Paris Requiem (8 page)

They were staying in a hotel on the Place Vendôme. Maisie loved the hotel, liked Paris, too, in a way, liked it with a girlish excitement which animated her features. She chattered enthusiastically, clinging to his arm with something like fervour as they promenaded through the bustle of the
boulevards
and took in the sights. Yet, she was also uncomfortable, dismayed by the unfamiliarity of it all, the thick texture of this alien environment.

Like a heavy grid, her responses had overlain his own earlier ones, so that his youthful devotion to the city grew shrouded, could no longer be recaptured. It was almost as if the Paris he remembered so vividly had disappeared into some
subterranean
vault to which he could no longer find the key.

But to be altogether exact, the problem hadn’t been with the city. It lay elsewhere, in more intimate, more elusive spheres. Everytime he tried to approach Maisie at night, she would tremble with animal fear, her face a mute plea, so that any performance of conjugal rites became an impossibility. He minded more than he liked to admit and as the days passed he sensed that Maisie minded too, but differently. She would rather he never approached her again.

Her cheeks lost their brightness. She would shudder slightly if he walked into her room and caught her unawares. At last he determined that he would somehow make it plain that they need not think of all that, not yet, not now. One afternoon when Maisie was resting, having pleaded one of the headaches which had begun to plague her, he had gone for a walk and come upon a milliner’s where she had admired a hat seen in the window. He stepped in. He would surprise Maisie with a present which would bring a light into her face.

Inside, a young woman greeted him. She had wide eyes, not unlike Maisie’s, and she smiled at him shyly when he asked if she might try the hat for him. It looked fetching atop her high-piled curls. She offered to try some others for
him, turning this way and that with light movements, so that he could see the different models from various
perspectives
. Each time she cast him demure, lingering looks, which sought his confirmation. Each time he gave it openly,
increasingly
aware of the freshness of her skin, the nimble motion of her quick hands as she edged a hat just so, the light scent of lemon that came from her. At the end he couldn’t make up his mind. The hats had become like so many images in a
kaleidoscope
, their shapes and colours fragmented, merging, though her eyes and the fine line of her cheek remained clear. Finally he opted for the first one, dimly remembering that it was the one Maisie had liked.

When she handed him the box, she looked at him directly and asked whether perhaps he might like her to show him a little of Paris. She finished at eight. There was a ball at the Moulin de la Galette he might enjoy. It was all the fashion.

James left with a flush in his cheeks and with no intention of returning. But two evenings later, after Maisie had pleaded headache and fatigue and urged him out, he had somehow strayed in the direction of the shop. The young woman was just leaving. She had remembered him and, with a delicious smile, had walked with him and accepted his stumbling offer of a drink.

One thing had led to another and after the bonhomie of the café concert, he had found himself in her tiny room in the Marais. He could still visualise its impeccable neatness, the bouquet of white blossom he had bought her bright on the blue-covered table with its two chairs, the divan which had shuddered slightly beneath their joint weight, the smooth arch of her neck on the striped bolster. She had made it all so easy. Yet he was ravaged by guilt.

He had left money hidden behind the lamp on the mantlepiece and told himself he would never return. Despite himself, he did.

It was as if Maisie was colluding with his worst instincts. Her vacillating health seemed to propel him out into the seductions of the Paris evenings where the summer air buffeted him like a pillow, warm with a sleepy sensuousness which lulled his conscience. Time and again, like a dreamer, he found himself in front of the millinery shop, where a softly smiling Yvette slipped her arm through his and led him off into a world where he was himself and not quite himself. It had gone on for the four remaining weeks of the Paris stay. And as the train which would take Maisie and him to London for another stage of their honeymoon pulled out of the station, he had waved a goodbye of mingled regret and relief to the city which held a part of him he never wished to meet again.

On their return to Boston, he looked back on the episode with a shuddering horror and buried it deep inside himself. If sometimes the traces of its fragrance caught him unaware on a lingering summer’s evening, he forced his mind onto other paths. He and Maisie had all their lives to build and he loved her. Loved her with a kind of fraternal protectiveness which waited for her to blossom into a woman. Five years passed before she did and the consequences made him wish she hadn’t. Passion was dangerous. His uncontrolled manhood was dangerous.

