Mister Memory

  ‘The dog knows how to be a dog,’ Morel said, apparently uninterested in Petit’s urgent whisperings about switched identities and absconding murderers. ‘The dog knows how to be a dog, whereas man, he does not know how to be a man.’

  This had brought Petit up short for a moment, a big mistake, allowing the doctor to resume his musings. Irrelevant musings that appeared to come out of nowhere as far as Petit was concerned but which had been prompted by the old doctor’s thoughts about Marcel. About how complicated the life of the average person is, never mind that of someone as extraordinary as Mister Memory.

  Now, in the dark early hours of the morning at the station in Clermont-Ferrand, Petit sits on a crate and watches a mangy hound sniffing around for scents, for traces of food perhaps. The conversation returns to him.

  ‘The dog knows how to be a dog,’ Morel said. ‘When he is hungry, he scavenges. When he is thirsty, he finds a puddle. When tired, he sleeps, when attacked, he fights back. He does not reason or worry or debate or doubt himself; he knows how to be a dog. But! Ah! Men and women! They do not know how to be. If I have learned one thing in my days as a doctor of the unwell mind, it is this. And it does not just apply to the sick; take a look at the so-called healthy man or woman, and you will see it there too. This thing called consciousness with which we are blessed is also our curse, for how should we be in the world? Should we be honest, or should we lie? Should we act as if we felt differently from the way we do, or should we allow all our fears and feelings to run riot and rule us? We question and doubt and fear and hesitate. This is the curse of humankind – that we do not know how to be any more. Perhaps we never did.’

  Then Petit managed to get the old doctor to be quiet and told him to listen very hard. He hurriedly explained his theory, and now Morel paid very close attention, for he asked a couple of pertinent and perceptive questions, rapid fire, before allowing Petit to vanish into the night once more.

  Who can Petit trust now? Who is he working for? Why? These questions chase each other around his tired mind. He makes it a fifty-fifty call whether he can trust Cavard, or not. He wants to believe that he can, and that worries him. Maybe he is letting that affect his judgement. But if he cannot trust his boss, then he believes he can trust the doctor, and, in a strange way, he knows he can trust Marcel too. He can trust Marcel to be Marcel, and not to lie. And if he cannot trust Cavard, then these two curious men are his only allies in the world. He thinks about them both: the doctor and the patient. Each is curious in his own way. It is not particularly easy to like either of them, not directly. Talking to Marcel is like swimming in fog, talking to Morel can be like trying to converse with an uninterested stone. Yet Petit has sympathy with both of them; he can empathise with the lonely man, the isolated man, and that is what all three of them have in common, albeit for very different reasons. Marcel, trapped by his unerring, tireless memory. Morel, who has dawdled his way down a cul-de-sac of uncaring medicine so far that perhaps there is no coming back. Petit, whose happiness was taken away in a few moments by a hand he will never even know. He thinks about Marie for a time, allowing himself to feel miserable, since there is nothing else to be done right now. Her face appears before him, but with anguish he realises that he is finding it harder to recall her image to mind, harder to remember his gentle fiancée as she actually was. Instinctively he reaches into his pocket for the portrait of her, and realises he did not bring it with him, a realisation that makes him feel sick. His head hangs.

  He finds himself remembering (now aware enough to realise that he is remembering, that he is watching himself remember) that conversation he had when he first met Morel. Morel had begun to open his mind to the ways of the memory, of its meaning, of its central importance. That without memory, we would have no identity. He finds that he understands it much more now. Memories, he sees, are what make our personality; through a self-narrated linking of moments from our past, we create ourselves, define ourselves. And each memory is itself only a construction of infinitely small moments of time, each of which has no meaning in itself. A bee lands on your arm. A watch stops. A leaf falls. You feel afraid. None of these things has any meaning in itself. It is only the story we make by linking such moments together, and the narrative that creates, that gives us any meaning, that gives us a personality.

  And if he can no longer remember Marie’s face without the aid of a photograph, then does that mean it is as if she never existed?

  Instead of Marie, Petit finds that he is holding that photograph of Ondine, her arrogantly beautiful head tilted on one side. He stares at her. She stares back, and it is she who wins.

  Petit watches the stray, its nose hunting through the air for something elusive but clearly desirable, and he understands what the doctor meant. He is tired, hungry and cold. He has no plan but to wait for a train to Lyon and then see what might unfold there. He has probably thrown his job away and, since the attack last night, he knows his life is under threat, as he suspected it might be.

  He wonders, Who were those men, anyway? Some henchmen of Delorme’s no doubt, but how they knew what he was up to is worrying. It crosses his mind that there is a chance they followed him into the Gare de Lyon and were on the night train too, but he has kept a close lookout, and he doubts it. If they had, he would surely not have survived the journey, for he fell asleep at last towards the end, which would have given them ample opportunity to strike. If they traced him as far as the hospital however, then that would leave Morel and Marcel open to danger as well. As soon as the telegraph office opens, he will send a telegram, warning Morel to take precautions, to strictly forbid access to the hospital. If Delorme wanted to have Marcel shut away, so he could not reveal Delorme’s blasphemous activities, then the Prefect must have believed Marcel was privy to what Ondine knew. That is a reasonable fear, Petit thinks, but by no means certain. Would Ondine have shared the full sordid details of her previous life with her husband? It seems both possible and impossible. But that must be what Delorme fears: that an investigation of Ondine’s case would lead to him, too. Maybe now, now that matters have escalated, Delorme sees a simpler option: kill Marcel, kill Morel maybe. Kill him, Petit.

  He is struck by an overwhelming wish not to be himself any more, but to be the dog. It sniffs around the station platform, scampering away when a porter swings a boot at it, trotting towards an early morning passenger now and again, hoping for handouts. Simplicity itself, it knows its place in the world, and doesn’t think twice about how to do it.

  Petit lifts himself from the crate and as the station clock chimes six o’clock a small and grimy café opens its doors for business. He enters and orders a string of coffees, which he nurses for the next hour, waiting for the telegraph office to open at seven, and for the train to Lyon half an hour later.

  MOMENTS

  Two evenings later, Petit proves that his wild idea is correct. After a couple of days of hunting around the city, he has never once doubted that his hunch is right, that Ondine and Bishop will be found in Lyon. It was why Lucie intended to move there too – Lyon being home to the biggest theatre and cabaret world outside Paris. He reasons that if you’re a cabaret performer and Paris is out of the question, it’s short odds that Lyon will be your next best bet. Since most of the musical cafés, theatres and cabarets in the city are to be found in the old town, to the west of the rivers, that is where he devotes his attention.

  The old town crouches, squashed between the Saône and the hill of Fourvière, at the top of which sits the basilica. Unlike the Sacré-Coeur this church is completed, but it has been put there for much the same reason, apparently to venerate God but, as everyone knows, in reality to celebrate the suppression of the socialist commune, just as in Paris. And just as in Paris it looms over the city, speaking of the power of the Church and its ever-watchful, ever-vindictive eye.

  Petit has scurried through the narrow medieval streets of the district, making a list of the theatres and cabarets, and visiting them each in turn. Not once doe
s he falter. He keeps his enquiries casual and vague. He plays the tourist, the young man of money come for some fun, and there are enough of those in Lyon for him not to attract anyone’s attention. He doesn’t know what he is looking for exactly, but he believes he will know it when he sees it. On the second evening, he finds himself perusing a playbill for the La Grande Rouge, a theatre-cum-cabaret tucked just off the Place Saint-Jean. Something about it catches his eye. It is somewhat newer than other posters he has seen, which have presumably been advertising the same bill of acts for months, if not years. This one is newly printed, and among a wide variety of acts it contains a listing for a hypnotist: the ‘Séance de Magnétisme’, presumably some kind of pastiche throwback to the days not so long ago when the craze swept through the parlours of rich ladies. On stage, no doubt there would be some lurid little twist to the affair.

  Didn’t Marcel mention that the American, Bishop, had worked such a routine in the States before coming to Paris? As Petit thinks harder, wishing for a moment that he had Marcel’s gift, he becomes more certain of it. Yes, he’s sure. He remembers that Bishop never did the act in the Cabaret of Insults because Chardon thought it dull and unimaginative.

  It is a great moment. One by one, things that were no more than feelings, guesses, wishes almost, are becoming real before his eyes.

  That evening, as he buys a ticket and sits towards the back of the small theatre, drinking wine by the glass as his thirst takes him, he feels an enormous sense of vindication. He knows that neither Ondine nor Bishop knows what he looks like. They do not even know he exists. They might worry that one day someone would come looking for them, but as far as they know their plan worked extremely well. This sense of anonymity gives him a sense of power, and he relaxes, actually enjoying the first few acts: some dance numbers and a comedian. From nowhere he becomes aware of something else, something remarkable. It has only been two days, but he realises that he has not done one clumsy thing in that time. Since every day usually brings at least a handful of slightly gauche actions, this in itself is something to be noted. But more than that, though he does not know how he knows, he is certain that the clumsiness has left him for good. He sits a little further back in his chair and takes a sip of Beaujolais, and says ‘so’ to himself, as if he is a clockmaker who has just figured out how to put a temperamental mechanism back together. Why should that be, he wonders, why should that be? He thinks about the fight with the two men outside the hospital, the way he moved without thinking about what he was doing, for there was no time for that. Skilful and strong. Not a trace of clumsiness.

  Then the hypnotist comes on. Petit has never seen Bishop, only had a description of him. Bishop has never been in trouble with the law and Petit was never able to find a photograph of him. But the man on stage is clearly not French. His accent is obvious, though the language itself is not bad. What clinches it is when he calls for a volunteer from the crowd, a woman just a few seats from him puts her hand in the air and is invited on stage. It is Ondine.

  Such an obvious trick! Do they get away with it every night? He can see why Chardon was against using it at the cabaret. What if someone returns another evening? Does Ondine change her appearance from time to time? Yet there is no mistaking it is her. He has gazed at her photograph enough times to be able to spot her at once, Ondine Després, back from the dead.

  Inspector Petit sits back in his seat, and smiles to himself.

  In another moment of time, far away in Paris, René Cavard is pondering a matter brought to his attention by Principal Inspector Boissenot: the matter of the missing inspector, Petit. Petit, Cavard thinks, what have you done now? Already their paths have crossed twice, and now it is his absence that is causing Cavard concern. Boissenot did not seem overly worried that one of his men has just upped and vanished. He threw his hands in the air and declared that the young man is probably at the bottom of the Seine. He probably put himself there because he never could get over that fiancée of his getting herself murdered, and anyway, didn’t it all just go to show what he was always saying, that the end of the world is in sight?

  Cavard is taking things more seriously. There was that conversation, after all, that evening, after work. That business about the murdered ex-courtesan and, oh God, Prefect Delorme. Cavard decides that he does not like the way this is falling out, one little bit.

  Chef Cavard is liked well enough by the policemen of the Sûreté. He has been in charge of the judicial force for five years, and in a quiet way he has fought little battles, the right battles, to protect the budget, to argue for an increased number of detectives, to weed out corruption, which is rife both in his judicial investigative force and the gardiens of the municipal force.

  His problems are twofold. First, it is true that his weight is not declining, especially not since he became deskbound. Second, he is not liked by those he refers to in his own mind simply as ‘them’. By this he means the establishment; the press, or the sections of it on the right; the Ministry of Justice, whose foremost representative is Prefect Delorme. Matters were not helped by a misprint (and can he ever shake the feeling that it was deliberate?) in one newspaper, which, on the announcement of his appointment, called him not Cavard but ‘Canard’. The duck. Unfortunately, the mistake turned into a nickname that he has not been able to rid himself of. And with every passing year, as he gets a little rounder and waddles a little more, the name seems ever more appropriate. Among his own men, the name is used affectionately, for the most part, and he does not mind that. It helps them to feel he is still one of them, and that helps them to be honest with him. But outside his men, it is a different matter. More than once the right-wing press have employed the headline ‘Confit de Cavard’, a reference to that most French of fat-laden foods, the confit de canard, salted duck leg cooked in its own fat, to describe a foul-up by his department.

  He is staring from his window one morning, looking across the Place Dauphine. It is a cold November morning, the little triangular place providing inadequate shelter from gusts of wind that blow in from the river, over the Pont Neuf, to swirl the last leaves of the year into small eddies. He shivers, but barely notices how cold it is; his mind is wondering whether to follow things up with this young Petit, or whether to have him dismissed in his absence and sweep anything that comes along under the carpet. So Delorme had something to do with the dead girl. He paid for her services, possibly on many occasions. So what? That doesn’t necessarily alter the obvious assumption that it was Marcel who killed Ondine. Yet Cavard knows that Petit is right about one thing. It is very odd that the Prefect’s office should have weighed in to have the accused man declared insane, and incarcerated in Salpêtrière. That rings alarm bells in his head that he wants to ignore, but cannot.

  What makes matters worse is the question of the examining magistrate, his greatest frustration as a police officer, and part of the mystifyingly stupid chains of command that make his life much harder than it needs to be. At the top of everything, on top of everyone, sits the Prefect, Delorme. He presides over the two arms of the police: the municipal police, the men on the street, controlled by twenty Commissaires, one for each arrondissement of the city, who all report directly back to him; and the judicial police, of which Cavard is director. Chef Cavard has five principal inspectors reporting into him, and under them are around three hundred inspectors or, he wryly notes to himself, two hundred and ninety-nine since Petit went absent without leave. It would be simple enough were it not for the existence of the examining magistrate. These men were hand-picked by the Prefect. They reported to him, and only to him; in rank they were superior to everyone, even the Chef of the Sûreté. And yet fully one quarter of the chef’s inspectors worked for the examining magistrates, appointed on a case-by-case basis at their whim, not the chef’s. It never made sense that someone else controlled his men, and in practice it could be as irritating as hell. Cavard got on well with some of the examining magistrates, many of them less so. Some seemed entirely in the pocket of the Pre
fect, others did their job as they were supposed to, with only the best interests of the law at heart. Either way they were powerful men: the examining magistrates appointed detectives to cases; they carried out initial questioning of arrested parties, often extracting confessions in the most unofficial ways. They were behind the practice of ‘cooking’ suspects in ‘kitchens’, the back rooms of station houses, not with their own hands of course, but through the roughest gardiens, the patrolmen.

  With a nagging feeling, for he has forgotten who the examining magistrate is in Marcel’s case, Cavard turns back to his desk and drags the file closer to him. He flips it open and reminds himself. His heart sinks. Peletier. Rarely has he come across a more unpleasant and conniving man. A careerist, still quite young but with his sights set high, Peletier was the sort to inform on his own mother if it brought him greater advancement. Cavard knew he was one of Delorme’s cronies, and there and then he decides that he is too overworked and too afraid to take on this fight of Petit’s. Whatever the young inspector has done, wherever he has gone, whatever he has found out, Cavard decides to opt for a quiet life, and turn a blind eye to anything that comes across his desk.

  No sooner has he made that decision, however, than the day’s dispatches are brought in by one of his two clerks. He has developed the habit over the years, not a good habit it must be said, of flicking through the whole pile of missives before tackling any of them. He knows he ought just to work his way through from top to bottom, because all of them are important or they wouldn’t have ended up on his desk. However, he can never resist the urge to find out if one dispatch might be more important than the others. The result of this weakness is that within a few seconds he finds he is reading a communiqué from the Chief of Police in Lyon, who informs Cavard that he has one of his inspectors, a man called Petit, in his presence, who has insisted on the arrest of two performers from a cabaret in the city. Even now the two, an American man and a French woman, are in custody. Petit wants to arrange for their transport back to Paris. He looks at the date on the communiqué. It is marked urgent. It is three days old.