Invitation to Provence(23)
Forgoing the lure of the soothing massage, the relaxing hot green tea, and the soft bed, he took a long cool shower, put on fresh clothes, and got a taxi to Hu Tong Road.
15
JAKE PAID OFF the cab and looked around. He was in one of the poorest parts of the city, certainly not a place frequented by tourists and travelers. The lowest of workers lived in these tumbling cinder-block apartments propped up with bamboo scaffolding and linked by drooping strings of wires. The bluish light of TV screens flickered in the darkness, and the odor of sewage and decay seeped from the gutters. Here and there small, open-fronted stores filled empty niches, and the arc lights of a motorway circled the area in blinding yellow halogen, silhouetting the jagged buildings and sending the inhabitants scuttling into the shadows. Over all filtered the sounds of poverty: the snarl of a dog, the wail of a child, the angry shout of a woman, and the impenetrable high whine of Chinese music.
He checked the address again. Apartment 127 was on the ground floor, to the left of the entrance to the four-story building. As he watched, the door to the apartment was pulled open and a child stepped out. She was about ten years old, small and thin and wearing what appeared to be a school uniform, a gray skirt and a short-sleeved white shirt. Her black hair was cut in a short fringed bob that emphasized the skinniness of her neck. She didn’t even notice him, just sped by him on sneakered feet, folded money clutched in her hand.
Jake followed her to one of the storefront businesses, a Chinese medicine shop, and saw her speak to the owner. The man took her money, unlocked a safe, took out a small packet, and gave it to her. She sped back, and this time she glanced up at Jake as she passed. He caught the look of surprise on her face at the sight of a non-Chinese in these parts. Then she was gone, back down the shadowy street, back through that malodorous doorway, into the poor home that Felix Marten had paid for.
Jake had seen her face clearly under the light over the medicine shop door, though. Sweet, startled, and wide-eyed. Wide blue eyes, the blue of the Mediterranean on a sunny summer day. They were Rafaella Marten’s eyes. He smiled. There was some good news for Rafaella after all. She had a grandchild.
The question was, Was she Felix’s? Or Alain’s?
16
RAFAELLA STOOD AT THE door of Felix’s old room over the front portico, staring at the polished brass knob, unable to bring herself to turn it and open the door. The tears seemed stuck behind her eyes. She could not cry and she wondered, the way mothers always do, where she had gone wrong.
This room contained Felix’s entire life up until the time he’d left the chateau at the age of twenty-three. His clothes were still hanging in the closet with his shoes arranged in rows beneath. He was always a neat boy and he’d grown into a fanatically neat man. His room had a military spareness about it that, when he was seventeen, had prompted Rafaella to suggest the army as a career for him.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” he’d said, with that contemptuous little line about his lips that had always worried her. “Of course I’m not going in the army. I’m going to run the winery.”
And Felix would have run it well, Rafaella thought now, leaning tiredly against his door. Of course he would have alienated everybody, that was the way Felix was, but he would have produced good Marten wine efficiently enough.
Finally, she gathered her courage and opened the door. Haigh had been there before her. He’d taken off the dust-covers, made sure the room was thoroughly cleaned, laid out a suit of clothes on the bed ready to dress Felix for the last time. She looked at the formal morning suit, the gray jacket and striped pants, the immaculate white shirt and gray silk cravat. Even the correct socks and shoes awaited Felix’s final dress engagement, and her heart brimmed with grief for the son she had lost so many years ago.
“But why would he kill himself?” she asked Haigh, “Felix was always so strong.”
“Too strong for his own good,” Haigh answered grimly.
Looking now at the remnants of Felix’s life, Rafaella wondered how her chubby, sailor-suited boy had come to this sad end. This son who had deserted her, who’d accused her of believing he’d killed the girl, when all she asked from him was the truth. “I’m your mother,” she’d said. “I’ll help you. Just tell me it was an accident. I know that’s all it could have been.” But in her heart she had not believed his story, and somehow Felix had known that.
She sank into the big green leather chair by the window. The sun illuminated every line on her weary face and finally the tears came, racing down her powdered cheeks, leaving little tracks, extra new lines, but of grief this time. Outside the door the dogs whined miserably.
Rafaella was remembering when she gave Felix this room. He was just seven years old. “Let’s go take a look at your new room,” she’d said, and he’d stared at her surprised. Holding his hand, she’d walked, barefoot as always, along the broad chestnut-floored hallway, past the pairs of exquisitely painted double doors leading to various rooms, past the great sweep of the staircase with its polished banisters and gleaming brass stair rods, around the corner to this big room immediately over the front portico.
“Here?” Felix asked, amazed, because this was the finest guest room in the house.
“You’re my eldest son,” she explained, smiling. “It’s only right that you have the best room.”