Someone Else

  Rodier stopped talking and braked sharply when he saw the Datsun stopping at a red light. He tucked his car behind a van double parked about fifty yards further back.

  “Even if he doesn’t suspect anything, and whatever else happens, the less he sees you, the better. Do it automatically. If the roads are clear like today, there’s no point in sticking right to him. Try and find little corners to stop and wait.”

  The light changed to green and Rodier set off again following the little Datsun, maintaining the fifty-yard distance, and he carried on with his story as if nothing had happened.

  “Luckily, the husband was found to be in the wrong.”

  “Luckily for sexual equality?”

  “No, for a good hard worker like me who got masses of women customers as a result of it.”

  Blin, who was still hypnotized by the rear window of the Datsun, smiled just to please him.

  “When you’re following a car, look for the blind spot, and put yourself in it as much as you can. If you know where he’s going it’s sometimes useful to go on ahead.”

  The Datsun was following the banks of the Seine towards the western suburbs.

  “At the moment, he’s still heading for home,” said Rodier. “If he goes down the Rue Mirabeau, he’s trying to get onto the ring road, and we’ll be in for a stretch on the motorway. But he told his wife he wouldn’t be back till late afternoon . . .”

  For fear of disturbing Rodier’s concentration, Blin no longer dared open his mouth, even for the most mundane comment. Supple, invisible, even his car did nothing to catch the eye. Lemarrecq put on his indicator and, at the Pont du Garigliano, turned off, away from the ring road.

  “This is beginning to get interesting,” said Rodier, who was still calm but much more intrigued.

  Blin pictured Lemarrecq on the roads of France with his car full of catalogues of hot-water tanks. Cheap hotel rooms, service stations, basic meals reimbursed on expenses, impatient customers, tired colleagues and, occasionally, a bored middle-aged woman at the end of the bar in a two-star hotel. Since he had retired, he missed all that, of course, and his wife could not understand, she had always been sedentary. He was not as old as all that, after all, he could still appeal to someone.

  “And what if he’s going to some friends to play poker with his savings?” Thierry asked.

  “Why not? As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t change a thing. I’ve been asked to find out what he’s doing and I’ll report on what he’s doing.”

  The Datsun set off into the maze of roads in a residential part of the Fifteenth Arrondissement; it was no longer possible to hover in his blind spot. Rodier stayed a good hundred yards back, at the risk of having it turn off some way ahead of them.

  “If he was depleting their savings or if he had a mistress, could his wife use the information you give her in court?”

  “In theory, no. But just think of a judge who’s onto his twenty-eighth divorce of the day; he’s hungry, he’s tired, he wants to make a phone call. If the plaintiff’s lawyer submits a photo of the husband kissing some young lady full on the mouth, it’s likely to strengthen their case, wouldn’t you say?”

  The Datsun stopped abruptly, Lemarrecq had found a miraculous parking space.

  “Oh shit, shit, shit and shit!” said Rodier.

  He forgot that Blin was there and acted as if he were alone. He abandoned his car across the entrance to a garage, leapt to the boot without losing sight of Lemarrecq, grabbed the camera with its telephoto lens already screwed on and hid behind a four-wheel drive to take pictures of the man who was still walking along unsuspecting. Rodier dumped the camera into Thierry’s hands.

  “Why should we take a picture of a man on his own in a street . . .?”

  “To prove that he was in the Rue François-Coppée at ten past one, and that I was there too at the same time. Haven’t you ever heard of justifying the expenses?”

  Lemarrecq had just turned into another street. Rodier left his trainee there to follow him again. Blin, his heart beating fast, put away the camera, ran round the corner of the street and saw Lemarrecq keying in a security code before disappearing through a front door which Rodier just managed to catch at the last minute before slipping, alone, into the building a moment later.

  Thierry wiped away some drops of sweat and caught his breath with a few deep breaths. He closed his eyes for a moment and gave a great sigh, just long enough to dispel the last of the adrenaline still burning through his limbs. He would probably always remember that moment, that thrust on the accelerator that he had just given to his whole life. Was he going to force himself to make wooden frames for much longer when the minute he had just lived had been far more intense than the last five years spent in his workshop? He felt as if he had achieved something, as if he had surpassed himself, even though he had still only been a spectator, even though he had been frightened like a little kid who is not used to being naughty. Was it his fault if he had felt an unfamiliar excitement as he followed some unfortunate man who had every right to make the most of his retirement as he saw fit? It was all absurd. And unhoped-for.

  Rodier came back out at last with a notebook in his hand, and headed for the car.

  “We’re going back to the office.”

  Unable to contain his impatience, Thierry begged him to tell him what he had just seen.

  “He went up to the second floor. I followed him up the stairs and stopped when I was level with his feet. He rang the bell of the door on the right, and someone let him in.”

  “Go on!”

  “Well, after that I could only hear what was going on. A young woman’s voice with an oriental accent, Miss Mai Tran, second floor on the right.”

  “She might be a friend.”

