Someone Else

  “We liked him very much, officer. I was worried from the very first day I saw his sign. Monsieur Blin had never closed like that before.”

  He could quite see Mme Combes playing out this little sketch in the hopes of finding a decomposing body behind a sheet of Plexiglas. A belated heroine, proud of her intuitions, this might be the opportunity she dreamed of, to go from self-portraits to still life (oh so still!) in her work. Blin would not give her the pleasure; he needed only one day to do his research and would be back before the evening. He did not choose the shortest route to the city centre, but the only one on which you could see the sky and the Seine flowing by. Closed due to exceptional circumstances. What was exceptional was the strange feeling of freedom he had as he put the sign up. He had just succeeded in doing something revolutionary, in capsizing the established order. However banal it might seem, his closure due to exceptional circumstances was a hazy cloud amid the transparency of an entire life, a secret which – already – he could no longer share, a public lie; it took very little to get to the point of no return.

  He went to the offices of a daily newspaper and was shown to the archives. He was asked to wait next to a hot-drinks dispenser, between a scratchy sofa and a full ashtray. Intrigued, he watched the comings and goings of the people he assumed were journalists. Thierry could not conceive the very idea of work as anything but a solitary exercise. If heaven and hell gave him the strength to construct the person he wanted to be, he was bound to be more alone than anyone else in the world. Safe and warm in his retreat, barricaded in his manic isolation, carried by the fervour of those who believe the outside world is just an illusion. That man would live incognito among his contemporaries, praying that his subterfuge would go on as long as possible.

  “I’d like to see all the articles about private detectives that have appeared in your paper.”

  He said private detectives as if the words themselves were troublemakers, harbingers of chaos; they had the same resonance as exceptional circumstances. Blin felt they were somehow compromising, deliciously dangerous. Although he was not duped by his own paranoia, he saw it as a sign of his determination and a promise to take seriously the adventure he had sworn to himself that he would live.

  Sitting there with her cup of coffee, the archivist could never have imagined his inner turmoil; she rattled on the keyboard and printed out all the passages in which the words “private detective” had appeared in the last twelve years. Less than an hour later, Thierry Blin was sitting at a table in the library at Beaubourg, surrounded by papers, with a highlighter in his hand. There he found a book cited in one of the articles – a rather fastidious history of the profession, which he got through in twenty minutes – with an exhaustive bibliography, which gave him plenty of other leads. By early afternoon, he already knew a great deal more about it and even revelled in the twist of investigating the work of investigators. A student came to his help, amused by his puppyish expression as he watched the screen scrolling through thousands of Internet sites with various degrees of relevance to the subject. His enquiries were going faster than anticipated, he had already collated an impressive amount of literature, complemented by a how-to guide, indications of related articles and more references than he needed. In a bookshop he ordered a copy of The Private Detective’s Research Today, considered the most reliable book about the profession, its myths, realities and legislation. He had time to go back to The Blue Frame to hide his file away and, convinced that no one had noticed his absence, rip down the exceptional circumstances sign.

  *

  The clinic was on the outskirts of a far-flung suburb, between a dated high-rise estate and a football ground where half the grass had been scuffed off. At nightfall, he parked his car in a side street beside the building, and went into the entrance lobby just as the street lights were coming on.

  “I have a meeting with Professor Koenig.”

  “And you are. . .?”

  “Paul Vermeiren.”

  There, he had said it. When he had made the appointment, he had succeeded in coming out with the name over the telephone, but the face-to-face test was a much more delicate affair.

  “Will you wait a moment, Monsieur Vermeiren?”

  Thierry was left alone in the waiting room, feeling uneasy. Hearing the name spoken had made his heart beat as if he had been crossing a border with a suitcase full of cataclysms. Paul Vermeiren was born that day, 28 July at 7.30pm. The receptionist in a suburban clinic had brought him into the world without even realizing it; that would be his birthday from now on. There was no going back for Blin now. He was going to play sorcerer’s apprentice with himself, without doing anyone any harm, and who cared if it was forbidden by law.

  Professor Koenig asked him into his consulting room, a simple office with an examination bed.

  “This is the first time we’ve met, Monsieur Vermeiren,” he said with an impossibly blank expression. “What can I do for you?”

  I’m forty years old and I want to prove that there is life after life.

  “I’d like to change my face.”

  An imperceptible blink from the doctor, who thought for a moment.

  “Could you explain that a bit for me?”

  “It’s not easy to say . . . I’m finding it more and more difficult to put up with this face. I’d like to change it. Apparently it’s possible.”

  “You can erase little defects, details that are a bit obsessive, but you’re talking about something more radical.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m the first person to ask you this.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “In the phone book.”

  “. . . The phone book?”

  The doctor’s face lost its peculiar immobility, and not in the way that Thierry would have liked.

  “Would you really trust your face to some practitioner recruited from a phone book?”

  Thierry said nothing.

  Koenig got up from his chair and gestured to Blin to follow him to the door.

  “Monsieur Vermeiren, I don’t want to know your reasons. You should just know that there are only 300 plastic surgeons in France skilled enough to perform this sort of operation, but that there are 2,500 in practice. You’re bound to find someone in amongst them.”

