There was a hesitant look on her face, an uncertainty that must have reflected their difficult life. She was afraid. This was not the Marianne of France, proud, confident, facing her country’s dangers, facing down the monarchy, leading the republican cause, the flag-waver for freedom and democracy. That persona was in the sculpture I held again in my hand; it was a cheap tourist toy, bought as a gift for his Marianne, to reassure her perhaps she had gained the freedom to life, that she was safe with him. A token of his love that she had kept with her when and wherever they were forced to move on. Until she had died in the accident and Giuseppe hung on to it in his grief. The loss that had caused him to flee from the norms of life into a reclusive existence in the cove.
Then I noticed the small pocket-book. Not as large as the one I had already taken from the grotte on his death. I knew I had to read this. There were other miscellanea in the trunk, but nothing obviously of value. I looked at the statue of Marianne, with her Phrygian cap, and felt she should wouldn’t decay in this lost place, so I put her back on the shelf. I shoved the small book in my pocket and turned back to the caverne entrance. As I hit the brighter light, I turned off the carbide lamp and stowed it back on a ledge. I stepped back into the boat and untied the rope, leaving the caverne to return to its perpetual darkness.
xvi
Giuseppe’s pocket-book had one word pencilled on the cover – Rimorso. The opening page carried an echo of the first notebook. ‘We were wrong.’
The story of Marianne’s end was to emerge from its scruffy entries. Her death had not been an accident and I realised at once that this part of his narrative must have been written later – when she had gone to her grave. I have pulled together the disjointed notes, eliminated the crossings-out, and the mass of annotations, which express his rage, to assemble events in a manageable interpretation. The facts were very different.
They had been on the run for some years and begun to feel safe from the past, when a close call reminded them that revenge might not be far away. By then the pair had become accustomed to relaxing as their luck improved and they became settled on Cap Corse near Canari, where Giuseppe had found regular work in the asbestos mine. The one danger they recognised was to his health, but the job paid well for those post-war times, and he took care to have simple but effective masks against the dust. They rented a small cottage on the west face of the mountains and could afford the occasional trip to Bastia. He notes Marianne was at her happiest and they were thinking of having a child.
But the trips to Bastia may have been their undoing. Maybe someone recognised them. One of the hunters. Or someone who had been paid to keep an eye out. Maybe the café-owner had given information. They became aware of being followed – or imagined that they were. Whether information had reached Marianne’s family quickly or over time they never discovered.
They knew someone was on to them. A fellow worker at the mine began asking Giuseppe too many questions of a personal nature. He had known this man for some time but the more inquisitive manner was artificial, even though the man made every effort to appear casual. It didn’t deceive Giuseppe.
A footnote: ‘We moved from the cottage, as this man was aware of where we lived. It was 1962, the mine was being closed down. Time for a complete change. Went to Casta.’
I had to get my maps of Corsica and it took time to locate Casta and the significance of this move. The hamlet lies in the Désert des Agriates - an area of virtually uninhabited scrubland between St. Florent and the mouth of the Ostriconi river on the north coast of Corsica. It would have been a move of around 30 kilometres south from Canari and then another 20 west along the coast from St. Florent. It must have seemed a radical enough distance. In such a small hamlet in this remote area, he and Marianne would feel they could know early enough if any strangers came into view. They felt they could control their defences, avoid trouble. Danger that they sensed more than saw.
The immediate problem must have been work. This area had in times past been the ‘bread basket’ of the north, producing wheat, olives, wine and fruit. But this was long gone, and the area had become a barren wilderness, the fields abandoned, the maquis edging over the landscape.
Giuseppe does not write down what work he got. There is mention of a motorcycle and this may have given him scope to work further afield. Then there is a note of another move to L’Ile-Rousse, further along the coast. There cannot have been any work around Casta. No date is given for this change, but here he found work as a fisherman. He and Marianne shared a small cabane near the shore, finding a new peace on this spur of land, which might have provided its own security. Further away from Canari.
‘We were wrong.’ Again Giuseppe records this fatal phrase.
I wondered now if I might be finding a motive for the killing of Giuseppe.
Had the family of Marianne never given up on seeking him in revenge for enticing their daughter away from the ancestral village? Even though she left on her own accord?
Antoine had said once that didn’t count. “She left without her parents permission. The customs there were still a century behind. There was no licence for girls to leave the countryside.”
“She remained on Corsica,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but as far as they were concerned she had deserted them. There is a world of difference between the towns on the coast, the places where tourists visit, where the world is modern. In those mountain villages, way off the roads, time – and customs – had stood still. Old customs die hard, there was a lot of hostility between clans. As I have told you, if one is injured, then an injury is required on the protagonist. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth … or worse. They all had shotguns on the walls of their houses. Everyone could take to arms if the call came.”
Giuseppe’s pocket-book laid out (with tears staining this page?) what happened.
He was out at work and coming home on his motorbike. On the approach to the house he sensed something was wrong. Marianne was not by the front wall, where by habit she looked out down the road for his return at the sound of his engine. There was washing on the line – surprising at this late stage of the hot drying afternoon. It was too quiet. He cursed that he was unarmed.
