“I’ve restricted myself to three coffees a day,” said Rodier. “I always have water in the boot. I drink a lot. If you do the same, make sure you check that there’s somewhere close by where you can pee. It seems stupid, but make a note.”
“If he comes out, will we both follow him?”
“Why not? What a luxury! Two tails for the price of one.”
“Stop joking about it, and tell me what we’ll do if he appears.”
“There’s nothing to get stressed about with a job like this. Look, if it makes you feel any better, we’ll give him a ring at home.”
Blin looked at him questioningly.
He took out a mobile, keyed in the number and let it ring while he swilled his cup of coffee. Blin strained his ears.
“Answerphone.”
“He would definitely have answered if he was there,” Thierry suggested.
“If he’s depressed, which his parents are afraid he is, he could have taken tranquillizers or sleeping pills in the middle of the night.”
“In that case he could just as easily stay in bed all day.”
“Possibly. Either way, we stop altogether at 10 o’clock, as agreed. Between now and then, we’ve got time to get to know each other with Vivaldi in the background.”
The day had slowly made its presence felt. Blin had a thousand questions but preferred to hold them back; no point gathering raw material without any real application. The time spent waiting in silence like this already said so much. His apprehension had given way to terrible curiosity: Blin could not wait to see the boy come through the door. He had lost any detachment from the events. He did not belong anywhere else, under more sensible skies, but well and truly here, in this car, sitting next to a man he did not know, waiting for a man he did not know. It all seemed less and less strange to him and was becoming increasingly real.
“Do you have any Métro tickets on you, Thierry?”
Rodier recommended that he bought some for the days to come, and took the opportunity to open the whole chapter on transport. Half the tailing he did in Paris took place in the Métro. Scooters were practical for following a car in the city but would soon be spotted on the outskirts or in the country; there, a car was more useful. Thierry was too busy trying to remember what he was being taught to notice the sudden intensity in Rodier’s eyes as he asked: “Is that him?”
“Where . . .? Who..?”
In a momentary lapse of concentration, Blin had not heard the front door clicking. A figure had appeared on the pavement.
“Is it him or not?” Rodier insisted, as if leaving the decision to Blin.
Panicking, Thierry snatched the photo. Rodier had already got out of the car and was waiting outside. From behind, it could have been him: the colour of his hair, the way it was cut, his build. He had a bag over his shoulder, a scarf round his neck as if it was the middle of winter, jeans, walking boots, the same sort of boy as in the photograph.
“It’s him!” said Thierry, as if giving a verdict.
“You have to follow your intuition. Let’s go.”
Blin, way behind, saw him trotting off towards the young man who was going down the Rue de Rennes, and followed him at a run.
“. . . What should I do?” Thierry asked, picking up on the urgency.
“Carry on along the same pavement as him. I’m crossing over – stay a bit further back than me.”
He did as he was told, with no idea of the distance he should keep or how to behave. Rodier walked with the nonchalance of a tourist interested in the old stone-work while Blin measured every step, sidled along the walls with his arms tight in to his body and his eyes so distracted that they did not come to rest on anything. He tried in vain to catch Rodier’s eye, then he locked onto the outline of the boy who turned left into the Boulevard Saint-Germain. As he followed him, strange thoughts came to mind. He imagined the boy in the throes of a family psychodrama, his mother in tears, his father raising his voice: we don’t know you any more! He could picture him at night, blind drunk, bellowing his freedom in the face of the world: I’ll do what I want with my life! The strangest part of it for Blin was the feeling that he could clearly read the soul of the man he was following through the streets of Paris, without even needing to look him in the eye. The way he walked was enough; the peculiarly dogged way he went from A to B was typical of a disoriented youngster going through life in a haze. Two hours earlier, Blin could not even have known he was alive, let alone anything about his situation; now he might know more about Thomas than the boy did himself. The latter made the most of the last few seconds of a red light to cut quickly across the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The traffic barred the route to the two acolytes, who ended up next to each other, momentarily unaware of each other as they watched their prey going down the Rue des Saints-Pères.
“It looks like he’s going to the Medical Faculty,” said Rodier. “But his parents told me he was doing business studies in the suburbs . . .”
Thierry was taking his role very seriously. He said nothing in reply but took great strides to catch up with Thomas, settling fifteen paces behind him. Rodier was right, the boy was heading for the massive cast-iron gates of the Medical Faculty. It was, after all, time for lectures and Thomas, with his little bag over his shoulder, looked every inch the future doctor. Thierry had to admit it: the slowness which he had taken for an obvious sign of depression had perhaps just been complete absorption in a traumatology tutorial. He cut short all his speculation about Thomas’s life and concentrated on following him, trying to narrow the gap a bit more even though he had to slow down as he went through the entrance to the building where masses of students, twenty years younger than himself, were streaming in. What did they look like, he and Rodier, in all the comings and goings on the concourse? Weirdos? Dirty old men? Not exactly honest, anyway. And they weren’t, were they? Thomas headed over towards the cafeteria corner and slipped some coins into a drinks machine. A convenient pause for them.
“Well, is it him or not?” Rodier asked again.
