Crazy Lady (11 page)

“It's been more than three years. I thought you were moving on. What about Daisy? What started this again?”

The blonde woman at the boulangerie, he knows, but he doesn't bother to explain. “A woman with Yolanda's eyes,” he says, and then realizes that he didn't actually register her eyes at all, that he doesn't even know what colour they are.

“Just get on with the book, Dad,” says Samantha. “It'll take your mind off her. Or take a trip,” she continues. “Get away for a bit. Go somewhere exotic.”

“Exotic,” he mutters as he scans the palm trees, the snow-capped mountains, and the cerulean sea. “Where, Hawaii?”

“Yeah. And take Daisy.”

Poor Daisy
, he thinks as he puts down the phone, and he's tempted to call her. But where are the fireworks? The ones he has seen only once in his life — in a briefing room at a police station in the port city of Hoek van Holland, when he and Yolanda looked into each other's eyes and both knew instinctively that there could never be anyone else. They may have danced around each other for a few
days, but they ended up in each other's arms as surely as day turns to night.

The wintry sun reflects brightly off the coastal mountains surrounding Vancouver as Trina prepares for her trip north by scavenging her and Kylie's closet for something flowing. She doesn't want tight, doesn't want to show off lumps and bumps that might be considered irreligious.
I could go for the burka look
, she thinks as she discards outfit after outfit, and considers running something up on her sewing machine. In the end she goes with a couple of printed cotton full-length skirts and several demure polo-neck sweaters. Janet's head scarf tops off the ensemble as she checks herself in the mirror, then she hurriedly wipes off all her lipstick and mascara.

“There,” she says, “plain as a pimple. God should be happy with that — but will Rick?”

The sun is sinking over the island of Ste. Marguerite yet again, and Bliss sees his novel sinking with it. “God, why is it so hard to write?” he questions, still looking for the masked man to give him renewed inspiration as he watches the famous prisoner's home fade into the twilight. “It was easier winkling confessions out of diehard rapists and murderers.”

A ruffle of cool breeze ripples across the bay and makes him shiver momentarily. He pulls his coat around him and is readying to return to his apartment when a feeling of presence bores into the back of his head. But he has been here before; has felt the vibes of love — always love, and always at sunset — and he knows that it is a trick. Yolanda's spirit is still alive in his mind, refusing to leave him, refusing to let him live: “Still thinking of you; still loving you.”

It could be the Man in The Iron Mask, he tries convincing himself, but knows it's not, knows he's been abandoned as much by his three-hundred-year-old mentor as he has by his great love.

The creepy feelings continue to wash over him, and he is tempted to turn but doesn't want to risk disillusionment.
I'm going mad
, he tells himself as he stares at the prison that is slowly evaporating into the gloom, then a cough so slight it might be in his mind spins him. But he can't look at the blonde-haired woman who is already turning away.

“Sorry,” she mumbles in embarrassment, and she keeps walking. “Sorry… very rude.”

“I saw that woman again,” he tells Daisy when he meets her at the bar L'Escale for an evening drink, but she's heard enough of Yolanda.

“Just imagination, Daavid,” she says dismissively. “It is like a parent wiz a lost child who spends their life running after strangers because of zhe hair.”

“I know,” agrees Bliss. “But it's not just her hair…” He pauses, realizing that, in truth, it is only her hair; he hasn't consciously examined any other features. “Maybe you are right.”

Marie, the floury baker's wife, adds to Bliss's consternation the following morning as she greets him on his way into the boulangerie. “Ah.
Bonjour, monsieur
,” she cries as she rushes to the door to peer up and down the street. “You have just missed someone.” Then she drops her voice conspiratorially. “I zhink you have a fan.”

“Not yet,” he replies with a chuckle. “But who knows. One day when my book is published.”

“And zhe writing. It is good, no?”

Now what? How long will you keep up the pretence? “It's all right,” he says with a shrug as he orders his usual, and he is halfway out of the door before Marie calls after him.

“But zhe woman who asks for you.”

