It was nine or ten – he was not sure – but it was dark as he sat on his terrace, near the row of pines, breathing steadily and calmed by their scent. He had said goodbye to Cathérine. He had embraced and kissed the baby, whose skin was flushed and salty. He loved Cathérine very much, but he didn’t give her the slightest reason to suspect that she would never see him, alive, again, except to say that he would be making arrangements that would help Luc. Cathérine’s expression was that of the child to whom the parent is once again the mystery that the adolescent imagines she has dispelled.
Lost in thought and remembrance, Jules didn’t notice that someone was knocking on the door. But because the gardener, who knew François, had told him that Jules was in, François persisted until Jules was roused. He walked slowly through the big living room to the hall, and opened the door with so little energy it suggested disdain.
François thought Jules was looking past him. “Jules?” he said, as if it were not Jules.
“François.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Jules said dispassionately.
“May I come in? I have something important to tell you.”
Jules turned and, without closing the door, led François into the living room.
“Where’s the piano?” François asked.
“I sold it. Shymanski is finally out. I have to leave by the first of September.”
“Where will you go?”
“I have the perfect place to go, really, the most perfect place.”
“I see. The house is nearly empty. Have you begun moving already?”
“I sold a lot of stuff.”
“The cello,” François said, eyeing the cello. “You’ll carry it out yourself?”
“The cello will be the last thing to go, just before me, but, no, I’ve arranged for it to be sent.”
“Where?”
“The fourth arrondissement.”
“That could be expensive.”
“Yes. Remember the girl I told you about? She lives there.”
“Oh. You’re going to start a new life?” François was surprised and curious, and was about to ask more questions when Jules, who had much the upper hand, cut him off.
“François, why have you shown up, at night, without calling?” Jules never would have said that to him before.
“They told me not to, the police. They threatened me.”
Jules nodded.
“You know?”
“I think so.”
“You stole a car?!”
“No, I didn’t steal a car. Do you think I would steal a car?”
“Of course not. They must be crazy. They really threatened me, but I owe it to you. I hope they haven’t followed. I took an extremely roundabout route. I went all the way down to fucking Disneyland.”
“Did you have a good time?”
I didn’t go in. They couldn’t have followed me, I took so many turns.”
“François, you’re a philosopher and an intellectual, so I suppose it might not have occurred to you that to see if you contacted me, apart from tapping your telephones they would just park outside my house and spare themselves a trip to Disneyland.”
“I didn’t think of that. I must be an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot, you’re a philosopher. You don’t fix enough faucets or do enough laundry. Those things teach you the kind of things you never learned. Why did you come?”
“They showed up at my apartment.”
“Arnaud and Duvalier?”
“You know them?”
“They came here as well. What did they want?”
“Last fall, in the rain, after we ate at Renée and you walked home, you dropped the check from your pocket. I paid for it only after a struggle, but you wouldn’t let go of the check.”
“I dropped it in the restaurant?”
“I don’t know where. The restaurant sent them to me. They wanted to know with whom I ate. They say you stole a car. I knew that was impossible, so I gave them your name. I didn’t think it could hurt. Are you sure you didn’t steal a car?”
“Maybe I stole a car while I was sleeping. Why would I steal a car? François, I have a car. I’m a cellist. Cellists don’t steal cars.”
“I really didn’t think so, but I went out in the hall as they left and I heard them talking. They’re going to get a warrant, but the judge in the case is in Honfleur for August, so they’re driving up there tomorrow. The next day, they said, they’re going to arrest you. One of them thought they should bring other men, but the other told him you weren’t dangerous and they didn’t need to. What’s going on? What are you going to do?”
“’It’s of no account.”
“No account? They’re going to arrest you!”
“No, no one’s going to arrest me.”
“How do you figure that?”
“The past will arise and the pace will speed up. In the gross and scope of things, it’ll hardly be perceptible. I have eternity on either side, so how much can it matter?”
François looked at Jules in complete perplexity, not because he didn’t understand what he called “the Bergson stuff,” but because Jules seemed as happy as if he had just been injected with morphine.
“I’ll look down upon Paris, the traffic on the streets and boulevards, the city breathing like something alive, and Arnaud and Duvalier will seem as small as grains of sand. Past and present will combine into one. I’ll see troop trains going to Verdun, Hitler on the empty ChampsÉlysées, the Liberation, century upon century overlaid all at once.”
“Jules, are you all right?”
“Yes, and I can see. Music is the only thing powerful enough to push aside the curtain of time. When it does, everything becomes clear, perfect, reconciled, and just, even if only for the moments when we rise with it. Nineteen forty-four, François. The world is still alive.”
AFTER HIS VISIT TO Jules, in which he had wanted to think of himself as a kind of French Paul Revere, François believed that Jules had gone mad, but that, despite this, Jules was safe.
