Deepest France: Mysterious Days

CHILD IN DEEPEST FRANCE Rennes-les-Bains--A four-year-old boy missing since last Thursday from his home in Rennes-les-Bains, Deepest France, was found this morning in the Salz River just below this charming little village of fewer than a thousand inhabitants. Local officials have identified the boy as Charles Plantard, son of Philip Plantard, the maire (mayor) of this small resort known chiefly for its thermal baths and historical importance.

Officials added that the body was discovered, with arms and ankles bound in rope and drawn tightly against the torso, lodged under a low footbridge over the Salz within 100 meters of the village.

Preliminary indications, they continued, are that death occurred before the boy entered the river inasmuch as the body bore upward of a dozen wounds probably inflicted by a long knife or other sharp instrument.

Young Plantard was still wearing the blue trousers and shirt and purple coat he had on when his mother, Christine Plantard, 25, also of Rennes-les-Bains, sent him to the baker’s for bread and, according to official reports, kissed him good-bye for the last time. Investigations are continuing.

Since you asked, dear Anthi, this is the story that gripped the heart of the French nation that spring we spent in France, the drama that millions of French men and women rushed each morning to their newsstands and televisions to follow, as layer after appalling layer revealed itself to them, like the proverbial onion of truth peeled before their eyes.

You were only fourteen, almost fifteen, too young then to notice much that mattered to news reporters. But if, as your email says, you really want to become a writer--now that you have sent your young flame back home to St-Cloud and B2B companies like yours in Paris are beginning to tank--exploring the mystery of ‘little Charles’ (the French papers affectionately christened him ‘petit Charles’ almost from the start) may interest you again. It would illustrate the bare-bones process of creating mystery stories as concisely as any disaster I know. And I plan to keep my suggestions to the bare bones.

Are you sure you are willing though to give up an office along the Champs d’Elysee and your apartment near the Bois de Boulogne--both, I suppose, elegant with French mirrors and gilded furniture--for the iffy existence of a beginning writer or even the up-and-down life of one with a handful of books who spends his days knocking about a solitary house staring at rows of photos of you and Nicky as he puts off creating his next sentence out of thin air? Only if you are certain, will I continue my mélange of mystery and ‘sullen art’. But if I digress to excess, or you decide your sacrifice would be too great, it’s up to you to send an email correcting the course I’m taking.

For starters, I want to confess that those of us who do this thing are not always the best teachers when it comes to explaining how we accomplish it. So much of real writing simply happens--things just pop up, like those three-dimension books we read together when you were a three-year-old and we were all living in Salonika. You know the ones, the picture books you liked before you turned to French graphic novels about that flaming-haired Gaul warrior named Asterix or those about the balloon-faced, cottontop little detective called Tintin--long before you became absorbed in Narnia tales. As we move along, I have to trust that parts of this story will keep popping up so that I--or the two of us--can fill gaps and answer the questions that still hang like ghost mists over the murdered boy.

The grim mystery of little Charles dropped into my lap during that brilliant spring in Les Issambres, a tiny little dot hidden along the south coast midway between the autoroute exits for Ste. Maxime and St. Raphael. Paolo (you remember Paolo?) had taken a house for the month in France, and he and Sylvana--they were still married then--had been generous enough to invite both you kids and me to stay with them. You flew in from Athens, but your mother wouldn’t let little Nick out of her sight. “Anthi would be with him,” I tried explaining. “I don’t care,” your mother said. “He’s not even ten yet.”

There’s not much a man living in Virginia the way I was, and am, can do to make a wife from whom he’s separated by more than an ocean act the way he believes she should. Except send more money.

“Be grateful I’m letting Anthi come!” your mother said. “I am--,” I said, “but I need--” “How do I know you’ll send her back?”

My stuff wasn’t selling well at the time (my experiments too erotic, I guess, for the decrepit eighties) so I had no money to spare. I was going to need every dollar for our trip. I said what I could: “I will. I always send her back”--then crossed my fingers and put your flight on a credit card. A week after I arrived in France, you were waiting, your long curls gold and blond from the Greek sun, eager for rescue from the sweltering, sea-lit airport in Nice. That was that. Nicky, with his flashing eyes and careful smile, I would have to do without for another six months.

Mornings, while you slept, I walked down to the village to buy a fresh loaf, pastries, and the papers to carry back up the hill to Paolo and Sylvana. It was all Sylvana would let me do--otherwise you and I were their guests. While you kids slept in, we adults enjoyed our long breakfasts with the news, huddled from the salt-laced breeze behind the bougainvillea that covered the front terrace of the house.

Between the sweets and the coffee one morning, Paolo tossed the France-Soir into my lap.

“You make any sense of this Plantard mess?” he asked, with a provocation in his eyes. The morning before, when he mentioned President Reagan’s surprising popularity that spring in France, he’d had the same look, and we argued politics for an hour.

“Which Plantard?” I knew the name, of course, but not from the papers. Plantards figured importantly in materials I was exploring for our trip together.

As soon as I saw the picture Paolo had framed by folding the paper, I understood exactly what mess he meant. Each morning at the newsstand, the same little boy--dark curls, soft open smile, one big ear jutting out from the hair--had stared back full face from one paper or another. Other mornings, his photograph simply caught my eye. After Paolo’s question it held me mesmerized.

The face possessed a fascinating quality. It looked totally familiar--yet the dark eyes understood things no child his age could be expected to grasp. Puzzled, I began buying papers like everyone in the village. At first the tabloids, simply for the pictures. These covered each move the boy’s mother made, described the roses on his small grave, her visits to the grandmother. The daily trivia. They referred also to an ongoing trial. But nothing about the earlier months of the mystery.