Mister Memory Read online

  At twenty-five any sane man would have found her to be barely approaching the height of her sexual attraction, but the world in which she lived was not composed of entirely sane men. They were rich men, powerful men, and those men who have the urge and the fortune to become rich and powerful have very often also the seed of other motivations. Those who are simply born rich and powerful, perhaps even more so. And the house in which Ondine had come to work was full of both, men of all backgrounds and creeds with one characteristic in common aside from their money: they liked their women young.

  And thus, at this still tender age, Ondine found herself with stark choices: move to a brothel of a lower nature where she would take a smaller cut of much less money, take to the streets where she would almost certainly become diseased, or use her body in the cabarets. There remained in her a tiny memory of that desire to act. And so she chose the cabarets.

  MARIE

  As Inspector Petit drops yet another coffee cup on the floor of his rooms, and it smashes into small pieces, it suddenly occurs to him that he was not always clumsy. Far from it, in fact: at school, where he fenced, and in the army, he was elegant with the rapier. At some point since, however, he has developed an unerring knack for breaking something every week, bumping into people every day, banging his head on lintels frequently and usually rounding everything off by spilling ink across his paperwork just when his reports are most behind-hand. He knows when it started. It started when Marie was killed.

  Marie and her ageing mother. They don’t know which of them died first. The house was broken into, doors were opened. Hands closed around the throats of mother and then daughter, or daughter and then mother, until they stopped breathing. Items of value were taken, and the killer, or perhaps killers, left. As if it weren’t bad enough, as if it doesn’t kill Petit that he was in Africa when it happened, as if he hasn’t cried for how Marie must have felt as she died, desperate, alone, in the dark, painfully, horrifyingly, there’s something else about the death that skewers at his mind. He hates himself for even feeling it, let alone putting it into words; it makes him ashamed to have loved Marie, it makes him writhe with guilt, but it’s this: he cannot bear that the killer, a man without doubt, lay on top of her as he strangled her. He touched Marie’s beautiful throat, pushed himself down on her as she lay in her nightgown, must have felt her breasts under him, felt her legs moving between his. It’s this, more than anything, that still haunts him about the murder, and this, and the guilt of feeling this way, is slowly killing him.

  Something else has been occupying his mind, and it is this: memory.

  Until he met Marcel Mémoire and Dr Morel he had never given memory a first thought, never mind a second one. Memory was as invisible to him as the air he breathed. He merely used it without awareness, without contemplation or any consideration, but now, things have changed. He has been thinking about memory a lot; he’s been thinking about the patricidal shoemaker in Morel’s care, the one with the memory span of less than five minutes. Something about that man, about his predicament, truly terrifies Petit; he is constantly haunted by the vision of the man making and remaking that simple wooden puzzle again, and again, and again. Like Sisyphus and his stone, he thinks, except it’s not like that, because it wasn’t Sisyphus’s punishment just to roll a rock to the top of a hill in Hell for all eternity; it was also his punishment to know that he would have to do it for ever. Whereas poor Henri is perhaps not so poor; maybe it’s a blessing, to be able to forget. Is it possible, Petit wonders, that Henri’s own mind in some way decided to become amnesiac, to prevent him from further harm, further pain? The good Dr Morel will have a theory about that, no doubt. He will have to ask Morel about that the next—

  He stops himself. There will be no next time. He will not contact Morel again, and he will put this whole affair from his mind, just as he wishes he could put Marie’s murder from his mind. Yet he cannot. She will not let him.

  Of course, it would not do to become like Henri, with a memory measured in seconds, but perhaps it would help if he could just forget a little bit more. The incident occurred, he thinks. There is no changing that. Marie is dead, and how she died was not good at all. But if he could be spared the remembering of it, if he could be freed from reliving the trauma every day, maybe then he could begin to feel easier.

  Knocking on the threshold of Petit’s thinking is a fleeting connection to Marcel himself, but he does not open the door to allow it in. Not yet. For now, he can only see his own torture as he endlessly replays his imagined creation of how his wife-to-be died, her lovely soft breasts spilling loose from her nightdress as the monster took her.

  And now, as if it were not enough to grieve for the wife he never had, he has been cursed with this laughable affliction, this cack-handedness. Not something you can wear as a badge of honour, a noble scar on his heart from the death of his fiancée, a twisted form of mourning wear, a black armband on his soul. No. It is ridiculous and he is frequently ridiculed for it, most often by his friend Drouot whenever he hears of Laurent’s latest exploit in incompetence.

  He doesn’t bother picking up the pieces of the cup, not yet. At least it was empty this time.

  August has become September. He has a fine view of the city from the window at the back of his rooms on the top floor of a house in the Rue Laplace. Already, leaves are starting to turn, and though there remain plenty of hot days in which the city seems to stand still in a furnace of its own expired breath, there have been some chilly mornings too, where the cold of the night before lingers in the pavements, sucking heat from Petit as he makes his way down to the river.

