Should someone arrive now, the evidence would point to Jules having been out on the water early. He wasn’t yet dressed, as someone who had just finished showering would not have been. Probably no one would show, but whoever might wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. The next step was to dress, and as he did he thought through one scenario after another.
His life had been saturated with and overwhelmed by ever-present guilt for the deaths of people he hadn’t killed, people he had loved, whom he would have done anything to save. Now, in regard to the two men, or boys, that he was fairly sure he had actually killed, he felt no guilt at all. The very fact of feeling no remorse made him feel remorse sufficient to set him in an argument with himself even as he desperately tried to strategize a way clear of capture.
Was what he had done a crime? Was it murder? There were three of them – and at least one was armed with a deadly weapon. Might he have been more measured? He was not a boxer or a street fighter but a seventy-four-year-old musician. Had he tried to moderate his response, they probably would have killed him, or at least they might have pushed him aside and killed the Hasidic Jew. Should he have abstained, as required of a good citizen, leaving the monopoly of violence to the state but allowing the murder of an innocent man? Years before, a woman had been raped and murdered in the park at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And not that long after, another woman, both with extreme brutality. The neighborhood was literally terrified. And the response of the good citizens had been to hand out orange plastic whistles.
At the neighborhood meeting, imagining a bunch of frightened, impotent people watching a crime unfold as they provided the musical accompaniment with their whistles, Jules had asked why they didn’t hand out revolvers instead. A hundred people summoning another hundred more would be of absolutely no avail if not a single one was willing actually to intervene. He stated this, perhaps somewhat un-diplomatically, by referring to “sheep whistles not for calling sheep but to be blown by them.” He was ostracized forever by everyone present, an indignant crowd bravely determined to be militantly helpless. His last words before he left were, “One must have the courage to save a life.” They thought he was crazy, and now he thought that perhaps they had been right. He was so shaken, unsure, and fearful that it grayed his vision, and things would fade in and out as he tried to think of what to do.
“Steady yourself,” he said out loud, “hold through.” It began to work. He would be all right even if someone came in, and no one did, giving him time to think. In the quiet fog of early morning everything was muted in gray, and the vigorously flowing river, powerful and unperturbed, was a model for his thought.
For whom would they be searching? The three witnesses would undoubtedly think he was taller and heavier than he was. Just as children imagine monsters, and seafarers once returned with exaggerated tales of gargantuan creatures, the witnesses would most likely endow Jules with strength and size appropriate to their fear of him. That he could outrun young police officers suggested that they would estimate his age to be lower than it was, given also that he had been able to take on three young men and quickly kill two of them. The heavy rain that night had soaked his hair, turning it dark and plastering it down. And he had been wearing a distinctive saffron/marigold-colored rain jacket over his blazer. He had bought this in Switzerland many years before. Its color was unforgettable. The company that made it was Japanese, and the Japanese vision of the spectrum was somehow different from the European. He had seldom worn it, but that day he had pulled it from his closet in response to the weather forecast.
The first action he took, therefore, was to wrap the jacket around one of the small cinder blocks used at the boathouse to prop open the doors on windy days, and tie it up with nylon boat twine, which would take years to rot. He then dressed, seized a broom, and went out to sweep the dock. At the edge, he inconspicuously dropped the weighted jacket into the water, which he knew to be about twenty meters deep beyond the dock, with a strong, scouring current. He carried the broom and swept in case there were distant traffic cameras across the river.
Instead of a taller, heavier, dark-haired man of between thirty and fifty, in a bright orange-yellow jacket, leaving the boathouse and exiting onto the street would be a man of lesser build in his middle seventies, with thick hair that was blonde and white. Leaving a place he had habituated for more than half a century, he would be dressed in a blue blazer. The blazer had come through for him in that it was made of a certain kind of fabric that simply would not wrinkle. The boast of the manufacturer was that you could stuff it into a thermos, if you could find one big enough, pour in hot water, leave it for a week, and it would come out as good as new and ready to wear. Why do this would be anyone’s guess, but the point was made, and despite the fact that it had been in the river the perfectly pressed blazer was an important element in disguising Jules as himself. Thus transformed, he would be anything but the man who had had the confrontation on the bridge, although of course he was.
Before he got dressed, he inspected himself. He had bruises on his arms and shoulders but his face was clear and he had no cuts or abrasions whatsoever, meaning he had left no blood. His hair had been matted by the rain tight against his head, so there was little chance that a hair had flown away as, when it is dry, it can. Nor had he left anything on the bridge or the Allée, for he still had everything he had had with him. At his age, the bruises would take two weeks to disappear, but none was visible as long as he was dressed. There were no cameras on the road near the boathouse. This he knew because he often parked longer than he should have, and in judging his chances of getting a ticket he had taken into account the lack of surveillance. Of course, there were cameras all over the place, and had someone actually dissected his comings and goings they might see that he had not returned home that night, and that his outerwear had changed while he was still out and about.
