Paris Requiem (10 page)

He was pacing the bright emptiness of the room as if it were Lear’s blasted heath. His eyes were haunted, darting this way and that in search of invisible objects. His shaggy
eyebrows
moved dramatically accompanying unspoken speech. When they greeted him, he stopped with the abruptness of a man caught out in perfidious thoughts

He bowed in their direction. ‘So sorry to intrude like this.’

Raf waved aside his apologies. ‘You had my note?’

‘Note?’ Incomprehension played over Arhnem’s gaunt face. He shook his grizzled head. ‘I … I came because … what was in your note?’

‘Let’s sit down, Monsieur Arnhem. Arlette, bring some coffee for everyone.’ Raf addressed the woman whose eyes James had still not been able to meet. At least she wasn’t holding the babe today.

Arnhem perched at the edge of the proffered chair and eyed them warily. ‘Has there been some news from Chief Inspector Durand? One of his men came to see me yesterday. His questions were perfunctory. It seemed to me they wanted to draw a line under Rachel’s death.’

‘No, no.’ Raf was adamant. He met James’s eyes for a moment as if to signal an ‘I told you so.’ ‘We won’t let that happen. I wanted to see you because in speaking to an old friend of Olympe’s … of Rachel’s, she mentioned that a man called Isak had suddenly turned up in Rachel’s life again after many years. Rachel wasn’t pleased. She felt threatened.’

James stopped himself from intervening. Raf was putting words into Louise’s mouth. This time he was leading the witness.

‘Isak?’ Arnhem looked into the distance. He met his own face in the mirror over the mantle and as if he had confronted an unwanted double, he swerved away. ‘You mean Isak
Bernfeld
. No, no.’ The man eyed them in visible confusion and then like a tortoise withdrew into the shelter of his jacket collar.

‘Yes, Isak Bernfeld. Isak Bernfeld.’ Raf repeated to etch the name in his mind.

‘Isak moved to Toulouse many years ago.’ It was a mumble.

‘Well, it seems he’s back. Rachel wasn’t happy about it.’

‘You say she felt threatened by him … Who told you this?’ There was a sudden edge of anger in Arnhem’s voice. ‘Are these her new friends casting doubts, vilifying an old friend of the family? Is that it?’

Arnhem moderated the shrill rise of his tone. ‘What I mean to say is that Rachel may not have wanted to … to link her future to Isak’s, but she agreed that he was a good man. Isak is … how do you say … a traditional man. He wished to protect her, to look after her. But to feel threatened by him … that is not in his nature. Nor hers.’

‘His nature to you may not be what it appeared to Olympe.’ Raf grunted.

Arnhem stood up and started to pace again. James could almost follow his thoughts from the dramatic turns of his expression, the suspicious glances he cast at them. The man was astute. He had recognised as soon as Raf had mooted the word ‘threat’ that they assumed Isak Bernfeld was somehow mixed up with Olympe’s death. Which would mean that they would blame her murder on one of his own. He couldn’t allow that and not only because it couldn’t, in his eyes, be true. It would compound the tragedy. It would throw an even more hostile light on his community. The police would jump on it as a way of forestalling any hunt for the real criminal.

‘Monsieur Arnhem,’ James began in his slow, careful
French. ‘No one is saying that Monsieur Bernfeld is involved in Olympe’s death. It is simply that he was mentioned as one of the people who had seen her, had also written to her, in recent weeks. We need to trace anyone who can give us a hint about her last days. Louise Boussel mentioned Monsieur Bernfeld and it would be useful simply to talk to him. If you have an address, we would be grateful for it.’

‘You saw Louise?’ Arnhem’s features were still tinged with mistrust.

James nodded. ‘A sweet young woman. She said Olympe had been very kind to her. She was trying to find her a new job.’

Arnhem nodded, as if that were altogether a generosity that could be expected of his daughter.

Arlette had brought in a tray with coffee. She poured it slowly, her face avid with curiosity.

‘Thank you, Arlette.’ Raf dismissed her and as if his own impressions had tracked those of his brother, he said in a gentler tone. ‘Yes, Monsieur Arnhem, we only want to ask this Bernfeld a few simple questions about Olympe.’

‘I do not have an address for him. We lost touch over the years.’

‘Perhaps you have mutual contacts. Perhaps you could trace him,’ James suggested. ‘Everything helps, particularly if – as you imply – the police are not being over-vigorous in their investigations.’

