Mister Memory

  Cavard manages to resist the urge to screw the paper up into a ball and toss it out into the winds of the Place Dauphine, but only just. He holds it in his hands, for a long, long time, reading it again, and over again, praying to God that Petit knows what he’s doing.

  Not so far away, but two days before Cavard receives this news, Dr Morel gets the second of two telegrams from Inspector Petit. In his whole life before, Morel has only ever received two telegrams; now he has had the same number again in as many days.

  The first telegram was curious, alarming. It spoke of someone trying to convey too much information without the time or space to do so. It read: take extreme care with patient. and self. danger.

  At first, Morel had not paid it much attention. He was as busy as ever with Marcel. He had been working on the idea that in order to forget, Marcel needed to change the way his memories were laid down in the first place. If successful, it meant that Marcel would still remember everything that he already knew, everything that had already happened to him, but it might mean that he could be freed from the ever-increasing additional memories he was storing from day to day. In order to work on these matters, Marcel needed new memories to try to forget, and Morel knew that there should be a lot of them. Marcel’s daily routine in the cell and the little time he was permitted outside would have been child’s play for anyone to remember, so Morel had brought in reading material: vast amounts of reading material in the form of newspapers. One or two new papers a day was not nearly enough to trouble Marcel, and Morel had the additional conceit that he might be able to overwhelm Marcel’s memory by sheer weight of information. So Morel had the archives of the hospital reading room emptied, and vast towers of old newspapers teetered against the wall in Marcel’s chamber, while Mister Memory worked his way steadily through the diet of information, page by page. From time to time, though it was not his prime intent, Morel could not resist picking up a paper that Marcel had discarded and quizzing him on some trivial fact of news or gossip or even an advertisement from three, five, even eight years before. Each time he felt a return of that childish glee he used to feel when they had first met, that he was about to catch Marcel out, and each time he was disappointed. Each time so far, he told himself, and bided his time for the next chance to try to trip up his patient.

  Once or twice, Marcel seemed to spend an extra long time reading this article or that; and there was even a moment when he stopped reading and held the paper out for Morel to see.

  ‘Look,’ he’d said, and showed the doctor a report about that café bombing, the one back in ’94.

  Morel blinked. ‘What of it?’

  Marcel almost seemed to smile. ‘I wrote that! Or rather, Monsieur LeChat did. But he wrote it from what I told him. Almost word for word.’

  Morel reads the article through, from time to time glancing up at Marcel, but Marcel seems lost again, afloat in an endless sea of remembering.

  Engaged in these activities, Dr Morel paid very little attention to Petit’s telegram until the porter on duty came to him one day and said that two rather suspicious men had been asking questions about Marcel, claiming to be relatives. What had puzzled the porter was that the men seemed to speak French with a foreign accent of some kind, and wasn’t Marcel as French as could be?

  Morel nodded at all this, saying nothing, and dismissed the porter, who seemed reluctant to leave until he had imparted one further piece of news. It happened, said the porter, that one of the orderlies, Miskov, was standing by the window of the gatehouse when the men came. Miskov kept his mouth shut, just listened to everything they had to say, but when they went, he told the porter that the men’s accent was Russian.

  ‘I see,’ said Morel, though he did not see at all. But he did speak to the director of the hospital and they agreed that they would put the younger, fitter members of their staff on gatehouse duty for the time being, and that all visitors would have to show proof of who they were before admittance to the grounds.

  That being done, Morel returned to his work with Marcel, and continued to try to overwork his brain with news that had passed into history, all the while trying different methods to block the formation of the memories in the first place. The form these methods took varied widely. He was indiscriminate in his approach; some tricks involved Marcel’s cooperation.

  ‘Try thinking about something else as you read,’ Morel suggested one day. Another: ‘Put one hand in your pocket as you read and focus on it. When you take it out again, you will not be able to recall what you have read.’

