It was for him to decide, and quickly.
Should he obey the Other’s lecturing, go back to the office like a good boy, drown himself in work instead of vodka, meet up with Loraine in the evening and spend the night with her? Or play detectives even though he did not know where that might end up?
He did not have to follow her for long.
Loraine went into a shop with a blue and white frontage.
Through the window, between two posters offering cod fillets for 64 francs for a 1lb bag and Cajun chicken portions for 22.80 francs, Nicolas could see a woman buttoning up her white overall near the till.
Loraine froze when she recognized Nicolas’s face.
A smile he would rather not have seen crept over her face. She waved to a colleague to take over for her, came out to him, stood squarely in front of him and crossed her arms.
“My name is Loraine Rigal, I live in a studio flat at 146 Rue de Flandre, I’m single and I don’t have any children. I was born in a little village near Coulommiers, my parents ran the farm. They weren’t very rich, but I got as far as the baccalauréat, which wasn’t much use to me when I moved to Paris when I was nineteen. I had a little garret room on the Rue Madame with a gas stove and a beige saucepan next to my bed; it had a nice view, I thought it was very bohemian. I went from one little job to another and one little studio to another for a few years until I got a job here. I make sure the departments are properly restocked, I run the till and, given how long I’ve been here, I run the place without anyone getting on my back. Just like everyone else, I always thought I’d have some great love affair. A waiter in a restaurant put me in the ‘weekend’ category. He had a girl for one night, a girl for a month and the woman of his life. Just for me, he created the special ‘weekend’ slot. Then there was Frédéric. I met him in a bookshop, he was a sound engineer in films. I thought he was beautiful and he seemed to like me. Over our very first cup of coffee, he asked me what I did for a living. When I told him that I worked in a frozen-food shop, I felt everything got faster and – without realizing there was a cause-and-effect connection – we were very soon lovers. I was crazy about him. It was one of those situations when you tell yourself that this time it’s for real. One day he invited me to a huge film gala. It was the first time I’d seen celebrities so close up. That evening I noticed a strange phenomenon: when any man came up to me, it took less than a minute (you could have timed it with a watch) for him to ask me who I was and what I did for a living. When I bravely told them that I worked in a frozen-food shop, it took them less than a minute (you could have timed it with a watch) to find someone else to go and ask the same question. But what else can you say except for ‘checkout girl in a frozen-food shop’ when you are a checkout girl in a frozen-food shop? What do you say? I work for a large distribution chain for a range of food products? I’m a technician for a chilled-goods chain? So many friends asked Frédéric what he was doing with me that he ended up asking himself the same question. It took me nearly a year to get over it. Then there was Eric. Like all married men, he didn’t like us being seen together in public places. We would meet at my apartment and he never stayed after two in the morning. He eventually left his wife to marry an editorial director from a publishing company. And I won’t mention Fabien, who knew what I did because we met when he was shopping here. When we had our first argument, he couldn’t help himself telling me that he wasn’t going to have ‘some frozen-foods salesgirl telling him what to do’. I don’t see any shame in doing what I do, but for a few years now I’ve had a different ambition in life. I want to live a real dream: to deal with wine. I got to know wine all on my own, in Paris. I would go into wine bars for the pleasure of discovering it. To learn more about the subject, I read guides and magazines. It’s impossible to develop a palate on your own, so I started joining cellarman’s associations, and going to wine seminars and tastings. In the more upmarket places I managed to get them to take me on as staff, and I was allowed to taste the grands crus. I listened to the professionals and took notes. Then I signed up for a wine tasting course, it helped me differentiate between the flavours and classify them. It was all becoming more and more serious, I saved enough money to go on my first course with trips to vineyards. That’s when everything started. I was given time off without pay, and I did the training to get a diploma from the National Federation of Independent Cellarmen. I learned to manage stocks, to buy and store wine, to explore new possibilities. I may have met someone who wants to form a partnership and try to get this going with me. My plan would be to open a little shop for ordinary people with bottles at twenty or thirty francs, sometimes fifty. To do that, you have to trawl up and down France looking for small vineyards which still show a respect for wine in their work, you have to explore the regions that aren’t as sought after as others, the Luberon, Corbières, Cahors, Anjou, Saumur, Bergerac, etc. There are still wine producers who know not to make too much, to wait till the grapes are ripe, they take real risks to try and rival the cheap plonk from the co-operatives, the kind you get in Paris in all the big stores with labels showing estates that don’t exist. I want to open this shop for the people who’ll never try a Talbot ’82, to give everyone a chance to taste good wine, because everyone has a right to.
“While I’m waiting to become this other version of me, this Loraine who gives a good bottle of wine even to the poor, I promised myself I would never say that I was Loraine, the checkout girl from a frozen-food shop again. The journey from one Loraine to the other is exciting but it’s long and difficult, it wouldn’t take much to bring it all crashing down. So, in order to look after myself, to keep my strength up, to stick to my convictions and to make sure I wasn’t infiltrated by other people’s doubts – even people who meant well – I’ve become Loraine who never answers any sort of personal questions. Until today it wasn’t going too badly. But you just had to know. And because of that, I never want to see you again.”
