Mister Memory Read online

  Or so Petit is thinking as he makes his way to the Quai des Orfèvres this Monday morning. But the events of the next hour will start to change all that certainty in his mind, certainty that he has been feeding off, like an opiate, for these last few weeks, keeping him numb, keeping him from feeling too much other than a gently brooding hate.

  ‘You’re for it,’ says Drouot as he comes into the office.

  Petit scowls at him, and Drouot holds up his hands.

  ‘You obviously had a rough weekend. Sorry. But you’ve been summoned.’

  Petit cringes slightly. He knows he’s been late once too often. ‘Boissenot,’ he says, and hangs his head.

  ‘Oh, come now,’ says Drouot, ‘you should have higher aspirations than that. Cavard wants to see you.’

  ‘The chef wants to see me?’ asks Petit. ‘Are you sure?’

  Drouot spreads his arms wide. ‘Would I joke about a thing like this?’ he says, and as Petit starts to head towards the chef’s offices, Drouot stops him. ‘He’s not in his office. You need to head to the other building.’

  He points aimlessly through the wall. ‘He’s in the Prefect’s office. He said he would wait for you there. As soon as you got in.’

  Petit sprints out of the Sûreté offices, and is still running, across the Boulevard du Palais, when he wonders why on earth the chef wants to see him there.

  By the time he gets to the tiny antechamber outside the Prefect’s office, he is panting and flustered. He takes a moment before knocking gingerly on the door, remembering how he put a boot to Baraduc’s door with really no call to do so.

  A voice beyond calls to him to enter, and he does. Before he can even begin to explain about his late arrivals at work, he senses that this has nothing to do with them.

  Paul Delorme, the Prefect of the Paris Police, the man in charge of all of them, sits behind a large, though not expensive, desk. The desk is full, but well organised, all the piles of papers neatly stacked and at perfect right angles to each other, with only a clear space for a blotting pad in front of him, and in one corner the obligatory photograph of himself in ceremonial dress, and another of his family. Petit has never met him before, and there is a lot to take in. Delorme is a tall man with a neatly cropped beard. He has the air of a businessman about him, or a politician, very different from Cavard, Petit’s boss, sitting in one of two chairs on Petit’s side of the desk. Cavard is a powerful man too, but he’s a cop, nonetheless, hands-on and practical. Cavard is of the streets, while Delorme . . .

  Petit does not know what to make of Delorme, not exactly, not yet. He senses ill-will and authority and that’s a combination that unsettles him.

  From rumours he has heard around the building in his short time as an inspector, he knows there is no love lost between the two men, and yet they are obliged to have a daily briefing.

  No one says anything immediately. Cavard stares at the carpet, Delorme reads some papers, and Petit sweats, wondering whether he should wipe his handkerchief across his brow or whether that would make him look guiltier than he already feels.

  ‘Petit?’ asks Delorme.

  Petit takes a step forward, wondering whether he will be invited to take the chair next to Cavard. A tiny glance in his direction and Petit stops where he is and stays standing. Delorme returns to the papers he was reading.

  It’s Cavard who speaks next.

  ‘Petit, how long have you been with the Sûreté? Eighteen months, I think?’

  Petit nods. ‘Yes, Chef.’

  ‘I would not expect to have anything to do with someone of your rank quite so often, yet here we are again.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You remember that I consigned you to Devil’s Island, as it were? The archives? I trust you didn’t find that particularly enjoyable, Petit, and it was not supposed to be. It was supposed to teach you a lesson. I fear it did not. Do you know what the lesson was, Petit?’

  ‘Not to question the decisions of superior officers, sir.’

  ‘Exactly. And you an ex-military man. I would have thought that you would understand such things, would have understood them long before you came here. And yet you left the military. Why was that?’

  Petit hesitates a fraction of a second. ‘I wanted to return to civilian life to marry, Chef.’

  ‘And you are now married?’

  A longer pause. ‘No, sir.’