  “No doubt about that, she greeted him with: ‘Oh, sweetheart, I waited all day yesterday!’ Only a friend would open a door with so much enthusiasm.”

  They got back into the car; Thierry slammed his door jubilantly, completely at home in his new persona. He had never felt so much himself.

  “Don’t go thinking this happens often. In normal circumstances, it would have taken two or three days to get a result like that. And the most amazing thing in this whole business is that Madame Lemarrecq is going to get all the answers for just 600 francs!”

  *

  Nadine was sleeping, in exactly the same position as when Thierry had left her. The same abandon. He sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Are you asleep . . .?”

  “Of course I’m asleep,” she mumbled, smiling.

  She came and snuggled in his arms. Weakly, Blin could not help himself talking to her, right there and then, as she dozed.

  “I’m going to take a year’s sabbatical.”

  “A what . . .?”

  “If I don’t do it now, I’ll do it in twenty years’ time, but it wouldn’t be the same then.”

  Her silence was full of surprise and concern.

  “. . . Are you sure? How are you going to manage . . .?”

  “I’m going to appoint a manager for the shop. Brigitte will tell me how to go about it.”

  He had already talked about it with his accountant, and she had thought it an absurd idea. She was going to have to cope without the complicity with Thierry which she valued so much.

  “I’ve found a youngster who wants to start out in the business. Brigitte’s done the accounts, I’ve got some money put aside, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried . . . All this is so . . .”

  “Go back to sleep, we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  She turned onto her side and stopped thinking about it so that she could sink back to sleep.

  Blin wondered whether Lemarrecq dreamed of the mysteries of the Orient as he slept next to his wife.

  And whether young Thomas felt protected by the darkness or terrified of it as the night trickled by.

  Rodier, who was waiting for him at 8 o’clock the following morning, had thought it worth mentioni
ng that it might be quite an eventful day.

  Nicolas Gredzinski

  If only he had slept with her.

  He was left with nothing of the previous night, apart from waves of words breaking inside his skull. Being drunk generated a lot of sound, perhaps a bit of fury, but rarely any memories. Above and beyond the frustration of not having held Loraine’s body in his arms, he was annoyed with himself for having suggested they spend the night together. The ethyl alcohol had acted directly on his sense of the ridiculous, and, in just a few minutes, it had breached the rampart he had spent years building as a result of childhood humiliation and teenage awkwardness. He had built it the traditional way, fashioning it with great patience, thanks to women – but mainly against them. His acute awareness of the ridiculous had probably meant he had missed out on some delicious moments but it had also spared him some foreseeable blunders. Everything had fallen apart in one blow because of a simple sentence pointing out where a bed was. However hard he tried to convince himself that Loraine’s refusal was a “maybe” with a promise of other tomorrows, he had well and truly fallen into the oldest trap in the world like a young fool. God, it’s awful being young again like that. That was his first conscious thought when his alarm clock went off, just two hours after he had fallen asleep in a heap, still clothed, and alone. Why had no one chucked him out of that bar? He thought he was protected by various laws – wasn’t there something about curbing public drunkenness? But no, they had let him drink, and talk, and drink some more, until he ended up in the small hours with just enough strength to raise his arm to hail a taxi, barely able to give his address, keying in his security code as if he were learning to count and, to finish off, knocking over the lamp in the hall: for God’s sake, what the bloody hell was that doing there, anyway, in his way like that! In amongst all the words still swirling round inside his head, just one word, a two-letter one, had been properly registered: Loraine had said no. An elegant no but one which meant no, just no. He even wondered whether she had recoiled slightly when, in the heat of conversation, he had leant forward to say something in her ear. If there had been any complicity, he had blown it clean away with that head-on attack (which had the sole virtue of being free of innuendo). What could be more pathetic than a drunk suggesting a bit of fooling around to a beautiful woman? The same man the following morning.

  As he fumbled for a clean shirt, he was tempted to go back to bed and to dump the Group in favour of a bit of sleep and oblivion. Not to think about anything any more, not to worry about being brave, to forget about remorse, to stay in the half light, buried under a quilt, to set off to some unknown land and come back healed. And if that weren’t enough, to fall into the final sleep and be done with the little animal which had been nibbling at his insides all his life.

  There was no question of resorting to beer; coffee and aspirin would be enough, as they were for everyone else, the people who experienced hangovers as the other side of the coin, a fair price to pay when you have enjoyed such unfounded merriment. Why should he break with it? He would just have to celebrate this pain, it reminded him of what he was, a forty-something dreaming beyond himself, who would never be able to summon up the strength to go to work in two short hours. He needed to be alone to understand the nostalgia he felt for the man he had been the evening before. Where did he come from, this guy who talked so prettily to a stranger and drank like a sailor with his eyes wide open and his every movement aggressively purposeful? Where had he gone now, that bastard who had had a good laugh at his expense? This morning Nicolas was paying that other man’s bill, and that was the worst of it: he was no more real than the woman who hung around in bars and talked about the Renaissance as if that was where she came from.

