Freeze Frame (22 page)
“And you, monsieur?”
Enzo looked up, eyebrows raised, to meet Cohen’s naked curiosity.
“Do you believe he found Erik Fleischer?”
“Yes, I do,” Enzo said. “And I also believe he is still alive.”
From the gallery beyond the living and working area, Enzo stood in the semidarkness looking down into the well of the building, where Charlotte conducted her patient consultations in the indoor garden. The rain, finally, had caught up with him, and he heard it battering now on the glass roof overhead, almost drowning out the musical tinkle of the artificial stream in the garden below.
From here he could also see into her bedroom, glass walls opening onto a view of the garden beneath it. A bedside lamp cast a warm glow around it, and he saw the rumpled sheets of her unmade bed. A bed he had shared with her many times, always aware of how exposed they were to the view of anyone standing where he stood now. It had always been an inhibiting factor.
But not for Charlotte. She had laughed at the idea of feeling watched and told him the story of the two Italian soldiers billeted during the war with the former owners of this one-time coal merchant’s in the thirteenth
arrondissement.
On the day of Liberation, the elderly couple had murdered the soldiers and buried them under the floor of the former coal store, an area now cemented over and providing the foundation for Charlotte’s indoor garden. They had told her this when selling her the property, and she had been amused by the idea that her home might be haunted by their ghosts. If anyone was watching them, she had once told Enzo, it would be her Italians. And who could deny them a little entertainment after their lives had been cut so brutally short?
“Will you stay for something to eat?”
He turned and saw her standing at the top of the short flight of steps leading up to her office. He had not heard her hang up the phone. “No, I won’t. I have to get out to Charles de Gaulle tonight. I’m booked into one of the airport hotels.”
“You could have stayed here,” she said. And when he didn’t respond, added, “You know I have a guest bedroom.”
He felt unaccountably disappointed. He might be the father of her child, but it seemed he was no longer welcome to share her bed. “The flight to Morocco leaves early. It made more sense to be at a hotel out there.”
“Then why are you here?” The light was behind her, and he couldn’t see her face. But her body was outlined in silhouette. Tall and willowy, dark curls falling abundantly over her shoulders. He felt the pain of their estrangement acutely.
“We have unfinished business.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You left Groix before we had the chance to talk.”
“There was nothing left to say.”
He drew a deep breath to calm himself. This meeting with her had been on his mind during all the long rail journey from Brittany. He had rehearsed so many things in his mind. What he would say, how he would say it. And now the spotlight was his, he seemed paralysed by stage fright. But perhaps it was only the outcome he feared.
“Was there some other reason for your visit?”
He hesitated. “You said, at Port Mélite, that you thought Killian might have spent time in prison.”
“Ahh.” She came down the steps. “The ulterior motive. There’s always an ulterior motive with you, Enzo, isn’t there?”
He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, cursing himself for his stupidity. He had given her the perfect opportunity to deflect his questions, to change the focus of their exchange. Now anything he might say would be construed as opportunistic and lacking sincerity. He decided to let the Killian question drop. “No. Our child is both my primary and my ulterior motive. Nothing else matters.”
“Oh, good. So I have your undivided attention, then.”
“Yes, you do.”
She turned away, sauntering along the gallery, trailing her fingers along the handrail, before turning back to face him. “Well, I suppose it’s only fair to tell you that I have made a decision.”
He felt the blood turn cold in his veins. If she had opted for termination, there was, in truth, almost nothing he could do about it. “And?”
“I’ve decided to go ahead and have the baby.”
His sense of relief was almost overwhelming. “Oh, Charlotte, I’m so glad.”
“But there’s a condition attached to it, Enzo.” She stared at him for a long time. “The child will be mine, not yours. You may be his biological father, but I really don’t believe that you are suitable to raise him. For all sorts of reasons, most of which we’ve already discussed.”
He opened his mouth to argue the point, but she cut him off. “For heaven’s sake, Enzo, for once in your life think about someone else for a change.”