  Something in Petit’s tone allows that this remark is left hanging, and no one speaks. An angel passes. Her name is probably Marie.

  ‘Petit,’ Cavard says, breaking the moment. ‘You will recall, I’m sure, the reason that I asked you to drop the investigation into the Després case. You will recall that I told you that the Préfecture had declared Després to be insane and that he should be incarcerated in a hospital best suited to take care of matters. I find myself this morning in the position of asking you to recall this once more, here in the office of the Prefect, since he has invited me to do it here, in his presence, so that there may be no further question or doubt about the matter.’

  ‘Sir, I didn’t think—’

  ‘No, you didn’t think that anyone knew that you were still working on the case. But you have been heard talking to people, asking questions, and we have a complaint from a Monsieur Baraduc that has come in. Something about a door . . . ? In addition, the Després apartment was ransacked a few days ago. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you, Inspector?’

  Petit shakes his head firmly.

  ‘So that is an end to the matter; I would like you to assure the Prefect here and now that you have, this time, understood. Otherwise you can find yourself a new profession, Petit, all right?’

  Cavard is clearly furious, not only with Petit, at the way he has been made to upbraid one of his men in front of the Prefect, but also with Delorme himself, for making it happen in this way. Yet he suppresses his displeasure as best he can. He and this idiot of an inspector are, after all, from the same team, and by and large the Préfecture only means one thing to the Sûreté, and that’s interference. There is no one with more power over police matters in the whole of Paris than Prefect Delorme, save the Minister of the Interior, and after him, the President of the great republic. For that reason alone, Cavard does what Delorme wants him to, and the magnitude of Delorme’s power is manifest. In the setting of the office, of the view it commands over the Rue de Lutèce outside, of the size of the desk if not its quality, of the way in which he has said only one word since Petit entered, and yet has got precisely what he wanted.

  ‘Sir,’ says Petit, with all the solemnity and honesty he can muster. If they wanted to scare him, it’s worked. And he knows he’s going to have to let Marcel get away with murder. But he wants to know one more thing before he is dismissed.

  ‘Sir?’ he asks.

  Cavard glares at him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Who. I mean, may I ask, who, within the Préfecture, made the decision about Després? Sir?’

  There is the longest silence of all since he entered the Prefect’s cave, during which Cavard seems too angry to speak. Slowly, Delorme tilts his head up, and takes a moment to focus on Petit’s form in front of him. Petit, who has fought hand to hand with naked African natives brandishing wickedly sharp spears, and seen his fellows drop next to him and thought nothing much of it until long after the fight was over, finds that he has to suppress the urge to pass water on the carpet there and then.

  Delorme opens his mouth. ‘I did,’ he says. Then he looks back down at his papers.

  Cavard is still staring at the carpet, but gives a tiny wave of the hand to show that Petit had better get out while he still has a job. As he does so, Petit is left with one final moment to take in the room.

  It lasts a second, maybe two, before he turns, but by the time his hand reaches the doorknob, his heart is pounding, and for a very different reason than his fear of Delorme. In that brief space of time, Petit scans the men in front of him one more time. He finds he is looking at the
tops of both of their heads, both of thinning hair. His gaze falls on the photographs on the desk, turned face out, so that the visitor can see who the Prefect is. And who he is, the photographs declare, is a true Frenchman. A family man, with a sturdy and dependable wife, and two children, an upright boy and a pretty girl. So says the first photograph of his family. And what of the other, of Delorme in his ceremonial dress? It cannot have been taken so very long ago. Like Petit, Delorme has only been in post for a year and a half, since the legendary Lépine went off to Algeria, and yet Petit has time to notice that already the Prefect has lost a little more hair since the picture was made. This photograph speaks of power; it speaks of tradition, and the authority that Delorme has just wielded at Cavard and the young inspector.

