All Sexual Encounters In This Story Involve Persons 18+ Years Old
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By his reckoning, Philippe Pique's slow descent into hell began on June 17, 1929. His younger brother, Michel, had been expected to arrive in Basel with his wife, Mai Nguyen and their ten-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Trang. Philippe would have guided them all on a lovely three-day country tour of Switzerland, after which Trang would remain to study at L'Ecole et Lycee Internationale. Instead, their flight on Imperial Airways crashed into the English Channel on the leg from Croyden Airport in Surrey, England, to Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, France.
Michel, Mai and five other souls were lost to drowning. The two air crew, three other adult passengers and Trang survived with varying injuries. Philippe later learned it was his niece's childish insistence to sit in the rearmost seat of the craft, rather than up front with her parents, which saved her as the plane hit the choppy water nose-first. That fact, however, was no consolation for the inconsolable new orphan.
After hospital for what were remarkably minor injuries, Trang was released to her uncle's care and guardianship. Though hardly surprised, Phillipe was still unprepared for the imposition. At thirty-eight, he was very much enjoying the comforts accompanying both his bachelorhood and his business success. How could he have anticipated that the terms of the will, drawn up a half-dozen years previously with his sincere cooperation, would ever come to fruition?
Yet, there Philippe had stood, in the reception lobby of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Folkestone, England, with a tearful slip of a girl clinging to his wool trousered legs. Grieving their loss with her, he put aside his selfish anger at his petit frère's untimely demise. He had not seen Trang since her christening when she was barely six months old. While he stared down at her shaking little arms, he had marveled at their ivory porcelain complexion and thought, "Tu n'étais pas le premier homme blanc dans la ascendance Nguyen, n'est-ce pas, Michel?"
Aloud, Philippe said, "Et bien, ma petite. Allons-y!"
"But where shall we go, Oncle Philippe? What am I to do?" Trang's consternation and fearful sadness were overwhelming.
It had been all Philippe could do not to visibly crumble. Sighing softly, he took his niece's small hand in his and answered, "For tonight, we will go to my hôtel, then tomorrow we will ride trains back to Basel and you shall go to school there just as your Maman and Papa planned. On Holidays and breaks between school terms you will live with me. I always will be your family and love you."
Trang had nodded sagely then whispered, "D'accord, Oncle."
During the next seven-and-a-half years Trang matriculated in security both at school and at home with Phillipe. The calamitous world economics and increasing drumbeats of another great European war had no negative effect on the protected trust her canny financier father had established for her safekeeping. Quite to the contrary, Michel's sound investments and her uncle's own industrial support of the Swiss government's national security defense needs kept the Pique household in excellent condition. The only external threat was the uncertainty of the times themselves.
Phillipe was assiduously dedicated to his assigned task as Trang's surrogate father. He was at all times caring and honorable, though her increasing innocent beauty haunted him more than his brother's shade ever could. During the times between school terms when she was living in his household, he never caroused or socially entertained any of his several girlfriends, except under the most discreet circumstances. Still, nothing had stopped The Devil from presenting test after test and even enlisting Trang herself to tempt him into iniquity.
Philippe knew well that he had fallen beyond hope and that it was his own thoughtlessness that had left him vulnerable. He wondered, "What if I had been discovered in the moment? Would my shame have been enough to save me?" When he recalled how the first events had actually unfolded and escalated, it gave him chills.
Trang's Lycee had let out for its three-week Christmas Holiday on Friday, December 11, 1936, the day after her eighteenth birthday. Her girlfriends wanted to celebrate with her before they all went to their respective homes and she had asked him could she host a small party that Saturday evening in the townhouse. Philippe not only agreed, but generously gave his live-in staff, Eric and Ursula Lindt, the entire weekend off so they could visit their new grandchildren in the canton countryside. He had then promised Trang, "We can go shopping in the afternoon for a cake and favors to make the girls happy."
When they returned from their spree in the downtown district, Philippe took the cake into the formal dining room and arranged four little gift boxes at place settings around the table. Trang clapped her hands with delight, pecked his jowl sweetly and exclaimed, "Merci beaucoup, Popo!" Then, while he walked up the sweeping alabaster stair to his library on the second floor for a book to read, she rode in the shiny brass birdcage elevator to the third-level rooms to prepare to meet her classmates.
As the lift rose past him, Philippe looked up over his shoulder and caught his niece grinning happily down at him. He smiled back and blew her a small kiss. While he browsed his shelves, he touched his jaw where her lips had landed so feather-light. Noticing his late-afternoon stubble, he grimaced and thought, "My time will be better spent with a razor than with a book if I don't want to embarrass Trang in front of her friends."
Decisively, Philippe returned 'Ciceronianus' by the Dutch philosopher, Erasmus, to its place and left the library. Continuing up the stairs toward his own rooms on the third floor, he fatefully paused on the landing when he distinctly heard water splashing. As he turned his head and cocked his ear to the sound, he saw that the door to the bathroom adjoining Trang's suite was ajar. Even today, he still felt sure that his intention when he walked toward the noise had been simply to close the door.
When he reached out his right hand to the doorknob, Philippe was transfixed by what he beheld through the fifteen centimeter gap between the jamb and the stile edge. Clearly reflected in the baroque gold-framed dressing mirror to her left, Trang stood facing the great claw-footed bathtub with her back to her uncle. He tried to look away, to draw the door shut, to retreat to propriety; but he could not. Instead, he had looked on and tugged his lips between his teeth, lest he inadvertently announced his presence.