French Kiss, page 27
“I think it’s a good idea.” He saw the relief flooding Soutane’s face, and belatedly realized how difficult her request must have been.
She was so close to him that he could inhale her scent, a bit spicy, a bit musky. “Who did you call when we first got here?” she asked. “I saw your face change. It got dark and hard as rock.”
Chris sat down opposite the fountain. Now that he was here, now that the disposition of Terry’s body had been taken care of, he could allow himself to feel how drained of emotion he was. At his core was an emptiness that had begun long before the news of Terry’s death. It was, he thought now, as if he had been living a stranger’s life, having come in on the middle of a film about someone he knew vaguely or not at all.
“A friend of mine was hurt very badly in New York just before I left. She was attacked. In my apartment, in fact.”
Soutane, concerned, sat beside him. She rolled a fallen chestnut blossom back and forth between her fingers. “One hears stories about the violence of New York. Are they, after all, true?”
“Not, I suppose, to New Yorkers,” Chris said. “I’ve lived all my adult life in New York. I’ve never been assaulted or had my apartment broken into.”
“Until now.”
“I don’t think this was a burglary, or a break-in,” he said. “At least, not of the normal sort.”
“What was it, then?”
“I wish I knew,” Chris admitted. “Most of it’s a blur. I was asleep. But it seems to me as if my friend, Alix, was injured trying to protect me.”
“Do you have enemies in New York?” Soutane had intimate knowledge of what having enemies could lead to.
Chris laughed. “I suppose. I don’t know. But I’m a criminal lawyer, a defender, not a prosecutor, so that seems unlikely.”
“Then who would have reason to want to attack you?”
“Not attack,” Chris said thoughtfully. “Ball. I’m sure this bastard was out to kill me.”
“But why?”
“I have no idea.”
Soutane put a hand over his. “How is your friend? She’s who you called, yes?”
Chris nodded. “I couldn’t talk with her yet. I spoke to her son. She’ll be okay.”
Soutane sensed something as yet unsaid. “What is it, Chris?”
He sighed. “I also spoke with the surgeon. There was apparently some vocal-cord damage. No one yet knows what the outcome will be. Certainly her voice will change, but that would be the least of all evils.”
“And the worst?”
He got up, leaned against the fountain so that the spray from the dolphins’ mouths pattered against his hot face. “The worst is that she will lose her voice altogether.”
Soutane reached out, turned him to face the sun. “Look over there. These hillsides are so beautiful this time of year,” she said.
“This part of France is filled with oddities as well as beauty. Do you know that in the sixteenth century, Vence was ruled by a bishop who had been an Italian prince? He eventually became Pope Paul the Third.” She lifted her hand to include the countryside. “Why don’t we take a walk through history. It’s all around us.”
Soutane took them through the villa’s gates, along a slope, and presently Chris saw that they were walking along a ridge like the spine of some great beast that seemed to be rearing up from the skeleton of the earth.
“We’re very near Tourrette-sur-Loup,” she said, pointing to a magnificent, ancient walled town built on the center of the spine-like ridge. “Terry was murdered there. In the church.” She paused, as if abruptly unsure of herself. “Mun said that must have been particularly terrible, to die in a holy place.”
“I don’t know. When Terry and I read the Bible, it was in an intellectual context.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said, “wasn’t it?”
They had moved on, and were considerably nearer Tourrette. “Do you hear it?” Soutane cocked her head. “The waterfall is just over there. On particularly still nights you can hear it from the villa.”
They were standing on a grassy knoll overlooking the spectacular cascade, the wooded view down into the valley. Above them, the medieval stone village brooded on the crest of the ridge like an owl in a maze of branches.
Soutane stood beneath an olive tree, with her hands together, very white against the dark of her clothes. “Chris, I want you to know something. I never stopped thinking of you. I was so young then. We both were. I did what I thought was right, what I thought I had to do.”
“I’m not sure I understand. You thought you had to make sure we’d never see each other again?”
“I was terribly afraid. My father made it quite clear what he would do to you.”
“I don’t believe you,” Chris said. “I knew your father. He wasn’t a murderer. He didn’t just—“
“You didn’t know my father at all,” Soutane said. “You were always so maddeningly sure of yourself. I see that hasn’t changed either. You never seemed capable of seeing beneath the facade, even if that facade was false. Oh yes, my father was charming, urbane, knowledgeable. But he made his living being engaging to a diverse cross section of people.”
“You make him sound like a snake-oil salesman,” Chris said. “I remember him being wholly committed to the cause of political revolution. Whereas we believed in nothing but ourselves.”
“Let me tell you something,” Soutane said. “My father was the most dangerous kind of salesman precisely because he believed in the revolution. History is littered with men like my father. Clever people—perhaps even geniuses—who, through their manipulations, thought they had managed to alter the political balance of Indochina. When all they had really done was help replace one tyrant with another.
“But, in the process, they themselves gained great power and wealth. In the end all of them—my father included—were whores to those twin evils. They were sinners in the house of humanity.”
