Forgetfulness (8 page)

Good idea, Russ said.

The boys in the wine trade are gone, too.

Even better, Russ said. Any replacements?

Boys in the fashion trade.

Noisy boys, I'll bet.

Quiet as little mice, Bernhard said.

Thomas looked from one to the other as they did their verbal soft shoe.

I'm worried about the damn cab, Russ said. Shall we call? The train leaves in ninety minutes.

Bernhard cleared his throat. I didn't mean to be abrupt about the Spaniard, Thomas. I was startled. I wasn't prepared. So I overreacted.

Thomas peered into his wineglass. He hadn't been listening to them. He said, Do you think an hour would have made a difference?

Russ looked at him blankly. A difference in what?

Florette, he said.

No, Russ said. Not one hour. Not two hours. Put that thought out of your head. Where did you get such an idea? It's ridiculous.

The doctor said something about it.

Oh, that's helpful of her. That's so helpful. What does she know? Was she there?

She was there at the autopsy, Russ. An hour might have made the difference. Florette alive today. Exact words.

She doesn't know what she's talking about, Russ said. It's only speculation on her part. Guesswork.

I think an hour might have made the difference, Thomas said. I think Florette would be alive today if we'd realized she'd gone for a walk, kept track of the time. We would have started earlier. Got help sooner. Raised the alarm, arranged for a search party instead of opening another bottle and telling another story. And she'd be alive right now. What do you think?

Russ was silent a long moment. Finally he said, When my Sandra was sick we went everywhere, Boston, New York, Paris. God, the treatments were painful. No success in Boston, New York, or Paris. So we thought about Mexico. They were supposed to have wonderful experiments in Mexico, things the Americans have never dreamed of and therefore discounted. But Sandy wasn't convinced. I wasn't convinced either. The doctors in Boston definitely were not convinced. So we didn't go to Mexico. We went back to our apartment in New York City and waited. Long months, as you'll remember. I've thought a hundred times about the things we might have done differently. There were plenty of them. And so what, Thomas? They weren't done. If they had been done, maybe the outcome would have been different. Maybe not. At the end, you know what made the big difference? Morphine. I'll tell you something else. She didn't die with a smile on her face. Turn the page, Thomas.

Sure it's possible, Bernhard said.

So you agree, Thomas said.

We started late. What can I say?

We started when we realized she was late. We didn't imagine she was in danger, Russ said, looking sideways at Bernhard.

Too late, Thomas said. I believe an hour would have made the difference. It was dark when we started. Because we were telling stories and having a hell of a good time.

Russ looked away and said nothing further.

Where are you going with this, Thomas? Bernhard looked at him steadily and moved a step closer.

Thomas ignored that and spoke to himself, as if he were in an empty room. And we still don't know who they were or where they came from. Or what they wanted. Why they took her to that place and abandoned her.

I've made inquiries, Bernhard said patiently. I'll know more in a few days. The people I spoke to had no good ideas, at least not yet. They were almost certainly not locals. Maybe they were small-time smugglers, drugs or whatever. Not weapons, because of the weight. Maybe they were only illegals moving from one place to another. Why did they abandon her? Attempt a coup de grâce? Because they thought she could identify them. That's one logical motive. But maybe it was for another reason altogether, something we haven't thought of or even imagined.

If only—

I'd forget the if onlys, Thomas, Bernhard said. If only this, if only that. Dead end there. Blind alley.

Fuck you, Bernhard.

That's enough, Bernhard, Russ said.

We did what we could and it wasn't enough, Bernhard said softly. We don't live in an ideal world, he added, his voice rising. He looked up when he heard a horn in the driveway. The cab had arrived.

Not an ideal world, Bernhard? And all this time I thought it was.

Then you were mistaken, Bernhard said evenly.

