‘Sir—’
‘Have you told anyone else these notions?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Listen to me, Petit. You think the Prefect of Police was indulging in orgies with this demi-mondaine, and that upon hearing of her murder he had the culprit moved to where no one in the police can touch him, or would care to, in order that he might prevent word of his association coming out?’
‘You have to admit that it is at least possible.’
‘It is. But then again, it is at least possible that we will fly to the moon. One day. But not today. Not on my watch, so to speak. Petit, my bus approaches. I want you to drop this business. It seems to have become an obsession with you, and obsession can be a good thing for an inspector. But not in this case. I advise you, no, I order you, to drop it. Furthermore, if you know what’s good for you, you will say nothing of this to anyone else. Whatever this envelope contains I strongly suggest that you forget it ever existed.’
With that, he slides the photograph into his jacket, steps up on to the omnibus and is gone, off to the Friday evening world of domesticity. He leaves Petit staring into thin air, with Cavard’s final words repeating themselves in his head.
BEAUTY AND TRAUMA
It will easily be understood how Marcel’s inability to recognise a face had a significant role to play in the false murder of Ondine, but it had just as big a part to play in why that fictitious event occurred at all.
It was sad to see what was once an intense love between Marcel and Ondine, each broken in their own special way, turn inside out and around on itself, change and vanish. On the surface, at least to begin with, matters between them were not so bad. Ondine didn’t mind so very much that Marcel had slept with Lucie, because, as we’ve seen, she knew he could not be blamed for it, it being an expression of his desire for Ondine herself. She was at daggers drawn with Lucie, of course, but that is only to be expected. They tolerated each other’s presence in the dressing room and on stage as best they could, and Ondine began to think about moving to a new club for a time, though part of her was determined not to be the one to be moved to a new ‘turf’. That being said, it was hard, when Lucie had clearly disseminated word of her accomplishment with Marcel through the other girls of the club. Stifled laughter and quick changes of conversation were frequent, Ondine found, and she began to construct yet another layer of protection around herself, one on top of so very many others. And there, of course, is the sadness. If Ondine had been someone else, had been born someone else, in better circumstances, how she might have blossomed and flourished and what a better way she might have made in the world. The same can be said of anyone, perhaps, and if, if, if can take you anywhere. Ondine was born who she was, and her young life and her experience and her adolescence and her womanhood had repeatedly taught her only bad things about the world. She never even thought about it, but the way she dealt with such matters was to wrap her emotions underneath layers of protection; a hardness to counteract the hardness she encountered. Then came Marcel, and in his naïve love she had sensed something she’d never had in her life before: tenderness. But that very naivety was what destroyed them, for Ondine simply could not bear the fact that her husband could not possibly know who she was, just as Lucie had said.
They talked and fought about it for days after the event. Marcel would protest that it wasn’t true, that he could and did know who she was, in fact, he had a better idea of who she was than anyone, for who else can say they remember every single aspect of their lover? Who else can say they remember every word and deed and moment between themselves and their lover, the bad along with the good, and still love them, despite the unpleasant memories? That, said Marcel, showed just how much he loved her. That only caused Ondine to demand just how unpleasant he found her, and it must be admitted, though Marcel had a point, he did not make it in the most flattering way. And Ondine, who had been shown since she was very young that she was best appreciated for her looks, could not bear the fact that Marcel did not appreciate that beauty.
‘But I do!’ Marcel exclaimed.
‘So you can tell I’m beautiful?’ Ondine asked.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But if you cannot recognise my face then you do not know that this beauty belongs to me.’
‘Surely that should make you happy,’ Marcel wondered. ‘For it means I love you for who you are, not for how you look.’
But Ondine wanted to be loved for how she looked. It was how she had been made, and from that trap escape is precious and correspondingly rare. So she began to find ways to hurt Marcel. Small things at first, which she told herself were just to test whether it was really true that he could not tell who she was. When he arrived for work, she would be sure to be seen flirting with a waiter in the club, or one of the men in the other acts. She’d stroke their cheeks and plant blatant kisses on their lips when she knew Marcel could see, and when Marcel took her to task, she’d exclaim that he had been lying, that he could recognise her. The truth of the matter was that Marcel had a lifetime’s worth of techniques to help him guess who someone was so he wouldn’t be shown up, and almost all the time he was right. But the damage was done, the process of decline had begun, and all these incidents only served to prove to Ondine that Marcel had been lying about his blindness for faces, and only served to develop a rapidly growing jealousy in Marcel.
At home, in the studio, he would shout and scream at her in a way he never had before as she continued to push him with ever growing indiscretions. She had walked stark naked into the men’s dressing room at the cabaret, which had led Monsieur Juron, that expert of insults, to make some especially obscene comments, even for him. It was the talk of the club. And she began to fall for the American again, and it seemed Bishop was taking an interest in her once more. His latest little fling with an English dancer had concluded and he and Ondine started to spend more and more time together, something that Marcel was only too aware of.