Arnhem studied them. ‘I will try to locate him,’ he said at last. ‘I will try.’ He emptied his coffee in a single gulp, seemed about to rise, then changed his mind. A prickly silence fell over them. In it, James could feel a gulf growing to what would soon be an unbreachable expanse. He cleared his throat.

‘Do, Monsieur Arnhem. Please. I know my brother did not mean to offend Monsieur Bernfeld in any way. It’s only that he feels so passionately about the tragedy your daughter has suffered that his emotion seeps into impatience.’

Arnhem gave him the glimmer of a yellow-toothed smile. ‘This is something I understand.’

‘You came here, you said, not because of the note Rafael had left you, but for another reason …’

Arnhem fidgeted. He seemed to be weighing something up. ‘Perhaps it is not so important. Like you,’ he gestured towards Raf, ‘I allow myself to get carried away with
suspicions
. Everything, everyone becomes suspicious. When one is in a situation of weakness, of a lack of knowledge, it is
perhaps
inevitable.’

‘So tell us your suspicions.’ Raf said.

‘No, no. It is nothing.’

‘It was enough to make you come here, damn it. It must be something.’ Raf suddenly banged his fist on the table. ‘Look, Arnhem. We’re on your side. All this shilly-shallying is just a waste of time. If you can’t trust me and my brother here, forget it. There’s no one you can trust. I’m not even a bloody Frenchman. Olympe trusted me. She introduced me to you. If your own daughter’s not enough of a recommendation, I don’t know what is.’

A twinkle appeared in Arnhem’s eye only to disappear as quickly, as if for a moment in Raf’s heated declaration, he had forgotten the situation.

‘All right. I will tell you. But now as I think about it here’ – he looked round the large, bright room with its polished floors, its sparsity of furniture – ‘I have the feeling it is just ramblings. It is something my daughter said.’

‘You mean little Juliette?’ Raf intervened.

‘No, no. Not Juliette. Judith.’

‘Judith?’ Perplexity settled on Raf’s face.

‘Yes, Judith. My eldest daughter. You have not met her, I imagine.’

It was clear from Raf’s expression that he had also never known of the existence of a Judith.

‘I see.’ Arnhem frowned. ‘It is probably best to forget I ever mentioned any of this.’

‘No, go on. Go on.’ Raf leapt from his chair and walked towards the fireplace, coming back a moment later with a silver box. He offered them cigarettes, lit one quickly himself and inhaled deeply. ‘Go on.’

Arnhem’s frown still furrowed his brow. Pain shadowed his features. ‘Yes, Judith is my eldest. She … she is in a hospital. The Salpêtrière.’ He let the name hang as if nothing more needed to be said.

‘The Salpêtrière?’ James echoed, after too long a pause.

Raf crushed his barely smoked cigarette into the ashtray. ‘That’s an asylum, Jim. Few leave it.’

Arnhem was studying them, clearly wondering whether to say any more.

‘I’m listening, Arnhem.’ As if to contradict his words, Raf got up again, his long limbs visibly restless. ‘Go on. I just need to move. To take this in.’

‘Yes, Judith has been there for many years. Too many. I can understand that Rachel would not want to mention her to … to her new friends. But she was loyal to her sister. She visited her not infrequently. Judith is sometimes lucid. Often, I regret that I took her there. But at the time there seemed no other solution. I wanted to … to protect her. And I thought they could help her. That it would pass.’

‘She tried to … to kill herself?’ James asked.

Arnhem nodded once, abruptly. ‘Several times. But don’t think that Rachel … no … no, in that they are very different, whatever those doctors’ theories. They are completely
different
. Suicide is not in the blood.’

James wanted to argue with him, but the moment was wrong. Instead he asked, ‘What did Judith say to you?’

‘I needed to tell her about Rachel. When I did, to put it very briefly, she said, “So they got her. They’re going to get
me, too. So many of our people gone.” She went on in the same vein.’

‘Do you know who she means by “they”?’ Raf’s eyes glinted like fiery coals.

Arnhem shook his head. ‘No. But the only people she sees are hospital staff. Doctors, nurses … Or perhaps Rachel said something to her.’

‘Didn’t you question her more precisely?’

‘It is not easy to question Judith. One just has to listen.’ He shrugged. ‘But as she was speaking, I believed her. I believed that her fear was real, not an imaginary one.’ He rubbed his eyes as if it might help him to see better.

‘Shall we go and visit her now?’ James pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘It isn’t too late.’

