The Black Notebook (12 page)

I entered the Jardin des Plantes and sat down on a bench in the main alley. Only a few passersby, owing to the cold. But it was still sunny, and the blue of the sky was my confirmation that time had stood still. I needed only to sit there until nightfall and study the sky to discover the few stars I could name, without really knowing if I was correct. And entire passages would come back to mind from my bedside book at the time of Rue de l'Aude:
Eternity by the Stars.
Reading it helped me wait for Dannie. It was as cold back then as it was on this bench in the botanical gardens, and Rue de l'Aude was covered in snow. But despite the cold, I leafed through the pages contained in the yellow plastic folder. A letter was appended to them, signed by Langlais, that I hadn't noticed earlier when I had peeked into the folder and he had said to me, “You'd be better off reading that with a clear head.” The letter was barely legible, no doubt dashed off in his apartment before he came back down to hand me the file.

Dear Sir,

I retired from the Force ten years ago, which means that I was still working in Vice and Homicide while you were writing many of your books, which I read with unflagging interest.

I naturally remembered your visit to my office on Quai de Gesvres, for an interrogation when you were very young. I have a good memory for faces. They often used to kid me about it, saying that even if I'd only seen someone once in the street, I could recognize him from behind ten years later.

When I left the department, I treated myself to a few souvenirs from the old Vice Squad archives, among them the incomplete file on you that I have long wanted to send you. That day has come, thanks to our meeting earlier.

Please be assured of my discretion. Moreover, I believe you wrote somewhere that we live at the mercy of certain silences.

Most cordially yours,

LANGLAIS

PS: To further reassure you: the investigation related to these documents has been definitively closed.

As I leafed through the file, I came across civil status records, reports, interrogation transcripts. Certain names jumped out at me: “Aghamouri, Ghali, Pavillon du Maroc, Cité Universitaire, born 6 June 1938, in Fez. Alleged ‘student,' attached to the Moroccan security forces. Moroccan Embassy . . . Georges B., alias ‘Rochard,' medium brown hair, straight nose, prominent bulge. Anyone with further information is asked to notify this department, Turbigo 92-00 . . . Before this court appeared the individual henceforth named Duwelz, Pierre. Seen and approved by the accused . . . Chastagnier, Paul Emmanuel. Height 5'11". Drives automobile Lancia no. 1934 GD 75 . . . Marciano, Gérard. Distinguishing marks: scar ¾" in length beside left eyebrow . . .” I flipped through the pages quickly, trying not to linger on any one sheet and each time fearing I would discover a new detail or record about Dannie. “Dominique Roger, alias ‘Dannie.' Under the name Mireille Sampierry (23 Rue Blanche), alias Michèle Aghamouri, alias Jeannine de Chillaud . . . According to Davin's information, resides at the Unic Hôtel under the name Jeannine de Chillaud, born in Casablanca on . . . She had her mail sent to a general delivery address, as attested by the attached registration form issued by P. O. Branch 84, Paris.”

And at the bottom of the pages held together by a paper clip: “Two projectiles struck the victim. One of the two projectiles was fired point-blank . . . The two slugs corresponding to the two spent shells were found. The concierge at 46-bis Quai Henri-IV . . .”

One evening, we had gotten off a train, Dannie and I, at the Gare de Lyon. I think we were returning from that country house called La Barberie. We didn't have any luggage. The station was packed. It was summer and, if I remember correctly, the start of the holidays. We left the station without taking the metro. She didn't want to return to the Unic Hôtel that evening, so we decided to walk to my place on Rue de l'Aude. As we were about to cross the Seine, she said:

“Would you mind if we make a small detour?”

She led me along the quays toward Île Saint-Louis. Paris was deserted, as it often is on evenings in summer, and it marked a contrast with the crowds in the Gare de Lyon. Very little traffic. A feeling of lightness, of vacation. I had written that last word in capitals in my black notebook, with a date: July 1, the date of that evening. I had even added a definition of “vacation” that I'd seen in a dictionary: “An act or instance of leaving or nullifying; a time of respite.”