Paul Vermeiren
If he refused Brigitte’s case, Paul would be exposing himself to serious danger: having another private detective set on Blin’s trail. A charlatan would rake in all her savings and an experienced private detective could follow the trail to Vermeiren.
She had dreamed about Blin so much that she had invented a relationship with him – what a cruel declaration of love! – and this blindness frightened Paul. Her determination to find the beloved man she had lost put him in danger. He had to get out of this and he had to set her free from this passion which had turned Mademoiselle into someone who now believed her own fabrications.
So Vermeiren set off to look for Blin, but before starting he could not resist the temptation of asking her about the man.
“Did he have any hobbies, what was he interested in?”
“He liked tennis, but he was too proud to lose a tournament, or even a match. He was what people call a ‘bad sport’.”
He raised an eyebrow to encourage her to elaborate.
“If he started playing poker, it would only have ended badly. You could try looking in that direction.”
“Without knowing what connections he might have had in those circles, it’s not going to be easy. Anything else?”
“I don’t know if it’s significant, but there is one detail I never mentioned to the police. I didn’t want to breach professional secrecy, even if it was a useful clue.”
Again he waited for her to explain.
“An accountant is like a doctor or a lawyer. You see what I mean, there are the same restraints of confidentiality.”
“Go on . . .”
“When I went through his cheque stubs, I would find three or four payments a year to a ‘Barbara’, with no other details. ‘Barbara 800 francs’, ‘Barbara 300 francs’, those sorts of amounts, never more. I thought it must be a mistress. I got quite jealous of her, but nothing’s turned up to support that hypothesis. I never found out who this Barbara was. Could that be any use to you?”
Barbara had a red nose, green hair and s
ize 25 shoes; Blin had never seen her real face. Barbara was a clown. In a long interview in Nouvel Observateur she had described how she spent her days in hospitals making children with cancer laugh, weekends and bank holidays included. Especially public holidays. Over the years she had managed to find a handful of voluntary helpers; at the end of the article there was an address to which to send donations. Blin gave the money, sometimes wondering whether it was buying him a clear conscience, until he realized that the answer did not really matter. He could have helped so many other organizations, charities and support agencies, but he had chosen Barbara because the photographs published in the press had not revealed her real face. She could have been a neighbour from his apartment block, he would never have known.
“Did he have foibles, habits?”
“Not really. Or just weird things.”
“. . . Weird?”
“There was one thing he liked more than anything else. When it was raining really hard he would secretly watch through the shop window as the street emptied and people ran for cover. Without fail, there was always someone who took refuge in the phone booth on the pavement opposite. Thierry would ring the number and the guy would look a bit disconcerted but he’d always pick up eventually. And that . . .”
And that what? It was just a schoolboy prank, an overgrown teenager’s dirty trick.
“Thierry would pretend he was this disturbing, dangerous character, as if he wanted to get the poor man out of there. It would be things like ‘. . . Hello, Étienne? I could only get 6 kilos, but I won’t go below 600 a gram, is that OK?’ The man would say something in reply and Thierry would say: ‘You’re not Étienne! Look, are you in the phone booth opposite the stationers in the Rue Raymond-Losserand?’ The poor man would slam the phone down, go out into the rain and disappear round the first street corner. Thierry played lots of other characters: Russian spies, jealous husbands. I thought it was a nasty little game, and he would tell me that he’d just injected a dash of excitement into someone’s life when they were bound to have been a bit short of it. You can’t imagine how unfair it was.”
“What if there was a woman in the phone booth?”
“That was different. Thierry would make a point of trying to make her laugh. He sometimes succeeded.”
That was what Paul wanted to hear. Even if hundreds of times Blin had felt like putting on a lugubrious voice and saying: ‘That little red skirt really suits you.’
“Can you think of anything else, Brigitte?”
“I found a few pages from his memo pad, but they don’t say anything.”
“A few pages of what?”
“It was a little notepad, he would put everything he had to do on it, so he wouldn’t forget.”
“. . . How did you get hold of them?”
“I would pick them out of the bin as he threw them away.”
Paul had to bite his lip to hide his surprise.
“I know that makes me look mad, but . . .”
Yes, ripe for locking up; he could not believe his ears.
“I’ve brought a few for you, to show you, but they may not be any use to you.”
Absolutely none, but Paul wanted to see them with his own eyes.
Order 50 sheets of plywood from Rossignol
Tuesday evening, chicken. Or veal, Juliette likes veal.
01 55 24 14 15, possible client for the Combes (watercolour)
Tell Nadine she looks good in that dress she doesn’t dare wear.
“Is it any use, Paul?”
Annual drink at Parshibi, Sunday (Efferalgan)
Record the film on Channel 3 tonight.
95C? Get an explanation.
“Is it or not?”
“None at all. Are you going to keep them?”
“Of course. I’ve got so little left of him.”