‘No, she has had enough visits for one day. She wasn’t … what I mean is that when I left her … she had scuttled back into her shell of silence. It takes her by turns. We should give her a day or two. But it would be useful to interview some others. Some of the doctors, too … Vaillant, maybe. Monday would be best for that.’ He looked beseechingly at Raf. ‘They will not talk to me in the same way.’

‘I don’t understand how this has anything to do with Olympe’s death.’

‘If you’ll permit me to say, Monsieur Norton …’ Arnhem squared his shoulders and stood to his not inconsiderable height. His face took on the severity of an ancient patriarch. ‘I don’t understand how Isak Bernfeld has anything to do with my daughter’s death, either. Yet I shall try my best to discover his whereabouts for you.’

T
he house where Olympe Fabre rented a small
apartment
stood on one of the steeply winding streets of
Montmartre
which abutted the unfinished flank of the Sacré Coeur. Remote from the hub of Paris, some of the streets of this mount of martyrs were still unpaved. Gaps between houses showed vineyards, the rise and dip of countryside and patchy waste ground. Stout women in black hauled buckets from neighbouring wells. An occasional chicken clucked and scrambled through dust at the passage of
thick-booted
feet or donkey’s hooves. Young men with unsavoury expressions and large hats lounged against door jambs and smoked, at once indolent and poised for action like so many cowhands. From the late afternoon gloom of a tavern came the sound of a guitar and a baritone drawling a slang of insolent inflection.

Olympe’s building stood a little apart from the poverty of its neighbours. A plaque bolted into the pale stucco boasted
‘eau et gaz
’ – water and gas. Flower-filled boxes adorned the first-floor windows, their colour spilling out into the grime of the street.

Before they could cross the threshold, Raf pushed James back and gestured him towards the corner. ‘Durand is in there. He’s talking to Madame Ribot. Better to wait.’

‘Why?’

James was about to object at greater length, but Raf’s arm was a barricade, pinioning him into the shadows.

‘He may not like us coming here,’ Raf mumbled.

A moment later, they saw the policeman emerge. He walked briskly past them, his short quick steps clacking with officious determination on the cobbles. As soon as he was out of sight, they hurried back to the front door.

A heavy, gap-toothed woman in an ancient bonnet stood on the step. When she saw Raf, she shrugged and shook her equine head in consternation. ‘
Ah, Monsieur Norton. Quelle histoire. Voilà encore la police
.’ She proceeded to explain to Raf in an agitated manner, that the police had already been twice and now this man, claiming he was their Chief and what did they expect to find in any case in poor Olympe’s rooms. There was little enough there to begin with.

Raf consoled her, introduced James and said they’d like to go up too.

Swirling her capacious skirts, she barred their way and exclaimed that she had just been told not to let anyone up, no one at all.

‘But that could hardly include us,’ Raf protested. He dug into his pocket and brought out a note which he tucked
discreetly
into Madame Ribot’s apron. ‘We’re working with the Chief Inspector. And I must bid Olympe’s rooms adieu, Madame Ribot.’ His face took on a stricken look as his tone fell. ‘You understand.’

The woman looked into Raf’s handsome features and
softened
visibly. With a superstitious glance down the street, she nodded and whisked them towards the stairs. She breathed audibly as they climbed to the top floor and unlocked the
far door. ‘You won’t touch anything. And no souvenirs,’ she admonished Raf. ‘Not because of me, mind. But the Chief Inspector …’

James took in the long narrow room, partitioned by a flowing muslin curtain, half-drawn. One end served as a dining and sitting area, complete with a sink and a small gas ring, the other as a bedroom. The walls were unpapered. Their
whitewashed
purity gave the space the aura of a convent, which the images they held belied. There were some garish playbills and drawings, studded here and there with a wash of blues and reds. He examined these more closely and saw that they depicted a young woman in various poses. They were
executed
in the modern style, almost but not quite caricatures. In all of them, whether a gloved hand arced the air or the figure lay curled on a divan, the face had a sweet serenity, a pensive seriousness which both captivated and took him aback. He hadn’t imagined Olympe like this, had conjured up a more open, a more actressy appeal. The dead body had given no clues as to expression or stance or character.

‘Yes, that’s her.’ Raf had come up behind him. His voice held a tremor. ‘Come next door.’

On a mantle stood a photograph in a curving frame. The image was of a young woman, almost a girl. Her wide-set eyes were cast downward in a look of shy gravity. Lips and nose and cheekbones and hair arced in fluid harmony above the cup of her hands. Sadness haunted beauty.