Enzo bit back a retort.
“I’ll raise him on my own. And at my own expense. I’ll not take a cent from you. I don’t want you having any claim on him of any kind. He will be entirely my responsibility, and he will never know that you are his father.”
He stared back at her in disbelief. The cold lack of emotion in her words was unnerving.
“That’s the price of your son’s life, Enzo. Your choice. But if you can’t accept it, then I’ll go ahead with the termination.”
Agadir, Morocco, November 2009
The taxi bumped and rattled its way along the highway from the airport. Dust rose in the hot air all around, almost obscuring a desolate landscape of sand and scrub. After the cooling autumn temperatures in France, it seemed incongruous to be back in shirtsleeves and sandals. Enzo felt the sweat prickling across his forehead. There was no AC in the car, and the air blowing in the driver’s open window did little to cool him. It was close to thirty degrees centigrade, the African sun bright in the southern sky, and Enzo had been forced to dig out his sunglasses from their winter hibernation in the bottom of his bag.
During the nearly three-hour flight, he had stared blindly out into the endless blue, lost in a turmoil of thoughts about Charlotte and his unborn son. Thoughts that had kept him awake most of the night, listening to the flights coming and going, trying to reach some decision about a course of action. In the end, he had realised that he was powerless to do anything. At least until the child was born. Then, with the fear of termination no longer an issue, he could surely make some legal claim on the child. But he had been haunted, during all those waking hours, by the words that Charlotte had used to cut him open and lay him bare.
For heaven’s sake, Enzo, for once in your life think about someone else for a change.
He gazed from the window as the outskirts of Agadir grew up around the arterial route that led unwaveringly toward downtown. Nearly fifty years after the quake, it still looked like a town in ruins. Unfinished apartment blocks sprang up like weeds from the dust and rubble. Roads had been laid out around gap sites, and satellite dishes grew like fungus on unrendered cement. Here and there was the odd splash of colour, red, green, blue, amongst all the grey. Stores and stalls selling clothes and groceries. Enzo was reminded of video footage he had seen on TV of a bombed-out Beirut.
As they neared the coast and the city centre, they passed walled villas slumbering in the shade of tall trees, rows of store fronts open for business. The traffic thickened, like cholesterol slowing the bloodflow, until they reached the boulevard that followed the shoreline along the tourist strip. Luxury hotels, palm trees, manicured lawns.
Enzo saw the curve of the beach, a deep crescent of golden sand washed by warm north Atlantic waters. It stretched away into a hazy distance, where the land rose above the docks at the north end and the remains of the old
kasbah
stood on the hill above.
Enzo tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Could you take me to the
kasbah
?”
The driver shrugged, without turning. “Nothing to see there, monsieur.”
“All the same…”
He shrugged again. “Sure.”
Major new highways converged on an enormous circular junction at the foot of the hill where the original city had once stood, and the driver turned off, circumventing road works and bumping over broken tarmac before heading up toward the walls of the
kasbah
. The road wound steeply around the hillside before spilling them out into a large paved parking area.
“You walk from here,” the driver said. “I’ll wait for you.”
Enzo stood looking out over the wall that bounded the car park down on to the docks below, the marina, and the port where all the fishing boats were tied up in rows. Then he turned to brave the touts and stall holders who lined the climb toward the old gate. He brushed aside offers of carpets and jewelry, pottery and camel rides, bottles of soda and food proffered by filthy fingers. Faces that were hopeful on his approach spat imprecations at his back, and he passed through the old gateway, climbing up broken steps into the
kasbah
itself.
He had not known quite what to expect, but when finally he arrived, there was nothing to see. The old broken-down city walls contained only rubble, sand, and dusty desert shrubs clinging obstinately to cracks in the parched earth. An old man in a timeworn
djellaba,
his head wrapped in grey cloth, followed him around, holding out a black kid goat.
