The Riddle of Monte Verita Read online

  THE RIDDLE OF MONTE VERITA

  THE RIDDLE OF MONTE VERITA

  Jean-Paul Török

  Translated by John Pugmire

  The Riddle of Monte Verita

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in French in 2007 by France Univers, 3, Rue d’Estienne-d’Orves,

  92110 Clichy-la-Garennes as L’Enigme du Monte Verita

  Copyright © France Univers 2007

  The Riddle of Monte Verita

  English translation copyright © by John Pugmire 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, contact: [email protected]

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Török, Jean-Paul

  [L’Enigme du Monte Verita. English]

  The Riddle of Monte Verita / Jean-Paul Török;

  Translated from the French by John Pugmire

  Author’s Note:

  Two objectives of unequal weight motivated me to create this work. The first was to write a mystery novel obeying the rules of what is often termed the Golden Age style, and to write it – word by word and line by line – in a manner consistent with French language usage of the time: the nineteen-thirties. The second, far more obscure, was to write a novel whose last sentence was that of John Dickson Carr’s ‘The Burning Court’ which, even more than the book itself, has forever exercised a fascination over me. It caused me to undertake the strange mission of writing a story from back to front, so to speak, while still remaining faithful to the rules and conventions of the classic locked-room novel.

  I

  Wednesday 21 September

  It was about six o’clock, maybe six-thirty. The sky-blue convertible weaved its way smoothly and rapidly between the vineyards and the chestnut woods. The Delahaye’s motor, seemingly reinvigorated by the evening air, purred almost musically. The wild mountain scenery of Bellinzona – passes cleaving sheer cliffs and deep, menacing valleys between snowy peaks – was behind them. The road now crossed slopes that fell gently away towards unknown parts; everywhere there were meadows, and in the meadows there were vines, and between the vines there were mulberry trees and plantations of corn. In the tiny villages clustered around the church towers, good folk came to the windows to see and those taking the air outside on the porch looked up with interest. It felt as if they were already in Italy, not by virtue of official frontiers or national customs, but because of the nature of the surroundings; and it was the scent of Italy that floated in the warm breeze that stirred the green countryside, so seductive and so full of life.

  Solange drove with her customary ease. She was wearing a white sports skirt and sweater; a light jacket fluttered casually on her shoulders and a few strands of her chestnut hair escaped from under her petite cloche hat.

  ‘Ah! Can you smell the sweetness in the air? Did you see all those roses in the gardens and all those golden grapes on the vines? I never knew there were so many vineyards in Switzerland. Isn’t it marvellous?’

  She took a couple of deep breaths and threw her head back.

  ‘Aren’t you tired?’ he said admiringly.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  They had spent the night in Lucerne. She had taken the wheel that morning and had not relinquished it the whole day. (“I know it’s your car, darling, but it’s better that I drive. Sometimes your head seems in the clouds.”) In fact, it was she that had bought the Delahaye without his knowledge and had presented him with it the day before their departure. (“You wouldn’t have wanted to turn up in Locarno in your old Citroen 5CV, would you? What would your colleagues have thought?”). She had driven with such dexterity down the steep roads and through the hairpin bends that Pierre, who was normally tense when others were at the wheel, was able to relax and admire both the scenery and the profile of his young wife who drove, as was her custom, in total silence as if to savour the pleasure to the full. At this moment he found her to be the perfect image of feminine grace: so pretty in her svelte outfit and so adorable in her slightest gesture.

  ‘I’m dying to have a bath at the hotel and relax with a glass of champagne. Pierre …’ She gave him the look that he knew only too well. ‘We’re not going out tonight, are we?’

  ‘I hope not. Why are you asking?’ he added mischievously.

  ‘You know very well, silly.’ She burst out laughing. ‘Meanwhile, darling, give me a cigarette.’

  He lit a Muratti and passed it to her. She brought it to her lips and drew a long puff. He gazed fondly at her. Her loose curls fluttered in the rushing wind. He noted the unconscious grace of her bare arms as she drove with one hand, an elbow resting negligently on the door, the other hand holding the cigarette up to her lips. All her thoughts and emotions seemed concentrated in the look which she focused on the road ahead. He noted the contrast between the seriousness in her eyes and the smile on her lips. There were times when he had the impression that she was trying to escape from him; moments he called her “thoughtful look.” Anyone less in love would have suspected she was not thinking about anything at all.

  She had been wearing that look when he had first seen her in profile, in the Romanesque manner, sitting in a bower of the enchanting garden inside the old walls of the Edgar Allan Poe museum in Richmond. With one arm draped nonchalantly over the back of the park bench on which she sat, she was drawing on a cigarette with the same concentration he could observe now. He had been surprised when she had suddenly addressed him in French, despite the fact there was nothing particularly French-looking about him. She had claimed to know nothing about the place; strolling around town while her husband, an engineer, attended a meeting in a local factory, she had simply seen the garden through an iron gate and been prompted by curiosity to enter. He had assumed that the unnecessary detail was intended to convey to him that she was not looking for romantic adventure and so, in all innocence, he had volunteered to show her the museum.

