“You don’t know Agathe. She’s asking about you.”
I stepped closer to his car window. I was wearing just a cotton-stretch running bra, on account of the heat. Sweat was trickling down into the bra where it pushed my breasts together.
Robert’s hideous eyeballs roved over me like the points of two pool cues, like he could probe me with them.
“I get here and see that you have put these locks on the front and back door. I wasn’t able to use our keys.”
“It’s Lucien’s house, as you just said. Perhaps you don’t need keys.”
“Yes, sure. It is Lucien’s! Families hand things down, not over and across, right? Never mind that Agathe took care of this house for the last decade, making the trip on these little roads to keep an eye out, be sure it hadn’t been burgled—over the last five years a lot of the old manoirs have been ransacked! Because people from Paris, they inherit these places, like Lucien inherited his, and they don’t come down. The country? Inconvenient. Dull. Not much to do. ‘Full of rednecks,’ right, Sadie? They come two weeks a year, make a big display of their ancestral pedigree, play feudal lord, pack up and leave. People get wind of which houses are empty. They back up a moving truck. These are real thieves. Professionals, who know antiques, they know which books are valuable and all of that. They sift through everything and leave the junk behind.”
There is nothing of value here, I didn’t say. They can back their truck up and steal baby stickers and a hot plate.
“Agathe was always worried about this happening to the Dubois house. Didn’t want it robbed. Didn’t want its pipes to freeze or its roof to collapse. Always making the drive, making calls, trying to help out. Now, of course, the house has gone to Lucien, from his father’s side, and not to my wife, despite all her work. We don’t dispute that. Still,” he said, “it’s a bit peculiar that you would show up out of nowhere and lock everything.”
He smiled, revealing a gold crown with a thick line of dark rot at its base.
“And the strangest thing,” he said, “is something no one knows but me. It was sent to my wife, to an email account she never checks. And after I read it, I thought, Say nothing. You don’t know Agathe. She worries. She has a heart condition and it is aggravated by stress. Her doctor said, keep the stress level down. I didn’t tell her about this email. I didn’t want to upset her. The email was about you.”
“Is that right,” I said. “What did it say?”
“That you aren’t who you say you are.” His pointy eyeballs roved over me.
I leaned down into his window. “Who am I, then?”
“Someone else,” he said. He broke into his cough-laugh, but he could not sustain it because nothing was funny.
Lucien had told me that his aunt Agathe had married her gardener. Or her landscaper. She married down, was the point, way down.
No one in the family liked this man, although Lucien hadn’t quite put it like that. The uncle didn’t fit in, was what I understood from Lucien’s coded language. (Then again, it could be argued that a good bourgeois family isn’t truly good if their purity isn’t marked a little by some bumbler from low-class stock marrying in: he reminds them what they are worth, and what they need to protect from people like him.)
I had done a little research on the situation. This Robert lived off Agathe, and he had taken out a quite beefy life-insurance policy on her, perhaps around the time they learned she had a heart condition.
I walked to the passenger side of Robert the Uncle’s little proletarian vehicle and opened the door. I got in and sat down next to him. The woods were still and quiet. There were no sounds but Robert’s labored breathing, which was ramping up, like he was excited.
Did he think this was going to be a date? A quickie?
“I have nothing to hide from your wife or from anyone in Lucien’s family. But you, Robert, you do have things to hide. We both know that.”
He shot me a look of fear.
I turned toward him, my head against the seat, like this was pillow talk.
“If you stay away from here, Robert, and mind your own business,” I said in my most girlish voice, “I won’t, for my part, say anything.”
I mentioned the insurance policy. The name of the carrier. The amount. The date it had been taken out.
“You go home, and you tell Agathe everything is fine here. And when Lucien arrives, we will invite the two of you to dinner.”
He stared at me as I got out. His look was dejected and childish, like I had just taken something that belonged to him, and broken it, and handed it back.
IV
LEMON INCEST
AN HOUR LATER, driving toward my meeting with Pascal Balmy, I found myself following a white Citroën panel truck as I entered a roundabout and took the turnoff for Vantôme.
Was this Robert the Curious? He should have left the area already.
This panel truck exited the roundabout at the turn before mine. The driver was a woman.
A few minutes later, another white Citroën panel truck appeared, traveling in the opposite direction, a young man behind the wheel.
A white Citroën panel truck is the most common utility vehicle in all of France, I reminded myself. I adjusted the volume downward on my mental alert for Robert the Unpleasant.
He might return. But for now, today, these vans were not his. And whoever had contacted Robert, whatever that was, I would fix it.
IT WAS TWELVE THIRTY P.M. as I arrived in Vantôme.
I parked my rental car near the village church and walked toward the Café de La Route, where Pascal had said to meet him.
The church was small and in disrepair, its plaster facade zigzagged with cracks, its main doors an unpainted wood that looked petrified. The doors were bolted shut.
I guessed that like so many other little parish churches across rural France, this one was long out of use. Its yard had thickets of stinging nettles and clumps of spear thistle, a dry fountain next to a secondary door in the side of the church, toward its rear, where the sacristy would have been. This side door was painted pale green, the powdery color of oxidized copper. It was warped and cracked and perhaps ten inches wide. A strangely narrow door, the width of a gym locker.
I pictured those people, the Cagots, young and old, men, women, children, waiting in an orderly line to receive the host on the end of a long wooden spoon. Not allowed in the church. Forced to pray at this little side door. I imagined them dressed crudely, in cloaks of rough burlap, these social outcasts without rights, who would come into the village to submit to the authority of the church. There was something moving about it, as if God and God’s emissaries on earth were separate from the cruel feudal structure that deemed them “Cagot.”
I had cross-checked some of what Bruno had written about these people, and it seemed they were real. They had different names, Cagot or Caqueaux or Gahet, Gotz or Quagotz or Bisigotz, Astragotz, or Gahetz. In most versions of the story, it was believed they were afflicted with an “internal leprosy,” an invisible taint, in addition to “maladies of brain,” deliriums precipitated by full moons and other celestial turns. What Bruno had described regarding the lenient conditions of their worship in Vantôme, groovy priests who offered Communion to the wretched through a little door, was reiterated in various histories.