Thomas opened the door to a landscape flooded with yellow light from the dying sun. He had spoken more sharply than he intended but Bernhard's mordant certainties had struck a nerve. Often Bernhard lost himself among the inflections of his many languages, caustic as a Frenchman one moment, sly as a Levantine the next, while remaining the sharp-eyed baker's son from LaBarre, Wisconsin, determined to get ahead in the wider world where the odds were assuredly—the assurance coming from his immigrant father, who kept a handbook on the side—not in your favor. When something was lost you accepted the loss and set your face. Whatever responsibility you bore was only an inconvenient detail in the larger scheme of things: getting even. Bernhard was mistrustful by nature and therefore a natural investigator who always went, as he said, the last inch. LaBarre's decline had made him a firsthand witness to the obvious truth that everything collapsed eventually and that the world was inherently unstable, so you disciplined yourself or someone else would do it for you. They were all midwestern boys, no matter where they were living or what language was in the street. They had taken different lessons from LaBarre, Russ the milkman's son and Thomas the son of a doctor. His mother was the doctor's nurse, medicine the family business. The consulting room was in an annex off the front parlor and when Bernhard and Russ went home with Thomas after school the parlor was always crowded with patients, people stirring awkwardly or coughing while they turned pages of the
Saturday Evening Post
or
Reader's Digest.
Often there was one patient who did not bother with a magazine but sat stoically staring into the middle distance. Russ wanted to rush through the parlor but Bernhard always paused for a long look at the patients before climbing the stairs to Thomas's bedroom to listen to the afternoon radio programs,
Terry and the Pirates
and the others. When Thomas warned him that they weren't to bother the people in the waiting
room, Bernhard replied that he wasn't bothering them, he was only looking at them. What was the harm in looking? Sometimes you could tell a lot by looking and remembering what you saw. Bernhard said you could tell which ones were in pain and not long for the world by studying their faces, where their eyes fell and what they did with their hands, and he mentioned the woman staring blankly into the middle distance as the case in point. Leave them alone, they don't want to be bothered, Thomas said. The woman's thinking about what she's going to tell her family, Bernhard said. But I'm only looking. And besides, they never see me, as if by that assertion he had made himself invisible. Bernhard was old beyond his years and had an answer for everything.

The cab's here, Thomas said.

We have to move along, Russ said.

I'll call very soon, Bernhard said. When I have news.

Thomas opened the door.

I know how painful it is, Bernhard said. But you have to get to the bottom of it. That's the first thing. And I'm going to start turning over rocks, every rock I can find. Whoever did this will not succeed. Trust me. They're dead men. We owe that to Florette.

Outside, they shook hands, promising to stay in touch. Russ proposed a weekend in Paris at the end of the month, nothing grand, a few decent meals and a stroll through the Grand Palais where an exhibit of Degas drawings was newly installed. Beautiful exhibit, Russ said, and by the end of the month the crowds will have thinned. Promise me you'll come. Thomas said he would think about it and let him know. Bernhard promised again to call when he had news of value. Thomas thanked them both and Bernhard said he adored Florette and would remember her always and meantime he would do whatever was necessary to settle the score. We won't let it rest, Russ said. "Without haste, but without rest," Bernhard added, quoting somebody, looking hard at Thomas, a private warning or perhaps a threat, one or the other. And then they were gone.

Thomas watched the cab winding down the drive to the road. The cab's were the only lights in the vicinity. Granger's farmhouse was
dark and Big Papa was very dark against the sudden night sky. Thomas watched the headlights rise and dip, like a ship navigating ocean swells, until the cab vanished at last into the darkness. He said aloud, Bon voyage, but he was thinking of Bernhard's score-settling skills. His American friends lived in a world where scores were always settled because the alternative was unbearable chaos. Chaos was a world without justice. In some sense score-settling was what they did for a living. Florette would become a civic project—a wrongful death, an unnecessary and violent death in the world-that-was-not-ideal, a crime that demanded vengeance. A death in the mountains, and how many of those were there on any given Sunday in November? Deaths in the Alps, the Himalayas, the Caucasus, Atlas, Andes, Blue Ridge, Urals, Pyrenees. He had the idea that in the death-stakes, mountains resembled oceans, brutally dangerous and unpredictable weather with the possibility always of a misstep or marauders, sometimes both at once. A mystery always surrounded an unwitnessed death at sea, the circumstances unknowable; and then Thomas wondered what Bernhard would turn up and whether his findings would bring consolation, meaning facts better known than not known. And now he had a motive, the better to discount the despised randomness. Randomness was the enemy of coherence. The day before, out of Russ's hearing because Bernhard was convinced Russ had lost a step over the past year (Notice how his hearing's gone to hell and his memory's a sieve and he's simply not on top of things; he's become repetitious and he's always talking about Sandra, who's been gone at least a decade), and was therefore an unreliable collaborator, he had confided: I don't think it's likely but you have to consider the possibility that Florette's death may have to do with you, Thomas. Payback for one or another of the odd jobs you've done for us over the years, maybe a job you don't even remember, it seemed so routine at the time. Truth to tell, Russ and I often thought you were too cavalier, doubting the seriousness of your tasks. It's true you never knew the full context of things, safer for you and safer for us, and naturally there were consequences, and these, too, were inside the parameters of need-to-know. And the Spaniard would be in this category.