  Marcel did recall what he had read, but he kept working hard on all Morel’s ideas, some of which were enacted by the doctor. Morel tried making all sorts of noises as Marcel pored over the papers, or he would produce smells that filled the room with obnoxious or delightful scents. He tried administering certain herbs to Marcel, as poultices on the back of his neck or as teas to be drunk the night before. Still nothing worked, yet Marcel seemed happy, occupied with activities that surely pushed his mind harder than anything or anyone had before. A certain stillness seemed to creep into his being; the doctor wrote in his notes that Marcel seemed calmer, more logical, more able to hold what he deemed to be a normal conversation, as if this gargantuan task of reading was finally occupying enough of his mind to create some inner tranquillity.

  So Morel was happy, and his patient was as well as he had been in all the months at the hospital, when the doctor received his second telegram from Petit. This one was composed of only three words, reading: we were right.

  Morel took the telegram straight to Marcel that very moment. He waved it in the air as if it were news of a peace treaty or a royal birth.

  ‘Marcel, my boy,’ Morel said, his eyes flitting across his patient’s face, not knowing how to explain, what to say, how to deliver the news. ‘Marcel. You will be exonerated. You will be set free. You are not guilty.’

  Marcel let the paper he was holding slide to the floor. He stood up silently. He did not understand. He could not understand. So Morel tried to explain it to him, told him about Petit’s idea, showed him the telegram.

  ‘What?’ asked Marcel. ‘What does that mean? We were right? Who is right?’

  Morel shrugged. ‘The policeman is generous. It was his idea. His theory. You didn’t do it, Marcel. You didn’t do it. You were tricked. It was elaborate, but it was a trick.’

  Marcel sat down again, rubbed his hands across the back of his head, then stared at the wall. An infinite amount of memories began interconnecting with a second infinite amount of memories, and before his eyes, Morel saw all the hard-won progress they had made start to vanish. Marcel’s face, his body, his very spirit seemed to diminish, there and then.

  Before he disappeared entirely, Marcel had one last thought for Morel, one question.

  ‘But why?’

  Morel spread his arms out wide, and shook his head, for that was a question it might take a lifetime to find an answer to.

  AN EXCHANGE

  November had become December. That Friday, the first of the month, Chef Cavard enters the citadel of justice that dominates the Quai des Orfèvres with renewed determination, having spent the night working through possibilities. For the thousandth time he wishes ardently that he had a telephone on his desk and could phone the Chief of Police in Lyon. No doubt he could arrange for access to a telephone, but there would be little point: the Lyon police are no doubt as stuck in the past as they are in Paris. Nevertheless, he will telegram to Lyon and arrange the details of Petit’s return with the couple, who are accused of multiple crimes, foremost of which is murder. Though Cavard is not yet sure who has been killed, only that Ondine Després has not been, after all.

  He stumps up the stairs to his office, calling to his clerk to come straight in for a briefing. The clerk, a somewhat ageing and nervous yet scrupulously efficient man, follows Cavard into his room, pad and pencil in hand.

  ‘Telegram, to the Lyon headquarters, attention Chef Guérin,’ he begins, but no sooner are the
words out of his mouth than the clerk coughs, and holds up a hand as if to beg forgiveness.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the clerk begins, but then seems too tense to continue.

  ‘What is it? Are you ill?’

  Cavard looks at his clerk but sees that he is no paler than usual.

  ‘No, sir. I am afraid that I was told to ask you to report to the Prefect this morning, first thing.’

  Cavard says nothing. Inside he fights the urge to swear, but instead he merely tells the clerk to take the telegram first and get it sent off, and then he will go to see the Prefect.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I was told that you ought to see the Prefect straight away. Especially if you asked anything about Lyon.’

  Now Cavard cannot hold his anger. ‘Who the devil told you this?’ he snaps.

  ‘A clerk from the Prefect’s office came over half an hour ago. He . . . well, he gave me to understand that it was rather important. Sir.’

