There’s one close by, where I wait on line at the pharmacy and examine the analgesics and sedatives on display behind the counter. They’re mostly antihistamines, phytotherapeutic capsules, which wouldn’t put a horse to sleep but a thirteen-pound child, no problem. When it’s my turn, I ask for four different boxes and, as a precaution, I produce my doctor’s prescription so that I can obtain the tranquilizers, just the tranquilizers. The young pharmaceutical intern gives me a worried look but I don’t back down. I am the customer, she is not a policewoman, I stare back at her until she hurries off to fetch my pills, then I return to the Moderne Saint Germain where I book a single room. It’s seventy-seven euros.
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.