The Reunion Read online

  I was pleasantly surprised by my powers of recollection—I could put a name to most of the faces from my generation of students. It was amusing, even fascinating, in some cases, to watch them, since for many, the reunion seemed to be an opportunity to get revenge for the past. Take Manon Agostini, for example, a plain, painfully shy girl who had grown up to be a beautiful, self-confident woman. Christophe Mirkovic had undergone a similar transformation. He was no longer the nerd—not that we used the word back then—the pimply, bespectacled punching bag I remembered, and I was happy for him. Like an American, he now brazenly flaunted his success; he bragged about the merits of his Tesla and spoke English to his girlfriend, twenty years his junior, who was turning heads.

  Éric Lafitte, however, had clearly had a rough time of it. I remembered him as a demigod, a kind of raven-haired angel, like Alain Delon in Purple Noon. Now, Éric the King had become a pathetic, potbellied guy with a pockmarked face who looked more like Homer Simpson than the star of Rocco and His Brothers.

  Kathy and Hervé Lesage arrived holding hands. They had started dating in junior year and married as soon as they had finished their studies. Kathy had been Katherine Laneau. I remembered her because she used to have magnificent legs—she probably still did, though she had swapped her plaid miniskirt for a pantsuit—and a perfect command of English. I used to wonder how a girl like her could fall in love with a guy like Hervé Lesage. We used to call him Nigel, Christopher Guest’s character in This Is Spinal Tap. He was pasty-faced, pea-brained; he made off-color jokes and asked teachers questions that were entirely beside the point. But most of all, he seemed blissfully unaware that his girlfriend was completely out of his league. Twenty-five years later, with his suede jacket and his smug grin, he looked every bit as dumb as he had back then.

  But when it came to clothes, Fabrice Fauconnier took the cake. Fabrice “the Falcon” was sporting his Air France pilot’s uniform. I watched him strut among the women with their blond hairdos, high heels, and boob jobs. He had remained handsome; his build was still athletic and his graying mane, forceful gaze, and evident vanity already designated him as a silver fox. A few years earlier, I’d come across him on a short-haul flight. He’d wanted to show off and thought it would please me to be invited into the cockpit for the landing, treating me like an excitable five-year-old.

  5.

  “Bloody hell, Falcon’s looking rough, isn’t he?”

  Fanny Brahimi gave me a wink and kissed me warmly. She had changed considerably herself. Originally from Algeria, she was petite with short blond hair and pale eyes; she was squeezed into skintight jeans and wore a belted trench coat and high heels. Back in school, she’d been a die-hard grunge fan who’d traipsed around in Doc Martens, lumberjack shirts, patched cardigans, and ripped 501s.

  She was clearly more resourceful than I was—she had somehow unearthed a glass of champagne.

  “Didn’t manage to find any popcorn, though,” she said, sitting next to me on the step.

  She had a camera around her neck, just like she used to, a Leica M, and she started taking pictures of the crowd.

  I’d known Fanny forever. She, Maxime, and I had been together at La Fontonne Elementary School, known locally as the “old school,” whose striking late-nineteenth-century buildings stood in stark contrast to the prefab structures of the École René-Cassin built decades later by the Antibes city council. As teenagers, the three of us had been close. Fanny was the first girl I’d ever dated, back when I was fourteen and in the ninth grade. We went to see a Saturday matinee of Rain Man, and, on the bus back to La Fontonne, both listening to the headphones of my Sony Walkman, we exchanged four or five awkward kisses between Jean-Jacques Goldman singing “Puisque tu pars” and Mylène Farmer crooning “Pourvu qu’elles soient douces.” We stayed together until junior year, at which point we drifted apart, though we remained friends. She was one of those mature, liberated girls, and in our final year, she started sleeping with guys, no strings attached. This was pretty unusual at Saint-Ex, and a lot of people criticized her for it. But I always respected her—to me, she was the embodiment of freedom. She was a friend of Vinca’s, a brilliant student, and a wonderful human being, three qualities that endeared her to me. After completing her degree in medicine, she traveled around a lot, working in combat zones and with various humanitarian missions. A few years ago, we’d met up again by chance in Beirut, where I was attending the Francophone Book Fair, and she’d told me that she was planning to move back to France.

