Paris Requiem (3 page)

Madame de Landois shook her head slowly. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘Two weeks ago. A little more now.’

‘Is your premonition … your fear … that she may have … taken off?’

The man lowered his burning gaze. He wrung his hands. The ability to speak had left him. Instead, he took a large handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow.

Madame de Landois turned to James and murmured in English. ‘Some years back, Olympe had a spate – I don’t quite know how you describe this in American – of, well walking. Walking, in something like a trance, and disappearing for days on end. Not quite knowing where she’d gone and then waking up in a strange, sometimes precarious place.’

Had his mother been privy to this biographical item, too? No wonder she had wrung her hands.

‘No, no.’ The man spoke at last. ‘I don’t believe so. All that is in the past. She has been much, much better. Her work was going well. She …’ He leapt up suddenly like a spring that had to be released. ‘I mustn’t trouble you any further. But if you hear anything, please let me know. I have given myself another twenty-four hours. And then I go to … to the police.’

The last word was a scraped breath. He rubbed his throat, then bowed again before reaching for his hat.

‘If you wish, I shall accompany you there, Monsieur.’

An angel seemed to have alighted on Arnhem’s shoulder to lift him from his abject state. His face was transformed. ‘Ah, if you really would, Madame, my gratitude would be limitless.’

‘Of course I will.’ She rose.

James watched her escort Arnhem to the door and murmur a few more words. He was thunderstruck by her liberality.

His feelings must have made their way to his face, for when she sat down again her expression was wry. ‘I think,
Monsieur
Norton, that you disapprove of the company I keep.’

‘I …’

Her laugh trilled. ‘You remind me of my husband.’

‘Oh.’

‘Fortunately, for my freedom, we have lived our separate lives for some years now.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m not sure that you do.’

‘I … I was only somewhat surprised … at Monsieur Arnhem.’

‘Yes.’ She examined him forthrightly. ‘Our situation in France these last years demands that we show kindness to these people. They have suffered through no fault of their own. Captain Dreyfus, as you must agree, was wrongly indicted – set up as a spy, indeed, because his origins made him easy prey to prejudice. Then, too, Monsieur Arnhem’s
daughter is a true artiste, a talented musician and dancer – and now an actress. She has even performed here on occasion for small gatherings of my friends …’

James felt like a small boy chastised by a stern governess. He wouldn’t have expected this regal woman to so value a figure his mother despised. Perhaps she didn’t know of this artiste’s relations with Raf. There might even be more than one Olympe.

‘Olympe is also a friend of Rafael’s.’

Madame de Landois responded to his scurrying thoughts.

‘A special friend?’ James stammered.

‘So you know?’

‘I know very little.’

‘You know that.’ She smoothed her dress and turned an innocent face on him, but the eyes glinted with something like humour. ‘Rafael warned me that I might find you a little cold, a little distant. But no, I do not altogether think so. The perceptions of brothers are often askew.’

‘He said that to you, that I was cold?’

‘Perhaps I should not have repeated it. You will think me interfering.’ She smiled a smile which made interference the best possible characteristic in the world.

Before he could find an appropriate response, a bell sounded and she leapt up.

‘Excuse me a moment.’

Her expression was one of open relief as if she’d been
waiting
too long for the call. She walked lightly to the far corner of the room where she picked up the telephone.

An odd sensation flickered at the edge of James’s mind as he surreptitiously watched her movements, some inchoate sense of familiarity.

He set it aside to distil his admiration, for that was what he principally felt. Madame de Landois was a thoroughly
modern
woman, not at all what he had anticipated when he stood
in front of the cold, formal stone of her
hôtel particulier
so little time before.

Her profile was alight now. The voice at the other end of the line was distinctly in favour. Then he heard a sharp intake of breath.

‘Non, ce n’est pas possible.’

He turned away in embarrassment and focused his
attention
on the garden. He didn’t want to be caught
eavesdropping
. The new technology engaged people in audible, yet private conversations. No set of manners existed for the excluded party. The situation always made him ill-at-ease.

A few minutes later Madame de Landois, her face
distraught
, was beside him. ‘My apologies, Monsieur Norton. I shall have to cut our meeting short. Feel free to finish your tea. Pierre will see you out.’