James leapt off the bed and found himself in the bathroom scrubbing his face and hands as if he wanted to peel off a layer of skin to find the pristine man within. He looked in the small mirror and saw a mask of unflappable health which seemed to bear no relation to him. There was an injustice in that which no laws could temper.

Maisie had conceived. He sometimes thought the act had more to do with their respective mothers’ constant veiled queries about grandchildren than with any shared desire on his and Maisie’s part. Nonetheless, the conjugal rites had been performed and soon Maisie was with child.

She had been happy during the pregnancy. The strain had fallen away from her face to be replaced by a musing
contentment
. She played the piano for hours, her fingers flitting over the keys in the dance her bulging form could no longer perform. Or she sat contentedly by the fire and stared into the flames, her knitting needles clicking out an unstoppable rhythm. Then in the seventh month of her pregnancy, she had tripped and tumbled down the long row of stairs in the Beacon Hill house.

James had come home from the office to find a grave Dr Bradley waiting for him. He reported the accident, told him Maisie was well. There was a broken leg, which he had set and which would mend. He had given Masie something calming. He averted his eyes. Tragically the baby had been born too soon. Born dead.

He tried to keep James from the bedroom, but James had rushed up past him. Maisie was lying there ashen-faced. She was staring at a tiny cocooned form at her side, its eyes closed, never to open. James took her hand.

‘I wanted to keep her. Just for a little while,’ she stammered.

They were the only words she spoke to him for the next weeks. No matter how much he tried to hide his own sadness, to distract her with stories of his doings or the gossip about friends she normally loved, she merely lay there, enveloped in a profound muteness. When she emerged from silence, it was to cry, great heaving tears in the midst of which she asked him to forgive her. It tore at his heart.

It was then that Yvette suddenly, abruptly, randomly leapt into his mind. He knew this was his punishment.

He took time off from his legal practice to spend it with Maisie. She chatted to him now, lightly, evenly, about nothing in particular, a distracted gaiety in her voice. It was clear she was trying to please him and he gave her his pleasure and his attention, as well as little daily gifts, chocolates, trinkets, even
a puppy, though he was all too aware that nothing could make up for the loss. And all through those weeks, he knew. He knew she was dying. He also realised he had never loved her so much.

Two months later, she was dead, her face still a mere girl’s, a sculptured paleness against the deep gold of her hair. Just before the end, she had looked him in the eyes and said, ‘I don’t mind, Jim. You see, I was never really meant to … Meant to grow up.’

He had grasped her hand and felt like a murderer.

With an angry, abrupt gesture, James collected all the articles he had scattered and heaped them back into a single pile. He stared out into what was now an empty square. Against his will, he populated it with thoughts of those distant years. Wisps of memory like gossamer, trailing shadows wherever they flew. He had refused himself such reminiscences for so long now, that their repressed emotion leapt out at him with the force of cannon fire. It left its imprint on the calloused skin he had grown to defend himself.

Through the blur his moist eyes made of the square, it came to him that his widower’s weeds had become like one of those suits of armour worn by knights of yore, so cumbersome that even his sense of himself had begun to disappear beneath its weight. Yes, he had buried a part of himself with Maisie, who had died for him, while the rest determinedly went off to lose itself in the details of work and responsibility.

His shoulders heaved with the sadness and guilt of it. As he finally stretched out on the bed, it occurred to him that even if it paled beside what was due to Maisie, he owed a debt to Yvette, too. He had no knowledge of her fate, though Raf’s clippings had given him a greater sense of the dangers of the world she inhabited.

His eyes played over the shadowy ceiling. Throughout those months of Maisie’s dying, he remembered, Ellie had
been a brick. She had sat by Maisie’s bedside, had chatted, cajoled, or been silent as need demanded. She had fetched drinks and library books. She had read aloud for hours. She had never before been so close to Maisie, nor indeed, for a long time to him.

Elinor understood about pain. He hoped Raf was with her now.

