Theory of Remainders (21 page)

“I don’t suppose you have access to the court records?”

Guérin turned and raised his hands in distress. “Alas, no. For that you must go to Rouen. But these other documents I can provide.”

He set out on an expedition through his wilderness, whistling while he worked, bringing his quarry back to the counter piece by piece. Before long there came the hum and flash of the photocopier. In under half an hour he had produced a tidy folder of documents.

“Here is everything I have to offer,” he explained as he handed it over. “All in all, there was more than I remembered. For the court documents and police reports, though, I’m afraid you’ll need to pay a visit to the Bureau of Records at the courthouse.” He raised a bony finger. “I should warn you that the personnel can be rather prickly.”

“Because it’s Rouen?”

Guérin’s eyes glinted. “You’re a quick learner, Monsieur Adler.”

“I’m just hoping the papers will still be available.”

“You needn’t worry about that.”

“Really?”

“Trust me. You can’t obliterate the past. This is one area where the French have considerable expertise.”

“You think? So far, everyone in Yvetot seems committed to the cause of amnesia.”

Guérin considered the point. “Yes, I see what you mean. There can be a bit of that, too. Still, remembering and forgetting . . .” He weighed the words with his hands. “They’re not so different, perhaps.” Philip arched an eyebrow, and Guérin continued. “There is a famous example from long ago. During the Revolution. Perhaps you know about it?” When Philip confessed his ignorance, Guérin clapped his hands together, shifting into the second gear of his storytelling. “You see, when the king and queen were executed in Paris, their bodies were thrown into graves filled with quicklime to speed the decomposition. The people wanted to erase everything. Just as they tore down the Bastille, so they wished to wipe out the royalty, and not just their bodies, but even their memory. Louis XVI was never to have existed.”

“But there would always be the grave, the tomb.”

Guérin drove a finger into the air. “That’s just it! There was a tomb, and yet
not
a tomb. The royal couple was both hidden and not hidden. Both forgotten and remembered.” At Philip’s expression of confusion, Guérin pressed on. “They buried the king in the same place as hundreds of other victims, in a common grave. The queen came some time later, in the same way. There were no markers, no names. They disappeared without a trace. Just two trees lost in a forest.”

A wrinkle formed on Philip’s brow. “You said the past couldn’t be obliterated. But your story shows the opposite.”

“Not at all. You see, many years went by. We had the Empire of Napoleon. Then, much later, the return of the royal family. The new king was desperate to recover the remains of his brother, and it happened that one man knew where the bodies were located. He had guarded this secret for years, waiting for the opportune moment. They dug where he told them to, and they found the royal remains. Despite the quicklime, the bones were intact. Can you imagine? Twenty-two years later?”

Yes, he could imagine. “But how . . . how could they recognize them? If it was a mass grave, how did they know which bones were which?”

Guérin’s eyes glowed as he wagged a finger. “An excellent question. It was the rubber in the garters, Monsieur Adler. The royal garters of Marie-Antoinette!”

Back at the hotel Philip shut himself in his room and stretched out on the bed. Guérin’s story had left him unsettled. Applying the lesson of royal corpses required traveling through the memory of Sophie’s death and, what was perhaps worse, imagining once again the irrevocable corruption of her flesh.

Like everyone, Philip had a pool of memories he couldn’t bear to hold in mind: the time as a child when he’d run barefoot and driven a rusty pin all the way through his middle toe, the day he’d found the family cat dead in the middle of the street—followed by any number of painful, embarrassing or deeply humiliating moments in his life. Sophie’s death was lord and master of all these smaller pains, but it followed the same logic. Memories like these bobbed up at unexpected moments, leaving him wincing until he could banish them back to the depths.

Forcing himself to work, he went through the folder Guérin had provided. It was filled with clippings from the papers—both
Fanal d’Yvetot
and the regional
Paris-Normandie
. There were even brief reports in the national press. The articles came in chronological order, starting with the report of Sophie’s disappearance, then breaking the news of the police investigation, the detention of Édouard Morin, the preparations for the trial, the declaration of the
non-lieu
, and finally a trickle of squibs over the years whenever Édouard Morin was transferred from one institution to another. The series concluded with Olivier Morin’s obituary.

Many of the early clippings included photos, grainy halftone shots that still managed to portray the terror in Édouard Morin’s eyes. It was an early, unformed version of the man Philip had visited at the psychiatric hospital in Rouen—though with the same fragile neck, the same wide eyes. He’d been so young! Philip imagined the boy’s growing awareness that his life was toppling into a hell of his own device.

There were two different pictures of the father: a close-up shot taken on the day of the arrest, and another showing him from a greater distance as he entered the courthouse in Rouen, his right hand raised in an unsuccessful attempt to block his face from the camera. Philip stared into the pained eyes of the father, wondering how it must have felt to surrender his own son to the authorities. He thought again of the day they had sat together in the courthouse cafeteria. If only Olivier Morin had spoken to him! They shared something, after all: they had each lost a child.

And then there were the pictures of Sophie, the same image copied again and again, first when she’d gone missing and there was still hope, then afterward when reports about the inquiry appeared. Over time the articles dwindled in size, finally fading to nothing.

