LITMIR.BIZ

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of the St Martin canal and travelling down to the Medico-Legal Institute³ where the boys in butchers’ aprons and rubber boots live. They’ll take an inventory of what they find in your pockets, send your clothes to the Poor Law Administration Office, put a numbered armband on you, freeze you to eight degrees centigrade and put you in a rack with two other foolish lads. The superintendent will phone me and I’ll have to go along and identify you. I’ll hate doing that because at this time of year there are clouds of flies as large as bats and a smell that reaches to Austerlitz Station.’ He paused. ‘And we won’t even investigate the affair. Be sure you understand.’

      I said, ‘I understand all right. I’ve become an expert at recognizing threats no matter how veiled they are. But before you give a couple of cops tape measures and labels and maps of the St Martin canal, make sure you choose men that your department doesn’t find indispensable.’

      ‘Alas, you have misunderstood,’ said Loiseau’s mouth, but his eyes didn’t say that. He stared. ‘We’ll leave it like that, but …’

      ‘Just leave it like that,’ I interrupted. ‘You tell your cops to carry the capes with the lead-shot hems and I’ll wear my water-wings.’

      Loiseau allowed his face to become as friendly as it could become.

      ‘I don’t know where you fit into Monsieur Datt’s clinic, but until I do know I’ll be watching you very closely. If it’s a political affair, then let the political departments request information. There’s no point in us being at each other’s throat. Agreed?’

      ‘Agreed.’

      ‘In the next few few days you might be in contact with people who claim to be acting for me. Don’t believe them. Anything you want to know, come back to me directly. I’m 22.22.⁴ If you can’t reach me here then this office will know where I am. Tell the operator that “Un sourire est différent d’un rire”.’

      ‘Agreed,’ I said. The French still use those silly code words that are impossible to use if you are being overheard.

      ‘One last thing,’ said Loiseau. ‘I can see that no advice, however well meant, can register with you, so let me add that, should you tackle these men and come off best …’ he looked up to be sure that I was listening, ‘… then I will personally guarantee that you’ll manger les haricots for five years.’

      ‘Charged with …?’

      ‘Giving Chief Inspector Loiseau trouble beyond his normal duties.’

      ‘You might be going further than your authority permits,’ I said, trying to give the impression that I too might have important friends.

      Loiseau smiled. ‘Of course I am. I have gained my present powerful position by always taking ten per cent more authority than I am given.’ He lifted the phone and jangled the receiver rest so that its bell tinkled in the outer office. It must have been a prearranged signal because his assistant came quickly. Loiseau nodded to indicate the meeting was over.

      ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘It was good to see you again.’

      ‘Again?’

      ‘NATO conference on falsification of cargo manífests, held in Bonn, April 1956. You represented BAOR, if I remember rightly.’

      ‘You talk in endless riddles,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been in Bonn.’

      ‘You are a glib fellow,’ said Loiseau. ‘Another ten minutes and you’d convince me I’d never been there.’ He turned to the assistant who was waiting to conduct me downstairs. ‘Count the fire extinguishers after he’s left,’ said Loiseau. ‘And on no account shake hands with him; you might find yourself being thrown into the Faubourg St Honoré.’

      Loiseau’s assistant took me down to the door. He was a spotty-faced boy with circular metal-framed spectacles that bit deep into his features like pennies that had grown into the trunk of a tree. ‘Goodbye,’ I said as I left him, and gave him a brief smile. He looked through me, nodding to the policeman on sentry who eased the machine gun on his shoulder. Abandoning the entente cordiale I walked towards the Faubourg St Honoré looking for a taxi. From the gratings in the road there came the sound of a Métro train, its clatter muffled by four huddled clochards anxious for the warmth of the sour subterranean air. One of them came half-awake, troubled by a bad dream. He yelled and then mumbled.

      On the corner an E-type was parked. As I turned the corner the headlights flashed and it moved towards me. I stood well back as the door swung open. A woman’s voice said, ‘Jump in.’

      ‘Not right now,’ I said.

      6

      Maria Chauvet was thirty-two years old. She had kept her looks, her gentleness, her figure, her sexual optimism, her respect for men’s cleverness, her domestication. She had lost her girlhood friends, her shyness, her literary aspirations, her obsession with clothes and her husband. It was a fair swop, she decided. Time had given her a greater measure of independence. She looked around the art gallery without seeing even one person that she really desired to see again. And yet they were her people: the ones she had known since her early twenties, the people who shared her tastes in cinema, travel, sport and books. Now she no longer wished to hear their opinions about the things she enjoyed and she only slightly wished to hear their opinions about the things she hated. The paintings here were awful, they didn’t even show a childish exuberance; they were old, jaded and sad. She hated things that were too real. Ageing was real; as things grew older they became more real, and although age wasn’t something she dreaded she didn’t want to hurry in that direction.

      Maria hoped that Loiseau wasn’t going to be violent with the Englishman that he had taken away. Ten years ago she would have said something to Loiseau, but now she had learned discretion, and discretion had become more and more vital in Paris. So had violence, come to that. Maria concentrated on what the artist was saying to her. ‘… the relationships between the spirit of man and the material things with which he surrounds himself …’

      Maria had a slight feeling of claustrophobia; she also had a headache. She should take an aspirin, and yet she didn’t, even though she knew it would relieve the pain. As a child she had complained of pain and her mother had said that a woman’s life is accompanied by constant pain. That’s what it’s like to be a woman, her mother had said, to know an ache or a pain all day, every day. Her mother had found some sort of stoic satisfaction in that statement, but the prospect had terrified Maria. It still terrified her and she was determined to disbelieve it. She tried to disregard all pains, as though by acknowledging them she might confess her feminine frailty. She wouldn’t take an aspirin.

      She thought of her ten-year-old son. He was living with her mother in Flanders. It was not good for the child to spend a lot of time with elderly people. It was just a temporary measure and yet all the time he was there she felt vaguely guilty about going out to dinner or the cinema, or even evenings like this.

      ‘Take that painting near the door,’ said the artist. ‘“Holocaust quo vadis?” There you have the vulture that represents the ethereal and …’

      Maria had had enough of him. He was a ridiculous fool; she decided to leave. The crowd had become more static now and that always increased her claustrophobia, as did people in the Métro standing motionless. She looked at his flabby face and his eyes, greedy and scavenging for admiration among this crowd who admired only themselves. ‘I’m going now,’ she said. ‘I’m sure the show will be a big success.’

      ‘Wait a moment,’ he called, but she had timed her escape to coincide with a gap in the crush and she was through the emergency exit, across the cour and away. He didn’t follow her. He probably already had his eye on some other woman who could become interested in art for a couple of weeks.

      Maria loved her car, not sinfully, but proudly. She looked after it and drove it well. It wasn’t far to the rue des Saussaies. She positioned the car by the side of the Ministry of the Interior.

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