The Reunion Read online

  “Could you check?”

  He took out his phone and began tapping. “I’ll text Claude Angevin. He was the journalist who worked on the story back in 1992.”

  “Does he still work for the paper?”

  “Are you joking? The guy’s seventy! These days, he’s sunning himself down in Portugal. Why do you want to know who took the photo?”

  I ignored the question. “Speaking of photographs, I read in your article that the kids who found the hundred grand in a rusty old locker posted photos on social media.”

  “Yeah, but the cops made them take them down.”

  “Surely you kept copies.”

  “You know me so well.”

  “Could you send them to me?”

  He looked for the photos on his phone. “I thought you weren’t interested in the story,” he said sarcastically.

  “Of course I’m interested, Stéphane.”

  “What’s your e-mail?”

  As I gave it to him, something became clear to me. I no longer had any contacts in the area, while Pianelli had lived here all his life, so if I wanted to find out what had happened to Vinca and who was threatening me and Maxime, my only option was to team up with him.

  “Would you be interested in collaborating on something?”

  “What do you have in mind, Mr. Potboiler?”

  “We do a little investigating into Vinca’s disappearance and pool our findings.”

  He shook his head. “You wouldn’t play fair.”

  I had expected his response. To earn his trust, I decided to take a risk. “Okay, to prove I mean it, I’ll tell you something that no one knows.”

  I sensed his every muscle strain. I knew I was walking a tightrope, but then I felt as though I had lived my whole life on a high wire. “Vinca was pregnant by Alexis when she disappeared.”

  Pianelli stared at me, half incredulous, half concerned.

  “Fuck…how do you know that?”

  “Vinca told me herself. She even showed me the pregnancy test.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything at the time?”

  “Because it was her private life. And because as far as the investigation was concerned, it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  “Of course it goddamned would have!” He bridled. “There would have been three lives to save, not two. With a baby in the mix, there’d have been a hell of a lot more media attention.”

  Perhaps he was right. To tell the truth, I’d never really thought of a blue line on a piece of plastic as a baby. I was barely eighteen at the time.

  I could see the wheels turning in his mind as he shifted in his chair. He opened his notepad and began scribbling. It was some time before he turned back to me.

  “Why are you so interested in Vinca if you think she was so dull?” I asked.

  “I’m not interested in Vinca, I’m interested in the person or persons who killed her.”

  “You really think she’s dead?”

  “People don’t just disappear like that. Nineteen years old and all alone—or practically—with no resources.”

  “So what’s your theory, then?”

  “Ever since they found the money, I’ve been convinced that Vinca was blackmailing someone. Someone who didn’t like being threatened and did a little threatening of his own. Maybe the kid’s father. Could be Clément, could be someone else…”

  As he closed his notepad, a couple of tickets fluttered to the ground. A smile lit up his face. “I’ve got tickets to a Depeche Mode concert tonight!”

  “Where?”

  “Parc des Sports. Want to come with me?”

  “Meh. I was never really a synth fan.”

  “Synths? You obviously haven’t listened to the latest albums.”

  “They never did much for me.”

  He narrowed his eyes and delved into his memories. “In the late eighties, Depeche Mode was the biggest band in the world. I saw them in Montpellier in ’88 at the Zénith. The sound—they were shit hot.”

  His eyes glittered. I decided to tease him.

  “In the late eighties, the biggest rock group in the world was Queen.”

  “Oh, please! I wouldn’t mind, but you’re being serious. Now, if you’d said U2, maybe…”

  For a few minutes we both lowered our guard, and in that moment, we were seventeen again. Stéphane tried to convince me that Dave Gahan was the greatest singer of his generation and I argued that nothing could top “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  Then, as quickly and unexpectedly as it had occurred, the spell was broken.

  Pianelli glanced at his watch and jumped to his feet. “Shit, I’m late! I’m supposed to be in Monaco!”

  “Another story?”

