Lovers and Liars Trilogy

  “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 d
ied 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.

  Maria Cazarès had not died at the St. Étienne hospital; she, Juliette, had spoken to the ambulance people, to the doctor who admitted her, and they had been definite. Cazarès was probably dead by the time poor, frantic, half-senile Mathilde had managed to telephone; she was certainly dead by the time the paramedics entered this apartment, and none of their attempts at resuscitation had met with any success. So she had not died at the St. Étienne with Jean Lazare at her side. Juliette did not know why he made that claim—unless it was something he wished to believe himself.

  She had spent the previous night trying to plug gaps, and putting out to the press the story Lazare favored, in the manner and at the time that he chose.

  The doctor at the St. Étienne, now rehearsed, had been available for interview. Lazare was skillful, Juliette thought. He understood how to give information to the press so they noticed less what he withheld. And what he was chiefly withholding, of course, was Mathilde—though why he should do so, Juliette could not conceive. This mumbling, half-senile old woman was unlikely to tell any reporter anything useful or scandalous. She was Maria’s devoted maid; they had been taking tea together; Maria had suffered a sudden and massive heart attack—where were the secrets there?

  Throughout the day Juliette had fended off only a few reporters; some Frenchmen that morning, a seedy cameraman from some British tabloid, and a rather more intelligent Italian paparazzo that afternoon. The paparazzo had wanted a picture of the room in which Cazarès collapsed; Juliette thought he had not expected to get it via the front door, and had not been greatly dismayed when he failed. After that, nothing—until the English journalist from a respectable paper, a paper Juliette would not have expected to take the least interest in this furor, had turned up.

  It had been unpleasant, endless—and a fairly pointless exercise to boot. She listened, hearing a door open—and then realized, to her great relief, that the old woman had finished washing at last and was now shuffling along the corridor to her bed. Juliette heard the creaking of floorboards, then further mutterings: more prayers, she thought, and looked at the clock. This last hour of duty seemed the longest hour of her life.

  Tomorrow morning, at ten-thirty, further duties remained to be performed. A limousine was to be sent to collect Madame Duval and bring her to Cazarès; she was then to be settled backstage for the duration of the show. This was tradition. Mathilde Duval had always attended the collections, had done so for twenty years—more. In the past it was she who arrived there with Maria Cazarès, she who stayed by her side throughout, soothing her nerves, talking to her, keeping her calm, tucked away in a little private back room until the moment Maria dreaded arrived, the moment she had to face the audience, the cameras, the applause.

  The fact that Maria was dead altered nothing, Lazare said. It would have been Maria’s wish for Mathilde to be present, and present she would be. Juliette shivered again and edged toward the doorway. She could hear the muttered praying continue. Through the open door opposite, she could see into that terrible pink shrine of a room. She turned back to the sitting room, frowning now. Was there something to conceal here? She had assumed she was here purely as a result of Lazare’s almost pathological secrecy concerning Maria. But what if there were a serious reason for his insistence Mathilde be kept away from the press? Was it Mathilde he was worried about—or was it this place itself?

  This idea had not occurred to her before. The instant it did, she began to look around her with closer attention. She moved to the mantelpiece and inspected the ugly objects crowded there, then to a table on which were perched more photographs of Maria, all of them fairly recent, she judged. She edged between small rickety tables, toward the far end of the room, which was dominated by a huge, very ugly secretary piled with knickknacks and papers, like every other surface here. There were pens, and bits of string, and scissors and sticks of sealing wax, and bottles of ink. The old woman had spilled some ink, she saw. A little pool of it, now dried, blotched one of the sheets of paper. It looked as if she had been trying to write a letter. Juliette bent over the page: the old woman’s writing was as crabbed as she would have expected; she could read only the opening words: Mon bien-aimé Christophe. Il faut que je te voie, c’est urgent… Je suis navrée’ tu me manques…

  Who was Christophe? she wondered. Some grandchild, perhaps? The rest of the letter, unfinished, was obscured by the spillage of ink, as if the old woman had been writing, knocked over the ink bottle, then abandoned the effort. Poor thing, Juliette thought. She straightened a few items on the desk, feeling guilty for her own curiosity. There was a small pile of tiny boxes, she saw, thrust behind the pile of papers. Their wrappings were scattered beside them, and those wrappings could have come only from Cazarès: she recognized the silver cord, the gold faille, the signature white silk scraps.