He turns. “Woman?”

“Your admirer. She ask what you do. I say, ‘He is most famous number one English writer.'”

“Thanks,” he says, laughing. “And she say, ‘OK.'”

“Just OK?” he queries, irrationally deflated.

“No, I zhink she say ‘Okey-dokey' like no-good damn Americans.”

“Yolanda always said…” he begins, then drops his bag and takes off.

She's gone, whoever she was, and as he races around the tight, twisted, medieval lanes that were built in the time of donkey carts, he easily convinces himself that he is being utterly stupid. But it doesn't stop him, and he pushes on through the bustling market in the heart of the town, scattering customers in his path and knocking over a basket of olives.

“
Va te faire foutre!
” screeches the stallholder, but Bliss tunes out the offensive insult as he dashes on.

“It's obviously a coincidence,” he tells Samantha by phone ten minutes later, seized by a compunction to confide in someone and not wishing to further upset Daisy. “I mean, lots of people must say, ‘Okey…'” he is adding as he leans over the balcony, gazing down at the garden. “Oh shit!”

“What is it, Dad?”

“A lemon.”

“A lemon?”

“It just dropped off the tree.”

“Sorry, Dad. You've lost me.”

Bliss tries explaining about the woman, but Samantha finally loses it. “Dad, for fuck's sake, will you just put her out of you mind and get on with the damn book.”

“Language!”

“Well, it's bloody ridiculous. You've got to move on.”
“Is that you, David?” inquires Daphne Lovelace a few minutes later, after Samantha has threatened to block all further calls and have him arrested as a dangerous lunatic.

“Yes,” he replies, though his mind is somewhere else as his elderly English friend gabbles excitedly about her plan to take up writing.

“I was hoping for a few pointers,” she says.

“That's all I need — competition.”

“No. Nothing major like yours. Not a global bestseller. Just a history of Dewminster's important families.”

Bliss catches on. “And you really think that the chocolate guy will fall for that?”

“One of the advantages of age, David,” she titters. “I'll just dress like a dowdy old fogy and pretend to be a bit slow.”

“You don't need me, Daphne Lovelace,” he tells her, then, with his mind totally absorbed by the strange woman, he quickly ends the call and focuses on the newly fallen lemon as he tries to picture Yolanda. The slightly bulbous nose and the single deep dimple come easily to mind, as do her perfectly formed teeth, then her smile, shaped by a pair of sweet rosy lips that most men would kill for, and finally her body, one that most women would die for.

With the image formed he tries to cross-match with the woman he'd glimpsed on the promenade in St-Juan. He draws a blank; he'd barely taken any notice beyond the hair.

What the hell am I doing?
he asks himself, realizing that Samantha is right.
I should be locked up. She's dead you fool. Get over it. Get back to your novel.

But writing is far from Bliss's mind. It's as if the masked man has stopped communicating, so the only thing to do is to get back into the Château Roger to try to pick up the trail from the woman that the château was originally built to impress in 1687. An hour later, armed with pad, pen, and flashlight, he walks the twisty hill that winds around the Château Roger's perimeter fence, looking for a spot where he can pry apart the rusty iron railings.

The Château Roger, eaten by time and swallowed by the encroaching undergrowth, is like a decayed maharajah's palace in the Punjabi jungle. The edifice was built by a man of great passion, much like the Taj Mahal was, but it has slipped ignominiously through the historical records because of the builder's failure.

How different things may have been if he succeeded, Bliss thinks as he surveys the cracked marble steps leading up to the enormous canopied front door, and he can't help but reflect on the fact that history is always recorded by the victor and no one writes about the losers with any relish.

But was it the man's fault, or was it the château that blighted his chances? Bliss doesn't need his manuscript to recall the plaint he has attributed to the island's most famous inhabitant:
Every day,
ma chère amour,
I watch my most magnificent château, Le Château Roger, rise on the promontory across the bay from the Isle Ste. Marguerite. Soon it will be ready, and then, my sweet heart, it will be my gift to you as a symbol of my great love. Reject me not, I beg of you, for I have asked the king to have me incarcerated incognito in the island fortress until you accept my endowment and release me by your love.