  Cavard waves the clerk away, and he scurries back out to his antechamber.

  Cavard does not like being summoned to the Prefect’s office at the best of times, and yet again it has something to do with that boy, Petit. When he gets hold of that young upstart, in private, he will tear him to pieces, he decides, even as he plops his hat back on his head, stomps down the stairs, and out into the bitter December morning. He puts his head down against the wind, crosses the Boulevard du Palais and slams through the door into the Préfecture. He allows himself some ire and some impatience with the staff on the desk, announcing his wish to see the Prefect.

  The man behind the desk is not falling for it. He makes it plain he knows that Cavard has been summoned, and sends the chef on up to the first floor, by which time the walk and the climb up the stairs have somewhat dissipated his anger.

  Just before knocking on the door, he squares himself. Then he gives two sharp raps on the wood, and tries not to be irritated that the Prefect allows five seconds to pass before calling him in.

  Cavard is immediately aware that the air between them is laden with unspoken threat. Delorme barely makes eye contact as he nods at him, and points across the desk at the chair he wishes Cavard to sit in.

  Cavard is tempted to take the other of the two, just to show he is not a dumb animal, but he prevents himself from doing so. There is no point in winning trivial battles when a greater struggle is clearly about to emerge.

  What happens next throws Cavard entirely.

  ‘It seems,’ Delorme begins, ‘that congratulations are in order.’

  ‘Prefect?’

  Delorme is practising his usual nasty habit of spending more time looking at the papers on the desk in front of him than at the man he is speaking to.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, shuffling some pages for the sake of it. ‘Your man, Petit, made quite a find down in Lyon.’

  ‘Would you care to enlighten me?’ Cavard says, and then tells himself off. Keep it civil, he thinks. Pretend the man is not the obnoxious little upstart that he so clearly is. He has risen so fast, he can barely contain his smugness at being better than everyone else. To Cavard’s way of thinking, Delorme owes his meteoric rise to his ability to engineer popularity in the right places. It was not that long ago that Delorme was just a Commissaire of an arrondissement, now he is Prefect of Police, the youngest ever to hold the office.

  Delorme’s gaze lifts and fixes Cavard, but only for a moment. He smiles, and Cavard knows he’s being got at, and successfully.

  ‘Yes,’ Delorme says, ‘I will. It seems that this Ondine Després was not dead, after all. She had left the city, with an American. They were party to the murder of another girl, a mutual acquaintance, one, let me see, Lucie Rey. Your man worked this out and found them in Lyon.’

  Cavard’s mind is being made to work faster than it has done in a good while, and after a moment he is forced to concede that he can make neither head nor tail of this news.

  ‘So the memory man, Després, is innocent?’

  ‘That is not yet clear,’ Delorme states, a little too fast, perhaps, something that Cavard notices even in his baffled state. ‘We are trying to establish the full facts at the moment,’ the Prefect continues.

  Cavard has the sense of the ground shifting from under him. ‘We?’ he says.

  ‘The examining magistrate. Peletier. You know him? A good man. He is working on certain new aspects to the case now. He has been reporting to me.’

  Cavard takes a deep breath.

  ‘You, sir? Isn’t this all a little . . . beneath you?’

  Delorme’s head whips up, and he stares hard at Cavard without saying anything for a long, long time. Cavard does his best to hold his gaze, then smiles and lets his eyes slip to the side. He finds he is looking at a photographic portrait of the Prefect, and he remembers what Petit said about it. In that moment, Cavard realises he needs to play a much smarter game than the one he has been playing. He feels the Prefect’s attention on him soften, fractionally, and he tries to take control of the interview.

  ‘What can I do for you, sir?’ he asks, smiling as genuine a smile as he can produce.

  ‘Do?’ asks Delorme, his voice full of condescension. ‘I don’t need you to do anything. The case is back in the hands of the examining magistrate. If we need further assistance from your department, I will let you know.’

