A Provençal Mystery (17 page)

“Why would he want it?” Rachel asked.

“He doesn’t say why he wants it. He seems nervous about it. And insistent.”

“You're an expert on artifacts,” I said to Roger, “and I suppose that includes relics?”

“Among other things, yes,” he replied, then added. “There is something strange about a religion that saves the body parts of dead holy people and encases them in boxes.”

“All peoples do that,” I said. “It’s a human thing to do. Even modern day Westerners. In the U.S., people pay lots of money for things like Elvis’s toothbrush. It’s a sort of relic, too.”

“But other peoples haven’t covered the world with missions to bring the unenlightened to recognize their god,” Roger said. His face was set, his voice low and grating. His voice was like Agatha’s even though what he was saying sounded more like Jack. “A god that is supposed to be a better god than theirs.”

“The relics had a reason,” I said. “They were middlemen of a sort between ordinary people and the terrible abstraction of an infinite God.”

“What an apologist you are turning out to be,” Roger said.

I stopped to think of what he said. He was right. I was changing, turning towards the unknown. Maybe Mother Superior Therese, had been right—if I looked into myself I would find a believer, though I doubted it. “Heaven forbid!” I said, then laughed at my choice of words.

“Perhaps we should change the subject to something more appetizing than a head in a box,” Roger said.

But Rachel persisted. “And you’re sure there isn’t a reliquary in the convent?” she asked.

“Sure as I can be,” Madeleine replied. “Sometimes reliquaries are sealed into the altar, but I think if there were one like that I’d know about it. Maybe the nuns do have such a reliquary and are willing to sell it to him, but just didn't tell me about it.”

“The nuns do have secrets,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” asked Rachel.

“I went there the other day. And spoke with Mother Superior Therese, who told me not all the convent records are available to the public. I wondered why.”

“As far as I know, the nuns at the convent have nothing to hide,” Madeleine said.

“I think they do. Anyway, I will try to find out. I’m going to spend next Thursday at the convent.”

“There’s a retreat?” asked Rachel. Her face was eager. “Can anyone go?”

“No, it’s just for me—because I study the place.” Rachel’s face closed in disappointment. “I didn’t know you were interested in Catholicism,” I added.

“Well, I am,” replied Rachel.

I wondered at Rachel’s sudden interest in the convent, but squirreled the question away in my mind as we continued talking. We had reached transubstantiation—such a tricky subject!—when Roger changed the subject: “So, Griset. Tell me,” he said. “What was the function of the archive building before it became an archive? A prison, they say?”

“Ah, yes,” he replied. “We store the documents in old cells.”

“And who ended up there?” I asked.

“Criminals,” said Griset. “Bad ones.”

“Fallen women?” asked Roger, glancing at me.

“No,” I replied. “fallen women went to the Refuge.”

“Fallen? Fallen how far?” asked Rachel.

“Not far,” said Madeleine. "All they had to do was drink too much. Meet some man down at the ramparts. Talk too loudly. Do something scandalous—like . . . ride on the back of a horse with a man." She was looking at me. Did she want me to know that she, too, had seen the records about Des Moulins?

"I didn’t know you were interested in the Old Régime," I said, hoping to elicit more information.

"When I helped Sister Agatha research the convent history, before I started on my thesis, I looked at Old Regime documents," she said. Then, as she usually did when questioned, she got up and left on a vague errand.

“So,” said Roger. “No women in the prison?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Griset. “Women were there. Prostitutes, among others. The ladies of the evening, patrolling the ramparts. The girls with their legs in the air pleasuring the soldiers.”

"Really, Griset!" I said, a bit scandalized. He was being deliberately provocative.

He made a conciliatory gesture and went on, “But no more, as you know. Only the rats come there at night. Now the very bad girls go in a police van to the modern jail in the center of the city. Some of them would profit from a night here, though. Some of them are very, very bad girls.” He laughed.

"So what do they do that is so bad?" I asked.

