The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence

by Tracy Whiting

  Havilah’s call went straight to MonaLisa’s voicemail. She decided to try her at her office.

  “MonaLisa Caren’s Literary Agency.”

  “MonaLisa Caren, please. It’s Professor Havilah Gaie.”

  “She’s not in. But I’ll transfer you to her assistant.”

  “Havilah, it’s so good of you to call. It’s just terrible, terrible,” Mathias Kennedy went on in a full-blown emotive pitch.

  “I’m sorry, Mathias, what’s happened? What’s going on?”

  MonaLisa’s gaunt, proficient, and highly devoted assistant of ten years launched into a profanity-laced tirade about “fucking cab drivers and unreliable pricks at the New York 20 car service.”

  “Mathias, I need you to walk me through what happened.” Havilah hadn’t any idea what could have set the usually low key Mathias off.

  With that request, he took off on another rant, less profane but equally graphic, about MonaLisa Caren’s being hit by a “callous asshole” that morning on her way to work.

  “He never even stopped,” he moaned through tears. “Luckily, only one tire crushed her sternum and her ribs punctured a lung. It’s a good thing that Birkin bag fell on top of her back; it gave her a bit of cushion. Nothing like a good, reliable bag. And then,” his tone changed now from high-pitched to a low growl, “the bastard peeled off, like the steaming pile of excrement that he is.”

  “Is MonaLisa…” she wavered, “…still alive?”

  “Barely. She’s in ICU. The doctors say she’s lucky to be alive. She may pull through. Havilah, the police have no leads. The wretch had a false registration with a cab company. He dumped the cab. He was wearing a hat so no one got a good look at him. The worthless piece of shit may well get away with murder,” he groaned.

  “Mathias, I need you to focus for me. Was MonaLisa Kit Beirnes’s agent?”

  “Who?”

  “Lathan Conor Beirnes.”

  “Oh, yes. He contacted her a while back at your suggestion. She was waiting for a proposal from him. Do you think this hit-and-run by this lower than lowest scoundrel had something to do with him? I know people get pissy when we don’t agree to take them on as clients but to blindside MonaLisa with a cab seems quite unreasonable, don’t you think? She hadn’t rejected his proposal. She was in fact quite interested.” He started wailing again.

  “Kit Beirnes was murdered yesterday evening. I don’t know if any of this has anything to do with him.”

  She didn’t. Though, to her mind, coincidences on this order seemed just too convenient. However, New Yorkers were hit practically every other day by cab drivers. Sometimes pedestrians simply didn’t pay attention while crossing the streets. And then there were those other times when the drivers shouldn’t have been given licenses: they were either too reckless or too ornery for such a stressful job.

  “Mathias, do you know if she received the proposal? Do you know if he was writing poetry?”

  “It didn’t arrive in this morning’s mail. I’ll also check her email. It was supposed to be a collection of poetry. Actually, poetry in prose. The form is different from verse; but it still employs certain techniques like fragmentation, compression, and repetition. It was the subject of the poetry that MonaLisa was very interested in. She said it was explosive.” He had quieted down but he was still weeping.

  Havilah knew the form well. She had read Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris or Petits poèmes en prose in graduate school. The prose poem was a new form for Kit.

  “Please do check her email. I need you to send me whatever he sent her. Send it to my personal email. Okay?” Unlike Hezekiah, Mathias was authorized to check and respond to MonaLisa’s email correspondences. And since Havilah had recommended Kit, he wouldn’t feel any compunction about forwarding the proposal. The agency frequently consulted her on projects when MonaLisa was skeptical of her junior agents’ opinions on a manuscript.

  “I will take a look at it sometime today. The office is in mourning. Everyone is going to the hospital. But if this proposal will help catch this hideous…”

  Havilah turned a deaf ear to his last string of invectives. She was sure that Mathias could go on and on with his colorful outbursts. If the occasion had been different, she would have found him side-splittingly hilarious.

  “I need you to send it to me as soon as you can.”

  “Okay,” he sniffed.

  This is not good. Gasquet often used the plural of the word killer. It couldn’t be. She didn’t want to believe it. If there was more than one, they had a cache of resources at their disposal and they were highly coordinated. It seemed impossible. Havilah contemplated knocking on Gasquet’s door and telling him everything. But she decided that she would wait until she got her hands on that proposal.

  Her room telephone jangled loudly.

  “Excusez-moi, Mademoiselle Gaie, mais un Monsieur Pierce a un paquet pour vous.” Laurent and Salazar had arrived with Kit’s mail.

  She put on her flip-flops, not bothering to change out of her PJs. She figured the shorts and tank resembled colorful beachwear. As soon as she opened her door, Thierry Gasquet opened his.

  “Going somewhere, Havilah?”

  She played it casual. “The lobby. Laurent brought me some memos relating to board initiatives from past meetings.” That sounded believable enough to her (as of late) hot-and-bothered ears.

  “I’ll just come along.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s just downstairs.” She stumbled nervously over her words.

  “We had this conversation earlier.” He closed his door and walked to the elevator with her.

