“When does the surveillance come in?”
“As it’s collected and formatted we’ll get everything available on both sides of the river downstream all the way to the bend north.”
“The bridge. What about the bridge and the streets leading to it?”
The cameras there have been out for more than six weeks. Lightning in August.”
“They couldn’t fix them?”
“They don’t have the money. It’s like the Third World here.”
“Duvalier, the Third World is going to pass us soon, not because it’s fast but because we’re racing backwards. Were you named for Papa Doc?”
“No.”
“Baby Doc?”
“I hope not.”
AS HE STUCK TO his narrative, Raschid Belghazi was noticeably nervous. They were up on the roof, having left his mother’s apartment not only so she could not interfere in the interrogation, but because the apartment smelled very bad.
“As I told them, we were walking to the station when he attacked us on the bridge, from nowhere. We went to the Comédie-Française and had dinner, and were going home. We had to walk to the Gare de Montparnasse because we didn’t have enough money for the Métro.”
The detectives were stunned, and for a while they said nothing, until Duvalier asked, “You went to the Comédie-Française?”
“Yeah. We go there a lot.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you see?” Arnaud asked.
“I don’t remember the title.”
“You don’t remember the title of a play you saw two days ago?”
“What play?”
“That’s what I asked you.”
“They don’t show plays there,” Raschid told Arnaud, as if speaking to an idiot. He laughed.
“To the contrary,” Duvalier instructed. “That’s where you see Molière, Racine ….”
“Who?”
“What did you see there?”
“A pornographic movie.”
“At the Comédie-Française?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is the Comédie-Française?”
“On a side street in Pigalle. It doesn’t have a sign because the movies are so dirty.”
“Okay, okay, but what was the title?”
“In pornographic movies the title is unimportant,” Raschid Belghazi said with the authority of a professor.
“We have to check it out. What was the plot?”
“The plot? This chick goes to a tropical resort and everybody fucks her, even the women, even on the airplane.”
“You mean in the airplane, unless they’re all wing walkers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Never mind. Tell us a detail you remember.”
Raschid laughed. “I know!” he said. “This you can’t forget. She goes into a hut on the tropical island and has sex with a guy, but through the window you can see the top of the Arc de Triomphe, covered in snow. I don’t think anyone noticed but me, because when I yelled out they all told me to shut up.”
“Duvalier,” Arnaud said, “you realize, you’re going to have to see that movie.”
“We’ll both go. Maybe we can arrange a screening at the Comédie-Française.”
Raschid then told the rest of his story.
“Describe the guy,” Arnaud commanded.
“He was very tall, heavy, bald, a mustache. He yelled at us in German.”
“Do you know German?”
“No, but I can recognize it.”
“You said he made racist insults. In German?”
Raschid nodded.
“How do you know?”
“Arabische Schweinen? That sounds racist to me.”
“Is it grammatical?” Duvalier asked, turning to Weissenburger.
“How should I know?”
“Weissenburger?”
“You don’t speak Arabic.”
Duvalier pressed on. “Your description of him is completely different from what the two witnesses say they saw. Why? Don’t you want us to find him? Was it a drug deal? Was he someone you attacked on the bridge?”
“So why did he run?” Raschid asked indignantly. “I didn’t run. He killed my two friends. I swear, we didn’t attack him. We didn’t. I can take a lie detector test. He just came out of nowhere.”
“Did he look like Gérard Depardieu?” Arnaud asked.
“Are you kidding?” Raschid asked. “This guy was an athlete. Gérard Depardieu is as fat as a hippopotamus.”
Duvalier turned to Arnaud and they both stepped aside to where Raschid couldn’t hear them. “I like the kid,” he said. “He’s kind of an idiot, but so was I at that age, in a different way I admit.”
“I like him, too,” Arnaud said. “It makes me want to find out who did this even more. Why kill some jerky kids who think the Comédie-Française is a pornographic movie house?”
