Viviane

And it went well?

I’m not going to lie to you, says Viviane after a pause during which she thinks I’d be better off lying, then no, I’m a lousy liar, he’ll never believe me, and finally, let’s be frank, maybe I can buy myself some credit. So Viviane says, I’m not going to lie to you, it never goes very well.

Yes?

Yes what? she shoots back. Sorry, he used to say that. He would keep saying yes instead of answering my questions, it was very irritating.

You’re nervous.

Correct, I’m nervous, that’s why I consult a specialist.

But he gets on your nerves.

So what are you trying to make me say, that I have problems? Because I can confess to that right now. Yes, I have plenty of problems and I’m worn out, my husband has left me, and she starts to cry.

Okay okay okay, the inspector says, because although he’s relentless in his search for the truth, he doesn’t seem too comfortable with personal secrets. And what were you doing last night between five and midnight?

I was home with my daughter, says Viviane, sniffling but without worrying because that’s hardly a lie: at five she was there, at home with her daughter, and at midnight as well. Then she adds too quickly, if you don’t believe me, you can ask my mother. She called me around eight, she’ll tell you, now excuse me, I’m going to take a tablet to calm down.

You’re on medication?

The doctor had me take some now and then. But they’re completely ordinary prescriptions, see, I’ve got one with me.

Yul glances at the paper, jots down a few words, probably the name of the drugs, and hands back the prescription. Viviane’s stomach is heaving. It’s the prescription the doctor wrote her yesterday, with the date in the upper right-hand corner. Her fingers are shaking as she puts it back in her purse, but Yul’s mind is elsewhere. She doesn’t seem to interest him very much and how can she resent him for that? She can tell that this interrogation makes her seem like a soon-to-be divorcée, garden variety, and such dry soil isn’t fertile terrain for murderous germs and deadly herbs.

But tell me, dear lady, why did you call the doctor at ten thirty-eight yesterday morning?

Think fast, Viviane, think, say something, anything to break this guilty silence. Well, yes, she finally replies, I was feeling faint. He gave me an emergency appointment at six thirty but I couldn’t make it, I didn’t find anyone to look after my daughter, just ask my mother.

And you couldn’t have mentioned that earlier?

I thought, pleads Viviane as she begins crying again, that it would look suspicious even though you can see I had nothing to do with it, and the inspector doesn’t bother to disagree, he finds her so lackluster as a suspect.

Then the telephone interrupts them and Philippot spends a few minutes paying close attention to the caller, saying little while fresh evidence appears to be on offer at the other end of the line. At last he hangs up and says fine, that’s enough for today.

I’m free to go? asks Viviane in surprise.

Right, you’re free, replies Yul as he escorts her to the exit, limiting contact with the grateful eyes of the mother and the more cautiously circumspect gaze of the child. You really could have found someone to take care of her, you know, he says a bit more pleasantly.

5

The article in Le Parisien the next day, Wednesday, November 17, poses all sorts of problems. According to the paper, the doctor’s body was not found until the morning after his death — and not by his wife or a patient but by a green-eyed redhead in an advanced state of pregnancy, a resident of L’Argentière-la-Bessée in the Hautes-Alpes, someone about whom one might well wonder what she was doing there on Tuesday at six thirty a.m. Then there was some difficulty in tracking down Madame Sergent. Although officially residing with her husband in a comfortable apartment on Rue du Pot-de-Fer, she appeared to spend her nights in a two-room flat on Rue du Roi-de-Sicile belonging to one Silverio Da Silva. Who — a psychoanalyst but not a psychiatrist, or even a doctor or state-certified psychologist, in short a simple lay analyst credentialed by the goodwill of his peers — did not deny being the widow’s lover. Instead of getting huffy when the investigators asked him, in their petty bureaucratic way, if it didn’t bother him to borrow another man’s wife, he attempted to point out that the human experience cannot be reduced to the laws of civil society, or rather that one sometimes enjoys transgressing them. Well naturally, riposted the public servants as they locked him up for the night. “Love: You are paying less and less attention to your look. Success: Avoid decisions that might affect your future. Health: Allergies.”

Viviane finishes her coffee at the café-bar on Rue Louis-Blanc, where she is beginning to be a regular. She has a cup there while waiting to pick up her daughter. It seems that the other mothers are overburdened, delighted to hand off their children in return for an hour or two of freedom, and Viviane wonders what for, as there are not enough administrative procedures to take up an entire life, nor enough creative resources at any hair salon to justify going there more than once a week. She closes the paper and winds up back at the intersection, next to the northbound railway tracks of the Gare de l’Est, which run beneath the elevated métro track. Thus all the streets in the neighborhood seem spread out like a fan, held together by the traffic circle where Louis-Blanc intersects Rue Cail, and gathered up at the other end by the metal ribbon of the métro above Boulevard de la Chapelle.

Beneath a sky dimmed by a profusion of bare branches, she veers right, along a strip of foreign grocery stores, Western Union agencies, cheap variety bazaars, butcher shops, and telephone retailers. Groups of Sri Lankan men without Sri Lankan women are deep in discussion at every doorstep. They might comment on the passage of this tall pale woman, so exotic in their eyes, and yet they pay no attention to her when she slips through their ranks, checking out of the corner of an eye to see if she’s attracting any looks but no, she remains as invisible to the Sri Lankans as she is to the others, psychoanalyst, police, and all the rest.

You’re going to take a stroll for no reason. One of the privileges of your present situation. You are utterly free and God knows it won’t last long, all the mothers say so, insisting that at least twenty years of slavery lie ahead of you.

In the variety store windows there are slippers, socks, teapots, coffeepots, skeins of wool, shirts, pajamas, DVDs of musicals, and rolling luggage, lots of rolling luggage. You have no use for wheeled suitcases. Wherever would you go? Your trips are entirely taken via the Paris public transportation system. Slippers, on the other hand, you might use. Tucked into the rocking chair with your child, you’d find those fuzzy bloodred slip-ons comfy on your bare feet. Or tucked into your cell, gently rocking in your solitude, you’d find them reminiscent of the very rich hours you are busy living, these last moments before the bureaucrats come to their senses and toss you into the hole. You enter a variety store.

The aisles are organized by categories of objects, from the decorative to the utilitarian. At the entrance, little blue-and-mauve mermaids loll on greenish rocks. Near the cash register, it’s colorful multipurpose plastic basins, and between the two displays stretches the gamut of kitchen utensils, toilet articles, children’s toys, and items for their mothers: sewing kits, sponges, feather dusters, brooms. You pick up a mermaid looking in your direction, turn her from side to side between your thumb and index, wondering how anyone could buy such an ugly object. You put the mermaid back.

She continues to study you from her shelf. A little nearsightedly, because her eyes have been hastily sculpted by some worker in Southeast Asia who hasn’t given much thought to either the intensity or the precision of her gaze. He has simply painted the pupils, but such as they are, these eyes are looking in your direction. You pick up the mermaid again. Posing on her rock, she reminds you vaguely of someone. A thinker on his pedestal. A parrot on its perch. A shrink in his armchair.