The Reunion Page 4

  “Bullshit, Mr. Potboiler, you haven’t moved on at all. I’ve read your novels, and Vinca’s in every single one of them. She’s there in most of your female characters!”

  Pianelli was starting to piss me off.

  “Enough with the pop psychology. It belongs on your rag’s horoscope page.”

  Now that the tone of the discussion had become heated, Stéphane Pianelli seemed electrified. You could see the excitement in his eyes. Vinca had driven him mad, just as she had other boys before him, though for different reasons.

  “Say what you like, Thomas, I’m taking up the investigation again. Seriously this time.”

  “You didn’t get very far fifteen years ago,” I said.

  “The discovery of the money changes everything! That much cash must be hiding something. I think there are only three possibilities: drugs, corruption, or serious blackmail.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “It’s like you’re writing a screenplay for a B movie, Pianelli.”

  “So you’re saying that there is no Rockwell case?”

  “Oh, there is. It’s a clichéd story of a girl who ran away with the guy she loved.”

  He pulled a face. “Even you don’t believe that theory for a second. Take my word for it, Vinca’s disappearance is like a tangle of wool. Someday, someone’s going to pull the right thread and the whole thing’s going to unravel.”

  “And people will find out what, exactly?”

  “Something much bigger than anyone ever imagined.”

  “You’re the one who should write novels. Maybe I can help you find a publisher.” I looked at my watch. I needed to find Maxime urgently.

  Suddenly calm, Pianelli got to his feet too and patted me on the shoulder. “Later, Mr. Potboiler. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

  He sounded like a policeman releasing a prisoner on bail. I buttoned up my jacket and walked down a step, hesitated for a second or two, and turned around. So far, I hadn’t put a foot wrong. I had to make sure I didn’t give him anything useful, but there was one question I was dying to ask. I tried to adopt as nonchalant a tone as possible.

  “You said they found the money in an old locker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was canary yellow. The same color as the Henri Matisse dorm.”

  “Vinca didn’t even live in that dorm!” I said triumphantly. “Her room was in the Nicolas de Staël dorm, the blue one.”

  “I know, I already checked. For someone who’s moved on, that’s some memory you’ve got.”

  He stared at me again, eyes glittering, as though he had tricked me, but I held his gaze and advanced another pawn.

  “And this locker, did it have a name on it?”

  He shook his head. “After so many years, obviously any writing had worn off.”

  “Aren’t there any records detailing who the lockers were assigned to?”

  “Back then, no one bothered with things like that. At the start of the school year, students bagged any locker they liked, first come, first served.”

  “But in this case, which particular locker was it?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just curiosity. You know, that thing journalists are famous for.”

  “They published the photo next to my article. I don’t have it on me, but it was locker A one. Top left, first one. Ring any bells?”

  “No, none. So long, Stéphane.”

  I turned on my heel and walked away quickly so I could leave the square before the end of the headmistress’s speech.

  On the platform, she was in the closing stages of her address and had mentioned the imminent demolition of the gym and the laying of the foundation stone for “the most ambitious building project in the history of this institution.” She thanked the generous donors, without whom this project, thirty years in the planning, would not have been possible; it would include “a building devoted to preparatory classes for the Grandes Écoles, a landscaped garden, and a new sports center with an Olympic-size pool.”

  If I’d had any doubts about what lay ahead, they were now dispelled. I had lied to Pianelli. I knew perfectly well who had used the locker where the money had been found.

  It was me.

  3

  What We Did

  1.

  The gym was a concrete building set on a raised platform surrounded by the pine forest. It was accessed by a steep ramp flanked by large opalescent limestone boulders that blindingly reflected the sunlight. When I got to the parking lot, I saw a bulldozer and a dumpster parked next to a modular building, and my anxiety level rose a notch. The Algeco modular structure contained all kinds of tools: jackhammers, concrete breakers, alligator shears, grappling hooks, and demolition excavators. What the headmistress had said about the imminence of the project was no lie—the old gym was on borrowed time. Construction work was about to start and with it the beginning of our downfall.

  I walked around the sports center looking for Maxime. Although we hadn’t kept in touch over the years, I’d followed his career with genuine interest and a certain sense of pride. The Vinca Rockwell affair had had a very different effect on his life than it’d had on mine. While it had devastated me and stopped me in my tracks, for Maxime, it had broken down barriers, released him from a straitjacket, and left him free to write his own story.

  After what happened, I was never the same. I lived in fear and in a constant state of mental anguish that led me to disastrously fail my final exams. By the summer of ’93, I had already left the Côte d’Azur for Paris, where, to my parents’ disappointment, I enrolled in a second-rate business school. I spent four years languishing in Paris, skipping half my classes and spending my days hanging out in the cafés of Saint-Michel, leafing through books in Gibert Jeune, buying CDs at the FNAC in Montparnasse, and watching movies at the Paramount.

