Lovers and Liars Trilogy (143 page)

Gini glanced back, feeling sick. Chantal had made the solution; Gini could see the small plastic bag of white powder, the blue of the gas jet, the little square of aluminum foil. One moment Chantai had the syringe in her shaking hand; the next it had dropped. Gini saw it roll across the floor and come to rest by the cat tray. She averted her eyes.

She heard Rowland pick it up, then the suck as it was filled.

“The mirror…” Chantai said. “I have to stand in front of the mirror. Otherwise I fuck up.”

Gini heard Rowland move aside. There was silence. Rowland said, “Oh, Jesus Christ…”

Gini swung around. Chantal was facing the mirror, the syringe raised to her face. For an instant she couldn’t understand what was happening, then she realized. Chantai was injecting the heroin solution into her eye. She was holding her lower lid down with one hand while she inserted the needle with the other. The clear liquid in the syringe turned pink. Gini turned away, covering her face, and beginning to tremble. Rowland moved behind her; she felt his arms come around her shoulders. She twisted back to look at his grim, pale face.

“That can happen,” he said in a low voice. “They do that. When their veins are badly shot. Wait. She’ll be all right in a minute. Then she’ll probably sleep.”

“All right?” Gini stared at him. “She won’t be all right. How many hours before she needs another fix?”

“You think we’re going to cure her—here and now? Come on, Gini. If we hadn’t brought her here she’d have managed it some other way. And she’d have been in an even worse state.”

He stopped. Chantal gave a deep sigh. Gini, turning, saw that the trembling had stopped and a very faint color had returned to her face. She began speaking then, fast, in a low voice, addressing Rowland as if they were alone in the room.

“Look. I need to sleep, all right? I’ll be fine. My friend Jeanne will be back. I will kick this—in the end I will. She’s helping me. I’m careful. I’m careful what I buy. I don’t share needles. When Jeanne gets here—I’ll be all right.”

She swayed back against the sink and closed her eyes.

“You were pretty polite to me. I liked that. So—I’ll tell you. Star—I’ve known him half my life. He’s like me—a cross. Too many breeds, too many countries, too many homes, too many beatings and—so I’m fucked up, and he’s fucked up. That’s why. We’re both really fucked around in our heads…”

She dropped the syringe. Neither Rowland nor Gini spoke.

“And I don’t know where he is. I swear to you—somewhere in Paris, but I don’t know where. I saw him last night. He told me he was alone, but he—he lies a lot, and if that girl is with him, he’ll hide her. That’s what he does. You don’t need to worry too much. She’s probably okay. He’ll just give her some grass, talk to her—maybe a few pills. That’s okay—he always has good stuff. He won’t fuck her or rape her, you don’t need to worry about that…” She gave a low laugh, then stopped and opened her eyes. She was focusing now, better than before; she raised her hand to her cheek.

“Only—you’d better know this, because what she said—” She gestured at Gini. “She was right. He can get angry. He gets these bad angers, really bad, like trips. And last night—I got him a gun. He wanted a gun, he’s been wanting one for months, and he had the money and I had the contacts, so I fixed it for him. He collected it last night, just before you came knocking at the door.” She turned her face toward Gini. “It was you, right?”

“Yes, it was.” She felt Rowland tense, as she did. “What kind of gun, Chantal?”

“I don’t know. Just a gun. He told me he wanted it—I got it. He showed me some pictures, made me write down the name.”

“A handgun?” Rowland said.

“Yes. Small. Some special ammunition stuff. It’s no use looking. I wrote the name down on a piece of paper. I threw it away weeks ago. It was German—no, maybe Italian.”

“Why would he want a gun?” Rowland moved toward her. Her eyes had closed again.

“I don’t know. He likes guns. Always did. He gets off on them, just looking at pictures of them. It was expensive—I know that. Nearly four thousand francs… Serious. That’s what he said. It was a serious gun. Only then”—she swayed again—“only then—I don’t know. The TV was on in the corner while we talked—and then he suddenly got this look on his face. There’s a look he gets—in the eyes. He had it before he did this to me…” She touched the scar on her face. “So maybe, it’s not so good for that girl. I don’t know. Look—I have to lie down.”

She stumbled across the room to the bed and lay down, eyes tightly shut. Rowland looked at Gini, then bent over the bed.

