The Night Gate

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Enzo blinked, almost as though waking from a dream, or with the lights coming up at the end of a movie. The completion of the story had taken most of the day, and only now did his stomach growl its displeasure at missing lunch. Outside it had grown dark, earlier since the turning back of the clocks the week before, and the fire had all but gone out. The air in the room had turned chill, and it was only now that he noticed it. Moonlight flooded in through the stained glass, and Anny sat like an apparition in her rocking chair, looking at him expectantly.

He said, ‘And the one reason that Georgette had above all others for weeping over Lange... was you.’

Her smile was so distant it barely registered. ‘I was just two months old when the war ended and she made her pilgrimage to that bench on the hill. It was a month after his death that she discovered she was pregnant. I always loved my mother with a passion, monsieur. And never knew, of course, the man who had betrayed her. The man who was my father. I would have wished to have known him. Truly. If only to find that one redeeming feature, the reason that he did what he did.’ He heard the tiniest break in her voice. ‘None of us would like to believe that their father was a monster.’

‘And did your mother ever find it? That one redeeming feature. In retrospect, I mean.’

‘I don’t believe so, monsieur. She never got over it, right up until the day she died. Although she spoke of him often, and sometimes with a fondness that I found hard to credit.’

‘And the story you have told me is the story she told you.’

She smiled. ‘A story I heard so many times. Over and over, from my earliest recollection. Until it seemed to me, monsieur, that I had been there myself. Felt her pain, her love, her sense of betrayal, as if it were mine.’ She turned her gaze to the floor where the door opened into the hall towards the kitchen. ‘If you look carefully, you can still see where the blood of my father stained the flagstones. In a way, he’s always been here. My mother acquired this house from the mairie, with money inherited from her mother. I was born here, grew up here, have never known any other home.’

‘Your mother married, didn’t she?’

‘Yes. A doctor. Albert Lavigne. The only father I ever knew. My mother gave birth to my half-sister a few years later, but Albert died before Claire even reached her teens, and my mother was alone again. And remained so for the rest of her life.’

‘That’s sad.’ Enzo grieved for Georgette, too. After everything that had happened to her, she had surely deserved some happiness. ‘But she always had you.’

The sadness now in Anny’s smile was almost painful. ‘She did. Although I was never quite able to shake off the feeling that somehow she saw Lange every time she looked at me. The sins of the father, and all that. Claire never carried that taint. Sadly, she passed before I did, so on my death I will leave the house to her daughter, Elodie, and it will remain within the family.’

‘And the Mona Lisa?’

Sharp eyes flickered towards Enzo. ‘Back in the Louvre where she belongs.’

Enzo scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘You know, it occurs to me that the reason both Narcisse and Bauer came here to seek you out was the belief that somehow you still possessed the Mona Lisa forgery. Passed on to you by your mother. After all, given its provenance, and the role it played in history, it must be worth a small fortune. Not to mention the story that goes with it. A bestseller if ever I heard one.’ He paused. ‘And, then, there is always the possibility that it wasn’t, after all, the original that was returned to the Louvre at the end of the war.’

Anny laughed. ‘You are letting your imagination run away with you, monsieur. Truth be told, there is actually no evidence whatsoever that such a forgery ever existed. It could just as easily have been a fanciful fabrication of my mother’s. A story to entertain. Or confuse.’

‘Confuse who?’

She shrugged and smiled. ‘Anyone who heard it.’

‘Well, I think that two men certainly heard it. Though not from you. Or your mother. And it’s why one of them is dead, and the other missing.’

Her smile faded, but it was clear to Enzo that she was going to say nothing further on the matter. He eased himself stiffly out of his armchair, and felt every ache and pain inflicted on him by the events of the night before. He said, ‘I have a notion that I might just know where that missing man is. And if’ — he caught and corrected himself — ‘when I find him, perhaps finally the truth will come out.’