  He closed the door firmly. Feeling a little unsteady on his feet as if the slight ambient smell of ether had anaesthetized him, Thierry went back to his car. Although he could not know whether Blin would have fared any better, he was sure of one thing: on his first outing into the world, Paul Vermeiren had been pathetic.

  *

  Despite the perennial threat that legislation will make a ruling once and for all on the subject, anyone can act as a private detective; without any qualifications or training, they can open up an agency and practise the profession with no constraints, apart from having no criminal record and being registered with the police headquarters. In short, all Blin had to do was to replace the word framer with investigator on his shop front and that was it. The bulk of the information he had gleaned from his review of the press was in agreement; he now knew about the bare bones of the profession, its history, everyday realities, clients, rates of pay and even its excesses.

  “What’s all that photocopying?”

  Nadine had arrived unexpectedly in the hopes of finding him at The Blue Frame, and caught him in the back of the shop surrounded by paperwork spread all over the floor. For a week now he had been ferreting through, underlining, filing, cutting out, ticking off and then burning everything he no longer needed. A week spent discovering a different world, at the expense of his own world and his work. He was careful to stow his Guide to the Work of the Private Investigator in a drawer to hide it from Nadine. This book had the advantage of stripping a fair amount of cliché from the job and describing its day-to-day realities. That very morning he had read an interview with a private eye who described his work in simple precise terms, a tone which inspired confidence and put paid to a good many prejudices.

/>   “I asked for some info about the guy who invented the Cassandra and the Carabin.”

  “The what?”

  Nadine was already onto something else, wandering round the workshop, hoping to find a little something to look at.

  “He’s someone I knew when I worked at the museum. He’s just invented two frames which can be screwed directly into the wall. I’d be happy to explain it to you, but only if you’re interested.”

  “Are you going to use them yourself, these frames?” she asked, looking at an original Scarface poster that needed framing by the following day.

  “No, I don’t think so, but I want to know why he invented these frames and not me.”

  “How do you think you’re going to answer a question like that?”

  “If you’d seen the guy at the time . . . there was something blinkered about him, awkward, how can he possibly have had such a brilliant idea?”

  “Are you going to take me out for supper?”

  From now on, lying was going to be a major part of Blin’s life. To him, a lie which stood its ground long enough became reality. Received ideas, stolen reputations and historic compromises were all lies which had stood the test of time; no one thought of questioning them any more. One day, perhaps, he too would believe in a guy from the Musée d’Orsay who had invented this Cassandra frame which screwed directly into the wall; in the meantime, he had put paid to Nadine’s curiosity. He closed the shop, got into the car and let her drive him to a Chinese restaurant she loved. He sat thoughtfully all through supper, watching her smiling, wielding her chopsticks and changing her mind about her order. She was not usually so talkative. He listened to her as she chatted about her day in great detail. Their paths would soon go their separate ways, he was going to disappear in the eyes of the world, and the world would not even realize it. He did not, under any circumstances, want to make her unhappy, to force her to cope with his absence, to impose his disappearance on her like a dictate, to condemn her to doubt, to let her hope he might come back or to imagine the worst with no one to contradict her thoughts. This woman who had said I love you would not suffer from it. He would never make her into a woman who waits. Someone else would soon replace him in Nadine’s affections and would take better care of her than he had been able to. He now had to dream up an end to their relationship before disappearing once and for all.

  Watching her sipping her tea, he remembered the limits they had set themselves when they moved in together, as if they had lived conjugal lives before, as if they knew by heart what a couple was and how to make it last. Not trying to change the other had been rule number one. Now, he no longer knew what to think of that, but one thing was sure: he was much more captivated by the idea of changing himself.

  Later in the evening, they made love without real fervour, motivated by a tacit desire to respect the normal state of coupledom without having to pronounce the word erosion, even if there was no better one.

  *

  Strange feeling of guilt. Hovering round a phone booth for a good fifteen minutes trying to find the courage to ring La Vigilante, one of the oldest private detective agencies and perhaps the most reliable. Asking to speak to Philippe Lehaleur, the investigator who, during the long newspaper interview, had intrigued Blin with his candour and his detachment. As Lehaleur was out, he was asked whether he would like to speak to someone else; Blin said he would rather call back two hours later. Given the article in question, he was probably not the only person who wanted to get hold of him. Blin had to put up with the delay, and sat in a café reading his bible on the modern private detective. Towards the end of the afternoon he succeeded in getting hold of Lehaleur.

  “I read an interview with you in the paper.”

  “Is this to arrange a meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would suit you?”

  “Straight away.”

  “I’m seeing someone in half an hour, that’s not going to work.”

  “I’m very close to your office.”

  “If you want me to take on some business for you, it’s likely to take longer than you think.”

  “It’s simpler than that but also more complicated.”

  “Would ten minutes do?”

