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.