  “Have you spotted any of our old teachers?” she asked.

  I nodded toward Monsieur N’Dong, Monsieur Lehmann, and Madame Fontana, who had taught us math, physics, and biology, respectively.

  “A fine bunch of sadists,” Fanny said, snapping their photos.

  “Can’t argue with that. Are you working in Antibes?”

  She nodded. “I’ve been in the cardiology unit at La Fontonne Hospital for the past two years. I’ve been looking after your mother there—didn’t she mention?”

  From my silence, she could tell I knew nothing about this.

  “We’ve been monitoring her since the minor heart attack, but it’s all good,” Fanny said reassuringly.

  I was completely taken aback. “Me and my mother…well, it’s complicated,” I said evasively.

  “That’s what all boys say, isn’t it?” she said, then let the subject drop. Fanny pointed out another teacher. “Now, she was cool!” she said.

  It took me a moment to recognize Miss DeVille, an American who taught English literature to those preparing for the Grandes Écoles.

  “And she’s still a knockout too!” Fanny whispered. “She looks like Catherine Zeta-Jones!”

  Miss DeVille was a good five feet eleven inches and had long straight hair that fell to her shoulders. She was wearing high heels, tight leather pants, and a collarless jacket. Her lithe, svelte figure made her look younger than some of her former students. How old had she been when she first came to Saint-Ex? Twenty-five? Thirty at most. She had never taught me but I remembered that her students were very fond of her, and some of the boys all but worshipped her.

  For a few minutes, Fanny and I continued spying on our former classmates and reminiscing. As I listened to her talk, I was reminded why I’d always liked her. She radiated a sort of positive energy, and she had a sense of humor, which was always a bonus. But she hadn’t had an easy start in life. Her mother, a pretty, blond, olive-skinned woman with eyes that could be either tender or lethal, worked as an assistant in a clothes shop on the Croisette in Cannes. When Fanny was in second grade, her mother had walked out on her husband and three children and run off to South America with her boss. Before becoming a boarder at Saint-Ex, Fanny and her brothers had lived for nearly a decade with their father, who’d been paralyzed in an accident on a construction site. The four of them lived in a run-down housing project on the boulevard du Val Claret—not the sort of place mentioned in guidebooks to Antibes Juan-les-Pins.

  Fanny delivered a few more stinging but good-natured barbs (“Good to see Étienne Labitte still looks like a dickhead”), then stared at me, a curious smile playing on her lips. “Life might have reassigned certain roles to others, but you’re still the same as ever.” She snapped a picture of me with the Leica and continued, “Top of the class, preppy, clean-cut in your flannel jacket and your nice blue shirt.”

  “Coming from you, I’m pretty sure that’s not a compliment.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Girls only go for bad boys, don’t they?”

  “At sixteen, maybe. Not when they’ve turned forty!”

  I shrugged, squinting and shading my eyes with my hand.

  “Looking for someone?”

  “Maxime.”

  “Our future member of Parliament? I had a quick cigarette with him behind the gym where we’re supposed to be having our big class party. He didn’t seem too interested in pressing the flesh. Fucking hell, have you seen the state of Aude Paradis
? Poor thing looks like shit! See if you can find some popcorn, Thomas. I could sit here for hours!”

  But her enthusiasm waned the moment she saw a couple of staff members setting up a microphone on a small platform.

  “Sorry, I’m going to skip the official speeches,” she announced, getting to her feet.

  On the steps across from us, Stéphane Pianelli was taking notes as he talked to the mayor. When he saw me, he gave a wave that meant something like Don’t move—I’ll be right over.

  Fanny dusted off her jeans and, in typical fashion, dropped a final zinger.