  Yet that’s not the thing Petit notices about the photograph. What he notices, in that short space of time, is that there is a mark on it. A slight imperfection, one that only an expert eye, or someone who has perhaps only recently become an expert on the matter, might see. A tell-tale blemish in the upper left corner of the picture, caused by an imperfection of the lens that captured it, and one that tells Laurent Petit that the Prefect of Paris Police had his portrait taken by the very same ex-spirit photographer and erstwhile pornographer who took indecent photographs of Ondine Badiou.

  The chance of a coincidence seems far too unlikely to Petit. Besides which, there is the simple question of what the Prefect is doing associating with such riff-raff as Baraduc. He can surely afford much better photographers, with much more salubrious addresses. It doesn’t prove, of course, that Delorme had anything to do with Ondine, or even that he knew her. And yet why in hell should he have concerned himself with what was otherwise a relatively commonplace and, for want of a better word, uninteresting murder? In two days he had had the thing shut down, closed up and forgotten, even before Petit had really started work.

  Petit leaves the office, trying to repress a sudden urge within him to run, an urge created from the belief that he is about to start shouting things at the top of his voice. Things that might get him in a lot of trouble.

  He decides he needs time to calm down, to think matters through. He might be jumping to conclusions; he needs to work calmly and rationally through everything he knows so far. He walks back to the Quai des Orfèvres the long way, taking an anticlockwise tour around the perimeter of the Île de la Cité, giving him time to think. During which time he comes to the conclusion that he is not mistaken. There is something very odd about this matter. There has always been something very odd about this matter, right from the start. That’s his conviction, and though there is nothing more he can say, nothing he can prove, he knows that he is going to continue to work on the affair, even at the risk of his job. He owes that much to his own poor Marie, and to Marcel’s dead wife, Ondine. But if Petit is right, that there is something very strange about the entire business, he has no idea just how strange it will turn out to be, and he is wrong about one thing, one very important thing indeed. Namely this: Ondine Després is not dead.

  TRAUMA

  ONDINE

  In order to understand how it came about that the entire world, apart from two people (one of them the ‘victim’ herself), believed that Ondine was both dead and buried it is necessary to unravel the twisting together of several remarkable occurrences.

  Where better to start than with the resurrected lady herself, Ondine Després? As we have seen, Ondine came to the city with dreams that outreached her. She was sixteen at the time. Her mother being dead, her father working very hard at trying to drink himself into his wife’s grave, Ondine believed that her life would certainly be better if she left the suburbs of Lille where she had grown up and sought greater opportunities in Paris, which like all capital cities exerts a great magnetic pull upon its nation’s ambitious young people, perhaps greater than it ought to. Certainly she knew that things could not be worse than at home, where a house that had always been poor was declining even further.

  On arrival in the city, she was already more streetwise than many of her contemporaries. She was sure of herself and who she was, and believed that she had two gifts: that she could act, and that she was attractive to men. Sadly she was only right about one of them. It was something she had been well aware of for some time. As a girl as young as seven she’d learned that rich old men in the park on Sunday could be made to part with a few centimes if she appeared in front of them in tears, claiming to have lost her father. A wipe with a handkerchief took the tears away and a couple of coins would put a smile on her damp face. Indeed, these centimes would mount up in her father’s pockets, it being a ruse he had developed to supplement the amount of money he had for beer. By the age of twelve she had grown too old for tricks like that, but by then she had already learned that she didn’t have to do very much in order for things to go better for her. A smile here, a fluttering glance there, and men would offer all sorts of treats: an extra ball of ice cream, a free ride on the carousel when the fair came to town.

  By the time she arrived in Paris, she had these arts perfected, she felt, to such a degree that she could get men to do things without them even knowing they wanted to. The right kind of lingering touch on a forearm could work miracles, she’d found, nearly as good as looking up at someone from under her eyelashes and biting her lip almost imperceptibly. It would be hard to judge Ondine at sixteen for being manipulating and calculating, because God had given her just two gifts (well, one), and she was going to make the best of what she had. It would be hard to say she was conniving when she could not for one moment have stepped back and asked herself if what she was doing was wrong in any way at all.

