THE GENDARME ESCORTED SUZANNE PETROVNA to a villa whose pink stuccoed walls and orange-tiled roof were flooded with light, its source hidden by the foliage of grand and trembling acacia trees. It was increasingly windy; the mistral gathered force at night, blowing dry leaves and dust through the street.
Suzanne looked at the black iron bars of the locked gate. She matched the number to that on the card in her hand.
May-li Cohen
AVENUE DES FLEURS, 72
The name of the street was well chosen: cineraria, lavender, jasmine, salvia, convolvulus, bougainvillea, espaliered apples in blossom—a confusion of colors and scents.
“Ici? C’est là?” Suzanne said to the gendarme. This is the place?
“Oui.” He set her bag down on the ground and pointed his finger—a surprisingly slender and white finger, more like a magician’s than a police officer’s—at a black button in a ring of highly polished brass: the bell. “Shall I ring?” he asked.
“It’s so late. Won’t we disturb them?”
“Oh, they’re up all night here.” The gendarme waved his arm in an expansive gesture at the villa, all its brightly lit windows. Suzanne watched as two slender silhouettes passed from one second floor window to another. The glass panes, curtained with fabric as sheer as a silk stocking, extended from floor to ceiling. She could see the outline of the women’s high-heeled feet as they walked though one luminous badge of light and into the next. As she stared—she was tired, the scene before her transfixing—the wind moved through the acacia leaves; they made an eager sound like that of dry hands chafing together, one palm stroking its mate.
“Alors?” said the gendarme. Well?
Suzanne nodded. With thirty-seven francs in her pocket, all that remained of what she’d received when she pawned her mother’s necklace, what choice did she have?
The gendarme reached forward and pushed the black button. A Chinese houseboy, dressed in blue and wearing black felt slippers, emerged from the front door and walked briskly down the path to the gate. “Bon soir,” he said, bowing. His jacket was so perfectly pressed, the trousers bore such precise creases, Suzanne found herself wondering if he ever sat down.
“Une amie de Madame Cohen,” the gendarme explained, and in hopes of furnishing what might be understood as an invitation, Suzanne held out May’s calling card.
“Oui,” the houseboy said, and he bowed again. From his pocket he withdrew a key to the black iron gate.
“Bon,” said the gendarme. All right, then. He tipped his hat to Suzanne, who gave him an anguished, panicked look.
He smiled. “Oh,” he said, “you’ve nothing to worry about now. That”—he gestured at the calling card in Suzanne’s clenched hand—“that’s money in the bank.” He tipped his hat again, tapped his heels together in a jaunty military farewell.
“Merci,” she said, and again the gendarme threw his arm open in a gesture that seemed to sweep Suzanne forward through the gate. The houseboy picked up her battered, grimy tapestry bag. “Merci,” she said again, nodding, her mouth so dry that it was difficult to say even the one word. And the officer left; she followed the houseboy up the path, noting how neatly the crushed white quartz had been raked around the trunk of each rose tree that formed its border.
When they reached the front door, Suzanne saw that the villa was, in fact, filled with people who were not only up late on an unremarkable Tuesday in April but dressed as if for a holiday party, in evening clothes and jewels, talking animatedly, some dancing, others dining, and still others, given sounds of water splashing, swimming. Through the crowded salon’s windows Suzanne saw flashes of blue from a long, illuminated pool in the back garden.
“Restez ici, s’il vous plaît,” said the houseboy, and Suzanne sat where directed, on a Chinese red lacquer chair in the hall.
When the houseboy returned, he was followed by the extraordinary Oriental who earlier that day had leaned out of a sedan chair to give Suzanne her calling card—or was that yesterday? Surely it was past midnight.
How slowly—with what mesmerizing, hypnotically slow grace—the woman moved. She walked, yes, but not like anyone else Suzanne had ever seen, the smallest slowest steps. Beyond regal. Otherworldly. A lifetime elapsed between hall and front door: trains arrived and departed; storms broke, the pavement dried; wedding bouquets wilted and were discarded, a few were pressed as mementos; children were born, old people died.