  “Yeah, the heats for the Formula E Grand Prix. The biggest electric-car race in the world.” He picked up his bag and gave me a wave. “Talk later.”

  I ordered a coffee. My mind was in a whirl, and I dimly felt that I had not played my hand well. At the end of the day, I had given Stéphane ammunition and had learned nothing in exchange.

  I signaled for the check, and while I waited, I picked up my phone to look at the photographs Stéphane had sent me. I had asked for them just for the heck of it. I didn’t expect that they would reveal much.

  I was wrong. Within seconds, my hand was trembling so fiercely that I had to put down the phone. I recognized the leather sports bag that had been stuffed with cash—I’d often seen it lying around my house.

  8

  The Summer of

  The Big Blue

  1.

  In front of the curtain wall, the Pré-des-Pêcheurs esplanade was teeming with people. In a carnivalesque atmosphere, multicolored floats revved to life for the traditional battle of the flowers. A joyful throng was gathered behind the steel barriers: toddlers with their parents, teenagers in costumes, old men who had left their games of pétanque.

  When I was a child, the battle of the flowers moved through the whole city. These days, security measures meant that there was a cop every ten meters and the floats went around in circles on the avenue de Verdun. The air was charged with excitement and apprehension. The crowd longed to have fun, to let themselves go, but the memory of the July 14 terrorist attack in Nice was on everyone’s mind. As I watched the children brandishing bouquets of carnations behind the barricades, I felt a surge of pain and anger. The threat of terrorist attacks had destroyed our impulsiveness, our spontaneity. Though we pretended otherwise, the fear was with us constantly, a dark shadow looming over every joy.

  I pushed my way through and walked back to the parking lot at Port Vauban. The Mini Cooper was exactly where I had left it, but someone had stuffed a thick brown envelope under one of the windshield wipers. No name, no address. I waited until I was in the driver’s seat before examining it. My stomach was in knots as I tore open the envelope. Good news rarely comes via anonymous letters.

  Inside the envelope were a dozen photographs, yellowing and faded by time. Staring at the first snapshot, I felt an abyss open up inside me—it showed my father kissing Vinca full on the lips. I felt a buzzing in my temples; my heart lurched into my throat. I opened the door of the car and spewed bile.

  Dazed with shock, I studied the pictures in more detail. They were all much the same. Not for a second did it occur to me that they might be faked. Deep down, I knew the scenes captured in these images had taken place. Maybe some part of me was not entirely surprised. It felt like a secret I had never been told but that was nonetheless buried deep in my subconscious.

  My father was in every photograph. Richard Degalais, known as “Richard the Lionheart” or simply “Rick.” Back in the early nineties, he had been around the same age I was now. I did not take after my father. He was elegant, distinguished. In the photos, he was slim with shoulder-length hair, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his chest. Rakishly handsome, silver-tongued, a gambler and a roué, my father was not so different from Alexis Clément except that he was fifteen years his senior. He loved beautiful women
, sports cars, classic cigarette lighters, and Smalto jackets. It was depressing to admit, but in the pictures, he and Vinca made quite a couple.

  The photos had been taken in at least two different locations. The first I immediately recognized as Saint-Paul de Vence, out of season—the Café de la Place, the old oil mill, the city walls overlooking the countryside, the old cemetery where Marc Chagall lies buried. In the photos, Vinca and my father were strolling hand in hand, and there could be no doubt that they were in a romantic relationship. The second location was more difficult to identify. At first, the only thing I could make out was my father’s Audi 80 convertible parked on a hard shoulder that was surrounded by gleaming white boulders. A set of steps was carved into the rock. In the distance, a steep island glittered like quartz. The penny dropped: Les Calanques at Marseille. The sheltered cove behind the embankment was the beach near the Baie des Singes, a secluded spot where my father had taken us many times as a family and that, apparently, also served as a setting for his secret trysts.

