Knowledge of Water

Ballantine Reader's Circle: The Knowledge of Water (Excerpt) Chapter 1 It takes a second to shoot a man. Thinking about it takes the rest of one's life. At eight years old, Alexander von Reisden got away with murder. He was not called Reisden then; he ran, he changed his country, his name; as far as he could, he changed his memories. He was admirably thorough, for a child of that age. For years he did not know what he had done, or at least believed he didn't. He was careful not to notice that he didn't remember any of his childhood. He didn't have an easy life. What one forgets does not go away. He was caught, finally. The crime had been essentially self-defense and he had been very young; there was no question of prosecution. The three people who knew his story kept silent; no one else would ever find out, they all hoped. It was finished. But Reisden had found himself out. He could no longer avoid thinking about murder, or wondering what sort of person would commit it. He was wondering now. The public viewing room of the Paris Morgue looked oddly like a theater. The walls were grimy plaster, furred with mineral deposits; the gaslit stage was marble, a white cheesy slab stained brown, separated from the audience by a glass pane running with moisture. Six corpses lay on it, dressed in the clothes in which they had been found, the bodies frozen and glistening. Seine water trickled under the slab, keeping them cold. Under the freezing chill and the smell of menthol and disinfectant, the air was unbreathable with the flowery whore's-talc of decay. She was the colorful corpse, still drawing the eye: purple satin skirt spreading around her, red satin jacket, and several waterlogged postcards and parts of postcards, recognizable as Leonardo's painting, still pinned to her clothes. Over her heart her murderer's knife had ripped her jacket to pieces. Reisden remembered her on the steps by the Orsay, a wrecked beauty of a woman, standing with her eyes closed, singing in the ruin of a voice, kiss me, kill me, oh how I suffer, shuffling and swaying and holding out her hand for centimes. She had looked like trouble, and now, to someone, she was. I wonder why he killed her, Reisden thought; I wonder how he came to it. "How did you know her?" Inspector Langelais stood in the shadows at the side of the stage. "She begged near the Gare d'Orsay, near where I work. She was the local colorful beggar. I gave her money." "Jeanne Cavessi was her name," the inspector said. "A stage-performer once, back in the last Napoleon's time; in these last years, a woman of the streets. She had your card--?" "I gave it to her once," Reisden said. "To put in the mirror of her grand salon. In her palace." "Her palace?" "Her imaginary palace." The Mona Lisa had described it to him: the tall wrought-iron fence around the park, the gardens; the rose salon, the grande salle with the mirrors, the withdrawing salon where no one but Victor Hugo had ever been, and the fourth salon: which will be a surprise to me, it has been so long, I forget it. "I collect hallucinations; I rather liked hers." Langelais pursed his lips. "And this Artist, Her Artist, did you collect his hallucinations too? Is that why he wrote you?" "I have no idea why he wrote me." Limping, the inspector led the way out of the viewing room to one of the interrogation rooms, a bare cell painted the greenish ocher favored by French bureaucracy. Through the walls Reisden heard the rumble of the Seine. The two men sat on either side of a scarred deal table. Langelais leaned his cane against the table, took off his bowler hat. The ends of the inspector's white mustache were waxed and twisted, a style military men affected, and in his buttonhole he wore a service rSmith, Sarah is the author of 'Knowledge of Water', published 1998 under ISBN 9780517270158 and ISBN 0517270153.