And the voice—musical, lilting, not at all slow. A current of nervous excitability, but modulated, graceful.
Suzanne stood and, catching herself in the ridiculous urge to curtsy, was relieved to have gotten only as far as twitching the hem of her skirt.
“I am glad you’ve come!” May said in impeccable French, and she seemed not only to remember Suzanne from their encounter that afternoon but to be genuinely pleased to see her. She held her hand out, a narrow, smooth, boneless-looking hand, perfumed, manicured. Suzanne took it with some embarrassment, her own fingers roughened and cracked, her nails unkempt.
“What would you like?” May asked. “You can stay up, have dinner with the rest. We’re having a bit of a party tonight. It’s Dick’s sixtieth birthday. But we’re not sitting at table, it’s buffet. Boy will make you a plate. Or you can have dinner in your room. You could have a swim. Or sleep.” She counted off possibilities on her fingers.
Suzanne, bewildered by what seemed the assumption of familiarity—her hostess spoke as if it were obvious who Dick was—looked at the white skin of May’s hands, how intensely it contrasted with the dark blue silk of her gown, the red varnish on her nails. Impossible to look at a hand like that without thinking of fairy tales, of blood on snow, on sheets. She raised her eyes to the face of their owner, who smiled and lifted her eyebrows in a gentle prod of inquiry, at which point Suzanne, for the second time that day, began to cry.
“Oh, dear.” May’s face reflected sorrow as immediately as a looking glass, but with warmth, not a mirror’s cold mimicry. She turned to the houseboy. “Please show Madame …” She paused, waiting for a name.
“Mademoiselle,” Suzanne said, after a moment and in a low, embarrassed voice. How unfortunate to have to announce oneself as a spinster. “Mademoiselle Petrovna.”
“Please show Mademoiselle Petrovna to her room. And after you’ve settled her in, a bit of dinner. Consommé, I think. Toast. Thé—camomille. Non, gingembre.” She turned and looked assessingly at Suzanne. “You’re wheezing,” she said. “Have you a chest complaint?”
Suzanne stared at her, her cheeks wet, so unexpected was the pain occasioned by a stranger’s solicitude. Before the enchanted progress of the past hours—her afternoon encounter with May on the promenade, her rescue by the policeman, and her arrival at Avenue des Fleurs, 72—it had been a very long time since anyone had shown her so much as a flicker of kindness. Even the cat, whom for years Suzanne had considered her own, had recently forsaken her for a neighbor with a better larder.
“Well,” May said, “I’ve asked for ginger tea. It will help if you do, and if you don’t it can’t hurt you.”
Suzanne, still weeping, was led away, up a long, carpeted stairway to a room with a blue-and-crimson Persian rug, a high four-poster bed, a chaise upholstered in slippery chintz, a writing desk with a blue blotter and, standing on it, a clock and a lamp with a cut-glass base; there was also a round table with a lace cloth and a tall vase of tuberoses, and two chairs. The houseboy opened the wardrobe, put her bag inside, and withdrew silently.
“Oh,” Suzanne said aloud, and she sank to her knees before the bed as if at an altar. She laid her cheek on the blue counterpane. How was it that she had never before recognized, never really admitted, her terrible tiredness? She was still kneeling with eyes closed when the houseboy returned with a tray, which he set soundlessly on the table. She wasn’t asleep but was watching a series of lacquered, jeweled boxes opening up against a black backdrop. The sides of each came apart at the seams to reveal another that was both smaller and more complex and ornate. “Chinese boxes. Of course, Chinese boxes,” Suzanne was commenting to herself, in an attempt to explain the curious, almost hallucinatory quality of her vision, when the houseboy, having unfolded her napkin and pulled out her chair, cleared his throat. She started and struggled to her feet, bowing awkwardly in response to his bow. It wasn’t until she was sitting at the table, drinking ginger tea, that she realized a fire was burning beneath the white marble mantle. What dissolute madness could explain a fire burning in April, on the warm sunny coast of the Riviera? Suzanne watched the flames. She sipped her tea, chewed one triangle of toast, swallowed two spoonfuls of soup, and when her eyes began to close, went to bed, sleeping, as usual, on her side, with knees bent, arms folded.