  My mouth was dry. Although I felt disgusted, I studied the pictures as closely as possible. There was something artistic, something creative about them. Who had sent me these photos? Who had taken them? Back then, zoom lenses had been much more primitive; in order to capture this much detail, the photographer would have had to be close to his subjects, so close that, for a moment, I wondered whether the shots could really have been taken without their knowing. It seemed clear that my father had not known he was being photographed, but what about Vinca?

  I closed my eyes and imagined a scenario. Someone had used these photos to blackmail my father. This explained what I had discovered only minutes earlier when I looked at the screenshots Pianelli had sent and realized that the leather bag had once belonged to my father. If Rick had given Vinca a bag stuffed with a hundred thousand francs, it could only be because she was threatening to tell people about their relationship.

  Maybe even about the fact that she was pregnant.

  I needed some fresh air. I turned the key in the ignition, rolled down the roof, and headed toward the sea. I could no longer postpone the showdown with my father. As the car sped along, I could barely concentrate on the road ahead. The photographs of Vinca were engraved in my mind. For the first time, I noticed a sadness, an uncertainty in her eyes. Had she been afraid of my father? Had Vinca been a victim or a devious manipulator? Perhaps she’d been both.

  I came to La Siesta—the most famous nightclub in Antibes—and stopped at the intersection where the road turns off toward Nice. The traffic lights hadn’t been updated and they still took an age to change. When I was fifteen and riding my old moped, I had decided just once to run a red light here, and I was immediately stopped by cops. I was issued a seven-hundred-and-fifty-franc fine that my parents droned on about for months afterward. The curse of being a nice guy.

  I dismissed this embarrassing memory, but another image appeared in my mind unbidden. Click-click. The girl with the Leica. Click-click. The girl who was mentally taking photographs of people even when she did not have her camera slung around her neck. I heard someone lean on the horn. The light was green. Suddenly, I knew who had taken the photos of my father and Vinca. I shifted gears and headed for La Fontonne Hospital.

  2.

  Situated to the east on the site of the market gardens that had once been the pride of Antibes, La Fontonne was a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Seen on a map, it looked like an idyllic spot set next to the beaches of the Mediterranean, but the reality was less promising. Although there was indeed a shingle beach, the nearby houses were cut off from the sea by the highway and the railway lines. In the mid-1980s, I had attended the local school, the Lycée Jacques Prévert, of which I had terrible memories; academic standards were poor, the atmosphere was toxic, and violence was endemic. The more gifted students were miserable there. A handful of heroic teachers managed the school as best they could. Without them and without my friends Maxime and Fanny, I think I might easily have gone astray. When the three of us were accepted at Saint-Ex, it changed our lives dramatically. For the first time, we could go to school without feeling terrified all the time.

  Since then, the reputation of the school had improved and the area had been completely transformed. Near Bréguières, one of the main gates to the hospital, the old hothouses had been demolished to make way for housing developments and blocks of luxury apartments. There was no tourism here; this was a residential area sprinkled with small neighborhood shops.

  I pulled in to the hospital parking lot. Not for the first time today, I was returning to a place that immediately evoked memories.

  Winter 1982. I am eight years old. I’m chasing my sister in the garden—she’s stolen my Big Jim to turn him into a slave for her Barbie doll. I accidentally knock over one of the metal benches on the patio and the sharp edge of the bench slices off a piece of my big toe. At the hospital, after giving me several stitches, a bungling junior doctor forgets to use a gauze pad and sticks the surgical tape directly onto my skin. The wound becomes infected, and for months, I’m not allowed to play any sports.

  I still have the scar to this day.