But there were millions of people in Paris, and the skein of their transit was a tangle of a billion threads. It would take an impossible brilliance or amazing luck to focus on his whereabouts specifically, especially given that he didn’t resemble the man the witnesses would describe. All he had to do now was walk calmly into Paris as if nothing had happened, buy a newspaper, sit in a café, read while having breakfast, and take the train home. The trick was not to shake and not to flutter, and, if he did, never to let anyone see.
WHEN HE GOT HOME he was tired because he had walked to l’Étoile to get the A line west. In Saint-Germain-en-Laye he had picked up something to eat, and now, with a sandwich and a bottle of beer, he sat on the terrace. The sun began to burn away first the clouds, and then the mist that had lingered over the Seine far below.
Not long before, it seemed, a young family of three had moved into these splendid quarters. The wife was vital, quick, statuesque, and erotic, but what was most wonderful was the way she loved her child. It would remain the most beautiful thing Jules had ever seen. Watching Jacqueline with Cathérine gave him a purpose and defined his life. He knew that educated people, who strove above all not to be commonplace, would mock his feeling that the child was an angel. Once, and only once, he had innocently and happily declared it. The robotic contempt that had ensued had spurred him to strike back. “You think it’s trite?” he asked. The unspoken answer was absolutely clear. “And that angels are only an embarrassing figment of the medieval imagination? Let’s stipulate, then” – the person he was addressing was a lawyer – “that there are no such things. But we do have evidence that for thousands of years people have believed in pure and blessèd intermediary beings close to God. So, what do you think fed their perfervid imaginations? Where did they get the idea? What were their models?
“Children, of course. And when a parent describes his infant as an angel, he’s referring to the source and inspiration of the word. The children came first, and the word, with all its connotations, is truly specific to them. It’s an accurate, exact, and original description with which one flatters the Pope’s angels by asso
ciating them with one’s child. And why must you react with such bile to such a lovely and wonderful thing even if it isn’t true?”
When Cathérine was an infant even Shymanski had been fairly young and his children not yet old enough to be horrible. Jules could run fifty kilometers then, and row twenty almost as fast as an Olympian. He was flush with his new academic appointment, and would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night to write down music that came to him in dreams. In summer they traveled throughout the Mediterranean, light and on the cheap, and they were sunburnt, well rested, always near the sea. When Cathérine was a little older, they went to the Atlantic beaches of the Gironde. Paris in the fall was the most glorious place in the world. Jacqueline had a gray Chanel suit that she had bought for her lecturing. To see her in it took her students’ breath away. And, famously, for her hour they hardly stirred in their seats.
At least as he now remembered it, life had been close to perfect, but then it began slowly to erode – imperceptibly at first and now almost gone, with a few years left of shortness of breath and difficulty sleeping as his body predictably and inevitably failed. But perhaps he could make one last reach, for Luc. That was his task, the last run, now more complicated than ever.
After the war, when he was still a child, Jules had no desire to live, and thought of death as his sole comfort. As he grew older, the will to survive was welded inextricably, in a slowly forming braid, to his love of beauty. Just the streets of Paris, the way they flowed pleasurably one into another, and the musical life of a city that was itself a musical composition seduced him at first modestly and then irreversibly.
For most of his youth, until his inherited talent and devoted work slowly led to greater ambition, he dreamed of living in a small, quiet place in a poor neighborhood, with a pretty wife, a cheap car, and perhaps a city job: clerk, sweeper, motorman, guard. He would be unheralded, undistinguished, and unambitious, but alive to every little thing, appreciative and observant of all the frictions of life, happy to live in the shadows, free to cultivate memory and devotion as busy people who grasp at the future seldom can. And now when he passed through the gray concrete cliffs of the banlieue, although he would never choose to leave his magnificent lodgings, he wondered what it would have been like, and was almost envious.
There would be nothing in that day’s papers of what had happened on the Île aux Cygnes, so he threw them away. No matter what was occurring in Africa, space, or the Middle East, not to mention all of France, there was only one story he would have the patience to read. Although in regard to Luc and his own health time was against him, in regard to the Île aux Cygnes it was salvation. No matter how devoted and programmatical were the police, time would dissolve evidence, passion, and motivation. Even in the relatively short term, after a month or two, he could not possibly be expected to come up with an account of his whereabouts or actions thirty or sixty days before. That clock had just begun to run.
On his terrace, far from the center of Paris, shielded by distance, riches, the trees, and the top of a fortress-like palisade, every slow breath marked the increasing seconds in which there was no knock at the door. But then the telephone rang. He started, and was frozen as it rang eight more times. Of course, the police would not have his telephone number, and wouldn’t have called him if they did. When finally he answered, the line was as clear as it would have been had someone been calling from next door, but the call was from New York. A woman’s voice asked in English if he was Jewels Lacour. “Please hold for Jack.”
“Hey Jewels! Hey!”
“Jack?”
“Jewels! We love it! Rich loves it! You didn’t get my email?”