E
xcept for the bars on its ground-floor windows and its dilapidated façade, Saint-Lazare had the aspect of a convent or, at worst, of an old and stately, civic building. Its name, too, was misleading. The prison stood on the Faubourg Saint-Denis far closer to the Gare de l’Est than to the station which bore its saint’s name. It housed some 12,000 women – many of them as Raf sardonically put it, women of easy virtue.

The harsh irony stayed in his face as he pointed to the words inscribed above the arched entrance:
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

‘Not much of that for the ladies incarcerated here, eh Jim?’

‘No, but the ideal is worth upholding.’

‘I dare say.’ Raf shot him a querulous glance, which made James aware that his words must have come out with a pomposity he didn’t feel.

It was odd how, whatever his intentions, he always ended up by wrong-footing it with Raf. This morning they had already argued over Ellie and then Olympe. James had probably put too much insistence in his voice when he had said that before they went any further, they really had to get a clear picture of Olympe’s past – her past before Raf had met her.
Raf had countered by saying that Jim was beginning to sound like a French investigative magistrate: get the low-down on a life and a past and you immediately know whether a person is guilty or innocent, whatever the facts of the case. Squalid beginnings, criminal ends. Bad blood, alcoholism, crime, wending their way uncontrollably down the inherited line towards the ultimate cesspit. Bye-bye free will.

James hadn’t bothered to argue. He sensed that Raf’s
vehement
exaggeration of a position James might have taken in a measured way was partly to do with the fact that he had been thinking along the same lines, but didn’t like to admit it. Or have it served up as an incontestable truth by his older brother. In any case, by then they had arrived, and had to confront guards, fill in forms, shamble down corridors.

The infirmary took up a wing of the building and housed both sick prison inmates and prostitutes who had been sent here for a cure after their enforced sanitary examination. As well as hapless girls picked off the street.

James had an impression of a sea of filthy beds stretching towards an infinite horizon. A billowing nun surfaced from amongst them like a storm cloud to block their passage. The weight of her wimple seemed to have turned all her features downward so that they took on a punishing severity. With thin-lipped terseness, she asked them their business. James let Raf work his charm and surveyed the women.

Some lay on their beds, their expressions cowed, their eyes half closed, somehow slumbering in what was an echoing din of sound. Others perched in little groups on the beds’ edge, their mouths moving, their faces sharp, combative. In their dirty, shapeless smocks, it was hard to distinguish them from one another.

A hundred eyes watched Raf and James as they trailed behind the nun. An occasional hiss or a raucous laugh
accompanied
their passage. One woman, perhaps emboldened by
the massed presence of her mates, tugged at James’s sleeve. Mistaking them for doctors, several shouted for attention only to be harshly silenced by the matron.

‘Louise Boussel,’ she suddenly called out in a stentorian voice. There was a rustle in a bed James had thought empty and a thin, pallid face peered out from beneath a blanket.

‘
Oui
.’ The word was barely audible.

‘De la visite,’
the nun declaimed in disapproval.

Louise stared at them with visible incomprehension.

Raf smiled and presented her with the box of pastries they had brought. As she opened it timidly, her eyes grew wide. A hand reached up to put some order into lank, dark locks. All the while, voices beckoned from other beds and exhorted her to keep some patisserie for them.

Raf encouraged the girl to eat, saying it would make a change from infirmary gruel. Only then did he mention Rachel Arnhem.

The girl sat up straighter in her bed. Her cheeks took on a tinge of excited colour. ‘Oh it’s so kind of Rachel to send you to see me. I didn’t know anyone had told her I was … well, I was here.’ A look of shame flitted across her face. ‘We had such a nice lunch together last week. Only last week. It feels so long ago now. Are you …’ She looked directly at Raf. ‘Are you the man Rachel … I should really call her Olympe, shouldn’t I? Are you the agent she said might be able to find me work in the theatre? I can sew anything, you know.
Anything
. Any kind of costume. I used to make Rachel’s. In the early days when …’ She stopped herself.

Like a wolf, a woman from a neighbouring bed had loped behind them and was rooting in the pastry box, stuffing a cake into her mouth. A chorus of mingled boos and cheers attended her act.

James met Raf’s eyes. If they were to tell Louise about Olympe, they couldn’t do so here.