“Chantal. Just try to stay awake. Can you hear me? Does he have a name, a name other than Star? What was he called when you first met him?”

He broke off and stepped back. There was the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, then the door was thrown back. The woman Gini had spoken to the previous evening came into the room, her face pale with fear. She stopped, looked at them both, then pushed past them and knelt down by the bed.

She took Chantal in her arms and began to stroke her hair, talking to her all the while in a low, crooning voice. When she swung back to look at them, there was no mistaking the love and the anger in her face. “How long did they keep her there? Those animals?”

She spoke in French, and Rowland answered her in the same language: “About an hour, maybe more,” he said.

The woman burst into a stream of angry accusations, directed at the police, them, the world.

“Jeanne, wait.” Chantal attempted to sit up, then fell back. “He’s okay. He helped me. I can’t talk. They need to know about Star. Just tell them his name, explain, all right?”

She closed her eyes again and seemed to drift off into some state close to sleep. The woman called Jeanne rose. In heavily accented English she spat out her explanation.

Star was to blame for all this. It was he who first got Chantal on to heroin, he who ruined her face. And Star was just one of his names—the latest he’d selected and the one he now liked the best. He had numerous surnames she could offer them, she said with scorn in her voice: Lamont, Lacroix, Newman, D’Amico, Rivière, Adams, Dumas—they could take their pick. When it came to first names they had a choice of two. He occasionally used the English version of his name, but he preferred the French. This past year he’d been claiming it was his true name, the name on his birth certificate—she doubted he had such a thing, but for what it was worth, the name was Christophe.

O
UTSIDE, IN THE DAMP
air and the gathering dusk, standing in the doorway of the St. Séverin church with the gargoyles arching above their heads, Rowland said, “I need a drink. You need a drink. Don’t argue.”

He walked her, fast, toward the Sorbonne, then turned off the boulevard St. Michel into a quiet street and into a small, old-fashioned bistro, almost empty; they were given a booth with high-backed seats, so they were enclosed as if in the cabin of a ship. There was a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, with a white paper one placed diagonally over it: two knives and forks, two ordinary glasses for wine. Rowland ordered brandies, and when Gini hesitated, made her drink. He watched her; for the first time that day, some of the tension left her body, and faint color returned to her face.

Her face seemed so lovely to him, he found he had to turn away, study the menu, consult with her, with the short, plump
patron,
anything to wrench his attention away from her mouth, from the mauve bruising across her cheekbone, and from the flare of her eyes, her wide-spaced, expressive, and very beautiful eyes which seemed to him to ask an unspoken question yet fear his possible response.

He ordered the food. Work, he thought: if he could just keep the conversation on their work. He began speaking, and she began speaking—both at once.

Rowland smiled, hesitated, then leaned back.

“You first.”

“Nothing—I was just going to say—you were very good with Chantal. She liked you—insofar as she’s capable of liking a man. Did you realize that?”

“No.” Rowland shrugged. “It seemed to me I was getting nowhere with her. Every question blocked.”

“No. You’re wrong. You were patient, and quiet—and polite. She was grateful for that. Maybe it doesn’t happen to her too often. Maybe—” Her eyes flickered up to his face.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe she liked your appearance. I imagine you’re used to that.”

Rowland leaned forward.

“Shall I tell you what made her decide to talk? It wasn’t me or what I said. It wasn’t even because she needed a fix desperately. I was watching her, and I know precisely the second when she decided.”

“When we showed her the photographs?”

“No.” Rowland looked at her, touched that she did not realize. “No. You used a particular phrase. It touched an immediate chord. Maybe you hit on something Star had actually said to her, maybe not—either way, it went straight to the heart.” He paused. “You asked her if she believed she was the constant in his life.”

Color washed into her cheeks. “Are you sure?”

“I’m absolutely sure. In any interview, any conversation like that, there’s always one moment when the questioner breaks through. That was it. What made you hit on that phrase?”

“I don’t know. It just came to me. We knew she was different from the other girls—she was older, for one thing. She’d known Star for some time, Mitchell said that. And I just began to wonder—if that was how she saw her role in Star’s life. It’s something women like…”

“Is it?”