“All this anger,” Chris said, “and yet back then you refused to help me go to the authorities. But it all happened. With the help of the money and arms your father was able to procure for him, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge wrested power. Pol Pot pulled Cambodia up by its roots, destroyed its past. Then, like the Soviets, he rewrote its history in his own vision. We had in our hands the power to stop him.”
“You were wrong then,” Soutane said. “And you’re wrong now. We had nothing, as you yourself found out. You held what you thought was a genie in your fist, but the moment you opened your hand it dissipated like smoke. You see, my father could move mountains, then. You could not understand that because he never allowed you to see its workings. Just like he never allowed you to see the other side of him, the part my mother and I saw. In any event believe me when I tell you he meant what he said. He would have had you killed had you remained in France.”
“And now that I am back in France? How long does your father’s memory stretch?”
“My father,” Soutane said, “never forgot anything.” She shrugged. “But it is of little consequence now. For all I know of him now he is dead like my mother.”
“You mean you don’t know? How is that possible?”
“He found out what I had done, that against his express instruction never to see you again I went to warn you. He cut me off from himself, from the family.”
The view down into the valley, thick with trees and drifting smoke, was spectacular. He could hear the roar of the cascade, though through the trees he could not see it.
“I haven’t forgotten what happened that night when we overheard your mother and Saloth Sar,” he said quietly. “Often, after the reports of the genocide became widespread, I’d see images of Pol Pot doing just what we overheard him saying he would do: killing the politicians in power, the intellectuals, the Buddhist priests, anyone with an educated brain who stood a chance of defying him. Ten million people slaughtered like cattle, dumped into vast pits. And that wasn’t the end of the nightmare. Then the reports on the reeducation camps became public. Children being taught to spy on their parents—learning to betray their own families at the age often. I would lie awake at night replaying over and over that scene in the embassy. Why wouldn’t anyone listen? Why wouldn’t they believe me?”
Soutane watched him. “You look so much like your brother, standing there concerned, a little bit bewildered. He had those qualities, too, but they were part of a darker mix. It was clear when I met him that he had been hurt, perhaps in the same way you had been, but in another, deeper way as well. There was a cruelty about him, but also a pain that might explain it. I saw him in Tourrette one day, and I pursued him. All the way back to Nice, thinking, could he be you?”
“We never looked that much alike,” Chris said.
Soutane smiled. “He wasn’t you, of course. So I came back here, determined to forget about him.
“And I think I did, until he saw me in Tourrette again, eating lunch. His face, through the windowpane, was dark, brooding, and he possessed that sense of determination I had grown to love in you. That the accident seemed to have destroyed or, at least, damaged.
“He came into the restaurant and sat at the next table. Eventually we began to talk. He was intrigued that I was an artist. He genuinely liked my work when I got around to showing it to him.”
Chris felt the old anger rising in him. “Did you go to bed with him right away?”
Soutane was curious. “Does that matter?”
“Yes,” he said. “Very much.”
“Oh, Chris. Why do you hurt yourself so?”
“I want to know,” he persisted.
“Tell me why.”
“Because he was my brother, because you and I were lovers.” Because, he thought, for a time you were all I ever loved, or could love.
“He wanted to help me,” Soutane said. “I needed help.”
“What kind of help?”
Soutane closed her eyes. Chris could see movement beneath her lids, as if she were asleep and dreaming.
“Mun’s family—my family as well, if you want to look at it that way—were in power in Cambodia during Lon Nol’s regime,” she said softly. “They made many enemies—powerful enemies, implacable enemies. When Mun fled here to France, he was afraid that he would be followed. He came to see me—we hadn’t seen each other in many years. He did not want to stay long because he hated exposing me to risk.
“I was the one who convinced him to come here to Vence, to create a hideaway for himself. But I found that I did not want to leave him. He was like a brother to me. He was so different from my mother, who I had learned to hate over the years. I missed my childhood in Southeast Asia and, with Mun, I had discovered it all over again.
“But all the time he was terrified that his enemies would find him and kill him. He was obsessed with the notion, to the extent that he made me train with him. He knows many forms of martial arts. His spiritual training is quite astounding, really, like a Tibetan monk who can stand for weeks as if dead or walk upon a mat of fire.
“Of course, it was impossible to teach me these things over the course of months or even a year. But he did teach me how to kill a human being. I fought against it and, once, he threw me out of the villa. ‘I don’t want you near me,’ he told me.
“I came back. I did everything he told me to do. I studied diligently, even though it made me sick to my stomach to learn these things. How many ways there are to kill a human being, Chris!
“The days wore on. The weeks turned into months, and the months into years. No one came to try to kill Mun, but he continued his morbid obsession, insisted that I train even more diligently.
“Few guests were ever invited to the villa. Terry, of course, later on, several of Mun’s Cambodian friends living in Paris. A
girlfriend, once in a while. Never any business associates. Mun was adamant about that.
“Mun is not monogamous. But there was one girl who came more than any others. She was a Khmer that Mun had known in Cambodia. They had grown up together, played in the mud together, swam in the Mekong together, perhaps even made love so long ago. I remembered her vaguely. I think jealousy was the predominant emotion I felt when I saw her. I remembered how Mun had stared into her eyes.
