Thanksgiving (14 page)

‘I did think about it. But if I’m in England, then everyone I know will feel they have to stop by to offer their condolences and all the rest of it. I might be ready for that in a week or two, but just now I’d prefer to be alone.’

‘Of course, of course. You must decide what’s best. I’ll call Robert while you’re on the way to Toulon and get him to turn on the heating and so forth. It’ll be perishing there at this time of year, and you know how long it takes those old stone houses to warm up.’

After my phone call, I went to an unoccupied departure gate area and broke open the tape cassette with a knife I had stolen from the breakfast service on the plane. I unreeled the black ribbon completely, then hacked it into lengths which I crumpled up and dumped, each in a different garbage bin in the concourse. The tape was clearly a compilation edited from various of the many nights when Lucy and I had lain in bed for hours, talking and making love. It must have been made fairly shortly after my arrival, before Darryl Bob had given up hopes that Lucy might change her mind about him and had moved to Nevada. She hadn’t bothered to change the locks on the house when he moved out, and although he’d given her his front-door key, it would have been easy for him to have a copy made first.

On the way across town to Orly, I read an article in
Le
Point
about the crash in which Lucy had died. It appeared that a faulty bolt in the stabilizer fin was the probable cause. The reporter made much of the fact that this could not have occurred with an Airbus product, and that if European regulations had been in effect, then the whole fleet would immediately have been grounded.

Lucy put in no appearances during the rest of the journey, or indeed after my arrival at La Sauvette. This both reassured and disappointed me. I knew we had unfinished business, and although I had no idea what to do about it, I’d sort of hoped that she did. She had always been quicker and cleverer than me in many ways, not least when it came to practical solutions. That was one of the many reasons I had loved her. Now, absurdly, I felt that she had betrayed my trust.

Those days were some of the quietest I had ever spent. I talked briefly on the phone to people in London and New York about projects I was supposedly working on, in response to calls originally made to the voicemail which still had the announcement Lucy had recorded: ‘You have reached two zero six, four nine four, eight eight zero one. If you have a message for Anthony or Lucy, please leave it at the tone.’ She started with an intake of breath which sounded like a sigh, as though she mildly resented being bothered by the phone. I’d tried to get her to re-record it, but she had never got around to it. Now that that reluctant inspiration and the formulaic message were all that remained of her, I cherished them. I often called in the middle of the night, just to listen to her voice.

There were also other messages on the voicemail. Lieutenant Mason had called several times, asking me in increasingly peremptory tones to get in touch with him immediately. Someone whose name I couldn’t identify left a number with the 775 prefix which covers all of Nevada apart from Las Vegas. He too urged me to return his call at my earliest convenience. Most disturbing of all were the clicks, indicating that someone had hung up when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to answer. Someone who had something to say to me personally, not to a machine. Someone who had already left the only message he was prepared to leave, and would now proceed to take other measures.

As a result, I found myself paying a lot of attention to any sounds in the vicinity of the house. The road which runs along the ridge below La Sauvette is scarcely more than a paved lane connecting the various properties strung out along the hillside. Traffic is infrequent by day and almost unheard of at night. So whenever the sound of a motor broke through the incessant keening of the mistral, I stopped whatever I was doing and listened intently. Sooner or later, I knew, one of those vehicles would slow down and then turn into the dirt drive leading up to the house.

A man in khaki uniform would knock at the door, salute stiffly, and then advise me in apologetic but implacable tones that I was to consider myself in a state of
détention provisoire
pending a judicial decision on the extradition request issued by the United States authorities on a charge of aggravated first-degree homicide.

The gendarme in question would almost certainly be Lucien, unless he had retired by now. You couldn’t argue or bargain with Lucien, still less bribe him. My father had found that out when he had attempted to stop the local hunters coming on to our property in the early hours of Sunday morning and discharging their blunderbusses at anything that moved. Lucien had listened with the most perfect patient attention to my father’s litany of complaints regarding broken sleep, trampled plants and two dead cats, and his pleas for something to be done, saying not one word the whole time. When my father finally ran out of steam, he said just two:

‘
Pas possible.
’

And when Lucien told you that something wasn’t possible, according to my father, you didn’t make the mistake of trying to get a second opinion.