  In the fourth year, the business school required students to do a six-month placement abroad. While most of my classmates found internships at prestigious companies, I accepted a more modest job as assistant to Evelyn Warren, a New York feminist intellectual. Though she was eighty at the time, Warren was still giving lectures at universities all over the United States. She was extraordinarily brilliant but also autocratic and capricious, and she was constantly losing her temper. She took a liking to me, God knows why. Maybe because I didn’t react to her volatile moods, didn’t let her get to me. Though she did not think of herself as a substitute grandmother to me, she asked me to continue working for her after I completed my studies, and she helped me get a green card. This is how I came to work with her, living in a wing of her Upper East Side apartment.

  During my free time—and I had a lot—I did the one thing that brought me calm: I wrote stories. Since I could not control my own life, I invented radiant worlds free of the fears that plagued me. There is such a thing as a magic wand—in my case, it took the form of a ballpoint pen. For a dollar fifty, I had access to a device that could transform reality, set it right, even refute it.

  In 2000, I published my first novel, which, through word of mouth, made it onto the bestseller lists. I have written a dozen more since, and writing and promoting my novels has become my full-time job. Though my success was real enough, my family did not consider writing fiction a serious profession. “To think, we used to dream you’d grow up to be an engineer!” my father said once with his customary tact. Gradually, my visits to France became more infrequent, and these days they were confined to little more than a week spent there doing promotions and signings. I barely saw my older sister and brother. Marie had graduated from the École des Mines and now had an important job at the National Directorate of External Trade Statistics. I had no idea what she did, but it didn’t sound like much fun. As for Jérôme, he was the family hero—a pediatric surgeon who had been working in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, coordinating operations with Doctors Without Borders.

  2.

  And then there was Maxime.

&n
bsp; The former best friend I had never replaced. My brother from another mother. We’d known each other forever; my mother’s family and his father’s family both hailed from Montaldicio, an Italian village in Piedmont. Before my parents were offered housing on the campus of Saint-Ex, we had been next-door neighbors on the chemin de la Suquette in Antibes. Our houses offered a sweeping view of the Mediterranean; our gardens, separated only by a low drystone wall, provided the venue for our games of soccer and our parents’ barbecues.

  Unlike me, Maxime had not been very good at school. Though far from stupid, he was a little immature and more interested in sports and blockbuster movies than the subtleties of L’Éducation sentimentale and Manon Lescaut. During summer vacation, he would work as a beach attendant at the Batterie du Graillon in Cap d’Antibes. He cut a handsome figure: sculpted torso, shaggy, surf-rat hair, Rip Curl trunks, and laceless Vans. He had the blond, wistful innocence of a teenager in a Gus Van Sant movie.

  Maxime was the only son of Francis Biancardini, a well-known contractor in the area who had built up an empire at a time when regulations about the awarding of public contracts were more relaxed. Because I knew him well, I could tell that Francis was a complex, ambiguous, intensely private individual. But to most people he seemed like a boor, with his coarse bricklayer’s hands, his potbelly, his rough manners, and the drunken ramblings that often echoed the rhetoric of the National Front. It didn’t take much for him to get going. He lined up in his sights those he believed responsible for the country’s decadence—“Arabs, commies, feminazis, and faggots.” He was a bigoted white alpha male who hadn’t yet realized that his world had disappeared.

  Having spent years in the shadow of a father he both worshipped and despised, Maxime struggled to carve out a place for himself. Only after the events of December 1992 did he manage to break free of his father’s grip. His metamorphosis spanned twenty years and occurred in stages. Once a second-rate student, Maxime began to study hard and earned an engineering degree in building and public works. He then took the reins of his father’s business and transformed it into a leader in green construction techniques. He was involved in setting up Platform77, the biggest start-up incubator in southern France.

  Around the same time, he came out as gay. In the summer of 2013, a few weeks after the same-sex marriage bill was passed, he and his partner, Olivier, were married at the Antibes city hall. Olivier Mons, another Saint-Ex alumnus, was director of the city’s multimedia library. Now, in 2017, they were raising two little girls, born to a surrogate mother in the United States.

  All this I had gleaned from the websites of Nice-Matin and Challenges and from an article about the “Macron generation” in Le Monde. Maxime had gone from being a lowly city councilor to joining the party Macron founded and running his regional campaign during the presidential election. Now he was running for a seat in Parliament as a Macron candidate. Although the district of Alpes-Maritimes was historically right-wing, in recent years, residents had consistently voted for centrist, no-nonsense candidates. A year ago, the idea that the locals would shift their political allegiance seemed unthinkable, but it now seemed as though the Macron wave might sweep up everything in its path. It would be a close-run contest, but Maxime looked to have every chance of ousting the incumbent.

  3.

  When I spotted Maxime, he was outside the old gym chatting to the Dupré sisters. I studied him from afar—the baggy cotton pants, the white shirt, the linen jacket; the tanned, slightly rugged face, the clear-eyed gaze, the sun-bleached hair. Léopoldine and Jessica were hanging on his every word as he tried to convince them that the proposed hike in social security contributions would increase the spending power of average earners.

  “Well, look who it is!” Jessica called out when she spotted me. I kissed each of the twins and gave Maxime a man-hug. Maybe my mind was playing tricks, but I thought he still smelled of the coconut hair gel he used to wear when we were at school.