We followed the Quai Henri-IV, which in fact is mentioned at the bottom of that page in Langlais's file, a page on which it is clearly specified that a “homicide” had taken place. She stopped at one of the last addresses, number 46-bis, the same address as on the page—I verified it the day I met Langlais, twenty years later. That day, I merely had to cross the bridge from the Jardin des Plantes.

She headed toward the carriage entrance, then paused for a moment:

“Would you do me a favor?”

Her voice sounded shaky, as if she found herself in a danger zone where she might be caught unawares.

“Ring at the door on the ground floor and ask for Mme Dorme.”

She looked at the ground-floor windows, their closed metal shutters. A dim glow filtered through the slits.

“Do you see a light on?” she asked in a whisper.

“Yes.”

“If you see Mme Dorme, ask her when Dannie can call.”

She seemed tense, and perhaps was already regretting her initiative. I think she was tempted to hold me back.

“I'll wait for you at the bridge. It's better if I don't stay here in front of the building.”

And she indicated the bridge that slices through the tip of Île Saint-Louis.

I went through the entrance and stopped in front of a huge double door on my left, made of light-colored wood. I rang the bell. No one answered. I could hear no sound behind the door. And yet, we had seen light peeking through the slits in the shutters. The timer on the hall light ran out. I rang again in the dark. No one. I stood there in the dark, waiting. I sincerely hoped that someone would finally open the door, that the silence would be broken, and that the lights would come back on. At one point, I pounded on the door with my fists, but the wood was so thick that it barely made a sound. Did I really pound on the door that evening? I've so often dreamed of that scene since then that my dream has become confused with reality. Last night, I was in total darkness, unable to orient myself, and I was pounding on a door with both fists, as if I had been locked in. I was suffocating. I awoke with a start. Yes, once again, the same dream. I tried to remember whether I had pounded like that on that distant night. In any case, I had rung several more times in the dark, and I had been surprised by the sound of the doorbell, both brittle and crystalline. No one. Silence.

I groped my way out of the building. She was pacing back and forth on the bridge. She took my arm and gave it a squeeze. She was relieved that I was back, and I wondered whether we had just been in danger. I told her that no one had answered the door.

“I never should have sent you in there,” she said. “But sometimes I still think things are like they were before . . .”

“Before what?”

She shrugged.

We crossed the bridge and followed the Quai de la Tournelle. She kept silent, and it wasn't the moment to ask questions. Everything here was calm and reassuring: the ancient building façades, the trees, the lit streetlamps, the narrow streets that spilled onto the quay and reminded me of Restif de La Bretonne. Many pages of my black notebook were filled with notes about him. I didn't even feel like asking her anything. I felt light, carefree, happy to be walking along the quay with her that evening, repeating to myself the name Restif de La Bretonne, with its soft, mysterious cadence.

“Jean, I want to ask you something.”

We were walking by the square set back from the quay, in the middle of which sat tables and tubs of greenery defining the limits of an outdoor café. That evening, they had put parasols on the tables. A summer's night in a little port town in the Midi. Murmurs of conversation.

“Jean, what would you say if I'd done something really serious?”

I have to confess that the question did not alarm me. Perhaps because of her casual tone, as one might recite song lyrics or lines of a poem. And because of her “Jean, what would you say,” it was in fact a line of verse that occurred to me: “Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?”

“What would you say if I'd murdered somebody?”

I thought she was joking, or that she'd asked because of the crime novels she often read. In fact, they were all she read. Maybe in one of those novels, a woman asked her boyfriend the same question.

“What would I say? Nothing.”

Still today, I would give the same answer. Do we have the right to judge the people we love? If we love them, it's for a reason, and that reason prevents us from judging them—doesn't it?

“Well . . . Not murdered, exactly . . . More like an accident . . .”

“That's comforting.”

She seemed disappointed by my response, and it was only years later that I recognized its glibness and poor unintentional humor.

