The detective thanked Daniel, then hung up abruptly, avoiding any ceremony—like Father Octave’s blessing.
Statistical probability. Daniel couldn’t recall exactly what he had said to the young tourist on the train. Something about odd events and the normal curve. But what was the normal curve? A run of blind wall, in a maze, along which you could walk, seeing only a little of the way ahead, until, eventually, around a long corner, you came face-to-face with the Minotaur.
Chapter 11
A BAD CANDIDATE
Eve heard Ila and Dawn arrive at the Menton apartment in the early hours of the morning. She thought she heard her sister laughing and wondered what Ila—silent Ila—might have done to make Dawn laugh.
After breakfast Eve went out to Martine’s funeral—at which she was the sole mourner, Father Octave having failed to appear. She followed her friend up to the Moskelute tomb, oversaw the interment, and received its key from the undertaker. Eve thanked him and the priest and pallbearers. She pocketed the key and walked down through the old town.
She didn’t go back to the apartment but spent the rest of the day in a manner customary to other Mentonnais of her station. She went to a patisserie and had a pear tart and a coffee. She sat in the shade on a park bench, beneath the orange trees on the Avenue Verdun. She nodded or spoke briefly to people she knew and once went into a café to borrow an ashtray, into which she poured some mineral water to rehydrate a tiny white-haired troll of a dog who had been left tethered to the leg of a bench by its master, who was asleep but plugged into a radio giving a running commentary on a bicycle race.
Eve was too late for the markets, so she went into a shop opposite the entrance to her street, bought several overripe tomatoes, a baguette, and a cylinder of soft goat’s cheese coated with ash. She took her time considering wine—since she was choosing for Dawn and Ila as well as for herself.
When she left the shop she stood still for a moment, dazzled by reflections, the low, angled sunlight on the glossy patches of old chewing gum plastered to the pavement, then set off across the delta of roadway at the bus station. At the entrance to the steep street to her apartment block Eve paused to let a car go by. It was a long car and swung out in order to make the turn into the narrow entry. Its windows were mirrored, and Eve saw herself in its beetle green glass, foreshortened and as pale as a wraith. The car revved and ran up the hill.
Eve went slowly, stopping now and then to catch her breath. She trudged up the Palais Lutetia’s front steps. It had rained in Menton while she was up in the Roya Valley, for the recently trimmed red and purple bougainvillea on the balustrade had sprouted fresh, questing shoots. Eve waited a moment in the sun, panting and hitching her shoulders to free the fabric of her shirt from the patch of sweat on her back. She noticed the car that had passed her, stopped in the yellow-painted turning space of the palais’s inadequate parking lot. Its driver was still sitting in it. Eve had the impression he was watching her. She squinted but couldn’t penetrate the reflective glass to see who he might be.
Eve pushed herself up the steps and went into her building.
It was cooler in the lobby beneath the apartment’s central well, where stairs with marble treads wound up ten floors around an elevator shaft fenced with bronze mesh. The Moskelute apartment was on the second floor, but because it was her habit when burdened by shopping, Eve went to the elevator. As she put her hand into the handle of its concertinaed door, Eve heard footfalls behind her. Someone was hurrying up the flight of steps from the outer door to the entrance hall. Eve glanced back over her shoulder and saw a shapeless shadow against the blue late-afternoon sky and the orange-tiled roofs of the apartments down the slope. The figure came into the light from the stairwell and Eve saw his enveloping coat, ski mask, shades, gloved hands.
She hauled the elevator door open and lunged inside. The elevator cage shook. She swept the outer door closed and heard its catch click. She slid the inner door into place and flung herself away from the hand that snaked through the two cages and made a grab at her. She hit the up button.
The elevator hummed and began to move. Eve backed against the cage’s far wall. As the elevator went up, she stooped to keep her attacker in sight.
The figure moved swiftly. Eve could suddenly see the whole rectangle of light from the front door. She began to jab as many buttons as she could and, as she’d hoped, the Palais Lutetia’s aged and temperamental elevator came to a stubborn stop. Eve looked up and saw boots, the swinging hem of a long coat. He was on the second floor before the elevator and at the call button. She heard the button rattle as he pressed it rapidly, over and over.
