Lovers and Liars Trilogy (144 page)

Gini was watching him and listening intently. He could see her mind start to race.

“Rowland—you don’t think? It couldn’t be—”

“That Star is the missing child in Lindsay’s New Orleans story? I’m ashamed to say it did occur to me, yes. Almost as soon as Lindsay told me the story. So, for what it’s worth, I got in touch with the
Correspondent’s
Miami stringer yesterday. He’s gone to New Orleans to do some checking. It’s also why I wanted you to ask Anneke’s mother if Star could have been American, or had American connections.”

“And has the stringer come up with anything?”

“Not so far, no. He’s in search of a last name, mainly. He was going to try that convent, and the Grants. But it’s nearly thirty years ago, and I’m not optimistic that he’ll have much success.”

“You said—ashamed? Rowland, there
is
some connection, you admit that. And Star is around the right age. He’s black-haired, like Cazarès and Lazare. He has the right kind of past history—foster homes, children’s homes—or so Chantal said.”

“I know. He has vaguely the right qualifications—and so have thousands of other men. No, Gini. It’s too neatly convenient, and it’s too damn far-fetched.”

“Far-fetched things do happen. Open any newspaper any day of the week—they’re
full
of far-fetched stories. Besides, is it that unlikely? Suppose Star
was
their child, and suppose he was fostered out or put in a home shortly after birth—he would have the right to be given his parents’ names when he reached a certain age. He could have tried to trace them.” She paused, then shook her head. “No. You’re right. It doesn’t stand up. How could he have traced them? Lazare and Cazarès have been very careful to cover their tracks.”

“I agree.” Rowland shrugged. “Even so—I thought it was at least worth instigating some inquiries. But I don’t seriously believe that
is
the connection between Lazare and Cazarès and Star. I wouldn’t even have considered it, but at the time—I’d had two nights with very little sleep. I was thinking of Cassandra, and I couldn’t forget the way I found her, how she looked…” He glanced away. “For that, and other reasons, my judgment was impaired, and I’m well aware of that.”

“What other reasons?”

“Work. Pressures of work. I’m still coming to terms with a relatively new job—a desk job, which is something I’ve never done before, something Max talked me into.” He hesitated, then turned back to face her. “Coming to terms with other changes in my life. And resisting them, of course.”

For a moment he thought she had picked up his inference; then he realized she had not. But something he had said had made her suddenly thoughtful. She picked up her fork again, then put it down. She had eaten only half her food. She pushed it aside with a gesture of apology, then seemed to forget it. She raised her eyes to his.

“Do people resist change? You think they do? Why, Rowland? Because they’re afraid?”

“Perhaps it’s fear. Change can be for the bad as well as the good,” he said in a guarded way. “So they cling to the known. Avoid the possible abyss.”

“Do you think—do people resist change in others, or just in themselves?”

He could see the importance of this question to her: “Yes, I do,” he said quietly. “In themselves, and in others. Both.”

“Why?
Why
do they do that?”

“Gini, for a hundred reasons—you know that. Because of the unpredictability of change. Because change can seem like betrayal, a treachery to people’s former selves.” He broke off, and Gini could see that he had suddenly brought himself up close to some experience painful to him. She saw the decision not to discuss it, or impart it, mask his face. “It’s pointless to resist,” he went on, after a while, in a quiet voice. “If the change involved is deep—not frivolous, superficial—I’m not sure that it even
can
be resisted. It will happen, like it or not. And sometimes”—he looked away again—“sometimes, if the change is very rapid, by the time you acknowledge it’s happened, it’s too late.”

There was a silence. She bent her head. She moved her knife one inch, then moved it back.

“And you think it can be rapid?” she said.

“Oh, I think it can be astonishingly fast. I think it can happen in the middle of a sentence, halfway through a meal, walking along a street. I think it can happen between falling asleep and waking the next morning.” His voice became dry. “No doubt it’s been approaching for some while, creeping up on you in a stealthy way—until finally you permit yourself to admit capture. Then it’s irremediable, of course.”

“You’re sure?”

Rowland could see that she was following a train of thought separate from his own. He had just spoken to her with a frankness he had not used in six years, and yet she had missed his meaning. He wondered if that was intentional, then saw it was not. He considered being more overt, then rejected that option as a form of trespass.