It could not not be him . . .
Unless . . .
Thierry no longer knew which version was the right one. They sat down at a table where two girls were comparing their work and paid no attention to them. Rodier looked at the photo again and Blin did the same: they may well have had the young man right under their noses, quite relaxed, cup of coffee in hand, but they were incapable of saying whether he was the right one. Rodier was growing impatient, his fists were balled tightly and his feet beginning to jig. Thomas or not Thomas? A future manager hounded by his parents or a future doctor keen to jump every hurdle up to the Hippocratic oath? He threw down his paper cup and headed very obviously towards a classroom. For the first time Blin saw Rodier’s cheeks flush.
“Thierry, forget what I’m about to do,” he said, clearly very calm.
He turned back towards the cavernous hallway and shouted: “THOMMAAAAAS!”
The walls reverberated, Rodier’s shout echoed back and dozens of figures turned towards them. Except that of the boy who quietly walked out of sight into a lecture room.
“That way, at least we know for sure,” said Rodier with relief.
*
He wanted to go back to 70 Rue de Rennes to ferret round the garret rooms, and asked Blin to stay downstairs for the obvious reason of discretion. However, he did ask him to dial Thomas’s number so that he could identify the right door from the ringing. Thierry rang several times in succession. Rodier came back out quite quickly and spoke briefly to the concierge before getting back into the car.
“He can’t have spent the night here. No point wasting our time, we’re going back to the office.”
“I’m really sorry about earlier. For a minute I really thought it was him.”
“It’s not your fault, I had my doubts and you might have been sure. Now you know a bit more about the ‘instinctive factor’.”
On their way to the office they talked about one thing and another, and Blin unwound
, freed of the pressure that had been building up since the early morning. Something had happened, something unthinkable which he could now think of as his first tailing job, even if it had drawn a blank. He felt he had got rid of his virginity and was ready to have thousands of other experiences. As they walked, he asked how you proceeded with the client when nothing had happened, like that morning.
“In cases like that, you have to make a ‘report’, invoice for the three hours and agree on a day to start the investigations again. Thomas can easily wait for us till the weekend.”
In the agency’s main office Blin sat down in the client’s chair and watched Rodier picking up his messages and looking at his faxes as he made some coffee.
“This is the bit I like best,” he said, “planning it all out, nice and easy in my office. Everything I loathed twenty years ago. I’d make a brilliant bureaucrat now, happy to give up my desk blotter to get home to my slippers.”
“Do you always know what you’re going to be doing from one day to the next?”
“More or less. If the Thomas job had been delayed, I would have typed out a report and this afternoon I would have taken care of another job. Some man complaining about paying his ex-wife astronomical alimony. He suspects she’s found work she isn’t declaring. If I can establish that she’s working, he’ll have the figures revised accordingly. He might even be able to wriggle out of this alimony – which seems to obsess him – once and for all. To be honest, I’m still not sure about it.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got a feeling this guy hasn’t told me half of what I ought to know. We’ll go and have a look, anyway.”
“In the meantime, what should I do?”
“I’ll show you what a report should look like. You can root through old files while I’m typing.”
His liking for Rodier was growing by the hour. Blin found considerable charm in his rather mannered phrasing, which gave a slight air of the white-collar crook. He could not understand how Rodier kept his cool in the face of his clients’ feverishness. How did he manage to come to terms with the crises in other people’s lives, with their anxieties and preoccupations, without sinking into depression or cynicism himself, but maintaining his very Rodier-like good humour? While Rodier took a telephone call, Blin wandered around the room and looked out of the window; there were some children playing noisily in a little courtyard. It occurred to him that he could call the answerphone at the shop, but there was no hurry. The sleepless night was already forgotten, and something told him that this evening he would be far too tired to have another.
“Change of programme,” said Rodier as he hung up. “We’ve got a little job in the car.”
And he grabbed his jacket without another word, already out on the landing, key in hand. Even though he may have been lacking in enthusiasm, his reflexes had not been dulled. Following him down the stairwell, Blin tried to imagine him as he would have been in his early days.
“It’s a woman who rang me last Sunday. She lives at Rambouillet with her husband, a sales rep who retired six months ago. She’s wondering what he gets up to for two whole afternoons a week in Paris. He’s just left the house to talk to the bank about his pension fund, and he won’t be back until this evening.”
“What are we doing?”
“We’re going to go there and wait for him. It’s very close.”
In less than ten minutes they were there on the Rue de Berne in the Eighth Arrondissement. Rodier slowed down as he drove past the building and looked for a parking space.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” he said. “The retired ones take care of their cars, they never double park.”
“And what if he doesn’t come?”
“Then his wife’s doubts are probably justified. We’d have to arrange to start tailing him from home.”
Rodier parked his car about ten yards from the front door of the bank. The game of solitaire would start again but this time in the full light of day during the lunchtime rush; even if their presence seemed less suspicious than it had in the morning, Blin wondered once again what two men sitting in a parked car really looked like. He could come up with only one answer: two detectives hiding.
“If I’m an attentive, conscientious pupil, how long do you think it’ll be before I can manage on my own?”