The elevator didn’t move.
The wrapped figure crept slowly back down.
Sunlight came through the tall windows that gave a view from each of the palais’s landings through the rear of the building and back toward the east, where the sun was touching the top of the high barrier of the Maritime Alps. There was a patch of hard, hot late-afternoon sun on the first marble-tiled landing. The bundled figure edged past it, his masked and hooded head averted. He came back down the lower flight. He stopped in the hall, raised his head, and looked into the elevator cage at Eve. He seized the outer cage and shook it.
A booming echoed up and down the height of the building. The metal grated and complained.
Who was this? Eve thought. Then she thought: This is Tom. Tom Hilxen—her husband’s biographer. At some point she had recognized his walk, his posture. She said, perplexed, “Tom?”
Tom Hilxen doffed his hood and pulled off his shades and ski mask. He stuffed them into his pockets.
Eve said, “If I’d known it was you I wouldn’t have imagined you were dangerous. You frightened me. What are you doing?”
Tom rattled the cage again. He put a hand through the bars and began to grope for the buttons.
Eve was so startled by his persistence that she dropped her shopping. The wine bottle burst. Shards of glass shot out in every direction, and a gush of wine splattered onto the elevator floor and ran out its open walls.
Tom kept up his fumbling search.
Eve tried to remain calm. She said, “What are you doing, Tom? Where have you been? Why are you trying to frighten me?”
She didn’t get an answer. Instead Tom Hilxen jumped onto the bars of the outer cage and began to rattle them furiously.
The racket of Tom’s attack brought Dawn to the door of the apartment. Dawn was awake early, tousled and in a bathrobe. She looked around the door and saw the elevator caught between floors with her sister inside it. She came out and padded down the first flight, her feet making sticky sounds on the marble. On the landing she stopped, then sank against the wall, her eyes streaming. She couldn’t look for long—the sun reflecting from the floor near her bare feet was too strong. Dawn tucked her feet beneath the hem of the robe, flung her hair forward across her face, then made a small parting with a fingertip and peered through it.
Tom finally spoke. He said—to Dawn—“No.” He wasn’t prepared to see her.
“No?” Dawn said sweetly.
“Yes. No,” said Tom.
“Binary is a bit too slow for conversation, Tom,” said Dawn. She edged along the wall, then whimpered, dropped her head, and thrust her reddening hands into the wide ends of the robe’s sleeves.
Eve told her sister to stay put.
At that moment a woman appeared in the hall behind Tom. It was Eve’s upstairs neighbor, a straw blond, mahogany-skinned matron. She said, “Pardon,” to Tom, then, when he didn’t immediately move, “Permesso!”
Tom shuffled out of her way, angled his body toward the ranks of mailboxes, hunched his shoulders, and hung his head.
“Madame Moskelute, is there some problem with the elevator?” Eve’s neighbor asked.
“Um,” said Eve stupidly. Then, “Yes. I’m trapped. Could you call the concierge?” The concierge was on-site; his apartment had its entrance at the rear of the palais.
The neighbor looked dubio
us. She watched the elevator cage drip into the elevator well. The hall smelled of machine oil and spilled wine. The neighbor lived on the fifth floor, and she was laden with shopping. She hefted her bags and looked pointedly at Tom. Perhaps this able-bodied individual might be prevailed upon to carry them?
Tom refused to meet her eye.
The neighbor sighed. She said she’d call the concierge. She began up the stairs, sighing and huffing. “Madame,” she said again, greeting Dawn in tones of deep disapproval. (The building did not like its tenants to appear in the stairwell—or even on their balconies—in nightwear. The rule was informal but its pressure definite.)
Eve, Dawn, and Tom remained frozen while the burdened matron huffed up ten flights to the fifth floor. They listened to her key in her lock, then her door closing.
Tom moved toward the elevator again. He put his arm back into the cage and sought the controls. Eve shrank against the far wall, well away from him. She shouted that the concierge was coming. She looked over her shoulder, saw Dawn edging through the narrow strip of shadow below the landing window. “Why are you trying to scare me?” Eve yelled at Tom. She knew that Dawn and Ila had hurt Tom, but he had stayed with them for years and had seemed to forgive them. When Tom vanished they all assumed that he’d met with some accident, not that he’d intended to disappear.
