“Do you know who I am?” the young man demanded with that desire to take the initiative Lazare found tiresome in the young.
“I imagine you are not Madame Duval’s great-nephew,” he replied. He took a sip of the brandy. “I also imagine you’re going to tell me who you truly are. Make it brief.”
The young man did not like that reply. Indeed, a taste for dramatics, Lazare thought, watching him: his response was to remove a gun from his pocket and place it, under his hand, on the desk.
Lazare glanced down at the gun, which he recognized as a Beretta. The safety catch was off.
“Continue,” he said.
“You have security in here?” The young man jerked his gaze away, tensing. “You have an alarm system—something like that?”
“Of course.” Lazare indicated a small panel built into the surface of his desk. “I could activate that. I could also activate a small button set into the floor by my feet. You needn’t worry. I have no intention of activating either. Besides—unless you are a very poor shot—I’d be dead or dying before assistance arrived—so there isn’t a great deal of point to it.”
He was still disconcerting the man—even alarming him, he realized, and this was not what he wanted. He saw his eyes swivel and the color come and go in his face. With a quiet gesture Lazare pushed his chair back from the desk. He sighed.
“I’m now beyond reach of either alarm. You prefer that?”
“Sure I do. Stay like that.”
“Tell me who you are,” Lazare said. “I should tell you, I already know the part you played in Maria Cazarès’s death. It was you who told her about that chemist in Amsterdam, was it not? Your friend who could provide the one pill that would restore her happiness and enable her to work? Maria told me—oh, nearly a year ago now—that some friend had discovered this man. She told me it was another designer. I didn’t believe her—but that didn’t matter. I even believed in the man and his experiments for a while, which was why I was persuaded to help fund them. I wanted to believe, of course.”
“You did?” The young man stared at him. “Why?”
“Because we had tried everything else. Innumerable doctors, clinics, methods of treatment. I had spent five years exploring the further reaches of medicine, with the help of some arcane and semilegal practitioners as well as some of the finest doctors in Europe. I was—desperate.” He paused. “And when one is desperate, one will try anything. Is that not so?”
The man made a small convulsive gesture of the hand. Lazare frowned.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, however. When you planted the idea in Maria’s mind that this chemist and these pills would be her salvation—did you realize they were lethal then?”
“They’re not lethal.” He gave Lazare a look of derision. “She was so fucking dumb. You were so dumb. You let her get hold of too many at once—and she took them. Four in one day, one from you, then three at Mathilde’s. No food. No water. She was sick already, very thin”—he gave a shrug—“so, what do you know? Cardiac arrest.” He paused. “But you’re smart, I’ll give you that. I didn’t want the pills to kill her. Quite the reverse.”
“You wanted them to ensure she was well enough to attend her collection today, is that it? I see. Of course.” Lazare gave a small frown. “You wanted her out on the runway.”
“Oh, I wanted you both out on the runway.” The young man gave a complacent smile. “You—no problem. But I could see she was cracking up fast. I could see that way back last year. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want her fucking up my plans. She had to appear. The White Doves should have fixed that…” His eyes narrowed. “It’s odd, isn’t it? You’re a careful man, a detail man—everyone says that about you. Every article I’ve ever read, that’s what it says. Yet you let her overdose. Why was that?”
A tiny flicker of emotion passed across Lazare’s impassive face. The young man was not so unintelligent, he thought.
“Let’s just say…” He gave a sigh. “I made it difficult for Maria, but not impossible. The pills were in a drawer in my desk. She knew which drawer and which desk. She knew that drawer was locked, and she knew I kept the key. In the end—and, of course, I couldn’t be certain what the result would be—I left her the choice. If she wanted to break into my desk, if she wanted to increase the dosage, when I had very clearly told her what that dosage should be—that was her choice. You see…” He looked away from the young man and let his eyes rest on the blank wall opposite.
“You see, I had come to the end. I could not go on any longer. I would never have expected to say that. I am not a man who gives up easily, or who likes to give up. But I had reached that point. Perhaps Maria had also. Death can be merciful, you know. There comes a point when it is very good simply to draw a line, close the accounts, close the book… You’re too young, perhaps, to understand that.”
Lazare half rose, then, seeing this movement increased the young man’s agitation, sat down again. He looked at his watch. He glanced up at the TV screen.
“So. I think I know what you told Maria. I think I know who you managed to persuade her you were. Mathilde Duval has told me certain details too. I now know how you first met her, and how you insinuated yourself, first into Madame Duval’s life, and then Maria’s. It wouldn’t have been difficult, an old, half-blind, near-senile woman; another woman who was desperately sick. Convince me. That may be rather more difficult, I think.”
The young man rose, still holding the gun. He stepped back one pace from the desk and fixed his eyes on Lazare. Lazare wondered how many times he had rehearsed this moment, how often he had scripted it. Many times, he thought, watching him dispassionately—and in front of mirrors too, he would have guessed. The young man struck an attitude, as if performing for a camera, an invisible audience.
“I’m your son,” he said.
Lazare continued to watch him, silently and without reaction. The man’s mouth tightened and his eyes began to take on a fixed and glittery look.
