Mister Memory Read online

  Perhaps nothing. Perhaps he’s just being methodical. Petit has learned from his time in the police archives that librarians like method.

  And, in truth, it doesn’t take them long to find the pornographer.

  Petit is working his way through the Bs, when he suddenly wonders if he’ll find a file marked Buguet among them. He flicks ahead to see, and finds that the sordid photographer was telling the truth, or, at least, if he wasn’t, he hasn’t been caught yet.

  Returning to his sequence, he pulls out a file marked BARADUC, and lo and behold, the very first photograph shows the tell-tale imperfection.

  ‘I’ve got him,’ says Petit, and shows the photograph, which is of an orgy of some kind, to Aubenas.

  Aubenas nods.

  ‘There are others?’

  They scan the next few photographs and there it is, on every one, the faint but identical mark. On any single photo, it wouldn’t amount to very much. Placed side by side, the repeating mark is as clear a sign as can be found.

  ‘Baraduc?’ asks Aubenas. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Why? You know him?’

  ‘I do not know anyone in here,’ Aubenas says. ‘I know the man’s work. An interesting case. Somewhere in your archives, at the Quai des Orfèvres, you will most likely find another file on him. Some twenty years ago he was arrested in a case that became rather famous. For a while.’

  ‘Of what nature?’

  ‘Baraduc was a spirit photographer.’

  Aubenas annoyingly leaves that hanging, forcing Petit to have to ask.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A spirit photographer. It was all the rage for a year or so. Baraduc was the foremost culprit. He was tried for a series of cases of fraud. He claimed to be able to photograph the dead, and produced some hundreds of photographic likenesses, each at a high fee, of course, for the bereaved, who in their grieving state were all too easily fooled. He was caught in the end, by one of your more enterprising inspectors, I seem to recall, who had Baraduc produce photographs of a dead uncle, who was not only not dead, but who had never lived in the first place.’

  ‘Aha,’ says Petit, ‘a spirit photographer . . .’

  ‘Very curious case. In court he tried to claim that not all the instances were false, merely some of them. It mattered little. He was arrested. And then ten years ago he popped up again in this line of work . . .’

  Aubenas waves a finger at the series of images before them.

  ‘You have your man, Inspector. Hermés Baraduc took the photograph of your girl, whoever she is. I trust that will be all for now?’

  Petit nods.

  He hovers.

  ‘I can put this material away,’ Aubenas says curtly, and Petit leaves, not looking back until he reaches the doorway, when, again like Orpheus, he cannot help but take a backward glance. He sees Aubenas in silhouette, motionless, staring at a photograph that he is holding close to the light.

  Petit feels sickened, not just at the thought of the odious librarian getting pleasure for himself, but at the memory of how his own body had reacted to the sight of those two women on the alp, not more than twenty minutes before. Yet on this subject, the voice in his head, the voice of his dead fiancée, is strangely uninterested.

  INCONSTANCE

  The poor doctor is beside himself. Since the session in which Marcel revealed his very earliest memory to the world, he has shut up again, closed like an oyster unwilling to release its treasure.

  For days Morel tries everything he can think of to bring Marcel back to life; he tries everything he has tried before and he tries things he has not, but none of it makes the slightest difference. Marcel is dead to the world around him once more, the situation becoming so bad that they are compelled to force-feed him again on two occasions.

  One day, unable to suppress his frustration, the doctor’s patience runs dry.

  ‘You are a fraud!’ he declares to Marcel’s unheeding form.

  Morel stomps up and down the tiny cell, as best he can, limited by the confined space and by his gait, which is not conducive to stomping at the best of times.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it, but it’s a trick! No one can do what you claim to do! And your memory of the womb is absurd! Do you take me for a complete imbecile? No one can remember before they were born. No one! For memory to function, language is required. Without language, such a thing is impossible!’