"Things it would be improper for me to tell you," he said in a near-whisper.

"Oh, come on, Griset!" I said.

Roger walked me home. I imagined myself pivoting down the street in a series of pirouettes, ending in a rotating, whirling sphere of lines, but I walked along sedately by his side. In front of my building, as he was leaving, I almost asked him in but decided not to—next time, I told myself. I needed to think. My store of information about the murder had grown, stuffed into my mind, which dwelt in chaos and then went on house-keeping binges. I hoped that when I felt the urge, more would fall into place.

That night relics haunted my mind. They had always fascinated me. Relics—desiccated, smelling of the perfume of the holy dead—like roses, reports said. They hummed with power, the power to cause miracles, to cure the sick, the insane, the terrified. Relics gave the lie to the old myth that Christianity was the religion of a sophisticated people, a people more rational and worldly—better—than Pacific tribes or pagan cults. Relics said that people need a tangible talisman to connect them with the world beyond death.

Back in my apartment, half asleep, I had a vision: light glanced off a cross shape, a human shape, a reliquary. The arms—iron bars—splayed out and ended in half-closed brass hands, as the legs ended in naked brass feet. In the huge metal head, eye and mouth holes gaped. The space for the torso held a small brass casket; I knew it contained a heart.

Then, quite perceptibly something stirred in me, a rising, like a fish flipping, something long submerged, which had lived concealed. I focused on it, and it pulled me into a dark place; I was a naked, skinned swimmer plunged down where one died of lack of air or learned another way to breathe. I fell asleep into a dream, which I forgot when I woke up in the middle of the night. With Foxy beside me, I lay and thought, staring into Foxy’s yellow eyes. Moonlight flooded across the floor of the room.

Then my stomach gurgled; I laughed to myself and gave up conjecture for the time being. Underneath, though, I was afraid. Irrationality was staring me in the face.

Logic is all I really have, I thought. This is the twentieth century. Thoughts chased each other around inside my head, but I couldn’t put together what those in history love to call “an analytical framework.”

Chapter 16

On Sunday morning, the seven o’clock church bells were tolling as Foxy and I climbed the steep stairs to the apartment after running our early morning errands. I stopped dead when I saw a figure at the top of the stairs standing, back to us, at my door. The neat back told me who it was—the even line of hair just hitting her shoulders, and above her coat collar, the faint impression of the knob at the top of her backbone, which to me hinted at vulnerability. Rachel. She turned around as she heard the last step creak.

She said, "I was afraid something had happened to you—that you had not come home or were in there. . . ."

"Dead," I said, completing her sentence. "No, I'm fine. I just went out to walk Foxy and get some bread." I opened the door and motioned her in.

In the apartment, I started heating the water to make coffee. My head was a little buzzy—I needed coffee badly. It was one of the disadvantages of living in France—having to go out and buy bread before making breakfast. At home I rolled out of bed, put on a bathrobe, started the coffee and oatmeal. But then oatmeal was nothing compared to a fresh-baked, crusty baguette with butter and jam.

Looking uncertain, Rachel stood in the center of the kitchen. I wondered why she was visiting—and so early in the morning. "Is there something wrong?" I asked. “Join me for breakfast and fill me in on whatever it is.” I motioned to a kitchen chair,

The butter was already out, coming to room temperature, and the jam—raspberry—was on the small table. I set another place and poured the steaming water over the coffee, waited until the brew was an appropriate brown, then ran it through an old metal strainer into two heavy cups, white with small blue rings around the top edge. The smell of coffee permeated the old apartment, merging with the faint dustiness that made me think of lives lived there—other coffee, other times, other people.

“Hobo coffee. I haven’t any milk. You’ll have to drink it black,” I said. “I've never gotten into café au lait.”

“That’s fine. I like it better black anyway,” replied Rachel.

I sliced the bread with a serrated knife, and flakes of crust littered the counter.

“And . . . ?” I asked.

“I need to talk to you. I have a mission, maybe a commission, set me by my mother.”

