The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (32 page)

Gaëlle departed on holiday with her family at the end of August, leaving the Judge buried in a fat dossier on a chain of health clinics that were clearly being used for laundering drugs money.

‘There. Hunt the evidence. That should keep you out of mischief.’ The Greffière kissed her Judge on both cheeks. ‘Take care of yourself. Try to eat every lunchtime. And properly. Not just slices of pizza.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Egypt. Sharm el-Sheikh. And I’m not going to bother with Luxor or the pyramids. In fact I’m not going to move from my air-conditioned hotel room or my sunbed on the beach. You ought to come with us. You never go away on holiday.’

‘Send me a postcard.’

‘Promise.’

And so the Judge brooded in her office, discontented and alone, at first answering the phone herself, then finally switching it over to Reception.

The fourth letter lay waiting in her green post box at home on the night of Gaëlle’s departure; the postmark smudged and the date missing, but his handwriting remained firm and clear.

My Dearest Dominique
,

Forgive me for shouting at you. I meant what I said. So please understand that the volume indicated nothing but the strength of my feelings. You say don’t hope, don’t count on me. But I do and I must. I cannot believe in chance or accidents. And I am not wrong. Don’t mistake my certainty for arrogance. This love is too strong and too vast to be contained. I will count on you and I will wait. I am waiting for you now and I will wait for ever.

Friedrich Grosz

_{*  *  *}

The offices were almost empty; an unexpected heatwave accompanied la rentrée on September the
3
rd. In the weeks that followed she covered for her other colleagues and worked overtime. She spent hours studying the Guide, staring at the strange solid script and the quotations in other languages. You must return the Guide to its Keeper. For that is where it belongs. The eccentric little Professor, wielding his teapot, may well be one of them, trying to frighten me. Well, I don’t scare. The Guide is the Keeper of the Book. Das Buch des Glaubens. And was it passed from Friedrich Grosz to Marie-Cécile Laval? So which one of them is the Guide? And what does that mean? She gazed at the initials. This is his handwriting, not hers. The notes and commentaries are all his. But the Book was in her possession. Did she pass on the Book and then set out with her friends towards the snowy mountain? The Composer did not expect Madame Laval to take her own life. Of that the Judge was certain. Was she then the Guide? Or had he chosen her? And had she reneged on the commitment? In which case who was left to pass on the knowledge of the Faith? She tapped her pencil against the desk and gazed upwards at the fan churning the air above; the blades shovelled heat into high corners of the room. She drew the shutters across her windows and watched one hard shaft of light waver against her desk. The Professor declared that the Faith was not a suicide sect, but a death cult. And in its own way Christianity is also exactly that – a mystery religion with death and resurrection at the core.

She fingered the Guide. This is the only copy that exists. And it is passed on, along with the knowledge of the Faith, to the next Guide. The Book itself had no mystical significance for her. The Professor described it as a Grimoire – a book of spells. Occult knowledge was synonymous with nonsense in the Judge’s mind. But she was intrigued by the idea that somewhere, in someone’s memory, all members of the Faith were added up on a list, accounted for, like subscribers to a golf club, generations of them, following one another across the centuries, then the millennia, marching to glory, the triumphant saints.
Suis-moi
. And then, suddenly, at ten o’clock in the morning, sitting at her desk in the office, one more piece of the puzzle slotted into place before her. Marie-Cécile Laval had given her daughter an expensive, beautiful present, which contained a command, a command that I have misunderstood.
Suis-moi
. I assumed this woman meant go on, kill yourself, follow me into the ecstatic, shared, eternal dark. But no mother, not even this one, on fire with the madness of the Faith, ever orders her daughter to die. Marie-Cécile Laval didn’t mean that. She meant:
Follow me – come after me – take my place
. That’s why Marie-T was unsure of her meaning. She had no idea what role they had prepared for her.

The Judge snatched up the phone and rang Myriam at the Domaine, her discarded papers slewed across the desk. Then she replaced the receiver before anyone had answered and drank a large glass of water in one long breathless gulp. She stood utterly still for a moment, interrogating her deduction. Then she redialled the number.

‘Domaine Laval – service commercial – j’écoute.’

‘Myriam?’

‘Ma belle, quel plaisir! Où es-tu?’

‘In the office. Is Marie-T at the Domaine?’ She took a huge, steadying breath. ‘And do you know how I can contact the Composer? Monsieur Friedrich Grosz?’

‘Monsieur Grosz? Alors, neither of them is here at the moment. There’s some sort of reunion in Switzerland. I’m not quite sure where, but I can find out. Is it urgent?’

‘I don’t know. But yes, it might be. Do you know where Monsieur Grosz is next performing with his orchestra?’

‘Alors ça, non. Aucune idée. But that’s easy enough to find out. They’ve got the future programme tacked up on the kitchen door. I’ll look up the dates and ring you back.’

The Judge prowled around her desk, angry at her own indecisiveness, her feelings troubled and confused. I should stand back, let a little time elapse, consider this summer’s events in a colder mood, from a rational distance. But why did she sense there was no time left? A reunion in Switzerland? In
1994
a gathering of the Faith around Anton Laval had led to a mass of abandoned bodies clasped in one another’s arms. I must save that girl from her own longing for her mother and from them, whoever they are. She saw Marie-T coming towards her across the tiles in the Domaine, a slender messenger in a green dress, hesitant and insecure, anxious to please and to be loved. And then she saw the girl again, her long bare legs stretched out, her arms folded across her belly and her head thrown back, looking up, up, up at the assembled gods and the frozen stars. She grabbed the Guide and hugged its bulk against her stomach; the leather felt warm through her shirt and the lock left a square red mark upon her hand. Dominique Carpentier had reached a crossroads, her experience and intelligence counselled caution, patience, the long careful assessment of motive and risk. But now she stood on the brink of a dark pool, and beyond her, on the far side of the still water, two people waited, two people who had inexplicably reached out towards her, the Composer and his teenage daughter.

