A Provençal Mystery (9 page)

If there was a murderer, didn’t he or she have to be somewhat thin in order to get out the door of the bathroom and leave the body blocking the door? But no, the body could have been placed so the head was against the door and the body would flex as the murderer opened the door, then fall back to make a barricade. I shuddered, and I couldn’t stop. My hand trembled in Foxy’s fur.

If there was a murderer, that person must have known that nuns mortified themselves by putting needles in their tongues back in the past. And wasn’t it true that the time of death had to have been close to the time when I found the body? Rigor mortis would have set in otherwise, and I would not have been able to close Agatha’s mouth.

If there was a murderer, did that person know something about the diary?

No real conclusions. None possible. Leave it to the police.

Eventually I went to bed, shut off the light, and lay in the dark, Foxy next to me.

The darkness waited outside the windows. Until four in the morning, I heard the church bells tell the hour. Finally, I fell half asleep and had a waking dream in which the archive blew up: the roar; blocks of yellow stone lifting to the skies in a shower of shattered, sharp-edged golden debris, falling up and out in an orgasmic, ear-splitting crescendo; the tiles from the roof clattering to the cobblestones; the archive’s documents flying like leaves, let out to dance in the intense sunlight, people in the plaza racing after them and reaching out and up to catch them. All the records gone to chaos—cartularies falling on nineteenth century diaries, marriage certificates rubbing against death sentences, city plans resting on kings’ letters, contracts of property exchanges tumbling into the shallow gutter. A glorious mix of the sacred and profane, significant and trivial, pompous and humble. The other readers and I played in the papers like kids with autumn leaves while stones crashed around us.

I awoke with a start and a pounding heart. The wind banged the shutters. No bogeyman was there.

Chapter 9

The vision of the exploding archive had not yet ebbed from my mind by the time I arrived there the next morning. With some apprehension, I looked up at the battlements of the Palace, the solid stone archive building next to it, and the statue of Our Lady, erected in 1859 and still there, on top of the cathedral on the other side of the archive building.

The archives opened as usual, though a security guard made us check our personal possessions when we entered. A hole existed where Agatha had been. No big laugh. No teasing. No one sitting at the table in the back of the reading room. The place was unnaturally quiet.

Jack Leach stopped me before I could get to my place. “It makes no sense, given that she was the ultimate Catholic,” he said. Tiny beads of sweat stood on the pale blond stubble of his upper lip. I had noticed before that when Jack was especially nervous, the sweat appeared. It endeared him to me because I didn’t think he knew about it.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It looks like suicide, doesn’t it? That means, according to her, she’s on her way to hell as we speak.”

“It could have been a heart attack,” I said.

“Suicide makes sense, though. The needle.”

“You heard about that?”

“Chateaublanc told me.”

“Oh. Of course. And why do you think the needle means she committed suicide?”

He looked pleased with himself, and I wanted to hit him. “Mortification—it means making as if dead, right? So why not the real thing? Dead dead.”

“A stretch,” I replied, looking up at his anxious and excited face. “Death ends pain, and mortification is about enduring pain, so that. . . “ The lecturing tone of my own voice in my ears stopped me. “I think she was murdered,” I found myself saying.

“Why?” He interlaced his fingers in an unconscious parody of prayer. “But she . . . ,” he said, then perhaps remembering that I was a professor, decided to agree with me. “Of course, you’re probably right.” He slunk to his seat. I wondered why he wanted to promote the idea that Agatha’s death was suicide. Perhaps he killed her, I thought, and he wants to keep suspicion off himself.

Then I noticed a new reader sitting at the table in front of Chateaublanc. A bear-like man, his face was rough-hewn, unfinished, except for the eyes half-hidden under his thick eyebrows —they looked out from that face sharp, intelligent, and very finished. He wore a t-shirt adorned with a picture of a giant housefly.

“Who is he?” I asked Rachel.

“Roger Aubanas, from the University of Marseille. He says he’s here to work on a book about the economic implications of local landholding. I heard him talking to Chateaublanc.”

Before I could reply, Schmidt entered the room and said something to Chateaublanc in a low voice.

Chateaublanc listened, nodded, adjusted his sweater nervously, then made a general announcement to the readers: “Mesdames et messieurs, the police have told me of some preliminary findings concerning Sister Agatha’s death. They are treating it as suspicious.”

A collective gasp from the researchers, whose heads had popped up from their work like jack-in-the-boxes.

“What killed her?” asked Fitzroy.

“That is police business,” said Schmidt. “You are to remain in Avignon and its surrounding area until the police permit you to leave.” Before anyone could ask more questions, he turned on his heel and, tin-soldier straight, marched from the room. The room buzzed, then the readers, except for Aubanas, the newcomer, all gathered at Chateaublanc’s desk.

“I’m not surprised,” said Rachel.

“Why is that?” asked Fitzroy.

“The police must have ruled out natural causes. What are the other choices? Suicide? Not her,” I said.

“A possibility,” said Jack.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She was a happy woman. And suicide is a sin. She thought a good deal about sin.”

“It took the police long enough to decide it was murder,” said Fitzroy.

“Less than twenty-four hours,” replied Rachel. “Not so long.”

“It seemed long,” I said.

A silence. The question. On everyone’s mind. Finally Fitzroy asked it: “Who did it?”

No one said that it had to be one of us, but we thought it and nervously looked at each other. Chateaublanc stared down. He seemed to be pretending to read. In unspoken agreement, we went back to our places.

There was nothing to do but get to work. I opened my laptop, but my mind would not stay on my statistical study. I decided to read the diary instead. I was beginning to believe that it held some kind of message. More, the diary was a link to Agatha. But when I looked inside H 42, the diary was gone.

