The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (24 page)

Havilah recommended that the book’s profts be divided between the Félibrige Foundation and Kit’s remaining relatives. Chastain again conceded and also tacked on the promise that he would use some of Kit’s gift to Astor to fund the Lathan Conor Beirnes annual lecture to be given by a distinguished scholar. In exchange, Chastain asked Havilah to oversee the annual lecture, which would require her to meet with him twice annually, once in the fall and once in the spring.
A small concession for a larger cause.

As the university’s president escorted Havilah to the Tuileries metro stop, she could see that he was pleased with the outcome of their meeting. It would never do to try and break a man like Charles Chastain. He would never admit publicly to being wrong or engaging in any wrongdoing even when presented with the truth. The most he would do is hedge. He was powerful and dangerous to the degree at least that he would ruin academic lives if their goals ran counter to his own. She had read
The Art of War
and Niccolò Machiavelli’s
Il Principe
. One never backed men and women like Chastain into a corner. You always had to leave them a way out of the morass of their own making. Havilah had done that for Charles Chastain.

She walked slowly down the metro’s steps. It was 7:30 p.m. In spite of the heat and humidity, she decided to walk along the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli towards the Place de la Concorde instead. She liked the promenade and its touristy shops, upscale hotels, and boutiques. It was still light and she wasn’t ready just yet to return to her apartment.

Just as she crossed Rue Cambon, her cell phone vibrated.

“Outside your apartment. Where are you?
Tu me manques
,” the text read.

And where have you been, Agent Gasquet?
she wondered.
And he misses me.

She texted him to meet her for take away falafels at L’As Du Fallafel at Rue des Rosiers in the Marais. She couldn’t believe she was smiling rather widely when she placed the cell phone in her purse. But she was, as she turned around and walked towards the Hotel de Ville.

XXXI

Libreville, Gabon, Saturday, July 10, 2010

The Gabonese presidential election was still months away, but the appointment of the new prime minister of Gabon occurred with little oppositional fanfare. Though it had been a lavish and elaborate installation ceremony, the Gabonese people barely looked up from their daily poverty to notice. Nothing had changed for them at all except a tall, light brown-eyed, brown man now occupied the role of prime minister.

Georges-Guillaume Daniel Damas had overcome the political opposition, the president’s daughter and her muckraking, and secured the post. Ambourouet sent GiGi and her husband to Beverly Hills to buy a multimillion-dollar home as a consolation prize. Damas had naturally been quite pleased when, after a hearing with Ambourouet, he had won the president’s confidence. It had forced Damas to confront episodes in his life that he had found particularly discomfiting. It all turned on letters written long ago, pictures painted in the incomparable light of Provençal summers, and the photographs taken by his mother, who he had not known his entire life was his mother until the American professor, Havilah Gaie, sent him a photograph and a cache of letters written between the three people who had loved and raised him. The photograph the professor sent was of his mother with her blond curls flapping in the wind on the terrace of Garnier, one of the buildings on the Félibrige Foundation’s grounds. Professor Gaie also told him about his father’s family. He had believed all these years that the Damas’s were a wonderfully benevolent family who had doted on a poor, orphaned brown boy out of sheer kindness rather than a mixture of kinship and compassion. Even President Ambourouet had never discovered the family secret.

Georges-Guillaume looked out over the flowering trees on his immense estate and thought about his boyhood and the circumstances of his birth. His mother, Annette “Annie” East, was obviously a young woman fascinated by life and people. She grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia with liberal parents who were educators; they had encouraged their daughter’s interest in photography and travel. When she left them to go to Europe, they had no idea that she would never return. She had met Phillippe Friedrich after the Second Great War in France and followed him back to Gabon to document his life’s work in photography.

Georges-Guillaume had always read with interest books about Africa and his native country of Gabon. And all three encouraged him to do so. William Daniel Knowlton loved him like he was his son. He had patiently taught him to paint and draw, holding on to every scrap of paper, every canvas with pride. To honor him, he took his middle name as his own. He now knew that his name, Georges, was his maternal grandfather’s name.

The photograph his mother took that day in June 1965 was one of the happiest summers of his teenagehood. Somehow it had all been turned into fodder for a political scandal and an incriminating book of poetry. Somehow his daughter, his Sophie, by a French woman he had loved dearly once in his life, was now on trial for the most reprehensible acts. And she had also used his wealth and influence to carry the deeds out.

The instability of his oldest child began the moment he decided he needed Africa. He had begun to feel alone in a world surrounded by people who did not look like him, except for his child. He supposed his loneliness, that gnawing alienation, began in his adolescent years, but he was cared for so he buried these feelings.

And Africa needed him. He had read and watched from Paris the various black liberation and independence movements in America and Africa. Favors were owed and he had been welcomed back as a long-lost son returned home by his father’s family though he had not known that they were his real kin. He had plans to return with his young French wife and child. But Janine could not leave her ailing mother in France. At first, he traveled to see them often. He had missed them both. The mother-in-law languished on for years until they began to grow apart. He had tried to honor Janine by taking care of her and Sophie despite her request for a divorce.

They ended their marriage amicably rather than rancorously. However, Sophie, a good-natured but strong-willed child, evolved into a belligerent teenager. She then devolved into a spoilt and rash adult who never forgave him for abandoning them no matter what he or Janine had tried to explain to her. She refused to visit Gabon even when Janine did. Africa had ruined her life. And she wanted nothing to do with it, including a name that recalled its claim on her person. She took her mother’s maiden name when she entered the École du Louvre. Georges-Guillaume knew that this last act had more to do with his name marking her as “French but not quite,” despite her fairer complexion. His money could not fully protect her from the vagaries of French racism.

She had knifed her mother’s heart and wounded his fatherly pride. But she was his first born. The Gabonese papers were running pictures of her with the headline, “The Prime Minister’s French Daughter.” President Ambourouet had signaled his willingness to drum the journalist out a job. But Prime Minister Damas saw no need. The journalist had brought both his white mother and his almost white daughter back to him with that photograph. Shackled in irons with her tear-stained face, he had seen his mother in her face, for he had not seen Sophie’s face in a good while or his mother’s since he was a young man on the verge of adulthood.

His driver called for him. He rang the butler to take his suitcases to the chauffered car. He boarded the private plane for Paris. Sophie’s last acts of defiance had been for him, her father. She did not hate him as she said she had year after year when he pleaded to see her in America, in France, anywhere she wanted. Georges-Guillaume would stand with her now.

THE END

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