“None of them has a record. We’ll have to make some inquiries, but I don’t think this kid is attached to a gang or anything. He’s too dumb. Okay, the gangs use dumb ones, but they’re always afraid, and he isn’t, unless he’s dumber than anyone I’ve ever encountered. Granted, he’s a tabula rasa, but I don’t think he’s mixed up enough in drugs or the underworld to have had anything impressed upon him yet. I mean, maybe when the cars were burning he threw a brick or two, but I’m not even sure he’d know how.”
“Informants?” Arnaud suggested.
“Do you have any? Because I don’t. We can ask the local cops, but so what. These guys are the victims. Let’s not forget that.”
They asked Raschid a few more questions about the details of the encounter, and the interview came to an end as a giant Airbus, forced by traffic and the wind to make its turn southeast of Paris before setting a near-polar course, roared overhead so loudly that it sent the forest of television antennas on the roof into aluminum hysteria.
A Million Swimming Pools
LIKE REMNANTS OF Pacific spray sparkling in the sun, a million swimming pools were sprinkled across the hills, ravines, and flats of Los Angeles, glinting sapphire and aquamarine from Mexican-tended foils of green. Veins of blinding molten silver in newly burgeoning watercourses testified to a recent October rain. And the unstoppable, inescapable traffic, never ceasing, coursed through arteries everywhere. As the plane made slow and methodical turns that with baby G forces pressed Jules against his seat, he strained to stay close to the window.
Wheeling now over the Pacific, now over villa-covered hills, Jules was able to sense that the lightness and ease of Los Angeles arose as if the whole city wanted to float up and be carried away on the wind. But though held down by a netting of freeways, roads, streets, fence lines, canals, high tension wires, telephone and other communications lines, and tens of thousands of radio and microwave rays that, were they light, would have encased the city in a gleaming, golden skein, Los Angeles, perhaps more than any place in the world, pulled buoyantly against the threads that tethered it. It was balmy, sunny, happy, and unreal.
THE CAR JULES HAD rented was not available, so he was promised it at his hotel the next day. In the taxi ride from LAX to the Four Seasons on Doheny, he was shell-shocked by the Persian horde of traffic, the massive construction, the ceaseless and insane maneuvers of cars, the cranes, helicopters, road workers, pedestrians, police, the desperate commercial density, and the radio.
“I know who that is,” he said to the taxi driver as a giant plane roared overhead after having almost given the Getty a haircut.
“Who who is?” the taxi driver returned.
“Erre, e, esse, pé, e, cé, té.”
“What?”
“‘Respect.’ Aretha Franklin. She’s excellently popular in France.”
“That’s the oldies station. I can change it.”
“No, I like it.”
“Aretha who?”‘
“Franklin.”
“I think that’s from a long time ago.”
“How old are you?” Jules
asked.
“Twenty.”
“Oh.”
“Are you a pilot?” the taxi driver wanted to know.
“A pilot? Why do you ask?”
“I picked you up at the airport. Air Ethiopia. Did you ever jump out of a parachute?”
Jules thought, so this is America. Then he answered. “I jumped out of an airplane. I was a paratrooper. How did you know?”
“Because I’d like to be one. I’d like to jump out of a helicopter into the ocean. With a surfboard. That would be cool.”
“You could do that, maybe minus the surfboard,” Jules told him, “if you set your mind to it.” They were passing a Bank of America at the edge of Beverly Hills. Although Jules was the same careful, honest man he had always been, he was also now a different man, on the run from the police, freer, crazier. So he said, “How about helping me rob a bank?” It was a joke, of course.
The taxi driver was silent for a block. Then he said, “When?”
“We’d have to plan it. The hard part for me would be getting the money back to France. But you don’t have that problem.” That also was a joke.
“Just one?”
“Just one what?” Jules asked.
“Just one bank?”
“Oh no, but we stop at six … banks, not o’clock.”
“That’s right. You don’t want to press your luck.”