The next day, Arnaud and Duvalier drove north to Honfleur, taking Duvalier’s Volkswagen Jetta instead of a police cruiser. It was light, and even though the engine was not powerful the acceleration was like that of a sports car. And it had a sunroof, as police cars do not. On their way, just east of Lisieux, they passed Armand Marteau, who was heading toward Paris. They wouldn’t have known Armand Marteau, and he wouldn’t have known them had they been stuck in the same elevator or elbow to elbow at a bar, even though the three of them were focused on Jules. Still, when their vehicles passed at a collective 190 kilometers per hour, only ten meters apart, had there been a little bell devoted to marking such things it would have sounded.
The judge was an elegant old man with, nonetheless, gaps between his teeth. They caught him completely by surprise as he was returning from the beach, dressed in shorts and a Dr. Seuss T-shirt. They were in summer suits, with ties. Less embarrassed than they were, he invited them into his garden, from which they could vaguely hear the waves. The judge pulled out of his flip-flops and swung his feet onto a big ottoman with a square cushion. His wife brought out caviar on toast, and a pitcher of sangria.
“We have to drive home, Monsieur Juge,” Arnaud said upon his third glass.
“Why don’t you stay for a swim and work it off. Do we have enough chicken?!!” he screamed so loudly that Duvalier’s drink spilled.
Because the judge had been looking straight at Duvalier when he shouted the question, Duvalier said, sheepishly, “I don’t know.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to my wife. I have arthritis and I can’t turn my head. Do! We! Have! Enough! Chicken!!!”
“For what?!”
“For four!”
“No. But we have ham, too!”
It was a very strange hearing, which ended when the two policemen – a Muslim and a Jew, who had had a nice lunch of ham – left their guns with the
judge and went off to the beach. The judge’s bathing trunks fit Arnaud decently enough, but to keep the pair loaned to him from falling off, Duvalier had to use a rope tied around the bunched-up waistband.
Before they went swimming, however, they told the judge what they had, including the most recent information, which was that the blood on the receipt was the same as that on the ground, that Raschid Belghazi’s prints were on the receipt, as were two other sets, one of which they were sure would be Jules’.
“But you don’t know,” the judge said.
“When we take him in we’ll know. Our theory about the boathouse seems to be correct.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“We’re very sure. We accept the risk.”
“Before you arrest him, it has to be cleared with the DGSI.”
“We would have broken the case much sooner had the DGSI not intercepted the letter from Belghazi.”
“They didn’t. The letter was caught by the DGSE, who got it from the Turks before it even left that country. And what do you mean, it shouldn’t have been intercepted by the DGSI? That’s their job. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Do you think he’s a flight risk?”
Arnaud expressed skepticism. “He’s old, he’s lived all his life in Paris, he has no one to go to and nowhere to go. The old almost never run.”
“I’ll sign,” the judge told him, “but only after I run it past the DGSI.”
“Can you reach them now?”
“Not the person to whom I speak. Tomorrow. Why don’t you stay overnight? It’s not a weekend, and there won’t be much traffic going back. Once I have clearance, you can be in Paris in time to arrest him.”
“You can’t do it independently of the DGSI?”
“No. Your Raschid Belghazi is with Islamic State. They take that very seriously, and the DGSI has much more information than we do, so we’ve got to defer. Besides, I promised them.”
“You knew?”
“Of course I did. The letter was forwarded to you a while ago. I thought you were working on it.”
ARMAND MARTEAU DROVE around Saint-Germain-en-Laye for almost an hour trying to find a good parking space. He had driven from Normandy to tell Jules something he could have related in a phone call of less than a minute, but he didn’t want to leave a record. Yes, someone might have recorded his appearance, but he knew that it wouldn’t be Nerval. Even were no one watching Jules, Armand didn’t want an accidental parking ticket to mark his whereabouts, so he took the time to find a good space.
When he appeared at the door, Jules wasn’t surprised. “Marteau,” he said. “Come in.”
“Better to walk in the garden.”
“All right,” Jules agreed, closing the doors and starting out in that direction. “Why?”
“Bugs.”
“It’s August,” Jules told him. “There are more bugs in the garden than in the house. Or is it the other kind of bug?”
“It’s the other kind.”
“In my house? There aren’t any.”
“How do you know?”
“Who would do it?”
“The DGSI.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. First the police then the DGSI ordered Nerval to lay off. The police were crude, and threatened him. He was going to work around them, but as soon as he started the DGSI flattened him. It came from above, in our company. Evidently you have the attention of ministers, which made sense to everyone, given that you live here, and would be the kind of person who would – excuse me, who could – pick up the phone and call the Élysée.
“I came here to tell you that Nerval is off your case, and the DGSI’s on it. There was a delay in wiping the servers because of vacations in August. It can happen. But they did it at the end of last week. Your policy exists only as it is written. The investigative materials and notes are gone forever.”
Armand looked back at the palatial house. “You don’t live here, do you. I mean, it isn’t yours.”
“How did you know?”