When she woke, her room was filled with light, and she sat up suddenly in apprehension and looked around her. On the table was her dinner, almost untouched. Outside, beyond the pool, she could see citrus trees, their trunks painted white with lime. She sat in the chair by the glass door to the balcony—the room’s private balcony—and drank the cold tea left in her cup.
Now what, she thought. The house was silent. The hands of the desk clock pointed to twenty minutes past noon. Still wearing the clothes she had worn the day before, and the day before that, Suzanne sat for an hour sipping cold ginger tea, her mind empty, as silent as the hall beyond her door. Her only thought was to note with surprise that she was thinking of nothing. A square of sunlight slid slowly across the blue-and-crimson carpet.
At half past one there was a knock at the door, a fast delicate rapping, so light that for a moment Suzanne thought the sound came from within her, a palpitation of the heart, perhaps. She stood from her chair by the balcony. “Oui,” she said, not very audibly.
The door opened. It was the Oriental woman, in silk again, red silk. Her hair was again dressed high, but differently from the previous evening. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Petrovna,” May said. “Did you sleep?”
“Yes. Yes.” Suzanne nodded. She made an embarrassed, clumsy gesture with her hands, something between wringing them and indicating the rumpled bedclothes, but May didn’t give any appearance of having noticed her awkwardness.
“I thought perhaps you’d like to join us at table?”
“Ah. Oh,” Suzanne faltered. “Yes, of course.”
May nodded. “When you’re ready, just come down the stairs. Turn left at the big pot of flowers.” She withdrew from the threshold of the room and closed the door softly.
Suzanne washed her face in the blue-tiled bathroom adjoining her room. Then, deciding that even if she would be late, she must take the time to bathe thoroughly, she filled the tub and sat in the warm water, regretting that she had no really clean clothes and would have to choose among her few wrinkled blouses. But when she went to her closet and opened it, she found the clothes that had been packed in her bag hanging freshly laundered and ironed.
Please, she thought, oh, please just let me enjoy this without growing accustomed to it. Without learning to expect it.
As a person whose optimistic periods were marked by a shift from atheism to agnosticism, Suzanne couldn’t have said to whom, other than her own force of will, such a plea might be addressed. She knew only that all of her life thus far had been a grinding effort, and that from this light-filled, fragrant house of servants and soft mattresses she would inevitably have to return to her gray room in Paris’s gray fifteenth arrondissement.
Suzanne looked in the mirror and twisted her hair into a tight, tidy knot at the nape of her neck. She put on her best blouse, with buttons that matched and a placket and collar that were not yet frayed, slipped her feet into her shoes and laced them with attention, finishing with neat bows whose loops were of equal length. From the pocket of her bag she withdrew a pair of gold-and-amethyst earrings (they matched the necklace she had pawned) and clipped them to her earlobes, wincing at the pinch. Then she stepped back from the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. All of her appeared ready, except for her face, wearing its customary expression of anxious woe. Suzanne practiced a few smiles.
The staircase she descended seemed impossibly long, the flowerpot at which she turned obscenely large. A geranium of immense, almost rude, proportion held up blooms of the same vivid, bloody hue that colored her mysterious hostess’s fingernails. Suzanne hesitated at the door to the dining room and looked at the long lacquer table it contained, an expanse so shining and so red, set with the whitest plates and napkins, that her eyes were drawn first to it and only then strayed to the people assembled around it.