  The second memory was more pleasant, although it, too, started out badly. Summer 1988. Some guy from one of the rougher areas of Vallauris attacks me on the soccer field after I score a goal from a free kick. He snaps my left arm and pushes me down, and I end up having to stay in the hospital under observation for two days because he knocked me unconscious. I remembered Maxime and Fanny coming to visit. They’re the first to write on my cast. Maxime simply scrawls Marseille FC forever! and Back of the net! because, at that point in our lives, nothing was more important than soccer. When it is Fanny’s turn, she takes a little more time. I can picture the scene now. It’s the end of the school year—maybe summer vacation has started already. The summer of The Big Blue. I can picture her, framed against the light, leaning over my bed, the sun streaming through her blond hair. She writes out a line of dialogue from the movie that the three of us saw two weeks earlier, Johana’s response to Jacques Mayol at the end of the film when he says, “I’ve got to go and see.” The moment when the audience realizes that he is going to dive and never come back up again:

  See what? There’s nothing to see, Jacques. It’s dark down there. It’s cold! You’ll be alone. And I’m here! I’m real! I exist!

  I might be over forty, but that line breaks my heart every time I think about it. More so today than it ever did.

  3.

  The hospital was a maze made up of a jumble of ill-assorted buildings. I somehow managed to find my way through the conflicting signage. Extensions had grown up over the decades around the main hospital building, which had been constructed in 1930 of dressed stone. Each extension offered a glimpse of what the best and worst architecture had produced over half a century: dark brick cubes, concrete blocks erected on piles, cubes with steel cladding, green spaces…

  The cardiology department was in the newest addition, an ovoid building whose façade was a clever mix of glass and bamboo. I strode through the bright lobby to the front desk.

  “How can I help, monsieur?”

  With her bleached-blond hair, her frayed denim skirt, her extra-extra-small T-shirt, and her leopard-print tights, the receptionist looked like a Debbie Harry clone.

  “I’d like to see the head of cardiology, Dr. Fanny Brahimi.”

  Blondie picked up the phone. “Who should I say is asking for her?”

  “Thomas Degalais. Tell her it’s an emergency.”

  The girl told me to wait in the small atrium. I gulped three glasses of icy water from the cooler and then slumped into one of the sofas that seemed to float on the floor. I closed my eyes. Pictures of Vinca and my father still flickered on my closed eyelids. I had been caught unawares by this nightmare, which further complicated and tarnished my memories of Vinca. I remembered what people had been saying to me all morning: “You never really knew Vinca.” They were way off. I would never claim
to truly know anyone. I was a firm believer in Gabriel García Márquez’s maxim that “everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” And yet I could not help but notice that, for Vinca, the third of these was uncharted territory.

  I was not naive. I was well aware that my image of Vinca had been fashioned by my passionately romantic teenage self. I knew that it was an image that responded to what I’d most longed for at the time: to experience true love with a starry-eyed heroine straight from the pages of Le Grand Meaulnes or Wuthering Heights. I had created an image of Vinca as I wished her to be, not as she actually was. I had projected onto her things that existed only in my imagination. But I could not bring myself to admit that I had been wrong from beginning to end.

  “Shit, I forgot my cigarettes. Would you mind getting my handbag from my locker?”

  Fanny’s voice roused me from my contemplation. She lobbed a key ring to Debbie, who caught it in midair.

  “What’s up, Thomas? We haven’t spoken in years and now, suddenly, you can’t live without me?” she said as she walked toward a vending machine.

  It was the first time I’d seen Fanny in her role as a doctor. She wore a doctor’s coat over pale blue cotton scrubs and a surgical cap. Her expression seemed much harder than it had been this morning. Behind her blond bangs, her pale eyes shone with a dark, flickering flame. A warrior of light waging war against illness.

  Who was Fanny? Was she an ally or the devil’s right hand? What if Vinca was not the only person from my past whom I had been wrong about?

  “I’ve got something to show you, Fanny.”

  “I don’t have much time.”

  She put coins into the machine and irritably thumped it when it didn’t deliver her bottle of Perrier quickly enough. She gestured for me to follow her out into the staff parking lot. She took off the surgical cap and the white coat, then sat on the hood of what must have been her car: a bloodred Dodge Charger that looked like something off the cover of an old Springsteen album.