Viviane (6 page)

The receptionist as well would like me to be forthcoming with explanations. He doesn't ask for them but I can tell from his sidelong glances that I should invent a story to justify swanning in with a three-month-old child as my only luggage. So I claim to be from Nevers in Burgundy, my car has broken down and won't be ready until tomorrow morning. It's at the Mercedes dealership
on the corner I add, because a big car always inspires confidence. He visibly relaxes and, handing me the key to the room, wishes me good night. I say thank you.

The room contains the bare minimum of furniture, plus pink-and-green curtains. Extracting a drawer from a chest, I line it with towels and settle the baby inside. She's still not asleep, still not crying, and looks at me as if to say, old thing, whatever are you up to now? Sometimes I feel as if she were the mother and I the child, and I reflect that in this case, there's no point in giving her the pills I bought: she won't betray me. As if to agree with me, she closes her eyes and goes to sleep.

While the receptionist is sorting through his brochures for the Americans, I leave the Moderne Saint Germain and go back toward Place Maubert, where I park myself in a café practically next door to the police station. In this morning's
Le Parisien
I study the photo of the young redhead who showed up earlier to offer new information to the detectives: I want to be sure I recognize her when she comes walking along from Rue des Carmes. Then I withdraw into myself and explore the memory of her face glimpsed in the hall of the police station, gathering all the elements at my disposal so I won't blow my fleeting chance.

Which occurs shortly after nine o'clock. On the other side of the boulevard, a compact mass is moving against the flow of traffic, weaving among the metal frames set up for the market tomorrow. Weighed down by the burden of her belly, her steps are further slowed by the confusion affecting both her mind and body. She advances in jolts, reconsiders, stops in a bus shelter to study the maps of transport lines, and sets out again in a westward direction. I leave the café, skirt the fountain—keeping my prey in sight as she moves slowly in a corner of my visual field—and trail her without any exaggerated precautions. An icy November rain is falling, infiltrating the seams of shoes, chilling legs up to the knees, and will render useless all later attempts to warm up.

Having reached the Saint-Michel bridge, the young woman once again considers the possibility of public transport, which here offers a much larger selection of options—métro, bus, Regional Express Network—but she decides to keep walking, and now we're crossing the bridge. I do not like bridges. I do not like where we're headed, the police headquarters at Quai des Orfèvres and its vans all parked in front of us, headlights off, staring at me with dead eyes. But we walk past the police building, the spear-tipped fence outside the courthouse,
the flank of the Conciergerie, crossing the Île de la Cité to reach the bridge on the other side where I can breathe better—it must be the fresh air over the river—and I hang back so as not to pass the woman still walking quietly along in front of me because suddenly I would like to run, having escaped the ancient stone walls of the Île de la Cité.

The young woman is not in so much of a hurry. She walks toward Rue de Rivoli, loiters a moment in front of a brightly illuminated shoe boutique, then proceeds up Boulevard de Sébastopol, turning right when abreast of the Centre Pompidou. I fear my plan has come undone when she goes over to a keypad door lock, but she turns around and heads for a brasserie. Guessing her intention, I dart off to the left and just beat her to the door. Entering, I allow myself a glance around.

The solitary customers are lined up along the banquette, facing a television showing a soccer match with the sound turned down. Most of the tables are occupied but I spy two that are free, side by side near the bar, and I take a seat at one—the table closest to a radiator—without looking at the person who has just come in after me. The three plasticized panels of the menu offer various meats with french fries or the usual vegetable sides.
I'll have the steak, I tell the waiter who comes to take my order and, using this occasion to look up from my menu, I pretend to notice the round belly of the young woman now seated to my left. I am flustered: wouldn't she rather sit near the radiator?

Oh no, she feels warm, so warm that the last thing she wants is to be closer to the radiator. She thanks me nevertheless, says she's touched by my concern, because you can't imagine how people can play blind on a bus, deliberately ignoring the huge belly looming over the barrier of crossword pages they erect to protect their jump seats. I can imagine quite well I say, delighted because Angèle—that's her name, she introduces herself first thing—is in the mood to chat.

People think that the victims of tabloid tragedies are left stupefied, ashamed. Actually, they ask only to speak. They need witnesses to corroborate what they have seen and to recognize the injury done to them. The young woman leans her face over to me, with that milky complexion so typical of redheads, her big eyes gleaming with provincial candor. Angèle wants to share, and anyone at all would fill the bill. I am a shadow, a vessel, I say pleased to meet you, I'm Élisabeth.

9

You are the collateral victim of a sensational incident and you cannot get over it. As far as you're concerned, the world fell apart Tuesday morning when you discovered the inanimate body of the doctor lying in his office to which you happened to have the key. Since then you have been wandering in a field of ruins, waiting for an equally supernatural phenomenon to put everything back to rights.

You are twenty-six. Born in the département des Hautes-Alpes, you still live there officially, with your parents, but have been living in Paris since getting your baccalaureate. You move from one room to another as your university years go by, paying the rent with your stipend (your family is a large one with only modest resources) and what you can earn from odd seasonal jobs.
You are now a doctoral student. Before his brutal death, you were very close to your thesis director.

Meaning what? asks Élisabeth, fishing for details.

You don't avoid the issue; you would like your audience to fully understand the situation and thus guide you, perhaps, toward an angle from which you might otherwise never have viewed things, and from which the image would recompose itself as if in an anamorphosis.

Five years ago you set out to seduce a professor whose old-fashioned, even faded air had somehow touched you. You've always had strange tastes. Your peers ignored him in favor of more obvious specimens, the university stars who played nonchalantly on their prestige, shining in the brilliance of their thoughts and dramatically flinging out their arms to wave their eyeglasses in the air for emphasis. You'd been the only one to bet on Professor Sergent, never hearing a word of the lectures he delivered so doggedly because you were too busy admiring him through half-closed eyes. And your imagination began running away with you so much that you soon had to stifle your daydreams: in the silence of the auditorium, you were afraid of letting slip too eloquent a sigh.