I shook out all the record books at my place. Nothing. I did not find it on the cart of documents to be replaced by Griset. I searched the bookshelves lining the interior walls of the room in case anyone had put it there, but did not find it. Then I went into the reference room to see if it had been shelved among the catalogs of the archive’s inventory. Nothing. I knew I looked frantic, but hoped that the readers would attribute it to distress over Agatha’s murder.

Finally I gave up, opened my laptop and H 42, and went to work at my table. Yet as my fingers typed, my mind told me that the diary must have something to do with the murder— why else would it have disappeared. Right then, too.

In early evening, Foxy and I went by way of the river and back streets to the Café Minette and found Jack Leach looking off into space at a table, a bottle of red wine, reduced by half, in front of him. Poor guy, I thought, remembering how my research year had been—among PhDs, I had felt like a kind of tolerated apprentice, not exactly part of the group. Agatha’s death must have affected him more than I had imagined. But also the questions of why he was so anti-Catholic and so intent on insisting that Agatha’s death was suicide now loomed large in my mind. Could he be Agatha’s killer? I decided to sit with him, both to be kind and to interrogate him—gently.

Jack motioned Michel over to ask him for an extra glass and pushed the bottle across the table to me when it came. Gigondas. I poured myself a large glass.

“Have you seen the latest
AHR
?” Jack asked. He took a pack of Gauloises out of his blazer pocket, extracted a cigarette, and lit it.

“The
American Historical Review
? No, I don’t read it while I’m here.” I took sip of wine—more a gulp—and reached down to pat Foxy on the head.

“I do. There’s a very interesting and abstruse debate between Thorne-Gruber and Landry,” said Jack. “Very, very nasty!” He smiled eagerly, excited that I, a professor (even if not yet tenured)!, was sitting with him. I did not reply. For a few minutes, my mind went off to speculation about the whereabouts of the Rose diary, and when I came out of my trance, I saw Jack tapping his foot. Though I suspected that he was misinterpreting my silent reverie as disapproval of his remark, I said nothing to disabuse him of this notion. He was such an annoying upstart.

Jack poured himself another glass of wine, swirled it around, looked at it in inebriated concentration. Michel drifted by. “Another bottle, monsieur?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you have any reds from Cassis?” I listened to his precise and effortless French. This was not the French of the ordinary American student. I had often wondered where he had become so proficient. “You speak French like a native,” I said after Michel went off to look for the red from Cassis.

He leaned forward, anxious to answer me—as he was about almost anything. “In a way I am a native because I lived here as a child. My father taught at the University of Aix, on and off, and the whole family came over with him. I was only three when we came the first time. That was just the right age to learn a foreign language. My mother and I used to play ball in the courtyard of our apartment house.” His eyes were alight with reminiscence, and his pretenses dropped away. “My mother loved being here. It was home to her.”

“In reality? She was French?” I asked. He nodded. “How did she meet your father?”

“He was on a sabbatical, working in Aix on his first book—about Freemasony. He began with the Joseph Sec monument”

Of course. Jack’s father had to be an academic—Jack knew academic politics too well not to have grown up with them. I decided to make a few remarks about the monument with its mysterious inscriptions, built during the French Revolution. “The monument by Joseph Sec, the eighteenth-century real estate king? The Freemason? Catholic charity worker? Jacobin? The monument that was in the back yard of a garage up until a few years ago?” I hoped to humble him with my erudition and shock him with my irreverence.

“You’ve read Vovelle,” said Jack. He tapped the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray, then let it rest there.

“Well, yes. Who hasn’t?” I watched him turning the stem of the glass in his fingers and wondered if he often drank too much, alone, perhaps in his room. “And your mother was brought up in Aix?” I asked.

“Yes. She was a baker’s daughter.”

Only true love could lure anyone away from Aix-en-Provence A fantasy of going there right then entered my mind. After all, it was only forty miles away and one of the most beautiful small cities in France, with its plane-tree-lined boulevards and many old fountains. And its food—I had eaten one of the best omelets in my life in a little restaurant off the main street.

“And she went with your father to America?” I asked.

“Yes. To New Jersey, to a small town near Rutgers.” He divided the rest of the Gigondas between us.

“And did she miss France?”

“I don’t know. She never said she did. But she was happy when we were in Aix.” Talking of his mother, he’d come off it, and I found myself liking him and wondering if he might be related to someone in Rose’s story or to Agatha. A long shot, but it might explain if he was the one who took the diary. “Do you know anything about your French ancestors?”

“I’ve never been too interested in family history,” he said. Maybe yes, maybe no, I thought—he knows enough not to admit an interest in genealogy, even if he has one. Academics frown on genealogists—who are too interested in the stories of their own families. Doing history is not supposed to be about telling stories, unless you are an antiquarian, who by definition has no talent for theory, and there is nothing worse than that. Historians look down upon antiquarians and genealogists because they never, in historians’ minds, wrestle with “big ideas.” More, an interest in genealogy might link Jack to the murder. His upper lip was sweating, his knee twitching. For now, a bit tipsy, I decided to let him off the hook so I asked about his research, a study of rebellion in the villages of the Luberon mountains. “Have you been around the villages to see what they are like now?”

“It’s too difficult without a car, especially in winter, when the buses don’t run as often. Sometimes it’s impossible to get to a village and back in one day. Mostly I’ve been using archive records.” He leaned back in his chair, tipping it on the back legs. Michel came over and pushed him upright. “Where is that bottle of wine?” Jack asked.

“Waiting for you, monsieur.”

“Bring it, then.” I heard the irritation in his voice. Michel gave a half-smile, an expression that spoke of patience with rude Americans, even rude Americans with perfect French. Then he shrugged, and went to fetch the bottle. Jack drummed his fingers on the table, waiting. We sat in silence.