It was almost impossible to imagine this as a thriving town of streets and apartments, restaurants and
souks
, a place thronging with people and life. Those who had died here remained here, beneath the buildings that had fallen on them. Like one enormous cemetery where the bodies of many thousands were entombed for eternity, a reminder, if any were needed, of the forces that nature wielded over man.
And here, too, was where the three operatives of the Wiesenthal organisation had died as they were closing in on the war criminal, Erik Fleischer. The same place that Fleischer himself had supposedly perished. But all Enzo could see now in his mind’s eye was the yellow Post-it stuck between the pages of the Everyman encyclopaedia in Killian’s study.
He did not die
.
***
In the shadow of the hill, the road ran around the perimeter of the docks. Huge rusting sheds shimmered in the heat, and the hulking carcasses of half-built boats stood, ribs exposed, like the skeletons of strange beasts long extinct. The decaying remains of ancient fishing boats sat up in the dry docks like the rotting remains of beached whales, and hundreds of small, blue-painted fishing craft were tied up to lines of wooden posts stretching across the inner harbour.
The fish market and the
Office National des Pêches
had been rebuilt since Fleischer’s day, a big square cream-coloured concrete building with pale blue stripes. A long gallery high up in the apex of the roof ran from one end of the building to the other, and windows all along its length looked down onto the trading floor below. Fish were beautifully laid out in colourful patterns in rectangular wooden boxes contained within numbered lots. Silver sea bream, red mullet, yellow snapper, sardines, white-coated buyers clustered around them in bidding frenzies. Raised voices echoed around the chamber as Enzo walked along the shiny wet concrete of the gallery with the latest in a long line of Fleischer’s successors.
Ahmed el Ghoumari was a personable young man with dark smiling eyes and unblemished olive skin. He wore an expensive suit, with a white shirt and red tie. His black shoes were polished to an impossible shine. He did not look like a man who managed a fish market.
“Your
father’s
uncle?” he said.
“No, he was on my mother’s side of the family. She was Italian, but her mother was French. Uncle Yves is the missing piece of the family jigsaw.”
“Of course, so many people died in the earthquake, their bodies never recovered. But I’m afraid Yves Vaurs was long before my time. I wasn’t even born then.” Ahmed el Ghoumari laughed, an infectious laugh full of unself-conscious good humour. “The only one I can think of who might have been around in those days was old Khalid.” There was an affection in his smile as he spoke the old man’s name. “Long past retirement, but no one has ever had the heart to ask him to go. He works in the accounts department now as a runner.” He chuckled. “I use the word ‘works’ advisedly. And it is probably about thirty years since he ran anywhere. He sits in the office and smokes cigarettes, and passes comment on the world, and has long lunches in the fish restaurant down the road. He will be only too happy to talk to you, monsieur.”
Khalid was even happier when Enzo offered to buy him lunch. He wore a grey and cream
djellaba
over faded jeans and open sandals, and he pulled the hood of it up over his baseball cap as they ventured out into the midday sun. He was an old man with a sun-dried face the colour and texture of a walnut. He walked with a limp and a stick, and had a hand-rolled cigarette permanently glued between his lips at the right-hand corner of his mouth.
Fish restaurants lined the road that led to the harbour, little more than prefab huts with open frontages and lines of plastic tables and chairs shaded by huge white parasols. Old Khalid ordered mixed seafood platters for them both and a jug of Pepsi-Cola. Enzo could have done with a beer or a chilled white wine. But neither was an option. Prodigious amounts of fried fish, prawns, and squid arrived on two enormous platters, and Khalid began gorging himself as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. For a man half Enzo’s size, it seemed as if he might be capable of eating twice as much.
“I was really just a
gamin
when Monsieur Vaurs was the manager here. Eighteen or nineteen. I started out on the fishing boats when I was twelve, but crushed my foot in a stupid accident when I was seventeen. I wasn’t fit for the fishing after that. It was Monsieur Vaurs who took me on here. Gave me a job when no one else would. He was a good man.”