I put the bread in a heap on a thick white plate, set the plate on the table, and sat down. “You were saying. A commission from your mother.” I buttered a piece of bread and slathered it with jam and started eating. I wondered why she had decided to trust me but realized we had been coming closer in the last couple of weeks, ever since we had spent the afternoon of Agatha's death together. And more, who else could she trust of all the people she knew at the archive?

“My family, on my mother’s side, used to live here. Then World War Two came,” she said.

“You told me your mother escaped . . .” I said through a mouthful of bread. Rachel wasn’t eating. I pushed the plate of bread closer to her.

“Yes. Someone denounced my family—my mother wanted me to find out who it was. The answer lies in those documents that Chateaublanc won’t let me have. The documents that tell who the collaborators were.”

“Madeleine, too, has been having difficulty getting documents about the Resistance,” I said. “I read somewhere—
Le Canard Enchainé
?—that the French government had classified them as top-secret.”

“True. They did. But no more. Chateaublanc may not have gotten the directive,” Rachel replied.

“Don’t count on it.” I was suspicious of Chateaublanc. His strong family pride could lead him to want to suppress documents about collaborators during the Vichy regime if his family had been involved. Was this something Agatha would know about? Griset?

“My grandfather died in the Nazi death camps. And one of my uncles, a small boy. Sent there all alone.” Rachel paused, edgily tearing up her paper napkin. "But my mother found out about the good in the hearts of men—rather people. Like the Shadow's opposite. Women. The nuns who hid her and arranged for her to be baptized, so she could be given a Catholic birth certificate, even though it was fake. They put themselves in great danger.”

“What nuns were they? I asked, suspecting the answer.

“Your nuns. The nuns of Our Lady of Hope. My mother told me that she heard them arguing about it. Some of them were opposed to taking her in. I think that they were either Nazi sympathizers or afraid.”

“So Agatha might have known your mother. She would have been a young nun, then,” I said, seeing in my mind's eye a younger and thinner Agatha, just as irrepressible. “Did you ask her about it?”

“Yes, I did,” said Rachel. ”I talked to her a bit without telling her my story. She was evasive, but you know how close-mouthed she was about some things. She seemed to want to concentrate on the present or the distant past. Anyhow, she didn’t want to talk to me about it. I thought she might have been one of the nuns who were against trying to save Jews, in fear for their own skin. And now it’s too late to find out more.”

“Yes,” I said, my heart heavy in my chest.

“They took my mother to a peasant family in the country, who kept her until the end of the war. Like the nuns, they put themselves in great danger. It was only when my mother became ill—she died of cancer last year—that she was willing to talk about it. I tape-recorded her. I want you to read the transcription of what she said."

“But why?” I had put my piece of bread down on the table, half-eaten.

“Because I need you for something. I have to do more than find out who the collaborator was, though that task may be related to it. You'll see. Read.” Rachel reached into her briefcase, took out a stapled piece of typescript, and handed it to me as if it were a sacrament.

* * * * *

Early spring. Chilly. My mother turned away and went around the corner -- that’s the last time I saw her. The last time. The woman -- her name was Henriette, I think -- took me into the convent. I didn’t like the way it smelled, musty and old, like -- what’s that stuff? Yeah, mildew, I think now. I threw a tantrum, lying on the floor and drumming my feet. Most of the nuns didn’t know what to do. Henriette did. She showed me a litter of kittens in the shed out by the garden. They were crawling all over the mother -- their eyes had just opened. No, not a sign of new life or anything symbolic like that. You know kids. Kittens are animated stuffed animals to them.

Henriette wasn’t dressed in a habit. Henriette was her lay name -- the one I knew her by. She was a friend of the family. Maybe a relative. I don't know. She must have worn regular clothes when she took me to the convent so we wouldn't stand out. What would the authorities think of a little child accompanied by a nun in a nun outfit? They’d maybe think hanky-panky. Maybe they’d think the kid was a Jew. Anyway, maybe questions.