“I haven’t looked. I don’t really like the email.”
“It’s all in there. We’re taking it. Isn’t that great?”
Jules hesitated. “Yes, yes, it’s great.” For some reason, he was fearful. He felt it in his stomach, but then he overruled it.
“Look, we want to use it for the Super Bowl, so we’ve got to get going. There’s gonna have to be a big change-over throughout the world. It’s a rush. We need you now in L.A. to orchestrate and record. Can you come right away?”
“Yes.”
“That’s perfect. It’s all in the email, a deal memo, which is a sort of contract. You know, emails, they never go away unless you’re Hillary Clinton. Get back to us, and we’ll see you soon. Any problems, call me.”
“Okay.”
“Great, Jewels. I won’t be in L.A. but I’ll see you in New York.”
“Okay, but ….” The line went dead as Jack had something else to attend to.
Jules didn’t bother with a few other emails but opened Jack’s directly. It read: “Acorn International Ltd., A subsidiary of Acorn Holding Company, London and The Hague, accepts the composition forwarded by M. Jules Lacour as of this date, and will pay Euro 500,000 upon completion of orchestration and recording in units of varying length to be used in different venues and media throughout the world for the purpose of promoting Acorn’s products, corporate image, and good name, without further payment or restriction.”
Already living far more dangerously than even a bank robber, Jules wrote back, “I cannot agree for less than one million Euros,” and hit send. He remained staring at the screen, not expecting anything. But then, in less than a minute, the answer appeared.
He opened it. “Agreed. One million Euros.” The phone rang. It was the secretary again.
“Hold for Jack.”
Jack came on the line, and without even making sure Jules was there, he said, “No problem, Jewels. We accept. When will you be in L.A.?”
“As soon as I can get a flight. Where in L.A.? Is there a person to contact?”
“Just go to the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and get a room on a high floor, not on the entrance side. At night the bar gets really noisy, believe me, I know. Look east and over the back garden if you can. Better yet, south and over the pool. We’ll get in touch with you when we’ve got the personnel lined up. We’re working on it, but it may take a while to get an orchestra together, because the studios take precedence. Still, you should be there so that when they’re ready you’ll be available. Save your receipts and we’ll take care of everything at the end. Fly business class. We’re no longer allowed to deduct First, but don’t stint on anything else. In L.A. you’ll need to rent a nice car, so you’d better reserve it as soon as possible. They don’t always have them.”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know, something nice. A Mercedes or a BMW. Try a convertible. It’s L.A.”
“But that would be so expensive,” Jules said.
“A business expense, Jewels. Go for it.” Jack hung up abruptly, as usual, as if Jules didn’t exist.
“Okay,” Jules said to the empty ether before he put down the phone.
The Policeman Is Your Friend
CATHÉRINE, DAVID, AND Luc lived half an hour to the northwest, if there was no traffic. If there were, that would be something else. Jules usually visited in late morning when the roads were clearest. He didn’t like to drive at night, so in winter when he went for dinner he would take the RER. Jules thought that Cergy looked like Germany. Despite that, his daughter’s house, with a roof of bright-orange terra-cotta tiles, was the typical little French villa advertised in the back of magazines. These houses were always very neat on the outside and rectangular in shape. They were somehow French and yet not French at all, too Mediterranean for the North, but not Mediterranean enough for the South. The orange roofs and white stucco exteriors had the effect both in photographs and in reality of bringing up the greenery around them and making the leaves in the bushes and on the trees seem waxy even if they were not. Jules thought that probably inside every such house was a washer-dryer combination that loaded from the front through a Nemo-like glass door, and that because of this, generations of children would be calmed by sloshing water and tumbling clothes.
Her father was crippled by doleful allegiance to a
time and events with which, not wanting to saddle her, he kept from her. Thus, Cathérine resented him for being, without apparent explanation, so much unlike other people. The fathers of other children in school at Saint-Germainen-Laye had been businessmen or functionaries of government. They went to offices, were members of clubs, danced, drank, took vacations on fashionable islands, and dressed sharply. They were happy in groups, schools, flocks, teams, and herds. Although Jules, always athletic, would play tennis with Jacqueline and François, he did everything else alone – running, rowing, swimming, even riding (except for the horse). Jacqueline was that way, too. At a time when Cathérine needed to fit in with classmates or suffer their rejection, her parents had few friends, avoided social engagement, were awkward when they couldn’t avoid it, and spent most of their time reading, playing music, doing punishing exercise, or, like crazy Zen monks, sitting for hours in the garden or on the terrace doing absolutely nothing.
They and especially Jules were not only incapable of imparting to her the skills necessary for a happy life among others, but for the rest of her life she was angry that they had never seen the need to do so. Her time at school was immensely painful because they had failed to protect her by at least making an effort to be like everyone else. They were not materially rich. They were not normal. Different as well for being Jewish, they were allergic to overt religiosity and ritual, and had no home even among the Jews.