“Of course.” She looked away. “Women are more monogamous than men. So they find ways of excusing their men when they stray. Being told they’re somehow in a different category, believing they’re in a different category, a more permanent, a more serious category—that’s one of women’s protective mechanisms. I’ve seen it often enough.” She hesitated, and a reticence Rowland was beginning to realize was very characteristic of her masked her face.

“Anyway”—she took a sip of her brandy—“I’m sure of one thing.”

“Anneke was
not
writing to Star care of Chantal? I agree. I also thought that.”

“In which case—we’re back to the beginning again. We have a clutch of false surnames, a first name that may or may not be genuine. We know Star has a gun, which makes things worse. But we don’t know why he wanted the gun and we still have no idea where he is.”

“No. We know more than that. We know something interesting, and curious too…” Rowland fell silent as the owner of the restaurant returned and began to ply them with food: freshly baked bread, salads,
pommes frites,
and two omelettes the man said were made with wild mushrooms, and his own hens’ freshly laid eggs.

Rowland smiled at this very French perfectionism; he waited until the proprietor left them, then leaned forward. As if trying to appear hungry, Gini began to eat.

“We know more than we thought,” Rowland went on. “This was staring us in the face yesterday. Think. Maria Cazarès died yesterday afternoon, at the apartment of her retired maid. Right?”

“The apartment in the Faubourg St. Germain area, sure. We discussed that. I know the district. I even know the street…”

“You do?”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “Pascal Lamartine’s ex-wife lives on that street now. It’s her new husband’s apartment. I went there twice, last year, to pick up Pascal’s daughter, Marianne. It’s a very fashionable neighborhood.”

She looked away, then continued to eat. She had set herself a test, Rowland thought, to see whether she could mention Lamartine’s name without any show of emotion—and she had almost succeeded, though not quite. Better not to inquire, he thought, better to let it pass, although he noted the fact that while Lamartine’s ex-wife had remarried, Lamartine had not.

“We also know,” he went on, “that it was close to that apartment, yesterday afternoon, that there was a sighting of Mina Landis and Star.”

“Yes. At about two
P.M.
We also discussed that.”

“But what we didn’t discuss was whether that was coincidence—or something more. At that point, we got—distracted, as I remember.”

“Rowland—”

“Very well. But we did.” He looked at her seriously. “In fact, the maid’s name wasn’t mentioned on those TV news bulletins. It was mentioned in the newspapers this morning, however. Her name is Mathilde Duval. Does that help? Now do you begin to see?”

“Oh my God.” She dropped her fork with a little clatter, and stared at him. “Anneke’s address book. Those seven girls’ names I wrote out. There was a Mathilde.”

“Exactly. A Mathilde Duval, at the address, the
same
address, where Maria Cazarès died yesterday afternoon. I think
that’s
where Anneke was writing to Star, not care of Chantal. Maybe he also gave her Chantal’s address, as a backup, a failsafe, I don’t know—but there’s definitely a connection between Star and Mathilde Duval.”

“Who isn’t a girl at all. Who’s an elderly woman—damn, how stupid I am.”

“—And since the conversation with Chantal, I’m
certain
there’s a connection. I brought Anneke’s address book with me. Look at this.”

He drew it out of his overcoat pocket, then passed it across the table. Gini turned to the entry for Mathilde Duval. The entire page was scattered with little hieroglyphs and scribbles. Very faint, next to Mathilde’s name, was a tiny crucifix shape.

“Christopher,” Rowland said. “Christophe. It means Christ-bearing. Anneke knew Star’s other name, which might be his real name, and she made a little sign for it, next to the address to which she wrote to him. I’m certain of it, Gini. And you see what this suggests?”

“That if Star knew Maria Cazarès’s maid, he could also have known Maria Cazarès herself? Rowland—you think so?”

“I do. I think he was visiting the maid yesterday, and that’s when he and Mina were seen—probably when they were leaving. And within two hours of his leaving, Maria Cazarès was there too. There’s some connection here between Star and Maria Cazarès, between Star and Jean Lazare. First, Star is obtaining White Doves from the same source as Lazare. Second, he chooses to be in Paris, where they are both based. Third, he has some connection with a maid to whom Cazarès was devoted, whom she visited frequently. And that connection is of some duration, Gini. If we’re correct, and Anneke
was
writing to Star care of Mathilde, we can even date it. Their connection
must
go back to last March at least.” He paused. “Now, all these details could just be coincidences, but I think not.”