“Is it? Is it irremediable?” She was now leaning toward him, her eyes bright, her face tense with entreaty.

Rowland sighed: “I would say so,” he replied. “Gini—that particular clock can’t be wound back.”

He sensed her draw away; he saw her begin to reach for her scarf and her coat. He signaled for the bill. She had recovered her composure and was trying to appear businesslike. Rowland watched her tie the shamrock-green scarf around her throat. He reached across the table, touched her hand, then withdrew his.

“So what do you want to do now, Gini? Go on? Stop? Rest?”

“Go on.” She picked up her bag. “We’ll go to Mathilde’s next. Okay?”

“It’s what I would suggest. If you’d prefer to go back to the hotel—they did find a room for you… I could go to Mathilde’s. You look tired, Gini.”

“No. I’m not. I told you. I want to work. Rowland—we have to go on with this. We
are
making progress. And Star has that gun. I want to find Mina.” She frowned, her face becoming set. “I’m determined to do that.” She rose. “Let’s both go to Mathilde’s. Fight our way past Lazare’s guards if they’re there.”

She smiled as she said this. Rowland followed her out of the restaurant. In the street outside, she glanced up at the sky. Her hair was still damp from the rain, and so was his. The last light of the afternoon had faded. A student rode past on a bicycle; from a house opposite, a child called to his mother. In the distance, muted, they could hear the roar of the city’s rush-hour traffic.

“How dark it is,” she said.

It was after five when they reached the rue de Rennes. It was, Rowland thought, a dull if expensive street, high bourgeois, one of those citadels of the rich to be found in any large city, the Paris equivalent of Mayfair, or Park Avenue: a wide boulevard lined with trees and flanked on both sides by ornate ten-story turn-of-the-century apartment buildings. Their ranked windows glittered with lights. There were few passersby; Gini, walking beside him, came to an abrupt halt.

“It’s that building across there. It’s the one next to Helen’s.”

“Helen’s?”

“Helen Lamartine-that-was. These apartments are huge, Rowland…” She hesitated, and he could see how tense she had suddenly become.

“There’s no point in our both going up.”

“You want me to go?”

“I’d rather you did. I’ll give you ten minutes—then I’ll wait around the corner. There’s a café there, just up on the right. You can’t miss it.”

“Very well. In any case, Lazare’s thorough. I doubt I’ll be as long as ten minutes.”

He was right. Gini waited, shivering. She turned up the collar of her coat and paced. She stared hard at the sidewalk, the trees, the porticos of these buildings, fixing on their details and refusing to allow the past back. Rowland returned six minutes later.

“As we thought. There’s some damn woman from the Cazarès press office standing guard. She gave me her card and told me to call their offices tomorrow if I had any queries. She was extremely charming. Then she shut the door in my face.”

“She did?” Gini looked at him in a curious way, a speculative way. “What sort of age was she?”

“Age? God knows. Forty? Forty-five? What difference does it make?”

“It might make a difference.” Her voice was dry. “You have certain advantages, Rowland, and you tend to underestimate them.”

He was already beginning to walk away. “What are you talking about?”

Gini looked at his tall figure, at his extraordinary eyes, at his hair. She linked her arm through his.

“Just around this corner, Rowland,” she said, “next to that café I mentioned, there’s a flower shop. One of the best in Paris. Filled with the most exquisite roses, lilies, narcissus…”

“So? What of it?”

“You may work for a very reputable newspaper, Rowland, and you may be very good at your job, but even you can learn. Come with me.” She smiled. “You remember what you said to me on the telephone in Amsterdam? Well, let me just show you a few
tabloid
techniques.”

It was not yet six in the evening, and Mathilde Duval, a woman of entrenched habits, was already preparing for bed. Juliette de Nerval, appointed her guardian and protector by Jean Lazare himself, watched this process with some pity, and a great deal of revulsion.

She did not know Mathilde Duval’s exact age, but she looked eighty at least. She was, of course, of peasant stock, and peasant women, particularly from the south, aged quickly—so she might be younger. Whatever her true age, Mathilde was the embodiment of everything Juliette most feared. Whatever it took, she told herself, watching the old woman, she herself was never going to end up like this.