Enzo remembered Cohen’s tale about the young prisoner in Mauthausen with the inflamed foot and wondered if Fleischer and Vaurs could really be the same person.
“Poor guy. Died in the earthquake. But just one of thousands, so maybe no one really grieved for him but me. I was lucky, lost no family. But everyone else was too busy grieving for parents, wives, husbands, children. It was a terrible time, monsieur. You have no idea.” He spat out some fishbones on to the plastic table cover and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before slurping several mouthfuls of Pepsi.
“Yves lived alone then?”
“As far as any of us knew.” Khalid grinned suddenly, revealing a mouthful of gaps and yellow stumps. “Though there was a rumour about an affair with the wife of some politician.”
“Who?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know, monsieur. No one did. Maybe it was just a story. But he had a certain…
mystique…
about him. You know? A sort of swagger. Self-confident. Like a man who was screwing the wife of someone important.” He laughed. “He had the style of the French. You could have believed anything about him.”
“Everyone thought he was French, then?”
Khalid looked at him blankly. “Why wouldn’t they, monsieur, since that is what he was?” He opened a tin that he produced from some hidden pocket, and took out a badly rolled cigarette. He lit it and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “Come to think of it, I might just have a photograph of him somewhere at home. There was a party to celebrate someone’s retirement, and all the staff were there. There were a lot of pictures taken that night. I have a few of them. Or, at least, I did at one time.”
***
The taxi took them deep into the rebuilt heart of the new Agadir. Apartment blocks lined narrow streets with shops and stalls and spindly trees with dusty green leaves shading donkeys and bicycles. Khalid talked nonstop with their driver in Arabic, sitting next to him in the front seat of the battered Volkswagen, smoking profusely. Enzo sat on his own in the back, staring from the window at the blur of colour and people that smeared his vision. He wasn’t really looking, lost still in the despond into which Charlotte had plunged him.
The entrance to Khalid’s apartment block was in a shaded alleyway that climbed steeply off the main drag. Enzo paid the driver and followed the old man through an archway and up a tiny staircase to the third floor. The heat was stifling and increased as they climbed. Arab music was blasting out somewhere from a badly tuned radio, and the sound of raised voices rose with the heat from the street below. They squeezed past several bicycles padlocked together on the landing and stepped over boxes and bric-à-brac cluttering the hallway just inside Khalid’s tiny apartment. A single room served as a living, dining, kitchen area, with a curtain closing off a recess with a bed. The floor and every available laying space was littered with the detritus of this man’s life. Newspapers, books, empty food cartons, bottles, dirty plates. All the windows were open wide, and the fetid air of the apartment vibrated to the hum of countless flies.
“Have a seat,” Khalid said over his shoulder, as he searched the drawers of an old dresser.
Enzo looked around. But he could not have sat without moving things off chairs. “That’s all right,” he said.
Finally, the old man turned toward him, clutching an envelope of old photographic prints, grinning widely, his eyes screwed up against the smoke that rose into them from his cigarette. “Got them.” He started leafing through the faded prints, colours that had long since lost their lustre, chuckling and muttering to himself as he recognised forgotten faces, and dredged up long lost memories. Finally he let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. “Ahhhh.” And he held out a dog-eared print for Enzo to take. “Yves Vaurs is the one in the middle.”
Here was a group, standing awkwardly together, smiling self-consciously for the camera. Women with covered heads, a couple of men in
djellabas
, the rest in suits. The faces of people long dead. Enzo wondered how many of them had died in the earthquake.
The man in the middle stood taller than the rest. He had a fine head of thick, black hair and smiled more easily than the others. Although older, it was, unmistakably, the same man in the photograph Gérard Cohen had shown him. Proof, if any were needed now, that Erik Fleischer and Yves Vaurs were one and the same man. A man who had not died, as everyone believed, in the terrible earthquake of 1960. A man who was still alive and living on a tiny island off the coast of Brittany in France.
