The Fifth House of the Heart (7 page)

The next morning (with five minutes to spare before the noon bells rang), Sax crawled out of bed and drew a lukewarm bath. If it was hot, he would fall asleep in it. He despised himself. The carousing he could live with. That was the price of being an attractive, interesting person with such notorious friends. What brought out the real,
hundred-proof self-loathing was what had happened afterward. He'd picked up a young Arab in front of an all-night
tabac
; the lad, prodigious in his endowments, applied himself to his host
avant et arrière
until well after dawn, then stole the contents of Sax's wallet on his way out of the room.

Despite a detour to the bank, Sax arrived at the café precisely on time. He was freshly dressed in a trim bespoke suit from Millings in Great Pulteney Street. Unfortunately he was trembling and greenish in the face, and the circles around his eyes looked like cigar burns. A more obvious hangover would have been hard to effect. Sax sat at a table on the sidewalk, placed several of the brand-new silver ten-franc pieces on the table to keep the service brisk, ordered a glass of tea, and begged a cigarette from the waiter. Business attended to, he sat and smoked and brooded on his own shortcomings with such concentration that he was startled to discover a man standing at the other side of his table. Sax rose.

“You look just like that actor,” the man said. He was broader than Sax, and shorter, with brief, iron-colored hair. The man's suit was double-breasted, cut in the postwar style, the color of river water. Brown shoes. Trilby hat. He wore a cream cashmere scarf around his thick neck. The overall effect, Sax thought, was part gangster, part bank teller. In other words, he looked like a man who had spent time in prison.

“Thank you,” said Sax, entirely uninterested in which actor. He wanted to be ill on the sidewalk.
Must resist that, if only for professional reasons.
“Asmodeus Saxon-Tang,” he added, and held out his hand.

“You'll pardon me if I identify myself only by my Christian name,” the man said. “Jean-Marc. I feel like I'm back in the Resistance, but there it is. Discretion is of the uttermost importance.”

Jean-Marc ordered a glass of wine and smoked foul SNTA cigarettes from Algeria. He said he had become addicted to them during
his time there. He did not say what he had done in Algeria, besides smoke. There was little small talk in him.

“Allow me to describe the property first,” Jean-Marc said. “Property is my business in some ways. The château is built directly on the river Loire. There is a tunnel beneath the walls for boats, built in the nineteenth century. In this way, one can enter the château from the water. It makes a mockery of the fortifications, naturally. There is a gravel carriage path up to the front of the property, and a dirt track that leads along the river's edge, interrupted by the structure itself.”

Warming to the subject, Jean-Marc began to diagram the house with his fingertip on the tabletop, an incomprehensible mass of strokes.

“It's a bit like Château de Chenonceau, but the place doesn't extend out into the water. Or Montreuil-Bellay, if you know it. A cross between the two. Medieval structure with Renaissance improvements. Riddled with secret passages and hidden rooms and tunnels. The château is built on three levels, exclusive of the cellars and attics. The main entrance is in the center, salons on either hand, dining and music rooms behind, kitchens beneath. Upstairs the usual bedrooms, parlors, suites, and so forth.”

“Monsieur,” Sax interrupted. “You describe the place as if we were planning a . . . What is the word. Christ.
Un vol qualifié
, if I have that right. A burglary.” Sax didn't like the sound of this. He needed to know the prize before he learned the obstacles.

Jean-Marc broke off a small piece of a laugh and chewed on it. “How can I describe what is inside the place if you cannot imagine the place?” he asked.

“I am not sure you should describe what is inside.”

“Very well. You know it's most valuable; I'll skip to the meat of the matter. The property is owned—”

“By a lady of indeterminate age, Madame Magnat-l'Étrange. She is ill. She is intestate. I remember,” Sax interrupted.

Jean-Marc raised his glass. “My apologies. You are not the first I have approached. The speech has become a habit. You remain interested?”

“Strictly for conversational purposes.”

“Naturally. Madame Magnat-l'Étrange is a formidable character, by the way. Erase from your mind any image of an ancient, trembling skeleton in a bath chair. She is a mystery.”

“In what way?” Sax asked, and flagged a glass of beer from the waiter.

Jean-Marc rubbed his hands together as if to start a fire. “There's no record of her existence.”