  He goes on in this vein for a while but soon runs out of steam. Marcel had spoken about words, after all. He’d spoken about how it was harder to explain his memories before he had words, but not that it was impossible. And if Morel is honest, he supposes some of his own memories were formed with sentences, while others, the majority in fact, only require words to explain them, to communicate them to others. The memories themselves come rushing in without language itself, as feelings: fear, happiness, sadness, pain. And what of animals? It’s known that some animals at least have memories, rather sophisticated in some cases, if one considers creatures like the salmon, who can return across oceans to the very river in which they were spawned. Or even the humble bee, who finds nectar, and then flies home to relate that information in some unknown way to his fellows. All that is done without language, apparently.

  He thinks of the recent work of Henri and Henri; their paper Enquiry into the First Memories of Childhood in which the first memories of one hundred and twenty-three people are noted and analysed. Most of the subjects report their first memory coming from the ages of two to four. A few of the subjects report a memory from before the age of two. None from before the first birthday. And now Marcel declares he remembers moments from before he was born . . .

  Morel looks at his subject disgustedly.

  He actually says pah! and turns to leave the cell, when he remembers the book he brought with him. He pulls it from his pocket, and throws it across the room. It misses Marcel and falls open on the floor.

  ‘I was going to get you to prove yourself with that,’ Morel grumps, ‘but I can see I am wasting my time. Good day.’

  He leaves Marcel behind, a still body.

  If his body is still, his mind is not, but Morel cannot see Marcel’s mind. This is what frustrates him so greatly: he wishes he could look at the damn man’s thoughts directly and not have to poke and tease at them from outside, through the medium of Marcel’s body – of his tongue. He wants to be able to see the workings of the clock, not merely wonder that the hands always tell the correct time. But he cannot. The only way he can learn about Marcel’s memory is at second hand, remotely, having to rely on the patient’s ability to think, to speak, to interpret, to tell the truth. Why, to think he claims not to be able to lie!

  Morel moves away. He has other patients, there are reports to write and lectures to give, but all of that will be done with only half his attention, he knows, until he can solve Marcel. That is how he puts it to himself. He must solve Marcel.

  In Marcel’s mind, all is far from still. He is caught in an endless whirling cycle of memories that fall hard and fast one after the other, tumbling over themselves, as he struggles to regain his composure. All too often, he fails. He tries to remember good things, just one good thing. If he can focus on that, perhaps he can calm himself. He searches hard and finds a happy thought, a time when Ondine had only recently moved in to the studio, a week or so after their little wedding. She was wearing white, as she often did, with the little purple velvet boots she was so proud of.

  While he set a pan of milk on the top of the stove, Ondine laughed at the sight of the seamstresses across the passage.

  ‘They’re like goldfish in an aquarium. Or perhaps it’s like watching them on the screen of the cinematograph,’ she said. ‘They’re there, but not really.’

  ‘At the cinematograph, the people on the screen do not wave back at you if you wave at them,’ Marcel pointed out. He came up to join her, resting one hand on her arm briefly, though hanging back, as if he did not want to draw attention.

  ‘And
neither do these little fish,’ Ondine said, going right up to the glass and waving and mugging at the seamstresses, who, it was true, gave not the slightest sign of seeing her, but kept their heads bowed, concentrating on their work. The lips moved on one of the three, but only a lip-reader would have known what she said.

  ‘See?’ said Ondine, laughing. Marcel laughed too but also, as Ondine turned away from the window, noticed that one of the three caught his eye; just faintly, enough to bring back memories of that happy night under the stars.

  Marcel pulled Ondine away and asked her to finish heating the milk for the coffee, and all of that was a happy thought, but despite his attempts to prevent it from happening, it is followed in his mind by a connected one. At first, Ondine was proud of her handsome husband’s memory, and would take the chance to show him off to anyone she could: to waiters in cafés, to newcomers at the cabaret, to anyone at all. However, he soon found that there were aspects of his memory that displeased her just as much. As the weeks passed, and the first glow of marriage dissipated, they had their first argument; when Ondine let the milk stand too long on the stove, and it burned. That was not what caused the argument, they fought when Marcel pointed out that it was the third time she had done it in a week.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Ondine protested, but Marcel knew that she had and took the trouble to tell her at what time and on which days it had occurred.