“I’m your son. Maria Cazarès was my mother. My name is Christophe Rivière. Your name was Rivière once. I was born in New Orleans in December 1969. You made her abandon me there. You made her put me in an orphanage, waiting for someone to adopt me—only no one ever did. I’ve seen my birth certificate—Maria showed me. She told me—how unwilling she was, how she wept and pleaded with you, but you wouldn’t fucking listen. You fucking wrapped me up and disposed of me like I was trash.”
“I see.” Lazare folded his hands. His quiet tones halted the rising torrent of words. The man stared at him, white-faced. “Maria showed you your birth certificate. Did she also show you the certificate for your death?”
The young man drew back his lips in a quick sneer.
“Oh, sure. She showed me that. And she knew it was fucking well faked. There was no certificate—not until years later. It was years before you first produced that. By that time you were fucking rich enough to buy anything you wanted. A back-dated certificate? An infant death? No problem. How much did it cost you? Five hundred dollars? A thousand?”
“Five thousand,” Lazare said.
He spoke in the same quiet voice as before. The boy’s face became a blur of rage and excitement. He was beginning to tremble violently; the barrel of the gun wavered to the ceiling, then back.
“I knew it,” he began on a rising note, “I fucking knew it. You fucking asshole, you bastard…”
“Hold the gun steady,” Lazare said. “If you wave it around like that, it could easily go off. I’m not armed. Look…” He reached inside his jacket, and fear flared in the young man’s eyes. “I simply want to take out my wallet. You see?” He laid the black leather wallet on the desk. “And now I want to take out a photograph, which I would like you to inspect.”
He took out a small colored snapshot as he said this and slid it across his desk. The boy snatched it up, then threw it down.
“Who’s that? Some fucking sick kid. Some spastic kid…”
“That is
my son.” Lazare felt such anger then, he wanted to rise, strike out, smash his fist in this young man’s face. He waited, letting that anger subside, then continued in a cold, flat voice.
“That is my son. His name was Christophe Rivière—just as you say. He was born with cerebral palsy. Do you know what that is? It is one of the crudest diseases that can afflict children. It does not necessarily affect the intelligence, but it does cripple the muscles of the body—as you can see from that photograph. It is progressive, and the deterioration cannot be reversed. My money—when I acquired it—bought my son the best possible care. Prior to that he was in a Catholic orphanage for sick children in New Orleans, and then he was in a very fine clinic in New York State. I visited him four times a year, every year of his life. He finally died, shortly before his twelfth birthday, in 1980.”
He looked down at the photograph, then quietly returned it to the wallet and replaced the wallet inside his jacket. The young man never moved once.
Lazare hesitated, then made the smallest gesture of the hand.
“I loved my son intensely. I was always fiercely proud of him. I could never express to you—or to anyone else—how much I admired his courage. The decision to leave him behind in America was the hardest decision I ever made in my life. When I set out to acquire a fortune, I did so for his sake. His welfare—and the welfare of his mother—have always been the controlling factors in my life.” He gave a sigh, and his voice hardened. “I can see you don’t believe me. As you like. For reasons that need not concern you, I chose to shield Maria from this. I see no reason to shield you. You are a fantasist. You are not my son. My son, much as I might wish it, is not likely to return from the dead.”
He braced himself then as he said these words, because he could see their effect. The young man’s face worked, and his hands shook. He was trembling uncontrollably. Lazare could see a terrible combination of emotions work their way through him: rage and disbelief and fear and grief. He expected him to fire then, and felt a grudging respect when he did not.
Lazare bent his head and passed his hand across his face. All the energy released in him by the arrival of this young man had now gone. He felt an absolute weariness of body and soul, a lethargy and an indifference so deep that he was surprised that his obstinate body continued to function, that his lungs circulated oxygen, that his heart beat.
He thought of his son, whom he had loved with such intensity, his son’s continued suffering, making that love poignant from the first. If he could have rewritten his own life, he knew that he would have ensured that Christophe spent his brief life with Maria and himself no matter if Maria, weaker than himself, cracked under the demands of that pain. But he could not rewrite his life.
The decision had been made at a time when he was young, torn between love, shame, and guilt—and the guilt had been so corrosive, so intense. For Maria too, of course. He glanced up at the young man facing him. Could she really have believed his claims? Perhaps she had, with a part of her poor fractured mind at least, though Lazare noted she had still been careful in what she revealed. The boy obviously had no inkling that the parents he was claiming were brother and sister—or perhaps Maria had simply forgotten that fact, displaced it, as she did anything that caused her pain: perhaps.
His own great weakness, he thought, had been his inflexibility. Once decided upon a course of action, he had always judged it weak to countenance change. In trying to protect Maria, he had denied himself closeness to his son—yet that closeness, he now saw, was what he had most craved in life.
He looked up at the tall, strong, and handsome young man facing him now. How ironic, he thought: he is as desperate for a father as I am desperate for a son. Does he not realize that—if miracles happened, and he were my child, I would not be able to speak for joy—I would rise and embrace him, my life would be utterly altered, and I might even believe that there was, after all, a God?
“So tell me”—he raised his head—“tell me why you’ve come here today. Tell me what you want.”
