The Adversary

When smoke cleared from the fire that ravaged the second floor of a cottage in the Gex region of France in the early morning of Jan. 10, 1993, Florence Romand and her two young children lay dead. Her husband, Jean-Claude Romand, a respected physician and world-renowned researcher with the World Health Organization just across the border in Geneva, Switzerland, was badly injured, but would survive.

Almost immediately, rescuers discovered bullet wounds in the back of the children`s heads, and in addition to her burns Florence appeared to have suffered severe blunt trauma. Soon thereafter, Romand`s elderly parents were found shot to death in their home. Romand babbled an absurd story about rampaging murderers, but before long he confessed. He had killed them all.

It seems that those who thought they knew Romand had not known him at all. Many years earlier, in medical school, he had overslept and missed an important final exam. Rather than tell his friends and family, he began pretending to attend classes. He then set about spinning a web of deception that came to comprise the fabric of his entire existence.

So he was not a doctor; he had no degree of any kind. He did not have an international reputation. He did not work, and never had worked, for the WHO. Jean-Claude Romand was a man who wasn`t there.

In "The Adversary: a True Story of Monstrous Deception" (Metropolitan Books, 191 pages, $22; translated by Linda Coverdale), a startling rumination on a crime that both electrified and mystified France, Emmanuel Carrre eschews the grainy approach of most American true-crime accounts. (Someone once suggested that the implied subtitle of the seminal book in this genre, Truman Capote`s "In Cold Blood," was "Hair All Over Them Walls," the killers` promise - to each other - of the blood-caked violence they would unleash, and the authors` promise, to the reader, of an up-close-and-grisly account of just what, exactly, a shotgun blast can do to a human being.)

Instead, Carrre wanted to know what went on in the mind of such a man as Romand when the good non-doctor went off to "work" every morning. How did he spend all those days, all those years?

What he found was unsettling: Romand took walks in the woods, or sat in his car and in cafes, essentially doing nothing at all. His faux personality was all he had, all he was. Without it, he didn`t exist. Romand sustained his not-really-so-elaborate subterfuge by feigning modesty, politely steering conversations away from himself and all the famous people he knew. Incoming telephone calls were fielded by an answering service. For funds, he drained the life savings of his in-laws (and later, of his mistress), telling them he could invest it in high-interest Swiss accounts to which, as an employee in Switzerland, he supposedly had access.

When finally he had run through everything, instead of fleeing, or confessing, or killing himself (which he claimed he had planned to do), Romand "acted like a king in a chess game who, menaced on all sides, has only a single square left; objectively, the game is lost, he should give up - but he moves to that square anyway, if only to see how his adversary will set the trap."

Carrre writes (and Coverdale translates) with austere, unassuming grace. He is concerned not so much with an awful, all-but-unimaginable deed, but with the mind as it perceives itself - and how, for Jean-Claude Romand, it was easier to murder his parents, his wife and his children than to lay bare the twisted strands of reality he had managed to weave into a credible tapestry of lies.

True story: As a junior in high school, I froze utterly when it came time to write a long report, in Spanish, for an advanced Spanish class. We were given weeks to work on it. I did nothing. When it came time to turn in the reports, my classmates in the desks behind me handed theirs up, and, feeling a not entirely unpleasant buzz of unreality, I dutifully passed them along. I said nothing to the teacher, or to anyone. Whenever - usually walking to and from school - I began to despair (for, A Good Student, I had never done such a thing), I rounded up the torment, shoved it into a corner of my mind and locked it away ... successfully. I did not think about it. I went about my business, my life, as if everything was OK - and it was.

Instead of the B/B+ I had been heading toward, my final grade was a C - a satisfactory ending, you might say. But the experience was ultimately terrifying, a glimpse into a heretofore unimagined abyss: I was made aware of a capacity for uncompromising self-deception. My very identity seemed maleable, impermanent. If we are able to construct personas with such relative ease, what is our true persona? Can we ever be sure that the image we`re projecting is anything but a self-serving falsehood? Do we ever know who we "are"?

I didn`t lose any sleep during the Spanish-paper fiasco, but I`ve lost a lot since.

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Author: Arthur Salm