  For another five minutes, we had to suffer the twins’ blathering about organizing the Alumni Prom, among other things. At some point, Léopoldine told me how much she adored my novels, “especially the Trilogy of Evil series.”

  “I rather enjoyed it myself,” I said, “even if I didn’t write it. But I’ll pass on your comments to my friend Chattam.”

  Léopoldine was mortified. After an awkward silence, she muttered something about problems with the strings of lights and left, dragging her sister along.

  I was finally alone with Maxime. Now that he did not have to put up a front for the twins, he looked distraught.

  “I’m completely shattered.”

  His agitation only increased when I showed him the sunglasses that had been left on my table at Dino’s and the handwritten word on the Nice-Matin article: Revenge.

  “The exact same message on that same article was delivered to my campaign office the day before yesterday,” he said, massaging his temples. “I should have mentioned it over the phone. I’m really sorry I didn’t, but I thought it might put you off coming.”

  “Any idea who sent them?”

  “Not the faintest, but even if we managed to find out, it wouldn’t change things.” He nodded at the bulldozer and the site office filled with tools. “Demolition starts Monday. Whatever we do, we’re fucked.”

  He took out his phone and showed me pictures of his daughters: Louise, four, and Emma, two. Despite the grim circumstances, I congratulated him. Maxime had achieved everything I had failed to: he’d started a family, built a career, was serving his community.

  “And now I’m going to lose everything,” he mumbled.

  “Hang on, hang on, let’s not panic before we have to,” I said in a vain attempt to reassure him. I paused for a moment, then said: “Have you been inside?”

  “No,” he said. “I was waiting for you.”

  4.

  Together, we went into the gym.

  The building was as vast as I remembered, more than two thousand square meters divided into two separate sections, a sports hall with a climbing wall and a basketball court surrounded by bleachers. In preparation for the ghastly Alumni Prom mentioned in the article, the tatamis, the mats, the goalposts, and the baskets had been stored away, making room for a dance floor and a stage for the band. Tablecloths were draped over Ping-Pong tables and the space was festooned with paper garlands and handmade decorations. As we walked across the linoleum floor, I couldn’t help but think that as some band played old hits by INXS and the Chili Peppers, couples would be dancing next to a corpse.

  We walked to the wall dividing the sports hall from the basketball court and the bleachers. Sweat was beaded on Maxime’s temples, and dark stains were spreading under the arms of his linen jacket. As we took the last few steps, he faltered and finally froze, as though unable to move, as though the concrete wall were physically repelling him. I pressed my hand against the wall, trying to keep my emotions in check. This was not a mere partition; it was a one-meter-thick load-bearing wall that spanned the twenty-meter width of the gym. Images once more flashed through my mind; for twenty-five years, generations of teenagers had come here to train, to sweat, oblivious to the dead body hidden in this gym.

  “Since I’m a city councilor, I was able to talk to the contractor doing the demolition,” Maxime said.

  “How do they plan to go about it?”

  “First thing Monday, the mechanical shovels and the wrecking balls will get to work. These guys are pros, they’re going to raze this place in less than a week.”

  “So, in theory, the body might be discovered the day after tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” he whispered, putting a finger to his lips.

  “Is there any chance they might miss it?”

  “You’re kidding, right? There’s no way.” He rubbed his eyelids. “The body was wrapped in a double layer of tarp. Even after twenty-five years there’ll be a pile of bones. All work will be immediately stopped while the police search for clues.”

  “How lon
g will it take to positively identify the remains?”

  “I’m no cop.” Maxime shrugged. “But with DNA and dental records, I’d say a week, tops. Problem is they’ll have found my knife and your crowbar long before then. And probably a bunch of other things. We were too fucking sloppy! Given today’s technology, they’ll probably find our DNA, maybe even fingerprints. And even if they don’t, my fucking name is on the murder weapon.”

  “A present from your dad,” I said.

  “Yeah, a Swiss army knife.” Maxime nervously tugged at the skin on his neck. “I’ve got to get in front of this,” he muttered. “I’ll resign this afternoon. The party will be able to select another candidate. I don’t want to be the first scandal of Macron’s presidency.”

  “Take your time. I’m not saying we can sort things out this weekend, but we’ve got to at least try and work out exactly what’s happening to us.”

  “What’s happening to us? We killed a guy, for fuck’s sake, we killed a man and we walled him up in the fucking gym.”

  4

  The Door of My Undoing

  1.

  Saturday, December 19, 1992

  It had been snowing since early morning. The weather, as exceptional as it was unexpected—and coming during the Christmas vacation—was causing chaos. “Complete pandemonium,” as people said around here. On the Côte d’Azur, a light dusting of snow is usually enough to bring everything grinding to a halt. But this was not a few snowflakes; it was a bona fide blizzard, something no one here had seen since the storms of January ’85 and February ’86. The forecast was for fifteen centimeters of snow in Ajaccio, ten in Antibes, eight in Nice. Only a handful of flights were taking off, most trains had been canceled, and the roads were almost impassable, and in addition to all that, random power outages were disrupting local life.