“I saw a cement mixer churning in the darkness. I was dumbfounded—why would anyone be mixing concrete at three in the morning in the freezing cold? I could feel someone nearby. I turned around and saw Ahmed Ghazouani, the guy who used to work for Francis Biancardini. He was almost as scared as I was. I screamed and ran back to my room as fast as I could, but I always thought that I’d seen something that night that I wasn’t supposed to see.”

“How did you know Ahmed was walling up Alexis Clément’s body?”

“I didn’t. It was Ahmed who told me…nearly twenty-five years later.”

“How did it happen?”

Fanny turned and nodded at the hospital building. “Last year, he was admitted with stomach cancer. He wasn’t my patient, obviously, but sometimes I’d pop in to see him after my shift. My father worked with him on the commercial port in Nice back in ’79, and they’d kept in touch. Ahmed knew the cancer was terminal, and before he died, he wanted to ease his conscience. So he told me everything. Like you did just now.”

My panic was reaching a fever pitch. “If he told you, maybe he told someone else. Can you remember who came to visit him?”

“Nobody, actually. Nobody came to visit him. He grumbled about it. All he wanted was to go back to Tunisia, to Bizerte.”

I remembered that Maxime had said Ahmed had gone back to his native Tunisia to die.

“And I always assumed that’s what he did,” Fanny said. “He discharged himself to go back to Tunisia…”

“…where he died a few weeks later.”

Fanny’s beeper echoed in the deserted parking lot. “This time, I really have to get back to work.”

“Of course, go ahead.”

“Let me know when you’ve talked to your father.”

I nodded and headed back to the visitors’ parking lot. When I reached the car, I couldn’t help but turn back. I had walked twenty meters, but Fanny was still there, staring at me. Framed against the light, her blond hair glowed like the filaments of a magic lantern. Her face was hidden in shadow, and in that moment she might have been any age.

For a fleeting instant, I imagined she was once again the Fanny I’d known back in the summer of The Big Blue. And I was once again the boy who was “different from other boys.”

The only version of Thomas Degalais I had ever liked.

9

The Lives of Roses

1.

With its meandering roads, its olive groves, and its neatly trimmed hedges, the district of La Constance had always reminded me of certain pieces of jazz, an easy, laid-back call-and-response where elegant motifs are repeated, embellished, and echoed.