‘You don’t even imagine that at some unspecified time in the future it might theoretically become possible, and that hope can thus spring eternal in the h.b. No, you just try to forget that you were ever stupid enough to bring the matter up in the first place, and then leave the country for about a year or so to give everyone else a chance to forget about it too.’

I knew that Lucien would come for me sooner or later. I almost wanted him to. The evidence against me was just too strong. In a sense, I was guilty. I had wished Darryl Bob Allen dead, even if I hadn’t killed him. I certainly didn’t remember killing him, but then I didn’t remember anything much about the stuff I’d done at the time those photos I’d looked at on the plane were taken. And even if I hadn’t killed him, it was only because I hadn’t had the guts to do it, which made me more culpable and despicable rather than less.

I should have, I thought now. Why hadn’t I just pulled the trigger and had the pleasure of watching his stupid, smug, gloating expression resolve itself into a mask celebrating my ultimate triumph? I was going to get the death penalty anyway. At least I could have done the job in the first place. And Darryl Bob Allen deserved to die, because he hadn’t deserved Lucy. Even now, I shied away from the thought of all he’d had and all I’d missed. It was so brutally unfair. After one dismal marriage and Christ knows how many inconclusive affairs, I’d finally found my destined mate, the love of my life, the mother of my unborn children. The catch was that I’d found her too late and then she’d died on me, one more statistic in the FAA record books. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much. Thanks for nothing.

Sooner or later, Lucien would come to call on me. I had nothing to do except wait, so I waited. Sometimes it was light outside, at others it was dark. I seemed to be waking at three and six. The clocks in the house had gone mad. Maybe there’d been a power cut, a frequent event at La Sauvette. I couldn’t be bothered to reset them, and my own watch was still nine hours behind. Who cared what time it was?

I got the Peugeot we kept at La Sauvette out of the garage and drove down to the sea, out to a promontory called Bec de l’Aigle, where I stood with the wind at my back threatening to pitch me down into the waters below. I wondered how deep they were, what sort of creatures lived down there and what they fed on.

On the way back I bought supplies for dinner. I’d planned a classic winter meal, a cassoulet with a green salad followed by a selection of cheeses. I got to work as soon as I got home. Cassoulet is straightforward enough to make, given the right ingredients, but the preparation takes a lot of time. According to the clocks, it was almost four in the morning when the dish finally came out of the oven, but by then I wasn’t hungry any more. The thought of food made me sick. It made me cry, too.

When the knock at the door I’d been expecting finally arrived, it turned out to be Robert Allier, a neighbour who keeps an eye on La Sauvette when my parents are away, in exchange for using the barn at the rear of our property as a chicken-coop and general storage area. There were no eggs at this time of year, so Robert had brought a bottle of the cherries preserved in kirsch which his wife made each summer.

I think what he really wanted was to find out what on earth I was doing there, but as soon as he saw me he remembered that he had other urgent business. I hadn’t shaved since my arrival, and now had quite a creditable beard. I was wearing my father’s dressing gown, a scarf, a woolly hat and two pairs of thick socks, eating cold cassoulet out of the dish and drinking Ricard 51 cut with warm water. The clocks said it was ten in the morning.

Robert backed rapidly away, lapsing into the thick local patois he employed when he didn’t want to be understood. I tried to entice him to stay, but the only language which would emerge from my mouth was German, which I had learned at school and almost never used since. As the sound of Robert’s boots on the gravel drive faded, I realized that word of my condition would be all round the community in a few hours.

This ended any further inclination I had to go out. I locked the doors and hunkered down inside. My real fear now was not so much of the police as of Lucy. She hadn’t finished with me yet, of that I felt sure. One of her stock phrases, when she left the room or the house, was ‘I shall return.’ She said it in a campy, theatrical tone with a heavy emphasis on ‘shall’ and a husky trill on the final syllable. And she would return, that I knew. She’d already destroyed Darryl Bob. She could certainly destroy me. In fact she’d already done quite a good job.

