A Tangled Web (37 page)

Andrew Frick's counterfeit money was so fine it had been compared by experts to the delicate purity of a Botticelli. And Andrew Frick had never been as happy in his life as he was in Max Lacoste's back room, where he could make his own hours and have the most modern equipment to do what he loved best, and receive in return generous pay, an apartment near the harbor and a charge account, billed to Max, at Fauchon and Galeries Lafayette.

Frick had burned all his bridges in America, moved everything he owned to France, and thrown in his lot for all time with Max Lacoste. He never wanted to be anywhere else.

Seeing all of it in his mind as he stood at his desk in Cavaillon, Max thought ahead to Thursday. “How much do they want in Iran?” he asked Carlos.

“One hundred fifty million rials.”

“When?”

“A month. I suggested a shipment of three backhoes about the end of July. If they find they don't need one of them after all, the contract specifies that they can send it back.”

A hundred fifty million rials would take no more than two or three cubic feet of space, Max calculated. The Iranians would convert thirty-seven and a half million rials—his fee—to francs and ship them to him in the backhoe that they would find they did not, after all, need.

“You're satisfied?” he asked Carlos.

“I think everything is there. I want you to go over it.”

“Good. I'll be there early on Thursday, eight or eight-thirty. By the way, Father Chalon will be there tomorrow. He needs identity papers; he'll tell you about them. I'd like them rushed through.”

“They always are, for him. Anything else?”

“No, I'll see you Thursday.”

He stood beside his desk after he hung up. Of course Robert is in danger, just as I am. There is always the chance that someone will talk, someone will recognize a face, someone will follow a trail that seems so faint as to be invisible but that, to just one person, is as clear and straight as an arrow.

Which is why I have to move.

And which is why a priest in Cavaillon, who believes prayer is good but prayer with action is better, might also have to move one day.

Maybe three of us will go, Max thought. Or Robert will join us later. That would make leaving Cavaillon easier for Sabrina to accept. I'll mention that to her as a possibility. He locked his door and went back to his desk, to return to work.

*  *  *

“I thought perhaps a hike and picnic,” Léon said on the telephone. “It's been five days since Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and I am badly in need of exercise.”

“No five a.m. bicycle rides?” Stephanie asked. She was in the back room of Jacqueline en Provence an hour before the shop would open. She had begun coming in early every morning, to work alone and to feel, for that brief, wonderful time, that it was her shop, her own place, to mold any way she wished. It was like a secret she carried with her. And now Léon was another secret. It was the first time he had called since their afternoon at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.

“I haven't even thought about bicycling; I've been working on a new series of paintings, very different and
exciting. Perhaps you'll come to the studio to see them.”

“I'd like that.”

“After our picnic, then. Are you free this afternoon?”

“No. I'm sorry. But on Thursday . . .”

“Three more days.”

Stephanie was silent.

“Well, then, Thursday. You choose the place; I'll bring the food. I'll call you the day before, about this time, if that's all right. I've missed you, Sabrina; I've replayed last Tuesday in my head a dozen times. It was a very special day.”

“Yes. For me, too.” Stephanie's hand shook as she hung up. Max was going to Marseilles on Thursday. She had made a date with Léon for a day when Max would be away.

“You're very quiet,” Jacqueline said later that morning as they unpacked and arranged a display of china. “Is something troubling you?”

Stephanie nodded. “But it's something I have to work out; it's complicated.”

“Then it involves love. And it is probably less complicated than you think. Love always seems to create so many tangles, but in fact there is usually a single thread that can be pulled to make everything clear. Though I admit that finding the thread is sometimes difficult and painful.”

“And have you found it, with your friend?”

“Certainly, but he and I have no tangle. The thread is friendship. Are you worried about finding it with Max?”

“I don't know what it would be. I couldn't give it a name.”

Jacqueline looked at her thoughtfully. “Perhaps because you don't know what you have: marriage, friendship, companionship, a living arrangement, a business relationship—”

“Business!”