Eleven years he waited. Day after day peering hopefully across the bay to the prize that awaited his dream woman, yet he was to be not just disappointed but totally destroyed by her rejection. He pined to death.

“Ah. The agony of true love,” muses Bliss with total empathy, and then a feeling of presence sharpens his senses.

He felt it before, on a previous visit, and knows that it isn't just the tormented ghost of the owner still waiting, still hoping, still praying. It's the ghosts of the thousands of prisoners, resistance fighters and others, who succumbed in the building's torture chambers. When the Château Roger was commandeered by the Nazis it became the first stop on the pipeline that led to the gas chambers, though many never made it beyond the evil edifice's basement.

“Here goes,” he says to himself as he slips through the aediculated doorway into a cavernous hall from which a couple of giant staircases curl off into the upper floors.

The three-hundred-year-old building has been abandoned for the past six decades; one more year has had little effect. Nothing has changed since his previous visit, but the hackles on the back of his neck still prickle.

“This is crazy,” he tells himself. “It's broad daylight.” Although he knows that beneath him, in the basement, it is permanent night. Looking upwards, he steels himself to try one of the rotten staircases, but a flustered pigeon takes off in an explosion of wingbeats and startles him.

“Pull yourself together,” he tells himself, then decides to head down to the basement, where he is already prepared for the rats and lizards.

One day this will be a shrine like the extermination camps
, he thinks as he plays his flashlight ahead of him down the flagstone steps.
One day, when my novel is finished and the truth about the Man in the Iron Mask is finally revealed
.

Murderous shackles and chains still festoon the walls in the torture chambers. It could be the setting for a Halloween dance, but Bliss knows it's not.

“What was that?” he questions at the sound of a soft footfall and he holds his breath. “This place could drive you mad,” he muses, then seriously questions whether he is thinking of himself or another jilted lover — the Man in the Iron Mask. “I wasn't jilted. She died,” he protests, but what of all the other ghosts that surround him, all the men who died here. Is there a difference?

It's one thing to have a flaming row and to have a lover walk away saying, “I hate you. I never ever want to see you again,” he reasons as he fingers the rusted shackles. But what of the man who looks into the eyes of his lover as he is being dragged away on the end of a rifle, still yelling, “I love you. I love you. I'll love you forever.” And what of
those who still see the love burning brightly in their partners' eyes, wanting to yell, “Tell me you don't love me. Please tell me you don't love me. I can live with that. How can I live knowing you still love me as much as I love you?”

Bliss stops at the thought, realizing that he is no different from the widows of St-Juan; he is completely stuck, unable to move forward and unable to go back, in limbo for the rest of his life, knowing that he can never love another.

Think about it: one look into each other's eyes and you were both hooked — then she left you.

She didn't leave. She died.

Is there a difference?

The creak of a door opening sharpens him again. But this time he's sure. It's the door above him — into the basement.

“Shit!” he mutters under his breath as he flicks off his flashlight and flattens himself behind a brick pillar. Footfalls slowly clatter down the stone steps.

Bliss balances the cheap torch in his hand as a potential weapon, although it's plastic — useless — and he tries to control his breathing as the steps slowly descend.

Just walk out and confront him, he tells himself, guessing that the guard will be as scared as he, but he hangs back knowing that he is the intruder, and a jumpy sentry might be trigger happy. But the château itself holds him back. The building seems to love death, has revelled in death. In addition to the thousands of wartime victims it has already killed Daisy's one-time lover, Roland, and its builder, the Man in the Iron Mask.

“Hello, anyone here?”

Bliss steels himself to run, then stops. It's a woman's voice — a female guard — and he is readying to raise his hands and shout, “Don't shoot,” when he has another thought.
English? Why is she speaking English?
He waits, holding his breath, sweat pouring down his forehead, his fingers taut around the flashlight.