  Somewhere in the crook of his ear he could still hear Loraine’s lecture about the beauty all around them – you just had to know how to look – and beauty had eventually appeared; the colour of the bourbon in the whisky glasses, the little movements made by the lovers around them, the black-and-white photographs of a music-hall performance, the night owls on the bar stools and, especially, Loraine, who at that precise moment eclipsed all the others.

  During the tortuous journey that took him from his bed to the office, only ugliness appeared to him. The world really was this dismal thing built by his ancestors and by himself, all of them convinced that they were doing the right thing, each following their own unique logic. Nicolas got out of the lift, preparing to slam the door to his office so that he could be heard from some way away. To be left in peace, that was all he asked. Muriel stopped him halfway and peeled a Post-it note from her switchboard:

  “Alissa would like to know if she can have lunch with you today, she’s sorry it’s such short notice.”

  “Who?”

  “Alissa, Monsieur Broaters’ secretary.”

  “What does she want from me?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Where’s she taking me?”

  “To the Trois Couronnes.”

  That was where they discussed the most important issues, where Marcheschi used all his powers of persuasion.

  “Tell her that’s fine.”

  “There’s also a Monsieur . . . Jeannot, I think . . . who called this morning.”

  “Jacot?”

  “I couldn’t really hear his name. To be honest, things didn’t seem to be too good.”

  Jacot picked up straight away at the sound of Nicolas’s voice on the answerphone. He had just got back from the clinic, his course of chemotherapy, which was meant to start in a month, had been brought forward to the following week, and that was just the beginning. Nicolas did not understand much, except for the urgency.

  “Muriel, cancel the lunch with Alissa,” he said, stepping into the lift.

  “. . . But I’ve just confirmed it!”

  Never mind. He hopped from foot to foot as the lift went down, and rushed across the hallway, then the footbridge to the taxi rank. Once outside Jacot’s house, he hesitated for a moment and asked the driver to drop him at the nearest café. He had never come close to illness, real illness; he was one of those people who shook at the slightest rash, and could see themselves ending their days in a sanatorium at the first sneeze.

  “What can I get you?”

  The question begged several more. Was Nicolas so naive as to think that he just had to swallow anything strong to produce miracles? Knowing how to talk to women, confronting the irritating, comforting the sick? Was he blessed with a transcendental power which could be unleashed with just a drop of alcohol?

  “What’s pretty stiff that I could drink at this time of day?”

  “You could have a calva coffee or a brandy.”

  “Brandy.”

  “A large one or a regular?”

  “Large.”

  Why was Jacot calling on him instead of someone close to him at such a crucial time? You don’t go talking about your cancer to the first person you meet, you don’t send up a cry for help to someone who doesn’t inspire complete confidence. The sick have a sixth sense for finding a kindly ear. Why me, for God’s sake!

  The coffee awakened his taste buds and introduced them to the taste of brandy, which he did not know. He found the shape of the glass pleasing and he swirled it in the palm of his hand as he had seen others do, not taking his eyes of the amber swell.

  Jacot welcomed him into a terrible mess, apologized for it without really feeling apologetic, and asked him whether he would like something to drink, hoping he would say no. Nicolas looked the place over, a bachelor’s retreat with piles of files that Jacot no longer consulted.

  “Up till now I was responding well to the treatments.”

  Nicolas waited in silence.

  “They’re going to give me some platelet transfusions.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “He says that my psychological state is going to have a big effect.”

  “And why shouldn’t he be right?”

  “Because when you’ve g
ot what I’ve got, you know.”

  What Nicolas had been afraid of did not happen, but the absolute reverse.

  The diffuse heat of the brandy came to appease him at the most unexpected moment. Relieved of his apprehensions, he managed to devote himself completely to the other man’s words. The message was getting through to him clearly, intact. He not only heard every word, but also the rhythm of the sentences, the tone and, particularly, the punctuation, the commas, breaks and full stops, not to mention the pauses, silences and sighs, which said a great deal more than the rest. No desire at all to flee.

  At last he could listen to someone. Right to the end. That was all that was being asked of him.

  *

  Nicolas was back at the Group at the stroke of midday, consumed by what had just happened to him. He now had an answer to the question why me? Someone close to Jacot would not have done.

  Jacot had chosen Nicolas for his announcement that he would no longer be doing battle. From now on he would offer absolutely no resistance to death if it decided to come looking for him, even if turned up earlier than expected. For the first time, Jacot had talked about it as if it were obvious, and he had summoned someone urgently to announce his official surrender. Nicolas had not tried to contradict him at any stage, for fear of being condemned to a lesson on hope which would only have underlined the depth of the crisis. He was now the depository for Jacot’s resignation, for his distress, which suddenly had come to rival his own good old anxiety and put it in perspective. Exhausted and losing the effects of the alcohol, he thought he deserved two hours of complete solitude in his office.

  “Alissa had already left when I tried to cancel, and I can’t get hold of her on her mobile.”

  “What shall we do?” he asked, stifling a yawn.

  “She must be waiting you at the restaurant, she booked a table for 1 o’clock. If you leave straight away you may not even keep her waiting.”