Tom said, “Ila’s fledgling killed our nestling.”
“Who?” Dawn said. “I don’t understand.”
Eve looked over her shoulder again. She saw the sun passing out of the notch in the mountain crest above St. Agnes, the gap that had concentrated the last ten minutes of its hot light. She saw a filmy fan of shadows sweep upward from the windowsill and close the other fan of hazy golden air. The ray of shadow brushed aside the ray of light, and both transparent geometries were gone. The window was suddenly blue with twilight, and Eve saw Ila cross it, leaping, airborne, a weightless blur. Dawn surged up after him—but looked slow. The whole stairwell shuddered as Ila hit the angle of its walls with both feet and one hand and launched himself, twisting in midair, in an arcing leap, over the whole bottom flight. Eve shifted her focus and saw Tom move toward the door, then stop, his back arched and arms outflung. Tom grunted, then wrenched himself off the blade in his back. The cleaver in Ila’s hand continued its stroke; it slit Tom’s coat open and slammed into the floor, shattering a tile.
Eve shouted at Ila, “Stop!”
Tom bolted. Ila hefted the cleaver—one of Eve’s cooking utensils—and sprang after him. Tom staggered, and Ila took a skid on Tom’s blood. They reached the front door at the same moment—Tom flung himself through it and, arms over his head, sailed across the balustrade. Ila came up hard against the brightness beyond the door, down toward the sea, where glass still scintillated in the low sun. He took cover against the door, his colorless eyes pouring tears.
Eve heard a car start; she heard it laboring back and forth, making an uncoordinated hash of its turn in the palais’s narrow parking lot. Dawn rushed out past Ila but returned as the car squealed away down the hill.
Dawn took off her bathrobe and used it to wipe up the blood, followed the splashes to their source, and dabbed at that. She folded the bloodied robe. Eve watched her sister, her swinging, matted blond and brown hair, her muscled body, its white markings smooth and continuous with her pale skin. “The concierge may come at any minute,” Eve said.
Dawn said she was almost done. She slung the bloody robe over her shoulders and came to the cage. She stretched a slender arm through it but couldn’t reach her sister. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Eve said she thought she was—only she wished they would both get out of sight before the concierge appeared.
Ila went back up the stairs, carrying the bloodied cleaver upright, like an ice-cream cone. Dawn sprinted up after him. They shut themselves into the apartment.
Eve waited. She was trembling. She knelt on the wet floor to shake bits of broken bottle out of the bag containing the rest of her shopping—sorted herself out thus far.
The concierge appeared, preceded by a wafting stink of pastis. He stared at Eve blearily and swayed. He had Madame Moskelute push the elevator’s buttons in various combinations and himself hammered helplessly on the call button. Then he shrugged and blew out his cheeks and trudged up twenty flights to the control room at the top of the building. Five minutes later the elevator jerked into action. It traveled up to the tenth floor, where the concierge let Eve out. He scowled at the mess of wine and glass on the elevator floor. Eve gave him twenty francs, then picked up her shopping and went back down the stairs to her apartment.
Eve unpacked her shopping. She rinsed and dried her hands and set to work at chopping board and stove top. Ila sat on a sofa, his feet tucked under him, and licked blood from the cleaver. Dawn wandered in and out of a bedroom, changing her outfit several times. Eve eyed her sister and thought that this was a rather strange manifestation of distress. Then she looked down at the frying pan, her wooden spatula chasing a pile of caramelized onions from side to side of it, and she realized that really she and Dawn, though upset, were behaving completely in character—she was cooking, and Dawn was trying on clothes.
Eve said to Ila, “Did you hear what Tom said right before you came out the door?”
Ila didn’t answer her. He was busy grooming a dribble of blood from one wrist.
“Actually … why haven’t you asked us what Tom said?” Eve left her cooking unattended and came to the door. The spatula dripped green olive oil on her apron. “And why did you just attack him?”