“Yes . . . an accident . . . It went off by itself . . .”

“Life's full of stray bullets,” I said.

I had immediately thought of gunshots. And indeed, she answered:

“That's right . . . stray bullets.”

I burst out laughing. She flashed me a look full of reproach. Then she squeezed my arm.

“Let's not talk about these depressing things . . . I had a bad dream last night . . . I dreamed I was in an apartment and I shot a man in self-defense . . . A horrible man with heavy eyelids . . .”

“Heavy eyelids?”

“That's right.”

She was probably still lost in her dream. But it didn't worry me. I had often had the same experience: certain dreams—or rather, certain nightmares—can stick with you all the next day. They blend in with your most ordinary movements, and even if you're sitting with friends at an outdoor café table in the sun, fragments of them still pursue you and adhere to your real life, like a kind of echo or static that you can't clear away. Sometimes that confusion is due to lack of sleep. I felt like telling her as much, to reassure her. We had come as far as Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. In front of the American bookshop, benches and chairs had been arranged as if at a café terrace, and about a dozen people were sitting there, listening to some jazz leaking from the shop.

“We should go sit with them,” I said. “It'll take your mind off your bad dream.”

“You think so?”

But we kept on walking, I don't remember which way. I recall silent avenues over which the leaves of the plane trees formed a vault, the occasional lit window in the building façades, and the Belfort lion keeping watch, eyes fixed toward the south. She had come out of her dream. We sat on the steep flight of steps leading to Rue de l'Aude. I heard the nearby sound of running water. She leaned her face close to mine.

“You shouldn't pay any attention to what I said a little while ago . . . Nothing has changed . . . It's just like before . . .”

That summer night, the ripple of a waterfall or fountain, the long stairway cut into the high retaining wall, from which we looked out over the treetops . . . Everything was calm, and I was certain that before us stretched lines vanishing into the future.

One doesn't often return to the southern part of Paris. The area ended up becoming an internal, imaginary landscape, and it seems extraordinary that names like Tombe-Issoire, Glacière, Montsouris, or Château de la Reine Blanche can exist in reality, spelled out on city maps. I've never gone back to Rue de l'Aude. Except in my dreams. And then I see it in different seasons. From the windows of my old room it is covered in snow, but if I approach it from the avenue by the steep flight of steps, it's always summertime.

On the other hand, I have driven many times along the Quai Henri-IV to go to the Gare de Lyon. And each time, I've felt a pang in my heart and a kind of disquiet. Once, when I had taken a taxi from the station, I told the driver to stop in front of number 46-bis, pretending I had to pick someone up. I stared at the carriage entrance. I had pushed it open at that same hour, one July evening. And this evening was also in July. I tried to count the years. After a while, the driver asked:

“You really think the person's coming?”

I asked him to wait a moment and stepped out of the cab. When I reached the entrance, I noticed a keypad to my right: this hadn't been there before. I pressed four buttons at random, plus the letter
D.
The door remained locked. I got back in the cab.

“Forgot the code, eh?” said the driver. “Should we keep waiting?”

“No.”

Sometimes, in my dreams, I know the code and don't need to push the door. No sooner have I pressed the letter
D
than it automatically swings open and shuts behind me. The wide entrance hall is bathed in daylight filtering through a huge window at the back. I find myself in front of the other door, the one to the ground-floor apartment, the door made of heavy, light-colored wood that a woman named Mme Dorme was supposed to open for me that July evening when I was with Dannie. I pause a moment before ringing. Sunlight dapples the door. I feel carefree, liberated from remorse or some obscure guilt. It will be like before; or rather, there will never have been a before or after in our lives, no “something serious,” no break, no handicap, no original sin—I struggle to find the right words—no weight that we drag around despite our youth and heedlessness. I am about to ring, and the sound will be as crystalline as on that first evening. The two leaves of the door will open with the same languid movement as the carriage entrance, and a blond woman of about fifty, elegantly dressed and with regular features, will say, “Dannie is expecting you in the salon.”