Although Monsieur Guérin had framed the photocopier on specific articles, bits and snippets of surrounding material appeared in the margins, ranging from news items to weather reports to coupons to classifieds. The same sheets that drummed the news of Sophie’s death offered slices of Yvetot’s life, and Philip found himself awash in memories he hadn’t expected: the construction of the new school, the autumn of abundant rains, and at the end of the year, the departure of the parish priest, the one who had presided over Sophie’s funeral, for a new position in Rouen.

What surprised him most about these records was their thinness. The different newspapers had cannibalized each other’s prose, more eager to fill column inches than to shed any new light. Nevertheless, the articles provided a structure of names and dates, and he transcribed these facts into the blue diary. He had to start somewhere, and if he could compile all the information in this one set of pages, perhaps the details would form their own web of connections.

Then came a powdery photo from the
Fanal d’Yvetot
, a shot of the funeral, that ginned-up ceremony that started at the church and ended at the Saint-Louis cemetery, where they’d stood about the vacant grave listening to Father Huet’s stiffly formal service. There Philip was in the middle, at Yvonne’s side, his hand clutching hers, the invisible germ of their separation already sprouting. What thoughts occupied his bowed head? It was a somber group assembled in that field of crosses, starched-looking men and downcast women. Behind them to the right stood the grainy figure of a man, his legs slack as if ready to buckle, one hand pressed against his brow, the other arm draped over the shoulders of a woman who braced him. It was Roger with Élisabeth. At the time Philip had been too stricken to consider the grief of others, but this photograph showed a man he barely recognized: a brother-in-law who, fifteen years later, would still lay a yellow rose on a girl’s tomb. Who, like Philip, still felt responsible.

Guérin’s file was a start. The next step was to contact Rouen for access to the legal documents. On the phone, a sharp-voiced woman in the Bureau of Records grew impatient as he stumbled over the technical vocabulary in French. “
Comment?
Quoi?
” she kept asking as she tried to penetrate his American accent.

All he wanted to know was if it might be possible to procure a copy of a dossier dating from 1993.
Possible?
she asked back. Of course it was
possible
. As long as he had a court order and had filled out the appropriate forms—without which it was quite
im
possible. When he pressed for details, she responded pointedly. “Monsieur, it’s not my job to provide legal assistance to the general public. If you need help understanding French law, I suggest you contact a French lawyer.” After that simple pronouncement, the line went dead.

Roger had suggested he try Father Cabot, so at noon he reinserted himself into the Smart Car and revved it up. But as soon as he pulled away from the curb the vehicle started to buck as if the pavement had sprouted bumps and ridges overnight. A flapping noise came from the front, and when he stopped to investigate he found that both front tires sagged like misshapen snails of rubber. In his entire life Philip had never experienced a single flat tire, and now, at the same time, he had two!

Then he understood. As Monsieur Bécot had warned, Philip’s welcome in Yvetot had worn thin. He glanced about in search of culprits. One fellow strolled by whistling an aria. Women pulled groceries in carts, all of them oblivious. So he leaned on the horn, letting it bleat without interruption as heads turned. He kept at it, determined to blare the horn forever if that’s what it took, and a few minutes later the white and blue police car rolled up at his side. The window went down, and Philip recognized the balding officer who frequented the
Tord-boyaux
.

“Anything wrong, Monsieur Adler?” he said, not even pretending he didn’t know who Philip was.

“Someone has slashed my tires. I’d like to file a report.”

The officer gave him an astonished look. “Are you sure?” He climbed out and examined the damage. “The thing is, Monsieur Adler, I don’t see any cuts. It must be a leak, don’t you think?”

“Two tires at once? You’re telling me this is an accident?”

The officer scratched the thin hair at the back of his head. “Yes sir. That’s my professional opinion. What else could it be? These cobblestones, they’re hard on a vehicle, you know.” He pointed up the street. “You’ll find a service station just a few blocks that way. They’ll be most helpful, I suspect.”

He ended up paying for a truck to come with a pump, and then—should he have been surprised?—the tires held the air just fine. The coveralled mechanic gave a shrug. Maybe the seal between the rubber and the rim had been compromised, only to reform in the summer heat. Who knows? He’d seen stranger things than this in his day.

In short, there was no way to prove that the car had been vandalized, and Philip struggled to contain his irritation. He was still smoldering by the time he made it to Saint-Pierre Church.

The main door led directly into the giant rotunda of the nave. Tall windows spangled with colorful glass displayed abstract mosaics of light: martyrs paired with the symbols of their sacrifice. Behind the altar hung a towering cross from which a splayed and frail Jesus looked down with forgiveness. At the entrances to the side chapels, racks of electric votives flickered mechanically.

Philip loathed this building. He fixed on the pew where he’d sat the day of Sophie’s funeral, and he recognized the area where the footsteps of pallbearers and the casters of caskets had worn the carpet thin. He remembered just where that old priest had stood, gesturing theatrically throughout the homily. He was glad to be dealing with a different man now.

He found Cabot in the sacristy, seated at a table, a napkin tucked into the collar of his cassock, his fork poised over a half-devoured meat pie, a bottle of red wine at the side. He was a corpulent man with a puffy face and a large nose veined with purple. The crown of his head was bare, almost like a monk’s shaved tonsure, though the hair was thinning up front, too.

“Excuse me, Father,” Philip said, the title strange on his tongue. He’d never grown used to this oddity of Catholicism—the conferral of fatherhood upon men sworn to celibacy. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but would you have time for a question or two?”