“On the other hand, she was never less than nice to me. Once or twice I remember she brought me presents when she arrived at the villa for the weekend; she did not want me to feel left out. Her kindness made my jealousy of her even stronger.
“One weekend—it was during the hottest two weeks in August, stifling, really—Mun announced that she would be coming. I was fed up with the two of then, and told him I’d go into Nice for a couple of days. He cajoled me into staying, but when I saw her I wanted to smash her smiling face with my fist. Appalled at what I was feeling, I left.
“It was already dusk, but still terribly hot. My car had been sitting out in the broiling sun all day. I got about a mile from the villa, and the coolant exploded.
“I searched for an open garage or gas station but it was too late. Everything was closed. I took my overnight bag out of the car and hiked back to the villa. No one saw me come in. I used my key at the gate, not bothering to ring inside.
“I found them in the library. Mun’s girlfriend—his childhood sweetheart—had put something in his brandy. He was gray-faced, lying on the carpet, unconscious or dead—I didn’t know which. She was standing over him, a coil of piano wire stretched between her fists.”
Soutane stopped abruptly. Her face was white and pinched, like a patient forced to recall the trauma that has caused her suffering.
Chris put a hand on her but she brushed it away as if her skin were too sensitive to touch.
“What happened?” he asked softly.
“What happened?” Her voice echoed his, eerily hollow. “I killed her. I came at her as Mun had trained me. She did not hear me; she had no chance. I broke her neck. Then I got Mun to the hospital. Then I tried to kill myself.”
“Oh, Soutane.” Chris was horrified. “Why? You were defending Mun. Defending yourself, for that matter. Don’t you think she would have killed you if you’d given her the chance?”
Soutane’s eyes blazed. “None of that matters!” Then, just as quickly as it had come, the spark went out of her. “You don’t understand.” Her voice was dull.
“Explain it to me, then.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Unless you’ve killed another human being.” She looked at him. “But I know you, Chris. You haven’t killed anyone. Thank God, you’ll never know what it’s like.”
“So this is what Terry helped you with? Your self-loathing? Your guilt?”
Soutane nodded. “Guilt is one thing you know about.” Then she looked up. “I’m sorry. That was cruel.”
Chris stared out over the hills, wondering how it was that life had passed him by. So many momentous events had occurred to people he loved while he had been scurrying around the rat warren of the legal profession. “You haven’t answered my question,” he said at last. “Did you sleep with Terry right away?”
“I thought you would have forgotten.” Soutane smiled bleakly. “He reminded me so much of you,” she said. “Of the person you had been before the accident.”
“I am what I am,” Chris said, with a mixture of anger and sadness that her answer had brought him. “You can’t bring me back. You can’t have what is already gone.”
“You talk as if you’re dead.”
It was then that Chris realized that his desire to discover what had happened to Terry in Vietnam had turned into an obsession. Because that same something—mysterious and elusive—had happened to him, in the rain, in the useless rush of adrenaline, of failed dreams, in the agony of a leg twisted beneath him, and a finish line he would never cross.
“The boy you knew,” he said, “le coureur cycliste, as your mother once called me. He is dead.”
“Why? Because you lost one race?”
“I could’ve won,” he said, not wanting to relive it again. “I would’ve won.”
“But you didn’t, and you still haven’t accepted it—even after all these years.” She shook her head. “You’re more like your brother than you think. He was living in the past, and so are you.”
Soutane came away from the tree. She walked in that way dancers have, with her center of gravity low, in her hips and lower belly. Ham, the Japanese called it, putting much store in its worth.
What it was, Chris thought, was sexy. Or perhaps it was Soutane who made it so. But then again perhaps it was he who made Soutane sexy.
When she was very close, when he could feel her breath on his cheek, she lifted an arm, using her hand to brush back the hair from his forehead. Her fingertips lingered on his skin.
“Remember when I asked if you knew any self-defense?” Soutane asked. “I’d like to show you something now.”
“What for?”
She shrugged. “We don’t know what Terry was involved in, but whatever it was, it got him killed. Don’t you think it makes sense to be prudent?”
“Maybe we should contact the police, then.”
Soutane looked at him. “What will we tell them?”
“Just what you’ve told me.”
“They are policemen,” Soutane said. “How do you think they would react to what I’ve told you?”
She took his right hand in hers. “Make a fist,” she said, and when he did, she ran a finger over the first set of knuckles. “In a fight you will tend to hit someone here.” Then she elongated his fist so that the second set of knuckles became the hand’s leading edge. “Curl your fingers tightly under,” she instructed him, “and when you hit, it will be more effective.”
She guided his fist to a spot beneath her sternum. “Strike here. Or in the armpit, just here, above the bone.” His knuckles against her soft flesh. “These are both lethal places, where the nerve meridians begin. They are, therefore, the source of great power.”
He took her hand, held it tightly to stop the shivers coursing inside her. “I remember,” he said softly, “when I hit you in the garden. I remember the sound of it, the way your head recoiled, the way your skin reddened, the hateful look in your eyes.”
