quite early. I got dressed and climbed out of my bathroom window and I noticed that the wind had dropped and the trees in the street were still.

  Didier was wearing a black T-shirt with an African mask printed on it. It didn’t look faded like his other clothes, but brand-new, as if he might have bought it at the Richard Lenoir market. I thought, if Violette gets sent back to Benin, this is the kind of job she’ll have to get – working in a T-shirt factory. I imagined her walking to work through miles and miles of dust.

  I asked Didier why he hadn’t been on the roof the day before. I watched him closely while he answered. He didn’t take his eyes off the slate he was hanging. ‘I was ill again,’ he said. ‘This flu keeps returning when I’m not expecting it.’

  I didn’t say: ‘I know that’s a lie. I know you’re having a love affair with Alice.’ Instead, I told him my dream about Valentina in her coffin, and when I described her hammering on the lid he took off his glasses and wiped some sweat from his face. ‘What are the police doing about it?’ he asked.

  ‘There was a raid,’ I said.

  ‘A raid?’

  ‘Yes. They searched the apartment and took lots of things away. Everybody’s under suspicion, including me and Alice. And you.’

  When I said this, he put his glasses back on again and shook his head. I could tell he didn’t believe a word I was saying. The clever bit of Didier’s mind could see right through me. It could see far more of me than my mind could see of him.

  And he didn’t want me there, asking him questions. He seemed serious today, sort of sad or depressed or something. His bird tattoo looked as if it was breathing its last breaths as the pulse in his neck vein ticked. I thought, perhaps it’s all over with Alice. It was Angélique who came along and destroyed it . . .

  ‘Who’s Angélique?’ I said.

  ‘Who do you think, Louis?’ asked Didier, without looking at me.

  ‘I don’t know. Your new girlfriend?’

  ‘My wife.’

  I’d known this the moment I’d seen Angélique, but it shocked me then and it still shocked me. I should have been pleased that Didier-the-Bird wasn’t all alone and free to snatch my mother away from her former life and b
reak my father’s heart, but somehow all I felt was disappointment.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just hung about there, saying nothing, and Didier ignored me and worked on.

  After about five minutes had passed, I said: ‘I didn’t think existentialists had ordinary things like wives.’

  Didier still didn’t look at me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘now you know that they do.’

  Carmody arrived. He came with some lowly agent with acne, who’d been given the task of carrying in Alice’s computer. Carmody looked like a man who never carried things. He had lazy eyes and the beginnings of a fat belly. While the spotty agent set up the computer on Alice’s desk, Carmody sat in the salon, leaning back on the Louis XVI sofa, like a dinner guest. It was weird the way everyone kept putting themselves in the very place where Valentina should have been.

  The agent left and Alice made coffee for Carmody. I watched him watching her as she came in from the kitchen and set the coffee down. Then he took out a notebook and said he had some good news for us.

  ‘You’ve found Valentina?’ I blurted out.

  He turned to me and smiled. ‘Perhaps . . .’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean – “perhaps”?’

  Carmody took a sip of the too-hot coffee. He flipped through the pages of his book. ‘We think,’ he said, ‘there is a strong possibility that she’s in Moscow. Aeroflot confirm there was a last-minute passenger booked into the flight taken by Monsieur Panin. She was travelling under the name “Marya Narishkin”, but the description of her – blonde, quite large, aged about forty – shows she could have been Mademoiselle Gavril. We have asked the Moscow police to trace this person, but they tell us they are so far unlucky. We have also discovered that Monsieur Panin is not at his home. His wife believes he is in Kiev. If he turns up there, we will be informed.’

  Carmody looked delighted and proud of this information. He seemed to expect Alice and me to applaud him, but all we did was just look at him in silence.

  ‘It’s still strange,’ said Alice. ‘Don’t you think, if Valentina had been planning to leave for Russia, she would have told us?’

  ‘Perhaps it was not planned,’ suggested Carmody. ‘Perhaps she was coerced into it – by some means that we do not yet know – by Monsieur Panin, at the last minute?’

  Alice shrugged. ‘Knowing her as I do, I don’t think she would be “coerced” into anything, Inspecteur.’

  ‘With all respect, you may not know the nature of her relationship with Monsieur Panin . . .’

  I got up. ‘What time was the flight to Moscow?’ I asked.

  ‘17.40,’ said Carmody.

  ‘Then it’s not possible that she was on it!’ I said. ‘She’s not in Moscow or Kiev or anywhere in Russia!’

  ‘We believe she is. The question of why she’s there we haven’t yet understood. No doubt there is a very important reason – which would be unknown to you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s not in Russia. I know she’s not! At ten past four, she was at the hospital, in the rue de Vaugirard, for her X-ray appointment. She wouldn’t have had time to get to the airport for a flight that left at 17.40.’

  ‘Not so,’ said Carmody. ‘We spoke to her radiologist, Dr Bouchain. She didn’t arrive for her appointment at the hospital.’

  ‘Yes, she did!’ I was screaming at Carmody now. I thought I might start to cry. He was the man in charge of finding Valentina and now he was wandering off on a completely stupid trail. ‘Mrs Gavrilovich rang the hospital,’ I said. ‘She rang it while I was with her. The receptionist said she saw Valentina. She admired her dress . . .’

  ‘Well, she was not checked in. There was a cross against her name.’

  ‘The receptionist said she saw her. Who else in that hospital would have a dress she’d bother to admire?’