He stopped short of the house and walked the rest of the way, picking up a large stick, and crept up to the front door. He waited, but there was no sign of Marianne.
As he went finally in, cautiously, fearfully, he came face to face with a peasant of a man. In his grasp he had Marianne and held one hand over her mouth. In the other he had a stileto. Its tip was set against her breast. Giuseppe sensed at once that this countryside peasant must be a member of her family, set on vengeance.
Giuseppe knew this man would be quicker with the stileto than he ever could be with a blow from his ineffective weapon. He had come on the scene a moment too late. All his worst fears had been realised.
In the stand-off the three exchanged glances, Giuseppe dreading the consequences of a false move.
“Disonorata.”
These were the only words Giuseppe heard before the man drew the stileto back and then thrust it upwards into Marianne’s beating heart, before his very eyes. Her body went limp and slipped from the grasp of her assassin, blood pouring out through the fabric of her white dress.
Her collapse threw the man off balance, giving Giuseppe just enough time to reach into a drawer and pull out his army pistol. Without a moment’s hesitation he fired a bullet into the assailant’s head. He knew instinctively he was a brother of Marianne’s.
I now recognised the source of his frequent saying, “Just in case.”
‘I wanted to kill myself too,’ he had noted down.
Had the feudal attitude survived the march of progress? If so Giuseppe knew he might have started a new round of revenge by killing the man, but cared nothing for that danger. His hopes of saving Marianne proved fruitless. He held her body in his arms but the flow of blood was unstoppable. He took her face in his hands but the blan
k stare of her eyes told him she had already left him. Alone. In his despair there was only one thought, to give her a decent burial in the olive grove behind the house. He could not call in the police without exposing himself to all sorts of dubious examination. The body of the killer would prove his own action, difficult to prove as in self-defence. Here in the north there were different rules from the hidden traditions of the south, more rigorous attention to the law, the modern legislation that could entrap him. Possibly for a life sentence.
‘I buried her with simple ceremony in the olive grove. Wrapping her body in a sheet, I commended her soul to the soil of the island that had brought her into the world and with its ancient customs taken her from it.’
The pocket-book had a page of symbols. M for Marianne, a cross, a heart, but also the dreaded three S’s that custom had determined her fate. I knew he referred to schioppetto, stileto and strada. He realised it was now time for him to take strada and escape from this terrible past. If he could.
The last notes tell of his abandonment of the cabane, of whatever employment he had obtained as a fisherman, and of the body of Marianne’s brother. He hid it in a shed at the back, for he did not want the killer’s body to soil the holy ground he had created for Marianne. He would have had sufficient time to make his escape on the motorbike. Until the curiosity of the villagers, employers or police would lead to the discovery of the man’s body, and a search for Giuseppe himself. He was on the run once again. With a gun and a stileto.
xvii
Nicole one day let slip a response to my idle chatter that caught me off-guard.
“I am too old to have children now.”
Why had I not thought to check the implications of our spontaneous lovemaking? She had never paused in the heat of passion to restrain my eagerness, nor had I give enough consideration as to her exact age, and whether a child might be the consequence of our lust. I imagined she was in her (later?) forties, but etiquette had rendered me too polite to advance a question on this. In my defence she had kept me from enquiring about her family background, and my ignorance was total. I knew nothing of husbands or children, and she seemed to run her life out here with a force of independence that excluded such considerations.
I let her words go unanswered, but released my sense of guilt – and intrigue – on Antoine next time I was down at the taverne for lunch.
“What exactly did she say?’ Antoine pressed.
“That she was too old to have children now.”
“And you don’t see the significance?”
“Of what?”
“Nicole’s use of the word now.”
“So?”
Antoine lit a cigarette and with disdain blew a smoke ring in my face. “She didn’t say she hasn’t any children.”
“Has she?”
“I don’t know.”
“She has never mentioned it.”
“Have you asked?”
“Not really. On the occasions I have started talking about family she has shut the conversation down, and I felt obliged to stop the questions.”
Antoine deliberately blow some more foul smoke at me. “So you see, you know nothing, do you.”
xviii
As the days progressed any lovemaking riddles of Nicole’s became more complex and fewer. Perhaps I missed some. There were increasing tensions as we could not ignore the intrusions on our haven, the murders of the man on the buoy and more significantly Giuseppe. These hung over us like a dark cloud on our otherwise sun-scorched landscape, as the police struggled to make sense of them. Nicole and I tried to put our minds to our work, but an unintended remark here or there would bring the deaths into focus.
There were lighter moments. One sheet of Nicole’s drawings seemed to be left around for some time. My inability to solve the puzzle may even have been frustrating her, as she would glance over to me as I pondered it’s content.
Papaver rhoeas sirius.
The red (for danger?) flower behind her ear was clearly of the poppy family, and I wondered if it was a Syrian branch of this narcotic. But rather than a sleepy mood when worn, she seemed to be bouncy, provocative, as if daring me to meet her need. In fact my guessing led to some irritation on her part, yet was accompanied by increasingly seductive behaviour.
