Petite Mort (33 page)

The only other thing left in the box, aside from the letters, is
a photo-frame, which I take out. I unclip the frame and lift off the wooden back; take out the photograph and check between the picture and the frame. Gently shake the ensemble.

There is nothing. I hold the photo for a minute, staring at the space between the frame and the back of the picture, then put it back on the desk.

We look at the empty box.

‘I’m sorry,’ says the archivist. ‘There’s nothing else.’ She smiles. ‘I suppose it’s lost for ever,’ she says.

‘I suppose,’ I say.

‘Maybe he destroyed it.’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But why go to the trouble of cutting it out in the first place? If it meant so much to him. If he wanted his work to be preserved for all time. This was the place to do it, wasn’t it? Temperature-controlled, safe. It doesn’t make sense.’

Something is fighting for attention: a tune I cannot identify. Something Rinaldi said.

I reach for the photograph again. Turning it over, I see Peyssac paterfamilias. His worried face set in a stern frown, he stands with one hand on the shoulders of each of his daughters; his wife hovering behind and to the left, her face a pale smudge. The little girls stare solemnly at the camera, their expressions blank. The taller is wearing a white dress, shoes and veil, posed in an attitude of piety. Just some spidery writing on the reverse of the picture.
On the occasion of Micheline’s first communion; to my dear wife. Your Robert
.

I’m still for so long that the archivist’s hand reaches out, and she gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze; I jump; we stand, confused, looking at each other.

‘Are you all right?’ she says.

‘It’s nothing,’ I say. Then: ‘People keep mementos of people, don’t they? Not of things. Images of loved ones. Like this photograph.’

The archivist shrugs. ‘I suppose so. Why?’

Juliette and Adèle
1967

‘And then?’

Adèle spreads her hands. ‘The trial, in the form it was, ceased. The charge against Luce and André was now murder on top of the attempt on my life, and as it was a capital charge, they were tried for it first. Victoire Doulay’s parents were the pursuers-injustice, and it was their lawyers who led, not Denis. The police took a month to assemble the burden of proof. The Doulay family hired an office for them to prepare the case. Although, as it turned out, there was no need.’

‘Why not?’

‘The judge asked her if it was she who had shot the girl, or whether it was her husband who had done it. He was giving her a chance to claim her innocence. I remember she waited, and she looked all over the courtroom, up to the ceiling and over to the windows as if someone passing outside would tell her what to say; and then she came to where I was sitting, at the table next to Denis.

‘“Yes,” she said, “I decided to shoot her.”’

I say: ‘Just like that?’

Adèle sighs. ‘Just like that. The easiest thing in the world.’

‘But why? Why did she confess?’

Adèle smiles. ‘Why? Because she was guilty.’

‘And then they questioned André?’

‘Yes. He did his best to pretend that she had implicated him maliciously, but her account of the shooting had been so clear that it was believed. Besides which, there were practicalities: it
would have been difficult for her to have carried Victoire to the lake without help.’

‘They were shipped out to Guyana on the morning of the ninth of June.’

‘And what did you feel when you knew she had been transported?’

‘Some parts of me felt heavier, others lighter.’

‘And when you heard about André?’

‘I was surprised. I had not thought he would become involved in petty squabbles; certainly not before the prison transport even touched land. I had thought he would demonstrate more
nous
. The article said he was thrown overboard with the shank still in his guts.’

‘Then?’

‘I worked hard, and got promoted. I moved to Vincennes, to my apartment, and have been here ever since.’

‘Have you been happy?’

She takes a moment to think about this.

Then she says: ‘It has always been surprising. Aurélie Vercors came to visit me, after her divorce. She was with a woman about my age, who looked at her as though she was the beginning of everything.’

‘And Luce?’

Adèle says: ‘I read about it in the newspaper. There was a little article to say that she’d been released after five years at the work camp and lived in anonymity nearby for five more years. That it was only discovered who she really was when she died.’

‘And how did you feel when you heard?’