  Carmody smiled. ‘I don’t know, Louis. But she must have been mistaken. There is a cross against the name. The receptionist was quite clear about their procedure: a cross indicates that the patient has not turned up for the appointment. In any event, Dr Bouchain never saw Mademoiselle Gavril at the hospital on that afternoon.’

  I felt a kind of sob come into my chest, so I walked over to the window and put my hand over my mouth, so that the sob wouldn’t escape. Suddenly I saw what was prime in the whole question of the hospital visit. If the receptionist had said ‘black-and-white dress’, this would have been absolute proof that Valentina had been there. But she hadn’t said that. She hadn’t described the dress; I’d just reimagined the black-and-white dress in my mind. The prime proof was missing.

  I kept staring out of the window. An ambulance siren went screaming along the rue de Lisbonne.

  ‘Does this mean,’ I heard Alice say, ‘that you’re going to stop searching for Valentina in France?’

  ‘No. Of course not,’ said Carmody. ‘When someone is missing, we go on searching until they are found – dead or alive. But we have no leads in France, absolutely none, whereas—’

  I turned and faced Carmody. ‘She’s not dead!’ I shouted. ‘But she could be dead soon, if you don’t hurry up and find her!’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ said Carmody.

  ‘Because it’s obvious! Someone’s taken her. They want to get hold of her jewellery and her money. She’s probably being kept in some horrible place. She could even be buried alive . . .’

  ‘If she had been kidnapped, I would have expected some ransom demand to come by now. But there is complete silence. It’s possible that such a demand may come, but as yet there is nothing to lead us towards a kidnap, except, as you say, Louis, the general motive of money.’

  Carmody turned back to Alice. I could tell he thought my fury was amusing. He cleared his throat. ‘However,’ he said, ‘the trail to Russia is beginning to emerge. Among the possessions we took from the bureau in Mademoiselle Gavril’s study, we found two love letters, hidden inside a street map of Beijing. They are from Monsieur Panin, dating from earlier this year.’

  Carmody leafed through his notebook again, then went on: ‘One of the letters talks of suicide and the other includes the following sentence: What I would like to do is drag you back here with me, so that you could see the misery that is my life.’

  Carmody rested his notebook on his knee and looked at us both in turn. He made an expansive gesture with his hands. ‘Do you not feel,’ he said, ‘that this may at least be a pointer to what has happened?’

  Sergei came into the salon at that moment, still smelling of lemonade and wagging his billowing tail. I made him sit by me and concentrated on stroking him, so that I didn’t have to answer Carmody’s question. I felt really confused and wretched, like my brain was being trussed up with wool. Inside the wool tangle somewhere was the thought that Grisha hadn’t struck me as an evil man.

  I wanted an ally.

  Alice wouldn’t do. Half her mind was elsewhere. I wanted somebody with an analytical brain, a kind of pedantic genius, like Porphiry Petrovich.

  I was sitting alone in the salon, wondering if I actually knew such a person, when I heard a sound at the apartment door. It was Violette. I knew it was her because she always turned the key to the left to start with and then had to turn it the other way three times for the door to open. She never seemed to remember which way that lock turned. She wouldn’t have been much good at chess.

  As soon as she saw me, she started whispering. ‘Come in the kitchen, Louis,’ she said. ‘I can tell you something.’

  I followed her in. She put her bag down on the kitchen table, took out the two photographs I’d given her and handed them to me. ‘I saw Lisette-Marie,’ she said in her whispering voice. ‘This American girl was called Gail. Gail O’Hara. Lisette says she was very bad to Madame. Very bad.’

  ‘Bad how?’

  ‘What is “bad”, Louis? Cruel.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘I don’t know. But Lisette-Marie says, all the time she was here, Madame was unhappy. This girl used to shout. Lisette-Marie coul
d often hear this shouting and insulting. And Madame was often crying.’

  I looked at the two pictures. Gail O’Hara looked a bit neglected. Her hair was rather stringy and her fingers were stumpy, as if she chewed her nails. I looked up at Violette and said: ‘Madame once told Alice she’d “killed” this girl, Violette. Does Lisette-Marie know what happened to her?’

  ‘What you mean, “killed her”?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean.’

  Violette shook her head and made a gesture over her chest a bit like the sign of the cross. Then she sighed one of her sad sighs. ‘All I know is she went into the hospital. Lisette had to pack a bag and Madame said she was taking this to Gail in the hospital. She was sick for a long time. And she never came back here. Lisette-Marie was told to pack all her things into a new suitcase Madame bought and this suitcase was put into a taxi. But I don’t think she died, Louis. I think she just went home to the United States. That’s what Lisette was told: “Mademoiselle O’Hara has gone back to her home.”’

  ‘Did Lisette-Marie see her after she went into the hospital?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘So she could have died?’

  ‘No. If she had died, I think the police would have come.’

  ‘Are you sure they didn’t come?’

  ‘They didn’t come.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Lisette would have seen them.’

  The Orangina supply had been replenished, so I poured us out two glasses. My brain was going into a kind of cash-register mode, trying to add things up.

  I went on: ‘Maybe they came when Lisette-Marie wasn’t there?’

  Violette shrugged. She had a shrug more expressive than anyone else’s I’d ever seen. What it expressed was Violette’s relationship with the world. It was like the world was the night sky and Violette couldn’t say if the stars were pieces of rock or whether God had sprinkled the dark with luminous muesli.