“By accident. We’re fixing up our farm, and I’ve been there since late July. There are a lot of old magazines lying around, and in one of them was an interview with Shymanski after he was accused of bribery. They didn’t show the outside of the house or say where it was, but I recognized the study where you received me, and the painting. It’s his house, isn’t it?”
“Now it’s his sons’, and they’re selling it.”
“So you have to move. But you’re not going to move, are you?”
“No.”
“This is your last stop, and where I come in.”
The fate of Cathérine and Luc now depended on a rotund blond farmer from Normandy, whom Jules hardly knew.
At times of stress and danger, the truth always shone out to Jules, which was partly why he had never quite succeeded in the world. Truth had always been more alluring than success. “Yes,” he confirmed. “This is my last stop, and it is where you come in. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going back to Normandy, to work my farm.”
Amina
JULES CROSSED THE Pont des Arts, where recently scores of thousands of padlocks fastened by hopeful couples to the grills beneath the railings had glittered in the sun. Now that the locks were removed, the panels that replaced the grilles to which they had been attached were covered with graffiti: “Dojo loves Priam,” “Jean-Paul loves Anneka from Groningen.” Though the locks, in being too heavy in their collectivity, may have endangered the railings, they had been a boon to local hardware stores, and as if the gold were real their brassy finish seemed not to fade. He remembered how not long before he had stopped to examine one of these locks. It had a chromed bolt, it was of foreign manufacture, with “333” engraved upon it, and hot to the touch. He had wondered if the two people who fastened it to the bridge to commemorate their love were still together, and how long it would be until not a single couple thus commemorated was intact or living. If both partners made it to the end, would that count as perpetual? Would they have to die on the same day, or at the same instant? If separated by years, would the loyalty of the one who was left count for perpetuity?
He was walking to the Quartier latin to take the last few things from his office, give the key to the new occupant, and, if desired, acquaint him with the idiosyncrasies of the room, the problematic radiator, and the almost stuck window. Jules would inform him of where the sun struck in different seasons, the restaurants nearby, and whom to call on the custodial staff.
Jacqueline had been in this office, of course, when death and parting were hardly a thought, and her presence as a young woman had remained, an invisible and ineradicable undercurrent stronger than even the exciting presence of Élodi. When Jules thought of Élodi it was like waking, and he would arise as if he were weightless, but then the excitement would drift away like a wave that would fall back and with the salute of its crest disappear into calmer waters.
Élodi was now like something in the light when seen from the dark. He could neither love nor not love her, even after she had ended something that hadn’t really begun. He was neither puzzled nor determined, and knew exactly what was happening and what had to be. There was no answer or resolution. The one thing that seemed to be getting stronger was the reality of Jacqueline even as she receded into the past. She may have been dreamlike, but as he himself faded, the dream was becoming more real. The comfort of fading dovetailed with the illusion of rising and the hope of returning. The more Élodi receded, the more Jacqueline came to the fore, like an image on photographic paper emerging as if by magic from what according to logic and the senses was only empty and white.
As he had ten thousand times before, he climbed the stairs, experiencing a momentary illusion that the years had not passed. Jacqueline was in a library somewhere, and would meet him for lunch. Cathérine, age six, was in school. They loved her as nothing else.
Waiting for the new tenant to show, he gathered up the few things left and put them in a shoppi
ng bag: some books to be returned, stationary for the departmental office, journals to be discarded. He sat down. The replacement was due in a minute and a half. As if to hold the new man to account either for being late or so rigid as to be exactly on time, Jules stared at his watch, ready to form an opinion. Thirty-five seconds before the appointed hour, there was a quick, soft series of knocks, as if a woodpecker had a boxing glove on his beak. Jules got up, went to the door, and opened it as slowly as if it had been the heavy door of a vault.
ACROSS THE THRESHOLD was a trim, beautifully dressed woman, neither tentative nor reserved. As Jacqueline once had been, she was in a gray suit, with pearls. Although beige, her blouse was blessed with pink, her hair reddish blond, down almost to her shoulders.
She had the most extraordinary expression, such as he had never seen even in Renaissance paintings and a millennium’s representation of angels. It was at one and the same time mischievous, knowing, innocent, forgiving, loving, comforting, challenging, proposing, curious, seductive, and enthusiastic, all of which ran together to knock him back into the world. One could say it was all in her eyes, or all in her smile, and one would not have said enough.
And it had to happen on the day before the day he had chosen to die. This woman, though vital and fit, was so much older than Élodi, probably in her early sixties. But though she was past the age of creating it anew, she possessed the fuse of life.
She introduced herself. Amina Belkacem – in origin Algerian for sure, Muslim most likely, charming and beautiful without doubt. Her French was that of a highly educated, upper-class Parisienne. Her eyes, like Élodi’s, were blue. She asked politely and diplomatically if this was the office to which she had been assigned, and when he responded that it was, she said she hoped she hadn’t inconvenienced him in any way, and although what she said was pro forma, it was also remarkably and absolutely true, the genuineness of it shining through.