“Pardon?”

Jean-Marc tapped the tip of his own nose. “I have some interest in real estate, as I say. It's all a matter of documents. There isn't a patch of earth in all of Europe that isn't carpeted with documents. Every bureaucrat has his little rubber stamp in the desk drawer next to the scissors and string and the gift for his mistress. He puts the little stamp on a document in the morning. He goes to lunch. He puts another little stamp on another document in the afternoon. Millions of bureaucrats for a thousand years have been doing this. And me? To get my feet on a single patch of honest dirt, I must first dig through a layer of documents as deep as oak leaves in the forest.”

Jean-Marc finished his wine and wagged the glass for a refill. Sax sipped his beer and tried not to look as interested as he was.

“Oak leaves,” Jean-Marc said again. “I was looking into the potential of just such a patch of ground two years ago for a little project near to my heart, and in the course of my investigations I noticed there was a lack of paperwork associated with the land across the river. By which I mean, not a single document had been filed in regards to Château Magnat-l'Étrange—although that is not its formal name—in over one hundred and thirty-five years.”

Jean-Marc pronounced
thirty
with an initial
F
, an accent Sax associated with Paris. Local boy, then. “The family hired solicitors,” Sax said. “They retreated behind a legal curtain for reasons of their own. Incorporated.”

Jean-Marc shook his head. “You're not understanding me. When I say nothing, I mean that they have opened no permits to build, asked no permissions. Installed no gas. No water, wiring, or telephone. The taxes on the place are paid automatically by a blind trust, at a rate fixed in the year 1812. How can this be? What happened to the socialist government with all its”—here he made a swirling motion with his hands—“its redistribution of wealth? The twentieth century has frowned on entitlement, monsieur. How has she escaped it?”

“In the same manner her ancestors did, presumably,” Sax replied. “Kept her head down, left the place unimproved. It's probably listed as a ruin in the local government's books by now.”

“I said no records whatsoever, did I not?” Jean-Mark said curtly. “Two years, I searched. Listen to me. You must. There were no births, no deaths, no marriages. There has only been one name on the deeds to that château in all this time, never changing hands.”

“Surely you're not saying this Magnat-l'Étrange woman is one hundred thirty-five years old?”

“Of course not. I'm saying she died a century ago, or more. And since then, certain persons have been . . . We have the same word in French, it's borrowed from the English. Squatters.
Squatters illégaux.
I suspect a local family discovered the original Madame Magnat-l'Étrange dead, or killed her, when they learned she was alone, and since then they have been living by cunning on the value of the property, perhaps selling pieces from it now and then for cash: bottles from the cellar, furniture, and so forth. For seven generations, they've been at it.”

“Incredible,” Sax said, meaning
ridiculous.
Surely the man didn't believe this himself?

“Yes, incredible,” Jean-Marc said. He was caught up now, breathless with his enthusiasm. “I suspect the servants, myself. Their families. They found the madam of the house dead, they realized the next owner of the property would bring his own servants, and so they hid the tragic event. And with all the wars and chaos in Europe since then, they got away with it. Until now.”

“So what is your idea? Purchase the property by some kind of law of adverse possession?”

“No, that's what these squatters have done. All statutes long since expired. They may very well be the legal owners now, in the strictest sense of the idea. But they can't make any noise about it, or God only knows what sort of tax bill they could end up with. And the property is unimproved since a hundred years! It will be condemned.”

“So what's the plan?”

“We walk in and take everything.”

II

There was genius in it, Sax had to admit. Gander sat beside him in the back of the prewar touring car, smelling of armpits and cologne in his old furniture-moving clobber of cloth cap, breeches, waistcoat, and shirtsleeves. He looked like something from D. H. Lawrence. Sax was wearing an army surplus coverall in denim and a shapeless Derby hat. Jean-Marc sat in the jump seat with his back to the engine, facing Sax. He was dressed in a much better suit than the one he'd worn in Paris, gray mohair with a seal topcoat, kid gloves on his blunt fingers, a silvery gray Eden hat resting on his knees. The bank teller look was gone, the gangster predominant; of prison, there was no indication. He appeared prosperous and unreliable. They all smoked continuously.

The driver, Rollo, was one of Jean-Marc's men. The back of his short neck was riddled with blackheads and deeply creased. He wore his hat jammed down low on his ears. Behind the touring car were three removal vans, ex-military box trucks repainted gloss black and picked out with thin green stripe.
Déménagements Toulouse
was lettered on the sides in crimson. At the rendezvous point where they'd met that morning, a motorist's café and fueling depot a few kilometers south of Paris, Sax had heard Jean-Marc reminding his men not to touch the paint, as it wasn't thoroughly dry. No half measures with him. There were ten men in the trucks, most of them old mates of Jean-Marc's.

Sax was frightened out of his wits.

He hid it as best he could, but his mouth was ashy and his heart fluttered inside his rib cage like a little yellow bird. His spine was wet with sweat. It was all very well, these great big thugs going about stealing things—and it
was
stealing, no question, even if the rightful owner had been dead a century and a half—but Sax was an up-and-coming, reputable dealer in sound articles. A stretch in a French prison was nothing to these other men, who might as well wear fraternal rings, being so obviously graduates of the penal system. But for Sax, prison would not be a place to make professional contacts. It would be hell on earth. Real homosexuals placed behind bars were doomed. It was the straight arrows who survived, gritting their teeth against the forced submission, the humiliation, their manhood stripped away, again and again brought to their knees for the brutal—

Sax realized he was getting an erection.

“Alain Delon,” Jean-Marc said.

“Where?” Sax said.

“The actor you look like. Alain Delon.”

“Mmph,” Sax said. He could imagine what short work an alpha male like Jean-Marc would make of him in a prison setting.

And yet, despite his fear, Sax could not possibly turn back. This adventure could be the making of him. He had competition with just as much taste, flair, and beauty as he commanded. Some of them had titles as well, or large family fortunes. Sax's father was a wealthy patrician, a naval officer during the war; his mother was French and En­­glish. There was money in the family, but Sax had been disowned at the age of nineteen.

What he needed was a big score, a haul of extraordinary objects that would form the foundation of his career. He was already successful, yes. But it depended entirely on what he could find one week and sell the next. When he was away on his buying expeditions, the stock in New York and London waned perilously low. When he returned there would suddenly be an enormous surfeit of things he had to sell cheap, just to make room. A mother lode of quality pieces would erase the cyclical aspect of his business, give him depth of range—and yield him a fortune, practically for free. Unless, of course, he paid for this escapade with ten years of his life.

T
hey drove through long stretches of rolling hills with fallow mustard fields and quilts of winter spinach, Swiss chard, onions, and wheat, bordered by hedges and copses of trees. Villages with roofs of gray slate and red clay tile were nestled in valleys and clustered around hilltop churches. Sax recognized Orléans and Blois, large towns, but the convoy bypassed them, taking smaller roads to avoid the urban centers. The trip covered some 250 kilometers and required nearly seven hours.

In a fast car, they could have made the distance in less than half the time, but the trucks were strong, not swift, and lunch required two hours of the afternoon. Jean-Marc's crew sat on the bistro
patio for the meal, ate bread and sausage, and drank twenty bottles of cheap
red wine, trading stories and filthy jokes in the rough argot of men whose entire lives had been marked by crime, conflict, and the main chance. Sax pretended his French was poor, but he understood well enough. He caught a few references to his sexual preferences, Oncle Bénard
,
Monsieur Môme, and so forth,
but nothing any worse than the obscenities with which they abused each other. Following a collective piss on the wall that could have cleared the Augean Stables, they piled back into the vehicles and rumbled on.

Their destination was not far from the Château de Chenonceau, in the part of the Loire marked by grand fortified houses at every turn in the river. There were more than three hundred châteaux in the Loire Valley, and at least as many manor houses only slightly less imposing. Hundreds more had been destroyed during various wartimes and the French Revolution. The valley was the cradle of the modern French language, high culture, and the French Renaissance. Its beauty never failed to lift Sax's spirits, and in the spring it was so gorgeous it made the heart ache. Such luscious green everywhere, ancient trees and bountiful fields, all punctuated by fairy-tale castles and senescent, rambling towns. The scent of new flowers and ripening leaves filled the air. The late-afternoon sunshine teased and dappled the road before them. Even now, obsessed as he was with the prospect of incarceration, Sax could enjoy his surroundings.