‘I had the impression that the walls of my apartment were made of a thick, viscous liquid: that I could put my hand through
them if I wanted. Everything was fragile and surrounded by a radiant glow: if I tried to go to the door, the door would bend away from me. I thought I was in another room: the salon at the house. The quiet of the silk sofa and the spirals of mica in the sunlight from the window.
I am a speck of dust. I am dancing for you
. Except she was not in any room any more.’

The door to the café opens; someone comes in, orders coffee. The waiters’ voices laughing with the new customer.

Adèle is looking at me with a wide, blank smile.

I say: ‘And in that time, the time she was free, she never tried to get in touch with you? And you never tried to look for her?’

A shrug. ‘Everything we had to say had been said.’

Seeing my face, the smile twitches down at one corner. ‘What is it, Juliette?’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just cold.’

Juliette, xi
.

Rinaldi opens the door on the second ring, his face showing perfect surprise, then awkwardness.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asks. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘I need to ask you about the photograph of the Pathé workers.’

He smiles warily. Then he relents. ‘Very well,’ he says, and turns to shuffle away down the corridor towards the salon.

‘I’m not sure how I can help you, really,’ he says.

‘I don’t think Peyssac took the film,’ I say. ‘I think it was someone else. Someone who had the opportunity, who was there on that day, but with a different motive.’ I take out the photograph. ‘I think it might have been this man.’

Rinaldi sighs. ‘Paul Leclerc?’

I run my fingernail over Paul’s eager eyes and hairless chin. ‘The security guard. The one Adèle Roux told me about. You said he tried to kill himself over a girl who worked at the factory.’

‘That’s right. In late 1914, I think. He almost hanged himself in the Bois de Vincennes. Very sad.’

‘Who was she? This love of his life?’

‘He never told me her name.’

I drum my fingers on the photo.

‘What happened to him?’

Rinaldi says: ‘He left the factory. He’d hurt his back; he wasn’t able to work afterwards. He did marry someone else eventually; he ended up living with his daughter on the outskirts of Paris.
She and her husband looked after him. I had a card from her when he died.’

I lean forward. ‘What was the daughter’s name?’

‘Anne something. Something beginning with R.’

It is dark by the time I arrive at the house in Vincennes.

I hammer on the door for a full minute until there is the shuffle of footsteps coming down the hall corridor and stopping just on the other side.

‘Your father was a security guard at Pathé. He was the one who stole the film.’

The door stays shut. Inside the house, the dog begins to bark frantically.

‘Let me in. I could call the police.’

Silence.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight—

Anne Ruillaux opens the door.

She crosses her arms across her chest and suddenly begins to cry: child-like, her fists in her eyes. ‘He made me do it,’ she says. ‘He said,
When I’m gone, take this to the archive, and say you don’t know how you got it. Don’t tell them I worked at the studio
. We never had much because of looking after him. He said I was due some money. He said it wasn’t wrong because the real wrong had been done by the man who made the film. He said we were helping to make everything right.’

In the back, the dog howls its distress, flinging itself at the inside of the closed door in a scrabble of nails.

‘Why couldn’t you leave me in peace?’ she asks.

I say: ‘Was it because of the girl that he stole it? The one he was in love with and tried to kill himself over? Was it so he could have something to remember her by?’

She watches me.

‘It’s because she died, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘He wanted a memento?’

Silence. She shakes her head.

I stare at her, thrown. ‘What do you mean?’

Anne says: ‘She asked him to destroy the film completely. It would be dangerous to her if anyone saw it.’

‘Dangerous?’

‘Yes. She could get in trouble with the law.’

Somewhere in the distance an express train passes, on its way south; and when the sound is over, I find everything is clear.

The enormity of it: bile rising into my mouth.

‘But he didn’t destroy all the film,’ I say. ‘Your father cut out a scene and kept it separately. That part really was a memento, wasn’t it? It was the only scene she was in. That’s why he bothered to cut it out, instead of just keeping the whole film.’

A nod.

Silence. Then I say: ‘Do you know where he kept it?’

She says grudgingly, as if it’s of no consequence: ‘He asked to be buried with a cigarette case I hadn’t seen before.’

Juliette, xii
.

You’re walking along the
quais
, between the Pont-Neuf and the Ile St Louis. Long, slanted light; breeze in your hair like someone running their fingers through it. The trees beside Notre Dame are shaking themselves free of their leaves.

