The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (17 page)

He had always been looked at suspiciously because of his color, his eyes, and his height in his homeland of Gabon. He was a native son but not quite. He was an orphan but the good doctor in Franceville had rescued him. He had not known his mother or father. He was kindly given the family name of a respected and powerful African clan in Libreville at the request of the good doctor. In rescuing him, the doctor had set him entirely apart from Africa, for as soon as he could be weaned from the breast of the native woman who had nursed him until he was two years old, he was sent to France to live with another white man. He didn’t remember the doctor. He was only told about him, saw him in newsreels and in documentaries, but he never saw the good doctor again. He had no more memory of him than he had had of Gabon. The doctor was dead by the time he returned to Africa as a man in 1980 full of ambition, hope, and pride swelled by the 1960s and 1970s rhetoric of black power and black consciousness. Georges-Guillaume smiled now and touched his head of soft curls, thinking about his youthful brashness and excitement. Music piped into the Versailles gardens and the fountains gushed water. The French Republic usually held the musical fountain shows on the weekends to attract more paying tourists to the usually free gardens. Today was just a test run.

He continued reflecting on his life, the decisions he had made, everything that had happened to him that had brought him this far. The music and water were soothing, aiding in his vivid recollections. Africa and its independence movements from their colonial masters were reported everywhere in the French press. The air was electric with anticipation. The West African country of Ghana had led the way with independence from the Union Jack in 1957. The French acted ugly when Sékou Touré of Guinea demanded independence in 1958, yanking up streetlights, destroying all in their wake as they hastily withdrew from their former colony in anger at the audacity and ingratitude of the Africans. In the years that followed, Africa called out to all those educated men and women in metropolitan France to return home to help build their new nations, to stem the brain drain that occurred when those Africans migrated to the European metropolises in search of education and better lives preindependence. When Gabon achieved independence in 1960, Georges-Guillaume was but 11 years old. But he understood what it meant and he began to study an African “Great Man” from afar: Jean-Hilaire Ambourouet, father of the Gabonese nation.

Georges-Guillaume had lived a long time among the whites; he had even married a French woman from the Savoy region of France who he’d met on spring holiday in Aix-en-Provence while a student. In that, he had been no different than Léopold Senghor, the late president of Senegal. Together they moved to Paris and started a family when he was but twenty-two. He had wanted to take his French wife and child with him to Africa, but things became complicated. His daughter blamed him and Africa for the dissolution of the marriage. She rarely spoke with him, though he continued to support her out of love and guilt.

At the height of his political career, the payoff for all of his hard work and dedication, GiGi Ambourouet was stoking the rumor mill. He would not be shamed into denouncing the special bond he had had with this white man in France. Besides loving him tenderly and dearly as no other man in his life would or could in the years after, William Knowlton had taught him a good deal as a Great Man from America.

He always felt like he had lived his life in between spaces, at the crossroads of cultures. Between cultures, places, and people. Africa, America, France. He took them all for himself, for they all belonged to him, blending them to create a new self, one that he believed could represent the future of Gabon.
I will not let GiGi destroy this opportunity
, he thought, as he left the garden passing the statue of the Great Man once more. He could see the ring. It was within his grasp. He just needed to figure out a way to snatch it from her undeserving fingers.

XXI

At exactly 10:30, Thierry Gasquet opened the door of the Académie and began walking down its front steps with Havilah. As soon as they were outside the building, he asked how the meeting went.

“It was very animated.”

“Thanks to you, I am certain.” He opened the car door for Havilah. She slid in and reached for the seat belt, ignoring his comment.

He had allowed her to set her plan for the meeting in motion because he understood that only Havilah Gaie could coax the killer to make a false move. But he had made her promise not to pull any more solo detective adventures afterwards.

“They hate him, you know.” She summarized the meeting’s events and the telephone call with Chastain. “But they were tight-lipped about what he was working on. There was an April meeting I didn’t know about.”

“When Professor Beirnes presented his work.”

