There, my dear Caisley, you have everything that I have gathered for you. I hope to see you soon, but on the condition that it isn’t in my work attire. Blémant would have laughed heartily at that tramp disguise. You, a little less, I suppose. And me, not a bit.
Take care,
Bernolle
All that remained was for me to telephone Jean-Pierre Choureau and tell him that the mystery was cleared up. I’m trying to remember at which exact moment I decided not to do anything about it. I had dialed the first digits of his number when I hung up abruptly. I was overwhelmed at the thought of going back to that ground-floor apartment in Neuilly during the late afternoon as I had before, of waiting with him under the red-shaded lamp for night to fall. I unfolded the old Taride map of Paris that I always keep on my desk, within arm’s reach. Through my years of consulting it, I have often torn it at the edges, and each time, I stuck Scotch tape over the tear, as if I were dressing a wound. The Condé. Neuilly. Quartier de l’Étoile. Avenue Rachel. For the first time in my professional life, I felt the need to go against the tide while conducting my investigation. Yes, I was traveling the road that Jacqueline Delanque had followed, but in the opposite direction. Jean-Pierre Choureau no longer mattered. He had only been a bit part and I saw him receding into the distance forever, a black briefcase in his hand, towards the Zannetacci offices. In the end, the only interesting person was Jacqueline Delanque. There had been many Jacquelines in my life. She would be the last. I took the Métro, the north-south line, as they call it, the one that connected avenue Rachel to the Condé. As the stations passed by, I traveled back in time. I got off at Pigalle. Once there, I walked along the boulevard’s wide median with a spring in my step. A sunny autumn afternoon where it would have been nice to work on new projects and where life could have started over from scratch. After all, it was in this area that her life had begun, this Jacqueline Delanque. It seemed as if she and I had an appointment. Coming up on place Blanche, my heart was racing a bit and I felt nervous and even intimidated. I hadn’t felt this way in a long time. I continued on down the median, my pace growing quicker. I could have walked this familiar district with my eyes closed: the Moulin Rouge, Le Sanglier Bleu. Who knows? Maybe I had crossed paths with this Jacqueline Delanque a long time ago, on the right-hand sidewalk as she went to meet her mother at the Moulin Rouge, or on the opposite side as school let out from the Lycée Jules-Ferry. There, I had arrived. I had forgotten about the cinema on the corner of the avenue. It was called the Mexico, and it wasn’t by chance that it had such a name. It gave you the desire to travel, to run away, to disappear. I had also forgotten the silence and calm of avenue Rachel, which leads to the cemetery, although you never think of the cemetery, you tell yourself that at its end it must let out onto the countryside, or even, with a bit of luck, onto a seaside promenade.
I stopped in front of number 10 and, after a moment of hesitation, I went into the building. I went to knock on the concierge’s glass door, but I stopped myself. What good would that do? On a little sign glued to one of the door’s panes were listed the names of the tenants and the floor number of each one. I took my notebook and my ballpoint pen from the inside pocket of my jacket and made note of the names:
Deyrlord (Christiane)
Dix (Gisèle)
Dupuy (Marthe)
Esnault (Yvette)
Gravier (Alice)
Manoury (Albine)
Mariska
Van Bosterhaudt (Huguette)
Zazani (Odette)
The name Delanque (Geneviève) was crossed out and replaced by Van Bosterhaudt (Huguette). The mother and daughter had lived on the fifth floor. Yet as I closed my notebook I knew that none of these details would do me any good.
Outside, by the building’s entrance, a man stood on the doorstep of a fabric shop whose sign read La Licorne. As I was looking up towards the fifth floor, I heard him say to me in a reedy voice, “Can I help you find something, sir?”
I ought to have asked him about Geneviève and Jacqueline Delanque, but I knew how he would have responded, nothing but very superficial little “surface” details, as Blémant used to say, without ever getting to the heart of the matter. All it took was to hear his reedy voice, to notice his weaselly face and the severity of his stare: No, there was nothing to hope for from him, except for the “information” that you could get from any old informant. Or else he would tell me that he didn’t know Geneviève or Jacqueline Delanque. A cold rage swept over me, directed at this weasel-faced fellow. Perhaps he suddenly took the place of all the so-called witnesses I had interrogated during my investigations, people who had never understood a thing of what they had seen, be it out of stupidity, spite, or sheer indifference. I walked with a heavy step and planted myself in front of him. I was some eight inches taller than him and weighed twice what he did.
“Is it against the law to look at a building?”
He stared at me with severe and timorous eyes. I would have liked to scare him even more.
And then, to calm myself, I sat down on a bench on the median, up by the entrance to the avenue, across from the Cinéma Mexico. I took off my left shoe.
Sunshine. I was lost in my thoughts. Jacqueline Delanque could count on my discretion, Choureau would never learn anything of the Hôtel Savoie, the Condé, La Fontaine Garage, or this person named Roland, doubtless the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket mentioned in the notebook. “Louki. Monday, February 12th, 11 p.m. Louki, April 28th, 2 p.m. Louki with the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket.” Throughout the pages of the notebook, I had underlined her name each time in blue pencil and recopied all the notes that concerned her on loose sheets. With the dates. And the times. But she had no reason to worry. I wouldn’t go back to the Condé. Really, I had been fortunate, the two or three times I had waited for her at one of the tables in the café, that she hadn’t come on those days. I would have been embarrassed to spy on her without her knowing, yes, I would have been ashamed of my role. By what right do we intrude, forcing our way in like common crooks, and by what presumptuousness do we delve into their heads and their hearts — and ask them to account for themselves? By what authority? I had taken off my shoe and was massaging my instep. The pain died down. Night fell. Before, I suppose this would have been about the time Geneviève Delanque left for work at the Moulin Rouge. Her daughter stayed home alone, on the fifth floor. Towards thirteen, fourteen years old, one evening, once her mother had gone, she had left the building, careful not to be noticed by the concierge. Outside, she hadn’t gone past the street corner. She had been happy, the first several times, with the ten o’clock show at the Cinéma Mexico. Then the return trip to the building, climbing the stairs without setting off the automatic lights, the door shut as softly as possible. One night, when the cinema let out, she had walked a little farther, as far as place Blanche. And each night, a little bit farther. Juvenile Vagrancy, it had been written in the police logs of the Quartier Saint-Georges and in those of Grandes-Carrières, and those two words evoked for me a meadow beneath the moon, beyond the Caulaincourt bridge all the way back there, behind the cemetery, a meadow where at last you could breathe in the fresh air. Her mother had come to pick her up at the police station. Unfortunately, things had already been set in motion and no one could hold her back any longer. Nocturnal wandering towards the west, if I was correctly reading the few clues that Bernolle had gathered. At first, the Quartier de l’Étoile, and then still farther west, Neuilly and the Bois de Boulogne. But why, then, had she married Choureau? And once again flight, but this time towards the Rive Gauche, as if crossing the river would protect her from some imminent danger. And yet hadn’t this marriage also been a kind of protection? If she’d had the patience to stay in Neuilly, it would have eventually been forgotten that beneath a Madame Jean-Pierre Choureau hid a Jacqueline Delanque whose name appeared in the police logs on two occasions.