  From here, in the Rue Laplace, a street below the Panthéon, he can see clear across the river, though the water itself is hidden from sight by the tall buildings of Haussmann’s Paris. The city rises up again beyond, and there is the hill of Montmartre, with that ridiculous-looking basilica slowly appearing on top of it, still as much scaffold as stone. Under the hill lurks Pigalle.

  It is September; Petit has not acted. He has done nothing about his suspicions, not one thing. To begin with, he had to fight to keep his mouth shut, especially that first morning. He’d calmed a little by the time he got back to the Sûreté offices, but still had to bite his tongue, so much so that he said almost nothing all morning, which only made Drouot wonder if he was angry, or ill. As the days passed and he managed not to tell anyone what he knew, or, as he often corrected himself, what he suspected, and as he successfully repressed his ideas, there came no point when he decided to speak. Having begun this process of repression, there was never any reason to stop it.

  And yet. And yet, every day as he fixes his coffee, he can almost see into the heart of Pigalle, where he is absolutely sure lie the secrets at the heart of the matter. Every day is a reminder that he has done nothing, and every time he is reminded of the murderous memory man is another time that he finds himself feeling angry at the world for allowing Maria’s killer to remain unknown. The guilty should be punished, the guilty should be punished. He doesn’t even have to tell himself that, it just runs through him, deep inside, rotting away, like an abscess forming. Of course, such things don’t just form; one day, when enough time has elapsed, they erupt. But today is not yet that day.

  The pieces of the broken cup remain on the floor.

  FACES

  It remains to be explained how Ondine still lived, and one particular matter can shed light not only on how that is the case, but why it is the case too. This concerns Lucie, Ondine’s friend at the cabaret.

  In truth, they were not such good friends, but they themselves had not yet realised that. They clung to each other, having known and worked with each other at three previous clubs before pitching up at the Cabaret of Insults. Familiarity in the face of the unknown is a powerful force. Their first job together ended when Lucie was sacked, but ever since the time they were reunited at the theatre known as the Grand-Guignol, they had stuck together. A small and seedy venue that had recently opened, the theat
re specialised in shows of a gruesome or sexual nature. It was the declared aim of the patron to have as many people faint in every show as possible, from exposure to one, or both, of these two things. Ondine and Lucie had stuck it out at the Grand-Guignol for a few months, and then worked in another dive before they reached the nadir as far as either of them was concerned: the Cabaret of Insults.

  Still they found no one they liked more than each other, and they did know a lot about each other by this time. They were open about their hopes and dreams, and Lucie knew (almost) all of Ondine’s past adventures. When men came through their lives, they discussed them and shared titbits of information, but all the while the seed of the destruction of their friendship waited in the wings. That seed was the business of envy. Lucie had just as spectacular a body as Ondine, as all the girls in the club did, but no one else had Ondine’s face, that remarkable face, which stopped men in their tracks. Lucie was envious when Ondine found another man willing to buy her drinks and dine her until she grew bored of him. And while men would spend idle time with Lucie, she knew she had never come close to finding a man to marry. Ondine let such men slip through her fingers every week, or so it seemed. For example, there was the American, Bishop. Ondine and he had been pretty tight for a good long while, until something unprecedented happened. He’d been the one to get bored of her. Ondine was not too distraught about this. More confused. Bishop had started going with a girl at the Moulin Rouge, which only added insult to the injury. Then that weirdo Marcel had come along, and Lucie had been able to do nothing to prevent Ondine rebounding from Bishop into his arms, so fast, so hard in fact, that they got married.

  Lucie did everything she could to put Ondine off, doing her best to convince her friend that she wasn’t really in love, that it wouldn’t last, that it was a mistake, and so on and so on and, as it happens, she was right. It didn’t last. Lucie had a hand in that, too.

  She had begun to suspect something about Marcel, something no one else had suspected. Everyone knew by now about his remarkable memory, that amazing brain, and if he was a little weird sometimes, well, what of it? That was bound to be the case with someone like him, and, after all, there was no one else like him, so who knew how he should behave?

  One day, more envious than ever now that Marcel and Ondine were married and apparently very happy, she decided to tell Ondine what she had come to realise.

  Ondine, of course, did not believe what she heard. At first she barely understood what Lucie was saying, and when she did, she simply knew it could not be true – Marcel remembered everything.

  Their conversation grew heated, until Lucie finally snapped.

  ‘I’ll bet I could take him to bed and make him think I was you!’

  Ondine slapped her, then stared at her, then decided to make a fool of her.

  ‘Very well. Try! I’ll give you a key, you can put on my clothes! And then you can try!’

  The bet was made in anger, and concluded in rage.

  Lucie knew a lot about how Ondine and Marcel lived. In her happiness, Ondine had been willing enough to share all sorts of details about her marriage, even her sex life. And it was this that Lucie used, gleefully.