“Now, how can I answer that? It all depends on how emotionally involved you get and how you cope with the stress.”
“No idea . . .”
“Let’s say that in a year you should be able to assimilate up to sixty or seventy per cent of what you need to know in this line of work. It takes a good deal longer to get to ninety. Personally, I’d say five years.”
Blin had never asked such a vague question, and had never been given such a precise answer. He found it hard to imagine that he would be fending for himself in one short year, and yet one thing was emerging: he felt that he was a good pupil and, if he did change his mind along the way, there was one thing that would never be dulled: his furious desire to put his learning into practice.
“In some ways you’re lucky to have landed up with me. My hard-bitten fellow detectives have quite a taste for secrecy and only delegate out the harmless little jobs. If you’re ready to play the game, I won’t keep anything from you and you’ll make faster progress than someone else might. It’s not to do with talent or having a sixth sense, no one in the world is born to find out strangers’ secrets. As with everything else, you just have to pay attention and take a personal interest. I won’t ask where you get your particular interest from, it’s none of my business.”
An elegant way of avoiding exposure to the same kind of question himself.
“How about a sandwich?” he asked.
“You’re not going to play the same trick on me twice. I’m going to do the shopping.”
“Get me something with ham in it, cured ham if they’ve got it, and a beer.”
Thierry used the opportunity to ring Nadine in case she had tried to get hold of him, which she clearly had. He explained that he had had to go to various suppliers, and asked her not to wait supper for him. Before he hung up, he could not help himself saying, “You know I love you,” when a “Bye bye, darling,” would have done. The thought of splitting up with her, or rather of pushing her into splitting up with him, made him feel sentimental.
“No one makes good sandwiches any more, that’s pretty pathetic for a place with several million inhabitants! All you can find is Teflon bread wrapped in cellophane with soggy ham – pitiful. You know, Thierry, it’s also little things like that that are driving me into exile in the country. I’m too old for tailing, I’m too old to eat rubbish and, worse still, I’m too old to be making a fuss because nothing’s what it used to be.”
Thierry chewed away, looking doubtful: “Don’t tell me this job doesn’t give you any pleasure any more, not even a little tingle of excitement from time to time?”
Rodier took a moment to think. He wanted to help this apprentice by giving him his own points of reference without unloading his experiences on him.
“Tingles, excitement, thrills, we’re not in that sort of territory. It’s always nice to know that you weren’t wrong, that your intuition brought you to a quicker conclusion. But for those three minutes of gratification there are so many hours of boredom with your bum on the seat of a car!”
The weariness that Rodier was keen to underline seemed unimaginable to Thierry Blin. If that sort of depreciation was lying in wait with all human activities, how many thousands of enquiries did you have to carry out before you began to feel worn?
Suddenly, a number plate caught Thierry’s eye: the last two numerals, 78, meant it came from around Rambouillet.
“Our old boy does drive a grey Datsun doesn’t he?”
“One point to you.”
As if to contradict Rodier, the man parked his car right in front of the driveway, opposite the door to the bank, and slammed his door without locking it.
“Highly strung,” said R
odier.
“Is that a disabled sticker on his windscreen?”
“He must think that means he can do whatever he likes. It’s not going to stop us finishing our sandwiches.”
Perhaps not, but it was no longer possible to chat happily. Automatically, Blin quickly closed his window. Bruno Lemarrecq had arrived in the place where the other two were waiting for him, and it had nothing to do with chance. How could he possibly guess that two men chewing on sandwiches were watching the door to the bank out of the corners of their eyes?
“After our failure this morning, I’m rather pleased to see him,” said Rodier.
Blin felt all the indecency associated with the very fact of being there in that car, secretly hoping that Bruno Lemarrecq had something to hide.
“What did he used to sell?”
“Hot-water tanks.”
They had time to clean up the crumbs, throw their packaging into a dustbin and regret not having a cup of coffee before Bruno Lemarrecq reappeared and got back into his car.
“It’s hard enough following a friend in a car,” said Blin, “but if you’ve got to do it without the driver knowing too . . .”
“By car it’s the first five minutes and the last five minutes which are the most difficult. The rest of the time I try to keep another car between theirs and mine. Unless the guy’s got very serious reasons to be paranoid, he won’t see a thing.”
Lemarrecq turned onto a main road and stayed on it for a good half mile; Rodier let a red Toyota overtake them to act as a screen. Blin looked anywhere other than at the Datsun, as if afraid of catching the man’s eye in his rear-view mirror, which made Rodier smile. The Toyota forked off to the right and Lemarrecq was directly in front of them once again.
“At the moment, we’re heading for Rambouillet.”
“And what do we do if he goes home?”
“We follow. He may have his own little ways close to home, it’s not unusual. You must have heard of the famous case of ‘the husband’s adultery on the party wall’.”
Blin raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“Until quite recently, a wife’s adultery was recognized pretty much everywhere, but a husband’s was only punishable if it actually took place in the conjugal home. One case set a precedent, where the man hadn’t found anywhere better to have it away with his neighbour than on the wall between their two gardens. The question was, did this constitute adultery?”