Spying a white-coated man cross the room, James rushed over. He introduced himself with his full credentials,
Professor
J.A. Norton from Harvard. He insisted that they really must have a quieter space in which to speak to Louise Boussel. It was important.

The man examined him with a slow, speculative gaze. He had a round, fleshy face, not uncongenial, except for the florid pucker at his brow.

‘Dr Henri Comte.’ He bowed slightly. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He waved to a passing lay nurse, who smoothed her white apron as she approached. ‘Show this gentleman and Louise Boussel to the second cubicle, Mademoiselle,’ he said
authoritatively
, then turned back to James. ‘What exactly is your
relationship
to Louise Boussel, Monsieur Norton?’

It sounded like an accusation and James heard himself saying, ‘Cousins. We are cousins.’

Comte nodded a little dubiously. ‘So she has been keeping secrets from her family and now they are out in the open … You might give her a little lesson in morality, Monsieur. Though perhaps leaving her here’ – he waved his arm in an expansive arc – ‘rather than taking her to a, shall we say, more genteel cure may be lesson enough. Good morning, Monsieur.’

The man clearly suspected him of having relations with Louise. Despite a shudder of guilt mingled with distaste, James hurried after him. ‘How much longer will Louise’s treatment take, Dr Comte?’

‘Point her out to me. Oh yes. That section over there have another five days. If she can take the nervous strain and is strong enough to resist secondary infection, there is really no good reason to move her now. It would entail not a little negotiation with the police.’ He gave James a meaningful look, then rushed off, brisk despite the shortness of his legs.

The cubicle was airless, but at least the noise had receded to a background hum. Louise sat on the shaky stool, her thin
shoulders hunched. She gasped as she heard Raf’s
stammering
announcement of Olympe’s death and the reason for their visit.

‘I can’t believe it, Monsieur. I can’t take it in. Not Rachel.’ Sobbing took her over.

‘How was she when you last saw her?’ Raf asked softly.

‘She was well. She was happy. Full of plans,’ she stifled a moan. ‘For me, too.’

‘And that was on what day?’ James interjected.

‘Monday. Yes, a week ago Monday.’

Before she could begin crying again, James asked, ‘Did she say anything at all to you which might indicate that something was troubling her? Think carefully now.’

The girl looked up at him with tear-laden eyes. She shook her head. ‘We just caught up. Caught up on news. We hadn’t met for a while. She told me about the little ones. Juliette is doing well, very well. Rachel is so proud of her. She wants her to train for a … well a proper job. You know, Rachel and I, we went to school together. We go back a long way. I know her family.’

‘So there was nothing at all that was upsetting her?’ James persisted, only to feel Raf poke him in the ribs for his leading questions.

A frown creased the girl’s forehead. ‘Well, I’m not sure. There was something, though Rachel laughed about it. It was just a … a sensation.’

‘About what?’ James urged her on gently.

Her hands played with the coarse smock, folding its material into tiny pleats. She glanced up at Raf and in that look James was suddenly aware that she now knew who Raf was, that Rachel must have mentioned him to her friend, perhaps done more than merely mention.

James repeated his query.

‘There was this man. So long ago, I can barely remember
him. We were only sixteen. Maybe seventeen. It was soon after Rachel’s mother died. He was much older. He wanted to marry her.’

‘What was his name?’ Raf’s voice was a hiss. James threw him a stern look.

Louise shook her head. She looked frightened. ‘I … I don’t remember.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ James said. ‘He wanted to marry Rachel?’

‘Yes. He wanted to look after her, I think. He was … well … older. I only met him once or twice. He didn’t speak much. He had big features and his skin was all pockmarked.
Anyhow
Rachel didn’t want to get married. She refused him.’

‘And then?’

‘Nothing really. Well, they moved soon after that. We didn’t see each other so much.’

‘But this man had come back into her life?’

‘Oh no, Monsieur,’ she threw Raf a sidelong glance. ‘No, no. Not like that. She’d had a letter from him. That’s all. Or maybe he’d come once to the theatre. I had the impression she wasn’t altogether pleased to see him. She gave me a ticket, too, you know. To come and see her. And then this happened … they put me in here.’ A look of disgust covered her face. She
crumpled
the smock material into a tight ball.