Stammering, boasting, the boy did. He was deeply deranged, Lazare thought; he seemed to have no conception of how impossible his plan was. All that seemed to concern him was that this execution—which he called a killing—should be public. He wanted it to be seen, witnessed, photographed, even filmed. That interested Lazare briefly. Listening to the young man’s tirade, he considered the seductions of fame—to which, as he had mentioned in his final public tribute to her, Maria had been as indifferent as he himself was.
The boy had the fame sickness, he could see it now. It was there in his pale face, glittering eyes, and wild gestures. His own desire was to become famous, world famous, with the firing of one or two shots. Parricide was to be his route to celebrity, his stage the runway, his audience the world’s press. Lazare sighed. He himself considered all fame deeply treacherous; yet with fame, this boy clearly believed he would find his lost identity, he would know who he was.
Lazare did not intend to die in such a way; nor was he, he realized, prepared to wait. He glanced up at the TV screen: the model Quest was advancing down the runway in one of Cazarès’s last designs, a black suit trimmed with sable. A long black sable scarf trailed over her arm, and down to the floor. As she turned, she gave it a practiced kick.
The collection had reached its midpoint. The suit was in every respect exquisite, though Lazare had never shared Maria’s taste for furs. He frowned, then stood.
“I will not cooperate,” he said.
The young man stared at him. He flourished the gun.
“You have to. You walk out of this room when I say. You walk along the corridor, through the dressing room, and out onto the runway—with me. Then I do it.”
“Thanks to your incompetence, my salon is filled with armed police.”
“So much the better.”
“Do you want a bloodbath?” Lazare gave him a long, cool look. “Well, perhaps you do. You will not get it with my assistance. This is Maria’s last collection, and it will be shown in the same manner as all her other collections. Perfectly. With discipline. One thing you should understand…” Lazare met his eyes. “I have never obeyed an order from anyone in my life. Around here I give the orders.”
“Not now you don’t.” The young man gave a smile. He waved the gun again.
Lazare returned the smile and began to walk toward the boy, around his desk. He watched the gun waver and the young man step back. He saw him glance toward the door, and he saw him begin to panic. He realized he would have to say the right thing, exactly the right thing, and that he would have to be quick.
Should he tell this young madman that he wanted to die, was prepared to die, and that if the young man would not oblige him now, he’d find other means himself? But no, he thought, watching him: the young man wanted more than the pleasure of firing the shot—and to admit to desiring it would be certain to make him delay, even abandon, his attempt.
Lazare looked lovingly at the gun. Anger might provoke him, he thought, because he could feel the young man’s fury, even smell it.
Anger, insult… he gave a small shrug. Whatever it took.
“How stupid you are,” he said, sharpening his voice. “You can’t make me do anything. What are you going to do if I won’t leave this room with you? What can you do? Fire? Your hands are shaking. You haven’t the guts. You can’t go through with it, can you? And if you did—you’d miss. Have you actually handled a firearm before? No. I thought not.”
He pushed past the boy, who made no attempt to stop him. He moved toward the door slowly; the boy still did nothing. Lazare turned. He was trembling now, holding the gun at the wrong angle, his arm extended, the barrel wavering. His face was blanched of color, distorted with emotion. Lazare almost pitied him; he gave him a look of contempt.
“My son had great courage,” he said. “I loved that courage in him. In all the years I knew him, I felt respect, admiration, humility because of that.”
“I’m your son. I’m Christophe. J
ust stop fucking lying… Maria recognized me—my mother knew who I was.”
“Maria was not sane.” Lazare looked at him coldly. “By the end she was very nearly as crazy as you are. You’re afraid, aren’t you? You can’t even hold a gun steady, let alone fire it. Unlike my son, you’re a coward when it comes to the test. A coward and a boaster and a fool. A nobody.”
With this, he turned his back. As he reached for the door handle, he thought he had failed, even then, and that he would, after all, have to endure the next few hours: the meaningless applause, the emotion, the accolades, and the emptiness after that. It was a pity, he thought with a flicker of amusement, because if ever there was a way of ensuring that Maria Cazarès’s last collection was never forgotten, it was this. Still, it did not really matter. He could go, later this evening, to any of his houses; all were equipped with a pharmacopoeia of Maria’s sleeping pills and painkillers, several of which, taken in the right quantity, preferably with alcohol, would prove as efficacious as a bullet.
He turned the handle, and pain exploded in his back. The room resonated with noise, so as he fell, he thought that perhaps the young man, the nameless young man, had fired more than once. He slumped against the wall and heard himself make a strange liquid noise.
He watched the dying process with an acuity that surprised him: here were its stages, the flowering of blood on his white shirtfront; the warm gush of blood from the groin, so he thought he had lost control of his bladder and felt a second’s fastidious distaste. The words that became blood in his mouth, and then the vision loss as the room rushed toward him, then darkened, then ebbed.
He was aware, dimly, that the young man was frenzied now. He had begun screaming something, words that might have been love or abuse. He was touching him now, Lazare thought; he could feel his hands clasping his chest, then his neck and face. All he would achieve, Lazare thought as his grip on consciousness slackened, would be to daub himself with blood.