He considered Nanée, still lying on the black-and-white floor where she’d fallen, a sickness in his gut as if he might really be seeing a dead body lying there, the pen with the bite marks at the end of the barrel not lodged in the long stretch of her neck because of course a good assassin would not leave it there as evidence, he would carefully wipe it clean and put it back in the desk. She was unscarred, though, except in his mind. It was Elza who was dead. Elza found on a street in Berlin, beaten to death by Nazi thugs. Her sister beside her, beaten to death too. Why had he let Elza return to Germany for her sister? They’d been in Vienna, in a country that was safe, although Hitler had been eyeing Austria too by then.
But of course he hadn’t let Elza do anything. Elza wasn’t a woman anyone controlled. She had promised to let him arrange to get her sister out of Germany, but she grew impatient. One afternoon, Edouard left to photograph a woman he saw leaving the Opera matinee in a red cape, and returned to find Luki having her dinner with the hired girl and Elza off to Germany. A woman will be less likely to be questioned and suspected, she’d written in a note for him. The Nazis know who you are too. And I have no way to make a living here; if anything happens to you, your daughter and I will be left destitute, and this new child too.
This new child.
Elza found her sister, only to have the Gestapo murder them both before they could get out of Germany. Edouard, still reeling, sent a telegram to André that same day, saying he would come to France immediately, with Luki and as much of his art as he could carry. If the Nazis would kill his wife and her sister because of the photographs he’d taken, they would kill Luki. It was their most hideous torture, to murder those you loved while leaving you to live.
Death was not a thing to be played at. Death was not an evening’s amusement.
But there was Danny, laughter lingering still at the corners of his eyes. Danny, who’d watched so many die. Soldiers. Friends.
“You think this is cruel, Edouard,” André said. “This pretending to violence. But it is in play that we access our own reprehensible depths, and unburden ourselves.”
“André!” Jacqueline said.
Nanée too was rising, but André put a foot on her, to stop her.
“No, no, André is right,” Edouard said. The cruelty was in his own imaginings, the violence inside himself, and it was a beautiful thing to hear Danny laughing. Danny, who needed to laugh as much as Edouard did. Even at Camp des Milles, there had been laughter. In laughter, you survived.
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