  “Don’t you want to get your shirt?” He was only wearing his pajama bottoms.

  “Aren’t we just going down to the lobby and coming right back up?” He looked at her quizzically.

  “Yes. It’s just, you know, people may think…”

  “But that’s exactly what we want them to think, don’t we?”

  That was not what she wanted anyone to think. That she was some American hoochie on a clandestine rendezvous in the South of France. She nearly sneered. But she caught herself instead, keeping her face inscrutable as they entered the tiny elevator. He, being French, would have found her protestations wildly American and amusing. The mental hissy fit she was having, though, had more to do with his accompanying her downstairs to meet Laurent than with antihoochiness. As soon as they stepped into the lobby, Laurent and Salazar rushed up and gave her deux bises.

  “I hope I didn’t interrupt you two.” Laurent’s smile was a bit too toothy as he introduced Salazar to Thierry Gasquet.

  She imagined they thought that the half-clothed Gasquet and she were doing some variation of the downward-facing dog before they arrived in the hotel’s lobby. Laurent handed her the package along with a stack of papers. At that point, she wanted to kiss Laurent again. “You didn’t interrupt anything. Quite the contrary. We hadn’t even started,” she offered. She was in a much better mood now that she had those papers.

  “It’s late and we don’t want to keep you. À demain.”

  “Until tomorrow then.” She waved as she stepped into the elevator.

  Thierry held the door open as she slid in. Havilah clutched the papers and parcel tightly in front of her. Thierry was trying to get a look over her shoulder. In the elevator, he deliberately tried to make her squirm by raising his arm up and placing it against one side of the elevator, while brushing ever so slightly against her back with his chest. He seemed to be doing his best to conjure her New England Puritan probably in hopes that she’d give up a glimpse of the parcel she had flattened against her chest. Not a chance!

  He then asked nonchalantly, “So what was that all about?”

  She wasn’t going to do Priggish Polly Prude this evening. She wiggled herself around so that she was facing him. He seemed genuinely taken aback. She craned her neck up so that her lips were at his ear. She smelled the spicy, floral scent again. It could be intoxicating under other circumstance
s.

  “Ah, c’est simple. Il pense que je te baise. Bonne nuit, Agent Gasquet.” The doors of the elevator opened. She slipped out quickly and into her room.

  XIV

  The agent was surprised by Havilah’s choice of words to describe the act of lovemaking and Laurent’s unwavering belief that they were intimately involved. From her lips to his ears in those moments when her whispers gave way to an occasional shout despite the taps that she would open, he had heard she wasn’t doing anybody nor had she been done in six months. He laughed quietly as he exited the elevator to his hotel room. He had had to literally lean on her. He needed to see exactly what she was hiding. He wouldn’t have bothered had her very expressive face not ogled the parcel like it was one of those buttery salmon canapés from earlier this evening. He had seen it; quite clearly in fact. And he knew he would have the information he needed about the parcel in an hour or so.

  From everything he had observed about her in her presence, read, and viewed, as he had spent the last hour watching webcasts of her lectures at various places in the US and in Europe, he knew Havilah Gaie wasn’t just going to sit tight and let the various police agencies do their jobs. But he was not prepared for how stealthy and simultaneously brazen she was in mining for information. He had observed her from the Panaroma’s terrace when she and Laurent did their version of a B & E at Professor Beirnes’s apartment. Chatty Cathy Améline would have been a clever enough distraction under different circumstances. He smiled again. He enjoyed the company of smart women. He also had to admit that he liked American women despite the hackneyed views held by many of his French male compatriots.

  Gasquet then reclined on his bed and adjusted his computer. He re-ran the video of Havilah Gaie speaking at the Louvre on Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and the questions of liberté, égalité, and l’esclavage. Despite the French passage of the Taubira Law in 2001, which recognized slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity, the French continued to believe they were never as bad as the Americans. And this point was the source of contention between her and a co-panelist.

  The male academic held fast to ideas of French paternalism and the civilizing mission in countries far and wide and with people who looked so thoroughly different from himself. The French didn’t keep statistics by race— everyone was either French or not— which for him tethered citizens to a very strong sense of a national identity versus the multiculturalism of the United States. And yet, race and class mediated every institution in the Republic. The Republic may have been blind, but its citizens— travel writers, men of science, artists, ethnographers, and novelists— from the seventeenth century onwards to twenty-first century politicians certainly were not, from the moment when the words nègre and noir entered the French lexicon. In the video, Havilah was poised and commanding at the podium. He could see she liked to use a pen as a prop. It served no other purpose, he had calculated; the pen was where she channeled her nervous energy. Once she got going, her hands took over with dramatic gestures. Her curly hair was pulled loosely in a chignon from which a few tendrils escaped for an elegant effect; she wore a black dress with high heels. Her lips were a deep garnet red. The audience was rapt. What she was saying in quite impeccable French and how she looked must have been for the predominantly French academic and intello class of attendees incompatible. Havilah Gaie’s kind of smarts was rarely imagined wrapped with such an alluring bow. He watched as Havilah politely allowed that same especially taken admirer on her panel to touch her hand frequently as he challenged certain points she had made during her presentation. She was seated next to him. In America, his gestures would have been denounced as patently sexist. The audience would have risen up and drawn and quartered the male panelist.