  He would have been hard pressed to say exactly what had happened between them. It could have been the atmosphere of the place exercising its power over their subconscious, or maybe that afternoon he had been particularly brilliant – he was writing his thesis on Poe and she had certainly appeared to be hanging on his every word; whatever the reason, as they parted they exchanged addresses. She and her husband lived in Baltimore and he was in New York on a year’s secondment to Columbia University. She had written first and seemingly with no ulterior motive; they had met two or three times.

  After Pierre returned to Paris they continued to correspond, in an increasingly intimate manner. One day she stopped writing to him and two interminable months went by before he received a letter which he had frankly assumed would never come. She informed him of the death of her husband from gastroenteritis and of her intention to return to France once the estate was settled. He had gone to meet her off the S.S.Normandie at Le Havre and three weeks later they were married.

  It had been barely a year, but in that short time his life had been transformed. He had been surprised to learn the day after the wedding that his wife, having inherited a number of important patent rights from her deceased husband, possessed a considerable fortune. On her initiative they proceeded to enjoy life at a level that he could never have afforded on his meagre sala
ry as a junior lecturer at the Sorbonne: the villa near Versailles, her constantly refreshed wardrobe, gifts on the most trivial occasions, and now the Delahaye. He had accepted it all without asking himself too many questions, so dazzled to have been chosen – he who had always considered himself to be so average – by such a seductive creature, that nothing surprised him any longer. And so it was that, despite knowing so very little about his wife, his curiosity never prompted him to find out more. He knew she was the daughter of a diplomat (her parents had died in an accident several years earlier) and she had told him the occasional anecdote about her youth, but he had never thought much about it. Once or twice, when he had become aware of empty passages in Solange’s past life, he had been tempted to ask her more, but he only needed to look at her as he was doing now for his curiosity to vanish and for him to think only about his present happiness. He was startled out of his thoughts by the imperious blast of a motor horn which caused him to turn sharply round. A large Mercedes had suddenly appeared behind the Delahaye and the driver was sounding the horn furiously. Her eyes fixed on the rear view mirror, Solange raised a wrathful eyebrow, threw away her cigarette and swerved to the right. The road was barely wide enough for the two vehicles and the wheels of the Delahaye were on the verge and almost over the edge of the slope as the saloon roared past, then slowed sharply to take the next bend, the driver, a huge man dressed in black to match his machine, making a vague hand gesture as he disappeared.

  ‘Road hog!’ shouted Solange into the wind, with little hope of being heard. Reading the licence plate, she added: ‘Not surprising, they were krauts!’ Pierre had just had time, while the other was overtaking, to observe the massive silhouette of the driver, a younger man seated next to him, and a very pale woman in the back with a velvet crimson hat crammed down over her blonde hair.

  Solange had slowed down a little, as if to show she was determined, as befitted a cultured person, to take her time and enjoy the countryside. If she had wanted, the Delahaye Grand Sport could, with a tap of the accelerator, have left the Mercedes far behind. As it was, the two vehicles were almost at a crawl as they went through Minusio, the last village before Locarno. Lake Maggiore spread out below them, its waters blackened and somehow thickened by the huge shadows cast by the two mountains that dominated it, their slopes covered by a dark, funereal cloak of fir trees. The sun having disappeared behind the rocky crest, a cave-like chill was emanating from the dark liquid mass, and she shivered.

  ‘Is that the famous lake you’ve been telling me so much about?’ she muttered in a tone full of reproach, flicking her jacket back onto her shoulders.

  He had been, like her, eager to contemplate in admiration this legendary site whose enchanting natural beauty had been so vaunted by the books he had read, but he was far more concerned about her disappointment than his own.

  ‘It would seem to me,’ he said, ‘that a pilgrimage to Lake Maggiore, in the footsteps of Stendhal and Gobineau, should be treated as a kind of initiation, understanding also that every initiation must include certain tests. We have, perhaps, been in too much of a rush to find what we were looking for….’

  And he launched into a eulogy about nature, that sly magician, so adept at hiding her charms, the better to seduce you when finally she decided to reveal herself, proclaiming it with that air of professionalism mixed with a dash of pedantry which so amused his wife, the more so because she knew he only adopted that tone when he was annoyed. But this time she blushed, bit her lip and fell silent for a moment; after all, he was right, and she cursed herself for having spoiled the moment – so she let herself be gently reprimanded, as it seemed to her that every good wife should, in such circumstances. And, truth be told, when he spoke like that she felt an almost sensual pleasure and pride in her husband’s intellect. And so she said:

  ‘I’m sorry, Pierre. I’m not very intelligent.’

  Under his breath, he murmured:

  ‘If you weren’t driving, I couldn’t have helped kissing you.’

  After a moment, he said out loud: ‘And all that because you aren’t very intelligent!’

  The road took them along the northern reaches of the lake, after which they turned towards the south, where the mountains receded into the background and the vast expanse of the lake took on a silver colour. They could discern terraces leading down to a port and a white boat anchored at its jetty. And there, at the end of their journey, they entered Locarno.

