The Postmistress of Paris(55)

André leaned against the back of the couch. “There’s blood on the scarf?” he asked.

Edouard studied him, trying to understand. Did André think he’d killed Elza? Thinking of Luki now. He ought to have had Luki baptized. What did it matter what he believed and what he didn’t? What he believed was that he wanted Luki to live.

“At her throat where you stabbed her,” André said. “True or false?”

“Oh.” The game wasn’t over. “Yes. True.”

“Nanée hides her neck under this white scarf,” André said, “knowing that it’s what is hidden that drives us to obsession. We want to remove it, to see her bare skin.”

“Good heavens,” Nanée objected. “It’s my flying scarf, is all.”

“Is it?” André asked.

“I didn’t know Nanée would be the victim when I wrote the scenario,” Edouard protested.

André was right about him, though, if not about Nanée. He wanted to unwrap the scarf. He wanted to see the little dip at the base of her pale throat. Not to do her violence, but to touch her neck. The thought had been there under the surface since she’d shown up to dinner, as always, wearing that scarf.

“It is a pointed instrument?” André asked Edouard.

“True.”

“Something from the kitchen?”

“False.”

“The office?”

Edouard saw the pen in Nanée’s fingers, the bite marks at the end of the barrel. Ink flowing onto quality stationery, Dear Berthe.

“Yes,” he said. “True.”

“A letter opener?”

“False.”

André considered him with surprise, then smiled slightly. “A fountain pen.”

“True.”

“A pen?” Nanée said, fingering the white scarf at her neck. “Could you really do me in with a fountain pen?”

Danny said, “With enough force, you would pierce the windpipe.”

“Doing violence with the tools of creativity,” André said, “and yet not your own tools.”

“Not my own tools,” Edouard agreed.

“Indeed with my tool,” André said provocatively. “And now, we must determine your motive, why you would kill poor Nanée by piercing her neck.”

Edouard felt more exposed now than he had for some time. He couldn’t even say why.

“It’s a crime of passion?” André said.

“True.”

“Hate,” André said. “That isn’t a question. That’s a deduction.”

Edouard watched him, feeling closed in, confined. André knew how Elza died.

“Revenge,” André said, “for a wrong done to a woman you love. When you imagined your murder, you didn’t imagine your victim was a woman. You can’t imagine killing a woman. But you can imagine killing men.”

Edouard nodded, thinking of Elza lying on that street in Berlin, and wanting to ask Nanée to please get up.

Nanée rose from the floor and dusted off the seat of her slacks. But of course she got up. The game was over.

“It’s a barrier to creating,” André said. “This discomfort with violence.”

It wasn’t a question, but still Edouard thought: true. So much of what he created came from violence, but the closer violence came to him personally, the less fascinating it became. He’d felt that even before Elza was murdered. He saw even then what a voyeur he was. And now? Now violence was there in the mirror every time he looked. Given a short moment with the men who had killed Elza and her sister, he would kill them with his bare hands and be glad of the chance. Up close so he could see their faces as the life bled out of them.

What had fascinated him when he saw it in others, he now abhorred in himself. And yet there it was. There it always had been. Evil in himself. Evil in everyone. In the beautiful Jacqueline and the more beautiful Nanée. In Varian, who imagined he was here only to do good. In Danny and T, who wanted to help Varian. In Elza. Yes, even in Elza. Not in Luki, though, he didn’t think. Not in Luki, he hoped.





Sunday, November 10, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


It was there on the table in the entry hall, where the Chagall painting of a flying cow had been until just that morning. An envelope. Edouard was descending the stairs, headed outside to help set up for a Sunday Armistice Day salon, marking the anniversary the next day of the cease-fire on the Western Front at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and with it France’s victory over Germany in the Great War—which was of course no longer allowed to be celebrated, now that Germany ruled France. But they were having a salon, at which they were going to show the flying cow. Varian was trying to persuade Marc Chagall to leave France before the chaos of the Marseille government gave way to enforcement of the new Alibert anti-Jewish laws against French citizens as well as foreigners, but Chagall wouldn’t believe his own government would turn against him, and he feared Varian’s illegal routes out of France. He preferred, he said, “to stay safely on the right side of the law,” but he’d given Varian the cow painting, and Nanée and Danny hung it from one of the plane trees that morning in preparation for the salon.