  Havilah had obviously learned the fine art of coquetry. She was demure, waiting until he had finished. She quartered him herself, touching his hand repeatedly and politely in turn. He was sure that when that professor joined his male colleagues from the French academy for apéritifs later that evening he would describe Havilah as “vachement belle mais seche comme des Américaines.” Extremely beautiful, but a killjoy like most American women. Because the French considered American women generally shallow, easy because they smiled at strangers, grinded wildly at bars and clubs particularly in Paris, and drank until incapacitated, yet aggressive, rigid, and unfeminine because of American feminism, there was simply no way for Havilah to fully escape French cultural stereotypes. American popular culture imported to France helped these stereotypes along. And Havilah’s race added a layer of exoticism and sexual intrigue.

  As he was drifting in and out of a deep thought, Havilah Gaie stared out from his computer screen. He was waiting for the professor to settle in for the night. He thought about tomorrow. He would take her with him to Avignon after the meeting. Avignon, the City of the Popes, had been the residence of seven popes for over seventy years when the papacy elected to move from Rome in the fourteenth century, making the Provençal city the capital of Christendom in Europe. He was Catholic. Every Catholic in good standing should visit the Papal Palace, a World Heritage site, he’d explain. She didn’t need to know that he was following up on a lead.

  * * *

  Havilah tore open the parcel as soon as she closed the door behind her. She decided she would read the board memos in the morning. She was unprepared for what she found inside the parcel. Instead of correspondences, there were photographs. Two of them, to be exact. Both were taken in 1965, according to the enclosed descriptions. The photos were of William Knowlton and a black teenaged boy in Cassis. They were posed on the steps of the Greek Theater. Greek Theater. Kit’s body was found at the Theater. Her stomach began to churn as a rash of untoward thoughts pushed themselves to the front of her mind, given Kit’s supposedly intriguing book idea and research. She then began to freely associate what their posing by the Greek Theater meant, given all the myths of male Gods and their adoration of the male form. It was perhaps what had inspired Kit’s poem.

  The photos were in sequence. The brown-skinned boy had curly dark hair and a beautiful smile. His eyes were light-colored— brownish. He was a handsome child. They were sitting closely together. He was looking up adoringly at William Knowlton. Knowlton, clad in a white shirt, was smiling back at the boy. Havilah looked for a word to describe what she saw in their eyes.

  She picked up the second photo. The boy’s head was on Knowlton’s shoulder. He was still smiling. And Knowlton had his arm around the teenager’s shoulder. This time they looked straight into the camera. The photographer was a woman named Annette East. The boy’s name was Georges-Guillaume. She wondered if this was Sweet William at 16. In 1965, Knowlton would have been 65 years old.

  Havilah felt her stomach beginning to twist into a billion knots. With her insides wrenching, she went to the bathroom but nothing came up. She took two Tylenol PM. She was going to need help sleeping tonight. She looked at the room clock. It was 10 p.m. Her computer pinged. She saw it was an email from Ansell Neely. The subject line was “Breakfast Tomorrow?” She ignored the email. Neely, she felt, was at least the most genuine of the lot from this evening’s supper. But she had no intention of taking the professor up on his offer of a breakfast rendezvous. She powered her computer down. She needed this hellish day to end. Morning couldn’t come soon enough.

  * * *

  Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois

  Mr. Allen, the librarian at the Chicago Historical Society, wished that he had caught Professor Gaie before she hung up. He remembered that he had had another request back in January for the very same documents she and Professor Beirnes had recently ordered. The William Knowlton Papers had seen a good deal of activity in the past eighteen months. It was rather unusual. He liked to play matchmaker sometimes with researchers. One never knew what you could learn from someone working on a similar subject. Since she hadn’t left a telephone number, he decided he would write to her at the 1 Avenue Jermin
i address in France. It was, he realized a bit later, the address of the Félibrige Foundation in Cassis. As he was the resourceful sort, he also decided he would email her the information before he left for the day. He typed in variations of her first and last name in Google, only to have the search engine ask him, “Did you mean: Havilah Gaie?” He found her at Astor University along with Professor Lathan Beirnes at Warren Institute. The other document request had come from Libreville, Gabon.

  PART II

  The Libyan Sibyl

  “Even as we desire new life and more life, we must realize that a part of us— of each individual person, black or white— has to die into that new life.”

  —Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro?

  XV

  Libreville, Gabon, Monday June 21st

  President Jean-Hilaire Ambourouet appeared outwardly calm. He was, however, fretting over several affairs pertaining to the upcoming presidential elections. The small man was not worried about winning. In fact, he would not declare his candidacy until early October, leaving only six weeks until the elections in late November. He had served as Gabon’s head of state since 1960, besting his good friend Léopold Sédar Senghors’ terms in office as President of Senegal by twenty-five years. He was the longest ruling elected head of state in the world. In order to squelch any rumors of voting malfeasance, he would even allow oversight of the elections to mute cries of corruption.