  “You know what? I think you’re one of the few men at this party that I haven’t slept with.”

  I wanted to say something witty, but nothing came to mind, because her words were not intended to be funny. They were sad and melodramatic.

  “But back then, you were head over heels in love with Vinca,” she remembered.

  “True,” I admitted. “I was in love with her. Like pretty much everyone else here, right?”

  “Yeah, but you always idealized her.”

  I sighed. After Vinca’s disappearance and the revelation about her affair with the teacher, she had quickly become a Laura Palmer–like character in a remake of Twin Peaks set on the Côte d’Azur.

  “Fanny, don’t you start too.”

  “Whatever you say. I’m sure it’s easier to keep your head in the sand.”

  She slipped her camera into her bag, looked at her watch, and handed me the half-full glass of champagne.

  “I’m running late and I really shouldn’t have drunk that. I’m on duty this afternoon. See you, Thomas.”

  6.

  The headmistress was giving her speech, the sort of vacuous homily that is a specialty among middle managers in France’s national education system. Madame Guirard hailed from Paris, and she had not been in this post for very long. What she knew about the school was strictly theoretical, so she confined her remarks to vague platitudes. As I listened to her, I wondered why my parents hadn’t come. As former deans of the faculty, they would certainly have been invited. I scanned the crowd, puzzled by their absence.

  When the headmistress had finished her lecture about “the universal values of tolerance, equal opportunity, and dialogue between cultures that this institution has cherished since its inception,” she went on to talk about the “notable figures” who had attended the school. I was mentioned with a dozen or so others, and when she said my name, a few heads turned in my direction. I gave an embarrassed smile and made a vague gesture of thanks.

  “That’s it, your cover’s been blown, Mr. Potboiler,” said Stéphane Pianelli, sitting down beside me. “Give it a few minutes and they’ll be getting you to autograph books.”

  I was careful not to encourage him, but he continued.

  “They’ll ask why you killed off the hero at the end of A Few Days with You. They’ll ask where you get your ideas, and—”

  “Give me a break, Stéphane. What is it you want to talk about? What’s this business about an article?”

  Pianelli cleared his throat. “When did you get here?” he asked.

  “I flew in this morning.”

  “Okay. Have you heard of the Ice Saints?”

  “No, but I’m guessing there are no statues of them in Antibes Cathedral.”

  “Very funny. Actually, it’s a meteorological term for the late frost you sometimes get in spring.” He took an e-cigarette from his jacket as he spoke. “The weather on the Côte has been completely shit this spring. First freezing cold, then days of torrential rain—”

  I cut him off. “Keep it short, Stéphane, I don’t want to hear weeks’ worth of weather reports!”

  He jerked his chin toward the colorful boarders’ buildings, shimmering in the sunshine. “Some of the dorm basements were flooded.”

  “That’s nothing new. Have you seen how steep the slope is? Even back in our day, they flooded every other year.”

  “Yes, but on the weekend of April eighth, the water rose as high as the ground-floor entrance halls. The school had to have the basements cleared out as an emergency measure.” Pianelli puffed on his e-cigarette, releasing plumes of vapor scented with grapefruit and verbena. Compared to Che Guevara chomping his cigar, a revolutionary vaping herbal tea was faintly preposterous.

  “During the clear-out, they brought up some old rusty lockers that had been there since the mid-nineties. A moving company was contracted to take them to the dump, but before they could, a bunch of students thought it might be fun to open them up. You’ll never guess what they found.”

  “Tell me.”

  Pianelli paused for as long as possible for effect.

  “A leather sports bag containing a hundred thousand francs in hundreds and two-hundreds! A small fortune that had been stashed away for twenty years.”

  “So the cops came to Saint-Ex?”

  I imagined the turmoil created at the school by the gendarmes showing up.

  “You could say that! Like I say in my article, they were pretty worked up about the whole business. A cold case, a stack of cash, a prestigious school; it didn’t take much to persuade them to search the whole place with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “What did they find?”

