A Provençal Mystery (8 page)

While the others were being interrogated, I reconstructed the morning in my own mind. Agatha had gone to the reference room. She had not returned. The other readers had been in and out of the main reading room, as had Griset and Chateaublanc. But where had they gone? Two choices: the bathroom and the reference room. Who might have murdered Agatha in the bathroom, and who might have seen the murderer leave and not know it? And when?

Chapter 8

At 1:30, Chateaublanc finally shut the archives for lunch. With the others, I joined the surge out into the hall. Milling around, we tried to find advantageous positions for entering the elevator without pushing and shoving too obviously. Then we rode down a few at a time, some talking about Agatha’s death, some, like me, standing in frozen, claustrophobic silence as if speaking would make something worse happen. All wondering which one of us might have killed her.

“We have arrived,” said Fitzroy, as the elevator touched down. Police cars lined the ramp to the steps, and two police officers stood guard next to them. Though the sun was out, the wind still blew fiercely.

Jack Leach went off to make a phone call. Chateaublanc and Griset disappeared. Rachel and I stood irresolutely on the cobblestones, while Madeleine sat huddled and sobbing on the bottom step of the archive building stairs that led from the elevator to the plaza.

Fitzroy lagged behind to interrogate the police. When he tapped one of the officers on the arm, the officer turned impatiently. I watched the two men in contention. By their gestures, I could see that it had quickly become a power tug-of-war between the important American professor and the officious policeman. Attack and counterattack. The policeman drew himself up with authority. The ends of Fitzroy’s sweater sleeves swung in agitation as he gesticulated, then the mean wind caught them and whipped them around his neck. I thought, not for the first time, Why doesn’t he put that sweater or his coat on? He’ll freeze to death.

“How self-important Fitzroy is,” I said. “Someone is dead, and he still has to exert his ego.”

“
L’habit ne fait pas le moine
,” said Madeleine, her voice rough with weeping.

“’The habit doesn’t make the monk’?Another of your proverbs?” I asked, even though I didn’t care about her answer. Everything seemed artificial, especially conversation, our words weightless and inconsequential.

“Oh, yes, and an old one.” She stood and put on her hat, which she had been carrying in her hand. She held it to her head with the other hand so that it wouldn’t blow off.

“And who is the monk?”

Madeleine shrugged, and began to cry again. “I leave that to you,” she said, wiping her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief. I wondered if Agatha had made the handkerchief and given it to her. After she had somewhat composed herself, she set off, probably, I thought, to the convent to talk to the Mother Superior about what had happened. Fitzroy collected Leach, who had returned from making his phone call, and they walked rapidly across the plaza to disappear around a corner.

Rachel and I were left standing together.

“I’m scared,” I burst out, feeling afraid, cold from more than the mistral, and alone in a foreign country.

Rachel regarded me. Her face was too still and her posture too straight. Her hands were jammed in the pockets of her black coat, her elbows at an awkward angle that was not like her. I looked at those buried hands, and saw, in my mind’s eye, her right hand, held like a crow’s beak, stabbing through her needle-point.

Could I trust her? Who else was there? The wind gusted. “And I’m cold,” I added. My teeth were chattering.

She looked away, and I knew she was making a decision. Finally she said, “I’m frightened, too.”

“I don’t want to be alone. Not right now,” I replied.

“Neither do I, “said Rachel. She hesitated then added, “I know I haven’t been very friendly.”

“That’s true,” I said, giving her no more than that.

“I have reasons,” Her ginger-colored eyes pleaded under lowered brows. “I really do. I have my reasons for being so stand-offish.” Now she was wringing her gloved hands. Rachel almost never repeated words or wrung her hands. She had to be upset.

I gave in. “I thought you were acting like the superior tenured professor.”

“Dear God! No!” she said. “But I can understand why you would think that way.”

“Your reasons?”

She looked away. “I can’t tell you yet. Let’s do something together. Now. Neither of us wants to be alone. Neither one of us.”

“All right,” I said. Though I was suspicious of her sudden friendliness, I relented, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I have the heebie-jeebies. We could walk along the Rhone with Foxy. Take him to the caf
é
.”

We collected Foxy and went down to the river, where we meandered along a path, stopping with him as he veered off to investigate ghosts of odors. Then he spotted a poodle and lunged toward it. The two dogs greeted each other in traditional dog fashion, round and round, nose to rear end. The poodle’s owner, an older woman wearing a shirtwaist dress and carrying a market basket, smiled and said hello. She looked like a bourgeoise from head to toe, but she delightedly watched the two dogs smelling each others’ butts.

“This is why I like France,” I said to Rachel, in French. “The French love dogs.”

“Even their nasty habits,” said the woman.

The two dogs touched noses.

“Pardon,” the woman said, “I am pressed for time.” She tugged at the poodle’s leash and he reluctantly followed her as she walked down the street.

“Foxy has no problem with the language,” I said to Rachel. “He loves the French. They give him food. Like Agatha. Agatha gave him little morsels from her plate. Foxy loved Agatha. And not just because of the food.” As the magnitude of Agatha’s death struck me again, I added, my voice shaking, “How could she die like that! In her bed, yes. I could imagine that. But she was sprawled there, in the bathroom.”

“I didn’t know her very well,” Rachel said. “But I’m sad about it.” She didn’t look very sad: her face, as usual, was composed, with her lips folded neatly together.

I could feel myself trembling internally with an aftermath of shock, as I had intermittently all afternoon. “She had a needle in her tongue, Rachel!” It burst from me, and I was immediately sorry, but I also knew that my seemingly spontaneous remark was at bottom deliberate—I wanted to see how Rachel would react.

“What!” Rachel replied, horror in her face and in her voice. She stopped walking, and Foxy, ears raised, looked up at her. She’s a good actor, I thought, or else perhaps she really wasn’t Agatha’s killer. Perhaps.

“Maybe it was a kind of mortification,” I said. “But Agatha? Not her.”

“Not like her. Not like her at all,” agreed Rachel.

Foxy put his nose in my hand. “No, not at all. But maybe I really didn’t know her,” I said, patting Foxy on the head—the nose meant sympathy.

“She is—was—so . . . hearty,” said Rachel,

“Good word. Heart-y. She had heart. No nonsense, either. Practical. She’d think it was senseless to do such a thing. It just wasn’t like her. She would stick out her tongue but not impale it. What would it accomplish to stick a needle through it? Why would God—if there is a God—want you to hurt yourself? Mutilate your body—the body he had theoretically made? I can just hear her!” I paused, thought about what I wanted to say, then said it, “In any case, the needle was not inserted until after she got to the archive. She was talking normally. Greeted me when I came into the archive. She couldn’t do that with a needle in her tongue. I keep thinking that maybe someone wanted to sew her mouth shut.”

And maybe it was you, I thought.

We resumed walking, in silence, to the Café Minette, where we sat inside to get out of the cold. I ordered pastis, Rachel coffee. While we were waiting for the drinks to arrive, Rachel brought up the needle again, “I can’t imagine anyone we know stabbing Agatha’s tongue with a needle,” she said.

“Someone did, though,” I replied. Then I said, dredging it out of my childhood, “‘Who knows what evil lies in the hearts of men.’”

“Who said that?” asked Rachel.

“My mother. She was quoting from an old 1930s-1940s radio show called ‘The Shadow.’ The answer is, ‘The Shadow knows.’ The Shadow was a detective.”

Rachel measured me with her eyes, and as she did, her face, usually so composed, crumpled.

Had she decided she could trust me? People have always told me secrets—I am not sure why. She was turning out to be no exception. She said abruptly, “While your mother was listening to ‘The Shadow,’ mine was escaping from the Nazis. She was only four then.”

“Oh,” I said, then added, not knowing what else to say, “Then she really knew about the evil in the hearts of men.”

The drinks came.

As I poured the water into the pastis and watched it turn cloudy, I thought of the pictures I had in my mind of my own mother when she was little, part photograph, part remembrance of tales told me—a curly-haired toddler crying at being cooped up in a playpen, a four-year-old fiendishly riding a tricycle. Then I thought of the frightened child who was Rachel’s mother threatened by the Nazis. It wasn’t fair.

Rachel was looking at me patiently. I had the feeling she had told this story before, met sympathy, lived through it.

Foxy laid his head on my foot.

Michel came to the table, pencil in hand.

“It is such a very sad thing—a horror, the happening at the archive,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I replied. For a second, I wondered how he knew, but then remembered how fast news seemed to spread in this part of town.

“I hope you are not too afraid.”

“No, the police stand guard.”

Michel held his pencil over his order pad, in readiness. For once I didn’t care about food, just dittoed Rachel’s order of salad and
steak-frites
.

Rachel absentmindedly put two spoons of sugar in her coffee; she had once said she didn’t like sweets. “What did the policeman ask you about?”

I told her: “What you might expect. Where was I. Where everyone else was. Information about the others in the archive. When he was interviewing me, I realized how little I know about anyone. Even the other Americans—you, Jack, and Fitzroy.”

“I can’t imagine Fitzroy having anything to do with a nun.” Rachel gave a weak smile—it looked tired.

“Maybe he’s more of a Casanova than you think.” I said.

“What makes you say that?” Rachel said sharply.

“I’m joking,” I said.

“What did you mean?” She wasn’t going to let it be.

“There have been rumors.” Rumors had it that since his divorce ten years before, he had squired a series of ladyloves, all younger than he, all adoring. “But maybe he’s just an academic with a huge ego.” As I wished I had never brought up the subject of Fitzroy’s love life, Rachel stirred still another spoonful of sugar into her coffee and stared down at it as if it could tell her something. Finally I added, “And . . .? What else do we know about him?”

“Divorced. Specializes in. . . “

I interrupted her: “Was he ever in the army? What are his politics really? And so on. See what I mean? We know so little about each other.”

“We should let the police take care of it,” Rachel said.

“I guess so.” I looked across the little round table with its faded cloth at Rachel’s serious face. “Agatha. Gone. Now you see her, now you don’t. Where is she?” Foxy sat up and put his paw on my knee—I put my hand over it.

The food arrived. Foxy’s ears went up, and. I cut him off a little piece of steak. “A dead nun in the bathroom says something. It says that France is not just a repository of history. It’s alive. Present. Now. Dangerous. If Agatha could die, so could we. All of a sudden, France really seems like a foreign land to me. Even though I’ve spent so much time living here, off and on, France has always been my escape.”

“From what?” asked Rachel, as she pushed a
frite
around on her plate.

“Demanding students, for one. From always having to cover my ass as a historian, for another. You know how it is—we all know it’s impossible to know everything, but we can’t admit it.” I was confessing, but I didn’t care.

We ate in silence for a while.

Michel came to get the plates and looked at me in amazement when he saw that I had left most of the food. “Was there something wrong with the steak, Madame Ryan?”

“No, Michel, it was fine. I am just not that hungry today.”

“Perhaps you should see the doctor,” he said. He looked down at me, concerned.

“No, I am just sad,” I said and asked him to pack up the leftovers for Foxy.

Later that evening, back in my apartment, all I wanted to do was to shut the door, lock it, pull the curtains together, and hide. And even then, I was anxious, for it did not seem so much like home as it had before. In spite of the photographs of friends on the mantel, my books on the table, it was just a couple of rooms. The night was silent. The children who usually played in the street had gone in for dinner.

For a while, Foxy by my side, I played a slow and sad folk tune on my flute. It was a song about a child romance, but I could not concentrate. The murder intruded into my mind. Was Agatha’s death suicide? I didn’t think so. If it was murder, how had she been killed? It didn’t have to have been in the bathroom. The murderer could have killed her in the little reference room and dragged her there. Either a man or a woman could have done it. Unlike those in the United States, French public bathrooms tend to be unisex. I have often left a toilet stall at a French bathroom to see a man exiting at the same time. As the gentleman is zipping up, he is likely to incline his head in a quick bird-like dip with a “Bonjour, Madame.” The French are too practical to be prudish about such matters.