  Perhaps Maria had brought some presents for the old woman yesterday, she thought, and given them to her before they took tea, before she collapsed. How sad. Whatever these three little boxes had contained, they were empty now. Perhaps little pieces of jewelry, some small token of affection. If so, she knew Mathilde would not let them out of her sight.

  She crossed the room and looked along the corridor. The muttered prayers had ceased. She tiptoed to the door of the old woman’s room and peeped in. She was lying there, breathing steadily, eyes open and staring into space. She looked as if she were waiting for something, or someone. Juliette crept away. She was just telling herself that she was letting her imagination run away with her, when the doorbell rang, startling her.

  She went to the front door, peered through the peephole, hesitated, then felt a sudden rush of elation: that handsome English journalist had come back.

  She unbolted the door and opened it at once. This Rowland McGuire, whose card was in her pocket right now, had a half-amused, half-reckless look on his face—an expression Juliette decided she liked. In his arms, spilling out of his arms—and this she liked even more—was one of the most exquisite bouquets she had ever seen in her life.

  “For you,” he said. “I was just wondering—when you come off duty—might I buy you a drink?”

  He had the most devastating green eyes she had ever seen, and also the most devastating smile.

  She hesitated for half a second; it was almost seven anyway. Then she returned the smile.

  “I admire persistence,” she said. “And after today a drink would be excellent. I’ll just get my coat.”

  From the window of Helen’s penthouse apartment, Pascal had a clear view of the street below. Standing in the darkened room in which Marianne was now sleeping, he watched Rowland McGuire leave the building next door and descend its wide portico steps. He was with a tall, elegant, middle-aged woman. Pascal caught a glimpse of her high-heeled shoes, her pale blond hair; she looked as if she were making some adverse comment on the weather; she drew her long fur coat more tightly around her. McGuire said something to her, at which she smiled; they disappeared, side by side, along the street.

  Pascal rested his face against the cold dark glass. Behind him, Marianne’s breathing had become peaceful. The room was quiet, filled with the stuffed toy animals Marianne loved. The book from which he had been reading to her lay beside her bed, next to the tiny night-light in the shape of an
owl with folded wings, which Pascal, knowing she feared the dark, had bought for her on one of his trips. From where? London? New York? Madrid? Rome? He had no recollection. He could no more remember this small event than he had been able to concentrate on the words in the story he had been reading aloud. Before he began reading, when he had been standing here at the window, as he was now, he had suddenly realized who they were, the man and the woman opposite, the tall man and the slender woman who kept her face carefully averted from this building as she spoke.

  To see them made his heart ice; he had continued to stand there, unable to move. He had watched McGuire leave Gini there, cross the street, and enter the apartment building next door. Just at the second when Pascal had decided to go down, go out, speak to Gini, McGuire had returned. They had walked away, and near the corner Gini had taken his arm. The gesture had been companionable; its easy working familiarity, as if they were not lovers but merely colleagues, cut Pascal to the heart. Here, too, he thought, he had been usurped. Now, turning away from the window, he told himself that it was fortunate he had not taken that plane, fortunate he had seen this, fortunate he had resisted that impulse to go down and speak to her. Gini was obviously continuing her work with McGuire despite a scene that morning that had left him scarcely able to function, to think. He loathed, and also despised, protracted endings. Yes, he had decided to remain in Paris, but everything that needed to be said had already been said—there was no going back.

  He looked down at his sleeping child, his heart welling with love for her; he bent and kissed her forehead, then left the room. He returned to Helen’s opulent living room, where she was sitting quietly, reading a book.

  “That took a while.” She looked up with a smile, saw his expression, and closed her book. Pascal picked up his overcoat.

  “Yes. I read the whole story twice. Then we talked. I think she’s nervous about the dentist tomorrow.”

  “Oh, she’ll be fine. It’s only a filling. You’re taking her. That makes it a treat.” Helen rose. Pascal wondered if she would ever lose this knack she had of making the positive negative, of making what might have been a compliment a reproach. Since Helen’s remarriage, their relationship had been easier, but even now she could never resist such sly digs.