“Well, because he offers you his home and his name and his protection and you offer him eight months of memory,
and affection but not love. I don't know how many men would consider that satisfactory for a marriage, though for a business transaction it would do.”

“I think he likes it that I have no memory.”

“Indeed? Why?”

“I don't know. But he doesn't urge me to make connections, to try to reach back, the way Robert does.”

“And you do not . . . when you are making love, at that time when we are most open and most receptive to stimuli, you do not recall anything?”

Stephanie concentrated on aligning pearl-handled knives and forks with the china. “I'm . . . not open then.”

“Ah. And what keeps you guarded?”

“What I told you before. I can't believe what he says. I can't trust him.”

“Yes, but just for the pleasure of it . . . Well I see that that is not enough for you. You need more. I hope you find it with someone, my dear. Or . . . perhaps you have found it and that is the tangle that bothers you now?” She waited, but Stephanie did not answer. “You know you can always talk to me, Sabrina.”

“I know. I love talking to you. And I will, but I have too much to sort out.”

The doorbell rang as a customer came into the shop, and Stephanie went to greet her with relief. She did not know why she was uncomfortable; she could always talk to Jacqueline. But today the words stayed inside her.

“And what have you planned while I'm gone?” Max asked that night at dinner.

“To work on this room,” Stephanie said. “If you don't mind, I want to get rid of most of the furniture; it's too heavy for a dining room, especially this one. We've got a table in the shop that I'd like to try, and Jacqueline told me about some places that may have chairs and a sideboard.”

He did not want to hear about her plans for the house. “And what else?”

“A chandelier—”

“No, I mean what else will you be doing?”

“Max, we go through this every time you leave. I haven't planned every minute of every day, and even if I had, I don't see why I'd give you an itinerary. You don't give me one for your time in Marseilles.”

“More bicycling?”

“I may ride to Roussillon with Robert.”

“And what else?”

“And I'm going to hike. I haven't done that yet.”

“Where?”

“I don't know.”

“If madame will forgive me for intruding,” Madame Besset said, bringing the cheese tray, “there is an excellent hike above Saint-Saturnin. That is the town, if you remember, we will move to after we sell the farm to our son. I know it well. If you park in the square and walk behind the church, you will find a stairway of Roman steps. I think you will be very pleased with what is at the top.”

“What is at the top?” Max asked.

“A medieval town now in ruins. Collapsed castles, homes, an old roadway.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Stephanie said. “That's where I'll go.”

“Take a camera,” Max said. “I'd like to see pictures.”

“Yes.”

I am deceiving Max. I'm doing it very easily. I wonder if I ever deceived anyone before.

She began to tremble and could not stop.
Something is wrong; what is wrong with me?

“Sabrina, what is it?”

“Madame!”

Max helped her to her feet, waving Madame Besset away. “We'll be in the library; you can bring our coffee there.”

He led Stephanie to a couch and held her so she would not collapse while she sat down. “Can you tell me what it is?”

“No.” She was breathless, as if she had been running.

He sat beside her. “Close your eyes. Lie back. Shall I call the doctor?”

“No.”

“Do you feel ill?”

“No. I don't know how I feel.” She lay against him, her eyes closed. Gradually her trembling eased. She opened her eyes.
Alice in Wonderland
lay open on the table in front of her.

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice . . . “but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

That has something to do with the way I feel. But I don't know what.

I was a different person then.

Yes, of course. I knew who I was; I had a name, memories, a past, a future.

But is that really what it means?

I don't know. I have to think, I have to try to understand—

“Feeling better?” Max asked.

“Yes. Thank you.” She sat up.
Later. When I'm alone.
Madame Besset brought in a tray with coffee and slices of tarte tatin. “Tell me what you'll be doing in Marseilles.”