“Entrez.” May was sitting at its head. “Do come in.”
Suzanne took an empty chair at the far end. Like the others, it was of red lacquer with a white cushion. Next to the Oriental sat a man with dark skin and nearly white hair, beside him a young woman, not yet thirty, who resembled him, except that she was beautiful and he was quite ugly, although not at all mean- or unpleasant-looking. Across from the man, next to the Oriental woman, one place remained empty, as if waiting for a latecomer.
“That’s the family,” said a nervous-looking man on Suzanne’s left. “The rest of us are just, um, visiting.” He reached for his coffee cup, revealing a hand that shook. “Who are you?” he said.
“I … well, I suppose I am a visitor, too.”
“I know that,” the man said. “But where did she find you?”
“She? You mean Madame—”
“May. Yes, Madame May. How did you get here?”
“What did you do?” The man put down his cup and looked interested. His cravat, she noted, was pinned with a gold stud fashioned like a tiny roulette wheel.
“Nothing.”
“Neither did I. Don’t worry. Elle a des bons avocats.”
“But why should I need a lawyer?”
“Well, you just said you hadn’t done it.”
“Done what?”
“Whatever the police said you did.” He cleared his throat. “Me, I had trouble with the casino,” he said.
Suzanne nodded, lacking the energy to correct the misunderstanding. Perhaps all of Madame May’s guests were in trouble of some kind, lost in some way. On the other side of the man with the shaking hands was a big-boned woman with dramatically made-up eyes, rings on all her large fingers, and on her thumbs as well. Suzanne sipped water from her glass. A houseboy, dressed just like the one who had served her the previous night, was making his way down the table with a platter of poached salmon. Another followed with asparagus and another with a gravy boat filled with thick cream sauce.
The man next to Suzanne patted her shoulder. “It will all come out all right,” he said. “I’ve actually stopped worrying.” He picked up his spoon with his trembling hand and lifted a mouthful of soup from the plate before him. Suzanne watched as a drop of it fell from the spoon’s wavering tip before he could put it in his mouth. As her neighbor, M. Fantoni, would explain during the leisurely course of the meal, he had just the previous month been employed as a croupier in one of the Hôtel de Paris’s famed salles privées, not far from where he had lived, in a luxurious apartment in Monte Carlo.
“Rue Bel Respiro,” he said, sighing. But, as fate would have it, one night he fell under an unjust accusation. The casino director (a man hired for his suspicious nature—he tracked the outdoor movements of his croupiers by means of spies and telescopes set up on the hotel roof) observed M. Fantoni in a behavior not tolerated by the management. At five in the evening of March the eighteenth, on the corner of Boulevard de Suisse and Avenue de Roqueville he exchanged words with one of the guests of the Hôtel de Paris, a German who won that very night a hundred and thirteen thousand francs at M. Fantoni’s roulette table.
Despite his protests that the German had only asked directions to a certain restaurant, and despite a complete lack of proof—the wheel was examined by house detectives and found to be quite in balance—Fantoni, accused of conspiring to swindle the casino, was summarily fired. This turn of events damaged his already taxed nerves (the life of a croupier is one of unnatural strain), so that an incipient and occasional tremor in his hands became constant. On subsequent interviews he couldn’t handle a wheel without trembling all over.
“There wasn’t much point to being interviewed anyway. Once your reputation is tainted, not even the Kitchen will have you.”
“Are you a chef then, as well?”
“Not at all. You are ignorant, aren’t you? The Kitchen isn’t a kitchen, it’s the big public gaming hall.”
