LITMIR.BIZ

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that would be taken in the next few seconds. Daniel watched as he raised his own hand to the brass bar, lifted the black hat carefully by the brim and slipped it onto his lap, where it remained hidden from view under the table.

      The whole operation took no more than three and a half seconds, but it seemed to him to have been performed in desperately slow motion, so that when the sounds of the dining room reached his ears once more, he felt as if he was emerging from a long period underwater. The blood beat in his temples and his heart thumped in his chest. What if someone came back to claim the hat now, he thought, in a brief moment of panic. A bodyguard? The President himself? What would he do? What could he possibly say? How could he explain the sudden transfer of the hat to his lap?

      He had just committed an act of theft. The last time he had stolen something was in early adolescence, in a shopping centre in Courbevoie, egged on by a friend after school. They had stolen a record: ‘Aline’, a hit single by the pop star Christophe. Since that afternoon back in 1965, he had never done such a thing again.

      What he had just done was far worse than sneaking a record into his schoolbag in a supermarket. Daniel sat motionless, his eyes darting around the room at the other diners. No, no one had seen him, he was sure of that. Nothing to fear on that score. But now he had to leave before anything untoward happened, before the President asked someone to call the restaurant, looking for his hat; before the waiters came scurrying to the table under the furious gaze of the maître d’.

      Daniel asked for the bill, saying he would pay by card. The waiter returned with the credit card machine. Daniel hardly noticed the amount. Nothing mattered any more. He signed the slip and took his receipt. He rummaged in his pockets for a tip and put it in the chrome dish. The waiter bowed slightly in a gesture of thanks and walked away.

      Now, said Daniel to himself. His mouth was dry so he poured himself a glass of water and gulped it down, then delicately extracted the presidential hat from under the tablecloth and put it on his head. Yes, it fitted perfectly. He put on his coat and headed for the door, feeling as if his legs were about to give way. The maître d’ would stop him: ‘Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur! S’il vous plaît! The hat, Monsieur …?’

      But nothing of the kind happened. Daniel had left a fifteen-franc tip, and the waiters all nodded respectfully as he passed; even the mâitre d’ attempted a smile which lifted the tips of his narrow moustache. The door was held open for him, and he stepped out into the cold, turning up the collar of his coat and heading for his car. Mitterrand’s hat is on my head, he told himself.

      Once in the driver’s seat, with the hat still on his head, Daniel angled the rear-view mirror and gazed at his reflection in silence for several minutes. He felt as if his brain was bathed in a refreshing dose of sparkling aspirin. Bubbles of oxygen were fizzing through zones that had slumbered for too long. He turned the key in the ignition and drove off slowly into the night.

      Daniel drove through the streets for a long while, circling his neighbourhood several times before leaving the car on level five of his building’s underground car park. He could have driven like that for hours, his mind a complete blank. He felt buoyed up with a confidence that was as comforting as a warm bath.

      In the deserted living room, he sat down on the sofa and looked at his reflection in the blank television screen. He saw a man sitting with a hat on his head, nodding slowly. He stayed like that for a good hour, contemplating his own image, his entire being suffused with an almost mystical feeling of serene calm. It was two in the morning before he listened to his wife’s message on the answering machine. Everything was fine in Normandy, Véronique and Jérôme would be back next day, arriving at Gare Saint-Lazare at 9.45 p.m. Daniel undressed. The last item he removed was the hat. He gazed in wonder at two letters embossed in gold on the band of leather running round the inside:

      F.M.

      In his account of the evening, Daniel allowed himself just one slight alteration – the seafood platter now featured no more than twenty-four oysters, half a crab and a few winkles. He knew that if he gave the full details of his sumptuous dinner, there was a danger Véronique would concentrate solely on the expense. Comments like ‘Well, you certainly look after yourself when we’re not around,’ or ‘I see, dining in solitary splendour!’ would interfere with the re-telling of his adventure. In Daniel’s version of the story, the arrival of the head of state assumed near-biblical proportions, and the phrase accompanying the vinegared oysters, ‘As I was saying to Helmut Kohl last week’, rang out like a divine commandment from the cavernous halls of heaven.

      ‘Still, I’m shocked.’

      ‘Shocked? Why?’ said Daniel.

      ‘That you stole the hat. It’s not like you.’

      ‘I didn’t steal it as such,’ he objected, irritated, although much the same thought had occurred to him as well. ‘Let’s just say I didn’t give it back.’

      Véronique seemed to accept that. He managed to convince her that he had, in fact, done the right thing by holding on to the hat because the moustachioed maître d’ would probably have kept it for himself. Worse, if he hadn’t spotted it, another customer might have taken it, unaware of the identity of its illustrious owner.

      When they’d finished supper and Jérôme had gone to bed, they returned to the sitting room. Véronique carefully picked up the felt hat and sat stroking it, as if seized by a sudden melancholy. She regretted that Daniel hadn’t been quicker to spot that François Mitterrand had left it behind: he could have called after the President and given it back to him with a smile.

      ‘There would have been an understanding between you,’ she remarked, sadly.

      ‘Yes, but he was too far away,’ Daniel pointed out. He still preferred the real-life version of the story, the one that ended with him wearing the presidential hat on his own head.

      ‘I don’t share your point of view at all, Monsieur Maltard,’ said Daniel, shaking his head. He touched the hat that he’d placed in front of him on the big conference-room table.

      Jean Maltard and the ten other members of the finance department summoned to the eleven o’clock meeting stared at him dumbfounded. Daniel allowed a few moments of silence to pass, a sphinx-like smile playing on his lips, then heard himself refute, point for point, the arguments put forward by the new departmental director.

      With unprecedented confidence, he watched himself negotiate the complex layers of diplomacy with the ease of a dolphin leaping through the waves. When he had finished stating his case, a great silence fell upon the room. Bernard Falgou stared at him open-mouthed. Michèle Carnavan ventured a small cough, then, despairing of her spineless male colleagues, spoke out.

      ‘I think Daniel has summarised our concerns perfectly.’

      ‘Brilliantly,’ added Bernard Falgou quickly, as if prodded by a tiny electric shock.

      Maltard gazed impassively at Daniel. ‘Nice work, Monsieur Mercier,’ he announced icily.

      Jean-Bernard Desmoine, head of Finance, had travelled up specially to attend the meeting, called to put the finishing touches to SOGETEC’s new objectives for the Paris-Nord section. He kept his eyes fixed on Daniel as he made his case, scribbling a few brief notes when he explained with perfect clarity, and the figures to back him up, that they couldn’t sensibly split the department into three divisions, but two at the very most.

      ‘Thank you for coming, everyone,’ said Jean-Bernard Desmoine. ‘I’ll let you get back to your desks. I’d like a word, Monsieur Maltard.’

      Maltard agreed with a meek, insincere smile, then glared at Daniel. Only Bernard Falgou caught the look of cold hatred directed at his subordinate by the new departmental director. As soon as they had left the conference room, Falgou took Daniel by the arm.

      ‘You slaughtered him, you slaughtered Maltard!’ he said.

      ‘Not really,’ protested Daniel, blinking.

      ‘But you did!’ insisted Françoise. ‘He’s out on his ear, no doubt about it. That’s

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