  Lucie had thought it through. She had taken great care with her dress, for example, wearing the same white blouse and white skirt that Ondine had been wearing that day. We use the word ‘same’. Such an artless word. It makes no distinction between same meaning the exact one, the article itself and no other, and same meaning from the same mould, or manufacturer, or two things that simply look alike. Lucie didn’t know that to Marcel no two things are the same, that to him each pebble was each pebble and that he could remember the difference between them all. She also didn’t know that this was what lay behind what she had begun to suspect. It was in the things Marcel did, little things he said, and sometimes things he didn’t say, when meeting someone for the first time each day. It was something she’d wondered about. It was also, in fact, something Fraser and Fossard had wondered about, though they had taken their initial musings no further.

  Lucie had. And though she didn’t know that Marcel, who could remember each expression of every face at every moment of contact, could not connect all these different faces up and allow that they all belonged to the same person, she had rightly guessed the result: Marcel was blind to faces.

  The one lacuna in his memory. He could not remember faces.

  This is what Lucie had guessed, and was now about to prove with relish. Marcel, after all, was very handsome, and when he walked into the studio, she wasted no time taking him to bed. Once again, she saw that moment’s hesitation in him as they greeted each other. But she was in their house, and before Marcel had time even to think to inspect her clothes, something that had got him out of trouble in the past, she was out of them, standing naked and pulling him backwards on to the bed, as Ondine had told her she often did.

  So Marcel relaxed, and they made love. They were still making love when Ondine, who had in the intervening time suddenly started to doubt whether this plan was such a good idea, let herself in and found her husband having sex with her best friend.

  The confusion that arose was inevitable, and yet it was the confusion on Marcel’s face more than anything else that convinced Ondine that he genuinely hadn’t known that he was not making love to his wife. Of course, that took much, much longer than it takes to say, and the fight was brutal and vicious. Lucie had not meant to be still in the act when Ondine returned, naturally, but caught she had been. That was the end of their friendship, but not before Lucie had told Ondine exactly what she thought of her, and also planted a thought in Ondine’s mind that would be the end of everything else, in time.

  As Ondine struggled to throw Lucie out of the door, and as she started to believe what Lucie had just explained, which Marcel was now confirming in tears, that he could not tell her face from one time to the very next time he saw her, Lucie screamed, ‘He doesn’t know who you are! How can he love you when he doesn’t know who you are from one day to the next?’

  That was it. That was all it took to get something lodged in Ondine’s mind. Time and again over the next few days she came back to it. She now believed that Marcel had genuinely thought he was making love to her. She didn’t know how it was possible, but she also knew that other odd thing about him: that he could never lie. And since he believed that Lucie was her, she couldn’t very well blame him for doing what she often delighted in doing with him, on that bed under the stars.

  Ondine did, certainly, blame Lucie, who could have chosen any number of other ways to prove the point, but instead did it by taking her husband to bed, while she, Ondine, in her stupid confidence, had agreed to the scheme. It mattered little, it mattered not who had done it, or why, all that mattered was that Ondine dwelt upon what Lucie had said.

  She brooded.

  How could he love her? How could he be in love with her, when he didn’t recognise her from day to day? How could he even know who she was?

  After a week of such thoughts, the damage was done.

  THE LACUNA

  It did not take Morel that long to make the same discovery about Marcel that Lucie had. It was something that Marcel had managed to manage, for a very long time; after all, he only could be sure who his own parents were because they were the man and woman who appeared in his room every morning when he was young, and who waited for him at the breakfast table when he was older. Ginette, perhaps the other most important person in his life until he came to Paris, was someone he learned to recognise by context and by dress, but even then he was in danger of having his secret uncovered. One day, a cousin of Ginette’s was visiting, and it was she who answered the door when Marcel went to ask the doctor about paying a bill. There was some uncertainty in his mind, but he gambled that he was speaking to Ginette, and called the cousin by that name. She laughed and looked confused and told the real Ginette what had happened, not knowing how well Marcel knew the doctor’s daughter, that it was not just a case of unfamilia
rity. But since the cousin did look a little like Ginette, and since Marcel explained he was not feeling himself that morning, he got away with it.

  It’s one thing to avoid detection when no one is actually looking for you, but still another to keep all your secrets when you are being studied on a daily basis, at close quarters, by one of France’s leading alienists. Thus, as Morel made his visits to Marcel, he too noted the brief reticence his patient displayed on every meeting, either with himself or with other doctors, warders or staff of any kind. This had aroused his suspicion. At first, he didn’t know what was amiss, he could merely tell that something was. Eventually he guessed that Marcel needed to wait until he was given information to confirm he knew who he was speaking to, and Morel, like Lucie, decided to test his theory, though thankfully for all parties concerned, not in the same way.

  One day, Morel dresses the Russian warder up in his doctor’s outfit. The long black morning coat, the cravat, the shining shoes. He puts the two pens in his top pocket that he always keeps there, poking up. And then he dispatches the Russian into Marcel’s chamber, while he stands unseen outside the door. Morel has primed the warder with an opening line, which the Russian delivers like a piece of ham on a stage.

  ‘Here I am, here I am, Marcel. Your doctor bids you good morning.’

  The line could not have been delivered more clumsily or with greater fraudulence, and yet without any hesitation or doubt he hears Marcel answering.

  ‘Good morning, Doctor.’