Suzanne smiled in embarrassment. While telling his story, Fantoni had interrupted his own travails to apprise her of those of their tablemates. The thin man with no hair, not even an eyelash, was a naturalist who had become suddenly and violently allergic to certain medicinal plants he had been trying to cultivate. The blonde was a Finnish opera singer—she’d lost her voice from fright when she debuted at Garnier’s. To her left was a perspiring man with a cad’s mustache. He’d lost all his money and taken an amount of chloral insufficient to kill himself but enough to induce his wife to go back to America without him. Sweat darkened the collar of his blue shirt. The woman with the rings on her thumbs was, naturally, a gypsy. “We were acquaintances,” Fantoni said. “In Monte Carlo. She made her living as a fortune-teller, and they ran her out of town when one of the numbers she suggested turned out to be genuinely lucky.”
“But what about Madame May? Who is she?”
“Oh, that’s a story more complicated than anyone knows. She came from Shanghai with her two nieces and their widowed father, as well as that woman with the dreadful lisp. You see her there, next to the opera singer?” Fantoni pointed discreetly. “She’s a retired spy, if you can believe it. Came from her post at a London boarding school from which the sisters were expelled. She’d been posing as a scholar and was ensnared in some peculiar contretemps. It had to do with smuggling Old Masters, I think, or sculptures on the black market. Something. At any rate, she finagled her way to China and followed them here. She has a real impediment; no one can understand her French. But, don’t laugh, she made a fortune during the war. It had to do with a market crash, blockades. She had privileged information, a stolen formula for chemical weapons.” Clearly flummoxed, Fantoni stared at Eleanor Clusburtson. “Perhaps it isn’t a real lisp at all,” he said. “Could be a disguise.”
“But what about the woman?” Suzanne persisted. “The Chinese woman?”
Fantoni was finished, however, with any story but his own. “Dreadful, isn’t it?” he said for perhaps the tenth time. He held his shaking hands out before him and considered their tremor. “I mean really just impossible.” As he was frowning and muttering, a young woman joined them, walking with what seemed to Suzanne self-consciously long strides. She took the empty seat beside Madame May.
“That’s the younger daughter,” Fantoni whispered.
“Well!” exclaimed the three seated at the head of the table. They spoke almost in unison, and Mr. Dick, the father, the one who’d just celebrated his birthday, stood up so suddenly that he bumped the table’s edge and upset his water glass. May rang a bell to the left of her plate, and a houseboy appeared with a cloth to mop the spill up from the table’s gleaming top.
“Explain yourself!” Mr. Dick said to the young woman, whose name, Fantoni said, was Alice.
“Dick, dear.” May put her hand on his sleeve. The other sister, Cecily, leaned, whispering, toward the slight, fierce-looking person on her left—“They call her Fräulein.” She had a liverish complexion, severe cheekbones, and deep-set eyes heavily rimmed in kohl. Apparently, the two shared an unusual sympathy: they ate from one plate placed between them; they drank from a single cup of coffee, neither using its handle but each in turn holding it by the rim, first and fourth fingers extended with arch, almost satirical, delicacy. In that Cecily was apparently left-handed and Fräulein right-, the two seemed formed for symbiosis—at table anyway, where their elbows never crowded or clashed, and they could lean into each other without being clumsy.
The sister called Alice sat down and smiled brightly. “Coffee my,” she said to the houseboy, who had finished mopping. “Wanchee all same. Piecee fish, soup.” She shook open her napkin with a crack. Her cheeks had the kind of proud and mischievous blush that can be acquired only in a paramour’s bedroom.
“Alice, dear, no pidgin. You know how many times I’ve asked you to speak in French.”
“Sorry, Aunt.” But Alice looked anything but.
“Where in heaven have you been!” Mr. Dick pounded the table so that everyone’s water glass trembled.
“Dick, shall we talk after lunch?” May suggested, and Cecily leaned a little farther into Fräulein, her whispering lips almost inside the sallow curve of the woman’s surprisingly large ear.
“Out,” Alice said.
“All night!” her father bellowed.
“And on the old fellow’s birthday, too.” Fantoni sucked his teeth disapprovingly.
Suzanne looked at her lap. She didn’t see May stand, indicating that lunch was over.