She jumped back against the water cooler as the phone went off like a bomb.

‘Dominique? C’est Myriam. His next engagement is Saturday September the
23
rd in London; guest conductor with the London Philharmonic. It’s a concert performance of
Fidelio
, the Beethoven Festival, which comes at the end of the Proms. He’s working with his usual singers, all the same ones that performed at Avignon, but not the whole orchestra. And the reunion took place last night at the Château de Séverin. It’s about an hour, no, maybe half an hour, beyond Lausanne on the Swiss side of the lake. Do you want the address? I can’t find a phone number, but I’ve got the address. And I can give you Marie-T’s mobile.’

The very ordinariness of Myriam’s helpful voice forced the Judge to acknowledge how far she had travelled towards an outburst of obsessive hysterics. She began to see fan shapes spread before her, which resolved into bodies, their eyes open, their mouths fixed and smiling.

‘Thanks, Myriam. You’re marvellous.’ She wrote down all the information and watched her damp, shaking hand leaving a smeared trail across the pad. When did I last eat a proper meal without Gaëlle? I work all the hours God made, and neglect to eat. No wonder I’m light-headed.

She rang Marie-T’s mobile,
Laissez-moi un petit message
, but she could find no words. Her sense of impending threat remained obscure and therefore, to her conscious mind, both unlikely and ridiculous. She drank half a litre of water and sat staring at the Guide; the stealthy unease crept through her bones. That fête at the Domaine was important to them both. I was their chosen guest. And I have let them down. Don’t hope. Never hope. Don’t count on me. For the first time the Judge realised the appalling scale of her rejection. I think that the subjects of my investigations must be mentally deficient and somehow less than human. These two people opened their hearts to me and I sent them packing. Why? Because my professional convictions prevent me from seeing the justice in any other narrative of reality that differs from my own. Their Faith is ludicrous and insane. I therefore dismissed them along with their monstrous delusions. But no one becomes worthless simply because they believe something different from yourself. Does my knowledge and education always give me the right to condemn? My role remains clear: to save and to protect.

The astronomical charts of the middle heavens still covered one wall of her office. She wheeled around and stared at the deep-blue map spattered with white points and the fine black lines between them. She saw the same patterns again, fluorescent on the ceiling of the children’s room in the freezing chalet. Their Faith follows the rhythm of the universe, as do all faiths, the patterns of the seasons and the phases of the moon. I never really listened to them. I did not care to understand. In my mind, they were already judged.

She rang the office administrator and told her she was going home. As she surveyed her tidy office before turning out the lights and the photocopier, her eye caught the gold clasp on the Guide, which lay closed and silent upon her desk. I must lock that up. She was halfway to the safe when she paused and stood still. The Judge was never again able to account for her reasoning, or for her actions, in the moments that followed. She swept up the Guide, for this is indeed the only copy in the entire world, placed it carefully in her documents case, where it consumed all the space, and marched out of her office into the first cool wind of the day.

Her locked house simmered, airless, stifling. The shutters onto her verandah had not been opened for a week. Her green plants had all wilted and died in the dark. She flung open her shutters and saw her shrubs and the wonderful Datura, les trompettes du jugement hanging their heads, shameful and parched. There had been no rain for almost a month, just dry thunder passing over the mountains. The computerised watering system had turned itself off during the power cuts and never been reset. She tested the system; then set the sprinklers to work throughout the garden all night long. She ran cold water over her wrists and flung open the fridge.

Four plastic bottles of water lay on the bottom shelf; a dried segment of St Nectaire, shrivelled in its wrapping, settled, stinking faintly, inside the door. She finished off a bottle of sour-sweet gherkins in vinegar and abandoned the cheese to its fate. No fruit, no wine, no bread. I’ve been eating once a week – dimanche midi – with my parents, and that’s it. How did I come to this? She opened a small tin of tuna, and, still standing at the sink, drained the brine and fished out each mouthful with a cake fork. The salt taste skimmed her throat.

She loosened the tortoiseshell clasp and ran her hands through her thick black hair; her scalp felt unpleasant, greasy and damp. She caught the smell of her own sweat. The Judge strode into her bathroom, threw everything she was wearing into the washing machine and turned the shower’s force to maximum. She scrubbed her body and her head until her skin was singing. Then she dressed for battle in black. By the time she had locked her rucksack into the boot and climbed back into her car her mind was clear; strait was the gate and narrow was the way that lay before her.

She set out for the motorway.

_{*  *  *}

By mid-September the A
9
is clear in the evenings, and once the Spanish lorries bound for Italy lurched on to the A
54
beyond Nîmes, the Judge found herself left looking at empty lanes, white cliffs, windy skies, and the shadows lengthening out from the feet of the cypress trees, those long rows of dark green guarding the frontiers of the garrigue and the rim of the vineyards. She had no plan, only an inner conviction. The Composer and his daughter were asking me for help in however strange and obscure a way, and I would not listen to their appeal. My manner was too rigid, guarded, cold; they were creatures to be observed, from the far side of the glass. I played the witch at the feast, plotting against my hosts. She stopped at the motorway services and deliberately chomped her way through the solitary, remaining plat du jour, rôti de porc et ses petits légumes, drank a bottle of water and a double espresso, and drove onwards, north, always north, with the blazing orange sunset draining the light behind her.