The entrance to the Oiseau Bleu is concealed behind plywood boards, and a cop is pacing up and down the pavement. Quignard enters through the back door and goes up to the third floor, entirely taken up by Tomaso’s private apartment. The latter already awaits him, and leads him into a small office done out in mahogany like a yacht. Quignard half lies on a chaise longue with wooden slats. Tomaso opens a casket with copper corners, containing six glasses and six crystal decanters filled with peaty malt whiskies of different strengths. ‘Medium,’ says Quignard, his mind on other things. Tomaso serves him then pours himself a glass that gives off a strong peaty whiff, takes a sip, goes over to a chair and straddles it, his arms on the back, a mocking expression on his face. At that precise moment, Quignard knows he’s sitting opposite the war dog of the old days.
‘So, Maurice, there’s something fishy going on in Pondange, and you haven’t said a word to me about it?’ Quignard looks stunned. Tomaso continues: ‘Who were the man and woman who came to see you in your office this morning?’
A punch in the stomach probably has a similar effect: your body snaps in half, winded, your mind’s in a haze. Mustn’t bat an eyelid. The driver in the office. Fuck. It’s too late to improvise and too dangerous.
Quignard rapidly explains the situation as he sees it, carefully leaving out the journalist and his visit to Neveu’s widow. There’s no point in making things worse. He concludes:
‘In my view, there’s no immediate danger, which is why I decided not to say anything to you.’
‘That’s not what I think. First of all, a journalist came sniffing round the Oiseau Bleu last night, asking questions about you and your connection to me …’
A second blow to the stomach. Hard. How does he always manage to be one step ahead? The journalist, the same one who went to see the Neveu widow, for certain. How did he trace things back to me? And how did he discover the link between Tomaso and me? Quignard feels himself going into a tailspin.
‘… my man had just got hold of him when the explosion went off, and they couldn’t find him afterwards. I infer that there are people poking around who know a lot more than you imagine. So we can’t allow an eyewitness to what happened in the factory to be left hanging around. That’s the golden rule in my profession. No eyewitnesses.’ He rises. Standing, his legs slightly apart, his hands still resting on the back of the chair. ‘This girl’s name.’
It isn’t a question, it’s an order. Quignard blurts out in anguish, with a mixture of fear and pleasure:
‘Aisha Saidani.’
‘Where do we find her?’
‘Cité des Jonquilles, staircase A.’
‘I’m holding on to you, Maurice, you’ll have dinner with us. An intimate dinner among friends, here at the club, there’ll only be about ten of us. It’s seabass en croûte, and Deborah’s waiting for you. She was thrilled to hear you’ll be joining us. Trust me. In any case you have no option.’ 26 October
When he hears the Mercedes pull up in front of the steps, at first Quignard retches. Last night, he was too smashed to realise he was being driven home. He’d been so drunk that he could almost claim he didn’t remember having told Tomaso: Aisha Saidani, Cité des Jonquilles. But this morning, sobered up and on an empty stomach, the idea of seeing his spy driver depresses him. Send him away? Delicate. That would be to sever relations with Tomaso. Could he? The blaze, Neveu, Park in Warsaw. Of course not. Does he want to? The tall, hard form leaning over him yesterday evening, the pent-up violence, the shudder of pleasure he experienced at that moment, which he remembers very clearly, and the uneasy feeling of abandon that followed. Of course not. He gulped down his coffee and cut breakfast short. Back to his daily routine: the morning papers, anxious to know. He hurries.
The Mercedes is there as usual. The driver is someone new. Tomaso had the bright idea of substituting him. He greets him with a groan, slumps on the back seat and spreads out the front pages of the three national dailies. Identical headlines: Thomson Multimedia employees organise national strike and demonstrate against Daewoo taking over their company. Relief. No point reading the articles. What effect can a strike have on the great machinations of international finance? None, it’s almost laughable. These people will never understand. He folds up the newspapers. Then anxiety resurfaces. Daewoo is the press’s main target, for the second time. Not being shielded by Matra makes that dangerous, with the shit-stirrer in the area who’s already traced things back to Tomaso. According to the superintendent, he’s straight. But it’s so easy to get it wrong. I’m going to have another chat to him about it. He leans back in his seat and admires the last patches of forest shrouded in fog, fragmenting as they near the city. The trees are turning russet, the leaves will soon fall, and they’ll be able to go hunting in the woods. I must take a tour of the Grande Commune with the gamekeeper to see where the pheasants are. Time’s going on. We’ve only got to hold out for a few more weeks, three or four at the most, get the Privatisation Commission’s approval, Brussels’ approval, and it’s all in the bag. We’ve held out so far. And yet … His stomach is in knots, it’s hard to breathe. Spiral. Park’s tricks first of all, right under his nose, without him noticing a thing, and he’d thought he was totally in control, the devastating blaze when he’d been expecting a dustbin fire. With that question nagging him since last night: Supposing Tomaso had deliberately overstepped the mark? With Neveu the infernal machine is set in motion, the discovery of Park’s fraudulent accounting system, Maréchal who drops him, the unstoppable Tomaso who takes charge. Admit it: I’ve lost control. The driver’s broad, impassive back and neck. They’re all the same, I’m free but under close surveillance. Random images of last night’s blondes, Deborah and the other one whose name he doesn’t even know, abundant flesh, pink and white, moist, wet, and that feeling of being cocooned. A phrase goes round and round in his head: an old man’s pleasures. He fears the days to come.
Quignard realises that the car has stopped outside his office, it’s probably been there for a while. He leans towards his driver.
‘Take me to the Grande Commune. I’m unavailable for the rest of the day. Unless Tomaso calls, of course.’
Montoya drops Rolande at the Cité des Jonquilles around mid-morning (no, let’s not arrange to meet, Pondange is a very small town, you know, you’ll find me easily), a smile, and the door slams. Then he stops at a cafe and drinks a coffee and brandy standing at the bar. Alone and glad to be on his own. A break before getting back to work. Time to plan the bugging of Quignard’s office.
The offices of Quignard’s design consultancy specialising in industrial reconversions are in Pondange, in the Grands Bureaux building, formerly the head office of the Pondange Steelworks Company. In other words, the nerve centre of the entire valley. Montoya has a very clear, physical, almost painful memory of it. A massive cube of blackish stone, standing at the frontier between the world of the city and that of the blast furnaces, with the roar of the steelworks always in the background. The main façade opened on to the town. There were two doors, side by side. One, the monumental doorway, white stone steps, colonnade supporting a balcony, solid carved wooden double door, was opened just once a month for board meetings, both doors flung wide open for the occasion. Only the directors in their dark suits and Homburgs were entitled to cross the threshold, watched by the local press photographers. The other, very ordinary, door was used by the staff going in to work each day. The young Montoya used to imagine the hundreds of employees shut up in there all day long, labouring like the workers you could glimpse through the factory gates, and he would never go near it, for fear that these barracks might gobble him up. The idea of returning under cover thirty-five years later, breaking in and installing an illegal phone tap puts him in a mood of slight elation mingled with the physical tiredness of the night, his muscles stiff, the image of straight wisps of damp hair plastered against Rolande’s cheeks, gales of laughter, the memory of the faint taste of soap bubbles in the corner of his mouth, stimulating a sense of fulfilment.