Mathilde was no more than five feet tall, if that, and bent as a witch. Heavy black clothes, head to foot; thinning hair scraped back against her scalp; a bristle of hairs on her chin; a face etched with deep lines, not just beneath the eyes and around the mouth, but everywhere. Her hands were twisted with arthritis; her ankles were swollen; she was virtually blind; she moved around this ghastly apartment at a snail’s pace, fingering a rosary, touching little sacred pictures, and muttering to herself.

The temperature in the apartment was about ninety degrees. Although the old woman was forever fussing, and dusting, and brushing, it smelled. It smelled of mothballs, which Juliette had forgotten existed; it smelled of burnt cooking oil, and dust, and clothes that weren’t quite clean. Occasionally—she was beginning to suspect Mathilde might be incontinent—it smelled powerfully of urine. Then the old woman would disappear into one of the bathrooms for a long time, emerging fresher.

Juliette knew that even if the old woman fell, or called for help from that bathroom, she would find it very difficult to go to her aid. She pitied, but her skin crawled.

At seven she was off duty. Meanwhile, she couldn’t breathe, and she felt sick.

The old woman’s preparations for bed seemed endless. First there had been the meal, then some hot milk, then the bed in her room had to be turned down and a hot water bottle put in to warm the sheets. Then she prayed—on her knees, by the bed. Then she went into the room next to hers, that dreadful shrine to her beloved Maria, and insisted on turning that bed down, as if Maria were going to be sleeping there, as if she were waiting for a woman she knew to be dead.

That particular part of her nightly ritual had made Juliette shiver; she began to have a horrible feeling that she and the old woman were watched, that they were not alone here, that some revenant stealthily and silently approached.

She had backed out of the pink room fast as Mathilde began to light a series of votive night-lights under the photographs of Maria Cazarès. Their flames flickered. In their wavering light the walls and the pictures seemed to move. The bed, with its monstrous fat pink silk eiderdown, looked as if it might stir. Juliette, who would have said she did not believe in ghosts, sensed them now. She could feel presences in the corners of this room, the caress of a cold hand on her spine. She fled. Back in the sitting room, trembling, she smoked several cigarettes.

The old woman was washing now. Juliette listened to the noise of running water, the thrum of pipes. She tried not to watch the time. She stood in the middle of this room, with its mass of crowded furniture, trying not to see the crucifixes, the saints’ pictures, and the portrayals of Christ Above the mantelpiece there was a huge depiction of Him: greenish-pink; He was indicating a large hole in His heart region, within which burned a light.

Juliette averted her eyes. None of the windows would open. She wished she could leave. She even wished that English journalist—that quite extraordinarily
handsome
English journalist—would come back. Anything to get her out of this place. Another hour, she told herself; less. Then she could go home, have a bath, a large drink, and talk to her husband—if he was there, of course. They could talk about Stockholm, to which city her husband, a diplomat, was shortly to be posted. Only another month, Juliette thought, and she couldn’t wait to leave Paris, leave Cazarès. She’d worked there nearly ten years, and she’d realized—suddenly, about six months ago—that she no longer relished her responsibilities or enjoyed her position. The spirit of Cazarès had gone, she thought, and had been gone for a while, perhaps as long as five years; she had just been slow to realize it. Lazare had disguised the alteration, of course; with unflagging energy—an energy she suspected ate him away—he herded them all on, never relaxing his standards, never acknowledging their collective pretense. He knew the heart had gone out of the whole enterprise; he knew they were trying to breathe life into the dead, but his cold refusal to acknowledge that fact in the smallest degree drove them all on. No one dared to question, or express doubt or dissent.

Juliette moved around the room restlessly. It occurred to her suddenly that Maria Cazarès almost certainly died in this very room—at that thought, she froze. Where? On the sofa? In that chair over there where Mathilde said she permitted only her beloved Maria to sit? On that rug, in front of the fireplace? Juliette shrank back from the rug, and with trembling hands lit another cigarette.

So many lies, she thought; that was what her job amounted to now. She was paid a handsome salary to disseminate untruths. No, there was no truth in these foolish rumors that Maria Cazarès was unwell. No, certainly, no extra staff were employed to assist with designs: every last item of the couture and the ready-to-wear was designed by Maria Cazarès herself… Even the press conference today: much of Lazare’s speech, which had moved her to tears, had been either a direct lie or a careful evasion of the truth.