As they glided along now green-swarded boulevards columned by fifty-foot palms, Jules breathed somewhat hard for someone just riding in a taxi. Before the Île aux Cygnes, the last time he had been an outlaw had been in Algeria, because when he was there, where he was there was no law. Something about being an outlaw was the same in music, and in dying. The words flying, falling, disappearing in light, and rising occurred to him completely absent framework or order.
They pulled onto the crescent drive of the hotel. Instead of allowing Jules to square with the taxi driver, get a receipt, and put back his wallet, the doorman opened the cab door and stood expectantly, as if used to greeting tycoons and heads of state who neither carried money nor took taxis. This put pressure on Jules, who gave the taxi driver an enormous tip. As Jules was struggling to exit, the taxi driver jumped out, ran around the front of the car, and pushed the doorman from the door. “Don’t touch my cab,” he ordered, “and don’t mess with a guy like him,” he said, nodding proudly at Jules, “unless you want a dead donkey on your bed.”
“What?” the doorman asked.
As Jules stood up, the taxi driver whispered, “My cell number’s on the back of the receipt. Let me know when it’s time to roll.”
As Jules walked toward the hotel’s acres of highly polished marble, carpets as soft as marshmallows, gardens echoing with chamber music and the sound of fountains, and people dressed beyond the nines, he passed a young woman walking alone the other way. A bright yellow silk print dress tightly embraced her from the waist up but flowed at the skirt. She had a mass of genuinely golden hair that was like a halo or an unruly crown, and she was beautiful in an intelligent, entrancing way. As she passed, she smiled at him and her eyes widened – as Jules, now in his seventy-fifth year, well understood – with interest as genuine as the sun color of her hair. To say that he was electrified would be an understatement. He was practically electrocuted. Once again, now in Los Angeles, it was as if his emotions had leapt from an extremely high diving board. That he might encounter her later gave rise in him to equal measures of hope, numbing pleasure, and terror.
He wondered what was happening as his face flushed so hard that he stopped in his tracks and people had to walk around him. A bellboy asked if he might take the bag, and was refused with a vacant shake of the head. Then Jules saw the bar. He hadn’t had anything to drink on the plane. He hardly drank at all, and he never went into bars. What’s more, he was always so buttoned up and responsible that he normally would have checked in and placed his clothing in the empty drawers and closets. He would have organized his papers, laid out toilet articles neatly along the side of the sink in their exact order of use, washed, and visited the fire stairs, counting the steps from his room so that he could escape in the dark, possibly crawling along under the smoke, dressed in wet towels, like an ancient Egyptian. But instead he went into the bar.
At first he thought he wanted a Martini, because he had been served one once and it was so clear as to be invisible, but after a sip of what seemed like dry-cleaning fluid he realized that he was really after the olive. Here he would have to have something else. For him, this hotel bar was as dark, elegant, and beckoning an adventure as if he were sneaking in at age twelve. The bartender came over.
“Bonjour. In the Caribbean,” Jules said, “I once had a drink with soda, rum, sugar, and lime. I’ve forgotten what it’s called in French. I never knew what it was called in English.”
“That’s a Planter’s Punch,” the bartender told him. “I can make you one.”
Five minutes after he started drinking it, not yet having checked-in to the hotel, fleeing Paris after having killed two people, and very recently proposing to a crazy kid he had just met that they rob banks together, Jules was floating with the same lightness that had always defined Los Angeles. He had wondered what people did in bars, how for half an hour, an hour, or more they could sit silently and immobile on seats from which it was surprising that they did not fall. And now he knew, because, for an hour or more, soaring like a condor on rum and sugar, he thought of the woman in the yellow silk dress – her hands, her hair, the magic of her face, the way she walked, the scent of her perfume, her eyes, her smile.
Although he couldn’t stop thinking of her, he understood that she had been just a brilliant, sudden, overwhelming flash, an imagined perfection that left its imprint upon the eyes even after it had vanished. And this, he realized, was the essence and object of Los Angeles itself, a work of the climate, terrain, vegetation, sea, and light. How wonderful that it could be found in the beauty of a woman apprehended in an instant as she smiled and passed by.