  And no one had ever given her to understand that she was anything other than startlingly attractive. As she moved from a girl to a young woman and her body developed, she found that even more doors seemed to open for her, though as the acting dream died, the doors all led to a certain kind of house. It was in one such house, at the age of twenty-two, that one of her clients decided that, although she was undeniably striking, she was also somewhat arrogant, cocksure of herself. The gentleman decided to formulate a question to test this theory.

  ‘When,’ he asked, ‘that is, how old were you when you knew you were beautiful?’

  The question was not really a question. It was a trap. It could, he thought, be answered in a few ways. There could be genuine modesty (perhaps rare) in which the girl could actually not feel herself to be beautiful, and would stammer out some reply to that effect. There might be an answer suggesting false modesty, implying the girl knew well enough that she was good-looking but also knew it was perhaps a little gauche to admit it boldly. And then, there was the answer that Ondine actually gave.

  ‘I was eight,’ she stated with pride, and without hesitation. There was no irony, no self-awareness or sham of modesty, and the customer of the house felt his suspicions were confirmed. Once again though, we might defend Ondine by pointing out that this was at least honest, and that circumstances had made her this way.

  Her mother had worked until she’d died but earned very little. Her father worked until his wife died, and then began drinking with renewed energy. Ondine had grown up very poor, and as a young child had been unable to understand why her parents did not simply just ‘get’ more money. Hunger was frequent, clothes were few and far between and never fine, heating was limited in the winter and all in all it was miserable to have no money. As she grew a little older and learned that money comes from the process of exchange, it was her father who taught her, in the park with the old rich men, that the asset she had of value was her beauty. No wonder then, that she came to treat it as a commodity, one that she did not value in and for herself very much, but which was of immense value in what it could get her. As she made her way into the working houses of Paris, and was very soon ensconced in the finest of them, she realised that there was something else about her gift, about her commodity of exchange. It was inexhaustible. When she gave her beauty away, men gave her money for it, a
nd yet, in actual fact, she gave nothing away. Her beauty was still hers. It did not leave, piece by piece with each transaction. When she slept with a man, she saw the hunger in their eyes as they tendered money to the madame of the house. They barely noticed the currency leaving their hands, all they wanted was to be enfolded in her beauty, and ravish it in return. And when it was over, and she began to dress again, she saw that her long, slim legs were still long and slim; her breasts were still firm and her lips still sensual; her eyes still smouldered if she made them do so and her hair hung in tresses just as fine as half an hour before. And yet, the customer’s money was still sitting in madame’s drawer, and a respectable portion of it would be in Ondine’s purse later that night. Her beauty remained hers, her beauty was infinite.

  So she earned a lot of money, and lived a wild life. She was many men’s favourite, and knew it. She was invited to the most extravagant parties, to the most lavish orgiastic soirées, and she met a lot of very powerful men. It was during this time that Monsieur Baraduc took her photograph, the one that Inspector Petit has been dragging around Paris, as well as other photographs for her rich clients’ personal consumption. Ondine believed she was happy. It would be arrogant in turn to say that perhaps she was not, for who are we to judge? Happy or not, one thing she was for sure: hungry.

  Is it simplistic to say that her desperately poor upbringing, and the teachings of her father, left her with a lifelong and insatiable hunger for security through money? Just because it is a simple explanation doesn’t make it untrue. What might be harder to work out is why, having found herself with money, it was never enough, although she spent it like water. Was she fulfilling some inbuilt process as she strove to get rid of what she’d deservedly earned so quickly? Centimes in the park, centimes in the park.

  There might also be other reasons why enough was never enough; some people just seem to be made that way, after all. But Ondine was wrong about something in all this: that her beauty was infinite. It is one of the potential curses of the young that they can never conceive of being old, and although her customers did not manage to steal one ounce of her beauty, as the years went by, time did.