“Exactly. But I didn’t find out who was present. Old members rotate off in some sort of celebratory sendoff. New members, like myself and Jean-Luc Cabassol, are rotated in in June. They’re pointing fingers and antagonizing one another. But the bluff at least revealed who nominated him.”

“Who was that?”

“Sophie Fassin. And they absolutely despise her for it,” she said, putting on her sunglasses.

“Unfortunately, she was not in Cassis Sunday evening. And the boy?” he wheeled the car smoothly down the hill to the intersection of Avenue Maurice Jermini and Amiral de Ganteaume.

“No, she wasn’t. She was in Paris. The boy’s not Knowlton’s, according to Lowery Jason, who also knew that Knowlton was gay. I’d like to head over to the exhibit at the Musée Méditerranéen at Place Baragnon. Something about that
Sweet William
painting…” she trailed off as she pulled down the visor and reapplied her lipstick. “It’s the boy. I keep seeing his face. And Knowlton’s. Kit was intrigued by them.”

Thierry Gasquet was intrigued by Havilah’s persistence. She wasn’t cowering despite the threats. She seemed now more emboldened, like she was on a crusade. And not just to stop someone from murdering her. There was a sense of rightness she needed to restore. He knew she wouldn’t stop prying and poking and asking questions. It made her just this side of reckless, which meant he’d need to take more precautions in protecting her. She was too curious, invested, and smarter than the average disinterested gendarme. So he decided to play her trusty sidekick in order to protect her. He’d also decided then that there were things about the investigation that he couldn’t share with her despite her recent forthrightness. The near death experience of the literary agent in New York was one those things. No one on this or that side of the Atlantic believed it was a coincidence— which meant Havilah Gaie was in way more trouble than she knew.

As he turned the car left in the direction of downtown Cassis, Thierry told her that they’d be heading to Avignon for the afternoon, saying he thought she needed a break from Cassis. A nice drive would do her some good.

For his part, Gasquet wanted to visit a hangar. He knew the French police had been focusing exclusively on private jets from Marseille-Provence airport to De Gaulle or Orly as the killer’s flight path. That route into Cassis seemed too obvious to him. So he had insisted that they expand the search to Avignon, which was closer to Cassis than Nice-Cote d’Azur and had one of the larger hangars for private jets in Provence. There had been two private flights in and out of Avignon on the day that Professor Beirnes was murdered. While one jet remained overnight, the other one arrived in the afternoon from Switzerland and departed Avignon around midnight. It had landed at Paris-Beauvais, an airport some fifty-three miles north of Paris. Due to some bureaucratic roadblocks involving Swiss privacy laws, the police had yet to receive the passenger manifest. He needed to get his hands on that manifest.

Thierry was also still puzzled over how the killer got to and from Avignon to Cassis, so he had had the police check one-day car rentals from the Avignon airport. That had led to a deadend. They were now following up with rentals from Avignon’s downtown train station.

Trying to sound casual, he presented an idea as a distraction from his real intentions. “Would you care to visit the Palais des papes? It’s the original seat of the Papacy before it moved to Rome.”

“It’s beautiful. I’ve been there. Even tried the wines in the cellar of the Palais. I lived in Avignon for six weeks one summer, attended the famous theatre festival.” She smiled, pulling her hair into an upswept ponytail. “But let’s do it again. I recall that some of the members of the Félibrige had lived and died in Avignon.”

* * *

They parked and walked to the museum. The curators were still deciding on the arrangement of the paintings and watercolors. She quickly found the original oil painting,
16 Sweet Williams
. Knowlton had signed it. She thanked the curators and they started on their way to Avignon.

By the time they were driving on highway A7 Autoroute du Soleil, her cell phone jangled loudly. She knew that ringtone.

“Hello.”

“Havilah, are you all right? I’ve been so worried about you. I can’t believe you didn’t call me.”

“Yes, I’m fine.” She felt guilty because she didn’t say his name aloud. So she repeated herself. “I’m fine. And I did call, just not directly.”

“I want to come to France to be with you. You need me there.”