His eyes strayed to the mantlepiece. It was covered in a fine grey powder. Not dust, no. He looked round. The powder clung to all flat surfaces. His mind raced. Dactyloscopy. Emile Durand was indeed versed in the latest scientific methods.

Raf had sat down on the bed’s edge. His hands
covered
his face.

As James murmured that Durand was being thorough, he sprang up. ‘Look, Jim, I don’t really want to be here.’ His
eyes were moist, his expression brooding. ‘No. You stay. I’ve got things to do. Too many things. I’ve got to check out the Patriot’s League. Did I tell you about Antoine. That
sharp-eyed
scoundrel found a charm on the ground of the metro site. It had a Hebrew character on it. Which means the girl must have been a Jewess.’

As if he still hadn’t heard James, he fingered the jewellery in a small open case on the bedside table, holding up earrings to the light, rubbing a ring.

‘You’re not paying attention, Raf. I said Durand has had the place dusted for fingerprints. You shouldn’t touch anything. Not with bare hands. Or he’ll know we’ve been here.’

‘What?’ Raf clamped the box shut. ‘Oh I see. Yes, well, I’m off. Can’t stomach this place now. Can’t bear it without her.’ He looked round him in panic, swallowed what seemed to be a sob. ‘We’ll meet up tomorrow some time. Or the next day.’ Before James could say anything, he was out the door.

James had a sudden memory of his father admonishing him. ‘You really have to look out for your little brother, James. He’s spending too much time with his sister. She’s stuffing his head full of poetry, silly emotional stuff. Women’s stuff. Get him out into the open air. Toughen him up.’

James had patently not succeeded, despite the reputedly cold and paternal role into which he had been cast. Raf was as mercurial as ever. A disquieting sensation crept up on him, like a longing, but one that churned his stomach. It was almost as if he envied his brother his ability to feel – to feel deeply, to be swept beyond the bounds of propriety.

But there was something else about Raf’s behaviour in these last days which niggled at him. He put it into words for the first time. Raf might want with all his heart to uncover the particulars of Olympe’s death and to avenge it. Yet at the same time, he seemed averse to discovering anything about Olympe he didn’t already know. It was unthinkable to him
that a woman who possessed the good fortune of his attention, should wish to do away with herself.

Then, too, the luminous portrait he had painted in his mind mustn’t be altered by fresh brush strokes. He had responded badly to Louise Boussel’s mention of a past suitor. Arnhem’s revelation of a second sister had been even worse. It had
irritated
Raf to the point that he hadn’t been able to think about anything else, as if Olympe’s omission constituted a veritable betrayal – not simply, in the circumstances, an
understandable
family secret. And now, he had fled, only to leave James alone amidst the material possessions of a mistress he had never met. But perhaps the dead urged on one a necessary blindness. The ideal had to be kept intact, now more than ever. If he understood little else about his brother, he could understood that particular need. He shared it.

With a shiver of apprehension, James took a handkerchief from his pockets and carefully opened a wardrobe. A rustle of silk and cool, smooth satin met his exploring fingers. He withdrew them abruptly, as if the material burnt. He forced himself to concentrate on the base of the cupboard, edged aside shoes. No, there were no boxes hidden amongst them. With relief, he wedged the door shut. Whatever his good intentions, he felt like a peeping Tom, an interloper
transgressing
the limits of another’s intimacy.

He looked at the portrait of Olympe and heard himself whisper an apology. Then steeling himself, he pulled open the drawers of the small dresser and finding nothing but lace and whites and a whiff of rose petals, closed them as quickly. He turned gratefully to the bedside table. Books were stacked on it. He examined their more familiar solidity one by one. There was Zola’s
Bête Humaine
, a novel by Anatole France and another by a writer he didn’t recognise, a few playscripts and volumes of poetry. Right at the base of the pile was a handsome leather-bound volume with gold-etched script.
Shakespeare. Olympe’s tastes were serious. Curious about the translation, he moved the top dusted volume aside and lifted out the bottom tome. A drawer slid out spilling letters onto the floor, some loose, some tied with blue ribbon.

This was more like it. He picked up the letters carefully. Amongst them he noticed a small notebook. He spread the lot on the bed, apologised to Olympe’s captive image and perched to read.