On the evening I solved it, I had sunk a brandy or two and was enjoying the clean night air on the terrace, admiring the stars. Suddenly a thought crossed my mind, surveying the known clusters. A connection that seemed at first far-fetched. At the door I shouted, “Ah, Sirius.” There was an evil laugh from the bathroom. Sirius – the Dog Star. Canis major. Surely I was fantasising from a man’s point-of-view? Dies canicularis – the Dog days of Roman renown. The ancient Greeks too mention the sizzling heat of summer that sent dogs mad, bringing upon them behaviour that was out of character, unlicensed. I went back indoors, but Nicole was not evident at first, until I heard a slight movement in the bathroom. Was she tending to her make-up, preparing for the declaration of a solution to the riddle? Indeed she was waiting for me, but completely naked, standing in front of the mirror with a wicked look on her face, challenging, her hands on either side of the basin. Her face was flushed, her eyes directed at me in the mirror, firm in their stare. I was aroused and she saw the rise in the thin fabric of my shorts. Then, still facing the mirror, she slowly leant forward and bowed her back towards me, the flesh of her bare cheeks pressed against my body. I dropped my shorts and she pushed further against me, not loosening her challenging gaze upon me, as I understood I had solved the puzzle.
“Entres.”
I needed no restraint, bending over her back, cupping her breasts from underneath, and let the tip of my eagerness part her legs. As she stayed braced against the basin and kept her hungry gaze upon my reflection in the mirror, I gently teased her nipples and between her legs my excitement hardened, until the head slipped into the moist cave she had offered, until her own tension built, and she wanted to overcome my self-indulgent but luscious driving. In the brief window of lust we exchanged vulgarities. “Garce, Putain!” “Brute, Toutou.” “Salope.” “Bête, Chien.” It became impossible to resist the frisson flooding into me. I could only increase the urgency of my thrusting until we both peaked together and remained locked in position. She remained quiet for a few moments until I released her breasts and withdrew.
Then as gentle satisfaction took over, we returned to our real selves. I lifted her limp body into my arms and carried her back to her room. I rested Nicole on the bed, and as she lay back splayed out carelessly, covered the body I found so tempting with a sheet. Only that wicked smile on her face said she was not yet asleep.
“Dors bien,” I said.
As I turned back towards my room, as the rules required me to do, she whispered to my retreating form, “Et toi, cheri.”
xix
Inspector Girard has returned. He remains suspicious of my reason for being here. He believes I am holding something back. But he is the one who has been dealing in deception.
At the taverne he tells me a surprising thing. The man on the buoy was a police informer, who from time to time kept an eye on suspicious gangs.
“So all that about him being a small time crook?”
“True, up to a point. He has been into all sorts of things, lots of scams. Our approach served to see if you might let something slip or give away any mention Giuseppe might have made about him.”
“You spent enough time,” I said irritably, “interrogating him. Three or four times. A string of accusations against him, and me.”
“Ways to get at the truth. There are some dangerous people out there. We need to find out what they’re dealing in. Catch them at it.”
Girard tactics seemed a long way round of finding out, but that was the nature of detective work, I assumed. I didn’t see what he had done as a charade, but nevertheless a game of hide and seek. He hid a truth, whilst he sought another. Who was using the truth in all this? Me?
“So you keep saying. A bit too forcefully. The rope was used to strangle him.”
“Because?”
“He was keeping a lookout and must have been spotted himself in his boat. They …”
“They?”
“That’s the point. He was due to report in if he found out what was going on. When and why anybody came near the cove, acting suspiciously. But they got him before he could do that.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“Not yet.”
“And there’s a connection with Giuseppe?”
“Might have been. Too late now to ask him!”
“But you’re accusing me of being involved in some way.”
“We keep that possibility open.”
“I was not involved in Giuseppe’s death either.”
“You were on the scene, first discovered him.”
“Well, yes, because the others were away, in Calvi, as you know.”
“So you can be the only suspect.”
“The motorboat I saw …”
“No evidence it was here.”
Girard went off to speak to the gendarme stationed as a guard. He had nothing to report over recent days. He was bored with his fruitless assignment. The man muttered and pointed out I could hardly leave the cove, I had given up my passport and outside help was unlikely. Even if I was part of some greater plot. He recommended the watch be withdrawn. Girard eventually agreed and took him in the dinghy back out to the patrol-boat. It left in its usual flurry of speed. The cove returned to its quiet isolation. I went back up to the house. Nicole was out. I sat down and applied myself to some work. I could now go to Calvi for a day if I could cadge a lift on a passing yacht and make some calls, submit my monthly report. To tell my editor, amongst others, that I intended to finish on schedule.
xx
I spent the next week concentrating on my literary critiques. Nicole was focused on some new treatments and potions for illnesses of which I knew nothing. We separately applied ourselves with a diligence that took our minds off the murderous events that had begun to alter the status quo of the haven. I kept out of her way, and spent middays down at the taverne to save her preparing lunches and to compensate Angelique for her lack of custom. Taking swims afterwards meant I was not returning to the house until Nicole had finished her sieste. We were not sharing the indulgence of lovemaking. The mood was against it. I missed the warmth of her body, but did not press my case.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 15