  ***

  Many years later, when Pierre Garnier looked back on those days, he would remember with a nostalgia bordering on despair that period before the war when everyone could still believe that peace was not lost. He would recall the easy nonchalance of life, the bustling open-air cafés at the moment of the mandarin-curaçao aperitif, the ladies more beautiful than ever in their tailored suits, the songs of Lucienne Boyer and the novels of Pierre Benoit, the jazz orchestras in the casinos, the open sports cars devouring the empty roads. That era had passed, but the memory would be fresh enough in his mind for him to recall what happiness had been like despite the intellectuals’ fantasies of a “better world.”

  In that late summer of 1938, he was tasting life to the full, despite the omens and forewarnings of disaster. But he noticed nothing and heard nothing; he was much too happy for that.

  Before him lay the town, already illuminated. The blue streetlights of the port were reflected in the impenetrable waters of the lake. From the balcony of his room he had a superb view; his wife had been right to insist on staying at the Grand Hotel. Ascona, where the symposium was being held, was only a few minutes away from Locarno but still far enough for them to avoid the lack of privacy inherent in that kind of meeting.

  ‘That way I can always find something to do while you’re in your dull conference, and I won’t be continually on your back when you’re having your discussions. And anyway,’ she had added, ‘I find all that business about murder and all kinds of other horrible things just a little unhealthy. And I haven’t got the morbid turn of mind that you and all those clever professors must have to be so interested in detective fiction.’

  It was true that the symposium theme was detective fiction but, given that she had insisted on accompanying him, he had been startled to hear her talk like that. He had almost retorted that detective fiction was a branch of literature in its own right, and there was nothing unhealthy about reading Stevenson, Dickens or Chesterton; and if she was worried about his “morbid” tastes, she could attend his session where he was going to argue that Edgar Allan Poe, eaten up by neuroses and melancholy, had invented the genre in order to rid himself of his demons and to exercise his intellectual faculties dispassionately. But, having noticed his reproving look, she had immediately added: ‘Darling, can’t you see I’m teasing?’ and, as happened each time she detected the glimmer of a disagreement between them, she had sealed his lips with a kiss.

  ‘Do you know we’re terribly late?’ said Solange, emerging from the bathroom preceded by a strong whiff of Shalimar and laughing as if she didn’t really care. On their arrival at the hotel they had found, waiting for them at the reception, an invitation to the inaugural cocktail party that same evening at the Albergo Monte Verita. She proposed taking the Delahaye, but he argued that it was already in the garage and, not knowing the route to Ascona, they would never find the Albergo; and anyway an omnibus had been arranged to take all the symposium participants staying at the Grand Hotel.

  What Pierre didn’t say was that he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by arriving in such a luxurious motor car. He was afflicted with the modesty of the simple man who hates people talking about him. His wife was already too beautiful and too elegant – as was he in the dinner jacket she had insisted he wear – for this crowd of academics that prided themselves on their disdain for worldly things and paraded their ugly wives as if to proclaim the simplicity of their lifestyle.

  In fact, although his scruples did him credit, they were, in the present circumstances, grossly ex
aggerated. Pierre Garnier should have known, having lived in the United States, that the stereotype only applied to Sorbonne professors and that things were quite different in foreign universities. For, at the reception, they made the acquaintance of a dashing cavaliere, none other than the eminent professore Umberto Lippi of Bologna, freshly arrived from Milan on the vaporetto. The professor, once he had set eyes upon them – or, more precisely, upon Solange – had sought them out and introduced himself, followed by a ‘Dr. Garnier, I presume?’ and a graceful bow, perfectly executed, to the young woman, with just the suggestion of a kiss to the hand.

  Courteously, but with the familiarity that clearly indicates superiority of rank, he congratulated Pierre for an article he had published but had never imagined such a distinguished personage would have deigned to read, let alone show such an interest in. To understand Pierre’s surprise it is necessary to describe in greater detail the distinguished Professor Lippi, recipient of more laurels than any literary expert since Aristotle. Inventor of the “neo-poetic”, a science exclusively devoted to the structure of the narrative, from which he had derived a general philosophy, he had achieved fame with the publication of his masterful study of the influence of the Homeric epics on the Divine Comedy and the subsequent influence of Dante’s work on Melville’s Moby Dick, based on the incontestable facts that Dante had known nothing of the Iliad or the Odyssey and Melville had never read the Florentine poet.

  The first thing Pierre noticed was the professor’s relative youth; given the man’s reputation, he would have expected someone of a venerable age. In fact, he barely appeared to have reached his fifties. Tall and slender, his skin was tanned, his teeth were sparkling white and, paradoxically, his silver hair made him appear younger. As a rule he was not particularly congenial, being somewhat haughty, as if he was aware of his superiority and expected others to acknowledge it as well. Pierre only realised that later, when he finally understood that Lippi’s warm welcome had been due in large part to the presence of Solange; she, on the other hand, had understood immediately, given her sensitivity and the fact that she was used to such attention. Having quickly sized up the brilliant charmer as one of those harmless men more infatuated with themselves than any woman, she amused herself promoting her husband by steering the conversation towards his supposed (and, as it turned out, real) admiration for the Italian scholar’s work.