She was already halfway through the door when she turned back. ‘No, no. It’s best if you come with me. Yes. Far better. If you’re free, that is.’

James rose with alacrity. He was about to ask her what was amiss, when she held up a staying hand.

‘No, please. No questions. Just come quietly. Things are bad. I need to think.’

T
he road which wound along the Seine was a clamour of construction sites. Everywhere ragged fencing squeezed traffic into ungainly rows. Men carrying planks clambered waist-deep through mud or hung from ladders. Shouts vied with hammering. A new railway station rose from the ground like the partial skeleton of some prehistoric dinosaur and abutted in jagged spikes where a roof might be. Along the Quai d’Orsay, scaffolding arced precariously across the river, a giant cobweb glistening in the amber rays of the low sun. Tiny figures clung to its many levels like so many marooned insects.

Further west, traffic ground to a halt as the road gave way to a pitted track.

‘We’ll get out here and walk,’ Madame de Landois announced.

These were the first words she had uttered since they had started out and they were stiff with an emotion James couldn’t name. She waved her arm in a wide circle which encompassed both sides of the river.

‘You see all this, this mammoth effort of building work. We are poised to welcome in the new century with an Exposition
Universelle. For one year, a fairy tale of a city will take shape. The elaborate structure you see here is the Italian Pavilion. Next to it the Turkish. And then your own country. And so on. And so on. A great spectacle waiting to be born. A hymn to brotherhood and progress. To industry and invention. All the nations working side by side – African, Asian, American, European. And then,’ she snapped her fingers. ‘Then nothing. It will all be torn down. All this effort will have been like a café-concert ditty to impermanence.’

She laughed oddly, her face hidden from him by the wide brim of her intricate hat.

Passers-by turned to stare. She was the only woman amongst scores of workingmen, their faces worn from the day’s labours. James wondered again where she was taking him. This was no place for a woman. The ground was heavy with mud. Slippery planks covered it here and there to
provide
a passage. He offered her his arm and she accepted it without meeting his eyes.

‘But perhaps that, too, is fitting.’

He didn’t know quite what she meant. He was busy
trying
to navigate them through the gathering human tide that poured from gaping pits and half-erect structures. In the distance he spied the towering steeple of the iron structure which had not yet been completed on his last visit to the city, almost twelve years ago now. Maisie had clung to his arm then and cried out at its brute ugliness.

As he looked at the finished tower now, he marvelled at Eiffel’s feat of engineering, a challenge to the visionaries of the new century. That hadn’t been torn down. He should mention that to reassure Madame de Landois. But she was pointing, tugging them to the right.

‘There. We go down those steps over there.’

She paused midway down the steep incline. ‘I trust you won’t hold this against me, Monsieur. I trust too, that you
have a strong stomach.’ She held his eyes for a moment before moving forward once more.

A cobbled width of quay stretched before them. At its edge old horses lapped water and an assortment of barges swayed, two of them still part loaded with building materials. A lone houseboat bobbed amongst them, half hidden by a strip of washing. It was towards this that Madame de Landois headed with a newly determined step.

A narrow gangplank creaked beneath their feet. From the deck a rank odour of vegetation and sewage rose like a miasma. For a brief second, James wondered whether this was what Madame de Landois had meant by her warning comment. But then, as she called out a loud greeting, there was no more time to wonder.

A burly man with a pugilist’s threatening features appeared from the prow of the boat. He paused as he took in
Madame
de Landois. She uttered something James didn’t catch. A moment later they were round the other side of the deck and through a narrow door into a cluttered room.

The air was fetid. Smoke curled round the low ceiling. In the dusky light, it was difficult to distinguish people from looming barrels and ramshackle furniture. Everyone seemed to be speaking at once. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, James made out two kneeling men, between them a prone figure stretched beneath a rumpled blanket. One of the
kneeling
men wore a police uniform. A few more leaden seconds passed before he realised that the other one, with his back to him, was his brother.

‘Raf.’ The single syllable fell into the taut silence which Madame de Landois’s entrance had precipitated.