Even if Paul had nothing to fear from these notes, he felt somehow despoiled and he resented Brigitte for being capable of this. Dream chaser, fetishist, what else? Did one-way love push people to these extremes?”
“Did he ever talk to you about suicide? I know the question’s a bit abrupt, but we have to consider everything.”
“He could sometimes seem absent, opaque, distant, but never depressive. The only time I ever heard him use the word suicide, it was in connection with the ‘Little Archimedes’.”
Vermeiren knew exactly what she was referring to and he found it quite entertaining asking her to explain.
“He quite often told me the story of the ‘Little Archimedes’, and I would pretend I’d forgotten because he liked it so much. I can’t remember where he’d got it from, the papers, a book, a film, it doesn’t really matter. It was about a boy of four or five who was an incredibly gifted musician. With no teaching at all, he mastered his scales and could play any instrument without any lessons. His parents were dazzled and they bought him a piano and paid for a teacher. They had a mini Mozart, it was the most amazing luck. But the child’s enthusiasm quickly petered out, he refused to play and his parents – who had fostered all sorts of wild hopes – forced him to practise his scales, which made him absolutely miserable. One morning the child threw himself out of the window. In his room, well hidden under his bed, his parents found masses of sketches, geometric figures, calculations, mathematical equations. They discovered, too late, that their child wasn’t a little Mozart but a little Archimedes. Like all great mathematicians, he could decipher the language of music, but it was just a diversion. His passion, his true calling, was algebra, geometry, calculus, the laws that govern the universe and shapes. Thierry was fascinated by this story. He couldn’t bear the thought of a thwarted vocation.”
A shiver ran down Paul’s spine as he finally understood why Blin had so liked telling this story.
“Do everything you can. Don’t hide anything you find from me. I can cope with whatever you have to tell me.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes.”
It was perhaps this certainty which encouraged Paul to fulfil his dearest wish: a fortnight later he asked her to come and see him at the agency late one afternoon. He made her wait for about ten minutes, until his associate had left.
“Come in, Mademoiselle Reynouard.”
Like other clients, she looked round the room, looking for some typical thing in there, an atmosphere. Then she sat down and crossed her arms, tense, ready for the worst. Paul waited until Brigitte’s eyes finally came to rest on his.
“. . . What’s happened to you, Monsieur Vermeiren!”
“Do you mean this?” he asked, pointing to the bandaging on his face – a wide band of gauze under his left eye, which was bruised and almost closed, and a plaster at the corner of his mouth. On the scars front, Paul had seen much worse than this: these would disappear in less than a week. In the meantime, they were having the intended effect.
“Was it your enquiries which. . .?”
His response to Brigitte’s surprise was a long silence.
“I’ll come back to that later, let’s start at the beginning. I thought about it for a long time before agreeing to this case. The simple fact that Thierry Blin was a client of mine meant that, theoretically, I shouldn’t have undertaken any enquiries about him; besides, he knew my face, which would make tailing more risky. You managed to persuade me, and what then happened proved that you were right to.”
Paul felt almost jealous as he wondered how Blin could still put that glow in a woman’s eyes.
“Despite your best efforts, Blin’s own friends and acquaintances didn’t give us very much. So I set off on the only trail I had: the job he’d given me with the Bonnard drawing, trying to find its owner. Do you want the details about how I traced him?”
“Have you found him?”
“Yes.”
He saw her cheeks flush in a moment, could sense her body tensing, her breath quickening. Blin had never noticed any of this when Brigitte came close to him.
“Where is he? Have you spoken to him!”
He pu
t his hand on a blue file.
“It’s all in here, Mademoiselle Reynouard. Thierry Blin lives in Paris, his face has changed and he’s now called Franck Sarla.”
She listened in stunned silence.
“It took me six days to track him down, four to find who he was in his new life. And it’s those four days that are recorded here. Before you read the report, I would like to warn you: what you read will probably shock you. You could still just leave it. I know how determined you are, but you may give up a memory you hold dear for a truth which could be a burden to you for a long time. Think it over!”
“I’ve thought!”
It was bound to happen.
He picked up the blue file and handed it to her.
She settled herself in the chair, took a deep breath and started to read while, at the back of the room, Paul took a cigarette from a packet that he kept for very rare occasions.
Confidential
Not to be divulged to any third party.
SURVEILLANCE REPORT
Purpose: Surveillance of M. Thierry BLIN, known as Franck SARLA (and hereinafter called by that name), on Monday, 28 May, starting from his home at 24 Cité Germain-Pilon, 75018 Paris.
0800 hrs:
Mission begins.
0830 hrs:
Set up surveillance equipment opposite 24 Cité Germain-Pilon.
1025 hrs:
M. SARLA comes out alone, wearing trousers and a heavy leather jacket. He walks to the Mont d’or Brasserie, on the corner of the Boulevard de Clichy and the Rue André-Antoine. The staff and patron, M. Brun, seem to know M. Sarla. M. Brun comes to greet him and they sit down together at a quiet table to talk.
1150 hrs: