Another Sun (34 page)

Anne Marie sat down on the other side of the table. On the Formica top there were a couple of tin lids that had been used as ashtrays.

The far wall was covered with pinned-up notices concerning the different teaching unions. Beneath the drawing pins, the paper rustled relentlessly; the doors to the staff room were wide open and a mid-morning breeze kept the air cool. Through the open shutters, Anne Marie could see a flame tree that had started to blossom.

“My husband is dead—isn’t that enough?”

Anne Marie nodded sympathetically. “He died under strange circumstances.”

“He was hounded to death.”

“I don’t think anyone hounded your husband.”

Madame Dugain shook her head. “I’d rather not talk about these things.”

“I understand.”

The eyes flared with brief anger. “You understand?”

The two women were alone in the staff room of the Collège Carnot. There was silence.

(Somewhere children were singing. In another building a class burst into muffled laughter.)

“I know how painful it is to lose someone you love.” Anne Marie held out her hand, “I’m Madame Laveaud. I’m the
juge d’instruction
.”

Madame Dugain took the proffered hand coolly. “I really have nothing to say to an investigative magistrate or to anybody else.”

“I asked the head mistress for permission to speak to you.”

Madame Dugain folded her arms against her chest. She was wearing a dress that went well with the brown, liquid eyes. A necklace, matching gold earrings. Black hair that had been pulled back into a tight bun. Her lipstick was a matte red.

“On Saturday, April twenty-first, three officers of the
police judiciaire
visited your husband in his offices in the Sécid Tower. They had a search warrant and they were seeking information concerning accusations made against your husband.”

“Everybody accused Rodolphe.”

“Accusations that as director of the Environment Institute, he had been misappropriating funds.”

“My husband’s not a criminal.”

“Your husband received money from the government—from the Ministry of Employment—to recruit and train young people under the Youth Training Scheme. Six young people were working for him at the institute, and their salaries, funded entirely with government money, were paid into the Institute’s account.”

“I know nothing about my husband’s financial affairs.”

“Your husband’s accused of employing two of the young people in his small business in Abymes and paying them with the government allowances.”

Madame Dugain bit her lip. “My husband would never have taken money that wasn’t his.”

Anne Marie touched the woman’s arm. “Now your husband’s dead. I don’t think any good can be achieved by continuing with the enquiry.”

“Leave me in peace.” The corners of her mouth twitched. “My husband and I were happy. We’d been married for nearly twenty years. My children and I have suffered enough.”

Somewhere an electric buzzer sounded, followed almost immediately by the sound of scraping chairs and the scuffling of feet as the pupils left their desks at the end of the lesson.

“Just supposing that your husband was guilty of these accusations …” Anne Marie shrugged. “A fine—twenty thousand, thirty thousand francs. Not a lot of money for your husband.”

Madame Dugain flinched. “Rodolphe was innocent.”

“It’s not for thirty thousand francs that an influential and well-respected member of the community decides to do away with himself.”

France Antilles, April 23, 1990

Mr. Rodolphe Dugain, better known to most television viewers as Monsieur Environnement, died on Saturday, April 21, following multiple injuries and internal concussion after throwing himself from the fourteenth story of Sécid Tower block in central Pointe à Pitre.

If the rumour had been circulating for some time that the judicial authorities were making enquiries into the Centre Environnement, the sudden and untimely death of Monsieur Dugain, one of the major and most respected figures in the cultural Who’s Who of our
département
, seems to have taken Guadeloupe by surprise. The ripples of shock can be still felt at the university where Monsieur Dugain held a lectureship in natural sciences as well as along the corridors of the RFO television station where he regularly broadcast his popular nature programmes.

On Saturday morning, three officers of the Service Régional de la Police Judiciaire presented themselves at the offices of the Centre Environnement. According to eyewitnesses, Monsieur Dugain appeared his normal, jovial self, not allowing his good humour to be affected in any way by the presentation of a search warrant. He is believed to have offered a drink to the three men then while the officers were looking for documents and other information—the nature of which as yet has not been revealed by the
parquet
—Mr. Dugain managed to slip from the room. Once on the far side of the steel door, he locked the police officers inside and, taking to the stairs, Mr. Dugain climbed from the third to the fourteenth floor of the tower block. On the top floor, he went to the observation window and from there jumped to his death, landing on a car parked on the sidewalk of the Boulevard Chanzy. Mr. Dugain died immediately from the impact. The vehicle was badly damaged and several people were taken to the nearby
centre hospitalier universaire
, suffering from shock.

A crowd of onlookers gathered around the macabre spectacle. Yet again in Guadeloupe, the lamentable behaviour of rubbernecks and passers-by hindered the fire and ambulance services in the execution of their duty.

Monsieur Dugain, who was a Freemason and an ex-secretary of the Rotary Club, was born in Martinique fifty-seven years ago. He leaves a wife and two children, as well as two other children from an earlier marriage.

A memorial service at St. Pierre and St. Paul will be held on Tuesday at ten o’clock. The inhumation will take place at the municipal cemetery at midday.

“I need to know why he died.”

Madame Dugain raised her eyes. “Is that important?”

“You said he was hounded to death by the police.”

“It doesn’t matter any more.”

“It matters.”

A moment of hesitation. “You don’t believe my husband was innocent?”

“Innocent or guilty, suicide is not a normal reaction.”

“The SRPJ threw him from the fourteenth floor.”

“Unlikely.”

“I must be going.” Madame Dugain took up her bag and stood up. She was in her late thirties, a trim girlish silhouette and attractive brown legs. She ran a hand along her hair. “It’s been nice meeting you.”

“When somebody’s pushed through a window, the victim hits the ground close to the building. Somebody committing suicide jumps—and the car on which your husband landed was nearly four meters from the entrance to the Tour Sécid.”

Madame Dugain stared in silence at the clasp of her handbag.

“Nothing else you can tell me?”

“Else in what way,
madame le juge
?”

“Was anything worrying your husband?”

“What more do you want, for heaven’s sake?” A hard laugh. “His name in the papers? The accusation of cooking the books? The police coming to search his offices? His probity and his reputation were being called into question. My husband was being put on public trial—no, not a trial but a public lynching. The telephone never stopped ringing.”

“With a good lawyer, he could have …”

“My husband needed to be left alone. He didn’t need a lawyer just as he didn’t need being dragged through the mud. The mud his enemies wanted. That the police wanted. That’s what you’ve now got and I hope you’re satisfied.”

“Satisfied?”

“Rodolphe’s dead.”

Anne Marie caught her breath. “Who were his enemies that you talk about?”

“I’ve nothing further to say.”

“You really don’t want to help me set your husband’s record straight?”

“You couldn’t care less about my husband’s reputation.”

“I care about the truth.”

“Your truth.” Madame Dugain picked up the pile of books, turned and walked out into the sunshine. As she passed beneath the flame trees her heels clicked on the stone pavings.

“Liliane Dugain’s my cousin.”

It used to be the
lycée
. Then in the mid-sixties, a new school complex was built at Baimbridge on the edge of the city to accommodate the increase in the number of pupils. Consequently the old colonial Lycée Carnot, with its courtyard, its mango and flame trees, its airy, wooden classrooms, stranded in the heart of Pointe à Pitre, was transformed into a
collège
, a junior high school.

The two women walked out of the staff room and across the yard, between the trees. A breeze rustled through the leaves, and the pendulous, mangoes swayed gently at the end of their long stalks. Other mangoes had fallen to the ground and split their bruised skin.

(Anne Marie was reminded of her school years in Algeria.)

“I got the impression she was more angry than upset.”

The headmistress raised her shoulders. “Liliane’d been married long enough to know what Dugain was like.”

“He was fond of women?”

“You know a man who isn’t?”

Anne Marie glanced at Mademoiselle Salondy as they stepped into the school building. “That’s why you never married, Lucette?”

“One of many reasons.” The headmistress put her finger to her lips and nodded to the closed doors of the administrative offices.

The muffled sound of a typewriter.

They went up the wooden stairs and entered an air conditioned room. There was a large desk. A photograph of President Mitterand hung on the wall between a poster of the Declaration of Human Rights and a calendar from a local garage. The cables leading into the light switches were unconcealed and had been tacked into the wall with staples. A telephone sat on the desk and beside it, a plastic cube containing various pictures of Lucette Salondy’s relatives. In a small glass jar, there was a solitary anthurium.

“Madame Dugain’s your cousin?”

“Sit down, Anne Marie.” Lucette Salondy had a smile that formed wrinkles at the corner of her bright eyes. “Who isn’t a cousin on this island?” She was a large woman whose dress could not hide the matronly hips.

“You know her well?”

“Liliane’s more than twenty years younger than me, and when I came back from France in ‘66 she was doing her philosophy baccalaureate. A bright girl and the youngest in her class.” She tapped the desk. “That was when the
lycée
was still here, before they built the concrete jungle on the ring road.”

“I shouldn’t discuss things that have been told to me in confidence.”

“Then don’t.”

Anne Marie squared her shoulders. “Liliane Dugain was acting out a role—that’s the impression I got.”

“Liliane’s too old to act. She simply needs to be left alone.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Perhaps you don’t understand Guadeloupe women here. They hide their suffering.”

“Do you ever talk to her?”

“My prison.” The headmistress gestured to the office, the walls painted the pale grey of France’s tropical public buildings and beneath the opaque louvers, the potted dieffenbachia, the leaves yellowing at the edges. “No time for idle chat—there are at least three new teachers this year whom I’ve never spoken to.” She pulled a blue cardigan from the back of the chair onto her shoulders. “Headmistress? I’m just a cog in a big, faceless administration. My job’s to sign bits of paper or phone the Rectorat in Martinique to sort out problems of their making. I am afraid our cousins in Martinique are notoriously incompetent.”

“You’re talking like a racist.”

“Perish the thought. Put simply, in Martinique they don’t understand our problems in Guadeloupe because those gentlemen of Martinique prefer not to understand. During the revolution we set up a guillotine here in the Place de la Victoire and we chopped off the heads of all the whites who hadn’t run away. For eight years we were free while over in Martinique the English protected the slave owners. So they like to think of us as peasants.”

“The gentlemen of Martinique fail to understand the honest folk of Guadeloupe?”

“My word! I see you’ve done some studying, Anne Marie.” She smiled. “The nobility of Saint-Domingue, the gentlemen of Martinique and the honest folk of Guadeloupe. Except that now in Guadeloupe and Martinique we run around in SUVs while the immigrants from Haiti cut our cane in the fields.”

Anne Marie smiled. “You don’t have time to talk to Madame Dugain, but you find time to talk with me.”

“First time I’ve seen you since Léonore’s wedding.” She stretched a plump arm across the desk and squeezed Anne Marie’s hand. “I rarely get out of this office.”

“You’ve just been out.”

“I went looking for you, Anne Marie Laveaud because I want to talk to my sister-in-law before she scurries back to the law courts.”

“Sister-in-law, Lucette?”

“I’m your father-in-law’s daughter—remember? Which makes me the half-sister of your husband.”

“My ex-husband.” Anne Marie gave a terse smile. “You still have your apartment on the beach at Le Moule?”

“I was there yesterday. I had to take a couple of hours off to drive over to les Alisées. Someone renting it—and the lavatory is blocked up.” Lucette Salondy shrugged. “A couple of hours I could ill afford to waste on private business. I just don’t get time for myself. My weekends are taken up with administrative work. Perhaps when I retire.”

“You’ll never retire, Lucette.”

The large woman sighed. “So many things to do, and never a moment to spare. I can’t wait to retire.” She added, “She was Dugain’s second marriage, you know.”

“They weren’t happy?”

“Liliane Dugain has two lovely children.”

“Why wasn’t she happy?”

“My cousin married someone who was seventeen years older than her. That kind of age difference’s common here in our islands but Liliane’s an educated woman, and she wanted a friend, and in the end she married somebody who could’ve been her father. She wanted equality, and she found a man who never treated her as an equal. Someone who gave her two lovely daughters but who went elsewhere for his pleasure.”