His brother turned and leapt up, his head narrowly missing the ceiling. His eyes were glazed. He hardly seemed to
recognise
him. Finally with an erratic gesture he raised his hand to grasp James’s. ‘Bad day, Jim. Bad timing. His attention flew to
Madame de Landois.
‘C’est vraiment elle,’
he mumbled. ‘Her.’

She nodded once abruptly, then clutched Raf’s arm with an intimacy from which James averted his gaze.

It was only now, as Raf introduced Madame de Landois to someone called Durand, a small, dapper, but distinctly stout man who bowed with the exaggerated deference of a perfect functionary, that James realised the figure on the floor was dead. He took a step backwards, wishing there was an
unencumbered
wall to lean on.

The body was a woman’s. A long lock of dark hair fell across her shoulder. One arm, bare but for the lace of a chemise, lay arched in an abrupt V at her side, as if the elbow had been cracked. The face was puffy, blotched, bloated with water. But the lashes were thick, the brow high, the bone structure fine. She was young and all-too-recently beautiful.

A blinding flash lit up the room. For a split second it
transformed
the reclining body into alabaster. The blanket had been pushed aside. Limbs glowed with a pale fire. The odour of burned sulphur hung in the air.

James took in a tripod, the hooded head of a photographer. He stepped outside unsteadily and filled his lungs with air. Through the leap and bounce of associations and half-heard words, it came to him that the dead woman must be the Rachel about whom Monsieur Arnhem had been so worried. The very Olympe he had come to extricate his brother from. Well, he was extricated now, but not in a manner even his mother might have wished. No. Then, too, death was not always a form of disentanglement, as he, himself, knew too well.

He hurried to the far end of the boat. A young, blonde woman emerged from the shadows at the corner like a
hallucination
. She was sitting on a bench and nursing a baby, crooning to it.

He averted his gaze, but her voice stopped him. ‘
Vous êtes
aussi du Commissariat?’

No, no, he wasn’t from the police. James shook his head and cast his eyes to the ground. The woman’s boots protruded from the flounce of her skirt. They were black and shiny.

He reached for his pipe, then thought better of it and turned to retrace his steps. He should go back to that room to see how Raf was doing. Yet he couldn’t quite face the sight of that body lying there so still amidst the onlookers. Maisie had had that stillness about her. Her cheeks, too, had a puffiness, but she had lain on sheets of the softest white. Yes. Maisie.

He realised that his nails were biting into his palms. His stomach churned. He leaned against the boat’s rail and gazed into the waters, willing the turmoil of those old emotions away. He wished for a habitual task to escape to, some
responsibility
which would whisk him away from the clotted hold of that past ordeal.

The man who now approached him and offered
cigarettes
from a silver case had the glow of a saviour despite his appearance. He was of middle height, bearded, slightly built. His shirt protruded from his open jacket as if he had
forgotten
to tuck it in. His tie was askew. Lank hair fell over his brow. There was an unsavoury air about him as he took a long puff of his cigarette.

‘The second Mr Norton,
je crois
. I am Gilles Touquet. Journalist, Anglophile, and a friend, a
collègue
of the first Mr Norton.’ His laugh was hollow as he tipped his bowler. ‘Bad business, this. Very bad business.
La Tristesse d’Olympe.
You know, Olympe Fabre once did a dance to which she gave that name.’

‘What happened to her?’ James asked.

Touquet shrugged. ‘Who knows! But I found her. Well not
exactement
found. I do the crime,’ he pronounced the word in the French way, ‘for my paper.
Le Journal
. You know it?’

James encouraged him with a nod.

‘I heard from one of my contacts at the Préfecture that a
body had been fished out of the Seine. I rushed over.
Recognised
Olympe Fabre immediately, but I pretended not to. I wanted to get your brother here. I knew he was looking for her.’ He threw James a swift sidelong glance.

‘And he came quickly, made a big brouhaha. Insisted that the police get Durand on the scene.’

‘Durand?’

‘Yes, Chief Inspector Emile Durand, you saw him perhaps. The stout little dapper man with the heavy brows and the big broom of a moustache.’