She poured coffee, they talked quietly in the library, and it became an evening like any other. And then it faded from her mind, more quickly than she would have thought possible. She was busy with Jacqueline; she and Max drove to Saint-Rémy where she shopped for clothes; she drew plans for the redesign of the dining room. And she thought about Thursday. And then Max was gone. And Thursday had come.

“Your Madame Besset is wonderful,” Léon said. “I've never been here.”

They were walking on a wide, rocky path, the remains of a Roman road far above the town of Saint-Saturnin. On
either side was a tumbled stone wall, here and there intact: black stones carefully set atop each other almost a thousand years earlier to mark the main road of the fortified town. The road began at a ruined castle overlooking the fertile valley far below, and stretched for more than two miles, past dozens of
bories
where families had lived, now little more than heaps of mute black stones.

“I wish I could bring the people back,” Stephanie said, “and watch them farm and go shopping and play and . . . Where did they get water?”

“There may have been a river down there.” They peered over the cliff into the valley below. “Dried up now, but we know that without water there could have been no town.”

“So many people, so many stories.” They walked slowly, beneath the blazing sun. They wore shorts, lightweight T-shirts and billed caps, and small backpacks. Léon had a sketch pad in his pocket and Stephanie's camera was hooked to her belt. “Did anyone write their stories? Is there a history of Saint-Saturnin?”

“I don't know of one. But I have histories of Provence in my library; I'll see what I can find.”

“All gone,” Stephanie murmured. “We should write everything down, everything, every day. We don't think about it, but otherwise it can vanish so completely . . .”

“Nothing vanishes.” Léon's voice was casual, but he was being careful, searching for the words that would allow her to talk about herself. “Everything is here surrounding us, wherever we are. It's what I try to show in my paintings: the other lives and memories that are part of us even though they're voiceless and invisible. They haven't vanished; it's just that we haven't figured out how to find the key that will open all those locked doors.”

They were alone in the ruined village. Bushes and flowers grew out of walls, clinging to bits of earth between the stones, lizards whipped across the road and into the shade of shrubs, birds flew protectively about their nests in the
crevices of shattered homes, and the
genêt
bushes were in bloom, perfuming the air.

“My life has vanished,” Stephanie said. She did not look at Léon. “You're right, of course, it's somewhere, in letters I wrote or work I accomplished or in people's memories. But not in mine. Not in my memory. I have none.”

Thank you, Léon breathed silently, and knew then how desperately he had wanted her to be open to him, and knew, too, in that moment that he loved her. But, my God, he thought, my God, to live without memory: such terrible loneliness . . . “And Max?” he asked.

“He says he can't help me.”

“Tell me all of it—can you?—from the beginning.”

“The beginning,” Stephanie said wryly. “A very recent one. Eight months ago. October.”

They walked a little apart from each other, drinking from their water bottles as the sun moved higher, and she told him everything, even her faintness of three nights earlier, and the passage from
Alice in Wonderland.
By the time she finished, they had left the ruined village behind and were in open fields of tall wild grass, hot and dry, dotted with low scrub bushes. A small farm was in a hollow on their right, with a donkey in a small fenced enclosure and a child throwing a ball against white sheets swaying on a clothesline. Ahead was the edge of a forest.

Léon took Stephanie's hand. “We'll find a place to sit and have our picnic.”

Stephanie felt his firm clasp and the rhythm of their matched steps. She was relaxed now, and happy, and there was a singing inside her. She had told him more than she had told Robert; more than she had told Jacqueline. She had talked to him as if she had been talking to herself.

The path led into the forest and they gave a small gasp at the sudden coolness. In a few minutes Léon stopped. “Grass, leaves, a small room. A place for lunch.” He ducked into a grove of trees near the path and when Stephanie followed, she found herself in a small green space with walls of leafy branches and a ceiling of cloudless
sky. Pale forest grasses covered the ground, drooping over the fallen leaves of many seasons, black and weathered to pliant softness.