HE WENT TO BED early without dinner and the next morning was at the swimming pool at dawn. Never had he seen such a clean pool. He tried to find a leaf, a speck, perhaps a discarded peanut, but couldn’t. How did they do it? Was the water distilled? Stacks of rolled towels and tables with pitchers of lemon water flanked every entrance. Solid chaises with thick cushions lay unoccupied all around the pool. Nothing stirred, and the water was flat until he broke the surface and swam his accustomed kilometer, trying not to lose count of the laps.
After he went back upstairs, he shaved, dressed, straightened up the room, and made the bed. He always did that, and then tipped and thanked the maids, who wondered what he was up to. His room was plush. Two balconies overlooked the pool to the south and Los Angeles to the east. It seemed peaceful and green, although he knew there was more to it than that, and that he was holed up in a privileged enclave.
AS HE DROVE TOWARD the Getty, palm fronds passing above like the fans that cooled the pharaohs, he tried not to think of the woman in the yellow dress, who had appeared like a blinding sunburst with the promise that it could put an end to longing and lay the past to rest. She was just a symbol, but he was sure that her splendor was not merely superficial. In her expression he had seen modesty, love, intelligence, and kindness.
He wished he had a billion dollars, or just a hundred million, perhaps even just fifty million. Then at least he would suffer for a time the delusion that he could outwit mortality. He would fly Luc in an air ambulance to the Cleveland Clinic or the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, or Harvard or Johns Hopkins, whichever was the best. He would settle Cathérine and David in a nearby Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton. He would visit them frequently. And he would buy a house on a mountainside so as to look out over the whole expanse of Los Angeles, comforted by the flat blue of the Pacific disappearing calmly toward the joint between water and sky, the fine-line gate to infinity. In this city, disconnected from everything but the present, he would live with the woman in the yellow
dress, the woman who had such full-bodied, wavy, astoundingly gold hair, if she would have him, until he was eighty, when he would die and return to Jacqueline forever, if she would forgive him.
Had Jacqueline lived, life would have been even more peaceful than the natural narcotic of Los Angeles could make it. She had a talent for happiness, and the patience, gentleness, and feminine power that allowed her to hold through without fighting. He, on the other hand, knew how to hold through only by fighting, and when he could no longer fight he would be done.
Since her death, his many infatuations, which had radiated like burning infrared into the hearts of younger and inappropriate women, were nothing more than a confused and pathetic attempt to reach beyond the veil, and by touching, embracing, and loving the beauty of another, to touch, embrace, and love life once more. Although he hadn’t misled the subjects of these infatuations for more than an instant, and although what passed between them was as pure as it was powerful, he was ashamed nonetheless. As honest as were his impulses, he could not act on them. He had full license to do so, for widowers can remarry. But not Jules. He could kill two men, evade the police, and perhaps rob a bank or two, but he dared not seek out the woman he had seen leaving the hotel, speak to her, embrace her, kiss her, and chance to stay with her for as long as he could.
AS THE DAYS HAD passed in beautiful weather and he had heard nothing, he had presumed that Acorn was making arrangements for an orchestra. He was so much absented from his own world and so put at ease by Beverly Hills – its drunken blue and green night lighting that made jeweled caves of almost every pocket of vegetation; its highly waxed cars gliding over streets as clean as new cloth; its population, desperately, but slowly, on the make – that he spent money as if he actually had it. After all, he was going to get a million Euros, and his living expenses would be covered by Acorn. He felt free to buy a thing or two: sunglasses for $750; a deep blue silk tie for $300; a cashmere blazer for $2,000. Then, after he hadn’t heard anything for five days, and thinking that he might have been hung out to dry, he stopped spending promiscuously.
After parking his car in the Getty’s spotless underground garage, he took the train up the mountainside. Perched above the sea, the museum’s many levels, terraces, fountains, courtyards, gardens, and galleries hung dreamlike in the sky.