Ila threw the cleaver down on the couch beside him and peered at Eve through the starbursts of his white eyelashes. “They go away, and come back, and think I’m the fatted calf,” he said. “If they come back they’re always trouble.”
Eve shook her head at him.
“Tom killed Martine,” Ila said, reasonable. “And now he’s trying to kill you.”
Eve asked what made Ila imagine Tom had killed Martine.
“He answered the phone in Martine’s apartment.”
Dawn reappeared, stooped over, shook herself, and came up again to show the hall mirror the smooth tops of her breasts pressed together in the slit neck of a green dress. She told Ila he was barking up the wrong tree. “Tom said, ‘Ila’s fledgling killed our nestling.’”
“Martine wasn’t a fledgling,” said Eve. Then she asked Ila whether Tom had been in Martine’s apartment before or after her death.
“After, I believe.”
“We don’t know that Martine wasn’t a fledgling,” Dawn said. “And I’m only going by what Tom said. In Ila’s nest there was only me and Martine. I haven’t killed anyone’s nestling. Hell, I haven’t even ever met another vampire. Tom must have meant Martine. If he was in her apartment he might have only been trying to find her. Find her and ask her questions.”
Tom had said “our nestling.” Eve wondered who Tom had found, who he could tolerate well enough to live with. Proud Tom. Resentful Tom.
“It’s Martine who is dead,” Ila said to Dawn. “Who was killed.”
“And Martine couldn’t have killed anyone,” Eve added. She said that perhaps Tom had only wanted to talk to them about it—Ila’s fledgling, his nestling—his grievance, whatever it was.
“Intimidate first and talk later? Well, yes, I suppose that’s like Tom,” Dawn said. Then to Ila, “But you showed up, with the cleaver.”
“Do you imagine Tom was only playing with Eve?” Ila said to Dawn. “Only pretending? No. Tom was always a bad choice. Not that he was mine. Not that I had a choice.”
Eve’s knife paused in its tattoo on the chopping board. Dawn stopped peering into the mirror. For a moment the only sound was of garlic and onions sizzling in the pan.
Dawn said, “This is the most we’ve heard from you in over a year.”
“I talked to Martine,” Ila said.
“Oh, that’s right. Martine was your guru. Martine was your confessor.”
“Daw
n,” Eve said, warning her sister.
Ila hung his head; he nodded at the rug, rhythmic nodding, as though he were jacked into some music inaudible to them. He said, “Eve? Is she really dead?”
Eve was gentle. She said, “Yes, she is. We’ll go and say goodbye to her tonight. But I must make dinner first, since I’m at the bottom of the food chain.”
Dawn strutted out of the room and came back a moment later in a red slip dress and carrying some black pumps by their tall heels. She dropped the shoes on the floor and mounted them, cocked her hip, and wriggled to show the mirror her small pouting belly and raised rump.
Eve asked her sister what she was doing.
“She’s dressing for her new friend,” Ila said.
“Something’s burning,” Dawn said.
Eve turned to the stove to chip at the place where the bacon’s thready flesh had adhered to the pan.
Eve had answered Tom Hilxen’s second letter, the one that arrived in 1979, two weeks after Jean had died. Tom offered his condolences and asked if he might see her. He had a grant to do some study, he wrote, to extend his thesis on Jean Ares. To turn it into a book. Eve acknowledged Tom’s condolences and said she wasn’t ready to meet him, wasn’t ready even to consider decisions she had to make.
Tom Hilxen came to Europe and seemed to circle her. She would hear from one of Ares’s sons that he’d met Mr. Hilxen. A daughter had a copy of Mr. Hilxen’s thesis. Another daughter mailed Eve a copy of an obituary—from the Denver Post—with Tom Hilxen’s byline. Apparently the family were all better prepared than Eve had been for Jean to continue his journey. Downward, Eve thought, remembering the smooth mechanism by which Jean’s casket had sunk into its green baize-lined grave, a grave like a jeweler’s case set in the dry white soil of the cemetery. Eve imagined a continuation of that smooth process. Her husband would go on down into the smelter of a first posthumous biography and emerge, bronze-dipped, sealed off from her in the shell of someone else’s regard. Someone—this young American.