‘But you’ll be cured, soon.’ James offered softly.

‘Yes, yes.’ Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘Poor Rachel. She can’t be cured. There is no justice in the world, is there, Messieurs!’

James waited for a moment. ‘When did Rachel change her name?’

Louise looked beyond them, as if a window had been cut into the bare wall. ‘I’m not sure exactly. I think someone, a friend, told her a different name would sound better on the stage. When we met up again, after they’d moved. It was a good year later, maybe more. Anyhow, she’d already invented
it then. Olympe … it comes from a picture someone said she looked like.’ The girl paused. ‘Isak … that was the man’s name. I remember now.’

She suddenly looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, all triumph and grief and wide-eyed perplexity bundled up together in a slight form.

‘Isak. You don’t remember a second name?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I knew it.’

‘But Olympe’s father would know.’ Raf muttered. He was already reaching for his hat.

‘Oh yes. Of course. It was an offer of marriage,’ Louise said gravely.

They walked her back to her bed. The box lay on it spreadeagled, a lone pastry left in its depths like a superstitious offering.

After the rank closeness of the infirmary, the sky had a
wondrous
height. Without needing to consult, they strolled, breathing in the welcome air, each of them reflecting
separately
on what they had learned. When they passed a patisserie, Raf wanted to go in to have more cakes delivered to Louise. James dissuaded him. It seemed more sensible to wait until she got home, when at least she could share them with dear ones, rather than provoking the jealous hostility of the other inmates. For once, Raf acceded. He was suddenly in a hurry.

‘We must go and see Arnhem.’

‘Not now, Raf. It’ll wait.’

‘What do you mean, it’ll wait. This Isak, if he’s had anything to do with Olympe’s death, won’t wait.’

‘We don’t know that Arnhem will have any inkling of where to find him.’

‘More than we have.’

James hesitated. ‘It’s the Sabbath.’

‘Olympe never …’

‘But her father may. And we must go and see Ellie. You didn’t last night. Where were you anyway?’

Raf waved his arm vaguely and then more purposefully to hail a passing cab. ‘I’m a working man, you know. I had some matters to attend to. Look, we’ll go via Arnhem’s. I’ll just pop up for a moment, ask him, and then we’ll carry on.’ He instructed the driver before James could stop him.

James lowered his voice. ‘I want to go through some things with you – having read all the material you left for me yesterday.’

‘Shoot.’

‘If I’m following your thinking correctly, you’re definitely ruling out suicide and imagining that Olympe was murdered in one of four ways.’

‘Four? Did I enumerate them?’

‘No, but I did.’ James counted the possibilities on his fingers. ‘One. There’s a killer on the loose who targets solitary women. Women he probably thinks are prostitutes. Two. This killer is somehow linked to or is a member of the morality police. Three, the killer not only targets women alone – but Jewish women alone. Therefore the killings aren’t random. The man knows who they are, knows their origins. He’s a bigot, either with a direct gripe or a political one, if the two are separable. Four. There is no link whatsoever between any of the deaths cited in the papers and Olympe’s. Any or each of them was a separate unrelated affair.’

Raf was staring at him with a bemused expression.

James carried on. ‘And now we have five: Olympe’s death may be the result of a crime of passion, committed by a rejected suitor. So which of these possibilities do we pursue first?’

‘Your implacable logic does me in, Jim. We pursue all the possibilities, of course.’ His voice rose. ‘Olympe isn’t a case,
for me. Some cipher subject to law 400 or 2002. She’s Olympe. Wonderful, irreplaceable Olympe. You must understand that. You’ve been there, after all. In your own way.’

James didn’t answer immediately. He stared out the window. They were driving along the street they had walked just two nights ago. In the sunlight, it looked tawdrier, but less frightening. The bars had a fatigue about them, their energies spent in the night. Rubbish lay scattered in the unkempt streets. Children kicked bits of it in desultory games. A woman with a plain, unpainted face and broad hips smacked a little boy on the bottom. He burst into a howl.