As luck would have it, the first letters were from Raf. He scurried over their lover’s heat and feeling his own face grow hot, put them to one side. He had a sudden sense of his mother, hovering at his shoulder, that look of pure
Bostonian
disapproval straining her haughty features. To chase her presence away, he paused to take in the atmosphere of the room again. There was a kind of peace to the place, he suddenly thought, like a nest far above the fray of the streets, safe. He remembered the cramped, musty quarters the rest of her family inhabited and had an acute sense of the distance Olympe had travelled. In a way, a little like his brother, he didn’t altogether want to know how she had got here, what breaches of dignity had marred her passage. It was enough to know that she had arrived.

Only to be cut off, he reminded himself. Who could have wanted to do away with this brave girl? For a moment, he was filled with the sense of a malignant presence envying Olympe her new-found height. With a shudder, he returned to the letters. He assumed that the ribbon-bound letters were
sentimental
in content. Lovers that preceded his brother?
Perhaps
. With sudden compassion, he had the urge to burn these traces before Raf could come across them. He pushed them to one side and concentrated on the loose pages – perhaps more recent since they hadn’t found their place yet within a set. He noticed a leaf in strange scrawling script and pulled it to the surface. Hebrew, he decided. Perhaps from her father.

A knock at the door made him jump. Quickly, like a
criminal
caught in the act, he crammed what letters he could into the satchel he had used to carry Ellie’s present. He smuggled the all-but empty Shakespeare box onto the bedside table, and had almost replaced the remaining volumes when Madame Ribot bustled in.

She looked first at him, then round the room
incompre-hendingly
. ‘Where is Monsieur Norton?’ she asked with a trace of anger.

‘He had to go. He asked me to thank you if he didn’t catch you downstairs.’ James was at his most gracious.

Her face was all narrow-eyed suspicion. ‘Well you can’t stay here. I don’t know you.’

‘I was just going.’ James bowed politely.

She grumbled something, then walked heavily across the room. James saw her remove the photograph of Olympe from its frame.

‘You’re still standing there?’ she turned on him. ‘It’s for the police not for me. They’ve sent somebody back. They want the photo, don’t they? They’re going to check it against their records. Measure it. Ears, eyes, nose, everything.’ A sly look came over her face. ‘He’s waiting downstairs. Now get out of here, before I tell them you’ve been snooping.’

James wished her a polite goodbye. He was fairly certain she would say nothing, if only so as not to implicate herself.

At the next landing, a door creaked open. A dark sullen face peered out at him, furtively sizing him up. He could feel the eyes on his back as he continued down the stairs. They made his skin prickle. He nodded briefly to the uniformed policeman at Madame Ribot’s front door and rushed away.

With the approach of evening, the streets had grown more crowded. Music poured from the open doors of bistros and bars. Unkempt youths with feverish eyes jostled with men
in frock coats, laughing women on their arms, their skirts raised against uneven cobbles to show a flash of ankle. The narrow lanes of the quarter, still almost a village unto itself, had gained a reputation for pleasure and danger, the second spicing the first.

Uncertain of his destination, James followed the wind of the streets. At a juncture, he came across the old wooden windmill which served as a beacon for the dance hall he had gone to with Yvette, all those years ago. He paused to watch the smiling couples in their summer finery parade through the doors, was almost tempted to track that mingled scent of lemon and perspiration to its source. He didn’t. He hurried on, remembering that he still hadn’t replied to his mother’s letter.

It came to him that his ambassadorial zeal was fading with an astonishing rapidity. It had been so strong on his arrival a few short days ago. He had been prepared to overcome any and all of Raf and Ellie’s resistance and coerce or persuade them home immediately, so that he could wrap himself in the soft blanket of habit once more. And now?

They hadn’t been short days, he corrected himself. Long days, so replete with events and sensations they had
transformed
Boston into a faint murmur somewhere at the far edge of his consciousness.

It came to him, too, with a louder surge, like a wave
breaking
on the shore, that he had spent much of his life as an intermediary – arguing on behalf of others whom he believed more or less, negotiating the finer points of contracts that touched him in no particular way, a shuffling go-between. So he should have been well cut out for his present mission. But the firmness of its initial outlines had grown blurred. He could no more see the imperative of shepherding his siblings back to Boston, than he could of returning himself. Olympe’s death had taken him over, as if she had been one of his own, as densely present to him as Maisie had once been – though
there was no justice to be found in the first case unless he locked himself up. Which he had done in a manner of
speaking
, James acknowledged with restless irony.