  “They haven’t released the information, but from my contacts, I know that they found two clear sets of fingerprints on the bag.”

  “And?”

  “One set of prints was on file.”

  I held my breath as Pianelli prepared to land the next blow.

  “They were Vinca Rockwell’s.”

  I blinked several times as I took this in; I tried to work out what it might mean, but my mind was a blank. “So what do you figure, Stéphane?”

  “I figure that I was right all along!” Pianelli said triumphantly.

  Aside from politics, the subject that most obsessed Stéphane Pianelli was the Vinca Rockwell affair. About fifteen years ago, he’d even written a book about it, Death and the Maiden, the title a nod to Schubert. It was a meticulous, exhaustive investigation, but it contained no stunning revelations about the disappearance of Vinca and her lover.

  “If Vinca really did run away with Alexis Clément, she would have taken the money with her. At the very least, she’d have come back for it!” he said.

  I wasn’t convinced. “Who’s to say it was hers?” I said. “Just because her fingerprints were on the bag doesn’t mean the money belonged to her.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty crazy. Where did all this cash come from? A hundred thousand francs! That was a fortune in those days.”

  I’d never really worked out what his theory about the Vinca Rockwell case was, but he didn’t accept the idea that she’d run off. Though he had no concrete proof, Pianelli believed that there had been no word of Vinca since then because she was dead, and he thought that Alexis Clément had probably killed her.

  “What does that mean in terms of criminal charges?”

  “No idea,” he said, making a face.

  “But the investigation into Vinca’s disappearance was closed years ago. Whatever they find now, surely it’s past the statute of limitations?”

  He thoughtfully rubbed his beard with the back of his hand. “Not necessarily. There’s quite a lot of complex case law on the subject. These days, there are cases where the statute of limitations doesn’t depend on when the crime was committed but on when the body was discovered.”

  He stared at me and I held his gaze. Pianelli was constantly looking for a scoop, but I’d often wondered what lay behind his fascination with this particular case. From what I remembered, he and Vinca had never been close. They’d never spent time together, and they had almost nothing in common.

  Vinca’s mother was Pauline Lambert, an Antibes-born actress with close-cropped red hair—a dead ringer for Marlène Jobert—who had played minor roles in 1970s films directed by Yves Boisset and Henri Verneuil. The highlight of her career was a twenty-second topless scene with Je
an-Paul Belmondo in La Scoumoune. In 1973, in a nightclub at Juan-les-Pins, Pauline met Mark Rockwell, an American race-car driver who had briefly been with the Lotus F1 team and had competed several times in the Indianapolis 500. Rockwell was the youngest son of a prominent Massachusetts family who owned a large stake in a major supermarket chain on the East Coast. Knowing that her career was going nowhere, Pauline followed her new lover to America, where they married. Their only daughter, Vinca, was born in Boston shortly afterward and lived there until the age of sixteen, when she was sent to Saint-Ex after the tragic death of her parents. In the summer of 1989, Mark and Pauline Rockwell had been among the victims of a plane crash. Their plane underwent an explosive decompression shortly after taking off from a Hawaii airport. When the fuselage was breached, the six rows of business-class seats had been torn from the plane. Twelve people had died in the accident, and, for once, it was the rich who suffered, a detail that must surely have pleased Pianelli.

  Given her background and her manner, in theory, Vinca epitomized everything Pianelli despised: a daddy’s girl from a wealthy American family, a brainy, snobbish heiress interested in Greek philosophy, the films of Tarkovsky, and the poetry of Lautréamont. Slightly pretentious and astonishingly beautiful, she was a girl who did not really live in this world but in a world of her own. A girl who was, unwittingly, somewhat contemptuous of young men like Pianelli.

  “For fuck’s sake, don’t you even care?” he snapped.

  I sighed, shrugged, and pretended to be uninterested. “It was all a long time ago, Stéphane.”

  “A long time ago? But Vinca was your friend! You worshipped her, you—”

  “I was eighteen; I was a kid. I’ve moved on.”