They no longer walked to the club or home together when they were both working, and this was how, on her way home one day, Ondine was set upon. She’d cut through the Place Ventimille, she told Marcel later, weeping, all their arguments forgotten for a time. She explained how from nowhere three men grabbed her and pushed her to the ground. She’d tried to struggle, and get up again, when one of them hit her across her jaw. She saw a knife. Then there were the shouts of a gardien, and the men panicked and ran. She didn’t get a decent look at them, because it was dark, and she was so shocked that she’d barely taken anything in. It all happened too fast, she told Marcel. She held a wet handkerchief to her face, where her lip had stopped bleeding but was swelling quickly.
‘Did they take much?’ Marcel asked.
‘Of course not,’ said Ondine. ‘I don’t have any money, do I? If I did I wouldn’t be walking home.’
This relatively minor incident was to have a significant effect on their fates, however, because as a result of the attack, Ondine persuaded Marcel to buy a gun on the black market. She wanted to be able to protect herself. They’d argued about it. Ondine pressed Marcel to give her more money, so she could take the tram or a bus home when she was working and he wasn’t. He told her what he always told her, that he didn’t have more money, but Ondine knew that wasn’t entirely true. Once upon a time, after all, he’d sold a small house in Champagne. He couldn’t have spent it all yet, she knew, because he had no idea how to spend money, not like she did. That was his trouble, she said, and then they’d fought again, until finally, relenting, Marcel set about finding out how to spend some of his money on a gun. It would be this gun that he used to shoot his wife.
The days were running by, bitterness and anger were growing, and it would not be long before Ondine organised her own death, yet her anger with Marcel was far from the major force behind that plan. There was something else, something even more pressing, that brought her to that point.
DOCTOR MOREL
Events continue to conspire against Petit. As he leaves wo
rk one day, he checks his pigeonhole. He finds an envelope bearing his name, written in a fine hand.
Something tells him this is a significant moment. He is developing a nasty little sense of impending connections, and so he waits until he has left the offices to open it. He doesn’t even realise that its brief contents have interrupted his walking. All the note says is this: ‘Come and visit me. I have something to show you. Morel.’
That is enough.
Five minutes later he is aboard an omnibus, which rattles along by the river till it turns and deposits him at the corner of the Rue de Buffon, a short walk from where lies the entrance to the hospital.
Morel is expecting him, almost nervously it seems. There is none of the pomposity of the old doctor that Petit felt upon their first meeting. Morel even goes so far as to thank the young inspector for coming.
‘And so quickly too,’ he adds. ‘Most efficient.’
Petit takes no notice of these potentially patronising remarks.
‘How can I help you, Doctor?’
‘Our mutual friend, Inspector,’ Morel says. ‘He interests me greatly. We have made some progress since you saw him last. Would you walk with me? I would like you to see him again.’
Petit does as he is invited to without further question. The doctor is acting strangely, that’s apparent. They walk through the grounds of the hospital. Across the lawns, gardeners are raking brown leaves into neat piles in the twilight. Otherwise it is quiet, and the hospital has an air of settling down for the evening. As they walk, Morel starts to explain what he has learned about Marcel.
There is the business, first of all, that he cannot lie. It is something that Morel has tried to test, he explains. He has tried to catch him in the act of lying; has set complicated traps for him to fall into, but so far, he has not done so.
‘It really appears that he is unable to lie. Of course, this is another thing, like his memory itself, that it is only impossible to disprove. If he did indeed lie, we would know for sure that he is able to. Like the rest of us, eh? That’s obvious. But since I have not been able to get him to lie, we don’t know for sure that that means he is unable to. Do you follow my logic?’
Petit nods. That makes sense, just about.
‘In truth, though, he seems unable to lie, even for the sake of it, even to make a joke. I asked him yesterday to tell me that he was a gorilla in the zoological gardens. He was unable to; it seemed to cause him great trouble even to think about it. So I let him be. Of course, he may be a very great actor, and as for the traps I set him, well, he does have that memory to help him with his lies, if lying he is. But I suspect that he is indeed unable to lie.’
Morel speaks about the various doctors who have catalogued such an inability in other forms of insanity and illness.
‘Curious, isn’t it? That lying seems to be such an essential part of being human.’
Like forgetting, Morel thinks, but he keeps that part to himself.
‘Very well,’ says Petit. ‘So he cannot lie. What else? Why have you brought me here?’
‘Aha!’ says Morel. For a moment there is a flash of his former pomposity, but it vanishes rapidly as he comes to what he wants to relate next. ‘Well, I have also discovered something even more remarkable.’
And now, Morel explains how Marcel is unable to recognise a face from one moment almost to the next. This concept Petit finds much harder to understand, and even when he has, he finds it even harder to accept. Morel repeats himself and elucidates and elaborates. He gives Petit the benefit of his theory on why this phenomenon might very well be caused by the perfect memory, far from being a flaw in it. But still Petit is doubtful, so Morel plays the game he played before, and has Petit don the white smock of the Russian warder, before entering Marcel’s chamber.
Marcel takes Petit to be who he is told he is: a new warder. Marcel greets him expressionlessly, and only then does Petit, who knows that Marcel’s memory is foolproof, see for his own eyes that he is blind to faces.