He gestured down the deck and moulded his body into a perfect parody of the man James had noted. ‘Durand is high up in the
Judiciaire
and a reputable detective. One of the force’s all too rare upholders of justice and scientific
investigation
. If you had come a few moments earlier, you would have heard him chastising the boatman for dragging
Olympe’s
body along the deck, perhaps breaking her arm, obliterating useful clues. He was fierce.’

Touquet chuckled, then stopped himself abruptly. He puffed at his cigarette. ‘It’s a good thing, too, that Rafael brought Madame de Landois here. Her association with the case will mean that our police take the matter seriously.
Otherwise
you know, they can be a little lazy. Another lovelorn grisette in the Seine. Another suicide. What difference can it make, eh?’ He shrugged in exaggerated fashion.

A half-empty
bateau mouche
passed them. One of the
passengers
waved. Touquet beckoned back in hearty fashion. Waves rocked the boat. James clung to the rail. His stomach was churning.

‘And is it suicide?’

Touquet peered at him from his bulging eyes. ‘Your brother does not think so.’

‘No?’

‘No. And now that Madame de Landois is here to cast her Paris
– how do you say – influence, there will be a proper
investigation
. An autopsy, too.’ He flicked his burning cigarette into the water. ‘So we shall know.’

Heavy steps echoed over the length of the deck. Two
uniformed
men bearing a stretcher appeared. They paused at the door of the cabin. James saw Madame de Landois come out, followed by Raf, Chief Inspector Durand and the surly thickset man they had first seen, who was evidently the boat’s owner.

James walked towards the group. Touquet followed.

‘He found her,’ Touquet gestured. ‘Quite a
raconteur
he is, when he’s got a few glasses in him. Fished her out. Thought he’d fished himself a
sirène
, at first. You’ll read all about it in the paper.’

The prospect took James aback. He gave the man a sharp look. The latter was oblivious to it.

They had reached the others. Durand was gesticulating, his demeanour Napoleonic. ‘You can rest secure, Madame. My men and I will take care of everything. Everything.’ He bowed to Madame de Landois with the magisterial panache of some defender of the grandeur of the French state and
ushered
them away.

Raf held back and looked once more into the room where a single light had now been lit. By its yellow glow, the body of Olympe was being raised onto the stretcher.

James was struck by the longing in his gaze, Orpheus
losing
Eurydice to eternal darkness. Everything was clear in that shivering look. His mother had been right. Raf loved this woman more than he ought. Loved her with a terrible
passion
which made James recoil. He held himself rigid against a sudden tide of nausea.

Madame de Landois urged Raf into motion. Two-by-two, like a funeral cortège, they made their way slowly off the boat and onto solid ground, trudging up the steps and along what
was now deserted terrain. The spectral frames of the twilit pavilions hovered like some ghost town to their side.

Madame de Landois’s carriage waited at a short distance from where the paved road began. She and Raf were engaged in a murmured conversation. James would have liked to
overhear
, but he kept his distance. In the flickering light the
carriage
lamps cast, her face was sombre. She turned to James as the coachman held open the door.

‘Our first meeting may not have been propitious, Monsieur Norton, but I hope for all that we shall meet again soon.’

James bowed. He only realised as the carriage pulled away that he had half expected Raf to accompany her. Instead, the three men were left on the darkened street. They walked along it in desultory fashion, his brother firing off short bursts of sentences to Touquet until the man tipped his hat and
disappeared
round the first turning.

‘I badly need a drink, Jim. What about you?’

James nodded.

Raf hailed a passing cab, gave directions to the driver, then sat back in his seat. His handsome face, so often a witness to fleeting passions, was stonier than those of the statues which flanked their passage to the right bank. James, himself, felt seized by a torpor which made both mind and tongue too heavy for use.

At last, after what seemed an interminable rat run over cobbles, the cab stopped.

‘You should feel right at home here, Jim.’ Raf spoke at last. ‘It’s one of my regular haunts.’

He led him into a long dim tavern tucked between
unremarkable
buildings on an unremarkable side street. A few lone drinkers sat at its highly polished zinc counter. The wall behind it, covered in mirror, reflected a string of booths and trebled their number.