“No. It’s not safe. Is everything all right?” She was being deliberately cryptic about her parents.

“Everyone is fine. Who is this Thierry Gasquet?” Lucian fumed.

“He’s with a special division of the French National Police. He’s keeping me safe.”

Havilah knew her parents were very happy to have an excuse to visit with Lucian’s parents. They were all probably planning the marriage.

“I hope that’s all he’s doing. I miss you. We haven’t been together in six months.”

“There’s a reason for that. Remember?” She turned her face towards the car’s open window.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I just want us to be together,” he pleaded.

Her heart started rending just a little. She had always wanted him to say those words, and not, “
Can we just be together? The two of us?”

“Lucian, I can’t have this conversation now. Your timing is awful.”

“Are you with someone?”

“Yes. Thierry Gasquet. But he’s not the reason we can’t have this conversation. Anyway, aren’t you dating that law professor at Michigan?” She had found her resolve again.

“It’s been six months, Havilah. You won’t see me or return my calls.”

“Ah, yes, six months is like a lifetime, isn’t it?” She could have gone another sexless six months.

“Misty and I are just dating. We’re friends.”

“Friends with benefits? I have unfortunately become more familiar with that term over these past two days. I really don’t need to know all of this. Really. Misty sounds like a very understanding person. I’m hanging up, Lucian.”

“I love you, Havilah.”

“Thanks for helping me out. It’s important to me.”

“Of course it is. I hope I am still important to you. I love you, Havilah.”

She hung up on him after the last “I love you.” Here she was somewhere in the vicinity of death’s door and now he suddenly wants to be together and make babies after having at it with some female named after a 1970s stalker film.
I don’t think so.
And she didn’t even want to look at Thierry Gasquet right about then. So she didn’t. He had had the good sense not to utter a word.

* * *

They arrived at the Avignon airport in 50 minutes. Thierry smiled at her as he turned the car around and headed towards Avignon’s city center and its medieval walls.

“Do you and Lucian communicate often?”

“It’s been six months since we’ve communed and communicated. I loved him very, very deeply at one time. He’s a good man. He knows what he wants and I know what I want. But he wants me to believe he wants something different because he wants us. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

Thierry Gasquet’s mind wandered over his theory. He estimated the killer had arrived at the Avignon airport in an hour and took the private jet by midnight. He assumed the killer had left the foundation around 10:30, leaving him or her about 40 minutes to do all the tampering with Professor Beirnes’s computer, cell phone, emails, and rifle through whatever papers that might explain the motive for the professor’s murder and point to his killers.
Plenty of time
.

Thierry drove through the medieval gates of the town, heading for a small sandwich shop for lunch before the drive back to Cassis. He parked the car so they could enjoy a short walk.

* * *

Paul Giéra
, Havilah suddenly remembered.

“Paul Giéra,” she said aloud pointing at a house. Thierry looked puzzled.

“One of the poets Kit had been researching lived at #15 rue de la Banastiere. He’s one of the star points in the Félibrige Foundation symbol.”

They walked slowly towards the maze of streets. Havilah pulled out her cell phone and began Googling the other poets. They were directed to rue des Ciseaux d’Or where the tapioca-colored Maison Théodore Aubanel stood, and then over to the college where Frédéric Mistral had studied. The phone buzzed twice, causing her hand to slide over the wrong key. She saw the first message was from Ansell Neely. He didn’t type anything in the body of the email, only in the subject line: “How about dinner tomorrow, then?”

She smiled a little at his persistence. She hadn’t bothered to respond to his breakfast request from the previous evening. Her silence, she felt, had been a form of rudeness. So she emailed back, “Can’t.”

The next sender made her wrinkle up her nose. Charles Chastain.

“Is everything okay? Still looking for poets?” Thierry Gasquet had been studying her face as she interacted with her cell phone.

“Fine. A message from Chastain, that’s all,” she said absently, clicking on the email link. “No, no, no! It’s not fine!”

She almost dropped the phone. She handed it to the agent. The message was wall to wall: “STOP!”