I know that's come between us in the past.

A job that got out of hand. A betrayal.

That's usually the way.

So we have to consider all the possibilities, disagreeable as they may be.

We have to consider this. Other people have long memories and carry them around like you'd carry cards in your wallet. So this is the possibility that cannot be overlooked, someone from your past deciding to make payback. Bottom line: what happened to Florette may not be random at all. Nothing random about it, bad luck, bad weather, Florette in the wrong place at the wrong time et cetera, assaulted by persons unknown, probably smugglers. But what's to smuggle on the trail of Big Papa in St. Michel du Valcabrère? Don't you see? It all adds up. And Thomas had replied, That idea is insane, not bothering to enumerate the reasons why because the reasons why were obvious. Bernhard, offended, had said what he always said in defense of coherence, his word for conspiracy.

Well, it's possible, isn't it?

Coherence demanded that Florette die for Thomas's sins, the message conveyed from one place to another, the document read upside down on the interior minister's desk, the surreptitious drawing of the valet attending the Saudi banker, the seascape drawn to scale at Antibes, boats in the harbor, one boat in particular. The yachtsman bought the painting and invited Thomas on board for a drink and dinner and he stayed for a week, the vagabond artist-in-residence watching the comings and goings aboard ship. His odd jobs were like that, the small change of snooping, though Bernhard preferred the word "espionage." Look, can you do us a small favor, won't take much time, no danger involved, we'd be grateful ... And there was excitement in it, the technique similar to portraiture, slipping into an alter ego of your own making, a not-quite-authentic doppelgänger, observing closely, enjoying the performance for the most part, assured that the consequences, whatever they might be, were not momentous. Meaning: no one will get hurt. Meaning: you are not responsible. Naturally he was not fully informed but there were advantages to that, too. Meanwhile, there was nothing at all to
be done about Bernhard in his search for coherence. His suggestion was monstrous but that would not keep him from full pursuit because in the world he lived in, anything and everything was possible and if you did not believe that, you were a naif who subscribed to a child's history of the world. Only chaos was inadmissible.

Thomas stood in the chill of the evening, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. This tiny domain, a smallholding in a remote province, was what was left of his world. In his lifetime he had visited all the continents and had traveled the great oceans and seas, and he knew this place better than any of them, perhaps because there was less to know, perhaps because village life was lived on a subterranean level, life at its most personal. In any case, he had lived longer in St. Michel du Valcabrère than anywhere else in his adult life. His traveling days were ended and he had difficulty remembering how he had managed it, traveling and working, now here, now there, moving from hotels to rented studios; truly a vagabond's life, entertaining as far as it went, a life without strings. Thomas strained his eyes, squinting, and made out the wan glow of the town square. He imagined the café, crowded at this hour, its windows misted over and tearing, the villagers playing cards and the pinball machine, gossiping all the while. Surely they would have words to say about Florette's funeral, her American husband and his American friends alone in the front pew. Monsieur Railles did not move during the service. He sat with his eyes fixed on the plain pine casket yet at the same time did not appear to be engaged; no doubt his mind was elsewhere. When the service ended, his American friends had to nudge him twice. It's over, Thomas, time to go to the cemetery. It was true he had been elsewhere during the formalities, remembering the patients in his father's waiting room in LaBarre and how Bernhard Sindelar seemed to enjoy watching the hands of those who were very ill, not long for the world. Years later one of his father's patients actually did die on the examining table. She had said she was not herself, feeling tired and unusually forgetful. Why, some mornings she could barely get herself out of bed, and when she did she was out of breath. The doctor was scanning an x-ray and when, alarmed at what he saw, he turned to speak to his patient, she was gone. It took
him a minute to understand what he was seeing; and when he did, and rushed to his patient's side, he was too late. Three days later they went to the funeral and the woman's husband, now widower, refused to shake the doctor's hand. Thomas, then seventeen and big for his age, had to intervene to prevent a scuffle. Sitting in the front pew of the church at St. Michel du Valcabrère, staring at his wife's coffin, Thomas remembered the awful look of grief on the widower's face and noticed also his fists lifeless at his side. His wife was dead and someone would have to own up to the responsibility because she had left for the doctor's office in perfect health and returned in a hearse. But in the end the old man only shook his head and walked away to his car, where his young children waited for him.