  It wasn’t a big fight.

  ‘So I’m a little forgetful,’ Ondine said, pushing Marcel backwards on to the bed, ‘but you forgive me, don’t you?’

  The burned milk was soon forgotten.

  But not by Marcel. Only by Ondine, who let it burn for a fourth time the following day.

  When it happened again, she tried to blame Marcel.

  ‘You were cooking. You left the milk to burn, not me!’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Marcel, quite matter-of-fact. ‘You were cooking. You set the milk on the stove.’

  ‘How do you know?’ shouted Ondine. ‘How can you be so sure? Maybe it was you!’

  ‘It wasn’t me. When I put the milk on the stove, I take the can from the shelf and I put it back where it was. There.’

  He pointed to an empty spot on the bottom shelf, to the far left.

  ‘When you cook, you take the can and put it back anywhere. In this case, right there, on the floor.’

  And he pointed to where the large metal milk can stood on the wooden boards, in front of the cupboards. He then proceeded to tell Ondine where she had left the milk can the previous three times she’d let the milk burn, at which point Ondine looked Marcel straight in the eye, told him he was a piece of shit, and stormed out.

  Marcel remembers that scene. He remembers all the times they argued about burned milk. He remembers every word that Ondine called him, every name, every time, and he remembers all the pain he felt at being so clumsy with her, so stupid as to care about burned milk, so cross with himself for not seeing why it was that it made her angry. So angry for not being able to see that.

  Of course, Ondine came back.

  She came back after that first time, when she’d sworn at him.

  When she came back into the studio, he just stared at her.

  She hesitated in the doorway, expecting him to apologise, to rush into her arms and beg her forgiveness, for that was how men usually operated with Ondine. Marcel did not do these things, not at first anyway. To start with, he just stared at Ondine, with a stupid look on his face. He glanced across the passage, he looked at the seamstresses, the three seamstresses, and then he looked back to Ondine.

  ‘What?’ asked Ondine, angry that she didn’t get the reaction she was used to getting. ‘What’s that look for?’

  Marcel seemed to stir.

  ‘I . . . Nothing. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, and I apologise.’

  And then he came to her and held her and she told him it was okay, and they made up and they made love, though if Ondine was honest, it was neither the first nor the last time that Marcel seemed a little weird with her. A little cold.

  Still the memories whirl around in Marcel, still he is unable to calm the storm. He remembers how they made love that time; it seemed that Ondine made love to him with anger in her, which was a new experience for him. He had thought love was only about love until that time, and then he saw something else in it: that there could be other emotions, not just passion, but something harder, something more . . . He couldn’t find the word, not then, but it would come to him later when he walked in to the studio on that first Saturday in July and found Bishop putting himself into his wife from behind.

  He replays the scene again, as he has done so many times, and as he will continue to do, over and over again. He sees every detail, recalls every emotion, senses every action and reaction, smells every smell, as he takes the gun from the top of the cabinet and points it at Ondine and pulls the trigger, and she falls on to the floor, where blood starts to seep out from under her, and then he’s running, and then he’s not running, but kneeling on the cobbles in the passage, staring at the ground, rocking, and rocking.

  Marcel spends around four hours on that single scene.

  When he is done, he is exhausted. In truth it is only exhaustion that lets the memories recede for a while, allowing him to get some rest, recover some energy, some mental energy, for a short time, until the torture can be resumed anew.

  The light in the cell has grown dim, but as he opens his eyes, he sees the cobbles of the Cour du Commerce, just as if he were still there, kneeling, staring down, rocking in confusion.