  Lehaleur was not really surprised; it was actually a typical way for someone to proceed if they wanted to get to grips with this job. From the start he tried to warn Blin against the romantic, fantastical image that clung to private detectives; he thought of his job as one of the most demanding, perhaps one of the most restricting and often one of the most difficult. He stressed the fact that there were a great many charlatans, a lot of prejudices and a lot of dubious motivations, all things that Blin had read and reread in his press cuttings. Now he was hearing them for the first time from someone whose job consisted of following people in the street, being stuck in a car with a thermos, and taking photos of couples kissing on café terraces. With one eye on his watch, Lehaleur ended the conversation by saying that the only way to get to know the job would be to do a work placement with an agency which would have him. His own did not need anyone, but he would give it some thought.

  “I’m forty. Is that too old to start?”

  “When I come to think about it, it would probably be an asset. If, that is, like the people you’re watching, you can take the risk of losing your private life completely.”

  *

  The house was ailing, empty but still on its feet. Yvette and Georges Blin had set up home there as soon as they had met and had eventually bought it for a song. That was where they were married and that was where they had made room for their only son. That was where Georges had come home one evening complaining of a pain in his left shoulder. The following morning little Thierry had seen the house full of people. And his mother, who could usually answer all his questions, had not uttered a word.

  From then on it was just the two of them, condemned to the place. After all, it was a little suburban house with its corner of garden, its peaceful neighbourhood – so many other kids from Juvisy had to make do with the wastelands next to the high-rise flats. Whoever had planned and built this place had never thought about the well-being of the people who would live there. The house was divided into three identical rooms, three impeccably regular squares, two bedrooms that were too big and, in the middle, a kitchen-cum-sitting-room where there was no room to move and where nobody wanted to sit. Those rooms had known the heady smell of the oil-fired boiler and Yvette’s comings and goings with the jerry can in her hand to fill the tank; Thierry used it as a grill and had learned when he was very young to cook popcorn and chestnuts on it. There was red hessian to hide the leprous peeling on the walls, and the unevenness of the lino produced a much more interesting surface for playing marbles than smooth tiling would have done. The bathroom was cold and had absolutely no glimpse of daylight. There was no attic but there was an abandoned cellar – it would have cost too much to convert it. Thierry had never been down there, he imagined he was living over a black hole, a mysterious place filled with all the things stories tell you about cellars. As a teenager he had started feeling uncomfortable within the walls of his own bedroom. He was always eager to be invited to a friend’s house, to hang out round a bench in the park until late at night, or to eat in the school canteen when people who lived further away than him went home for lunch. At night he would listen to music on his headphones and project himself to America for the duration of a record. He left home just after his baccalauréat to live in a little garret room in a building on the Place Daumesnil in Paris; life could start. He only went back to 8 Rue Jean-Perrin in Juvisy to visit his mother, on Saturdays. She went back to live, and die, where she had been born in the Vendée; because of a family history of the condition, she had lived her whole life in fear of that aneurysm.

  Blin parked his car in front of the entrance gate. The street was empty and silent as it always had been, even more so now that there were no longer any dogs. The green shutters on the house were corroded with rust,
and couch grass had pushed up through the paving stones. He felt happier waiting outside to meet Keller, a representative of a construction company interested in buying up and joining together five plots, including Blin’s. He was an affable man, prepared to play any part to seal the deal; Thierry was careful not to give him any assurances until the last minute. After all, he was not the only one in the running, there was that young couple. Fresh young love, a dream of having an old-fashioned kind of happiness which put their home above everything else. With their mortgage already agreed, they could aspire to their own little place which would grow in step with their family and their free time. They were brave and made you want to help them. In spite of everything, Thierry felt happier clinching it with the construction company and coming to a covert arrangement with Keller, lowering the selling price so that he could have some cash under the table, cash he was going to need in the next few months. Besides, he could not imagine a young couple setting up home here as his parents had done. They must at all costs be given an opportunity to build somewhere else, somewhere clean, new, far from the bad vibrations of a past that seeped from every wall. This house would never be a home, it had not been that to Georges and Yvette. There was also another reason, though far from the most crucial: Thierry wanted to see it destroyed. The man he was going to become would never be able to find his place in the world with this house still standing, even in his memory.

  And so it was that he set out one October morning to witness the show. A bulldozer arrived punctually at 8 o’clock and knocked the house onto its side with one thrust. Hypnotized, Thierry saw the damp-damaged walls collapsing of their own accord, the roof structure cracking, and the tiles scattering like a house of cards; he saw the red walls of his bedroom scrambling with the enamel of the bathroom, the greasy corner of the kitchen opening up to the sky, his parents’ bedroom ending up as a carcass of plaster and breeze blocks, a mosaic of little moments from his life entangled together before being reduced to dust. The sink that he used to get to by climbing onto a chair arced through the air before falling down onto the green lino where he had taken his first steps; the wallpaper that his father had hung in the living-room end was ground into the rubble of the front doorstep where the three of them had enjoyed the cool air late on summer evenings; beneath the hessian, which came away like dead skin, wallpaper with big flowers on it appeared and, with it, a series of photographs of Thierry in his cradle, stuck in the family album. The bulldozer’s jaws gobbled up and spat back out whole chunks of his childhood until they were razed to the ground.