  ‘Very good,’ says Cavard, yet he knows there is something else. There has been something underneath all this, something in the choice of language that Delorme has been using. Cavard knows he has maybe one chance left to learn something that is useful. He stalls for the chance to get it. ‘Then why did you want to see me?’

  Delorme does not look at Cavard. He picks up a piece of paper by the corner with his fingertips as if it is poisonous. It takes Cavard a moment to realise that the Prefect is lazily holding it out towards him, for him to take it. He does so, and starts to read, even as Delorme relates what it has to say.

  ‘I asked you here because an incident occurred that concerns you and your department. Yesterday morning, your man, Petit, left Lyon with the Després woman and her lover, an American named Bishop. Along with Petit were two men from the Lyon station. It had been arranged for them to meet officers of the Paris police in Dijon to effect a handover from one force to the other.’

  Cavard thinks, Arranged? Who arranged it? Which officers? None of his men have been requisitioned, that he knows of. Delorme must have sent some of his own men . . .

  Delorme is not finished, however.

  ‘It seems that an unfortunate incident occurred just after the changeover in Dijon. The party were travelling in the mail carriage at the back of the train, the arrested parties in handcuffs. Just after the exchange, it appears that the American, Bishop, managed to free himself and attacked his custodians. The details are not clear, but the police officers involved were forced to employ their weapons. In the struggle, the girl and the American were shot dead.’

  Cavard stares at Delorme, speechless. Two captives, one of them a woman, attempted to overpower three armed policemen?

  Yet still Delorme is not finished.

  ‘Yes, an unfortunate turn of events,’ he says, only now looking at Cavard again, ‘especially as the inspector from your department was also killed.’

  Cavard does not breathe, he does not move. He looks back at Delorme, very carefully choosing his next words.

  ‘Killed?’ he says eventually. His voice trembles and he tries to control it. ‘How so?’

  ‘I am waiting for the details. I understand that the American was strangling the inspector. That my men fired upon the assailant and your man was, unfortunately, also hit.’

  Cavard says nothing, but he openly stares at Delorme with hostility. He says nothing, but his eyes say it all. You’re lying. You’re lying and you know you are. You think you can lie and scare me into letting this all slide away. But I won’t.

  With his mouth, Cavard says, ‘Most unfortunate. Anything else, sir? I have a busy desk.’

  Before D
elorme has another chance to lie, Cavard rises to his feet.

  ‘I’ll take a copy of this report?’ he says, waving the lies about Petit’s death at the Prefect, before leaving as calmly as he can manage.

  Outside, in the street, Cavard heads away from the Palais de Justice and goes north over the river, where, without knowing it, he sits in exactly the same seat, in the same café in the Place du Châtelet, where Petit once sat, confessing nothing to his friend Drouot.

  He reads the lies of the report Delorme gave him once more, and knows it cannot be the case that a man and a woman in handcuffs managed to overpower three armed policemen. He would very much like to know who the two Parisian men were, but he knows they came from Delorme’s inner circle. Cavard feels a spasm of guilt over Petit. He misjudged him. He had put him down as a young fool with loose ideas. Now he is dead. He finds himself picturing Petit’s final moments, as the Prefect described them.

  It is true that Bishop was a cabaret worker, and had picked up some escapology skills. In truth, he did not free himself from his handcuffs, which had been secured competently by the Lyon police. They were unlocked by Delorme’s men, who met the train at Dijon. The handover was made, and the Lyon men left the carriage. Before the train had even fully left the station, Petit suspected something was wrong. He asked the two men who they reported to and what their names were, and when they refused to answer, the young inspector grew suspicious. One of the two men told Ondine to stand against the wall, and Petit immediately saw what was about to happen. Both the men from Paris had their guns pulled.

  Ondine guessed it too. And Bishop, who tried to charge the nearest man, and was taken down with a bullet at close range. He lay on the floor, groaning. Ondine screamed, briefly, once, looking from her lover to Petit.