They stand for a long while in the cell, the three of them, blinking at each other in the half-light, until Morel explains to Marcel that Petit is in fact the inspector who came to see him before.
Marcel looks up at Petit, and there is deep sorrow in his face. He turns to Morel and asks him, ‘Should I say what you asked me to say?’
Morel nods.
Petit turns to question the doctor, who merely holds his hand up, inviting patience.
‘Inspector,’ Marcel says. ‘I have been speaking with the doctor about what I did. How I shot Ondine. We have been discussing it in some detail. I spoke about the moments before and after. And the moment itself. And he has some knowledge of what occurred from the reports in the newspapers. But Inspector, you should know, I only shot Ondine once.’
There is a silence. Petit is thinking. Morel is stifling a smile, and Marcel speaks again.
‘I only fired the gun once, Inspector.’
Petit feels the touch of destiny creeping on to his shoulder again. It gives him a little shake, as he understands what Marcel, what Morel, is getting at.
‘They said you fired four times. Or five. Almost all the witnesses said you fired the gun five times.’
Marcel nods. He closes his eyes.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t.’
Petit believes him.
BOUNDLESSNESS
Thus it is that Petit comes to the truth of the matter, or begins to approach it at least. The question of Ondine’s apparent death, the motives and mechanisms behind it, all this starts to unwind, but only after a miserably long time spent with Marcel in his tiny chamber.
Of course, there is also the fact that Petit cannot be seen to be spending any time on the case that is not a case. Before, this meant merely the threat of a rebuke from his superiors. Now, Petit is fairly sure that he might be dealing with people who consider that the stakes are somewhat higher, and that those stakes could include his life. Prefect Delorme, he has already learned, is a dissembler and an impostor, of sorts. He pretends to be a fine upstanding citizen when he is nothing of the kind. From the destruction in Baraduc’s atelier, Petit has seen first hand that he plays the game hard, and in the photograph he has seen things the Prefect would potentially kill to keep secret. Then Petit made the decision to tell Cavard, and although he didn’t see the chef in the picture, something tells him that he made the wrong decision to share his suspicions with his boss’s boss. Perhaps, Petit thinks, perhaps I should leave it alone after all, but this is only an idle idea that crosses his mind from time to time. He knows it is not real. He knows he cannot let this matter rest now, not if he ever wants to find any peace over his Marie. Not if she is ever to let him go.
It is clear to him that there is something amiss about the murder itself. Up to now, he has only been interested in its aftermath and its possible causes. Yet this small detail about the number of bullets fired has opened up a whole new world of wondering to him; and he is convinced that something does not add up.
In his own time, therefore, when he should be sipping coffee in his favourite café, when he should be knocking back a beer with Drouot, he makes his way to the Salpêtrière. Very soon, the guards know him by sight, and merely nod as he makes his way into the hospital to find Morel, who insists on being present at every session.
It is slow work. All Petit wants is for Marcel to tell him, in his own words, what happened that evening in the Cour du Commerce. But even that seems to be an impossible task for Marcel to manage.
He stares at Petit as if he is the one who’s mad, as if he’s the one who murdered his own wife. That’s a thought that derails Petit for a moment as he wonders whether Marie would still be alive if he’d come back from Africa the first time she’d asked him to.
Just tell me! Petit thinks. Why is it so hard just to tell me? My God!
‘Listen,’ he says, leaning closer to Marcel. ‘You came home. You saw your wife with another man. You shot her. You ran away. Correct?’
&
nbsp; Marcel stares.
‘Is that correct?’
Marcel stares some more until Petit cracks, and shouts.
‘Is that correct?!’
Morel puts his hand on to Petit’s sleeve as if restraining him.
Infuriatingly, Marcel blinks and stares and then blinks some more, and then turns his head to say, ‘In a way.’
‘In a way?’
Marcel nods. ‘Those things are true. But so are a million other things.’
‘Yes,’ says Petit eagerly. ‘And I want you to tell me those things.’
‘I could, for example, tell you that I saw mouse droppings on the stairs, and that there is paper peeling in the corner above our bed or that Bishop has a strange-shaped mole on his thigh.’
‘So why don’t you?’ snaps Petit.
‘Because . . .’ begins Marcel, then stops. ‘Because it would take too long to say it all. It would take for ever.’
‘So let it take for ever!’ cries Petit. ‘I’m here. I’m waiting.’
‘I know you want to know things,’ adds Marcel, who never seems entirely to respond to the question in hand, ‘but I don’t know which ones you think are important.’
‘Exactly!’ says Petit. ‘I don’t want you even to try, I just want you to tell me everything, really everything, that happened that night. Let me be the one to decide what is important and what is not.’
Morel speaks for the first time. He speaks softly to Marcel, who still seems unsure.
‘Marcel, when in your life was anyone prepared to sit and listen to you say everything you needed to say? Everything that is in that head of yours? This is your chance. It may be the only chance in your life to let everything out, the only time when someone will listen to everything you want to say. It may make things easier for you, make things clearer. Perhaps it would help you, perhaps not. But why don’t you see?’
So Marcel begins to speak. ‘Where should I start?’