Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Smith has lived in Japan, London, and Paris. A Harvard Ph.D., she has taught film and eighteenth-century literature, and she now writes and designs documentation for advanced computer products. She is also the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Vanished Child and A Citizen of the Country, her newest novel. Ms. Smith lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and children, and their twenty-two-pound Maine coon cat.


From the Paperback edition.

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ng," said The New York Times Book Review of Sarah Smith's historical mystery, The Vanished Child, "Tells a grim tale of murder and duplicity in stately prose that subtly enhances the psychological horror." Now with The Knowledge of Water, Sarah Smith delves even more deeply into the realm of deception, forgery, and menace that she has made so uniquely her own. Set in Paris during the devastating flood of 1910, and redolent of the colorful bohemian atmosphere of the time, The Knowledge of Water is a lush, complex, beautifully written novel about the consuming pleasures of passion and the obsessive perils of art.
Three years ago, the enigmatic Alexander von Reisden proposed to the young and very lovely Perdita Halley on a train between Boston and New York. Though initially accepting, Perdita later declined, fearing that marriage would compromise her dream of becoming a concert pianist. Now Perdita has come to study at the famous Conservatoire in Paris, the endlessly romantic city wh

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ng," said The New York Times Book Review of Sarah Smith's historical mystery, The Vanished Child, "Tells a grim tale of murder and duplicity in stately prose that subtly enhances the psychological horror." Now with The Knowledge of Water, Sarah Smith delves even more deeply into the realm of deception, forgery, and menace that she has made so uniquely her own. Set in Paris during the devastating flood of 1910, and redolent of the colorful bohemian atmosphere of the time, The Knowledge of Water is a lush, complex, beautifully written novel about the consuming pleasures of passion and the obsessive perils of art.
Three years ago, the enigmatic Alexander von Reisden proposed to the young and very lovely Perdita Halley on a train between Boston and New York. Though initially accepting, Perdita later declined, fearing that marriage would compromise her dream of becoming a concert pianist. Now Perdita has come to study at the famous Conservatoire in Paris, the endlessly romantic city wh

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The Knowledge of Water

By Sarah Smith

Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1996 Sarah Smith
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780345391353
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 ribbon from the campaign of 1870, forty years ago. War hero, Reisden thought; entered the police force when the Prefecture had been virtually a branch of the army; now waiting to re- tire. The murder of "Mona Lisa," street beggar, was not being handled by the Prefecture's best.

Inspector Langelais took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands, then his nose.

"Do you remember when she disappeared, Monsieur le Baron?" he asked.

"About a week ago." The Mona Lisa had been singing Aida's farewell on the steps of the railroad station: O terra addio, wringing her hands and rolling her eyes in theatrical despair. He hadn't been in the mood and had gone round by the quai rather than spend five minutes listening.

And then she hadn't been there.

"Today you received this letter?"

"Yes, by the early post."

The inspector laid the photographic copy of the letter on the scarred table, then the original beside it, in a glassine envelope. It was written on the cheap greenish notepaper that is sold by the sheet in any post office, in purple ink and an uneducated scrawl.


Cher mseur le Baron de Reisden,

You like me you have lovd a Womn of Knidness Greace & Beauty She us Not Recthd the End of the Rivr war She ws Mnt t Go It is not Rit tht Mona Lisa shd be in That Plasc like any Comun Folk Ples Help

Hr Rtis



"'The end of the river--'"

"Her palace was there," Reisden said. "At the end of the Seine."

"Her imaginary palace.--You knew her very well."

"Not at all."

"You knew this man, Her Artist? She had spoken of him to you?"

"No."

"Why should he write you?" Langelais asked.

Because I know what he's thinking, Reisden thought without wanting to; because I can know. "I have no idea." Painfully, with a sputtering unfamiliar pen, son Rtis had copied the engraved letters of Reisden's calling-card. "He had my card. He may have taken it when he killed her."

"'You like me, you have loved ...,'" the inspector pointed out. "He believes you knew her well enough to 'help' her. That indicates he knows you."

Reisden shrugged.

"Perhaps someone you added to your collection. Like her."

"I don't collect people."

The inspector pulled at his mustache-points. "What does he expect you to
do?"

"It sounds as though he expects me to bury her."

"Why?"

"I have no idea."

The inspector tented his fingertips doubtfully, rubbing the ends together.

"She had been in the Seine for several days," Reisden said, "but her body was discovered yesterday morning and the story was in the afternoon papers. The letter came from," he picked it up and looked at the cancellation, a slightly smeared RDULOUV over a red ten-centime stamp. "From the Hôtel des Postes on the rue du Louvre. From the time-stamp, he mailed it at ten last night. Louvre is the only all-night post office. Yesterday afternoon or evening he read that her body had been found and taken to the Morgue; he had my card, which he took from her body; he immediately wrote me. The Morgue disturbs him."

"But why did he write to you, Monsieur le Baron?"

"I really have no idea."

"Perhaps you had a--particular relationship with the lady?"

He was...