For months you waited at the foot of the dais to ask insignificant questions, leaving more and more
pregnant pauses until he suggested continuing the conversation at a café, where the discussion mainly featured throat-clearing and eyelash-batting. It took a complete campaign to prompt an invitation to a restaurant and months more of effort to wangle an appointment at the doctor's office, after consultation hours.

Neglected by his wife, Jacques had precious little experience of love. You have tender memories of his chubby fingers probing the openings in your clothes, hardly daring to venture further. No, the doctor was not really at ease with women, aside from a few flings with patients at the end of their cure, when through sheer boredom doctor and patient had thrown themselves at each other just for something to do. He had observed that this technique significantly accelerated the resolution of transference. After three weeks they would be seeing each other less and less and after two months, not at all. But whenever you came up with some objection, armed with the convictions of your age and the principles inculcated by the university, he would wax ironic about the fanaticism of youth to disparage your arguments. And you, busy shedding your clothes on the chaise to foster a more direct approach to the subject, had come away rather disappointed. Disappointed and pregnant, which you
now illustrate by pointing a finger at your belly jammed against the table on which your frankfurters and fries have just been placed, while your neighbor, sitting with her now cold steak and ratatouille, considers you with the stunned amazement of someone who has never before encountered the victim of a sensational incident.

You're off and running now, you spare her nothing. You describe how the doctor took the news (up on his high horse, as if he'd never gotten anywhere near her), how he made fun of young Angèle Trognon (that's your name), announcing point-blank that he wasn't going to leave his wife for a student.

It's a girl? asks Élisabeth suddenly.

It
is
a girl. How did you know that?

Just a thought.

You observe your neighbor, who still hasn't touched her food. You could take an interest in her now, ask if she has children, inquire about her situation. You couldn't care less about all that. And since you've finished the saga of your misadventures, you tackle your present experience, the relentless harassment that leaves you no time to bemoan your fate. The authorities are pressing you about your intentions, about questions of money and inheritance. Bank statements must be produced,
expenses justified—you have no idea, you tell Élisabeth, what questions you get asked after a crime.

Well, replies Élisabeth, who is languidly picking the eggplant out of her ratatouille with the tip of her knife, I think I should be going.

You have worn out your audience. There she is putting on her gray coat, dropping a bill on the table without waiting for her change or saying good-bye. The coat sails across the room—sweeping the tables, destroying in its wake any forks and breadbaskets in precarious equilibrium at their tables' edges—and out of the café, bound for its mysterious destination. You will learn nothing more about the woman who listened to you. Her face is already dwindling in your memory and you have even forgotten her name.

This woman is now walking back along Boulevard de Sébastopol toward the taxi stand at Châtelet. There she takes a Mercedes that reaches Rue des Écoles in eight minutes. Without bothering to whip up an explanation for the young reception clerk, she goes up to room 17 and walks in at 11:09 p.m.: it has been exactly a hundred and twenty minutes since she left the baby, who is just waking up. Viviane carries her away in the taxi still waiting downstairs.

10

Le Parisien
announces the next day that the widow is being held by the police. There's a photo with the article, showing her escorted by two uniformed officers at the entrance to police headquarters. She's a woman of about fifty, slender, elegant; the doctor must have made a good living. I try to get a reading on her character but it's a snapshot taken on the fly, printed on cheap newsprint. It reveals nothing except that the woman would no doubt prefer to be elsewhere, nibbling on a pastry in a tearoom or visiting art galleries with her girlfriends while their husbands work in their opulent offices. The article simply says that the police suspect her because she was leading a double life, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, with that Silverio Da Silva, the man they recently arrested but released.

Then the following day brings a new twist. In
connection with this affair they are now interrogating one Tony Boujon, twenty-three, a printing-plant worker. A patient of the doctor's, but one with a police record. Toward the end of spring, armed with a knife, he'd attacked a girl outside the Lycée Paul-Valéry as she was leaving the school. Detectives had searched the room he still lived in at home with his parents, on Rue Montgallet in the 12th arrondissement, whereupon they'd discovered that this young man owned a lovely collection of knives.

In short, the widow is free, and I immediately take up my post on Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. I had no trouble obtaining the address. Shoved to the front of the stage, the protagonists of police-blotter dramas have not had time to get an unlisted number: they're all in the phone book. And on the Internet it's child's play to locate their block on a city map, cruise over it, and even get an idea of their building's façade. In the end I managed to pick out a nearby front porch where I could stand guard.

Just as I was ready to go about my business my daughter rose in revolt, and this time I didn't hesitate to put her to sleep. I gave her a quarter of one of those tablets you are not supposed to administer to children
under six. But I know these drugs: the best they can do is induce a vague drowsiness. Then I left the apartment after turning the radiators up full blast. I like my daughter to be cozy.

The cold is seeping between my ears. At times I must step aside to let someone pass and I use my cell phone to make myself less conspicuous. I pretend to text an important message but as usual, no one notices me. I'm a thing they walk by, an obstacle to be avoided, and I've no idea how long I'll have to play the lookout here.

Thick flakes begin to fall. They win out against the asphalt, soon carpeting every aspect of the landscape: ledges, branches, cornices, flowerpots, windshield wipers at rest, recycling bins, transparent green plastic garbage bags, cardboard boxes, bulk trash. To pass the time and take my mind off the cold, I make mental note of the places infiltrated by the snow. I'm not properly shod for this climate; I didn't bring my gloves or check the weather report, either. I've had so much to think about lately.