The first time the phone rang, I ignored it. The second time too. No one had called me since my arrival, for I had been careful to give no hint as to my whereabouts. It was mid-afternoon. The wind had shifted to the south, bringing in a skittish rain from the sea. The sky was drab and overcast.

The phone fell silent. It could have been my parents, I supposed, but they were of the generation that regarded international calls as a luxury to be used only in times of life-threatening emergency. The only other innocuous possibility was Robert, but whatever he thought of my present state of mind, he would never call me. If he had something to say, he’d walk over and knock at the door. Speaking on the phone to a neighbour, or even the demented son of one, would have been a discourtesy.

That left only the police.

The third call was later. Outside the closed shutters, the sky was starting to darken.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ said a familiar voice.

I paused, trying to control my hyperventilation.

‘Lucy?’

‘What?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Rome.’

‘What’s the matter? Is everything okay?’

By now I had recognized Claire’s voice, similar to her mother’s, but marginally flatter and less modulated.

‘We’re fine. How are things with you?’

‘How did you know where I am?’

‘I called your parents. They gave me the number.’

‘Oh, right. So I guess you’ve told the police.’

‘I’ve talked to the police, yeah.’

‘What did they say?’

‘It’s kind of a long story.’

‘Is that why you’re calling? It must be the middle of the night there.’

‘Where?’

‘You said you were at home. It’s like 3 a.m. or something there, right?’

She laughed.

‘I love the way you start to do teenspeak whenever you talk to me.’

‘Do I? Sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘That’s what makes it so charming. But what I said was, we’re in Rome.’

‘You’re in Italy?’

She laughed again.

‘No. Rome, Idaho. Of course I mean Italy.’

‘But . . .’

‘Basically it looks like Dad was worth a lot more than he was letting on. There’s a house in California we haven’t figured out what to do with yet, plus a bunch of retro neon signs that are turning out to be worth a fortune. Frank got on the Internet and found this collector who wants to have them restored and arrange them into a neon sculpture park on his estate in Florida. We haven’t actually seen any money yet, but I’ve basically got the green light to max out my Visa card. So what with everything I’ve been through recently, I figured I deserved a break to take some time off and decide what to do next. Everything’s changed so fast. You remember I did that student trip to Europe when I was at college? Just a couple of weeks. I’ve always wanted to come back and see the place properly. And here I am. Here we are, I should say.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Daniel and me.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘We’ve been to Amsterdam and then to Paris and Vienna and now we’re in Italy.’

‘Fabulous.’

‘Yeah. So anyway, here’s the thing. It’s Thanksgiving in a couple of days, right?’

‘It is?’

‘Thursday. So what I was wondering was, seeing as it’s kind of tough travelling around with a three-year-old, and it’s going to be pretty lonely . . .’

‘Do you want to come here?’

‘Could we?’

‘Of course you can. I mean, I don’t know if I can get a turkey. The French aren’t big into turkeys, and the pumpkin pie’s definitely out. But I’ll do what I can.’

‘Oh, that would be so great. Don’t worry about the food. I never cared much about that. But it would be really nice to have like a family day together, you know? And you’re about all the family I have left.’

‘How are you travelling?’

‘Trains, mostly.’

‘Okay. We’re on the line from Nice to Marseilles, but there are also a few through trains from Italy, I think. Come whenever you want. Just give me a call from the station when you get in, and I’ll come down and pick you up.’

‘Great. We’ll be there on Wednesday sometime.’

‘When is that?’

‘When’s what?’

‘I mean, what day is it today? I’ve sort of lost track, being here all alone.’

‘It’s Monday.’

‘Oh, right. Listen, Claire.’

‘Yes.’

‘What were you going to say about the police?’

‘I’ll tell you when I see you. I’ve got to go now, there’s a line of people waiting to use the phone.’