  Then, the cobbles fade, and into his vision swims a book; thrown at him by a frustrated alienist.

  He picks it up, blankly, and places it on the small stool by his bed, and he notices that the book is a foreign dictionary, a French–Russian dictionary.

  Tired, Marcel lies back on his bed, closes his eyes, and begins to remember killing his wife, all over again. The word he applies to himself is the same one he applies to Ondine and Bishop’s sex. Animal.

  THE STUDIO OF HERMÉS BARADUC

  Still working in his own time, things move slowly for Petit. It is another week or so before he can find a moment to pay Monsieur Baraduc a visit. There has been a stabbing in the 6th, and as part of the investigation the examining magistrate concerned, a supercilious oaf with the splendid name of Henri Huberman, has dispatched Petit out of the arrondissement and up to Montmartre to interview a sister of the victim. Petit conducts this interview rapidly and without great interest; the sister knows, or claims to know, of no reason why anyone should want to kill her brother. Petit notes in passing that Boissenot’s theory of the end of the world seems to be holding good, because there was an unnecessary ferocity about the killing. The man was robbed for a few francs. Why then was his body so broken and beaten? There was a certain terror in the whole thing, Petit admitted, and so the Principal Inspector’s theory seems vindicated once again.

  What really holds Petit’s mind this afternoon is the knowledge that he is no more than three hundred metres from Baraduc’s studio, a short walk up from Place Blanche, just off Rue Lepic.

  He takes a light lunch in the Brasserie Cyrano on the corner of Rue Lepic. It’s not his normal taste to eat somewhere so large, but, being August, many of the smaller family restaurants are closed. He tastes little, and despite his wish to hurry, forces himself to idle away the time. Baraduc will himself be out at lunch no doubt, no point arriving too soon. At this moment, Petit doesn’t ask himself why he is bothering with this case that is not a case. He has merely found that things have unfurled themselves before him, and lain down at his feet, so that he has an easy path to tread. Nothing has required much hard work or any great insight, and he has been pushing on open doors simply because they are open.

  He watches Pigalle go about its business. It’s a hot day, the city is quieter than usual, with many people taking their annual holidays. It is possible that Baraduc is among them, but only a visit to the studio will tell if there is the sm
all white card in the window: congés annuels.

  He leaves the Cyrano at two, and takes a cigar from the tabac next door. He doesn’t smoke, but selects a small elegant-looking thing called Maria Mancini, purely for sentimental reasons. Paying for the cigar and a book of matches, he puts Maria between his lips, and puffs her into life. If only it were that easy, he thinks, suddenly bitter. Only the need to seem to be doing something prevents him from hurling the cigar into the gutter there and then.

  He strolls on, pretending to saunter like an aficionado of the cigar would if he had such an important business to concentrate on, until he reaches the Rue Constance. After fifty metres, the street takes a ninety-degree turn to the right, and there, Petit notices the name of the narrow impasse that goes on straight ahead: Marie Blanche. This second omen, this second reminder of his dead fiancée, is enough to test his character severely. He takes the cigar from his mouth and drops it under his heel on the pavement. His foot twists, and he is forced to admit to himself why he cares so much about the case that is not a case; of Marcel the Memory Man killing his young wife and getting away with it. Of course Petit cares. Of course he does. If he doesn’t, when his own fiancée was taken from him and the killer or killers never found, then who will?

  There is no one around. This is a quiet backstreet on a quiet day in a quiet month; shutters are closed on many buildings, he is alone in the city. He looks up from the crushed body of the cigar called Maria, and on the first floor of the corner building hangs a sign: Atelier Baraduc. Underneath, smaller writing promises the client ten photographs for the sum of five francs as an introductory offer, and that is all.

  He makes his way through the street door, up to the first floor. It’s dim on the landing but after a moment his eyes adjust to the darkness and he sees the half-glazed door of the photographer’s workshop, with Baraduc’s name there once more.