You’ve come here because it’s where you go to make decisions, with the city around you like a blanket. The latelunch cooking smells. Near here a girl walked and bought a postcard of Max Linder; over there, a car rattled home from a party at the Ex-Minister’s apartment; the statue of St Jeanne d’Arc was lit up underneath the moon.

Of course there is a bruise: the burning sensation of being tricked, because she has been lying to you since you met. But underneath, what you feel is surprise. Surprise, because now that you’re here, there isn’t a decision to make.

To come to the end, and find you are not the person you thought you were.

Wind on the surface of the river. On the parapet above a tourist points his camera at you:
click
.

You lift your hand and wave.

Juliette and Adèle
1967

She frowns as if she hasn’t understood. ‘You’re leaving Paris?’ she says. ‘A holiday? Where will you go?’

‘I haven’t decided,’ I say. ‘Somewhere new.’

She smiles at me. ‘Then this is our last meeting,’ she says. ‘And you’ve brought some chapters of the book for me?’

‘No. That’s not what it is.’

‘What, then?’

‘It’s a silent filmscript, of a kind. I think you’ll find it interesting reading.’

The café door opens and closes – and that’s when she guesses, now, before I have even spoken.

She folds her hands over each other. ‘Tell me it instead,’ she says.

‘We open on the silhouette of a man, hanging from the branches of a skeletal tree. He rotates, as if on a thread; we think he’s gone, but then three men rush into the frame and support his legs. One climbs up to cut him down and we see that the man is alive, after all. He clutches his throat and gasps for air. His friends gather round.

‘The intertitle: WHAT COULD DRIVE YOU TO THIS HATEFUL CRIME OF SELF-DESTRUCTION?

‘Then I think we cut to a close-up of Paul Leclerc’s face as he begins to tell his story.’

She doesn’t flinch when I say his name. ‘Continue,’ she says.

‘Then we have another intertitle. YOUNG LOVE IN SUMMER.

‘We watch a younger, happier-looking Paul walking in the same woods with a pretty girl. She has long, dark hair, she’s in her late teens. They exit the woods, holding hands, and go through the Pathé factory gates, where with much blowing of kisses, they part ways, each to their separate section.

‘A montage follows. Paul and the girl in a café, flirting; Paul and the girl strolling on the riverside. Paul walking her back to her apartment. He stands mooning in the street while she leans out of the window and waves to him. Next to her, at the window, a fat woman with eyes like currants smokes a cigarette.’

She puts her hand to her mouth: as if she’s suppressing a smile.

‘Then we cut back to Paul’s mournful face. He says
I would have done anything for her. But nothing stays the same for ever…
and we fade to the next scene, in a Pathé studio, empty apart from a few people. A cameraman is filming a young girl, Adèle, who looks startlingly like Paul’s girlfriend. She is standing on a stage with various mirrors arranged on it. A director walks around and around the set, agitated, waving his arms and shaking his head. Suddenly he stops. Points. Paul’s girlfriend is sitting beside the set, holding a make-up box on her lap. She lifts her head, places her palm on her chest –
Me?
– and allows herself to be beckoned forward. The director snaps his fingers –
You, Camille!
– and someone brings an empty mirror-frame forward and places it on the set. Paul’s girlfriend goes to stand on one side and the girl stands on the other side. The director claps his hands in joy and tells the cameraman to start filming. Paul watches from the doorway to the room, a dreamy expression of pride on his face.

‘Cut back to the group of friends surrounding Paul by the tree. One of them has a knowing expression on his face.
So her head was turned by the chance of fame?
he says. Paul shakes his head.
No. This was different
.

‘Now we go to a dark and stormy night. An exterior of
Camille’s apartment, rain spattering its windows. Camille’s sister, Adèle, runs to the front door and opens it. She vanishes inside.

‘Cut to Camille asleep in her room. The door bursts open and Adèle rushes in. An older, stringy woman hovers in the doorway, her hand over her mouth; behind her the fat woman we saw at the window before. We now see that Adèle is bleeding and clutching her arm.